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Phoenix666 writes:

In the not too distant future, PC makers want to free your laptop of wires and cables. Some announcements at CES signal progress toward that goal.

PC makers want to bid adieu to bulky power adapters, and make charging as simple as placing a laptop on a kitchen counter, desk or table at a cafe. Another goal is to establish speedy wireless connections between laptops and external peripherals, which could eliminate wired ports like USB and HDMI from PCs.

Intel showed a wire-free prototype laptop last year. The laptop charged wirelessly when placed on a surface. Monitors and external storage linked up to the laptop through the emerging WiGig wireless technology, which is significantly faster than Wi-Fi.

There wasn't a specific product announced at CES with all the key wire-free attributes. But some laptops were announced with integrated WiGig, and wireless power standards organization AirFuel Alliance said that products capable of charging laptops would be available this year.

Finally a good use for all that cancer-causing WiFi radiation around us.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

What is the PACE trial?

This large-scale trial is the first in the world to test and compare the effectiveness of four of the main treatments currently available for people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). These are adaptive pacing therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, graded exercise therapy, and standardised specialist medical care (see below). All of the treatments offer ways for patients to deal with and improve the symptoms of CFS/ME and its effects on disability.

http://www.wolfson.qmul.ac.uk/current-projects/pace-trial#overview

It has been discovered that the threshold used to determine who was allowed to join the trial was higher than that to qualify as recovered. Patients who got worse after treatment were then categorized as improved:

If the standard formula is used on a population-based survey with scores clustered toward the healthier end, the result is an expanded "normal range" that pushes the lower threshold even lower, as happened with the PACE physical function scale. And in PACE, the threshold wasn't just low–it was lower than the score required for entry into the trial. This score, of course, already represented severe disability, not "recovery" or being "back to normal"—and certainly not a "strict criterion" for anything.

http://www.virology.ws/2015/11/04/trial-by-error-continued-did-the-pace-study-really-adopt-a-strict-criterion-for-recovery/

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takyon writes:

New York City plans to replace sidewalk pay phones with Wi-Fi kiosks that include built-in tablets and phone chargers:

In New York City, the future is calling. New York City is saying goodbye to sidewalk pay phones, and hello to free Wi-Fi kiosks. Plans call for installing 7,500 of them. "This is going to be the fastest and largest free municipal network in the world," said Colin O'Donnell, the chief technology officer for CityBridge, which is partnering with the city to replace the old pay phones with high speed internet. They're called Links: slabs that look like fancy mall directories, but are actually hubs for Wi-Fi that can reach as far as 400 feet, about a block and a half. They'll include built-in tablet computers, and phone chargers. You can use them to call anywhere in the U.S. for free.

The first is already installed on a corner in the city's East Village, though it hasn't been switched on yet. Sitting at a Starbucks a few feet away, grad student Aliyah Guttmann said she's a fan. "It's interesting," she said. "I mean it's going to be more useful than a pay phone now." But she's not sure how much she'll use it. "I'm not going to be sitting outside with my computer on the Wi-Fi connecting to that and working there," she said.

To pay for the new system, the kiosks will have ads, big ones, right there on the sidewalk. O'Donnell says those ads will raise enough to cover the free stuff, with money left over for the company and the city. City officials say all the free Wi-Fi fits with their mission to give more poor people access to the internet.

We first saw this mentioned over a year ago.

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xpda writes:

The age-old assumption that I/O is slow and computation is fast is no longer true. This invalidates decades of design decisions that are deeply embedded in today's systems, and requires rethinking the compute/storage balance and architecture from the ground up. The arrival of high-speed SSD and other high speed non-volatile storage (Storage Class Memories, or SCM) is likely the most significant architectural change that datacenter and software designers will face in the foreseeable future, according to this paper in ACM Queue.

I found this excerpt to be especially thought-provoking. -Ed.

Can we just drop SCMs into our systems instead of magnetic disks, and declare the case closed? Not really. By replacing slow disks with SCMs, we merely shift the performance bottleneck and uncover resource shortfalls elsewhere—both in hardware and in software. As a simple but illustrative example, consider an application that processes data on disk by asynchronously issuing a large number of outstanding requests (to keep the disk busy) and then uses a pool of one or more worker threads to process reads from disk as they complete. In a traditional system where disks are the bottleneck, requests are processed almost immediately upon completion and the (sensible) logic to keep disk request queues full may be written to keep a specified number of requests in flight at all times. With SCMs, the bottleneck can easily shift from disk to CPU: instead of waiting in queues ahead of disks, requests complete almost immediately and then wait for workers to pick them up, consuming memory until they are processed. As a result, we have seen real-world network server implementations and data analytics jobs where the concrete result of faster storage media is that significantly more RAM is required to stage data that has been read but not processed. Moving the performance bottleneck results in changes to memory demands in the system, which may, in the worst case even lead to the host swapping data back out to disk!

Do any Soylentils have experience with SCMs? What surprises have you had? How have you worked around them?

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HughPickens.com writes:

Scott Jaschik writes at Inside Higher Education that although most faculty members would deny that physical appearance is a legitimate criterion in grading, a study finds that among similarly qualified female students, those who are physically attractive earn better grades than less attractive female students. For male students, there is no significant relationship between attractiveness and grades. The results hold true whether the faculty member is a man or a woman.

The researchers obtained student identification photographs for students at Metropolitan State University of Denver and had the attractiveness rated, on a scale of 1-10, of all the students. Then they examined 168,092 course grades awarded to the students, using factors such as ACT scores to control for student academic ability. For female students, an increase of one standard deviation in attractiveness was associated with a 0.024 increase in grade (on a 4.0 scale).

The results mirror a similar study that found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely to go on to earn a four-year college degree. Hernández-Julián says that he found the results of the Metro State study “troubling” and says that there are two possible explanations: “Is it that professors invest more time and energy into the better-looking students, helping them learn more and earn the higher grades? Or do professors simply reward the appearance with higher grades given identical performance? The likely answer, given our growing understanding of the prevalence of implicit biases, is that professors make small adjustments on both of these margins."

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darkfeline writes:

A blind gamer has completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - nearly five years after starting the Nintendo classic.

Terry Garrett began his playthrough of Ocarina of Time on 8th May 2011 with the launch of a YouTube series designed to show he was capable of completing 3D games as well as 2D games (he'd previously finished Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee).

Garrett, who studied engineering at the University of Colorado, uses in-game sounds to help navigate the virtual environments. Left and right-hand speakers placed directly in front of him signal where sounds such as those made by Link's fairy companion Navi, nearby enemies and weapons striking walls, come from. Playing an emulated version of Ocarina of Time, Garrett uses save states for quick trial and error progression.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-04-blind-gamer-completes-the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Consumerist reports on a proposed judgment in Federal Trade Commission vs. Lumos Labs, Inc, d.b.a. Lumosity, which includes monetary penalties of $50 million (suspended, because according to paragraphs of legalese, "Lumosity doesn't have the money to pay it"), as well as $2 million to be held in escrow to execute the suspension.

In addition, Lumosity must no longer make claims that their games improve cognitive ability or heal psychological illnesses, nor can they claim their product is "clinically proven." If claims of improved cognitive and memory performance are true, that would make Lumosity subject to FDA regulation.

Lumosity has been spending the past few years in a marketing marathon, including Google ads triggered by users searching for brain diseases, as well as underwriting for National Public Radio and American Public Media.

Interestingly, an NPR news story filed by Ina Jaffe in January 2014 quotes the National Institute on Aging's Cognitive Aging Program head Jonathan King, saying that he has nothing against sites like Lumosity, but "we really don't know how well they work."

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takyon writes:

Robots could gain valuable slaughtering skills as the meatpacking industry begins to test greater use of automation in its plants:

Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants throughout the country employ a lot of people. About a quarter of a million Americans prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up on dinner tables. But some of those workers could eventually be replaced by robots. The world's largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery. Late this fall JBS, the Brazil-based protein powerhouse, bought a controlling share of Scott Technology, a New Zealand-based robotics firm.

While many manufacturers have gone to automated machines to process and package everything from food to furniture, the beef industry has stubbornly held on to its workers. It still takes thousands of workers to run a modern beef plant. In fact, U.S. meatpacking plants are expected to add jobs in the next decade, as the appetite for pork, chicken and beef grows in the developing world.

[...] JBS is looking at how robots could fit into its lamb and pork plants first, Bruett says. Sheep and pigs tend to be more uniform than beef cattle. "Now when it comes to beef packing, beef processing, the fabrication of the animal, it's very difficult to automate beef processing," Bruett says.

The meatpacking robots of today use vision technology to slice and dice, but the key to butchery is touch, not sight, Rupp says. And the company's beef division president, Bill Rupp, says right now, robots just can't feel how deep a bone is, or expertly remove a filet mignon. "When you get into that detailed, skilled cutting, robots aren't there yet. Someday, I'm sure they will be," Rupp says.

Phoenix666 writes:

Dandelions are troublesome weeds that are detested by most gardeners. Yet dandelions also have many insect enemies in nature. However, they are able to protect themselves with their latex, a milky, bitter-tasting sap. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, have now demonstrated that a single compound in the latex protects dandelion roots against voracious cockchafer larvae. Thus, latex plays a crucial role in dandelion defense against root feeders.

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale agg.) are well-known plants of European and Asian origin that have spread around most of the temperate world. Children love their yellow flowers and even more the fluffy seed heads with their parachute-like seeds that can travel long distances by wind. Young plants grow with such force that they can penetrate even asphalt. Therefore dandelions have become a symbol for survival in modern cities.

In fields and meadows, the plant must fend off many herbivores, among them cockchafer larvae. The common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha) spends the first three years of its life cycle underground as a grub feeding on the roots of different plants. One of its favorite foods is dandelion roots. Like many other plants, dandelions produce secondary metabolites to protect themselves against herbivores. Some of these defenses, such as terpenes and phenols, are of pharmaceutical interest and are considered promising anti-cancer agents. The most important dandelion metabolites are bitter substances which are especially found in a milky sap called latex, a substance found in almost ten percent of all flowering plants.

PLOS has the full article.

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CoolHand writes:

It looks like MTV will be ruining a fantasy favorite for many of us:

Back in my day, when I was an adolescent nerdling escaping into the pages of Terry Brooks' Shannara fantasy literature series, the Tolkien-esque escapades of elves, druids, dwarves, and humans were engrossingly epic affairs tinted with somber urgency.

[..] So epic was the high fantasy world of Shannara—set in the fictional Four Lands long after nuclear war laid waste to Earth and paved the way for magic and monsters to overrun the land—that the prolific Brooks has churned out 25 separate Shannara novels to date, nearly one per year, for the last three decades. He's still writing more.

Shannara, in other words, was serious sword and sorcery business. Fast-forward to 2016 and brace for a not-so-shocking shocker in the age of repurposed nostalgia: Shannara has now gone full MTV, thanks to Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the show runners who re-envisioned Superman's high school days into the hit show Smallville and have another new fantasy action series, Into the Badlands, blending genres over at AMC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

U.S. President Obama announced a series of "common-sense executive actions" relating to guns on Tuesday. During his speech at the East Room of the White House, he could be seen with tears in his eyes as he recalled victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The President's plans include requiring all gun sellers to be licensed and perform background checks, including online and gun show sellers. He also plans to remove barriers keeping states from reporting and sharing information about those barred from keeping guns, while spending an additional $500 million to improve access to mental health care. Obama will push for research into "smart guns", and add 200 new agents to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

In a public opinion poll from last August, 85 percent of Americans said they're in favor of expanding background checks, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Those in support included 88 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Republicans.

The National Rifle Association has criticized Obama's plan, calling it "a political stunt." In 2013, the group worked to block enhanced gun control legislation that was introduced in the aftermath of the elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

Legal challenges to aspects of the executive orders are anticipated:

The crucial question in any direct legal challenge will be whether the ATF guidance creates new obligations, or merely clarifies existing law. The more the Obama administration acts as though the guidance has created a new legal requirement, the more legal trouble it might invite, said Lisa Heinzerling, administrative law professor at Georgetown University.

Gunmakers Smith & Wesson's and Sturm, Ruger & Co.'s saw massive increases in their stock prices following the news.

Previously: President Obama: The Great "Salesman" For the U.S. Firearms Industry

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xpda writes:

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has confirmed the discovery of elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118, completing the seventh period (row) of the periodic table of elements. It is somewhat impractical to use these elements in manufacturing, as it takes about 10^18 particle collisions to create one atom of these elements, and it exists only a fraction of a second before decaying into other elements. These elements cannot be observed directly. They are detected only by their decay products.

Elements of Period 8 (row 8 in the Periodic Table) have been predicted, but not yet synthesized.

The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row. IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalizing names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118)" said Professor Jan Reedijk, President of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A black hole at the center of a companion galaxy to the Whirlpool Galaxy has been spotted expelling gas in two huge waves:

Astronomers have spotted two huge waves of gas being "burped" by the black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy. The swathes of hot gas, detected in X-ray images from Nasa's Chandra space telescope, appear to be sweeping cooler hydrogen gas ahead of them.

This vast, rippling belch is taking place in NGC 5194 - a small, neglected sibling of the "Whirlpool Galaxy", 26 million light years away. That makes it one of the closest black holes blasting gas in this way.

The findings, presented at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida, are a dramatic example of "feedback" between a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy.

"We think that feedback keeps galaxies from becoming too large," said Marie Machacek, a co-author of the study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA). "But at the same time, it can be responsible for how some stars form. This shows that black holes can create, not just destroy."

The BBC article also notes research on a "lopsided" pair of black holes in the merged galaxy SDSS J1126+2944.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

Ars Technica details a recent outage in Ukraine, calling it the first known hacker-caused power outage:

Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said.

The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure. The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to "destructive events" that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage.

Researchers from antivirus provider ESET have confirmed that multiple Ukrainian power authorities were infected by "BlackEnergy," a package discovered in 2007 that was updated two years ago to include a host of new functions, including the ability to render infected computers unbootable. More recently, ESET found, the malware was updated again to add a component dubbed KillDisk, which destroys critical parts of a computer hard drive and also appears to have functions that sabotage industrial control systems. The latest BlackEnergy also includes a backdoored secure shell (SSH) utility that gives attackers permanent access to infected computers.

In 2014, the group behind BlackEnergy, which iSIGHT has dubbed the Sandworm gang, targeted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries. iSIGHT researchers say the Sandworm gang has ties to Russia, although readers are cautioned on attributing hacking attacks to specific groups or governments.

According to ESET, the Ukrainian power authorities were infected using booby-trapped macro functions embedded in Microsoft Office documents. If true, it's distressing that industrial control systems used to supply power to millions of people could be infected using such a simple social-engineering ploy. It's also concerning that malware is now being used to create power failures that can have life-and-death consequences for large numbers of people.

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mendax writes:

Ars Technica has a short article about the recovery of data off 200 floppy disks used by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbery for scripts and story ideas:

The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991.

Here is the press release from DriveSavers, the company that was paid to do the recovery work.

Original Submission