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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

The internal tissues of the fossilized fern. Benjamin Bomfleur A violent death has led to a remarkably lucky preservation. Researchers in Sweden have discovered ferns that were buried suddenly in a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period. The sudden burial has preserved stunning details of the fern, down to showing the plant’s chromosomes being separated during cell division. In fact, the details are sufficient to determine that its genome hasn’t undergone major changes in at least 180 million years. The fossil was found in a volcanic deposit in southern Sweden. It belongs to a group of plants called the royal ferns (technically, the Osmundaceae ). The group, which includes a number of different species, was already known as a bit of a living fossil, since some of its distinctive features have been seen on plants that are 220 million years old, and a variety of other fossil species look indistinguishable from modern forms. The samples themselves are simply stunning. Not only are the internal details of various plant tissues preserved, but internal details of individual cells have been preserved. These include cells at various stages of the cell division process; darker, dense material shows the chromosomes being split up between the two incipient daughter cells. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

Texas A&M Supercomputing Transistors keep getting smaller and smaller, enabling computer chip designers to develop faster computer chips. But no matter how fast the chip gets, moving data from one part of the machine to another still takes time. To date, chip designers have addressed this problem by placing small caches of local memory on or near the processor itself. Caches store the most frequently used data for easy access. But the days of a cache serving a single processor (or core) are over, making management of cache a nontrivial challenge. Additionally, cores typically have to share data, so the physical layout of the communication network connecting the cores needs to be considered, too. Researchers at MIT and the University of Connecticut have now developed a set of new “rules” for cache management on multicore chips. Simulation results have shown that the rules significantly improve chip performance while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption. The researcher’s first paper, presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture, reported gains (on average) of 15 percent in execution time and 25 percent energy savings. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Kyle Orland At a “Driving the Future of Innovation at Sony” panel today, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida revealed the company’s long-rumored plans to enter a virtual reality headset space that has gained new relevance in the wake of the Oculus Rift’s development . The headset, codenamed Project Morpheus (after the god of dream, not the Matrix character, Sony clarified), is being developed by an international team of Sony engineers. “Virtual Reality is the next innovation from PlayStation that may well change the future of games,” Yoshida said. “Nothing elevates the level of immersion better than VR,” he continued, adding that VR “goes one step further than immersion to deliver presence.” The headset will have its position and orientation tracked 100 times per second in a full 360 degrees of rotation within a three cubic meter “working volume.” Tracking will make use of high-fidelity inertial sensors in the unit itself, tiny tracking markers on the surface of the headset, and the same stereo PlayStation Camera that tracks the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Move. Sony R&D engineer Dr. Richard Marks wryly noted at the panel that the PlayStation Camera “almost seems as if it was designed for VR, actually,” to laughs from the audience. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Andrew Cunningham The California computer science student who hacked various women’s computers for the purposes of “sextortion”—including Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf —has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The sentence comes after Jared James Abrahams pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion last November. According to a press release published Monday afternoon by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Abrahams “used the nude photos to extort victims by threatening to publicly post the compromising photos or videos to the victims’ social media accounts—unless the victim either sent more nude photos or videos, or engaged in a Skype session with him and did what he said for five minutes.” As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wrote last year , Abrahams became decently adept at using remote administration tools (RATs), a malware used to spy on victims. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Photograph by David Davies In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy. The new change is  in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil has fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Google’s makeover kicks the underlined URL to the curb, with a few other changes. Experiencing mild disorientation while using Google today? Google has quietly rolled out a subtle redesign for its search results that, among other things, removes the age-old hyperlink underline, bumps the font size two points, and evens out the line spacing. Google search results have gotten incremental changes over the years, and the search page certainly no longer looks like it did when the site first launched. Jon Wiley, the lead designer for Google search, took to Google+ Wednesday to say that the new look “improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look.” Having gone nearly a decade without underlined hyperlinks, we here at Ars wholeheartedly agree with the decision. The redesign moves Google up and away from competitors like Yahoo and Bing , which preserve the underline. However, it only catches Google up to the upstart DuckDuckGo, which does not use underlines and is cleaner still on its search results page, with truncated URLs for each result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js , the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js. Unreal Engine 4 running within Firefox. Over the past year, Mozilla has improved asm.js’s performance, to go from around 40 percent of native performance, to something like 67 percent of native. Our own testing largely supported the organization’s claims, though we noted certain limitations at the time, such as JavaScript’s lack of multithreading. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA gave Senate Intelligence Committee staffers access to its data offsite—in a leased facility the CIA controlled. It sounds like something out of Homeland : at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program. And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today  crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.” The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed