Brussels Locked Down, Subway System Halted
November 21st, 2015Via: Daily Mail:
Brussels has been put into security lockdown after Belgian intelligence received ‘precise information’ of a planned Paris-style ISIS attack in the capital.
Belgium’s prime minister Charles Michel confirmed that the decision to raise the terror alert level in Brussels was taken ‘based on quite precise information about the risk of an attack like the one that happened in Paris.’
Service has been halted on the Brussels subway system and heavily armed police and soldiers are patrolling the Belgian capital amid a high security alert.
The country’s national security center has raised the terror threat level to Level four after fears of a ‘serious and imminent’ terror threat involving ‘weapons and explosives’.
Public Service Announcement: Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1, Corsair DDR4 RAM and XMP
November 20th, 2015This is totally off topic, but maddening for the handful of people who are having the problem, so, all regular readers, please skip.
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If you landed here looking for a solution to the “overclocking failed” error when trying to enable XMP with your Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 and Corsair DDR4 RAM (in my case, 16GB, 2x8GB, Corsair Vengeance LPX Series, CMK16GX4M2A2666C16, DDR4-2666): Updating the board’s BIOS fixes it.
My board came with BIOS 0901 and enabling XMP caused the overclocking failed error when trying to boot. It would only boot normally with XMP off and the DRAM running at 2133. People on forums are suggesting entering the DRAM timings manually, but I found that just upgrading the BIOS to 1302 made XMP work properly.
So, upgrade the BIOS, enable XMP and restart. That’s it.
Australia: Robot Bricklayer Can Build a Home in Two Days
November 19th, 2015Via: Financial Review:
Australian investors have begun buying in to the rise of the machines, as a company promising to replace the humble brickie with a robot that can build a four-bedroom house in two days hit the ASX boards.
Fastbrick Robotics started trading on the ASX on Wednesday, and was up almost 4 per cent by midday.
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Fastbrick Robotics chief executive Mike Pivac said the robots would be able to build a house faster and more accurately than traditional methods.
“The home buyer is the real beneficiary of this. The time it takes to build a standard home is six to eight weeks, so the home buyer will save $20,000 to $30,000,” he said.
Australia Just Stopped China Buying a Farm the Size of Kentucky
November 19th, 2015Via: Fortune:
You can have too much foreign investment, it seems.
The Australian government Thursday blocked the sale of a portfolio of farmland the size of Kentucky to Chinese investors on national interest grounds.
Four separate groups linked to Chinese-based investors had been dominating the bidding for properties amounting to 2.5% of Australia’s farming land owned by S. Kidman & Co. The assets were expected to fetch an estimated 350 million Australian dollars ($250 million). The proposed sale had become a test case for how the country balances concerns over foreign ownership with the need for foreign investment in an economy that has slowed sharply due to the collapse in commodity prices this year.
Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption
November 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
Federal regulators on Thursday approved a genetically engineered salmon as fit for consumption, clearing the way for the first genetically altered animal to reach American supermarkets and dinner tables.
The approval, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes more than five years after agency reviewers made their initial determination that the fish would be safe to eat and for the environment, an unusually long delay.
The salmon has been fiercely opposed by consumer and environmental groups, which have argued that the safety studies were inadequate and that wild salmon populations might be affected if the genetically engineered fish were to escape into the oceans and rivers.
The AquAdvantage salmon, as it is known, is an Atlantic salmon that has been genetically modified so that it grows to market size faster than a conventional farmed salmon. It was developed by AquaBounty Technologies, which is now majority owned by the Intrexon Corporation.
SSI’s Shred of the Week: Hard Drives
November 19th, 2015Via: SSI:
In the digital age, information is a powerful asset that must be protected. As computer systems become outdated and replaced, their hard drives, which can contain valuable or sensitive information, must be securely destroyed so their data has no chance of being read or retrieved. This requires a very specialized piece of shredding machinery. Watch as the SSI Dual-Shear® M55 with SmartFeed technology takes huge bytes out of outdated computer hard drives.
Recovery: Half of New Yorkers Say They Are Barely or Not Getting By, Poll Shows
November 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
Half of New York City residents say they are struggling economically, making ends meet just barely, if at all, and most feel sharp uncertainty about the future of the city’s next generation, a new poll shows.
The poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, shows great disparities in quality of life among the city’s five boroughs. The stresses weighing on New Yorkers vary widely, from the Bronx, where residents feel acute concern about access to jobs and educational opportunity, to Staten Island, where one in five report recently experiencing vandalism or theft.
But an atmosphere of economic anxiety pervades all areas of the city: 51 percent of New Yorkers said they were either just getting by or finding it difficult to do so.
Even in Manhattan, three in 10 said they were just getting by. (Fifty-eight percent said they were doing all right or thriving financially — the highest response of the five boroughs.)
These Biohackers Are Creating Open-Source Insulin
November 19th, 2015Via: Popular Science:
The 370 million people worldwide with diabetes rely on injections of insulin to regulate the amount of sugar in their blood, since their bodies can’t make the hormone themselves. Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive—that cost was likely a large proportion of the $176 billion in medical expenditures incurred by diabetes patients in 2012 alone. Now a team of biohackers with Counter Culture Labs, a community lab in Oakland, California, wants to pave the way towards generic insulin, and they’ve started a crowdfunding page for their project.
The biohackers’ goal is fairly straightforward: To make and refine synthetic insulin from E. coli bacteria and document their process. The result, they hope, will be that a generic pharmaceutical company will use that protocol to make insulin that’s affordable for diabetes patients all over the world. There are several types of insulin that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration—some are long-lasting, others are fast-acting—but they are all protected by patents, so there are no generic versions. “It takes legitimate scientific research to create a biosimilar generic [drug], and generic companies don’t want to do scientific research,” says Maureen Muldavin, a program manager at Counter Culture Labs and a biohacker involved in the Open Insulin project.
The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea
November 18th, 2015Via: Vice:
And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they’ll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
It’s a little-watched but fast-approaching milestone that raises serious questions about the future of consumption in our rapidly modernizing, mineral-hungry world: How deep are we willing to dive to get the materials that make our electronics run?
Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
November 18th, 2015Via: Armstrong Economics:
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
