While Apple focused much of its media event on the new iPad mini, the company also took time to introduce three new Macs, including a redesigned iMac, a new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and a speed-bumped Mac mini. Adam Engst has all the details.

 

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The Bad Astronomer writes "NASA's NuSTAR satellite, designed to detect cosmic X-rays, detected a flare of high-energy emission coming from the Milky Way galaxy's central supermassive black hole. The X-rays were the dying gasp of a small gas cloud being torn apart, heated to a hundred million degrees, and then falling into the black hole itself. Events like this are relatively uncommon, so it's fortunate NuSTAR happened to be observing the black hole when it flared."

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At least 10 dead in attack on Herat security force convoy in bloodiest day this year for ANSF in western Afghanistan.

Åklagaren lägger ner förundersökningarna där två undersköterskor misstänkts ha begått övergrepp mot boende på ett äldreboende i Norrköping förra året.

Artillery attack targets fighters trying to launch rockets into Israel, hours after bomb attack wounded Israeli soldier.

Medan deras föräldrar jobbade fick två flickor i yngre tonåren händer och fötter bundna och ögonen tejpade vid ett rån i deras bostad i Hässleholm i morse.

MrSeb writes "A team of researchers from MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and other universities in Europe, have devised a way of boosting the performance of wireless networks by up to 10 times — without increasing transmission power, adding more base stations, or using more wireless spectrum. The researchers' creation, coded TCP, is a novel way of transmitting data so that lost packets don't result in higher latency or re-sent data. With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations (PDF) that describe the packets. If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data. The process of solving the equations is simple and linear, meaning it doesn't require much processing on behalf of the router/smartphone/laptop. In testing, the coded TCP resulted in some dramatic improvements. MIT found that campus WiFi (2% packet loss) jumped from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. On a fast-moving train (5% packet loss), the connection speed jumped from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Moving forward, coded TCP is expected to have huge repercussions on the performance of LTE and WiFi networks — and the technology has already been commercially licensed to several hardware makers."

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Attacker med rasistiska motiv har ökat till alarmerande nivåer i Grekland och myndigheterna gör litet för att få bukt med problemet, skriver FN:s flyktingorgan UNHCR i en rapport.