Researchers capture first ‘image’ of a dark matter web that connects galaxies


Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The composite image, which combines a number of individual images, confirms predictions that galaxies across the universe are tied together through a cosmic web connected by dark matter that has until now remained unobservable.
[…]
They combined lensing images from more than 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away to create a composite image or map that shows the presence of dark matter between the two galaxies. Results show the dark matter filament bridge is strongest between systems less than 40 million light years apart.

“By using this technique, we’re not only able to see that these dark matter filaments in the universe exist, we’re able to see the extent to which these filaments connect galaxies together,” said Epps.

Source: Researchers capture first ‘image’ of a dark matter web that connects galaxies

This new solar-powered device can pull water straight from the desert air

You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, but wringing water from the desert sky is now possible, thanks to a new spongelike device that uses sunlight to suck water vapor from air, even in low humidity. The device can produce nearly 3 liters of water per day for every kilogram of spongelike absorber it contains, and researchers say future versions will be even better. That means homes in the driest parts of the world could soon have a solar-powered appliance capable of delivering all the water they need, offering relief to billions of people.
[…]
“It has been a longstanding dream” to harvest water from desert air, says Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the work. “This demonstration … is a significant proof of concept.” It’s also one that Yaghi says has plenty of room for improvement. For starters, zirconium costs $150 a kilogram, making water-harvesting devices too expensive to be broadly useful. However, Yaghi says his group has already had early success in designing water-grabbing MOFs that replace zirconium with aluminum, a metal that is 100 times cheaper. That could make future water harvesters cheap enough not only to slake the thirst of people in arid regions, but perhaps even supply water to farmers in the desert

Source: This new solar-powered device can pull water straight from the desert air

Burger King ads talk to Google Home devices, make them talk when listening.

The advertisment says: “Hello Google, what is the whopper burger?” and Google home reads out the first line of the wiki page.
So Google blocked Burger King. So BK re-recorded and Google Home devices recite the first

Absolutely brilliant and very funny! Alexa next! And even more funny: changing the wiki page just as the advert runs and getting Google Home to read out something completely different!

Source: Burger King thought it had a great idea. Instead, it ended up with a Whopper of a problem.

Shadow Brokers release 4 year old NSA hacks for Win2k to Windows 8

The Shadow Brokers have leaked more hacking tools stolen from the NSA’s Equation Group – this time four-year-old exploits that attempt to hijack venerable Windows systems, from Windows 2000 up to Server 2012 and Windows 7 and 8.

The toolkit puts into anyone’s hands – from moronic script kiddies to hardened crims – highly classified nation-state-level weaponry that can potentially compromise and commandeer systems around the world. This is the same powerful toolkit Uncle Sam used once upon a time to hack into and secretly snoop on foreign governments, telcos, banks, and other organizations.

The files range from Microsoft Windows exploits to tools for monitoring SWIFT interbank payments. Ongoing analysis of the leaked documents and executables has revealed Cisco firewalls and VPN gateways are also targets.

Source: Leaked NSA point-and-pwn hack tools menace Win2k to Windows 8

These are actually useful and working tools, as opposed to the last lot.

Samsung blocks ability to remap Galaxy S8’s Bixby button

Samsung wants to keep you locked in the Bixby AI ecosystem in its fight against Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and others.

Source: Samsung blocks ability to remap Galaxy S8’s Bixby button | ZDNet

And Bixby won’t work at all during launch. I’m actually not so very happy with Samsung deciding to ditch the hardware buttons, so not being able to remap at all sucks. Time to start looking for a new smartphone manufacturer: my S6 edge + wasn’t particularly great either. It’s battery life is half of what it was, the screen glass is cracked (and not repairable, even though the underlying LEDs are all fine) and the camera broke and had to be repaired. Not particularly impressive for a flagship phone.

feeling things you touch in VR

haptics for VR walls and other objects [CHI17 fullpaper]
← SIC on EMS [UIST16 contest hardware]
Ad Infinitum: a parasite [ScienceGallery’17] →

In this project, we explored how to add haptics to walls and other heavy objects in virtual reality. Our main idea is to prevent the user’s hands from penetrating virtual objects by means of electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). Figure 1a shows an example. As the shown user lifts a virtual cube, our system lets the user feel the weight and resistance of the cube. The heavier the cube and the harder the user presses the cube, the stronger a counterforce the system generates. Figure 1b illustrates how our system implements the physicality of the cube, i.e., by actuating the user’s opposing muscles with EMS.

Source: haptics for VR walls and other objects [CHI17 fullpaper] – pedro lopes research

MS now blocking updates for Win7 & 8 on PCs with modern CPUs. User makes patch to be able to install updates after all.

GitHub user Zeffy has created a patch that removes a limitation that Microsoft imposed on users of 7th generation processors, a limit that prevents users from receiving Windows updates if they still use Windows 7 and 8.1.

Source: User-Made Patch Lets Owners of Next-Gen CPUs Install Updates on Windows 7 & 8.1

MS wants to force you to update to that privacy invasion Windows 10 and has thought of another way to strongarm people into it.

Scammers place fake pins on Google Maps

A partnership between computer scientists at the University of California San Diego and Google has allowed the search giant to reduce by 70 percent fraudulent business listings in Google Maps. The researchers worked together to analyze more than 100,000 fraudulent listings to determine how scammers had been able to avoid detection—albeit for a limited amount of time—and how they made money.

The team presented their findings at the 26th International Conference on the World Wide Web in Australia earlier this month.

The computer scientists identified what they describe as a “new form of blackhat search engine optimization that targets local listing services” such as Google Maps. They also describe how these scammers were able to make money.
[…]
For example, when people run a search on their mobile phone, the search engine uses their physical location as one of the inputs to decide which results to display, Snoeren explained.

The scammers take advantage of this by using fake locations to make it look like their business is in close proximity to the user doing the search.
[…]
Scammers are able to make money when they get called to help a user based on a fake listing. Scammers might quote a low price when called on the phone, only to charge a higher fee when they show up. They might not be licensed but get the business anyway.

In another scheme, scammers set up fake pins for real hotels or restaurants on Google Maps. They set up websites where customers make reservations, which are connected to the business’ real website or to a travel agency, which is not part of the scam. This allows scammers to make money either by getting a commission for each reservation or for referring traffic to the businesses’ real websites.

*D.Y. Huang, D. Grundman, K. Thomas, A. Kumar, E. Bursztein, K. Levchenko and A.C. Snoeren, “Pinning Down Abuse on Google Maps,” Proc. of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), April 3-7, 2017, Perth, Australia.

Caffe2 Open Source Brings Cross Platform Machine Learning Tools to Developers

We’re committed to providing the community with high-performance machine learning tools so that everyone can create intelligent apps and services. Caffe2 is shipping with tutorials and examples that demonstrate learning at massive scale which can leverage multiple GPUs in one machine or many machines with one or more GPUs. Learn to train and deploy models for iOS, Android, and Raspberry Pi. Pre-trained models from the Caffe2 Model Zoo can be run with just a few lines of code.

Caffe2 is deployed at Facebook to help developers and researchers train large machine learning models and deliver AI-powered experiences in our mobile apps. Now, developers will have access to many of the same tools, allowing them to run large-scale distributed training scenarios and build machine learning applications for mobile.

We’ve worked closely with NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Intel, Amazon, and Microsoft to optimize Caffe2 for both cloud and mobile environments. These collaborations will allow the machine learning community to rapidly experiment using more complex models and deploy the next generation of AI-enhanced apps and services. to optimize Caffe2 for both cloud and mobile environments. These collaborations will allow the machine learning community to rapidly experiment using more complex models and deploy the next generation of AI-enhanced apps and services.

Source: Caffe2 Open Source Brings Cross Platform Machine Learning Tools to Developers