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Coverage on this tends to be really politically charged.

What are the technological options for evaluating and address situations such as this?

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28705984/epa:-waste-pressure-evidently-never-checked-before-colorado-mine-spill

Dangerously high levels of water pressure behind the collapsed opening of the Gold King Mine were never checked by the Environmental Protection Agency, in part because of cost and time concerns.

The revelations came Wednesday as the EPA released an internal review of a massive Aug. 5 blowout at the mine above Silverton. The report called an underestimation of the pressure the most significant factor leading to the spill.

According to the report, had crews drilled into the mine's collapsed opening, as they had done at a nearby site, they "may have been able to discover the pressurized conditions that turned out to cause the blowout."

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NotSanguine writes:

Phys.Org is reporting on a new genetic analysis of viruses which shows that viral species are more similar to cellular species than previously shown.

From the article:

A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, researchers report. The study offers the first reliable method for tracing viral evolution back to a time when neither viruses nor cells existed in the forms recognized today, the researchers say.

The new findings appear in the journal Science Advances.

The article goes on to discuss the method developed by researchers Arshan Nasir and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés from the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Crop Sciences and Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois:

The new study focused on the vast repertoire of protein structures, called "folds," that are encoded in the genomes of all cells and viruses. Folds are the structural building blocks of proteins, giving them their complex, three-dimensional shapes. By comparing fold structures across different branches of the tree of life, researchers can reconstruct the evolutionary histories of the folds and of the organisms whose genomes code for them.

The researchers chose to analyze protein folds because the sequences that encode viral genomes are subject to rapid change; their high mutation rates can obscure deep evolutionary signals, Caetano-Anollés said. Protein folds are better markers of ancient events because their three-dimensional structures can be maintained even as the sequences that code for them begin to change.

More after the break...

CoolHand writes:

NASA Discovers Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars

For years, scientists have known that Mars has ice locked away within its rusty exterior. More elusive, though, is figuring out how much of that water is actually sloshing around in liquid form. Now, NASA scientists have found compelling evidence that liquid water—life-giving, gloriously wet H20—exists on Mars.

We're not talking gushing rivers or oceans here. These scientists have been investigating "recurring slope lineae," patches of precipitated salt that appear to dribble down Mars' steep slopes like tears rolling gently down a cheek. Planetary scientists hypothesized that the streaky formations were products of the flow of water, but they didn't have concrete, mineralogical evidence for that idea until now, says Lujendra Ojha, a scientist at Georgia Tech who first spotted the lineae back in 2010. In a new Nature Geoscience paper, published online today, Ojha and his colleagues present "smoking gun validation" that it was liquid water flowing on Mars' surface that formed these tear stains.

gman003 writes:

NASA reports strong evidence that liquid water exists on Mars at the present time.

Spectrographic readings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the presence of hydrated salts, mostly perchlorates, in a common surface feature called "recurring slope lineae". The best conclusion at this time is that, during the summer months, salty water melts and flows downhill to form the lineae, then freezes during the winter.

This water may, however, be unable to support life. The salt content is incredibly high, which lowers the freezing point and allows it to melt at -23° Celsius. An Antarctic lake with similarly low temperature and high salinity is lifeless, so scientists are conservative in stating the effects this has on the potential for life on Mars.

RSLs have long been considered weak evidence for water on Mars. Current Mars rovers are prohibited from examining them, as they were not sufficiently sanitized before launch, and Earth microbes may have hitched a ride. While the Mars 2020 mission will also not be completely sterilized, I expect probes after that will be, to examine these formations up close.

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tt0064603 writes:

New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider.

The sophistication of new cars brings numerous benefits — forward-collision warning systems and automatic emergency braking that keep drivers safer are just two examples. But with new technology comes new risks — and new opportunities for malevolence. Cars have become "sealed-hood entities with complicated computers and modules," said Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and technologist. "All of this is deeply nontransparent. And all of this is grounds for cheating of all sorts."

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NotSanguine writes:

Joanna Connolly and Peter Walsh over at Honi Soit, the University of Sydney's weekly newspaper, are reporting that:

University of Sydney doctoral candidate in Physics, Paddy Neumann, has developed a new kind of ion space drive that has allegedly smashed the current record for fuel efficiency held by NASA.

The current record, held by NASA's HiPEP system, allows 9600 (+/- 200) seconds of specific impulse. However, results recorded by the Neumann Drive have been as high as 14,690 (+/- 2000), with even conservative results performing well above NASA's best. That suggests the drive is using fuel far more efficiently, allowing for it to operate for longer. Furthermore NASA's HiPEP runs on Xenon gas, while the Neumann Drive can be powered on a number of different metals, the most efficient tested so far being magnesium.

The article goes on to say that:

The drive works through a reaction between electricity and metal, where electric arcs strike the chosen fuel (in this case, magnesium) and cause ions to spray, which are then focused by a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust. Unlike current industry standard chemical propulsion devices, which operate through short, high-powered bursts of thrust and then coasting, Neumann's drive runs on a continuous rhythm of short and light bursts, preserving the fuel source but requiring long-term missions.

The drive—which allegedly outperforms NASA's HiPEP in fuel efficiency, but not acceleration—could potentially function as the packhorse of space travel, allowing for the transportation of cargo over long distances. Most interestingly, as it runs on metals commonly found in space junk, it could potentially be fuelled by recycling exhausted satellites, repurposing them into fresh fuel. Given the current cost of transporting fuel into space (exponential), and the ubiquity of space junk, the Neumann drive has huge commercial potential. It could vastly reduce the cost of space transportation, keep satellites in orbit for longer periods of time, and enable space travel of much greater distances, with Neumann suggesting the possibly of "Mars and back on a tank of fuel".

Neumann was assisted by Professors David McKenzie and Marcela Bilek. Neumann is moving forward to commercialize the new design.

This story has also been covered by TechXplore, Gizmag and other sites.

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Runaway1956 writes:

A number of "news" sites, from Salon to Fox, and many more, are pointing out that school administrators are pushing back against "zero tolerance".

• From Salon.com: Zero-tolerance madness: A "no touching" rule means even tag is out-of-bounds for Seattle-area school kids
• From FoxNews.com: Old school: Districts rediscover teacher discretion, drop 'zero tolerance' policies
• From the Boston Globe: Ahmed Mohamed and the absurdities of zero-tolerance
• From the Atlantic: Will School-Discipline Reform Actually Change Anything?

From that last link:

Districts from Los Angeles to New York City are experimenting with new policies designed to eliminate zero-tolerance discipline. But the reality is often a lot different than the idea.
High-school students attend a circle session at restorative justice class at the Augustus F. Hawkins High School in Los Angeles, which recently reformed its discipline policies. Damian Dovarganes / AP

Christine Rodriguez vividly recalls her early school years. A native of Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, a working-class predominantly black and Latino section of New York City, her most vivid memories of elementary school consist of crammed classrooms with inadequate books, insufficient chairs, and the constant presence of the school-safety agent. (School Safety Agents, or SSAs, are New York Police Department officers assigned to K-12 campuses and charged with protecting students, campus staff, and visitors.) Now a college freshman at The New School studying education, Rodriguez rattles off with ease how school discipline shaped her K-12 education.

"We go to schools where there are more SSAs than guidance counselors. For us, it makes us feel that they expect us to end up in jail rather than in college," said Rodriguez, 17. "I've been to public school my whole life. I've experienced the school-to-prison pipeline"—a term commonly used to describe the trend in which largely disadvantaged students are funneled into the criminal-justice system—"and criminalization (of students). And I've questioned why all of these things happen to our communities."

The school-to-prison pipeline. The lady nailed it with that one descriptor of the system. School-to-prison pipeline. Zero tolerance does little more than to identify "criminals" early, so that they can be put into "the system" as early as possible. Institutionalize them early, for maximum profit.

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frojack writes:

The problem of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind is the inability to control production. You end up needing a grid inter-tie just to compensate for night and calm days. Either that, or you need to be able to store energy somehow. Energy harvesting, windmills and solar arrays, are mature technologies, easily "good enough" to deploy on industrial scale. But storage of energy on industrial scale is still in its infancy.

Last year, Harvard University developed scale-able Flow Batteries. The batteries can scale from basement installations the size of a couple water heaters to industrial storage parks the size of tank farms.

(See conceptual image).

Excess solar or wind power can simply be stored in the electrolyte and these charged electrolytes can be pumped to tank farms for long term storage.

The problem was the one of electrolytes contained bromine, a toxic, ozone depleating compound that also readily corrodes steel and other materials commonly used to contain the liquid electrolyte and pipe it around.

Chemistry World and ScienceNews and many others are reporting that the same Harvard team has developed new electrolytes that are even more stable, non toxic, and non corrosive.

The obligatory "10 years away" rule probably applies, but this technology is probably the closest thing to feasible storage for large scale installations.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has relocated the following story:

Peer-to-peer ride-sharing startup Lyft informed 20 members of its San Francisco-based customer support team this week it will be relocating them to Nashville, Tennessee.

Lyft is building out its new customer service headquarters in Nashville, where overhead such as rent and salaries are cheaper. It will also help Lyft’s east coast support. The ride-sharing startup is asking customer service reps in San Francisco to work out of the capital of country music, instead.

“As we continue to grow we know we need more space for the employees who support our passengers and drivers,” reads an official statement from Lyft. “We chose Nashville as the home of our newest office because it is a great city with a lower cost of living and a growing talent pool.”

The move is part of a growing trend in Silicon Valley to find cheaper space and lower overhead elsewhere. Average office rent in San Francisco nearly doubled from $30 in 2013 to $70 per square foot today. Compare that to the $18-$22 average per square foot rental price in downtown Nashville.

[...] Those on Lyft’s customer support team who don’t want to go could also face layoffs, according to a source close to the matter. Lyft tells us that’s not the case and that it is working with these team members to ensure everyone is able to work within the company.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have discovered that an insect has evolved something like a gearbox to coordinate its leg movements while jumping. That's right, nature invented mechanical gears before man got around to it.

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears -- essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement -- the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

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Justin Case writes:

So, any gene-programmers out there? How long until I can patch my genes to reverse the effects of aging?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A pair of physicists, one with Tsinghua University in China, the other with Perdue University in the U.S. has come up with what they believe is a viable way to cause a living organism to be in two places at the same time. In the paper they have posted to the arXiv server, Zhang-Qi Yin and Tongcang Li suggest that an experiment conducted at the University of Colorado recently, could be modified by placing a living organism into a superposition state, rather than using just a piece of metal.

[...] Two years ago, researchers at the University of Colorado put a very small vibrating aluminum membrane into a superposition state—Li and Yin believe that if a microbe were put on the same type of membrane it could be put into a superposition state along with the membrane. They note that to date, no one has put any sort of living organism into a superposition state, despite a lot of interest in doing so by both academics and the public at large.

More specifically, the team suggests the way to make it work would involve cooling a common bacterium down to approximately 10mK to prevent chemical activity from taking place and energy from being exchanged with the environment, then causing the microbe to adhere to the membrane using natural forces. That should be enough, they theorize, to allow for the bacterium to be put into a superposition state along with the oscillating membrane.

Perhaps this will solve the classic question of time travel: what happens if one copy of you meets another?

As mentioned in the summary, arXiv has an abstract and full report (pdf).

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elixir writes:

Hey Soylenters,

I have always been one to have a strong opinions of the tech giants. I personally never thought any of those companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc...) were ethically right in the decisions they made when it comes to data collection, product integrity, and sandboxing. I feel these beliefs can be easily generated for someone with a GNU/Linux and free software background as myself.

I realized that most of these opinions have not been truly researched, so I recently decided to look into Apple's privacy policy. I have found some pretty interesting info in the article here. There is also very descriptive information on privacy on Apple's website here. I never enjoyed how Apple's user do not understand what is going on or how their product works, but I am getting the point in my life where I ask myself: "Does that really matter?" Technology is my hobby and career path, not everyone else's. People can learn and understand what they want.

What are your opinions of Apple? Do you believe they are a company with strong ethical values for the good?

Instead of talking in absolutes about trust, one could instead make a comparative analysis of, say, Apple vs. Google — then how do things stand?

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Phoenix666 writes:

New research shows Australia’s first human inhabitants grappled with massive predatory lizards.

Researchers working in Central Queensland discovered the first evidence ever to indicate that Australia’s early human inhabitants and giant apex predator lizards lived together during the same era, according to Gilbert Price, a vertebrate palaeoecologist at Australia's University of Queensland.

The researchers dated the bone at about 50,000 years old by using radiocarbon and uranium thorium techniques. That would coincide with the arrival of Australia’s Aboriginal inhabitants.

[...] Price speculated that the bone could be from a Komodo dragon or the extinct Megalania monitor lizard, an even bigger species that weighed about 1,100 pounds and could grow nearly 20 feet long.

Wait...the the Institute for Creation Research got it right?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Cary Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, has some choice words about the current state of US copyright law. He says that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rightsholders must play a game of whack-a-mole with Internet companies to get them to remove infringing content.

But that "never-ending game" has allowed piracy to run amok and has cheapened the legal demand for music. Sure, many Internet companies remove links under the DMCA's "notice-and-takedown" regime. But the DMCA grants these companies, such as Google, a so-called "safe harbor"—meaning companies only have to remove infringing content upon notice from rightsholders.

Sherman added:

Compounding the harm is that some major online music distributors are taking advantage of this flawed system. Record companies are presented with a Hobson’s choice: Accept below-market deals or play that game of whack-a-mole. The notice and takedown system—intended as a reasonable enforcement mechanism—has instead been subverted into a discount licensing system where copyright owners and artists are paid far less than their creativity is worth.

If the RIAA is tired of playing whack-a-mole, perhaps it's time for them to greet their new mole overlords.

See our previous stories: Why the Record for DMCA Takedown Notices to Google was Smashed Yet Again and Fair-Use Proponents Score Early Win in DMCA Copyright Case.

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An Anonymous Coward provides this brief summary, following up on the previously reported Volkswagen emissions scandal:

In the US, VW is already facing multiple lawsuits, as well as $18 billion in potential government fines. That's in addition to all their legal troubles in the rest of the world.

The Guardian has an interview with John German, the engineer who discovered that VW diesel cars turn off their pollution-reducing mechanisms when they're not being tested for pollution emissions.

Switzerland has instituted a sales ban on all affected diesels made by Volkswagen and subsidiaries. The ban does not affect cars which are already on the road, and newer cars in the 'Euro 6' emissions category.

The British government is facing allegations that they ignored evidence of the emissions test rigging which they received a year ago, and also that they tried to block EU regulations that would strengthen the testing regimens by requiring surprise checks in real-world conditions.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has announced that they will revamp their test procedures to prevent this kind of cheating in the future. The new additional tests will be "using driving cycles and conditions that may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal operation and use".

Original Submission