Corvus.corax

An anonymous reader writes New malware targeting Mac machines, opening backdoors on them and roping them into a botnet currently numbering around 17,000 zombies has been spotted. The malware, dubbed Mac.BackDoor.iWorm, targets computers running OS X and makes extensive use of encryption in its routines, Dr. Web researchers noted. What's even more interesting is that it gets the IP address of a valid command and control (C&C) server from a post on popular news site Reddit. The malware is capable of discovering what other software is installed on the machine, opening a port on it, and sending a query to a web server to acquire the addresses of the C&C servers.

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An anonymous reader writes Researchers have found that a chemical found in hops may actually improve memory. Unfortunately, a person would need to drink 3,520 pints of beer a day to get a high enough dose of the chemical to boost their brain power. A daunting task for even the most enthusiastic Oktoberfest participant. From the article: "Researchers at Oregon State University discovered that doses of xanthohumol, a flavonoid found in hops, improved memory and thinking in a lucky group of mice. Flavonoids are a class of compounds present in plants, known to have numerous health benefits. Last year, researchers discovered that a flavonoid found in celery and artichokes could potentially fight pancreatic cancer. The researchers treated the mice with dietary supplements of xanthohumol over the course of eight weeks. Their goal was to determine if xanthohumol could affect palmitoylation, a naturally occurring process in animals (including humans) that's associated with memory degradation. The mice then went through a series of tests—including the popular Morris water maze—to gauge whether or not the treatments had improved their spatial memory and cognitive flexibility. For the younger mice in the group, it worked. But on the older mice, unfortunately, the xanthohumol didn't seem to have any effect."

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‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was laughing because he was […]

The post Exodus appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel is released in cinemas January 30

schwit1 writes: Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan's largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing. Quoting: "The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini's July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini's infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini's flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen. Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic." That the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.

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An anonymous reader writes: If you're a Grooveshark user, you should probably start backing up your collection. In a decision (PDF) released Monday, the United States District Court in Manhattan has found Grooveshark guilty of massive copyright infringement based on a preponderance of internal emails, statements from former top executives, direct evidence from internal logs, and willfully deleted files and source code. An email from Grooveshark's CTO in 2007 read, "Please share as much music as possible from outside the office, and leave your computers on whenever you can. This initial content is what will help to get our network started—it’s very important that we all help out! ... Download as many MP3’s as possible, and add them to the folders you’re sharing on Grooveshark. Some of us are setting up special 'seed points' to house tens or even hundreds of thousands of files, but we can’t do this alone." He also threatened employees who didn't contribute.

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derekmead writes: After 40 years, astronomers have likely found a rather strange celestial body known as a Thorne–Zytkow object (TZO), in which a neutron star is absorbed by a red supergiant. Originally predicted in the 1970s, the first non-theoretical TZO was found earlier this year, based on calculations presented in a paper forthcoming in MNRAS. TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.

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Photo by roaming-the-planet

Photo by roaming-the-planet

Photos by roaming-the-planet

First a Boeing 747, and now an industrial complex on a Vancover island; it seems no canvas is too large for Brazilian graffiti artists Os Gemeos who were invited to the Vancouver Biennale to turn six multi-story silos on Granville Island into their trademark ‘Giants.’ The murals on the 70-foot towers are now the largest paintings ever attempted by the pair, an astounding feat considering Os Gemeos completely donated a month of their time to create the non-profit art project. An Indiegogo fundraising campaign to recoup costs associated with painting the silos has been extremely successful. You can see more over on Arrested Motion.

World War I was shaped by the new vehicles developed during the four years of conflict. A century after the start of the war, we’re looking back at the most remarkable vehicles—the planes, cars, tanks, ships, and zeppelins—it helped bring about. For British merchant vessels operating during World War I, few things were so terrifying […]

The post How WWI’s U-Boats Launched the Age of Unrestricted Warfare appeared first on WIRED.

“The Woman Who Lost Her Soul,” an epic about America’s unbridled military ambitions, has won this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction. In their announcement of the $10,000 award this morning, the judges said that novelist Bob Shacochis “creates an intricate portrait of the catastrophic events that have led to an endless cycle of vengeance and war between cultures.”

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About 3 months ago photographer Dan Tobin Smith set up a website to ask the public to donate kipple: junk that was lying around their house. “It’s time to free yourself of the pointless or unused objects in your life,” read the plea. “Give them a purpose as part of Dan Tobin Smith’s installation for the London Design Festival 2014.”

Sure enough, the donations began coming in and in no time at all Smith had enough junk on his hands to create a sprawling installation that filled an entire floor and mezzanine, “carpeting 200-square-metres with a dense, precise, chromatically-themed arrangement of thousands of objects.” The objects are so carefully placed that gradients seem to blend together seamlessly.

The fictional word Kipple was coined by science fiction writer Philip K Dick. Kipple appears in his 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (the film adaptation was Blade Runner) and is used to describe useless, pointless stuff that humans accumulate. It served as the inspiration for Smith’s installation “The First Law of Kipple,” which was part of London Design Festival this month. (via Creative Review)

Hear a sample of the eagerly anticipated film's score now

"I love reading, but there's just no time!"

Chances are good you've heard this excuse or maybe even used it. It's not a bad excuse, either: reading does take time, and sometimes, it takes lots of it. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, literature worth reading doesn't offer quaint tl;dr summaries. It may be time to implement a strategy to help you get to those books you've been putting off for the past 17 years.

It might be good to start by planning out your reading by the length of time it will take you to finish a book. A nifty infographic from Personal Creations can help here. The website calculated the hours it takes for an average reader — which they define as reading 300 words per minute — to finish 64 of the world's most popular books

Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well will take you just under two hours, which is about the length of a romcom you might watch on Netflix. The Great Gatsby and A Wrinkle in Time will both take you less than three hours. Some books, like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, will require a slightly longer commitment (six hours), and some, like Gone With the Wind, will require almost an entire day to read.

Here's the infographic to help you plan your literary schedule. Happy reading!

How long to read books (Personal Creations)

(H/t Shortlist)

Richard D James' long-awaited return is a banging reminder of why the Cornish raver is one of music's true innovators

mpicpp writes with news that UPS will be expanding their 3D printing services. UPS announced plans Monday to bring in-store 3-D-printing services to nearly 100 stores across the country, billing itself as the first national retailer to do so. With the UPS system, customers can submit their own designs for objects like product prototypes, engineering parts and architectural models that are then printed on a professional-quality 3-D printer made by Stratasys. Prices vary depending on the complexity of the object; an iPhone case would be about $60, while a replica femur bone would be around $325. UPS can also connect customers with outside professionals who charge an hourly rate to help produce a design file for the printer. It generally takes about four or five hours to print a simple object, with more complex items taking a day or more. The program started as a pilot at six locations last year, and UPS says those stores "saw demand for 3-D print continuing to increase across a broad spectrum of customers."

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The track appears on the band's sixth album 'Hail To The Thief'

Albert Einstein never won a Nobel prize for the theory of relativity—in fact, it was only through long, political jockeying within the Nobel committee that he won the prize at all. Instead, when he was given the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics (in 1922, after a long bout of internal Nobel hand-wringing), he received it primarily for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Extraordinarily enough, he came up with both his relativity theory, and the photoelectric effect in the same year: 1905.

At the turn of the century, physicists already knew that, in some circumstances, exposing certain materials to light could create an electric current. An American named Charles Fritts had even created a working solar cell from selenium more than two decades before, in the early 1880s.

But observing that light can create electricity is not the same as understanding why light can create electricity. That was baffling.

It was understood, at that point, that light worked as a wave. But if that was true, it didn't make any sense that light could create an electric current: A wave of light just wouldn't have enough energy to cause materials like selenium to shoot off electrons as fast as they did when exposed to light.

In 1905, Einstein was 26 and producing physics papers that would change the way we think about the world for decades to come. He wasn't quite the wild-haired celebrity yet:

But in a paper published in March 1905, Einstein suggested that, perhaps, light wasn't a wave. Phenomena like the photoelectric effect, he wrote,

are more readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading out from a point source is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space, which move without dividing, and which can only be produced and absorbed as complete units.

In other words, light could create electricity if it behaved, sometimes, like a particle rather than a wave. (This should sound familiar to anyone who remembers physics class.)

Only one section of the paper covered the photoelectric effect, but it outlined how a light particle might deliver enough energy, all at once, to knock an electron off an atom and create an electric current. This, it turned out, was easier to show experimentally than some of the other ideas Einstein had outlined. Within a decade Robert Millikan had verified, experimentally, the equation that Einstein had used to describe the photoelectric effect.

The idea that Einstein described in 1905—that won the Nobel Prize a decade and half later—is what makes today's solar panels work at all. But it wasn't until 1954—almost 50 years later—that anyone was able to make a solar cell that created enough current to actually run electrical equipment. Just as there's a gap between observing something and knowing how it works, there's a gap between knowing how something works and being able to do anything useful with it.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/einstein-didnt-win-a-nobel-for-relativity-he-won-it-for-this/380451/

An anonymous reader writes Yelp has, for the past year or so, garnered a reputation for extorting businesses into paying for advertising on their site. Allegations include incessant calls for advertising contracts, automatic listing of a business, and suppressing good reviews should a business decide to opt out of paying Yelp for listing them. One small Italian trattoria, however, may have succeeded in flipping Yelp's legally sanctioned business practices in its favor. The owners of Botto Bistro in Redmond, CA, initially agreed to pay for advertising on Yelp one year ago apparently because they were tired of getting calls from Yelp's sales team. But even after buying advertising, the owners claim that they kept receiving calls. So they started a campaign to get as many one-star reviews as they could, even offering 25% discounts to customers. As of this writing they have 866, and a casual perusal of them reveals enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek support for the restaurant. One-star reviews, once Yelp's best scare tactic, is now this particular business's badge of quality. And they didn't even have to pay Yelp for it.

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gbjbaanb writes: This year's Ig Nobel prize was won by Japanese researchers investigating why banana skins produced a frictionless surface compared to apple and orange peels. (Apparently, "The polysaccharide follicular gels that give banana skins their slippery properties are also found in the membranes where our bones meet," so its not all fun and jollity). Other prizes were awarded for noting that dogs only defecate when aligned with north-south magnetic fields, and that "night owl" people are more likely to be psychopaths than early risers. Yes, that probably includes you.

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The TV series Little House on the Prairie turned 40 this year. Some might date its debut to the airing of its pilot (a made-for-TV movie) in March of 1974, but the first regular airing of the show, which would run nine seasons, came on Sept. 11, 1974. The show was a massive hit for NBC, at a time when the network was in need of hits; even by the time it was canceled, it had yet to fall out of the Nielsen top 30. Based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, it was one part coming-of-age series, one part small-town show, and one part Western in the vein of something like Gunsmoke.

It was also, particularly as it got older, completely bugnuts.

The books Little House was based on weren't terribly easy to adapt for television at the time — particularly since its protagonists, the Ingalls, were always moving around. The series took a few incidents and ideas from Wilder's writing, but for the most part, it started constructing its own world more indebted to ‘70s and ‘80s TV drama than anything else.

And it loved melodrama. Loved it. It never missed an opportunity to tell a story that involved as much weeping and misery as it could muster. And as it got older, that love of melodrama combined with the general lack of stories any TV show faces in its old age — and the show just completely lost its mind.

Here are nine episodes of Little House that will remind you what a whacked-out masterpiece this could be, and display just how frequently TV shows used to run out of plotlines about three seasons in.

1) "As Long As We're Together" (season five, episodes one and two)

Were there crazy episodes on this show prior to the season five premiere? Sure. But this two-parter — in which the vast majority of the show's characters just up and move to a new town, because why not? — is where things started to spin off their axis. Yeah, pioneers would occasionally follow the gossip of those they had once known to new towns. But rarely did they do so in what amounted to late '70s caravan road trips. Even odder: everybody would be back in the show's more familiar setting of Walnut Grove, Minnesota, within a few episodes.

2) "The Odyssey" (season five, episode 24)

Episodes where the characters took incredibly unrealistic road trips, like they were the Brady Bunch or something, were surprisingly common. In this one, Laura helps a dying boy fulfill his wish of seeing the ocean by hopping a train. Along the way, she receives some help from William Randolph Hearst.

3) "Annabelle" (season six, episode five)

Another thing that was always happening on this show: the circus coming to town. In this one, Nels Oleson goes to the circus, only to find out the morbidly obese sister he's always been ashamed of is its fat lady. It has a reasonably sweet conclusion (and plays into the show's general calls for tolerance), but it's hard to imagine what writers' room discussion possibly led to this storyline.

4) "The Halloween Dream" (season six, episode seven)

Little House did a surprising number of horror-themed episodes, particularly ones where somebody dresses up like a monster, as though they were a cut-rate Scooby Doo villain. But this one — which involves young Albert dreaming he's somehow confused for an Indian — takes the cake, both for sheer oddity of its existence and utter lack of racial sensitivity.

5) "Sylvia" (season seven, episodes 17 and 18)

This is the one that seems have left psychological scars on most Little House fans. The series' star Michael Landon had long written and directed many of its episodes, and it's evident he wanted this one to be a serious discussion of sexual assault. But by putting the rapist in a creepy mime mask and masking his identity, Landon inadvertently created a Little House slasher movie homage.

6) "He Was Only Twelve" (season eight, episodes 21 and 22)

Little House was both obsessed with the Judeo-Christian notion of God and with orphans. Ma and Pa Ingalls took in more and more of them over the years, as their girls aged out of being cute, telegenic children. In this one, a young boy who's been living with the Ingalls is accidentally shot in a bank robbery, and then Pa takes him out into the woods to place him on an altar and demand God heal him. Even weirder: this was Landon's last episode on the series as a regular.

7) "The Wild Boy" (season nine, episodes six and seven)

There's a boy who's been imprisoned in a cage and is brought to Walnut Grove by a peddler selling magical elixirs? Sure. That sounds like two full episodes of this show.

8) "For the Love of Blanche" (season nine, episode 19)

One of the last episodes ever to air, this one features Mr. Edwards, gregarious pal of the Ingalls clan, agreeing to take in a baby — only to learn that baby is an orangutan. Presumably, this happened all the time in late-1800s Minnesota. Or someone on the writing staff had just seen Every Which Way But Loose.

9) Little House: The Last Farewell (special five)

The greatest thing Little House ever did was end its run with a two-hour, made-for-TV movie (the last of a handful of specials produced after the show's cancellation) that concluded with the residents of Walnut Grove blowing up their town with dynamite, rather than let an unscrupulous developer get hold of their homes and buildings. Because now, presumably, he can't build anything else on the land? It seems they didn't really think this one through. (And NBC didn't either, actually airing this special second to last in the series run.)

Much has been gained from TV shows having shorter runs — on both a season and series level — but we've also lost the days when those shows just needed to fill out their episode orders with any old thing they could think of. And, look, that's great and all, but isn't a little part of you sad we'll never get an episode of Mad Men where Don Draper has to care for an orangutan?

Evolution’s popularity has been driven not only by a more secure and professional operation than its competitors, but also by a more amoral approach to the cryptomarket than the strict libertarian ethos the Silk Road preached.

The post The Dark Web Gets Darker With Rise of the ‘Evolution’ Drug Market appeared first on WIRED.

Give it Up is a new track released yesterday by Israeli musician and composer Kutiman. The song was created entirely using vocal and instrument tracks lifted from 23 different YouTube videos of mostly amateur musicians, credited here. If you liked this, you’ll be happy to learn this is just the first track off his upcoming album Thru You Too which the artist says will be comprised entirely of unrelated YouTube videos.

In other composing-music-with-videos news, Andrew Huang created a version of the 80s hit 99 Red Balloons… using only red balloons. Included here for your listening pleasure.

(via Adam Savage)

This slick commercial for Japanese high-speed optical internet service au Hikari has a pretty novel take on the Rube Goldberg Machine. Each sequence in the device is powered (or otherwise set in motion) by a single beam of light sent through magnifying glasses and mirrors to burn strings, pop balloons, and melt bits of ice. Even if you’re Rube Goldberg’d out lately, this is worth a watch. (via The Kid Should See This)

Starting this month Verizon FiOS customers can get upload speeds every bit as fast as their download speeds. Since that means faster, easier sharing of high-res illustrations, designs, and photos, FiOS is sponsoring a series of posts on Colossal to help us commission and share these super hi-res animated GIFs from some of the most amazing artists we could find.

Art director and designer Kevin Weir uses historical black and white photographs forgotten to time as the basis for his quirky—and slightly disturbing—animated GIFs. His path to online GIF superstardom began when he was in high school. He tells us that “my parents’ boss bought me a copy of Photoshop and I decided I wanted to be some kind of designer.” Having mastered the software, he found himself five years later “making black and white GIFs as a way to occupy myself during the downtime of an internship I had during grad school.” He shared the images on his Tumblr, Flux Machine where they quickly went viral.

Weir makes use of photographs he finds in the Library of Congress online archive, and is deeply drawn to what he calls “unknowable places and persons,” images with little connection to present day that he can use as blank canvas for his weird ideas. Perhaps it’s the nature of his imagination, or maybe a result of the medium’s limited frames of animation to communicate anything too serious, but despite the creepiness factor, it’s hard to not to smile at the absurdity of his ideas.

Weir is now an art director at Droga5 in NYC, he also also animates music videos and sassy birds.

For the past few months Portuguese artist Bordalo II (previously) has been stalking the streets of Lisbon looking for heaps of trash. Using mounds of discarded plastic sheeting, old tires, shingles, and tangles of electrical cable, he carefully repositions everything before spray painting it to resemble animals and insects. You can see more from the ongoing series on Facebook.

An anonymous reader writes: It's easy to make a robot walk, but hard to keep it from falling over. We've seen a number of crazy robot prototypes, but they're usually tethered and/or stuck on a treadmill. Now, researchers from MIT have developed an algorithm that allows their giant robot cheetah to run around outdoors at up to 10mph. They expect the robot to eventually hit speeds of 30mph. "The key to the bounding algorithm is in programming each of the robot's legs to exert a certain amount of force in the split second during which it hits the ground, in order to maintain a given speed: In general, the faster the desired speed, the more force must be applied to propel the robot forward. ... Kim says that by adapting a force-based approach, the cheetah-bot is able to handle rougher terrain, such as bounding across a grassy field." The MIT cheetah-bot also runs on a custom electric motor, which makes it significantly quieter than gas-powered robots. "Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals. The only things you hear are the feet hitting the ground."

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