Molten metal batteries aimed at the grid. 21 September 2014Last updated at 13:50 ET By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News The battery runs at 450C so its workings are impossible to photograph; this room-temperature mock-up uses mercury (bottom) and steel foam instead of hot, liquid metals Engineers in the US have invented a battery, made of three molten metals, which could help smooth the power supply from renewable energy sources. Previous battery designs have largely been too expensive to help store energy on the scale of a national power grid.
The new liquid battery has a negative electrode made of lead, which is cheap and melts easily, mixed with a dash of antimony to boost performance. This lowers its cost, as well as the heat required to liquefy the metals. Published in the journal Nature, this latest attempt at a scalable solution for storing electricity is set for commercial demonstrations within a year and has been greeted with enthusiasm by engineers in the UK. Hot source Continue reading the main story “Start Quote. Artist Turns Old Photos Into Terrifying Haunted GIFS. Kevin J Weir is an artist who works with GIFS, whether it's creating moving photographs or turning old paintings into moving landscapes. He's extremely good at what he does and his latest venture might just be his finest yet. Taking old pictures from the Library of Congress Flikr account Weir turned them into haunting 'living' photos that show landscapes and people from the early 1900s.
You can see the originals over at his website here or you can check out the gallery below for just a taster of Weir has done. As haunting as they are captivating it's hard not to get sucked into watching them while the artistry involved has to be respected. Weir's previous work includes pieces for Coke Zero as well as the Greenland Tourism board but it goes without saying that these are the pictures that have caught the public's imagination. BBC iPlayer - Horizon - 2014-2015: 4. Inside the Dark Web. Elite Dangerous Kickstarter Passes Funding Target. The classic video game Elite will be remade after its creator raised more than £1.25 million on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.
Elite was a cult hit in the 1980s thanks to its sprawling open-world gameplay and classic science fiction setting. A landmark for its time, the game has since become known as a true pioneer - though the project to remake it proved trickier than some expected. The proposed new game, 'Elite Dangerous, aims to take the game to a new level of detail and realism with complex space combat, trading and exploration. But Frontier Developments, run by Elite creator David Braben, picked an ambitious fundraising target, and at times it appeared that it might not match it. With four days until its deadline the game still made more than £100,000 to raise. But a late funding drive saw donations pour in on Wednesday, with the game pulling in around £80k in pledges in 24 hours.
@DavidBraben David Braben #EliteDangerous has crossed the line! Cardboard Cockpit Lets You Fulfill That Fighter Pilot Dream. Watching films like Top Gun it's easy to become jealous at the pilots who spend their days pulling Gs and flinging multi-million pound fighter jets around the skies. Thankfully Lukas Homola feels your pain and has come up with an ingenious solution that lets you create a jet fighter simulator in your living room. The flatpack cockpit is made from hardened cardboard and lets you install a 22-inch screen as an instrument panel along with a range of different gaming joysticks. You can have almost any design printed on the outside while the lightweight cardboard design means you can cut and change out dials as you see fit.
Sadly you won't be playing much Elite Dangerous just yet as the project is still on Kickstarter but if you're feeling seriously passionate then you can go and donate. This Is The Powerpoint From HELL. A startup CEO has created the Powerpoint presentation from hell. It has 1,284 slides. And he made it for his 30th birthday. Spotted by ValleyWag, the presentation was created by entrepreneur Ryan Allis to "give back" his accrued life experience and advice in one handy, easy to read collection of optimism, charts and graphs which if it was printed on A4 would have a surface area of eight square kilometers.
Understandably the deck -- which is characterised by a certain Silicon Valley-style view of the world -- has been torn apart on social media. Anyway, the slideshow, titled "Lessons From My 20s", can be read in full below. Some of the highlights include: Advising potential mentor-ees to Fedex letters to their targets, because "important people like opening Fedex packages". Advice on how to be a Jedi ("a highly competent, super-connected and deeply compassionate soul" Avoiding "random" friends who hold you back into an "ordinary" life Lessons From My 20s - By Ryan Allis. Do Not Click: Funny Facebook Video Scam Installs Malware and Steals Your Credentials.
Facebook users are advised not to click on a video link that looks like some woman removing her cloths in front of a webcam, as it lead users to a fake YouTube link and tricks them into downloading a malicious malware that steals their personal data. The malware is of Albanian origin, can also access user’s internet browser, according to research by Bitdefender. It is a very professional looking YouTube video, but when user clicks it, it redirects browser to install malicious Adobe’s Flash update that installs a malware on the computing device. “Scammers have created over 20,000 unique URLs that redirect victims to malicious websites and a fake alluring YouTube video, showing a woman taking her clothes off on a webcam,” states Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender.
“The video seems to actually play for a couple of seconds to entice male users to click. Malware writers faked the number of views so the video seems to have been watched by over a million users.” How to Stop Facebook From Using Your Browsing History. Learn how to code by playing a game. Opt Out From Online Behavioral Advertising By Participating Companies (BETA) Spending Too Much Time On Facebook And Twitter? You Need A 'Social Media Guard' The Gun Lobby And A Dumb Law Are Keeping Us From Safer Guns. Imagine a gun that a person could leave on his or her kitchen counter, without having to worry that someone else would fire it. That gun exists. A so-called "smart gun" uses biometrics or radio signals to stay locked until it's held by its rightful owner.
Smart guns could save some of the hundreds of lives -- many of them children's -- lost in accidental shootings every year. And they could reduce the number of shootings committed by criminals with stolen guns. "We see things all the time where guns fall into the wrong hands," San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told The Huffington Post. "Since we're stuck on getting any sensible gun control legislation like background checks, it seems like there would be no argument against this technology.
" That's not for lack of trying. “Even by local people, people I thought were my friends,” Raymond told HuffPost. Andy Raymond, the owner of a Maryland gun shop, said he got death threats after announcing he would sell the Armatix smart gun. RSA - Home. RSA - Information Security, Governance, Risk, and Compliance. RSA. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia RSA may refer to: Cryptology and security[edit] Organizations[edit] Military[edit] Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association, an organization for the welfare of veterans of New Zealand's militaryRoyal School of Artillery, a training establishment for artillery warfare in the British ArmyRoyal Signals Association, an organization for serving and retired members of the Royal Corps of Signals Places[edit] Science and technology[edit] Other[edit] See also[edit] RSA Examinations Board, a UK examination board that merged to form Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations.
The Sinister Ways Governments Make It Dangerous To Protest Online. Narrator: We have heard a lot of stories about the impact of the Internet on protest movements. We have heard a lot about the information revolution and how it's transforming countries like China, countries like Iran, even many of the countries in the former Soviet Union, and the assumption so far has been that the Internet is basically a very good thing when it comes to promoting democracy. So, many of these illusions were put together in the mid-nineties by thinkers which I can only call cyberutopians, people who really believed in the transformative power of the web to change societies and to change them for the better. The most famous quote was that, if social networking and blogging was around in the earlier '90s, the genocides in Rwanda wouldn't have happened, which is now very often quoted to illustrate this very naive view that many people had back at the time. And one of the names which pundits have developed this particular views, iPod Liberalism.
Tungsten: The perfect metal for bullets and missiles. 11 July 2014Last updated at 19:19 ET By Justin Rowlatt BBC World Service Imagine a lump of iron the size of a tennis ball. Weigh it in your hand. Now let it drop on to your foot. How does that feel? Now imagine an identical object three times as dense. That metal is tungsten. As well as being incredibly dense it is also incredibly hard and has the highest melting point of all the elements - 3,422C. A century or so ago the world had no use for it - it was almost impossible to shape or work the stuff. To understand how this happened, we need to understand the competitive forces that have shaped everything in our world, and where better to start than a mystery at the heart of the evolution of life?
For the first four billion years, life didn't actually do much evolving. The Cambrian explosion An extraordinary array of wonderful new organisms appeared. Charles Darwin reckoned what is known as the "Cambrian explosion" was the most powerful objection to his theory of natural selection. Banks Dreading Computer Hacks Call for Cyber War Council. Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document.
The proposal by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, calls for a committee of executives and deputy-level representatives from at least eight U.S. agencies including the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, all led by a senior White House official. The trade association also reveals in the document that Sifma has retained former NSA director Keith Alexander to “facilitate” the joint effort with the government. Alexander, in turn, has brought in Michael Chertoff, the former U.S.
Secretary of Homeland Security, and his firm, Chertoff Group. More on Cybersecurity: The trade association also reveals in the document that Sifma has retained former NSA... Close Open ‘Train Wreck’ Ericsson R380. The Ericsson R380 Smartphone was a GSM mobile phone made by Ericsson Mobile Communications, released in 2000.[1] It combined the functions of a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA).[2] It was the first device marketed as a 'smartphone'.[3] In December 1999 the magazine Popular Science appointed the Ericsson R380 Smartphone to one of the most important advances in science and technology.[4] It was a groundbreaking device since it was as small and light as a normal mobile phone.[5] It was the first device to use the new Symbian OS.[6] The display was a black and white touchscreen, partially covered by a flip.
For that reason it can be considered the clear forerunner of the popular P800/P900 series of smartphones. It predates the UIQ user interface which runs on those later phones, but again, the heritage is clear. Despite the sophisticated user interface, users could not install their own software on the device. The device was delivered in three variants. External pic. Canadian Court Rules Google Must Erase Search Results Worldwide. Google is planning to appeal a ruling by the British Columbia Supreme Court ordering the search engine giant to erase certain results from internet searches around the world. Because the ruling applies to all of Google’s search results worldwide, and not just search results in Canada, legal experts say the decision could have major international ramifications. Some say it potentially opens the door to courts in any country claiming the right to control what internet users see around the world.
In ruling on Equustek Solutions v. Jack last week, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ordered Google to remove links to the website of a company that had been found to have stolen trade secrets from a competitor. Google had previously agreed to remove results for that company from the Google.ca portal, but not from other Google search portals, such as Google.com. B.C. E-commerce law professor Michael Geist went further on his blog.
Also on HuffPost: Snapchat Isn't Standing Up For Your Privacy: Report. Snapchat promises to make your photos, videos and messages disappear. It doesn't, however, do enough to make the government disappear, according to a new report. The popular photo messaging startup was singled out in a survey released Thursday that gave it only one star out of six for how it protects consumers' data from government requests. The annual survey by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, evaluated more than two dozen companies on several factors, including whether they require a warrant before handing over communications and whether they notify their users and the public about government data requests. Snapchat received just one star, for its policy of publishing law enforcement guidelines.
"This is particularly troubling because Snapchat collects extremely sensitive user data, including potentially compromising photographs of users," the EFF report said. Snapchat denied the EFF's charge that it hands over information even in the absence of a warrant. One Frightening Chart Shows What You Might Pay For Internet Once Net Neutrality Is Gone. A graphic making its rounds on the web this week offered a glimpse of what the Internet might look like if net neutrality disappears. The takeaway? Not good. A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down an Federal Communications Commission order that required Internet service providers to abide by the rules of “net neutrality.” ISPs had previously been forced to treat all types of web traffic equally -- meaning providers couldn’t block some sites or speed up loading times for others. Now, consumers looking to get Internet access might be met with something like this hypothetical set of pricing options like this, pointed out by Buzzfeed earlier this week: This graphic was created by Reddit user quink, who wanted to illustrate what happens if net neutrality disappears.
Quink's graphic shows web-based service offerings (offered by the fictional TELCO ADSL) that look suspiciously like cable bundles. As for smaller sites? Will the end of net neutrality see ISPs imitating cable companies? Tests agree with AP: Comcast is forging packets to interfere with user traffic. The One Thing You Need To Understand About Net Neutrality. Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can.