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CoolHand writes:

Could the Tesla factor push the market for self driving cars faster than most anticipate.? Self-driving features may give them the edge on the increasing competition in the emerging electric vehicle market.

“Tech” is an attribute that is authentically a part of the Tesla brand. Self-driving features are essentially tech and in this area Tesla has been pushing out in front; most recently with an announcement that this summer an over-the-air update will enable their “Autopilot” feature on all Model Ss. (Autopilot will allow, as Tesla puts it, on-ramp to off-ramp self-driving.)

This new feature could be Tesla's saving grace, as well as a market force to more quickly push other automakers to use the new technology.

The convenience and safety of self-driving technologies offers Tesla a lifeline; “reasons to buy” for consumers who lack the environmental fervor of their early customers. And these reasons are compelling to a large number of car buyers; enough for many to overlook the limitations on an electric power-train–opening up a vastly larger market for Tesla.

Skyscrapers often darken adjacent neighborhoods with their shadow. Here's an innovative approach that uses reflection off one tall building to fill in the shadow cast by another. In the example given, the shadow from the first building typically falls over water so it doesn't affect a neighborhood. There is an animated gif in the article at weburbanist to illustrate the technique.

This building design technology might go a long way to preventing a catastrophe, as happened in another article on which weburbanist reported.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Recently, oral arguments were heard regarding a case about license plates and the first amendment. The Texas division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has challenged a rejection of their proposed plate that had images of the Confederate flag.

The Texas solicitor general argued that, "Messages on Texas license plates are government speech ... [because] Texas etches its name onto each license plate and Texas law gives the state sole control and final approval authority over everything that appears on a license plate.”

Please share your ideas/comments on this case or your views on vanity plates in general.

Story: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-supreme-court-confederate-license-plates-20150323-story.html
Case: http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2014/2014_14_144
What a vanity plate is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_plate

darkfeline writes in with yet another incident that the $41-billion-valued Uber would like to forget.

Gerald Montgomery, a 51-year-old UberX driver, has been arrested on suspicion of second-degree burglary. He was reportedly trying to break into the Denver home of a woman he had just driven to Denver International Airport, and was found carrying "burglar tools". Uber says that Montgomery had passed all background checks, and the man had no criminal history in Colorado according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation records. Montgomery has been "deactivated" from the UberX platform and the Denver victim's fare was refunded.

The UberX platform requires drivers to operate their own vehicles and is less regulated than taxi services. Rides are covered by commercial insurance. An investigation [autoplay video] by NBC Los Angeles last year found that Uber has employed "screened" drivers with long-term felony records.

The company continues to attract unwanted attention around the globe; Uber's headquarters in Amsterdam has been raided twice this week, and an Uber employee has been arrested for obstructing the investigation. The investigators were looking for evidence that the company is continuing to operate UberPop, an urban ridesharing service deemed illegal by a Dutch court.

AnonTechie writes:

A test that costs less than a $1 and yields results in minutes has been shown in newly published studies to be more sensitive and more exact than the current standard test for early-stage prostate cancer.

The simple test developed by University of Central Florida scientist Qun "Treen" Huo holds the promise of earlier detection of one of the deadliest cancers among men. It would also reduce the number of unnecessary and invasive biopsies stemming from the less precise PSA test that's now used.

When a cancerous tumor begins to develop, the body mobilizes to produce antibodies. Huo's test detects that immune response using gold nanoparticles about 10,000 times smaller than a freckle.

When a few drops of blood serum from a finger prick are mixed with the gold nanoparticles, certain cancer biomarkers cling to the surface of the tiny particles, increasing their size and causing them to clump together.

Among researchers, gold nanoparticles are known for their extraordinary efficiency at absorbing and scattering light. Huo and her team at UCF's NanoScience Technology Center developed a technique known as nanoparticle-enabled dynamic light scattering assay (NanoDLSay) to measure the size of the particles by analyzing the light they throw off. That size reveals whether a patient has prostate cancer and how advanced it may be.

And although it uses gold, the test is cheap. A small bottle of nanoparticles suspended in water costs about $250, and contains enough for about 2,500 tests.

http://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news/newsid=39654.php

[Source]: http://today.ucf.edu/cheap-prostate-cancer-test-better-than-psa/

[Abstract]: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.5b00371

Hugh Pickens writes:

We covered the story about powdered alcohol when it was first announced, but it ran into problems. It was re-announced in mid March. Rachel Abrams reports at the NYT that six states have passed legislation to ban Palcohol, a freeze-dried, powdered alcohol developed by Mark Phillips who he says was inspired by a love of hiking but a distaste for carrying bottles of adult beverages uphill. "When I hike, kayak, backpack or whatever, I like to have a drink when I reach my destination. And carrying liquid alcohol and mixers to make a margarita for instance was totally impractical," says Phillips, who hopes to have Palcohol on store shelves by the summer. One packet of Palcohol equals one shot with each packet weighing 1 ounce and turning into liquid when mixed with 6 ounces of water. Phillips has vigorously defended his product, called Palcohol, saying it is no more dangerous than the liquid version sold in liquor stores and plans to release five flavors: vodka, rum, cosmopolitan, powderita (which is like a margarita) and lemon drop.

Critics are concerned people may try to snort the powder or mix it with alcohol to make it even stronger or spike a drink. "It's very easy to put a couple packets into a glass and have super-concentrated alcohol," says Frank Lovecchio. Amy George, a spokeswoman for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said MADD did not typically take a stand on the dangers of specific alcohol products, but MADD is concerned about the colorful or playful packaging of such products that can sometimes appeal to children. Phillips dismisses concerns saying that they don't make sense if you think it through. "People unfortunately use alcohol irresponsibly. But I don't see any movement to ban liquid alcohol. You don't ban something because a few irresponsible people use it improperly," says Phillips. "They can snort black pepper. Do you ban black pepper?"

SubiculumHammer writes:

Scientific American (SA) points out that although there are medical illustrators on staff at the University of Southern California it is highly likely that they were not consulted before putting out the cited press release about a $50 million dollar donation. The brain is shown back to front!

Additional images of the brain are available from Google.

Update: 04/05 18:27 GMT by mrcoolbp : User wantkitteh points out that the inaccurate image has been pulled from the USC links (though it's showing in the SA article at the time of this update)

AnonTechie writes:

An experiment conducted by Princeton researchers has revealed an unlikely behavior in a class of materials called frustrated magnets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrical_frustration), addressing a long-debated question about the nature of these discontented quantum materials.

The researchers tested the frustrated magnets—so-named because they should be magnetic at low temperatures but aren't—to see if they exhibit a behavior called the Hall Effect. When a magnetic field is applied to an electric current flowing in a conductor such as a copper ribbon, the current deflects to one side of the ribbon. This deflection, first observed in 1879 by E.H. Hall, is used today in sensors for devices such as computer printers and automobile anti-lock braking systems.

Because the Hall Effect happens in charge-carrying particles, most physicists thought it would be impossible to see such behavior in non-charged, or neutral, particles like those in frustrated magnets. "To talk about the Hall Effect for neutral particles is an oxymoron, a crazy idea," said N. Phuan Ong, Princeton's Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics.

Nevertheless, some theorists speculated that the neutral particles in frustrated magnets might bend to the Hall rule under extremely cold conditions, near absolute zero, where particles behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics rather than the classical physical laws we observe in our everyday world. Harnessing quantum behavior could enable game-changing innovations in computing and electronic devices. Ong and colleague Robert Cava, Princeton's Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry, and their graduate students Max Hirschberger and Jason Krizan decided to see if they could settle the debate and demonstrate conclusively that the Hall Effect exists for frustrated magnets.

[Abstract]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6230/106.short

[Source]: http://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2015/04/03/frustrated-magnets-new-experiment-reveals-clues-to-their-discontent/

Introduction to frustrated magnets [PDF Presentation]: http://www.lpt.ups-tlse.fr/IMG/pdf_Lecture5-frustrated_magnets-LesHouches2011.pdf

Ryuugami writes:

Strike is a new BitTorrent search engine with a clean, no-ads interface and an "AI bot" presenting the results, which combines public torrent indexing with DHT scraping. As explained to TorrentFreak by the developer Andrew Sampson himself:

"DHT basically is a second P2P protocol aiming to replace trackers. It stores pairs of info hashes and updates the swarm if it receives announce messages. When it comes to DHT every [torrent] client is announcing themselves as being present. Because of this I'm able to scrape millions of torrents in a decentralized manner; not having to rely on trackers themselves," the dev told TF.

Unfortunately, the search engine has come under attack from multiple vectors, including a flood of DMCA notices and a DDoS attack. The situation went downhill from there, forcing the site to change hosting providers at least three times.

The developer says that the majority of complaints against his site were filed by anti-piracy company Entura International. Sampson says he tried to explain that his site carries no content and no torrents but simply extracts these from DHT upon user request but the company wasn't particularly interested.

In response to the DMCA issues, Sampson says he has now taken things a step further. During the past few days the dev took the decision to stop storing any data whatsoever on Strike's servers "except for search phrases for learning purposes."

This presents an intriguing situation. Aside from some disk caching, Sampson says that Strike now operates purely on demand. When a user types in a search the site pulls the results from its usual sources and presents them in the browser window. When that browser is closed the data effectively disappears, meaning that there is nothing for anti-piracy companies to take down because it's already gone.

I haven't used the site myself yet, but it sounds like a great project and I'd hate to see it disappear.

janrinok writes:

A report that could be bad news for many Californians describes how 2 faults are, in fact, connected which might have significant consequences:

University of California, Berkeley seismologists have proven that the Hayward Fault is essentially a branch of the Calaveras Fault that runs east of San Jose, which means that both could rupture together, resulting in a significantly more destructive earthquake than previously thought. "The maximum earthquake on a fault is proportional to its length, so by having the two directly connected, we can have a rupture propagating across from one to the other, making a larger quake," said lead researcher Estelle Chaussard, a post-doctoral fellow in the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. "People have been looking for evidence of this for a long time, but only now do we have the data to prove it."

The 70-kilometer-long Hayward Fault is already known as one of the most dangerous in the country because it runs through large population areas from its northern limit on San Pablo Bay at Richmond to its southern end south of Fremont. In an update of seismic hazards last month, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a 14.3 percent likelihood of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the next 30 years, and a 7.4 percent chance on the Calaveras Fault. These are based on the assumption that the two faults are independent systems, and that the maximum quake on the Hayward Fault would be between magnitudes 6.9 and 7.0. Given that the Hayward and Calaveras faults are connected, the energy released in a simultaneous rupture could be 2.5 times greater, or a magnitude 7.3 quake.

"A rupture from Richmond to Gilroy would produce about a 7.3 magnitude quake, but it would be even greater if the rupture extended south to Hollister, where the Calaveras Fault meets the San Andreas Fault," Chaussard said.

tonyPick writes:

From the FSF website is the release that there has been a sudden increase in the use of GNU Social following the suspension of a prominent Twitter user.

GNU Social provides a decentralised social networking system,and:

Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000 followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other political parties or groups of power.

On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se and started posting. Her Twitter followers proved willing to follow her all the way to GNU social, and began joining existing nodes en masse and starting their own.

The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes were unable to handle the traffic

There is further background information on GNU Social at the project homepage.

It's worth noting that the numbers (in the thousands) are still relatively low, compared to the Twitter statistics:

The node Quitter.es (Quitter Spain) was created to handle some of the extra people that overloaded existing GNU social instances like Quitter.no and Quitter.is. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting and Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish users.

However it's still interesting to hear about the improvement in traction gained in a relatively short time frame, and it will be worth monitoring to see if the gains persist or continue.

Originally spotted at HackerNews

janrinok writes:

Several weeks back, Bill Gates was proclaiming the dark side of artificial intelligence (AI). Teradata's John Thuma believes that Bill Gates is wrong, and explains how big data and machine intelligence could be a massive game changer if only we can get over our fear of progress:

If I can come up with a computer doctor better than your current doctor, would you as a patient consider it? Would you as a doctor use it? For example, if we do an analysis of common genes between diseases such as obesity and asthma, we can construct a virtual dictionary that defines those genes. We can then take the human genome and check it against that dictionary to see who's got those genes and use a proven data source to see who's afflicted with either of the diseases. With that information we can predict who's obese and who's asthmatic, and vice versa. If we can do that across a collection of diseases, we would have a tool for being proactive with healthcare and promoting wellness.

I'm not saying we'll ever want to get rid of doctors, but we must overcome fear that stops us from making progress. Right now, humans are on the front line of fields like healthcare and machine intelligence is in the background. In the future we'll see machines move closer to the front under the governance of doctors.

So Soylentils, do you agree with Thurma, or do you think that we are treading a very dangerous path?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Amazon has unveiled a button that can re-order your commonly-used household products. And they can be delivered in as little as one hour, if you live in one of six cities where Amazon is also testing a new ultra-speed delivery service! "Since launching, we've seen high demand on everything from essentials like water and paper towels to more surprising deliveries like getting a customer a hard-to-find, top-selling toy in 23 minutes," says one Amazon VP of their "Prime Now" service. And the Amazon Dash button lets you set up recurring orders which can be triggered whenever you press a small real-world button you keep somewhere in your house (which then places that order over your Wi-Fi network).

Hugh Pickens writes:

Alyssa Newcomb reports at ABC News that the software company started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975 is 40 and fabulous and highlights products and moments that helped define Microsoft's first four decades including: Microsoft’s first product - software for the Altair 8800; Getting a deal to provide a DOS Operating System for IBM's computers in 1980; Shipping Windows 1.0 in 1985; Microsoft Office for Mac released in 1989; Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers; Windows 95 launches in 1995, selling an astounding 7 million copies in the first five weeks, and the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window.

For his part, Bill Gates sent a letter to employees celebrating Microsoft's anniversary, recalling how far computing has come since he and Paul Allen set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home, and predicting that computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it ever has before. "We are nearing the point where computers and robots will be able to see, move, and interact naturally, unlocking many new applications and empowering people even more. Under Satya's leadership, Microsoft is better positioned than ever to lead these advances. We have the resources to drive and solve tough problems. We are engaged in every facet of modern computing and have the deepest commitment to research in the industry," concludes Gates. "We have accomplished a lot together during our first 40 years and empowered countless businesses and people to realize their full potential. But what matters most now is what we do next. Thank you for helping make Microsoft a fantastic company now and for decades to come."

Some of us may disagree that the company is currently fabulous, but there is no doubt that it has been a force that has shaped the industry for the past forty years.

janrinok writes:

Wired has a story about volcanoes or, more specifically, the growing number of volcanoes that are being watched by webcams:

Never in the history of volcanology have so many volcanoes been monitored. We have the ability to sit and watch hundreds of volcanoes as they sleep, rumble or erupt — all from the comfort of our homes or offices. This instant connectivity to volcanoes in some of the most remote parts of the world is what gives us the impression that there are more volcanic eruptions today than in the past. There really aren’t more, but rather we hear about or see the eruptions much faster. With the network of webcams and the peering eyes of satellites, almost no volcano can erupt on the planet and we not notice. So, fear not, volcanism isn’t on the rise but our ability to see the action live is.

The article goes on to list well over 100 volcanoes that you can watch from the comfort of your own computer, and the list was updated on 2 April. However, remember that watching a volcano that isn't doing what volcanoes are most famous for doing - erupting - can be a little bit like watching paint dry...