Visit any major U.S. city and you’ll likely see the anecdotal evidence that use of public transit is steadily growing in popularity. Last year, however, Americans reached an important milestone: according to a new study by the American Public Transit Association , U.S. residents took almost 10.7 billion trips on transit, the highest number since 1956. Read more…
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Americans Are Riding Public Transit In Record-Breaking Numbers
sciencehabit writes “Most magnets shrug off tiny temperature tweaks. But now physicists have created a new nanomaterial–an ultrathin 10-nanometer layer of nickel grafted onto a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide–that dramatically changes how easily it flips its magnetic orientation when heated or cooled only slightly. The effect, never before seen in any material, could eventually lead to new types of computer memory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives
LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine , these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller. Read more…
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The World’s Thinnest LED Is Only 3 Atoms Thick
First time accepted submitter paddysteed writes “I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA’s, and found my school’s. I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad, but what my school has done is install their certificate on people’s own machines — which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad. We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within five minutes, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had ‘fixed’ it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk. I want to take this further but to get the school’s management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non-technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A 17-month old deaf toddler named Alex Frederick recently had an experimental device implanted directly into his brainstem — a device that has yet to be approved for children in the United States. This is the exact moment it started to work. Read more…
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Watch the exact moment a deaf toddler hears for the very first time
We’ve all spent hours—maybe even days—of our lives cursing the slow crawl of the dreaded progress bar. But did you ever stop to think about how much worse it might be if the bar wasn’t there in the first place. Fortunately, thanks to one grad student’s genius idea back in the 80s , we’ll never have to find out. Read more…
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Where the Progress Bar Came From
TechCrunch reports that your Facebook news feed is getting a design touchup. Nothing major: new fonts, “bolder” images, and a simplified left sidebar. As for the glorious overhaul we were supposed to get last year—still no word. Read more…
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TechCrunch reports that your Facebook news feed is getting a design touchup.
v3rgEz writes “Even as some police departments curtail their sue of license plate scanning technology over privacy concerns, private companies have been amassing a much larger, almost completely unregulated database that pulls in billions of scans a year, marking the exact time and location of millions of vehicles across America. The database, which is often offered to law enforcement for free, is collected by repo and towing companies eager to tap easy revenue, while the database companies then resell that data, often for as little as $25 for a plate’s complete recorded history.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
John Gruber believes that iOS 7.1 should ship any day now—because the app required to stream Apple’s SXSW iTunes Festival, which starts in a week, requires the new OS. Let’s see! Read more…
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John Gruber believes that iOS 7.1 should ship any day now–because the app required to stream Apple’
Today is Mardi Gras , and like any booze-fueled street celebration, that means tons of full-bladdered revelers seeking out a place to relieve themselves. Thankfully, technology’s here to save New Orleans from becoming a literal Urinetown . Meet AirPnP , the web app that lets you do your business in the privacy of a stranger’s home. Read more…
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AirPnP Connects Mardi Gras Partiers With Places to Pee