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tonyPick writes:

There's an article over at Aeon on Quantum Biology, the interaction between Quantum Mechanics and Biological processes.

The article is written by Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey. He's written on the same subject last week in a related article at The Guardian, and over at YouTube there's a video of a keynote presentation from back in July.

tonyPick writes:

Over at Drew Ex Machina is an article on the low quality of media reporting on space related issues, such as SETI and Extrasolar planet detection.

It also refers to Dwayne Day's Space Review article from September on the problems in Newsweek's reporting of the history of the Space Race.

(These issues are not restricted to mainstream media sources; the Day article also refers to an earlier piece on some problems in online journalism).

tonyPick writes:

Over at the Scientific American Physics Week in Review is a link to a video on the Derek Muller's explanation on the physics behind Kelvin's Thunderstorm.

The setup, also known as a Kelvin water dropper is a system where two streams of falling water use electrostatic induction to generate high voltages across a spark gap.

It's explained further, along with hints and tips on how to build your own, in this article by Bill Beaty, and in this Makezine Article.

Spotted at Scientific American Physics Week in Review. Derek Muller's Veritasium Youtube channel is also worth a more general look if you haven't seen it before.

(No this is not news, but it is cool).

jbernardo writes:

The BBC decided to shut down the RSS feeds for the iplayer without any kind of warning on Thursday. The excuse is the end of a larger hosting contract for those legacy sites, and the users are promised some day in the future an API, called Nitro, to access the same kind of info. However, the head of platform API, Jon Billings, makes it clear that the reason was to break third party players: In particular, the BBC does not sanction XBMC, get_iplayer or similar clients, and the iPlayer RSS feeds were never designed or intended to support them. Nitro will almost certainly not support their ways of working.

The Nitro API portal seems to be only for BBC corporate partners only, according to the comments on that blog post, so it will indeed be worthless to third parties like kodi or get-iplayer developers.

tonyPick writes:

The Guardian has an article on the recent release of CERN Photo Archives, and how they (CERN) would like help in figuring out what some of them actually are.

This refers to the CERN Mystery Photo archive update from a couple of weeks ago:

Also covered at Gizmodo and Petapixel. Originally spotted on Scientific American's Physics Week Review.

dmc writes:

At the Washington Post, Brett Frischmann elaborates on the theory that the continuing flaw with the FCC's Net-Neutrality strategy lies in the perverse distinction between "End User" and "Edge Provider". Succinctly:

The key to an open Internet is nondiscrimination and in particular, a prohibition on discrimination or prioritization based on the identity of the user (sender/receiver) or use (application/content).

and then:

Who exactly are the end users that are not edge providers? In other words, who uses the Internet but does not provide any content, application, or service? The answer is no one. All end users provide content as they engage in communications with other end users, individually or collectively.

...

Think of all the startups and small businesses run from people’s homes on home Internet connections, using WordPress tools or Amazon hosting services. Are they “end users” when they email their friends but “edge providers” when they switch windows to check their business metrics?

cafebabe writes:

There's a line in the film The Wizard Of Oz which goes "Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown? Uh-huh." Technology isn't quite there yet but people travel abroad to have eye surgery for cosmetic reasons. The most high-profile case occurred quite recently:

Reality-TV star Tameka "Tiny" Harris "just wanted to do something different" when she traveled to Africa for a procedure that permanently changed her eye color from brown to light gray, she said.

"They are ice gray. That's the color I purchased," Harris, 39, told ABC News' Deborah Roberts in her first interview confirming the buzzed-about change.

Harris, the star of two reality shows who first gained fame as a member of the R&B group Xscape, traveled to Africa for the procedure because the operation is illegal in the United States.

People are complaining that she did to appear less Black and more Caucasian/Oriental but it appears to be a choice based on the frequency of wearing colored contact lens:

"I had been wearing colored contacts for a couple of years, and they were making my vision blurry," said Tiny. "A friend of mine mentioned that she had heard of a procedure where you could permanently change your eye color, and we looked into it. We researched it for a bit, but I was nervous because … it’s your eyes! But two years later, it came up again. I spoke to the doctors and to patients who’d had it. I learned that there was no downtime, that it only took about 15 minutes - plus it’s reversible. When I found out that you could reverse it, I was sold."

Many doctors strongly advise against the surgery which can cause permanent blindness or death.

Also in the news for looking less ethnic is Renée Zellweger. Personally, I think she looks greatly improved but her ancestry is an issue for other people:

Renee Zellweger hit the news headlines earlier this week, following some pretty drastic cosmetic surgery she had done to her face recently, and apparently, she did so to hide her Norwegian Sami/Kven heritage in order to look more "traditionally European."

That claim comes from a top professor of Finnish culture, Edward Dutton, from Oulu University in Finland, who says that Renee went under the knife to hide her ethnic roots.

According to Professor Dutton, "With a Swiss father and a mother who is part Kven and part Sami - ethnic minorities Indigenous to Norway, Finland and Sweden – Renee had a somewhat "eastern" face. I suspect Renee has had plastic surgery which makes her look less Sami, less Kven, and more stereotypically North European. She was so much more beautiful and interesting when she had the courage to be Sami and Kven."

While talking about Renee Zellweger's possible intentions for the surgery, Dutton compared her to none other than the King of Pop himself. "There seems little question that Michael Jackson underwent plastic surgery to make himself look more European, and Renee seems to have done exactly the same thing. How sad," he said.

The article has further information about ancestry and blepharoplasty to remove a style of eyelid believed to be an adaptation for cold climate.

sudo rm -rf writes:

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues managed to develop a genetic strain of mice that show, when infected with Ebola, similar symptoms as humans. This work, published in the current issue of Science, will significantly improve basic research on Ebola treatments and vaccines.
From the abstract:

Existing mouse models of lethal Ebola virus infection do not reproduce hallmark symptoms of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, neither delayed blood coagulation and disseminated intravascular coagulation, nor death from shock, thus restricting pathogenesis studies to non-human primates. Here we show that mice from the Collaborative Cross exhibit distinct disease phenotypes following mouse-adapted Ebola virus infection. Phenotypes range from complete resistance to lethal disease to severe hemorrhagic fever characterized by prolonged coagulation times and 100% mortality. Inflammatory signaling was associated with vascular permeability and endothelial activation, and resistance to lethal infection arose by induction of lymphocyte differentiation and cellular adhesion, likely mediated by the susceptibility allele Tek. These data indicate that genetic background determines susceptibility to Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In a short interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, touts the W3C's HTML 5 standard, which was finally published last week after eight years of work. Sir Berners-Lee sees HTML 5 as advancing the Web as the central platform for delivering Internet content and applications, to mobile devices as well as PC users.

Some other quick takes on HTML 5 are here.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

One of the main benefits of the OpenBSD 5.6 release is its new httpd HTTP server that includes FastCGI and SSL support.

As httpd contributor Reyk Floeter describes it:

httpd was written in and by OpenBSD and it shares a lot of code and efforts with other daemons, including relayd, snmpd, iked and even the "cousins" bgpd, ospfd, smtpd and others. The FastCGI implementation was contributed by florian@ based on his slowcgi code. We have an amazing lineup of tools in base, but they are not individual software projects -they share code, principles, and concepts. They are not "alien" to us and we have multiple people who "know" or understand the code base. I get useful contributions, tests, bug reports and direct feedback from many OpenBSD developers and our user community.

OpenBSD is already known as one of the most, if not the most, secure and robust operating system in existence. As the project's home page states, OpenBSD has suffered from "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" Given the project's remarkable focus on security, and the project's long history of developing extremely reliable software, it is without a doubt that httpd will soon reach the stature of the OpenBSD community's other renowned and respected projects, including OpenSSH and LibreSSL. For those desiring a strong and secure, yet capable, web server stack, OpenBSD is clearly worth a look.

sudo rm -rf writes:

If you are a primary school teacher or if you like silly portmanteaus, you could be interested in this report by Queen's University, Ontario:

Four minutes of physical activity can improve behaviour in the classroom for primary school students, according to new research by Brendon Gurd.

A brief, high-intensity interval exercise, or a “FUNterval,” for Grade 2 and Grade 4 students reduced off-task behaviours like fidgeting or inattentiveness in the classroom.

Note: the link to the PDF in TFA is broken, you can find it here, full article can be found at NRC Research Press.

tonyPick writes:

Over at The Washington Post is the story on a request by Pianist Dejan Lazic asking the Washington Post to remove a negative review under the EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” law.

The article in question is a review by Anne Midgette from 2010 which is critical of Lazic's performance which:

The Washington Post is highlighting this case as a troublesome consequence of the European law

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jason Plautz writes at The Atlantic that the more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment. "And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," says Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau. Even as the population passes 7.2 billion and is projected by the United Nations to reach 10.9 billion by the end of the century, policymakers have been unable—or unwilling—to discuss population in tandem with climate change. Why? Because "talking about population control requires walking a tightrope." writes Plautz. "It can all too easily sound like a developed world leader telling people in the developing world that they should stop having children—especially because much of the population boom is coming from regions like sub-Saharan Africa." Just look at what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2009, when as secretary of State she acknowledged the overpopulation issue during a discussion with Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh. Clinton praised another panelist for noting "that it's rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning."

A 2010 study looked at the link between policies that help women plan pregnancies and family size and global emissions. The researchers predicted that lower population growth could provide benefits equivalent to between 16 and 29 percent of the emissions reduction needed to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius warming by 2050, the warning line set by international scientists. But the benefits also come through easing the reduced resources that could result from climate change. The U.N. IPCC report notes the potential for climate-related food shortages, with fish catches falling anywhere from 40 to 60 percent and wheat and maize taking a hit, as well as extreme droughts. With resources already stretched in some areas, the IPCC laid out the potential for famine, water shortages and pestilence. Still, the link remains a "very sensitive topic," says Karen Hardee, "At the global policy level you can't touch population … but what's been heartening is that over the last few years it's not just us, but people from the countries themselves talking about this."

tonyPick writes:

The Scientist is running an article on DNA contamination and the effect this may have had on recent research.

The paper is available at PLOS ONE and concludes:

tonyPick writes:

Phys.org is reporting that a Chinese Lunar orbiter completed the return trip to Earth early on Saturday.

The probe, “Xiaofei” or "Little Flyer", was launched on the 23rd of October and spent eight days on a 520,000 mile (840,000 km) round trip to the moon and back, as a test run for China's next Lunar mission.

The journal phys.org has an earlier article on the original launch; this story is also covered at Space.com and The Telegraph