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fritsd writes:

It's high summer in Europe.

The Guardian newspaper reports on a new initiative in the Danish musical epicentre of Roskilde to make festivalgoers aware of the intimate link between them and their beer: the festival organization coined a new word "beercycling" which means nothing more than recycling the valuable nitrates from music lovers' urine through a near-by barley field, and then transmogrifying said barley into golden mjød (actually pilsner beer in the current project).

According to the newspaper, the Roskilde festival (established æons ago in the hippy era) has a reputation for its ecological awareness.

Phoenix666 writes:

Each of us has, in our nose, about six million smell receptors of around four hundred different types. The distribution of these receptors varies from person to person -- so much so that each person's sense of smell may be unique. In research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Weizmann Institute scientists report on a method of precisely characterizing an individual's sense of smell, which they call an "olfactory fingerprint."

The implications of this study reach beyond the sense of smell alone, and range from olfactory fingerprint-based early diagnosis of degenerative brain disorders to a non-invasive test for matching donor organs.

The method is based on how similar or different two odors are from one another. In the first stage of the experiment, volunteers were asked to rate 28 different smells according to 54 different descriptive words, for example, "lemony," or "masculine." The experiment, led by Dr. Lavi Secundo, together with Dr. Kobi Snitz and Kineret Weissler, all members of the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department, developed a complex, multidimensional mathematical formula for determining, based on the subjects' ratings, how similar any two odors are to one another in the human sense of smell. The strength of this formula, according to Secundo, is that it does not require the subjects to agree on the use and applicability of any given verbal descriptor. Thus, the fingerprint is odor dependent but descriptor and language independent.

takyon writes:

Sealed Air Corp., the original seller of Bubble Wrap since 1960, is introducing a new version of its signature product:

Dubbed iBubble Wrap, the new packaging is sold in flat plastic sheets that the shipper fills with air using a custom-made pump. The inflated bubbles look much like traditional Bubble Wrap, with one key difference: They don't burst when pressure is applied.

Charlotte N.C.-based Sealed Air is betting iBubble Wrap will appeal to space-conscious online retailers who are driving swift growth in the global packaging business, even as fans are disappointed by the lack of pop. Traditional Bubble Wrap ships in giant, pre-inflated rolls, taking up precious room in delivery trucks and on customers' warehouse floors. One roll of the new iBubble Wrap uses roughly one-fiftieth as much space before it's inflated.

Though an afterthought for consumers, protective packaging is big business: World-wide sales hit $20 billion in 2013, the most recent data available, according to Freedonia Group, a research firm. An increasing number of products and components are shipped around the world as manufacturing has become more global. Retailers like Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. are constantly experimenting with new types of packaging as they look for ways to undercut rivals to offer cheaper, faster shipping, all while ensuring products reach their destinations unscathed.

Phoenix666 writes:

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which provides oversight for UK intelligence services, admitted yesterday that its judgement made on 22 June wrongly failed to declare that Amnesty International had been subject to unlawful surveillance by GCHQ. The IPT revealed this in an e-mail sent to the ten NGO claimants involved in the earlier legal challenge to UK government surveillance. As Amnesty International explained: "Today's communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa."

The Intercept has obtained a copy of the e-mail sent to the NGOs, which shows that the IPT made the finding that "there had been a breach by virtue of the exceeding of time limits for retention"—the communication files were kept too long. That is, as far as the IPT was concerned, spying on one of the world's most respected NGOs was not in itself problematic.

Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary general, commented: "The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK's surveillance legislation. If they hadn't stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to by internal guidelines, we would never even have known." If the records had been destroyed according to the rules, the IPT would have made "no determination" as to whether surveillance had taken place—its standard way of neither confirming nor denying allegations that spying has occurred.

Shetty went on to point out: "It's outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government." The rationale for intrusive surveillance of the kind carried out by GCHQ is generally that it is only directed against serious threats to the UK public and society and that it is always proportionate and necessary. It is hard to see how the UK government can seriously claim that Amnesty International is a threat or that spying on them is proportionate.

Numbering Mistake Leads Tribunal to Admit UK Illegally Spied on Amnesty International

takyon writes:

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which is investigating the actions of the UK's GCHQ, has reversed itself on its June 22 determination that Amnesty International had not been illegally spied upon:

Responding to a complaint that Amnesty and nine other human rights organizations sent the tribunal in April, it said only two of the groups—the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa—had been subject to illegal surveillance. In the e-mail sent to Amnesty late Wednesday, the president of the tribunal said the unlawful retention of communications it had previously said affected the Egyptian group had in fact affected Amnesty.

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers from Royal Holloway, Birkbeck and Kings College, University of London used satellite images to map abandoned shore lines around Palaeolake Mega-Chad, and analysed sediments to calculate the age of these shore lines, producing a lake level history spanning the last 15,000 years.

At its peak around 6,000 years ago, Palaeolake Mega-Chad was the largest freshwater lake on Earth, with an area of 360,000 km². Now today's Lake Chad is reduced to a fraction of that size, at only 355 km². The drying of Lake Mega-Chad reveals a story of dramatic climate change in the southern Sahara, with a rapid change from a giant lake to desert dunes and dust, due to changes in rainfall from the West African Monsoon. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms earlier suggestions that the climate change was abrupt, with the southern Sahara drying in just a few hundred years.

Re-Initializer writes:

The founder of one of the Dark Web's fledgling search engines is warning Tor users about the presence of hundreds of fake and booby trapped .onion websites. Nurmi first noticed a fake of his own site before discovering that there are multiple clones of hundreds of other Dark Web sites, including a fake of the .onion version of the popular DuckDuckGo search engine. Nurmi also claims that the fake sites aren't just duplicates of the real sites but proxies for them (he could presumably verify this for his own site but he doesn't state how or if he tested it for the others).

Tor sites are often found through directories rather than search engines and they have addresses that are quite difficult to read, which probably makes it easier to plant fakes than on the regular World Wide Web.

For example, the real and fake addresses for DuckDuckGo are the equally immemorable:

• http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ (real)
• http://3g2up5afx6n5miu4.onion/ (fake)

Phoenix666 writes:

Take the F train to Roosevelt Island and you'll find yourself on an island in the East River, sandwiched between midtown Manhattan and Queens. Its seclusion and history as an enclave of middle-class families in an absurdly expensive city gives it a small-town feel. People use words like lost, suburban, and eerily quiet to describe the place.

That's about to change.

Bustling, youthful, and collegiate will more aptly describe the island now that Cornell Tech is building a campus there. The school, a joint venture between Cornell University and Technion University, broke ground earlier this year, launching a development plan that the school (and the city) sees elevating New York's status as a major player in tech.

The designers envision a campus of shiny, modern buildings on a verdant strip of land stretching about a mile from the Queensboro bridge to Southpoint Park. The first four buildings will be completed within two years, but work will continue through 2043. New York architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill developed the master plan, which so far includes the Bloomberg Center, a zero net energy building designed by Thomas Mayne of Morphosis; a glassy co-location building called the Bridge designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architecture; a 26-story residential tower from Handel Architects; and a conference center and landscaping by James Corner of Field Operations. A pathway called the Spine ties it all together, with smaller sidewalks that direct people toward a central plaza.

Despite its name, the East River is an estuary that rises and falls with the tide. That meant designing everything around a specific elevation. Colin Koop, the partner leading the project, says the island's natural ridge encouraged designing a path that led toward the center. "It's been calibrated so all the sidewalks and pathways bring everybody from the edge of the site diagonally up to the center and naturally spill them back down into the sidewalks and promenades of the island," he says. Every building faces the center of the island, creating a centralized hub that will foster spontaneous and serendipitous meetings of people from various disciplines and departments as they walk around the campus.

Have you experienced business or university campus designs like this? Does it make a difference?

TK writes:

Today, a new "cloud tax" takes effect in the city of Chicago, targeting online databases and streaming entertainment services.

Chicago's new tax is actually composed of two recent rulings made by the city's Department of Finance: one covering "electronically delivered amusements" and another covering "nonpossessory computer leases." Each one takes an existing tax law and extends it to levy an extra 9 percent tax on certain types of online services. The first ruling presumably covers streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify, while the second would cover remote database or computing platforms like Amazon Web Services or Lexis Nexis. Under the new law, what passes as $100 of server time in Springfield would cost $109 if you're conducting it from an office in Chicago.

The result for services is both higher prices and a new focus on localization. For the web services portion, the most likely effect is simply moving servers outside of the city limits — and, where possible, the offices that use them. Once implemented, streaming services will also have to keep closer track of which subscribers fall under the new tax, whether through billing addresses or more restrictive methods like IP tracking, which is already used to enforce rights restrictions.

Although the tax is technically levied on consumers, some companies are already preparing to collect it as part of the monthly bill. Netflix says it's already making arrangements to add the tax to the cost charged to its Chicago customers.

Phoenix666 writes:

People with blue eyes might have a greater chance of becoming alcoholics, according to a unique new study by genetic researchers at the University of Vermont.

The work, led by Arvis Sulovari, a doctoral student in cellular, molecular and biological sciences, and Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Dawei Li, Ph.D., is the first to make a direct connection between a person's eye color and alcohol dependence. The results of the research, published in the July issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics: Neuropsychiatric Genetics (Part B), suggest the hope of finding the roots of not only alcoholism, but also many other psychiatric illnesses.

"This suggests an intriguing possibility -- that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," Sulovari says.

The authors found that primarily European Americans with light-colored eyes -- including green, grey and brown in the center -- had a higher incidence of alcohol dependency than those with dark brown eyes, with the strongest tendency among blue-eyed individuals. The study outlines the genetic components that determine eye color and shows that they line up along the same chromosome as the genes related to excessive alcohol use.

Correlation does not equal causation, but more studies are emerging that suggest some traits are linked.

An abstract is available.

Phoenix666 writes:

In the game of anonymity-versus-surveillance online, the discovery of the user's IP address usually means game over. But if Ben Caudill has his way, a network snoop who successfully hunts a user through layers of proxy connections to a final IP address would be met with a dead end—while the anonymous user remains safe at home more than a mile away.

At the upcoming DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas next month, Caudill plans to unveil ProxyHam, a "hardware proxy" designed to use a radio connection to add a physical layer of obfuscation to an internet user's location. His open-source device, which he built for $200, connects to Wi-Fi and relays a user's Internet connection over a 900 megaherz radio connection to their faraway computer, with a range of between one and 2.5 miles depending on interference from the landscape and buildings. That means even if investigators fully trace the user's internet connection, they'll find only the ProxyHam box the person planted in a remote library, cafe, or other public place—and not their actual location.

Caudill, a researcher for the security consultancy Rhino Labs, compares his tool to typical tactics to hide the source of an Internet connection, like using a neighbor's Wi-Fi, or working from a coffee shop instead of home. But "the problem with Wi-Fi as a protocol is that you can't get the range you need. If the FBI kicks down the door, it may not be my door, but it'll be so close they can hear me breathe," says Caudill. "[ProxyHam] gives you all the benefits of being able to be at a Starbucks or some other remote location, but without physically being there."

David Eccles (gringer) writes:

Victoria Taylor, the human interface between many celebrities and the Reddit "Ask Me Anything" subreddit, was today unexpectedly let go from her position with Reddit. The nature of the dismissal is unclear, including whether or not it was initiated by Victoria herself. As a result of this action, a large number of popular and/or default subreddits have gone private, or have disabled story submissions.

See here for more updates:

TL;DR /r/IAmA, /r/AskReddit, /r/Books, /r/science, /r/Music, /r/gaming, /r/history, /r/Art, /r/videos, /r/gadgets, /r/todayilearned, /r/Documentaries, /r/LifeProTips, and /r/movies have all made themselves private in response to the removal of an administrator key to the AMA process, /u/chooter, but also due to underlying resentment against the admins for running the site poorly - being uncommunicative, and disregarding the thousands of moderators who keep the site running. In addition, /r/listentothis has disabled all submissions, and so has /r/picsand /r/Jokes has announced its support (but has not gone private). Major subreddits, including /r/4chan, /r/circlejerk and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, have also expressed solidarity through going private.

Phoenix666 writes:

If you've been putting off pre-ordering Valve's upcoming Steam Link or Steam Controller hardware since the devices first went on pre-sale earlier this month, we have some bad news. Valve has announced that it has sold out of units for the initial "get it early" offer (with its expected delivery on October 16). Any orders placed from now on will instead be delivered weeks later on November 10.

You may have also missed your chance to get early delivery of the first commercial "Steam Machines" pre-loaded with SteamOS. Any orders for the Alienware Steam Machines placed through GameStop since last Thursday will now be shipped November 10 rather than October 16. Syber now lists a ship date "on or after 10/15/2015" for its first wave of Steam Machines.

Anyone in Soylent-Land got their hands on a pre-release console?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Occupational burnout is a well-known problem within the computer programming industry. While many programmers have experienced it themselves, or at least witnessed it happen to others, few have experienced it as intensely as reddit user Max-P has.

In a comment at reddit, Max-P wrote:

Let his tale be one of caution; let it be a lesson to learn from!

NC added: /r/technology at reddit briefly went private. I'm copying the original post here as as an extended message in case it goes down again.

AnonTechie writes:

Consciousness — the internal dialogue that seems to govern one's thoughts and actions — is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control, according to a new theory proposed by an SF State researcher. Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella.

Morsella and his coauthors' groundbreaking theory, published online on June 22 by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, contradicts intuitive beliefs about human consciousness and the notion of self.

According to Morsella's framework, the "free will" that people typically attribute to their conscious mind — the idea that our consciousness, as a "decider," guides us to a course of action — does not exist. Instead, consciousness only relays information to control "voluntary" action, or goal-oriented movement involving the skeletal muscle system.

http://scienceblog.com/79096/theory-consciousness-free/

Wonder if Edward Bernays would agree with this assessment. Enjoyed watching the very intriguing documentary, The Century of the Self a 2002 British television documentary series by Adam Curtis. It focuses on how the work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have analyzed, dealt with, and controlled people.

You can see the documentary: The Century of the Self | Happiness Machines | Episode 1

Phoenix666 writes:

Solar Impulse 2, a solar-powered plane co-founded by Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg, took off on June 28 on a potentially record-breaking flight across the Pacific Ocean. The BBC reports that the single-seater left Japan's Nagoya Airfield at 18:03 GMT (a little after noon CT) and hopes to reach Hawaii in roughly five days. In total, the flight would traverse 8,200km or approximately 5,095 miles. If successful, the BBC notes the Solar Impulse team will break records for both the longest-duration solo flight and the farthest distance flown by an entirely solar-powered aircraft.

Borschberg and partner Bertrand Piccard hope that the third time is the charm for this endeavor. The plane's first attempt in May was cut short by the forecast causing an unscheduled landing, and the second attempt (occurring last Tuesday, June 23) was postponed for similar reasons. According to the BBC report, the team hasn't aggressively publicized its take off today just in case weather conditions again cause an unexpected landing. At the time of this article, Solar Impulse's official site and Twitter account remained mum on its current progress. The BBC reported the point of no return is set at about eight hours, so Solar Impulse should know within the next two hours.

Solar Impulse 2 has a bigger wingspan than a jumbo jet, but it's light (roughly the weight of a car) and powered solely by 17,000 solar cells. "During the day, the solar cells recharge lithium batteries weighing 633 Kg (2,077 lbs) which allow the aircraft to fly at night and therefore to have virtually unlimited autonomy," the team states on its About page. Of course beyond technical challenges, the human element of this record attempt also present a significant hurdle. Borschberg's space is roughly the size of a phone booth, according to the BBC, and the pilot will only be able to take 20-minute naps throughout this initial leg. If a water landing must happen, the plane contains supplies for its pilot to survive for an entire week during recovery.

What does it take to risk your life like this for a record, or for science?

Follow its flight here