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Jaruzel writes:

The Guardian has an article on an unexpected effect of the Californian drought:

In some parts of the valley, the land is sinking at a rate of 2in (5cm) a month. About 1,200 square miles, roughly bounded by interstate 5 and state route 99, is collapsing into what scientists describe as a "cone of depression".

[...] The sinking is a consequence of farmers' desperate efforts to stay in business after California began cutting off their access to rivers and reservoirs because of the drought.

The farmers began a literal race to the bottom, going underground, drilling new and deeper wells, and pumping so much water from the layers of sediment, sand and clay that it is causing the ground to collapse.

If only Lex Luther had thought of this, he could have saved himself the trouble of stealing those nukes.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this story from CNet:

VTech, a Chinese company that makes popular electronic toys for kids, had its app store hacked.

An "unauthorized party" accessed customer information in a database for VTech's Learning Lodge app store on November 14, the company said in a statement Friday. The app store lets parents download apps, games, e-books and educational content to VTech toys.

The database contains customer data including name, email address, password, IP address, mailing address and download history. It does not contain credit card information, the company said.

VTech has not said how many customers were affected, but Motherboard, which first reported the hack, said information on nearly 5 million parents and more than 200,000 kids was exposed. The hacked data included kids' first name, gender and birthday, according to Motherboard.

[...] Motherboard was notified of the breach by an unidentified hacker who claimed responsibility. The hacker said he intends to do "nothing" with the data, according to Motherboard. Hackers sometimes break into systems simply to demonstrate that the networks are vulnerable and need to be made more secure.

If the number of exposed accounts reported by Motherboard is accurate, the VTech hack would be among the largest breaches in recent years. In August, hackers published data from more than 30 million accounts that had been set up on adultery website Ashley Madison. The personal information of an estimated 110 million Target customers was stolen in 2013 by malware installed on the retailer's point-of-sale terminals.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket found this at ArsTechnica:

The Obama administration said on Friday that it would go ahead with the scheduled closure of the National Security Agency's bulk phone records collection program. The USA Freedom Act, which passed in early June, outlined this weekend's deadline.

Now, instead of the NSA keeping the metadata onsite, the organization will theoretically have to obtain a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to request metadata pertaining to a person or a group from a telecom company.

Privacy advocates largely pulled their support for this reform effort before the USA Freedom Act was passed, saying that the language in the bill was too vague and noting that no "probable cause" standard was required to be granted a warrant through FISC.

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Runaway1956 writes:

Parasitic worm 'increases women's fertility':

Infection with a species of parasitic worm increases the fertility of women, say scientists. A study of 986 indigenous women in Bolivia indicated a lifetime of Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of roundworm, infection led to an extra two children. Researchers, writing in the journal Science, suggest the worm is altering the immune system to make it easier to become pregnant.

Experts said the findings could lead to "novel fertility enhancing drugs".

But while Ascaris lumbricoides increased fertility in the nine-year study, hookworms had the opposite effect, leading to three fewer children across a lifetime. Prof Aaron Blackwell, one of the researchers , from the University of California Santa Barara, told the BBC News website: "The effects are unexpectedly large." He said women's immune systems naturally changed during pregnancy so they did not reject the foetus. Prof Blackwell said: "We think the effects we see are probably due to these infections altering women's immune systems, such that they become more or less friendly towards a pregnancy." He said using worms as a fertility treatment was an "intriguing possibility" but warned there was far more work to be done "before we would recommend anyone try this".

The full paper.

The paper suggests that hookworms are the roundworms may not increase lifetime fertility, but instead, suggests fecundity compensation.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Independent journalist Michael Yon, best known for his work during the Iraq War, has accused Facebook of deleting his posts and his users' comments without reasonable cause. Yon now says that Facebook suspended him for a week after his complaint made the news.

Facebook has previously come under criticism for banning links to its competitor Tsu.co, suspending political cartoonist Ben Garrison for his "Crybabies" cartoon critical of campus protests, banning atheist cartoonist Bosch Fawstin, removing a comment calling for the strict separation of church and state, and blocking access to The Federalist article "Microaggressions and Trigger Warnings Meet Real Trauma".

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Pax writes:

Hungryhouse take away delivery service has suffered a data breach. I was informed after receiving text message to say my password had been changed.

Your password has been updated.If you did not make this change, please contact us on 02088199778

So I checked on the website and sure enough.. I could not log in. so I phoned them and I was told that about 10,000 passwords had been reset and that it was a "minor data breach" and if i wanted my account checked i could. I then asked if anyone had ordered anything since last night as that was my last known order. All was well. They are very much playing it down... but we shall see, there's nothing on the interwebs about it yet

[Looks like it has now received coverage; see: The Register and Data Breaches. - ed.]

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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/oct/discovery-about-new-battery-overturns-decades-false-assumptions

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Snotnose writes:

The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield spent five months in 2012 and 2013 twirling around the Earth in command of the International Space Station. Hadfield guesses he made several thousand orbits of the planet during that time, and though he was never exactly bored, he certainly found some novel hobbies – tweeting astonishing pictures (he took 45,000) and at one point posting a video cover version of David Bowie's Space Oddity that went viral back on Earth. Arguably the first astronaut to properly intrigue the masses since the 1960s, Hadfield, 56, has published two books since he landed. His Major Tom has been viewed more than 27m times.

The American artist Randall Munroe knows something, too, about capturing an audience in the age of the fast and fickle online share. Munroe's webcomics, produced under the banner of xkcd and promising "romance, sarcasm, math and language", have for years been a part of the social media fabric.

Here's what happens when they meet and have a conversation

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tt0454848 writes:

Two web browser extensions that use content delivery networks (CDNs) in entirely opposite ways:

A research group at UMass Amherst has developed the CacheBrowser extension to circumvent the great firewall of China. In a nutshell, it works for websites that are hosted on CDNs like akamai and cloudfare. When you access a blocked site, CacheBrowser goes directly to the CDN and pulls a copy from there via SSL. The key is that the data is retrieved via SSL so the chinese censors are unable to distinguish between CDN access to blocked websites and CDN access to permitted websites. They are playing a game of chicken with China's censors. If China wants to block those websites it must block all websites using that CDN, the overwhelming majority of which are not on the censor list.

The yin to CacheBrowser's yang is the Decentraleyes firefox extension. Nearly every large website, and many small ones, use cross-site includes to pull javascript libraries like jquery, googleapis, cloudfare, etc from a CDN. That enables the CDN to track every page a browser loads from those websites. Decentraleyes helps the user go black by redirecting those CDN accesses to local copies of the libraries, making the user invisible to the CDN's tracking systems.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This is about my homebuilt TTL computer processor. TTL stands for "transistor-transistor logic" and refers to a set of first-generation integrated circuits (I.C.'s) that contain simple logic gates, buffers, a binary adder, flip-flops, registers, decoders, multiplexors etc. These series 7400 I.C.'s are carefully designed so they can be connected together in patterns to make larger logic circuits. I built a computer central processing unit (CPU) of my own design out of these I.C.s.

I am not an engineer or computer scientist. I am a computer hobbyist. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80. I learned BASIC, and later Z-80 assembly language. Using the BASIC PEEK and POKE statements I wrote simple assembly language programs on this little machine. Later, I wrote some simple video games on a [Tandy] TRS-80.

I was interested in how these machines worked on the electronic level, so I bought a Radio Shack Digital Logic Learning Lab, a kit with a single 7400 I.C. (four NAND gates) and various light-emitting diodes, resistors and capacitors. I got a good feel for how a digital I.C. works with this inexpensive kit. I read some books about building your own 8-bit computer, and tried it using a Z-80 processor. My first attempt was a complete failure because I did not have the ability to test the system. I built it, it didn't work, and that was that. Next time, I made sure that I designed and built the computer in such a way that I would know why it did not work. One must expect that after making several hundred connections, one will get some wrong, and one must be able to correct one's mistakes.

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takyon writes:

Archaeologists have found evidence of a hidden chamber in King Tutankhamun's tomb:

Egyptian officials now say they are "90% sure" that there is a hidden chamber in King Tutankhamun's tomb. The Antiquities Ministry said it had carried out scans to gather more information about the theory. Archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes Tutankhamun's remains may have been rushed into an outer chamber of what was originally Queen Nefertiti's tomb. The remains of Tutankhamun, who may have been her son, were found in 1922. He died 3,000 years ago aged 19.

"Clearly it does look from the radar evidence as if the tomb continues, as I have predicted," Mr Reeves said at a press conference with the Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damati on Saturday, AFP reports. "The radar, behind the north wall [of Tutankhamun's burial chamber] seems pretty clear. If I am right it is a continuation - corridor continuation - of the tomb, which will end in another burial chamber," he said.

Mr Damati said the scans would now be sent to Japan for further analysis. Dr Reeves developed his theory after the Spanish artistic and preservation specialists, Factum Arte, were commissioned to produce detailed scans of Tutankhamun's tomb. [...] While assessing the scans last February, Dr Reeves spotted what he believed were marks indicating where two doorways used to be. The archaeologist from the University of Arizona says he believes Nefertiti may lie inside.

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hubie writes:

The primary method for investigating where the water on Earth comes from is by measuring the deuterium to hydrogen (D/H) ratio of water from different sources. The problem with measuring that ratio in water on Earth is that almost all water that is readily available has been recycled and mixed with materials on the Earth surface or atmosphere. Recent lava flows in Canada and Iceland brought primordial material up from deep within the Earth. Researchers measured the D/H ratio of water trapped in this material and found the D/H ratio to be lower than anything else measured apart from the Sun. This suggests that this water did not come from comets nor meteorites, but from the dust cloud from which the Earth formed (from the research paper summary):

Where did Earth's water come from? Lavas erupting on Baffin Island, Canada, tap a part of Earth's mantle isolated from convective mixing. Hallis et al. studied hydrogen isotopes in the lavas that help to "fingerprint" the origin of water from what could be a primordial reservoir. The isotope ratios for the Baffin Island basalt lavas suggest a pre-solar origin of water in Earth, probably delivered by adsorption onto dust grains.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A new method of delivering data, which uses the visible spectrum rather than radio waves, has been tested in a working office.

Li-fi can deliver internet access 100 times faster than traditional wi-fi, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second).

It requires a light source, such as a standard LED bulb, an internet connection and a photo detector.

It was tested this week by Estonian start-up Velmenni, in Tallinn.

Velmenni used a li-fi-enabled light bulb to transmit data at speeds of 1Gbps. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of up to 224Gbps.

It was tested in an office, to allow workers to access the internet and in an industrial space, where it provided a smart lighting solution.

It doesn't penetrate walls, which can be a good thing where too many wi-fi nodes compete.

[ Editor's note: The article says Estonia, the apparently official website lists a contact address in India, as does public information about the CEO. ]

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HughPickens.com writes:

Peter Thiel writes in the NYT that what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. "But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie "The China Syndrome," about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled," says Thiel. "If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago. Instead, we went in reverse."

According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "Supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."

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patella.whack writes:

The largest animal cloning factory in the world is now likely underway in China —

a path "no one has ever travelled" in cattle cloning and meeting the country's skyrocketing demand for beef. The projected 14,000-square-meter factory will be built and operated by Boyalife, which is allotting 200 million yuan ($313 million) for the project.

They are hoping at the moment to produce 100,000 cow embryos annually and to contribute five percent of China's premium cattle.

"We are building something that has not existed in the past," said Xu in an interview.

Boyalife scientists will also explore cloning champion racehorses as well as sniffer dogs that can assist in rescue operations or detect illegal drugs. Xu added that helping save critically endangered species is another one of their targets.

"This is going to change our world and our lives," the CEO said of the factory, which is among the latest moves of China to lead in cloning technology worldwide.

Uh huh. Ostensibly for cattle, racehorses, crime-fighting canines, and environmental responsibility. And humans too, as reported by the telegraph earlier this year.

China has been ordered to 'rein in' scientists who have edited the DNA of human embryos for the first time, a practice banned in Europe.

In a world's first, researchers at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou confirmed they had engineered embryos to modify the gene responsible for the fatal blood disorder thalassaemia.

The team, led by Junjiu Huang attempted to head off fears of eugenics by claiming the embryos were 'non-viable' and could never had become babies.

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