- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache

These plugins have been reported as having a security hole that allows a hacker to control your WordPress installation by using a method called Remote Code Execution, which in this case is fairly simple to exploit. The good news is that the developers of both plugins have released a security update, disabling the vulnerable functions.

If you’re running WordPress, with WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache installed, should immediately log in to their WordPress administration panel and upgrade the plugins as soon as possible in order to prevent the vulnerability from being exploited.

Please note that if you have the plugins installed but they are not activated, it is still imperative that you update them, or delete them entirely.

The WWFund, which is the driving force behind Earth Hour, said it bestowed the ‘capital’ honour on Vancouver in recognition of the city’s efforts to reduce pollution that causes climate change.

The city also received the highest number of online votes in a People’s Choice ballot, and the city’s government passed an official “Earth Hour 2013″ proclamation.

About 13-million Canadians turned off their lights for an hour last year in the symbolic event aimed at drawing awareness to climate change.

It’s unclear how many Canadians will join the seventh edition of Earth Hour; however, Earth Hour is embraced by hundreds of Canadian municipalities and many utilities have Earth Hour sections posted on their websites.

BC Hydro, for example, has a way for many of its customers to compare their electricity use during Earth Hour with their normal power usage. It said the B.C. community that saved the biggest relative percentage of electricity during Earth Hour 2012 was Revelstoke, which cutback on an estimated 12 megawatt hours of electricity, or around 12 per cent of its usual load.

Steven Price, a conservation director with the World Wildlife Fund, says municipalities are a driving force behind Earth Hour.

“Now if we could get the provinces, territories and federal government more interested, we’ll be getting somewhere. And Earth Hour is meant to send a message, even if it’s ‘a dark one’ to them.”

His hope may not be so far away.

Provincial governments get involved

B.C. Environment Minister Terry Lake posted a message on BC Hydro’s website urging all residents in the province to power down tonight to show their concern for the global environment.

New Brunswick Environment Minister Bruce Fitch posted a similar message on the website of NB Power.

“This is an important initiative that highlights ways that we can impact our energy consumption and lessen our environmental footprint,” Fitch said in a statement.

A couple eats dinner while taking in the view of downtown from southeast False Creek during Earth Hour in Vancouver in 2012. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)

Price said the challenges of dealing with climate change can be enormous and can seem overwhelming, but we shouldn’t underestimate the difference Canadians can make.

“One way to start doing that is have a moment when you turn the lights out and say ‘I’m starting right now and I’m sending a message to my family but also to my government representatives and I’m going to re-examine how I use fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — in my household,’” he said

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the UN headquarters in New York City will join more than 7,000 cities and towns in more than 150 countries and territories for Earth Hour.

“We participate with an undimmed determination to take action on climate change,” he said.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/03/23/bc-earth-hour-canada.html

Tthere product is great if you are into Pilates or just stretching on a daily basis.
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Just thought I would share a new logo we created for a client today. Peachy Clean Maid Services in Penticton, and the Okanagan.

Every January, millions of people resolve to get more exercise. Health-club memberships spike as does interest in fitness trackers, which use accelerometers to record activity. The trouble with those devices, though, is that they rely on binary tracking algorithms—moving or not—so they generally can’t tell the difference between a steady jog and vacuuming the living room. The Amiigo is the first tracker that can discriminate between exercises, tally reps, and accurately tabulate calories burned.

The device consists of a shoe clip and a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, each with a three-axis accelerometer, microcontroller, battery, and enough flash memory to store up to five days’ worth of data; the band also contains an infrared blood-oxygen and pulse sensor. When the wearer opens the Amiigo smartphone app, it prompts the bracelet to transmit its data. Algorithms process that data to determine what kind of exercises the wearer has done (barbell curls versus hammer curls, for example) and how much of each one. The Amiigo recognizes more than 100 exercises, but the company plans to release app updates to include more—from sit-ups to bat swings to Frisbee tosses.

AMIIGO

Battery Life: Up to 2 days
Price: $119 (est.)
Available: Spring

The jackpot for the Powerball lottery game rose another $50 million today, to $550 million, as people flocked to lottery outlets to take a chance on the mammoth payout.

The jackpot had been $450 million as recently as Tuesday morning, but it was raised later Tuesday by $50 million and then by another $50 million today.

The increases in the jackpot followed what the Massachusetts State Lottery calls a “national ticket sales frenzy.”

The record jackpot could yield some lucky person a lump sum payment of $360.2 million before taxes.

Massachusetts lottery dealers by noon had sold more than $3 million in tickets for the day, a rate of $14,800 per minute, the Lottery said. Since Oct. 3, Massacushetts buyers have plunked down $29 million for tickets and watched as 15 drawings have gone by without a big winner.

About 42 percent of ticket sales are returned to cities and towns. So far, this Powerball series has generated more than $12 million for cities and towns, the Lottery said.

(As for the other 58 percent —players receive about 50 percent of the money back in prizes, lottery dealers get about 6 percent in commissions and bonuses, and lottery administration costs take up about 2 percent, said spokeswoman Beth Bresnahan.)

“It’s been pretty busy. We’ve been selling lots of tickets,” said Alyssa Pawlowski, whose family owns Vista Donuts in Attleboro. “We used to be the No. 1 lottery store in Massachusetts.”

Pawlowski said Vista Donuts, which has been in business for 48 years, has sold a winning jackpot ticket for every big game for everything except Powerball. The Pawlowski family is unsure how much they’ve sold today, but they said they’ve seen some new faces come in to buy a ticket.

Tickets for tonight’s drawing will be sold up until 9:45 p.m.

Powerball is played in 42 states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Island.

NPR science correspondent Joe Palca happened to be in the room recently when John Grotzinger, lead scientist for the Curiosity mission at NASA, started receiving data on his computer from the rover’s on-board chemistry lab, also known as SAM (sample analysis at Mars). SAM and NASA scientists on Earth have been busy analyzing a sample of Martian soil of late, and apparently the dirt from the Red Planet has a secret to tell.

“This data is going to be one for the history books, it’s looking really good,” Grotzinger said in the story that aired yesterday.

And that’s about all he said.

Grotzinger and NASA have remained mum on what exactly Curiosity may have found in the Martian soil, saying it could be several more weeks until they’re able to verify the data. The scientists need to make sure whatever earth-shattering find they have isn’t an error or perhaps some kind of stowaway molecule or whatever it may be that hitched one really long ride from Earth.

Hmmm. So the reporter turned to another source in search of some informed speculation.

Lewis Dartnell is a leading astrobiologist at The Centre For Planetary Sciences at UCL/Birkbeck in London. He makes it clear that with so little to go on, no one outside of NASA can know what the agency thinks it has, but, he says, “the SAM instrument is designed to detect organic molecules on Mars, so the smart money is on an announcement along those lines.”

That’s right, the smart money is on what we all were already thinking — LIFE ON MARS.

Wow. That would be one of the four or five biggest discoveries in human history, wouldn’t it? Or not. The agency has now trotted out a spokesman to hose the rumors down with cold water.

“John was delighted about the quality and range of information coming in from SAM during the day a reporter happened to be sitting in John’s office last week. He has been similarly delighted by results at other points during the mission so far,” spokesman Guy Webster told AFP.

“The scientists want to gain confidence in the findings before taking them outside of the science team. As for history books, the whole mission is for the history books,” Webster said.

So, what can we conclude from these mysterious events? For starters, let’s note that the spokesman with the cold water did not say the speculation was incorrect. He did not deny that Curiosity has found evidence of life on Mars (or, for that matter, actual life on Mars). This is perhaps significant. For sure, I know carefully crafted PR-speak when I see it (having carefully crafted a good bit of it throughout the course of my career), and this is official language that’s scrupulously saying not a damned thing. The whole “it’s all historic!” line is pure misdirection. In other words, the PR statement has made me more suspicious, not less.

Why the secrecy, though? There are a number of possible explanations. For one thing, this is science, and science is about gathering, analyzing and verifying evidence. The timetables this process employs are completely at odds with those preferred by ratings-mad media agencies on a 24/7 “news” cycle. They’re not trying to generate sensational headlines – on the contrary. Until they know precisely what they’re dealing with they’d rather generate no headlines at all, and I’m willing to wager that Dr. Grotzinger has been on the business end of a stern talking-to today for reacting that way in front of a reporter.

Another possibility is that they have uncovered a landmark moment in human history. If so, it so radically alters what we know about the universe and our place in it that official acknowledgement of the discovery requires deep consideration.

Let’s speculate a bit. Say that Curiosity has, in fact, discovered life on Mars. What does it mean? The dominant assumption throughout most of history, driven primarily by religious exceptionalists, was that Earth is home to the only life in the universe. More recently we’ve discovered that the portions of the universe that we can detect, observe and examine contain several Earth-like planets that could theoretically support life. These analyses employ narrow definitions and, obviously, we cannot yet study more than the smallest fraction of the universe. Basic probability suggests that it’s unlikely we’re alone.

Still, it is one thing to speculate that life might exist, or even that it probably exists, and another entirely to have evidence of extra-terrestrial life.

So if NASA has, in fact, discovered life on Mars, it turns our assumptions upside down. Instead of viewing life as something unspeakably rare, if not utterly unique to Earth, we overnight have to assume that life isn’t rare at all – it’s common as dirt. Instead of life being too complex to evolve more than once, it becomes something that evolves as a matter of routine. Put another way, at that stage we will have evidence that life exists on two-thirds of the worlds that we have knowledge of. Never mind what are the odds of life elsewhere in the universe – if it evolved on two planets that are side-by-side, what are the odds that they’re the only two? If you’ll pardon the expression, the chances would be astronomical.

For the moment, we have no idea what’s going on at NASA right now. We do know that there have been other bits of evidence suggesting that the conditions for life may have once existed on Mars, and we know what SAM was designed to look for. It’s therefore not unreasonable to speculate a bit in the spirit of the joy of discovery.

If Curiosity has uncovered extraterrestrial life, I personally cannot wait for the official announcement and the uproar to follow. It might do us arrogant humans good to learn that we have neighbors, even if they’re microscopic ones.

Source Via: http://scholarsandrogues.com/2012/11/21/has-nasa-discovered-life-on-mars-if-so-what-are-the-implications/

Jeffrey Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor at Idaho State University, has spent significant time in his career searching for Bigfoot. That’s gained him the ire of colleagues, but it hasn’t stopped him from upping the stakes more and more. Now he’s gotten the nod from the University to build a remote-controlled blimp and continue the chase.

Meldrum is trying to raise $300,000 in private donations for the project, which pays for some high-tech bells and whistles, like a thermal-imaging camera, that could help find the infamously blurry animal. Meldrum will be running the blimp and camera with another Bigfoot enthusiast, William Barnes, who says he came up with the plan when he saw the creature more than a decade ago. Dubbing the plan the Falcon Project, the duo hopes to have a months-long expedition across the West started by next spring, but so far, to the chagrin of other believers, they haven’t raised any cash to move the blimp skyward.

VIA POPSCI

Researchers at Imperial College London have created a simple and quick HIV test that is both more sensitive and 10 times cheaper than existing methods. The new test, which uses nanotechnology to produce results visible to the naked eye, could be invaluable in poorer countries that lack sophisticated laboratory equipment.

To detect the AIDS-causing virus using the new method, researchers add serum from a patient’s blood sample to a solution of gold nanoparticles. If the nanoparticles come into contact with an HIV biomarker called p24, they clump together into an irregular pattern that turns the mixture blue–indicating a positive test result. If p24 is absent, the gold nanoparticles separate into ball shapes, and the mixture turns red, signaling a negative result.

Lead investigator Molly Stevens said the test could be altered to detect other diseases, including malaria, sepsis, prostate cancer, tuberculosis, and leishmaniasis.

The study appears in Nature Nanotechnology.

Credits to Popsci http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/cheap-new-nanoparticle-hiv-test-produces-results-visible-naked-eye

A new class of electronics can dissolve and disappear on a pre-set schedule, within a few minutes or a few years, depending on when you want them to go away. They could live in the body and deliver drugs, they could stick on the exterior of buildings or tanks, and they can become compost instead of metal scrap–in other words, they turn the common conception of electronics completely upside down.

Transient electronics, as they’ve been dubbed, are a combination of silk and silicon designed to work seamlessly in our bodies and in our environments. In a new study, researchers built a thermal device designed to monitor infection in a rodent and a 64-pixel digital camera–all from dissolvable material.

Suk-Won Hwang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and several colleagues made circuits out of silkworm cocoons, superthin sheets of porous silicon, and electrodes made of magnesium. All these materials are biocompatible and because they’re extremely thin and soluble, they dissolve even in minute quantities of water. The silk is the main structural scaffold, and it determines the dissolution rate of the entire device. Biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto at Tufts University, a coauthor, figured out how to adjust the silk protein’s properties so it degrades at a wide range of intervals. The silk is dissolved and then re-crystallized, and by controlling the crystallization, the researchers can control the rate at which it dissolves again.

In a major test of the platform’s biocompatibility, the team engineered a silk biomedical implant in a mouse. The device was programmed to break down after a certain length of time in which it was exposed to bodily fluids, and then it was doped with an antibacterial compound. The team implanted it in an infected surgical site and after three weeks, the infection was reduced and small residual pieces of the implant could be detected. Here’s a list of other items they’ve built so far: transient transistors; diodes; wireless power coils; temperature and strain sensors; photodetectors; solar cells; radio oscillators and antennas; and digital cameras. There is a huge array of possible uses for this technology, which is partly funded by DARPA.

Even when they’re likely to be obsolete the moment you buy them, modern electronics are built to last. When they’re no longer needed, they pile up in our houses, recycling centers or landfills. Transient electronics could be a solution–a device can be programmed to last a few years, and then completely dissolve when it’s rendered obsolete. The research appears in this week’s issue of Science.