news.buyenne.com

One of the most fascinating sci-fi horror novels of 2014 was The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey's tale of a girl who goes to a very special school where every student gets a classical education by day—and is locked into a cage like a wild animal at night. This fall, the movie version comes out in the UK, and it promises to be just as original and compelling as the novel.

It seems pretty much impossible to reinvent the zombie genre, but then a story like this comes along. In Girl with All the Gifts, we've got a scenario vaguely reminiscent of The Last of Us. A mind-altering fungus is infecting people and turning them into violent "hungries" without higher reason. Our young hero Melanie is part of a second generation of hungries, who carry the fungal invaders but are otherwise completely normal humans. Well, except for the part where they have the urge to eat human flesh. In a remote part of the British countryside, the military has gathered several of these second generation children together for study. While the creepy Dr. Caldwell does terrifying experiments on the kids, their kindly teacher Miss Justineau tries to rear them to be ordinary children. Out of the entire class, Melanie is the only one who is completely in control of her violent urges. She won't munch on humans except in self-defense.

As you can see in this trailer, the school doesn't last long. It's attacked by zombies, and Melanie is forced to flee with Caldwell and Justineau. In the book, this leads to a seriously gripping tale that involves evolutionary theory as well as philosophical questions about what it means to be human in the first place. While it's not entirely clear where the movie is taking this scenario, it's obviously exploring the infected as a scientific phenomenon, and Melanie is at the heart of it. Unlike many zombie stories, The Girl with All the Gifts doesn't offer us a post-apocalyptic world of humans vs. zombies. Things are much more complicated than that, and the fate of the zombies seems inextricably tied to humanity's future. Possibly the best comparison might be with In the Flesh, a British TV series about zombies whose violent urges can be controlled with drugs, and who are now struggling to rejoin the communities where they once rampaged.

When it comes to men making decisions on condom use for casual sex, there may not be more to it than meets the eye.

In a survey of 51 heterosexual men between the ages of 19 and 61 published in BMJ Open, researchers found that men’s intentions to use a condom during casual sex varied based on the perceived attractiveness of their potential partner. Specifically, the more attractive a woman seemed to each participant, the lower their intention to use a condom during sex—even if the woman seemed to have a relatively higher risk of having a sexually transmitted infection.

Though the study was small, the finding backs up several others that have found that perceived hotness of a potential sex partner is a key determinant in people’s decisions on whether to have sex and have safe sex. And together, the studies suggest that discussions about people’s biases on particularly steamy flings could improve sex education.

On Tuesday, Tesla announced it intends to acquire the solar power business Solar City, provided shareholders of both companies approve the purchase. In a conference call with reporters, Elon Musk said that Tesla "thinks this is a huge opportunity to have a highly integrated sustainable energy company, from generation to storage to transport." It's a move Musk said he's been thinking about for many years, and that the timing seemed right with Tesla's recent activities in energy storage.

Assuming the shareholders agree, this will add a third product line to Tesla's retail stores, which will be literal one-stop-shops for sustainable energy, from power generation (via solar panels), energy storage (Powerwalls—the battery packs the company announced earlier this year), and electric vehicles. Integrating Tesla's Powerwall storage systems with Solar City's solar panels also promises to remove some duplication—currently both storage and generation systems have to have their own control computers and modems, connecting to different clouds.

"Tesla's goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. You need energy generation, storage, and electric transport," Musk said. "We need those three ingredients to have a good future. I don't think of us an automotive company; the world doesn't lack automotive companies, it lacks sustainable energy companies. That's the fundamental good Tesla will achieve."

Linux developers are going to have more than one choice for building secure, cross-distribution applications.

Ubuntu's "snap" applications recently went cross-platform, having been ported to other Linux distros including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo. The goal is to simplify packaging of applications. Instead of building a deb package for Ubuntu and an RPM for Fedora, a developer could package the application as a snap and have it installed on just about any Linux distribution.

But Linux is always about choice, and snap isn't the only contender to replace traditional packaging systems. Today, the developers of Flatpak (previously called xdg-app) announced general availability for several major Linux distributions, with a pointer to instructions for installing on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, and Ubuntu.

Imagine a $50 million diamond heist that isn't investigated by any police body, and more than four days later, the broken vault that made the whole thing possible remains unfixed and suffers follow-on attacks by a group of marauding copycats. In essence, that's what's happening to an elite group of investors holding Bitcoin rival Ethereum, and the events threaten the very survival of the fledgling cryptocurrency.

The ransacked jeweler in this parable is The DAO, a crowdfunded investment fund that relies on highly specialized computer code and Ethereum to automatically execute investment decisions made by its members. On Friday, thieves exploited a software bug that allowed them to transfer more than 3.6 million "ether"—the base unit of the Ethereum currency—out of The DAO's coffers. The digital loot made up more than a third of The DAO's 11.5 million ether endowment. The seized booty is valued at anywhere from $45 million (based on the plummeting value of ether following the attack) to as high as $77 million (based on pre-attack exchange rates).

In the days following the theft, there have been at least a half-dozen copycat attacks (for instance, as documented here and here) that combined have purloined more than 785 ether. While the smaller attacks don't pose the same devastating blow, they underscore a problem that's vexingly hard to fix. As long as the flaw remains active, The DAO and the Ethereum currency are at risk of additional attacks that could further sink its viability. (Note: as this story was close to going live, there were indications that at least some of the follow-on attacks were being carried out by whitehat hackers who in essence are attempting to save Ethereum from itself.)

The forecasting supremacy of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and its global weather prediction model is well documented. This most glaringly reached the American public when only the European forecast model correctly predicted Hurricane Sandy would turn toward the northeastern United States in 2012, rather than remaining out to sea. For several years, the United States and its global forecasting system (GFS) have been struggling to catch up.

But as the United States' forecasting enterprise has more or less stayed the same, other nations are now equaling and passing the GFS model. Perhaps the most well accepted method of measuring a model's accuracy is by scoring its "anomaly correlation," a measure of its ability to accurately predict observations (a score of 1 is perfect). For the northern hemisphere during the last two months, as measured at the 500mb level of the atmosphere (about 5.5km above the Earth's surface), the European model scores by far the highest, at .905. It is followed by the United Kingdom's model (.870), Canadian model, (.868) and finally the GFS (.857).

On Tuesday, Cliff Mass, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist who closely tracks the forecast model "wars," wrote about the GFS model's poor performance relative to other nations. He concluded: "It is not that U.S. global (numerical weather prediction) is getting less skillful, but that other nations are innovating and pushing ahead faster. This situation could be greatly improved within a year, but to do so will require leadership, innovation, and a willingness to partner with others in new ways."