Tag: science

First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW

the_newsbeagle writes The $10 million Tricorder X-prize is getting to the “put up or shut up” stage: The 10 finalists must turn in their working devices on June 1st for consumer testing. At SXSW last week, the finalist team Cloud DX showed off its prototype, which includes a wearable collar, a base station, a blood-testing stick, and a scanning wand. From the article: “The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions. Grant Campany, director of the Tricorder XPrize, said he’s looking forward to getting those devices into real patients hands. ‘This will be a practical demonstration of what the future of medicine will be like, ‘ said Campany at that same SXSW talk, ‘so we can scale it up after competition.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW

Bring On the Boring Robots

malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke’s ‘butler bots’ are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2, 000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke’s CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone’s door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bring On the Boring Robots

Crazy No-Stick Coating Is Coming to a Bottle of Glue Near You

Remember that no-stick ketchup bottle of the future an MIT professor made a few years ago? Well, the MIT team created a company to sell the super slippery technology, and Elmer’s recently signed an exclusive license to use it in their glue bottles. Pretty slick! (Sorry.) Read more…

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Crazy No-Stick Coating Is Coming to a Bottle of Glue Near You

Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy

An anonymous reader writes with news about an impressive renewable energy accomplishment in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has achieved a clean energy milestone by using 100 per cent renewable energy for a record 75 days in a row. The feat was achieved thanks to heavy rainfall, which powered four hydroelectric plants in the first three months of the year, the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute said. No fossil fuels have been burnt to generate electricity since December 2014, in the state which is renowned for its clean energy policies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy

DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects

jones_supa writes As is the search engine company’s annual habit, DuckDuckGo has chosen to advance four open source projects by donating to them. The primary focus this year was to support FOSS projects that bring privacy tools to anyone who needs them. $25, 000 goes to The Freedom of the Press Foundation to support SecureDrop, which is a whistleblower submission used to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was given $25, 000 to support PrivacyBadger, which is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your surfing habits. Another $25, 000 arrives at GPGTools to support GPG Suite, which is a software package for OS X that encrypts files or messages. Finally, $25, 000 was donated to Riseup to support Tails, which is a live operating system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects

LightEater Malware Attack Places Millions of Unpatched BIOSes At Risk

Mark Wilson writes Two minutes is all it takes to completely destroy a computer. In a presentation entitled ‘How many million BIOSes would you like to infect?’ at security conference CanSecWest, security researchers Corey Kallenberg and Xeno Kovah revealed that even an unskilled person could use an implant called LightEater to infect a vulnerable system in mere moments. The attack could be used to render a computer unusable, but it could also be used to steal passwords and intercept encrypted data. The problem affects motherboards from companies including Gigabyte, Acer, MSI, HP and Asus. It is exacerbated by manufactures reusing code across multiple UEFI BIOSes and places home users, businesses and governments at risk. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LightEater Malware Attack Places Millions of Unpatched BIOSes At Risk

How To Encode 2.05 Bits Per Photon, By Using Twisted Light

Thorfinn.au writes Researchers at the University of Rochester and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using “twisted light.” [Abstract here.]This remarkable achievement is possible because the researchers used the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information, rather than the more commonly used polarization of light. The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How To Encode 2.05 Bits Per Photon, By Using Twisted Light

OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

abhishekmdb writes No browsers are safe, as proved yesterday at Pwn2Own, but crashing one of them with just one line of special code is slightly different. A developer has discovered a hack in Google Chrome which can crash the Chrome tab on a Mac PC. The code is a 13-character special string which appears to be written in Assyrian script. Matt C has reported the bug to Google, who have marked the report as duplicate. This means that Google are aware of the problem and are reportedly working on it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

The Pirate Party Now the Biggest Party In Iceland

jrepin writes The Pirate Party now measures as the largest political party in Iceland, according to a new servey from the Icelandic market and research company MMR which regularly surveyes the support for the political parties in Iceland. Support for political parties and the government was surveyed in the period between the 13thand 18th of March. The results show that The Pirate Party has gained increased support. Now, support for The Pirate Party totals 23.9%, compared to their previous 12.8% in the last MMR survey. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Pirate Party Now the Biggest Party In Iceland