Sci-Tech news

• New Study Reveals How Rain Reshaped the Surface of Mars

  16-05-2017 23:09 via scitechdaily.com
  
  A newly published study from the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University reveals that heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet’s impact craters and...
  The post New Study Reveals How Rain Reshaped the Surface of Mars appeared first on SciTech Daily.
  
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• Researchers Use Human Stem Cells to Create Model of the Human Kidney Glomerulus

  16-05-2017 22:50 via scitechdaily.com
  
  A team of researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed an in vitro model of the human kidney glomerulus, which could...
  The post Researchers Use Human Stem Cells to Create Model of the Human Kidney Glomerulus appeared first on SciTech Daily.
  
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• Fin24.com | World close to 'serious digital sabotage', warns Dutch spy chief

  16-05-2017 22:39
  
  The world may be close to a "serious act of digital sabotage" which could trigger unrest, chaos and disorder, Dutch spy chief Rob Bertholee has warned.
  
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• WATCH: California teen's social media obsession took her down a dark path

  16-05-2017 22:28
  
  Brooke first became active on social media when she was 12 years old and her parents later discovered she was sexting with strangers.
  
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• How WannaCry Went From A Windows Bug To An International Incident - Forbes

  16-05-2017 22:21 via forbes.com
  
  Forbes
  How WannaCry Went From A Windows Bug To An International Incident
  Forbes
  The WannaCry ransomware burst into the spotlight over the weekend as reports of infections streamed in from around the globe. It was the stuff of a Hollywood techno-thriller, and we watched it unfold in real time. But how did WannaCry come to be? How ...
  After WannaCry, Should You Worry About Ransomware?PCMag
  Why Android is likely safe from a WannaCry-like attackCNET
  The next ransomware attack will be worse than Wan
  
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• Cyber kid stuns experts showing toys can be 'weapons'

  16-05-2017 21:52
  
  An 11-year-old "cyber ninja" stunned an audience of security experts Tuesday by hacking into their Bluetooth devices to manipulate a teddy bear and show how interconnected smart toys "can be weaponised".
  
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• The Latest: Law enforcement officials flag North Korea link

  16-05-2017 21:46
  
  U.S. investigators suspect North Korea may be behind the global "ransomware" attack
  
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• Under cyber attack: UH researchers look at how to catch a 'phisher'

  16-05-2017 21:40
  
  As cybersecurity experts scramble to stop another wave of ransomware and malware scams that have infected computers around the world, computer science experts at the University of Houston are "phishing" for reasons why these types of attacks are so successful. The research findings, presented last month at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, are being used to develop the next generation of email filters to better identify and defend against this type of cyber attack.
  
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• UK prison moves to stop drone deliveries of contraband

  16-05-2017 21:02
  
  A British prison will install anti-drone technology to stop contraband being smuggled through the skies, the jail's governor told AFP on Tuesday.
  
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• Canada blocked climate change audit: official

  16-05-2017 21:02
  
  Canada's auditor general blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government Tuesday for effectively blocking an audit of efforts to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies in the fight against climate change.
  
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• 'Narco-deforestation' study links loss of Central American tropical forests to cocaine

  16-05-2017 20:50
  
  Central American tropical forests are beginning to disappear at an alarming rate, threatening the livelihood of indigenous peoples there and endangering some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in North America.
  
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• Plants call 911 to help their neighbors

  16-05-2017 20:49
  
  When Harsh Bais, a botanist at the University of Delaware, emailed Connor Sweeney to tell the high school student he would be willing to mentor him on a research project, Sweeney, a competitive swimmer, was so ecstatic he could have swum another 200-meter butterfly at practice.
  
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• New study documents aftermath of a supereruption, and expands size of Toba magma system

  16-05-2017 20:49
  
  The rare but spectacular eruptions of supervolcanoes can cause massive destruction and affect climate patterns on a global scale for decades - and a new study has found that these sites also may experience ongoing, albeit smaller eruptions for tens of thousands of years after.
  
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• 3-D models reveal hidden details of zebrafish behavior

  16-05-2017 20:48
  
  Zebrafish have become increasingly popular model animals in preclinical and neurobehavioral research due to their genetic similarity to humans and rapid rate of reproduction. Studies of zebrafish behavior have shed light on social and biological phenomena ranging from the dynamics of collective animal behavior, such as shoaling and schooling, to anxiety, fear, and leadership. Borrowing from decades of work on mice and rats, most observations of zebrafish are conducted using a two-dimensional app
  
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• Marine scientists determine how the larvae of a common coral species respond to environmental stresses

  16-05-2017 20:47
  
  Talk about stressed out. Cauliflower coral larvae are feeling the heat—literally.
  
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• Atheism might be more common than assumed...but it's complicated

  16-05-2017 20:40
  
  It's tough to figure out just how religious or nonreligious different populations of people are. Widely-cited telephone polls (e.g., Gallup, Pew) suggest U.S. atheist prevalence ranging from 3% to 11%. But in the US, there's heavy stigma leveled against religious disbelief, which might make people reluctant to disclose their lack of belief over the phone to a stranger. Using a subtle, indirect measurement technique, psychology researchers have found that atheists may represent anywhere from 20%
  
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• Public divides over environmental regulation and energy policy

  16-05-2017 20:35
  
  A 54% majority of U.S. adults believe that "government regulations are necessary to encourage businesses and consumers to rely more on renewable energy sources," while 38% support the notion that "the private marketplace will ensure that businesses and consumers rely more on renewable energy sources, even without government regulations," according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
  
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• Scientists develop real-time technique for studying ionic liquids at electrode interfaces

  16-05-2017 20:21
  
  Ionic liquids—salts made by combining positively charged molecules (cations) and negatively charged molecules (anions) that are liquid at relatively low temperatures, often below room temperature—are increasingly being investigated for uses in batteries, supercapacitors, and transistors. Their unique physical and chemical properties, including good ionic conductivity, low flammability and volatility, and high thermal stability, make them well suited for such applications. But thousan
  
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• 3-D-printed, soft, four legged robot can walk on sand and stone

  16-05-2017 20:20
  
  Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the first soft robot that is capable of walking on rough surfaces, such as sand and pebbles. The 3D-printed, four-legged robot can climb over obstacles and walk on different terrains.
  
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• Disney Research transforms movie-quality animations for interactive viewing

  16-05-2017 20:00
  
  Cinema-quality animations and virtual reality graphics that need to be rendered in real-time are often mutually exclusive categories, but Disney Research has developed a new process that transforms high-resolution animated content into a novel video format to enable immersive viewing.
  
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• Endangered vaquita marina porpoise could be extinct by 2018: WWF

  16-05-2017 19:44
  
  The vaquita marina, a tiny porpoise native to Mexico, could be extinct by next year if urgent action including a ban on gillnets is not taken, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature warned.
  
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• Mark Zuckerberg Has a Plan to Help Get More Kids to College

  16-05-2017 19:40 via nbcnews.com
  
  Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are setting their sights on their next philanthropic endeavor: helping more students get to college.
  
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• ALMA Views a Newborn Star Enshrouded in Dust

  16-05-2017 19:33 via scitechdaily.com
  
  This newly released ALMA image shows a newborn star enshrouded in dust. This intriguing image may look like a collection of colored blobs, but it...
  The post ALMA Views a Newborn Star Enshrouded in Dust appeared first on SciTech Daily.
  
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• Facebook fined $166,000 for breach of French privacy laws

  16-05-2017 19:00
  France's independent privacy watchdog has fined Facebook for breaching French privacy laws by tracking and using the personal data of 33 million users, as well as non-users who browse the internet
  
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• No one lives on this remote Pacific island — but it's covered in 38 million pieces of our trash - Washington Post

  16-05-2017 18:48 via washingtonpost.com
  
  Washington Post
  No one lives on this remote Pacific island — but it's covered in 38 million pieces of our trash
  Washington Post
  Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific, is so isolated that it's one of the few places in the world “whose ecology has been practically untouched by a human presence.” That is, at least, according to its description by a United ...
  Pacific island has 38 million pieces of trash, but no peopleFox News
  Remote island turns into a dump
  
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• NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Successfully Observes Ceres at Opposition from Sun

  16-05-2017 18:42 via scitechdaily.com
  
  On April 29th NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft successfully observed Ceres at opposition, taking images from a position exactly between the sun and Ceres’ surface. Mission specialists...
  The post NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Successfully Observes Ceres at Opposition from Sun appeared first on SciTech Daily.
  
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• UN, Microsoft announce $5M partnership on human rights

  16-05-2017 18:33
  Microsoft says it is contributing $5 million over five years to the United Nations human rights office, assistance the Geneva-based agency called a "landmark partnership" that could prod other big private-sector donors to follow suit
  
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• American chestnut rescue will succeed, but slower than expected

  16-05-2017 18:30
  
  The nearly century-old effort to employ selective breeding to rescue the American chestnut, which has been rendered functionally extinct by an introduced disease—Chestnut blight, eventually will succeed, but it will take longer than many people expect.
  
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• NASA to create first-ever space-based sodium lidar to study poorly understood mesosphere

  16-05-2017 18:20
  
  A team of NASA scientists and engineers now believes it can leverage recent advances in a greenhouse-detecting instrument to build the world's first space-based sodium lidar to study Earth's poorly understood mesosphere.
  
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• France fines Facebook for data protection breaches

  16-05-2017 18:10
  
  France's data protection agency said Tuesday it had fined Facebook for collecting information on users without their knowledge, following a probe of the social network in cooperation with other European regulators.
  
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• These Omnidirectional Tires Could Mean the End of Your Parallel Parking Woes

  16-05-2017 18:00 via nbcnews.com
  
  Created by Canadian inventor William Liddiard, these omnidirectional tires don't require major modifications to the cars themselves. Instead, a special ring with motorized rollers bolts directly to the car's wheels.
  
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• Experts see possible North Korea links to global cyberattack

  16-05-2017 18:00
  
  Cybersecurity experts are pointing to circumstantial evidence that North Korea may be behind the global "ransomware" attack: the way the hackers took hostage computers and servers across the world was similar to previous cyberattacks attributed to North Korea.
  
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• Travel distances of juvenile fish key to better conservation

  16-05-2017 17:50
  
  Marine reserves—sections of the ocean where fishing is prohibited—promote coral reef sustainability by preventing overfishing and increasing fish abundance and diversity. But to be effective, they need to be sized right, and in a way that accounts for how far juvenile fish travel away from their parents after spawning.
  
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• Team breaks down social networking behavior

  16-05-2017 17:40
  
  New big-data analytics by a City College of New York-led team suggests that both an individual's economic status and how they are likely to react to issues and policies can be inferred by their position in social networks. The study could be useful in maximizing the effects of large-scale economic stimulus policies.
  
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• Managing stress helps transistor performance

  16-05-2017 17:30
  
  Tensile mechanical stress can have a useful effect for some transistors, where the resulting atomic strain allows its current-carrying electron-hole pairs better mobility. However, when that stress is applied to the whole device, as is a popular approach via use of what's called contact etching stop layers (CESLs), the drift region adjacent to the stretched channel is compressed and results in reduced performance.
  
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• From where will the next big earthquake hit the city of Istanbul?

  16-05-2017 17:30
  
  The city of Istanbul is focus of great concern for earthquake researchers. This 15-million metropole is situated very close to the so-called North Anatolian Fault Zone which runs just outside of the city gates below the Marmara Sea. Here in the underground there is a constant build-up of energy which results from an interlocking of the tectonic plates causing plate movement to come to a halt until a great tremor releases this energy. Scientists, therefore, reckon with an earthquake with a magnit
  
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• Don't count on your chickens counting

  16-05-2017 17:29
  
  Clocks and calendars, sports scores and stock-market tickers - our society is saturated with numbers. One of the first things we teach our children is to count, just as we teach them their ABCs. But is this evidence of a biological drive? No, says cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez of the University of California San Diego. It is evidence of our cultural preoccupations. "Numerical cognition," he says, "is not biologically endowed."
  
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• Extreme weather has greater impact on nature than expected—researchers launch roadmap

  16-05-2017 17:20
  
  An oystercatcher nest is washed away in a storm surge. Australian passerine birds die during a heatwave. A late frost in their breeding area kills off a group of American cliff swallows. Small tragedies that may seem unrelated, but point to the underlying long-term impact of extreme climatic events. In the special June issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B researchers of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) launch a new approach to these 'extreme' studies.
  
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• Great expectations force risky business acquisitions

  16-05-2017 17:10
  
  A good reputation can be bad for business, according to new research from the University of Georgia.
  
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• The new Sonic basically lets you play as fan art - The Verge

  16-05-2017 17:00 via theverge.com
  
  The Verge
  The new Sonic basically lets you play as fan art
  The Verge
  A common complaint among Sonic fans — stick with me, friends — is that the series, over the decades following the original trilogy, has been hamstrung by a ballooning cast of supporting characters: Shadow the Hedgehog, Jet the Hawk, Espio the ...
  You Can Create Your Own Custom Hero in Sonic ForcesPlayStation LifeStyleall 82 news articles »
  
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• Thailand backs off threat to block Facebook over content

  16-05-2017 17:00
  
  Thailand backed off a threat to block Facebook on Tuesday, instead providing the social media site with court orders to remove content that the government deems illegal
  
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• Engaging diamond for next-era transistors

  16-05-2017 17:00
  
  As consumers around the world have become increasingly dependent on electronics, the transistor, a semiconductor component central to the operation of these devices, has become a critical subject of scientific research. Over the last several decades, scientists and engineers have been able to both shrink the average transistor size and dramatically reduce its production costs. The current generation of smartphones, for example, relies on chips that each feature over 3.3 billion transistors.
  
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• Cities need to 'green up' to reduce the impact of air pollution

  16-05-2017 17:00
  
  The harmful impact of urban air pollution could be combated by strategically placing low hedges along roads in a built-up environment of cities instead of taller trees, a new study has found.
  
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• Sam Houston state researchers study DNA from explosives

  16-05-2017 16:50
  
  Researchers at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) hope to unmask manufacturers of homemade explosives using new advancements in DNA technology.
  
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• The brighter side of twisted polymers

  16-05-2017 16:40
  
  A strategy to produce highly fluorescent nanoparticles through careful molecular design of conjugated polymers has been developed by KAUST researchers. Such tiny polymer-based particles could offer alternatives to conventional organic dyes and inorganic semiconductor quantum dots as fluorescent tags for medical imaging.
  
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• Scientists study atmospheric waves radiating out of hurricanes

  16-05-2017 16:40
  
  Researchers believe they have found a new way to monitor the intensity and location of hurricanes from hundreds of miles away by detecting atmospheric waves radiating from the centers of these powerful storms.
  
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• HP Enterprise unveils computer 'for era of Big Data'

  16-05-2017 16:30
  
  Researchers from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise on Tuesday unveiled what they claimed was a breakthrough in computing with a new machine capable of handling vast amounts of data at supercomputing speeds.
  
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• Family TV viewing and SMS texting could help cut internet energy use

  16-05-2017 16:30
  
  Scrapping automatically-playing videos in apps and reversing trends of instant messaging and on-demand services could be key to cutting the growing energy demand of the Internet.
  
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• Video: When water levitates

  16-05-2017 16:26
  
  Have you ever seen a drop of water navigate a maze? It's possible thanks to the same phenomenon that lets you know if a griddle is hot enough for pancake batter. Water droplets that dance and skitter across a hot surface instead of boil away on the spot are experiencing the Leidenfrost effect. Understanding Leidenfrost—first described more than 200 years ago—helped engineers make more efficient steam engines. Today, scientists are using high-speed cameras to better characterize how s
  
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• Stars as random number generators could test foundations of physics

  16-05-2017 16:20
  
  (Phys.org)—Stars, quasars, and other celestial objects generate photons in a random way, and now scientists have taken advantage of this randomness to generate random numbers at rates of more than one million numbers per second. Generating random numbers at very high rates has a variety of applications, such as in cryptography and computer simulations.
  
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