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HughPickens.com writes:

James Vincent reports that the overlap between Final Fantasy XIII fans and people who splash out on Louis Vuitton handbags might be a slim one, but modern marketing is all about exploiting those profitable niches as FFXIII's protagonist Lightning is now appearing in a series of ads for the famed French fashion house, Louis Vuitton. The pink-haired, samurai sword-wielding heroine, is pictured in the advertisements striking various poses while modeling the brand's latest collection. Vuitton's last collection was centered around the premise of exploring a virtual reality, with a heroine with suspiciously Lightning-like pink hair described in the show's notes as "initiating a quest, a heroic journey in which the protagonist gains strength every step of the way" which certainly sounds like Final Fantasy to us.

Strangely enough, it's not the first time Final Fantasy characters have been tapped for their gamer fashion. In 2012, Lightning and her fellow characters were pictured in a Japanese magazine spread clad in Prada. According to Ben Gilbert "Final Fantasy" is a solid choice for fashion models — the game is full of highly-detailed, unrealistically portioned characters. "In fairness, not much else is real in the fashion world. So why do its models have to be real people?"

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cmn32480 writes:

From the BBC:

Iran holds two US Navy boats and crew, Pentagon says, adding it has assurances Tehran will return them "promptly"

As this was released at about 4:15pm Eastern time (9:25pm UTC) there are no futher details at this time.

We will update this summary when more information is available.

UPDATE - 9:35pm UTC:

The incident happened near Farsi Island after one of the ships encountered mechanical problems. Fox News reported that the sailors had drifted into Iranian waters, but that has not been independently confirmed. Iran has assured the US that the sailors and two small vessels would be returned promptly, the Associated Press reported.

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xpda writes:

According to satellite data estimates, 350 million tons of natural gas were wastefully burned at the wellhead in 2012, about 3.5% of worldwide natural gas production. To put this into perspective, this amount of natural gas could provide electrical power to the entire continent of Africa. The CO2 emissions from natural gas flares are roughly equivalent to 10% of all CO2 emissions of the European Union.

The problem, as you might surmise, is the handling and transportation of the natural gas produced as a by-product of oil wells in areas without the infrastructure to handle gas. In addition, some gas produced as oil by-product has relatively low levels of methane. Russia flares more natural gas than any other nation, followed by Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria, and the United States.

The World Bank is trying to stop all routine flaring of natural gas by 2030. North Dakota and New Mexico are taking steps to reduce gas flares.

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chromas writes:

From CIO:

It's not the usual type of vehicle you expect to see unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show, but on Monday Audi showed off a lunar rover developed with its assistance by a team of private scientists in pursuit of Google's Lunar Xprize.

The Audi Lunar Quattro rolled onto the stage at the beginning of the German automaker's news conference.

The rover has a large 300-square-centimeter solar panel across the top that recharges the Lithium Ion batteries. The wheels are electrically driven and can turn through 360 degrees. Its top speed is 3.6 kilometers (2 miles) per hour.

From Slashgear:

Audi's biggest contribution to this project may be the lightweight nature of the beast. The wheels on this rover are made of 3D-printed aluminum, which allows them to be large, yet light. Compared to past models made by Audi, these wheels alone save the machine 200g (that's per wheel, mind you).

That much weight will add up quick, says Audi, as it'll cost 80K Euro (around $87k USD) per kilo of payload for each rover to make this mission happen.

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xpda writes:

Since 1972, a widely quoted "fact" was that bacteria in our body outnumber our own cells by a factor of ten. The ratio is actually closer to 1:1. In1972, Thomas Luckey published the estimate of 10:1, and the number has been widely cited ever since. The new paper is available online.

While this may be interesting, it's not too important. As Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory said, "It is good that we all now have a better estimate to quote, but I don't think it will actually have any biological significance."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Democracy Now! reports

In Flint, Michigan, a growing number of residents are demanding the arrest of Governor Rick Snyder over the ongoing water contamination crisis. Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint [January 6], after learning federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into lead contamination in the drinking water. The poisoning began after an unelected emergency manager appointed by Governor Snyder switched the city's water source to the long-polluted Flint River in a bid to save money.

Lead can cause permanent health impacts including memory loss and developmental impairment. Researchers at Virginia Tech who have been testing Flint water say the city could have corrected the problem by better treating the water at a cost of as little as $100 a day. On [January 7], the mayor of Flint revealed it could now cost as much as $1.5 billion to fix the city's water infrastructure.

[...] Flint residents are now scrambling to find sources of safe water as fears of lead poisoning grow. Forty percent of Flint lives in poverty. Students at the nearby Davison Community Schools just posted a documentary online called Undrinkable, looking at how the Flint water crisis grew.[...]

Less than three weeks after Flint's water was declared safe and in compliance with the Safe Water Act, [...] the water found in some homes was three times the federal limit of lead within water. Aged lead pipes and lead soldering found in pipes are common throughout the city, not only in city lines, but also in people's homes, and has been for years. But why is the lead a problem now? It's the corrosive Flint River that released the lead into the water.

[...] People knew from the beginning, as soon as the switch was made in April of '14, that the water was bad. It looked bad. It tasted bad. It smelled bad. And there was all sorts of problems throughout 2014. In 2015, one of the residents, LeeAnne Walters, had her water tested by the city, and the lead levels came back at over 100 parts per billion. Of course, there's no safe levels of lead whatsoever. The federal action level is 15 parts per billion. So it was about seven times what the federal action level was. She had it tested a second time, and it came back almost 400 parts per billion.

[...] Anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of chemistry could have looked at the situation and predicted what would happen. [...] Did they take a serious look at what was going on with that river before they decided to make the switch? And it's either they didn't do that, which I would think is gross negligence, or they did do it and ignored whatever they found.

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BeaverCleaver writes:

There are plenty of products that claim to be a safe heat- and hassle-free alternative to soldering, and that makers of the future will be able to simply draw their prototype circuits instead of using real wire and real solder. These are typically plagued by high electrical resistance and mechanical fragility. Tech Crunch links to Meso Glue, which claims to be an alloy that sets at room temperature. It seems to be intended more as a replacement for solder paste in surface-mount electronics, which would make commercial electronic assembly much easier, and make toaster ovens unnecessary for hobbyists.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA has launched a Planetary Defense Coordination Office to reorganize its approach to asteroid detection and response:

NASA has formalized its ongoing program for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs) as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). The office remains within NASA's Planetary Science Division, in the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The office will be responsible for supervision of all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth's orbit around the sun. It will also take a leading role in coordinating interagency and intergovernmental efforts in response to any potential impact threats.

More than 13,500 near-Earth objects of all sizes have been discovered to date -- more than 95 percent of them since NASA-funded surveys began in 1998. About 1,500 NEOs are now detected each year.

"Asteroid detection, tracking and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "While there are no known impact threats at this time, the 2013 Chelyabinsk super-fireball and the recent 'Halloween Asteroid' close approach remind us of why we need to remain vigilant and keep our eyes to the sky."

NASA has been engaged in worldwide planning for planetary defense for some time, and this office will improve and expand on those efforts, working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies and departments.

The move follows a 2014 audit of NASA's asteroid detection activities that found a lack of "oversight, objectives, and established milestones".

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takyon writes:

Despite mechanical failures, the Kepler space observatory continues to find exoplanets in its extended K2 mission phase:

Between 2009 and 2013, Kepler became the most successful planet-hunting machine ever, discovering at least 1,030 planets and more than 4,600 possible others in a single patch of sky. When a mechanical failure stripped the spacecraft of its ability to point precisely among the stars, engineers reinvented it in 2014 as the K2 mission, which looks at different parts of the cosmos for shorter periods of time.

In its first year of observing, K2 has netted more than 100 confirmed exoplanets, says astronomer Ian Crossfield at the University of Arizona in Tucson. They include a surprising number of systems in which more than one planet orbits the same star. The K2 planets are also orbiting hotter stars than are many of the Kepler discoveries.

[...] The original Kepler mission was designed to answer a specific question: what fraction of Sun-like stars have Earth-size planets around them? Unbound by those constraints — even if not as good at pointing itself — K2 has been able to explore wider questions of planetary origin and evolution. "Now we get to look at a much bigger variety," says Steve Howell, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

And because K2 looks at stars that are generally brighter and closer to Earth than Kepler did, the exoplanets that the mission finds are likely to be the best studied for the foreseeable future. This is because they are near enough to allow astronomers to explore them with other telescopes on Earth and in space.

Ten Multi-planet Systems from K2 Campaigns 1 & 2 and the Masses of Two Hot Super-Earths

Kepler & K2 Science Center

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o_o writes:

Congress ain't walkin' the way it's talkin'? When it comes to rocket engines, it appears that Congress sucks it up, and quite silently at that as well. From the article:

For the global public looking on, flooded daily with news and op-eds about how much of a threat Russia is to global peace and stability, the fact that the US Department of Defense is still essentially buying rockets from Russia to put American satellites into orbit should serve as a reminder that nothing resembling actual principles, facts or honesty guides US foreign policy or how it is presented across US and European media.

If the US finds itself unable to justify continued sanctions against Russian rockets — rockets used in vital roles for maintaining US defense capabilities — how is the US continuing to justify other sanctions against Russia that remain in place? Are these sanctions in place simply because the businesses being hurt by them across the West lack the lobbying power of Boeing and Lockheed Martin? And are we expected to continue believing Russia is such a "threat" but still America's primary partner in launching defense satellites into space, not to mention American and European astronauts and supply missions to the International Space Station?"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Physicists around the world were puzzled recently when an unusual bump appeared in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing them to wonder if it was a new particle previously unknown, or perhaps even two new particles. The collision cannot be explained by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics.

Adam Martin, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, said he and other theoretical physicists had heard about the results before they were released on Dec. 15, and groups began brainstorming, via Skype and other ways, about what the bump could mean if confirmed -- a long shot, but an intriguing one. He and some collaborators from Cincinnati and New York submitted a pre-peer-review paper that appeared on arXiv.org on Dec. 23.

"It was so weird that people were forced to chuck their favorite theories and start from scratch," Martin says. "That's a fun area of particle physics. We're looking into the unknown. Is it one new particle? Is it two new particles?"

The paper considers four possible explanations for the data, including the possibility that it could indicate a heavier version of the Higgs boson, also commonly known as "the God particle." Further research could yield mundane explanations, Martin says, and the excitement could fade as it has many times in his career. Or it could open up new insights and call for new models.

Perhaps it's the Satan particle.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. If confirmed, this would be one of the most significant physics discoveries of the last century.

Move a large mass very suddenly—or have two massive objects suddenly collide, or a supernova explode—and you would create ripples in space-time, much like tossing a stone in a still pond. The more massive the object, the more it will churn the surrounding spacetime, and the stronger the gravitational waves it should produce. Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity back in 1915, but he thought it would never be possible to test that prediction.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) is one of several experiments designed to hunt for these elusive ripples, and with its latest upgrade to Advanced LIGO, completed last year, it has the best chance of doing so. In fact, it topped our list of physics stories to watch in 2016.

There have been excited rumors about a LIGO discovery before, most notably a mere week after the upgraded experiment began operations last fall. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, spilled the beans on Twitter, giving it a 10- to 15-percent chance of being true.

http://gizmodo.com/rumors-are-flying-that-we-may-have-finally-found-gravit-1752259868

[Related]:
Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves ?

Experts reveal which scientific mysteries we may FINALLY get to the bottom of in 2016

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Phoenix666 writes:

A new way of printing electrodes could make touchscreens in phones and other devices work and look better.

The new electrodes, some of the most transparent and conductive ever developed, take advantage of 3D printing to form a grid of gold or silver nanowalls on a glass surface.

The walls are so thin that they can hardly be seen with the naked eye. It is the first time that scientists have created nanowalls like these using 3D printing.

The new electrodes have a higher conductivity and are more transparent than those made of indium tin oxide, the standard material used in smartphones and tablets today. This is a clear advantage: The more transparent the electrodes, the better the screen quality. And the more conductive they are, the more quickly and precisely the touchscreen will work.

"Indium tin oxide is used because the material has a relatively high degree of transparency and the production of thin layers has been well researched, but it is only moderately conductive," says Patrik Rohner, a PhD student at ETH Zurich who was involved with the research.

Original study (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201503705).

Original Submission

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Destin Sandlin (of SmarterEveryDay) has been invited to go to the White House to sit down with the president of the US. The interview is framed as a response to the state of the union address. He would love for this to be different, he wants to ask questions about scientific topics.

Help Destin out by:

• Tweet him a question
• Comment on the Youtube video
• or the Ask Reddit Thread

Help get the best questions in front of the Commander In Chief. Destin is most interested in your science questions and your fun questions for the president.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Version 4.4 of the Linux kernel has been finalised and released into the wild.

Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday evening, US time.

What's new this time around? Support for GPUs seem the headline item, with plenty of new drivers and hooks for AMD kit. Perhaps most notable is the adoption of the Virgil 3D project which makes it possible to parcel up virtual GPUs. With virtual Linux desktops now on offer from Citrix and VMware, those who want to deliver virtual desktops with workstation-esque graphics capabilities have their on-ramp to Penguin heaven.

Raspberry Pi owners also have better graphics to look forward to, thanks to a new Pi KMS driver that will be updated with acceleration code in future releases.

There's also better 64-bit ARM support and fixes for memory leaks on Intel's Skylake CPUs.

Torvalds also says the new release caught a recent problem, by "unbreaking the x86-32 'sysenter' ABI, when somebody (*cough*android-x86*cough*) misused it by not using the vdso and instead using the instruction directly."

No, this OS will not force you to upgrade.

Original Submission