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tonyPick writes:

According to the BBC the UK National Health Service (NHS) is setting up a programme to sequence 100,000 Genomes by 2017 and use this data to develop new treatments:

Under the scheme, 11 Genomics Medicine Centres are being set up in English hospitals to gather DNA samples to help devise targeted treatments for a wide range of diseases.

...

Doctors will offer suitable patients the opportunity to take part in the scheme. They will have to agree to have their genetic code and medical records - stripped of anything that could identify them - made available to drugs companies and researchers.

The scheme, known as the "100,000 Genomes Project" is being co-ordinated by Genomics England, a company set up and owned by the Department Of Health, specifically for this purpose.

Also covered at The Guardian and The Independent.

lhsi writes:

Research into Honey Bees has found that their behavioural responses change when they are affected by cocaine (full text).

Bees developed a preference for locations at which they received cocaine, and when foraging at low quality sucrose feeders increase their foraging rate in response to cocaine treatment. Cocaine also increased reflexive proboscis extension to sucrose, and sting extension to electric shock. Both of these simple reflexes are modulated by biogenic amines. This shows that systemic cocaine treatment alters behavioural responses that are modulated by biogenic amines in insects. Since insect reward responses involve both octopamine and dopamine signalling, we conclude that cocaine treatment altered diverse reward-related aspects of behaviour in bees. Our findings further validate the honey bee as a model system for understanding the behavioural impacts of cocaine, and potentially other drugs of abuse.

sigma writes:

Augusta Free Press:Virginia Tech wins contract from Army Research Office to develop tool to link individuals, events

A researcher at Virginia Tech has won a subcontract from the United States Army Research Office and United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center to develop an automated tool to make sense of data captured in news articles, tweets, images, and audio and video streams.

The software, intended to help help law enforcement agencies connect suspects and events, will allow the intelligence community to rapidly generate “linkages” by extracting information about location, identity, organization, and relationship, which will help them to tie individuals and groups to events and activities.

The researcher, associate professor Chang-Tien Lu, said. “By developing efficient spatiotemporal storytelling techniques we will discover meaningful relationships among entities and deliver rapid and accurate insights.”

Presumably Cyberdyne's involvement is pending hardware "development".

Blackmoore writes:

EFF - As Hollywood Funds a SOPA Revival Through State Officials, Google (And The Internet) Respond

Almost three years ago, millions of Internet users joined together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a disastrous bill that would have balkanized the Internet in the name of copyright and trademark enforcement. Over the past week, we've been tracking a host of revelations about an insidious campaign to accomplish the goals of SOPA by other means. The latest development: Google has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block enforcement of an overbroad and punitive subpoena seeking an extraordinary quantity of information about the company and its users. The subpoena, Google warns, is based on legal theories that could have disastrous consequences for the open Internet.

The subpoena was issued after months of battles between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. According to the lawsuit, Hood has been using his office to pressure Google to restrict content accessible through the search engine. Indeed, among other things, he sought "a “24-hour link through which attorneys general[]” can request that links to particular websites be removed from search results "within hours,” presumably without judicial review or an opportunity for operators of the target websites to be heard." As Google states, "The Attorney General may prefer a pre-filtered Internet—but the Constitution and Congress have denied him the authority to mandate it."

The subpoena itself is bad enough, but here's what's really disturbing: the real force behind it appears to be the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which has been quietly supporting state-level prosecutors in various efforts to target the company and the open Internet. The clear aim of that campaign—dubbed "Project Goliath" in MPAA emails made public through the recent high profile breach of Sony's corporate network—is to achieve the goals of the defeated SOPA blacklist proposal without the public oversight of the legislative process. Previously, Google had responded with a sharply worded notice and a petition titled #ZombieSOPA.

To be clear though: Google may be the target today, but the real target is the open Internet, which depends on free and uncensored platforms to survive. Any campaign to censor the Internet is cause for concern—and a secret one is all the more so. The public has clearly and unambiguously denounced the SOPA effort; it's shameful to see its backers try to revive its goals by dodging the scrutiny of the democratic process.

Also reported at Ars Technica -
Tech groups send Miss. AG a “friendly reminder” about how bad SOPA was
Mississippi AG backs off Google investigation pushed by MPAA
Google moves to halt investigation by Mississippi AG, cites MPAA lobbying

fritsd writes:

TEPCO announced on December 15, 2014 that their ongoing work of emptying the damaged fuel rods from the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is complete now.
Fuel removal started on November 18, 2013 and is completed on December 22, 2014. The 1533 fuel assemblies have been very carefully lifted out of the pool with a special crane and put in another pool nearby that's at least not on the first floor of a building in an earthquake zone.

Link: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/planaction/removal-e.html

(comment from submitter: I read this first on de Volkskrant, http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/alle-splijtstofstaven-verwijderd-uit-reactor-4-fukushima~a3815702/.)

tonyPick writes:

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: using a light emitting e-reader before sleep may be counterproductive.

Originally spotted on phys.org, this story is based on research at Pennsylvania State University.

dlb writes:

The Skiplagged web site is a one-person project helping people find cheaper airfares by linking them to less-expensive multistop flights where one of the layovers is their actual destination.

According to CBS News:

It works like this: A traveler looking to fly from Newark to Miami might find it's actually cheaper to buy a ticket to Charleston with a stopover in Miami.
At the time, the direct flight was $541 while the Skiplagged route was $325.

The ploy has been around for years, but wasn't that well known until 22-year-old Aktarer Zaman created Skiplagged. Now the airlines (and Orbitz) are lawyering up.

In a federal lawsuit filed last month, United Airlines, one of the world's largest carriers, and Orbitz, said, "Zaman has intentionally and maliciously used Skiplagged to damage [their] businesses."

American Airlines Group Inc., as stated in Bloombert News, claim that Zaman is helping people engage in dishonest, if not criminal behavior.

“Purchasing a ticket to a point beyond the actual destination and getting off the aircraft at the connecting point is unethical,” according to the letter by American, which isn’t party to the case. “It is tantamount to switching price tags to obtain a lower price on goods sold at department stores.”

lhsi writes:

Scientists have attempted to recreate the déjà vu experience (full text) in a controlled setting and have found that novelty is an important component of experiencing déjà vu.

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica - EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture

OAKLAND, Calif.—A federal judge spent over four hours on Friday questioning lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and from the Department of Justice in an ongoing digital surveillance-related lawsuit that has dragged on for more than six years.

That July 2014 motion asks the court to find that the government is "violating the Fourth Amendment by their ongoing seizures and searches of plaintiffs’ Internet communications." The motion specifically doesn’t deal with allegations of past government wrongdoing, nor other issues in the broader case.

Richard Wiebe, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, countered: "The government can't circumvent the Fourth Amendment simply by automating its searches and seizures."

"If suddenly our homes were being searched by drones, that wouldn't be permissible under the Fourth Amendment?" he added later.

"What really matters is not what the government gains but what the plaintiffs lose: they lose privacy and control of their communications. That's really what we're talking about. The Fourth Amendment protects us all against mass surveillance of our papers."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

AlterNet reports

[...]the prestigious British Medical Journal has joined [The New Yorker, the US Senate, and the Twittersphere in condemning Mehmet Oz, MD for the pseudoscience on his TV show].

In an article published this week, a group of health experts analyzed a random sampling of episodes of "The Dr. Oz Show" (along with another syndicated show, "The Doctors"). The upshot: the evidence supports less than half of what he says. Which, in practical terms, means you should have reasonable doubt about all of it.

The researchers sat through 40 episodes of the "The Dr. Oz Show"; from those, they identified 479 separate recommendations he or his guests made to his TV audience. After winnowing the selection down to more forceful recommendations, they randomly selected 80 and weighed them against the existing medical literature, evaluating each claim for "consistency and believability."

Only 46 percent of the advice, they found, had evidence supporting it, and just 33 percent of the time were those claims supported by "believable or somewhat believable evidence." For just more than 1 in 3 recommendations, they weren't able to find any supporting information at all (despite, they note, "being quite liberal in the type and amount of evidence we required").

The sad part is how many people get their "information" from television.

Blackmoore writes:

The Verge -

reports from Dyn indicate the country's infrastructure has suffered a series of major outages over the past 24 hours. As a result, anyone at a North Korean IP would have found it nearly impossible to connect to the web. "I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn Research

canopic jug writes:

The Librem 15 is already near halfway to its crowd funding goal. The Librem is a high-end notebook and as free/libre and open source friendly as is technically feasible. It is designed to run entirely with free software while requiring no proprietary drivers. The units are expected to ship in April 2015 if the crowd funding goals are met. Unlike the Yeeloong netbook which was a low-end machine, the Librem is a full high-end notebook and customizable in regards to storage and display. The screen is normally 1920x1080 but can be ordered with 3840x2160 instead. It weighs in at 2kg and the battery is expected to provide up to 8 hours of use.

[Ed. Note - We've run other projects/crowdfunding laptops before, it seems that it would be a shame to not run this. ]

martyb writes:

Found on Ars Technica — "Critical Git bug allows malicious code execution on client machines":

Developers who use the official Git client and related software are being urged to install a security update that kills a bug that could allow attackers to hijack end-user computers.

The critical vulnerability affects all Windows- and Mac-based versions of the official Git client and related software that interacts with Git repositories, according to an advisory published Thursday. The bug can be exploited to give remote code execution when the client software accesses booby-trapped Git repositories.

ghost writes:

As promised, PHK has released an early version of Ntimed, his NTPd replacement. While some are disappointed that it wasn't written in rust or go or haskell, it has the support of the Linux Foundation and even the Network Time Foundation - "Harlan from The Network Time Foundation has agreed to adopt Ntimed and it will run in/with/parallel to the NTPD project." A version 1.0 is expected in Q1 2015.

dlb writes:

According to NPR, Coder Boot Camp "...arose as an elegant solution to a problem of supply and demand."

The author of the article, Anya Kamenetz, states:

This is one of the fastest-growing areas of the job market, and average salaries are high: from $62,500 for a web developer to $93,350 for a software developer. ... At the same time, in just the past five years, the nature of coding itself has changed. Programming languages like JavaScript and Ruby, essential for websites and web browser-based applications, are evolving to be increasingly powerful, even for novices.

She goes on to explain:

The application process for Dev Bootcamp is similar to a job application, and people complete a 9-week, part-time introduction online before they come to campus. And, Dev Bootcamp says, about 95 percent complete the program — that includes those who repeat the first six weeks, which you can do for free.

And she concludes:

All this helps explain their stellar reported job-placement rates.

No job-placement numbers were given in the article, other than stating that "the top programs say they are placing the vast majority of their graduates into jobs earning just under six figures in a rapidly expanding field."

So, 12 weeks to become a web developer, with coding thrown in to "boot"?