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Erwin Proell, the governor of Lower Austria (the largest of Austria's 9 states, with a population of 1.6 million) announced on Thursday that his state now gets 100% of its electricity from renewable sources (63% hydroelectric, 26% wind, 9% biomass and 2% solar).

"Since 2002 we have invested 2.8 billion euros ($3bn) in eco-electricity, from solar parks to renewing (hydroelectric) stations on the Danube," Proell told a news conference.

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takyon writes:

Exxon Mobil is facing an investigation by New York's attorney general:

New York's attorney general would like to know: Did Exxon Mobil lie to you about the risks of climate change and to investors about how those risks might reduce profits?

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman's office confirms that a New York Times story is correct in reporting that an investigation has been launched into Exxon Mobil. That story said Schneiderman issued a subpoena on Wednesday, seeking financial records, emails and other documents.

The goal is to examine whether back in the 1970s, Exxon Mobil funded groups to undermine scientific studies involving climate change. Also, the attorney general is investigating whether the oil giant properly informed its investors of the profit risks that might arise as countries cut back on fossil fuels.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil confirms it is under investigation and says its executives "unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research."

[More after the break.]

canopic jug writes:

In 2012 Petter Reinholdtsen came across a document in the mail journal for the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that piqued his interest. It appears that someone capable of inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in the Pentagon organized a meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norway's negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. According to Reinholdtsen, the rejections do not seem to make sense and cause him to ask, is the Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?

The title of the document was "Internet Governance and how it affects national security". The document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". He asked for a copy, but his request was rejected. Three years later, he requested again and the ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a different clause.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A California-based electric car manufacturer named after a towering scientific genius from the nineteenth century, mobilizing to disrupt the auto industry. You guess it - Faraday Future, a 400-person company based in Gardena, CA (a Los Angeles suburb), led by former executives and designers from Tesla and the electric car operations of BMW and General Motors. Nick Sampson, the former Director of Chasis Engineering at Tesla (he left in the company in 2012) is now Senior Vice President at Faraday Future, while Richard Kim from BMW and Porsche heads up design.

Sampson confirmed that the vehicles under development will be 100 percent electric, and may include some autonomous driving functions (Tesla reportedly has similar plans). The company's business model could be a hybrid of product (like Tesla) and service (Uber); for the latter, the cars could drive themselves to customers, and then presumably be driven manually or automatically.

Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting is reportedly bankrolling the company via the media company Leshi Internet Information & Technology; a Leshi executive named Chaoying Deng has been installed as Faraday's CEO. Faraday is reportedly ready to invest $1 billion in a factory, with locations in California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada under consideration. The company hopes to put its first vehicle on the market in 2017.

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FakeBeldin writes:

"Microplastics" is a term used to describe the tiny particles of plastic waste. The problem is that these don't break down organically - they just become smaller (to the molecular level). There's famously the "plastic soup" in oceans that contains such particles.

A recent Norwegian* study looked into the originators of these microplastic. Surprisingly enough: car tyres. There are other sources, but they contribute significantly less. According to the infographic, it breaks down as follows:
- Car tyres: 2250 tons
- Paint/maintenance of ships: 650 tons
- loss from plastic production: 400 tons
- painting/maintenance of buildings+infrastructure: 310 tons
- laundry: 110 tons
- waste treatment: 100 tons
... and some small change.
This means that car tyres alone, by themselves, account for a staggering 55% of microplastic waste.
To put this in perspective: Germans and Norwegians (both) use up about 2 kilos of car tyres per person per year.

Note: These numbers seem particular to Norway - overall yearly production of microplastics seems (unfortunately) vastly greater, see the below-linked German report (table on page 33) for some EU estimates.

* There's apparently a German study corroborating this. The only one I could find is here (English, downloads a PDF).

PS: For the pedantics

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AnonTechie writes:

Telescope mirrors of old basically came in one shape: they were round and fit nicely inside a tube. No longer. An emerging optics technology now allows these light-gathering devices to take almost any shape, potentially providing improved image quality over a larger field of view -- all in a smaller package.

Called freeform optics, this emerging mirror technology, brought about by advances in computer-controlled fabrication and testing, has triggered a sea change in optical engineering. Seeing the benefit of "potato chip-shape" or asymmetrical optics, NASA optical engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have moved quickly to establish an expertise in this emerging technology.

"The use of freeform optics can significantly reduce the package size as well as improve the image quality," said Joseph Howard, who is working with Goddard engineer Garrett West to ultimately design, integrate, and test a two-mirror freeform optical telescope for imaging and spectroscopic applications.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/nsfc-owt110515.php

[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG

[Source]: NASA Goddard

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Voters in Colorado have abolished laws that had prohibited local governments from offering their own broadband internet services.

Local ballots in 17 counties all resulted in voters electing to allow their local governments to offer broadband service in competition with private cable companies. The vote overturns a 2005 law that prevented any government agency from competing in the broadband space.

[...] According to The Denver Post , the 17 counties have differing reasons for overturning the rule. Some areas want to build their own broadband infrastructure, while others simply want to offer Wi-Fi service in public buildings or improve service for farming communities.

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eof writes:

The Washington Post follows up on the death of a police officer in September who had radioed that he was in pursuit of three men and was later found shot. People called him a hero, and the nation made note of his death as further evidence of police being under attack.

On Wednesday morning, however, officials are expected to shatter that image of Gliniewicz as a heroic officer cut down in the line of duty. Instead, they will announce that the veteran cop killed himself in an elaborately staged suicide, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times reported, quoting police individuals.

The story also mentions the case of an Arkansas police officer, David Houser, who has been fired for lying about being shot at during a traffic stop.

Sgt. David Houser, 50, of the England Police Department was charged with filing a false police report, according to KTHV-TV. Houser had claimed that he was shot in his bulletproof vest during an Oct. 24 traffic stop.

"Houser told local and state law enforcement officers that while on patrol that he had exchanged gunfire with a suspect who fled from him driving a sport utility vehicle south of England along state Highway 15," Arkansas State Police said in a press release obtained by the local TV station. "Houser also reported he had been shot by the suspect."

As with the Illinois case, this report lead to a massive hunt for (imaginary) suspects.

The article cites FBI data, which says "[...] assaults on police officers dropped sharply in 2014 and are at their lowest point since 1996."

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fliptop writes:

Researchers at Lookout Security have discovered more than 20,000 adware samples that masqueraded as legitimite apps like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Calling it "trojanized adware", they described what they found:

By taking legitimate apps from the Google Play store, malicious actors will repackage the app with baked-in adware, and serve it to a third-party app store. In many cases, the apps are still fully functional and doesn't alert the device owner.

It works like this: the user installs an app from a third-party store, and the app auto-roots gaining access to the entire phone's system -- an act alone that punches a hole in Android's security, opening up more ways for hackers to launch their attacks. Periodically from there, the app will serve ads, which generates money for the attacker.

The good news is there's no indication apps installed from the official Google Play store are affected. The bad news is, that short of reflashing the device's ROM, it's almost impossible to remove, forcing most users to replace their devices entirely.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A severely immunosuppressed man, due to an HIV infection, died as a result of an atypical Hymenolepis nana infection. It appears that some of the tapeworm cells became cancerous and spread to the patient where they formed tumors. This is the first reported case of cancer in multicellular parasites in addition to the first reported case of transmission of such a cancer to a human.

From the full report which appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine:

In January 2013, a 41-year-old man in Medellín, Colombia, presented with fatigue, fever, cough, and weight loss of several months' duration. He had received a diagnosis of HIV infection in 2006 and was nonadherent to therapy ... Stool examination revealed H. nana eggs and Blastocystis hominis cysts. Computed tomographic imaging showed lung nodules ranging in size from 0.4 to 4.4 cm, as well as liver and adrenal nodules and cervical, mediastinal, and abdominal lymphadenopathy.

... This case posed a diagnostic conundrum. The proliferative cells had overt features of a malignant process — they invaded adjacent tissue, had a crowded and disordered growth pattern, and were monomorphic, with morphologic features that are characteristic of stem cells (a high nucleus-to-cytoplasm ratio) — but the small cell size ([less than] 10 μm in diameter) suggested infection with an unfamiliar, possibly unicellular, eukaryotic organism.

... Although the cells were unrecognizable as tapeworm tissue, immunohistochemical staining and probe hybridization labeled the cells in situ. Comparative deep sequencing identified H. nana structural genomic variants that are compatible with mutations described in cancer. Invasion of human tissue by abnormal, proliferating, genetically altered tapeworm cells is a novel disease mechanism that links infection and cancer.

Here are some additional links:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34721419
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/4/9670574/tapeworm-cancer-cells-hiv-infection-immune-system-cdc
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/11/04/454066109/a-man-in-colombia-got-cancer-and-it-came-from-a-tapeworm

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AnonTechie writes:

Hearing from the leaders of the tech world is always revealing, and very often surprising. In our second annual Silicon Valley Insiders Poll, a panel of 101 executives, innovators, and thinkers weigh in on some of the biggest technological, political, and cultural questions of the moment.

So when we ran an unscientific poll of leaders and thinkers in tech, we had to ask: Which technology do you wish you could un-invent? What innovation do you think should go "back in the box" and be banished forever?

The two winning responses were: selfie sticks and nuclear weapons.

But let's go through some runners-up first.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/what-would-you-un-invent/413818/

Which inventions would Soylentils like to un-invent?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Here's a short video clip of the Mk2 Turing machine working at Derby Maker Faire. It took about 6 weeks from sending the plans off to RazorLab to having a working machine at the Handmade Digital exhibition in Manchester. There are still lots of handmade parts in the Turing machine, but having the majority of it laser-cut has made it much easier to construct. There are also a lot of bugs in the design. One of the great things about the laser-cut design is that I can record these bugs as though they were software defects, which they are in many ways.

The design for the machine is on github, at https://github.com/jmacarthur/millihertz/tree/master/scad/newbuild, although it may not be very intelligible at the moment. I really need to spend more time documenting the design. Lots of people have said they like the shiny black laser-cut Turing machine, and others have said they prefer the scrappy style of the original. Personally I'd prefer to hand-make the final version out of solid brass, but that will be several iterations away.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The animated graphic from NPR shows how the economy has changed over time. Interesting how jobs have shifted from production to services and distribution. "Peak Secretary" seems to have occurred in the mid 80's.

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HughPickens.com writes:

We've all read about standing desks and treadmill desks but now Rachel Gillet reports at Business Insider about the Altwork Station, a workstation that allows users to sit, stand, and recline while they work on their computers. Designed to accomodate two computer screens, the manufacturer says their new product is the ultimate combination for workplace productivity. "Most experts agree that humans should change positions and move throughout the day. We believe movement throughout the day is important," says the company who targets "high intensity" computer users, which it defines as people who spend at least four hours a day in front of a computer and are required to focus on complex tasks for extended periods of time.

If the $5,900 ($3,900, if you pre-order) reclining workstation is not for you, there are other options you may want to consider including the scooter desk, bicycle desk, and hamster wheel desk.

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An Anonymous Coward offers the following:

Volkswagen has admitted that more models gamed the emissions test, nearly doubling the number of cars affected. This now includes some Audi and Porsche models and other VW brands. From http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-volkswagen-problems-expand-20151105-story.html

The latest developments followed Volkswagen's admission Tuesday that it had understated the carbon dioxide emissions for 800,000 cars, widening the scope of the scandal.

Bob Lutz comments on a very toxic management culture at VW and offers his explanation for where things went sideways, http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a27197/bob-lutz-vw-diesel-fiasco/, suggesting that the management ruled by fear and threats.

And, a quote from a conversation with the dictator (former VW boss Ferdinand Piëch) about tight (high quality) body panel fits on a VW, Lutz remembers:

...
"Yeah. I wish we could get close to that at Chrysler."

"I'll give you the recipe. I called all the body engineers, stamping people, manufacturing, and executives into my conference room. And I said, 'I am tired of all these lousy body fits. You have six weeks to achieve world-class body fits. I have all your names. If we do not have good body fits in six weeks, I will replace all of you. Thank you for your time today.' "

This must really be serious now, none of the articles I saw used "xyz-gate" -- instead calling it a scandal or similar.

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Sennheiser has announced a new pair of headphones it says will cost "around €50,000" (£35,314 or US$54,279).

The forthcoming "Orpheus" model boasts silver-plated copper cable and "gold-vaporized ceramic electrodes and platinum-vaporized diaphragms ... exactly 2.4 µ thick, the result of extensive research that shows that any thinner or thicker would be sub-optimal." The accompanying amplifier boasts "comes from Carrara in Italy and is the same type of marble that Michelangelo used to create his sculptures.

The tubes "rise from the base and start to glow", and "the control elements, each of which are crafted from a single piece of brass and then plated with chrome ... slowly extend from the marble housing."

We could go on, but fear doing so may induce ire among some readers. Know, then, that there's a very gushy website here [ecmascript required] full of all the jargon a rich audiophile could want.

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