Biomimicry. Technology. Rockets & fireworks. Sea mining. Twitter files confidentially for IPO. WORLD VIEWS. COOL STUFF. Ostrich-egg globe showing Newfoundland hailed as ‘oldest’ New World orb. Star Size Comparison HD. Darren Perks: Solar Warden - The Secret Space Program. News In Two Minutes - Comet Ison - Egyptian Military Riots. “Torah” Bible Codes and Dr. Eliyahu Rips. Is this a golden age for science on TV? If anyone still needed convincing that television has a stupefying impact on the public at large, it's worth examining the case of doctor and BBC presenter Michael Mosley's episode of Horizon on the 5:2 diet, broadcast in August last year.
Before he came along with a scientific take on the apparent health effects of fasting for two days out of every week, this was just another in a long list of fads. Of course, it is now ubiquitous – Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Benedict Cumberbatch and Beyoncé, among many others, are confirmed fans and this newspaper even tried to persuade readers to "5:2" their entire lives. In his programme, Mosley travelled across America, spoke to scientists and successfully tried the diet himself. It sparked a wild amount of attention for a programme that was largely about hormones, genetics and careful scientific trials with promising, but uncertain, results.
This isn't what you expect from a science programme. Weird Neutrino Eludes Scientists Yet Again. Though they've been looking for over a year, scientists have found no trace of an elusive interaction among elementary particles called neutrinos.
The interaction, in which neutrinos would collide and annihilate one another, would prove that the mysterious particles act as their own antimatter partners, said Manfred Lindner, director of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany. Antimatter particles are subatomic particles that typically have opposite properties of normal matter. For instance, the antimatter partner of the electron is a positively charged particle called the positron. But a new analysis of more than a year's worth of data puts limits on how frequently this elusive behavior can occur. It also suggested that clues of this interaction found in an earlier experiment were probably just due to background radiation. Ultrarare event. Is the Government Spying On You Through Your Own Computer’s Webcam Or Microphone? - The Washington Post. The companies said some of the requests were for terrorism investigations.
But others were from a local sheriff asking for data to locate a missing child or from federal marshals tracking fugitives. From these statements, it was impossible to ascertain the scale of the FISA requests made by the National Security Agency. The companies said they have been pressing the U.S. government for permission to talk more openly about the data requests since The Washington Post and Guardian newspapers reported on a secret surveillance program code-named PRISM that was aimed at tracking terrorist activities.
The reports cited an NSA PowerPoint presentation that said the agency connected directly to the servers of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other tech-industry giants. Another NSA document described the program differently. Facebook and other tech companies have vigorously denied giving the government direct access to their servers. A letter that Google sent to Attorney General Eric H. The Changing and Terrifying Nature of the New Cyber-Warfare. During that same period, a virus that would be named Duqu—which targeted fewer than 50 machines, mostly in Iran and Sudan—began collecting information about the computer systems controlling industrial machinery, and to diagram the commercial relationships of various Iranian organizations.
Duqu, like many other significant pieces of malware, was named for a feature of the code, in this case derived from the names the malware gave to files it created. In time, researchers found that Duqu bore several resemblances to an even more virulent cyber-attack. As early as 2007, the first versions of a computer worm, designed not for espionage but for the physical sabotage of machinery, began to infect computers in several countries but primarily in Iran. As reported in these pages (“A Declaration of Cyber-War,” April 2011), it was one of the most resilient, sophisticated, and noxious pieces of malware ever seen.
Nikola Tesla. Silkworms and robot work together to weave Silk Pavilion. News: researchers at MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter group have created a dome from silk fibres woven by a robotic arm, which was then finished by live silkworms (+ movie).
Update: this interview is featured in Dezeen Book of Interviews, which is on sale now for £12. The project is intended to explore how digital and biological fabrication techniques can be combined to produce architectural structures. Intel's James Reinders Talks OpenMP, Developer Tools and GPUs. Tutorial: Understanding Intel’s New Processors and Tools - Go Parallel. Intel Evangelist James Reinders explains how software development tools support features of current and emerging Intel hardware, including the 60-core Xeon Phi Coprocessor , now shipping, and products based on the code-named Haswell microarchitecture, scheduled to emerge next year.
This high-level tutorial summarizes key points, including new programming features of the 3rd generation Intel Core™ Processors, Intel® HD graphics and new acronyms including AVX and TSX and support via C, C++, Fortran, OpenCL and OpenMP. Context: Developer tools and hardware are co-evolving in several interesting ways.
Tutorial: Understanding Intel’s New Processors and Tools - Go Parallel.