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Phoenix666 writes:

Experts have spoken, studies have been conducted, the results are in: screen time at night is bad for our sleep. The blue wavelengths of light from LED screens like those in our phones, laptops and tablets mess with our circadian rhythm by suppressing the body's release of melatonin, the hormone our body secretes as it gets dark in order to calm us and prepare us for sleep.

When we stare at these blue-lit screens at night time, our bodies don't release the needed amount of melatonin, but release cortisol -- the stress hormone -- instead, which keeps us awake. Neurologists who conducted studies on people who were exposed to blue-heavy lights before bedtime found that those people took far longer to fall asleep than those who were exposed to warmer light or light more evenly distributed across the color spectrum.
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[An] app [f.lux] for your desktop or laptop computer adjusts the color temperature of your monitor throughout the day to best mimic what type of light your eyes should be exposed to at those times. During daylight hours, the light is more blue-toned and similar to the bright daylight you would be exposed to outside, but as day turns to night, the monitor slowly goes warmer to match the indoor lights around you.

The article also mentions two other apps, Oyster and Twilight. Have any Soylentils used apps like these?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The natural defenses of dead plants -- which are designed to inhibit enzymes in the gut to prevent digestion -- would be toxic for any other animal. But a group of researchers from Imperial College London have discovered new molecules in the worm gut, named drilodefensins, that can counteract the toxins, breaking them down the way that dish liquid breaks apart grease.

"Without drilodefensins, fallen leaves would remain on the surface of the ground for a very long time, building up to a thick layer," said Jake Bundy, an author of the study and a professor at Imperial College, in a statement. "Our countryside would be unrecognizable, and the whole system of carbon cycling would be disrupted."

The humble worm is amazing. It can turn lawn waste and food scraps into rich black soil in a matter of weeks.

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takyon writes:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) says that an "unauthorized person" obtained usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords for ICANN.org profile accounts. All users are required to reset their passwords. More from El Reg:

ICANN says its website's user accounts have been compromised by hackers who gained access to their names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and more.

On Wednesday, the domain-name system overlord admitted its server security was breached within the past week: an "unauthorized person" obtained account records, which included harmless info such as site preferences, and newsletter subscriptions, as well as the usernames and passwords.

Anyone can create an ICANN.org account, and they're mostly used by people working in the area of internet governance – policy makers from governments and business, network techies, trade journos, and so on.

[...] We're told the attack did not affect any IANA systems, which operate on a separate network to ICANN's. ICANN is under contract from the US government to provide the IANA functions, which include maintaining the root of the internet's global DNS, allocating IP addresses, and assigning numbers and names to protocols that glue the 'net together. ICANN wants total control of IANA.

An ICANN spokesman told The Register the account passwords were hashed using bcrypt. "There is no evidence that any profile accounts were accessed or that any internal ICANN systems were accessed without authorization," he added.

"While investigations are ongoing, the encrypted passwords appear to have been obtained as a result of unauthorized access to an external service provider."

This is not, by a long shot, the first time ICANN has been attacked. In March, a security hole was found in the dot-word domain-name portal; in April, gTLD applicants' information was exposed; in December, hackers compromised a database of DNS information; and earlier that year, security bugs delayed the launch of the new dot-word gTLDs. Perhaps, the US government would like to take another hard look at ICANN before the California-based org takes over the DNS binding together the internet.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket rings in:

In a breakthrough study, an international team of scientists, including Professor Nikolai Brilliantov from the University of Leicester, has solved an age-old scientific riddle by discovering that planetary rings, such as those orbiting Saturn, have a universally similar particle distribution.

The study, which is published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), also suggests that Saturn's rings are essentially in a steady state that does not depend on their history.

[...] Professor Brilliantov from the University of Leicester's Department of Mathematics explained: "Saturn's rings are relatively well studied and it is known that they consist of ice particles ranging in size from centimetres to about ten metres. With a high probability these particles are remains of some catastrophic event in a far past, and it is not surprising that there exists debris of all sizes, varying from very small to very large ones.

"What is surprising is that the relative abundance of particles of different sizes follows, with a high accuracy, a beautiful mathematical law 'of inverse cubes'. That is, the abundance of 2 metre-size particles is 8 times smaller than the abundance of 1 metre-size particles, the abundance of 3 metre-size particles is 27 times smaller and so on. This holds true up to the size of about 10 metres, then follows an abrupt drop in the abundance of particles. The reason for this drastic drop, as well as the nature of the amazing inverse cubes law, has remained a riddle until now. We have finally resolved the riddle of particle size distribution. In particular, our study shows that the observed distribution is not peculiar for Saturn's rings, but has a universal character. In other words, it is generic for all planetary rings which have particles to have a similar nature."

[...] Professor Brilliantov added: "The rather general mathematical model elaborated in the study with the focus on Saturn's rings may be successfully applied to other systems, where particles merge, colliding with slow velocities and break into small pieces colliding with large impact speeds. Such systems exist in nature and industry and will exhibit a beautiful law of inverse cubes and drop in large particle abundance in their particle size distribution."

"Size distribution of particles in Saturn's rings from aggregation and fragmentation" at PNAS and Arxiv.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket passed by The Register and tripped over this boondoggle:

The Cabinet Office is understood to have formally contacted central agencies within the last month and asked them to look for ways to “get rid of Oracle".

No. 10 is believed to be concerned about the amount civil servants are spending on the database giant’s applications and software.

A Cabinet office spokesperson told The Register: "As part of our continuing digital transformation and efficiency programmes, we regularly review technical requirements within a department to see how they may have changed."

The chief problem is the sheer number of Oracle licenses in the UK government, not just their price, although the public sector spent £290m on Oracle in 2013, according to TechMarketView.

Individual IT chiefs will have their own relationship with Oracle and pay for licenses rather than re-use licenses of those within their own department.

In January The Reg reported that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which has around 10,000 staff, was forking out for two million Oracle licenses at £155 per employee, for an annual cost of £1.3m per year. (That worked out at 200 licences per civil servant in the department.)

That’s contrary to the Cabinet Office’s own guidelines of £93 on licenses, with a view to reducing that down further to £52.

Meanwhile, the mighty Home Office has tried to slash its Oracle budget by moving an ERP contract to a shared-services platform run by Steria. A Register source told us: “Nobody has a holistic view or how Oracle is used across the whole government or looking at economies of scale.”

The source described the the central communication as an “edict” that has been interpreted as an order to move away from Oracle.

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kurenai.tsubasa writes:

On Tuesday, August 4th, Neflix announced on their blog that they would begin offering new parents a progressive parental leave policy:

The Boston Globe picked up the story earlier today and compared Netflix's new policy to Google's, which offers 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and 12 weeks of "baby bonding" time. The Boston Globe also notes:

This new policy "covers all of the roughly 2,000 people working at [Netflix's] Internet video and DVD-by-mail services, according to the Los Gatos, California, company."

However, not all media voices are pleased with this change. Suzanne Venker, author of the recent book The Two-Income Trap: Why Parents Are Choosing To Stay Home, writes for Time :

What does Soylent think? Should companies offer new parents lengthy paid leave after they bring a new bundle of joy into the world, or do generous policies do more harm than good?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers in Taiwan have developed a solution-based process for producing graphene that is tuned to exhibit specific electrical and mechanical properties. While solution-based exfoliation of graphene has been possible for some time, this new approach uses pulses of an electrical voltage rather than a constant voltage to produce the desired effects.

The researchers believe that their work, which was reported in the journal Nanotechnology, could pave the way for new applications for graphene in drug delivery or electronics.
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The trick to getting exactly the right defects in the graphene depended not only on using a pulsed voltage, but also being able to carefully monitor how the graphene was changing in the solvent process. To monitor this change, the researchers found that they could simply observe the transparency of the solution.
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As part of their work, the researchers tested the quality of the graphene produced via their method as a transparent conductor (the application for which graphene is being considered as a potential replacement for indium tin oxide). The resistance[sic] of their graphene films (at 50 percent transparency) was 30 times that of other graphene-based transparent conductors.

An abstract and full article (pdf) are available.

With the holy grail of graphene's amazing properties, this chapter of materials sciences is... riveting.

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kurenai.tsubasa writes:

Photography website PetaPixel reports that researchers affiliated with Google and MIT have devised an algorithm that automatically removes reflections and obstructions from photographs, provided multiple frames are captured. Even more intriguing: this algorithm can also recover a reflected image.

The MIT Technology Review provides more details about the algorithm:

Fairly impressive! Does this have the potential to become a new standard tool for photographers, or will this appeal primarily to cameraphone-toting consumers?

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FrogBlast writes:

The United State Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has ruled that a "probable cause" warrant is required before law enforcement can obtain cellular location records for an individual. Two thieves in Baltimore were identified when their locations were correlated with robberies near Baltimore. Their conviction will be allowed to stand, as law enforcement had a good-faith belief that the technique was permissible at the time, but future investigations will be subject to the ruling. The US 4th Circuit is a Federal court that handles appeals from the states of Maryland, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. The ruling does not apply in other districts, which so far have ruled against the requirement, but could allow cases in other states to reach the Supreme Court.

Ars Technica coverage:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/warrant-required-for-mobile-phone-location-tracking-us-appeals-court-rules/

Link to the ruling, in PDF form:
http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/124659.P.pdf

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Phoenix666 writes:

That didn't take long. The world's oldest Internet hobby is resuming in India, days after the country virtually banned Internet porn. Indians took to Twitter and other social-media sites blasting this weekend's anti-porn move, and the government has listened.

IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Tuesday that websites that don't display child pornography may resume streaming, according to local media reports. On Saturday, the Indian government initially ordered Internet providers to filter about 857 websites said to render pornographic material in a bid to protect morality. The government said the sites' content was "immoral and indecent," sites including things like Pornhub and Playboy.

"A new notification will be issued shortly. The ban will be partially withdrawn. Sites that do not promote child porn will be unbanned," Prasad told India Today TV.

The Indian government had not gotten the memo.

Previously on SoylentNews.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Wells Fargo & Co., lagging behind its rivals in mobile-banking prowess, is turning to an unlikely source for advice: the video-game industry.

The lender bought a small stake in Context360 Inc., a startup that makes behavior-predicting technology used by game-makers to retain mobile players. For Wells Fargo, similar technology could help it pitch car loans on Saturday mornings when customers visit dealerships, for example, or block a suspicious credit card transaction, according to Stephen Burke, Context360's chief operating officer.
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Like many industries, banking is seeing more customers migrating to mobile devices. Thirty-five percent of people reported using mobile banking in 2014, up from 20 percent three years earlier, according to a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve and published in March.

"Banking is necessary, banks are not."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket dances his way to this story:

Google’s Project Tango tablet development kit is going on sale this month in 12 additional countries.

The tablet and associated tools were released in the U.S. in May, and as of Tuesday they’re now available in South Korea and Canada as well, Google said in a blog post. On Aug. 26, the development kit will also go on sale in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

While anyone in those countries will be able to buy Project Tango from the Google Play Store, the company stressed that it’s intended right now for developers.

Project Tango uses a depth sensing camera and other technologies to create a virtual 3D map of the world around it. That allows developers to create novel apps that incorporate things like augmented reality and object tracking. NASA has used it to help guide flying robots in space.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Consumers may soon be able to go for longer between milk-buying trips. That's because Brazilian company Agrindus hopes to start marketing plastic milk bottles that use embedded silver nanoparticles to kill bacteria. Grade A pasteurized fresh whole milk packaged in those bottles can reportedly last for up to 15 days, as opposed to the usual seven.

The technology was developed by partner company Nanox, and involves first coating silica ceramic particles with silver nanoparticles. This reportedly has a synergistic effect, with the silica boosting the antimicrobial properties of the silver.

Those coated particles take the form of a powder that is subsequently mixed into liquid polyethylene. Using blow- or injection-molding, that plastic is then made into bottles which Agrindus plans to sell to dairy goods companies. The particles can also be used to make milk bags, which should extend shelf life from four to 10 days.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket wheezes his way to this offering:

Australian researchers funded by the National Heart Foundation are a step closer to a safer and more effective way to treat heart attack and stroke via nanotechnology.

The research jointly lead by Professor Christoph Hagemeyer, Head of the Vascular Biotechnology Laboratory at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute and Professor Frank Caruso, an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Melbourne, was published today in the leading journal Advanced Materials.

Professor Hagemeyer said this latest step offers a revolutionary difference between the current treatments for blood clots and what might be possible in the future.

This life saving treatment could be administered by paramedics in emergency situations without the need for specialised equipment as is currently the case.

"We've created a nanocapsule that contains a clot-busting drug. The drug-loaded nanocapsule is coated with an antibody that specifically targets activated platelets, the cells that form blood clots," Professor Hagemeyer said.

Phoenix666 writes:

For a Venus lander mission, active cooling of most of the electronics would be necessary, but it would also need sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers that can stand up to Venus' surface conditions. Trying to keep this stuff from immediate "puddleification" isn't easy, but NASA has just thrown a quarter of a million dollars at a University of Arkansas spinoff to develop Venus-resistant chips for a weird little rover.

Thanks to some earlier National Science Foundation funding, Ozark Integrated Circuits already has a chip that can tick along quite happily at temperatures of up to 350 degrees Celsius. To bump that up to the temperatures required for Venus operation, Ozark is using a silicon carbide substrate, with a secret sauce (literally a secret, for now) for the interconnects that's something much more stable and reliable than either aluminum or copper. Besides the physical hardware, Ozark also has to come up with biasing circuits and reference models to help compensate for high temperature operation.

Does exploration of Venus suffer because it does not seem possible for life to exist there, the way it does for Mars?

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AnonTechie writes:

Roman Schnabel, a physics professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics has published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters outlining a plan for entangling two "massive" objects. He and his team are still working on a way to actually carry out the plan, but if successful, the group would succeed in entangling two 0.1 kg mass mirrors, which would represent a much larger example of entanglement than anything that has come before—up till now the largest objects to be entangled were of micron size.

Entanglement is of course the odd and perhaps a little eerie situation where two or more objects are connected in a way that cannot yet be explained—measuring one causes the other to be impacted instantaneously. The phenomenon was predicted back in the 1930's by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Over the years, scientists have developed ways to cause particles and then tiny objects to become entangled, but it still was not clear if a way could be found to cause objects large enough to be governed by classical physics to be entangled. In his paper, Schnabel draws up a means of achieving that goal, and notes that he believes it can be done.

http://phys.org/news/2015-08-physicist-unveils-entangling-massive.html

[Also Covered By]: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/aug/03/plan-for-supersized-entanglement-is-unveiled-by-physicist

[Abstract]: http://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.012126

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