Albener Pessoa

Submitted by: Unknown

Facebook has built a prototype cold storage system that uses Blu-ray Discs instead of traditional drives. "The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives," the IDG News Service reported, based on a talk given by Facebook VP of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh at yesterday's Open Compute Summit.The prototype storage cabinet reportedly holds 10,000 Blu-ray Discs for a petabyte of data. The idea is to store rarely accessed files, such as backups of users' photos and videos, and not the primary copies that need to be on faster storage systems so they can be accessed immediately.

Facebook expects to eventually increase the capacity of each cabinet to 5 petabytes. According to GigaOm, Parikh also revealed that "the first site is now in production and storing 30 petabytes of data, but a second will be coming online soon. Within a couple of months, Facebook expects to have 150 petabytes of data in cold storage, which is just a fraction of the 3 exabytes each facility is designed to house."

The design of the Blu-ray system will likely be made public through the Open Compute Project, which Facebook created to share hardware designs. IDG reports:

Gretar Ívarsson

Can enormous heat deep in the Earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma—the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes—suggests it could.

The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. But in 2009 a borehole at Krafla, Northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma. The molten rock was intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below at searing temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius.

This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. A special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat. (The only previous case like this was in Hawaii in 2007, but that well was sealed in concrete.)

Stream movies before they're released? (Pretend Jackie Brown is the hot, new VOD option...)

Nathan Mattise

The lawsuit-happy companies often called "patent trolls" have made so many brash moves over crazy inventions in the past year. In 2013 alone, a troll won an appeals ruling upholding a patent on watching ads online; another sent out letters to thousands of small companies asking for fees for using networked scanners.

What's a troll got to do to get some attention these days?

Here's one company that nailed it this month: Red Pine Point LLC. The Nevada LLC patented the idea of downloading movies and watching them before they've been released in theaters.

Facebook: home of the quintessential tempered and rational political discourse.

Political discussions on Facebook are, in fact, undermining both people’s relationships and use of the website. A new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that users who try to talk about politics on Facebook are often surprised by the political opinions of their acquaintances. And researchers say that a diverse set of opinions among a user's friends makes everyone want to speak up less.

Consistent with the entire world’s personal experience of Facebook, all 116 participants in the study had been involved in or witnessed a political discussion that turned ugly on the site. What often motivated their changes in behavior, the participants said, was seeing a “weak tie,” or casual acquaintance, express a political opinion that differed from their own.

Per the research paper, “most social networks are clustered in groups of like-minded individuals,” a principle called homophily. Because Facebook not only has a low threshold for “friending” another person but also can bridge together many social groups with a single person’s post, it can be a breeding ground for alienation and resentment.

Flickr user leted.

The completion of a Neanderthal genome showed that there was a very clear signal of Neanderthal DNA in all non-African populations of modern humans, demonstrating that the two populations had interbred during the latter's migration into Eurasia. But a statistical signal doesn't really tell you what's there. Do all humans carry the same few pieces of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting it has been contributing to our fitness? Or have bits of Neanderthal been scattered through the human genome, kept around by little more than random drift?

Two papers, one in Nature and the second in Science, attempt to answer these questions. Conveniently, they come up with the same answer. Yes, lots of Neanderthal DNA is scattered around at random—enough so that if it were all brought together in one individual, that person would be 20 percent Neanderthal. But there are also lots of bits that aren't located randomly. Some of them are useful, many others less so.

Given that we now have a few Neanderthal genomes, it might seem easy to spot pieces of DNA that originated there. But the Neanderthal genome is so similar to that of modern humans that it can be difficult to tell whether something originated the the Neanderthals or whether it's just a bit of normal variation. The task is made harder by the fact that recombination has scrambled the Neanderthal and human chromosomes so that the typical piece of Neanderthal DNA should now be less than a hundred thousand bases long; the chromosomes are millions of bases.