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At Rest -Emma Kisiel

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We all know someone who can never seem to get comfy, no matter the temperature. They're always pulling off sweaters because they're too hot, or cranking up the heat because they're too cold. But soon, salvation for these folks could come in the form of a special wristband that uses a copper heatsink to fool your body into thinking it's just been warmed or cooled—when in reality, the ambient temperature hasn't changed.

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We all have an ego that can get in the way of our work, and it sometimes masquerades as confidence. If you don't know the difference, you can make your life a lot harder without ever realizing it.

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Out of all of the studios and developers gaining a second life via Kickstarter, it's honestly surprised me that it's taken this long for Cyan to get in the game. The developers behind the seminal Myst are looking to fund Obduction, a new IP that will draw on some of the same themes from the adventure game classic that's celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. 

In the video above, Rand Miller cites a lack of enthusiasm from publishers and the desire to stay totally independent. Cyan is looking to raise $1.1 million to complete Obduction. That's a lot of money for any developer to ask for but they are looking to release the game in mid-to-late 2015, so that's almost a two-year development cycle which isn't going to be cheap.

Still, the team have raised over $325,000 so far in just 24 hours, so I wouldn't be surprised to see Obduction hit its goal.

For more than seven years isoHunt and the MPAA have been battling it out in court but today the case appears to have come to an end, at least for now.

Both parties have submitted a request to conclude the case and isoHunt founder Gary Fung has agreed to pay a $110 million settlement and shut down the site.

“It’s sad to see my baby go. But I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. 10.5 years of isoHunt has been a long journey by any business definition, and forever in Internet startup time,” Fung told TorrentFreak.

“I think one worry I want to address is at no time have I compromised privacy of any user on isoHunt, in terms of your IP addresses or emails,” he added.

At the time of writing isoHunt is still up and running but Fung told TorrentFreak that it will soon close its doors. It’s a landmark decision – the site has been one of the most visited torrent search engines for nearly a decade.

The MPAA is delighted with the outcome and hopes it will deter others from starting similar websites. The Hollywood group explained earlier that while two to five million dollars would be enough to bankrupt isoHunt, a higher penalty would scare off others.

“Today’s settlement is a major step forward in realizing the enormous potential of the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce and innovation,” MPAA boss Chris Dodd, said in a comment.

“It also sends a strong message that those who build businesses around encouraging, enabling, and helping others to commit copyright infringement are themselves infringers, and will be held accountable for their illegal actions.”

The MPAA believes that the closure of isoHunt will help save thousands of jobs and protect many more businesses.

“The successful outcome of this landmark lawsuit will also will help preserve jobs and protect the tens of thousands of businesses in the creative industries, whose hard work and investments are exploited by sites like isoHunt,” Dodd added.

The full terms of the settlement agreement have not been disclosed, but there appears to be more behind it. IsoHunt will be bankrupted by the $110 million settlement, so there is no reason to throw in the towel two weeks before the trial was supposed to start, unless they received something in return.

For the MPAA this is the second big official legal victory against a torrent site. In 2009 the movie industry group won its legal battle against TorrentSpy.

While the MPAA has booked a clear victory, the case is not completely over yet. IsoHunt recently filed an application to appeal the case at the Supreme Court, which could mean that both parties are back in court again in the not too distant future.

Source: isoHunt Shuts Down After $110 Million Settlement With The MPAA

Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be 10 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

In dense urban areas, the range within which Wi-Fi signals are transmitted is increasingly crowded with noise — mostly, other Wi-Fi signals. What’s more, the physics of electromagnetic waves sets an upper limit to the bandwidth of traditional Wi-Fi. The short version: you can only transmit so much data at a given frequency. The lower the frequency of the wave, the less it can transmit. Read more...

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Oculus Rift's recently recruited Chief Technology Officer John Carmack confirmed that a new dev kit for the company's augmented reality headset will be available before the hardware launches at retail next year.

Speaking with Engadget, Carmack additionally revealed that the retail Oculus Rift unit will likely run on an Android-powered operating system, easing its development process. "The way I believe it's going to play out is you will eventually have a head-mounted display that probably runs Android, as a standalone system, that has a system-on-a-chip that's basically like what you have in mobile phones," Carmack said.

Several in-development projects have added official support for the Oculus Rift over the last several months, and early adopters have successfully added Rift functionality to a number of existing games using the VorpX and TriDef drivers. The Oculus Rift secured $16 million in investor funding earlier this year, following up on its successful Kicksarter campaign.

Carmack: New Oculus Rift dev kit coming, retail model will 'probably' run on Android originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 18 Oct 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Breaking Bad, a TV show permanently sculpted onto television's Mount Rushmore, whipped itself from a critically acclaimed yet not exactly ratings dominant TV show into THE bizz-bizz-buzzy pop culture phenomenon of the year as the series raced to its end. How did it happen? According to Breaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan, illegal downloads help.

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Get your best heart hand gesture ready because it may soon come in handy for sharing photos

The Independent reports that a patent filed by Google hints at a new Glass feature that would allow users to "like" and share photos by making a heart shape with their hands

According to the filing, Google wants to patent the heart hand gesture so that a "wearable computing device, which could include a head-mounted display (HMD) and a video camera, may recognize known hand gestures and carry out particular actions in response." As The Independent states, that HMD probably refers to Google Glass

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Today, my otherwise lovely boyfriend of a month showed his true colors. He freaked out when he learned that I use tampons instead of pads. He yelled that using them is like cheating on him, because his penis is the only thing that should ever enter me. FML

http://wiki.qcraft.org/

A supercomputer that is fueled with blood? It's coming! IBM scientists have created a new supercomputer inspired by the human brain and is powered by what they call "electronic blood."

Patrick Ruch and Bruno Michel of IBM Research lab in Zurich, Switzerland, wanted to "fit a supercomputer inside a sugarcube." But in order to do that, they'd have to model it after the human brain, which is 10,000 times more dense and efficient than any computer today. "The brain uses 40% of its volume for functional performance - and only 10% for energy and cooling," said Michel to the BBC. Compare that to the world's fastest current supercomputer, which uses 99% of its volume devoted to cooling and powering, and only 1% for processing information. The human brain is made possible, Michel added, "because it uses only one - extremely efficient - network of capillaries and blood vessels to transport heat and energy - all at the same time."

So, the pair have created a "bionic" computing architecture, which uses "electronic blood" of charged electrolytes to provide fuel and cooling to computer chips.

Read more over at this intriguing article by James Morgan over at the BBC.

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It's one thing to build the most useless machine, but artist Thijs Rijkers takes things one big step further; his machines actively destroy themselves.

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We mentioned last year that some horse riders enjoy running on the same courses that their horses do. It’s called a horseless horse show. This young lady from Sweden, Anna Salander, engages in a similar activity, except that she runs on all fours like a real horse.

She can jump high, too! Watch her clear one hurdle after another, raised as high as 1.1 meters. As you can see from the slow-motion portion at the end, Anna isn’t cheating. She’s jumping and landing on all four feet/hands. She has a real future in this sport!

Content warning: needlessly annoying soundtrack.

-via Pleated Jeans

Perhaps, one day, your Kinect will be able to follow you through the walls of your house

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a motion-tracking device, which they call the "Kinect of the future." It can follow a person even when in another room, pinpointing his or her location with extreme accuracy, using only radio waves. (Kinect is the Xbox 360's motion sensor.)

The device tracks a single person with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters — about the size of an adult hand. Apart from the ability to "see" through a wall, its main advantage is that the person being tracked isn't required to wear a transmitter. While other location systems depend on Wi-Fi, this device can track a person's movements within the radius of its radio waves. Read more...

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jones_supa writes "If you want to find the computer geniuses of tomorrow, you could do worse than to check out which kids are playing Minecraft. In a Google+ post, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab Team says that they've released a mod called qCraft to enable kids (and adults) to play around with blocks that exhibit behaviors like quantum entanglement, superposition and observer dependency. qCraft obviously isn't a perfect scientific simulation, but it's a fun way for players to experience a few parts of quantum mechanics outside of thought experiments or dense textbook examples. The team doesn't know the full potential of what you can make with the mod, but they are excited to see what Minecraft's players can discover."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All the time, we are discovering ways videogames can substantially improve our lives, and it now seems they are improving our medical care. Dr. James "Butch" Rosser has found that a doctor playing videogames before performing a laparoscopic operation can lead to a 26 percent increase in surgical performance. Physicians who play games like Super Monkey Ball at least three hours a week make 37 percent fewer surgical errors, according to Dr. Rosser's study. That is an incredible improvement, considering that the study also states that  98,000 patients die every year from medical errors.

Dr. Butch, as I am compelled to refer to him for the rest of time, was inspired to conduct this study essentially on a hunch that his gaming hobby might be improving his surgical dexterity. As it turns out, he was right. The study lasted from 2001-2003, testing more than 300 doctors, analyzing their technique through a simulated laparoscopic surgery. Half of the physicians played Super Monkey Ball prior to their evaluation, while the other half went with their usual routine. Naturally, those who gamed walked out with a better score, and a better result for their patient.

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“It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

Although the innermost planets, from Mercury through Saturn, were known since ancient times, it’s only since the advent of the telescope that we’ve discovered what really lives in our Solar System. Over the past four centuries, the wonders of not only the distant Universe, but also our nearby neighborhood, have been uncovered in spectacular detail.

The third and fourth largest planets were discovered, as were a plethora of moons around other worlds, a belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter (at the ice-line of our Solar System, or where the strength of the Sun is insufficient to move water out of its solid phase), and a Kuiper belt out beyond the final planet. (And the Oort cloud even beyond that!)

Although Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel and its bizarre failure to adhere to Kepler’s laws led to the prediction-and-discovery of Neptune in 1846, it wasn’t until 1930 that a lone astronomer, looking at pairs of images taken at different times, happened upon the serendipitous discovery of a lifetime.

Even though it was the only world located out beyond the orbit of Neptune for nearly 50 years (until Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, was discovered), it was recognized relatively quickly that Pluto was a harbinger for many more such objects, now recognized (and confirmed, since 1992) to be just one of a great many located in the Kuiper Belt. The other bodies began to exhibit a variety of sizes, shapes, and orbital characteristics, although they all had a number of properties that threw Pluto’s “privileged” status as a “planet” into question:

• similar, trans-Neptunian orbits in the same direction and with similar periods,
• masses and sizes of the same order-of-magnitude as Pluto,
• Pluto-like densities and surface properties, with lots of surface methane ice,
• similar atmospheric compositions to Pluto, as seen by occultations, and
• numbers that grew from “a few” to “dozens” to more than a thousand as of today.

This all came to a head in 2005, when it was discovered that Pluto isn’t even the most massive object in the Kuiper Belt!

That distinction belongs to Eris, which weighs in at about 127% the mass of Pluto. That discovery paved the way for a new classification scheme that included an additional class of Solar System objects known as dwarf planets, of which Eris and Pluto are the two most massive at the present time.

But when it comes to the King of all Kuiper Belt objects, none of these little monsters can stake that claim. Because there’s one object that we don’t normally think of as a Kuiper Belt object that has them all beat.

This is Neptune, the outermost planet in our Solar System. No, it doesn’t qualify as a Kuiper Belt object; it’s a planet, just like you’ve always learned. But back in 1846, there were some awfully powerful telescopes in the world, certainly much better and bigger ones than were around in 1781 (when Uranus was discovered) or at any time before that. Back in 1781, there was only one telescope in the world — commissioned in 1780 — that had a primary mirror of two feet (61 cm) or more in diameter.

By time 1846 came around, the largest telescope in the world had a primary mirror that was six feet (1.8 meters) in diameter, and amateurs with no formal training — like William Lassell — were building their own two foot diameter telescopes themselves.

The timetable for the discovery of Neptune was swift: Urbain Le Verrier announced his prediction for the undiscovered planet’s position on August 31, 1846, and composed a letter to Johann Galle, director of the Berlin observatory. Galle and his assistant, Heinrich d’Arrest, looked for the planet on September 23, and discovered it that very night in one of the greatest accomplishments of all-time in theoretical astrophysics.

But news traveled fast, and back in England, William Lassell was eager to view the newly-discovered world.

Just 17 days after the discovery of the hypothesized new world that had occupied many of the world’s greatest professional astronomers for decades, a virtually unknown and amateur telescope-maker discovered Triton, by far the largest satellite world of Neptune. (Although to be fair, it was the largest telescope in England at the time.) If all the Solar System’s moons were compared to one another, Triton would be the seventh largest in size, behind only Earth’s Moon, Saturn’s Titan, and the four Jovian moons discovered by Galileo.

But — up close — Triton doesn’t look like any other large moon in the entire Solar System! For one, every other large moon revolves around its planet the same way all the planets revolve around the Sun: counterclockwise, as viewed if you flew directly upwards above the Earth’s north pole. But not Triton, which revolves around Neptune in the opposite direction!

In terms of density, it resembles Pluto far more than it resembles either Neptune or any other Moon in the Solar System. And in terms of atmospheric composition, it’s virtually identical to the known worlds found in the Kuiper Belt.

What does all this mean?

That Triton isn’t a naturally occurring moon of Neptune, but has been gravitationally captured (by the same mechanism described here last week) from its place of origin: the Kuiper Belt. Even though it isn’t currently in the Kuiper Belt, that doesn’t stop it from being the largest, most massive, most accessible, first-discovered, and in many subjective ways, greatest Kuiper Belt Object of them all!

But it’s real, it’s spectacular, and unlike every other Kuiper Belt Object (so far), we’ve been there! That was thanks to Voyager 2 in 1989; take a look at this photo mosaic of a large chunk of its surface!

If it looks cantaloupe-like to you away from the poles, well done; that’s the semi-official NASA term for it! So the next time you think about worlds from beyond our planets, don’t just think of frozen ice-and-rock-balls orbiting in deep space, nor only of the comets disturbed by passing gravitational bodies and hurled inwards towards the Sun, but also of the rogue worlds that migrate inwards and wind up captured by gas giants.

After all, if you didn’t include them, you’d be missing out on Triton, largest of all the trans-Neptunian objects and the onetime King of the Kuiper Belt!

Ever since the late 17th century, it's been understood that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's Newton's Third Law of Motion. But a group of German scientists recently came up with a trick that appears to break that law, one that lets light accelerate all by itself. And it could bring us faster electronics in the process.

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Usually, when entering a restaurant — even a sushi boat restaurant — you're greeted by a waiter. The friendly server takes your order, brings you your food and disposes of the dirty dishes post-meal

This Tokyo sushi restaurant, however, has none of those amenities. Instead, everything is done automatically, using high-speed conveyor belts. The kitchen computers are constantly checking how many people are in the place, and the tablets on which you order special dishes can also play games.

BBC's Spencer Kelly checked the place out and, though he doesn't mention its name, it really appears to be waiter-less. The food is delivered via a conveyor belt and you can even request special deliveries via a touchscreen menu, which take a couple of minutes Read more...

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Need a quick fix but only have a web browser? Try FullScreenMario.com. It's Super Mario Bros. cracked open, by creator Josh Goldberg. It's neat seeing this old game in widescreen, but it's even neater to scroll over the level select button and simply click the stage you'd like to warp to. And when you get bored of that, a random button has the game spitting out a fully playable random world instantly!

If you're a creative person, try the map maker. It's super easy to create a world of your own with its drag and drop controls. You can save it as text to pull back up later, too!

Bravo.