Tag: science

Print-On-Demand Bone Could Quickly Mend Major Injuries

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: If you shatter a bone in the future, a 3D printer and some special ink could be your best medicine. Researchers have created what they call “hyperelastic bone” that can be manufactured on demand and works almost as well as the real thing, at least in monkeys and rats. Though not ready to be implanted in humans, bioengineers are optimistic that the material could be a much-needed leap forward in quickly mending injuries ranging from bones wracked by cancer to broken skulls. Researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, in Illinois are working on a hyperelastic bone, which is a type of scaffold made up of hydroxyapatite, a naturally occurring mineral that exists in our bones and teeth, and a biocompatible polymer called polycaprolactone, and a solvent. Hydroxyapatite provides strength and offers chemical cues to stem cells to create bone. The polycaprolactone polymer adds flexibility, and the solvent sticks the 3D-printed layers together as it evaporates during printing. The mixture is blended into an ink that is dispensed by the printer, layer by layer, into exact shapes matching the bone that needs to be replaced. The idea is, a patient would come in with a nasty broken bone — say, a shattered jaw — and instead of going through painful autograft surgeries or waiting for a custom scaffold to be manufactured, he or she could be x-rayed and a 3D-printed hyperelastic bone scaffold could be printed that same day. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Print-On-Demand Bone Could Quickly Mend Major Injuries

Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant

Enlarge / Leonardo DiCaprio signs autographs for fans during the Tokyo premiere for “The Revenant” in March. (credit: Yuriko Nakao via Getty Images) The pirate who in December leaked The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie  days ahead of their US releases has been ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to 20th Century Fox and was also handed eight months of home confinement, federal prosecutors said . The defendant, William Morarity of the Los Angeles suburb of Lancaster, was working for an undisclosed studio lot when he unlawfully accessed watermarked, screener versions of the films and uploaded them to a private BitTorrent site ” Pass the Popcorn ,” according to his guilty plea  (PDF).  The Revenant was downloaded more than 1 million times and The Peanuts Movie more than 220,000 times, according to court documents . (PDF) Deirdre Fike, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said the defendant’s behavior is a killer of creativity and jobs. “Mr. Morarity used his position of trust to gain access to sensitive intellectual property, then shared that content online and incurred large-scale losses to the owner of that property,” Fike said. “The theft of intellectual property—in this case, major motion pictures—discourages creative incentive and affects the average American making ends meet in the entertainment industry.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant

IEEE Sets New Ethernet Standard That Brings 5X the Speed Without Cable Ripping

Reader coondoggie writes: As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification — IEEE P802.3bz — that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling. The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks. Indeed, the wireless component may be the most significant implication of the standard as 2.5G and 5G Ethernet will allow connectivity to 802.11ac Wave 2 Access Points, considered by many to be the real driving force behind bringing up the speed of traditional NBase-T products. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IEEE Sets New Ethernet Standard That Brings 5X the Speed Without Cable Ripping

Elon Musk Proposes Spaceship That Can Send 100 People To Mars In 80 Days

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Mars vehicle — the spaceship his company plans to build to transport the first colonists to Mars. It will have a diameter of 17 meters. The plan is to send about 100 people per trip, though Musk wants to ultimately take 200 or more per flight to make the cost cheaper per person. The trip can take as little as 80 days or as many as 150 depending on the year. The hope is that the transport time will be only 30 days “in the more distant future.” The rocket booster will have a diameter of 12 meters and the stack height will be 122 meters. The spaceship should hold a cargo of up to 450 tons depending on how many refills can be done with the tanker. As rumored, the Mars vehicle will be reusable and the spaceship will refuel in orbit. The trip will work like this: First, the spaceship will launch out of Pad 39A, which is under development right now at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At liftoff, the booster will have 127, 800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28, 730, 000 pounds of thrust. Then, the spaceship and booster separate. The spaceship heads to orbit, while the booster heads back to Earth, coming back within about 20 minutes. Back on Earth, the booster lands on a launch mount and a propellant tanker is loaded onto the booster. The entire unit — now filled with fuel — lifts off again. It joins with the spaceship, which is then refueled in orbit. The propellant tankers will go up anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the spaceship. The spaceship finally departs for Mars. To make the trip more attractive for its crew members, Musk promises that it’ll be “really fun” with zero-G games, movies, cabins, games, a restaurant. Once it reaches Mars, the vehicle will land on the surface, using its rocket engines to lower itself gently down to the ground. The spaceship’s passengers will use the vehicle, as well as cargo and hardware that’s already been shipped over to Mars, to set up a long-term colony. At the rate of 20 to 50 total Mars trips, it will take anywhere from 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization with one million people on Mars, says Musk. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Elon Musk Proposes Spaceship That Can Send 100 People To Mars In 80 Days

Oldest Proteins Ever Recovered Found in 3.8 Million-Year-Old Eggshell

Researchers working in Africa have uncovered 3.8 million-year-old protein fragments encased in an ostrich eggshell. These biological building blocks are millions of years older than the oldest DNA ever found, highlighting the possibility of recovering ancient proteins from extinct animals—and even the remains of early humans. Read more…

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Oldest Proteins Ever Recovered Found in 3.8 Million-Year-Old Eggshell

Watch Elon Musk Reveal His Plan to Colonize Mars

We’re finally going to hear Elon Musk’s plans for a mission to Mars. You can watch along to find out what it is at 2:30pm EDT. In the meantime, here’s some of what we expect to hear—and what it means to the plan to finally put a person on Mars. Read more…

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Watch Elon Musk Reveal His Plan to Colonize Mars

Windows 10 Now On 400 Million Active Devices, Says Microsoft

Microsoft announced today that Windows 10 is now running on over 400 million active devices. This is up from 300 million as of May, and 207 million as of end of the March. The company says that it deems devices that have been active in the past 28 days as “active.” Microsoft added that this 400 million active devices figure include tablets and phones as well as Xbox One consoles, HoloLens, and Surface Hubs running Windows 10. Paul Thurrott adds:Microsoft last provided a Windows 10 usage milestone on June 29, when it said that there were 350 million active Windows 10 devices. At that time, I noted that the Windows 10 adoption had accelerated from the previous milestone, hitting an average of almost 29 million new devices per month. But 50 million additional devices over three months is a much slower pace of about 17 million per month. This is the slowest rate since Windows 10 was first announced. Again, no surprise there: Windows 10 was free for its first year, and over that time period it averaged roughly 31.25 million new devices per month (if you assume a figure of 375 million after one year, as I do). Does this mean that Windows 10 will see fewer than 20 million new devices each month, on average, going forward? No, of course not. There’s no way to accurately gauge how things will go, given that most future devices will be new PCs purchased by businesses or consumers, or business PCs upgraded to Windows 10. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Now On 400 Million Active Devices, Says Microsoft

Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

Enlarge / Scenario for getting water to Europa’s surface. Artist’s conception of ridges and fractures on Europa. (credit: Caltech/NASA) In the seminal science fiction series Space Odyssey , novelist Arthur C. Clarke called attention to the Jovian moon Europa’s special place in the Solar System. At the end of the series’ second novel, 2010: Odyssey Two , a spaceship sent to the Jupiter system receives a message from aliens: “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” In data released publicly Monday NASA didn’t get quite such a declarative message from the intriguing moon, but the new information is nonetheless thrilling. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what are likely water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. If the plumes do, in fact, emerge and rain down on the surface, it will be significantly easier for scientists to study the moon’s interior ocean. “E uropa is a world of great interest,”  Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said during a news conference Monday. Monday’s news is significant because it comes as NASA is taking formative steps toward launching a pair missions to Europa in the 2020s—an orbiter to scout the moon, and a lander that will follow a couple of years later. The same engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who masterminded Curiosity’s landing on Mars have turned their attention toward how best to land a probe on Europa’s icy surface. And it is no easy feat. The moon creaks as Jupiter’s gravitation bulk rends its frozen surface in deep crevasses, pushing and pulling the ice upward and downward by tens of meters every few days. And with only a very tenuous atmosphere, it is cold: -210 degrees Celsius. The radiation from nearby Jupiter would kill a human in a matter of hours or days. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

NASA changed all the astrological signs and I’m a crab now

Enlarge / The new sign, “Ophiuchus,” means “Snake Bearer.” And who’s got two thumbs and loves snakes? THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. (credit: Wikimedia Commons ) According to a post on NASASpacePlace , everything we thought we knew about the influence the heavens have over our Earthly lives has been thrown into chaos. NASA has announced that the celestial sphere above us contains not twelve canonical zodiacal constellations, but 13. The heretofore overlooked constellation, Ophiuchus, is purported to guide and command events surrounding humans born between November 29 and December 17—so, if you used to be a Sagittarius, then congratulations: you’ve got a new sign, baby! The addition of Ophiuchus—the snake bearer , in case you were wondering—has obvious and far-reaching implications for the entire western Babylonian-derived zodiac calendar. For one thing, squeezing it in means changing the effective dates of all the other signs. According to Yahoo News , the new 13-sign calendar plays out like this: Capricorn:  January 20-February 16 Aquarius:  February 16-March 11 Pisces:  March 11-April 18 Aries:  April 18-May 13 Taurus:  May 13-June 21 Gemini:  June 21-July 20 Cancer:  July 20-August 10 Leo:  August 10-September 16 Virgo:  September 16-October 30 Libra:  October 30-November 23 Scorpio:  November 23-November 29 Ophiuchus:  November 29-December 17 Sagittarius:  December 17-January 20 The changes are as sweeping as they are staggering. For example, I woke up this morning firmly believing that I was an outgoing, courageous, independent, generous Leo. However, now I have to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a stupid, sulky, inconsiderate, pessimistic Cancer. I have gone from lion to crab, and it weighs heavily upon me. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA changed all the astrological signs and I’m a crab now

California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP: All 800 police departments in California must begin using a new online tool launched Thursday to report and help track every time officers use force that causes serious injuries… The tool, named URSUS for the bear on California’s flag, includes fields for the race of those injured and the officers involved, how their interaction began and why force was deemed necessary. “It’s sort of like TurboTax for use-of-force incidents, ” said Justin Erlich, a special assistant attorney general overseeing the data collection and analysis. Departments must report the data under a new state law passed last November. Though some departments already tracked such data on their own, many did not… “As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force, ” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a news release. It’s an open source tool developed by Bayes Impact, and California plans to share the code with other interested law enforcement agencies across the country. Only three other states currently require their police departments to track data about use-of-force incidents, “but their systems aren’t digital, and in Colorado’s case, only capture shootings.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force