firehose

Moridin_

As Andrew Cunningham reported today, Intel and Google are announcing an upcoming onslaught of new Google Chromebooks based on Intel's Haswell architecture processors. The idea of a cloud-tethered notebook that can keep its owner connected over Wi-Fi and broadband all day long—in some cases for less than the price of a shiny new Apple iPhone—is going to be awfully appealing to many.

And without a doubt, no one will be happier than the National Security Agency (NSA) and law enforcement. While Google's cloud computing has provided a platform for the company to grab a big chunk of the low-cost notebook market and upend Microsoft's Windows applecart, the recent NSA leaks by Edward Snowden have put the cloud under... a cloud.

There are some places where this isn't going to necessarily have much impact on Google's market ascension. Google has steamrollered the education market with Google Apps, and the low-cost Chromebook is a natural fit for the classroom. My middle-school-aged daughter now is required to have a Google account for school so she can be linked into her teacher's shared documents; the Chromebook's connection to Google credentials means that she can share a device with classmates, and the school doesn't need IT support to provision accounts on them.

One of the topline features of the iPhone 5s is its fingerprint scanning system Touch ID, but Apple is now clarifying some nuances about the way the device works in order to calm potential security fears before they can take hold. An Apple spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the iPhone 5s will not store actual images of a user's fingerprint, correcting an impression that the company itself may have inadvertently given. In a promotional video for the new phone, Apple's senior vice-president of hardware engineering Dan Riccio explains that, "The sensor uses advanced capacitive touch to take, in essence, a high-resolution image of your fingerprint." It then analyzes the sensor's data before "all fingerprint information is encrypted, and stored inside the secure enclave" on the phone's A7 processor. As the company clarified to the Journal, fingerprint "data" is stored — not an image of the fingerprint itself.

Storing the resulting digital signature, rather than a complete recreation of a user's fingerprint, is certainly less of a sticking point for those concerned by the implications of the new system. Of course, if someone has control of your iPhone without your knowledge they're likely going to be able to access all kinds of sensitive data — and fingerprint identification itself can be hacked in various ways. Thankfully for those that opt to use Touch ID, Apple's provided a few fallbacks: the Journal reports that the iPhone 5s will require a passcode to unlock the phone after a reboot or if it hasn't been unlocked in the last 48 hours.

Event:

DJ SHADOW ALL BASSES COVERED DJ SET

Date:

September 12, 2013 9:00 pm

Cost:

$30 ADV

Updated:

July 22, 2013

Venue:

Neumos

Phone:

206-709-9467

Address:

925 E. Pike St., Seattle, WA, 98122, United States

In a crushing blow to Jurassic Park enthusiasts worldwide, the odds of successfully extracting genetic information from fossils preserved in amber appears to be downright nil. That's the verdict from a team of UK scientists who used highly sensitive sequencing techniques in an effort to detect ancient DNA molecules in fossilized insects.

"Because these fossils were captured in amber, there was a possibility that their DNA might resist degradation and be available to extract," says study leader David Penney, PhD, a biologist at the University of Manchester. "Unfortunately, we've shown that this is not the case."

"The blood may contain actual dinosaur DNA"

For decades, however, scientists suspected the opposite. In 1992, researchers out of the University of California, Berkeley, announced that they'd successfully extracted gene fragments from a 40-million-year-old bee that had been preserved in amber. "Sooner or later, we're going to find amber containing some biting insect that filled its stomach with blood from a dinosaur before getting trapped in the resin that eventually turned into amber," the study's leader, Dr. George Poinar, raved to The New York Times following the announcement. "The blood may contain actual dinosaur DNA. That will be an exciting discovery."

Subsequent research called those tantalizing results into question

That finding catalyzed a series of similar ones, including the purported extraction of DNA from ancient beetles, wood gnats, and termites, among other critters. Unfortunately, subsequent research called those tantalizing results into question: other groups of scientists couldn't replicate the findings, leading to a growing consensus that amber did not — as had initially been suspected — preserve fragile DNA segments over millions of years. And as DNA analysis techniques grew more sophisticated, it emerged that some earlier findings had actually isolated more contemporary DNA molecules — essentially sample contaminants — rather than ancient ones.

This new research offers compelling reinforcement of that skepticism. Earlier analyses of amber fossils relied on a technique called PCR amplification, which takes one small piece of DNA and then copies it thousands or millions of times. Unfortunately, Penney says, PCR tends to "selectively amplify more recent DNA that has not undergone as much degradation, which leads to false positives." So his team relied on a newer, more sensitive technique, one that "sequences everything within a sample, and so will pick up even the smallest strands of DNA."

"This would be the end of the road for these investigations."

They used that technique to extract DNA from insects that were trapped inside copal, which is resin that hasn't yet fully hardened into amber. The samples were relatively young (up to 10,600 years old), but the team was unable to detect any viable DNA — a finding which suggests that DNA extraction from even older, amber fossils would be extremely unlikely. "If we cannot pull DNA from copal, then we absolutely cannot do it from amber either," Penney says. "So this would be the end of the road for these investigations."

Want to make historic recipes?  Or how about reading handwriting, converting measurements, recreating historic cooking implements, food photography, or writing and blogging?

300+ years of handwritten cookbooks with thousands of recipes from Chef Louis Szathmary’s culinary collection from Special Collections & University Archives are now online in DIY History, the newest transcription project from the University of Iowa Libraries.  Helpful people around the world are trying to puzzle out what the handwriting says.  But is that where it ends?  Unlike letters, diaries, or even menus, recipes are not done even what you can read what it says.  They are instructions just calling out to be tested to bring a slice of history back to life one piece of hardtack at a time.

Sound interesting?  Come to the first meeting and have a voice in determining what the group should be.

If  you can’t make the meeting but want to be in the loop, e-mail colleen-theisen @  uiowa dot edu to be added to the e-mail list.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

6:30-8PM

PS-Z, 120 N. Dubuque St.

(3 blocks north of PS1, on the lower level of the Wesley Center)