Tag: technology

Alaska Gets ‘Artificial Aurora’ As HAARP Antenna Array Listens Again

Freshly Exhumed quotes Hackaday: The famous HAARP antenna array is to be brought back into service for experiments by the University of Alaska. Built in the 1990s for the US Air Force’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array is a 40-acre site containing a phased array of 180 high-frequency antennas and their associated high-power transmitters. Its purpose is to conduct research on charged particles in the upper atmosphere, but that hasn’t stopped an array of bizarre conspiracy theories. A university space physics researcher will actually create an artificial aurora starting Sunday (and continuing through Wednesday) to study how yjr atmosphere affects satellite-to-ground communications, and “observers throughout Alaska will have an opportunity to photograph the phenomenon, ” according to the University. “Under the right conditions, people can also listen to HAARP radio transmissions from virtually anywhere in the world using an inexpensive shortwave radio.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alaska Gets ‘Artificial Aurora’ As HAARP Antenna Array Listens Again

MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari’s unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he’d built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program. But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries. A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME’s 1, 600 contributors — more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary — and also thanks MAME’s uncredited contributors. “if you’ve filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it.” I’ve seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

Thousands Of Disabled People Are Living In ‘Virtual Utopias’ In Second Life

“For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world, ” reports Backchanel. “For them, the fevered fantasies of a decade ago have become reality: Second Life is where they live.” mirandakatz shares this article: Wagner James Au, who has written extensively about Second Life, estimates they may account for roughly 20 percent of users. Some active members estimate the number higher — at as much as 50 percent… Abundant research shows imagining movement, without actually moving the body, can have positive effects on motor skills, balance, and learning… Studies suggest the therapeutic benefits of virtual reality extend beyond movement disorders — to chronic pain, cognitive functioning in people with ADHD and PTSD, and social skills for people on the autism spectrum. The article describes a 90-year-old former nurse, now living in a retirement community, who’s spent eight years living in a Second Life archipelago called “Virtual Ability Island” with over a thousand other members. “Watching her avatar hike trails and dance gave her the confidence to try things in the physical world that she hadn’t tried in a half decade — like stepping off a curb or standing up without any help.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Thousands Of Disabled People Are Living In ‘Virtual Utopias’ In Second Life

Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

After successfully extracting sequenceable DNA from a pair of Woolly Mammoth carcasses pulled from Siberia’s permafrost in 2014, a team of Harvard researchers announced on Thursday that they are tantalizing close to cloning the (currently) extinct pachyderms. The team made the announcement ahead of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week. They estimate that they’re just two years away from creating a viable hybrid embryo. That is, they take a modern day asian elephant embryo and splice in DNA from the Mammoth to get a fuzzy “mammophant, ” as the team calls it. “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo, ” Harvard Professor George Church told the Guardian . “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.” So far, the team hasn’t progressed passed the cellular stage in creating one of these beasts though they have managed to splice in as many as 45 mammoth genes, up from their initial 15. Within a few years, the team expects to ramp their efforts up to the embryonic stage but it’ll likely be quite a while until they can birth a living mammophant. Since the Asian elephant is itself endangered, this hybridizing technique could help preserve the species. At the same time, the Harvard team doesn’t want to put one of these valuable animals at risk carrying a mammophant fetus to term, so they’re looking into gestating it in an artificial womb. That’s where the delay comes in. While Church’s team has managed to grow a mouse in an artificial womb for ten days — half its normal gestation period — the technology for doing that for an elephant-scale animal likely won’t be feasible for at least a decade. And even once that technology has matured, there are still a host of hand-wringing ethical arguments that will have to be sorted before Church’s team gets the green light to proceed further. Source: Guardian

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Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research “designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from a pig, ” says co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist. “This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle.” Digital Trends reports: It may not sound like the most appetizing of foodstuffs, but pig skeletal muscle is in fact the main component of pork. The fact that it could be grown from a stem-cell line, rather than from a whole pig, is a major advance. This is also true of the paper’s second big development: the fact that this cultivation of pig skeletal muscle didn’t use animal serum, a component which has been used in other livestock muscle cultivation processes. [Genovese] acknowledges that there are other non-food-related possibilities the work hints at. “There is a contingent interest in using the pig as a model to study disease and test regenerative therapies for human conditions, ” he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

YouTube now has over one billion auto-captioned videos

Over a billion videos on YouTube are accessible to viewers who are hard of hearing or completely deaf, thanks to the video platform’s automated captions . YouTube product manager Liat Kaver has announced the milestone number in a blog post, where he also talked about how hard it was growing up as a kid who’s hard of hearing and having very little access to closed captions. After his team launched automated captions in 2009, they started concentrating on making it more available and improving its accuracy. Kaver said they made automated captions more available to YouTubers by combining Google’s automatic speech recognition technology with the YouTube caption system. They then achieved a 50 percent leap in accuracy — for English captions, at least — by improving the service’s machine learning algorithms and expanding its training data. We all know how funny caption fails can be, but people who have no other way of knowing what was actually said would end up missing bits of information. In the image above, you’ll see an example comparing the service’s old (left) and current (right) models. Going forward, the company aims to improve the accuracy of the 10 other languages its caption tech supports. Kaver is encouraging YouTube creators to chip in and review the accuracy of machine-generated captions for their videos, as well. After all, the more data they have on their hands, the easier it’ll be to improve the technology. Source: YouTube

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YouTube now has over one billion auto-captioned videos

Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute

According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR, ” The Verge reports. From their report: STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patents are different enough from the ones the University of California applied for that the Broad patents stand. The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn’t so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn’t how the science world views her work, STAT points out: “Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500, 000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450, 000 Japan Prize in 2017, ” the outlet notes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute

Pioneer’s New Lightning Earbuds Solve an Annoying iPhone Problem

After the initial outrage of Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 died down, users not wanting to go wireless soon realized that using the phone’s Lightning port meant they could no longer charge while listening to music. Pioneer’s new Rayz Plus earbuds include a simple solution to that problem, but… Read more…

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Pioneer’s New Lightning Earbuds Solve an Annoying iPhone Problem

Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other ‘Pirate’ Sites

Several Pirate Bay users from ISPs all over the world have been unable to access their favorite torrent site for more than a week. Their requests are being stopped in the Internet backbone network of Cogent Communications, which has blackholed the CloudFlare IP-address of The Pirate Bay and many other torrent and streaming sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: When the average Internet user types in a domain name, a request is sent through a series of networks before it finally reaches the server of the website. This also applies to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites such as Primewire, Movie4k, TorrentProject and TorrentButler. However, for more than a week now the US-based backbone provider Cogent has stopped passing on traffic to these sites. The sites in question all use CloudFlare, which assigned them the public IP-addresses 104.31.18.30 and 104.31.19.30. While this can be reached just fine by most people, users attempting to pass requests through Cogent’s network are unable to access them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other ‘Pirate’ Sites

Scientists make battery that runs on air and carbon dioxide

Researchers at Penn State University have potentially come up with yet another way we could create energy from all that nasty carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. They’ve developed an inexpensive flow cell battery that uses mostly water solutions containing either dissolved CO2 or dissolved normal air — the technical name for the dissolving process is called sparging, just FYI. Because the liquids contain different concentrations of CO2, they have different pH levels, and it’s this imbalance that generates electricity. In a flow cell battery, two liquids are separated by a membrane that doesn’t allow them to mix, but does permit the flow of ions. As ions are exchanged between the denser CO2 solution and normal air solution, the voltage changes at the manganese oxide electrodes in either tank. This stimulates the flow of electrons between the two connected electrodes and voilà : electricity. When the ion concentrations have normalized, you can effectively recharge the battery by refilling each tank with the opposite solution, reversing the flow of electrons. The Penn State scientists were able to do this over 50 times before seeing a drop in performance. Using CO2 in a flow cell battery isn’t an entirely new idea, but this version has an average power density of 0.82 W/m2 — nearly 200 times higher than anything developed previously, according to the researchers. Other CO2-based fuel cell systems are capable of much more, but they are also much more complicated, using other energy dense fuels and requiring high temperatures to operate. Penn State’s battery, on the other hand, works at room temperature and uses inexpensive materials and processes. Even so, the team admit it may not be economically viable to make use of their research on a large scale just yet. The dream, though, would be to integrate these batteries into fossil fuel power stations, repurposing their CO2 emissions to make even more energy. While more work needs to be done to improve performance and viability, anything that can make light of a bad (and worsening) situation can only be a good thing. Via: Phys.org Source: Environmental Science & Technology Letters

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Scientists make battery that runs on air and carbon dioxide