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Interesting find - headline... "Japan just found a 'semi-infinite' deposit of rare-earth minerals — and it could be a 'game-changer' in competition with China Jeremy Berke Apr. 13, 2018, 12:26 PM" Story highlights... "Japan started seeking its own rare-earth mineral deposits after China withheld shipments of the substances amid a dispute over islands that both countries claim as their own, Reuters reported in 2014. ... A new finding that could change the global economy... The newly discovered deposit is enough to "supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world," the study's authors wrote in the study. ... The...

May 8 (UPI) -- The study of a unique crystalline material, composed of aluminum and platinum atoms, has revealed a pair of electronic properties that have never been seen before. The atoms in the new materials are crystallized in a special pattern, with each row offset from the other. The pattern creates a spiral staircase of aluminum and platinum atoms. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, the material's unique crystalline structure produces Rarita-Schwinger fermions in its interior and extremely long quadruple topological Fermi arcs on its surface. Rarita-Schwinger fermions are a type of...

Excerpt not allowed from Quartz, story here.

Parents have been using apps and GPS devices to keep track of their kids for years, but now a local school district wants to prohibit parents from using one feature while their students are in school. Lake Travis ISD's board will vote Wednesday on a policy change to prevent parents from using devices to listen in to their kids while they're at school. It's a legal issue, the district told KXAN. Parents who are discreetly listening in to their kids might also be listening in on other children, and in addition to raising privacy concerns, the practice could violate federal...

How deeply does Google penetrate both your internet life and your real life? Maybe you've been considering ditching Google search for Duck Duck Go, or trading in Google Chrome for a privacy-respecting browser like Brave? Perhaps you want to separate yourself from Gmail and Google Maps? Those are all worthwhile endeavors, but what happens when you actively block all of your devices from even pinging Google's servers? Apparently, nothing short of nightmare fuel. Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill recently accepted a monumental challenge: blocking tech giants from her everyday life due to privacy concerns and sheer curiosity. But she took the challenge...

Tespa’s Overwatch Collegiate Championship has been well underway for several months now. Back in January, a crowded field of over 500 participating teams with over 4,500 players began to thin down to the final 16 teams that we had at the start of this past week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, that field thinned down to the final eight teams, set to play one another at a LAN event in Houston, TX. The exact date for the quarterfinals is listed as May 10 on the Tespa website, although no official announcement has been made to confirm this. Each of these Round...

Internal discussion threads exclusively obtained by Breitbart News shows Google employees in meltdown over the tech giant’s decision to include the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Kay Coles James, on an artificial intelligence advisory council. Multiple Google employees in the thread also engaged in outright smears against the Heritage Foundation. Google employees accused the think-tank of transphobia, homophobia, and “extremism,” of viewing LGBT people as “sub-human,” questioning their “humanity,” and supporting “exterminationist” views. “Would we even consider having a virulent anti­-semite on the advisory board? How about an avowed racist or white supremacist?” asked one Google employee. “This seems...

Amazon is joining the race to provide broadband internet access around the globe via thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, newly uncovered filings show. The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service. It’ll take years to bring the big, audacious project to fruition, however, and Amazon could face fierce competition from SpaceX,...

This is an amazing post of how an American company needed to move their operations outside of the USA in order to prove fourth amendment protections to their American clients. Read, learn and cry at what is left of our once great republic. Why we moved our servers to Iceland 30 Mar 2019 - Adriaan van Rossum - Help improve this post As the founder of Simple Analytics, I have always been mindful for the need of trust and transparency for our customers. We would like to be held accountable for our customers needs, so they can sleep in peace....

President Donald Trump accused companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google of colluding with Democrats to censor his supporters online to their political advantage. “Actually it’s incredible that I won the election because you know it was so rigged against me,” he said. “It wasn’t Russians. Russia collusion was a delusion. But what there is, is there was collusion between the Democrats and these tech companies.” The president spoke about political bias in top Silicon Valley companies in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Monday. The president said that any Republican running in 2020 would face a “tremendous disadvantage” in...

When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work. The surprising conclusion to the latest version of the annual study contrasted sharply with the experience of women working in Silicon Valley and in many other industries. In response to the finding, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money....

Academics from Greece have devised a new browser-based attack that can allow hackers to run malicious code inside users' browsers even after users have closed or navigated away from the web page on which they got infected This new attack, called MarioNet, opens the door for assembling giant botnets from users' browsers. These botnets can be used for in-browser crypto-mining (cryptojacking), DDoS attacks, malicious files hosting/sharing, distributed password cracking, creating proxy networks, advertising click-fraud, and traffic stats boosting, researchers said. . .

Advocates of "body hacking" will gather in Austin this weekend to promote everything from bionic limbs to human microchips that can serve as anything from identification to a car key... Goodman showed off his own most recent "hack," a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip in his left hand. It's the same technology veterinarians implant into pets as a way to identify dogs and cats, but humans are using them to make their lives simpler or, in some cases, safer. "You can log into your computer, you could open your doors" with the chips, Goodman said. "I know people who start their...

It was a crowded primary field and Tony Evers, running for governor, was eager to win the support of officials gathered at a Wisconsin state Democratic Party meeting, so the candidate did all the usual things: He read the room, he shook hands, he networked. Then he put an electronic fence around everyone there. The digital fence enabled Evers’ team to push ads onto the iPhones and Androids of all those attending the meeting. Not only that, but because the technology pulled the unique identification numbers off the phones, a data broker could also use the digital signatures to follow...

This may be disappointing news for the tablet-toting software buffs that populate San Francisco, but their hometown is no longer the top tech city in the world, according to a new report. It’s being outranked by an East Coast rival, New York. The northern California metropolis has long held its title, largely thanks to giants like eBay, Netflix, Apple and Fitbit storing their headquarters there. But its high cost of co-working is sending firms and their talent eastward, notes a study from the commercial real estate agency Savills. Manhattan and Brooklyn already have their fair share of big names in...

(CNN) - Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has quickly become one of Washington's most prolific social media users, but this weekend the New York freshman said Silicon Valley companies had too much power and that "the current monopoly trend is societally and economically unsustainable." Ocasio-Cortez's comments came in the aftermath of layoffs at a number of number of news organizations, including BuzzFeed and HuffPost. "The biggest threats to journalism right now are tech monopolies & concentration of ownership," she tweeted on Saturday, adding: "The fact of the matter is the current monopoly trend is societally & economically unsustainable. We can't simply...

I'm looking for an affordable dash cam system, either front facing or both front and rear facing. I don't want to have to tear out my headliner or pay big bucks to have it installed. TIA.

Researchers have created a field-effect transistor using a single-crystal, “paint-on” perovskite Illustration: North Carolina State University =================================================================== Transistors, and the conductive traces that connect them, are routinely created by the billions on the surface of silicon wafers, which are later cut into the individual “chips” that power our computers, phones, watches, and countless other electronic gadgets. But few people think much about how those silicon wafers are made in the first place. It’s quite tricky. Very pure sand (silicon dioxide) has to be melted, at which point a seed crystal of elemental silicon is brought in contact with the melt,...

In a move supported by both major political parties in Australia, a bill named the “Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018,” has passed the House of Representatives and is headed to the upper House for a vote. Given its bi-partisan support and the position of PM Michael Turnbull regarding encryption, passage into law seems certain. A Hacker News article provides additional details about the bill and its ramifications, not only for tech companies like Apple, Samsung, WhatsApp, Signal and others but also for individuals. The intended purpose of the legislation is to give the Australian government and security and law...

The Worldwide Ferry Safety Association (WFSA) is pleased to announce that winners have been selected for its 2019 Ferry Design Competition. The awards will be presented at WFSA’s Ferry Safety and Technology Conference, which will be be held in Bangkok February 20?22, 2019. In the contest, student teams were tasked with designing a passenger ferry for the Pasig River, the locus of commercial and public activities in Manila. Dr. Roberta Weisbrod, executive director of WFSA, noted that navigational challenges included low bridges and waterborne vegetation and debris. The first prize of $5000 will be awarded to a team from the...