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Phoenix666 writes:

Want to own your own island but can't find one in your desired location?

Such issues could soon be consigned to history - for the super-wealthy, at least - after plans were unveiled for the world's first PORTABLE islands.

These artists' impressions show the self -sustaining, eco-friendly creations that will allow people to create their own getaways anywhere on Earth.

Each home will adhere to the customer's every need - with the renderings including options such as swimming pools, boat docks and greenery.

The article's photos depict idyllic, luxurious island retreats. Potential customers are presumably advised not to check into this or this.

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Phoenix666 writes:

From Wired:

Researchers at the University of North Carolina have developed an experimental system of so-called "visual cryptography" designed to communicate secret messages to the wearer of an augmented reality headset. In the system they created and tested, information is encrypted in what look like random collections of black and white static. But when the recipient's augmented reality glasses overlay another random-seeming image over their vision, the two images combine to form a readable message.

That system could, for instance, allow someone to unscramble encrypted text in a way that couldn't be spied on by an over-the-shoulder snoop, since the text is never decrypted on the reader's screen. Or it could be used to overlay a keypad with randomized numbers onto an ATM's display, so that no one watching could learn the bank customer's PIN as they typed it. "When you overlay the secret visual share, only you can see the final message," says UNC researcher Sarah Andrabi, using the technical term "visual share" to refer to each of the two indecipherable images that add up to a message. "That secret is now only for the user's eye."

The original paper can be found on scribd.com.

Reminds you a bit of the glasses from They Live, don't they?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A series of groundbreaking studies have revealed that what we have always thought of as individuals are actually "biomolecular networks" that consist of visible hosts plus millions of invisible microbes that have a significant effect on how the host develops, the diseases it catches, how it behaves and possibly even its social interactions.
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In this case, the parts are the host and its genome plus the thousands of different species of bacteria living in or on the host, along with all their genomes, collectively known as the microbiome. (The host is something like the tip of the iceberg while the bacteria are like the part of the iceberg that is underwater: Nine out of every 10 cells in plant and animal bodies are bacterial. But bacterial cells are so much smaller than host cells that they have generally gone unnoticed.)

Microbiologists have coined new terms for these collective entities -- holobiont -- and for their genomes -- hologenome. "These terms are needed to define the assemblage of organisms that makes up the so-called individual," said Bordenstein.

There may really be something to this. Other recent research has focused on the role that microflora play in obesity and other aspects of human health. What do you fellow "holobionts" say, does it disturb or comfort you to think of yourselves as a walking constellation of bacteria?

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canopic jug writes:

The BBC reports that a Russian former astroturfer has been awarded one rouble ($0.01) in damages after she sued her ex-employer to expose it as a propaganda "factory". The BBC confuses "troll" with "astroturfer" but makes the point that she and hundreds of colleagues at Internet Research in St Petersburg were paid to flood websites with pro-Putin commentary. Astroturfers are nothing new, M$ has been using them for ages to push their agenda, and lately even governments are officially in on the action. The British example is the 77^th brigade. As to the Russian example, the former astroturfer is happy with the award even though it is small because it exposes the activity for what it is.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This press release from the University of East Anglia tells us:

Scientists have found a way to "switch" the structure of DNA using copper salts and EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) -- an agent commonly found in shampoo and other household products. It was previously known that the structure of a piece of DNA could be changed using acid, which causes it to fold up into what is known as an "i-motif." But new research published today in the journal Chemical Communications reveals that the structure can be switched a second time into a hair-pin structure using positively-charged copper (copper cations). This change can also be reversed using EDTA. The applications for this discovery include nanotechnology -- where DNA is used to make tiny machines, and in DNA-based computing -- where computers are built from DNA rather than silicon.

Wouldn't a chemical-based switch make for slower performance?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Buying tickets into space has typically been the reserve of governments and billionaires, but if you want to send your name on an interplanetary jaunt NASA might now be able to accommodate you. The space agency is now accepting submissions from members of the public who'd like their names recorded on a silicon microchip and shuttled to the Red Planet onboard the InSight Mars lander launching next year.

This is not the first time NASA has offered such a service. Last December, 1.38 million names flew on a chip aboard an unmanned test flight for the Orion spacecraft, which will carry astronauts into deep space on Orion Exploration Mission-1 that is expected to launch no later than 2018. Participants are given "frequent flier" points that provide them with alerts of future missions and a "boarding pass" in appreciation of their support of NASA.

It's not clear if submitting your name will guarantee its place on the chip, but you can submit it here.

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Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] Da Vinci is a robot that is completely piloted by a surgeon. It enables the achievement of an extreme precision of gesture during certain delicate procedures, all while reducing the risks associated with a surgeon's trembling hands.

Comfortably seated in his pilot's chair, a specialist can also undertake a "tele-operation" on a patient located thousands of kilometers away. It gives patients access to better specialists while limiting the fatigue of the practitioner and reducing costs associated with travel.

The robot is composed of a stereoscopic camera and mechanical arms that have instruments attached for a procedure.

In this video from Youtube, watch as Da Vinci sews a cut in a grape.

Does anyone have any experience with tele-operations?

eof writes:

An article in the LA Times discusses a publication in the journal Science (abstract) on why humans as predators have a much greater ecological impact than other predators.

From the LA Times article, it is because:

... humans have a very different, and problematic, hunting strategy from nature's other successful hunters. Humans tend to pick out adults rather than younger, smaller, weaker members of a species.

The article goes on to use an analogy:

Think of it from a business perspective, the researchers said. An adult female, for example, is like your capital; the young that she produces are the interest generated by that capital. If you kill an adult animal today, it will take years for another to grow up and take her place. But if you kill a young animal, it will (theoretically) take only until the next breeding season to produce another. In other words, it's better to use the up [sic] interest rather than to draw down the capital, because the capital is much more difficult to build back. Once it's gone, it's gone -- and so is the interest.

This has several consequences, including for the evolution of the prey species. For example, killing the biggest or strongest animals (as might be done with trophy hunting) potentially leads to smaller or weaker future generations.

takyon writes:

Were you concerned that Intel and Micron's new and totally-not-phase-change-memory technology would become vaporware? At the Intel Developer Forum 2015, Intel announced that 3D XPoint based products will be available in 2016 under a new brand name: Optane.

The Optane products will be available in 2016, in both standard SSD (PCIe) form factors for everything from Ultrabooks to servers, and in a DIMM form factor for Xeon systems for even greater bandwidth and lower latencies. As expected, Intel will be providing storage controllers optimized for the 3D XPoint memory, though no further details on that subject matter were provided. This announcement is in-line with Intel and Micron's original 3D XPoint announcement last month, which also announced that 3D XPoint would be out in 2016.

Finally, as part of the Optane announcement, Intel also gave the world's first live 3D XPoint demonstration. In a system with an Optane PCIe SSD, Intel ran a quick set of live IOps benchmarks comparing the Optane SSD to their high-end P3700 SSD. The Optane SSD offered better than 5x the IOps of the P3700 SSD, with that lead growing to more than 7x at a queue depth of 1, a client-like workload where massive arrays of NAND like the P3700 traditionally struggle to achieve maximum performance.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame.
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"Breast-feeding infants, responsiveness to crying, almost constant touch and having multiple adult caregivers are some of the nurturing ancestral parenting practices that are shown to positively impact the developing brain, which not only shapes personality, but also helps physical health and moral development," says Narvaez.

Studies show that responding to a baby's needs (not letting a baby "cry it out") has been shown to influence the development of conscience; positive touch affects stress reactivity, impulse control and empathy; free play in nature influences social capacities and aggression; and a set of supportive caregivers (beyond the mother alone) predicts IQ and ego resilience as well as empathy.

The United States has been on a downward trajectory on all of these care characteristics, according to Narvaez. Instead of being held, infants spend much more time in carriers, car seats and strollers than they did in the past. Only about 15 percent of mothers are breast-feeding at all by 12 months, extended families are broken up and free play allowed by parents has decreased dramatically since 1970.

On the other side, there's hand-wringing about helicopter parenting.

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Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] A US company wants to compete with the giant robot of a Japanese competitor. However, they're apparently lacking the money to complete their own battle machine. Now they're turning to patriots for help.

For the representatives of the company MegaBots, there is nothing more beautiful than robots that tear each other to pieces. "Your childhood dreams have come - can you hear them knocking?", asks the speaker in a video on Kickstarter. As though it were unthinkable, that someone could find a duel of nations in highly stylized robot battle dubious or completely superfluous. A battle advertised with slogans like "Together we can conquer Japan!"

In practice it's not about real declarations of war, but a robot duel between the US company MegaBots and the Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industry. At the end of July, MegaBots challenged its competitor from the Far East to pit their model named Kurata against MegaBots' Mk.II in the summer of 2016.

MegaBots is hoping to raise $500,000 on Kickstarter to fund their robot. Are they hoping for a Reality TV show?

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mendax writes:

El Reg has published an article that suggests, at least according to one person in the LibreOffice community, that OpenOffice development is essentially moribund and Apache should abandon it.

Christian Schaller, a Red Hat Software Engineering Manager and GNOME developer, wrote an open letter to Apache saying that "the OpenOffice project is all but dead upstream since IBM pulled their developers off the project almost a year ago and has significantly fallen behind feature wise... I hope that now that it is clear that this effort has failed that you would be willing to re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead."

A member of the Apache OpenOffice team was quick to respond: "We think Apache OpenOffice as released has been a huge success," he said. "Most of us don't really like the direction LibreOffice is heading to."

That said, the most recent OpenOffice update, version 4.1.1, was published nearly a year ago, and while the source code repository does show recent activity, it is much less than that for LibreOffice, as a quick browse of GitHub stats will confirm.

Other coverage can be found here.

I use LibreOffice when I'm in Linux and OpenOffice when I'm in MacOS X. Personally, I prefer them both to MS Office, although I do have MS Office on the Mac only because the people I work with don't use anything else. Are there any Soylentils here beside myself who use either one of these free products?

Note by Subsentient: Changed title from "Wither OpenOffice?"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Finding a technology to shift carbon dioxide (CO₂), the most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas, from a climate change problem to a valuable commodity has long been a dream of many scientists and government officials. Now, a team of chemists says they have developed a technology to economically convert atmospheric CO₂ directly into highly valued carbon nanofibers for industrial and consumer products.
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Because of its efficiency, this low-energy process can be run using only a few volts of electricity, sunlight and a whole lot of carbon dioxide. At its root, the system uses electrolytic syntheses to make the nanofibers. CO₂ is broken down in a high-temperature electrolytic bath of molten carbonates at 1,380 degrees F (750 degrees C). Atmospheric air is added to an electrolytic cell. Once there, the CO₂ dissolves when subjected to the heat and direct current through electrodes of nickel and steel. The carbon nanofibers build up on the steel electrode, where they can be removed, Licht says.

To power the syntheses, heat and electricity are produced through a hybrid and extremely efficient concentrating solar-energy system. The system focuses the sun's rays on a photovoltaic solar cell to generate electricity and on a second system to generate heat and thermal energy, which raises the temperature of the electrolytic cell.

If it bears out, this is an incredibly important result, as it solves a number of challenges like atmospheric carbon and the demand for carbon nanotubes at once.

Phoenix666 writes:

By early childhood, the sight regions of a blind person's brain respond to sound, especially spoken language, a neuroscientist has found. Working with individuals who are blind offers cognitive researchers an opportunity to discover how nature and nurture, or a person's genes and their experience, sculpt brain function, the researcher says.
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Bedny, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, studied 19 blind and 40 sighted children, ages 4 to 17, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientists Hilary Richardson and Rebecca Saxe. All but one of the blind children were blind since birth.

They monitored the children's brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while the children listened to stories, music or the sound of someone speaking an unfamiliar language. The blind children's vision portion of the brain, the left lateral occipital area, responded to spoken language, music and foreign speech -- but most strongly to stories they could understand. In sighted children and sighted children wearing blindfolds, that same area of the brain didn't respond.

The researchers concluded that blind children's 'visual' cortex is involved in understanding language.

The neuroplasticity this demonstrates bodes well for our future ability to accommodate and control cybernetic implants. Perhaps we can implant lab-grown mini-brains to supplement what our natural brains can't...

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Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] You often find yourself on the road, stuck behind a Semi... it's a two-lane highway and the truck rolls gently between sequences of bends and almost zero visibilty in front of the truck, and trying a quick pass can rapidly turn into a real nightmare.

With its concept, Samsung wants to help us forget this problem and reduce the risks associated with passing trucks. The world's first manufacturer of LCD screens has placed a camera in front of the truck. The camera directly displays the image of the road ahead on the giant screen positioned on the rear doors of the trailer, quite visible to the drivers who are following the truck.

It's a good idea that would also be welcome on the backs of Winnebagos.

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patella.whack informs us The Guardian recently reported that:

After years of formal and informal negotiations, Volkswagen has agreed to the "publication of the paper [pdf] after accepting the authors' proposal to remove one sentence from the original manuscript. Back in 2013, Volkswagen won a case in the high court to ban its publication.

A major security flaw in more than 100 car models has been exposed in an academic paper that was suppressed by a major manufacturer for two years. Academics found cars were vulnerable to 'keyless theft', including models from Audi, Honda and Volkswagen.

"Our attacks require close range wireless communication with both the immobiliser unit and the transponder," the team say in the paper. "It is not hard to imagine real-life situations like valet parking or car rental where an adversary has access to both for a period of time. It is also possible to foresee a setup with two perpetrators, one interacting with the car and one wirelessly pickpocketing the car key from the victim's pocket."

The researchers argued they were "responsible, legitimate academics doing responsible, legitimate academic work" and their aim was to improve security for everyone.

The RAC said electronic security systems have improved car security as vehicle theft has fallen 70% in 40 years. However, the overall decrease hides a rise in electronic hacking of vehicles, which featured in four out of 10 car thefts in London last year.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Victor Fleischer writes in the NYT that university endowments are exempt from corporate income tax because universities support the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. But instead of holding down tuition or expanding faculty research, endowments are hoarding money. Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers for managing about $8 billion, one-third of Yale's endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university's operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes. Private equity fund managers also received more than students at Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton.

Fleischer, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, says that as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expected later this year, Congress should require universities with endowments in excess of $100 million to spend at least 8 percent of the endowment each year. Universities could avoid this rule by shrinking assets to $99 million, but only by spending the endowment on educational purposes, which is exactly the goal. According to a study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity a minimum payout of 5 percent per annum, would be is similar to the legal requirement for private and public foundations. "The sky-high tuition increases would stop, and maybe even reverse themselves. Faculty members would benefit from greater research support. University libraries, museums, hospitals and laboratories would have better facilities," concludes Fleischer. "We've lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university's endowment."

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