Month: March 2016

An asteroid some seven meters across swooped to within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Earth on Halloween, and the collective public reaction registered as barely more than a snigger. Various news stories called the rock “spooky” or the “The Great Pumpkin,” dismissing it as yet another near miss while we celebrated the holiday with costumes and candy. The sobering reality is that, only three weeks before its closest approach, Earth-based observers discovered a rock that could dissipate many times the energy of the Hiroshima blast in the atmosphere.

We view ourselves as a modern civilization, with dazzling rocket launches and pocket computers that allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. Yet when it comes to detecting and deflecting asteroids, we are little better than our ancestors who evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. We can look up into the sky, see the bright fireball, and if we’re close enough to the impact, we will die. Just like them, except we might be able to tweet about the end of the world.

Unlike our ancestors, however, we actually have the technology to prevent such a calamity. For about $1 billion we could build an infrared space telescope to find all of the asteroids that threaten Earth, and we could then fly a mission to demonstrate our capacity to deflect one. NASA, in fact, could fund such efforts with about one percent of its annual budget over the next five years. The price of planetary insurance, it turns out, isn’t all that high.

A man has been jailed for life after being convicted of raping, and assaulting divorced or widowed women he met on dating website Match.com.

Jason Lawrance, 50, of Arundel Close, Liphook, Hampshire was described by detective chief inspector Allison Rigby—who led the police investigation—as "a prolific, serial rapist who preyed on women he had contacted through Match.com."

On Wednesday, Lawrance was found guilty of five counts of rape, one of attempted rape, and one count of sexual assault by a jury at Derby Crown Court, following a two-week long trial.

AMD hints that it's working on a new external graphics card solution that promises to be "the answer" to "ultrathin" laptop gaming, according to technical marketing head Robert Hallock.

"Ultrathin notebooks are awesome to carry, but nobody in their right mind would confuse one for a gaming notebook," says Hallock. "But there's still a HUGE appetite for thin notebooks that can game. I also bet there's a bunch of gamers out there who, as they get into their 30s and 40s, wouldn't mind condensing their entire computing life down into one device that does it all... External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardised connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc."

AMD isn't saying what those "standardised connectors" might look like just yet, but Hallock promises that the company will share "more info very soon." With GDC 2016 just around the corner, AMD could opt to discuss its plans there, although a quick scan of the sessions taking place during the conference—which mostly revolve around DirectX 12—reveals little.

Gray’s Anatomy is easily recognized worldwide as one of the most revered and influential medical texts of all time. But a closer examination of its medical history turns up tales of a disgraceful birth and hints that its author, Henry Gray, may have been a bit of a fraudster.

Notes, publications, and diary entries from Gray’s colleagues suggest that the famous author may have plagiarized numerous passages of the text and was pushy, cut-throat, and resented, a new commentary piece in the journal Clinical Anatomy argues. While the allegations are not new, one researcher claims to have fresh data that refutes them, urging a renewed dissection of Gray’s character and actions.

The commentary’s author, Ruth Richardson, a medical historian and visiting scholar at King’s College London, wrote about Gray’s alleged cheating ways in her 2008 book, The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy. But in a 2014 scientific conference, anatomy professor Brion Benninger, of the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific – Northwest, publicly announced that he and a colleague had carried out a computer analysis of the text and found no such evidence of plagiarism. He said that he intended to publish the analysis. But, in the year since, he has not produced any data.

A Utah legislator has recently introduced a proposed state law that would allow law enforcement to shoot down drones in certain situations, among other suggested limits to drone activity.

If passed, Senate Bill 210 would firmly establish many limits on the behavior of drones that currently don’t exist at either the federal or state level. As currently written, Sen. Wayne Harper’s bill seems squarely aimed at many drone-related incidents that have occurred across the country.

Specifically, Harper’s bill would establish the concept of aerial trespass—which does not exist elsewhere in the United States. It's likely an attempt to avoid future situations of landowners shooting drones down out of the sky. The bill also would ban the use of drones within 500 feet of correctional institutions, forbid flights within three miles of a "wildland fire," and halt surveillance of gatherings of 500 people or more, and aerial voyeurism.