Month: March 2016

A Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google)

Google today said it has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), and the company will donate a specification for a rack that it designed for its own data centers.

Facebook founded the Open Compute Project in 2011 to share designs of servers and other data center equipment. Many companies, including Microsoft, have joined the project and contributed their hardware designs. While Google has been building its own hardware for years, it hasn't joined the project until now.

Google's first contribution will be "a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers," the company said. Google will also be participating in this week's Open Compute Summit.

(credit: Chad Horwedel)

The US Supreme Court is letting stand a lower court ruling that the Batmobile is protected by copyright. The high court's move is a blow to Gotham Garage, the maker of Batmobile replica modification kits, and it means car tinkerers must get a license from DC Comics to sell vehicles that look like the one driven by Batman and Robin.

The court did not comment when rejecting (PDF) Gotham Garage's petition (PDF) for the court to hear its case. In September, a federal appeals court sided with DC Comics' suit against Gotham Garage.

"As Batman so sagely told Robin, 'In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential,'" the San Francisco-based 9th US Court of Appeals concluded (PDF). That wasn't the first time a Hollywood car was assigned copyright. The vehicle "Eleanor" from Gone in 60 Seconds prevailed in an IP court battle.

NASA's InSight Mars lander spacecraft in a Lockheed Martin clean room near Denver. (credit: Lockheed Martin)

NASA announced Wednesday that it will attempt to launch its InSight mission to Mars in 2018, two years after its original launch date, after engineers discovered problems with the spacecraft's seismometer system. The decision is a win for Mars scientists because there had been some concern that NASA would have to cancel the mission due to cost overruns.

"The science goals of InSight are compelling," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The quest to understand the interior of Mars has been a longstanding goal of planetary scientists for decades. We're excited to be back on the path for a launch."

The seismometer itself worked fine, but several times during the last summer and fall engineers found a leak in the 22cm sphere that creates a vacuum so that the instrument can function on the harsh surface of Mars. Their temporary fixes didn't address the problem. Now NASA and the French seismometer manufacturer Centre National d'Études Spatiales believe they have found a permanent fix for the recurring leak.

(credit: Khan AO, Aldahmesh MA, Ghadhfan FE, Al-Mesfer S, Alkuraya FS)

Cataracts—the clouding of the lens in our eyes—are the leading cause of blindness in the world. Though we often associate them with the elderly, they're also a major cause of vision loss in infants, especially in the developing world. In either case, they are dealt with surgically, by removing the entire lens and replacing it with either a transplanted lens or an artificial one.

More than twenty million people undergo this surgery annually, but it often comes with a host of complications, and children in particular usually still need glasses afterward. But now some researchers have shown that it's possible to skip the replacement lens and get stem cells to repair the damage, a procedure that results in fewer complications.

Researchers in China noticed that the eye contains lens epithelial stem/progenitor cells (LECs) that continue to divide, even in forty-year-old adults. Injury can stimulate them to grow into three-dimensional, transparent, light refracting, lens-like structures. Rather than using artificial lenses, these researchers thought, maybe they could get infants to regrow their own new lenses.

Not that kind of crack. (credit: Geoff Parsons)

The custom firmware that the FBI would like Apple to produce in order to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone would be the most straightforward way of accessing the device, allowing the federal agency to rapidly attempt PIN codes until it found the one that unlocked the phone.

But it's probably not the only way to achieve what the FBI wants. There may well be approaches that don't require Apple to build a custom firmware to defeat some of the iPhone's security measures.

The iPhone 5c used by the San Bernardino killers encrypts its data using a key derived from a combination of an ID embedded in the iPhone's processor and the user's PIN. Assuming that a 4-digit PIN is being used, that's a mere 10,000 different combinations to try out. However, the iPhone has two protections against attempts to try every PIN in turn. First, it inserts delays to force you to wait ever longer between PIN attempts (up to one hour at its longest). Second, it has an optional capability to delete its encryption keys after 10 bad PINs, permanently depriving access to any encrypted data.

(credit: Shawn Collins)

It was just days ago when the federal judge presiding over the upcoming Oracle v. Google API copyright trial said he was concerned that the tech giants were already preparing for a mistrial—despite the fact that the San Francisco jury hasn't even been picked yet. US District Judge William Alsup said he was suspicious that, during the trial, the two might perform intensive Internet searches on the chosen jurors in hopes of finding some "lie" or "omission" that could be used in a mistrial bid.

To placate the judge's fears, Google said (PDF) it won't do Internet research on jurors after a panel is picked for the closely watched trial, set to begin on May 9.

"The Court stated that it is considering imposing on both sides a ban on any and all Internet research on the jury members prior to verdict. Provided the ban applies equally to both parties, Google has no objection to imposition of such a ban in this case," Google attorney Robert Van Nest wrote to the judge in a Tuesday filing.