Intel and Micron Announce New Memory Technology, 3D XPoint
July 30th, 2015Via: Intel:
The technology is up to 1,000 times faster and has up to 1,000 times greater endurance than NAND, and is 10 times denser than conventional memory.
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Following more than a decade of research and development, 3D XPoint technology was built from the ground up to address the need for non-volatile, high-performance, high-endurance and high-capacity storage and memory at an affordable cost. It ushers in a new class of non-volatile memory that significantly reduces latencies, allowing much more data to be stored close to the processor and accessed at speeds previously impossible for non-volatile storage.
The innovative, transistor-less cross point architecture creates a three-dimensional checkerboard where memory cells sit at the intersection of word lines and bit lines, allowing the cells to be addressed individually. As a result, data can be written and read in small sizes, leading to faster and more efficient read/write processes.
3D XPoint technology will sample later this year with select customers, and Intel and Micron are developing individual products based on the technology.
Kentucky Man Arrested for Shooting Down Drone
July 30th, 2015Via: WDRB:
A Hillview man has been arrested after he shot down a drone flying over his property — but he’s not making any apologies for it.
It happened Sunday night at a home on Earlywood Way, just south of the intersection between Smith Lane and Mud Lane in Bullitt County, according to an arrest report.
Hillview Police say they were called to the home of 47-year-old William H. Merideth after someone complained about a firearm.
When they arrived, police say Merideth told them he had shot down a drone that was flying over his house. The drone was hit in mid-air and crashed in a field near Merideth’s home.
Police say the owner of the drone claimed he was flying it to get pictures of a friend’s house — and that the cost of the drone was over $1,800.
Merideth was arrested and charged with first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment. He was booked into the Bullitt County Detention Center, and released on Monday.
Japan Fires the World’s Most Powerful Laser (for a Trillionth of a Second)
July 29th, 2015Via: Popular Science:
Researchers at Osaka University are claiming to have fired the most powerful laser in the world. The 2-petawatt (two quadrillion watt) pulse lasted just one picosecond (a trillionth of a second).
For a rough comparison, in 2013, a 50 kilowatt (50,000 watt) laser shot down a drone two kilometers away.
Osaka’s mega-powerful laser is called LFEX, or Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, and measures more than 300 feet long.
While two petawatts is a formidable amount of power, the idea of a petawatt laser isn’t new. The United States has a few of their own, notably a one-petawatt laser at the University of Texas at Austin.
Michael Donovan, associate director for the Texas Petawatt, says that it’s important to remember when talking about lasers of this size that, while the power output is immense, the energy used is actually very little.
“The energy of the Texas Petawatt, 150 to 200 Joules, is about that in a cup of coffee or a very hard tennis serve,” Donovan said via email. ”It is the energy used by a 100 watt light bulb in 2 seconds.” Power is energy over time, and since one picosecond is a very small amount of time, the power output turns out to be immense.
The scientists at Osaka University claim that their pulse (2 petawatts at 1 picosecond) is about 100 times the energy of UT Austin’s laser, and twice its peak power.
“Two petawatts, that’s a lot,” said Julio Soares, senior research scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What could a laser that powerful be used to do? Based on the kinds of experiments done at the National Ignition Facility, which houses a similar high-powered lasers, Soares jokes: “Well, to blow things up.”
New Zealand Parents Feeding Junk Food to Children Until Their Teeth Dissolve to the Gums
July 29th, 2015Via: Stuff:
Children as young as 18 months old are having multiple rotten teeth pulled out as parents feed toddlers soft drinks through sipper bottles, and chocolate biscuits and Milo as bedtime treats.
Dentist and veteran anti-sugar lobbyist Rob Beaglehole said he pulled several teeth on Monday from an 18-month-old, and had once treated a 2-year-old who had been drinking Coke from a baby bottle. The child’s teeth had dissolved down to the gum line and were bleeding.
Beaglehole, a father of two and principal dental officer for Nelson Marlborough District Health Board, recently extracted 11 teeth from a 3-year-old whose parents had let him drink Coke from a sipper bottle to “keep him happy”.
Another 3-year-old needed four stainless steel crowns, had four teeth pulled and was given four fillings the child’s parents put Milo in a baby bottle to sip on overnight.
All these procedures, performed under general anaesthetic, cost the Nelson Marlborough DHB about $4000 each, and none of them needed to happen, Beaglehole said.
Each year 35,000 children aged under 12 have rotten teeth extracted because of excessively sugary diets – mainly from sugary drinks and other junk foods.
Amazon Provides New Details on Plan for Drone Air Corridors
July 28th, 2015Via: The Verge:
The company laid out its vision for a multi-tiered superhighway in the sky, one in which all drones flying above 200 feet would have the ability to communicate with — and ideally sense and avoid — other aircraft. It’s an attempt to put an end to the Wild West atmosphere that has been the norm for uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) over the last five years, replacing it with a next-generation air traffic control system. It hopes to establish a basic regulatory framework and set of technical standards that manufacturers can work toward. All this would prepare the airspace for a time when thousands, even tens of thousands of drones fly over the average city delivering parcels, monitoring air quality, and handing out parking tickets.
Amazon’s proposal, which is in line with similar ideas floated by NASA and Google, would create a slow lane for local traffic below 200 feet and a fast lane for long-distance transport between 200 and 400 feet. Altitudes between 400 and 500 feet would become a no-fly zone, and anything above that is already against FAA regulations for hobbyists. While some commercial drone operators are pushing to fly large UAS above 500 feet, Amazon is avoiding that discussion for now.
Colorado City Stops Water Fluoridation
July 28th, 2015Via: Natural Society:
Snowmass, a skier’s paradise tucked into the Colorado Mountains, and part of Aspen, has decided to stop fluoridating its water. The news comes just after the latest groundbreaking study on water fluoridation concluded that there was zero relationship between water fluoridation and cavity prevention.
As Anthony Gucciardi shared with you on July 1st, the study incorporated years of research into a serious conclusion that could help activists remove fluoride from the water worldwide.
The sanitation district board members at Snowmass decided that ‘it wasn’t in the business of medicating’ its citizens, shortly after the federal government revised its recommendations regarding public-water fluoridation to lower the allowable levels.
Deep Neural Nets Can Now Recognize Your Face in Thermal Images
July 28th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
One problem with infrared surveillance videos or infrared CCTV images is that it is hard to recognize the people in them. Faces look different in the infrared and matching these images to their normal appearance is a significant unsolved challenge.
The problem is that the link between the way people look in infrared and visible light is highly nonlinear. This is particularly tricky for footage taken in the mid- and far-infrared, which tends to use passive sensors that detect emitted light rather than the reflected variety.
Today, Saquib Sarfraz and Rainer Stiefelhagen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany say they’ve worked out how to connect a mid- or far-infrared image of a face with its visible light counterpart for the first time. The trick they’ve perfected is to teach a neural network to do all the work.
Britain: “Police May No Longer Attend Burglaries”
July 28th, 2015Via: BBC:
The public should not expect to see a police officer after crimes such as burglary, the head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council has said.
Sara Thornton told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire budget cuts and the changing nature of criminality meant police in England and Wales had to prioritise.
She said it “could be” that if an iPad was stolen from a home an officer would not come round to investigate.
Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers
July 27th, 2015Via: Future of Life Institute:
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.
Major Flaw In Android Phones Would Let Hackers In With Just A Text
July 27th, 2015For Samsung users: Since the payload is in video files, how about unchecking “Auto retrieve” in Multimedia messages in the Samsung Messages app settings? Am I right?
Via: NPR:
Android is the most popular mobile operating system on Earth: About 80 percent of smartphones run on it. And, according to mobile security experts at the firm Zimperium, there’s a gaping hole in the software — one that would let hackers break into someone’s phone and take over, just by knowing the phone’s number.
Just A Text
In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that’s corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message.
“This happens even before the sound that you’ve received a message has even occurred,” says Joshua Drake, security researcher with Zimperium and co-author of Android Hacker’s Handbook. “That’s what makes it so dangerous. [It] could be absolutely silent. You may not even see anything.”
Here’s how the attack would work: The bad guy creates a short video, hides the malware inside it and texts it to your number. As soon as it’s received by the phone, Drake says, “it does its initial processing, which triggers the vulnerability.”
