Tag: technology

How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin

Molly McHugh writes with this story about sensors that can be attached to temporary tattoos to monitor various medical information. “The Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California San Diego has been experimenting with attaching sensors to temporary tattoos in order to extract data from the body. The tattoos are worn exactly as a regular temporary tattoo would be worn. The sensors simply sit atop the skin without penetrating it and interact with Bluetooth or other wireless devices with a signal in order to send the data….A biofuel battery applied as a temporary tattoo converts sweat into energy, and a startup within the center has developed a strip that extracts data from sweat to explain how your body is reacting to certain types of exercise. Amay Bandodkar, a fourth year PhD student at UCSD, explains that the sensors are programmed to react to the amount of lactate the body produces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin

IoT Is the Third Big Technology ‘Wave’ In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard

dcblogs writes: The Internet of Things (IoT) may be more significant in reshaping the competitive landscape than the arrival of the Internet. Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity. That’s the argument put forth by Michael Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School and James Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC, in a recent Harvard Business Review essay. PTC is a product design software firm that recently acquired machine-to-machine firm Axeda Corp. In the past 50 years, IT has delivered two major transformations or “waves, ” as the authors describe it. The first came in the 1960s and 1970s, with IT-enabled process automation, computer-aided design and manufacturing resource planning. The second was the Internet and everything it delivered. The third is IoT. That’s a strikingly sweeping claim and there will no doubt be contrarians to Porter and Heppelmann’s view. But what analysts are clear about is that IoT development today is at an early stage, perhaps at a point similar to 1995, the same year Amazon and eBay went online, followed by Netflix in 1997 and Google in 1998. People understood the trend at the time, but the big picture was still out of focus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the article:
IoT Is the Third Big Technology ‘Wave’ In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard

Obama Calls For $75 Million In Funding for 50,000 Police Body Cameras

The Hill reports that today President Obama will propose $263 million in funding to law enforcement to help avoid another disaster like the ongoing mess in Ferguson, Missouri. Read more…

Continue reading here:
Obama Calls For $75 Million In Funding for 50,000 Police Body Cameras

Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

An anonymous reader writes It’s the oldest rock on Earth–and it’s from Mars. A 4.4-billion-year-old martian meteorite, found in a dozen pieces in the western Sahara, has ignited a frenzy among collectors and scientists; prices have reached $10, 000 a gram, and museums and universities are vying for slivers of it. It is the only known martian meteorite made of sediment, a conglomerate of pebbles and other clumps of minerals from when the planet was warm, wet, and possibly habitable. The story of the discovery of the rock and its significance is fascinating, as well as the details presented about the economics of rare space materials. Apropos, this older story about missing moon rocks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post:
Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can’t really spin the drives faster than 7, 200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We’ll have to wait and see on that. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever”

Party time with the corporate tool, BlackBerry’s Passport. Sean Gallagher Specs at a glance: BlackBerry Passport Screen 1440 x 1440 pixels, 4.5 inches (493 ppi) AMOLED OS BlackBerry 10.3 (with Android compatibility) CPU 2.26 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 RAM 3GB GPU Adreno 330 Storage 32 GB internal, with microSD support up to 128 GB Networking Wi-Fi 802.11ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot

Continue Reading:
The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever”

Highly Advanced Backdoor Trojan Cased High-Profile Targets For Years

An anonymous reader points out this story at Ars about a new trojan on the scene. Researchers have unearthed highly advanced malware they believe was developed by a wealthy nation-state to spy on a wide range of international targets in diverse industries, including hospitality, energy, airline, and research. Backdoor Regin, as researchers at security firm Symantec are referring to the trojan, bears some resemblance to previously discovered state-sponsored malware, including the espionage trojans known as Flame and Duqu, as well as Stuxnet, the computer worm and trojan that was programmed to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. Regin likely required months or years to be completed and contains dozens of individual modules that allowed its operators to tailor the malware to individual targets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Highly Advanced Backdoor Trojan Cased High-Profile Targets For Years

Google’s Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer

An anonymous reader writes Google [Thursday] shared an update from Project Loon, the company’s initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of the world via hot air balloons. Google says it now has the ability to launch up to 20 of these balloons per day. This is in part possible because the company has improved its autofill equipment to a point where it can fill a balloon in under five minutes. This is a major achievement, given that Google says filling a Project Loon balloon with enough air so that it is ready for flight is the equivalent of inflating 7, 000 party balloons. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Google’s Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer

Judge Approves $450M Settlement For Apple’s Ebook Price Fixing

An anonymous reader writes: On Friday a U.S. federal judge approved a settlement in the Apple ebook price-fixing case that could see the technology giant paying $450 million. $400 million of that would go to the roughly 23 million consumers thought to be affected by the price fixing, and the rest would go to lawyers. Though the case is now settled, the dollar amount is not necessarily final — an appeals court still has to rule on a previous verdict. If the appeals court finds in Apple’s favor, then the total settlement drops to only $70 million. If they find against Apple, then it’s the full amount. “The settlement appeared to reflect fatigue by Apple, the Justice Department, state attorneys general and class-action lawyers eager to conclude a case that has dragged on, largely because of delays by Apple.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View original post here:
Judge Approves $450M Settlement For Apple’s Ebook Price Fixing

BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today outlined the company’s plans for its file synchronization tool Sync. Next year, the company will launch Sync 2.0, finally taking the product out of beta, as well as three new paid Sync products. Ever since its debut, Sync has provided a wide variety of solutions to various problems, BitTorrent says, from distributing files across remote servers to sharing vacation photos. BitTorrent thus believes it needs to build three distinct products for each of these separate audiences, including a Pro version for $40 per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue Reading:
BitTorrent Unveils Sync 2.0