SoylentNews

gewg_ writes:

Medical News Today reports

Steven Lipschultz, MD and his team at Wayne State University analyzed records of the American Association of Poison Control Centers' National Poison Data System from October 2010 to September 2013. These records have information about calls to 55 US poison control centers from the public and health care professionals regarding energy exposures.

Those reports indicate that calls about energy drinks and children younger than 6 years old are alarmingly high--over 40 percent--and some of these children are suffering serious cardiac and neurological symptoms.

The team notes that some energy drinks can have up to 400 mg of caffeine per can or bottle, compared with 100-150 mg in a regular cup of coffee.

What is more, caffeine poisoning can happen at levels higher than 400 mg per day in adults, above 100 mg a day in adolescents, and at 2.5 mg per kg (2.2 lbs) of body weight in children under the age of 12.

"Energy drinks have no place in pediatric diets," says Dr. Lipschultz. "Anyone with underlying cardiac, neurologic, or other significant medical conditions should check with their health care provider to make sure it's safe to consume energy drinks."

The Center for American Progress notes

Energy drinks represent part of a larger subset of energy products that include gels and bars.

[...]The new study comes on the heels of calls to regulate the sale and marketing of these caffeinated beverages, particularly as some energy companies have targeted children as young as six in their marketing campaigns.

[...]Unlike most caffeinated drinks, energy drink makers don't always disclose the amount of the substance in each serving. A Consumer Reports investigation in 2012 found that many energy drink manufacturers producers either fail to reveal the level of caffeine in their products or underestimate it by 20 percent.

[...]Some of these incidents have spilled into the headlines. The parents of a 14-year-old Maryland girl, for example, sued producers of Monster, claiming that the caffeine caused the teen to go into cardiac arrest after consuming two 24-ounce bottles within a 24-hour period. Monster was also the defendant in a lawsuit involving the family of a 16-year-old girl from Arizona who died from a heart attack while on a trip in Mexico. In that case, the girl's mother said that she had been consuming nothing but the energy drink over the course of two days.

jcd writes:

As an investor in DeepMind, Elon Musk has come forward as seriously concerned about the potential for runaway artificial intelligence. The Washington Post writes:

“The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe,” Musk wrote in a comment since deleted from the Web site Edge.org, but confirmed to Re/Code by his representatives. “10 years at most.”

The very future of Earth, Musk said, was at risk.

“The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety,” he wrote. “The recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen.”

Musk seemed to sense that these comments might seem a little weird coming from a Fortune 1000 chief executive officer.

“This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don’t understand,” he wrote. “I am not alone in thinking we should be worried.”

With all the talk of the Singularity and Roko's Basilisk, it's no surprise. The article also has a good timeline of Musk's previous criticisms of and concerns about artificial intelligence.

toygeek writes:

Just a few minutes ago, I received an email from Malwarebytes notifying me that I'd have to change my forum password next time I logged in. On November 10th their Invision Power Board based forum was compromised. Yes, it can happen to anyone! There are several lessons that can be learned, as outlined in my blog post below:

http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2014/11/malwarebytes-forum-hacked/

AnonTechie writes:

When a medication enters the bloodstream, it ends up being concentrated in the liver – after all, one of the organ's main functions is to cleanse the blood. This means that if a drug is going to have an adverse effect on any part of the body, chances are it will be the liver. It would seem to follow, therefore, that if a pharmaceutical company wanted to test the safety of its products, it would be nice to have some miniature human livers on which to experiment – which is just what San Diego-based biotech firm Organovo ( http://ir.organovo.com/news/press-releases/press-releases-details/2014/Organovo-Announces-Commercial-Release-of-the-exVive3D-Human-Liver-Tissue/default.aspx ) is about to start selling.

Known as exVive3D, the three-dimensional liver models measure just a few millimeters across, and are created using a 3D bioprinter. The device incorporates two print heads, one of which deposits a support matrix, and the other of which precisely places human liver cells in it.

http://www.gizmag.com/organovo-exvive3d-liver-models/34843/

[Additional Coverage]: http://www.popsci.com/3-d-printed-pencil-tip-size-livers-go-sale

q.kontinuum writes:

I just saw a story on a German news site about a new, power-efficient supercomputer, which claims 5.27 GFlops/watt; that makes it roughly 20% more efficient than the current leader of the Green 500 which has 4.39 GFlops/watt. The owner's press release is (also in German) here. Their website supports English as well, but currently not for this press release — you might want to check again later today.

I was thinking, maybe this is the new race in power-computing. In the past, energy costs played a substantial role in operation of a datacenter. Lowering this prohibitive cost makes power-computing suitable for lots of new organisations, which might have a much bigger impact than new local power-houses.

AnonTechie writes:

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall began to fall, American artist Jim Sanborn was busy working on his Kryptos sculpture, a cryptographic puzzle wrapped in a riddle that he created for the CIA’s headquarters and that has been driving amateur and professional cryptographers mad ever since.

To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades.

The 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture on the grounds of the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, contains four encrypted messages carved out of the metal, three of which were solved years ago. The fourth is composed of just 97 letters, but its brevity belies its strength. Even the NSA, whose master crackers were the first to decipher other parts of the work, gave up on cracking it long ago. So four years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”—a revelation that many took to be a reference to the Berlin Wall.

To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”—that may or may not throw a wrench in this theory. Now the Kryptos sleuths just have to unscramble the remaining 86 characters to find out.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/second-kryptos-clue/

AnonTechie writes:

If you're not too busy this weekend, why not sit down on your sofa and try to find a Higgs Boson or dark matter ?

The idea's feasible because CERN yesterday released data generated by the the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). “one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors” at the Large Hadron Collider. CERN says the CMS' goal is “to investigate a wide range of physics, including properties of the recently discovered Higgs boson as well as searches for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.”

It's rather complex. CERN says “it takes CMS scientists working in groups and relying upon each others’ expertise many months or even years to perform a single analysis that must then be scrutinized by the whole collaboration before a scientific paper can be published.

The data is a little old: (recorded in 2010) http://opendata.cern.ch/collection/CMS-Derived-Datasets

The CMS team has prepared tools ( http://opendata.cern.ch/collection/CMS-Tools ) to help you with your exploration, plus a virtual machine ( http://opendata.cern.ch/record/250 ) in the notionally portable .OVA format (and recommends VirtualBox to run it).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/hunt_for_higgs_boson_and_dark_matter_now_starts_on_your_sofa/

AnonTechie writes:

Novel molecules could help flash memory move beyond its storage limits, allowing for massive amounts of data to be recorded in small spaces, according to European scientists.

Metal-oxide clusters that can retain electrical charge and act as RAM could form a new basis for data cells used in flash memory, the researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Schools of Chemistry and Engineering and Rovira i Virgili University in Spain wrote in a letter ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13951.html ) published in Nature.

The group of 13 researchers said that polyoxometalate (POM) molecules can act as storage nodes for MOS flash memory. They used tungsten to synthesize POM metal-oxide clusters and added selenium to their inner cores, in a process known as doping, to create a new type of memory they call “write-once-erase.”

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2851032/molecular-flash-memory-could-store-massive-data.html

[Additional Coverage]: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/researchers-craft-molecule-that-works-as-flash-storage/

mendax writes:

The suits working for the federal three-letter agencies are at it again according to this article published in Ars, citing a pay-walled Wall Street Journal article.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department recently warned top Apple executives that stronger encryption protections added to iPhones would lead to a horrific tragedy, such as a child dying, because police couldn't access a suspect's device, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The beefed up protections, Apple recently disclosed, mean that even when company officials are served with a court order, they will be unable to retrieve potentially crucial evidence such as photos, messages, or contacts stored on iPhones and iPads. Instead, the data can be accessed only by people who know the passcode that serves as the encryption key.

Justice Department officials wasted no time objecting to the changes and used the scenario of a child being kidnapped and murdered to drive home their claim that Apple was "marketing to criminals." According to the WSJ, Justice Department officials including Deputy Attorney General James Cole met with Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell and two other company employees on October 1.

The article goes on to quote the WSJ article's description of that meeting:

Mr. Cole offered the Apple team a gruesome prediction: At some future date, a child will die, and police will say they would have been able to rescue the child, or capture the killer, if only they could have looked inside a certain phone. His statements reflected concern within the FBI that a careful criminal can shield much activity from police surveillance by minimizing use of cellphone towers and not backing up data.

The Apple representatives viewed Mr. Cole’s suggestion as inflammatory and inaccurate. Police have other ways to get information, they said, including call logs and location information from cellphone carriers. In addition, many users store copies of a phone’s data elsewhere.

How long will these "Think of the children!" arguments actually be made before the government realizes this situation came about because it cannot be trusted?

mendax writes:

The law which authorized the NSA's bulk phone records collection to continue is supposed to sunset June 1, 2015 unless reauthorized. But as the New York Times reports. that may not be the end of it.

A little-known provision of the Patriot Act, overlooked by lawmakers and administration officials alike, appears to give President Obama a possible way to keep the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records program going indefinitely — even if Congress allows the law on which it is based to expire next year. [...]

Several executive branch officials said the [Obama] administration had not been studying that option and expressed doubt that Mr. Obama would take such a step, or that the Surveillance [FISA] Court would agree to it if he tried. Still, the mere existence of a potential way for the program to keep going without congressional action could recast the debate.

AnonTechie writes:

President Barack Obama says the United States needs to bring its schools into the 21st century when it comes to technology.

Obama says less than 40 percent of public schools have high-speed Internet in their classrooms. He says that's not good for the country where the Internet was invented.

Obama commented Wednesday as he opened a White House conference with school superintendents and other educators from across the country who are helping their schools and school districts transition to digital learning.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obama-us-bring-schools-21st-century-27025796

This has to be compared with a survey conducted in 2013 which showed that 30% of Americans do not have broadband access at home, although the majority of these are aged 50+ where the desire to have access diminishes as people get older. Furthermore, some of those from this group do have access to 3G and 4G LTE so are not entirely without access to modern communications.

[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]

Konomi writes:

http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:

Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.

hemocyanin writes that Linux still owns supercomputing:

For years, Linux has dominated supercomputing. The November 2014 Top 500 supercomputer ranking found 485 out of the world's fastest 500 computers running Linux. That's 97 percent for those of you without a calculator at hand.

I became a little curious about what distro supercomputers run, and ran across a distro targeted directly at them: Rocks. The fastest supercomputer in the world today, Tianhe-2, runs a distro called Kylin which interestingly, used to be based on FreeBSD but is now Linux-based.

[Ed's note: See our earlier story: Top-500 Supercomputer Race Goes Cold.]

AnonTechie writes to tell us of the Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years:

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centres. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

A team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège in Belgium used the FORS instrument on the VLT to study 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the Universe was about one third of its current age.

"The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other—despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years," said Hutsemékers.

The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.

[Source]: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/

[Paper]: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1438/eso1438a.pdf

Hugh Pickens writes:

Christina Nunez reports in National Geographic that in the past four years, at least 29 coal-fired plants in 10 states have switched to natural gas or biomass while another 54 units, mostly in the US Northeast and Midwest, are slated to be converted over the next nine years. By switching to natural gas, plant operators can take advantage of a relatively cheap and plentiful US supply. The change can also help them meet proposed federal rules to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, given that electricity generation from natural gas emits about half as much carbon as electricity from coal does.

But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. “We couldn’t let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future,” said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. “This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community’s Christmas miracle!”