coondoggie writes "NASA wants to test out 3-D printing technology onboard the International Space Station to find out if the technology could be used to manufacture parts in space." NASA may not be creating any production parts this way for a long time yet, but they've got to start somewhere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, last No Show Conference, I had a pretty good time. I met many MIT games academics, East Coast indies, Canadian indies, and interactive fiction authors. It's kind of a strange crowd but I think it works, and the lack of bullshit really helps everyone talk to each other as people instead of networking opportunities. For this year, No Show's back -- and they've even lowered the price to make it more affordable -- which is pretty much unheard of, among the game conference circuit, and to me it shows that they don't just talk the talk but they actually go and do what they argue for.

Much like last year, they offer a $500 travel / hotel stipend for speakers.

So go and submit a talk! You have until June 7th. It's a conference and community worth supporting.

Daily Mail

Victims of Hepatitis A outbreak may not show signs for a month fox5sandiego.com Medical SAN DIEGO — It will take 30 days for hepatitis A to show up in the unlucky people who will get infected by a particular Costco frozen berry blend sold in San Diego County, and people who consumed the product were urged today to seek medical help ... Frozen berry mix sparks hepatitis A outbreak in 5 statesUSA TODAY Local Health Officials Offer Free Vaccines In Wake Of Multistate Hepatitis A ...CBS Local Consumer Alert: Costco Berries Linked to Hepatitis APatch.com Daily Mail -OregonLive.com -Newsday all 118 news articles »

[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

Kiss curtains, blinds and shades goodbye - smart glass is not just an Xbox enhancement. Smart glass technology is evolving and faster than ever. It can shade rooms on demand, making them transparent and reduce thermal gain … all just by flipping a switch or even turning a key in a door.

There are various methods employed to make the transition, but one of the most fascinating involves low-power electrochromatic devices that can be activated in a variety of clever ways.

Essentially, a current is passed through the window panel to turn it from transparent to translucent then back again – the voltage does not need to be sustained in between.

Aside from micro-blinds and mechanical smart windows, other variants on this technology include suspended-particle devices, which can be finely-tuned to allow in (and block out) desired levels of light, heat and glare.

Applications to date include commercial windows and doors in places ranging from private skyscraper offices and public restrooms to hospital rooms high-speed trains. Smart glass can also be found in luxury sunroofs, meeting spaces, projection screens and television studio surfaces. As it becomes easier and cheaper to produce, the applications are limitless (above images by Sebastian Terfloth).

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[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

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theolduvaigorge:

Who invented clothes? A Palaeolithic archaeologist answers

Hadley Freeman’s answer to the question was chiffon-flimsy, so here’s the lab-coat response

• by Rebecca Wragg-Sykes

““Who invented clothes?” It’s one of those brilliant questions that children ask, before they learn that the big things we wonder about rarely have simple answers. It’s the kind of thing that archaeologists like me get put on the spot about when chatting to kids, and we love to have a crack at answering.

Saturday’s “Ask a grown up” section featured just that question, from eight-year old Harriet, with an answer by Hadley Freeman, fashionexpert and fantastic writer. Hadley’s response was, as usual, entertainingly breezy, with some refreshing encouragement to Harriet to experiment in developing her own style; but, like a fine chiffon, it was a little flimsy in substance.

I’m proud to be involved with ScienceGrrl, which aims to show girls that science is for everyone by providing diverse role models, andTrowelBlazers, a new project that is all about bringing to the fore the achievements of pioneering women archaeologists, geologists and palaeontologists. So I was kind of disappointed that a girl asking a genuine question about archaeology ended up with the barest of facts, as well as being told, even if it was meant lightheartedly, that the grown-up answering her question would rather she pay attention to what she looks like.

Hadley knows today’s fashion world inside out and might not care much about pre-silk times, but I’ll bet that Harriet wanted to find out more than what the Flintstones wear.

It’s this kind of response that can, in aggregate, have a negative impact on children: being mentally curious ends up as something deeply uncool and not relevant to modern life. I’m not advocating force-feeding facts Vulcan-style when talking to young people – far from it. They like to be challenged and humour is a great way to do this. But I do think we should take every chance we get to pass on the incredible stuff that we’ve found out about our world thanks to science – including archaeology – and keep on showing girls that using their brains by asking big questions is, actually, absolutely fabulous.

So for Harriet, if you’re reading: there’s a whole lot we know about the invention of clothing. Many TV reconstructions and book illustrations of stone age (Palaeolithic) people really don’t do them justice. People were already making finely worked bone needles 20,000 years ago, probably for embroidery as much as sewing animal skins, like the thousands of ivory beads and fox teeth that covered the bodies of a girl and a boy buried at Sunghir, Russia, around 28,000 years ago. This was some serious bling, representing years of accumulated work.

And – caveman stereotypes aside – stone age clothes weren’t just animal skins. We’ve known since the 1990s that people were weaving fabric back then, revealed by impressions in baked clay from the sites of Pavlov and Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. We don’t actually know for sure that these were used for clothes, but the materials weren’t heavy duty, and the variety in weaving styles suggests a long tradition. And at Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia, 30,000 year old spun plant fibres were found which had been dyed: pink, black and turquoise blue!

But what about the really old stuff (because 30,000 years ago isn’t really old in human evolution)? As Harriet asks, who were the first fashionistas? People are still debating what, if anything, our close relatives the Neanderthals were wearing” (read more).

• Becky Wragg Sykes (@LeMoustier) is a postdoctoral researcher working on Neanderthal archaeology. She blogs atwww.therocksremain.org and is part of the TrowelBlazers team (@trowelblazers)

(Source: Guardian; bottom image: Antropark)

For the annual Quiet Music Festival of Portland, which begins today, the goal is to celebrate calming sounds. The festival gained fame after the show Portlandia featured a Battle Of The Gentle Bands.

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For every U.S. service member serving in Afghanistan, there are 1.6 Defense contractors on the ground (and on the payroll) in supporting roles.

MIT is rightfully proud of alumna Limor Fried, the superhero hardware hacker behind AdaFruit Industries, creators of fantastic DIY, open source electronics components and kits. We're proud of Limor too! From MIT News:

Apart from selling kits, original devices and providing hundreds of guides online, Adafruit works around the world with schools, teachers, libraries and hackerspaces — community technology labs — to promote STEM education, designing curricula in circuitry and electronics, among other initiatives.

The company has released an online children’s show called “A is for Ampere.” On a weekly Saturday night program, “Ask an Engineer,” anyone can ask Fried questions online or show off their original devices.

One of Fried’s favorite stories, from a young viewer of “Ask an Engineer,” illuminates what she sees as the growing diversity of engineering. “A parent emailed us after watching the show with his daughter,” she says. “I had another engineer on the show with me — my friend Amanda — and this parent’s daughter asked, ‘Dad, are there boy engineers too?’”

"Meet the maker"

Decked out from head to toe in black and white, the group that won the day were campaigning for neither for race war nor ethnic equality, but an end to the government's cull on badgers. ///// And it was the pro-badger campaigners who appeared to steal a march on the political activists. ///// Young women dressed in fake fur were seen chasing doughty nationalist supporters down London's Whitehall as a large number of security forces in iridescent jackets looked on from police lines. ///// Led by Queen guitarist Brian May, protesters in fancy dress demanded an end to the government's cull of badgers, brought in to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis. ///// They chanted: "Smash the cull! Smash the BNP!"

Matt who?

Robotoki, the development studio founded last year by ex-Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling, was stormed by LAPD forces last Thursday after its offices' silent alarm system was activated by an unnamed designer on his way out of the building.

Bowling, the only employee on site at the time, was temporarily taken into custody while the building was cleared by a four-man team - a process that involved a momentary standoff with Bowling's life-size statue of Modern Warfare 2 character Simon "Ghost" Riley, pictured above.

"Our studio is equipped with a 'panic' alarm in case of an armed threat, which was installed yesterday," Bowling told Polygon. "One of our designers, who shall not be shamed, pressed it on his way out because apparently when boys find buttons that they are unsure of, their first instinct is to push it."

The true cause of the incident remained unclear until security footage Bowling reviewed the day's security footage. No charges were filed or fines levied due to the false alarm.

Robotoki offices stormed by LAPD after designer unknowingly presses panic button originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 01 Jun 2013 19:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re hoping to raise $30,000 in two weeks to power this effort and cover the fees needed to file an inter partes review with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

$30,000? That’s it? Geeks like us have raised a lot more money for far less important things. We can do this.

I donated. Gruber’s link tonight boosted it so much that they’ll probably hit their goal within an hour or two, but let’s not stop there. If you like podcasts, if you like the EFF, or if you simply want to fight a high-profile patent troll, please donate what you can.

∞ Permalink

McKayla Maroney is not impressed with this analysis.

I talk a lot about height and floor area ratio restrictions as a key modality restricting the creation of high-density neighborhoods, but people sometimes point out that some very dense cities don't have much in the way of very tall buildings. Paris often comes up in this regard, but a better example for the American context is probably Somerville, Massachusetts where I happen to be at this very moment.

Somerville, a highly urbanized "suburb" of Boston contains over 18,000 people per square mile making it somewhat denser than San Francisco. And yet it has few tall buildings and certainly no skyscrapers. The key to that happening is that it's very literally dense. The streets are narrow, there's very little parkland, there are few office buildings or hotels. And most of all, the dwellings themselves are small. It's no coincidence that this town is in the oldest-settled part of the United States. Over the years as America has gotten wealthier people have tended to live in larger and larger spaces, but Somerville is full old structures that fit two or three households into apartments that cost more than the average American dwelling but have less square footage than the average American dwelling.

And as far as it goes, it's fine. But if you're thinking about a community that's not already like Somerville, it'd be somewhat curious to make this kind of a thing a model. A population density of 18,000 per square foot should be perfectly compatible with spacious dwellings, ample parks, sidewalk cafes, at least some broad boulevards, and an office district. But it couldn't all consist of two and three storey buildings. In practice, the most likely scenario is to have some very tall buildings. People put a value on building services (doormen and such) that are easier to provide if you have a lot of households in a single structure, and people also put a value on the privacy and outdoor space of a single-family home. So given 21st century construction technology and elevators, a mix of big buildings and single-family buildings makes more sense than a crowd of three-deckers.

Meanwhile, I wonder what the future holds for Somerville. This building features small dwellings in its current configuration as a two-unit rental property but as prices continue to rise in Cambridge, I wouldn't be surprised to see it bought by a rich guy and turned into a spacious single-family home. With upzoning, high demand for Somerville living would lead to new construction and higher density even as average dwelling size rises. But if larger structures can't be built, then higher demand and higher incomes are going to lead to falling density as multifamily structures are converted to single-family ones. Indeed, between 2000 and 2010 Somerville's population fell by 2.2 percent even as it's become nicer and more expensive than it was when I was in college.

Original Source

MIT Game Lab's OpenRelativity toolset, which powered its psychedelic first-person collection game/physics demonstration A Slower Speed of Light, is now available for free through Github. The toolkit works in both free and paid versions of Unity.

OpenRelativity allows for the real-time simulation of principles such as time dilation, Lorentz transformation and relativistic Doppler shift by allowing the designer to augment the ways in which light behaves. As it turns out, light moving at the speed it normally does is pretty dang essential to our world not transforming into a disorienting funhouse where cause and effect are meaningless. Who could have guessed?

MIT's relativistic OpenRelativity toolkit now freely available originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 01 Jun 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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bunny bath

jakiiiro:

Photographs taken inside musical instruments making them look like large and spacious rooms.

mierswa-kluska.

For years, nearly all of the world's iPhones and iPads rolled off the assembly lines of a single company: Foxconn. But no longer.

Rockets fired from Syria hit eastern Lebanon Newsday BEIRUT - (AP) -- More than a dozen rockets and mortar rounds fired from Syria struck eastern Lebanon on Saturday, security officials said, as tensions escalated along the Lebanese-Syria border over the increasing role of Hezbollah militants in the civil war ... and more »

The round-about way this iPhone garage door opener was put together borders on Rube Goldberg. But it does indeed get the job done so who are we to judge? Plus you have to consider that the Apple products aren’t quite as hacker friendly as, say, Android phones — so this may have been the easiest non-Jailbreak way.

The main components that went into it are the iPhone, a Wemo WiFi outlet, and a 110V rated mechanical relay. But wait, surely it can’t be that simple? You’re correct, just for added subterfuge [Tall-drinks] rolled IFTTT into the mix.

You may remember hearing about If This Then That from the Alert Tube project. It’s a web-based natural language scripting service. Throw everything together and it works like this: The iPhone sends a text message which IFTTT converts to a Wemo command. A power cord connects the Wemo outlet to the 110V electrodes on the relay. The normally open connection of the relay is attached to the same screw terminals of the garage door opener as the push button that operates it. When the relay closes, the garage door goes up or down.

The biggest problem we have with this is the inability to know if your garage door is open or closed.

Filed under: home hacks, iphone hacks

A Texas woman has told investigators her husband may have sent ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but the woman's husband has accused his wife, saying he was set up.

During a heated interview on Friday, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly blasted her colleagues Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson for the controversial comments they made this week about women in the workplace.

Save Department - Work Time Fun (D3 - PSP - 2005)

via http://attackofthecute.com/

An anonymous reader writes "The presence of 0-day vulnerability exploitation is often a real and considerable threat to the Internet — particularly when very popular consumer-level software is the target. Google's stance on a 60day turnaround of vulnerability fixes from discovery, and a 7-day turnaround of fixes for actively exploited unpatched vulnerabilities, is rather naive and devoid of commercial reality. As a web services company it is much easier for Google to develop and roll out fixes promptly — but for 95+% of the rest of the world's software development companies making thick-client, server and device-specific software this is unrealistic. Statements like these from Google clearly serve their business objectives. As predominantly a web services company with many of the world's best software engineers and researchers working for them. One could argue that Google's applications and software should already be impervious to vulnerabilities (i.e. they should have discovered them themselves through internal QA processes) — rather than relying upon external researchers and bug hunters stumbling over them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A day after attending the New York premiere of the post-apocalyptic thriller, "After Earth," he admits the film was a great family drama, but the space scenes were not realistic.