Rtersieva

This week, Madrid became the first European city to launch a fully electric bike share system for its residents. It works just like a regular bike share, but better: An electric motor kicks in to help with pedaling, and most importantly, give you an extra push up hills. Why isn't this standard for bike shares everywhere?

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Even though it's designed for kids, it's going to be hard for adult Star Wars fans not to trade in their carry-on luggage for this awesome 3D Vader suitcase—even if they are Yoda-sized.

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An anonymous reader writes Researchers at CERN have discovered the first evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions, a strong indication that the particle found two years ago is the Higgs boson. From the article: "Assistant professor of physics at MIT and leader of the international effort, Markus Klute, said that his team was trying to establish if the particle that was discovered in 2012 was really consistent with the Higgs boson that was found in the Standard Model, and not one of many Higgs bosons, or an a particle that looks like it but has a different origin."Their researchers also found that the bosons also decay to fermions (fermions include all quarks and leptons) in a way that is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs. 'We have now established the main characteristics of this new particle, in its coupling to fermions and to bosons, and its spin-parity structure; all of these things are consistent with the Standard Model,' Klute says." CERN has also announced the LHC restart schedule.

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Traditionally, the delicate madeleine gets its flavor from vanilla, butter and eggs. In Fruitful, Brian Nicholson adds raspberries and lemon zest, taking them from a teatime treat to an anytime indulgence. Read More

Make It Right launched in 2007 to rebuild homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now the nonprofit founded by Brad Pitt has moved on to other communities in need—and its next project will be building sustainable homes for Native American tribes in Fort Peck, Montana.

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Plans to build a new road in Iceland ran into trouble recently when campaigners warned that it would disturb elves living in its path.

itwbennett writes Police in Dallas are scrambling after difficulties using a new records management system caused more than 20 jail inmates, including a number of people charged with violent crimes, to be set free. The prisoners were able to get out of jail because police officers struggling to learn the new system didn't file cases on them within three days, as required by law.

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jfruh writes: "Creators of compilers are in an arms race to improve performance. But according to a presentation at this week's annual USENIX conference, those performance boosts can undermine your code's security. For instance, a compiler might find a subroutine that checks a huge bound of memory beyond what's allocated to the program, decide it's an error, and eliminate it from the compiled machine code — even though it's a necessary defense against buffer overflow attacks."

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realized writes: "A man with almost no hair on his body has grown a full head of it after a novel treatment by doctors at Yale University. The patient had previously been diagnosed with both alopecia universalis, a disease that results in loss of all body hair, and plaque psoriasis, a condition characterized by scaly red areas of skin. The only hair on his body was within the psoriasis plaques on his head. He was referred to Yale Dermatology for treatment of the psoriasis. The alopecia universalis had never been treated. After two months on tofacitinib [an FDA-approved arthritis drug] at 10 mg daily, the patient's psoriasis showed some improvement, and the man had grown scalp and facial hair — the first hair he'd grown there in seven years. After three more months of therapy at 15 mg daily, the patient had completely regrown scalp hair and also had clearly visible eyebrows, eyelashes, and facial hair, as well as armpit and other hair, the doctors said."

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An anonymous reader writes "With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games."

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An anonymous reader writes Two months after OpenBSD's LibReSSL was announced, Adam Langley introduces Google's own fork of OpenSSL, called BoringSSL. "[As] Android, Chrome and other products have started to need some subset of these [OpenSSL] patches, things have grown very complex. The effort involved in keeping all these patches (and there are more than 70 at the moment) straight across multiple code bases is getting to be too much. So we're switching models to one where we import changes from OpenSSL rather than rebasing on top of them. The result of that will start to appear in the Chromium repository soon and, over time, we hope to use it in Android and internally too." First reactions are generally positive. Theo de Raadt comments, "Choice is good!!."

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Rambo Tribble writes: Research published in the journal Cell describes a mechanism whereby exposure to UV light leads to endorphin production in the skin. Additionally, they show that rodents exhibit the characteristics of addiction to those substances. This adds to earlier studies which demonstrated withdrawal-like symptoms in frequent tanners One of the researchers, Dr. David Fisher, commented, "It sounds like a cruel joke to be addicted the most ubiquitous carcinogen in the world,' The researchers conclusions are subject to some skepticism, however. Addiction researcher Dr. David Belin is quoted as opining, "... their study is going to be seminal even though their conclusions are not supported by their results." The BBC offers nicely rounded coverage, as well.

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An anonymous reader writes: Years of research has gone into products that are hydrophobic — they resist getting wet. But nature solved this problem long ago, and it's ubiquitous outside our buildings and homes. You've probably seen it yourself, after a light rain: water collects in round droplets on many leaves from trees and plants, refusing to spread out evenly across the surface. This article explains why that happens using super slow-mo cameras and an electron microscope. "[T]he water isn't really sitting on the surface. A superhydrophobic surface is a little like a bed of nails. The nails touch the water, but there are gaps in between them. So there's fewer points of contact, which means the surface can't tug on the water as much, and so the drop stays round. ... [After looking at a leaf in the electron microscope,] we saw this field of tiny wax needles, each needle just a few microns in length! The water drops are suspended on these ultra-microscopic wax needles, and that keeps it from wetting the surface."

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Anyone who has been in a crowded bar around closing time would agree that the higher your alcohol consumption, the more attractive you seem to find whoever you happen to be flirting with at last call.

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The Steam Summer Sale has begun. Lots of PC games, super cheap. See all the deals right here.

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Think about it. Really. Think about what you are looking at right now. That's Oleg Artemyev and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Skvortsov—photographed today by Reid Wiseman—just doing their job, floating between Earth and the nothingness at 4.8 miles per second. If that's not awesome, I don't know what is.

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You're looking at the first-ever electric Harley-Davidson motorcycle, coming to a showroom near you sometime in 2016. Here's what the LiveWire means for motorcycles, America and the future.

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A third of Iceland's population has donated a DNA sample for genetic research, but a new push to increase that figure is meeting some resistance.

From the Communist dictator who claimed 35,000 conquests to the 18th century poet who kept souvenirs of his many dalliances, check out 10 men who knew how to put on the charm.

sandbagger sends this news from io9: In what's being heralded as a secular triumph, the U.K. government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the "requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school." So, if an academy or free school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, it's breaking the funding agreement to provide a "broad and balanced curriculum." ... In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.

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An anonymous reader writes In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in machine learning is mathematically identical to the equations used to describe the distribution of genes within a population of organisms. Researchers may be able to use the algorithm, which is surprisingly simple and powerful, to better understand how natural selection works and how populations maintain their genetic diversity.

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[landerah]

© Julio Lucas. Bradenton, FL United States. 1st Place / 2014 Photographer of the Year.

© Jose Luis Barcia Fernandez. Madrid, Spain. 2nd Place / 2014 Photographer of the Year.

© Jill Missner. Ridgefield, CT United States. 3rd Place / 2014 Photographer of the Year.

© Michael O’Neal. San Francisco, CA United States. 1st Place / Animals.

© Coco Liu. Illinois, United States. 3rd Place / Architecture.

© Felicia Pandola. Providence, RI. 1st Place / Nature.

© Juana Chaves. Madrid, Spain. 2nd Place / News & Events.

© Terry Vital. Windham, NH. 1st Place / Others.

© Hector Navarro. Zapopan, Jalisco Mexico. 3rd Place / People.

© Coco Liu. Illinois, United States. 1st Place / Seasons.

© Little Su. New Taipei City, Taiwan. First Place / Sunset.

It’s amazing to see the stories we’re now capable of telling with a device that fits in our pocket containing a camera about the size of a dime (or maybe it’s even smaller now, I’m running out of currency/technology scale comparisons). One of the primary champions of photography taken with iPhones is the iPhone Photography Awards which just announced the winners of their 2014 competition. This is the 7th year of the IPPAWARDS, a global contest for photographs taken only with iPhones. This year includes 54 photographers hailing from 17 countries who competed in 17 different categories. Seen here are the top three winners and some of my own favorites, but you can see much more on their website. (via Tim Cook)