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tonyPick writes:

In Discover is an article on the construction of astonishingly accurate medieval maps, known as "portolan charts", and the detective work done by John Hessler of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in deducing how the maps were made.

One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it.
...
“Even with all the information he had—every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal—I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.

But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves.

Wikipedia has additional background.

Originally spotted on Scientific American's Physics Week in Review.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

According to a new French law approved [March 19], rooftops on new buildings in commercial zones across France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels.

Green roofs, which cover rooftop space with a layer of grasses, shrubs, flowers, and other forms of flora, offer a number of benefits. They create an insulating effect, reducing the amount of energy needed to heat or cool a building depending on the season. They increase local access to green space, which often comes at a premium in urban environments. They retain rainwater, thus decreasing runoff and any related drainage issues. They provide a space for urban wildlife, such as birds, to congregate and even nest, and they reduce air pollution by acting as natural filters.

Green rooftops also significantly reduce the urban "heat island" effect in which urban areas are noticeably warmer than their surroundings. The heat island effect can cause large cities to get 1.8°F to 5.4°F warmer than surrounding areas in the day, and 22°F warmer at night, according to the EPA. This effect happens when buildings, roads, and other developments replace formerly open land and greenery, causing surfaces to become moist and impermeable, and to warm up.

[...]the law was scaled back from initial proposals [made] by environmental groups [who asked that green roofs] cover the entire rooftop surface of all new buildings. The compromise gave businesses a choice to install solar panels instead or to only cover part of the roof in foliage.

Phoenix666 writes:

Washington Post reports(full-page ad):

New calculations in a study published Wednesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society indicate that billions of the Milky Way's stars have one to three planets in the habitable zone, meaning that they potentially have liquid water as well.

The calculations, which were produced by a group of researchers from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, are based on a method called the Titius-Bode law. This law, which was created around 1770, predicts how planets in a solar system will be spaced out. The researchers applied the law to the 1,000 exoplanets (and 3,000 possible exoplanets) found by NASA's Kepler satellite. They looked at 151 planetary systems — ones where Kepler had detected between three and six planets — and found that the Titius-Bode law fit well with the way 124 of them were spaced out.

Yes, but which one of them hosts Illium? I am eager to open dialogue with the Asari...

q.kontinuum writes:

Yes, I know, Betteridge's law of headlines, but I couldn't think of a better one.

Many people in Germany are unhappy with their Government's decision not to grant asylum to Snowden. Now, according to this story, vice-chancellor Gabriel claims that the German government was "aggressively threatened" into this decision by the US government, which forewarned they would withhold any information they might get in the future regarding terror-plots against Germany.

In the end, the article raises the question:

One of two things is true: 1) the U.S. actually threatened Germany that it would refrain from notifying them of terrorist plots against German citizens and thus deliberately leave them vulnerable to violent attacks, or 2) some combination of high officials from the U.S. and/or German governments are invoking such fictitious threats in order to manipulate and scare the German public into believing that asylum for Snowden would endanger their lives. Both are obviously noteworthy, though it’s hard to say which is worse.

Personally, I wouldn't put it past our (German) government to invoke fictitious threats for fear-mongering, but it is no excuse for them to deny asylum. Either we are an autonomous state and make our own decision, or we should stop pretending. We should grant asylum. The US-"threat" is no threat in my opinion; they didn't threaten to do something to us, they just announced they would not help. That still sucks, but calling it a "threat" is unfair to the US. If they volunteered the information until now, it's of course their decision to stop doing that. If there is an agreement for cooperation, I'd expect them to honour that agreement without telling other governments whom to grant asylum and whom not.

Recently, we have reported several claims (here, here, and here) made by the Russian security software manufacturer Kaspersky Lab that they have discovered 'evidence' of NSA involvement in malware. Now, Bloomberg claims that the Moscow-based computer security company has effectively been taken over by the FSB. Company founder Eugene Kaspersky was educated at a KBG-run school, which was never a secret, but the new report describes a much more current and intimate connection.

Kaspersky Lab is denying the allegations, as one might expect, and counter with the statement:

It's not as though the US has clean hands in all of this. The CIA has funded the development of security software firms like FireEye, Veracode, and Hytrust though its In-Q-Tel investment fund, and American firms have been noticeably silent when it comes to investigating suspected US state-sponsored malware.

We are unlikely to hear the truth from either side, nor should we realistically expect a confession from the NSA or the FSB. Nevertheless, it is possible that the security industries on both sides are 'guilty' of looking after their respective government's interests and what we are seeing is just another day in the world of intelligence collection and cyber-security, the world of claim and counter-claim.

[Editor's Comment: Typo fixed at 15:39 UTC]

Hugh Pickens writes:

CNN reports that when asked how to offset the influence of big money in politics, President Barack Obama suggested it's time to make voting a requirement. "Other countries have mandatory voting," said Obama "It would be transformative if everybody voted -- that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly.

"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups. There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls."

At least 26 countries have compulsory voting, according to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison. Less than 37% of eligible voters actually voted in the 2014 midterm elections, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts. That means about 144 million Americans -- more than the population of Russia -- skipped out.

Critics of mandatory voting have questioned the practicality of passing and enforcing such a requirement; others say that freedom also means the freedom not to do something.

Fluffeh writes:

Since [release] 5501_B34 Vuze has supported 'swarm merging' across torrents that share common files. Vuze automatically detects when two or more of your incomplete downloads share one or more files of identical size and will attempt to merge the torrent swarms to download the file faster or, possibly, complete an existing file with bad availability.

For example, if you download a copy of LibreOffice, Vuze can search for torrents that have the same files and combine these swarms. This is particularly useful when a torrent has no seeds or very few active ones. The merging feature makes use of Vuze’s swarm discovery tool and finds files through the Distributed Hash Table (DHT). It’s relatively primitive and based on file-sizes, but can be a life-safer nonetheless.

AnonTechie writes:

Earlier this year, a new type of mobile app blew the collective minds of many—including NBC News investigative reporter Jeff Rossen. Using the camera of a smartphone, these applications could scan a house key, allowing it to be duplicated remotely. Rossen warned America that it could allow someone to digitally steal your house keys if you left them unattended—by uploading photos and getting shipped a custom-cut copy. Of course, they could do the same thing with your house keys just by running with them to a nearby hardware store. But hackers !

One of the contenders in this market is called KeyMe ( https://key.me/ ). No one is going to shoulder surf your house key with KeyMe—it requires photos of a key placed on a white background, taken from 4 inches away. But KeyMe is doing something that will further boggle minds and will likely raise even more security concerns: using the app, you can store scanned copies of your keys on their server and download them at a kiosk. The company has been rolling out kiosks across the country and has just expanded its fleet after inking a deal to place them at the Lowe's home improvement chain. And you can also share your keys with others via e-mail, allowing them to make copies for themselves.

Hawkwind writes:

World Water Day (Mar 22), can't say I had heard of this before and it seems to be an overly broad topic for a focused conversation. But the social issues surrounding it touch upon science and engineering in many ways.

Just one is Can China Solve Its Water-Energy Choke Point. In addition to the web page there is a 180 page pdf delving even further in to this issue (which I haven't taken on). I'd like to call out one part:

[Experts] urge the textile industry in China, the world’s top apparel exporter, to adopt more water efficient practices and technologies that can lead to co-savings in water and energy. They point out that reducing pollution and water usage can also improve a company’s bottom line. The authors cite the Responsible Sourcing Initiative, spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a group of apparel retailer and brand partners, which laid out 10 best practices to improve water efficiency, ranging from insulating pipes to reusing cooling water.

In parts of the world where for some time water has been in short supply and regulatory schemes like building codes have been in place this sounds eminently doable. Personally I'm left wondering if and when emerging economies will invest in these types of water and monetary savings.

There are a lot more world water stories out there. A D.C. group called New Security Beat has a run-down of stories they've done over the last year. The stories fall in to the groups:

• Peacebuilding, Fragility, Security
• Gender Equity
• Health and Development
• From the China Environment Forum
• India
• Urbanization

NotSanguine writes:

An article in the April, 2015 issue of The Atlantic details the current state of alcohol abuse treatment in the United States and comes to (at least for some) the surprising conclusion that Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is not the only viable treatment option for alcohol abuse.

In fact, the article points out that:

A meticulous analysis of treatments, published more than a decade ago in The Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches but still considered one of the most comprehensive comparisons, ranks AA 38th out of 48 methods.

A variety of alternative treatments that include targeted therapy and a class of drugs known as opioid antagonists which include drugs such as Naloxone and Naltrexone have been shown to be much more effective in reducing alcohol abuse at much higher rates than the AA program. Using treatments based on research done by neuroscientist John David Sinclair, clinical trials in Finland have shown a success rate of around 75%. Treatment using these methods has gained some support in the U.S. Notably, Claudia Christian of Babylon 5 fame was successfully treated with opioid antagonists and later narrated a film about Sinclair's treatment methods.

A 75% success rate is an order of magnitude higher than AA, according to a study referenced by the article's author:

Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School, looked at Alcoholics Anonymous’s retention rates along with studies on sobriety and rates of active involvement (attending meetings regularly and working the program) among AA members. Based on these data, he put AA’s actual success rate somewhere between 5 and 8 percent.

Much more to follow:

AnonTechie writes:

The annual Pwn2Own hacking competition wrapped up its 2015 event in Vancouver with another banner year, paying $442,000 for 21 critical bugs in all four major browsers, as well as Windows, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader.

The crowning achievement came Thursday as contestant Jung Hoon Lee, aka lokihardt, demonstrated an exploit that felled both the stable and beta versions of Chrome, the Google-developed browser that's famously hard to compromise. His hack started with a buffer overflow race condition in Chrome. To allow that attack to break past anti-exploit mechanisms such as the sandbox and address space layout randomization, it also targeted an information leak and a race condition in two Windows kernel drivers, an impressive feat that allowed the exploit to achieve full System access.

[Related]: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Security-Research-Blog/Pwn2Own-2015-Day-Two-results/ba-p/6722884#.VQwyVuF7S_Y

stormwyrm writes:

EFF Deeplinks reports that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has advanced a new cybersecurity bill to the Senate floor last March 13, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015. The EFF believes the bill to be terribly flawed, as rather than advancing cybersecurity it facilitates surveillance. From the article:

....the Senate Intelligence bill grants two new authorities to companies. First, the bill authorizes companies to launch countermeasures (now called "defensive measures" in the bill) for a "cybersecurity purpose" against a "cybersecurity threat." "Cybersecurity purpose" is so broadly defined that it means almost anything related to protecting (including physically protecting) an information system, which can be a computer or software. The same goes for a "cybersecurity threat," which includes anything that "may result" in an unauthorized effort to impact the availability of the information system. [...]

Second, the bill adds a new authority for companies to monitor information systems to protect an entity's hardware or software. Here again, the broad definitions could be used in conjunction with the monitoring clause to spy on users engaged in potentially innocuous activity. Once collected, companies can then share the information, which is also called “cyber threat indicators,” freely with government agencies like the NSA. [...]

The bill also retains near-blanket immunity for companies to monitor information systems and to share the information as long as it's conducted according to the act. Again, "cybersecurity purpose" rears its overly broad head since a wide range of actions conducted for a cybersecurity purpose are allowed by the bill. The high bar immunizes an incredible amount of activity. Existing private rights of action for violations of the Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act, and potentially the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would be precluded or at least sharply restricted by the clause.

The EFF urges action to stop this bill, which in their opinion is fatally flawed. It is the fifth such bill in as many years.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Gaurdian is celebrating "the world’s worst ebook artwork", as discovered by the creator of a new Tumblr feed.

It's the hubris of it that people get a kick out of—the devil-may-care attitude of an author who, with zero arts training, says to themselves: "How hard can it be?"

Two different authors simply cut-and-pasted smaller images over a background showing the planets, according to one Kindle blog, which notes that one author actually pasted eyes and lips onto the planets, creating an inadvertently creepy montage. But the site's creator tells the newspaper that it's ultimately meant to be an affectionate tribute to their rejection of the mundane and appreciating each creative and beautiful mess.

tonyPick writes:

There's an article over at ScienceDaily on research into the workings of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which has the interesting effect of altering important functions in the brain of the infected host.

Rodents infected with a common parasite lose their fear of cats, resulting in easy meals for the felines. Now IU School of Medicine researchers have identified a new way the parasite may modify brain cells, possibly helping explain changes in the behavior of mice—and humans.

This is based on research from Indiana University School of Medicine. The original research is available as an open access publication on PLOS ONE.

The parasite also inhabits the brains of (an estimated) three billion people worldwide, and the piece references an article in Scientific American MIND which suggests human hosts may also experience behavioural changes.

Intriguingly—and much more speculatively, Drs. Arrizabalaga and Sullivan warn—some research has suggested that Toxoplasma infection could alter human behavior, and that changes could vary by gender. One study found that infected men tend to be introverted, suspicious and rebellious, while infected women tended to be extroverted, trusting and obedient. Others have suggested an association with schizophrenia.

"The studies in humans have been relatively small and are correlative. In contrast, the behavioral changes seen in mice infected with Toxoplasma are much better characterized, although we still don't know the mechanisms the parasite employs to alter host behavior," Dr. Sullivan said. "But our analysis of the astrocyte acetylome changes could move us toward better understanding of Toxoplasma's actions and the implications for behavioral impacts."

mrcoolbp writes:

SpallsHurgenson dropped a link in IRC.

Apparently, an Imgur user uploaded 142 behind the scenes photos of miniatures [wikipedia] used in the filming of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner.

A massive gallery of behind-the-scenes Blade Runner slides has been uploaded to the internet, revealing a teeny, tiny world of space blimps and flying cars, all crafted with special care and beautiful attention to detail. Take a look at the dystopian miniatures, each tiny car hand painted with future dirt from riding clouds stuffed with future smog.