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Last week you had the chance to ask electrical engineer and L5 society co-founder Keith Henson about space colonization, his solar power satellite project, and his run-ins with Scientology. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. Microwaving power to Earth from space
by Anonymous Coward

If the beam becomes misaligned and strikes Iowa, how do you stop the entire state from exploding into a massive popcorn volcano?

Henson: Sorry to disappoint about the popcorn, but it can’t happen. The transmission needs a guide beam to phase the wave front. Lose the beam and the power scatters into the entire half space in front of the antenna. Also, the power inside a microwave oven popping popcorn is around 10 kW/m^2. The beam from a power satellite is under 0.3 kW/m^2. Sunlight is around a kW/m^2.



Cost per KWh
by Rob Lister

What is the cost per KW for the build/deployment and resultant cost per KWh for the end user?

Henson: If you are going to do power satellites at all, they have to undercut coal or there is little point in doing them. If you go through the levelized cost of electric power for a no-fuel power source, the capital cost can’t exceed $2400/kW for 3 cent per kWh power. That undercuts coal, which costs around 4 cent per kWh. Because the cost of power to the end user includes a lot of fixed distribution cost, the retail cost to households probably will not change a lot, but it won’t go up either. Also it puts a cap on transport fuel because we can use cheap electricity to make cheap gasoline.

The investment to set up the parts pipeline to GEO is probably around $60 B (not counting Skylon). The financial model shows the whole capital investment paid off in less than ten years.



Minimum cost
by Winged Cat

By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.

Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)

If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.

Henson: I have thought a lot about demonstration missions. Sorry to say, but they don’t make sense, at least not if you are trying to use expendable rockets. For less than the cost of one full sized demonstration power satellite, you can set up the low cost transport system and build half a dozen. That recently (last few days) might have changed. There may be a reason to build a 1/8th scale power satellite using a 25 GHz transmission beam. It’s to power the LEO to GEO leg of the transport system, but it would also demonstrate that power satellites work. It also looks like it will cost much less than the alternate, a $15-20 B, 8 GW transmitter on the ground at the equator.

As for why not, convincing governments or private investors to build any part of this is a different skill set. Be delighted to have you (or anyone) help. And thanks for the compliment.



What "wear and tear" factors are relevant
by ShieldW0lf

Could you give a general overview of what the wear factors are for your system, how long you would expect a satellite to last, and what the post failure plan would be?

Henson: PV type power satellites degrade because of radiation damage to the cells. That’s predictable but it might not be as bad as what we have seen on communication satellites. If you build many power satellites, and that’s the only program that makes sense, then the satellites capture the trapped particles in the Van Allen belt. When you start talking about hundreds to thousands of power satellites at 32,500 tons each and a total of 3 kg of protons trapped in the belts, you can see that the trapped particles are going to be soaked up rather fast. There is also a proposal to drain the belts.

If we build thermal power satellites, then there will be a lot of turbines, steam or possibly supercritical CO2. How the bearings will work in space is unknown, but the forces are so small that we could use noncontact bearings. Seals are harder. The levelized cost calculations included 10% per year maintenance based on the cost of the original parts. Thermal power satellites also require steady patching of micrometeorite holes in the radiators.

There is no reason I can think of why a power satellite would last less than several decades. For worn out power satellites, the assumption is that we reprocess the material into new ones. Mass in GEO is worth $200/kg, and it costs much less to reprocess mass than to haul up new materials. If the program comes about, there would be a substantial industrial and human presence in GEO, perhaps upwards of 10,000 people.



Why geosynchronous orbit?
by Anonymous Coward

Has anyone considered using a semi synchronous orbit with multiple receivers around the world to provide electricity to places at peak times (4pm to 8pm) when electricity is more expensive? I'm curious about the economics of it all.. e.g. how much down time would such a system have (as it's over the pacific say), what's the price of a receiving station, what's the comparative peak vs base load price of electricity? Would the sun still be visible to a satellite in semi synchronous orbit that can beam to a place on earth at 8pm (I imagine so) etc.

Henson: Addressing the economics, electricity is a commodity, especially base load power. Market goes to the lowest cost producers. Power satellites are cheaper than ground solar in close to the ratio of their utilization (i.e., fraction of the year they are selling power). Ground solar plants sell power about 20% of the time, vs space-based upwards of 90%. The problem with orbits other than GEO is the low utilization when the power satellites are in a bad location to deliver power. The last thing a utility wants is a big intermittent power plant.

If we build space-based solar power at all, it has to be 3 cents a kWh or less, otherwise the project just does not happen. Since the power uses no fuel and costs 3 cents a kWh, then run half the time it would cost 6 cents a kWh. That’s the same price as gas turbines used for intermediate and peaking loads. In a mature market, off peak power might be worth 2 cents a kWh to make hydrogen. The hydrogen plants are not efficiently used, but there is no reason they should be expensive, which is to say $200/kW or less. The effect of a 2-cent diversion market for power over the base load reduces the cost of intermediate power used half the time to 4 cents (6 +2)/2.

The long-range effect of power satellites will be to greatly reduce the value of peaking power, essentially to zero. What do we do with the hydrogen? Combine it with CO2 to make transport fuel. That solves the other half of the energy problem.



Space Elevator
by Btrot69

Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.

I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.

Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines.And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.

Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator?

Henson: The easy reason is that we don’t have the materials for the cable. I worked on the problem years ago, even figured out how to make a step-taper, moving-cable elevator. I can’t make one work for the Earth. I am not down on elevators; a Lunar elevator out through L1 makes sense with current strong materials such as Spectra. If someone finds material good enough for an Earth to GEO cable, we can then try to solve the other problems with satellites hitting and vaporizing the cable.



We've learned a lot
by Geoffrey.landis

We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students.How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?

Henson: The main thing that is different now is the single-stage-to-orbit space plane—Skylon. Space has always been tightly constrained by the cost of launch, $20,000 to get a kg to GEO. The energy cost is under a dollar so there is lots of room to improve. At 10,000 flights per year Skylon should get the cost down to around $120/kg to LEO and with remotely powered electric rockets, the cost to GEO should not exceed $200/kg.

It’s hard to say what is the most important thing we have learned since O’Neill’s days. For me it might be that humans may not leave the Earth in significant numbers, but instead leave reality as we know it (by uploading).

I think O’Neill was aware of the problem, but if you read up on the space-station activities, the fraction of time they spend on maintenance is impressive. I think the solution might be to send up families, and put the kids to work.

If you want to keep up with the progress look here, It used to be low traffic, but activity is picking up. There are a few conferences on the topic and it gets coverage at the International Space Development Conference.



Transportation station
by Jack Dixon

With some of the income and infrastructure from this project, why not use it as a way station for Mars expeditions? Build a self sufficient habitat and inject it into the favorable orbit between L5 and Mars. Then every two years a group of colonists could ride it with very little fuel expenditure to Mars. They would need to park their descent vehicle nearby. Food, water, and radiation protection could be provided in the habitat, with artificial gravity and greenhouse food production managed by a team of robots during the long sector of the orbit.

Henson: I am not a big Mars fan. O’Neill convinced me long ago that planetary surfaces are not good places for a growing industrial society. Still, I have proposed that the charter for the construction company include a “hundredth one goes to Mars” clause. The Mars fans can have a power satellite to move to Mars and use there, or the mass (~30,000 tons) of one in GEO for a Mars mission. This could happen rapidly. Governments could decide that they just have to quit burning fossil fuels and that power satellites are the only way to do it without destroying the economy from high energy prices. If we started building power satellites at 5 per year in 2023, and doubled every year (mostly building more Skylons) then the Mars mission could leave before 2030.



Asteroid Mining
by meta-monkey

Leaving aside the not insignificant economic and safety concerns, I'm interested in the technical feasibility of extracting minerals from asteroids in useful quantities. On earth, we extract minerals concentrated by geological and biological processes that are unlikely to have occurred on an inert asteroid.

What do we know about the distribution of minerals within asteroids, what more do we need to know in order to design machines that can extract these minerals, and what can you speculate about how those machines might work?

Henson: You are correct, other than the Siderophile separation, same that sent most of the gold to the center of the Earth, it doesn’t look like the asteroids had mechanisms that concentrated minerals. There may be exceptions on asteroids as large as Vesta.

We know a lot about asteroid mineral concentrations from the tens of thousands of samples found as meteorites. Most of them would not be valuable if you found them in the millions of tons on Earth.

On the last question, you are in luck! I happen to be one of the few space fans who actually worked in mining. A few years ago I wrote up my thoughts on how to mine a huge asteroid (1986 DA). It is the metallic core of a differentiated asteroid.



So, whatever happened, anyway?
by Anonymous Coward

So, whatever happened to the scientology thing, anyway? I remember reading about what was going on, but I never really heard how it all came out.

Henson: It’s still in process. The cult has shrunk from around 100,000 when they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology to (some say) 10,000. With all the data on the net, they have an awful time trying to recruit new members, and former members sue the cult in an orgy of litigation. After the recent “Going Clear” documentary on HBO, there are now many people saying the IRS should yank the cult’s tax-exempt status. The cult abused the IRS through the courts back in the early 1990s to get that status. The IRS still fears the cult so that’s not likely to happen soon, in spite of huge abuses such as hiring PIs that have no legitimate corporate function. That makes the money spent on them an illegal use of a non-profit funds (inurement). If any ordinary religion did this they would be facing jail time. Of course, the cult has more in common with organized crime than religion.

I got a couple of academic papers out of my involvement. I was trying to figure out why (some) people are so vulnerable to cult attention rewards that they act like drug addicts, for example abandoning their own children. Search for Sex, Drugs, and Cults or just go here. Other papers are here.

Last week you had the chance to ask electrical engineer and L5 society co-founder Keith Henson about space colonization, his solar power satellite project, and his run-ins with Scientology. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. Microwaving power to Earth from space
by Anonymous Coward

If the beam becomes misaligned and strikes Iowa, how do you stop the entire state from exploding into a massive popcorn volcano?

Henson: Sorry to disappoint about the popcorn, but it can’t happen. The transmission needs a guide beam to phase the wave front. Lose the beam and the power scatters into the entire half space in front of the antenna. Also, the power inside a microwave oven popping popcorn is around 10 kW/m^2. The beam from a power satellite is under 0.3 kW/m^2. Sunlight is around a kW/m^2.



Cost per KWh
by Rob Lister

What is the cost per KW for the build/deployment and resultant cost per KWh for the end user?

Henson: If you are going to do power satellites at all, they have to undercut coal or there is little point in doing them. If you go through the levelized cost of electric power for a no-fuel power source, the capital cost can’t exceed $2400/kW for 3 cent per kWh power. That undercuts coal, which costs around 4 cent per kWh. Because the cost of power to the end user includes a lot of fixed distribution cost, the retail cost to households probably will not change a lot, but it won’t go up either. Also it puts a cap on transport fuel because we can use cheap electricity to make cheap gasoline.

The investment to set up the parts pipeline to GEO is probably around $60 B (not counting Skylon). The financial model shows the whole capital investment paid off in less than ten years.



Minimum cost
by Winged Cat

By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.

Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)

If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.

Henson: I have thought a lot about demonstration missions. Sorry to say, but they don’t make sense, at least not if you are trying to use expendable rockets. For less than the cost of one full sized demonstration power satellite, you can set up the low cost transport system and build half a dozen. That recently (last few days) might have changed. There may be a reason to build a 1/8th scale power satellite using a 25 GHz transmission beam. It’s to power the LEO to GEO leg of the transport system, but it would also demonstrate that power satellites work. It also looks like it will cost much less than the alternate, a $15-20 B, 8 GW transmitter on the ground at the equator.

As for why not, convincing governments or private investors to build any part of this is a different skill set. Be delighted to have you (or anyone) help. And thanks for the compliment.



What "wear and tear" factors are relevant
by ShieldW0lf

Could you give a general overview of what the wear factors are for your system, how long you would expect a satellite to last, and what the post failure plan would be?

Henson: PV type power satellites degrade because of radiation damage to the cells. That’s predictable but it might not be as bad as what we have seen on communication satellites. If you build many power satellites, and that’s the only program that makes sense, then the satellites capture the trapped particles in the Van Allen belt. When you start talking about hundreds to thousands of power satellites at 32,500 tons each and a total of 3 kg of protons trapped in the belts, you can see that the trapped particles are going to be soaked up rather fast. There is also a proposal to drain the belts.

If we build thermal power satellites, then there will be a lot of turbines, steam or possibly supercritical CO2. How the bearings will work in space is unknown, but the forces are so small that we could use noncontact bearings. Seals are harder. The levelized cost calculations included 10% per year maintenance based on the cost of the original parts. Thermal power satellites also require steady patching of micrometeorite holes in the radiators.

There is no reason I can think of why a power satellite would last less than several decades. For worn out power satellites, the assumption is that we reprocess the material into new ones. Mass in GEO is worth $200/kg, and it costs much less to reprocess mass than to haul up new materials. If the program comes about, there would be a substantial industrial and human presence in GEO, perhaps upwards of 10,000 people.



Why geosynchronous orbit?
by Anonymous Coward

Has anyone considered using a semi synchronous orbit with multiple receivers around the world to provide electricity to places at peak times (4pm to 8pm) when electricity is more expensive? I'm curious about the economics of it all.. e.g. how much down time would such a system have (as it's over the pacific say), what's the price of a receiving station, what's the comparative peak vs base load price of electricity? Would the sun still be visible to a satellite in semi synchronous orbit that can beam to a place on earth at 8pm (I imagine so) etc.

Henson: Addressing the economics, electricity is a commodity, especially base load power. Market goes to the lowest cost producers. Power satellites are cheaper than ground solar in close to the ratio of their utilization (i.e., fraction of the year they are selling power). Ground solar plants sell power about 20% of the time, vs space-based upwards of 90%. The problem with orbits other than GEO is the low utilization when the power satellites are in a bad location to deliver power. The last thing a utility wants is a big intermittent power plant.

If we build space-based solar power at all, it has to be 3 cents a kWh or less, otherwise the project just does not happen. Since the power uses no fuel and costs 3 cents a kWh, then run half the time it would cost 6 cents a kWh. That’s the same price as gas turbines used for intermediate and peaking loads. In a mature market, off peak power might be worth 2 cents a kWh to make hydrogen. The hydrogen plants are not efficiently used, but there is no reason they should be expensive, which is to say $200/kW or less. The effect of a 2-cent diversion market for power over the base load reduces the cost of intermediate power used half the time to 4 cents (6 +2)/2.

The long-range effect of power satellites will be to greatly reduce the value of peaking power, essentially to zero. What do we do with the hydrogen? Combine it with CO2 to make transport fuel. That solves the other half of the energy problem.



Space Elevator
by Btrot69

Most of us on slashdot will probably agree that "Economics, Energy, Carbon and Climate" are all one big problem that needs more investment. But the devil is in the details of how to do it.

I'm not an expert on this subject like Henson, but IMHO a space elevator seems just as close to being technically viable as space plane powered by a ground-based laser and microwave power beamed to earth.

Not only that -- a space elevator would be much cleaner and the cables might even be able to double as power transmission lines.And -- since all the good tethering points are in the third world (the equator) it would be a big solution to economic disparities too.

Why does Henson's article not consider the possibility of a space elevator?

Henson: The easy reason is that we don’t have the materials for the cable. I worked on the problem years ago, even figured out how to make a step-taper, moving-cable elevator. I can’t make one work for the Earth. I am not down on elevators; a Lunar elevator out through L1 makes sense with current strong materials such as Spectra. If someone finds material good enough for an Earth to GEO cable, we can then try to solve the other problems with satellites hitting and vaporizing the cable.



We've learned a lot
by Geoffrey.landis

We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students.How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?

Henson: The main thing that is different now is the single-stage-to-orbit space plane—Skylon. Space has always been tightly constrained by the cost of launch, $20,000 to get a kg to GEO. The energy cost is under a dollar so there is lots of room to improve. At 10,000 flights per year Skylon should get the cost down to around $120/kg to LEO and with remotely powered electric rockets, the cost to GEO should not exceed $200/kg.

It’s hard to say what is the most important thing we have learned since O’Neill’s days. For me it might be that humans may not leave the Earth in significant numbers, but instead leave reality as we know it (by uploading).

I think O’Neill was aware of the problem, but if you read up on the space-station activities, the fraction of time they spend on maintenance is impressive. I think the solution might be to send up families, and put the kids to work.

If you want to keep up with the progress look here, It used to be low traffic, but activity is picking up. There are a few conferences on the topic and it gets coverage at the International Space Development Conference.



Transportation station
by Jack Dixon

With some of the income and infrastructure from this project, why not use it as a way station for Mars expeditions? Build a self sufficient habitat and inject it into the favorable orbit between L5 and Mars. Then every two years a group of colonists could ride it with very little fuel expenditure to Mars. They would need to park their descent vehicle nearby. Food, water, and radiation protection could be provided in the habitat, with artificial gravity and greenhouse food production managed by a team of robots during the long sector of the orbit.

Henson: I am not a big Mars fan. O’Neill convinced me long ago that planetary surfaces are not good places for a growing industrial society. Still, I have proposed that the charter for the construction company include a “hundredth one goes to Mars” clause. The Mars fans can have a power satellite to move to Mars and use there, or the mass (~30,000 tons) of one in GEO for a Mars mission. This could happen rapidly. Governments could decide that they just have to quit burning fossil fuels and that power satellites are the only way to do it without destroying the economy from high energy prices. If we started building power satellites at 5 per year in 2023, and doubled every year (mostly building more Skylons) then the Mars mission could leave before 2030.



Asteroid Mining
by meta-monkey

Leaving aside the not insignificant economic and safety concerns, I'm interested in the technical feasibility of extracting minerals from asteroids in useful quantities. On earth, we extract minerals concentrated by geological and biological processes that are unlikely to have occurred on an inert asteroid.

What do we know about the distribution of minerals within asteroids, what more do we need to know in order to design machines that can extract these minerals, and what can you speculate about how those machines might work?

Henson: You are correct, other than the Siderophile separation, same that sent most of the gold to the center of the Earth, it doesn’t look like the asteroids had mechanisms that concentrated minerals. There may be exceptions on asteroids as large as Vesta.

We know a lot about asteroid mineral concentrations from the tens of thousands of samples found as meteorites. Most of them would not be valuable if you found them in the millions of tons on Earth.

On the last question, you are in luck! I happen to be one of the few space fans who actually worked in mining. A few years ago I wrote up my thoughts on how to mine a huge asteroid (1986 DA). It is the metallic core of a differentiated asteroid.



So, whatever happened, anyway?
by Anonymous Coward

So, whatever happened to the scientology thing, anyway? I remember reading about what was going on, but I never really heard how it all came out.

Henson: It’s still in process. The cult has shrunk from around 100,000 when they tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology to (some say) 10,000. With all the data on the net, they have an awful time trying to recruit new members, and former members sue the cult in an orgy of litigation. After the recent “Going Clear” documentary on HBO, there are now many people saying the IRS should yank the cult’s tax-exempt status. The cult abused the IRS through the courts back in the early 1990s to get that status. The IRS still fears the cult so that’s not likely to happen soon, in spite of huge abuses such as hiring PIs that have no legitimate corporate function. That makes the money spent on them an illegal use of a non-profit funds (inurement). If any ordinary religion did this they would be facing jail time. Of course, the cult has more in common with organized crime than religion.

I got a couple of academic papers out of my involvement. I was trying to figure out why (some) people are so vulnerable to cult attention rewards that they act like drug addicts, for example abandoning their own children. Search for Sex, Drugs, and Cults or just go here. Other papers are here.

MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in Astronomy Magazine, NASA is contemplating sending flagship sized space probes to the so-called "ice giants" of Uranus and Neptune. These probes would orbit the two outer planets, similar to how Galileo orbited Jupiter and how Cassini currently orbits Saturn. The only time NASA has previously had a close encounter with either of these worlds was when Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986 and then Neptune in 1989. Each of these missions would happen after the Europa Clipper, a flagship-class mission scheduled for the mid-2020s.

An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory.

The IoT is becoming more pervasive partly because processor costs are dropping. So are bandwidth costs, even if your ISP isn't sharing those savings with you. Today's interviewee, Mark Skarpness, is "the Director of Embedded Software in the Open Source Technology Center at Intel Corporation," which is an amazing mouthful of a title. What it means is that he works to extend Intel's reach into Open Source communities, and is also aware of how hardware and software price drops -- and bandwidth price drops at the "wholesale" level -- mean that if you add a dash of IPV6, even lowly flip-flops might have their own IPs one day.

This video interview is a little less than six minutes long, while the text transcript covers a 17 minute conversation between Mark Skarpness and Slashdot's Timothy Lord. The video can be considered a "meet Mark" thing, and watching it will surely give you the idea that yes, this guy knows his stuff, but for more info about the spread of the IoT and how the Open Hardware MinnowBoard fits into the panoply of developer tools for IoT work, you'll have to read the transcript.

Last week you had a chance to ask Dr. Tarek Loubani about his 3D-printable, 30-cent stethoscope project, and other open source, ultra-low cost medical equipment. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. What about patents?
by ciaran2014

Most activities that can be performed commercially but which can also be performed non-commercially are either exempt from patents or never get prosecuted. Fixing other people's bicycles, writing a book, and performing music come to mind. (Software development is a grey area.) But 3D printing is taking an activity where efficient production on any reasonable scale was pretty much the exclusive domain of businesses, and making it accessible to DIY-ers and people who would do it while doing their job or performing some task at home, without any direct commercial aspect. Any idea what stage the debate is at regarding patent restrictions on printing or distributing designs for things more complicated or more modern than stethoscopes?

Tarek: This project does not aim to innovate as such. We aim to drop the bottom out of the costs on devices whose patents have long since expired. We might be trolled, harassed and sued into oblivion, but not because we are in violation of any patents. Indeed, the patents that cover the stethoscope we made are long expired US3168160, filed in 1962; US3108652, filed in 1960; US3515239, filed in 1968. The patents that cover a few small innovations in the Littmann Cardiology III expire in just a couple of years US5945640, but fundamentally the tech is ancient.

It's the same for pulse oximetry. Same for electrocardiograms.

Regarding your overarching question, brilliant minds like Geist, Doctorow, Stallman, etc. might be better positioned to answer. My hope, of course, is that the copyright bargain turns in favour of users and citizens sooner rather than later.



Was your stethoscope 3D printed in Gaza?
by mrops

It seems there are a lot of restrictions on what can be imported into gaza as there is a risk technologies might fall into terrorist hands and used for nefarious purpose. Under this, is it really possible to import a 3D printer into gaza for such tasks?

Tarek: There are already 3D printers in Gaza. Those who have made Prusa i3 printers know that it's trivial to make one from salvaged parts taken from old inkjet and laser printers. These printers will be used in the production of prosthetics and medical devices.

Those who support the blockade or oppose the rights of patients in Gaza to access health care might contend that 3D printers could be used to make weaponry. This is a ridiculous claim: Gaza has hundreds of CNC routers, and most of the weaponry currently in the hands of the Palestinian resistance was either captured from Fatah forces during an “attempted coup” (David Wurmser's words) in 2007 or smuggled, mostly via tunnels under the Egyptian border. The armed resistance groups in Gaza are not waiting for us to bring in 3D printers. If they wanted them, they'd have brought them in with the last batch of rockets.



Are medical devices restricted?
by Anonymous Coward

I see lots of stuff blamed on the import restrictions, but are medical devices actually blockaded, or are they stopped because they're used as a cover to smuggle in other things?

Tarek: According to Gisha, an Israeli NGO, the blockade is “not in order to protect against security threats ... but rather as part of a policy to apply 'pressure' or 'sanctions' on the Hamas regime.” Your question assumes that the blockade is security instead of sanction, which is not the case. Even so, there has never been smuggling of illicit items into Gaza under the cover of medical supplies.

Israel does not declare the list of banned items, but claims that medicines are not banned (see this partial list of banned items, but MSF and others report chronic severe shortages of medical supplies. The World Health Organization reported in 2011 that “shortages of the 190 medical disposable items include some basic and very critical items such as: syringes, Central Venous Pressure devices, ECG and CTG paper, X-Ray film, gauze, disposables used in laparoscopies, and filtration cartridges used in haemodialysis for patients with kidney failure.”

Frankly, I have never cared about why. In Gaza, it's blockade. In Democratic Republic of Congo it's war. In Rwanda, it's poverty. The end result is the same: The denial of health care to the world's most vulnerable people. Everyone deserves health care. This project is about ensuring that doctors and patients in Gaza and elsewhere can alleviate their own suffering without waiting for international law and public goodwill to catch up with illegal occupations, collective punishments and colonial legacies.



3D Printing, catalyst for Intermediate Technology?
by Anonymous Coward

Your 30-cent stethoscope seems to be an excellent example of "Intermediate Technology" (or “Appropriate Technology“) as popularized by Dr Hans Schumacher in his influential book, Small is Beautiful. Do you think that 3D printing will become increasingly important in the third world with regards to improving basic medicine, agriculture etc?

Tarek: I see my 3D printer as a portable factory. It can't do all the same things at the same scales, but it is possible for people in very poor places to create high precision plastic parts that were previously impossible. Because these parts are created from digital models, it also allows collaboration via open source models, as we see on various model repositories. Open source models and repositories are where I think exponential achievements are happening today.

3D printing then becomes one of the ingredients in the empowering of disenfranchised people to take control and come up with indigenous solutions to problems.



Local making of tools
by fortunatus

While reviewing the online repository for the stethoscope design, I saw that mainly it's the sound gathering part that is 3D printed. The rest is - reasonably - made out of regular stuff. So then, with some regular stuff, can't local people figure out how to make stethoscopes? They really can't figure out that one sound gathering piece? It takes a doctor/hacker to come from some land far away bearing the URL to a 3D printable part to solve the problem?

Tarek: You're right - there is nothing special here, and I embrace my mediocrity as a doctor and geek. Somebody just had to do a bit of work and spend a bit of money. I don't consider myself to be from some “land far away”: I am Palestinian and lived as a stateless refugee the first 13 years of my life in Kuwait where I was born, and then in Canada. However, I now have the luxury of a Canadian passport, a first-world academic post at the Division of Emergency Medicine in London, Canada, and the ability to connect two disparate worlds.

When I saw the problem while trying to treat wounded patients in the 2012 war in Gaza, I didn't ask myself “why not somebody else?” I asked: “why not me?”



non alergenic materials for printing
by McLae

With all the allergies to various materials, such as nickel and latex, what materials can be 3d-printed that are medically inert? Surgical instruments are stainless steel, implants are titanium, how do you print these? It seems another whole line of questions to find proper materials that can be printed.

Tarek: A few plastics come to mind. ABS is FDA approved, as is Nylon 680 and some PETT. For now, underserviced populations will not be able to receive 3D printed metals – it's too costly and out of scope. However, there can be some creativity. 3D4MD, a group in Toronto, Canada has successfully developed and published on 3D printed surgical instruments made from ABS. Because their models are not published online and I believe are not open source, we have started our own surgical tools project, which will have tremendous impact when completed.

Your answer, then, has two parts. The first is that we should aim at the low-hanging fruit of medicine. Off-patent, ubiquitous devices like stethoscopes, pulse oximeters, electrocardiograms, and hemodialysis are good examples.

The second part is that we in the global south accept that some people will die because of the lack of proper supplies. Given latex gloves or no gloves at all, the choice is obvious. This is not academic: physicians and policymakers have been forced to make this decision in Gaza at the Shifa hospital's emergency department, where most of our gloves are latex.

We're talking about basics like gloves and gauze. Nobody here is talking about custom-printed titanium implants.



Challenges
by Anonymous Coward

What do you see as the main challenges in getting your devices to the regions that need them?

Tarek: I guess the main challenge by far is buy-in. Once a ministry of health or hospital buys into the idea, then the technical parts are trivial and inexpensive.



What else is out there?
by ciaran2014

I've read there are other 3D-printed stethoscopes. Is yours (the Gila 3D stethoscope) attracting attention because it's better, or cheaper, or because it's actually getting used? Or is the Gila 3D stethoscope getting attention not for what it is but for it being an example from a domain where 3D seems set to bring radical change?

Tarek: I know of a few other stethoscopes. In that sense, what we're doing is not unique technically. Our innovation is taking the technology and mixing it with the politics of Free hardware and enfranchisement and the science of verification and validation. Then, as you noted, we put it to use in the real world.

Our stethoscope is as good or better than a Littmann Cardiology III. I can prove it. You can build it today, all of the models are available to modify, and soon it will be Health Canada approved as a Class I device. A peer-reviewed publication is hopefully forthcoming.

The attention is indeed because of the idea and the promise, not the stethoscope. However, the stethoscope has created a model and a high standard that we and other groups must meet when working on future projects of this kind.

Etherwalk writes: Windows 95 turns 20 tomorrow, August 24, 2015. Users looking to upgrade from Windows 3.1 should be warned that some reviewers on the Amazon purchase page have been receiving 3.5" high-density floppy disk versions instead of a modern 150 kbps CD-ROM disk. Do you remember first seeing or installing Windows 95? Do you have any systems still running it?

New submitter Gennerik writes: According to a recent article in the MIT Technology Review, a team of international physicists have been able to create a quantum computing interconnect. The interconnect, which is used to connect separate silicon photonic chips, has the important feature of preserving entanglement. This marks a vital step in creating quantum computers that don't have to work in isolation. According to the article, the trick that The trick that [University of Bristol Researcher Mark Thomson] and pals have perfected is to convert the path-entanglement into a different kind of entanglement, in this case involving polarization. They do this by allowing the path-entangled photons to interfere with newly created photons in a way that causes them to become polarized. This also entangles the newly created photons, which pass into the optical fiber and travel to the second silicon photonic chip.

An anonymous reader writes: Junk DNA (or noncoding DNA) is a term for section of a DNA strand that doesn't actually do much. Huge tracts of the human genome consist of junk DNA, and researchers are now finding that it may be more useful than previously thought. "For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that [gene duplication] was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. ... But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA."

An anonymous reader writes: Junk DNA (or noncoding DNA) is a term for section of a DNA strand that doesn't actually do much. Huge tracts of the human genome consist of junk DNA, and researchers are now finding that it may be more useful than previously thought. "For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that [gene duplication] was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. ... But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA."

mask.of.sanity writes: Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch for Internet Explorer versions seven to 11 that closes a dangerous remote code execution flaw allowing attackers to commandeer machines. From their advisory: "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Systems where Internet Explorer is used frequently, such as workstations or terminal servers, are at the most risk from this vulnerability." The attack could assist in watering hole and malvertising campaigns. The Windows 10 Edge browser is not impacted.

mask.of.sanity writes: Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch for Internet Explorer versions seven to 11 that closes a dangerous remote code execution flaw allowing attackers to commandeer machines. From their advisory: "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Systems where Internet Explorer is used frequently, such as workstations or terminal servers, are at the most risk from this vulnerability." The attack could assist in watering hole and malvertising campaigns. The Windows 10 Edge browser is not impacted.

HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian reports that in a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping U.S. and other citizens from traveling on airplanes is a matter of "predictive assessments about potential threats." "By its very nature, identifying individuals who 'may be a threat to civil aviation or national security' is a predictive judgment intended to prevent future acts of terrorism in an uncertain context," Justice Department officials Benjamin C Mizer and Anthony J Coppolino told the court. It is believed to be the government's most direct acknowledgment to date that people are not allowed to fly because of what the government believes they might do and not what they have already done. The ACLU has asked Judge Anna Brown to conduct her own review of the error rate in the government's predictions modeling – a process the ACLU likens to the "pre-crime" of Philip K Dick's science fiction. "It has been nearly five years since plaintiffs on the no-fly list filed this case seeking a fair process by which to clear their names and regain a right that most other Americans take for granted," say ACLU lawyers.

The Obama administration is seeking to block the release of further information about how the predictions are made, as damaging to national security. "If the Government were required to provide full notice of its reasons for placing an individual on the No Fly List and to turn over all evidence (both incriminating and exculpatory) supporting the No Fly determination, the No Fly redress process would place highly sensitive national security information directly in the hands of terrorist organizations and other adversaries," says the assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, Michael Steinbach.

Keith Henson is an electrical engineer and writer on space engineering, space law, cryonics, and evolutionary psychology. He co-founded the L5 society in 1975, which sought to promote space colonization. In addition to being an outspoken critic and target of the Church of Scientology, Keith has recently been working on the design of an orbiting power satellite (video here). The proposed satellite would collect solar energy, send it to Earth via microwaves, and Henson has a plan on how to launch it cheaply. Keith has agreed to give us some of his time and answer any questions you might have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

theodp writes: Plans for Rupert Murdoch & Co. to teach your children to code just hit a bump in the road. Murdoch's News Corp. last week announced it plans to exit the education business as it announced a $371 million write-down of the investment in its Amplify education unit, which aimed to reinvent education via digital tools, tablets and curriculum reinforced with snazzy graphics. The news may help to explain why Amplify MOOC, the entity that offered online AP Computer Science A to high school students, was re-dubbed Edhesive ("online education that sticks") a couple of months ago. Tech-backed Code.org, whose $1+ million "Gold Supporters" include the James and Kathryn Murdoch-led Quadrivium Foundation, announced a partnership with Edhesive to bring CS to schools in June, around the same time Edhesive LLC was formed.

New submitter eporue writes: YouTube claims that I haven't been able to prove that I have commercial rights to this video of Superman. They are asking me to submit documentation saying "We need to verify that you are authorized to commercially use all of the visual and audio elements in your video. Please confirm your material is in the public domain." I submitted a link to the Wikipedia page of the Superman cartoons from the 40s where it explains that the copyright expired, and to the Archive page from where I got it. And still is not enough to "prove" that I have the commercial rights. So, how do you "prove" public domain status ?

theodp writes: Educational technology has been stuck for awhile, laments Hack Education's Audrey Watters in And So, Without Ed-Tech Criticism... (an accompanying 1984 photo of Watters making a LOGO turtle draw a square looks little different than President Obama 'learning to code' 30+ years later by making a Disney Princess draw a square). "We might consider why we're still at the point of having to make a case for ed-tech criticism," writes Watters. "It's particularly necessary as we see funding flood into ed-tech, as we see policies about testing dictate the rationale for adopting devices, as we see the technology industry shape a conversation about 'code' — a conversation that focuses on money and prestige but not on thinking, learning. Computer criticism can — and must — be about analysis and action."

An announcement at last week's American Physical Society's Division of Particles and Fields conference revealed that Fermilab's NOvA experiment has for the first time observed oscillating neutrinos, which have long been predicted but -- as a case even more special than observing neutrinos in general, not an easy task -- never before detected. The research team fired trillions of of muon neutrinos from an accelerator at the Fermilab, outside Chicago. The neutrinos travel 500 miles through Earth's crust to a detector at Ash River, Minnesota. There, scientists were able to filter through millions of cosmic ray strikes and hone in on neutrino interactions. The arriving neutrinos featured some electron neutrinos, suggesting they had oscillated along their path through Earth. "Basically, it shows that we know what we're doing," said Patricia Vahle, associate professor of physics at the College of William & Mary.

schwit1 writes: In the new opinion, the Fourth Circuit (Judge Davis joined by Judge Thacker, with Judge Motz dissenting) holds that ordering a cell provider to hand over "extended" records is a Fourth Amendment search because "society recognizes an individual's privacy interest in her movements over an extended time period." The Fourth Circuit relies primarily on the "mosaic theory" arguments of the D.C. Circuit's opinion in United States v. Maynard and the concurring opinions when that case reached the Supreme Court under the name of United States v. Jones.

msm1267 writes: Samy Kamkar has built a new device called Rolljam that is about the size of a wallet and can intercept the codes used to unlock most cars and many garage doors. The device can be hidden underneath a vehicle and when the owner approaches and hits the unlock button on her key or remote, the device grabs the unique code sent by the remote and stores it for later use. The device takes advantage of an issue with the way that vehicles that use rolling codes for unlocking produce and receive those codes. Kamkar said that the device works on most vehicles and garage doors that use rolling, rather than fixed codes.

Marvell is the parent company. Kinoma is the company Marvell bought in 2011 that "provides an open-source, cross-platform ECMAScript stack aimed at developing software for Internet of Things products and other embedded devices." They'll sell you a little hardware, too, which makes sense when you realize that parent company Marvell is big-time in the hardware business and will happily help you produce your IoT product -- for a fee, of course. Slashdot interviewed Peter Hoddie at last year's OSCON, so please consider this video an update. And before you ask: Peter says Kinoma is open source, from the bottom to the top -- to which we reply, "we like it like that."

Marvell is the parent company. Kinoma is the company Marvell bought in 2011 that "provides an open-source, cross-platform ECMAScript stack aimed at developing software for Internet of Things products and other embedded devices." They'll sell you a little hardware, too, which makes sense when you realize that parent company Marvell is big-time in the hardware business and will happily help you produce your IoT product -- for a fee, of course. Slashdot interviewed Peter Hoddie at last year's OSCON, so please consider this video an update. And before you ask: Peter says Kinoma is open source, from the bottom to the top -- to which we reply, "we like it like that."

An anonymous reader writes: When the shipping deadline was approaching for The Witcher 3, designer Matthew Steinke knew there was a big part of the game still missing: its economy. A game's economy is one of the things that can make or break immersion — you want collection and rewards to feel progressive and meaningful. Making items too expensive gives the game a grindy feel, while making them too cheap makes progression trivial. At the Game Developers Conference underway in Germany, Steinke explained his solution.

"Steinke created a formula that calculated attributes like how much damage, defense, or healing that each item provided, and he placed them into an overall combat rating could be used to rank other items in the system. ... Steinke set about blending the sub-categories into nine generalized categories, allowing him to determine the final weighting for damage and the range of prices for each item. To test if it all worked, he used polynomial least squares (a form of mathematical statistics) to chart each category's price progression. The resultant curve (pictured below) showed the rate at which spending was increasing as the quality of each item approached the category's ceiling value."

hackingbear writes: Following similar hi-tech export restriction policies in the U.S. (or perhaps in response to the U.S. ban on China,) China will impose export control on some drones and high performance computers starting on August 15th, according to an announcement published on Friday by China's Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs. The ban includes (official documents in Chinese) drone that can take off in wind speed exceeding 46.4km/hour or can continuously fly for over 1 hour as well as electronic components specifically designed or modified for supercomputers with speed over 8 petaflops. Companies must acquire specific permits before exporting such items. Drones and supercomputers are the two areas where China is the leader or among the top players. China is using its rapidly expanding defense budget to make impressive advances in (military) drone technology, prompting some to worry that the United States' global dominance in the market could soon be challenged. The tightening of regulations comes two weeks after an incident in disputed Kashmir in which the Pakistani army claimed to have shot down an Indian "spy drone", reportedly Chinese-made. China's 33-petaflops Tianhe-2, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, while still using Intel Xeon processors, makes use of the home-grown interconnect, arguably the most important component of modern supercomputers.

Reuters reports that four people have died of Legionnaire's Disease in an outbreak in the Bronx, and 65 more have exhibited symptoms of the disease. The Bronx was also home to the most recent flare-up of the disease, in December of last year. Says the article, In response to the outbreak, the city's health department has inspected 22 buildings in the Bronx, 17 of which have cooling towers. Five buildings, including the historic Opera House Hotel, Lincoln Medical Center and the Concourse Plaza mall and movie complex, tested positive for Legionella. Disinfection efforts are ongoing or have already been completed at all five sites. ... The people who died from the disease were older adults with underlying medical problems, according to a city press release. The department said the city's drinking water supply, fountains and pools have not been affected.

An anonymous reader writes: The MPEG LA has announced a call for patents essential to the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (or DASH) standard. According to the MPEG LA's press release, "Market adoption of DASH technology standards has increased to the point where the market would benefit from the availability of a convenient nondiscriminatory, nonexclusive worldwide one-stop patent pool license." The newly formed MPEG-DASH patent pool's licensing program will allegedly offer the market "efficient access to this important technology."

theodp writes: Those of you slugging your way through EdX's (free) Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics MOOC course might want to take a break from your R and SQL coding to check out Grantland's Before Beane, in which Ben Lindbergh tells the story of AVM Systems, the little-known company that jump-started sabermetrics and made Moneyball possible. Ken Mauriello, whose love-for-the-analytics-of-the-game led him to ditch a trading career to co-found AVM in the mid-90's, said of the early days, "Back in the day we weren't doing presentations [to skeptical MLB teams] with laptops. We were carrying around two enormous boxes with an enormous monitor and an enormous tower. It was like Planes, Trains & Automobiles traveling around with that stuff. Watching a great big Gateway box with your monitor come tumbling out upside down, and you pick it up and it's rattling. ... So we're in the hotel, saying, 'Please lord, let this thing work.'"

theodp writes: Those of you slugging your way through EdX's (free) Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics MOOC course might want to take a break from your R and SQL coding to check out Grantland's Before Beane, in which Ben Lindbergh tells the story of AVM Systems, the little-known company that jump-started sabermetrics and made Moneyball possible. Ken Mauriello, whose love-for-the-analytics-of-the-game led him to ditch a trading career to co-found AVM in the mid-90's, said of the early days, "Back in the day we weren't doing presentations [to skeptical MLB teams] with laptops. We were carrying around two enormous boxes with an enormous monitor and an enormous tower. It was like Planes, Trains & Automobiles traveling around with that stuff. Watching a great big Gateway box with your monitor come tumbling out upside down, and you pick it up and it's rattling. ... So we're in the hotel, saying, 'Please lord, let this thing work.'"

An anonymous reader writes: The HEVC Advance patent pool has announced the royalty rates for their patent license for HEVC (aka H.265) video. HEVC users must pay these fees in addition to the license fees payable to the competing MPEG LA HEVC patent pool. With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue which could translate to licensing costs of over $100M a year for companies like Facebook and Netflix, Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media advocates that "content owners band together and agree not to license from HEVC Advance" in the hope that "HEVC Advance will fail in the market and be forced to change strategy, or change their terms to be fair and reasonable." John Carmack, Oculus VR CTO, has cited the new patent license as a reason to end his efforts to encode VR video with H.265.

An anonymous reader writes: HP was once known as a research and technology giant, a company founded in a garage by a pair of engineers and dominated by researchers. Whilst a part of that lives on in Agilent any hope for the rest of the company has now died with the announcement that HP R&D will have to dress in business "smart casual" with T-shirts, baseball caps, short skirts, low cut dresses and sportswear all being banned.

An anonymous reader writes: For those of us who still remember the Hobson's choice with the 3.21 update of the PS3 firmware, the most recent update to the Nvidia Shield Portable is eerily similar. The update, which is necessary to run recent games and apps that require Android 5.0 APIs, removes some features from the device, and removes the games that were bundled with the device, Sonic 4 Episode II and The Expendables: ReArmed. Nvidia has stressed that it is an optional update, but how many users have been told for months that the update was coming, some of whom may have bought the device after the update was announced, only to find out now they won't receive all the functionality they paid for? How is it still legal for these companies to advertise and sell a whole product but only deliver part of it?

An anonymous reader writes: For those of us who still remember the Hobson's choice with the 3.21 update of the PS3 firmware, the most recent update to the Nvidia Shield Portable is eerily similar. The update, which is necessary to run recent games and apps that require Android 5.0 APIs, removes some features from the device, and removes the games that were bundled with the device, Sonic 4 Episode II and The Expendables: ReArmed. Nvidia has stressed that it is an optional update, but how many users have been told for months that the update was coming, some of whom may have bought the device after the update was announced, only to find out now they won't receive all the functionality they paid for? How is it still legal for these companies to advertise and sell a whole product but only deliver part of it?

Albanach writes: Following on from this week's Wired report showing the remote control of a Jeep using a cell phone, security researchers claim to have achieved a similar result using just the car radio. Using off the shelf components to create a fake radio station, the researchers sent signals using the DAB digital radio standard used in Europe and the Asia Pacific region. After taking control of the car's entertainment system it was possible to gain control of vital car systems such as the brakes. In the wild, such an exploit could allow widespread simultaneous deployment of a hack affecting huge numbers of vehicles.

Artem Tashkinov writes: We've all known for a very long time that DCMA takedown requests are often dubious and even more often outright wrong but in a new turn of events a Universal Pictures contractor which does web censorship has requested a takedown of an IMDB page and the 127.0.0.1 address. I myself has seen numerous times that pages which barely include the title of an infringing work of art get removed from search engines.

Applehu Akbar writes: Two new research papers claim to have found an Australo-Melanesian DNA signal in the genetic makeup of Native Americans, dating to about the time of the last glacial maximum. This may move the speculation around the Clovis people and Kennewick man to an entirely new level. Let's hope that it at least shakes loose some more funding for North American archaeology. Ars reports: "The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there's general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there's a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there's DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there."

Applehu Akbar writes: Two new research papers claim to have found an Australo-Melanesian DNA signal in the genetic makeup of Native Americans, dating to about the time of the last glacial maximum. This may move the speculation around the Clovis people and Kennewick man to an entirely new level. Let's hope that it at least shakes loose some more funding for North American archaeology. Ars reports: "The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there's general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there's a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there's DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there."

New submitter Lawrence Bottorff writes: Dieter Moebius, who is credited as a founder of the late-sixties Berlin 'Krautrock' scene, has died at age 71. Krautrock, of course, was hardly rock music, but the protoplasm of a uniquely German avant-garde industrial ambient electronica. Probably his best-known work was with Brian Eno on their famous Cluster collaboration albums. Many believe Cluster (Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Conny Plank) cemented Eno's path on his laconic, melancholic, New-Age-free ambient sound back in the mid- to late-seventies.

snydeq writes: Public keys, trusted hardware, block chains — InfoWorld's Peter Wayner discusses tech tools developers should be investigating to help secure the Internet for all. 'The Internet is a pit of epistemological chaos. As Peter Steiner posited — and millions of chuckles peer-reviewed — in his famous New Yorker cartoon, there's no way to know if you're swapping packets with a dog or the bank that claims to safeguard your money,' Wayner writes. 'We may not be able to wave a wand and make the Internet perfect, but we can certainly add features to improve trust on the Internet. To that end, we offer the following nine ideas for bolstering a stronger sense of assurance that our data, privacy, and communications are secure.'

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hawking is joining forces with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to start a $100 million effort to search the skies for signs of alien life. The initiative is called Breakthrough Listen, which will pay for large amounts of access to the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Telescope to scan the skies for signals over the next 10 years. They say the search will be 50 times more sensitive than previous attempts, cover 10 times more of the sky, and scan a greater portion of the radio spectrum 100x faster. They add, "All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source." The project is also supported by Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, and Lord Martin Rees.

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hawking is joining forces with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to start a $100 million effort to search the skies for signs of alien life. The initiative is called Breakthrough Listen, which will pay for large amounts of access to the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Telescope to scan the skies for signals over the next 10 years. They say the search will be 50 times more sensitive than previous attempts, cover 10 times more of the sky, and scan a greater portion of the radio spectrum 100x faster. They add, "All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source." The project is also supported by Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, and Lord Martin Rees.

linuxwrangler writes with a bit of news overlooked from last week, but worth noting: Prolific aircraft designer James "Jim" Bede has died at age 82. Although Bede designed numerous aircraft he is most commonly associated with the BD-5J, the "world's smallest jet", that was famously used to help James Bond escape in the movie "Octopussy." Bede's company currently has that aircraft for sale.

An anonymous reader writes: Over the past decade, Marvel has been rolling out superhero film after superhero film. They've found a successful formula, and each of the last half-dozen films has brought in over a half-billion dollars in ticket revenue. Today they added to the franchise with Ant-Man, based on a superhero who can shrink himself to the size of an ant (while maintaining normal strength), and control insects. But where the spate of Avengers-related movies only occasionally interjected humor into their world-preserving plots, Ant-Man focuses more on being funny and simply entertaining. Reviews are generally positive, but not overwhelmingly so — Rotten Tomatoes has it at 79%, with a 91% audience score while Metacritic has it at 64/100, with an 8.4/10 user score. The LA Times calls it "playful." Vox has good and bad to say about Ant-Man, but notes that its failings are very common to Marvel's other films. Salon says, "...in its medium-stupid and mismanaged fashion it's not so awful." Wired posted the obligatory physics of Ant-Man article, as did FiveThirtyEight.

New submitter Ramze writes: Several outlets are reporting on Intel's confirmation that it will make three generations of 14nm processors, delaying the switch to 10nm. The planned 14nm Kaby Lake processor marks the first time Intel has skipped the "tick" of a die shrink on its regular "tick/tock" cycle. Production of Cannonlake processors on 10nm has been pushed back to the second half of 2017 — likely due to manufacturing difficulties. Intel reported earlier this year that it may have to switch away from silicon to exotic materials such as indium gallium arsenide to make the next shrink to 7nm.

Noryungi writes: The New Yorker has published a chilling account of what would happen in the case of a major earthquake (roughly magnitude 9.0) inevitably striking the Cascadia subduction. "Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely." Most of the west coast of the U.S. and Canada is at risk, from Vancouver all the way down to Los Angeles and beyond. Most of the states and cities within this region are woefully under-prepared for a large earthquake. Scientists peg the odds at 1-in-3 for a quake within the next 50 years, and 1-in-10 for a really powerful one.

Brianna Wu is the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a company specializing in cinematic experiences using the Unreal engine. She’s also a frequent speaker on women-in-tech issues and was one of several women subjected to a campaign of attacks in Gamergate. Wu has worked as a journalist and politico. She currently has a patreon campaign which helps to offset the costs of doing speaking engagements and work to further the goals of feminism and women in tech. Brianna has agreed to give us some of her time and answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

An anonymous reader with the news, announced with a statement released by Nintendo on their homepage, that Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata died of a bile duct growth on the 11th of July, 2015. The news is noted by Kotaku and by Engadget. Wikipedia notes that Iwata was the first of the company's presidents to be unrelated to the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage.

An anonymous reader writes with a story at IB Times that speculates instant messaging apps which enable encrypted communications (including Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and iMessage) could be banned in the UK under the so-called Snooper's Charter now under consideration. The extent of the powers that the government would claim under the legislation is not yet clear, but as the linked article says, it "would allow security services like the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, and MI5, or Military Intelligence Section 5, to access instant messages sent between people to and from the country," and evidently "would give the government right to ban instant messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption." That might sound outlandish, but reflects a popular and politically safe sentiment: "'In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read? My answer to that question is: "No, we must not,"' [Prime Minister] Cameron said earlier this year following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris."

An anonymous reader writes: The Truck Factor describes the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. Wikipedia defines it as a "measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. A high truck factor means that many individuals know enough to carry on and the project could still succeed even in very adverse events." The term is also known by bus factor/number. In this article, the authors calculate the truck factor for 133 popular GitHub applications. Spoiler, but unsurprising: Linux ranks near the top (meaning that it's highly resilient).

An anonymous reader writes: A 17-year-old from the Vancouver area in Canada has been sentenced to 16 months in youth custody and 8 months under supervision in the community after pleading guilty to 23 charges including criminal harassment, public mischief, extortion and uttering threats. The teenager was responsible for a number of swatting calls across the United States and Canada — mostly of female gamers. The judge told him, "It appears that when real life became too hard you retreated into the online world and became increasingly socially isolated. While you may think you enjoyed greater success in the online world, that success was an illusion. You were left with severely limited social skills and a significant educational deficit."

jrepin writes: The final draft version of the RGI (general interoperability framework), still awaiting final validation, maintains ODF as the recommended format for office documents within French administrations. This new version of the RGI provides substantiated criticism of the OOXML Microsoft format. April thanks the DISIC (French Inter-ministerial IT directorate) for not giving in to pressure and acting in the long-term interest of all French citizens and their administrations. As Wikpedia notes, OOXML (Office Open XML) is not to be confused with OpenOffice.org XML. (Also on the open-source office-document format front, OpenSource.com has taken a look at five open alternatives to Google Docs.)