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Phoenix666 writes:

How does microbial life manage to survive in subglacial environments over millions of years? New research from the University of Bristol has found that the grinding of bedrock by glaciers and ice sheets produces a continual supply of hydrogen gas, a ready source of energy ('food') for many microbes. This hydrogen is most likely formed when the highly reactive surfaces of freshly fractured silicate minerals react with and split water.

Lead author, Dr Jon Telling of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences said: "A wide diversity of microbes inhabit vast 'wetland' areas beneath ice sheets and many glaciers but life certainly isn't easy for them. They have to contend with cold temperatures, high pressures from overlying ice, dwindling food supplies as washed-in soils and vegetation are consumed, and constant crushing as rocks embedded in glacier beds are ground against bedrock or sediment."

However, when Dr Telling and colleagues investigated whether hydrogen produced during this grinding of rock could provide a continual source of energy to support subglacial life, they found that living in a 'rock crusher' has an unexpected advantage.

The researchers collected a range of silicate rocks representative of subglacial environments in Greenland, Canada, Norway and Antarctica and crushed them with a sledgehammer and ball mill to varying surface areas. Then, under an inert atmosphere in the laboratory, they added water and measured the production of hydrogen over time.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Past research shows that more than 85 percent of US adults who are dependent on alcohol are also dependent on nicotine, but why do the two go hand in hand?

Now, a new study with rats finds that nicotine cancels out the sleep-inducing effects of alcohol.

"We know that many people who drink alcohol also use nicotine, but we don't know why exactly that is," says Mahesh Thakkar, associate professor and director of research in the University of Missouri School of Medicine's neurology department and lead author of the study.

"We have found that nicotine weakens the sleep-inducing effects of alcohol by stimulating a response in an area of the brain known as the basal forebrain. By identifying the reactions that take place when people smoke and drink, we may be able to use this knowledge to help curb alcohol and nicotine addiction."

http://www.futurity.org/smoking-drinking-1036052-2/

[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jnc.13219/abstract

[Source]: http://medicine.missouri.edu/news/0305.php

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Phoenix666 writes:

Yamaha unveiled the "Motobot" at the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday. According to the company, it's an "autonomous motorcycle-riding humanoid robot built around a fusion of Yamaha's motorcycle and robotics technology".

It adds: "R&D is currently underway with the goal of developing the robot to ride an unmodified motorcycle on a racetrack at more than 200 km/h. The task of controlling the complex motions of a motorcycle at high speeds requires a variety of control systems that must function with a high degree of accuracy."

It remains to be seen if Motobot does ultimately surpass Rossi, who currently rides for Movistar Yamaha MotoGP. With one race left in the 2015 season, he's leading the title chase, with a seven point advantage over team-mate Jorge Lorenzo.

The world has been lacking motorcyclists with even less fear of death.

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Phoenix666 writes:

One of the top entomologists within the U.S. Department of Agriculture is fighting a suspension for publishing research about adverse effects on monarch butterflies from widely-used neonicotinoid insecticides (or "neonics"). He is also being punished for a travel paperwork irregularity for when he made an appearance before a panel of the National Academy of Sciences. His legal challenge is in the form of a whistleblower complaint filed on his behalf today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren is a Senior Research Entomologist and Lab Supervisor for the USDA Agriculture Research Service based in South Dakota. His cutting-edge research has drawn national attention and international recognition. He has worked for USDA for eleven years with great success—until recently.

On August 3, 2015, the USDA imposed a 14-day (reduced from 30 days) suspension on him in connection with two events:

        --Publication of a manuscript by Dr. Lundgren on the non-target effects of clothianidin on monarch butterflies in the scientific peer-reviewed journal The Science of Nature; and
        --An error in Dr. Lundgren's travel authorization for his invited presentation to a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as to a USDA stakeholder group.

This is what suppression looks like.

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Phoenix666 writes:

While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?

Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.

Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."

How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Seagate has launched an 8TB disk drive for surveillance use, enabling up to 6PB of CCTV data in a rack.

This is a 3.5-inch form-factor drive and joins the existing set of 8TB Archive, Enterprise Capacity, Enterprise NAS and Kinetic disk drives. It follows on from the 6TB model announced in September last year. That had 6 platters and a 642Gbit/in2 areal density.

Seagate says the 8TB disk has 1.33TB/platter, which we calculate to mean about 854Gbit/in2 IT comes in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8TB capacity points, and features;

• 7,200rpm spin speed
• 6Gbit/s SATA interface and up to 256MB cache
• Up to 230MB/sec sustained transfer speed for 8TB capacity; 180MB/sec at lower capacities
• 64 cameras supported
• Rotational vibration sensors enabling it to work reliably in 8-bay and larger enclosures
• Designed for 24 x 7 operation and up to 180TB/year workload, the same as the shingled 8TB Archive drive which spins at 5,900rpm

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Phoenix666 writes:

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly [has] set a new record for the longest single stretch of time spent in space by an American, with 216 consecutive days at the International Space Station.

Kelly is more than midway through an entire year at the ISS, as part of an experiment to study the effects of long-term spaceflight on the body and mind.

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko is also spending a year at the orbiting outpost for the study.

Kelly's twin brother, Mark, is taking part on Earth to help scientists compare any genetic changes they see in Scott while in space.

Astronauts typically spend no longer than five to six months at a time in space.

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Phoenix666 writes:

An upcoming International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference is about to become an international battleground over whether or not to retain the leap second – the periodic adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) so it stays in agreement with atomic clocks.

The debate's expected to be so intense it will continue throughout the World Radiocommunication Conferences (WRC), which have an agenda spanning more than three weeks starting November 2.

In spite of frequent predictions of a leap second apocalypse, the last leap second passed pretty much without incident. Still, factions in the world of international standards keep the issue ticking over.

That wasn't the case in 2012, when Australian airlines Qantas and Virgin Australia both staggered when the Amadeus booking system crashed, and servers run by Mozilla, Reddit, Yelp, and FourSquare struggled. By contrast, 2015 was so unremarkable that some people argue we've worked out how to deal with leap seconds, so we may as well keep them.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes in with this anniversary that Sony would like to forget:

Hackers really have had their way with Sony over the past year, taking down its Playstation Network last Christmas Day and creating an international incident by exposing confidential data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in response to The Interview comedy about a planned assassination on North Korea's leader. Some say all this is karmic payback for what's become known as a seminal moment in malware history: Sony BMG sneaking rootkits into music CDs 10 years ago in the name of digital rights management. "In a sense, it was the first thing Sony did that made hackers love to hate them," says Bruce Schneier, CTO for incident response platform provider Resilient Systems in Cambridge, Mass.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, the Helsinki-based security company that was an early critic of Sony's actions, adds: "Because of stunts like the music rootkit and suing Playstation jailbreakers and emulator makers, Sony is an easy company to hate for many. I guess one lesson here is that you really don't want to make yourself a target.

[...] Noted tech activist Cory Doctorow, writing for Boing Boing earlier this month, explains that some vendors had their reasons for not exposing the Sony rootkit right away. "Russinovich was not the first researcher to discover the Sony Rootkit, just the first researcher to blow the whistle on it. The other researchers were advised by their lawyers that any report on the rootkit would violate section 1201 of the DMCA, a 1998 law that prohibits removing 'copyright protection' software. The gap between discovery and reporting gave the infection a long time to spread."

[...] The non-profit Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has been calling attention to the Sony BMG rootkit's 10th anniversary, urging the masses to "Make some noise and write about this fiasco" involving DRM. The FSFE, seeing DRM as an anti-competitive practice, refers to the words behind the acronym as digital restriction management rather than the more common digital rights management. In a blog post on FSFE's website, the group states: "Despite the fallout of Sony's rootkit experiment, 10 years later restrictions on users' personal property are more prevalent than ever. Restrictions are commonly found in legitimately purchased ebooks, video game hardware, and all manner of proprietary software. It has even found ways into our cars and coffee machines."

Phoenix666 writes:

CIA chief John Brennan said Tuesday he was "outraged" that hackers broke into his personal email account, and faulted the media for its coverage of the incident.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group, began releasing documents from Brennan's private AOL account last week, days after a teenage hacker was reported to have claimed he had gained access to the account.

"I was certainly concerned about what people might try to do with that information," he told a conference on national security in Washington, criticizing the media for "giving air to what is criminal activity."

The documents released so far have included a contact list, policy recommendations on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his family's addresses and phone numbers.

Although an embarrassment, the document dump has not exposed national security secrets, and Brennan appears to have stopped using the account in 2008 when he rejoined the government after a period in private life.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Has the computer become a black box, even to experienced electrical engineers?

Will we be forever reliant upon large, opaque organizations to build them for us? Absolutely not, we say. And to prove our point, we built our very own laptop, from the circuit boards on up.

Admittedly, we did not delude ourselves that we could build a laptop that would be faster, smaller, or cheaper than those of Apple, Dell, or HP. However, we did set out to build a machine powerful and convenient enough to use every day. Fortunately, our dream inspired enough people to crowdfund the effort. Our laptop, which we call Novena, started shipping to backers in January 2015.

TFA has a lot more details on the project, the steps involved, the choices they made.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

There are 101 non-fiction, and several fiction, books credited to popular science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner (1914-2010), who would have turned 101 on October 21. Among the myriad math problems that Martin presented in his influential "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American over a 25-year period, quite a few of them spawned more questions than answers, which is actually a good thing.

The influence of the "Mathematical Games" brand and recognition of the importance of recreational mathematics continues today, and Martin's readers now span several generations. His hard core fans continue to host invitation-only "Gatherings for Gardner" in Atlanta every two years and anyone (anywhere) can attend or host Celebrations of Mind in and around each October. Most importantly, people keep pushing the envelope by producing new solutions of substance to his conundrums as well as new twists on old plots.

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Koen writes:

BRUSSELS — The European Parliament narrowly (285 vs 281 votes) adopted a nonbinding but nonetheless forceful resolution on Thursday urging the 28 nations of the European Union to recognize Edward J. Snowden as a "whistle-blower and international human rights defender" and to shield him from prosecution.

On Twitter, Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about electronic surveillance by the American government, called the vote a "game-changer."

But the resolution has no legal force and limited practical effect for Mr. Snowden, who is living in Russia on a three-year residency permit. Whether to grant Mr. Snowden asylum remains a decision for the individual European governments, and thus far, none have done so.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has spat out a "high level" update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.

SFC said that VMware had filed its defence against the suit brought by German kernel developer Christoph Hellwig back in March, which alleges VMware's proprietary ESXi hypervisor products use portions of the code that Hellwig wrote for the Linux kernel, in violation of the terms of version 2 of the GPL.

VMware has asked for the filings to kept under wraps, but according to the SFC, the virtual giant's defence "questions Christoph's copyright interest in the Linux kernel and his right to bring this action" and "claims vmklinux is an 'interoperability module' which communicates through a stable interface called VMK API." Which is no particular surprise.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Mass spectrometry data from the Rosetta spacecraft show that 3.8% of the gas emitted by Comet 67P is molecular oxygen, O₂. The result is surprising, because oxygen readily combines with other elements. A likely explanation for the presence of free oxygen is that the material comprising the comet never went through an episode of high temperatures.

Coverage:

• Scientific American
• Los Angeles Times
• NBC
• National Geographic blog
• BBC

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

University of Notre Dame astronomer Timothy Beers and his Galactic Archaeology group, which includes Notre Dame astronomers Daniela Carollo and Vinicius Placco, have led an international team of researchers that produced the first chronographic (age) map of the halo of the Milky Way galaxy. The halo, along with the disk and bulge, are the primary components of the galaxy. Using a sample of 4,700 blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the research team showed that the oldest stars are concentrated in the central region of the galaxy, confirming predictions from numerical simulations of galaxy assembly. The researchers have also shown that chronographic maps such as theirs can also be used to identify complex structures of stars still in the process of being added to the halo system of our galaxy.

The researchers used the colors of BHB stars, which burn helium in their cores, to produce the age map. The technique relies on the fact that the colors of BHB stars are related to their masses, which in turn are related to their ages. The research results allowed the team, for the first time, to demonstrate two primary results.

"The oldest stars in the galaxy are concentrated toward the center of the galaxy, as predicted by previous numerical simulations of the assembly of our Milky Way," Beers said. "Surprisingly, the region of the oldest stars extends all the way to the halo region close to the sun. This Ancient Chronographic Sphere can now be explored in order to study the properties of these old stars, which will tell us about the chemistry of the early universe."

Original Submission