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tonyPick writes:

Spotted over at The Scientist is the report that the winning bidder will return Watson's Nobel prize medal following the auction last week.

It turns out that James Watson’s Nobel Prize medal, which he won in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of DNA, will be staying with the biologist after all. The Russian entrepreneur Alisher Usmanov, who paid $4.1 million for the medal at an auction last week (December 4), will return the prize to its original owner, The New York Times reports.

The New York Times' report adds:

Mr. Usmanov said his father had died of cancer, so he valued Dr. Watson’s contributions to cancer research. “It is important for me that the money that I spent on this medal will go to supporting scientific research,” [Usmanov] said, “and the medal will stay with the person who deserved it.”

janrinok writes:

Phys.org has a report regarding the use of molybdenum sulfide (MoS2) [sic - I think that should be molybdenum disulfide] as a catalyst when spliting water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen:

Hydrogen could be an important source of clean energy, and the cleanest way to produce hydrogen gas is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But the catalyst currently used to facilitate this water-splitting reaction is platinum. And that's a problem. When an electric current is run through water, it can split some of the water molecules. A catalyst lowers the amount of energy needed to split those molecules, and platinum is really, really good at this. But platinum is also really, really expensive – much too expensive for widespread use in hydrogen production.

So, researchers have long viewed molybdenum sulfide (MoS2) as a promising, much cheaper alternative to platinum. The drawback is that MoS2's catalytic performance is far worse than platinum's. To get around that problem, researchers have been trying to find ways to improve MoS2's catalytic performance. And now they may be on to something.

"The biggest stumbling block to improving MoS2's performance has been a lack of understanding of the connection between the material's performance and its composition and structure," says Linyou Cao, senior author of a new paper on the subject and a materials science and engineering researcher at NC State. "We're now able to shed some light on that connection."

In molybdenum sulfide, the ratio of sulfur atoms to molybdenum atoms can range from two to three. As a result, many researchers wondered if the precise composition of the material could affect its catalytic performance.

According to a new paper from Cao and his team, it doesn't. But the crystalline structure of the material does.

janrinok writes:

A report found on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website details some rather alarming results of test that they have recently conducted:

Firefighters rely on the radios to report their location and to communicate with other first responders as well as the incident command post or communications center. Performance problems with portable radios have been identified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as contributing factors in some firefighter fatalities.

All seven of the firefighter portable radios tested by NIST failed to perform properly within 15 minutes when exposed to temperature levels encountered in “fully involved” fires, as when all the contents in a room or structure are burning. Four of the hand-held radios stopped transmitting, and three experienced significant “signal drift,” rendering the radios unreliable for communication.

The failures occurred while the radios were subjected to a temperature of 160 degrees Celsius (320 degrees Fahrenheit), termed Thermal Class II conditions. The temperature is representative of a fully involved fire or conditions outside a room when its contents burst into flames simultaneously, a phenomenon known as flashover.

During the post-test cool-down period, three of the radios did not recover normal function.

However, as someone with no specialist knowledge of the fire-fighting profession, I do wonder howmany firefighters have to be able to withstand 160 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. Does the rest of the fireman's equipment continue to work after such an extreme test? I know that firemen may have to cope with a lower temperature for a much longer period, or perhaps even higher temperatures for a brief period, but I am not certain if the test is a realistic one or a test until destruction/inoperability. The NIST report states that the tests should be 'realistic and reliable' - but doesn't actually state that these test meet that requirement.

fliptop writes:

JPL announced Curiosity has found clues to how water shaped the Martian landscape:

Observations by NASA's Curiosity Rover indicate Mars' Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years.

"If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds p, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "A more radical explanation is that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."

There was also news that Saturn's moon Titan has giant dunes that may have been formed over thousands of years.

Radar images of the dunes - the most detailed ever taken - reveal that the winds that rearrange the sand probably change direction as Titan's orbit wobbles relative to the Sun. Those orbital variations are thought to alter which parts of the surface get the most sunlight, and the shape of the dunes reflect the resulting changes in weather patterns.

The dunes are made of hydrocarbon particles and

...so they are more similar to mounds of soot than to Earth's sand, which is mostly silica - and are some of the biggest in the Solar System. They stretch for hundreds of kilometres over a total area as big as the United States (including Alaska). Various ideas for what shaped them include winds from the east or the west, which may be driven by daily, seasonal or other regular changes. Dunes can even assume different forms depending on how much sediment is available to feed them.

Ting Model writes:

Nick Wingfield reports at the New York Times that Loc Tran, a top player on the school’s competitive video game team, became a big man on campus at San Jose State University in Northern California after helping San Jose State claw its way to victory in June over California State University, Fullerton, in a tournament watched online by nearly 90,000 people. When the new school year started this fall, classmates’ heads swiveled toward him when professors said his name during roll call. “I thought that was pretty cool,” says Tran. Winning big video game competitions, also known as e-sports, can sometimes earn players several years’ worth of tuition money and, in a possible sign of the future, the athletic department of Robert Morris University Illinois in Chicago created an official video game team this fall, offering the same sort of scholarships given to athletes playing soccer, football, and ice hockey.

The rise in e-sports has been so abrupt, many schools have not determined what to make of it. Carter Henderson, a spokesman for the University of Washington’s athletics program, said no one from the department was familiar enough with e-sports to discuss the topic. Game companies say it is too early to predict how university administrations will become involved in e-sports. “This is just how basketball was in the 1940s,” says Christopher Wyatt. “A lot of the structure and organization you see in more formal athletics, that groundwork is still being laid down here.” In the meantime, game companies and collegiate league organizers predict that college e-sports could become a pipeline for the growing professional circuit. “We really want e-sports to become as ingrained in the academic environment as anything else," says Tyler Rosen like "speech competitions, football competitions."

"gewg_" writes:

TechDirt tags this story as "Failures" and further classifies it as from the "did-we-win-the-War-on-Terror-yet?" dept.

Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Torture Report (PDF) is the fact that the CIA clearly knew the methods weren't producing usable intelligence but continued to use them anyway, all the while hiding the extent of its abuses from the rest of the [government].

The Executive Summary is 525 pages of abusive activity, carried out under the pretense that no other approach would keep the US safe from further terrorist attacks. Dianne Feinstein's preamble addresses the incredible amount of work that went into the full report (which weighs in at over 7,000 pages). While it does point out that the CIA destroyed evidence[1] and forced Senate staffers to work[1] in a CIA-controlled environment while performing research, it curiously omits any mention of the CIA's spying on Senate staffers--something that seemed to be a big deal a few months ago.

[...]the CIA's own records (what remains of them) point out the limited return on investment.

according to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody.

A lack of useful intel wasn't enough to derail the CIA's torture plans. Agents ignored warnings from medical staff and continued to "break down" detainees. Medical personnel were asked to do whatever was needed to return detainees to torture-ready condition.[1]

[1] Content is behind scripts.

Lagg writes:

Earlier today (9 Dec), the Pirate Bay servers became unresponsive worldwide. The cause was later found to be a police raid by the Stockolm IP enforcement division. Personally and despite this being a first for TPB (other downtimes were due to hardware failures) I doubt that it'll last. This also seems to be the general consensus among the community. I would imagine that there is a regularly updated backup of the site for mirroring just for this situation.

[Ed's Note: As at 10 Dec 0900 UTC the site was still down.]

mcgrew writes:

I ran across this article, Everybody farts. But here are 9 surprising facts about flatulence you may not know. I doubted I'd learn anything from it, but was surprised. Did you know most farts are odorless?

hubie writes:

The old fashion saw is that shoes make the man, but it turns out that they may affect him in other ways as well.

The well-heeled Marilyn Monroe reportedly once said if you give a girl the right shoes, she can conquer the world.

The allure of high-heeled shoes is no secret among women, who have used them to entice men from the streets of Ancient Rome to the New York City sidewalks of Carrie Bradshaw. Heels have also been a controversial symbol in the battleground of sexual politics.

Now a scientific study in France has measured their power.

tonyPick writes:

Phil Plait has an opinion piece on Slate which asks the question is NASA's Orion crew vehicle really the right thing to do?

Phil Plait is the author of the Bad Astronomy blog, and in this article he argues that the funding and schedule problems with the Orion Launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), mean that Orion is the wrong design.

The alternative offered is to have private companies, such as SpaceX, supply launch vehicles, and scrap the SLS. However without the SLS then Orion itself would require a fundamental redesign.

As a result of this the article argues that scrapping the Orion/SLS project and redirecting the money would allow NASA to build and launch many more missions using private sector launch vehicles. This is the same argument in the (linked) earlier space.com article:

Hugh Pickens writes:

Bruce Parker, the former chief scientist of NOAA’s National Ocean Service and currently a visiting professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, reports in the Wall Street Journal that there is a natural explanation for how a temporary path across the Red Sea could have been revealed that that doesn't involve biblical miracles. The explanation involves the tide, a natural phenomenon that would have fit nicely into a well-thought-out plan by Moses, because Moses would have been able to predict when it would happen. In the biblical account, the children of Israel were camped on the western shore of the Gulf of Suez when the dust clouds raised by Pharaoh’s chariots were seen in the distance. The Israelites were now trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea. The dust clouds, however, were probably an important sign for Moses; they would have let him calculate how soon Pharaoh’s army would arrive at the coast. Moses had lived in the nearby wilderness in his early years, and he knew where caravans crossed the Red Sea at low tide. He knew the night sky and the ancient methods of predicting the tide, based on where the moon was overhead and how full it was. Pharaoh and his advisers, by contrast, lived along the Nile River, which is connected to the almost tideless Mediterranean Sea. They probably had little knowledge of the tides of the Red Sea and how dangerous they could be

Interestingly enough Moses was not the only leader to cross the Gulf of Suez at low tide. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte and a small group of soldiers on horseback crossed the Gulf of Suez, the northern end of the Red Sea, roughly where Moses and the Israelites are said to have crossed. On a mile-long expanse of dry sea bottom exposed at low water, the tide suddenly rushed in, almost drowning them. When Napoleon and his forces almost drowned in 1798, the water typically rose 5 or 6 feet at high tide (and up to 9 or 10 feet with the wind blowing in the right direction). But there is evidence that the sea level was higher in Moses’ time. As a result, the Gulf of Suez would have extended farther north and had a larger tidal range. If that was indeed the case, the real story of the Israelites’ crossing wouldn’t have needed much exaggeration to include walls of water crashing down on the pursuing Egyptians.

Blackmoore writes:

A new month means a new stable release of the Linux Kernel and today Linus Torvalds has obliged, announcing the immediate availability of Linux 3.18.

What’s New In Linux 3.18?

The Linux 3.18 kernel is amped up with some of the latest improvements in hardware support, power efficiency, bug fixes, and reliability.

As ever, these span the breadth of comprehension, going from bamboozling — e.g., multi-buffer operations for cryptographic layers — to the air-punchingly understandable, like support for the Razer Sabertooth gamepad.

• Nouveau (free Nvidia GPU driver) now supports basic DisplayPort audio
• Support for the Razer Sabertooth gamepad, maps it as Xbox 360 controller
• Xilinx USB2 peripherals
• Touchscreen support for Microchip AR1021 i2c, PenMount 6000 touch
• Audio codecs: Cirrus Logic CS35L32, Everest ES8328and Freescale ES8328
• Audio support: Generic Freescale sound cards, Analog Devices SSM4567 audio amplifier
• Various filesystem improvements, including Btrfs and F2FS
• DCTCP congestion control algorithm now supported
• JIT compilation of eBPF programs on 64-bit builds
• “Tinification” patches to help developers compile leaner, smaller kernels

janrinok writes:

Advances in implanted medical devices are being reported in an Ars Technica story:

For a variety of medical reasons, it’s useful to implant devices inside the body. These devices may be needed to help regulate the cardiovascular system, or they can release drugs inside the body. Unfortunately, they’re also problematic. Once such a device has served its function, it must be removed, which necessitates another surgery. Plus, the presence can lead to complications such as infection, inflammation, and pain.

To address some of these problems, scientists have developed new kinds of circuitry that can safely dissolve in the body. While these water-soluble devices don’t need to be removed, they come with a new problem—they dissolve too quickly for many purposes. So a group of researchers have now reported that they’ve developed a new way to control how long the devices last. The researchers propose that dissolving devices could be encased in a material made from silk protein and magnesium. The advantage of this approach comes from a property of the silk: its crystallinity.

Different preparations of silk dissolve in water at different rates depending on their crystallinities. Altering this property allows researchers to choose among a range of dissolution times from only a few minutes up to a few weeks. This gives more control over the duration of the device, which is important, since different medical situations require devices that can last vastly different times.

The researchers tested actual devices encased in silk in two ways, first in vitro (in test tubes filled with saline solution to mimic body fluids) and next in vivo (in live mice) to determine if they would actually work as intended. The results are promising: both tests shoeds that the devices could be controlled wirelessly while inside the body over the time periods needed, and they can survive the process of surgical implantation.

The abstract can be found here.

janrinok writes:

Alan Schriesheim became the first industry executive to lead a national laboratory when he took the helm of Argonne in 1983, after serving as Exxon’s head of engineering and the director of its research lab, which developed more efficient processes for producing components of gasoline. According to Forbes, as the director emeritus of Argonne National Laboratory, he has said:

No utility executive could propose a nuclear reactor ”in good conscience” in the U.S. today, the director emeritus of Argonne National Laboratory said in Chicago Monday.

At Argonne he championed, among other projects, an integral fast reactor, and he is credited with fostering a revival at Argonne. Now in retirement, he leads the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, which sponsors public talks like the question-and-answer session he offered Monday to students at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

“In the United States the price of natural gas is of such a level that I don’t think a CEO of a utility could in good conscience propose a nuclear-power reactor to his or her board of directors,” Schriesheim told about 75 students at UIC’s engineering building.

Nuclear is infeasible for the next 10 or 15 years in this country, he said, with the price of natural gas as it is.

Do you agree with this view, or do you feel that he is supporting the industry that once employed him?

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that with the release of the long-awaited Senate report on the use of torture by the United States government — a detailed account that will shed an unsparing light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s darkest practices after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the US is bracing itself for the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas. Some leading Republican lawmakers have warned against releasing the report, saying that domestic and foreign intelligence reports indicate that a detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration could incite unrest and violence, even resulting in the deaths of Americans. The White House acknowledged that the report could pose a “greater risk” to American installations and personnel in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Iraq. But it said that the government had months to plan for the reverberations from its report — indeed, years — and that those risks should not delay the release of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “When would be a good time to release this report?” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, asked. “It’s difficult to imagine one, particularly given the painful details that will be included.”

Among the administration’s concerns is that terrorist groups will exploit the disclosures in the report for propaganda value. The Islamic State already clads its American hostages in orange jumpsuits, like those worn by prisoners in CIA interrogations. Hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria were subjected to waterboarding, one of the practices used by the CIA to extract information from suspected terrorists. The 480-page document reveals the results of Senate investigation into the CIA's use of torture and other techniques that violate international law against prisoners held on terrorism-related charges. Though many details of the Senate's findings will remain classified – the document is a summary of a 6,000-page report that is not being released – the report is expected to conclude that the methods used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners during the post-9/11 years were more extreme than previously admitted and produced no intelligence that could not have been acquired through legal means.