Mainframes aren’t dead yet. IBM is launching a new version of its z13 mainframe for mid-sized enterprises today that introduces a number of new security features. With up to 4 TB of RAM, the z13s also supports 8x as much memory as IBM’s previous single-frame mainframes. IBM also says the z13s offers…

Spread’s indoor lettuce farm in Kameoka, Kyoto prefecture, in 2012.Photograph: AFP/Getty A Japanese company is to open the world’s first “robot farm”, as agriculture joins other sectors of the economy in attempting to fill labour shortages created by the country’s rapidly ageing population. Spread ,…

Phase one of Morocco’s vast $9bn Ouarzazate solar power plant provides 160MW of its ultimate 580MW capacity.Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian Morocco’s king will switch on the first phase of a concentrated solar power plant on Thursday that will become the world’s largest when completed.…

The year 1989 in Beijing opened chilly and white, with a soft, clean snowfall. Who could guess that within just a few months it would be the scene of cataclysm—or that blood, flesh, and death would replace the falling snow? It almost seems fated that my first paper of 1989 was about explosions—…

We all know that cola and lemonade aren’t great for our waistline or our dental health, but our new study on rats has shed light on just how much damage sugary drinks can also do to our brain. The changes we observed to the region of the brain that controls emotional behaviour and cognitive function…

Users of adblockers such as Adblock Plus could be ‘leveraged as a high-value segment’, according to a new report.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian People who use adblockers when using the web could be some of the most valuable people to show ads to, according to a new report. The report’s…

A new therapy which involves a patient embodying themselves in a virtual reality avatar of a crying child could help with depression, research has suggested. Patients wear a headset that projects a life-sized image, firstly of an adult and then of a child. The new research tested the technology for…

Beyond mere chat and games Another company operating in the same space as Viber and Palringo is North American chat company Kik. The company was spun out, rather like Talkomatic 30 years ago in Chicago, from academia. In this case, it was a group of students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario…

Illustration: Steph Davidson Illustration: Steph Davidson The cheese police are on the case. Acting on a tip, agents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration paid a surprise visit to a cheese factory in rural Pennsylvania on a cold November day in 2012. They found what they were looking for:…

Biologists have described a new species of extinct plant, based on two fossil flowers that were trapped in chunks of amber for at least 15 million years. Strychnos electri belongs to the genus whose tropical shrubs, trees and vines are famous for producing the deadly toxin strychnine. The US…

Update: In a statement, the hospital confirmed that a ransom (less than what was previously reported by consultants) was paid in order to return the network to working order. A copy of the official statement is here . "The reports of the hospital paying 9000 Bitcoins or $3.4 million are false. The…

All news News Feed News Search Topics All Russian Politics & Diplomacy World Business & Economy Military & Defense Science & Space Emergencies Society & Culture Sport Press Review ОК Use filter You can filter your feed, by choosing only interesting sections. Go to Search Science & Space February 11,…

More than a hundred years ago, a few intrepid amateurs began experimenting with a new means of communications known then as “wireless.” These protohackers — soon to be known as hams — for etymologically obscure reasons — began building their own electronics gear, hoping to use it to communicate with…

"Completely bullshit" The problem, Ball told Ars, is how the NSA trains the algorithm with ground truths. The NSA evaluates the SKYNET program using a subset of 100,000 randomly selected people (identified by their MSIDN/MSI pairs of their mobile phones), and a a known group of seven terrorists. The…

Email Diminutive humans who died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study that dives into a fierce anthropological debate. Fossils of Homo floresiensis , dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature, were discovered on…

Pompeii’s graffiti is the world’s most frustrating goldmine. When it comes to ancient Rome, the vast majority of insights into their world we have are from one group: Wealthy (or patronized) free men. According to Charles Freeman[1], in all of the surviving works from Rome, only one author speaks of…

L ast spring I came to know a pair of pigeons. I’d been putting out neighborly sunflower seeds for them and my local Brooklyn house sparrows; typically I left them undisturbed while feeding, but every so often I’d want to water my plants or lie in the sun. This would scatter the flock—all, that is,…

A few years ago there was a woman in my life—let’s call her Tanya—and we had hooked up one night in Los Angeles. We’d both attended a birthday party, and when things were winding down, she offered to drop me off at home. We had been chatting and flirting a little the whole night, so I asked her to…

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After a two-year campaign from the FBI , U.S. intelligence officials, and powerful politicians calling for backdoor access into Americans’ encrypted data, a new Harvard study argues that encryption is a worldwide technology that the United States cannot regulate and control on its own. The study,…

Reed Ball started playing Monopoly with his family at age three—and beat them. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first kids to have a “portable” computer, a 10-kilogram Amstrad PPC512. Reed brought it to class until one of the school’s bullies knocked it out of his hands and down a stairwell.…

Maëlick A federal appeals court is upholding the firearms conviction of a Tennessee man whose brother's rural farm was monitored for 10 weeks straight by a remote-controlled camera the authorities installed on a utility pole 200 yards away—without a warrant. The decision (PDF) by the 6th US Circuit…

Image recognition has become increasingly critical in applications ranging from smartphones to driverless cars, and on Wednesday UCLA opened up to the public a new algorithm that promises big gains. The Phase Stretch Transform algorithm is a physics-inspired computational approach to processing…

P hysicists and astronomers are agog. On Thursday, experimenters will report the first detection of a phenomenon that has been long predicted: bursts of gravitational waves generated by cosmic collisions of black holes . Sadly it is not unknown for hyped-up scientific claims to be mistaken or…

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago. “We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave…

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2570 Zoomology Series I've written a number of times on this blog on using the "paper microscope" on finding small images hidden in plain sight within larger images in antiquarian prints. The image below is by Giuseppe Zocchi (1711-1767) (commissioned by the Marchise Andre…

Take a look at the red chips on the two Rubik cubes below. They are actually orange on the left and purple on the right, if you look at them in isolation. They only appear more or less equally red across the images because your brain is interpreting them as red chips lit by either yellow or blue…

Photo by Dennis van Zuijlekom (Last Updated March 8th 2016) If you follow politics, it’s no secret that campaigns on either side of the aisle have invested in using data and analytics over the last decade in search of an edge. Yet most people don’t realize the scope of the digital tracking…

Rebecca Mock Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end. A rule of thumb that has come to…

Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer. The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Street, in Ridgewood, Queens, is the most radioactive spot in the entire state of New York, and would be the northeast's if not for NJ's McGuire Air Force Base in…

Weekly Playlist L-Vis 1990 & Sinjin Hawke Feat. Pink Dollaz – 'Cake (UNiiQU3 Remix)' via soundcloud.com End Hits Now Playing Playlist L-Vis 1990 & Sinjin Hawke Feat. Pink Dollaz 'Cake (UNiiQU3 Remix)' Blawan 'North' Viva La Void 'Red Rider' Oli XL 'Stress Junkie' E-40 'Boy' (feat. P-Lo) Honnda…

Enlarge vulnsec.com Camtasia, uTorrent, and a large number of other Mac apps are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks that install malicious code, thanks to a vulnerability in Sparkle , the third-party software framework the apps use to receive updates. The vulnerability is the result of apps…

Bags of coffee beans for export in a factory in Espirito Santo do Pinhal, Brazil, last year. Commodity-producing countries have suffered setbacks. (Paulo Whitaker/Reuters) You cannot understand the vulnerable state of the U.S. and global economies — and nervous stock markets — without coming to…

The tale of how one researcher has made nearly every scientific paper ever published available for free to anyone, anywhere in the world. On the evening of November 9th, 1989, the Cold War came to a dramatic end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years ago another wall began to crumble, a wall…

Back in the olden days, most typists were trained to use all their fingers. That’s less of a concern now, leading to all sorts of self-taught typing styles. But as a new study shows, our lack of formal training—and our resistance to using all ten fingers—doesn’t mean we’re not proficient typists. I…

Editorial Congress Starts to Get Serious About Online Privacy Internet users today store incredible amounts of private information online. Credit Brian Lee for The New York Times Congress could soon vote on a bill that would require law enforcement agencies to get a search warrant from a judge to…

I’m 29 years old, and I’ve been on Snapchat for about a year now. I post fairly often (usually on my Story), and I get a decent amount of engagement from my friends. Quite honestly, up until Thanksgiving, I thought I was pretty good at Snapchat. Then I watched my little sister on Snapchat. This is…

Jo Marchant asks if we can harness the mind to reduce side-effects and slash drug costs. Marette Flies was 11 when her immune system turned against her. A cheerful student from Minneapolis, Minnesota, she had curly brown hair and a pale, moon-shaped face, and she loved playing trumpet in her…

Story highlights Horses distinguish between happy and angry human emotions, study says Heart rate increases when looking at negative facial expressions (CNN) A smile can get you a long way with people -- and animals, it turns out. Horses can distinguish between happy and angry facial expressions on…