Category: Science / Technology

Trump’s has an opportunity to help protect internet freedom – here’s how he can do it.

The rise of cybersovereignty – or, as it might be more accurately called, cyberfascism – has ushered in a global wave of censorship, surveillance, monitoring, and filtering that could directly hamper, or even reverse, the spread of a free and open internet. Couple that with Russian interference into not only the US election but potentially others around the world , and digital warfare puts core freedoms at risk globally.

Kepler’s unusual orbit

A couple more interesting things about the just-launched Kepler telescop e – then we’ll let it get on with the business of searching for distant planets. The spacecraft will be controlled, at times, by college kids working alongside professional operators.

Apple’s New MacBook Pros Helped Boost Mac Shipments In Q4 2016

Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pros are expensive, but it seems that despite their hefty price tag, they might have actually helped Apple in terms of shipments in Q4 2016. According to the recent numbers from Gartner , it has been revealed that Apple’s Q4 2016 shipments has actually improved compared to the previous year’s quarter.

UK’s Funding Circle, an online marketplace lender, raises $100 mln

Funding Circle, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace used by small- and medium-sized companies, has raised $100 million in an investment round led by venture capital firm Accel. Existing investors including Baillie Gifford, DST Global and Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Rocket Internet, Sands Capital Ventures, Temasek and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round, the company said.

Russian hackers could go after Congress next a ” and not just to read their email

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday took turns questioning top intelligence officials, who say investigative agencies found compelling evidence of Russian cyber-hacking throughout the 2016 election cycle. Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., during the committee’s hearing Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017, on Russian intelligence activities.

Trump’s boldest campaign promises are getting a reality check

President-elect Donald Trump holds his first news conference since July 27, 2016, on Jan. 11, 2017, in New York City. During his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised voters a “big, beautiful wall,” an Obamacare replacement ” immediately ” and a new era for a Veterans Affairs agency that had “failed” service members.

U.S. bioengineers develop low-cost, hand-powered blood centrifuge

Bioengineers at Stanford University in west coast of the United States have created an ultra-low-cost, hand-powered blood centrifuge with rotational speeds of up to 125,000 revolutions per minute . The device, capable of separating blood plasma from red cells in 1.5 minutes, applies the same mechanical principles in a whirligig, which is built by threading a loop of twine through two holes in a button, grabbing the loop ends, then rhythmically pulling.

UNC Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies dies at age 91

Oliver Smithies, D.Phil., who was recruited to North Carolina with grant funding from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 20 years later, died today at the age of 91. In 1987, the Biotechnology Center helped recruit seven researchers from the University of Wisconsin in Madison to start the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s molecular biology and biotechnology research program. The Biotech Center’s faculty recruitment grant program, inaugurated to help attract that group of Wisconsin scientists, was named to honor Smithies after he became a Nobel laureate in 2007.

Obama Plan to Shake Up Coal Leases Could Restrict Trump

The outgoing Obama administration issued a blueprint for overhauling the way coal on federal land is sold, making it tougher for President-elect Donald Trump to resume sales under decades-old procedures. The report released Wednesday lays out a menu of potential options for policy makers to consider, including tacking a carbon fee onto coal leases to account for climate change, requiring payments into a fund that could help out-of-work miners and devastated communities — and even halting sales altogether.

Bull Market Masks Australia’s Year of 20%-Plus Stock Swings

Last year, the S&P/ASX 200 had 27 instances of a constituent rising or falling more than 20 percent on a single day, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Comparisons with other developed markets in Asia aren’t equal because Japan enforces limits on how much some stocks can move, and the main gauges in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand have 50 members at most.

Scientists: Moon over the hill at 4.51 billion years old

In this Feb. 13, 1971 file photo, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. conducts an experiment near a lunar crater, using an instrument from a two-wheeled cart carrying various tools. On Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, a California-led research team reported that the moon formed within 60 million years of the birth of the solar system.

Singapore’s Garena Said to Pick Goldman for $1 Billion IPO

Garena, Southeast Asia’s most valuable startup, picked Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to lead a planned initial public offering that could fetch about $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The Singapore-based online gaming portal and e-commerce provider plans to select additional banks as soon as this month, the people said.

Improving E911 Services Should be a Service Provider Priority

In today’s technology landscape, emergency services have evolved to facilitate faster response times, ensure better accuracy and accommodate a broader range of users and channels. It is becoming increasingly easier to connect to emergency personnel through alternative means like text-to-911, which can be useful for victims with hearing loss or in situations where a voice call could prove dangerous.

New MacBook Pros stop Apple’s skid in worldwide PC shipments

Apple’s new MacBook Pros have put the brakes on a free-fall of Mac shipments globally, though they haven’t provided the significant boost the company was looking for. The company’s Mac shipments totaled 5.3 million units during the fourth quarter of 2016, a decline of just 0.9 percent compared to the same quarter in 2015.

Play virtual reality mind games at Palmer’s VR Cafe

It can be hyper-realistic, such as standing on a capsized ship in the ocean while schools of fish zip by all around and a lazy whale rolls over next to you. It can be cartoony, as in the “Job Simulator,” a game in which robots have replaced all human jobs and you can perform familiar tasks in places such as a kitchen, an office or a convenience store.

Corporate Financial Data Theft and Customer Information Breaches: Top …

Financial and customer information, brand reputation, intellectual property, and employee information were also listed as critical assets to protect against security breaches. New business priorities and technologies also create challenges for IT and security teams, with 65% of respondents indicating that public clouds have the biggest security implications.i 1 2i 1 2 also found that security transformation impacts both the technology choices enterprises make to ward off cyber thieves and the way companies organize internal stakeholders, assess risk, and prioritize future investments.

CENTRI Wins Inaugural IoT Breakthrough Award

The IoT Breakthrough Awards recognizes the IoT innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the world in a range of categories, including Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, IoT Security, Wearables, Industrial IoT, M2M, Enterprise IoT and many more. More than 2,000 award nominations from organizations and individuals representing 15 nations were submitted to the awards this year for consideration.

Chrome, Safari, Opera form autofill can be easily tricked into leaking sensitive data

Your browser or password manager’s form autofill feature can be a big time saver, automatically entering data like your name, address, and phone number on those lengthy sign up or check out screens. But as Finnish web developer and hacker Viljami Kuosmanen points out , you might be inadvertently giving away more information than you are willing to share with a particular website.

Hubble Looks at Voyager’s Future

Nothing built by humans has ever gotten as far from our planet as Voyager 1, which is now almost 21 billion kilometers from Earth. We’ve talked about the future of both Voyagers before in these pages – Voyager 1 passes within about 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in some 40,000 years, its closest approach to a neighboring star.

Chinese humanoid robot turns on the charm in Shanghai

“Jia Jia” can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China. Billed as China’s first human-like robot, Jia Jia was first trotted out last year by a team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Uranium Gains 10% as Top Producer Plans Output Cut Amid Glut

Uranium surged the most in more than three weeks as Kazakhstan said it will reduce production by 10 percent this year after prices slumped in 2016 amid a global inventory glut. Spot uranium rose $2.25, or 10 percent, to close at $24.25 a pound on Tuesday, the highest level since September, according to data from Ux Consulting Co.

These Swedish Stocks Will Pay You the Best Dividends in 2017

Sweden may have negative interest rates, but its biggest firms are about to deliver some hefty payouts to their shareholders. Of the 29 names listed on Sweden’s index of its most-traded stocks, phone companies Tele2 AB and Ericsson AB offer the highest projected dividend yields over the next 12 months, according to Bloomberg BDVD forecasts.

Intel adds Hyper-Threading to all Kaby Lake Pentiums

Intel has confirmed that all Kaby Lake Pentium processors will include Hyper-Threading support, creating four logical cores from two physical, but in adding the feature has dropped support for ECC memory. Intel has officially confirmed that it is bringing Hyper-Threading support back to its Pentium family in the Kaby Lake microarchitecture, but in doing so is sacrificing support for Error Correcting Code memory.

Alphacool releases Eiswand 360 external AIO cooler details

Alphacool’s Eiswand 360 offers high-performance liquid cooling for even the most cramped of cases, providing you can spare the desk space. Liquid cooling specialist Alphacool has unveiled plans to launch an all-in-one external water cooling system, dubbed the Eiswand 360, which offers to bring high-performance cooling to even the most cramped of case – if you can spare the desk or floor space, of course.