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AnonTechie writes:

The background to this new set of experiments lies in the debate regarding conscious will and determinism in human decision-making, which has attracted researchers, psychologists, philosophers and the general public, and which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s. Back then, the American researcher Benjamin Libet studied the nature of cerebral processes of study participants during conscious decision-making. He demonstrated that conscious decisions were initiated by unconscious brain processes, and that a wave of brain activity referred to as a 'readiness potential' could be recorded even before the subject had made a conscious decision.

How can the unconscious brain processes possibly know in advance what decision a person is going to make at a time when they are not yet sure themselves? Until now, the existence of such preparatory brain processes has been regarded as evidence of 'determinism', according to which free will is nothing but an illusion, meaning our decisions are initiated by unconscious brain processes, and not by our 'conscious self'. In conjunction with Prof. Dr. Benjamin Blankertz and Matthias Schultze-Kraft from Technische Universität Berlin, a team of researchers from Charité's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, led by Prof. Dr. John-Dylan Haynes, has now taken a fresh look at this issue. Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered.

http://scienceblog.com/479948/the-brain-computer-duel-do-we-have-free-will/

[Also Covered By]: A Simple Computer Test Shows the Limitations of Our Free Will

[Abstract]: The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1513569112)

Original Submission

CortoMaltese writes:

Protest in Tehran after Saudis execute Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr

CNN:

Iranian Protesters Ransack Saudi Embassy After Execution of Shiite Cleric

NYT:

[More after the break.]

fliptop writes:

Whirlpool, one of the first companies to commit to the Amazon Dash Replenishment Service, has integrated the service directly into its mobile Smart Kitchen Suite app:

The app, which runs on iOS and Android, will let you buy regularly used items with one click directly from your mobile device. It'll also connect directly with a host of Whirlpool Smart appliances to be shown off at CES this week, including a new top-loading washer and dryer, and a new connected dishwasher. Both devices are capable of working out how many wash cycles you've done since your last order of detergent, and will prompt you via the app to buy more when you might be running low. Smart Kitchen Suite can also tell Whirlpool's smart washer and dryer to activate various modes, including quiet mode for those late night wash sessions, and "wrinkle shield" for when you're away from home but don't want your clothes crumpling in the dryer.

Spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

Zinho writes:

For those of you who remember Psychonauts from 10 years ago, and for those who bought it in its more recent re-release, the producer is crowdfunding a sequel: Psychonauts 2!

The crowdfunding is through a website called fig [*], which gives you the option of investing in addition to / instead of getting Kickstarter-style rewards. At the time of submission they had $3,192,445 raised of a $3,300,000 goal. The project has just a few days left, closing January 12, 2016 at 3pm Eastern time.

Having only recently purchased and played through the original myself for the first time, I'm excited about the sequel. I'm hoping a little extra exposure will help like-minded folks find a way to push it over the top.

Best of luck to Double Fine studios!

[Editor's note: A GamingonLinux story covered a youtube video which had a lot of concerns about this funding model - especially through fig.]

[* Warning: javascript heavy page. -Ed.]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city's pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

[...] In Portland, one of the city's main pipelines now uses Lucid's pipes to make power that's sent into the grid. Though the system can't generate enough energy for an entire city, the pipes can power individual buildings like a school or library, or help offset a city's total energy bill. Unlike wind or solar power, the system can generate electricity at any time of day, regardless of weather, since the pipes always have water flowing through them.

The pipes can't generate power in every location; they only work in places where water is naturally flowing downward with gravity (if water is being pumped, the system would waste energy). But they have another feature that can be used anywhere: The pipes have sensors that can monitor water, something that utilities couldn't do in the past.

The turbine sections also contain sensors for monitoring water pressure and quality.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Generally, organic conductors has[sic] disorder structures so charge transfers from one place with high conductivity to another place with high conductivity. In such occasions, Coulomb blockade of charge transport takes place. It was thought that Coulomb blockade took place in low dimensional aggregates of inorganic particulates only at very low temperatures.

A research group of Osaka University succeeded in showing experimental evidence to prove Coulomb blockade taking place on two-dimensional organic conducting polymer films, a world first. They also demonstrated its theoretical evidence through quantum calculations and the verification of conductivity models of experimental results. This group's research results will possibly overturn conventional understanding of conduction mechanism of organic conductors and help one to understand and design properties of organic and molecular devices.

[...] A group of researchers led by Megumi Akai-Kasaya, Assistant Professor, and Yuji Kuwahara, Professor, at Osaka University created a sheet of two-dimensional ultrathin-films of regularly arranged hexylthiophene (P3HT) monolayers and attached the sheet of about 1-nm monolayer to a metal electrode with a gap of less than a micrometer and measured electrical conductivity. The current flowing in the molecular membrane showed the temperature-dependent threshold voltage in the low temperature range of 150K—4K and increased in power law of the current-voltage beyond the threshold. This is a typical feature of Coulomb blockade. This group theoretically verified the onset of two-dimensional Coulomb blockade in the organic thin film through the calculation of the delocalization of electric charge in the molecular film and the verification of a distribution model of conductive segment in the two-dimensional film.

It was considered that Coulomb blockades occurred only in low-dimensional aggregates of inorganic particulates at extremely low temperatures. This research is very important in that it clarified that Coulomb blockade occurred in organic conductors as well. Many organic conductors show that nonlinearity of conductivity occurs at nearly room temperature. This group's achievement suggests that in organic conductors, Coulomb blockade affects conductivity at room temperature as well.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Unicode version 9.0 is scheduled for release in June 2016. The final repertoire is not yet fixed, but currently 7,227 characters are scheduled for addition to Unicode 9.0, which will bring the total number of graphic and format characters in the Unicode Standard to 127,899 characters (in case you are concerned that Unicode is running out of space, that still leaves room for another 846,566 characters to be encoded). In summary, Unicode 9.0 will include 9 new blocks (named ranges of characters) and cover 4 new scripts (Osage, Bhaiksuki, Marchen and Tangut), making a total of 268 blocks and 133 scripts.

Original Submission

This is a quick blurb about our financials last year and looking forward.

Last year we comfortably paid expenses and reduced our server costs. We ended up paying more for tax prep than originally was estimated, but we exceeded our funding goals by enough to afford that with a little breathing room. I'm optimistic this year will be similar, if not better overall; I believe that tax-costs will be lower, and we have no large expenses planned. Here is a rough breakdown of where the money is going:

• 54% Hosting/Backups/Domains
• 37% Taxes/Accounting
• 9% Administrative/Other

It's obviously frustrating that such a large amount of where we spend money is on taxes, but we should see that number come down as we mature.

Moving forward I'll be estimating all expected costs on a yearly basis, and then still continuing with goals on a half-year funding periods; this should make things more consistent and easier to understand. As usual I'll link to the current funding breakdown on the wiki from the beg-o-meter. My estimate is that we will spend about $6,000 this year, so that puts the beg-o-meter at $3,000 for each half. Thanks again for all of the support we receive that keeps this such a cool community for everyone.

Phoenix666 writes:

In a series of experiments (pdf), researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or "disfluency" and cognition. They presented the same test to two groups, one in an easy to read (intuitive) format and the other in a difficult (disfluent) format. And in all the experiments they carried out, the disfluency group scored substantially higher. The theory behind this is that people will default to relying on the automatic, effortless, and primitive system for reasoning. But if things are counter-intuitive or harder to understand we switch to the deeper, deliberate and analytical mode of thinking.

I've been thinking about how this translates to programming. Programming is an intellectually challenging task, but luckily we invent tools to make it manageable. I find that up to a certain point, the intuitive and easy properties of a given language, framework, or library might start to have negative effects. From personal experience and from mentoring beginners I noticed that when using tools that allow us to reason within our intuition, anytime we're faced with some difficulty we feel that we've done something wrong. And although we might have the necessary skills to overcome the difficulty, we often start questioning and revising our work. Asking questions about best practices relative to the framework instead of programming our way out. The quintessential example of this is the Stack overflow questions for "how do I use jQuery to do X?" or the answers "use jQuery [plugin] to do X" where X could be anything from basic arithmetic to websockets.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ceramic materials offer many appealing qualities, including high-temperature stability, environmental resistance, and high strength. But unlike polymers and some metals, ceramic particles don't fuse together when heated.

Thus, the few 3D printing techniques that have been developed for ceramics have slow production rates and involve additives that increase the material's tendency to crack.

Zak Eckel and colleagues were able to improve upon these processes by using silicon- and oxygen-based polymers that, upon polymerization, trap the UV light so that additives aren't needed for the UV curing steps.

Once the polymer is printed, the part is heated to a high temperature to burn off the oxygen atoms, thus forming a highly dense and strong silicon carbide product.

Also covered at Ars Technica .

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Zinc deficiency alters the makeup of bacteria found in the intestine, according to a new study with chickens.

The condition affects 25 percent of the world's population, especially in developing countries.

"We are the first to show that zinc deficiency has a significant effect on the microbial population and diversity in the intestine," says Elad Tako, a senior scientist physiologist at the US Department of Agriculture's Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture and Health and a courtesy food science professor at Cornell University.

The finding is important because previous studies have shown that many diseases and physiological conditions—including depression, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease—have links to recognizable gut bacterial profiles.

Original study (DOI: 10.3390/nu7125497).

Background information, dietary sources, recommended intakes, and risks are available at the US National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements.

Original Submission

and

What are the real-world implications of this? It doesn't sound like it would be accurate enough yet to be useful for "programmer tracking" as such, but perhaps the research could be of some heuristical significance for detecting new forms of malware?

Original Submission

Nuke writes:

Nicky Morgan, the UK Education Secretary, has announced that from 2017 all 11 year olds will be tested for their knowledge of the times tables up to 12x12.

She said: "Maths is a non-negotiable part of a good education. .... That is why we are introducing a new check to ensure all pupils know their times tables by age 11."

I am glad I was taught those tables at school until I knew the answers by reflex, but I had not realised that the teaching of them had lapsed.

Critics are saying it is a memory test and nothing to do with maths skills. But does that matter, when the alternative for most would be a calculator? You can find 8x7 by putting dots in an eight by seven rectangle and then counting them, but having done that once, say in primary school, why not remember the answer as a quickly-accessible building block for further maths skills?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

... even the most fiercely devoted Polar Bear Club members are only human, and woefully limited compared to other animals that have adaptations for swimming in cold ocean waters. Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Ocean Giants Program, told Live Science that, for many marine mammal species, a thick layer of fat called blubber is "first and foremost" in their list of defenses against the cold. Blubber operates both as insulation and as an energy source.

Some animals, such as seals and sea otters, have coats with two layers of dense fur — a thick undercoat and a covering layer of longer guard hairs. These insulate the animals by trapping layers of air near the skin, helping the sea creatures conserve heat, Rosenbaum said. The southern sea otter, which lacks blubber, has particularly dense fur, with approximately 1 million hairs per square inch (6.5 square centimeters), more than any other known animal.

Heat exchange within the body and metabolic adjustments also help marine animals regulate their temperatures, G. Carleton Ray, a biologist and research professor at the University of Virginia, told Live Science. These processes work together, along with insulating factors like blubber or fur, to help animals keep warm or cool down, he said.

Come on in, the water's... fine.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A wave of startups [is] aiming to wean Americans off foods like burgers and eggs, and their efforts are attracting tens of millions of dollars from investors. The goal is to lessen the dependence on livestock for food, which they say isn't as healthy, affordable or environmentally friendly as plant-based alternatives.

[...] In its office in Southern California, Beyond Meat works on "chicken" strips made with pea and soy proteins that have been sold at places like Whole Foods since 2012. But founder Ethan Brown concedes the product needs work.

To give the "meat" its fat, for instance, canola oil is evenly mixed throughout the product.

[...] At Impossible Foods, the patty is made by extracting proteins from foods like spinach and beans, then combining them with other ingredients. The company, which has about 100 employees, expects the product to be available in the latter half of next year, initially through a food-service operator.

[...] Modern Meadow in New York City takes cells from a cow through a biopsy and cultures them to grow into meat. At a conference in February, company founder Andras Forgacs likened the process to culturing yogurt or brewing beer.

Boca Burgers do a pretty good job. What are Soylentils' favorite meat substitutes?

Original Submission