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takyon writes:

According to another recent study, there is no evidence to support the existence of seasonal affective disorder (SAD):

A large-scale survey of U.S. adults provides no evidence that levels of depressive symptoms vary from season to season, according to new research [DOI: 10.1177/2167702615615867] published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings are inconsistent with the notion of seasonal depression as a commonly occurring disorder.

"In conversations with colleagues, the belief in the association of seasonal changes with depression is more-or-less taken as a given and the same belief is widespread in our culture," says Steven LoBello, a professor of psychology at Auburn University at Montgomery and senior author on the new study.

"We analyzed the data from many angles and found that the prevalence of depression is very stable across different latitudes, seasons of the year, and sunlight exposures."

Based on emerging research investigating seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a "seasonal pattern" modifier for depression diagnoses was officially added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. To receive a diagnosis of depression with seasonal variation, patients must meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression and also experience recurring depressive episodes that coincide with specific seasons – in most cases, patients report an increase of symptoms in the fall and winter and a decrease in symptoms in spring and summer. But more recent studies have challenged the validity of earlier SAD research, including the fact that SAD is typically identified by asking patients to recall past depressive episodes over the course of the previous year or more. Furthermore, the criteria used to identify SAD do not align with the established criteria for major depression.

You don't need more lumens.

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takyon writes:

Circuit City, an electronics retailer that filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and subsequently closed all of its stores, may be getting back into the brick-and-mortar retail business:

Once the No. 1 big-box tech chain, Circuit City succumbed to a rapidly changing marketplace in 2008, and misfired in its second incarnation as an online-only sister site to Systemax's TigerDirect. This time, what Shmoel and his top lieutenant Liniado have in store for Circuit is an ambitious, multi-tiered game plan that calls for retail outlets, web sales, branded and private-label products, licensed kiosks, mobile shops and franchise opportunities, all under the iconic red-and-white banner. The fun is expected to begin in June when the company opens its first store, most likely in the Dallas market, and relaunches CircuitCity.com.

"We want to bring profitability back into retail," said Liniado, business development VP, who previously co-ran DataVision, Manhattan's landmark IT reseller, as president. He left the company after more than two decades in 2014. To that end, the new Circuit City will embrace MAP and UPP pricing, build margins into its private-label assortment, and will stick to a small-box retail format in affordable yet densely-populated real estate markets, he said.

The stores themselves will range from 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, and will feature product zones that present the assortment by category and brand. Targeted directly at millennials, the mix will include pre- and postpaid smartphones, as well as tablets, notebooks, wearables, networking equipment, gaming products, headphones, drones, 3D printers, health appliances, and DIY devices, all supplemented by a service desk, electronic price tags and touchscreen terminals that link customers with what is envisioned as a million-SKU selection online.

[...] Shmoel, CEO of the enterprise, expects to have 50 to 100 corporate-owned stores up and running by next year and, eventually, an additional 100 to 200 franchised locations.

Here are some 2009-era musings on why Circuit City failed in the first place.

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fritsd writes:

BBC News reports that the main component of the European Data Relay System (EDRS) was launched at 22:20 GMT on Friday, January 29, 2016, as part of the Eutelsat 9B communications satellite.

The satellite will take its place at 9°E in the Clarke belt, and besides its usual tasks of bouncing back various and sundry TV channels, it will also act as a receiver for laser-transmitted high-bandwidth data from lower (low-earth-orbit or otherwise) earth observation satellites. Then it will beam back this data to its earth ground stations, vi Ka-band microwave (no lasers pointed at the ground apparently).

The latency is expected to be 20 minutes, still better than internet-by-carrier-pigeon (and they can't fly so high), and the system is meant to give faster updates to earth observations such as ice floes, floodings, and other disasters that can be seen from space and change rapidly.

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Phoenix666 writes:

New research by Lawrence Livermore [National Laboratory (LLNL)] scientists shows how shock waves can damage membrane proteins in traumatic brain injury patients.

Blast-induced traumatic brain injury (TBI) from improvised explosive devices is the most frequent wound occurring from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Estimates suggest more than 200,000 veterans have had at least one traumatic brain injury.

Clinical reports and in vivo studies show exposure to a blast can cause TBI, although how the energy is transmitted to the brain is not well understood.

That's where Livermore researchers come in. Using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, LLNL physicists Ed Lau and Eric Schwegler, along with University of North Carolina (link is external) colleague Max Berkowitz, found that ion channels are resistant to damage by shock waves. But with the presence of bubbles, the damage from shock waves is magnified and can contribute to an electrolyte imbalance within cells that can lead to the initial symptoms of TBI, such as headaches and seizures.

When a body is exposed to a blast, shock waves are produced, resulting in shear forces within the cranium. How cells react to shock waves is not well understood.

Cell walls are composed mainly of lipids but contain a large number of proteins that are vital for the normal function of the cell. The team performed all-atom MD simulations on shock-wave-induced bubble collapse to determine its impact on a nerve membrane-bound protein.

Presumably the findings (DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2015.11.030) have implications for football and boxing, too, in which concussions are common.

[Original report at LLNL. -Ed.]

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tonyPick writes:

At The Planetary Society is the news that data from the Chinese Chang'e 3 lunar exploration mission is now available for download, with Emily Lakdawalla providing a mirror of Lander and Rover imaging data.

So, space fans, without further ado, here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover. I don't usually host entire data sets (PDS-formatted and all) but I made an exception in this case because the Chinese website is a bit challenging to use.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Leninist argument is that imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism were intertwined. It did not make sense to discuss capitalism or industrialization without discussing Empire, and all its crimes. It is also the common argument that land clearances, in which commons rights were taken away from peasants and serfs, often by law and force, were required to create the industrial workforce.

This is because the early industrial workforce was a terrible place to work and live–and the phenomenon is not temporary, by most measures. It was true for between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years. Maybe longer. You worked longer (six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day was common in certain periods), you lived in urban filth, ate less, were sick more, grew to lower height if born into this, and died younger.

So, clearance was bad for the people who were cleared. I trust I don't have to explain why European Imperialism was bad for most everyone else. Granted, European Imperialism predates the Industrial Revolution (but not the commercial, wind, and water revolutions), but it goes into overdrive during the Industrial period, and the gains of previous periods are definitely used to support the Industrial Revolution.

There are two questions to answer with regards to the clearance issue. First, whether or not clearances were necessary for the agricultural revolution to occur. With no agricultural revolution, there's not enough food for expanding city populations.

[...] The second question concerns wages for workers, and is trickier. Allan argues that the Industrial Revolution happened in England for a simple reason: The coal was right there and could easily be shipped to factories. Shipping coal was hellishly expensive, and early steam engines were massively inefficient. Industrialization didn't start in, say, Paris, because it lacked the resources. In Paris, it was cheaper to use more labor rather than to use coal.

Socio-economic history--a different flavor of geekdom, but variety is the spice of life.

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Submitted via IRC by MrPlow for Bytram:

For the first time, scientists have pinned down a molecular process in the brain that helps to trigger schizophrenia. The researchers involved in the landmark study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature, say the discovery of this new genetic pathway probably reveals what goes wrong neurologically in a young person diagnosed with the devastating disorder.

The study marks a watershed moment, with the potential for early detection and new treatments that were unthinkable just a year ago, according to Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute at MIT. Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, calls it "the most significant mechanistic study about schizophrenia ever."

"I'm a crusty, old, curmudgeonly skeptic," he said. "But I'm almost giddy about these findings."

The researchers, chiefly from the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, found that a person's risk of schizophrenia is dramatically increased if they inherit variants of a gene important to "synaptic pruning" -- the healthy reduction during adolescence of brain cell connections that are no longer needed.

In patients with schizophrenia, a variation in a single position in the DNA sequence marks too many synapses for removal and that pruning goes out of control. The result is an abnormal loss of gray matter.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/01/27/scientists-open-the-black-box-of-schizophrenia-with-dramatic-genetic-finding/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

University of Helsinki staff will be reduced by about 1000 people by the end of 2017. It's where Linus Torvalds was when he started on Linux. Since 2009, the Finnish universities have been private corporations which operate as publicly traded companies (see PDFs). The Minister of Education and Culture is on record as saying, "We could have even fewer universities than we now do", so more cuts there or elsewhere are likely to come.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

Apple is currently working with partners in the US and Asia to develop wireless charging for iPhone and iPad. Mobile devices with wireless charging capabilities could be released as soon as next year. Apple has not released the specific details on the range that could be available, but as far back as 2010, Apple applied for a patent to use an iMac as a wireless charging hub for distances of 1 meter. In 2014 it applied for a patent on specialized housing for a mobile device with an integrated RF antenna, which would also allow for wireless charging by helping to eliminate the problem of metallic interference with charging signals. Apple would apparently be building on these ideas to create a new iPhone or iPad that could charge further away from the hub, while continuing to be used.

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Phoenix666 writes:

New transparent metamaterials under development could make possible computer chips and interconnecting circuits that use light instead of electrons to process and transmit data, representing a potential leap in performance.

Although optical fibers are now used to transmit large amounts of data over great distances, the technology cannot easily be miniaturized because the wavelength of light is too large to fit within the miniscule dimensions of microcircuits.

"The role of optical fibers is to guide light from point A to point B, in fact, across continents," said Zubin Jacob, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. "The biggest advantage of doing this compared to copper cables is that it has a very high bandwidth, so large amounts of data can pass through these optical cables as opposed to copper wires. However, on our computers and consumer electronics we still use copper wires between different parts of the chip. The reason is that you can't confine light to the same size as a nanoscale copper wire."

Transparent metamaterials, nanostructured artificial media with transparent building blocks, allow unprecedented control of light and may represent a solution. Researchers are making progress in developing metamaterials that shrink the wavelength of light, pointing toward a strategy to use light instead of electrons to process and transmit data in computer chips.

"If you have very high bandwidth communication on the chip as well as interconnecting circuits between chips, you can go to faster clock speeds, so faster data processing," Jacob said. Such an advance could make it possible to shrink the bulkiness of a high-performance computer cluster to the size of a standard desktop machine.

Would all the extra cycles go to handle the VR entertainment system, or at-home gene sequencing?

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Phoenix666 writes:

TV and movie lovers in Asia jumped for joy earlier this month when Netflix finally launched throughout the region.

Some in Indonesia, however, weren't so excited by the news. The country's largest telco, PT Telkom Indonesia, announced that as of 12 a.m. Wednesday morning they had blocked access to the streaming service on all of its Internet platforms.

Dian Rachmawan, Telkom's Director of Consumers, said the ban was put in place due to Netflix not following the country's broadcast laws and for having violent and "pornographic" content, Indo Telko reports. The exec did not specify which content the company found to be overly violent or indecent.

No cewek cewek nakal [girl bad girl] for you!

Original Submission

You have too many rights, so it's time for a little rebalancing:

Internet anonymity should be banned and everyone required to carry the equivalent of a license plate when driving around online. That's according to Erik Barnett, the US Department of Homeland Security's attaché to the European Union.

Writing in French policy magazine FIC Observatoire, Barnett somewhat predictably relies on the existence of child abuse images to explain why everyone in the world should be easily monitored. He tells a story about how a Romanian man offered to share sexually explicit images of his daughter with an American man over email. The unnamed email provider uncovered this exchange and forwarded the IP address of the Romanian to the European authorities and a few days later the man was arrested. Job well done.

Before we have an opportunity to celebrate, however, Barnett jumps straight to terrorism. "How much of the potential jihadists' data should intelligence agencies or law enforcement be able to examine to protect citizenry from terrorist attack?", he poses. The answer, of course, is everything. Then the pitch: "As the use of technology by human beings grows and we look at ethical and philosophical questions surrounding ownership of data and privacy interests, we must start to ask how much of the user's data is fair game for law enforcement to protect children from sexual abuse?"

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Phoenix666 writes:

Canada's ultra-secret eavesdropping agency said Thursday it has stopped sharing intelligence with international partners after revealing it had illegally collected Canadians' metadata in sweeps of foreign communications.

In a report to parliament, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said the breach was unintentional and had been discovered internally in 2013.

A CSE official blamed a software flaw that resulted in sharing of metadata, used to identify, manage or route communications over networks that could identify Canadians.

The agency said the likelihood of this leading to any abuses was "low."

But as a precaution, the CSE suspended its sharing of metadata with its Five Eyes intelligence partners—Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and the United States—until it finds a fix to the problem.

Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said he was satisfied that any data that had already been shared with the intelligence alliance before the software glitch was discovered "did not contain names or enough information on its own to identify individuals."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Can't stop texting? If you're a teenager, it may be to blame for falling grades and increased yawning in school, according to a new Rutgers study.

The study, published in the Journal of Child Neurology (DOI: 10.1177/0883073815624758), is the first of its kind to link nighttime instant messaging habits of American teenagers to sleep health and school performance.

"We need to be aware that teenagers are using electronic devices excessively and have a unique physiology," says study author Xue Ming, professor of neuroscience and neurology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. "They tend to go to sleep late and get up late. When we go against that natural rhythm, students become less efficient."

The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that media use among children of all ages is increasing exponentially; studies have found that children ages 8 to 18 use electronic devices approximately seven-and-a-half hours daily.

Ming's research is part of a small but growing body of evidence on the negative effects of electronics on sleep and school performance. But few studies, Ming says, have focused specifically on instant messaging.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Falling out of the sky may well be most passengers' worst fear when they board a plane. With this mind, a Ukrainian inventor has proposed building airliners with detachable passenger cabins that could separate from the rest of the plane and parachute safely to the ground in the event of an emergency.

This may sound like a reassuring idea for those who find flying more of a terrifying ordeal than an exciting way to start a holiday. But as someone with a keen interest in aircraft design and technologies, I found the plan a bemusing distraction. Not only would such a design be prohibitively expensive, it would also be unlikely to save any lives in all but a very few airline disasters.

While the video proposal shows the detachable cabin deploying on a plane experiencing engine failure, it should first be noted that crashes due to this problem are exceptionally rare. Systems and power failures have accounted for less than 3% of all fatal accidents in the past 10 years. From the beginning the argument did not stack up.

An aircraft is most vulnerable during take-off and landing because it is closer to the ground (its biggest obstacle), and is travelling at low speeds and therefore is harder to manoeuvre. According to statistics from Boeing, almost three-quarters of deaths from plane crashes between 2005 and 2014 occurred during these phases of flight. But this is the time when a detachable cabin would least likely be successful at saving lives. Being closer to the ground would give the pilot much less opportunity to jettison the cabin following an incident and if it were detached it could well land in a built-up area.

Original Submission