Gut bacteria from a worm can degrade plastic

Plastic is well-known for sticking around in the environment for years without breaking down, contributing significantly to litter and landfills. But scientists have now discovered that bacteria from the guts of a worm known to munch on food packaging can degrade polyethylene, the most common plastic. Reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, the finding could lead to new ways to help get rid of the otherwise persistent waste, the scientists say.

Jun Yang and colleagues point out that the global plastics industry churns out about 140 million tons of polyethylene every year. Much of it goes into the bags, bottles and boxes that many of us use regularly -- and then throw out. Scientists have been trying to figure out for years how to make this plastic trash go away. Some of the most recent studies have tried siccing bacteria on plastic to degrade it, but these required first exposing the plastic to light or heat. Yang's team wanted to find bacteria that could degrade polyethylene in one step.

The researchers turned to a plastic-eating moth larva, known as a waxworm. They found that at least two strains of the waxworm's gut microbes could degrade polyethylene without a pretreatment step. They say the results point toward a new, more direct way to biodegrade plastic.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Basic Research Program of China and the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Bioenergy.

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The above story is based on materials provided by American Chemical Society . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Study of deadly bat disease finds surprising seasonal pattern of infections

The deadly fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome has spread to bat colonies throughout eastern North America over the past seven years, causing bat populations to crash, with several species now at risk of extinction. The devastating impact of this disease is due in part to the seasonal dynamics of infection and transmission, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published December 3 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The researchers were surprised to discover that during the winter, when the bats are hibernating, the fungus can infect nearly every bat in a colony. Bats that survive the winter are able to clear the infection during summer when their body temperatures are above the growth limit of the fungus. But the remarkably high rate of infection during hibernation leads to high mortality rates at the time of year when bat populations are naturally at their lowest, before the females give birth in the summer.

"It hits when the population is at its smallest, and by the end of winter nearly 100 percent of the bats in a cave can be infected, which helps explain why it has such large impacts," said Kate Langwig, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the paper.

The study provides the first description of the dynamics of fungal infection and transmission in bats, and the findings are in striking contrast to most infectious diseases, said senior author Marm Kilpatrick, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "For many diseases, population density and social interactions play a big role in transmission, but these bats are actually very social and live in dense colonies in both summer and winter," he said. "In this case, transmission is tied to hibernation and body temperature. When the bats start hibernating, it's almost like they become petri dishes for this fungus to grow on."

The fungus (Pseudogymnoascus destructans) thrives in cold environments and grows superficially on exposed skin on the bats' noses, ears, and wings. During hibernation, the body temperatures of bats drop to the cold ambient temperatures of their "hibernacula" (the caves and abandoned mines where the bats hibernate). The fungus proliferates at these temperatures, which range from 2 to 12 degrees Celsius (35 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit). Over the course of the winter hibernation period, which can last more than five months, the infection spreads throughout the colony and on individual bats. Most of the mortality is in late winter, when both infection prevalence (the number of infected bats) and infection loads (the amount of fungus on individual bats) are highest.

"The peak load in late winter is probably what's driving mortality," Langwig said. "Bats that survive the winter can clear the fungal infection once they warm up, so that by mid-summer, when the young of the year are born, almost no bats are infected any more."

The researchers studied six species of bats, testing them for infection with the fungus during three key periods of their annual cycle: fall, when the bats mate outside the hibernacula; winter, when they go into hibernation; and summer, when they migrate to maternity sites and the females give birth.

The researchers began to detect low levels of fungal infection in the fall, probably as a result of bats coming in contact with spores of the fungus inside the hibernacula. "The bats are still active then, so the infections are at a very low level and don't appear to be growing. But as soon as they go into hibernation and their body temperature drops, the infections ramp up really quickly," Langwig said.

The fact that bats are not transmitting the infection during the migratory period is important in limiting the rate at which it is spreading geographically, she added, noting that West Nile virus--which, like white-nose syndrome, was first detected in New York state--spread rapidly throughout most of North America because birds are infected during migration.

The study provides valuable information for planning strategies to manage white-nose syndrome. If scientists can develop an effective treatment, for example, this study indicates that the best time to apply it would probably be early winter, Langwig said. Kilpatrick and coauthor Winifred Frick, an adjunct professor of biology at UC Santa Cruz, are leading efforts to develop a "probiotic" treatment using bacteria to suppress the growth of the fungus. The researchers have isolated several bacterial species that occur naturally on bats and are measuring their ability to suppress the fungus in laboratory tests. Then they plan to use the most promising bacteria as a treatment to see if it can help bats survive through the winter.

"The idea would be to apply the bacteria on bats during hibernation and see if it suppresses the growth of the fungus," Kilpatrick said.

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz . The original article was written by Tim Stephens. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Future of Popular Coding Tool In Doubt After Public Split

Then One/WIRED

Node.js, a popular and influential tool for building and running modern internet services, has split in two.

Late yesterday, some of its primary developers “forked” this open source project, creating a new version of the tool they call Io.js. The group was unhappy with the stewardship of Node’s official sponsor, cloud computing company Joyent, so they’ve chosen to fashion a new version on their own.

“We don’t want to have just one person who’s appointed by a company making decisions,” says Mikeal Rogers, a Node community organizer involved in the fork. “We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus.”

The split highlights the tensions that often exist between the corporate sponsor of an open source project and the many other coders and businesses who use it and help build it. Docker, the company behind a new approach to cloud computing that has exploded in popularity in the past year and half, is in a similar boat, with some community members complaining that the parent company has strayed from its original mission and one outfit going so far as to create a new rival for the project.

Commercial companies can benefit in big way when they open source their software, making it freely available to the world at large and encouraging others to test and improve the code. But balancing their own needs with the wishes of outside developers and users isn’t always easy. Joyent, as a major user of Node, has its own requirements for the platform, but it also benefits from wide-spread adoption and contributions from other companies. The trick lies in keeping everyone happy, and it seems the company is having trouble doing do.

The question is whether yesterday’s split will help the wider world of companies and developers that use Node. And that’s an important question. Node is one of many new programming environments that are changing the ways developers build new applications. Its popularity has exploded since it was introduced five years ago, and it now underpins critical software at dozens companies ranging from corporate giants like GE and Walmart to nimble tech companies like LinkedIn, Rdio, and Uber.

Anatomy of a Fork

Node was created by software developer Ryan Dahl as a way of building and running entire online applications with JavaScript—the standard programming language for writing code that runs in your browser. Developers love it because it lets them to use a single language to write code that runs both in the browser and on the distant computer servers that feed data into the browser. Plus, it’s suited to building applications that can juggle large numbers of simultaneous users, such as online games.

In 2009, Joyent hired Dahl, asked him to continue developing the project, and acquired the rights to the Node name. Three years later, Dahl stepped down as the project’s leader, and soon disappeared from public life.

The project carried on without him, several coders from many different companies helping to develop the platform. But Rogers says that in the past year, both the number of contributions from the community and the number of updates published by Joyent has been steadily shrinking. “I was getting legit emails from people asking me if the project was dead,” he says.

That’s a big part of why the Io.js team—which includes four of Node’s five biggest contributors since the project’s inception—decided to fork Node. So far the project is identical to the version maintained by Joyent, but the developers plan to release their own custom version of the platform early next year which will include an up-to-date version of Google’s open source JavaScript engine, V8.

But for Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill, Node is alive and well, despite the slower pace of development. He says that Joyent has been focused on making Node faster and more stable, rather than adding new features. “You’ve got to look at the quality of contributions,” he explains, “not the quantity.”

A New Foundation

Rogers doesn’t necessarily blame Joyent for the problems the project faces. But the Io.js team think the best way to resolve these issues is to create a new independent foundation to steward the project, outside the control of any single company. That said, the team hasn’t actually set up this foundation because they’re still hoping that Joyent will let them to use the Node.js trademark.

A foundation would make a certain amount of sense. Many companies—including NPM, NodeSource, and Strongloop—depend on Node, and many members of the Io.js team work for those companies. And some of the most widely adopted and best funded open source projects in history are owned by independent foundations instead of individual companies, including the Apache web server, the Hadoop data crunching platform, and the Linux operating system.

But the single company approach followed by Joyent and Docker has become increasingly common in recent years as open source has become more widely accepted in the business world, and sometimes this has worked out well. The massively popular programming framework Ruby on Rails, for instance, is still sponsored by its creator, a company called Basecamp.

Joyent has tried to make Node more inclusive by implementing consensus driven decision making process, and it has created an advisory board that includes many developers outside the company. But for many, the advisory board was too little too late.

Starbucks Schools Silicon Valley (Again) With Launch of iPhone Ordering

Payment happens in the app, not at the counter. Starbucks

Starting on Wednesday, if you open up the Starbucks iPhone app in Portland, Oregon, you’ll see a new tab that reads “order.” If you tap it, you can both order a latte and pay for it before walking into the nearest Starbucks to pick it up. You’ll never have to stop at the checkout counter, the company says.

The order-ahead feature sounds like a great way to streamline recovery from caffeine withdrawal. But it signifies something bigger than just skipping the line. By fusing mobile and physical commerce on a massive scale, a company better known for Frappuccinos is once again outpacing Silicon Valley.

Portland is the beta city for what Starbucks is calling “Mobile Order & Pay.” The company plans to roll out the feature city-by-city in 2015 (and make the order-ahead option available in its Android app). Starbucks is not the first to offer this kind of service. But like Apple with Apple Pay, it has a unique potential to change consumer behavior because of its massive reach.

App Everywhere

Starbucks says it has about 12,000 stores in the US, which puts it not too far behind McDonald’s. In those stores, Starbucks processes about 47 million transactions every week, and CEO Howard Schultz recently announced that 7 million of those are customers paying at the counter with their phones.

In other words, a full 15 percent of Starbucks purchases in the US are made with phones. That’s remarkable at a time when paying by phone is still the rare exception, Apple Pay or no. This also means, like Apple and iTunes, Starbucks has a coveted trove of linked credit cards, which it can turn from pay-in-store to pay-in-app.

By fusing mobile and physical commerce on a massive scale, a company better known for Frappuccinos is once again outpacing Silicon Valley.

That mass adoption puts Starbucks in a unique position to leap ahead on a problem Silicon Valley has been trying to solve for years: how to link up mobile phones to in-store retail. Take Square, a one-time Starbucks partner that long sought to foster the quasi-magical experience of buying something in a store without ever needing to pull out a wallet. The Square Wallet app worked by linking directly to stores’ Square point-of-sale systems but floundered as the independent merchants that make up Square’s customer base failed to adopt it. (Square now offers its own order-ahead service as a scaled-down version of Wallet.)

Starbucks, on the other hand, can effectively just flip a switch to launch order-ahead across an entire city. The new “Order” tab will simply appear in customers’ apps when they’re within a set of GPS coordinates where the service has become available. (Where it’s not, users will see a new “Menu” tab.) And it won’t even seem like a radical change. If you’re paying at the counter with your phone already, ordering with it, too, won’t seem any weirder than ordering from Amazon.

“We designed this mobile order-and-pay capability to just feel like a natural extension from an experience perspective,” Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman tells WIRED.

Coffee Fulfillment

Brotman believes ordering ahead will make going to Starbucks better by eliminating the “pinch point” of the line—and drive more business as a result. Coming soon, Starbucks will take the concept one step further by cutting the need to go to the store altogether. As Starbucks has announced previously, it will start delivering your lattes to you starting in mid-to-late 2015.

In some cases, Brotman says, delivery will work a lot like pizza delivery, where the orders come from the same physical stores that let you order at the counter. But in some locations, such as big office buildings, he says Starbucks plans to have the coffee equivalent of an Amazon fulfillment center—kitchens where baristas are slinging orders for delivery full-time.

In Silicon Valley, the typical recipe for success involves building a platform that other businesses use. Starbucks, by contrast, has succeeded by controlling both the coffee and the tech, the store and the app. It’s not clear yet whether Starbucks’ success offers an alternative model for other retailers, or if it’s an outlier because it sells a product that upon which customers develop a genuine physical dependence.

If Starbucks’ app makes mainlining caffeine easier, then no wonder it’s succeeding. But Silicon Valley would do well to think hard about why what Starbucks is doing is working, lest it wants a coffee company to eat its lunch.

Watch: First Test Flight for NASA Spacecraft That May Take Us to Mars

The first test flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which is designed to carry humans deeper into space than ever before—and eventually to Mars—is set for launch tomorrow morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The launch window, which will last for 2 hours and 39 minutes, begins at 4:05 a.m. PST/7:05 a.m. EST. Meteorologists forecast a 70 percent chance of favorable weather. You can watch live coverage beginning at 1:30 a.m. PST/4:30 a.m. EST on NASA TV.

The Orion spacecraft and the Delta IV Heavy rocket is prepared for launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NASA/Kim Shiflett

Orion won’t have anyone onboard for its 4.5-hour, two-orbit trip, which will test some of the riskiest aspects of a spacecraft mission, such as launch, entry back through Earth’s atmosphere, the parachute system, and the heat shield, which will have to withstand temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The new spacecraft will launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket, which will bring Orion into orbit at an altitude of 3,600 miles at its highest—15 times higher than the International Space Station. The space shuttle orbited at an altitude ranging from 190 miles to 330 miles. After two spins around the globe, Orion will return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles southwest of San Diego.

Ride along with Orion by watching NASA’s video depicting the flight:

Sony Got Hacked Hard: What We Know and Don’t Know So Far

Getty Images

Who knew that Sony’s top brass, a line-up of mostly white male executives, earn $1 million and more a year? Or that the company spent half a million this year in severance costs to terminate employees? Now we all do, since about 40 gigabytes of sensitive company data from computers belonging to Sony Pictures Entertainment were stolen and posted online.

As so often happens with breach stories, the more time that passes the more we learn about the nature of the hack, the data that was stolen and, sometimes, even the identity of the culprits behind it. A week into the Sony hack, however, there is a lot of rampant speculation but few solid facts. Here’s a look at what we do and don’t know about what’s turning out to be the biggest hack of the year—and who knows, maybe of all time.

Who Did It?

Most of the headlines around the Sony hack haven’t been about what was stolen but rather who’s behind it. A group calling itself GOP, or Guardians of Peace, has taken responsibility. But who they are is unclear. The media seized on a comment made to reporter by an anonymous government source that North Korea might be behind the hack. The motive? Retaliation for Sony’s yet-to-be-released film The Interview, a Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy about an ill-conceived CIA plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

If that sounds outlandish, that’s because it likely is. The focus on North Korea is weak and easily undercut by the facts. Nation-state attacks don’t usually announce themselves with a showy image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected machines or use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves. Nation-state attackers also generally don’t chastise their victims for having poor security, as purported members of Guardians of Peace have done in media interviews.

Nor do such attacks result in posts of stolen data to Pastebin—the unofficial cloud repository of hackers everywhere—where sensitive company files purportedly belonging to Sony were leaked this week.

We’ve been here before, with nation-state attributions. Anonymous sources told Bloomberg earlier this year that investigators were looking at the Russia government as the possible culprit behind a hack of JP Morgan Chase. The possible motive in that case was retaliation for sanctions against the Kremlin over military actions against Ukraine. Bloomberg eventually walked back from the story to admit that cybercriminals were more likely the culprits. And in 2012, U.S. officials blamed Iran for an attack that erased data on thousands of computers at Saudi Aramco. No proof was offered to back the claim, but glitches in the malware used for the attack showed it was less likely a sophisticated nation-state attack than a hacktivist assault against the oil conglomerate’s policies.

The likely culprits behind the Sony breach are hacktivists—or disgruntled insiders—angry at the company’s unspecified policies. One media interview with a person identified as a member of Guardians of Peace hinted that a sympathetic insider or insiders aided them in their operation and that they were seeking “equality.” The exact nature of their complaints about Sony are unclear, however.

Similarly, in a cryptic note posted by Guardians of Peace on Sony machines, the hackers indicated that Sony had failed to meet their demands, but didn’t indicate the nature of those demands. “We’ve already warned you, and this is just the beginning. We continue till our request be met.”

One of the purported hackers with the group told CSO Online that they are “an international organization including famous figures in the politics and society from several nations such as United States, United Kingdom and France. We are not under direction of any state.”

The person said the Seth Rogen film was not the motive for the hack but that the film is problematic nonetheless in that it exemplifies Sony’s greed. “This shows how dangerous film The Interview is,” the person told the publication. “The Interview is very dangerous enough to cause a massive hack attack. Sony Pictures produced the film harming the regional peace and security and violating human rights for money. The news with The Interview fully acquaints us with the crimes of Sony Pictures. Like this, their activity is contrary to our philosophy. We struggle to fight against such greed of Sony Pictures.”

How Did the Hack Occur?

This is still unclear. Most hacks like this begin with a phishing attack, which involve sending emails to employees to get them to click on malicious attachments or visit web sites where malware is surreptitiously downloaded to their machines. Hackers also get into systems through vulnerabilities in a company’s web site that give them access to backend databases. Once on an infected system in a company’s network, hackers can map the network and steal administrator passwords to gain access to other protected systems on the network and hunt down sensitive data to steal.

How Long Had Sony Been Breached Before Discovery?

It’s unclear when the hack began. One interview with someone claiming to be with Guardians for Peace said they had been siphoning data from Sony for a year. Last Monday, Sony workers became aware of the breach after an image of a red skull suddenly appeared on screens company-wide with a warning that Sony’s secrets were about to be spilled. Sony’s Twitter accounts were also seized by the hackers, who posted an image of Sony CEO Michael Lynton in hell.

News of the hack first went public when someone purporting to be a former Sony employee posted a note on Reddit, along with an image of the skull, saying current employees at the company had told him their email systems were down and they had been told to go home because the company’s networks had been hacked. Sony administrators also reportedly disabled VPN connections and Wi-Fi access in an effort to control the intrusion.

What Was Stolen?

The hackers claim to have stolen a huge trove of sensitive data from Sony, possibly as large as 100 terabytes of data, which they are slowly releasing in batches. Judging from data the hackers have leaked online so far, this includes a list of employee salaries and bonuses; Social Security numbers and birth dates; HR employee performance reviews, criminal background checks and termination records; correspondence about employee medical conditions; passport and visa information for Hollywood stars and crew who worked on Sony films; and internal email spools.

All of these leaks are embarrassing to Sony and harmful and embarrassing to employees. But more importantly for Sony’s bottom line, the stolen data also includes the script for an unreleased pilot by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad as well as full copies of several Sony films, most of which have not been released in theaters yet. These include copies of the upcoming films Annie, Still Alice and Mr. Turner. Notably, no copy of the Seth Rogen flick has been part of the leaks so far.

Was Data Destroyed or Just Stolen?

Initial reports have focused only on the data stolen from Sony. But news of an FBI flash alert released to companies this week suggests that the attack on Sony might have included malware designed to destroy data on whole systems.

The five-page FBI alert doesn’t mention Sony, but anonymous sources told Reuters that it refers to malware used in the Sony hack—though it’s not clear they’re in a position to know this. “This correlates with information about that many of us in the security industry have been tracking,” one of the sources said. “It looks exactly like information from the Sony attack.”

The alert warns about malware capable of wiping data from systems in such an effective way as to make the data unrecoverable.

“The FBI is providing the following information with HIGH confidence,” the note reads, according to one person who received it and described it to WIRED. “Destructive malware used by unknown computer network exploitation (CNE) operators has been identified. This malware has the capability to overwrite a victim host’s master boot record (MBR) and all data files. The overwriting of the data files will make it extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible, to recover the data using standard forensic methods.”

The FBI memo lists the names of the malware’s payload files—usbdrv3_32bit.sys and usbdrv3_64bit.sys.

It’s unclear if these files were found on Sony systems. So far there have been no news reports indicating that data on the Sony machines was destroyed or that master boot records were overwritten. A Sony spokeswoman only indicated to Reuters that the company has “restored a number of important services.”

How Facebook Aims to Beat Google by Tracking Your Offline Purchases

Facebook

Brian Boland thinks Google gets too much credit for its ads.

That should come as no surprise. Boland is the vice president of ad products at Facebook, one of Google’s chief advertising competitors. But he may have a point.

People are bombarded by ads—on television, on Facebook, on Billboards, on news sites, in the subway. The best ads stick in consumers’ heads until later, when they search for whatever it was that was advertised and decide to purchase it. Typically, that search happens on Google, which is one reason why search based advertising is a money minting machine for Google. But if Google is getting credit for being the final step in the purchase process, Boland says, so should the website or social network (wink, wink) that served up the ad in the first place.

“It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window. That’s how it happens today,” Boland said on stage at Business Insider’s Ignition conference on Wednesday. “Search has a great place in that role, but it’s definitely not what should get all the credit, for that last click.”

All of which explains why earlier this year, Facebook announced the relaunch of Atlas, the ad serving platform it acquired from Microsoft in 2013. The goal of Atlas is to help publishers across the web prove the effectiveness of their ads in influencing purchase decisions both on and offline. And while Boland wouldn’t admit it outright, that in turn, could help convince advertisers to shift some of their budgets away from Google, and toward other websites—including Facebook. As Boland put it: “Rising tides raise all boats.”

‘It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window.’

Part of the trick is that Atlas is connected to Facebook. That means it can serve people ads across devices and understand that—even though Suzie Q. Jones might be using a phone, a tablet, and a laptop—she’s still the same person. On all three devices, she’s logged into the same Facebook account. Traditional behavioral tracking technology, using what are called “cookies,” would identify each device as a different person. That leads to redundancies in advertising, and for Boland, it makes ads less effective because they “get to be annoying.”

What’s more, Boland explained, Atlas can best Google by showing what percentage of people who saw an ad actually made a purchase offline, which is pretty much the Holy Grail for advertisers. To do that, Atlas collects offline purchase information from advertisers and compares that list to its own data on who saw the ad online. The system uses things like users’ email addresses and names to determine if there are any matches between the two groups. Then, Atlas can tell the advertiser what percentage of people who saw the ad also made a purchase, without naming any individual users.

“If we make it easier for marketers to understand if their business is growing from digital, they’ll invest more in digital,” Boland said.

It’s also, well, kinda creepy that Facebook is matching you up with your offline purchases. But this is the way the world is moving. Google is the net’s advertising powerhouse, but recently, its ad business growth has slowed. If Atlas is indeed able to serve smarter ads across devices, and link those ads to offline purchases, Facebook may soon give Google a run for its money.

Future of Popular Coding Tool In Doubt After Public Split

Then One/WIRED

Node.js, a popular and influential tool for building and running modern internet services, has split in two.

Late yesterday, some of its primary developers “forked” this open source project, creating a new version of the tool they call Io.js. The group was unhappy with the stewardship of Node’s official sponsor, cloud computing company Joyent, so they’ve chosen to fashion a new version on their own.

“We don’t want to have just one person who’s appointed by a company making decisions,” says Mikeal Rogers, a Node community organizer involved in the fork. “We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus.”

The split highlights the tensions that often exist between the corporate sponsor of an open source project and the many other coders and businesses who use it and help build it. Docker, the company behind a new approach to cloud computing that has exploded in popularity in the past year and half, is in a similar boat, with some community members complaining that the parent company has strayed from its original mission and one outfit going so far as to create a < a href="http://ift.tt/1AhK7pu">new rival for the project.

Commercial companies can benefit in big way when they open source their software, making it freely available to the world at large and encouraging others to test and improve the code. But balancing their own needs with the wishes of outside developers and users isn’t always easy. Joyent, as a major user of Node, has its own requirements for the platform, but it also benefits from wide-spread adoption and contributions from other companies. The trick lies in keeping everyone happy, and it seems the company is having trouble doing do.

The question is whether yesterday’s split will help the wider world of companies and developers that use Node. And that’s an important question. Node is one of many new programming environments that are changing the ways developers build new applications. Its popularity has exploded since it was introduced five years ago, and it now underpins critical software at dozens companies ranging from corporate giants like GE and Walmart to nimble tech companies like LinkedIn, Rdio, and Uber.

Anatomy of a Fork

Node was created by software developer Ryan Dahl as a way of building and running entire online applications with JavaScript—the standard programming language for writing code that runs in your browser. Developers love it because it lets them to use a single language to write code that runs both in the browser and on the distant computer servers that feed data into the browser. Plus, it’s suited to building applications that can juggle large numbers of simultaneous users, such as online games.

In 2009, Joyent hired Dahl, asked him to continue developing the project, and acquired the rights to the Node name. Three years later, Dahl stepped down as the project’s leader, and soon disappeared from public life.

The project carried on without him, several coders from many different companies helping to develop the platform. But Rogers says that in the past year, both the number of contributions from the community and the number of updates published by Joyent has been steadily shrinking. “I was getting legit emails from people asking me if the project was dead,” he says.

That’s a big part of why the Io.js team—which

includes four of Node’s five biggest contributors since the project’s inception—decided to fork Node. So far the project is identical to the version maintained by Joyent, but the developers plan to release their own custom version of the platform early next year which will include an up-to-date version of Google’s open source JavaScript engine, V8.

But for Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill, Node is alive and well, despite the slower pace of development. He says that Joyent has been focused on making Node faster and more stable, rather than adding new features. “You’ve got to look at the quality of contributions,” he explains, “not the quantity.”

A New Foundation

Rogers doesn’t necessarily blame Joyent for the problems the project faces. But the Io.js team think the best way to resolve these issues is to create a new independent foundation to steward the project, outside the control of any single company. That said, the team hasn’t actually set up this foundation because they’re still hoping that Joyent will let them to use the Node.js trademark.

A foundation would make a certain amount of sense. Many companies—including NPM, NodeSource, and Strongloop—depend on Node, and many members of the Io.js team work for those companies. And some of the most widely adopted and best funded open source projects in history are owned by independent foundations instead of individual companies, including the Apache web server, the Hadoop data crunching platform, and the Linux operating system.

But the single company approach followed by Joyent and Docker has become increasingly common in recent years as open source has become more widely accepted in the business world, and sometimes this has worked out well. The massively popular programming framework Ruby on Rails, for instance, is still sponsored by its creator, a company called Basecamp.

Joyent has tried to make Node more inclusive by implementing consensus driven decision making process, and it has created an advisory board that includes many developers outside the company. But for many, the advisory board was too little too late.

Starbucks Schools Silicon Valley (Again) With Launch of iPhone Ordering

Payment happens in the app, not at the counter. Starbucks

Starting on Wednesday, if you open up the Starbucks iPhone app in Portland, Oregon, you’ll see a new tab that reads “order.” If you tap it, you can both order a latte and pay for it before walking into the nearest Starbucks to pick it up. You’ll never have to stop at the checkout counter, the company says.

The order-ahead feature sounds like a great way to streamline recovery from caffeine withdrawal. But it signifies something bigger than just skipping the line. By fusing mobile and physical commerce on a massive scale, a company better known for Frappuccinos is once again outpacing Silicon Valley.

Portland is the beta city for what Starbucks is calling “Mobile Order & Pay.” The company plans to roll out the feature city-by-city in 2015 (and make the order-ahead option available in its Android app). Starbucks is not the first to offer this kind of service. But like Apple with Apple Pay, it has a unique potential to change consumer behavior because of its massive reach.

App Everywhere

Starbucks says it has about 12,000 stores in the US, which puts it not too far behind McDonald’s. In those stores, Starbucks processes about 47 million transactions every week, and CEO Howard Schultz recently announced that 7 million of those are customers paying at the counter with their phones.

In other words, a full 15 percent of Starbucks purchases in the US are made with phones. That’s remarkable at a time when paying by phone is still the rare exception, Apple Pay or no. This also means, like Apple and iTunes, Starbucks has a coveted trove of linked credit cards, which it can turn from pay-in-store to pay-in-app.

By fusing mobile and physical commerce on a massive scale, a company better known for Frappuccinos is once again outpacing Silicon Valley.

That mass adoption puts Starbucks in a unique position to leap ahead on a problem Silicon Valley has been trying to solve for years: how to link up mobile phones to in-store retail. Take Square, a one-time Starbucks partner that long sought to foster the quasi-magical experience of buying something in a store without ever needing to pull out a wallet. The Square Wallet app worked by linking directly to stores’ Square point-of-sale systems but floundered as the independent merchants that make up Square’s customer base failed to adopt it. (Square now offers its own order-ahead service as a scaled-down version of Wallet.)

Starbucks, on the other hand, can effectively just flip a switch to launch order-ahead across an entire city. The new “Order” tab will simply appear in customers’ apps when they’re within a set of GPS coordinates where the service has become available. (Where it’s not, users will see a new “Menu” tab.) And it won’t even seem like a radical change. If you’re paying at the counter with your phone already, ordering with it, too, won’t seem any weirder than ordering from Amazon.

“We designed this mobile order-and-pay capability to just feel like a natural extension from an experience perspective,” Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman tells WIRED.

Coffee Fulfillment

Brotman believes ordering ahead will make going to Starbucks better by eliminating the “pinch point” of the line—and drive more business as a result. Coming soon, Starbucks will take the concept one step further by cutting the need to go to the store altogether. As Starbucks has announced previously, it will start delivering your lattes to you starting in mid-to-late 2015.

In some cases, Brotman says, delivery will work a lot like pizza delivery, where the orders come from the same physical stores that let you order at the counter. But in some locations, such as big office buildings, he says Starbucks plans to have the coffee equivalent of an Amazon fulfillment center—kitchens where baristas are slinging orders for delivery full-time.

In Silicon Valley, the typical recipe for success involves building a platform that other businesses use. Starbucks, by contrast, has succeeded by controlling both the coffee and the tech, the store and the app. It’s not clear yet whether Starbucks’ success offers an alternative model for other retailers, or if it’s an outlier because it sells a product that upon which customers develop a genuine physical dependence.

If Starbucks’ app makes mainlining caffeine easier, then no wonder it’s succeeding. But Silicon Valley would do well to think hard about why what Starbucks is doing is working, lest it wants a coffee company to eat its lunch.

Watch: First Test Flight for NASA Spacecraft That May Take Us to Mars

The first test flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which is designed to carry humans deeper into space than ever before—and eventually to Mars—is set for launch tomorrow morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The launch window, which will last for 2 hours and 39 minutes, begins at 4:05 a.m. PST/7:05 a.m. EST. Meteorologists forecast a 70 percent chance of favorable weather. You can watch live coverage beginning at 1:30 a.m. PST/4:30 a.m. EST on NASA TV.

The Orion spacecraft and the Delta IV Heavy rocket is prepared for launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NASA/Kim Shiflett

Orion won’t have anyone onboard for its 4.5-hour, two-orbit trip, which will test some of the riskiest aspects of a spacecraft mission, such as launch, entry back through Earth’s atmosphere, the parachute system, and the heat shield, which will have to withstand temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The new spacecraft will launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket, which will bring Orion into orbit at an altitude of 3,600 miles at its highest—15 times higher than the International Space Station. The space shuttle orbited at an altitude ranging from 190 miles to 330 miles. After two spins around the globe, Orion will return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles southwest of San Diego.

Ride along with Orion by watching NASA’s video depicting the flight:

Sony Got Hacked Hard: What We Know and Don’t Know So Far

Getty Images

Who knew that Sony’s top brass, a line-up of mostly white male executives, earn $1 million and more a year? Or that the company spent half a million this year in severance costs to terminate employees? Now we all do, since about 40 gigabytes of sensitive company data from computers belonging to Sony Pictures Entertainment were stolen and posted online.

As so often happens with breach stories, the more time that passes the more we learn about the nature of the hack, the data that was stolen and, sometimes, even the identity of the culprits behind it. A week into the Sony hack, however, there is a lot of rampant speculation but few solid facts. Here’s a look at what we do and don’t know about what’s turning out to be the biggest hack of the year—and who knows, maybe of all time.

Who Did It?

Most of the headlines around the Sony hack haven’t been about what was stolen but rather who’s behind it. A group calling itself GOP, or Guardians of Peace, has taken responsibility. But who they are is unclear. The media seized on a comment made to reporter by an anonymous government source that North Korea might be behind the hack. The motive? Retaliation for Sony’s yet-to-be-released film The Interview, a Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy about an ill-conceived CIA plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

If that sounds outlandish, that’s because it likely is. The focus on North Korea is weak and easily undercut by the facts. Nation-state attacks don’t usually announce themselves with a showy image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected machines or use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves. Nation-state attackers also generally don’t chastise their victims for having poor security, as purported members of Guardians of Peace have done in media interviews.

Nor do such attacks result in posts of stolen data to Pastebin—the unofficial cloud repository of hackers everywhere—where sensitive company files purportedly belonging to Sony were leaked this week.

We’ve been here before, with nation-state attributions. Anonymous sources told Bloomberg earlier this year that investigators were looking at the Russia government as the possible culprit behind a hack of JP Morgan Chase. The possible motive in that case was retaliation for sanctions against the Kremlin over military actions against Ukraine. Bloomberg eventually walked back from the story to admit that cybercriminals were more likely the culprits. And in 2012, U.S. officials blamed Iran for an attack that erased data on thousands of computers at Saudi Aramco. No proof was offered to back the claim, but glitches in the malware used for the attack showed it was less likely a sophisticated nation-state attack than a hacktivist assault against the oil conglomerate’s policies.

The likely culprits behind the Sony breach are hacktivists—or disgruntled insiders—angry at the company’s unspecified policies. One media interview with a person identified as a member of Guardians of Peace hinted that a sympathetic insider or insiders aided them in their operation and that they were seeking “equality.” The exact nature of their complaints about Sony are unclear, however.

Similarly, in a cryptic note posted by Guardians of Peace on Sony machines, the hackers indicated that Sony had failed to meet their demands, but didn’t indicate the nature of those demands. “We’ve already warned you, and this is just the beginning. We continue till our request be met.”

One of the purported hackers with the group told CSO Online that they are “an international organization including famous figures in the politics and society from several nations such as United States, United Kingdom and France. We are not under direction of any state.”

The person said the Seth Rogen film was not the motive for the hack but that the film is problematic nonetheless in that it exemplifies Sony’s greed. “This shows how dangerous film The Interview is,” the person told the publication. “The Interview is very dangerous enough to cause a massive hack attack. Sony Pictures produced the film harming the regional peace and security and violating human rights for money. The news with The Interview fully acquaints us with the crimes of Sony Pictures. Like this, their activity is contrary to our philosophy. We struggle to fight against such greed of Sony Pictures.”

How Did the Hack Occur?

This is still unclear. Most hacks like this begin with a phishing attack, which involve sending emails to employees to get them to click on malicious attachments or visit web sites where malware is surreptitiously downloaded to their machines. Hackers also get into systems through vulnerabilities in a company’s web site that give them access to backend databases. Once on an infected system in a company’s network, hackers can map the network and steal administrator passwords to gain access to other protected systems on the network and hunt down sensitive data to steal.

How Long Had Sony Been Breached Before Discovery?

It’s unclear when the hack began. One interview with someone claiming to be with Guardians for Peace said they had been siphoning data from Sony for a year. Last Monday, Sony workers became aware of the breach after an image of a red skull suddenly appeared on screens company-wide with a warning that Sony’s secrets were about to be spilled. Sony’s Twitter accounts were also seized by the hackers, who posted an image of Sony CEO Michael Lynton in hell.

News of the hack first went public when someone purporting to be a former Sony employee posted a note on Reddit, along with an image of the skull, saying current employees at the company had told him their email systems were down and they had been told to go home because the company’s networks had been hacked. Sony administrators also reportedly disabled VPN connections and Wi-Fi access in an effort to control the intrusion.

What Was Stolen?

The hackers claim to have stolen a huge trove of sensitive data from Sony, possibly as large as 100 terabytes of data, which they are slowly releasing in batches. Judging from data the hackers have leaked online so far, this includes a list of employee salaries and bonuses; Social Security numbers and birth dates; HR employee performance reviews, criminal background checks and termination records; correspondence about employee medical conditions; passport and visa information for Hollywood stars and crew who worked on Sony films; and internal email spools.

All of these leaks are embarrassing to Sony and harmful and embarrassing to employees. But more importantly for Sony’s bottom line, the stolen data also includes the script for an unreleased pilot by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad as well as full copies of several Sony films, most of which have not been released in theaters yet. These include copies of the upcoming films Annie, Still Alice and Mr. Turner. Notably, no copy of the Seth Rogen flick has been part of the leaks so far.

Was Data Destroyed or Just Stolen?

Initial reports have focused only on the data stolen from Sony. But news of an FBI flash alert released to companies this week suggests that the attack on Sony might have included malware designed to destroy data on whole systems.

The five-page FBI alert doesn’t mention Sony, but anonymous sources told Reuters that it refers to malware used in the Sony hack—though it’s not clear they’re in a position to know this. “This correlates with information about that many of us in the security industry have been tracking,” one of the sources said. “It looks exactly like information from the Sony attack.”

The alert warns about malware capable of wiping data from systems in such an effective way as to make the data unrecoverable.

“The FBI is providing the following information with HIGH confidence,” the note reads, according to one person who received it and described it to WIRED. “Destructive malware used by unknown computer network exploitation (CNE) operators has been identified. This malware has the capability to overwrite a victim host’s master boot record (MBR) and all data files. The overwriting of the data files will make it extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible, to recover the data using standard forensic methods.”

The FBI memo lists the names of the malware’s payload files—usbdrv3_32bit.sys and usbdrv3_64bit.sys.

It’s unclear if these files were found on Sony systems. So far there have been no news reports indicating that data on the Sony machines was destroyed or that master boot records were overwritten. A Sony spokeswoman only indicated to Reuters that the company has “restored a number of important services.”

Why Facebook’s Ad Platform is All About Beating Google

Image: Facebook

Brian Boland thinks Google gets too much credit for its ads.

That should come as no surprise. Boland is the vice president of ad products at Facebook, one of Google’s chief advertising competitors. But he may have a point.

People are bombarded by ads—on television, on Facebook, on Billboards, on news sites, in the subway. The best ads stick in consumers’ heads until later, when they search for whatever it was that was advertised and decide to purchase it. Typically, that search happens on Google, which is one reason why search based advertising is a money minting machine for Google. But if Google is getting credit for being the final step in the purchase process, Boland says, so should the website or social network (wink, wink) that served up the ad in the first place.

“It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window. That’s how it happens today,” Boland said on stage at Business Insider’s Ignition conference on Wednesday. “Search has a great place in that role, but it’s definitely not what should get all the credit, for that last click.”

All of which explains why earlier this year, Facebook announced the relaunch of Atlas, the ad serving platform it acquired from Microsoft in 2013. The goal of Atlas is to help publishers across the web prove the effectiveness of their ads in influencing purchase decisions both on and offline. And while Boland wouldn’t admit it outright, that in turn, could help convince advertisers to shift some of their budgets away from Google, and toward other websites—including Facebook. As Boland put it: “Rising tides raise all boats.”

‘It’d be like if you owned a fast food restaurant and gave all your advertising credit to the drive-in window.’

Part of the trick is that Atlas is connected to Facebook. That means it can serve people ads across devices and understand that—even though Suzie Q. Jones might be using a phone, a tablet, and a laptop—she’s still the same person. On all three devices, she’s logged into the same Facebook account. Traditional behavioral tracking technology, using what are called “cookies,” would identify each device as a different person. That leads to redundancies in advertising, and for Boland, it makes ads less effective because they “get to be annoying.”

What’s more, Boland explained, Atlas can best Google by showing what percentage of people who saw an ad actually made a purchase offline, which is pretty much the Holy Grail for advertisers. To do that, Atlas collects offline purchase information from advertisers and compares that list to its own data on who saw the ad online. The system uses things like users’ email addresses and names to determine if there are any matches between the two groups. Then, Atlas can tell the advertiser what percentage of people who saw the ad also made a purchase, without naming any individual users.

“If we make it easier for marketers to understand if their business is growing from digital, they’ll invest more in digital,” Boland said.

It’s also, well, kinda creepy that Facebook is matching you up with your offline purchases. But this is the way the world is moving. Google is the net’s advertising powerhouse, but recently, it’s ad business growth has slowed. If Atlas is indeed able to serve smarter ads across devices, and link those ads to offline purchases, Facebook may soon give Google a run for its money.

New Analysis Says FDA Farm Antibiotic Reduction Won’t Work As Planned

Epsos.de (CC) on Flickr

A brand-new analysis of the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to restrict agricultural overuse of antibiotics brings some needed clarity to the subject — and calls into question how effective those plans will be.

The analysis, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts, examines whether the FDA’s request to veterinary pharma companies — to observe voluntary curbs on the antibiotics they sell — is actually going to make much difference in quantities of antibiotics that are used. And concludes: Maybe not.

The background here: For decades, scientists have been demonstrating that antibiotics used in raising meat animals pose a health threat to humans, because the antibiotics cause bacteria in the animals’ systems to become resistant. When the animals are slaughtered and turned into meat, the resistant bacteria remains on the meat; the bacteria may be consumed directly, or may contaminate kitchens — or may contribute resistance DNA into the environment that then is sucked up by other bacteria.

The concern is acute because so many of the antibiotics that are used in meat production are functionally identical to the same drugs that would be used to treat bacterial infections in human medicine. That means that, because of agricultural use, human-use drugs are ineffective when they are needed. What adds to the problem is that agriculture uses so many antibiotics: three to four times what is used in humans in the US each year.

Antibiotics are used in meat production in three ways: to treat illness in a flock or herd; to prevent illness that might occur; and to cause animals to put on weight faster, or get to market weight with less feed. That last category is called “growth promotion” (and sometimes “feed efficiency”); it consists of animals being given tiny doses of antibiotics, literally grams per ton, in their feed, and sometimes in their drinking water. The FDA attempted to control growth promotion back in the 1970s, about 25 years after it granted licenses for several antibiotics to be used that way, but was forestalled for decades by Congressional interference. (The European Union banned growth promotion entirely in 2006.)

Since the FDA was never able to obtain a legal or regulatory ban here, it decided three years ago to follow a different path, and ask ag-antibiotics makers to participate in a voluntary program of changing their drugs’ labelling in such a way that growth-promotion would no longer be a permitted use. (Past posts on this: here, here, and here.) Many drug makers signed on.

But: The FDA voluntary program only affects growth promotion; it does not cover that middle category of use for disease prevention. And among experts on the issue, there has been a lot of concern that growth-promotion use could simply be redefined as disease prevention, meaning that the amount of drugs being used, and causing resistance, would never really go down.

This new Pew analysis suggests that may in fact take place. The organization’s Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming examined the label restrictions for every one of the 287 antibiotics now used in meat production, to see whether growth-promotion and preventive doses were significantly different, or so similar that the drugs could go on being used unchanged.

Here’s what they found: Out of the 287, half — 144 — have no overlap; so growth-promotion with them really should cease under the new rules. And 34, or 12 percent, have been taken off the market completely. But the labelling of the remainder raises real questions whether their use will change:

• 26 (9 percent) make an ambiguous claim about “maintaining weight”;


• 17 (6 percent) use the same doses for growth promotion and prevention, but restrict administration of the drugs to differing amounts of time;


• and 66 formulas, 26 percent of the total, have identical dosing for growth promotion and prevention, and no restrictions on use in either category.

Summing that up: If this analysis is correct, then one-fourth of the drugs that the FDA says its policy will take out of use, can actually continue being used, under an FDA-approved label. Which raises real questions about how well the FDA policy for controlling the emergence of antibiotic resistance is going to work.

Here’s a graphical representation of the Pew analysis, drawn from their issue brief here.

courtesy Pew Charitable Trusts. original here.

What’s Up With That: Stress Could Be Turning Your Hair Gray

Getty Images

My third favorite X-Man is a character named Rogue. If you don’t know, her power is siphoning the powers away from anyone she touches. Rogue’s trademark is a big shock of white hair right in the middle of her brown mop. Depending on where you get your X-myths (comics, cartoons, movies), this bit of premature gray came from either kissing a boy named Cody, choking out Ms. Marvel, or soaking up some of Wolverine’s healing factor. Whatever it was, the experience traumatized her, bleaching her bangs.

Stories of stress turning hair gray abound in popular culture, from Marie Antoinette’s hair turning white the night before her beheading, to Barack Obama’s rapid first-term graying. But, is there actually a mechanism in your body that translates anxiety into silver locks?

Scientists have looked into it, but despite several promising results they haven’t yet nailed down a solid link. In fact, they aren’t exactly sure what causes hair to turn gray in natural aging. What they do know is that it has something to do with the pigments that give your hair its hue.

Hair color comes from two naturally occurring pigments, called melanins. Eumelanin produces the darker shades, from brown to black. Gingers and towheads get their shining locks from pheomelanin. As you age, something interferes with these pigments. But, what could that be?

There are two prevailing hypotheses. The first is that aging wears down your DNA, somehow inhibiting the production of the cells called melanocytes that produce melanin. Most of the studies supporting this hypothesis have been done in mice, however, and so far haven’t closed in on a complete explanation of how this would work.

The second hypothesis says that your hair gets bleached from within, rather than depigmented. The culprit is hydrogen peroxide, the same stuff you used in 10th grade to complete your “Eminem” look. Your follicles make it in small amounts, but normally this bleaching compound is kept in check by another enzyme called catalase. A 2009 study showed that catalase production falls off as we age, letting hydrogen peroxide build up and whiten your hair. It’s another intriguing hypothesis, but there still isn’t enough evidence to back it up.

Scientists have no idea how stress would prematurely trigger either of these processes. The best, and most recent, answer goes through a different pathway—your body’s fight or flight response. When you get stressed or anxious, your body turns on its sympathetic nervous system, causing your heart to beat faster, your body to tense up, and your senses to heighten. It’s basically like when KITT from Knight Rider goes into Super Pursuit mode, and is great for short bursts of focused effort.

However, maintaining this state is pretty bad for your body. In 2011, a team led by Nobel Prize winner Robert Lefkowitz showed that the negative affects of prolonged stress reach all the way into your DNA, affecting genes that control hair pigment.

But even this link hasn’t been totally confirmed. That would take longer, broader studies conclusively linking cause and effect. This means someone would have to convince an ethics board to allow purposefully put a group of volunteers into prolonged states of panic. Good luck with that.

But even though there’s no conclusive link, you should still try to avoid getting stressed out. Lefkowitz’s 2011 study also showed that stress was linked to a miscarriages, premature aging, and a variety of cancers.

You may not be able to stave off your unpaid bills, nagging ex, or impending deadline, but you can address some of the behavioral baggage that accentuates your anxiety. When stressed, you tend to eat worse, exercise less, drink more, and toss and turn through the night. Tack on that stone face expression and hunched shoulders, and you’ve added muscular tension to the mix. Start the process by giving yourself some quiet time. Research has shown that even ten minutes of controlled breathing, or mindfulness, can lower your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing, as well as increase circulation to your skin.

So maybe there’s no definite link between stress and gray hair. Marie Antoinette might have already been gray beneath her wigs, and President Obama’s first term happened to fall right around those silvering late 40’s. But, if fear of turning gray gives you reason to manage your anxiety, I’d say keep on believing. Just don’t stress yourself out about it.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, my second favorite X-man is Blink, and number one is Nightcrawler. Neither has a touch of gray, maybe because they have the power to teleport away from their problems.

Vivid Paintings That Shape-Shift as You Walk by Them

Artist Rafaël Rozendaal is best known for his colorful, abstract website artworks. For a series of new images, however, he makes use of an old-school technology best known for its use in baseball cards. Steve Turner Gallery

Artist Rafaël Rozendaal is best known for his colorful, abstract website artworks. For a series of new images, however, he makes use of an old-school technology best known for its use in baseball cards.

Steve Turner Gallery

Remember those funky, ridged cards where it looked like the slugger was swinging a bat when you turned the card slightly to and fro? That's called "lenticular animation." Rafaël Rozendaal

Remember those funky, ridged cards where it looked like the slugger was swinging a bat when you turned the card slightly to and fro? That's called "lenticular animation."

Rafaël Rozendaal

It's what our grandparents had instead of animated GIFs. Rafaël Rozendaal

It's what our grandparents had instead of animated GIFs.

Rafaël Rozendaal

"A lenticular painting is like a very specialized single purpose computer," he says. "As you stand in front of it, it is computing an equation. The algorithm consists of the four frames, the possible outcomes are infinite. It's a computer that does not need electricity to run." Rafaël Rozendaal

"A lenticular painting is like a very specialized single purpose computer," he says. "As you stand in front of it, it is computing an equation. The algorithm consists of the four frames, the possible outcomes are infinite. It's a computer that does not need electricity to run."

Rafaël Rozendaal

"Lenticulars are not great at showing exact motion, there is a fuzziness that is difficult for your eyes if you try to create full motion," says Rozendaal. This fuzziness interests me." Rafaël Rozendaal

"Lenticulars are not great at showing exact motion, there is a fuzziness that is difficult for your eyes if you try to create full motion," says Rozendaal. This fuzziness interests me."

Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal defines the shapes and colors that make up the composition and scripts their transition. Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal defines the shapes and colors that make up the composition and scripts their transition.

Rafaël Rozendaal

Each of these paintings starts like a piece of software. Rafaël Rozendaal

Each of these paintings starts like a piece of software.

Rafaël Rozendaal

Four key frame images are selected and specialized software slices them into strips just a few pixels thick and interlaces them. Rafaël Rozendaal

Four key frame images are selected and specialized software slices them into strips just a few pixels thick and interlaces them.

Rafaël Rozendaal

This images is printed on a special sheet of plastic with ridges that act like lenses, exposing each of the four images sequentially, and creating the animating effect. Rafaël Rozendaal

This images is printed on a special sheet of plastic with ridges that act like lenses, exposing each of the four images sequentially, and creating the animating effect.

Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal is an accomplished young artist whose work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the prestigious Venice Biennial. He's lectured at Yale and the École beaux-arts. And aside from these protean "paintings," his oeuvre exists almost entirely online. Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal is an accomplished young artist whose work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the prestigious Venice Biennial. He's lectured at Yale and the École beaux-arts. And aside from these protean "paintings," his oeuvre exists almost entirely online.

Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal has developed over 100 works of art and his virtual gallery draws about 35 million visitors per year, more than the Louvre. Rafaël Rozendaal

Rozendaal has developed over 100 works of art and his virtual gallery draws about 35 million visitors per year, more than the Louvre.

Rafaël Rozendaal

Some of these digital works were translated into physical works, like this painting which references a digital work called Almost Calm Rafaël Rozendaal

Some of these digital works were translated into physical works, like this painting which references a digital work called Almost Calm

Rafaël Rozendaal

One of these digital works, Rafaël Rozendaal

One of these digital works, Rafaël Rozendaal

Anyone can load his webpages, but each URL can have only one owner. When he sells one of the works, as he did at the auction last fall, the owner's name is added to the browser's title bar, like a plaque that accompanies a donated sculpture in a public park. Steve Turner Gallery

Anyone can load his webpages, but each URL can have only one owner. When he sells one of the works, as he did at the auction last fall, the owner's name is added to the browser's title bar, like a plaque that accompanies a donated sculpture in a public park.

Steve Turner Gallery

His move to physical works grew out of experimentation with lenticular printing, the evolution of his digital portfolio, and simple creative desire. "There are ideas to explore that don't fit in a browser window," he says. Postmasters Gallery

His move to physical works grew out of experimentation with lenticular printing, the evolution of his digital portfolio, and simple creative desire. "There are ideas to explore that don't fit in a browser window," he says.

Postmasters Gallery

Rozendaal's projects, both physical and digital, are computational compositions where the user and the work contribute to the final experience. He says the works are never finished, and it's this infinite potential that attracts him to projects. "I always say I create fountains or waterfalls," he says. "They're always doing the same thing, but not really." Postmasters Gallery

Rozendaal's projects, both physical and digital, are computational compositions where the user and the work contribute to the final experience. He says the works are never finished, and it's this infinite potential that attracts him to projects. "I always say I create fountains or waterfalls," he says. "They're always doing the same thing, but not really."

Postmasters Gallery

Artist Rafaël Rozendaal is best known for his colorful, abstract website artworks. For a series of new images, however, he makes use of an old-school technology best known for its use in baseball cards.

Remember those funky, ridged cards where it looked like the slugger was swinging a bat when you turned the card slightly to and fro? That’s lenticular animation. It’s what our grandparents had instead of animated GIFs. But Rozendaal thinks of it as a modern medium. “A lenticular painting is like a very specialized single purpose computer,” he says. “As you stand in front of it, it is computing an equation. The algorithm consists of the four frames, the possible outcomes are infinite. It’s a computer that does not need electricity to run.”

Each of these paintings starts like a piece of software. Rozendaal defines the shapes and colors that make up the composition and scripts their transition. Four key frame images are selected and specialized software slices them into strips just a few pixels thick and interlaces them. This images is printed on a special sheet of plastic with ridges that act like lenses, exposing each of the four images sequentially, and creating the animating effect.

Rozendaal is an accomplished young artist whose work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the prestigious Venice Biennial. He’s lectured at Yale and the École beaux-arts. And aside from these protean “paintings,” his oeuvre exists almost entirely online.