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An Anonymous Coward suggested a story based on an article appearing in the prestigious journal Nature — http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-a-tragedy-of-errors-1.19264:

Just how error-prone and self-correcting is science? We have spent the past 18 months getting a sense of that.

We are a group of researchers working on obesity, nutrition and energetics. In the summer of 2014, one of us (D.B.A.) read a research paper in a well-regarded journal estimating how a change in fast-food consumption would affect children's weight, and he noted that the analysis applied a mathematical model that overestimated effects by more than tenfold. We and others submitted a letter1 to the editor explaining the problem. Months later, we were gratified to learn that the authors had elected to retract their paper. In the face of popular articles proclaiming that science is stumbling, this episode was an affirmation that science is self-correcting.

Sadly, in our experience, the case is not representative. In the course of assembling weekly lists of articles in our field, we began noticing more peer-reviewed articles containing what we call substantial or invalidating errors. These involve factual mistakes or veer substantially from clearly accepted procedures in ways that, if corrected, might alter a paper's conclusions.

[Continues.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/20/nasa-record-number-astronaut-applications/

Apparently, everyone wants to be an astronaut. NASA has received a record number of applications for its open astronaut positions from mid-December 2015 until February 18th. Over 18,300 hopefuls submitted their resumes, almost thrice as many compared to the agency's last hiring round in 2012. This round has shattered the previous record set way back in 1978, wherein 8,000 people tried to get a spot in the agency's roster of space explorers.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said it's "not at all surprising [...] that so many Americans from diverse backgrounds want to personally contribute to blazing the trail on our journey to Mars." The fact that it's been four years since the agency hired its last batch of astronauts most likely contributed to the the number of applications. But there are probably other factors at play: for one, NASA has been doing a great job connecting with the common folk via social media. All the astronaut blockbusters in recent years, such as Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, could have also contributed to the surge of interest in space exploration.

Of the 18,300 applicants, only eight to 14 will get their dream job.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Volvo is recalling nearly 59,000 cars due to a software issue that can cause the vehicles to briefly shut down and restart the engine:

Swedish carmaker Volvo is recalling 59,000 cars across 40 markets over a fault that can temporarily shut down the engine. The software fault is restricted to five-cylinder diesels from the 60 and 70 series constructed from the middle of 2015.

Group spokesman Stefan Elfstrom told Associated Press the fault could be "unpleasant" for drivers. However, he said there had been no recorded accidents as a result.

The glitch can shut down the engine and electrical system while the car is in motion, but Mr Elfstrom said they would then both restart immediately. The glitch had been reported by drivers of new Volvos who said the engine could cut out without warning, creating a brief absence of steering and braking.

Swedish owners beware; 24,000 of the faulty cars were sold there.

Vehicle Identification Number search at Volvo.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This week a management consulting company called The Strawhecker Group (TSG) released the results of a study that found that only 37 percent of US retailers were ready to process chip-embedded credit and debit cards. The slow adoption of chip-embedded cards leaves merchants open to accepting liability for fraud perpetrated with traditional, less-secure magnetic stripe cards.

The US officially migrated over to the so-called EMV standard (eponymous for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, the companies that developed the standard) in October 2015, and at that late date, it was one of the last countries to make the shift. The upgrade in technology has forced card issuers to send out new, chip-embedded cards to users (which still have magnetic stripes to complete transactions on now-"legacy" magnetic stripe terminals). It also required merchants to upgrade their terminals to be able to accept the new credit cards. Credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard instituted a liability shift in October to get merchants to speed things up on their end—either upgrade your terminals or you're liable for any fraud that happens with a card that could have made a transaction using the chip technology.

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Phoenix666 writes:

China appears to be moving forward with its Mars ambitions, as a key space official has confirmed that work is continuing toward launching an orbiter and lander by 2020 or 2022.

"We are aiming to use the launch window of 2020," Dr. Wu Ji, director-general of the National Space Science Center in Beijing, told the website gbtimes. "If we miss that window, it will be 2022. So it is quite urgent."

[...] Chinese spacecraft that reaches to[sic] Mars, and safely lands, would be a real coup. In its rivalry with India, China was upstaged in 2013 as India's Mars Orbiter Mission successfully reached and explored the red planet. However, only two countries have ever softly landed spacecraft on Mars. The United States has done so half a dozen times; and the Soviet Union landed Mars 3 on the red planet in 1971, although the vehicle failed after sending back about 15 seconds of data.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have reported the first example of ultrafast 3D-printed graphene supercapacitor electrodes that outperform comparable electrodes made via traditional methods. Their results open the door to novel, unconstrained designs of highly efficient energy storage systems for smartphones, wearables, implantable devices, electric cars and wireless sensors.

Using a 3D-printing process called direct-ink writing and a graphene-oxide composite ink, the team was able to print micro-architected electrodes and build supercapacitors with excellent performance characteristics. The results were published online January 20 in the journal Nano Letters and will be featured on the cover of the March issue of the journal.

"Supercapacitor devices using our 3D-printed graphene electrodes with thicknesses on the order of millimeters exhibit outstanding capacitance retention and power densities," said corresponding author Yat Li, associate professor of chemistry at UC Santa Cruz. "This performance greatly exceeds the performance of conventional devices with thick electrodes, and it equals or exceeds the performance of reported devices made with electrodes 10 to 100 times thinner."

LLNL engineer Cheng Zhu and UCSC graduate student Tianyu Liu are lead authors of the paper. "This breaks through the limitations of what 2D manufacturing can do," Zhu said. "We can fabricate a large range of 3D architectures. In a phone, for instance, you would only need to leave a small area for energy storage. The geometry can be very complex."

This would obviously have applications in mobile phones as well as wearables and IoT devices, but what other applications would this empower? Would this be of use in automotive or home power applications? -Ed.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Volkswagen is reportedly being called to make restitution for the recent diesel emissions cheat scandal, which has severely clouded the car giant's reputation.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has asked VW to produce electric vehicles in its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, according to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (via Google translate). The car maker has also apparently been told to develop a network of charging stations.

Can the government dictate which lines of business VW should be in?

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MrPlow submitted, via IRC, for Bytram:

SpaceX performed a static burn Monday to check out its rocket for a planned Wednesday launch — and if all goes well — its first successful water landing:

SpaceX reports that it's ready to roll for Wednesday's satellite launch, which will be followed by another attempt to get one of the Falcon 9 rockets to land on a water-borne platform.

Luxembourg-based SES[*] is paying SpaceX to loft a new communications satellite into geostationary orbit along the equator at 108.2 degrees east longitude. The current launch window is available from Wednesday at 1846 ET (2346 UTC) and for about two hours after that point.

[*] SES is a European satellite owner and operator. The company's name comes from: Société Européenne des Satellite.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/23/spacex_successful_static_burn/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-scientists-are-investigating-a-propulsion-system-that-could-reach-mars-in-3-days

NASA scientist Philip Lubin is working on a system where lasers propel spacecraft with giant sails to the Red Planet in as little as three days. Much like Bill Nye's much-hyped solar sail, this 'photonic propulsion' system relies on the momentum of photons - particles of light - to move forward. But instead of photons from the Sun's rays, Lubin's design would be given a push by giant Earth-based lasers.

[...] So how do photons work to propel something as big as a spacecraft? Despite not having any mass, particles of light have both energy and momentum, and when they reflect off an object, that momentum is transferred into a little push. With a large, reflective sail, it's possible to generate enough momentum to gradually accelerate a spacecraft.

While Lubin and his team haven't yet tried out their system, their calculations show that photonic propulsion could get a 100-kg robotic craft to Mars in just three days.

A larger craft, like the kind humans might travel in, would take around a month to get there - one-fifth of the time it would take the Space Launch System (SLS), the world's most powerful rocket currently being developed to take us to Mars.

Lubin also explains that in the 10 minutes it will take to get the SLS into orbit, photonic propulsion could propel a spacecraft to an unheard-of 30 percent the speed of light - and it would also use a similar amount of chemical energy (50 to 100 gigawatts) to do so.

But the real benefit of photonic propulsion comes over longer distances, where the spacecraft has more time to speed up, and could eventually take us outside our Solar System and to neighbouring stars.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/37495/20160222/air-pollution-exposure-increase-risk-obesity.htm

Exposure to air pollution may up your risk of obesity. Scientists have found that lab rats who breathed Beijing's highly polluted air gained weight and experienced cardio-respiratory and metabolic dysfunctions.

In this latest study, researchers decided to take a closer look at the effects of air pollution on animals. They placed pregnant rats and their offspring in two chambers; one was exposed to outdoor Beijing air and the other contained an air filter that removed most of the air pollution particles.

After only 19 days, the lungs and livers of pregnant rats exposed to the polluted air were heavier and showed increased tissue inflammation. The rats had 50 percent higher LDL cholesterol, 46 percent higher triglycerides, and 97 percent higher total cholesterol. Their insulin resistant level, which is a precursor of Type 2 diabetes, was higher than rats exposed to cleaner air.

An early (pre-print) version of the abstract is available for free; the full article is paywalled.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Human skin's natural ability to feel sensations such as touch and temperature difference is not easily replicated with artificial materials in the research lab. That challenge did not stop a Saudi Arabian research team from using cheap household items to make a "paper skin" that mimics many sensory functions of human skin.

The artificial skin may represent the first single sensing platform capable of simultaneously measuring pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels. Previously, researchers have tried using exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes or silver nanoparticles to create sensors capable of measuring just a few of those things. By comparison, the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia used common off-the-shelf materials such as paper sticky notes, sponges, napkins and aluminum foil. Total material cost for a paper skin patch 6.5 centimeters on each side came to just $1.67.

"Its impact is beyond low cost: simplicity," says Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, an electrical engineer at KAUST. "My vision is to make electronics simple to understand and easy to assemble so that ordinary people can participate in innovation."

An early view of both the abstract and the full article are available.

Commander Data will be very happy.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees. The more a quantum state is entangled with its partner, the better the states will perform in quantum information applications. Unfortunately, quantifying entanglement is a difficult process involving complex optimization problems that give even physicists headaches.

Now in a new paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, mathematical physicists Bartosz Regula and Gerardo Adesso at The University of Nottingham have greatly simplified the problem of measuring entanglement.

To do this, the scientists turned the difficult analytical problem into an easy geometrical one. They showed that, in many cases, the amount of entanglement between states corresponds to the distance between two points on a Bloch sphere, which is basically a normal 3D sphere that physicists use to model quantum states.

As the scientists explain, the traditionally difficult part of the math problem is that it requires finding the optimal decomposition of mixed states into pure states. The geometrical approach completely eliminates this requirement by reducing the many possible ways that states could decompose down to a single point on the sphere at which there is zero entanglement. The approach requires that there be only one such point, or "root," of zero entanglement, prompting the physicists to describe the method as "one root to rule them all."

For further reading, arXiv.org has both an abstract and the full article (pdf) available.

There you go, Soylent, a great sig line for your registered account: "one root to rule them all."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The U.S. Navy is bringing back training in celestial navigation for officers due to fears of over-reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS):

"Raise your hand if you have ever determined your location on the planet using the stars," Lt. Daniel Stayton tells his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. A young officer halfheartedly puts up her hand. Another wavers. The rest of the class of 20 midshipmen sits stone-faced.

This is the challenge facing the U.S. Navy as it tries to bring back celestial navigation. The Navy stopped training its service members to navigate by the stars about a decade ago, focusing instead on electronic navigational systems. But fears about the security of the Global Positioning System, and a desire to return to the basics of naval training are pushing the fleet back toward this ancient method of finding a course across open water.

[...] So, why return now to the old ways? The Navy and other branches of the U.S. military are becoming increasingly concerned, in part, that they may be overly reliant on GPS. "We use it to synchronize all military operations, we use it to navigate everywhere — it's just something the U.S. military can't live without," says Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that studies security issues in outer space. In a big war, the GPS satellites could be shot down. Or, more likely, their signal could be jammed or hacked. Already, jamming has become more common, Weeden says. "You can buy a lot of GPS jammers off the Internet," he says. "A lot of those are made by Russia." He thinks the Russians probably have systems to jam the special signals the military uses as well. And China may be developing similar capabilities.

[Continues.]

mendax writes:

This is by now old news but nevertheless El Reg has reported in a short article that Microsoft's Office 365 suite has been down, more or less, all day Monday:

The exact cause of today's periodic Office 365 blackout remains a mystery some eight hours after the service in EMEA first fell over.

Poor unsuspecting souls took to Twitter this morning to vent their frustration at their lack of productivity caused by the cloudy productivity suite's outage.

"We are experiencing a national level intermittent problem with Office 365, we are hoping it will be fixed later today," stated Teeside University Tech Supp more than seven hours ago.

Computing's article is more specific about the cause, quoting a Microsoft talking head:

"A limited number of customers in Europe may have intermittent access to email on mobile devices, or intermittent delays accessing the portal, and we're working to resolve both as quickly as possible," said the spokesperson, curiously focusing only on mobile when, to Computing's knowledge, a number of types of device were affected.

Yet another reason why reliance on cloud computing is such a bad, bad idea.

Original Submission

MrPlow on IRC submitted this story for takyon:

Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai found that the more a particular country's culture values excitement, the more its political leaders show enthusiastic smiles. On the other hand, when the specific culture emphasizes calm, those leaders show more reserved smiles.

[...] In the United States, the smiles of politicians and other leaders tend to be big and wide. In East Asian countries like China and Taiwan, they are much more modest, the research showed.

The reason is that how one's culture views smiling influences how people in that culture may smile, said Jeanne Tsai, a Stanford associate professor of psychology and the lead author on a recently published paper in the journal Emotion.

"Often people think that when they are viewing a candidate's official photo, they are learning about the candidate's unique traits," Tsai said. "But our findings suggest that they are also learning about the candidate's culture and the emotions it values."

Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/february/smiles-jeanne-tsai-021516.html

Leaders' smiles reflect cultural differences in ideal affect (DOI: 10.1037/emo0000133)

Original Submission