SoylentNews

DeathMonkey writes:

The Times Gazette is reporting on a sea slug that is able to perform photosynthesis to supply itself with food from sunlight.

According to Pierce and his team of researchers, “Here, we have used fluorescent in situ hybridization to localize an algal nuclear gene, prk, found in both larval and adult slug DNA by PCR and in adult RNA by transcriptome sequencing and RT-PCR. The prk probe hybridized with a metaphase chromosome in slug larvae, confirming gene transfer between alga and slug.”

The emerald sea slug exploits a process known as kleptoplasty – whereby it steals chloroplasts from V. litorea and then embeds these into its own digestive system to enable it manufacture its own food like plants do.

"gewg_" writes:

from the broken-rules-allow-a-peek-at-history dept.

El Reg notes

Top secret documents devised by Alan Turing, which should have been destroyed under wartime rules, have been found during renovations of Bletchley Park where they were used in roof cavities to stop draughts.

The documents have been identified as 'Banbury sheets', papers punched with holes to allow manual comparison of enciphered texts. Turing devised the sheets as part of his efforts to crack Nazi naval communications. [They] were found jammed into holes in the ceiling of Hut 6. Conditions in the room were known to be poor, leading code breakers there to stuff wastepaper into holes to keep out the cold.

Milton Keynes Web reports

Top secret documents used to break the Nazi's Enigma Code were found during the restoration of Hut 6, which housed the unit dedicated to breaking German army and air force messages.

The papers, found in 2013, were [freeze-dried] to prevent further decay before being cleaned and repaired.

The exhibition is called The Restoration of Historic Bletchley Park and the panels show the processes that were undertaken such as the paint analysis.

Amongst the fragmented codebreaking documents located in the roof of Hut 6 were also parts of an Atlas, a pinboard, and a fashion article [from] a magazine.

[...]The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found.

All the findings are unique, as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules.

Fnord666 writes:

An article on pymnts.com says that two fraud analysts for Capital One have been charged with engaging in insider trading by the SEC. According to the article, Bonan and Nan Huang used their access as fraud analysts to gather non-public sales data about publicly traded companies and used that information to buy call and put options prior to quarterly reports. This resulted in a $2,826,500 profit over three years of activity. According to an article on Reuters, a federal judge has signed a temporary restraining order freezing the brokerage and bank account assets of the two former staff members. The case is Securities and Exchange Commission v. Huang, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-269.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Well, this was unexpected. Is there a gender gap in editors of Wikipedia? Absolutely. Does it lead to bias in the articles? Also absolutely. Just not quite in the way you'd expect.

Wagner and her colleagues used a computer model to assess the articles for evidence of four different kinds of bias: coverage bias (the number of articles about notable women compared to notable men), structural bias (where links within articles go), lexical bias (difference in language used), and visibility bias (how many articles make it to Wikipedia’s front page).

The results were mixed. When it came to coverage bias, Wikipedia was remarkably equal in the number of articles about notable men and women in all six languages when compared to other reference databases. In fact, the researchers found Wikipedia “exhibited an over-representation of women” compared to other databases.

The researchers also discovered the home page articles are equally representative of the genders, stating they did not find “any evidence” of a male bias.

But where they did find evidence of gender bias was in the content of the articles themselves. Wagner and her partners found that articles about women more often linked to articles about men than vice versa. Even more noteworthy was the discrepancy in the kind of language used in articles about women compared to articles about men. For one, articles about women were more likely to use words referencing its subject’s gender than articles about men.

The question I find more interesting is why are women apparently just not interested in editing Wikipedia? My theory, more women have a life that precludes having the time or desire to argue over largely pedantic content disputes. I know I sure do.

oaklandwatch writes:

The archive editor at Time magazine has re-published a 1955 letter they received from science fiction author Philip K. Dick. A cover story had touted "The Caine Mutiny," the Pulitizer Prize-winning war novel by Herman Wouk, but Dick "really, really didn't like" it, according to Time's archivist. "The message I got out of Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny is: (a) Believe! (b) Work! (c) Die!" Dick wrote, in a scathing letter to the editor. This was early in his career — Dick sold his first short story in 1951, and began writing mainly short fiction (much of which has now fallen into the public domain). Time's archivist notes that it was the only time in his life Dick appeared in the magazine until his death in 1982, "mere months before Blade Runner would propel his work into the mainstream."

"M. Baranczak" writes:

California, like all the other states, requires children to be vaccinated before attending school. But the law allows exemptions for reasons of religion or "personal beliefs". The recent measles outbreak is causing some politicians to reconsider this approach. The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Two state senators said Wednesday they will introduce legislation to eliminate a controversial "personal belief exemption" that allows California parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.

"We shouldn't wait for more children to sicken or die before we act," Sen. Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat who is also a pediatrician, said at a Wednesday news conference. "Parents are letting us know our current laws are insufficient to protect their kids."

Pan is sponsoring the legislation with Sen. Ben Allen, D-Redondo Beach.

In Washington, D.C., California's two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, on Wednesday asked state health officials to go further and consider eliminating the "religious exemption."

Further information:
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-measles-vaccination-20150205-story.html
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/04/health/california-measles-outbreak/

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Microsoft has quietly pulled the plug on the last device to ship running Windows RT, casting doubt on the future of Redmond's ARM fondleslab OS.

The software giant confirmed on Wednesday to The Register that it has stopped manufacturing the Nokia Lumia 2520, a 10.1-inch Windows RT tablet with a quad-core ARM processor, an HD display, and 4G LTE wireless connectivity.

The Surface 2--not to be confused with its beefier cousin, the Intel-powered Surface Pro 2--ceased production in January, meaning Microsoft is no longer making any devices that run Windows RT.

And because all of Microsoft's other hardware partners walked away from the underpowered OS long ago, citing poor customer reception--after all, even Redmond took a bath on the original Surface RT--that means nobody is producing any Windows RT kit anymore.

[...]the recent announcement that Windows 10 will run on the Raspberry Pi 2 hobbyist board indicates that Microsoft plans to keep maintaining a version of its OS kernel that runs on ARM chips.

[...]If you're still in the market for a Windows RT device, though, you may be in luck. Units of both the Surface 2 and the Nokia Lumia 2520 are believed to still be in the retail channel--and you may soon be able to get them at bargain rates.

ah.clem writes:

Acoustic-gravity waves — a special type of sound wave that can cut through the deep ocean at the speed of sound — can be generated by underwater earthquakes, explosions, and landslides, as well as by surface waves and meteorites. A single one of these waves can stretch tens or hundreds of kilometers, and travel at depths of hundreds or thousands of meters below the ocean surface, transferring energy from the upper surface to the seafloor, and across the oceans. Acoustic-gravity waves often precede a tsunami or rogue wave — either of which can be devastating.

Now a new study by an MIT researcher suggests that these immense deep-ocean waves can rapidly transport millions of cubic meters of water, carrying salts, carbons, and other nutrients around the globe in a matter of hours.

Surf's up over at ScienceBlog.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The New York Times reports that Mississippi — which ranks as one of the worst states for smoking, obesity and physical inactivity — seldom is viewed as a leader on health issues. But it is one of two states that permit neither religious nor philosophical exemptions to its vaccination program. Only children with medical conditions that would be exacerbated by vaccines may enroll in Mississippi schools without completing the immunization schedule, which calls for five vaccines. With a vaccination rate of greater than 99.7%, Mississippi leads the national median by five percentage points and has the country’s highest immunization rate among kindergarten students.

However, in recent weeks, the nearly unbending nature of Mississippi’s law requiring students to be vaccinated has been in jeopardy, with two dozen lawmakers publicly supporting an exemption for “conscientious beliefs” turning Mississippi into one more battleground between medical experts who champion vaccinations and parents who fear the government’s role in medical decision-making. “We have been a victim of our success, and people don’t realize how bad these diseases are,” said Mississippi state epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, before lawmakers met to consider a bill that would have expanded exceptions to the vaccine requirement. Members of the education committee for the House of Representatives, in effect, endorsed the state’s current approach. By a voice vote, they advanced a heavily amended version of the bill that now calls for only technical changes to Mississippi’s law, which has been largely untouched since the late 1970s. The amended version of House Bill 130 puts into law the state's existing practice of granting medical waivers to children whose physicians request them, and in doing so, removes the Mississippi Department of Health's ability to deny such requests. "If a medical professional thinks it's wise not to vaccinate, then that will be the gospel," said House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, R-Brandon.

Hugh Pickens writes:

BBC reports that Android users are being warned that several popular apps that were on the official Google Play store appear to contain hidden code that made malicious ads pop up with one of the apps — a free version of the card game Durak — downloaded up to 10 million times, according to Google Play's own counter.

The "adware" causes spurious pop-up messages to appear that had been made to look like system notifications that say the phone is running "slow" and that the user needs to install new software to fix the problem. "You get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages," writes Avast malware analyst Filip Chytry, "like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value."

Several people who had downloaded the Durak card game had posted warnings on Google Play as far back as November 2013, that they suspected it was forcing pop-up ads to appear. Google Play has been plagued by app problems in the past. It has previously offered titles that provide secret remote access as well as ones that are malicious advertising networks. "Phone users ultimately have to trust the operating system vendor," says Steven Murdoch, "whether that's Google or Apple [or someone else] to protect them."

AnonTechie writes:

Even under normal circumstances, drought is a regular occurrence in agricultural regions. Several human-driven trends, from groundwater depletion to climate change, are expected to aggravate natural water shortages. While crops can't be expected to be very productive during times of drought, it might be possible to at least get them to better tolerate short periods of water scarcity without dying.

Efforts to that end have largely focused on traditional breeding between commercial crops and drought-tolerant relatives. But researchers are now reporting progress with an alternative approach: genetic engineering. They have taken a signaling network that plants normally use to respond to stresses such as lack of water and have rewired it so that it responds to a molecule that's normally used to kill fungus.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/plants-engineered-for-on-demand-drought-tolerance/

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14123.html

Hugh Pickens writes:

James Simpson has an interesting story about the TP-82 survival weapon that Russian cosmonauts carried into space with them on missions between 1982 and 2006. The TP-82 was essentially a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun with a short-barreled rifle added onto it. Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy, but the Soviets had their reasons. Much of Russia is desolate wilderness. A single mishap during descent could strand cosmonauts in the middle of nowhere.

In March 1965, cosmonaut Alexey Leonov landed a mechanically-faulty Voskhod space capsule in the snowy forests of the western Urals … 600 miles from his planned landing site. Getting through the ordeal would end up requiring a gun to ward off wild bears, some tricks to staying warm in below zero temperatures and cross country skiing. For protection, Leonov had a nine-millimeter pistol. He feared the bears and wolves that prowled the forest—though he never encountered any. But the fear stayed with him. Later in his career, Leonov made sure the Soviet military provided all its cosmonauts with a survival weapon. For the Soviets, the weapon was a case of “better safe than sorry,” and from 1986, it was a permanent fixture in the portable survival kits of every Soyuz mission. "Astronauts of all nationalities—including Americans—have trained with the TP-82," writes Simpson. "And still today, before they ride the Soyuz to space, they must complete a Russian survival training course in the Black Sea and the Siberian forest."

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT have developed a new search engine that outperforms current ones, and helps people to do searches more efficiently.

The SciNet search engine is different because it changes internet searches into recognition tasks, by showing keywords related to the user’s search in topic radar. People using SciNet can get relevant and diverse search results faster, especially when they do not know exactly what they are looking for or how to formulate a query to find it.

Once initially queried, SciNet displays a range of keywords and topics in a topic radar. With the help of the directions on the radar, the engine displays how these topics are related to each other. The relevance of each keyword is displayed as its distance from the centre point of the radar — those more closely related are nearer to the centre, and those less relevant are farther away. The search engine also offers alternatives that are connected with the topic, but which the user might not have thought of querying. By moving words around the topic radar, users specify what information is most useful for them.

http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/news/2015-01-27/

[Paper]: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181621-interactive-intent-modeling/fulltext

LancePodstrong writes:

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/02/03/climate-change-forestry

Minnesota is unique because it lies at the convergence of three distinct ecosystems, or biomes. And the boundaries among those three - boreal forests of spruce, fir, pine and birch; deciduous forests of maple and oak and basswood; and prairie grasslands - are very sensitive to climate changes, said Lee Frelich, the director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology.

In addition, Minnesota has been warming faster than most other states. In particular, northern Minnesota is heating up faster still - by nearly three degrees over the past century.
...
Minnesota's iconic northern forests are undergoing a gradual shift as the climate warms. Aspen, birch, balsam fir and black spruce, for example, are projected largely to vanish from the state by the end of the century.

But some foresters are suggesting a more radical shift in approaching what to do about it. Although not everyone agrees, some in forestry are stressing urgency and experimenting with bringing new species from hundreds of miles away, betting that with a helping hand those trees stand a better chance of producing a healthy diverse forest than existing species.

For proponents, bringing oaks and even ponderosa pines from as far away as the Black Hills is the best way to ensure Minnesota and its sizable forest industry will have thriving forests many decades from now. Others worry that the idea is too much of a gamble and could wind up essentially introducing troublesome invasive species.
...
DNR [Department of Natural Resources] forest ecologist John Almendinger said, "I'm not wild about the idea of using our native forests as the place to experiment. I don't like the concept right now of moving trees that have shown no ability to perform in those kinds of habitats."

Palik at the Forest Service said planning for the uncertainty of how rainfall and temperature might change is the challenge. But he believes forest managers need to be more urgent and have little time to pause.

"I've had the realization that we are faced with something potentially very radical and unprecedented, in terms of the future climate scenario and habitat suitabillty for species we have here," Palik said. "The time to be thinking about how to act is now, and the time to act even beyond experimentation is rapidly approaching."

While climate change may not be easily evident in your corner of the world, there's no ignoring it in the Northland. From longer growing seasons, shorter snow seasons, warmer winters, and less lake ice, it's hard to ignore. It's increasingly evident that adaptation, not prevention, is the task at hand. For more information on the signs of Minnesota's changing climate, check out another MPR article with all the stats.

AnonTechie writes:

The U.S. defense intelligence chief warned Tuesday that America's technological edge over China is at risk because of cybertheft. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told a congressional hearing the U.S. retains technological superiority. But he said China had stolen "a lot" of intellectual property from U.S. defense contractors and that effort continues.

He's declined to say publicly whether that has affected U.S. defense capabilities. "I do not believe we are at this point losing our technological edge, but it is at risk based on some of their cyber activities," Stewart told a House Armed Services Committee hearing on worldwide threats.

Stewart's comments underscored the strains between the U.S. and China over cyberespionage. Last May, U.S. authorities indicted five Chinese military officials over allegations they targeted big-name American makers of nuclear and solar technology. China denied the allegations.

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-intel-chief-tech-threatened-china.html