SoylentNews

Are any Soylentils in or from the region? Do you have any insights to share?

c0lo writes:

"More appropriate to an (no existing) idle section, no longer news, but it made a fascinating reading for me:
How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries going the full range of:

• economic espionage involving Scavenger Hunt and social engineering
• reverse engineering
• original research and method improvement
• disclosure of the method the good side of it: no patent"

kef writes:

"Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of exo-planet Tau Boötis b, which was was discovered in 1996 and is just 51 light years away. From the article:

To analyze the atmosphere surrounding Tau Boötis b, scientists looked at its faint glow. Different types of molecules emit different wavelengths of light, resulting in signatures known as spectra that reveal their chemical identity.

Scientists have used spectrographic analyses to find water signatures on other alien planets before, but only when those worlds passed in front of their parent stars. Tau Boötis b does not transit in front of its parent star from our viewpoint on Earth, but Lockwood and colleagues were able to tease out the weak light emitted by the planet using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii."

[ED note: The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal (paywalled), but they are also freely viewable on Arxiv.]

AnonTechie writes:

"MasterCard is partnering with mobile technology company Syniverse. The two will deliver a service to fight credit-card fraud by linking the user's card with the user's mobile phone. This will be an opt-in service and it is still in pilot-phase. Geolocation data will be key in making this work; the person will need to have both the phone and card. In order to complete any card transaction the user will need to have that mobile device switched on to a specific geolocation while abroad. A credit card user's point-of-sale details will be correlated with the geolocation of the mobile device. The true location will be identified, reducing the likelihood that criminals are able to buy goods with stolen cards."

TheUnknownCoder writes:

"Researchers at Stanford University have taken inspiration from the pomegranate to design a supercharged anode battery. Working in collaboration with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the team used the pomegranate's unique seed design to make a battery that can store 10 times more charge than a standard rechargeable lithium-ion battery."

Barrabas writes:

"From Hackaday:

Jeff Highsmith's son just started school and needed a desk to do homework on. They had recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, and his son found a new interest in all things space, so Jeff make the desk into this mind-boggling control panel.

The video demonstrating the project is quite impressive check it out."

buswolley writes:

"Is the United States or the EU really too poor to afford to build the things each needs to maintain prosperous nations? Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) posits that America is not too poor in real resources to do the things it needs to do, and now proponents of the theory have adapted the rules of the classic board game Monopoly to demonstrate their case. For those that do not know what modern monetary theory is about, a suitable primer on the topic might be Warren Mosler's Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economy Policy or Diagrams and Dollars, either as a book on Amazon or on-line for free at NewEconomicsPerspectives.org.

While the Modern Monetary Theory perspective tends to elicit disbelief and even rage, I think it is important for any scientist and geek to weigh the evidence carefully, and by doing so understand better about how and why money is created and destroyed."

AnonTechie writes:

"Can a Computer Fall in Love if It Doesn't Have a Body? Much has been written about Spike Jonze's Her, the Oscar-nominated tale of love between man and operating system. It's an allegory about relationships in a digital age, a Rorschach test for technology. It's also premised on a particular vision of artificial intelligence as capable of experiencing love.

Poetic license aside, is that really possible ?"

GungnirSniper writes:

"Nintendo has announced the discontinuation of their Wi-Fi Connection Service for the Wii, DS, and DSi systems. Over 400 titles are affected, including Mario Kart Wii. Engadget reports that the services that will keep working on the DS after May include the DSi Shop, DS Browser, and DSi Browser, while the Wii will keep Netflix, Hulu, Wii Shop Channel, Internet Channel, Pay & Play, and YouTube.

Could the slow sales of the Wii U be motivating this move? Will casual gamers be instead put off by this, and hurt the company's future sales?"

tonya servo writes:

"Season two of the Saturn Award nominated Hannibal, which is based on characters from the novel Red Dragon, debuts tonight (NBC 10 pm EST). The brain child of the delightfully quirky and morbid Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me), Hannibal is nominated in the Best Network TV Series and Best Actor (Mads Mikkelsen) categories. A guest turn on Hannibal as Bella Crawford (starring opposite real-life husband Laurence Fishburne) earns Gina Torres (Firefly) her first Saturn nomination.

The Saturn Awards are presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, and they reward the best in both film and television in those genres. A quick scan down the list of nominees for the 40th annual awards shows how varied the field is. Blockbusters like Star Trek Into Darkness and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug are on the list, but so is the Siri-seduction film Her and the historical drama The Book Thief."

McGruber writes:

"Following up on the Bil Nye and Ken Ham debate on Creationism, Creation Museum founder Ken Ham announced Thursday that a municipal bond offering has raised enough money to begin construction on the Ark Encounter project, estimated to cost about $73 million. Groundbreaking is planned for May and the ark is expected to be finished by the summer of 2016. Ham credits the high-profile evolution debate he had with "Science Guy" Bill Nye on Feb. 4 with boosting support for the project.

After learning that the project would move forward, Nye said he was 'heartbroken and sickened for the Commonwealth of Kentucky,' lamenting that the ark would eventually draw more attention to the beliefs of Ham's Young-earth Creationist ministry. 'Voters and taxpayers in Kentucky will eventually see that this is not in their best interest.' Nye hopes."

AnonTechie writes:

"The Register is reporting on a new approach to discourage mining of your cloud-stored data. The so-called 'Melbourne Shuffle' should make it harder for cloud operators to mine or sniff your data.

Researchers from Microsoft, the University of California-Irvine, and Brown University have proposed a technology that should make it harder to derive value from data stored in the cloud. In a paper titled The Melbourne Shuffle: Improving Oblivious Storage in the Cloud, authors Olga Ohrimenko, Michael T. Goodrich, Roberto Tamassia and Eli Upfal kick things off with the statement that, 'One of the unmistakable recent trends in networked computation and distributed information management is that of cloud storage, whereby users outsource data to external servers that manage and provide access to their data.'

'Such services also introduce privacy concerns,' the authors write, '[because] it is likely that cloud storage providers will want to perform data mining on user data, and it is also possible that such data will be subject to government searches. Thus, there is a need for algorithmic solutions that preserve the desirable properties of cloud storage while also providing privacy protection for user data.'"

Wakaranai writes:

"BBC News has a video report that a UK company, Hybrid Air Vehicles, is developing helium-filled hybrid airships for passengers and cargo.

The first prototype was 91 m long, and was built for the US Army. However, the military project was scrapped due to budget cuts, and the airship was returned to the UK. A larger vehicle is on the drawing board.

One of the companies shareholders is... err.. Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden!"

AnonTechie writes:

"Haifang Wen is professor in civil and environmental engineering at Washington State University where he uses his education to research new ways of making asphalt better and cheaper.

'The asphalt used in roads has traditionally been made from aggregate small particles of rock and products made from crude oil. When crude oil is refined, it produces a variety of products including light fuels like gasoline, heavier plastics and also dense asphalt. But the price of asphalt made from crude oil is pretty high, about $700 to $800 per ton', Wen said. 'That really adds up. One lane of a highway, paved for one mile, costs about $1 million. Now you know where your taxes go !'

One alternative to traditional asphalt that Wen and the people in his lab are looking into is bioasphalt. Instead of using petroleum, waste cooking oil is processed into asphalt.

http://news.wsu.edu/2014/02/18/rock-doc-designing- better-asphalt-at-wsu/"

c0lo writes:

"Russian legislators are asking the government to impose a temporary ban on all genetically-altered products in Russia, while the Agriculture Ministry suggests the punishment for illegal GMO production be equated to that of growing cannabis.

While the State Duma's Agriculture Committee posed as worried about the control over the GMO effects on humans and the natural environment, the deputy Agriculture Minister Aleksandr Petrikov seems to focus more on economic risks. Russia cannot compete with foreign producers when it comes to costs, but still can position itself as a producer of high-quality, GMO-free agricultural goods.

However, the deputy head of Russia's state consumer rights watchdog, Gennady Ivanov, reminded MPs that since Russia joined the WTO in 2012, trade restrictions can be imposed only after the hazardous effects of the banned goods are scientifically proven. In early February, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a government session that Russia will create its own research base for genetically modified organisms that would provide the authorities with expert information and allow for further legislative movements and executive decisions."

girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

"An international team of researchers has discovered a 'microbial Pompeii'; a menagerie of bacteria and microscopic food particles preserved in the dental plaque of 1000 year old skeletons.

The use of dental plaque for genetic and medical research was described by Professor Christian von Mering, an author of the study and Group Director at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as, 'a window into the past ... [which] may well turn out to be one of the best-preserved records of human-associated microbes.'

The study, published in the latest issue of Nature Genetics (paywalled), focused on four adult human skeletons with evidence of mild to severe gum disease from the medieval (c. 950-1200 CE) monastic site of Dalheim, Germany. Their dental plaque was compared to that of nine living people with known dental histories. By using shotgun DNA sequencing and Raman spectroscopy, the study revealed that although human diet and hygiene have changed considerably during the last millennium, gum disease is caused by the same bacteria today as it had been in the past.

What's more, the research found that the basic genetic machinery for antibiotic resistance had already existed in our oral cavities well before the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s. Thus, the researchers were able to identify native resistance genes to aminoglycosides, Beta-lactams, bacitracin (used in Neosporin), bacteriocins, and macrolides, among others.

The food particles they recovered were preserved well enough to enable DNA analysis, thus identifying some dietary components, such as vegetables, that leave few traces in the archaeological record. Medieval dental plaque was also found to contain disordered carbon (microcharcoal), an environmental pollutant that causes respiratory irritation."

GungnirSniper writes:

"Pharmaceutical company Zogenix has received US FDA approval to launch a new hydrocodone-based analgesic in March. The drug is intended only for chronic pain, not as an short term or as-needed analgesic. CNN is reporting a coalition of groups are lobbying for the FDA to revoke their approval before the medicine is even available.

The concerns echoed by all groups are broadly about the drug's potency and abuse potential. They say they fear that Zohydro especially at higher doses will amplify already-rising overdose numbers.

'You're talking about a drug that's somewhere in the neighborhood of five times more potent than what we're dealing with now,' said Dr. Stephen Anderson, a Washington emergency room physician who is not part of the most recent petition to the FDA about the drug. 'I'm five times more concerned, solely based on potency.'

A number of other news outlets are hyping the potency of Zohydro, going so far as calling the drug ten times more powerful than a 5mg Vicodan. A fairer comparison may be to OxyCodone, since they have similar opioid levels. Zohydro ER will be available in 10 mg, 15 mg, 20 mg, 30 mg, 40 mg, and 50 mg strengths.

Chemistry Soylents can find the structural formula for hydrocodone bitartrate on RxList.

Should the FDA allow such a potent medication on the market? Or would moving opioid analgesics to Schedule II mitigate the potential for abuse?"