For over forty years, archaeologists have longed to peek inside a badly damaged ancient scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Now an international team of scientists has managed to do so by virtually unrolling the scroll, revealing the text hidden deep within: the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. Read more…
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Wondergadget Allows Researchers To Read a Charred Biblical Scroll
Tardigrades, aka ‘water bears, ‘ are microscopic organisms that survive in harsh environments from the antarctic to oxygenless space . They are so robust that Japanese scientists froze a group of them for 30 years and successfully revived two specimens. But to understand what makes these tiny creatures so impervious, another group of researchers took a closer look at their genes. By mapping the entire genome of a particularly stress-tolerant tardigrade species, Ramazzottius varieornatus , they found a protein that protects DNA from being irradiated — which could be used to shield humans. As the University of Tokyo researchers describe in the science journal Nature , they took a sample group of human DNA and watched it deteriorate when bombarded with X-rays. But when they allowed some of those to create that tardigrade protein, they only showed half the damage as the control group. Further, those protected cells were still capable of reproducing. As in all specific studies, it’s too early to state how this will translate into treatment, prevention or any dramatic transhumanist strengthening of our species. But the scientists believe more of these proteins, and new applications, are likely lying in wait for more research to uncover. Via: Gizmodo Source: University of Tokyo newsroom
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‘Water Bear’ protein could shield human DNA from radiation
Marine archaeologists have found the partial remains of a 2, 000-year-old skeleton while conducting an excavation at the Antikythera shipwreck, the famous site that yielded the freakishly-advanced Antikythera Mechanism. Incredibly, the ancient remains could still contain traces of DNA. Read more…
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Ancient Skeleton Uncovered at the Antikythera Shipwreck
The space laboratory that China launched earlier this week has an atomic clock in it which is more accurate than the best timepiece operated by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, according to Chinese engineers. The atomic called, dubbed CACS or Cold Atomic Clock in Space, will slow down by only one second in a billion years. In comparison, the NIST’s F2 atomic clock, which serves as the United States’ primary time and frequency standard, loses a second every 300 million years. From an RT report:”It is the world’s first cold atomic clock to operate in space… it will have military and civilian applications, ” said Professor Xu Zhen from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, who was involved in the CACS project. An atomic clock uses vibrations of atoms to measure time, which are very consistent as long as the atoms are held at constant temperature. In fact, since 1967 the definition of second has been “9, 192, 631, 770 vibrations of a cesium-133 atom.” In a cold atomic clock, the atoms are cooled down with a laser to decrease the effect of atom movement on the measurements. CACS goes even further and eliminates the pull of Earth’s gravity by being based in orbit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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China’s Atomic Clock in Space Will Stay Accurate For a Billion Years
This week saw the first stable release of Android-x86 6.0 (marshmallow-x86) — and a new version of Remix OS for PC, a PC-optimized version of Android. Slashdot reader prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Android-x86 6.0 has been in the works since early this year, and it received a total of two RC (Release Candidate) builds during its entire development cycle, one in June and another in August. After joining the Remix OS team, Chih-Wei Huang now has all the reasons to update and improve its Android-x86 system for the latest Android releases. Therefore, as you might have guessed already, Android-x86 6.0 is the first stable version of the project to be based on Google’s Linux kernel-based Android 6.0 Marshmallow mobile operating system, and includes the most recent AOSP (Android Open Source Project) security updates too. Under the hood, Android-x86 6.0 is using the long-term supported Linux 4.4.20 kernel with an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 12.0.2 3D Graphics Library, and offers support for Samsung’s F2FS file system for SSD drives, better Wi-Fi support after resume and suspend, and initial HDMI audio support. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Run Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Your PC With Android-x86 6.0
We’ve seen a number of entities announce plans to operate with 100% renewable energy over the years. Costa Rica, for example, has gone 76 straight days using 100% renewable electricity. General Motors is the latest company to release a roadmap to achieving 100% renewable energy. The catch? It won’t be until 2050. CleanTechnica reports: American multinational General Motors, or GM, has committed to generating or sourcing 100% of the electricity for its operations across 59 countries from 100% renewable energy by 2050. GM made the announcement on Wednesday, revealing that it planned to generate or source all its electrical power needs for its 350 operations in 59 countries with 100% renewable energy such as wind, solar, and landfill gas, by 2050. In turn, the company has joined the 100% renewable energy campaign RE100, lending its considerable global business weight to an already important and successful campaign. “Establishing a 100% renewable energy goal helps us better serve society by reducing environmental impact, ” said Mary Barra, GM Chairman and CEO. “This pursuit of renewable energy benefits our customers and communities through cleaner air while strengthening our business through lower and more stable energy costs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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GM Commits To 100% Renewable Energy By 2050
Hello, old friend Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30 th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don’t even support lower-case characters. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
An anonymous reader writes: Over 500, 000 people have downloaded an Android app called “Guide for Pokemon Go” that roots the devices in order to deliver ads and installs apps without the user’s knowledge. Researchers that analyzed the malware said it contained multiple defenses that made reverse-engineering very difficult — some of the most advanced they’ve seen — which explains why it managed to fool Google’s security scanner and end up on the official Play Store. The exploits contained in the app’s rooting functions were able to root any Android released between 2012 and 2015. The trojan found inside the app was also found in nine other apps, affecting another 100, 000 users. The crook behind this trojan was obviously riding various popularity waves, packing his malware in clones for whatever app or game is popular at one particular point in time. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Over 500K People Have Installed a Pokemon Go-Related App That Roots and Hijacks Android Devices
Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News) One quarter of all body-worn camera footage from the Oakland, Calif. police was accidentally deleted in October 2014, according to the head of the relevant unit. As per the San Francisco Chronicle , Sgt. Dave Burke testified on Tuesday at a murder trial that this was, in fact, a mistake. This incident marks yet another setback in the efforts to roll out body-worn cameras to police agencies nationwide. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Police IT staff checked wrong box, deleted 25% of body cam footage
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has really embraced open source over the past couple of years. GitHub, a site that is home to a number of the web’s biggest collaborative code projects, has counted more than 5.8 million active users on its platform over the past 12 months, and says that Microsoft has the most open source contributors. Microsoft has 16, 419 contributors, beating out Facebook’s 15, 682 contributors, Docker’s 14, 059 contributors, and Google’s 12, 140 contributors. The Next Web reports: “Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. In October 2014, it open sourced its .NET framework, which is the company’s programming infrastructure for building and running apps and services — a major move towards introducing more developers to its server-side stack. Since then, it’s open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine, Visual Studio’s MSBuild compiling engine, the Computational Networks Toolkit for deep learning applications, its Xamarin tool for building cross-platform apps and most recently, PowerShell. It’s also worth noting that the company’s Visual Studio Code text editor made GitHub’s list of repositories with the most contributors. You can check out these lists, as well as other data from GitHub’s platform on this page.” GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath said in an interview with Fortune, “The big .Net project has more people outside of Microsoft contributing to it than people who work at Microsoft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google