CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});
On July 20, 1969, at about four minutes before 10:00pm Central Daylight Time, former naval aviator and test pilot Neil Armstrong became the first human being to stand on the surface of the Moon. About 20 minutes later, he was followed by Buzz Aldrin, an Air Force colonel with a PhD in astronautics from MIT (Aldrin had, quite literally, written the book on orbital rendezvous techniques). Armstrong and Aldrin’s landing was the culmination of almost a decade of scientific and engineering work by hundreds of thousands of people across the United States. Even though the lunar program’s goals were ultimately political, the Apollo project ranks as one of the greatest engineering achievements in human history.

The six successful Apollo landings between 1969 and 1972 still inspire awe today, almost half a century later. A big part of that awe comes from the fact that those voyages from the Earth to the Moon were accomplished with only the most basic of computing assistance. There were no supercomputers as we’d understand them today; although the computers that eventually powered the Apollo spacecraft were almost unbelievably advanced at the time, they are alarmingly primitive when viewed through the lens of 21st century computing.

Fortunately for amateur and professional historians wondering how the effort succeeded despite its comparatively primitive computing, NASA has extensive historical resources about project Apollo available in the public domain to study, including the outstanding Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (along with its companion site, the Apollo Flight Journal). We’ve combed through gigabytes of documents and images to bring you this brief retrospective of some lesser-known interesting historical tidbits around Apollo 11 and that one small step nearly a half-century ago.

Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NIH

In Type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system destroys the cells that produce insulin, leaving your body unable to make it. In Type 2 diabetes, the body continues to produce insulin, but organs don't respond to it efficiently. As a result, insulin injections, which effectively treat Type 1, don't do as much to help people with Type 2 diabetes.

There is a class of drugs called thiazolidinediones that help restore the body's ability to respond to insulin. Unfortunately, these drugs also cause a variety of side effects, including weight gain, bone density loss, and heart problems, so the search for a less problematic treatment has continued.

Now, working with mice, researchers have found that a well-known growth factor also restores the body's sensitivity to insulin and does so without any of the side effects associated with existing drugs. And they show that a modified form of the growth factor can still work effectively while reducing the risk of unforeseen consequences. This doesn't mean that using this method as a treatment will be free of side effects, but it does provide a promising avenue for further experiments.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Earlier this week, the US Department of Energy announced that work has started on what when finished will be the world's largest carbon capture facility. Located in Thompsons, Texas, the project will capture a portion of the emissions from the coal-fired W.A. Parish Generating Station. The CO2 will then be compressed and piped to the West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected under ground. This will help liberate oil that's otherwise difficult to extract, but has the added benefit that the carbon dioxide typically stays underground, sequestered.

The project was originally planned as a small pilot that would only extract CO2 from the equivalent of 60 megawatts of the plant's 3,500MW of generating capacity. When it was realized that the amount of CO2 from 60MW of would be too little CO2 to supply the oil field's needs, the project scope was expanded to 240MW. At that scale, the facility would become the largest of its type in the world.

The exhaust gas will have its sulfates removed before being bubbled through a solution of amines, which will bind the CO2. Once separated from the rest of the gasses, the carbon dioxide will be released by heating the amine solution, which can be recycled. The CO2 is then sent under pressure via a pipeline.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Melanie Gonick / MIT

Four fingers and a thumb on each hand is pretty useful. Humans have gone from caves to sprawling cities in part because of our dexterous digits.

But researchers at MIT think we could do even better if we had an upgrade. They have developed a glove with two extra robotic fingers that respond intelligently to your movements, allowing you to perform two-handed tasks with just one robot-enhanced hand.

"You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally. Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers," said the glove's creator Harry Asada, of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that the area of Shejaiya in Gaza under attack on Sunday is a "terror stronghold" and is a centre for rockets that are fired out to Israel.

Gaza has come under the most intense shelling since the launch of Israel's offensive 13 days ago, with more than 50 people reported killed in one district.

For those that have followed the state of camera software in AOSP and Google Camera in general, it’s been quite clear that this portion of the experience has been a major stumbling block for Android. Third party camera applications are almost always worse for options and camera experience than first party ones. Manual controls effectively didn’t exist because the underlying camera API simply didn’t support any of this. Until recently, the official Android camera API has only supported three distinct modes. These modes were preview, still image capture, and video recording. Within these modes, capabilities were similarly limited. It wasn’t possible to do burst image capture in photo mode or take photos while in video mode. Manual controls were effectively nonexistent as well. Even something as simple as tap to focus wasn’t supported through Android’s camera API until ICS (4.0). In response to these issues, Android OEMs and silicon vendors filled the gap in capabilities with custom, undocumented camera APIs. While this opened up the ability to deliver much better camera experiences, these APIs were only usable in the OEM’s camera applications. If there were no manual controls, there was no way for users to get a camera application that had manual controls.

With Android L, this will change. Fundamentally, the key to understanding this new API is understanding that there are no longer distinct modes to work with. Photos, videos, and previews are all processed in the same exact way. This opens up a great deal of possibility, but also means more work on the part of the developer to do things correctly. Now, instead of sending capture requests in a given mode with global settings, individual requests for image capture are sent to a request queue and are processed with specific settings for each request.

This sounds simple enough, but the implications are enormous. First, image capture is much faster. Before, if the settings for an image changed the entire imaging pipeline would have to clear out before another image could be taken. This is because any image that entered the pipeline would have settings changed while processing, which means that the settings would be inconsistent and incorrect. This slowed things down greatly because of this wait period after each change to capture settings. With the new API, you simply request captures with specific settings (device dependent) so there’s no need to wait on the pipeline with settings changes. This dramatically increases the maximum capture rate regardless of the format used. In other words, the old API set changes globally. This slowed down image capture every time image settings changed because all of the images in the pipeline had to be discarded once the settings were changed. In the new API, settings are done on a per-image basis. This means that no discarding has to happen, which means image capture stays fast.

The second implication is that the end user will have much more control over the settings that they can use. These have been discussed before in the context of iOS 8’s manual camera controls, but in effect it’s now possible to control shutter speed, ISO, focus, flash, white balance manually, along with options to control exposure level bias, exposure metering algorithms, and also select the capture format. This means that the images can be output as JPEG, YUV, RAW/DNG, or any other format that is supported.

While not an implication, the elimination of distinction between photo and video is crucial. Because these distinctions are removed, it’s now possible to do burst shots, full resolution photos while capturing lower resolution video, and HDR video. In addition, because the pipeline gives all of the information on the camera state for each image, Lytro-style image refocusing is doable, as are depth maps for post-processing effects. Google specifically cited HDR+ in the Nexus 5 as an example of what’s possible with the new Android camera APIs.

This new camera API will be officially released in Android L, and it’s already usable on the Android L preview for the Nexus 5. While there are currently no third party applications that take advantage of this API, there is a great deal of potential to make camera applications that greatly improve upon OEM camera applications. However, the most critical point to take away is that the new camera API will open up the possibility for applications that no one has thought of yet. While there are still issues with the Android camera ecosystem, with the release of Android L software won’t be one of them.

A US court has ordered the country's second largest cigarette company to pay $23.6 billion (£13.8bn) to the wife of a smoker who died of lung cancer.

Forty years ago on 20 July 1974 Turkish troops landed on Cyprus, in response to a Greek-led coup on the island. Now it's time for scars to heal, some say.

An exhibition at the Jewish museum in Berlin is showcasing a robot which has been programmed to write the sacred Jewish scriptures, known as the Torah.

The Loris, one of world's smallest primates is under threat through loss of habitat. Naturalist Chaminda Jayasekara runs a conservation site to protect the animals.

The Loris, one of world's smallest primates is under threat through loss of habitat. Naturalist Chaminda Jayasekara runs a conservation site to protect the animals.

The Glasgow Science Centre tower has reopened to the public after being closed for almost four years.

The Israeli military has stepped up its ground offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as Palestinian officials say the death toll in Gaza is now past 300.

The FAA had barred search-and-rescue volunteer Gene Robinson from flying this five-pound Spectra styrofoam drone to find the missing. mahapix studio

A Texas volunteer search-and-rescue outfit that uses five-pound drones to find missing persons is resuming operations following its Friday courthouse victory against US flight regulators.

Federal Aviation Administration officials in February grounded Texas EquuSearch Mounted Search and Recovery Team, which deployed the unmanned aircraft to search for the missing for free.

EquuSearch, which does not charge for its services, says it has found more than 300 persons alive in some 42 states and eight countries. It challenged the FAA's order and, indirectly, prevailed. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found [PDF] that the e-mail from the FAA to EquuSearch was not the official method for a cease-and-desist order.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Internet's Own Boy

Every element of Aaron Swartz’s brief, remarkable life exemplifies the stuff we cover all the time on Ars. His tech-filled upbringing, his teenage rise to geek royalty, his hand in reddit’s genesis, and his online political activism made him a worthy subject of Ars conversation well before he became a household name.

Sadly, Swartz’s story didn’t reach critical mass until he took his own life nearly two years after being indicted by a federal court on twelve felony charges. The case hinged on allegations that he had downloaded 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an online academic research archive, which he accessed from within MIT’s campus without permission.

In the weeks after his suicide, the Internet saw both a massive outpouring of grief and a comprehensive examination of what made his case so outrageous. The latter makes the new feature-length documentary about his life, The Internet’s Own Boy, less than indispensable in telling Swartz’s story, but considering the fact that he spent his final years trying to make information free and open, that’s fitting.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Timothy Tolle

Despite court-governed blocks and its founders being jailed, The Pirate Bay's traffic has doubled since 2011.

The world's most infamous peer-to-peer file-sharing site shared these stats with Torrent Freak, adding that nine percent of all visitors use a proxy to access the site and that the US continues to be its biggest source of traffic (last year it was revealed that the US was responsible for a third of traffic to the site). That's despite the majority of copyright complaints about content shared on The Pirate Bay coming from US record labels and Hollywood studios.

An increasing number of countries around the globe block the site by forcing Internet service providers to directly block access. In 2011, Advocate General Cruz Villalón of the European Court of Justice said that forcing an ISP to filter Web traffic would infringe upon its fundamental rights. The installation of such a filter would be "a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data." In addition, "such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights." Essentially, forcing ISPs to block Web content by their own expense and indefinitely breaches rights of citizens and companies. This view was upheld by the court.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. Aurich Lawson

AOL VP Ryan Block’s cancellation nightmare phone call with Comcast’s customer service went insanely viral this week, drawing a contrite canned response from Comcast’s public relations group and likely resulting in the firing of the overly zealous customer service employee who badgered Block for 10 solid minutes about his request to terminate service. Unfortunately, Block’s experience is far from unique. Putting aside the Comcast representative’s hilariously insensitive tenacity ("This phone call is a really, actually amazing example of why I don't want to stay with Comcast," Block said at one point), terrible phone-based customer service is standard operating procedure for most companies.

There is some delicious irony in the fact that Block is an AOL employee, since AOL’s ludicrous and borderline-abusive customer retention tactics are the stuff of legends. However, in this instance, Block's affiliation with AOL was immaterial: he was just another customer being forced to fight a war to cancel his Internet service.

Why do companies like Comcast and AOL make it so hard to pull the plug? Do customer service representatives get some kind of incentive for keeping customers from canceling? Is there anything you can do to power through their garbage and get what you want without having to verbally fight it out, Block-style?

Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Jonathan Ryan

In May 2014, I reported on my efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, I wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked.

But instead of providing what I had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So I appealed—and without explanation, the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time.

The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain:

Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A powerful Typhoon is heading towards Vietnam after causing widespread flooding and damage in parts of southern China.