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Phoenix666 writes:

About 321 million light-years away from us is the Coma Cluster, a massive grouping of more than 1,000 galaxies. Some of its galaxies are a little unusual, however: they're incredibly dim. So dim, in fact, that they have earned the title of "Ultra-Dark Galaxies" (UDGs). (The term is actually "Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies", as their visible matter is thinly spread, though "ultra-dark" has been used by some sources and, let's face it, sounds a lot better). This was discovered earlier this year in a study that identified 47 such galaxies.

Dimness isn't necessarily unusual in a galaxy. Most of a galaxy's light comes from its stars, so the smaller a galaxy is (and thus the fewer stars it has), the dimmer it will be. We've found many dwarf galaxies that are significantly dimmer than their larger cousins.

What was so unusual about these 47 is that they're not small enough to account for their dimness. In fact, many of them are roughly the size of our own Milky Way (ranging in diameter from 1.5 to 4.6 kiloparsecs, compared with the Milky Way's roughly 3.6) but have only roughly one thousandth of the Milky Way's stars. The authors of the recent study interpret this to mean that these galaxies must be even more dominated by dark matter than are ordinary galaxies.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Another Phys.org story:

In a move akin to adding chemical weapons to a firebomb, researchers at Duke University have devised a method for making a promising nanoscale cancer treatment even more deadly to tumors.

The invention allows an extremely thin layer of hydrogels (think contact lenses) to be deposited on the surface of nanoshells—particles about a hundred nanometers wide designed to absorb infrared light and generate heat. When heated, these special hydrogels lose their water content and release any molecules (such as drugs) trapped within.

By depositing the hydrogels on tumor-torching nanoshells and loading the new coating with chemotherapeutic drugs, a formidable one-two punch is formed.

The technique is described in a paper published in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering on July 13, 2015, that was highlighted as an ACS Editor's Choice.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

From a Phys.org story:

Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider has reported the discovery of a class of particles known as pentaquarks. The collaboration has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The pentaquark is not just any new particle," said LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson. "It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."

Our understanding of the structure of matter was revolutionized in 1964 when American physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, proposed that a category of particles known as baryons, which includes protons and neutrons, are comprised of three fractionally charged objects called quarks, and that another category, mesons, are formed of quark-antiquark pairs. Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 1969. This quark model also allows the existence of other quark composite states, such as pentaquarks composed of four quarks and an antiquark. Until now, however, no conclusive evidence for pentaquarks had been seen.

LHCb researchers looked for pentaquark states by examining the decay of a baryon known as Λ_b (Lambda b) into three other particles, a J/ѱ (J-psi), a proton and a charged kaon. Studying the spectrum of masses of the J/ѱ and the proton revealed that intermediate states were sometimes involved in their production. These have been named P_c(4450)⁺ and P_c(4380)⁺, the former being clearly visible as a peak in the data, with the latter being required to describe the data fully.

"Benefitting from the large data set provided by the LHC, and the excellent precision of our detector, we have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states", says LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University.

Phoenix666 writes:

The technology to enable self-driving vehicles is maturing faster and faster these days. Google, Delphi, and others are testing their autonomous cars on the streets of California and elsewhere, taking journalists for rides and even getting into the occasional fender-bender. Audi is one of the car makers leading the charge for autonomous vehicles, and it's been demoing its technology on the racetrack. Last year the company showed off a self-driving RS7 called "Bobby" at the season finale of the German equivalent of NASCAR. Today, the company announced that Bobby's smarter, lighter sibling "Robby" has been taking to the track here in the US, and he's faster than ever.

Robby has been putting Audi's autonomous driving tech to the test at Sonoma Raceway in California, 90 minutes north of Silicon Valley. The new car is 882lbs (400kg) lighter than its predecessor, and even with the sensors and processors it's only now approaching the weight of the production RS7. Audi says it isn't just teaching the car to lap for publicity though, the point is to make sure that a self-driving car is capable of exploiting the entire performance envelope of the vehicle.

I've been told by racing fans that it is the possibility of catastrophic human error that keeps them glued to their seats. Would robotic racing take the fun out of it?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A ComputerWorld story explains that Mozilla has taken the unusual step of blocking all Flash after the announcement of the third 'zero-day' vulnerability in the last few days. It is possible to override the block by user selection for a single flash link or for all links. The block is in force even if Flash player has been updated since the first vulnerability was announced.

Mozilla on Monday began blocking all versions of Adobe Flash Player from running automatically in its Firefox browser, reacting to news of even more zero-day vulnerabilities unearthed in a massive document cache pilfered from the Italian Hacking Team surveillance firm.

Mozilla engineers swung into action over the weekend after reports surfaced late Friday of another Flash zero-day -- the term that describes a flaw for which there is yet no fix, or patch -- discovered in the gigabytes of data and documents stolen from the Hacking Team. At the time, the bug was the second in Flash spotted in just five days.

After reading the block warning, Firefox users can still run Flash content by authorizing the plug-in's operation. Since then a third Flash zero-day has cropped up.

Neither the second or the third vulnerability had been patched by Adobe as of late Monday, although the company has promised to do so this week.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

PhysOrg runs a story on the implications of 3D printers for the food industry.

The use of 3D printers has the potential to revolutionize the way food is manufactured within the next 10 to 20 years, impacting everything from how military personnel get food on the battlefield to how long it takes to get a meal from the computer to your table..

takyon writes:

According to the White House:

After many months [Ed: years?] of principled diplomacy, the P5+1 -- the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany -- along with the European Union, have achieved a long-term comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran that will verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and ensure that Iran's nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful going forward.

Reported at BBC, NYT, Reuters, and everywhere else. President Obama spoke about the deal for 15 minutes this morning.

The deal has been praised by Syrian President Bashar Assad and slammed by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Text of the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."

Phoenix666 writes:

The new study looks at twenty-two light-colored, igneous rocks Curiosity inspected, half of which got the laser treatment. The rocks fell into three groups. Some were made up of large crystals, indicating that they cooled slowly, below ground. Some were made up of microscopic crystals and were riddled with bubbles, indicating that they erupted from a volcano. And the third group was a sort of hybrid, with large crystals of one mineral surrounded by tiny crystals of others—often the product of a magma that cools slowly for a while before erupting.
...
The specific chemical varieties include things not found on Mars before. But apart from rounding out Mars’s rock collection, they have some pretty interesting things to tell us about Mars’s early history. The granite-like rocks are similar to some of the rocks that make up Earth’s earliest truly continental crust, which differs from the basalt that makes up the seafloor. That could have come about by partly melting pre-existing basalts that began to sink back into Mars’s still-soft interior, for example.

Regardless of how it happened, the idea that there was continental crust being manufactured on Mars makes that planet’s early history look more like the Earth’s than we thought. The researchers also note that the existence of some of these rocks “challenge[s] the simple idea of continuous cooling of the Martian mantle over geologic time, pointing to more complex global or local variation in mantle temperature”.

The lithosphere would be an exciting new region for Mars exploration. If those looking for life there are on to something with the hypothesis that any life that evolved may have retreated far underground, it seems the logical next step for them as well. How would we get at those secrets without landing men on Mars?

Most system administrators working with a large number machines will be at least passingly familiar with LDAP, or it's Microsoft's incarnation as Active Directory. Like most organizations, we used LDAP to organize shell account information for SN's backend servers, and spent the last year and a half cursing because of it. As such, we've recently replaced LDAP with a much older technology known as Hesiod, which is a DNS-based system of storing user accounts and other similar information. Given Hesiod's unique history (and relative obscurity), I though it would be interesting to write a review and detailed history of this relic, as well as go more in-depth why we migrated.

In this novel:

• Why We Dumped LDAP
• Project Athena
• Overview of Hesiod
• Drawbacks
• In Closing

Read past the break for a look at this piece of living history.

takyon writes:

"Hologram" technology featuring the Pepper's ghost illusion is becoming a recurring gimmick in concerts, protests, and political rallies. The technique has been used to stage a "holographic" protest in Spain, and was used by current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to appear live simultaneously in 53 locations in 2012, and 88 in 2014. In the concert business, it was used to display a virtual projection of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella Festival, as well as a similar posthumous projection of Michael Jackson at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards.

Now rapper Chief Keef will reportedly utilize a semitruck modified by HologramUSA to deliver a benefit concert in Chicago from a soundstage in Beverly Hills, California this Friday. The benefit concert is intended to raise money for the families of Keef's friend and fellow rapper Marvin Carr, who was killed in a drive-by shooting, and Dillan Harris, a toddler killed when the suspects crashed into a bus stop. Why not go to Chicago in person? Because Chief Keef, also known as Keith Cozart, has an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

From a Phys.org story:

Algae is evolving as the next new alternative protein source consumers are anxious to bite into as an ingredient in crackers, snack bars, cereals and breads, according to a July 12th presentation at IFT15: Where Science Feeds Innovation hosted by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) in Chicago.

Algae, quinoa and pulses are considered by some food technologists to be the best protein sources and strong alternatives to slow meat consumption, reduce food waste and help feed the world's growing population.

Algae is a new vegan source of protein with a comparable carbon footprint to existing vegan proteins, such as rice and soy, according to Beata Klamczynska who leads food application development at Solazyme. It contains 63 percent protein, 15 percent fiber, 11 percent lipids, 4 percent carbohydrates, 4 percent micronutrients and 3 percent moisture, she said, and is easily digested and considered heart healthy. It's found in the ingredient lists of some protein shakes, crackers or bars, cereals, sauces, dressings and breads.

"Are consumers ready for algae as an ingredient? Yes, they are ready and excited about algae," she said. "The more they learn, the more excited they get. Just a little education eliminates any doubts.

c0lo writes:

For your apocalyptic pleasure, the New Yorker runs as story on "the next big one" Earthquake - the one which will happen in the 700 miles long Cascadia subduction zone:

Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

...Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

n1 writes:

El Reg reports:

Apple manufacturer Foxconn reckons it will create one million jobs in India by 2020 – nearly the entire number of its current Chinese workforce – according to reports.

Hon Hai otherwise known in the West as Foxconn, last month revealed it was setting its sights on India due to increasing wage costs in China.

The firm has not released any more details or elaborated on what the plans will mean for its Chinese manufacturing base. However, it does appear to be slowly fleshing out a relocation move.

Runaway1956 writes:

Rats trained to sniff out landmines in Cambodia
Unexploded devices said to have killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians and wounded 44,000 since 1979

Pit, only two and with just one eye, needed only 11 minutes before he detected a deadly mine buried in a Cambodian field, work that humans with metal detectors could have taken up to five days to investigate. But Pit is not human. He is part of a team of elite rats, imported from Africa, that Cambodia is training to sniff out landmines that still dot the countryside after decades of conflict.

"Under a clear sky, he would have been quicker," said Hul Sokheng, a veteran Cambodian deminer, who oversees training of 12 handlers on how to work with 15 large rats to clear Cambodia's farmland and rural villages of bombs. "These are life-saving rats," he said under rainy skies.

Their work could prove vital in a country where unexploded devices, including mines and unexploded shells, have killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians and wounded about 44,000 since 1979, according to the Cambodian government. Pit is able to smell highly explosive TNT inside landmines, watched over by two handlers who tie him up to a rope as the one-eyed rat searches through the grass.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rats-trained-to-sniff-out-landmines-in-cambodia-1.3149277?cmp=rss

This particular story is "current events", sure enough - but I did a search for these rats and found several other, older stories.

http://www.vice.com/read/this-ngo-trains-giant-rats-to-clear-mine-fields-182

This story is especially interesting, http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/09/07/herorats.detect.landmines/index.html. "Nailing down the regimen was tricky. At one point in APOPO's early days, the rats performed perfectly in trials, making Weetjens suspicious. It turned out the rats were outsmarting the humans."

Oh, not just explosives, but diseases too: http://www.occupyforanimals.net/rats---the-apopo-herorats-detect-landmines-and-tuberculosis.html

Lots more stories here: https://www.apopo.org/en/. So - can we expect to see TSA handlers walking around our airports, with rats on leashes soon?

hubie writes:

As an update to an earlier story, PayPal has changed some of the language in their new User Agreement that went into effect on 1 July. Below is copied from an email I received today:

We value our relationship with you and work hard to communicate clearly. Recently, however, we did not live up to our own standards.

Earlier this year, we sent you an email about updates that we planned to make to our User Agreement on July 1, 2015. The User Agreement is a document we share to help you understand your relationship with PayPal and the obligations we both have.

Unfortunately, some of the language in this update caused confusion and concern with some of our customers about how we may contact you.

To clear up any confusion, we have modified the terms of Section 1.10 of our User Agreement. The new language is intended to make it clear that PayPal primarily uses auto-dialed or prerecorded calls and texts to:

Help detect, investigate and protect our customers from fraud
Provide notices to our customers regarding their accounts or account activity
Collect a debt owed to us

In addition, the new Section 1.10(a) and 1.10(b) makes it clear that:

• We will not use auto-dialed or prerecorded calls or texts to contact our customers for marketing purposes without prior express written consent.
• Customers can continue to enjoy our products and services without needing to consent to receive auto-dialed or prerecorded calls or texts.
• We respect our customers' communications preferences and recognize that their consent is required for certain auto-dialed and prerecorded calls and texts. Customers may revoke consent to receive these communications by contacting PayPal customer support and informing us of their preferences.

Link to statement. The Verge.

takyon writes:

Mission page at JHUAPL
Eyes on Pluto application

New Horizons mission to Pluto prepares for huge letdown on Tuesday AM:

On Tuesday morning at 0449 PDT (1149 UTC), the New Horizons space probe will make mankind's first visit to Pluto, and there will be much rejoicing; but we won't actually know if the mission is a success until much later in the day. At a press conference on Monday the team, some of whom have been working on the project for more than 20 years, explained that despite all the celebrations planned for tomorrow morning, the real crunch time will come at around 1800 PDT (0100 UTC), when the first signals for the probe are returned.

Update: New Horizons is expected to call home at 8:53 PM EDT.

NASA TV Schedule for Tuesday-Wednesday [More detail here]

Anonymous Coward writes:

ProxyHam was a device that would let you share internet over traditional radio frequencies, enabling a user to be miles from the actual internet connection. A good tool for anonymity. It was supposed to be featured at Def Con, but has suddenly been shut down. All devices have been destroyed, no details will be released, according to the twitter of Rhino Security, the company behind the device.

This is possibly a National Security Letter, but due to their nature it's pretty hard to get that confirmed.

So if patents were not a problem, and if the FCC wasn't a problem - as confirmed by Caudill himself, why was this tool forced out of the public's reach? We may never know.

[...] For the record, I asked Caudill about getting a NSL, Caudill would only answer, "No comment."

I'd like to know what the commenters think. Was this actually rubbish like the AnonaBox and is this their elegant way to bow out? Or was this actually a solution that worked, and hence got shut down? Considering the fact these dudes wanted to demonstrate it at Def Con, it appears pretty legitimate.

AnonTechie writes with an article from Popular Science:

For your typical hypochondriac, online symptom checkers are a rabbit hole of medical information and the anxiety that comes with it. But according to a new study led [PDF] by researchers at the Harvard Medical School, most of these sites are so inconsistent and inaccurate that patients shouldn't rely upon them for correct diagnoses.

In the study, which was published in the British Medical Journal, the researchers looked at 23 web sites from around the world that claim to offer information for diagnosis and triage (assessing how urgently a condition needs to be treated). They used 45 patient vignettes, about half of which were common conditions, to assess the sites' accuracy.

They found that the correct diagnosis came up first only 34 percent of the time. Half the sites had the right answer in their top three results, and almost 60 percent had it in the top 20. Triage advice fared a bit better, with accurate suggestions coming up first 57 percent of the time. The sites in which the right answer came up as the first result most often were: DocResponse (50 percent), Family Doctor (47 percent), and Isabel (44 percent).

What has been the experience of SN Members? Do they rely on online medical diagnosis?

[Also Covered By]: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/07/self-diagnosing-health-websites-study

takyon writes:

SanDisk has announced a follow-up to their previous eMMC NAND storage at Mobile World Congress Shanghai. The iNAND 7232 parts use SanDisk's 15nm triple-level cell NAND, each with a 500MB to 1GB single-level cell cache to improve performance to SSD-like levels in smartphones. Sequential write performance is increased to 150 MB/s from the 125 MB/s limit of iNAND 7132.

While iNAND 7132 came in 16, 32, and 64 GB capacities, these new units will ship with 32, 64, or 128 GB of flash. It could signal a shift away from 16 GB smartphones and tablets, which have been maligned due to increasing storage demands and ballooning mobile operating systems.