By manishs from
Slashdot's the-curious-case-of-Tor-usage department:
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: You might assume that people in the most oppressive regimes wouldn't use the Tor anonymity network because of severe restrictions on technology or communication. On the other hand, you might think that people in the most liberal settings would have no immediate need for Tor. A new paper shows that Tor usage is, in fact, highest at both these tips of the political spectrum, peaking in the most oppressed and the most-free countries around the world. "There is evidence to suggest that at extreme levels of repression, Tor does provide a useful tool to people in those circumstances to do things that they otherwise would not be able to do," Eric Jardine, research fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think-tank, told Motherboard in a phone call.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's physiological-arousal department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question, but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it's actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. The study, to be presented soon but previewed by IEEE Spectrum, is entitled "Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing" -- and really, the title says it all. The researchers sat volunteers at a table with a Nao humanoid robot reclining casually on it. They were told (by the robot, in fact) that it was a vocabulary exercise focusing on terms for body parts. Volunteers were told by the bot to, for instance, "touch my ear" using their dominant hand, while the non-dominant hand remained on a skin conductance sensor that loosely monitored their physical state. When asked to touch "high accessibility" areas -- places we normally touch on other people, like shoulders and elbows -- volunteers did so without hesitation or agitation. But "low accessibility" areas -- this would be the robot's butt and where its junk would be -- produced delay and that arousal we talked about.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's world-book-of-records department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers report Tuesday that they were able to keep pig hearts alive and beating in the abdomens of five baboons for record amounts of time -- a median of 298 days and a max of 945 days. Previous benchmarks were set at a median of 180 and a max of 500 days, respectively. Currently in the US, 22 people die every day just waiting for organs, which are in constant short supply. To help solve the problem, researchers turned to pigs years ago to see if they could lend useful organs or at least provide temporary "bridge" tissue to those on wait-lists. Pigs were a good fit mainly because their organs' sizes are similar to that of human's. In early studies, successful survival time in pig-to-primate transplants, generally called xenotransplants, were measured in minutes. The swine substitutes naturally have a molecular marker, called alpha 1-3-galactosyltransferase (gal), which triggers deadly blood clots in primates. In the new study, researchers at the National Institutes of Health and colleagues, tweaked the approach; they engineered the gal-knock out pigs to have extra anti-clotting genetic features and used an antibody to selectively shut down the part of the primate's immune system that responds to pig organs. To avoid needlessly killing the baboons and doing extensive surgery, the researchers opted to transplant the pig hearts into the baboon's abdomens, leaving the primates' hearts in place. In the abdomen, the pig tickers hooked up to circulatory system and beat for a record-breaking amount of time.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's how-to-deal-with-amusing-people-101 department:
An anonymous reader links to a report on Washington Examiner: It simply would not be possible to shut down areas of the Internet that terrorists use to conduct malicious activity, the head of U.S. Cyber Command told a Senate panel on Tuesday. "In a very simplistic way, people ask why can't we shut down that part of the Internet. ... Why are we not able to infiltrate that more?" Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked Cyber Command leader Adm. Mike Rogers during a hearing on the agency's budget for fiscal 2017. Manchin maintained it was a common question from his constituents. "I've had people ask me, can't you just stop it from that area of the world where all the problems are coming, be it Syria or in parts of Iraq or Iran," he said. "I'm not just trying to find an answer, because that question is asked like shut her down, like you do your telephone, but it doesn't work that way," Manchin concluded.
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