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Injured Bald Eagle Gets New 3-D Printed Beak 103

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the terrorist-your-game-is-through dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A bald eagle that lost its beak to a poacher's gun receives a 3-D printed beak prosthetic like a dental implant." More (with pictures): "Mr Calvin, a founder of the Boise-based Kinetic Engineering Group, made a mold of Beauty's shattered upper mandible, laser-scanned it, fine-tuned it in a 3D modeling program, and created a prosthetic beak from a nylon-based polymer."
Biotech

Exposing the Machinery of the Resistome 23

Posted by Soulskill from the right-click-add-to-dictionary dept.
aarondubrow writes "2011 Nobel Prize Winner, Bruce Beutler, is using the Ranger supercomputer at The University of Texas at Austin for an ambitious new project to discover all of the genes involved in the mammalian immune response – the so-called 'resistome.' Over several years, Beutler's lab will sequence the protein coding portions of genes in 8,000 mice to detect the impact of mutations on immunity. This means scanning, enriching and sequencing 500 billion base pairs every week. The project represents a 'Big Data' problem of the highest order."
Intel

Intel Unveils 10-Watt Haswell Chip 103

Posted by Soulskill from the ever-more-efficient dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "At IDF, Intel announced the company's fourth-generation Core processor code-named Haswell. The chip is based off of the same 22nm process used in the current third-generation Core products. What makes this chip remarkably different from the third-generation chips is its ability to product twice the graphic capabilities at a much lower power consumption, which Intel has achieved by making use of a number of tactics." HotHardware has video of Haswell running a 3D benchmark.
Power

Cutting the Power Cable: How Advantageous Is Wireless Charging? 284

Posted by Soulskill from the very-advantageous-for-the-lazy dept.
Lucas123 writes "Furniture and auto makers are already ramping up production of wireless charging for mobile devices that will also allow I/O for music and data synchronization. Thanks to the widely accepted Qi standard, there shouldn't be a problem with interoperability, but how advantageous is wireless charging? Would it really offer more charging opportunities for mobile users in coffee shops who are today hamstrung by how many outlets are available? And then there's the added cost and reduced efficiency. As wireless systems are more complicated, a wireless battery charger will be more expensive and there are resistive losses on the coil, stray coupling, etc."
Math

Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators? 302

Posted by timothy from the compare-them-for-accuracy dept.
New submitter Covalent writes "I'm a science teacher and have, over the years, accumulated a number of lost graphing calculators (mostly TI-83s). After trying to locate the owners, I have given up and have been loaning them out to students as needed. I want to something more nerd-worthy with them, though. I would feel wrong for selling them. What is the best use for bunch of old calculators?"
Math

Fujitsu Building Robot To Pass Math Exams 75

Posted by samzenpus from the head-of-the-robot-class dept.
itwbennett writes "Pity those poor Japanese students who attend cram schools, either full time or in addition to their regular schooling, to have a shot at passing the grueling math entrance exams for Tokyo University. If Fujitsu has its way, those students will be upstaged by a robot. The company has set a goal for the year 2021 of building an artificial intelligence robot that can pass the exams."
Portables

Bill Moggridge, GRiD Compass Designer, Dies 29

Posted by samzenpus from the fare-thee-well dept.
judgecorp writes "Bill Moggridge, the British-born designer of the first laptop computer has died aged 69. The GRiD Compass was a computing landmark, designed to meet a US government request for a briefcase-sized computer, and first sold for $8000 in 1982. The GRiD compass was used widely, and taken into orbit on the Space Shuttle. It embodied industrial design principles and paved the way for subsequent laptops and devices. Moggridge's company ID Two, later IDEO, also designed the Palm V."
Businesses

Valve Reveals Gaming Headset, Teases Big Picture 151

Posted by timothy from the this-one-goes-on-your-head dept.
dotarray writes with a bit from Player Attack: "Gaming is big business, says Valve, as the developer takes the time to show off its brand new gaming headset and TV-based Big Picture. Rather than inviting the games media masses who have been clamouring for any details on the Seattle company's 'wearable computing' initiative, Gabe Newell and his team instead went right to the top, with an in-depth interview published in The New York Times." The New York Times article on which this report is based is worth reading, too: Valve's corporate non-structure sounds hard to believe. It seems Valve is also looking for hardware designers.
Education

Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old? 423

Posted by timothy from the better-than-an-easy-bake-oven dept.
First time accepted submitter Boldizar writes "My son turns seven next month and I'd like to buy him a cheap computer. I'm looking for the Slashdot hivemind opinion on what would be the best computer for a child. I'm looking for a computer that will teach him basic computer literacy, and hopefully one wherein the guts are a bit exposed so that he can learn how a computer works rather than just treating it like a magic object (i.e., iPad) – but that would still keep him interested and without leaving him behind in school. For the same reason, I prefer a real keyboard so he can learn to type. I don't know enough about computers to frame the question intelligently. Perhaps something in the $300 range that would be the computer equivalent of an old mechanical car engine? Another way to think about it: I'm looking for the computer equivalent of teaching my son how to survive in the forest should the zombie apocalypse ever come."
Crime

Rick Falkvinge On Child Porn and Freedom Of the Press 580

Posted by timothy from the all-consuming-taboo dept.
bazorg writes "Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party blogs on the subject of freedom of the press and foresees how users of Google glasses could be charged for possession and distribution of illegal porn. 'Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why possession of child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years.'"
Hardware

Researchers Create First All Optical Nanowire NAND Gate 50

Posted by Soulskill from the anything-electrons-can-do-photons-can-do-better dept.
mhore writes "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the first all optical, nanowire-based NAND gate, which paves the way towards photonic devices that manipulate light to perform computations. From the release: 'The research team began by precisely cutting a gap into a nanowire. They then pumped enough energy into the first nanowire segment that it began to emit laser light from its end and through the gap. Because the researchers started with a single nanowire, the two segment ends were perfectly matched, allowing the second segment to efficiently absorb and transmit the light down its length.' The gate works by shining light on the nanowire structure to turn on and off information transported through the wire. The research appeared this month in Nature Nanotechnology (abstract)."
Music

Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters? 158

Posted by timothy from the everyone-should-just-learn-to-hum dept.
First time accepted submitter mrhelio writes "I work for a medium-sized helicopter company; we mainly fly tourists around on sightseeing flights. My company needs help finding a hacker-friendly portable music player for our helicopters. We have a problem with our onboard music players — mostly because it is an obsolete terrible design. The manufacturer has made an updated model, but it's basically the same obsolete design with the same terrible software and user interface. We are worried about spending $1000 per unit on these because the manufacturer will eventually stop making replacement units and then we will be force to buy upgrades for our entire fleet again and get everything recertified. (Any piece of equipment hard mounted in a commercial aircraft has to be certified by the FAA and it takes a lot of paper work, time and money for that to happen.) So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons. There are buttons and toggle switches already designed into the flight controls for these kind of purposes and we have mechanics/ engineers that can wire it all together, but the music player has to support the remote interface in the first place. Our first choice would be to give each pilot an iPod, but Apple is notoriously anti-hacking and anti-open source, plus you have to pay them ridiculous licensing fees to get access to their USB interface. So we are looking for a manufacturer that is open source / hacker friendly and makes something that meets our needs. Do you know of anything that would work for us? Maybe something that runs Rockbox? Should we just break down and design something from scratch like the Butterfly MP3 player?"
China

Rhombus Tech A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card Schematics Completed 155

Posted by timothy from the soon-for-the-carputer dept.
lkcl writes "Rhombus Tech's first CPU Card is nearing completion and availability: the schematics have been completed by Wits-Tech. Although it appears strange to be using a 1ghz Cortex A8 for the first CPU Card, the mass-volume price of the A10 was lower than other offerings. Not only does the A10 classify as 'good enough' (in combination with 1GB of RAM), Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place. Overall, it's the very first step in the right direction for collaboration between Software (Libre) developers and mass-volume PRC Factories. There will be more (faster, better) EOMA-68 CPU Cards: this one is just the first."
Android

Samsung: Android's Multitouch Not As Good As Apple's 176

Posted by timothy from the when-the-facts-are-on-your-side dept.
itwbennett writes "Hoping to avoid a sales ban in the Netherlands, Samsung has said that Android's multitouch software doesn't work as well as Apple's. Samsung lawyer Bas Berghuis van Woortman said that while Apple's technology is a 'very nice invention,' the Android system is harder for developers to use. Arguing the bizarre counterpoint, Apple's lawyer Theo Blomme told judge Peter Blok, that the Android multitouch isn't inferior and does so infringe on Apple's patent: 'They suggest that they have a lesser solution, but that is simply not true,' said Blomme."
Data Storage

The Lies Disks and Their Drivers Tell 192

Posted by Soulskill from the designed-at-odds dept.
davecb writes "Pity the poor filesystem designer: they just want to know when their data is safe, but the disks and drivers try so hard to make I/O 'easy' that it ends up being stupidly hard. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes about the difficulties in making the systems work nicely together: 'In the real world, many of the drives targeted to the desktop market do not implement the NCQ specification. To ensure reliability, the system must either disable the write cache on the disk or issue a cache-flush request after every metadata update, log update (for journaling file systems), or fsync system call. Both of these techniques lead to noticeable performance degradation, so they are often disabled, putting file systems at risk if the power fails. Systems for which both speed and reliability are important should not use ATA disks. Rather, they should use drives that implement Fibre Channel, SCSI, or SATA with support for NCQ.'"
The Military

DARPA's Robo-Cheetah Is Now Faster Than Usain Bolt 91

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "The Boston Dynamics Cheetah just clocked a 28.3 miles per hour sprint on a treadmill, and it's heading outdoors soon. At that speed, it could edge out the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, in a dead sprint. (Bolt peaked at 27.78 miles per hour in his world-record-setting 100-meter dash back in 2009.) 'To be fair, keep in mind that the Cheetah robot runs on a treadmill without wind drag and has an off-board power supply that it does not carry,' admitted Boston Dynamics in a press release. 'So Bolt is still the superior athlete.' Nevertheless, the team hopes to drop these implements and have a freestanding speed bot by early next year. They're calling that model the WildCat."
Handhelds

Amazon Debuts Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Fire HD In 2 Sizes 307

Posted by timothy from the plus-they-wash-your-back dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Amazon used a Sept. 6 event in California to debut a range of products, including a front-lit [not back-lit, as originally reported] Kindle e-reader with a higher-resolution screen, an updated Kindle Fire, and the new Kindle Fire HD in two screen sizes. First, Bezos showed off a new version of the Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite, complete with a front-lit, higher-resolution screen (221 pixels-per-inch and 25 percent more contrast, according to Amazon). The device weighs 7.5 ounces and is 9.1mm thin; battery life is rated at eight weeks, and the screen brightness is adjustable. He then showed off the updated Kindle Fire, before moving to the Kindle Fire HD, which features a choice of 7-inch or 8.9-inch screens, dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus, two antennas for better Wi-Fi pickup, and a Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 processor (which Bezos claimed could out-perform the Tegra 3). The Kindle Fire HD's 7-inch version will retail for $199 and ship Sept. 14, while the 8.9-inch version will cost $299 and ship Nov. 20. An 8.9-inch, 4G LTE-enabled version with 32GB storage will be available starting Nov. 20 for $499, paired with a $49.99-a-year data plan."
Businesses

Ask Slashdot: What's Your Take On Stand-Up Desks? 347

Posted by timothy from the desks-that-won't-rat-under-pressure dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a non-profit that doesn't have the resources to automatically bend to each and every whim. However, I've been told that I can't use a cardboard box to put my computer on, for OSHA and fire prevention reasons. So the choice is, sit down for nine hours each day or else get a standup desk to the tune of 500 bucks or more. Is this worth it? Can I make one myself? Anything to know before I get in deep?" There are lots of home-grown stand-up desks out there (search IKEA Hackers for "stand-up desk" if that's your aesthetic leaning), and some ready-made ones from plainish to very expensive. If you've used a stand-up desk, what are your thoughts?
Businesses

Cash-Poor Sharp Mortgages Display Factories 111

Posted by timothy from the surely-they-can-reach-a-resolution dept.
Sharp is one of the small handful of companies that actually make the LCDs that go into products badged with many other companies' names. Now, itwbennett writes "The company was asked by one of its main banks to put its physical assets, including its Apple screen plant, up as collateral for about $2 billion in emergency loans, according to an IDG News Service report. Sharp expects to lose over $3 billion this fiscal year."
Upgrades

Raspberry Pi Revision 2.0 Board Announced 155

Posted by timothy from the like-gangbusters'-hotcakes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi finally saw a release on February 29 this year and is thought to have sold 200,000 units, with a million expected to ship before the year is over. That's a lot of tiny PCs, but it's also been an opportunity for owners to feedback any problems or tweaks they'd like made to the board. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the feedback on board and today announced a revised design is being put into production. The new Raspberry Pi, known as revision 2.0 PCB, is expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. The revision includes a number of changes, but is essentially the same board. To summarize it includes a new reset circuit, a replacement for the reset fuses allowing for more reliable USB hub power, two GPIO pin changes for JTAG debug support, four redundant GPIO signals have been removed, and a new connector has been added for attaching a range of boards including a clock or audio codec. Two of the more easily noticeable changes include a fix that stops the HDMI connection interfering with certain operations of the Raspberry Pi, and the addition of two 2.5mm mounting holes to allow for easier mounting."

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