Amazing Aerogel: Eight Looks at the Ghostly Supermaterial in Action

Aerogel must be one of the strangest supermaterials to ever exist. Ghostly and shimmering in appearance, it’s insanely light, incredibly strong, and an amazing thermal insulator. And its tricks look absolutely impossible when you see them up close. Read more…        

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Amazing Aerogel: Eight Looks at the Ghostly Supermaterial in Action

Nissan Unveils 88 Pound 400-HP Race Car Engine

cartechboy writes “Motorsports used to be about lots of horsepower, torque, and big engines. In recent years there’s been a shift to downsizing engines, using less fuel, and even using alternative energy such as clean diesel and hybrid powertrains. Today Nissan unveiled a 400-horsepower 1.5-liter three-cylinder turbocharged engine that weighs only 88 pounds. This engine will be part of the advanced plug-in hybrid drivetrain that will power the ZEOD RC electrified race car that will run in the 2015 LMP1 class during the race season. Nissan says the driver of the ZEOD RC will be able to switch between electric power and gasoline power with the batteries being recharged via regenerative braking. Even more impressive, according to Nissan, for every hour the ZEOD RC races, the car will be able to run one lap of the Le Mans’ 8.5-mile Circuit de la Sarthe on electric power alone. If true, that will make it the first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions. If this all works, we could be witnessing the future of motorsports unfold before our eyes later this year when the ZEOD RC (video) makes its race debut at this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours in June.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nissan Unveils 88 Pound 400-HP Race Car Engine

Intel’s Knights Landing — 72 Cores, 3 Teraflops

New submitter asliarun writes “David Kanter of Realworldtech recently posted his take on Intel’s upcoming Knights Landing chip. The technical specs are massive, showing Intel’s new-found focus on throughput processing (and possibly graphics). 72 Silvermont cores with beefy FP and vector units, mesh fabric with tile based architecture, DDR4 support with a 384-bit memory controller, QPI connectivity instead of PCIe, and 16GB on-package eDRAM (yes, 16GB). All this should ensure throughput of 3 teraflop/s double precision. Many of the architectural elements would also be the same as Intel’s future CPU chips — so this is also a peek into Intel’s vision of the future. Will Intel use this as a platform to compete with nVidia and AMD/ATI on graphics? Or will this be another Larrabee? Or just an exotic HPC product like Knights Corner?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel’s Knights Landing — 72 Cores, 3 Teraflops

Linux 3.13 Kernel To Bring Major Feature Improvements

An anonymous reader writes “There’s many improvements due in the Linux 3.13 kernel that just entered development. On the matter of new hardware support, there’s open-source driver support for Intel Broadwell and AMD Radeon R9 290 ‘Hawaii’ graphics. NFTables will eventually replace IPTables; the multi-queue block layer is supposed to make disk access much faster on Linux; HDMI audio has improved; Stereo/3D HDMI support is found for Intel hardware; file-system improvements are on the way, along with support for limiting the power consumption of individual PC components.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.13 Kernel To Bring Major Feature Improvements

Toyota’s Killer Firmware

New submitter Smerta writes “On Thursday, a jury verdict found Toyota’s ECU firmware defective, holding it responsible for a crash in which a passenger was killed and the driver injured. What’s significant about this is that it’s the first time a jury heard about software defects uncovered by a plaintiff’s expert witnesses. A summary of the defects discussed at trial is interesting reading, as well the transcript of court testimony. ‘Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.’ Anyone wonder what the impact will be on self-driving cars?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Toyota’s Killer Firmware

DARPA Issues $2mil Cyber Grand Challenge

First time accepted submitter Papa Fett writes “DARPA announced the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC)–the first-ever tournament for fully automatic network defense systems. International teams will compete to build systems that reason about software flaws, formulate patches and deploy them on a network in real time. Teams would be scored against each other based on how capably their systems can protect hosts, scan the network for vulnerabilities, and maintain the correct function of software. The winning team would receive a cash prize of $2 million , with second place earning $1 million and third place taking home $750, 000.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DARPA Issues $2mil Cyber Grand Challenge

NanoLeaf Bulbs Provide Unusually Bright, Energy-Efficient LED Lighting

We’re all for energy-efficiency, and NanoLeaf managed to pack quite a bit of it into one of the weirdest looking lightbulbs we’ve ever seen. With their LED bulb you get 30, 000 hours of brightness equivalent to a standard 100W unit. Read more…        

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NanoLeaf Bulbs Provide Unusually Bright, Energy-Efficient LED Lighting

Malwarebytes for Android Kills Malware, Protects Your Privacy Too

Android: Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a great tool for removing trojans, worms, and other malware from your Windows computer, but now it’s made the jump to Android. It still offers robust malware protection, but it goes further to protect your privacy from apps with overreaching permissions or other vulnerabilities. Read more…        

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Malwarebytes for Android Kills Malware, Protects Your Privacy Too