Apple’s iBeacon tech is still in its early stages, but we’re starting to see more people show interest in the idea of connecting their smartphones with real-world places and items. Ifinity, a Warsaw-based company, uses a similar type of beacon service but wants to raise its scalability so that a whole city can make use of it. Ifinity’s beacons are small transmitters… Read More
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Beacon Transmitter Service Ifinity Valued At $12M After Seed Round
Have you ever wanted to become a self-sufficient hermit, living off the grid and generating all your own energy? Well you can stop drying out and burning your number-twos because here comes AirEnergy 3D. This Polish crowdfunding project is a compact, portable, and upgradable wind turbine that consists of blades and a base station. Created by the folks at Omni3D, a 3D printer manufacturer… Read More
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AirEnergy Is An Upgradable Wind Turbine You Can Keep In A Backpack
schwit1 writes Archaeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great. “The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander’s generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as ‘clearly extremely significant’. A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Giant Greek Tomb Discovered
brindafella (702231) writes Australian scientists have accidentally made one of the most significant discoveries in stem cell research, by studying the transparent embryos of Zebrafish (Danio rerio). The fish can be photographed and their development studied over time, and the movies can be played backwards, to track back from key developmental stages to find the stem cell basis for various traits of the fish. This fundamental research started by studying muscles, but the blood stem cell breakthrough was a bonus. They’ve found out how hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), among the most important stem cells found in blood and bone marrow, is formed. The scientists are based at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. The research has been published in the Nature medical journal. This discovery could lead to the production of self-renewing stem cells in the lab to treat multiple blood disorders and diseases. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Transparent Fish Lead to Stem Cell Research Breakthrough
An anonymous reader writes The entire South Korean space program has been forced to shut down after its only astronaut resigned for personal reasons. Yi So-yeon, 36, became the first Korean in space in 2008 after the engineer was chosen by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) to lead the country’s $25m space project. Her resignation begs questions of KARI regarding whether she was the right person to lead the program and whether the huge cost of sending her into space was a waste of taxpayer’s money. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Entire South Korean Space Programme Shuts Down As Sole Astronaut Quits
MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives and may never with, at least with the current technology, the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba’s 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it’s possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ’s new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn’t lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100’s strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3 year warranty. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has released a diversity report on the genders and races of its employees. As is common in the tech industry, the majority of Apple’s workforce is male — only three out of 10 employees around the globe are female. Broken down, males compose 65 percent of non-tech workers, 80 percent of tech workers, and 72 percent of Apple’s leadership. According to CEO Tim Cook, he’s unhappy with Apple’s diversity numbers and says Apple is working to improve them: “Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple’s Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White
One of the defining images of the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s and 90s was William Gibson’s cyberspace decks. Although never explicitly described, they seemed to be something like a self-contained keyboard with electrode leads hanging off and a sometimes unmarked keyboard that hackers used to jack into the Matrix. I remember running around in my parents’ basement with my… Read More
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The Das Keyboard 4 Is The Hacker’s Choice
MojoKid (1002251) writes “Security researcher Gene Bransfield, with the help of his wife’s grandmother’s cat, decided to see how many neighborhood WiFi access points he could map and potentially compromise. With a collar loaded with a Spark chip, a Wi-Fi module, a GPS module, and a battery, Coco the cat helped Gene identify Wi-Fi networks around the neighborhood and then reported back. The goal here is obvious: Discover all of the unsecured, or at least poorly-secured, wireless access points around the neighborhood. During his journey, Coco identified dozens of Wi-Fi networks, with four of them using easily-broken WEP security, and another four that had no security at all. Gene has dubbed his collar the “WarKitteh”, and it cost him less than $100 to make. He admits that such a collar isn’t a security threat, but more of a goofy hack. Of course, it could be used for shadier purposes.” (Here’s Wired’s article on the connected cat-collar.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Connected Collar Lets Your Cat Do the War-Driving
An anonymous reader writes “Beginning with the Chrome 38 Beta it’s now possible to watch Netflix without any Wine/Silverlight plug-ins but will work natively using Chrome’s DRM-HTML5 video capabilities with Netflix. The steps just involve using the latest beta of Chrome and an HTTP user-agent switcher to tell Netflix you’re a Windows Chrome user, due to Netflix arbitrarily blocking the Linux build.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Now Works On Linux With HTML5 DRM Video Support In Chrome