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Ancient crystals might rewrite Earth’s early history

Carbon in 4.1 billion-year-old zircon. (Stanford/UCLA) Some 4.1 billion years ago -- just over 400 million years after it first formed -- the Earth was a pretty hellish place. Or at least that's what we've always thought. That geological eon is even known as the "Hadean," named for the Greek god of…

Oct 20, 2015

Germany Just Introduced Data Retention. Politicians Should Be Ashamed.

tutanota.com

The new law allows the retention for call data and IP addresses for up to ten weeks, far less than the recently passed Australian lawwith a data retention of 24 months. Nevertheless, any such law is unacceptable in a democracy that is based on the fundamental rights tofreedom of speech and to…

Oct 20, 2015

The Box That Built the Modern World - Issue 29: Scaling - Nautilus

nautil.us

I t was 11:30 am on a sunny Tuesday in mid-April, and the Hong Kong Express had been docked at Hamburg’s Container Terminal Altenwerder for exactly 33 hours. Already, the ship was half empty. Cargo from Asia was stacked in neat rows of shipping containers on the dock. Standing in its shadow, it’s…

Oct 20, 2015

This Guy Obsessively Recorded His Private Data for 10 Years

wired.com

Back in 2006, during the Dark Ages of self-quantification, Nicholas Felton started doing a strange thing: in the Notes app on his phone, the graphic designer started recording the details of his life in obsessive detail. He tracked time spent in Manhattan or Brooklyn. He counted emails, texts, and…

Oct 20, 2015

You Can Learn a lot about Social Engineering from a Repo Man

hackaday.com

The most vulnerable part of any secure information system is the human at the controls. Secure passwords, strong encryption, and stringent protocols are all worthless if that human can be coerced to give away the keys to the kingdom. The techniques of attacking a system through the human are…

Oct 20, 2015

Free will is back, and maybe we can measure it – Stephen Cave – Aeon

aeon.co

The cat is crouched low to the ground, whiskers brushing grass. It inches forward in minute movements, eyes drilling towards two sparrows just ahead. It tenses, set to spring. The birds prance like sparring boxers, unaware. But then the cat’s muscles relax. The moment wasn’t quite right – something…

Oct 20, 2015

Britain's digital exclusion crisis, mapped | The Memo

thememo.com

Report Britain’s digital exclusion crisis, mapped 20 October 2015 Summary Digital exclusion heat map: a quarter of Brits lack basic digital skills. While it’s easy to poke fun at Victor Meldrew’s old fashioned ways, everyone knows someone who could really benefit from better digital skills; whether…

Oct 20, 2015

Marijuana exposure in utero has lifelong consequences

arstechnica.com

A newborn mouse. Credit: Wikimedia Commons As marijuana is legalized in more states, questions about its safety and the health consequences of cannabis use are becoming mainstream. A new study published in PNAS finds that use of cannabis by pregnant women can have implications for the neural…

Oct 20, 2015

There’s a Mystery Machine That Sculpts the Human Genome

theatlantic.com

Jason Ku and Erik Demaine Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They are made of molecules. They are physical objects that take up space—a lot of…

Oct 20, 2015

Computer Utopias in RISD Graphic Design (Chris Novello)

chrisnovello.com

RISD GRAPH-3192-01 by Chris Novello (cnovello at risd) A studio workgroup for urgent concerns in computers & representation. Three decades ago, the Macintosh dropped a sci-fi bomb on pop culture. It advertised a utopic vision of human-computer creativity to mass audiences. By remixing…

Oct 20, 2015

X-Ray Scans Expose an Ingenious Chip-and-Pin Card Hack

wired.com

The chip-enabled credit card system long used in Europe, a watered down version of which is rolling out for the first time in America, is meant to create a double check against fraud. In a so-called “chip-and-PIN” system , a would-be thief has to both steal a victim’s chip-enabled card and be able…

Oct 20, 2015

Star Trek Is Wrong: There Will Always Be Scarcity

mises.org

With the recent successes and announcements of sci-fi movies and TV shows like The Martian , Interstellar , and new incarnations of Star Trek and Star Wars , no one can deny that we crave futurism and stretching our imagination on what advanced technology can accomplish. Many look to the example of…

Oct 20, 2015

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx Announces Unmanned Aircraft Registration Requirement

transportation.gov

New Task Force to Develop Recommendations by November 20 WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta today announced the creation of a task force to develop recommendations for a registration process for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The task force…

Oct 20, 2015

Life on Earth may have begun 300m years earlier than previously thought

theguardian.com

Electron microscope images taken during the analysis of the graphite specks, which were trapped within immensely old zircon crystals.Photograph: Bell et al, University of California, Los Angeles Living organisms may have existed on Earth as long as 4.1bn years ago – 300m years earlier than was…

Oct 20, 2015

The Problem With Tying Health Care To Trade

fivethirtyeight.com

I first met Cesar Alva on a gray winter afternoon in downtown Lima. He wore a knit stocking cap over a thick head of hair, drawing attention to his slight underbite and jaundiced eyes. Alva lives with his parents, a retired housekeeper and construction worker, in a neighborhood at the center of…

Oct 20, 2015

The Jobs That Offer Great Work-Life Balance (and Some That Don't)

bloomberg.com

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg Simon Dawson/Bloomberg The eight-hour day probably seems like a thing of the distant past—that is, unless you have one of the jobs below. According to a new survey from career website Glassdoor, while work-life balance has continued to decrease over the past six years, there…

Oct 20, 2015

In Nigeria, Solar-Powered Fridges at Outdoor Markets Save Food From Spoiling

gizmodo.com

In developing countries, an unbelievable 45% of food goes bad because of a lack of cold storage. It’s an especially big problem during transportation from farms to outdoor markets, where food sits in the scorching sun for hours on end. But one startup has a solution: solar-powered refrigeration…

Oct 20, 2015

15,000 Years Ago, Probably in Asia, the Dog Was Born

nytimes.com

Farmers playing with their dog in China's Inner Mongolia. A study says Central Asia is the best candidate as the point of origin for the modern dog. Credit Qiu Pan/European Pressphoto Agency Where do dogs come from? Gray wolves are their ancestors. Scientists are pretty consistent about that. And…

Oct 20, 2015

1 in 5 American Animal Species Is at Risk of Extinction

ecowatch.com

Guest Contributor Oct. 19, 2015 11:18AM EST American environmental policy faces a sobering reality: The U.S. has enacted and implemented some of the world’s most effective wildlife conservation laws, yet U.S. wildlife populations are still in perilous decline. One in five animal and plant species in…

Oct 20, 2015

UNICEF: 500,000 Yemeni Children Face Potential Famine and Death

telesurtv.net

Nigeria: Early Tally Shows Buhari in Lead, Opposition Rejects 86% Votes For New Constitution in Cuba US VP Pence Leads Lima Group, Pushes for More Severe Blockade Venezuela: EU Spurns Violent Intervention for Peaceful Solution Jamaica Debates Permitting Abortions In Case of Rape, Incest Campaign…

Oct 20, 2015

Israel probes mob assault on African bystander shot amid latest violence

washingtonpost.com

JERUSALEM — It was brutally graphic video that shocked and shamed: An African asylum seeker was shot by an Israeli security guard who mistook him for an assailant in a terrorist attack. Then an enraged mob stomped and cursed him as he lay bleeding on the floor of a bus station. While images of the…

Oct 20, 2015

George W. Bush’s military lies: The real story about the undeniable service gaps he got away with

salon.com

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein weren't just journalistic heroes in the normal sense. Their work on Watergate redefined the journalistic world they inhabited, making them more like heroes in the classic mythical sense, as culture-founding figures, whose creation the rest of us merely live inside of.…

Oct 20, 2015

F.E.C. Can’t Curb 2016 Election Abuse, Commission Chief Says - NYTimes.com

nytimes.com

Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, says the gridlocked agency cannot rein in financial abuses. Credit Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times WASHINGTON — The leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised…

Oct 19, 2015

The Downside of Encrypting Everything: Virus-Filled Ads Are Harder to Track

motherboard.vice.com

During the last year, online crooks have realized that buying ads and lacing them with malicious code is an easy and cheap way of infecting victims with malware and get some money out of it. As a result, "malvertising" in 2015 has almost tripled from the year prior, even if security firms have…

Oct 19, 2015

The Earth-Twin Planet That Nobody Talks About - Out There

blogs.discovermagazine.com

A colorized radar map of the Maat Mons volcano on Venus, shows lava flows of unknown age, along with an apparent impact crater in the foreground. This image, created more than two decades ago by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, still represented the state of the art in our knowledge of Earth’s near-twin.…

Oct 19, 2015

'Traffic lights are so dictatorial' ... but are roundabouts on the way out?

theguardian.com

The Columbus Circle traffic circle near Central Park in New York City.Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. But unlike Joni Mitchell, I’m driving in Newcastle , not Honolulu, and it’s not a parking lot that they’ve paved paradise to put up, but…

Oct 19, 2015

Beavers: A Potential Missing Link in California's Water Future

waterdeeply.org

On California’s central coast, a region that usually receives drenching rainfall or fog for most of the year, some forests are now as arid as a desert. Streams that once ran at least at a trickle through summer have vanished in the ongoing drought, and environmentalists and fishermen fear that local…

Oct 19, 2015

Australia’s war on feral cats: shaky science, missing ethics

theconversation.com

In July 2015, the Australian government announced a “ war on feral cats ,” with the intention of killing over two million felines by 2020. The threat abatement plan to enforce this policy includes a mix of shooting, trapping and a reputedly “humane” poison. Some conservationists in Australia are…

Oct 19, 2015

Google makes an insanely aggressive move to steal Microsoft Office customers

uk.businessinsider.com

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Jeff Chiu/AP Google is making an aggressive move to grow its Google Apps for Work business with a new plan that will make it easier and cheaper than ever for big companies to switch away from Microsoft Office. If you're under a Microsoft enterprise agreement , or EA, Google…

Oct 19, 2015

Teen says he hacked CIA director's AOL account

nypost.com

Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a high school student who claims to have hacked into them. CIA Director John Brennan ’s private account held sensitive files — including his…

Oct 19, 2015