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LancePodstrong writes:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141215094147.htm

Because of undetected toxicity problems, about a third of prescription drugs approved in the U.S. are withdrawn from the market or require added warning labels limiting their use. An exceptionally sensitive toxicity test invented at the University of Utah could make it possible to uncover more of these dangerous side effects early in pharmaceutical development so that fewer patients are given unsafe drugs.

The key to the test's sensitivity is the way it uses untamed house mice -- rather than docile, inbred laboratory strains -- and subjects them to a relentless, Darwinian competition for food, shelter and mates much like they would face in the wild. Mice jostle and race for a place in a roughly 300-square-foot pen divided into six territories by wire fencing that individuals must climb to invade or flee neighboring turf. Four of the territories are prime real estate with multiple hidden nesting sites and direct access to feeders. Two territories are poor, offering only open nesting sites and indirect feeder access. The test is called the organismal performance assay, or OPA.

Potts first came up with the idea as a way to explore the impact of inbreeding. Those studies revealed harmful effects of cousin-level inbreeding that had gone unnoticed for decades of research on mouse genetics. Laboratory mice that are only slightly less healthy may not appear so when given ample food and living space. But if there is a defect in any physiological system, it is likely to stand out during intense competition.

tonyPick writes:

The Conversation has an article analysing the recent major spending of the UK Conservative party on Facebook.

News that the Conservative Party has been spending more than £100,000 a month on Facebook advertising has its supporters and rivals all wondering if this is money well spent.

The article examines the spending and return of the current strategy.

The Conservative Party are currently the majority partner in the present UK Coalition Government (alongside partners the Liberal Democrats), and the next UK General Election is set for Thursday 7 May 2015. All the UK political parties appear to be gearing up their use of Social Media ahead of this, following the experience of the 2008 US election campaigns.

The source for the spending figures is this BBC Article on the Conservative's Facebook Bill. For the non-UK readers - £100,000 is around $150,000 (US).

frojack writes:

Columbia University has published a story about the confusing interplay of volcanoes and global warming.

The discussion this time isn't about the effect of volcanic aerosols perhaps causing the recent pause in warming. This time the discussion is whether warming induces volcanic eruptions, or whether eruptions trigger the warming. Turns out, its both, depending on where you look.

Marine geophysicist Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has research that suggest that the undersea volcanoes wax and wane on a cycle that is correlated with historical climate change cycles.

We are all aware that there are vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans. These have been presumed by scientists to be oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But Tolstoy's new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years.

Historically researchers have suggested that as icecaps build on land, pressure on underlying volcanoes also builds, and eruptions are suppressed. But when warming somehow starts and the ice begins melting, pressure lets up, and eruptions surge. They belch CO2 that produces more warming, which melts more ice, which creates a self-feeding effect that tips the planet suddenly into a warm period.

Tolstoy's theory is the corollary, and suggests that undersea volcanoes do the opposite: As the climate warms, sea levels rise, and the added weight suppresses under sea eruptions, and as earth cools, sea levels may drop 100 meters, because so much water gets locked into ice. This relieves pressure on submarine volcanoes, and they erupt more.

This theory may help climate scientists adjust the predictive models of human-induced global warming to better tune them to actual measurements.

AnonTechie writes:

Maybe the Universe isn't expanding at all. Maybe everything is actually just shrinking, so it looks like it's expanding. Turns out, scientists have thought of this.

There are some people who would have you believe the Universe is expanding. They're peddling this idea it all started with a bang, and that expansion is continuing and accelerating. Yet, they can't tell us what force is causing this acceleration. Just "dark energy", or some other JK Rowling-esque sounding thing. Otherwise known as the acceleration that shall not be named, and it shall be taught in the class which follows potions in 3rd period.

I propose to you, faithful viewer, an alternative to this expansionist conspiracy. What if distances are staying the same, and everything is in fact, shrinking? Are we destined to compress all the way down to the Microverse? Is it only a matter of time before our galaxy starts drinking its coffee from a thimble or perhaps sealed in a pendant hanging on Orion's belt? So, could we tell if that's actually what's going on?

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-universe.html

http://www.nature.com/news/cosmologist-claims-universe-may-not-be-expanding-1.13379

[Abstract]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878

Magic Oddball writes:

Note: I'm not mentioning what I'm trying to fund, as I don't want this to look like a thinly-disguised play on people's emotions for money. I'll just say it's nothing unethical, immoral, or controversial, and put a link in my sig once I've set something up.

I need any tips or suggestions on personal crowdfunding sites that fellow Soylentils have — recommendations, warnings, which have unusual practices or options, personal experiences you've heard, anything you feel is relevant. I've had one site recommended to me (GoFundMe) by non-technical family, though my experience is that by the time a site/service is popular with the non-technical crowd, there's usually much better options available that they're unaware of!

Normally I research everything myself, but my initial searches have been so packed with irrelevant & spammy sites/articles that finding the gems while sleep-deprived and stressed-out isn't going well. More importantly, this is an extremely urgent situation, so every moment I spend searching is time I'm not filling out charity aid forms, tracking down more to apply for, handling the situation itself, and so forth.

Thanks in advance for any info people can drum up!

"gewg_" writes:

The Inquirer reports:

Canonical has taken the covers off the first phone to be powered by Ubuntu, created in association with Spanish electronics company BQ. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition phone will be available across Europe by mail order starting next week.

It boasts a 4.5in screen, Mediatek A7 quad-core processor running at 1.3GHz and 1GB RAM, with 8GB storage. The rear camera is 8MP and the front is 5MP.

[...]No operators have agreed to take on the BQ Aquaris as yet, although several, including Giffgaff in the UK, are offering plans for the device, although it isn't yet clear whether that means anything specific.

[...]Cristian Parrino, VP of mobile at Canonical, described [the debut] as a product "aimed at early adopters". The version of Ubuntu included is not the latest, it does not have Snappy, the system that allows easy rollout of app updates in the operating system, and most notably of all, this is not the Universal version of Ubuntu which we were promised over a year ago.

[...]the whole thing has a feeling of being rushed out rather than thought out.

Engadget notes:

Where Canonical and BQ are hoping to break the mould is with their software and sales strategy. Taking a page from the playbook of Chinese firms such as Xiaomi, the first Ubuntu handset will be sold, at least to begin with, through a series of online flash sales. The first of these is next week and a handful of European carriers will be offering special SIM bundles to early adopters.

But here's the bad news: BQ currently has no plans to sell the phone outside of Europe. Canonical has stressed that it's still "actively working on a US device strategy" and that its flash sales are a deliberate move to target early adopters.

Jay Cassano at Fast Company says of the Scopes interface:

The First Ubuntu Phone Won't Rely On Apps. Here's Why That's Brilliant

The mobile market is saturated. Any new entrants are doomed from the start. And if you need proof, just look at Windows Phone or BlackBerry. The problem is that you need an app ecosystem to gain market share, but you need market share in order to entice developers to your platform.

So goes the prevailing wisdom.

[...]Scopes are essentially contextual home-screen dashboards that will be much simpler and less time-consuming to develop than full-on native apps. [...] The user experience offered by Scopes seems a lot more intuitive than the "app grids" that dominate most devices.

frojack writes:

Just last week we talked about getting data back from Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft.

Today NASA's "Dawn" spacecraft has returned the sharpest-ever photos of Ceres, just a month before its planned orbit around the mysterious dwarf planet.

On the night of March 5, Dawn will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit Ceres. Its the second solar system body (beyond Earth) that the Dawn space craft has orbited. (Dawn orbited the protoplanet Vesta, the asteroid belt's second-largest denizen, from July 2011 through September 2012.)

Space.com has a story and an animation built of multiple stills taken last Wednesday from 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) away from Ceres.

According to Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman:

Its going to be an interesting couple months for space watchers.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Clay Latimer writes at IBD that Ian Ballantine, called by many the father of the mass-market paperback, helped change American reading habits in the 1940s and '50s founding no fewer than three prestigious paperback houses — Penguin USA, Bantam Books and Ballantine Books. But Ballantine's greatest influence on mass culture was publishing science-fiction paperback originals, with writers including Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, and Frederik Pohl and publishing the first authorized paperback editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's books. "These were great classics of world fiction," says Loren Glass. "He published in original form some of the greatest works in the golden age of science fiction. One of the interesting things about Ballantine is that he was not only a businessman trying to make money in books; he was a student of literature and publishing, and something of an intellectual."

Turning serious science fiction into a literary genre ranks among Ballantine's greatest feats. Prior to Ballantine Books, science fiction barely existed in novel form. He changed that with the 1953 publication of "Fahrenheit 451," the firm's 41st book. "That was obviously a key moment in the history of science-fiction publishing," Glass says. In 1965, when Tolkien's rights to his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy lapsed, Ace Books published his books without paying royalties and Tolkien responded by conducting a personal campaign against Ace. Tolkien began to urge the fans who wrote to him to inform them that the American copies were pirated: "I am now inserting in every note of acknowledgement to readers in the U.S.A. a brief note informing them that Ace Books is a pirate, and asking them to inform others." Ballantine quickly bought the rights and included Tolkien's back-cover note: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."

"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports:

In the latest vindication of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, a UK [court] ruled on [February 6] that the British government violated human rights law by failing [until December 2014] to safeguard some aspects of its intelligence-sharing operations.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) accessed information obtained by the National Security Agency (NSA) without sufficient oversight, violating Articles 8 and 10 of the European convention on human rights. According to Reuters , "The tribunal's concern, addressed in the new ruling, was that until details of how GCHQ and the NSA shared data were made public in the course of the court proceedings, the legal safeguards provided by British law were being side-stepped."

The Guardian adds, "The ruling appears to suggest that aspects of the operations were illegal for at least seven years--between 2007, when the Prism intercept [program] was introduced, and 2014."

Article 8 guarantees the right to privacy; Article 10 protects free expression.

[...]IPT's decision marks the first time [in its entire 15-year existence] that the highly-secretive court has been known to ever rule against any of the UK's intelligence services.

jbWolf writes:

Projekt Exodus is an educational Live Action Role Playing (LARP) game and based off the 2003 version of Battlestar Galactica. February 4th and 5th are preparatory days, February 5th - 7th are game days, and February 8th is reflection day. There are 80 participants (and a fee of about €300 for each participant). The game will be played on a retired German destroyer and is even sponsored partially by the German government. It will even include custom hardware and software. A few more details about the game itself can be found here as a PDF.

The game itself will be private so players can be more free to explore, but there are pictures of some of the work they are doing.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"The End" post from the developer "corenominal":

"I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love."

The listing at Distrowatch now shows: "Status: Discontinued". Also covered at reddit.

ah.clem writes:

A cluster of young, pulsating stars discovered in the far side of the Milky Way may mark the location of a previously unseen dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxy hidden behind clouds of dust.

A team, led by Sukanya Chakrabarti from Rochester Institute of Technology, analyzed near-infrared data collected by the European Southern Observatory's survey VISTA to find four young stars approximately 300,000 light years away. These young stars are Cepheid variables-"standard candles" that astronomers use to measure distances. According to Chakrabarti, these are the most distant Cepheid variables found close to the plane of the Milky Way. The paper announcing the discovery appears in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Read the four-star article over at ScienceDaily: here.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox that something really weird that economists thought was impossible is happening now in Europe where interest rates have gone negative on a range of debt — mostly government bonds from countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany but also corporate bonds from Nestlé and, briefly, Shell. As in you give the owner of a Nestlé bond 100 euros, and four years later Nestlé gives you back less than that. "In the most literal sense, negative interest rates are a simple case of supply and demand. A bond is a kind of tradable loan," says Yglesias. "If there isn't much demand for buying the bonds, the interest rate has to go up to make customers more willing to buy. If there's a lot of demand, the interest rate will fall."

But why would you want to buy a negative interest rate loan? The question itself seems absurd – the very idea that anyone should have to pay someone to keep their money safe rather than demand an interest payment for the use of their money is counter-intuitive. But according to Yglesias, very rich people and big companies need to do something with their money and most European banks only guarantee 100,000 euros.Plowing the money into negative-yielding government bonds can appeal to banks when the alternative is to pay even more to store cash on deposit. J.P. Morgan calculates there is currently 220 billion euros of bank reserves subject to negative interest rates, which looks set to grow exponentially because of the European Central Bank’s forthcoming colossal bond-buying program. "It may be the case that if governments push the negative interest rates thing too far the entire economy would become a cash based system," says Merryn Somerset Webb. "But that might take a while to get to."

taylorvich writes:

A lot of tosh is talked about “nanotechnology”, much of it designed to separate unwary investors from their hard-earned cash. This does not mean, though, that controlling the structure of things at the level of nanometres (billionths of a metre) is unimportant. In materials science it is vital, as a paper just published in Nature, by Hansoo Kim and his colleagues at the Pohang University of Science and Technology, in South Korea, demonstrates. By manipulating the structure of steel on a nanometre scale, Dr Kim has produced a material which has the strength and the lightness of titanium alloys but will, when produced at scale, cost a tenth as much.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21642107-alloy-iron-and-aluminium-good-titanium-tenth [Pop-ups and Cookies!]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Erik Wemple writes at the Washington Post that Fox News recently took the controversial step of posting a horrific 22-minute video online that shows Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh being burned to death warning internet users that the presentation features "extremely graphic video." "After careful consideration, we decided that giving readers of FoxNews.com the option to see for themselves the barbarity of ISIS outweighed legitimate concerns about the graphic nature of the video," said Fox executive John Moody. "Online users can choose to view or not view this disturbing content."

But Fox's decision drew condemnation from some terrorism experts. "[Fox News] are literally — literally — working for al-Qaida and ISIS's media arm," said Malcolm Nance. "They might as well start sending them royalty checks." YouTube removed a link to the video a few hours after it was posted, and a spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian that if anyone posted the video to the social networking site it would be taken down. CNN explained that it wouldn't surface any of the disturbing images because they were gruesome and constituted propaganda that the network didn't want to distribute. "Does posting this video advance the aims of this terror group or hinder its progress by laying bare its depravity?" writes Wemple. "Islamic State leaders may indeed delight in the distribution of the video — which could be helpful in converting extremists to its cause — but they may be mis-calibrating its impact. If the terrorists expected to intimidate the world with their display of barbarity, they may be disappointed with the reaction of Jordan, which is vowing "strong, earth-shaking and decisive" retaliation."