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Phoenix666 writes:

Using the gravitational microlensing technique, astronomers have recently detected what appears to be a Saturn-like planet residing near the Milky Way's bulge. The newly discovered exoplanet has a mass somewhere between Saturn and Jupiter and is orbiting a star with half the mass of the sun. A paper detailing the finding was published online on Mar. 21 on the arXiv pre-print server.

If a star moves in front of an another star, the light from the distant star is bent by the gravitational pull of the nearer star and the more distant star is magnified. Microlensing does not rely on the light from the host stars; thus, it can detect planets, even when the host stars cannot be detected. This technique is very useful for detecting alien worlds in the inner galactic disk and bulge, where it is difficult to search for planets with other methods.

An international team of researchers, led by Aparna Bhattacharyaha of the University of Notre Dame used the gravitational microlensing method to detect a gas giant planet orbiting the lens stars of a microlensing event. This gravity lens, discovered in August 2014, was designated OGLE-2014-BLG-1760 and is the 1,760th microlensing event detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) collaboration. OGLE is a Polish astronomical project based at the University of Warsaw, searching for dark matter and extrasolar planets. It utilizes the 1.3 meter Warsaw telescope mounted at the Las Campanas observatory in Chile.

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takyon writes:

Facebook was blocked in mainland China in 2009 following conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on a "charm offensive" likely intended to convince the government to bring the site back through the firewall... in a heavily censored form. Meanwhile, Chinese social media users have been amused and confused by Zuckerberg's journey, which has been featured in state media rather than censored:

Chinese social media users have taken to popular microblog Sina Weibo to mock media coverage of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's visit, since Facebook is blocked in China. Whilst outlets praised Mr Zuckerberg's "sincere" acts of diplomacy, web users mocked the activities he has taken part in during his China visit, which included jogging through "hazy" Beijing's Tiananmen Square, visiting the Great Wall and meeting China's propaganda chief Liu Yunshan as well as fellow media guru Jack Ma.

[...] The Breaking News account on Sina Weibo, which has over 49 million followers, asked users the question: "Will Facebook this time successfully enter the Chinese market?" Despite Facebook being blocked, the post appears to have survived censorship cuts perhaps because Alibaba, headed by internet entrepreneur Jack Ma, owns a 31.4% stake in the popular microblog. Jack Ma is one of the people Mr Zuckerberg met during his visit. Outlets also virally shared pictures showing the Facebook founder riding a toboggan down the Great Wall, which were originally posted on his Facebook account. Despite traditionally censoring posts from the US social network, the overseas edition of People's Daily shared posts on his visit. These included one by "Michael Wyh", alluding to China's firewall. "I thought there were two great walls in China: one for Mark Zuckerberg, and one for Chinese residents," it reads, receiving over 100 likes.

Amid heavy media coverage of the Zuckerberg visit, many users expressed bemusement, since they have absolutely no idea who he is. "Who is this? What is Facebook, what website?" asks PlanAsphy. Chen Jinlei JC appears to offer an explanation, saying "Overseas Facebook users are all 'older people'." Others simply commented on his physique, especially during his Tiananmen Square jog. Bad-Jim said "His body is alright". "The CEO's beauty cannot be blocked," adds LiYouYou_Asik.

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takyon writes:

Researchers from the University of Surrey have mixed two types of particles into a coating in which the particles spontaneously separate into layers as the liquid dries:

Scientists have been watching paint dry in experiments they say could improve the performance of everyday items, from sun screen to mobile phones. What's different about this paint is that some particles are on a nanotech scale, at just one thousandth the width of a human hair. However, other particles are larger, meaning the paint separates into two layers as it dries. The "self layering" coatings will be useful in industry, say UK researchers. "This is literally like watching paint dry because we are looking at polymer colloids, which is the base of most commercial paints and varnishes," said Dr Ignacio Martin-Fabiani of the department of physics at the University of Surrey. "So literally what we are doing is mixing two different sizes of these latex particles that are used in paints and then we are watching how this blend dries and seeing how the small and the big particles are distributed after the drying of the paint."

The two physicists found that during evaporation, the small particles pushed away the larger ones, so that they naturally separated out into layers. "We mix these two different types of particles in two different sizes and we see that just by drying we can create a layer of just small particles on top, while all the other particles are at the bottom," lead researcher Dr Andrea Fortini told BBC News.

Also at the American Physical Society.

Dynamic Stratification in Drying Films of Colloidal Mixtures (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.118301)

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takyon writes:

The Dawn spacecraft has found evidence of magnesium sulphate (epsom salts) on Ceres, causing the mysterious bright spots:

The US space agency's Dawn satellite continues to return remarkable images from the dwarf planet Ceres. Now just 385km above the surface (lower than the space station is above Earth), the probe has revealed new features inside the mini-world's Occator Crater. This is the 92km-wide depression that has multiple bright spots of what are thought to be exposed salts.

[...] "The intricate geometry of the crater interior suggests geologic activity in the recent past, but we will need to complete detailed geologic mapping of the crater in order to test hypotheses for its formation." Scientists think the bright spots are deposits of epsom salts (magnesium sulphate), the trace remains of briny water-ice that at one time became exposed on the surface.

With no atmosphere on the dwarf planet, the water content would have rapidly vaporised, leaving only the magnesium sulphate spots. Ceres likely has quite a lot of buried water-ice. This idea is being investigated by the satellite's GRaND instrument, which senses neutrons and gamma rays produced by cosmic ray interactions with surface materials. It is a means to understand the chemistry of the top metre or so of Ceres' rocky "soil".

Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

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c0lo writes:

Sydney Morning Herald reports that Hollywood blockbusters may take control of your television settings:

Not satisfied with releasing a director's cut, filmmakers want the next generation of High Dynamic Range movies to override your picture settings to preserve their artistic vision.

High Dynamic Range is the Next Big Thing in picture quality – relying on new standards like Ultra HD Premium (HDR 10) and Dolby Vision to reveal a wider range of colours along with much more detail in the highlights and shadows. It's designed for videophiles dreaming of the perfect picture, but they might be in for a rude shock when they grab some popcorn, dim the lights and sit back to watch their first HDR blockbuster movie.

Embedded within HDR video is metadata detailing the characteristics of the picture – whether you're watching via a streaming service like Netflix or the upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray disc standard. When some new HDR-compatible televisions detect HDR content they automatically lock-down most of your advanced picture settings, believing they know what's best.
...
Taking control of your television to overrule your picture preferences is a contentious issue and the industry is yet to agree on standard practice, says Chris Porter – Hisense's Director of Product Management. "Filmmakers and studios might be excited about HDR metadata giving them control over the picture, but I think that viewers should have the final say. There's no official ruling yet on how HDR metadata should be handled and who is in control, the issue might be tabled at the next UHD Alliance meeting."

The final decision on who has control over HDR mode is up to television makers, as the Dolby Vision HDR standard does not insist that content can lock-down your picture settings, says Patrick Griffis – Vice President, Dolby Laboratories, Office of the CTO.
...
"We've encouraged the television makers to think about adding a studio or director's mode to their televisions – to offer the most faithful reproduction of the artistic intent in the original master – but if you don't like it you certainly should be able to override it and switch to your personal preferences."

My bet? The TV manufacturers will implement whatever is cheaper from the two alternatives. But beats me if I know which one this will be.

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devlux writes:

Hey Soylentils,

I was speaking with a client of mine who is looking to monetize his website. To give some clarity of where I'm coming from; right now the client gives trading suggestions about what he thinks will make big moves during the week. He has a small but dedicated following, I have no idea how accurate he is, but people are paying money for the advice.

The advice section of his site is paywalled and a monthly subscription is required to access it. Unfortunately people have begun to share usernames & passwords, going so far as to even put credentials that were paid for with a stolen credit card on bugmenot.

He approached me about a possible solution and I have what I think is a good solution, but I wanted to ask how you felt about it. In a nutshell, the currently "secure" areas of the site would be stripped of any authentication. In it's place the server would return a 402 response code.

If you're unaware, 402 literally means "payment required" and has for decades, but as yet no browsers have implemented it.

I think DOGE or Bitcoin might be perfect here, just need to create a plugin for the browser that can catch the 402 and display a notice that payment is required, showing a QR code the user can scan and pay, before proceeding.

This got me thinking that it might also be an alternative to both traditional paywalling and ads. With adblocking turning into an arms race, it might be the correct way to monetize valuable content.

So here's the question I'm getting at. If a site you were already subscribing to, decided to implement something like this, would you switch over or just cancel your subscription? Keep in mind that at least at first, it would mean installing a plugin but the plugin would be opensource, with hopes it just becomes a standard.

Thanks for the feedback!

Original Submission

MrPlow writes on behalf of Runaway1956 with a story about an ancestral peanut:

A new study reveals how two ancient species of this legume were combined 10,000 years ago, in Andean valleys, to create the modern peanut. The modern peanut (Arachis hypogaea) is the result of the hybridization of two older types of Andean peanut. It has 20 pairs of chromosomes—the total from both old species, which have 10 chromosomes each. Scientists always thought—a suspicion now confirmed—that the "parents" of this peanut were the variants Arachis duranensis, very common in the Andean foothills between northwestern Argentina and southeastern Bolivia, and Arachis ipaensis, a species that had been reported but unconfirmed in a Bolivian town several hundred kilometers north, but thought to be extinct, until now.

Researchers at The University of Georgia (U.G.A.) and the International Peanut Genome Initiative, however, recently found a live specimen of A. ipaensis in the Bolivian Andes, and with it the answers to a mystery of how the two ancient species living so far one from each other had managed to hybridize into modern peanuts.

To solve this puzzle, scientists looked up old botanical collections and what they knew about migration patterns and transfers—in accordance with rainy and drought seasons—of the ancient farmers, hunters and food collectors. In addition, researchers used the molecular clock technique—an analysis used to determine, via DNA studies, the time when two species diverge their evolutionary paths to undertake new ones. "We now know that the first inhabitants of South America in their long voyages carried A. ipaensis to the land of A. duranensis 10,000 years ago. Once in the same area, bees pollinized the peanut plant flowers, allowing the birth of the hybrid that our South American ancestors ate and that eventually led to the modern peanut, Arachia hypogaea. It's a fascinating story," says David Bertioli, a researcher at the Center for Applied Genetic Technologies at U.G.A. and lead author of the study, published in Nature Genetics. (Scientific American is part of Springer Nature).

The genome sequences of Arachis duranensis and Arachis ipaensis, the diploid ancestors of cultivated peanut (open, DOI: 10.1038/ng.3517)

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bitstream writes:

Researchers at John Hopkins University have found a bug in Apple Inc instant messaging client iMessage that can be exploited by a attackers to decrypt photos and videos sent as secured messages. "Even Apple, with all their skills -- and they have terrific cryptographers -- wasn't able to quite get this right," said Matthew D. Green, whose team of graduate students at the aforementioned university found the bug. "So it scares me that we're having this conversation about adding back doors to encryption when we can't even get basic encryption right." Apple acknowledged the bug to The Washington Post, adding that it had "partially" fixed the glitch with iOS 9 software update last year. Apple assures that it will offer a complete patch for the bug with iOS 9.3, which will be released on Monday.

I guess the proprietary nature of the client software helped in vetting the code and that upgrading to the next CPU hog and jailbreak resistant software fixes everything(tm) ..

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports:

A new study by a University of California-Berkeley economist says that at current sluggish levels of job growth, entire regions of the United States, which were hit hardest by the Great Recession, will not return to "normal" employment levels until the 2020s. This amounts, to "more than a 'lost decade' of depressed employment" for "half of the country", wrote economist Danny Yagan.

The new study is one of many showing that the fall of the official unemployment rate, touted by the Obama administration and the news media as proof of a robust economic recovery, if not a return to "full employment", is largely based on the fact that millions of workers fell out of the labor force in the years preceding and following the 2008 financial crash.

The labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent last fall, and only climbed up to 62.9 percent in February. According to the Economic Policy Institute, February's official jobless rate of 4.9 percent--the lowest since the pre-recession level of 4.7 percent in November 2007--would really be 6.3 percent if the country's "missing workers" were included. These include 2.4 million workers who have given up actively looking for work. Trend graphic

Yagan [...] found that the areas hardest hit by the recession, which began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, continued to have high levels of joblessness in 2014. Map [Note the entire state of Florida.]

[...] Last month's Labor Department employment report noted that the average annual unemployment rate in 36 states, plus Washington, D.C. was higher in 2015 than the average unemployment rate for those states in 2007.

[...] The details of these studies will come as no surprise for tens of millions of workers across the United States who face unprecedented levels of economic insecurity, ongoing mass layoffs, and more than a decade of stagnating or falling real wages.

[...] Continual layoffs in the US have been driven by the plunging price of steel, petroleum, coal, and other commodities, which has been generated in large measure by the fall in demand from China and other so-called emerging economies.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Cringely has a pair of blog posts about the latest (annual?) round of IBM layoffs, which probably affected at least 15 percent of US workforce (precise numbers have not been released). Cringely's more recent post, published Monday, starts by dishing on the legal details of IBM's employee severance 'agreement', then pivots to launch haymakers at IBM's business model under CEO Ginny Rometty and her predecessor, Sam Palisano:

Cringely suggests that Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella may have outfoxed IBM by acquiring a leading vendor of the R open source statistics language, and by pledging to release SQL Server on Linux. The latter could produce considerable downward pressure on DB2 (and Oracle) licensing prices.

Dan Burger at the mainframe business site itjungle.com usually prefers to stick to business, speeds and feeds and numbers, but he seems ticked off at IBM as well:

Burger notes that the Lee Conrad, former head of Alliance@IBM (a group of ex- and current IBMers who unsuccessfully tried to unionize the company), has started a new website and Facebook page to replace the old alliance watering hole.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Yahoo News:

"Two British ships arrived in eastern Japan on Monday to transport a shipment of plutonium — enough to make dozens of atomic bombs — to the U.S. for storage under a bilateral agreement.
[...]
Japan has accumulated a massive stockpile of plutonium — 11 metric tons in Japan and another 36 tons that have been reprocessed in Britain and France and are waiting to be returned to Japan — enough to make nearly 6,000 atomic bombs.
[...]
The Pacific Egret and Pacific Heron, both operated by Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd., will take the 331 kilograms (730 pounds) of plutonium to the Savannah River Site, a U.S. government facility in South Carolina under a pledge made by Japan in 2014. The plutonium, mostly from the U.S. and some from France originally, had been used for research purposes."

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takyon writes:

Russian scientists have reportedly developed a new superconducting memory architecture that could be orders of magnitude faster than conventional memory, with switching times of under a nanosecond:

Russian scientists claim to have invented a new superconducting memory architecture that will be 100s of times faster and consume dozens of times less power than conventional memory chips. The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT, Russia) working with the Moscow State University (MSU, Russia) claim the architecture can also be used to perform single-flux quantum logic operations for superconducting processors, but admits that commercialization is decades away.

[...] "This research as published shows great promise in the untapped potential of materials science to advance storage and computing designs," Rick Doherty, research director at Envisioneering (Seaford, N.Y.) told EE Times in an exclusive interview. "Superconducting quantum computer research and designs may get a boost in support and funding thanks to this team's remarkable materials engineering work."

The unique part of the MIPT/MSU project is a new type of superconducting junction and memory architecture. Normal Josephson junctions use sandwiches of superconductor-insulator-superconductor such as in D-Wave's quantum computer, but MIPT/MSU's memory uses adds a normal-metal/ferromagnetic-metal (N/F) interlayer adjacent the insulator to achieve two stable conduction currents that can quickly switch between 1s and 0s. Since superconductors conduct current with zero resistance, the two stable states should take no energy to maintain, argue the scientists in their paper Superconducting phase domains for memory applications [DOI: 10.1063/1.4940440].

The MIPT/MSU researchers claim that read and write operations will be hundreds or even thousands of times faster than with conventional ferromagnetic memory technologies--depending on the final materials formulation--taking just a few hundred picoseconds to switch a 0 to a 1 or visa versa.

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takyon writes:

Intel may finally be abandoning its "Tick-Tock" strategy:

As reported at The Motley Fool, Intel's latest 10-K / annual report filing would seem to suggest that the 'Tick-Tock' strategy of introducing a new lithographic process note in one product cycle (a 'tick') and then an upgraded microarchitecture the next product cycle (a 'tock') is going to fall by the wayside for the next two lithographic nodes at a minimum, to be replaced with a three element cycle known as 'Process-Architecture-Optimization'.

Intel's Tick-Tock strategy has been the bedrock of their microprocessor dominance of the last decade. Throughout the tenure, every other year Intel would upgrade their fabrication plants to be able to produce processors with a smaller feature set, improving die area, power consumption, and slight optimizations of the microarchitecture, and in the years between the upgrades would launch a new set of processors based on a wholly new (sometimes paradigm shifting) microarchitecture for large performance upgrades. However, due to the difficulty of implementing a 'tick', the ever decreasing process node size and complexity therein, as reported previously with 14nm and the introduction of Kaby Lake, Intel's latest filing would suggest that 10nm will follow a similar pattern as 14nm by introducing a third stage to the cadence.

This suggests that 10nm "Cannonlake" chips will be released in 2017, followed by a new 10nm architecture in 2018 (tentatively named "Ice Lake"), optimization in 2019 (tentatively named "Tiger Lake"), and 7nm chips in 2020. This year's "optimization" will come in the form of "Kaby Lake", which could end up making underwhelming improvements such as slightly higher clock speeds, due to higher yields of the previously-nameed "Skylake" chips. To be fair, Kaby Lake will supposedly add the following features alongside any CPU performance tweaks:

Kaby Lake will add native USB 3.1 support, whereas Skylake motherboards require a third-party add-on chip in order to provide USB 3.1 ports. It will also feature a new graphics architecture to improve performance in 3D graphics and 4K video playback. Kaby Lake will add native HDCP 2.2 support. Kaby Lake will add full fixed function HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit hardware decoding.

Previously: Intel's "Tick-Tock" Strategy Stalls, 10nm Chips Delayed

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Phoenix666 writes:

In a survey released today, 27 percent of of U.S. office workers at large companies would sell their work password to an outsider, compared to a global average of 20 percent.

And despite all the recent media attention on data breaches, password hygiene is actually deteriorating, said Juliette Rizkallah, CMO at SailPoint Technologies, which sponsored the survey.

The study itself was conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent research firm. The same survey was conducted last year as well, but then only one in seven employees were willing to sell their passwords.

Crooks have to be willing to shell out some dough, however, as 56 percent of employees priced their credentials at over $1,000. Others, however, were willing to go as low as $100.

If guaranteed that the password sale would result in the CEO living on foodstamps, what would the percentage be then?

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cmn32480 writes:

NPR writes about the NERC naming poll for their $300million polar research vessel:

Britain's Natural Environment Research Council asked the public to help think of possible monikers for the new world-class ship, urging them to look for "an inspirational name" that exemplifies the vessel's mission, a historical figure, movement, landmark or a famous polar explorer or scientist.

"The polar research ship represents a leap forward in securing Britain's place as a world leader in marine and climate change science — and illustrates this government's commitment to invest in research facilities on a record scale," Jo Johnson, minister of universities and science, said in the initial press release. "Can you imagine one of the world's biggest research labs travelling to the Antarctic with your suggested name proudly emblazoned on the side?"

A name like, you know, Boaty McBoatface.

Since the NERC announced the poll, the Internet (as it is wont to do) hijacked it and went full-steam ahead with Boaty McBoatface. While the poll's Web page is experiencing "technical issues" due to what the NERC said was "overwhelming interest," Boaty McBoatface had amassed 27,000 votes as of Monday morning, while the second place pick had racked up around 3,000, according to the BBC.

Other perhaps less-than-inspirational names suggested include Ice Ice Baby, Usain Boat and It's Bloody Cold Here.

Alison Robinson, NERC's director of corporate affairs, said in a statement that the council is "pleased that people are embracing the [naming] idea in a spirit of fun," but noted that the NERC will have the final say over the boat's name.

Good faith would be naming a lifeboat, or a submersible using the results.

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