SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) are used to treat heartburn (stomach acid indigestion). NPR is reporting on the dangers of PPIs following a recent study that links them to chronic kidney disease [Abstract] (DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.7193).

Many people have trouble discontinuing PPIs because the amount of acid in their digestive systems surges when they stop taking the drug. [...] "The teaching for many years was that these drugs were quite safe," says John Clarke, a gastroenterologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. "But there is data that's emerging that suggests PPIs may not be as safe as we think they are."

An estimated 15 million Americans use PPIs, which are sold by prescription and over the counter under a variety of brand names, including Nexium, Prilosec and Prevacid. They work by blocking production of stomach acid. And that could be the root of the problem, according to Clarke. Stomach acid helps digest food and also has a "barrier function against different pathogens which are ingested," he says. So when there's less stomach acid, it leaves people vulnerable to nutritional deficiencies and infections, including food poisoning like salmonella, a serious, sometimes life-threatening digestive system infection called Clostridium difficile, and perhaps pneumonia.

In addition, one recent study suggested people who take PPIs may be at greater risk of heart disease; another suggested they could increase the risk for chronic kidney disease. As this evidence has emerged, Clarke says, "It's imperative that people who take these drugs look at the risks versus benefits in their individual case and make sure the safety concerns are being looked at closely and people don't use these drugs lightly."

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darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/02/warning-bug-in-adobe-creative-cloud-deletes-mac-user-data-without-warning/

Adobe Systems has stopped distributing a recently issued update to its Creative Cloud graphics service amid reports a Mac version can delete important user data without warning or permission.

The deletions happen whenever Mac users log in to the Adobe service after the update has been installed, according to officials from Backblaze, a data backup service whose users are being disproportionately inconvenienced by the bug. Upon sign in, a script activated by Creative Cloud deletes the contents in the alphabetically first folder in a Mac's root directory. Backblaze users are being especially hit by the bug because the backup service relies on data stored in a hidden root folder called .bzvol. Because the folder is the alphabetically top-most hidden folder at the root of so many users' drives, they are affected more than users of many other software packages.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

(Phys.org)—Maxwell's demon, a hypothetical being that appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, has been widely studied since it was first proposed in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell. But most of these studies have been theoretical, with only a handful of experiments having actually realized Maxwell's demon.

Now in a new paper, physicists have reported what they believe is the first photonic implementation of Maxwell's demon, by showing that measurements made on two light beams can be used to create an energy imbalance between the beams, from which work can be extracted. One of the interesting things about this experiment is that the extracted work can then be used to charge a battery, providing direct evidence of the "demon's" activity.

Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-physicists-photonic-maxwell-demon.html

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takyon writes:

The Register reports that the market for both external hard drives and entry-level networked attached storage (devices with 3-12 bays) is shrinking:

The very small network attached storage (NAS) market is scarcely alive, according to IDC's 2015 Worldwide Personal and Entry-Level Storage Tracker.

The analyst firm defines personal storage has having one or two disks and entry-level storage as packing three to twelve disk bays. The former category now accounts for 99 per cent of all sales in the combined segments, IDC says. That means that of the 68,466,000 devices the firm says shipped in 2015, just 700,000 or so were small NAS devices. The rest were either single USB-connected disks or two-bay NAS.

The whole segment's sliding, as 2015's shipments were down from 2014's 75,377,000 units shoved out the door. The culprit? Cloud, which users increasingly see as a fine alternative to desktop storage. And why wouldn't they, given that the likes of Microsoft fling a terabyte of capacity at users when they sign up for Office 365? Lock-in, you say. Fair point. But we digress.

Those still buying in these segments now prefer disks with three to five terabytes capacity, preferably with USB connections. IDC sees USB-C as likely to attract buyers' attention, albeit at the expense of Thunderbolt.

From IDC's press release:

"2015 marks the first year of decline in the personal and entry-level storage (PELS) market since the Thailand floods in 2011," said Jingwen Li, Senior Research Analyst, Storage Systems. "The growing utilization of cloud storage continues to negatively affect the demand for PELS. In response, players in the PELS market are being forced to either capture more market opportunities through M&A or go through re-organization to better position their PELS business."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes in with a an article from El Reg, reporting on some very old hardware still in use:

The can of worms we opened when we learned of the server switched off after eighteen years and ten months' service is still wriggling, as a reader has contacted us to tell of nearly 30-year-old laptops still in service.

Reader "Holrum" says he has "a couple dozen Toshiba T1000 laptops from the mid [1980s] still fully functional (including floppy drives)".

The T1000 was introduced in 1987. [...] The machine was one of the very first computers to use a clamshell form factor. [...] It also offered a rather archaic LCD display, as illustrated.

[...]The machine ran MS-DOS 2.11 on a ROM [and] came with a colossal 512kB of RAM [...] and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.

Holrum says the T1000s are taken offline every few years for just the few minutes required to replace the NiCad batteries and give them a clean before they are returned to duty as process monitoring terminals.

Previous: Beat This: Server Retired After 18 Years and 10 Months

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have reportedly accelerated learning by stimulating the brain with specific patterns of electricity:

You can learn how to improve your novice pilot skills by having your brain zapped with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), according to researchers at HRL Laboratories. "We measured the brain activity patterns of six commercial and military pilots, and then transmitted these patterns into novice subjects as they learned to pilot an airplane in a realistic flight simulator," says Matthew Phillips, PhD.

The study, published in an open-access paper in the February 2016 issue of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that novice pilots who received brain stimulation via electrode-embedded head caps improved their piloting abilities, with a 33 percent increase in skill consistency, compared to those who received sham stimulation. "We measured the average g-force of the plane during the simulated landing and compared it to control subjects who received a mock brain stimulation," says Phillips.

"Pilot skill development requires a synthesis of multiple cognitive faculties, many of which are enhanced by tDCS and include dexterity, mental arithmetic, cognitive flexibility, visuo-spatial reasoning, and working memory," the authors note.

The study focused on a working-memory area — the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — and the left motor cortex (M1), using continuous electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor midline frontal theta-band oscillatory brain activity and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to monitor blood oxygenation to infer neuronal activity. The researchers used the XForce Dream Simulator package from X-Force PC and the X-plane 10 flight simulator software from Laminar Research for flight simulation training.

Previous research has demonstrated that tDCS can both help patients more quickly recover from a stroke and boost a healthy person's creativity; HRL's new study is one of the first to show that tDCS is effective in accelerating practical learning. Phillips speculates that the potential to increase learning with brain stimulation may make this form of accelerated learning commonplace. "As we discover more about optimizing, personalizing, and adapting brain stimulation protocols, we'll likely see these technologies become routine in training and classroom environments," he says. "It's possible that brain stimulation could be implemented for classes like drivers' training, SAT prep, and language learning."

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Modulates Neuronal Activity and Learning in Pilot Training (open, DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00034)

Original Submission

frojack writes:

The Zika Virus is triggering all sorts of fear in much of the warmer areas of south and central America, and recently spreading to the US via semen of a man who visited the area. (There are only 31 cases of the virus being found in the US to-date, all from travelers.)

The fear is caused by linkage to microcephaly birth defects, but so far the science behind that linkage is unproven.
The World Health Organization is becoming alarmed:

Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that can lead to life-threatening paralysis also seems to be linked with the Zika.

But this isn't the first outbreak of the Zika virus. Its been around for decades. And prior outbreaks did not exhibit any linkage to Microcephaly or Guillain-Barre.

[Continues.]

oaklandwatch writes:

On Thursday Amazon announced the winners of its first-ever "AWS IoT Mega Contest," a competitive hardware hacking event held in conjunction with Hackster last month which drew nearly a thousand participants. First place went to an RFID/infrared/light and sound sensor system that gathers data about a sleeping baby — and to a voice-controlled drone that sends radio signals using a Raspberry Pi board. "IoT is here now," posted an Amazon cloud evangelist, just four months after Amazon released their own Internet of Things platform. "People are building devices, sites, and applications that are sophisticated and useful."

Original Submission

Gordon Shure writes:

Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup financier behind successes like Airbnb and Dropbox, is soon to launch an experiment in offering a Universal Basic Income. At present, the plan is for hundreds of people to receive over 5 years' [time] a recurring sum of money unconditionally. Thereafter, the study will assess the various life consequences such as changes in work habits, entrepreneurship, creativity, or idleness.

Recent waves of interest toward UBI in Finland, Germany and elsewhere see supporters contend the initiative will — in a world facing structural unemployment due to jobs taken by automated AI, robotics and machines — combat resultant poverty and job insecurity. Many however voice doubts.

Original Submission

stmuk writes:

Perl 6 was officially released in source form for the Rakudo compiler on Christmas Day 2015 as promised in the old "ready by Christmas" joke. But for most people the most usable form is Rakudo Star (which includes docs and some batteries in the shape of library modules) and this was released earlier in this month.

Yesterday the first Mac installer was released alongside the existing Windows MSI. UNIX users can install from the rakudo-star-2016.01.tar.gz source tarball.

Full details at http://www.perl6.org/downloads/

So now is a good time to try out this radical new reboot of perl into a different but related language if you are interested in programming languages. The classic version (perl 5) powers Soylentnews and is, of course, still widely used.

There are some nice examples at the homepage http://www.perl6.org/

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

While some of us occasionally struggle to "navigate the terrain," sand wasps never get lost. In a recent study scientists have reconstructed what it is exactly the insects see and how they manage to "memorize" their routes.

Researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra managed to record wasps' flight and the direction of their gaze using high-speed stereo cameras and reconstruct what the insects see, using 3D models and a panoramic imager. The results of their study were published in Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 11.

It has long been known by scientists that insects tend to carry out special orientation flights before going on a long-distance journey. In other words, they capture snapshots which allow them to come back home. However, until recently, scientists weren't able to explain what actually occurred during these "learning flights."
Jochen Zeil, co-author of the report, and his colleagues learned that wasps not only fly backward but also move in a zigzag pattern of arcs around the nest. Before gaining height and distance, their attention is always focused on their nest.

"I was especially surprised by how long it took us to find the right way of looking at what the wasps were doing," he says. "It took us over 10 years!"

They analyzed the orientation flight data of real wasps and found that a virtual one would be able to come back home if programmed with this information.

"Wasps move along arcs centered on the nest entrance, whereby rapid changes in gaze assure that the nest is seen at lateral positions in the left or the right visual field," the scientists said in their report.

The research could be useful in the future development of self-navigating robots, the researchers said. "It will be interesting to implement the learning and homing rules we found into flying robots to test the validity and limits of our findings," Zeil said. "We want to understand what trick the insects are using to acquire the competence of homing," he added.

https://www.rt.com/news/332361-wasps-moving-arcs-video/
http://www.livescience.com/53690-see-the-world-through-wasp-eyes-video.html

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A study of pull requests made by nearly 1.4 million users of Github has found that code changes made by women were more likely to get accepted, unless their gender was easily identifiable. The study is awaiting peer review, so keep that in mind:

The researchers, from the computer science departments at Caly Poly and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day - 1 April 2015. Github is an enormous developer community which does not request gender information from its 12 million users. However the team was able to identify whether roughly 1.4m were male or female - either because it was clear from the users' profiles or because their email addresses could be matched with the Google+ social network. The researchers accepted that this was a privacy risk but said they did not intend to publish the raw data.

The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men. The researchers considered various factors, such as whether women were more likely to be responding to known issues, whether their contributions were shorter in length and so easier to appraise, and which programming language they were using, but they could not find a correlation.

However among users who were not well known within the community, those whose profiles made clear that they were women had a much lower acceptance rate than those whose gender was not obvious. "For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women's acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong," the paper noted.

"Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they're outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men. Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless," the researchers concluded.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

Could you erectify a luxurimole flackoblots? Have you hidden your chocolate cake from Penelope? Or maybe you're just going to vada the bona omi?

If you understand any of these sentences, you speak an English "anti-language". Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities.

Thieves' Cant, Polari, and Gobbledygook (yes, it's a real form of slang) are just a few of the examples from the past – but anti-languages are mercurial beasts that are forever evolving into new and more vibrant forms.

A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. Unless you yourself are a member of the "anti-society", the strange terms would sound like nonsense. Yet those words may have nevertheless influenced your swear words, the comedy you enjoy and the music on your iPod – without you even realising the shady interactions that shaped them.

The BBC article on cryptic slang is interesting, particularly the section about the Malian cliff dwellers who were escaped slaves.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Indonesian government has this week demanded that instant messaging apps available in the country remove all same-sex emoticons from their platforms, or face heavy sanctions.

While homosexuality is not illegal in the country, it remains a controversial issue in the Muslim-dominated country. Now in the latest effort to crackdown on gay rights, Indonesian authorities want to ban emojis, stickers and emoticons which depict same-sex couples, the rainbow flag, and any symbol that symbolises the lesbian, bay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

Apps that have been targeted by the demands include the popular Asian messaging app LINE, Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. The Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry added that a particular concern was that children would find the bright coloured stickers appealing.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

The Guardian has an article discussing the decision by the publishers of The Independent newspaper to cancel the print edition and move to an online-only model.

In the end it was the internet which killed The Independent newspaper and not Rupert Murdoch. Hit by a price war launched by the News UK owner in the 1990s, the 'Indy' was a casualty of an industrial revolution which has changed the economics of the newspaper business for ever.

The Independent was a major British newspaper which at its height in 1989 reached a circulation of over 400,000 in the UK.

The story is covered in more detail in the main Guardian article as well as additional coverage at the BBC, where there is speculation that this may be the first of many similar transitions.

Stephen Glover, a co-founder of The Independent, said the paper was selling "so few copies that it doesn't really make sense to go on printing it every day".

Speaking on Thursday — before the move was confirmed — he told BBC Newsnight: "If it is true then I think it will be the first of many papers which stop their print editions and have another existence online."

Further information and the history of the newspaper is at Wikipedia.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer.

The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Street, in Ridgewood, Queens, is the most radioactive spot in the entire state of New York, and would be the northeast's if not for NJ's McGuire Air Force Base in Burlington County (called "the most contaminated base" in 2007 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency).

In 1918, chemical engineer Alcan Hirsch, and his brother, mining chief Marx Hirsch, opened a chemical plant where today sits most of the businesses on Irving Ave's north side. In 1920, they christen it Hirsch Laboratories, and later added the mining company Molybdenum Corporation (aka Molycorp). The Hirsch brothers sold the lab in 1923 to Harry Wolff and Max Alport, who renamed it Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, but continued their mining operations, and supplied W-A Chemical with the rare-earth metals needed to produce a huge list of products.
The plant processed Monazite sand, which, when treated with Sulfuric Acid, separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate, but also the radioactive waste known as Thorium Pyrophosphate.
It wasn't till the United States' nuclear weapons program in 1942, known as the Manhattan Project, that Thorium became useful. Until 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission began to purchase the fertile heavy element from Wolff-Alport, and for the full 20-years prior, the Thorium waste was simply dumped into the area's sewers.

"Thorium waste dumped into the area's sewers." Amazing.

Original Submission