Starting today, you can create cross-region read replicas for Amazon Aurora. This allows you to serve read traffic from your users in different geographic regions and increases your application’s responsiveness. 

This major update to the NIST 800-53 Quick Start (published earlier this year) deploys a standardized environment that helps support additional NIST-based security requirements on the AWS cloud. Specifically, it helps organizations with workloads that fall in scope for any of the following:

• National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) SP 800-53 (Revision 4)
• NIST SP 800-171
• The OMB Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) Initiative – FedRAMP Overlay (pilot)
• The DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG)

Starting today, customers can launch MariaDB version 10.1 instances on Amazon RDS. They can also upgrade their existing Amazon RDS for MariaDB database instances from version 10.0 to 10.1 using either the console or API.

Water technologists at Xylem have developed what they are calling “the world’s first pumping system with integrated intelligence.”

Desalination capacity is expected to grow by 8 per cent annually to 140 million m3/d by 2020, new research shows.

The contract will provide services to approximately 340,000 homes and businesses throughout the region.

A transcript of the WaterWorld Weekly Newscast for May 30, 2016. 

The BBC micro:bit educational controller module is to be commercially available in the UK for £12.99. Distributor element14 has a 15 month contract to manufacture and distribute micro:bit in the UK. It also has plans to sell the product overseas at some stage. Element14 is announcing pre-order facilities for consumers and will be the exclusive …

BBC micro:bit goes on sale today for £12.99

I can add a new name to my list of heroines: Which now reads: Beryl Burton (cycling), Florence Nightingale (statistics), Dr James Barry (medicine) and Sarah Guppy (engineering). It transpires Sarah Guppy was an engineer in the early 1800s, having made contributions to bridge foundations that were used by Thomas Telford, amongst other stuff. From here, …

Sarah Guppy