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Runaway1956 writes in with an article from the Washington Post:

On Monday night, Donald Trump made his latest polarizing comment, saying it was "too disgusting" to talk about Hillary Clinton's use of the bathroom during the last Democratic debate and that she had got "schlonged" by Barack Obama when she lost to him in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Trump was surely talking off-the-cuff in his usual style — and the comments were criticized as offensive and sexist — but it was another example of his mastery in exploiting the psychological biases of conservatives who see much to dislike in today's society and express support for Trump in the polls.

In fact, a growing mass of academic research has shown that conservatives have a particular revulsion to "disgusting" images. In this line of thinking, Trump's decision to describe Clinton, one of the most disliked people by conservatives, as a "disgusting" figure would have been an especially powerful way to rile up his supporters.

The research — still debated — suggests that psychological and even biological traits divide people politically, both in the United States and abroad. These are attributes that may help explain why Trump has been so popular among a segment of the electorate, confounding political and media elites.

Some of the recent research has been most pronounced evaluating the differing responses of conservatives and liberals to "disgusting" or "negative" images. Several studies have shown that conservatives are far more likely to have strong reactions to these images or situations than moderates or liberals are. Researchers have also suggested that conservatives are more likely to respond negatively to threats or be prone to believe conspiracies, perhaps helping explain why Trump's calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States or build a wall at the southern border have resonated with many voters.

Phoenix666 writes in about a variety of rice created using a technique called "Client Oriented Breeding":

The rice, Ashoka 200F, was developed for resource-poor farmers, using a new method of plant breeding. Instead of conventional plant breeding, when thousands of plants are crossed in the hope of finding beneficial traits, fewer plants are crossed, but carefully selected for desired characteristics, such as drought tolerance and a good yield. The pioneering plant breeding method, called Client Oriented Breeding also differs from conventional commercial development of new crop strains, as it involves the growers in the selection of plant traits which will be important to them, such as good taste, short cooking time and good straw for fodder.

"The figures are quite staggering," explains Prof Witcombe. "We estimate that around a million smallholders are growing formally released Ashoka, bringing in a benefit of £12 million a year to their households. Added to that, many farmers are saving and sharing their own seeds.

"Our evidence shows that over 80% of farmers surveyed said that the rice they were growing was lasting around a month longer than previously- saving them a month's purchase of rice. Ashoka's early and large crop provides food for the 'hungry season- as well as being able to supply fodder for animals. Farmers with surplus grain for sale were also able to sell 45% more grain, and gain a higher price as it's a higher quality grain."

Often we're captivated by physicists and chemists, the flashier disciplines, but if you want to use science to make the world a better place for the most people possible, perhaps figuring out how to feed them is the way to go. Norman Borlaug, for example, was credited from saving a billion people from starvation.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia have drawn inspiration from the way kestrels hover above their prey to develop an autonomous fixed-wing micro air vehicle (MAV) that can gain height from convenient updrafts.

The results are published today, Friday 18th December, in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

"It's long been known the birds take advantage of upward air currents to save energy when flying" explains Alex Fisher, a lead author of the paper. "This 'boost' of upward-moving air can be found when the wind hits a large obstacle, like a cliff or mountain range, and to a smaller extent close to man-made obstacles like buildings."

"We envisage that in the future, MAVs will be used for many tasks in urban environments, such as delivering packages, performing surveillance, and search and rescue" he continues. "Using these updrafts would make them more efficient and therefore extend their working range."

Emulating avian orographic soaring with a small autonomous glider (DOI: 10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016002)

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jdavidb writes:

A second season has been announced for The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon original streaming series based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. Amazon released the pilot of the series in January of this year and it quickly became Amazon's most-watched pilot ever, leading to greenlighting for nine additional first season episodes which were released in November.

Both the book and the movie take place in an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany developed the atomic bomb and the Axis powers won World War II. It's 1962, and the United States has been carved up into a Nazi-ruled regime in the east, a Japan-ruled regime in the west, and a central neutral zone. Germany and Japan are still officially allies, but are beginning to look at each other warily and war between them is becoming a possibility. Meanwhile, a contraband film called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (modified from a contraband novel in the original book) circulates which details another possible reality in which the Axis did not win the war.

My understanding is that production for the first season was expensive in terms on money, resources, effort, and time, so I expect it will be awhile before the second season is available. If the second season is like the first, it will be well-worth the wait, and it will also be over all too soon, as ten episodes don't take very long to watch when the show is this gripping.

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takyon writes:

The Register reports on yet another Internet-connected industrial control system hack that has come to light:

Iranian hackers penetrated the online control system of a New York dam in 2013, according to reports, and poked around inside the system.

The Wall Street Journal reported that hackers gained access to the dam through a cellular modem, according to an unclassified Homeland Security summary of the case. Two sources said the summary refers to the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small facility 20 miles outside of New York. They said the hackers didn't take control of the dam but probed the system, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Department of Homeland Security has declined to comment on the incident. US intelligence agencies noticed the intrusion as they monitored computers they believed were linked to Iranian hackers targeting American firms, according to people familiar with the matter. The analysts detected a machine that was crawling the internet for vulnerable US industrial-control systems. The hackers appeared to be focusing on certain internet addresses, according to the people. The US has the highest number of industrial-control systems connected to the internet in the world, with 57,000 systems, according to researchers at Shodan.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg that the California Department of Motor Vehicles has proposed new rules for driverless cars that would prohibit cars without a steering wheel or a brake pedal -- or a human driver ready to take the wheel, an enormous setback for Google's program, which is evolving toward smaller, lower-speed vehicles with none of these things. There are basically two ways to innovate toward a "Level Four" truly autonomous car. The first way is to innovate system by system, starting with a car that can handle some tasks on its own (like cruise control), and eventually arriving at a car that can handle all of them. In between, the car will be doing a lot of the driving, but a human will be standing by, ready to take over if needed. This is the approach most automakers have chosen. But there's a big problem with this approach.: the lag between when the car realizes it can't handle a problem, and when the human can grab the wheel. Unfortunately, when the car has gotten into trouble is probably the exact moment when a lag in reaction time is most problematic.

Google is moving toward the other approach: Take the driver out of the loop entirely. You start at Level Four automation, but slow and safe and in a limited range. According to McArdle Google's driverless cars are now essentially well-padded golf carts. "That has some drawbacks, since you can't go very far very fast. But it does let you completely route around the safety issues that are created by mostly autonomous systems," says McArdle. " As the company works out the bugs on driverless cars, it can gradually scale them up in speed and size, and expand their range." Unfortunately California's new rules force Google to put wheels and brakes back into its cars reintroducing the very problems of human error and folly that Google is trying to engineer away. "Google can try to find a state with a more progress-friendly DMV, of course. But the company has already done an immense amount of work mapping the area around Mountain View. Letting that work go to waste because the government of California just can't get past the old way of doing things would be a shame."

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frojack writes:

We add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion. About 40% of this carbon stays in the atmosphere and roughly 30% enters the ocean, and we are not too sure where all the rest goes.

Most scientists thought the remaining carbon was taken up by plants, but measurements show plants don't absorb all of the remaining 30% of carbon we generate.

Lots of theories have been expounded about where the leftover carbon is being stored.

A study published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests some of this carbon may be disappearing underneath the world's deserts – a process exacerbated by irrigation, beginning as recently as 2000 years ago.

Researchers studying the Tarim Basin in China, found that around 20 billion metric tons of carbon is stored underneath the desert, dissolved in an aquifer that contains roughly ten times the amount of water held in the Great Lakes.

This is a carbon sink that is not observable in plant or soil, with dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) leached from irrigated arid land and deposited in the saline/alkaline aquifers under bare deserts. For the most part, this is a one way trip for the carbon. No mechanism has been identified for return to the surface or the atmosphere.

Such carbon sinks formed during groundwater recharge has been reported before. But never on this scale.
The amount of dissolved inorganic carbon stored is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude higher than previously thought.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

After a three-year campaign, the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] has cleared the way for a new HTTP status code to reflect online censorship.

The new code--451--is in honor of Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451 in which books are banned and any found are burned.

The idea is that, rather than a web server, proxy, or some other system returning a 403 code to a browser when information is blocked--i.e. you are not authorized to see it--the 451 status code will mean "unavailable for legal reasons." Specifically, according to a draft RFC:

This status code indicates that the server is denying access to the resource as a consequence of a legal demand.

The server in question might not be an origin server. This type of legal demand typically most directly affects the operations of ISPs and search engines.

The IETF published the proposal late last week; this should encourage some people to start using it early. There will be a few more steps before it becomes official. It was first proposed back in June 2012 when British ISPs started being forced to block The Pirate Bay.

That sparked a blog post[1] that proposed a special censorship code, and in turn a campaign to make it happen.

In a post on Friday,[2] the chairman of the relevant working group, Mark Nottingham, revealed why it had taken so long to get approval: because the powers that be at the IETF were not persuaded is was a good use of a limited number of status codes.

[1] I remember that article being the base for a story on the other site (the week Ray Bradbury died).
[2] I got a 408 error. Google cache

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Phoenix666 writes:

Humans learn to very quickly identify complex objects and variations of them. We generally recognize an "A" no matter what the font, texture or background, for example, or the face of a coworker even if she puts on a hat or changes her hairstyle. We also can identify an object when just a portion is visible, such as the corner of a bed or the hinge of a door. But how? Are there simple techniques that humans use across diverse tasks? And can such techniques be computationally replicated to improve computer vision, machine learning or robotic performance?

Researchers at Georgia Tech discovered that humans can categorize data using less than 1 percent of the original information, and validated an algorithm to explain human learning -- a method that also can be used for machine learning, data analysis and computer vision.

"How do we make sense of so much data around us, of so many different types, so quickly and robustly?" said Santosh Vempala, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of four researchers on the project. "At a fundamental level, how do humans begin to do that? It's a computational problem."

[...] "This fascinating paper introduces a localized random projection[*] that compresses images while still making it possible for humans and machines to distinguish broad categories," said Sanjoy Dasgupta, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California San Diego and an expert on machine learning and random projection. "It is a creative combination of insights from geometry, neural computation, and machine learning."

Although researchers cannot definitively claim that the human brain actually engages in random projection, the results support the notion that random projection is a plausible explanation, the authors conclude. In addition, it suggests a very useful technique for machine learning: large data is a formidable challenge today, and random projection is one way to make data manageable without losing essential content, at least for basic tasks such as categorization and decision making.

[*] See: random projection.

They were able to replicate human levels of performance.

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Phoenix666 writes:

From Roman gladiatorial combat to Egyptian animal mummies, capturing and manipulating wild carnivores has long been a way for humans to demonstrate state or individual power. Historians and scientists alike have attempted to determine when humans first began to use carnivores to establish their place on the social ladder, one of the earliest examples being Moctezuma's 14th century zoo at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. A recent PLOS ONE study, however, reveals evidence from the ruins of the Mexican city of Teotihuacan that may push back the date of captivating carnivores by 1000 years.

Between the first and sixth centuries A.D., Teotihuacan was one of the largest and most powerful urban cities in Mesoamerica and was home to at least 25,000 people. When the city reached the height of its influence around 1300-1500 A.D., its architects designed massive temples to show off the city's power. The ruins of three of these incredible temples still stand: the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Pyramid of the Moon.

During excavations from 1998-2004, the authors of this study found rare artifacts and human and animal remains in chambers in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The authors focused the present study on the 194 animal remains, as they are evidence of one of the largest known animal sacrifices in Mesoamerica.

Of particular interest to the authors were the remains of carnivores like wolves, eagles, jaguars, and pumas, as we have little information about how humans related to carnivores prior to Montezuma's zoo in Tenochtitlan. Using isotope analysis and visual inspection of the bones, the authors were able to draw possible conclusions about the relationship between the carnivores in the chamber and the ancient inhabitants of Teotihuacan.

Were ancient Mayan heretics thrown to the jaguars?

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takyon writes:

Sanrio, which owns the $5 billion a year Hello Kitty merchandise empire, has fallen victim to a hack of SanrioTown.com, an online community for fans of Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters. Data from users of SanrioTown and other portals including "first and last names, [birthday], gender, country of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes, [and] password hint questions" were leaked to the Web and discovered by security researcher Chris Vickery.

The breach is reminiscent of the recent VTech data breach that exposed up to 6.4 million children. A UK man was arrested over the breach last week. Children are reportedly better targets for identity theft due to their blank credit histories, although it is currently unclear how many users of Sanrio sites were children.

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takyon writes:

Apple's CEO Tim Cook was interviewed by Charlie Rose for 60 Minutes. The interview was full of softball questions but some parts stand out, such as Cook's claim that vocational skills are the reason Apple's products are made in China. Taxation and other issues also popped up:

Earlier in the interview, the conversation heated up just a bit when the subject turned to allegations that Apple is a "tax avoider" and is "engaged in a sophisticated scheme" to shelter the $74 billion in revenue parked overseas.

"That is total political crap," Cook fired back. He said he'd "love to bring it home" but doesn't because "it would cost me 40%... and I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do. This is a tax code, Charlie, that was made for the industrial age, not the digital age. It's backwards. It's awful for America. It should have been fixed many years ago. It's past time to get it done."

From The Register:

The program did at least ask Cook about encryption, a topic on which the CEO opined that "I don't believe that the tradeoff here is privacy versus national security."

Asked if the tradeoff is "versus security" Cook replied "I think that's an overly simplistic view. We're America. We should have both." The CEO also re-iterated his stance that Apple will always comply with warrants but is happy for those requests to be futile if it protects customers' health, financial and other personal information.

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cmn32480 writes:

From Gizmodo:

On Monday, the FAA will launch its online registry for drone operators with the aim of collecting personal information from the owners of these unmanned aircraft. But according to a report from Forbes, all those names and addresses will eventually be publicly available. Which seems... kinda scary?

Over at Forbes, John Goglia says he's been poking the FAA for answers ever since the FAQ about registration went up. Of particular concern are two contradictory statements from the FAA and DOT. The FAA says only their agency and a contractor will have access to the personal information collected. The DOT says that all information regarding registered aircraft must be made publicly available. So Goglia emailed the FAA until he got this answer:

"Until the drone registry system is modified, the FAA will not release names and address. When the drone registry system is modified to permit public searches of registration numbers, names and addresses will be revealed through those searches."

To me, despite the fact that I don't have a drone (nor do I plan on getting one), this is a very scary slippery slope that we are running down. Today it is a publicly searchable drone registry, what comes next? That I own a gun? My tax returns? How I voted in the last few elections? My medical history?

While I can see the want to keep tabs on drones that are able to carry cameras, and there are tremendous privacy concerns about it, having a database like this be publicly searchable is a VERY frightening prospect.

Original Submission

Landslide, Explosion Strike Shenzhen

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In Shenzhen (which lies directly north of Hong Kong), a mound of soil and construction waste, piled against the side of a hill, gave way on Sunday. Official reports say that 91 people are missing after the disaster. At least 33 buildings were damaged.

A major gas pipeline in the area exploded at around the same time. The local government attributed the explosion to the landslide.

• Channel News Asia
• South China Morning Post
• NBC News
• Telegraph
• Bloomberg
• Reuters (video without narration)
• New York Times
• BBC
• China Economic Review
• iCrossChina
• CNN

[More After the Break]

Falcon 9 Stage 1 successful landing

e_armadillo writes:

I just watched the live stream at http://www.spacex.com/, and they did it! Elon is the man!

SpaceX Succeeds in Landing Booster

J053 writes:

SpaceX has successfully launched their upgraded Falcon-9 rocket, returned and successfully landed the booster stage (on land!), and deployed a constellation of 11 Orbcomm satellites.

SpaceX Just Landed a Rocket for the First Time

martyb writes:

Wired is reporting that SpaceX Just Landed a Rocket for the First Time:

They stuck the landing! For the first time ever, SpaceX has landed a booster after sending its payload into orbit—on the ground.

Over the past year, SpaceX has tried and failed to land the first-stage booster of its Falcon 9 rocket twice on a drone barge in the ocean. (And on its third try, the rocket blew up on launch, which, yeah.) This time, SpaceX managed to land its rocket on a landing pad on Cape Canaveral, Florida. Being able to reuse the booster could help cut launch costs in the future.

Also, SpaceX's YouTube channel posted a 56-minute video: "ORBCOMM-2 Full Launch Webcast by SpaceX".

SpaceX Stage 1 Booster Landed Successfully

el_oscuro writes:

Elon Musk's SpaceX not only blasted 11 satellites to orbit on Monday, but also brought its towering first-stage booster back down, with a historic landing at a pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

It was the company's first launch since its rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded on June 28.

The full video is available http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-return-to-flight-20151221-story.html

The launch is at about 32 minutes in, and the booster lands at about 42 minutes.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Guests at several amusement parks in the United States will now be checked for weapons such as guns or bombs as they arrive, with several theme parks beginning the inspections on Thursday, December 17. Some operators cited holidays as the reason for the new procedures.

Universal Studios Hollywood, which has used metal detectors at its entrances during special events, has begun a "test" during which it is using them every day. Universal Orlando is using metal-detecting wands.

Disneyland has begun using metal detectors, as well as dogs trained to sniff for explosives. Toy guns are now banned in the park and are no longer being sold there. Costumes and masks are now prohibited for visitors 14 years of age or older. Walt Disney World has begun using metal detectors at its four parks in Orlando, Florida.

SeaWorld Orlando has begun using metal-detecting wands. The company said it is "enhancing security measures at all [its] parks for the busy holiday season."

Legoland in San Diego said it is "implementing additional security measures in preparation for [the] busy holiday season."

sources:

• WOFL-TV (Orlando, Florida)
• Orlando Sentinel
• KUSI-TV (San Diego)
• OC Register
• Metro
• NBC San Diego

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The email that shut down Los Angeles schools on Tuesday [December 15, 2015] came from an email host linked to 8chan:

The "credible" threat that caused the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to close all schools on Tuesday was sent from cock.li, the "meme" e-mail host that also provides e-mail services for 8chan, the 4chan splinter site.

School officials in New York and Los Angeles reportedly both received threats from madbomber@cock.li, but only LAUSD took it seriously. All 640,000 LAUSD students were unable to attend classes on Tuesday.

Vincent Canfield, the founder of cock.li, posted a copy of the subpoena he received from a New York detective on his own website and included audio recordings of polite but brief conversations with two officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Bureau.