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tonyPick writes:

According to IEEE Spectrum a proposed robot lawnmower from iRobot (developers of the Roomba) has astronomers concerned about the proposed design.

In order to provide the robot lawnmower with information about position iRobot are proposing to use wireless beacons in the 6240-6740 MHz range, which covers a region of the radio spectrum the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) uses for observations, and iRobot would like the FCC to allow them to operate in this protected spectrum by issuing a waiver:

As you might expect, the NRAO got a little bit upset that iRobot wanted to set up its beacons to broadcast on a protected frequency, because they're worried that people's lawn mower beacons would start to mess with their radio astronomy data. So, they’ve filed a comment to that effect on iRobot's FCC waiver application, to which iRobot responded, and then NRAO responded to that.

We’ve read through these documents (including iRobot’s waiver application, NRAO’s comments, iRobot’s response, and NRAO’s reply), and they’re full of amusingly passive-aggressive commentary from both sides as they argue back and forth in front of the FCC.

mendax writes:

If you've ever wondered why Dutch people are so tall, this story from The New York Times may have the answer:

Today, the Dutch are on average the tallest people on the planet. Just 150 years ago, they were relatively short. In 1860, the average Dutch soldier in the Netherlands was just 5 feet 5 inches. American men were 2.7 inches taller.

Since 1860, average heights have increased in many parts of the world, but no people have shot up like the Dutch. The average Dutchman now stands over six feet tall. And while the growth spurt in the United States has stopped in recent years, the Dutch continue to get taller.

For years, scientists have sought to understand why average height has increased, and why the Dutch in particular have grown so quickly. Among other factors, the Dutch have a better diet than in the past, and they also have better medical care. But now Dr. Stulp and his colleagues have found evidence suggesting that evolution itself is also helping to make them taller.

It seems that taller men in the Netherlands are more likely to father more children:

Dr. Stulp and his colleagues analyzed data on 42,612 men and women over age 45, looking at the height of their subjects and how many children they had. Dutch men who were taller than average had more children than those of average or lower than average height, the researchers found.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Extreme Tech is a report on the variation between processor speeds on Intel Core-M devices between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers):

...users have generally been able to expect that a CPU in a Dell laptop will perform identically to that same CPU in an HP laptop. These assumptions aren’t trivial — they’re actually critical to reviewing hardware and to buying it.

The Core M offered OEMs more flexibility in building laptops than ever before, including the ability to detect the skin temperature of the SoC (System on Chip) and adjust performance accordingly. But those tradeoffs have created distinctly different performance profiles for devices that should be nearly identical to one another

The article references the detailed analysis done by Anandtech. Originally spotted at Hackernews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Got some time to burn away? Interested in reading? If you find yourself agreeing with those two propositions, you might be a good candidate for Distributed Proofreaders which turns public domain books into versatile and compact ebooks. The OCR'd* pages of the books are first proofread because the machine still makes some mistakes and then formatted to all kind of layouts. If you're willing to give the process a try, here's a live demo. (no registration required) Distributed Proofreaders has preserved more than 29,000 books!

I think this is a wonderful way to spend some time and find interesting books while at the same time doing something useful. Also, no technical skills are required.

* Optical Character Recognition, a process of turning a scanned image of text into actual text

frojack writes in with a story from The Scientist reporting on the results [Abstract] of a clinical trial Last December.

Scientists at Juno Therapeutics reported that their chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy put 24 of 27 adults with refractive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) into remission, with six patients remaining disease free for more than a year. This response rate is unprecedented for patients who had stopped responding to all other treatments.

In persons with ALL, lymphoblasts are overproduced in the bone marrow and continuously multiply, causing damage and death by inhibiting the production of normal cells.

This disease is extremely hard to treat and progresses rapidly when it becomes refractory (resistant); most patients die within a few months.

CAR T-cell therapies are cell therapy, gene therapy, and immuno-therapy all at the same time.

From The Scientist:

[More after the break.]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Reuters reports that in the first ever suit of its kind from Amazon, the online retailer has sued four websites to stop them from selling fake, positive product reviews. The suit accuses Jay Gentile of California and websites that operate as buyamazonreviews.com and buyazonreviews.com, among others, of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticyber­squatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act. Amazon says the defendants are misleading customers, and through their activity generating improper profit for themselves and a "handful" of dishonest sellers and manufacturers. Amazon says the defendants have caused reviews to be posted on its website intermittently, through a "slow drip" designed to evade its detection systems, at a typical cost of $19 to $22 per review. "While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand."

Mark Collins, the owner of buyamazonreviews.com, denies Amazon’s claims and says the site simply offers to help Amazon’s third-party sellers get reviews. Collins defended his business, writing that his website operates as a “middleman,” connecting sellers with buyers willing to write reviews. The sellers provide reviewers with discounted items. But he said there are no restriction on the type of review they can post. “We are not selling fake reviews. however we do provide Unbiased and Honest reviews on all the products,” Collins wrote. “And this is not illegal at all.”

takyon writes:

The Register's new sister site, The Platform, broke news of an upcoming 180 petaflops supercomputer named "Aurora" to be installed at the Argonne National Laboratory. The system will reportedly use 2.7x the power (from 4.8 megawatts to 13 megawatts) to deliver 18x the peak performance of Argonne's existing Mira supercomputer (more detail here).

Aurora will use Intel's upcoming 10nm "Knights Hill" Xeon Phi processors and a second-generation Omni-Path optical interconnect with far greater bandwidth than current designs. The storage capacity will exceed 150 petabytes. Cray Inc. will manufacture the system, which will cost $200 million and round out the CORAL trio of supercomputers, including the 150-300 PFLOPS Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the 100+ PFLOPS Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other two systems will use IBM Power9 and NVIDIA Volta chips.

An 8.5 petaflops, 1.7 MW secondary system named Theta will be built in 2016.

According to Intel and Argonne National Laboratory:

Research goals for the Aurora system include: more powerful, efficient and durable batteries and solar panels; improved biofuels and more effective disease control; improving transportation systems and enabling production of more highly efficient and quieter engines; and wind turbine design and placement for improved efficiency and reduced noise.

Editor's Note: For the purists, and from a maintainer of the TOP500 list, What is a Mflop/s?:

Mflop/s is a rate of execution, millions of floating point operations per second. Whenever this term is used it will refer to 64 bit floating point operations and the operations will be either addition or multiplication. Gflop/s refers to billions of floating point operations per second and Tflop/s refers to trillions of floating point operations per second.

AnonTechie writes in about a bill [PDF], currently being considered by the Nevada State Senate Government Affairs committee that would require Nevada government electronic communications to traverse network paths within the state of Nevada only.

Ostensibly, the bill is aimed at enhancing data security. However, many aren't convinced that the provisions of the bill would provide any value at all.

From the USA Today article:

Nevada could become the first state in the nation to mandate the physical route government data takes as it travels the Internet under a bill being considered by the Nevada Legislature.

The bill's sponsors, Assembly Majority Leader Paul Anderson, R-Las Vegas, and Sen. Mo Denis, D-Las Vegas, argue their measure is critical for cybersecurity because it would keep government Internet traffic confined to the state, instead of allowing that data to travel traditional paths that often include out-of-state connection points.

But both critics of the bill and independent Internet security experts said the measure would do just the opposite, creating a single-point bottleneck that could make data more vulnerable to attack and would defeat the Internet's greatest strength, that it is decentralized with an almost infinite number of traffic routes.

The bill has until Friday (4/10/2015) to make it out of committee or it will die.

It's worth noting that the only public supporter of the bill is Switch (better known as Supernap) which would have a lot to gain should this bill pass.

Magic Oddball writes:

Thanks to somebody at the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup, I saw a link to 'never-before-seen' lost footage of Douglas Adams playing with Pink Floyd which was recently posted to YouTube. From the video description:

For Douglas Adams's 42nd birthday his friend David Gilmour gave him the opportunity to join Pink Floyd on stage during their 1994 tour live at Earls Court in London. Douglas played rhythm guitar on the tracks Eclipse and Brain Damage. While it was always known by Douglas' family that the concert had been filmed by someone in the audience, the tape of the event could never be found. That is, until now.

Douglas' brother James Thrift finally unearthed the tape in [Adams'] Islington home, and so, at last it is here for you'll to enjoy. The sound quality is as you might expect from a 20 year old handheld video recording of a live concert, but at the end of the day, who cares.

This is Douglas Adams and Pink Floyd, on stage, together. Enjoy.

Note: the camera-work is amatuer, but it does stop bouncing around and focus on Adams and Gilmour around 1:30

tonyPick writes:

Over at Crazy Engineers is a report that Police in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, plan to use pepperspray-equipped drones for riot control:

The Lucknow Police Senior Superintendent has informed the media that they have acquired five drones that are able to pepper spray unruly crowds. These drones cost Rs 6 lakh each and have a range of one kilometre. These drones are able to carry payloads of two kilograms and can fly up to a height of 600 meters. This isn’t the first time the authorities have deployed drones in the state. Previously the state government had hired surveillance drones during important religious and national festivals. The authorities were impressed by their capabilities and decided to buy them instead of hiring them for a fee.

The cost quoted is 600,000 Rupees, or about $9,600 (USD) per drone.

Additional coverage at engadget, Yahoo News and The Telegraph.

AnonTechie writes in with a story from phys.org about the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) push to create software that can continue to be useful along time scales of up to a century.

From the phys.org article:

As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.

The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. Such advances will necessitate the development of new linguistic abstractions, formal methods, and resource-aware program analyses to discover and specify program transformations, as well as systems designed to monitor changes in the surrounding digital ecosystem. The program is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.

DARPA's press release and call for research proposals.

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.