An anonymous reader writes: NASA partner Orbital ATK reports an unmanned cargo shipped has successfully docked at the ISS, delivering 7,900 lbs (3.6 metric tons) worth of supplies for the crew of six astronauts. The supplies consisted of food, water, clothes, and materials needed for scientific research such as a new 3D printer and Gecko Gripper. The operation was over by 1452 GMT as the space station's robotic arm, operated by crew members, captured Cygnus and guided it into its berthing port. Orbital has launched five supply missions to the ISS as part of a $1.9 billion contract with NASA. "Our flexible Cygnus spacecraft has a lot of work left to do. Following its stay at the ISS, and for the first time, we will undertake three experiments onboard the unmanned spacecraft," said Frank Culbertson, president of Orbital ATK's Space Systems Group.

anderzole quotes a report from BGR: With calls for Apple's upcoming iPhone models to be "spectacular," it appears that pundits and those who have been quick to proclaim that we've reached "peak iPhone" have nothing to worry about. While we'll know what type of wild new features the iPhone 7 will incorporate in just about three months, a new report from reputed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo provides us with some interesting insight as to what Apple has planned for 2017 when it releases what will presumably be called the iPhone 7s. According to a research note Kuo provided to investors, Apple is busy working on an iPhone model with curved pieces of glass and an AMOLED display. What's more, the report relays that Apple also has plans to shake up its iPhone lineup with a model sporting a 5.8-inch display. Further, Kuo believes that the bezels on the iPhone 7s will be smaller than they are on Apple's current iPhone lineup.

New submitter FourG writes: Not much fanfare (which is to be expected given the niche of the device now) but it looks like Sony posted a fix for the much maligned "can't download dashboard" error. It requires a USB key and can't be done over-the-air. My Dash required a factor reset afterward before it successfully downloaded the dashboard, but YMMV...

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel has been released. New to the Linux 4.6 kernel are a significant number of new features including NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 open-source 3D support when using the closed-source firmware files, Dell XPS 13 Skylake laptop support, a fix for laptops that were limiting their own performance due to incorrectly thinking they were overheating, AHCI runtime power management support, Intel graphics power management features enabled by default, a new file-system (OrangeFS), and a range of other improvements.

Reader mdsolar writes that for the first time a majority of Americans have told Gallup they oppose nuclear energy. Support peaked at 62% in 2010, but "as Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation's energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels," Gallup reports. Their latest poll found 44% of respondents still supported nuclear energy, while 54% opposed it, a trend which could eventually affect the future of nuclear power. The New York Times reports that operating licenses will expire for 36 of America's 99 reactors between 2029 and 2035. What do you think? How strongly do you support (or oppose) generating electricity with nuclear energy?

skywire writes: We've all followed the recent story of AlphaGo beating a top Go master. Now IBM researchers Tayfun Gokmen and Yurii Vlasov have described what could be a game changer for machine learning — an array of resistive processing units that would use stochastic techniques to dramatically accelerate the backpropagation algorithm, speeding up neural network training by a factor of 30,000. They argue that such an array would be reliable, low in power use, and buildable with current CMOS fabrication technology. "Even Google's AlphaGo still needed thousands of chips to achieve its level of intelligence," adds Tom's Hardware. "IBM researchers are now working to power that level of intelligence with a single chip, which means thousands of them put together could lead to even more breakthroughs in AI capabilities in the future."

An anonymous reader cites an article on The Next Web: Microsoft research manager Shahram Izadi is showing off the company's latest innovation using HoloLens: 'holoportation,' enabling him to appear as if he's there in real-time, anywhere in the world. His image is captured in 3D by cameras placed around the room. This is then stitched together, compressed and transmitted so someone else can see, hear and interact with him as though he's right there with them. You can even playback previous interactions, as though "walking into a living memory," and miniaturize the content to make it easier to consume. "Imagine being able to virtually teleport from one place to another," he says. Well, if you're the owner of a HoloLens, you soon could do. Microsoft's HoloLens is arguably the front-runner in the nascent, but fast-evolving, augmented reality space. The company's technology has previously been seen used by astronauts and scientists to "walk on the Mars surface" without stepping out of their office on Earth. It's fascinating to see how Microsoft continues to further innovate in this field.

BVBigelow quotes a report from Xconomy: 3D Robotics, the drone maker that began life in Tijuana and San Diego, has been consolidating its operations after stumbling in its bid to go head-to-head against China's DJI, the world's biggest maker of consumer drones. In an interview with Xconomy, CEO Chris Anderson confirmed that 3DR has been reorganizing to focus its drone business on enterprise customers, but downplayed the significance of the high-flying robotic company's layoffs over the past six months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Amazon has published an online guide explaining how to access its virtual assistant Alexa via a Raspberry Pi. The walkthrough includes access to the necessary app data and certificates in order to link the budget computer up to the tech giant's servers. Amazon says that users require at least the second-generation model, released in February 2015, as well as: a plug-in USB microphone, microSD card, ethernet cable, Wi-Fi wireless adapter, mouse, keyboard, and screen. The coding involved is limited to typing in sets of commands, but the guide explains the purpose of each one. Users also need to register for an Amazon Developer Account, which they can get for free.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Intel could dump Nvidia for a licensing deal with AMD as the chip giant tries to prop up its patent portfolio. Currently, Intel is under a $1.5 billion licensing agreement with Nvidia, which the two companies signed in 2011. At the time, the two companies had spent years fighting each other in courts over patent licensing, and the agreement put all that litigation to rest. Intel's Nvidia deal is set to expire on March 17, 2017, and a recent report by Bloomberg claimed that Intel is now looking to cut a deal with AMD instead.

eggboard writes: While blue light emitted by monitors and mobile displays has been widely cited as a cause in disrupting people's circadian rhythm, the evidence is thin: a narrow range of blue spectra might not be the problem (it may be a more complicated interaction), brightness may be more important, and Night Shift's (and f.lux's) effects are probably too negligible anyway. Apple's Night Shift feature lets you adjust the color temperature of your display to the warmer end of the spectrum. Apple notes, "Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep."

An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Fortune, Snapchat, the messaging platform which has recently become the number one free app on the App Store, has agreed to acquire Bitstrips, the folks behind the popular emoji-creation service Bitmoji. Fortune's sources has said the deal is "in the ballpark" of $100 million. TechCrunch writes, "The idea behind Bitmoji is simple. Users download the app and create an Avatar that represents them. They can choose from a wide range of options like face shape, hair color and cut, eye shape and color, etc. From there, Bitmoji is added as a third-party keyboard, and the app offers hundreds of options for users to send to their friends, all featuring their avatar." It'll be interesting to see which features of Bitstrips will be implemented into Snapchat, given Bitstrip's experience with keyboard integrations.

insitus quotes a report from Speier.House.Gov: Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) introduced the Closing the Pre-Paid Mobile Device Security Gap Act of 2016, which would require people to present identification when purchasing "burner phones" and other pre-paid mobile devices, as well as requiring merchants to keep records of those purchases. "Burner phones" are pre-paid phones that terrorists, human traffickers, and narcotics dealers often use to avoid scrutiny by law enforcement because they can be purchased without identification and record-keeping requirements. This bill would close that legal gap. "This bill would close one of the most significant gaps in our ability to track and prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery," said Speier. "The 'burner phone' loophole is an egregious gap in our legal framework that allows actors like the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber to evade law enforcement while they plot to take innocent lives. The Paris attackers also used 'burner phones.' As we've seen so vividly over the past few days, we cannot afford to take those kinds of risks. It's time to close this 'burner phone' loophole for good."

mdsolar quotes a report from The Japan Times: A heavily contaminated area within a 10-kilometer radius of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine will be used to store nuclear waste materials, the chief of a state agency managing the wider exclusion zone said in an interview. "People cannot live in the land seriously contaminated for another 500 years, so we are planning to make it into an industrial complex," said Vitalii Petruk, the head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management. The zone is 30-km radius from the site of the 1986 nuclear accident -- the world's worst nuclear disaster. "We are thinking of making land that is less contaminated a buffer zone to protect a residential area from radioactive materials," he said. Petruk added, "We are considering building a facility for alternative energy such as solar panels" so as to utilize the remaining electricity infrastructure including power grids for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant there.

tripleevenfall writes: Pebble is laying off 25% of its employees -- that's 40 pink slips -- taking it down to just 80 people. It seems indicative of the smartwatch market's terrible state. Previously the darling of the crowdfunding fraternity -- it raised over $30 million on Kickstarter -- Pebble is finding it hard to keep the plates spinning in 2016.
The layoffs were confirmed by Pebble's CEO Eric Migicovsky, who implied that venture capitalists are now less keen on funding the smartwatch category.

aarondubrow writes: Researchers working on the Severe Hail Analysis, Representation and Prediction (SHARP) project at the University of Oklahoma used the Stampede supercomputer to gain a better understanding of the conditions that cause severe hail to form, and to produce hail forecasts with far greater accuracy than those currently used operationally. The model the team used is six times more resolved that the National Weather Service's highest-resolution forecasts and applies machine learning algorithms to improve its predictions. The researchers will publish their results in an upcoming issue of the American Meteorological Society journal Weather and Forecasting.

coondoggie quotes a report from NetworkWorld: NASA this week said it was considering a new Centennial Challenge: Build an airship capable of long-duration flight for scientific missions. The agency issued a Request For information to see if there was enough industry interest in the challenge and to further develop rules for the competition.
The challenge would award prizes for successful demonstration of a stratospheric airship that would be required to accomplish the following: Reach a minimum altitude of 20 km, maintain the altitude for 20 hours (200 hours for Tier 2 competition), remain within a 20 km diameter station area (and navigate between two designated points for Tier 2), successfully return the 20 kg payload (200 kg for Tier 2 competition) and payload data, and show airship scalability for longer duration flights with larger payloads through a scalability review. The proposed structure for this competition is [centered around two main awards]. Award 1: A proposed $1.0 million will be split between teams successfully completing Tier 1 within 3 years of the challenge initiation. Award 2: A proposed $1.5 million will be awarded to the first successful demonstration of Tier 2 within four years of challenge initiation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranians with intelligence links over a series of crippling cyberattacks against 46 U.S. financial institutions between 2011 and 2013. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also accuses one of the Iranians of remotely accessing the control system of a small dam in Rye, N.Y, during the same period. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the indictment is meant to send a message: "That we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market." According to the indictment, the seven men worked for two Iran-based computer security companies that have done work for the Iranian government, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The men allegedly carried out large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a server with communications in order to disable it.

Reader itwbennett writes: A Trojan program, dubbed USB Thief by researchers at security firm ESET, infects USB drives that contain portable installations of popular applications such as Firefox, NotePad++, or TrueCrypt, and it also seems to be designed to steal information from so-called air-gapped computers. "In the case we analyzed, it was configured to steal all data files such as images or documents, the whole windows registry tree (HKCU), file lists from all of the drives, and information gathered using an imported open-source application called 'WinAudit'," the ESET researchers said. The stolen data was saved back to the USB drive and was encrypted using elliptic curve cryptography. Once the USB drive was removed, there was no evidence left on the computer, the ESET researchers added.

An anonymous reader quotes an article on AndroidAuthority: Optics pundits have been crowing about AMOLED destroying LCD for a while now: they are thinner, brighter, more energy efficient and arguably offer better colors, higher contrast, and deeper saturation than LCD. The biggest barrier stopping AMOLED from taking over as the smartphone display technology of choice has been price. Until now that is. As predicted two years ago, it has only taken 24 months for AMOLED production costs to fall below that of LCD. Production costs in the first quarter for a 5-inch Full HD smartphone display are $14.30 for an AMOLED panel and $14.60 for an LCD display. In the fourth quarter of 2015, these figures were $17.10 and $15.70, respectively. [...] With AMOLED production costs dropping below LCD for the first time, AMOLED panels will soon become the default display technology choice for manufacturers on their mid-range and entry-level devices as well.