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HughPickens.com writes:

CNN reports that about 150 Muslims were fired from their jobs at a beef processing plant in Colorado for walking off the job to protest a workplace prayer dispute over how many Muslim workers are allowed to pray at the same time. "There are times where we have to sequence how many people are allowed to go [to pray] so that production is not slowed down," says Cargill spokesman Michael Martin adding that the company tried to work toward a solution with the workers, without success.

Ten days ago more than 200 workers walked off their jobs at Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan. Some workers later returned, but more than 100 of the Muslim employees who took part in the walkout, the majority of whom are of Somali heritage, have retained the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to represent them regarding their religious accommodation request and to work with Cargill to implement a workable policy that meets the needs of all parties. Although some circumstances surrounding the prayer dispute remain vague, Jaylani Hussein, a spokesman and executive director of the CAIR, says that a plant policy allowing short prayer breaks at various times during the day was changed, and Muslim workers were told to "go home" if they wanted to pray. "They feel missing their prayer is worse than losing their job," says Hussein. "It's like losing a blessing from God."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new contest allows the submission of selfies as well as algorithms for determining beauty:

Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets. But people don't usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world's first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.

The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways. The contest intends to have robots analyze the many age-related changes on the human face and evaluate the impact on perception of these changes by people of various ages, races, ethnicities and nationalities.

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, a consultant on the competition and CEO of Insilco Medicine, a bioinformatics company focusing on aging research, says "Recent advances in Deep Learning have made machine recognition of beauty aspects far better than ever before." [...] Part of the AI beauty contest framework is not just for humans submitting selfies, but also programmers submitting their best algorithms for machine detection of beauty. Near the bottom of the contest website is a link (pdf) for algorithm submissions that takes coders to a page saying, "Would you like to go down in history as one of the first data scientists who taught a machine to estimate human attractiveness?" In a way, this makes the contest a crowd-sourced event.

[More After the Break]

AnonTechie writes:

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the "wicked" problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. In an article [DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6499] published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot. New human computation technologies can help. Recent techniques provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs, where individual contributions can be processed by a computer and sent to the next person for improvement or analysis of a different kind. This enables the construction of more flexible collaborative environments that can better address the most challenging issues.

http://scienceblog.com/479926/human-machine-superintelligence-can-solve-worlds-dire-problems/

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Telesur reports

Venezuelan lawmakers approved [December 23] a new law that will impose stricter regulations on hybrid seeds and ban transgenic seed research. The legislative text mandates the state promotion of sustainable agriculture as the constitutional foundation of food security and rural development. [...] The seed law has the backing of campesinos and rural families and will regulate the production of hybrid seeds in Venezuela and prevent the research, production, importation, and distribution of GMO seeds.

[...] The Seed Law will also launch a National Seed System as the central body to implement the law and monitor and sanction any agricultural violations, with a focus on the protection of traditional seeds.

[...] Rural activists said the rejection of the Seed Law would have constituted a major setback for Venezuela's agricultural sector with big impacts for soil fertility, agricultural productivity, and the wellbeing of small farmers, according to [Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, the national news agency].

Venezuelan agriculture has been applauded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization for its efforts to eradicate hunger and achievements in food security and food sovereignty.

Original Submission

frojack writes:

In simple English, when you remove large bodied seed eating animals from a forest, the trees with the largest seeds are reduced over time, and that negatively affects the ability of the forest to capture and store CO2. The larger seeds tend to be produced by larger trees, and these do not spread without animal action.

Science Advances reports that:

In hardwood forests this effect is less pronounced, but in typical softwood forests in warm areas the removal of the large seed eating animals can have a relatively large effect on changing the forest structure.
This tends to reduce the number of large trees, replacing them with smaller species that rot quickly at end of life and return carbon to the environment much more quickly than large trees.

The study is a computer simulation, with no actual on the ground measurements or biological studies.

Original Submission

xpda writes:

Epigenetic drugs can modify the long term behavior of carpenter ants. Like many social insects, carpenter ants come in multiple versions of the same species. Major (larger) carpenter ants are larger ants that perform guarding and defense functions. The minor ants scout around and forage for food. The two ant types share exactly the same genome (and parents), but with very different looks and behaviors. Using epigenetic modifications, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were able to change the behavior of major ants into that of minor ants. The effect was long-term, lasting up to 50 days. Data suggest that this method might also be used to alter social interactions of vertebrates.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/slightly-creepy-experiment-with-ants-shows-that-drugs-can-permanently-alter-behavior/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

...the announcement that Springer was giving away a very large part of their catalog did not seem all that outrageous to me, how better to compete with 'free' than to slash the price to one that can't be beat.

On Hacker News two threads appeared and people wiser and smarter than me observed that this was probably a mistake. I figured that an entity the size of Springer would surely not expose their catalog like this and that there must be some master plan. Still, the 'no announcement in sight' made it a bit more strange but who knows, the Christmas Spirit might have infected some Springer executives with a sudden flash of insight into what would be the best way in which the Springer corporation could positively affect mankind. From there it would have been a short meeting with the relevant minions in order to effect the incredible reach of the company onto the devices of pretty much every earthling with even a passing interest in science and at least one common language with the publications.

The name Springer would overnight be synonymous with 'Good', 'Charitable', 'Favorite Company' and so on.

But there is a small chance it would also be linked to 'bankrupt'. And that's why, not all that long after opening up the floodgates for voracious readers the gates were closed again and we were back to $175 for a decades old text book in pdf format.

Pre-Common Core textbooks are going to become collector's items.

Original Submission

mendax writes:

On the heels of the story published here on December 31, 2015, about the genetic background of the Irish and how it indicates the migration of people to the Emerald Isle, Ars Technica has a story about human migrations in detail, with the interesting and not unexpected premise, as the article's subtitle indicates:

The farther from Africa, the more of them [mutations] there are.

The article says:

When it comes to evolution, people tend to focus on the big driving force of natural selection, which latches on to helpful mutations while purging the harmful ones. But there are other processes that change the frequencies of mutations—everything from random drift to the founding of small isolated populations.

Looking at our own species' history, we would expect to see some of this in action. After modern humans established themselves in Africa, smaller populations branched out to establish footholds in Asia before spreading east, eventually reaching the Americas. At each step, a small group of migrants took a fraction of humanity's genetic diversity with it, creating a series of population bottlenecks.

This should be easy to see in our DNA, but so far it has turned out to be complicated. Different attempts using distinct populations and methods have come to mixed conclusions about whether a clear signal is there. Now, a large international team of researchers has gone and sequenced genomes from multiple populations along humanity's route out of Africa, and they found a signature of these bottlenecks both in terms of genetic variation and in terms of potentially harmful mutations.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Wired reports:

Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works. Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used by an array of corporate and government systems, announced on Thursday that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper's devices.

The researchers' findings suggest that the NSA may be responsible for that backdoor, at least indirectly. Even if the NSA did not plant the backdoor in the company's source code, the spy agency may in fact be indirectly responsible for it by having created weaknesses the attackers exploited.

Evidence uncovered by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, founder and CEO of Comsecuris, a security consultancy in Germany, suggests that the Juniper culprits repurposed an encryption backdoor previously believed to have been engineered by the NSA, and tweaked it to use for their own spying purposes. Weinmann reported his findings in an extensive post published late Monday.

Previously on SN: "Unauthorized Code" in Juniper Firewalls Decrypts Encrypted VPN Traffic.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Liliputing reports

Hacker group fail0verflow recently showed off a PlayStation 4 running Linux[1] at the Console Hacking 2015 conference, marking the first time someone has managed to install a full-blown, desktop operating system on the game console.

Although others have tinkered with the PS4 in the past, including a Brazilian hacker group that used a Raspberry Pi to break into Sony's Orbis operating system, fail0verflow is the first group to successfully install a full version of Linux on the PS4.

Sony's flagship gaming console has had a tumultuous relationship with the DIY community. The third-generation PlayStation came stock with "OtherOS", which was a feature that allowed users to upload Linux to the operating system, which the company eventually removed.

The PS4 has been much less hacker-friendly in the 2 years since the console launched... at least until now. Fail0verflow took advantage of an exploit found by another hacker earlier this year, which allowed them to get around Sony's content protections.

They fiddled with a WebKit bug discovered by the programmer to trick the browser into freeing the processes from the core of the operating system. This hack essentially turns the PS4 into a fully operational PC.

[...] The group noted that some of the differences between the PS4 operating system and a PC are "crazy" and some are "batshit crazy". Oh, and the Marvell Tech engineers that designed the PS4's southbridge chip were "smoking some really good stuff".

[1] The nugget is an embedded video in an iframe, apparently. Link to the video

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

the single biggest problem with Fallout 4 is combat. It may be an improvement over Fallout 3, but it's still so unwieldy. As far as shooters go, I could rattle off a dozen I've played this year that employ better mechanics without breaking a sweat. It reminds me so much of Skyrim, the last big Bethesda RPG. I loved a lot of things about Skyrim the same way I love Fallout 4. These worlds are like no other games out there. I like Fallout 4 more than Skyrim for a lot of reasons, even though I tend to lean fantasy over science-fiction. And the combat is no exception. I prefer Fallout 4′s shooting to the clunky bows, magic, and melee of The Elder Scrolls. But both games suffer in the combat department to the detriment of the rest of the experience.

That's also the case with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which couples a fantastic story and marvelous questing with truly underwhelming swordplay and magic. I guess it's strange to me that these game developers and publishers are pumping so much money and time and resources into these games and still fail to shore up what's quite possibly the most fundamental piece of almost every video game.

The combat is pretty much the same as Fallout 3, with a slightly downgraded V.A.T.S. The biggest drag is power armor that runs out of batteries you can't find ready replacements for.

Original Submission

xpda writes:

CRISPR, a genome-editing technology that has been progressing rapidly in the last three years, has just been named Science's Breakthrough of the Year. CRISPR is a technique that can be used to edit and manipulate the DNA of any organism—crops, livestock, and even humans. It can allow scientists to control gene expression and selectively turn genes on or off.

Two striking examples—the creation of a long-sought "gene drive" that could eliminate pests or the diseases they carry, and the first deliberate editing of the DNA of human embryos—debuted to headlines and concern. Each announcement roiled the science policy world. The embryo work (done in China with nonviable embryos from a fertility clinic) even prompted an international summit to discuss human gene editing.

Original Submission

JeffPaetkau writes:

As usual, more information on auto-brewery syndrome can be found on Wikipedia.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have developed a web application and data set that gives researchers worldwide a powerful interactive tool to advance understanding of the mutations that lead to and fuel pediatric cancer. The freely available tool, called ProteinPaint, is described in today's issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics.

ProteinPaint provides users with a gene-by-gene snapshot of mutations from pediatric cancer that alters genetic instructions for encoding proteins. The application provides critical information unavailable with existing visualization tools. For example, ProteinPaint shows whether mutations are present at diagnosis or just at relapse, or whether mutations occur in almost every cell (germline) or just cancer cells (somatic).

ProteinPaint's novel interactive infographics also let researchers see at a glance all mutations in individual genes and their corresponding proteins, including detailed information about mutation type, frequency in cancer subtype and location in the protein domain. That information provides clues about how a change might contribute to cancer's start, progression or relapse.

Original Submission

julian writes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65LbFWCf0A (duration: 1:01:33)

From the Youtube description:

The future does not look much brighter than ten years ago. What comes next, and what can the hacker community do to make things better?

The talk "We Lost The War" was presented at [Chaos Communication] Congress ten years ago, causing quite a stir. It was a prediction of a dark future that did not sit well with many people, but unfortunately many predictions have come true meanwhile. This talk will try to address what comes next, as well as what the hacker community can do to make things better.

It's a broad-spectrum talk that covers analysis of past and current events and possible futures in specific fields such as surveillance and digital rights, as well as a broader analysis of where the speakers think the world might be in 5-10 more years.