Tag: science

$350 million Nintendo land coming to Universal Japan’s park

When Nintendo announced it was granting Universal Studios the rights to some of its properties for theme park rides, it was anyone’s guess where they’d show up first. Now we know that they’ll debut in the gaming juggernaut’s back yard: Japan. Regional news outlet Sankei (Japanese) reports that the attraction is scheduled for completion by 2020, the year Tokyo is slated to host the Olympics. And lest you think this will be a simple statue of Princess Peach and a Mario Kart -themed go-kart track, the publication says this should be on par with the likes of Universal’s Harry Potter -themed zone but focused entirely on everyone’s favorite Italian plumber. Hell, it could even be called “Super Mario World.” Crazier things have happened! Need more evidence for how serious of a deal this is? Universal is putting up ¥40 billion ($351, 509, 200) — given Nintendo’s current financial woes , the company is probably happy someone else is footing the bill. For that amount, maybe we’ll see a full scale version of the entire Mushroom Kingdom in a few years. 4) Busy start of 2016 for Nintendo. See the picture below for details (from Sankei: https://t.co/NRejTXGL6Q ) // end pic.twitter.com/EMHunhgYFa — Dr. Serkan Toto (@serkantoto) March 5, 2016 Via: Dr. Serkan Toto (Twitter) Source: Sankei (Japanese)

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$350 million Nintendo land coming to Universal Japan’s park

SpaceX’s Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing"

Eloking writes with this news from The Verge: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space this afternoon, but — as expected — failed to land the vehicle on a drone ship at sea afterward. CEO Elon Musk said the rocket ‘landed hard’ on the drone ship. The mission requirements made a successful landing unlikely. This was SpaceX’s fourth attempt to land the Falcon 9 post-launch on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. All of the previous sea landings failed too, though the third attempt came very close. The company had low hopes of a successful landing from the start of this mission, since the rocket had to send a heavy satellite into a high orbit. That requires a lot of fuel for the launch itself, so there wasn’t much fuel left for the rocket’s return to Earth and powered landing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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SpaceX’s Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing"

MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

New submitter _merlin writes: MAMEdev just announced that MAME (formerly Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is now entirely available under OSI-comliant, FSF-approved licenses. The project as a whole is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0), while individual source files are available under BSD-3-Clause, LGPL-2.1 or GPL-2.0 (all compatible with GPL-2.0). Over 90% of the code, including core functionality, is available under the BSD-3-Clause license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. “Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests, ” says Popper. “But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

hackingbear writes: While the general steps of forming a long-term memory are clear, the details, such as how exactly the molecular signals get shuttled to the command center, which generally has tight security, are unclear. A new study, led by neuroscientist Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, may finally have that answer. In the tiny minds of fruit flies, a protein called importin-7 acts to shuttle the memory-triggering signal into the nucleus with its top-level clearance to the restricted area, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With genetic tweaking, the researchers dialed up and down the amount of importin-7 in the flies and then put them through the memory training and test. They found that cranking up levels of the shuttle protein strengthened the long-term memories of the flies, while turning it off weakened their memory. “The current work confirms that [importin-7] is indeed critical at the behavioral level in mediating [long-term memory] consolidation, ” the authors concluded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

Ikea Is Growing New Eco-Friendly Mushroom Packaging

To stop all those $20 side tables getting banged up, Ikea has to use a lot of polystyrene packaging every year. Unfortunately, polystyrene isn’t biodegradable, and people are bad at recycling, leaving Ikea looking for a better material to stick between sheets of ply. Read more…

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Ikea Is Growing New Eco-Friendly Mushroom Packaging

“Problematic” fossil turns out to be oldest known example of life on land

Martin Smith Detail of the Tortotubus fungus, which lived 440 million years ago in Sweden. 4 more images in gallery Life oozed out of the seas onto land somewhere between 450 and 500 million years ago, but we have almost no fossils from this period on land. That may be about to change. A scientist in the UK believes he’s identified the oldest terrestrial organism yet discovered, after careful analysis of 440-million-year-old microfossils gathered in Scotland and Sweden in the 1980s. Durham University Earth scientist Martin Smith suggests in a new paper published in the  Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society that a few fossilized filaments discovered in Scotland and Sweden are actually part of a root-like system used by fungus to gather nutrients from soil. They were long known as “problematic” fossils because nobody was sure what they were, nor where they fit into fungal evolution. Smith identified the filaments as part of an ancient fungus called  Tortotubus,  which bears some resemblance to modern mushrooms—though we have no fossils that could prove that the fungus had fruiting bodies like mushrooms do. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Problematic” fossil turns out to be oldest known example of life on land

Slack to start integrating native voice chat into its app

A couple of months ago, you could start making Skype calls from within Slack , an award-winning work chat app that’s pretty popular with a lot of companies (we certainly use it over here in the Engadget office). Now, however, voice calls are simply baked into the app itself, without you having to use an external service. The feature is in beta right now, and testing will roll out in Slack’s desktop apps as well as in Chrome. The voice calling feature actually comes from Slack’s acquisition of Screenhero over a year ago. If you have it, you’ll spot a phone icon at the top of your screen next to the info button. Click it and you can initiate a voice call much like most other chat apps out there. This doesn’t work with just individual folks either; you can also make channel-wide calls with up to 15 folks, but this is only for Slack users who pay for the service. And because this is Slack — known for its wide range of emoji — you can also respond to voice chats with one of several colorful reactions imposed over your user icon. This isn’t to say that Slack will stop supporting the aforementioned Skype or other voice chat services; it’s just another option. We should also note that rival Hipchat has had voice and video chat for awhile now. Still, for loyal Slack users, this is great news; here’s hoping that video support will be coming too. Via: The Verge Source: Slack

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Slack to start integrating native voice chat into its app

DoD Announces New Bug Bounty Program Called Hack the Pentagon

Quince alPillan writes: Announcing what it calls “the first cyber bug bounty program in the history of the federal government, ” the Department of Defense says it’s inviting vetted hackers to test the security of its web pages and networks. Vetted hackers will need to pass a background check and will be attacking a predetermined system that is not a part of critical operations. This program is being put together by the Digital Defense Service, launched last fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DoD Announces New Bug Bounty Program Called Hack the Pentagon

Pirates hacked a shipping firm to find boats to raid

Seaborne pirates just borrowed a page from their land-based counterparts . A Verizon security report has revealed that raiders hacked a shipping company’s content management system to determine which ships were worth boarding, and where the valuable cargo was located. They not only knew when to launch a raid, but the exact crates they had to pry open — they could get in, steal the cargo they want and leave without the risk of a days-long, Captain Philips -style hostage situation. In this case, the pirates still had a lot to learn about hacking. They didn’t encrypt their commands or use proxies, making it easy to trace their activities. They also weren’t skilled enough to compromise systems as much as they wanted. However, those tidbits aren’t about to comfort other shipping companies. If there’s a pirate outfit that’s both well-armed and technically savvy, it could create havoc by plundering ships with relatively little fear of getting caught. Via: Business Insider Source: Verizon

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Pirates hacked a shipping firm to find boats to raid