Rtersieva

An anonymous reader writes "A biotech start-up from Massachusetts has an unusual product: a bottle full of bacteria you're supposed to spray onto your face. The bacteria is Nitrosomonas eutropha, and it's generally harmless. Its main use is that it oxidizes ammonia, and the start-up's researchers suspect it used to commonly live on human skin before we began washing it away with soaps and other cleaners. Such bacteria are an area of heavy research in biology right now. Scientists know that the gut microbiome is important to proper digestion, and they're trying to figure out if an external microbiome can be similarly beneficial to skin. A journalist for the NY Times volunteered to test the product, which involved four straight weeks of no showers, no soap, no shampoo, and no deodorant. The sprayed-on bacteria quickly colonized her skin, along with other known types of bacteria — and hundreds of unknown (but apparently harmless) strains. She reported improvements to her skin and complexion, and described how the bacteria worked to curtail (but not eliminate) the body odor caused by not washing. At the end of the experiment, all of the N. eutropha vanished within three showers."

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UNISONIC, the band featuring former HELLOWEEN vocalist Michael Kiske and guitarist/vocalist Kai Hansen alongside guitarist Mandy Meyer (ASIA, GOTTHARD and KROKUS), bassist Dennis Ward and drummer Kosta Zafiriou (both of Germany's PINK CREAM 69), will release a new EP, "For The Kingdom", on May 23 via earMUSIC/Edel. Produced by Ward, the EP contains the fast album track "For The Kingdom", the exclusive song "You Come Undone" (only available on this release) plus four previously unreleased live cuts: "Unisonic", "Never Too Late", "Star Rider" and "Souls Alive", all recorded at the 2012 edition of the Masters Of Rock festival in Czech Republic. The EP cover artwork was created by graphic artist Martin Hausler, who previously worked with UNISONIC on the band's debut album cover design. "For The Kingdom" will be available on CD, strictly limited 12-inch vinyl and as a digital download. The track listing is as follows: 01. For The Kingdom 02. You Come Undone (EP exclusive track) 03. Unisonic (live 2012; EP exclusive track) 04. Never Too Late (live 2012; EP exclusive track) 05. Star Rider (live 2012; EP exclusive track) 06. Souls Alive (live 2012; EP exclusive track) The official lyric video for the song "For The Kingdom" can be seen below. UNISONIC's self-titled debut studio album was released in North America on May 22, 2012 via Eagle Rock imprint Armoury Records. "Unisonic" was recorded at ICP Studios in Brussels, Belgium. The CD — which features 11 tracks, plus a bonus live version of HELLOWEEN classic "I Want Out", only available on the domestic edition, and cover art by Martin Häusler (MEAT LOAF, GOTTHARD, HELLOWEEN, MOTÖRHEAD) — marked the first full-length musical union between Kiske and Hansen in 23 years. UNISONIC released its debut EP, "Ignition" on January 27, 2012 via earMUSIC/Edel. The effort included the track "Unisonic" plus one demo song and a cover version of the HELLOWEEN classic "I Want Out", recorded live on October 15, 2011 at the Loud Park festival at Saitama Super Arena, a multi-purpose indoor arena located in Saitama City, Japan. Hansen's position in GAMMA RAY is unaffected by his involvement with UNISONIC. UNISONIC is: Michael Kiske (vocals) Mandy Meyer (guitar) Kai Hansen (guitar) Dennis Ward (bass) Kosta Zafiriou (drums)

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I remember the first time I saw one of the Salvadoran prep cooks at a restaurant where I worked slice up a pineapple for us to eat as a cool snack on a particularly hot night. The pineapple was great, but the truly awesome part was the way in which she prepared it. Up until then, I was of the just hack away until it looks like I can eat it school; as a consequence, I ended up throwing a lot of edible bits into the trash along with the skin.

Her method, which I've since seen everywhere from the streets of Cartagena to the streets of Bangkok, was to remove the dark, spiny eyes with a series of shallow, diagonal, wedge-shaped cuts. It takes a bit of practice before you can do it efficiently (I'm still nowhere near as fast as she was!), but the reward is a much higher yield of pineapple (read: fewer sweet edible bits in the compost), and the ability to look badass and inspire badassery in anyone who sees you do it.

Here's how it's done.

Step1: Trim off the top

Slice off the top of the pineapple, being generous with the slice. The top of the pineapple can be pretty woody and fibrous.

Step 2: Trim off the bottom

Similarly, be generous when you slice off the bottom.

Step 3: Trim the sides

Stand the pineapple on its end, then slice off the sides, working your way around the pineapple. Here, it's better to be conservative with how much you remove. Take off just enough so that there's no dark green or pale brown skin remaining, but don't worry about taking out the eyes just yet, we'll get to them.

Step 4: Identify the pattern in the eyes

Once you have the sides removed, you should be able to identify a distinct array of straight parallel diagonal lines that connect all the eyes. You're going to be cutting them out along these lines.

Step 5: Start slicing eyes

Start by cutting your knife into the pineapple along one of these lines at an angle so that your knife slides underneath them. Don't cut too deep, and don't try to get too many at a time.

Follow that cut up by slicing along the opposite diagonal, removing the eyes in a single wedge.

Step 6: Take out rows of eyes in wedges

Keep working around the pineapple, taking out wedge-shaped rows of eyes as you go.

Eventually you end up with this: eye-free, and very high yield.

Step 7: Split lengthwise

Next, split the pineapple lengthwise into halves...

...then into quarters (or sixths if you prefer).

Step 8: Trim out the core

Like the top and the bottom, the core can be very woody, so it's best to remove it. Stand a wedge up on its end, feel the fibers to see where it starts to get tough, then slice down to remove the core.

Step 9: Slice into bite-sized pieces

Slice each wedges crosswise into bite-sized pieces (or if tacos al pastor are on the menu (and they should be!), leave those big wedges intact!).

Step 10: Serve

Arrange your slices, serve, and let the badassery commence.

Blessed with the calming voice of a warm blanket on a cold night, Morgan Freeman is basically the best narrator for nearly every documentary and most life situations. I could listen him talk about anything and it would feel important. But what about Morgan Freeman on helium? How's that sound? Hilarious.

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cartechboy writes: "GPS was originally developed by the military, but today it's in your smartphones, and soon, possibly your watches. Now the British military is developing something called quantum compass. The concept is a GPS-style navigation for submarines that doesn't use satellites. The quantum compass uses the movements of super-cooled subatomic particles to pinpoint a vessel's location. These particles, stored in a vacuum, react to the Earth's magnetic field. The movements caused by this interaction can be used for location positioning. At the moment, the Ministry of Defense's prototype resembles a '1-meter long shoe box,' so the next step is to miniaturize it. It could then be used by individual soldiers, as well as huge ships and submarines. Not only is it useful, but it's secure too—the technology is apparently interference-proof. Is this the future of navigation systems, or the reinvention of the compass? Possibly both."

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The Monty Hall Problem is a fantastic probability brain teaser based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal—and this video is the best explanation of it you're likely to find.

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An anonymous reader writes "The Linux Foundation has teamed up with MOOC provider edX to teach an introduction to Linux class. Quoting the course description: 'This course explores the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux programmers, system administrators and end users to achieve their day-to-day work in a Linux environment. It is designed for experienced computer users who have limited or no previous exposure to Linux, whether they are working in an individual or Enterprise environment.' The course begins on August 1st. In addition to the free version of the course, a verified track is available for students who want a credential with more weight (for a nominal price)." Update: As many have pointed out Linus just did an intro for the class. Headline corrected accordingly.

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If you're a cinema fan you may know part of this story but, if you aren't, this video is a throughout summary of how American westerns influenced the samurais of Akira Kurosawa—and how the samurais of Akira Kurosawa influenced that galactic western known as Star Wars.

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It pumps blood. Duh. Well, for most of history, people were unsure what the heart's main function was. Even Leonardo Da Vinci gave up studying it and he's probably one of the five smartest guys ever. Even now, it's not as easy as it should be to find out how the ticker works. Don't worry, this Ted-Ed animation will explain it to you perfectly. Basically, if you watch this, you'll be smarter than Da Vinci.

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This is just a stone. Not a photo of a stone with a Hubble Space Telescope image pasted over it. Not a hologram made inside some piece of glass. Not a portal to another dimension. Just a stone. It's like a some spacetime wizard captured a piece of the Universe and trapped it inside.

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   В официалното тур-разписание на сайта на GRAVE DIGGER може да се види дата за концерт в България на 21 септември 2014 г. Мястото е клуб "Mixtape

The French train operator SNCF has discovered that 2,000 new trains it ordered at a cost of 15bn euros are too wide for many regional platforms.

• Check email and notice a message from somebody having trouble using SQLitePCL.raw on Windows Phone 8.1. Realize that I haven't run the test suite since I started working on the new build scripts. Assume that I broke something.

• Hook up the automated test project to the output of the new build system. Sure enough, the tests fail.

• Notice that the error message is different from the one in the user's email.

• Realize that the user is actually using the old build system, not the new one. Wonder how that could have broken.

• Bring up the old build system, run the tests. Yep, they fail here too. Must be something in the actual code.

• Dig around for a while and try to find what changed.

• Use git to go back to the last commit before I started the new build system stuff. Rebuild all. Run the tests. They pass. Good. Now I just have to diff and figure out which change caused the breakage.

• git my working directory back to the current version of the code. Rebuild all and run the tests again to watch them fail again. BUT NOW THEY PASS.

• Wonder if perhaps Visual Studio is less frustrating for people who drink Scotch in the mornings.

• Decide that maybe something was flaky in my machine. The tests are passing again, so there's no problem.

• Realize that the user wasn't actually running the test suite. He was trying to reference from his own project. And he had to do that manually, because I haven't published the nuget package yet. Maybe he just screwed up the reference or didn't copy all the necessary pieces.

• Run the tests in the new build system to watch them pass there as well. But here they STILL FAIL.

• Decide to take the build system out of the equation and just finish getting things working right with nuget. Build the unit test package separately in its own solution. Add a reference to the nuget package and start working out the issues.

• Run the tests. Everything throws because the reference got added to the "bait" version of the PCL instead of the to the WP81 platform assembly. Oh well. This is what I need to be fixing anyway.

• Notice that the .targets file didn't get properly imported into the test project when the package was installed. Wonder why. But that's gotta be why the platform assembly didn't get referenced.

• Realize that the bait assembly somehow got referenced. Wonder why.

• What is Scotch anyway? Go read several articles about single malt whiskey.

• Decide to take nuget out of the equation and focus on why the new build system is producing dlls that won't load.

• Google the error message "Package failed updates, dependency or conflict validation". I need to know exactly what was the cause of the failure.

• Realize that the default search engine or IE is Bing. Do the same search in Google. Get different results.

• Become annoyed when co-worker interrupts me to tell me that there is a new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy.

• Read a web page on the Microsoft website which explains how to get the actual details of that error message. Spend time wandering around Event Viewer until I see the right stuff.

• Realize that the web page is actually talking about WinRT on the desktop, not Windows Phone.

• Try to find a way to get developer-grade error messages in the Windows Phone emulator. Fail.

• Notice that below the error message, Visual Studio's suggested resolution is to instead use a unit test project that is targeted for Windows Phone, even thought IT ALREADY IS.

• Blame Steve Ballmer FOR EVERYTHING.

• Wonder if WP81 is the only thing that broke. Run the tests for WinRT. They fail as well.

• Get annoyed because the only way Visual Studio can run the unit tests for just one project is to unload all the others.

• Get upset because the Visual Studio Reload Project command doesn't work like the way it did a week or two ago. Now it reloads all the projects instead of just the one I wanted. Did the installation of the Xamarin Visual Studio integration break it?

• Go back to the very basics. Run the unit tests for plain old .NET 4.5. They pass.

• Re-run the unit tests for WinRT to watch them fail again. NOW THEY PASS.

• Realize the co-worker is absolutely right. The most important thing is to watch the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer.

• Get annoyed because the sound on my MBP isn't working. Watch the whole trailer anyway, without sound.

• Review all my project settings in the Visual Studio dialogs, just to see if I notice anything odd.

• Go back to my web browser. Realize that the world of Scotch whiskey might actually be more complicated than Visual Studio.

• Go home. Discover that the annual spring invasion of ants in our kitchen is proceeding nicely.

• Fight some more with Visual Studio. Give up. Go to bed.

• Wake up the next morning. Discover that the teenager's contribution to our war against the ants was to leave unrinsed plates by the sink. Thousands of ants feasting on cheesecake debris and syrup.

• Open the laptop. Run diff to compare the csproj and vcxproj files from the old build system against the new one. See that there are no differences that should make any difference.

• Change them all anyway. Update every setting to exactly match the old build system. One at a time. Run the test suite after each tweak so I can figure out exactly which of the seeminlgy-harmless changes caused the breakage.

• Wait. My kid had cheesecake and waffles FOR DINNER?

• Become seriously annoyed that Visual Studio changes the Output pane from "Tests" to "Build" EVERY SINGLE TIME I run the tests.

• Finish getting all the settings to match. The tests still don't pass.

• Try to remember if I ever done anything successfully. Anything at all. Distinctly recall that when I was mowing the lawn this weekend, the grass got shorter. Focus on that accomplishment. Build on that success.

• Realize that the old build system works and the new one doesn't. There has to be a difference that I'm missing. I just have to find it.

• Go back to the old build system. Rebuild all. Run the tests so I can watch them pass and start over from there. BUT NOW THEY'RE FAILING AGAIN.

• Go do something else.

 

by @m_uysl

An anonymous reader writes "Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light — a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorized 80 years ago. From the article: 'A pair of researchers predicted a method for turning light into matter 80 years ago, and now a new team of scientists are proposing a technique that could make that method happen in the purest way yet. The proposed method involves colliding two photons — the massless particles of light — that have extremely high energies to transform them into two particles with mass, and researchers in the past have been able to prove that it works. But in replicating that old method, known as Breit–Wheeler pair production, they had to introduce particles that did have mass into the process. Imperial College London researchers, however, say that it's now possible to create a collider that only includes photons.'"

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Paleontologists have just unearthed the fossilized bones of a gigantic dinosaur that's never been seen before. They believe it's an entirely new species—and based on the size of its bones, it's way bigger than what we thought was the biggest dinosaur ever. Meet the new number one among earthly creatures.

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"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality."

From a zombie girl to a premature baby, these twisted dolls can give you the worst nightmares ever!

Nemo the Magnificent writes: " Everybody knows software development is a young man's game, right? Here's a guy who hires and manages programmers, and he says it's not about age at all — it's about skills, period. 'It's each individual's responsibility to stay fresh in the field and maintain a modern-day skillset that gives any 28-year-old a run for his or her money. ... Although the ability to learn those skills is usually unlimited, the available time to learn often is not. "Little" things like family dinners, Little League, and home improvement projects often get in the way. As a result, we do find that we face a shortage of older, more seasoned developers. And it's not because we don't want older candidates. It's often because the older candidates haven't successfully modernized their developer skills.' A company that actively works to offer all employees the chance to learn and to engage with modern technologies is a company that good people are going to work for, and to stay at."

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An anonymous reader points out this Science Daily report: "Researchers ... have solved one aspect of the discrete logarithm problem. This is considered to be one of the 'holy grails' of algorithmic number theory, on which the security of many cryptographic systems used today is based. They have devised a new algorithm that calls into question the security of one variant of this problem, which has been closely studied since 1976. The result ... discredits several cryptographic systems that until now were assumed to provide sufficient security safeguards. Although this work is still theoretical, it is likely to have repercussions especially on the cryptographic applications of smart cards, RFID chips , etc."

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reifman (786887) writes "San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates. But, if you're a straight male thinking of moving to Seattle to work in technology, think again. Seattle's gender ratio is even more imbalanced and it's about to get much worse for men. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women."

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redletterdave (2493036) writes "When my best friend upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a Galaxy S4, I texted her hello. Unfortunately, she didn't get that text, nor any of the five I sent in the following three days. My iPhone didn't realize she was now an Android user and sent all my texts via iMessage. It wasn't until she called me about going to brunch that I realized she wasn't getting my text messages. What I thought was just a minor bug is actually a much larger problem. One that, apparently, Apple has no idea how to fix. Apple said the company is aware of the situation, but it's not sure how to solve it. One Apple support person said: 'This is a problem a lot of people are facing. The engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it. There are no reliable solutions right now — for some people the standard fixes work immediately; many others are in my boat.'"

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