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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The European Union's interoperability page reports

The revenue and number of IT workers employed by open source service providers in the Basque Country has nearly doubled in 2015, according to figures published by a regional trade group for the sector, ESLE[1]. The combined 2015 revenue of the nearly 40 companies that ESLE represents is €58 million compared to €31 million the year before. The number of workers grew by 413 new staff members. Altogether, ESLE members now employ 1033 people.

Part of this growth is thanks to the Basque Country's IT policies, says Eneko Astigarraga, the trade group's president. The regional government promotes the use of free and open source software.

"The policies boost demand in the public sector itself, but government programmes running on open source are also helping indirectly", Astigarraga says, "by promoting these tools to companies and citizens. Examples include Euskadi Innova[1]--the region's innovation programme, and KzGunea,[1] a digital literacy project."

Additionally, the ESLE president says that the region's open source service providers are proving to be more innovative and more competitive. "In this, we are part of a global trend", Astigarraga adds. "The future is open."

"The Basque Country is emerging as a force of Open Knowledge and Free Software at the national level", the ESLE president is quoted as saying in the review for 2015.[1] Now in its 11th year, ESLE has grown in experience, and has become the reference point for free software, for both the commercial and the public sector, the trade group writes.

[1] En Español

The Basque region is home to the Mondragon worker-owned cooperative, a widely-referenced example of successfully doing things in non-traditional ways. Its business model is sometimes favorably compared to the Open Source ethos.

[NOTE: The "Basque Country" variously refers to either an autonomous community or a greater region of northern Spain. -Ed.]

Original Submission

bitstream writes:

The U.S. military is spending millions of dollars on an advanced implant to enable the human brain to communicate directly with computers. If successful, cyborgs will be a reality. The goal is to "open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics" according to DARPA's program manager, Phillip Alvelda.

In January 2016, DARPA announced it plans to spend up to 62 million USD on the project, which is part of its Neural Engineering System Design program. DARPA states that the implant would be smaller than one cm³. The aim according to DARPA is to connect neurons in the brain with electronic signals and provide an unprecedented "data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world,".

DARPA sees the implant as a foundation for new therapies that could help people with deficits like sight or hearing by "feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain." A DARPA spokesman told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications.

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bitstream writes:

The Bank of England is collaborating with researchers at University College London to design a Bitcoin clone of its own that can be centrally controlled. The bank is interested in a digital currency that is cryptographically secured.

The resulting system has now been revealed, and is named RSCoin. The system employs cryptographical methods to obviate counterfeiting and tampering.

Unlike other mechanisms, the digital ledger used by the new cryptocurrency is handled exclusively by a central body and will only be made accessible to users in possession of a specific encryption key. The RSCoin ledger could be published publicly and allow a central bank to make transactions anonymous to various degrees.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

In a[n] historic ruling described as a "wake-up call" for both the nuclear industry and the Japanese government, a district court on [March 9] ordered the shutdown of Takahaka Nuclear Plant in western Japan--a decision that was welcomed by residents and local officials who said the plant posed health and safety risks.

The order, coming just days before the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, will bring the number of operating nuclear reactors in Japan down to two. According to news outlets, it is the first injunction issued in Japan to halt a nuclear plant that is currently operational.

The Japan Times reports:

The lawsuit that sought the injunction was filed by Shiga residents who are fearful that an accident at the Takahama plant, which lies less than 30 kilometers from the northern part of Shiga Prefecture, would impact Lake Biwa, the nation's largest freshwater body and the source of water for about 14 million people in the Kansai region, including Kyoto and Osaka.

[...] Hisayo Takada, deputy program director at Greenpeace Japan, [said]: "This is a landmark victory for people living in the shadow of shut-down reactors across Japan and a devastating blow against the nuclear industry and the policies of the Abe government. It's a clear message that nuclear power has no place in Japan's energy future."

[...] A survey publicized [the week of March 7] found that fully two-thirds of Japan's local authorities--the heads of prefectural, city, ward, town, and village governments across the island nation--think the government should reduce, if not eliminate completely, its nuclear power capacity.

[...] A report from Greenpeace [the week of March 7] warned there is "no end in sight" to the ecological fallout from the Fukushima meltdown, and that "the government's massive decontamination program will have almost no impact on reducing the ecological threat from the enormous amount of radiation" released after the disaster.

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bitstream writes:

To sustain a permanent human settlement on the Moon or on Mars the people there will need to grow their own crops to produce food to eat. Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands are attempting to grow crops in simulated Moon and Martian soil. The first attempt was unsuccessful. The second, has however promising results.

A future colony most likely will resemble something like Biosphere 2, Eden project or BIOS-3. Projects like MELiSSA also investigate the issues. A space habitat would however also have to deal with radiation protection while at the same time farming using sunlight.

[See: abstract, full article (pdf), as well as Wikipedia's coverage of: Lunar regolith simulant and Martian regolith simulant. -Ed.]

Original Submission

Two Soylentils wrote in about the failure of the United States' first attempted uterus transplant:

Uterine Transplant Fails

butthurt writes:

The Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, Ohio, has embarked upon a programme of uterine transplantation, with surgeries planned on a total of ten patients. The first recipient, however, has suffered an unspecified "sudden complication" and the transplanted uterus, which was obtained from a cadaver, has been removed.

The first uterine transplant, which was unsuccessful, was performed in 1931. This was the first time the procedure had been attempted in the United States, where it is still considered experimental.

coverage:

• People
• Daily Mail
• The Dallas Morning News blog
• CNN
• Business Insider
• NBC News
• ABC News
• The Washington Post
• New York Times
• Reuters

[Continues.]

takyon writes:

Google has released a preview of the next iteration of Android, "N", and it includes improved multitasking features:

The expectation was that Google wouldn't start talking about Android N until its I/O developer conference in May. Instead, it decided on a very different approach.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's SVP for Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast, writes on Medium today (yep, Medium and not Blogspot) that the team decided it wanted to release the preview earlier in order to get more feedback from developers earlier in the process and get the final N release into the hands of device manufacturers this summer. Google's current plan calls for five preview releases and a final release in Q3 2016.

[...] For the first time, Android will also offer a split-screen view. Apps that support this will be able to run side-by-side with other apps on both tablets and phones (and developers can set the minimum allowable dimensions for their apps). Multi-windows support is something users have long asked for — especially on tablets. Google's own Pixel-C, for example, would make a far better productivity device with this feature. Besides a basic side-by-side mode, Android N will also offer a picture-in-picture mode so video apps can play in the corner on Android TV devices, for example.

Samsung and other device makers have already included split screen modes in their customized versions of Android, and projects like Remix OS have tried to make Android look and act more like a Windows/OS X/Linux desktop.

Android Marshmallow is installed on just 2.3% of Android devices. The slow pace of over-the-air updates may lead Google to compete more directly with smartphone manufacturers.

Original Submission

bitstream writes:

A disillusioned convert to the group ISIS has released a memory stick with 21 000 documents on phone numbers, addresses, family contacts to Sky News which has then given the same information to the British MI6. Nationals from at least 51 countries, including the UK, had to give up their most personal information as they joined the terror organization. Only when the 23-question form was filled in were they inducted into ISIS. It's considered a "Goldmine Of Information" for intelligence services. The data was stolen from the head of Islamic State's internal security police, an organization described by insiders as the SS of the group. The leaker had been entrusted to protect the core secrets of the organization and he rarely parted with the memory device.

Disillusioned with the leadership, which he says has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein. He claims the Islamic rules he believed in have totally collapsed inside the organization, prompting him to quit.

The reporter met him at a secret location in Turkey, and he said ISIS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa (Syria) and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the birthplace of the group. He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. From the attacks in Tunisia and the Bataclan massacre in Paris, it is clear that ISIS is refocusing its base of operations abroad and is intent on carrying out high-profile attacks in Western countries, something that security chiefs across Europe are warning about right now.

There are entries for 'countries travelled through', 'previous fighting experience', 'who recommended him' and 'special skills'. The leaker says "There hasn't been anything at all like this since the discovery of the Sinjar records in 2007 and that only covered about 700 people (IS fighters entering Iraq), all of whom were from Arab countries." The data contains 500,000 individual data points.

"There has been a slight change, they (the sponsors) are nowadays wanting to recruit people to attack in their own country rather than come to fight the war," the leaker said.

The former head of counter-terrorism at the Ministry of Defence, Major General Chip Chapman, told Sky News that the documents have huge value to the security services and is disastrous for ISIS. He says "Often counter-terrorism can be a treasure hunt without clues," and "They've given us the treasure chest and they've given us the key as well."

(The term "IS" is used in the source but ISIS is used here for clarity)

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

David Streitfeld writes in The New York Times that cities do not usually cheer the downfall or even the diminishment of the hometown industry, but the relationship between San Francisco and the tech community has grown increasingly tense as the consequences for people who do not make their living from technology become increasingly unpleasant.

"It's practically a ubiquitous sentiment here: People would like a little of the air to come out of the tech economy," says Aaron Peskin. "They're like people in a heat wave waiting for the monsoon." Signs of distress are plentiful. The Fraternite Notre Dame's soup kitchen was facing eviction after a rent increase of nearly 60 percent. Two eviction-defense groups were evicted in favor of a start-up that intended to lease the space to other start-ups. The real estate site Redfin published a widely read blog post that said the number of teachers in San Francisco who could afford a house was exactly zero. "All the renters I know are living in fear," says Derrick Tynan-Connolly. "If your landlord dies, if your landlord sells the building, if you get evicted under the Ellis Act" — a controversial law that allows landlords to reclaim a building by taking it off the rental market — "and you have to move, you're gone. There's no way you can afford to stay in San Francisco."

Even some tech folks think things are out of kilter. "There are valid concerns that San Francisco is becoming a plutocracy," says Donna Burke. "Silicon Valley traditionally valued changing the world over money. We need to get back to that ethos." Some San Franciscans also lament what they see as a high degree of tech cluelessness as some tech people regularly issue electronic broadsides that irk San Franciscans. The latest came in late February from a start-up founder, Justin Keller, who complained about the homeless and "riffraff." "The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city," Keller wrote in an open letter, adding: "I shouldn't have to see the pain, struggle and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have repaired the vision of children with cataracts by removing the cataract while leaving the lens capsule and the stem cells contained within intact:

The technique developed by scientists at the Sun Yat-sen University and the University of California, San Diego removes the cloudy cataract from inside the lens via a tiny incision. Crucially it leaves the outer surface - called the lens capsule - intact. This structure is lined with lens epithelial stem cells, which normally repair damage. The scientists hoped that preserving them would regenerate the lens.

The team reported that tests on rabbits and monkeys were successful, so the approach was trialled in 12 children. Within eight months the regenerated lens was back to the same size as normal. [...] The procedure was tried in children because their lens epithelial stem cells are more youthful and more able to regenerate than in older patients. Yet the overwhelming majority of cataracts are in the elderly. Dr Zhang says tests have already started on older pairs of eyes and says the early research "looks very encouraging".

Lens regeneration using endogenous stem cells with gain of visual function (DOI: 10.1038/nature17181)

A separate study mentioned in the BBC article used stem cells to grow new eye tissues: Co-ordinated ocular development from human iPS cells and recovery of corneal function (DOI: 10.1038/nature17000)

Original Submission

We had two Soylentils submit stories on Microsoft's joining the Eclipse Foundation:

Eclipse Foundation Gains Member

butthurt writes:

Coincident with a solar eclipse, Microsoft Corp. has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The company has also made its Team Explorer Everywhere software, "the official TFS [Team Foundation Server] plug-in for Eclipse," available in source form under an MIT-style licence.

coverage:

• Ars Technica
• Tech Crunch
• The Register (Cloudflare-protected)
• Infoworld
• ZDNet
• Network World
• The Inquirer
• CIO
• Fortune
• WinBeta (Cloudflare-protected)

[Continues.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age who also ironically shares a name with a telecom fatcat, has published an analysis of the recent Google fiber deal in Huntsville Alabama. This deal differs from all previous deals in that the city will build and own the fiber network and that Google has only committed to lease capacity on it, leaving the city the option to lease to other internet service providers and thus engender competition for internet access. It is a utility model for connectivity that has had great success in other nations, but is contrary to the way American telecom corporations view their role in the broadband market.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Peter N. M. Hansteen has a blog post about active DNS registration scams. The gist is that some are trying to hustle up unnecessary domain registrations in China. He notes in the blog post their attempts at getting him to buy as well as his responses to brush them off. Basically they're fishing for him to pony up some cash and register those domains himself through their outfit. As crime goes, this is the rough equivalent of some petty, if unpleasant, street crime and seems to have been going for some years. However, for those actually considering or planning on expanding into China or Asia in general, these scams can be a serious issue.

[Do any Soylentil's have experience getting domain names in China and/or Asia? What registrars have you used? -Ed.]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new 2-D form of carbon that resembles graphene was discovered several years ago by Nina Fechler of the Max Planck Institute. This material exhibited some desirable properties where it excelled those seen in graphene, such as a much higher surface area and high electrocatalytic activity. A new paper from Liu et al investigates the structure of this new material.

Driven by their curiosity to understand how one material could accommodate all of these properties, the team used advanced TEM techniques to elucidate its structure. It turns out the material comprises interlinked carbon nanoribbons knitted into homogeneous layers and looks rather like a block of uncooked ramen noodles.

'It's a new type of carbon morphology that resembles graphene but is not graphene. It's doped with nitrogen or sulfur, which are known to increase catalytic activity. The carbon noodle bands are terminated with one of these active molecules and are very accessible, making them potentially much better for any application that graphene is used for at the moment,' explains Fechler. Changing the salts changes the heteroatoms; providing a route to tune the material's properties.

As an added bonus this material is manufactured in a very low-tech manner, involving heating sugar and salt.

From the author summary:

2d-nanomaterials are a recent, important addition to their 3d counterparts and are presumably responsible for a most significant practical progresses in the nanoworld. For carbons, it is generally thought that "graphene" is the only 2d-version. The generation of inplane porosity (and its lining with heteroatoms) within sp2 carbon materials is another valuable target for efficient materials synthesis. Especially nitrogen-doped nanocarbons turned out to be a material family as such, as they offer unprecedented stability, electronic conductivity, and (electro)catalytic activities.

Original Submission

bitstream writes:

Google has kept its data center designs to itself. But some will now be opened up as they join the Open Compute Project (OCP), set up by Facebook to share low cost, no frills data center hardware specifications. Google will donate a rack specification that they designed for their own data centers. Google's first contribution is a "a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers," the company said. "We kicked off the development of 48V rack power distribution in 2010, as we found it was at least 30 percent more energy-efficient and more cost-effective in supporting these higher-performance systems." The company said it hopes to help others "adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google." Google hasn't submitted a proposed specification to the OCP yet, but is working with Facebook on that.

In many countries, installations which use 48 volt DC don't require a formal qualification permit to setup.

Original Submission