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NotSanguine writes:

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submilimeter Array (ALMA) have detected methyl cyanide and hydrogen cyanide in the protoplanetary disk around the young star MW480.

From the ESO press release:

For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star. The discovery, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), reaffirms that the conditions that spawned the Earth and Sun are not unique in the Universe. The results are published in the 9 April 2015 issue of the journal Nature.

The new ALMA observations reveal that the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star MWC 480 contains large amounts of methyl cyanide (CH₃CN), a complex carbon-based molecule. There is enough methyl cyanide around MWC 480 to fill all of Earth's oceans.

Both this molecule and its simpler cousin hydrogen cyanide (HCN) were found in the cold outer reaches of the star's newly formed disc, in a region that astronomers believe is analogous to the Kuiper Belt — the realm of icy planetesimals and comets in our own Solar System beyond Neptune.

The paper [Full] provides more details about this discovery, for example: "The presence of cyanides in comets, including 0.01% of methyl cyanide (CH₃CN) with respect to water, is of special interest because of the importance of C-N bonds for abiotic amino acid synthesis."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Ending a marriage is never easy, but Kelly Clay reports at ReadWrite that things just got easier as Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper has granted 26-year-old Ellanora Baidoo permission to serve papers to her elusive husband via a Facebook message. Invoking the social network was a last resort. Husband Sena Blood-Dzraku's whereabouts in the real world were unknown. But because he communicated with his estranged wife via phone calls and Facebook, Baidoo knew where to find him online. Justice Cooper says the "advent and ascendency of social media," means sites like Facebook and Twitter are the "next frontier" as "forums through which a summons can be delivered." Previously, if you couldn't find a defendant, you had to leave the notice at a last-known address or publish it in a newspaper, and there was no guarantee the defendant would know about it.

Before Cooper agreed to her using Facebook, Baidoo had to prove the Facebook account belongs to her husband, and that he consistently logs on to the account and would therefore see the summons. Attorney Andrew Spinnell says he has contacted Blood-Dzraku twice on Facebook, but has yet to hear back. If Blood-Dzraku refuses the summons, Spinnell says the judge can move forward with a "divorce by default" for his client. "She's not asking for any money," says Spinnell, "She just wants to move on with her life and get a divorce."

Marneus68 writes:

GitHub is announcing that is will soon support the open source extension Git LFS (Large File System) on every repository they host.

This extension allows the replacement of large files (audio samples, images, textures models, various assets...) by references pointing to a remote server, allowing you to store huge files in your repository. While GitHub is only now implementing it as part of its service, it can be used without GitHub as of now.

This system could easily benefit organizations and projects relying on a heavy quantity of assets.

See the official announcement here on the GitHub blog.

Do you use GitHub for your work? How do you think this could be implemented in your organization and projects? I know this will end up replacing the complex workflow I have put in place in my company, based on on a intricate system of submodules.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:

Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowadays," writes Olsen. "Even the world’s current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world’s elite."

The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."

Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead “draw death,” where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent “draw death,” but it never really seemed to catch on.

NotSanguine writes:

Phys.org has an article describing new superconductivity research [Full paper] in research involving so-called "unparticles", a theoretical form of matter which could be involved in mediating superconductivity.

Physicists have proposed that a hypothetical form of matter called "unparticles" may play a key role in mediating superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance.

From the Phys.org article:

Physicists James LeBlanc and Adolfo Grushin at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden (LeBlanc is now with the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor) have published a paper on their proposal of unparticle-mediated superconductivity in a recent issue of the New Journal of Physics.

"Understanding all forms of superconductivity remains one of the holy grails of modern physics," Grushin told Phys.org. "Proposing new ways of how this astonishing phenomena can emerge is of key importance to push the frontier of knowledge that deals with how materials can superconduct. By identifying how unparticles contribute to superconductivity, we open a new path to possibly finding unparticles, by looking for strange superconducting behavior. Moreover, the novelty and broadness of our approach can inspire other researchers to look for this new type of superconductivity in nature."

The basic theory of superconductivity involves electrons forming Cooper pairs due to a very small attraction between electrons in a metal. In some superconducting materials, the electrons are thought to be bound together by phonons. However, in many materials, the underlying mechanisms that cause this pairing are still not well understood: what is the "glue" that holds these pairs together? One thing that is clear is that, in order for electrons to form pairs and move with zero resistance, they must behave in a very complex way.

Here, LeBlanc and Grushin have investigated the possibility that this complex electronic behavior arises from the presence of unparticles. As their name suggests, unparticles do not behave like particles. While a particle's mass always stays the same, even though its energy and momentum may change, unparticles are different. In an unparticle, all three of these properties—mass, energy, and momentum—must scale up or down equally.

NotSanguine writes:

Reuters is reporting on the FCC's settlement with AT&T over data breaches at foreign call centers. From the article:

The Federal Communications Commission reached a $25 million settlement with AT&T Inc over a consumer data breach at call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines, the U.S. communications regulator said on Wednesday.

The breaches led to unauthorized disclosure of names and full or partial Social Security numbers and illegal access to account information of about 280,000 U.S customers of AT&T, a senior FCC official told reporters on a conference call.

The data was used by call center employees to request handset-unlock codes for AT&T phones and shared with third parties who seem to have been trafficking stolen cell phones, the official said. The breaches occurred in 2013 and 2014.

AT&T said in a statement: "We are terminating vendor sites as appropriate. We’ve changed our policies and strengthened our operations."

NotSanguine writes:

Reuters is reporting on a lawsuit filed against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) by Human Rights Watch. The lawsuit, filed on April 7, 2015, seeks to have the DEA's bulk collection program [autoplay video, exclusive report by USA TODAY] declared unlawful.

From the Reuters article:

Ethanol-fueled writes:

National Journal's Rebecca Nelson reports about the Republicans lurking in the shadows of the Bay Area:

mrcoolbp writes in with an article from Phys.org which quotes top scientists at NASA postulating that finding life outside of earth is "definitely not an if, it's a when."

They are not expecting large-headed, lanky humanoids with oval-shaped black eyes hiding behind a crater on mars; instead they fully expect to find microbial life very soon for a number of reasons. Mainly, we finally are starting to "know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology."

From the article:

[Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA] also described another recent study that used measurements of aurora on Jupiter's moon Ganymede to prove it has a large liquid ocean beneath its icy crust. The findings suggest that previous ideas about where to find "habitable zones" may have been too limited. "We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too," Green said. "We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place." He also talked NASA's plans for a mission to Europa, another moon of Jupiter with an icy ocean. "I don't know what we are going to find there," he said.

NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld, said part of what excites him most about the search for life beyond our planet is to see what that life looks like. "Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low," he said.Grunsfeld said he believes that life beyond Earth will be found by the next generation of scientists and space explorers, but Green said he hopes it is sooner than that.

takyon writes:

According to VR World and HPCwire, the U.S. government has blacklisted "high technology" shipments to the National Supercomputing Center Changsha (NSCC-CS), National Supercomputing Center Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ), National Supercomputing Center Tianjin (NSCC-TJ), and the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. This effectively means that these major supercomputing facilities can no longer purchase Intel Xeon chips. Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer since June 2013 according to Top500, is located at the NUDT in Guangzhou and uses a total of 32,000 Intel Xeon and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips.

The U.S. also uses supercomputers for nuclear weapons research.

The news coincides with the Intel Developer Forum 2015 in Shenzhen, China, at which the company announced new Braswell, SoFIA, and Cherry Trail chips, among other products. VR World speculates that the move could cost Intel $1 billion on lost Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 sales and accelerate the development of homegrown Chinese processors.

NotSanguine writes:

phys.org is reporting that researchers working with radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) [flash required] have determined that belts of glaciers away from the poles are primarily composed of water ice.

What is more, researchers from the Neils Bohr Institute have been able to use the radar data and ice flow modelling to calculate the volume of water ice present in the glacier belts.

From the Phys.Org article:

Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice. The results are published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water (H2O) or of carbon dioxide (CO2) or whether it was mud.

Using radar measurements from the NASA satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have been able to determine that is water ice. But how thick was the ice and do they resemble glaciers on Earth?

A group of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have now calculated this using radar observations combined with ice flow modelling.

Data combined with modelling

"We have looked at radar measurements spanning ten years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is after all a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the ice flow," explains Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson, a postdoc at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

c0lo writes:

CBC Canada has a report on a law under consideration in France's lower house that would require models to meet a minimum body mass index standard.

The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.

Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.​

Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks.

The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 [US] for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.

The bill's amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles and forums that encourage eating disorders.

Body Mass Index (BMI) is is a measure of relative size based on the mass and height of an individual.

c0lo's random thoughts:

• On one side: governments regulating the BMI... (large soda ban)... hmm?
• On the other side: how is this different from laws against public indecency, laws which are well-knitted into the fabric of westernized societies?

mrcoolbp writes:

CNET has a quick video podcast [flash required] on a few new technologies that are coming out. Read on for links to the individual stories.

[More after the break]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in the past year, after the killings of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, many police departments and police reformists have agreed on the necessity of police-worn body cameras. But the most powerful cameras aren’t those on officer’s bodies but those wielded by bystanders. We don’t yet know who shot videos of officer officer, Michael T. Slager, shooting Walter Scott eight times as he runs away but "unknown cameramen and women lived out high democratic ideals: They watched a cop kill someone, shoot recklessly at someone running away, and they kept the camera trained on the cop," writes Robinson. "They were there, on an ordinary, hazy Saturday morning, and they chose to be courageous. They bore witness, at unknown risk to themselves."

“We have been talking about police brutality for years. And now, because of videos, we are seeing just how systemic and widespread it is,” tweeted Deray McKesson, an activist in Ferguson, after the videos emerged Tuesday night. “The videos over the past seven months have empowered us to ask deeper questions, to push more forcefully in confronting the system.” The process of ascertaining the truth of the world has to start somewhere. A video is one more assertion made about what is real concludes Robinson. "Today, through some unknown hero’s stubborn internal choice to witness instead of flee, to press record and to watch something terrible unfold, we have one more such assertion of reality."

Update: NBC News has identified the cameraman as Feidin Santana.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The Washington Post reports that according to President Obama global warming isn’t just affecting the weather, it’s harming Americans’ health, as he announced steps government and businesses will take to better understand and deal with the problem. Obama said hazards of the changing climate include wildfires sending more pollution into the air, allergy seasons growing longer and rising cases of insect-borne diseases. “We’ve got to do better in protecting our vulnerable families,” said Obama.. “You can’t cordon yourself off from air."

Speaking at Howard University Medical School, Obama announced commitments from Google, Microsoft and others to help the nation’s health system prepare for a warmer, more erratic climate. Google has promised to donate 10 million hours of advanced computing time on new tools, including risk maps and early warnings for things like wildfires and oil flares using the Google Earth Engine platform, the White House said. Google’s camera cars that gather photos for its “Street View” function will start measuring methane emissions and natural gas leaks in some cities this year. Microsoft’s research arm will develop a prototype for drones that can collect large quantities of mosquitoes, then digitally analyze their genes and pathogens. The goal is to create a system that could provide early warnings about infectious diseases that could break out if climate change worsens. “The sooner we act, the more we can do to protect the health of our communities, our kids, and those that are the most vulnerable,” according to a White House statement. The actions “will allow us to better understand, communicate and reduce the health impacts of climate change on our communities.”