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Phoenix666 writes:

A world scientific body says Japanese scientists have met the criteria for naming a new element, the synthetic highly radioactive element 113.

The U.S.-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry said Thursday that researchers at the Riken institute had conclusively identified and earned the right to name the element. It provisionally was named ununtrium. The new name wasn't immediately disclosed.

A joint working group of the IUPAC and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics were due to announce decisions on naming rights to elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 in January.

Element 113 sits between copernicium and flerovium on the periodic table. A joint team of scientists in Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. also were vying for naming rights for 113.

Hyakujyusan-ium?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A new history shatters myths about an extraordinary nation.

Which is the largest nation in Europe to lack a state of its own? The Catalans? The Walloons? Wrong and wrong. It is the English: population 50 million-plus, all of them under the government of a multinational entity, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Until recently, nobody worried much about the statelessness of the English. After all, they dominated not only the U.K., but also for much of the past 300 years a vast global empire. The empire is gone, but its legacy of language and law and political systems endures from California to Calcutta.

Suddenly, though, the future of England has become a very live question. Since the late 1990s, Scotland has obtained more autonomy for itself. Nearly 45 percent of Scots voted for outright independence in 2014. And Scotland's governing nationalists are weighing a second try if reelected in 2016. Meanwhile, the U.K. as a whole faces a referendum on exiting the European Union that could trigger a different constitutional crisis if England votes narrowly in favor of leaving the EU, but is kept in Europe by Scottish, Irish, and Welsh votes. Such an outcome could prod the English to follow the Scots in rethinking the United Kingdom.

It's quite imaginable that sometime within the next U.S. presidential term, England could under one scenario or another part ways from Scotland and emerge as a self-governing entity (albeit with Wales and a sliver of Ireland still attached) for the first time since Shakespeare started his writing career.

Interesting article for history buffs and Anglophiles.

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Phoenix666 writes:

People with type 1 diabetes have to live with daily injections of insulin. As research progresses in this field, scientists are looking into new methods that can free, or at least partially free, patients from regular doses. One such method is pancreatic islet transplantation, something that researchers at Okinawa Institute of Technology and Science Graduate University (OIST) claim they have improved.

Current procedures involve injecting the insulin-producing islets into the liver. After an adaptation period, the cells will start producing enough insulin for the patient. The technique has advanced in recent years, but one challenging issue is the collection, preservation, and transportation of those cells, which can be damaged by sharp ice crystals during freezing and thawing.

Led by Professor Amy Shen, head of the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at OIST, the research team, in collaboration with the University of Washington and Wuhan University of Technology, has developed a new cryopreservation method that preserves the cells without damage and makes it easier to assess their viability in real time.

The islets are encapsulated in hydrogel made from alginate, a polymer extracted from seaweed. The strong bond between water molecules and hydrogen networks prevent the formation of ice and so protects the cells from damage. As a consequence, the need for cryoprotectants, anti-freeze materials than can be toxic in higher concentrations, is reduced.

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takyon writes:

Reuters reports that a nearby burning building only added to the festive atmosphere at a New Year's Eve celebration at the world's tallest building. The Address Downtown Dubai is merely Dubai's 19th tallest building:

Fire engulfed a 63-storey skyscraper in Dubai on Thursday night, but with the block evacuated and only minor injuries reported authorities went ahead with a New Year's fireworks display at the world's tallest building a few hundred meters away. Tongues of flame shot skywards from one side of the luxury Address Downtown Dubai hotel and residential block, which stands across a plaza from the 160-storey Burj Khalifa tower where people had gathered for fireworks to mark the New Year.

Television pictures showed pieces of blazing debris raining down from The Address as evacuated occupants hurried away from the building, some running.

"We came out on my balcony to look at the Burj. All the buildings around here had fireworks prepped on the roof," Paul Mithun, a U.S. consultant in downtown Dubai said. "We were like, huh, that looks like a little Olympic torch off in the distance. We thought someone lit fireworks. In under two minutes, the fire went up two-thirds of the length of the hotel. I watched the whole thing. It was real bad."

But as midnight struck, with the Address building continuing to burn, onlookers cheered as a swirling mass of multicoloured fireworks enveloped the Burj Khalifa.

The Dubai government's media office said the Address blaze was 90 percent under control. Police chief Major General Khamis Matar told Al Arabiya television: "All residents of the hotel were evacuated and there are 14 injured, with light injuries."

CNN.

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martyb and Phoenix666 both wrote in:

Glenn Greenwald reports in The Intercept on how very differently politicians react when they find their own communications have been monitored by the NSA or CIA. Greenwald notes the change in position for: Pete Hoekstra (GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee), Jane Harman (former ranking Democratic member on the House Intelligence Committee), and Senator Dianne Feinstein (chairperson of the Select Committee on Intelligence since 2009).

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA under President Obama targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top aides for surveillance. In the process, the agency ended up eavesdropping on "the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups" about how to sabotage the Iran Deal. All sorts of people who spent many years cheering for and defending the NSA and its programs of mass surveillance are suddenly indignant now that they know the eavesdropping included them and their American and Israeli friends rather than just ordinary people.

The long-time GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and unyielding NSA defender Pete Hoekstra last night was truly indignant to learn of this surveillance:

WSJ report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power.

— Pete Hoekstra (@petehoekstra) December 30, 2015

NSA and Obama officials need to be investigated and prosecuted if any truth to WSJ reports. NSA loses all credibility. Scary.

— Pete Hoekstra (@petehoekstra) December 30, 2015

In January 2014, I debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy concerns I was invoking. "Spying is a matter of fact," he scoffed. As Andrew Krietz, the journalist who covered that debate, reported, Hoekstra "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they've been spied on because they, too, gather information" — referring to anger from German and Brazilian leaders. As TechDirt noted, "Hoekstra attacked a bill called the RESTORE Act, that would have granted a tiny bit more oversight over situations where (you guessed it) the NSA was collecting information on Americans."

But all that, of course, was before Hoekstra knew that he and his Israeli friends were swept up in the spying of which he was so fond. Now that he knows that it is his privacy and those of his comrades that has been invaded, he is no longer cavalier about it. In fact, he's so furious that this long-time NSA cheerleader is actually calling for the criminal prosecution of the NSA and Obama officials for the crime of spying on him and his friends.

This pattern — whereby political officials who are vehement supporters of the Surveillance State transform overnight into crusading privacy advocates once they learn that they themselves have been spied on — is one that has repeated itself over and over. It has been seen many times as part of the Snowden revelations, but also well before that.

If these politicians have had a change of heart, how can others become persuaded?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Compared to the hectic rush of our bipedal world, a plant's life may appear an oasis of tranquility. But look a little closer. The voracious appetites of pests put plants under constant stress: They have to fight just to stay alive.

And fight they do. Far from being passive victims, plants have evolved potent defenses: chemical compounds that serve as toxins, signal an escalating attack, and solicit help from unlikely allies.

However, all of this security comes at a cost: energy and other resources that plants could otherwise use for growth and repair. So to balance the budget, plants have to be selective about how and when to deploy their chemical arsenal. Here are five tactics they've developed to ward off their insect foes without sacrificing their own wellbeing.

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

The German company Sonnenbatterie has launched a trading platform for distributed renewable energy by offering a way for owners of small solar and wind generation capacity to buy and sell power across the utility grid.

The trading system, which will launch in early 2016, is available via subscription to anyone on the German grid. The system will give solar owners an alternative revenue stream when they produce more power than they can use, but the company's ambition is to establish a virtual alternative to the utility grid. Sonnenbatterie CEO Boris von Bormann calls it the "Airbnb of energy," with community members trading energy as their needs and grid conditions warrant.

Sonnenbatterie's platform joins a handful of other programs for trading distributed energy. The Dutch platform Vandebron, for example, has more than 38,000 subscribers. Consumers pay a monthly fee to contract directly with suppliers of clean energy for a set amount of power over a set amount of time. Consumers get to choose their specific energy supplier; producers get to name their price.

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mendax writes:

The New York Times ran a story yesterday about an example of elusive giant squid, complete with video, having been spotted alive in Toyama Bay off the coast of Japan:

They can be as big as a bus, or even bigger, and yet the elusive giant squid has hardly been spotted swimming alive in the ocean. [...]

The last time a giant squid was captured on video, though less vividly so, was during a scientific expedition in 2012. Photos of the creature in the wild were captured for the first time in 2005 by Japanese researchers, stirring excitement among those who had long sought to glimpse a giant squid in its natural habitat.

"This has been a mystery for a thousand years," Richard Ellis, author of "Monsters of the Sea," said of the photographs at the time. "Nobody knew what they looked like in the wild."

The original CNN story can be found here.

Hopefully, this noble creature is not turned into sashimi.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Emma Roller writes at The New York Times that 2015 was the Year of Trump because he is the perfect candidate for our viral age and Trump's success tells us a lot about the nature of what goes viral and how it reflects our beliefs and our fears. According to Roller, Trump has more Facebook likes and Twitter followers than any other candidate in the field because if we think about a given news story as a disease waiting to be passed along, human emotion is its most common vector.

Richard L. Rapson, a professor of psychological history at the University of Hawaii, has studied virality through the lens of emotional contagion and has found that the most shareable moments come when a story lights up the deepest recesses of our minds. "Hate, fear of the other, anger — they come directly from the nonconscious, and that's why they're so easy to evoke," says Rapson. So when Trump says that Mexicans are rapists and killers, or that the government should register Muslims in the United States in a mandatory database system, people hit the share button. "And as long as stories about Mr. Trump are receiving as many eyeballs as possible," says Roller, "it doesn't really matter if people are reacting negatively to him. In fact, it probably helps his popularity."

That Trump is both volatile in nature and allergic to nuance is part of his viral success. Humans use mental shortcuts to process information quickly while conserving brain power. This means that we often don't think critically about the information we're receiving before sharing it with others. Trump is the living embodiment of the saying "All publicity is good publicity." "The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you," wrote Trump in 1987. "Even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business." According to Roller, Trump has no qualms about looking or sounding "unpresidential" — hence the tacky hats, Twitter rants and debate performances worthy of W.W.E. "SmackDown.' "It's almost as if he understood the concept of Internet virality before a single cat ever LOLed."

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martyb writes:

The Register is reporting:

Microsoft will warn email and OneDrive users if it detects apparent attempts by governments to hack into their accounts.

[...] Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo already offer similar government hacker alert systems to the one just introduced by Microsoft. Alerts are far from rare. Google, for example, reportedly tells tens of thousands of users every few months that they've been targeted by foreign spooks.

Redmond's alerting system has raised issues about US data breach disclosure laws. "If China had stolen Hotmail users' passwords, Microsoft would have had to tell users," Christopher Soghoian, a principal technologist at the ACLU, stated in an update to his personal Twitter account But *private emails* are not considered PII [personally identifiable information]."

Soghoian went on to take issue with Microsoft's advice about changing passwords frequently. Current best practice, advocated by most but not all security pros, is to use strong passwords together with a password manager. Changing passwords frequently tends to encourage the use of easier to remember passwords, which are easier for hackers of all stripes to guess.

The BBC reports: Microsoft to warn of nation-state hacks:

[More after the break.]

mendax writes:

Ars Technica has a story about the Electronic Freedom Foundation's latest "Stupid Patent of the Month" award:

The chosen patent (PDF), numbered D554,140, would seem to be one of those things that's so simple it raises some basic philosophical questions about the patent system. That's because it's just a slider, in the bottom-right corner of a window, with a plus sign at one end and a minus sign at the other. That's it. [...]

And Microsoft has put the '140 patent into action, using it to sue Corel Software on December 18. In their complaint (PDF), Microsoft lawyers say that software like Corel Write, Corel Calculate, and Corel Show infringe nine Microsoft patents, of which four (including the slider bar) are design patents.

Microsoft's recent lawsuit is meant counter Corel's earlier one. Corel, which bought WordPerfect from Novell in 1996, sued Microsoft in July, saying that Microsoft Preview infringed on several Corel patents. Like many patent cases, Corel's complaint can be summarized as "we lost, but it's someone else's fault." Corel lawyers write that "WordPerfect has been reduced to minimal market share as a result of Microsoft's aggressive actions."

One wonders who is working in the patent office that would have issued such a nonsense patent.

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martyb writes:

The Conversation has a story about five key findings from 15 years of the International Space Station:

1. The fragility of the human body — there is considerable loss of strength and bone mass without intervention. Mitigating this is key to making it possible to have manned trips to mars.

2. Interplanetary contamination — spores of Bacillus subtilis were exposed to space upon the ISS (but shielded from solar UV radiation). "The space vacuum and temperature extremes alone were not enough to kill them off."

3. Growing crystals for medicine — "Crystals in a microgravity environment may be grown to much larger sizes than on Earth, enabling easier analysis of their micro-structure. Protein crystals grown on the ISS are being used in the development of new drugs for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cancer."

4. Cosmic rays and dark matter — early results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) support the theory that a halo of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way.

5. Efficient combustion — flames burn more efficiently in space with much less soot produced. Understanding this may lead to more efficient combustion in vehicles.

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frojack writes:

According to their Blog SpiderOak ditched Google Analytics for their website a few months back, in favor of their own home grown analytic software running on their own servers. They were also testing Google AdWords, which inserts small ads in pages, for which Spideroak would pay by the click.

One thing they noticed was that their Google AdWords click counts didn't seem to agree with their own analytics and web logs. They were getting billed for clicks that never did arrive at their servers.

Their ads were all in English, but their clicks were from non English speaking countries.

Further when they started comparing the click data from Google to their own analytics they found that half those clicks never arrived at Spideroak servers:

What experiences have other Soylentils had with web advertising that seemed a little questionable?

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HughPickens.com writes:

Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on the topic of open collaboration systems about how Wikipedia's reaction to its popularity is causing its decline (pdf).

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia's primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community's formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.

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mendax writes:

El Reg is reporting that nature will be giving many of us living northerly climes a fireworks show:

A major eruption from the surface of the Sun could give a spectacular display of the aurora borealis in time for New Year's festivities.

At 1245 UTC (0445 PT) on 28 December our star belched out a coronal mass ejection from the surface in our direction. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that a G3-class solar storm will hit us on 30 and 31 December, and the delightful lighting effects this will cause might be seen as far south as California.

Enjoy!

[Seeing the 'Northern Lights' is one of the top ten things I have ever experienced — if conditions are at all favorable in your area, I cannot too highly recommend watching. I'd expect the 'Southern Lights' will also be visible. Best viewing is generally after midnight, local time. -Ed.]

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