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takyon writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35688546

A radar survey into William Shakespeare's grave and an excavation of the playwright's house are among research projects marking the 400th anniversary of his death. Shakespeare's grave in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford upon Avon has never been excavated, but a scan has been carried out to search below ground. This allows an investigation without physically disturbing the site. The findings are expected to be revealed in the next few weeks.

There are believed to have been discoveries in the grave, in a church where five members of the Shakespeare family are buried. There has been speculation about a possible family vault under the stones - and questions about whether such a ground-penetrating scan would show other items buried with Shakespeare.

The grave, where the playwright was buried in 1616, carries the warning: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare, To digg the dust enclosed heare; Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, And curst be he that moves my bones."

The investigation into the grave was revealed ahead of this summer's World Shakespeare Congress.

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takyon writes:

A federally-indicted former CEO of Chesapeake Energy won't be testifying. "Speed was a factor":

Aubrey McClendon, the former CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., who was charged yesterday with orchestrating a conspiracy, has died in a car crash. The fatal crash occurred Wednesday morning, the Oklahoma City Police Department said on Twitter. A police spokesman said McClendon's car was traveling at a high rate of speed when it collided with an overpass wall and "was engulfed in flames."

[...] McClendon was indicted yesterday, charged with "orchestrating a conspiracy not to compete for oil and gas leases in northwest Oklahoma," as Laura reported for the blog. The Justice Department described the indictment as "the first case resulting from an ongoing federal antitrust investigation into price fixing, bid rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in the oil and natural gas industry."

Earlier article at The New York Times :

His interests ranged far and wide, as he acquired trophy assets like the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team, interests in a French winery and a $12 million antique map collection. He was once fined $250,000 by the National Basketball Association for bragging that he and his partners did not buy the Seattle SuperSonics to keep the team in Seattle — a statement that was at odds with the N.B.A. commissioner's intentions. The Sonics moved to Oklahoma City for the 2008-9 season, and they became the Thunder. They play in Chesapeake Energy Arena.

Mr. McClendon donated millions of dollars to the Sierra Club from 2007 to 2010, money that the environmental group neglected to disclose even as it advocated increased use of natural gas to replace coal burning. The Sierra Club cut its ties to the natural gas industry as environmentalists raised concerns over pollution caused by fracking and the disposal of fracking fluids.

The indictment follows a four-year federal investigation that began after Reuters revealed in 2012 that Chesapeake had discussed with Encana, a rival Canadian energy giant, how to suppress land lease prices in Michigan. Last year, Chesapeake settled charges of antitrust, fraud and racketeering violations by agreeing to pay $25 million as compensation to landowners with leases.

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takyon writes:

This story wasn't here for some reason. From Bruce Schneier's blog:

As part of an ongoing series of classified NSA target list and raw intercepts, WikiLeaks published details of the NSA's spying on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy, and key Japanese and EU trade reps. WikiLeaks never says this, but it's pretty obvious that these documents don't come from Snowden's archive.

From WikiLeaks:

Today, 23 February 2016 at 00:00 GMT [updated 12:20 GMT], WikiLeaks publishes highly classified documents showing that the US National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting; between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin; singled out the Chief of Staff of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception targetting his Swiss phone; singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Johann Human, and targetted his Swiss phone for long term interception; stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with US President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu; intercepted top EU and Japanese trade ministers discussing their secret strategy and red lines to stop the US "extort[ing]" them at the WTO Doha arounds (the talks subsequently collapsed); explicitly targetted five other top EU economic officials for long term interception, including their French, Austrian and Belgium phone numbers; explicitly targetted the phones of Italy's ambassador to NATO and other top Italian officials for long term interception; and intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berluscon[i], where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to "pop like a cork".

Some of the intercepts are classified TOP-SECRET COMINT-GAMMA and are the most highly classified documents ever published by a media organization.

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takyon writes:

A report in BMJ has estimated that about $3 billion will be wasted this year on cancer drugs that will be thrown away, due to larger packaging:

Patients, insurance companies and the federal government are on track to spend about $3 billion this year on cancer drugs that will be thrown away, according to a report on pharmaceutical company profits in BMJ – formerly known as the British Medical Journal – that was released Tuesday. At the same time, drug makers, hospitals and doctors are profiting from the way these drugs are packaged, researchers found.

At his office at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan – a leading cancer center – Dr. Leonard Saltz shows off a drug. "So this is a box that contained a vial of Keytruda at 100 mg," he said. "About the size of a small salt shaker. So this would cost approximately $5,000, a little bit over." Keytruda is part of a new wave of promising oncology drugs. It mobilizes your immune system to fight the cancer for you. "There is no question that this is a drug we want to have available for our patients," Saltz said. But Merck packages this valuable drug in only one size in the U.S.: 100 mg. The typical patient needs 150 mg, which means half of the second vial is thrown away.

[Continues.]

takyon writes:

Facebook's Vice President in Latin America Diego Dzodan has been arrested for refusing to comply with a Brazilian court order demanding WhatsApp data in relation to a drug trafficking investigation:

Police in Brazil have arrested the vice president of the social media company Facebook in Latin America. Diego Dzodan, an Argentine national, has repeatedly refused to comply with court orders to hand over data for use in a criminal investigation into drugs trafficking, police said. His arrest relates to the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. In a statement, Facebook called Mr Dzodan's arrest an "extreme and disproportionate measure".

Mr Dzodan's arrest was ordered by a judge in the north-eastern state of Sergipe. He was held as he left his house in an exclusive area of Sao Paulo on Tuesday morning. Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao had in two previous instances issued fines against Facebook for refusing to release WhatsApp data. The information was needed as part "secrete [sic] judicial investigations involving organised crime and drug trafficking," he said.

Also at TechCrunch.

Update: A reader points out that Diego Dzodan has been released, just one day after he was jailed for non-compliance with the court's orders.

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martyb writes:

A recent article in IEEE Spectrum looks into the challenges of building an exascale computer.

Al Geist works at at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and worries about... monsters hiding in the steel cabinets of the supercomputers that threatening to crash the largest computing machines on the planet.

[...] the second fastest supercomputer in the world in 2002, a machine called ASCI Q at Los Alamos National Laboratory. When it was first installed at the New Mexico lab, this computer couldn't run more than an hour or so without crashing. ...The problem was that an address bus on the microprocessors found in those servers was unprotected, meaning that there was no check to make sure the information carried on these within-chip signal lines did not become corrupted. And that's exactly what was happening when these chips were struck by cosmic radiation, the constant shower of particles that bombard Earth's atmosphere from outer space.

In the summer of 2003, Virginia Tech researchers built a large supercomputer out of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers. They called it Big Mac. To their dismay, they found that the failure rate was so high it was nearly impossible even to boot the whole system before it would crash.

The problem was that the Power Mac G5 did not have error-correcting code (ECC) memory, and cosmic ray–induced particles were changing so many values in memory that out of the 1,100 Mac G5 computers, one was always crashing.

[...] Just how many spurious bit flips are happening inside supercomputers already? To try to find out, researchers performed a study [PDF] in 2009 and 2010 on the then most powerful supercomputer—a Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, called Jaguar.

Jaguar had 360 terabytes of main memory, all protected by ECC. I and others at the lab set it up to log every time a bit was flipped incorrectly in main memory. When I asked my computing colleagues elsewhere to guess how often Jaguar saw such a bit spontaneously change state, the typical estimate was about a hundred times a day. In fact, Jaguar was logging ECC errors at a rate of 350 per minute.

[Continues.]

Phoenix666 writes:

Hundreds of union construction workers walked off the job at Tesla Motors' battery manufacturing plant in northern Nevada on Monday to protest what union organizers say is the increased hiring of out-of-state workers for less pay.

Approximately 350 plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters and others walked away from the construction site Monday along U.S. Interstate 80 about 25 miles east of Reno, said Russell James, District 16 business development specialist for the Building and Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada.

More than 100 picketed outside the main gate against what they say is an unfair labor practice that undermines promises to hire mostly Nevada workers in exchange for more than $1 billion in state tax breaks, James said.

"It's corporate welfare at its worst," he told The Associated Press.

Union officials said work at Tesla's gigafactory is increasingly being done by crews for the non-union, New Mexico-based Brycon Corp.

Tesla had better take care: there are plenty of other jobs for those skilled workers in the country east of Reno.

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takyon writes:

Scientists have discovered a gene variant partially responsible for making human hair go gray:

Scientists say they've identified the first gene for gray hair. The variant, dubbed IRF4, is also associated with blonde or lighter-colored hair. That makes sense, because melanin is the pigment that paints hair with the chestnut, golden or raven hues of youth. With age, the melanocytes that produce the color in hair follicles can slow down. And you start going gray.

"You think about hair graying as the absence of melanin," says Kaustubh Adhikari, a statistical genetics postdoc at University College London and lead author of the study [open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10815], which was published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

Gray hair is more common in people of European origin, as is lighter hair. That makes sense, Adhikari says. "You would sort of think of hair graying as an unintended consequence of selecting for this hair color." In other words, if you decide to marry a blonde, don't be surprised if your kids someday turn gray. People of Asian and African ancestry also go gray, but less often than do Europeans. "You would expect that they would have genes that influence graying," Adhikari says. "We just haven't found them yet."

The scientists discovered the gray gene by studying the scalp and facial hair of 6,630 volunteers in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru. The researchers took photographs and asked about natural hair color. The participants had a mix of European, Native American and African ancestry.

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Someone Else writes:

Two Israeli soldiers drove into an urban neighborhood in the West Bank deemed a "dangerous area". They were using the Waze GPS navigation app but forgot to turn on a "Avoid dangerous areas" setting specially made for the Israeli market. A firefight ensued:

The two soldiers apparently lost their way while using the Israeli-developed app called Waze. They strayed into the Qalandia camp, a dense urban neighborhood that was originally set up as a refugee camp 50 years ago. The soldiers were attacked and their vehicle set on fire. The violence escalated when other Israeli forces were sent to rescue them.

Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner told NPR's Emily Harris that the soldiers were on duty and driving to a destination in the West Bank when directions from Waze led them into the Qalandia camp. The area, Lerner said, is "known for its heightened violence when military forces go in there." The Israeli soldiers were "pelted with rocks and firebombs" and fled their vehicle after it caught fire, The Associated Press reported, citing Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen. Motti Almoz.

Lerner said a distress call from one soldier came in just before 11 p.m. local time, and that it took 20 minutes to find him. It took another 40 minutes to rescue the other soldier. The AP reported that one soldier escaped "to a nearby Jewish settlement and the other [took] cover in the yard of a Palestinian family for about an hour before he was rescued by the Israeli troops amid heavy clashes." The rescue mission was over by 4 a.m., Lerner told NPR.

The AP added that the "Palestinian Red Crescent identified the killed Palestinian man as university student Eyad Sajadiyeh, saying he was shot in the head during the fighting. The Israeli military said 10 security personnel were wounded."

Lerner confirmed that the soldiers who wandered into the camp were using Waze, noting that in Israel the app has a "fail-safe" mechanism to warn Israelis of Palestinian towns where Israel believes it is dangerous for its citizens to travel, such as Qalandia. He said, however, that the military's after-action review found that the fail-safe had been turned off. When asked if it was the standard for soldiers to use Waze for navigation, Lerner said, "We would expect the soldiers not to use it as a default," adding that the soldiers' usage of the app was under review. A spokesperson for Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, confirmed that the safety mechanism had been disabled.

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turgid writes:

The Guardian reports that NASA has begun another project [Javascript required] to design a quieter (low boom) commercial supersonic transport aircraft and has awarded the contract for the preliminary design to a team lead by Lockheed Martin.

Part of the project will be to study what would be acceptable noise levels from such a vehicle, and advances in design mean that the sonic boom associated with traditional supersonic aircraft could be replaced by a less disruptive pair of soft thuds.

A quieter supersonic aircraft would have potentially much larger markets than Concorde, which was effectively limited to going supersonic only over the ocean because of the intensity of its sonic boom.

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takyon writes:

The SD Association has announced the SD 5.0 standard, which will specify memory cards with write speeds capable of recording 8K and 360°/VR video:

The SD Association, the multi-vendor consortium responsible for developing standards for Secure Digital flash memory cards, has unveiled the newest version of the Secure Digital standard, SD 5.0. The latest iteration of the standard has been released specifically to accomdate video capture, particularly the write speeds needed to record 8K (7680x4320) and 360° videos. To that end, the upcoming SD 5.0 memory cards will introduce the Video Speed Class labeling, as well as a newer protocol that takes into account new NAND flash architectures, enables higher transfer rates and supports multi-file recording.

In order to address the needs for video, the new standard will be tackling both transfer rates and the overall nature of writes with video recordings. The new standard does not introduce a new bus - the current UHS-II bus supports over 150MB/sec in full duplex mode, more than any SD card can currently handle - but rather the focus is on the cards themselves and how they behave.

In particular, the SD 5.0 standard takes into account the fact that recent, high capacity NAND flash chips feature larger block sizes (the smallest area of NAND flash memory that can be erased in a single operation) than previous-gen chips. For example, SK Hynix recently released planar MLC and TLC NAND ICs (integrated circuits) with 6 MB page and 9 MB block sizes, whereas upcoming 3D NAND flash from Intel and Micron will feature 16 MB (MLC) or even 24 MB (TLC) block sizes. Erasing a group of larger blocks takes less time than wiping out a huge number of smaller blocks, which is why larger blocks enable faster write operations, something that is needed to build memory cards for UHD video capture.

The Video Speed Class standard includes a set of 37 block sizes that range from 8 MB to 512 MB, which should be sufficient for the foreseeable future. In addition, the SD 5.0 VSC protocol supports simultaneous interleaving of eight different files, which is useful for 360° videos, multiple independent video streams, or even numerous high-quality still pictures taken at the same time.

The new standard adds new write speed classes of 60 MB/s and 90 MB/s. The fastest former class was UHS Speed Class 3, which specified a minimum of 30 MB/s write speed to allow 4K video recording. The whitepaper lists a 120 FPS frame rate for 8K video recording.

SD Association press release (PDF) and whitepaper (PDF).

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Phoenix666 writes:

But here's the surprise: the Broken Hill skull is a strange (and still largely unexplained) anomaly. Look into the mouths of most other early human fossils and you'll rarely find a dental cavity. Strangely, for millions of years of human prehistory our ancestors were blessed with generally good oral health [open, DOI: 10.5772/38059] - even though their dental healthcare consisted of little more than the use of simple toothpicks.

In fact, rotten teeth only became a common problem very recently - about 10,000 years ago - at the dawn of the Neolithic period, a time when our ancestors began farming. Relatively sophisticated dentistry emerged soon after. In the last decade or so archaeologists have found evidence from cultures across the world that bad teeth were scraped, scoured, even drilled and filled apparently to remove decayed tissue.

Or, to put it another way, it looks like the dental drill predates writing, civilisation, and even the invention of the wheel by thousands of years.

...
Last year, Stefano Benazzi at the University of Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues took a closer look at a 14,000-year-old adult male skull that was found on a dig in Italy in the late 1980s. They discovered signs that the biting surface of one rotten tooth in the jaw had been deliberately scoured and scraped with a tool - perhaps in an effort to remove the decayed tissue.

Theories about the rise of tooth decay in humans include the introduction of carbohydrates to the diet from farming and the increase in female fertility (pregnancy changes the pH of saliva and allows the formation of more acids. But experiments by scientists show that bow-drilling tooth enamel with stone tips can penetrate in under a minute, so drilling teeth for dentistry by early humans was entirely practicable.

Interesting article worth reading in full.

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quadrox writes:

What damage can you do with Javascript if your script is not allowed to contain alphanumeric characters? "Not much" is what Ebay must have thought when they decided that scrubbing alphanumeric characters between script tags was good enough to prevent exploits.

As it turns out the weak typing in Javascript combined with creative abuse of the textual representation of certain values allows you to do quite a lot. Welcome to JSF*ck.

[The article systematically explains how they created the integer values zero and one, and then the logical values of true and false, and from there scaffolded into being able to construct any desired character.

There is even a web site that allows you to translate your own script. -Ed.]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

We have all heard ad nauseam about Windows 10 "telemetry" features. Most of us don't like them and avoid the OS or neuter it as much as we can.

Now, the question arises, what about other OSes?

How about Android and what it specifically does that we don't like with regards to our privacy and how do we adjust it? How about OSX? Anything wrong with Apple's OS that you modify? And iOS, the least flexible OS of all? Finally, we come to Linux; apart from Ubuntu's Amazon fling, any other distro doing something that smells bad? Feel free to toss in other OSes, as well. Let it rip.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This week Dutch, American and Canadian researchers present a major step in understanding antifreeze proteins, the proteins that hinder the growth of ice crystals. Artificial forms of these proteins are interesting for a whole range of applications – from de-icing spray and road salt to improved preservation of frozen food and organs. The team, led by TU/e researcher Ilja Voets, will publish its findings this week in the leading journal PNAS on how we need a different type of antifreeze protein than previously thought for most applications.

[...] Roughly speaking, antifreeze proteins work in two ways. On the one hand, they reduce the temperature whereby ice crystals begin to grow rapidly (the scientific term being 'thermal hysteresis', or TH). On the other hand, they combat so-call recrystallization, the process by which, in simple terms, small ice crystals cluster into larger chunks (scientific term: 'ice recrystallization inhibition', or IRI). However, the relationship between these two activities of antifreeze proteins has long been unclear.

[...] TU/e researcher Ilja Voets and her team of Dutch, American and Canadian researchers now reveal that there is no clear relationship between these activities and that there are also significant differences per protein. This also means that it is not so easy, as had long been thought, to determine how 'active' a protein is – an important consideration in its suitability in applications. "Sometimes the TH activity is important but more often than not it is the IRI activity that appears to be the determining factor," says Voets.

Antifreeze proteins are considered for a variety of applications from de-icing aircraft wings to keeping roads ice-free to producing better-quality frozen food.

Blocking rapid ice crystal growth through nonbasal plane adsorption of antifreeze proteins (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1524109113)

Original Submission