Oxford professor won £500,000 for solving 300-year-old mathematical theorem

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March 16, 2016

Believe it or not, someone just won £500,000 for solving one line mathematical equation, which remained unsolved for last 300-years. A professor from Oxford University earned this achievement by cracking Fermat’s Last Theorem.

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Professor Won £500,000 For Solving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Sir Andrew Wiles, 62, was awarded the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he published in 1994, by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.

The Abel Prize is widely regarded as the Nobel for mathematics and the most prestigious international award for the discipline.

“It is a tremendous honour to receive the Abel Prize and to join the previous laureates who have made such outstanding contributions to the field.
“Fermat’s equation was my passion from an early age, and solving it gave me an overwhelming sense of fulfilment,” — Sir Andrew, currently a professor at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute was quoted as saying by The Telegraph
“It has always been my hope that my solution of this age—old problem would inspire many young people to take up mathematics and to work on the many challenges of this beautiful and fascinating subject.”

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First formulated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, the Fermat’s Last Theorem states: There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2. Wiles has been awarded for developing proof for this simple looking yet complex theorem.

Fermat himself claimed to have proved the theorem, but in what must rank as one of the greatest teases in the history of mathematics, claimed that the margin of the book he was making notes in was too narrow to elaborate. Over the next three centuries, mathematicians around the world tried and failed to solve the theorem.

Wiles took seven-year quest to solve the problem, working in his attic without telling anyone except for his wife. In 1993, after seven years of intense study at Princeton University, Wiles went public with his proof in a series of lectures at Cambridge. When he wrote the proof on the board to conclude the lectures, the room erupted in applause from the two hundred researchers present.

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But later that year, a mathematician who was checking Wiles’s proof found a major mistake in his workings. Wiles was devastated but vowed to fix the error, and called on his former student, Richard Taylor to help. After a year of work, the mistake was corrected and the revised proof published.

Wiles had solved the problem by combining three complex mathematical fields, namely modular forms, elliptic curves, and Galois representations. Though complicated, Wiles said the equations were not beyond the capabilities of a student. “The truth is the methods I used were not any more sophisticated than I could certainly do as an undergraduate,” he said.

In solving the Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles developed new tools which have since allowed researchers to make great strides in an ambitious effort to unify disparate branches of mathematics.

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Stardock’s new multi-GPU tool let you mix AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a PC

By

Sabarinath

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March 14, 2016

What you think about mixing of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a single PC ? Untill now I thought it was impossible to combine these two rival brands to work together but now a company came up with a new idea of multi-GPU tool that will will allow gamers to combine the power of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in one machine.

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Multi-GPU Tool to Mix AMD and Nvidia Graphics Cards in a PC

Stardock, the company famous for its Windows customization software – such as desktop organization utility Fences, and its Start menu alternatives, come up with this new multi-GPU tool.

“Basically, it’s multi-GPU. You can mix and match cards however you want. One of the biggest problems with games is that a new video card comes out from AMD and Nvidia, and they’re like [expensive], and you have to make a call. I like my video card. I can play most games on it, and I don’t want to spend $800 on some new video card. But imagine, instead, hey, they’re having a sale [using my GTX 760 as an example]. Hey, they’re having a sale on an AMD 290 for $75. Wouldn’t it be cool to put this into your computer and double your performance. You keep this in there [the 760]. You put this in there [the 290], and your games are twice as fast without doing anything else.” – said by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to Venturebeat

Of course, with NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and AMD’s CrossFire you can link multiple graphics cards together but only of the corresponding manufacturer, and the cards must be identical.

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But with this new Stardock approach enables you to mix brands and generations of cards. So gamers will be able to throw any old card in to boost the power of their existing video board. And the interesting thing is all of these will be possible not with a new hardware peripheral but via software.

Stardock and Microsoft have supposedly been working together for about a year now to take advantage of a feature found in DirectX 12 that will make this possible. Name of the product and details of the requirements still remain undisclosed.

This new multi-GPU tool could even benefit monitor makers. Instead of needing to buy beefier cards to run games at 4K resolution, you could just get one or two older cards to help you meet that threshold. It could also help motherboard manufacturers. People may need more PCIe spots, and it’s cheaper to upgrade a motherboard and use a cheaper card than to buy the newest, most powerful GPUs.

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Newly discovered plastic-eating bacteria could save our planet

By

Jenna Jose

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March 13, 2016

One of the major problem that our planet facing today is plastic pollution. We know plastics are non-biodegradable materials, and according to reports we manufacture over 300 million tonnes of plastics each year for use in everything from packaging to clothing. But after use when we discarded these plastics, they will become a real threat to our environment. But now scientists found a new plastic-eating bacteria to minimize this problem.

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Discovered Plastic-Eating Bacteria

A group of scientists from at Kyoto University, Japan discovered a species of plastic-eating bacteria which is capable to breaks down fully one of the most common kinds of plastic called Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the type often used to package bottled drinks.

Earlier a group of Yale researchers has led to the discovery of a rare fungus that can break down plastic. And now its found that any microbes that can eat it.

To find the plastic-eating bacteria research team collected 250 PET-contaminated samples including sediment, soil and wastewater from a plastic bottle recycling site.

Next they screened the microbes living on the samples to see whether any of them were eating the PET and using it to grow. They originally found a consortium of bugs that appeared to break down a PET film, but they eventually discovered that just one of bacteria species was responsible for the PET degradation. They named it Ideonella sakainesis.

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plastic-eating bacteria — Bottle breakdown | Image Credits : Sciencealert

Further tests in the lab revealed that it used two enzymes to break down the PET. After adhering to the PET surface, the bacteria secretes one enzyme onto the PET to generate an intermediate chemical. That chemical is then taken up by the cell, where another enzyme breaks it down even further, providing the bacteria with carbon and energy to grow.

The researchers report that a community of Ideonella sakaiensis working this way could break down a thin film of PET over the course of six weeks if the temperature were held at a steady 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

This opens a whole new approach to plastic recycling and decontamination. At present, most plastic bottles are not truly recycled. Instead they are melted and reformed into other hard plastic products.

The PET-digesting enzymes offer a way to truly recycle plastic. They could be added to vats of waste, breaking all the bottles or other plastic items down into into easy-to-handle chemicals. These could then be used to make fresh plastics, producing a true recycling system.

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New MIT Javascript code will load all web pages 34% faster in any browser

By

Sabarinath

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March 10, 2016

Even though if we have good internet connection sometimes we have to wait several minutes for a single web page to load. This is because now websites are getting more complex. But now a group of computer scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come with a new tool that promises to solve this problem.

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Load All Web Pages 34% Faster

A team of researchers of MIT, working at the university’s Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory developed a system known as Polaris, that can make your browser to load all web pages 34% faster. Polaris cuts load-times by determining the best way to ‘overlap’ the downloading of different parts of a webpage.

How Polaris Work ?

When you visit a new page, your browser reaches across the internet to fetch ‘objects’ like pictures, videos, and HTML files. The browser then evaluates the objects and puts them on the page. However, some objects are dependent on others, and browsers can’t see all of these dependencies until they come across them.

Polaris works by tracking all of these relationships and dependencies between objects on the page and turning the information into a ‘dependency graph’ that can be interpreted by your browser. Polaris essentially gives the browser a roadmap of the page, with all the details of the best and quickest way to load it.

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“It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data,” says PhD student Ravi Netravali, who is first author on a paper about Polaris. “As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.”

The researchers tested Polaris across a range of network conditions on some of the world’s most popular websites, and found it made them load an average of 34 per cent faster when compared to a normal browser.

The good news is that Polaris is written in JavaScript. That means that it could be introduced to any website—it’d just have to be running on the server in question, so it’d automatically kick in for any page load—and used with unmodified browsers.

The team is hoping that some day soon the system will be integrated directly into browsers so that they will be able to work on further optimizations and everyone will be able to experience a faster Internet.

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First Fully Functional Mac Ransomware Targeted Apple Users

By

Sabarinath

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March 7, 2016

Here come first ever Mac ransomware targeting Apple users. So Apple users now new Mac ransomware shows that you’re no better off than regular old PC users. Researchers reported that hackers are targeting users with this ransomware through torrenting software.

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First Known Mac Ransomware Out There

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks on friday found first fully functional ransomware, dubbed “KeRanger“, seen on the OS X platform. Researchers said that piece of “BitTorrent” software known as “Transmission” was infected with ransomware, KeRanger. so that when Mac users were downloading the latest version of the product, the ransomware was installed on their machine.

“Transmission is an open source project. It’s possible that Transmission’s official website was compromised and the files were replaced by re-compiled malicious versions, but we can’t confirm how this infection occurred,” Palo Alto said in the blog entry.

According to researchers the ransomware was able to bypass Apple’s security checks as it was “signed with a valid Mac app development system”, tricking the OS X operating system into thinking it was a legitimate piece of software.

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How KeRanger Ransomware Attack ?

So once KeRanger was installed on a Mac, it waited three days before carrying out the attack. The malware begins encrypting certain types of document and data files on a system and once that process is finished, KeRanger demands the victim pay one bitcoin, equivalent to just over $400, according to the latest price by industry website CoinDesk.

It’s not the first time Mac-targeting ransomware has been detected by security experts, as back in 2014 Kaspersky Labs discovered ransomware for Mac, though it wasn’t complete at the time. But the researchers today announced that they believed KeRanger was “the first fully functional ransomware seen on the OS X platform.”

The Palo Alto Networks team notified both Apple and the Transmission Project on March 4. Since then, they say Apple has revoked the security certificate exploited by KeRanger and updated its XProtect antivirus software.

The researches also note that Transmission has removed the affected versions of the BitTorrent installer from its website.

Usually Windows PCs are making headlines for being targeted with viruses, malware and any number of digital infections and now onwards untouchable Mac also came to the field.

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Scientists Built Biological Supercomputer for Much Faster Problem Solving Using Very Little Energy

By

Sabarinath

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February 27, 2016

When we hear Supercomputer, first thing comes to our mind is its super speed and performance related to normal ones. But with impressive performance every supercomputer comes at a price – size and energy consumption. Now some scientists developed a model of biological supercomputer that have much faster problem solving feature by using very little energy.

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Biological Supercomputer – Faster & Power Efficient

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have utilised nanotechnology to create a biological supercomputer that can solve certain mathematical problems far faster and more energy-efficiently than conventional electrical computers.

Conventional computers can only do one thing at a time. The more arithmetic operations a problem requires, the longer it takes to perform the calculations. This means that electronic computers are not efficient in dealing with combinatorial problems, for example in cryptography and mathematical optimisation, which require the computer to test a large number of different solutions.

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So unlike a traditional computer, biological supercomputer don’t work in sequence, they operate in parallel — leading to much faster problem solving and using energy efficiently.

Biological supercomputer use a strategy similar to that of so-called quantum computers. Quantum mechanics uses qubits – ones and zeroes – whereas biocomputers use molecules that work in parallel.

And next advantage of biological supercomputer is its energy efficiency. Lund’s Heiner Linke says – “Biocomputer requires less than one per cent of the energy an electronic transistor needs to carry out one calculation step”.

And also CBC reports that the model biocomputer used in the experiment is only about the size of a book.

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Forget Freedom 251, Here Comes Freedom 651, Promises to Deliver Rs 651 Smartphones in 10 Years via Drones

By

Sabarinath

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February 23, 2016

You may all remember World’s cheapest smartphone, Freedom 251 which make a revolutionized launch on February 18th promises to deliver Rs.651 smartphones before June 30. But now Freedom 251 gets tough competition, Rs 651 phone, Freedom 651 to launch soon and promises you delivery to your doorstep within 10 years by drones.

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Freedom 251 : World’s Cheapest Smartphone

Noida-based company Ringing Bells recently launched the most affordable touchscreen handset, Freedom 251 in India for Rs 251, making it the world’s cheapest 3G smart-phone.

The Ringing Bells Freedom 251 runs on Android 5.1, with a 4-inch display, a quad-core 1.3GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage (expandable to 32GB).

The company make their online launch in February 18 2016, started to take orders online by promising customers that they will deliver the phone before 30th June 2016.

Ringing Bells Freedom 251 bookings have officially been stopped by the company on February 21 , which claims to have gotten orders worth Rs 1.75 crores via the website freedom251.com.

Many people still not believe that this is a legit one and they have hundreds questions to ask. But many people believes this is true and they already booked the device from the official website. Ringing Bells claims it will deliver the first batch of deliveries for Freedom 251 by February 25.

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Freedom 651 : A “Tight Competitor”

Now it seems like the company is having a “tight competitor” in the field with a smart-phone available at Rs 651 that will be “delivered by June 30, 2026, to the doorstep by drones.”

Well, if the Freedom smartphone did not get you angry, here is a website that has been launched claiming that they will deliver the smartphone, priced at Rs 651, by June 2026.

At the first look, the website Freedom651.com, owned by Doesn’t Ring a Bell Pvt. Ltd., looks very similar to Freedom 251’s web-page. But only on close observation you will realise it as a spoof website taking a dig at the makers of the cheapest smart-phone. From the ‘Do not Buy’ button, a delivery date of 30th June, 2026, a customer care number which reads- 0420-420420, 4200420, and a separate ‘Contact Us’ section that asks for a user’s grandfather’s, neighbour’s details and still warns not to even try submitting the form; the website brutally takes down every aspect of Freedom 251’s existence or the lack of it.

The ‘About Us’ section of the spoof website mentions that it is indeed a ‘parody website with no intentions of making a smart phone or any other smart move towards making one.’ The social media links on the website direct to a ‘Places near Pune‘ tourist information page on Facebook, seemingly created in late 2010.

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New Malicious Text Message Malware Can Erase Everything In Your Android Phone

By

Sabarinath

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February 17, 2016

Malicious Text Message Malware Can Erase Everything In Your Android Phone

Alert !Watch out for that next text message you receive. A new malicious text message malware is out there to attack your Android smartphones. This malicious text message Android-based malware is able to grant itself administrator privileges and completely take over a users’ device.

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LogBook : Malicious Text Message can Erase Everything in your Android Phone

Norwegian security firm Heimdal has detected a nasty piece of malware that spreads via SMS and tricks users into downloading a malicious app, allowing it to gain administrator rights to the device.

This new malware is being called Mazar Android BOT and it is spread via SMS and MMS messages. The message will generally look like this:
“You have received a multimedia message from +[country code] [sender number] Follow the link http://www.mmsforyou[.]Net/mms.apk to view your message”

Once it is installed the malicious code embedded inside grants the app administrator privileges. This allows attackers to retrieve device data, monitor calls and text messages, and root the device.

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The Mazar malware also has the ability to entirely erase all of the data stored on an infected device. Not only would a users’ device be infected but such a move by attackers could render the device useless as well.

Security firm Heimdal thinks the malicious texts could have been sent to over 100,000 phones in Denmark, though it is not sure whether users in other countries may have received the messages.

This is believed to be the first time Mazar has been detected in widespread, real world attacks.

One interesting feature of Mazar is that it cannot be installed on smartphones running Android with “Russian” selected as the operating system’s language.

Mazar has been available for purchase on the Dark Web for quite a while now but this is the first time it has been actively used on the Android platform.

So how to stay away from this dirty malicious text message malware ? First off, users should not click on links in text messages from strange recipients and not install unknown apps. Additionally, most users should make sure unknown sources cannot install apps (Settings > Security > Unknown sources).

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