In the days of the Soviet Union, western antibiotics couldn’t make it past the Iron Curtain. So Eastern Bloc doctors figured out how to use viruses to kill the bacteria infecting their patients. Now, with antibiotic-resistant bacteria vexing modern medicine, that eerie yet effective method might come our way. In post-antibiotic world, infection is cure! Read more…
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Soviet Doctors Cured Infections With Viruses, and Soon Yours Might Too
When we think of medicine, we usually think of the treatment: drugs, surgery, therapy. But before all that comes the diagnosis—a tricky proposition when symptoms are confusing and information scant. Now for the first time ever, doctors were able to use rapid DNA sequencing to identify an obscure bacterium in time to save a boy’s life. Read more…
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A New Rapid DNA Test Helped Save a Kid From an Obscure Infection
astroengine writes: “A weird type of ‘hybrid’ star has been discovered nearly 40 years since it was first theorized — but until now has been curiously difficult to find. In 1975, renowned astrophysicists Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., and Anna Zytkow, of the University of Cambridge, UK, assembled a theory on how a large dying star could swallow its neutron star binary partner, thus becoming a very rare type of stellar hybrid, nicknamed a Thorne-Zytkow object (or TZO). The neutron star — a dense husk of degenerate matter that was once a massive star long since gone supernova — would spiral into the red supergiant’s core, interrupting normal fusion processes. According to the Thorne-Zytkow theory, after the two objects have merged, an excess of the elements rubidium, lithium and molybdenum will be generated by the hybrid. So astronomers have been on the lookout for stars in our galaxy, which is thought to contain only a few dozen of these objects at any one time, with this specific chemical signature in their atmospheres. Now, according to Emily Levesque of the University of Colorado Boulder and her team, a bona fide TZO has been discovered and their findings have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Star Within a Star: Thorne-Zytkow Object Discovered
MojoKid (1002251) writes “Last year, Intel launched two new processor families based on the Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E based Core i7 architecture. Both chips were just incremental updates over their predecessors. Haswell may have delivered impressive gains in mobile, but it failed to impress on the desktop where it was only slightly faster than the chip it replaced. Enthusiasts weren’t terribly excited about either core but Intel is hoping its new Devil’s Canyon CPU, which launches today, will change that. The new chip is the Core i7-4790K and it packs several new features that should appeal to the enthusiast and overclocking markets. First, Intel has changed the thermal interface material from the paste it used in the last generation over to a new Next Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material, or as Intel calls it, “NGPTIM.” Moving Haswell’s voltage regulator on-die proved to be a significant problem for overclockers since it caused dramatic heat buildup that was only exacerbated by higher clock speeds. Overclockers reported that removing Haswell’s lid could boost clock speeds by several hundred MHz. The other tweak to the Haswell core is a great many additional capacitors, which have been integrated to smooth power delivery at higher currents. This new chip gives Haswell a nice lift. If the overclocking headroom delivers on top of that, enthusiasts might be able to hit 4.7-4.8GHz on standard cooling.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Announces Devil’s Canyon Core I7-4790K: 4GHz Base Clock, 4.4GHz Turbo
If driverless cars give you the jitters , how about computer-assisted trucks instead? Because two 18-wheelers in Nevada look set to use automation to make them safer and more efficient—and they could be on the roads as soon as 2015. Read more…
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Nevada Roads Could Be Home to Computer-Assisted Trucks By 2015
itwbennett (1594911) writes “ActiveLink, which is 80% owned by Panasonic, is building heavy-duty strength-boosting suits that the company says can help workers shoulder the burden of heavy gear and protective clothing and could be useful at nuclear plants. ‘Our powered suits could be used to assist and support remote-controlled robots in emergencies, ‘ ActiveLink President Hiromichi Fujimoto said in an interview. ‘Workers could wear the suits to carry PackBots to their deployment point and to work in low-radiation areas.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Robotic Exoskeletons Could Help Nuclear Plant Workers
An anonymous reader writes “Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.” From the article: “While details are scarce at the moment, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reports that the arrest has been confirmed by the Swedish authorities. According to Peter Althin, Sunde’s lawyer, the news means that his client will most likely be sent to prison to serve his 8-month sentence. Sunde’s prison sentence was made final in 2012 after Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested In Sweden
schwit1 (797399) writes “As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy. The FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning document for 2013-17 describes the bureau as monitoring 95 percent of all mortgage transactions. FHFA officials claim the database is essential to conducting a monthly mortgage survey required by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and to help it prepare an annual report for Congress.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Federal Database Will Track Americans’ Credit Ratings, Other Financial Info
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes “Former Sun executives and employees gathered in Mountain View, Calif., in May, and out came the ‘real’ stories. Andy Bechtolsheim reports that Steve Jobs wasn’t the only one who set out to copy the Xerox Parc Alto; John Gage wonders why so many smart engineers couldn’t figure out that it would have been better to buy tables instead of kneepads for the folks doing computer assembly; Vinod Khosla recalls the plan to ‘rip-off Sun technology, ‘ and more.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out
An anonymous reader writes “The SparkFun team took a tour of a factory in China that manufactures LEDs. They took lots of pictures showing the parts that go into the LEDs, the machines used to build them, and the people operating the machines. There’s a surprising amount of manual labor involved with making LEDs. Quoting: ‘As shipped on the paper sheets, the LED dies are too close together to manipulate. There is a mechanical machine … that spreads the dies out and sticks them to a film of weak adhesive. This film is suspended above the lead frames … Using a microscope, the worker manually aligns the die, and, with a pair of tweezers, pokes the die down into the lead frame. The adhesive in the lead frame wins (is more sticky), and the worker quickly moves to the next die. We were told they can align over 80 per minute or about 40, 000 per day.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How LEDs Are Made