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Phoenix666 writes:

New fossils from Kenya suggest that an early hominid species—Australopithecus afarensis—lived far eastward beyond the Great Rift Valley and much farther than previously thought. An international team of paleontologists led by Emma Mbua of Mount Kenya University and Masato Nakatsukasa of Kyoto University report findings of fossilized teeth and forearm bone from an adult male and two infant A. afarensis from an exposure eroded by the Kantis River in Ongata-Rongai, a settlement in the outskirts of Nairobi.

"So far, all other A. afarensis fossils had been identified from the center of the Rift Valley," explains Nakatsukasa. "A previous Australopithecus bahrelghazali discovery in Chad confirmed that our hominid ancestor's distribution covered central Africa, but this was the first time an Australopithecus fossil has been found east of the Rift Valley. This has important implications for what we understand about our ancestor's distribution range, namely that Australopithecus could have covered a much greater area by this age."

A. afarensis is believed to have lived 3,700,000-3,000,000 years ago, as characterized by fossils like "Lucy" from Ethiopia.

Stable isotope analysis revealed that the Kantis region was humid, but had a plain-like environment with fewer trees compared to other sites in the Great Rift Valley where A. afaransis fossils had previously appeared. "The hominid must have discovered suitable habitats in the Kenyan highlands. It seems that A. afaransis was good at adapting to varying environments," notes Nakatsukasa.

Kantis: A new Australopithecus site on the shoulders of the Rift Valley near Nairobi, Kenya (DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.01.006)

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Phoenix666 writes:

If you frequently find yourself binge watching TV shows, take solace in knowing you're not alone.

Seventy percent of US consumers engage in marathon TV-watching sessions, devouring an average of five episodes per sitting, according to a new survey by consulting firm Deloitte. The 10th annual Digital Democracy Survey also found that nearly half of all US consumers subscribe to a streaming movie service -- the highest level in the survey's history.

The survey's results, released Wednesday, underscore shifting tastes in how people watch TV. Increasingly, consumers are shedding their cable and satellite TV packages and opting for video found online or through streaming-media boxes such as Roku and Apple TV.

"The survey data indicates that consumers are more willing than ever to invest in services to watch whenever, wherever and on whatever device they choose," Gerald Belson, Deloitte vice chairman and US media and entertainment sector leader, said in a statement.

Deloitte found that nearly a third of us binge watch TV on a weekly basis, and that 53 percent of those consumers who do binge watch are more often in the mood for dramas.

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takyon writes:

Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor Blackwater USA (renamed many times, such as Xe Services and Academi), is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice:

Erik Prince, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group [FSG], is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

What began as an investigation into Prince's attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the central bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince's relationship with Chinese intelligence.

[...] For more than a year, U.S. intelligence has been monitoring Prince's communications and movements, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence officer and a second former intelligence official briefed on the investigation. Multiple sources, including two people with business ties to Prince, told The Intercept that current government and intelligence personnel informed them of this surveillance. Those with business ties were cautioned to sever their dealings with Prince.

[...] "He's a rogue chairman," said one of Prince's close associates, who has monitored his attempts to sell mercenary forces in Africa. That source, who has extensive knowledge of Prince's activities and travel schedule, said that Prince was operating a "secret skunkworks program" while parading around war and crisis zones as FSG's founder and chairman. "Erik wants to be a real, no-shit mercenary," said the source. "He's off the rails exposing many U.S. citizens to criminal liabilities. Erik hides in the shadows ... and uses [FSG] for legitimacy."

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hubie writes:

Little is known of Northern Europe during the Bronze Age and is generally thought as much more primitive, particularly as compared to the civilizations in the Near East and Greece at the time. It took 1000 years for bronze technology to migrate to the region from the Near East. Despite tales depicting great battles as told in Greece and Egypt, there was never any substantial archaeological evidence to support these stories. Evidence uncovered in a dig site north of Berlin has changed that view:

Before the 1990s, "for a long time we didn't really believe in war in prehistory," DAI's Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. "Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on," says Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "Very few talked about warfare."

Uncovered at the site are skeletons from hundreds of bodies, many showing signs of severe trauma such as embedded arrow heads, fractures, and stab wounds. A lot of the bones were found in dense caches suggesting mass dumping of corpses, and others had apparently sunk into the marsh and were well protected from looters and scavengers. With less than 10% of the area excavated, they estimate that thousands of participants were involved in the battle. These numbers and the types of weapons found suggest that these were not farmer-soldiers who fought part time, but rather organized professional militias.

Tollense looks like a first step toward a way of life that is with us still. From the scale and brutality of the battle to the presence of a warrior class wielding sophisticated weapons, the events of that long-ago day are linked to more familiar and recent conflicts. "It could be the first evidence of a turning point in social organization and warfare in Europe," Vandkilde says.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Terrorism will cast a continuing shadow over future generations and government electronic surveillance is a small price to pay to combat it, a leading historian said Wednesday, a day after the carnage in Brussels.

British author and journalist Max Hastings gave a robust defence of electronic intelligence-gathering in what he called a new world that would never know absolute security.

"Our tolerance of electronic surveillance, subject to legal and parliamentary oversight, seems a small price to pay for some measure of security against threats that nobody—today of all days—can doubt are real," Hastings told Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club.

Twin attacks by Islamic State jihadists killed around 35 people in the Belgian capital Tuesday.

Hastings, a former war correspondent and newspaper editor, is author of 26 books mostly on military history.

His latest, "The Secret War", tells the story of behind-the-scenes intelligence operations in World War II.

Future wars "will almost certainly" be fought on similar turf.

The expert named did not explain how the current total surveillance did not prevent the Brussels attacks. In other news, he taped a "Dox me and SWAT me" sign to his own back.

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takyon writes:

Vacuum and appliance maker Dyson is reportedly developing an electric car, and it has help:

Dyson is developing an electric car at its headquarters in Wiltshire with help from public money, according to government documents. The company, which makes a range of products that utilise the sort of highly efficient motors needed for an electric car such as vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and bladeless fans, last year refused to rule out rumours it was building one. But on Wednesday, the government appeared to have accidentally disclosed Dyson is working on one, along with other big companies outside of the automotive industry, such as Apple.

"The government is funding Dyson to develop a new battery electric vehicle at their headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. This will secure £174m of investment in the area, creating over 500 jobs, mostly in engineering," said the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan, published on Wednesday.

[...] Dyson recently reported profits up 20% in 2015, driven by strong growth in China, and said it plans to invest £1bn in battery technology over the next five years. Last October, Dyson bought solid-state battery company, Sakti3, for $90m, which founder Sir James Dyson said had "developed a breakthrough in battery technology."

Also at NPR.

Previously: Chinese Smog Leads to Spike in Dyson's Sales

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Phoenix666 writes:

CloudFisher does exactly what it says on the tin. On the slopes of Mt. Boutmezguida, in the Anti-Atlas range, the project's organizers have erected a series of tall steel poles, hung with rectangular black polymer nets. These are the fog harvesters. They look like the flags of long-buried pirate ships, standing out from the slope of the mountain, the only man-made thing for miles around, but they behave rather like Echinopsis cacti. Built on arid, rocky ground at an elevation of more than four thousand feet, they can, in twenty-four hours, collect up to seventeen gallons of water—condensed fog from the nearby Atlantic—per square yard of netting.

Reliable access to freshwater would, of course, provide a host of benefits to rural, water-poor districts in North Africa. According to the World Health Organization, a community requires about twenty gallons of water per person per day in order for its residents and their crops and livestock to thrive. Even a relatively small CloudFisher installation could provide a consistent water source for a group of rural families or a village. In a part of the world that is battling the progressive effects of continuous drought—exhaustion of wells, topsoil erosion, population loss as the land becomes inhospitable to agriculture—fog-water collection could be a life-altering adaptation.

The greatest benefit of the technology, though, might be time. In arid regions around the world, the task of obtaining water for the family frequently falls to women. Residents of Morocco's rural villages commonly spend as much as four hours a day walking to and from functioning wells. The lucky families own or borrow donkeys, but often the women simply carry the barrels—five gallons each, weighing nearly fifty pounds—on their heads. In Africa alone, women spend an estimated forty billion hours a year fetching water.

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Phoenix666 writes:

New research presented this week at the Royal Economic Society Conference from our Department of Social & Policy Science questions the commonly held belief that more education is 'good for you' and results in higher wages and better life outcomes.

The new study, by Dr Matt Dickson, with collaborator Dr Franz Buscha, examines for the first time in the UK, the relationship between wages and education over the entire life-cycle.

Its[sic] finds that:

        An additional year of schooling from the 1972 education reform in England and Wales resulted in a lifetime earnings loss of up to £45,000 over a 35-year period.
        Experience matters. Minimum school leaving age reforms might increase education but they also lead to a loss of potential labour market experience.
        The effect of experience lost is not overcome until individuals are in their mid-30s.
        When only the 'pure' education effect is examined, results suggest a positive return of approximately £60,000 over a 35-year period.

The report raises important questions about why education and investment in human capital are important and whether more education implies that people earn higher salaries. In addition it challenges when such effects are felt over a life-course and how might our current generation of children be affected by the recent raising of the participation age to 18.

Now you have hard research to back you up when you tell that professor reading Kant will harm your life.

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el_oscuro writes:

According to El Reg , Stefan Metzmacher, a Samba core developer, has discovered what sounds like a pretty bad security bug, and he says a patch will be released on April 12.

The vulnerability already has everything it needs to make a big splash: a name, Badlock, a website, and a logo. Here's what we know from the site:

"On April 12th, 2016 a crucial security bug in Windows and Samba will be disclosed. We call it: Badlock. Engineers at Microsoft and the Samba Team are working together to get this problem fixed. Patches will be released on April 12th."

"Admins and all of you responsible for Windows or Samba server infrastructure: Mark the date. (Again: It's April 12th, 2016.) Please get yourself ready to patch all systems on this day. We are pretty sure that there will be exploits soon after we publish all relevant information."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Today, two representatives from the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee sent a letter (PDF) to Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), asking him to discontinue any plans to expand the list of who the NSA shares certain information with.

In late February, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was working with the NSA to craft new rules and procedures to allow domestic law enforcement organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) access to the digital communications information that the NSA collects through programs like PRISM. Under the new rules, domestic law enforcement agencies would be able to access raw information that the NSA collects, without the so-called "minimization" process that the NSA has formerly employed to scrub surveillance information of identifying data pertaining to American citizens before handing it over to the requesting agency.

"We are alarmed by press reports that state National Security Agency (NSA) data may soon routinely be used for domestic policing," Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Representative Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) wrote. "If media accounts are true, this radical policy shift by the NSA would be unconstitutional, and dangerous."

Sending letters, not FBI tac teams?

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Phoenix666 writes:

as it happens, the DNA in our own cells isn't solely ours, either. More than eight percent of the human genome is not human at all—it's from viruses. And scientists are still digging up yet more viral code [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602336113] from human DNA that may well influence our lives.

In a new study this week, researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 2,500 people and found 19 never-before-noticed segments of viral genetic code. Some of that viral DNA may have been traveling down human lineages for at least 670,000 years, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most of the genetic sequences are mere remnants of long-gone viral particles. Still, previous research has found evidence that such fragments may influence the development of diseases, such as cancer and autoimmune disorders, based on their activity or placement near human genes.

But, perhaps more interesting, the researchers also found a segment of viral code that appeared to be completely intact and, when activated, may resurrect an ancient virus.

"This one looks like it is capable of making infectious virus, which would be very exciting if true, as it would allow us to study a viral epidemic that took place long ago," senior author and virologist John Coffin, of the Tufts University School of Medicine, said in a press release.

Sounds like H.P. Lovecraft was onto something.

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Sir Finkus writes:

Microsoft's new AI Twitter bot @tayandyou was shut down after only 24 hours after it began making "offensive" tweets.

The bot was built "by mining relevant public data and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff including improvisational comedians," and designed to target 18-24 year olds.

Shortly after the bot went live, it began making offensive tweets endorsing Nazism and genocide, among other things.

As of this submission, the bot has been shut down, and all but 3 tweets deleted.

The important question is whether or not it succeeded in passing the Turing test.

takyon: This bot sure woke fast, and produced much more logical sentence structures than @DeepDrumpf.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In a proof-of-concept study, NC State University researchers show that genetically engineered green bottle fly (Lucilia sericata) larvae can produce and secrete a human growth factor -- a molecule that helps promote cell growth and wound healing.

Sterile, lab-raised green bottle fly larvae are used for maggot debridement therapy (MDT), in which maggots are applied to non-healing wounds, especially diabetic foot ulcers, to promote healing. Maggots clean the wound, remove dead tissue and secrete anti-microbial factors. The treatment is cost-effective and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. However, there is no evidence from randomized clinical trials that MDT shortens wound healing times.

With the goal of making a strain of maggots with enhanced wound-healing activity, NC State researchers genetically engineered maggots to produce and then secrete human platelet derived growth factor-BB (PDGF-BB), which is known to aid the healing process by stimulating cell growth and survival.

Max Scott, an NC State professor of entomology, and colleagues from NC State and Massey University in New Zealand used two different techniques to elicit PDGF-BB from green bottle fly larvae.

It's a new twist on maggot therapy, which has been around since antiquity and involves using maggots to eat dead flesh in wounds while leaving healthy flesh alone.

Towards next generation maggot debridement therapy: transgenic Lucilia sericata larvae that produce and secrete a human growth factor (open, DOI: 10.1186/s12896-016-0263-z)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have discovered a microbiome in the reproductive tract of male mice that harbors potentially harmful bacteria.

Bacteria found in this specialized microbiome may pass from father to offspring, where it may lead to later disease risk, such as obesity. In fathers, some bacteria may initiate diseases, such as prostatitis, that can lead to prostate cancer.

"Microbiomes are influenced by many factors such as temperature, the pH or acidity of the environment, and whether there's a food source to promote bacterial growth," says Cheryl Rosenfeld, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri.

"The male reproductive tract includes a unique niche in which bacteria thrive, i.e. the seminal vesicles. These tubular glands produce seminal fluid, are located in an environment that is temperature controlled, and is rich in carbohydrates needed to feed bacteria. Our team set out to isolate this potential microbiome and analyze whether it could harbor harmful bacteria."

Discovery of a Novel Seminal Fluid Microbiome and Influence of Estrogen Receptor Alpha Genetic Status (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep23027)

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c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcast Corporation reports on the nanotechnology research being developed by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) researchers:

People could soon be able to replace their washing machines with a little bit of sunshine, thanks to pioneering nanotechnology research being developed by RMIT University researchers.
The researchers have been working on self-cleaning textiles, by growing nanostructures on textiles which — when exposed to light — release a burst of energy that then degrades organic matter.

Dr Rajesh Ramanathan, one of the lead researchers at the Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility and NanoBiotechnology Research Lab at RMIT, said the team worked with copper and silver-based nanostructures, which are known for their ability to absorb visible light.

"Basically what we do is take a simple cotton textile, we have a few different new methodologies to grow nanostructures directly on them, and then once these structures are formed we can just shine light on them," Dr Ramanathan said.

"Because the nanostructure is metal-based they can absorb visible light, what that does is it basically excites the metal nanoparticles which are present on the surface.

"And because of this energy, it's able to degrade organic matter which is present on it so that's how it'll get rid of stains."

[...] Dr Ramanathan said this research could be extrapolated in other fields.

"In fields like biology or antibacterial textiles, one of the problems the entire world is facing is superbugs, it's very difficult to kill them or get rid of them," he said. "So one of the potential aspects of this material is that we have started testing it on superbugs and it's showing amazing results."

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

Would you wear garments made from these self-cleaning fabrics?

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