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Phoenix666 writes:

Quebec researchers have discovered that a mutation in a coronavirus protein slows the spread of the virus in the central nervous system and reduces its neurovirulence. It is the first time that this phenomenon has been observed in the coronavirus family, which is responsible for one-third of common colds and is also suspected of being associated with the development or aggravation of neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and encephalitis. The discovery, which has just been published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, was achieved in the Laboratory of Neuroimmunovirology at INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier.

In analyzing more than 60 human respiratory tract samples from patients infected by the human coronavirus, researchers discovered an important mutation in the S protein that modifies the virus capacity to infect nerve cells. The mutation is associated with the degree of viral virulence.

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Phoenix666 writes:

While most people associate the mathematical constant π (pi) with arcs and circles, mathematicians are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. But two University scientists were still surprised to find it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.

"We didn't just find pi," said Tamar Friedmann, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics and a research associate of high energy physics, and co-author of a paper published this week in the Journal of Mathematical Physics. "We found the classic seventeeth century Wallis formula for pi, making us the first to derive it from physics, in general, and quantum mechanics, in particular."

The Wallis formula—developed by British mathematician John Wallis in his book Arithmetica Infinitorum—defines π as the product of an infinite string of ratios made up of integers. For Friedmann, discovering the Wallis formula for π in a quantum mechanics formula for the hydrogen atom's energy states underscores π's omnipresence in math and science.

"The value of pi has taken on a mythical status, in part, because it's impossible to write it down with 100 percent accuracy," said Friedmann, "It cannot even be accurately expressed as a ratio of integers, and is, instead, best represented as a formula."

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thomasdotnet writes:

Physicists at US and Chinese research firms have discovered a means of suppressing a persistent instability that has hampered fusion reaction research. The instability, commonly referred to as the "kink mode" instability, made controlling the plasma temperature impossible without constant external influences. Now by allowing the plasma to operate closer to the containment unit's wall the plasma is constrained by its own pressure and the fusion reaction comes one step closer to self-sustaining.

The team is led by Dr. Xianzu Gong of ASIPP and Dr. Andrea Garofalo of General Atomics (GA) in San Diego.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-us-china-fusion-team.html; an abstract is available.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The latest statistics on the behavior of streaming subscribers are upending conventional understandings of how and why we consume music.

Last week, media and technology analysis firm MIDiA Research released an infographic on streaming users' listening habits. According to the graphic, 58% of streaming subscribers listen to an individual album or track only a few times, while 60% of subscribers engage in this behavior due to the desire to discover more new music. These numbers are significantly higher compared to the 30% and 27%, respectively, of overall music consumers with those attitudes, implying that paying subscribers tend to exhibit more casual listening behavior.

These findings put into question historical understandings of music fandom, and have particular urgency in today's music landscape where streaming revenues are surpassing physical sales for the first time. Indeed, streaming is one of the fastest-growing music formats today: the 2014 Nielsen Music U.S. Report declared record levels of on-demand audio streaming in 2014 at 78.6 billion streams, a 60% increase from 2013. Spotify itself has over 20 million paying subscribers as of June 2015, a 100% increase from the previous year.

[...] The prominence of streaming services is leading to the emergence of a new dichotomy of superfandom in music—the artist superfan versus the streaming superfan (a.k.a. the paying streaming subscriber). A standard framework for understanding the artist superfan is laid out in the film "Super Fans: The Future of the Music Industry." Co-produced by direct-to-fan music platform PledgeMusic and online education company Lynda.com, the video defines superfans as those who are willing to pay the most to connect on a deeper level with artists, and provides action items for artists to maximize their superfans' engagement. First, artists themselves need to work toward increasing their own exposure, "one fan at a time," instead of relying on labels to do the job. Second, artists need to foster bidirectional conversation with their listeners and foster a personal relationship that extends beyond music.

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hubie writes:

Evidence for the existence of ice volcanoes and other exciting findings were presented at the annual meeting for the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. The potential volcanoes showed up when stereo images were made using images from the New Horizons flyby taken from different vantage points. The stereo images made it possible to determine the height and breadth of the mounds, which are several kilometers tall. The stereo images showed that the depressions on top of the mounds are too deep to be craters and are more akin to volcano calderas. In addition, the mounds show an absence of craters which is consistent with material being ejected from them.

Also presented was an analysis of the density distribution of craters, which suggests that Pluto has been geologically active over its lifetime. In addition, there appears to be a dearth of smaller craters on Pluto and Charon that may indicate that Kuiper Belt objects formed "as-is" and not via the accumulation of smaller objects, as is currently thought.

In fact, the evidence that many Kuiper Belt objects could have been "born large" has scientists excited that New Horizons' next potential target – the 30-mile-wide (40-50 kilometer wide) KBO named 2014 MU69 – which may offer the first detailed look at just such a pristine, ancient building block of the solar system.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they're not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.

In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile. Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio, suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut.

In the mouth, on the other hand, researchers found that microbial communities fared much better, rebounding in weeks after antibiotic treatments. The finding raises the question of why the oral microbiome is less disturbed by drugs. It could simply be because of the way that antibiotics, taken orally, circulate through the body. Or, it could imply that oral microbiomes are innately more resilient, a quality that would be useful to replicate in microbial communities all over the body.

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AnonTechie writes:

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne, concluded that the changing nature of family living situations often led to avoidable conflict. Associate Professor Cassandra Szoeke and Katherine Burn, from the University's Faculty of Medicine, Health and Dentistry Sciences, examined both 'boomerang kids' (those who return home) and 'failure to launch' kids (those who never left).

The project reviewed 20 studies involving 20 million people worldwide was published in Maturitas. The research shows:

The shifting economic climate and changes in social norms were driving the phenomenon of kids staying at home for longer.

The main reasons for young adults choosing to remain at home were for stability and additional support while they transition to university or employment.

Divorce, unemployment and health problems often led to children returning. This return under negative circumstances can heavily impact on the wellbeing of everyone in the household.

Parents who are well-educated, married and well-off tend to have children who stay home longer, whereas children who grow up in households with a single parent, or step-parent, or didn't finish high school, tend to leave early.

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-young-adults-boomerang-home.html

[Also Covered By]: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/uom-mya111115.php

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AnonTechie writes:

Want a FIPS 140-2 RNG? Look at the universe. The cosmic background radiation bathes Earth in enough random numbers to encrypt everything forever. Using the cosmic background radiation – the "echo of the Big Bang" – as a random number generation isn't a new idea, but a couple of scientists have run the slide-rule over measurements of the CMB power spectrum and reckon it offers a random number space big enough to beat any current computer.

Not in terms of protecting messages against any current decryption possibility: the CMB's power spectrum offers a key space "too large for the encryption/decryption capacities of present computer systems". A straightforward terrestrial radio telescope, this Arxiv paper states, should be good enough to make "astrophysical entropy sources accessible on comparatively modest budgets".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/big_bang_left_us_with_a_perfect_random_number_generator/

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Phoenix666 writes:

Purdue University is collaborating with General Motors to develop a new type of energy-absorbing material that might be 3-D printed and that could have an impact in areas ranging from earthquake engineering to safer football helmets.

The honeycomb architecture of the "phase transforming cellular materials," or PXCMs, could be scaled to a range of sizes tailored for various applications. One size could be ideal for integration into helmets to reduce head impacts, while another size would be suited for installation in the walls of buildings to dampen earthquake forces. Being able to 3-D print the PXCMs would make them less expensive and more practical than other technologies, said Pablo Zavattieri, an associate professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue.

"The main advantage is that not only can it be used as an energy absorbing material, but unlike many other materials designed for this purpose the PXCMs would be reusable because there is no irreversible deformation," he said.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In spite of my status and obvious bias as co-creator of D, I'll do my best to answer candidly; I follow Go and Rust, and I also definitely know where D's dirty laundry is. I'd encourage people with similar positions in the Rust and Go communities to share their honest opinion as well. So here goes.

First off, C++ needs to be somewhere in the question. Whether it's to be replaced alongside C, or be one of the candidates that's supposed to replace C, the C++ language is a key part of the equation. It's the closest language to C and the obvious step up from it. Given C++'s age, I'll assume in the following that the question also puts C++ alongside with C as a target for replacement.

Each language has a number of fundamental advantages (I call them "10x advantages" because they are qualitatively in a different league compared to at least certain baselines) and a number of challenges. The future of these languages, and their success in supplanting C, depends on how they can use their 10x advantages strategically, and how they overcome their challenges.

[Another way to look at this is to ask "What is wrong with C?" and then assess how well these languages solve those problems. -Ed.]

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HughPickens.com writes:

BBC reports that Budi Waseso, the head of Indonesia's anti-drugs agency has proposed building a prison island guarded by crocodiles to house death-row drug convicts and says crocodiles make better guards than humans - because they cannot be bribed. "We will place as many crocodiles as we can there," says Waseso. "You can't bribe crocodiles. You can't convince them to let inmates escape." Waseso says only traffickers would be kept in the jail, to stop them from mixing with other prisoners and potentially recruiting them to drug gangs. The plan, reminiscent of James Bond's "Live and Let Die" movie escape, is still in the early stages, and neither the location or potential opening date of the jail have been decided.

Anti-drugs agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi confirmed authorities were mulling the plan to build “a special prison for death row convicts.” Indonesia already has some of the toughest anti-narcotics laws in the world, including death by firing squad for traffickers, and sparked international uproar in April when it put to death seven foreign drug convicts, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Despite the harsh laws, Indonesia’s corrupt prison system is awash with drugs, and inmates and jail officials are regularly arrested for narcotics offences.

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"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

In August, New York-based Amalgamated Bank announced it would immediately raise its minimum pay to at least $15 an hour.

The bank, which is owned by the union OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union), came to the $15 wage floor in the midst of contract negotiations with the union. The contract also specifies automatic 3 percent increases each year.

[...] "Morale in our bank is just great after this" [said CEO Keith Mestrich.] He's even heard from potential customers who say they have sought out the bank after the announcement.

[...] But the bank isn't satisfied to make its own changes. It also wants to change the industry. A recent report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that bank tellers, the most common job in the financial services industry, make a median wage of just $12.44 an hour; and three-quarters make below $15. That means that about a third of bank tellers rely on some kind of public [assistance], such as Medicaid, food stamps, or the Earned Income Tax Credit, to get by. Many who work in customer service, maintenance, protective service, and production also make below that wage.

[...] Amalgamated has launched a campaign to get a $15 minimum wage--a level that has already been passed in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle--and encourage all other banks to adopt one in their own businesses. It also recently sent a letter to other banks urging them to adopt other practices that it calls "principles of responsible banking" such as ending the intense opposition to regulation, advocating for policies that would help customers, and embracing corporate transparency.

I hope you have your bloat blockers engaged before clicking the links to the bank's site.

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dogvomit writes:

Groundbreaking for the Giant Magellan Telescope began with a ceremony on the clear moonless evening of November 11 at Las Campanas Observatory in central Chile.

This event marks the official start of construction for what will become the world's most powerful optical observatory in the early 2020's.[1] Ultimately the telescope will consist of seven 8.4 meter mirrors forming a single optical surface over 24 meters in diameter with a resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. The GMT will be the first of several next-generation telescopes that are essentially guaranteed to challenge our understanding of the universe.

Las Campanas, located in the southern Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, is one of the best places in the world for astronomy. The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization is a consortium of 11 governments, organizations, and universities.

The science case for the GMT is a drool-worthy cornucopia of astrophysics, including formation of stars and planetary systems, properties of exoplanets (including their atmospheres), chemical evolution in stellar populations, dark matter and dark energy (including synergy with the LSST), galaxy formation and evolution, and the first light and reionization of the universe. The potential for observing non-equilibrium chemistry in extrasolar planetary atmospheres is pretty darned exciting with consequences that could reach beyond astrophysics to religion, philosophy, and policy.

The future of astronomy is very bright.

[1] In addition to the 24m GMT, the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii (by an International Consortium) is planned for 2022 and the European Extremely Large Telescope in Chile (by the European Southern Observatory) is planned for 2024 at 39 meters across. Also covered at Ars Technica -Ed.

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Phoenix666 writes:

To boost its bottom line, Sprint decided last week to end the era of free office snacks for its employees. The move represents a tiny fraction of the struggling telecom's effort to cut $2.5 billion from its total operating expenses. Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget. But at what cost?
...
From the most cynical point of view, however, this isn't just a case of corporate largesse. Snacks keep workers in the office working instead of out foraging for sustenance during working hours. A 2011 study by Staples found that half of all workers left the office to get snacks at least once a day, with some people making as many as five trips to get their munchie fix. Snack runs account for 2.4 billion hours in lost productivity in the U.S., according to the study. It should be noted, of course, that Staples and your boss have a shared interest in keeping more people in the office.

There has been no economic study on the elasticity of perks. Proposing Phoenix's Law: "When free coffee, soda, and snacks go, so should you."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Renewables represent the future, even if they get far less in subsidies than fossil fuels. At least according to the data in the latest report from the International Energy Agency.

The agency's World Energy Outlook 2015 provides a comprehensive forecast of the use and consumption of energy worldwide. Energy demand is still rising—the IEA estimates that total global energy demand will rise by 33% by 2040—but a growing proportion of it will come from renewables. The growing popularity of efficiency and regulations promoting efficiency, meanwhile, will also keep a ceiling on overall demand.

Like last year's report, the 2015 report also underscores the vast sea change that has taken place in the world energy scenario. In the 2004 IEA report, solar didn't rate a mention and "efficiency" was only mentioned twice in the summary.

Sea change.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy.

And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana.

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself.
...
Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Kant wrote that "Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense." Indeed, when Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer can unerringly identify smells, remember them, and mix and match them in his head, he seems disconcerting and supernatural to us, precisely because we suck so badly at those tasks.

Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have many more words for smell.

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