Feed Roundup

Andrea Rossi's E-Cat rig tested by boffins

Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi has surfaced again to restate his claim that his E-Cat low energy nuclear reaction kit puts out more energy than goes in. And so it is that the “cold fusion” debate will be re-ignited – this time with new voices in Rossi's corner.…

3D augmented reality specs coming your way this year

Watch out, Sergey! A new startup is hard at work on a device that's far more ambitious than Google Glass, and it has just signed on wearable-computing maven Steve Mann as its chief scientist.…

This is CNN.    

Forget the Space Needle, the e-commerce giant is planning to bring 3.3 million square feet of office space to Seattle in the form of mirrored towers and giant spherical domes filled with plant life. [Read more]    

I Love this 1958 video of old school Disney animators going outside to paint a tree (Thanks, Scott!)

    

No government in Canadian history has been as hostile to science as Stephen Harper's Conservatives. John Dupuis has assembled a brief, brutal chronology of the ways that the Tories have attacked Canadian science. It's no coincidence that this government is so hostile to science, seeing as how its funding and grassroots support come from the tar sands and related Big Oil interests, who want as little known as possible about the impact of their dirty industry on the planet we all share.

This is a brief chronology of the current Conservative Canadian government’s long campaign to undermine evidence-based scientific, environmental and technical decision-making. It is a government that is beholden to big business, particularly big oil, and that makes every attempt to shape public policy to that end. It is a government that fundamentally doesn’t believe in science. It is a government that is more interested in keeping its corporate masters happy than in protecting the environment.

As is occasionally my habit, I have pulled together a chronology of sorts. It is a chronology of all the various cuts, insults, muzzlings and cancellations that I’ve been able to dig up. Each of them represents a single shot in the Canadian Conservative war on science. It should be noted that not every item in this chronology, if taken in isolation, is necessarily the end of the world. It’s the accumulated evidence that is so damning.

The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment (Thanks, John!)

(Image: US Tar Sands exploratory mission, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from beforeitstarts's photostream)     

Google Fiber has been on a small surge lately with a number of new small town stops, but IHS iSuppli is skeptical about a nationwide tour. [Read more]    

An anonymous reader writes "When in early 2010 Google shared with the public that they had been breached in what became known as the Aurora attacks, they said that the attackers got their hands on some source code and were looking to access Gmail accounts of Tibetan activists. What they didn't make public is that the hackers have also accessed a database containing information about court-issued surveillance orders that enabled law enforcement agencies to monitor email accounts belonging to diplomats, suspected spies and terrorists. Whether this was the primary goal of the attacks as well as how much information was exfiltrated is unknown. current and former U.S. government officials interviewed by the Washington Post say that the database in question was possibly accessed in order to discover which Chinese intelligence operatives located in the U.S. were under surveillance."

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Matthew says: "For several weeks, a fourth-grade girl was relentlessly harassing a classmate's choice of clothing. As punishment, the girl's stepmother spent about $50 at a thrift store and forced her to wear poorly-fitting and embarrassing clothing to school."    

Steve Wilhite, the man who created the GIF, is miffed that anyone -- be it the Oxford English Dictionary or the White House -- should imagine it's not pronounced like "jiffy." [Read more]    

The massively popular comics Web site was seemingly shut down by AOL late last month, yet a new post on the site hints at a return. [Read more]    

An anonymous reader writes "Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart: 'When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you'll see a terse language without ceremony. ... Dart understands that sometimes you just don’t feel like appeasing a ceremonial type checker. Dart’s inclusion of an optional type system means you can use type annotations when you want, or use dynamic when that’s easier. For example, you can explore a new idea without having to first think about type hierarchies. Just experiment and use var for your types. Once the idea is tested and you’re comfortable with the design, you can add type annotations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Geeks order over $100,000 of startup's 'default meal' powder

Credulous geeks have poured over $130,000 into a fantastic food replacement named "Soylent," a substance whose creators aim to "free your body" from the need to eat solids ever again.…

Security researcher Charlie Miller sits in his home-office in Wildwood, Missouri, April 30, 2013. REUTERS/Sarah Conard.

The booming market for hacking tools known as zero-day exploits has officials at the highest levels in Washington very worried, reports Joe Menn at Reuters, "even as U.S. agencies and defense contractors have become the biggest buyers of such products." White House cybersecurity policy coordinator Michael Daniel says the trend is "very worrisome to us." But as Menn writes in a second piece in this Reuters special report, even as the U.S. government "confronts rival powers over widespread Internet espionage, it has become the biggest buyer in a burgeoning gray market where hackers and security firms sell tools for breaking into computers."    

One of my favorite exhibits at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013 (held last weekend) was Alex Andre's Metamorphosis Project. It's a six-foot-diameter spinning disc with a hand crank. The disc is made of clear glass and mirrors in alternating quadrants. You stand on one side and line up your nose with a person standing on the other side. As the disc spins, you see a rapidly flickering image of your reflection and the other person's face. The effect was hallucinatory - I not only saw my face merge with the other person's face, but I also saw faces pop in and out that looked nothing like either of our faces. These videos give you just a small taste of the trippiness. I hope you get a chance to experience it yourself one day.

    

Faster browsing and better offline support for some Web apps kick off the stable version of Chrome 27. [Read more]    

Cody Brown, developer of software that makes it easy to generate classy website news features in the style of The New York Times' "Snow Fall", made a mistake: he used photos from that legendary web layout in a youtube demo. The NYT sent a cease and desist letter, and he took it down. But then something strange happened: the NYT ordered him to remove all mention of the NYT from his own website.    

Here's a mesmerizing gallery of "Fabrege Fractals" created by Tom Beddard, whose site also features a 2011 video of Fabrege-inspired fractal landscapes that must be seen to be believed. They're all made with Fractal Lab, a WebGL-based renderer Beddard created.

Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard, using his WebGL-based fractal engine, Fractal Lab. (via Colossal)     

The music-streaming service launches most-streamed and most-shared song lists, as well as a feature that tracks number of plays. [Read more]    

New submitter QuantumPion writes "The Environmental Protection Agency released draft guidelines last month that could significantly relax radiation hazard standards in the case of a radiological event in the United States by using risk-based decisions. The goal is to have limits that make sense in an emergency that are different from the limits in day-to-day life. From the article: 'Currently, the only guidance are the extremely strict standards that apply for EPA Superfund sites and nuclear plant decommissioning, which are as low as 0.010–0.025 rem/year, far below the natural background levels in the U.S. of 0.300 rem/year, and even well below the average amount of radioactive materials that Americans eat each year. And these guidelines aren’t really different from the 1992 PAG, except in the area of long-term cleanup standards and, perhaps, standards for resettlement. What’s the big deal here? As radworkers, we’re allowed to get 5 rem/year. 2 rem/year doesn’t rate a second thought. ... No one has ever been harmed by 5 rem/year, so setting emergency levels at 2 rem/year is pretty mild and more than reasonable. ... Think of it this way. The situations covered by these new guidelines are similar to someone dying of thirst who has the chance to drink fresh water having 2,000 pCi per gallon of radium in it. While the safe drinking water levels are 20 pCi/gal for Ra, 2,000 pCi/gal is of no threat, especially if you’re going to die from imminent dehydration. Of course, a bag of potato chips has 3,500 picocuries, so go figure.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.