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Phoenix666 writes:

Composite metal foams (CMFs) are tough enough to turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact. Given that these foams are also lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new types of body and vehicle armor – and that's just the beginning of its potential uses.

Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, has spent years developing CMFs and investigating their unusual properties. The video seen here shows a composite armor made out of her composite metal foams. The bullet in the video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile, which was fired according to the standard testing procedures established by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). And the results were dramatic.

"We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters," Rabiei says. "To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor." The results of that study were published in 2015.

But there are many applications that require a material to be more than just incredibly light and strong. For example, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation.

Pretty amazing result, but then stranger things have proven effective armor before.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 and butthurt write:

Various news outlets report on a study of ten people who were asked by a 58 cm (23-inch), speaking, humanoid robot to touch various parts of its structure.

Changes in the conductivity of the participants' skin were measured, along with reaction time. When they touched parts of the robot corresponding to the eyes, buttocks, or crotch, changes in conductivity and reaction time were greater than when the robot's head, neck or hands were touched. The investigators say that this indicates an "emotional response."

It was found that a touch where the robot's buttocks or genitals would be produced a measurable response of arousal in the volunteer human, the scientists report.

"Our work shows that robots are a new form of media that is particularly powerful. It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way," said Jamy Li, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University in California, who led the study. "Social conventions regarding touching someone else's private parts apply to a robot's body parts as well. The research has implications for both robot design and the theory of artificial systems."

The results are to be presented in June at the International Communication Association Conference in Fukuoka, Japan.

A video depicting the experimental procedure is available. Wikipedia has a page about the robot.

Phoenix666 writes:

People with diabetes who rely on insulin have seen the cost of that drug triple in just a decade -- even as doctors have prescribed higher doses to drive down their blood sugar levels.

Meanwhile, the cost of other diabetes drugs has stayed about the same or even gone down.

The rise in insulin costs was so large that since 2010, the per-person spending on insulin has been higher than per-person spending on all other diabetes drugs combined.

Published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the findings estimate in constant dollars what patients and their insurance plans paid from 2002 to 2013 for all antihyperglycemics, or medicines that reduce blood sugar levels.

Expenditures and Prices of Antihyperglycemic Medications in the United States: 2002-2013 (DOI: 10.1001/jama.2016.0126)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Version 1.0 of Vivaldi, a spiritual successor to the Opera web browser, has been released. The browser uses the Webkit/Blink layout engine also used by Google Chrome and current versions of Opera, but adds back in certain Opera 12 features and customizability for power users.

Vivaldi runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and is freeware but not open source software. The browser is compatible with existing Google Chrome add-ons.

Previously: Original Opera Founders Back with New Browser: Vivaldi

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Research firm Gartner predicts that commercial buildings will have more than 500 million "connected things" during 2016.

The biggest driver for this is to improve energy efficiency - currently commercial buildings account for 40% of the world's electricity consumption.

By embedding hundreds of sensors in walls, ceilings or even lights, the systems that keep the office running smoothly can be connected and in turn these building management systems (BMS) can be connected to the corporate network and the internet.

At Deloitte's headquarters in Amsterdam, workers can control the lights, heating and blinds via an app, while in London building consultant Arup is experimenting with smart desks - embedding sensors in them and hooking them up to smartphone apps to allow people to control lighting and heating.
...
Concerns about the smart lighting not working could pale into insignificance next to the wider question about what data all the hidden sensors around a building are collecting.

Architect Rem Koolhaas has spoken out against the way technology is infiltrating buildings, saying it is "totally astonishing" that people are willing to sacrifice their privacy for convenience and describing the rise of smart systems as "potentially sinister".

And you thought your company treated its employees like cattle now...

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

According to Scientific American a new paper uses data from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn to help locate the proposed Planet Nine:

The hunt is on to find "Planet Nine"—a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size—that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world's largest telescopes.
...
Agnès Fienga at the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France and her colleagues checked whether a theoretical model (one that they have been perfecting for over a decade) with the new addition of Planet Nine could better explain slight perturbations seen in Cassini's orbit. Without it, the eight planets in the solar system, 200 asteroids and five of the most massive Kuiper Belt objects cannot perfectly account for it.

The article also discusses further efforts to gather and examine data sets in an effort to establish Planet Nine's existence.

Although the journal is paywalled a copy of the Fienga paper is available at arXiv.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

In a pair of papers posted online this month, a Ukrainian mathematician has solved two high-dimensional versions of the centuries-old "sphere packing" problem. In dimensions eight and 24 (the latter dimension in collaboration with other researchers), she has proved that two highly symmetrical arrangements pack spheres together in the densest possible way.
...

Higher-dimensional sphere packings are hard to visualize, but they are eminently practical objects: Dense sphere packings are intimately related to the error-correcting codes used by cell phones, space probes and the Internet to send signals through noisy channels. A high-dimensional sphere is easy to define — it's simply the set of points in the high-dimensional space that are a fixed distance away from a given center point.

Finding the best packing of equal-sized spheres in a high-dimensional space should be even more complicated than the three-dimensional case Hales solved, since each added dimension means more possible packings to consider. Yet mathematicians have long known that two dimensions are special: In dimensions eight and 24, there exist dazzlingly symmetric sphere packings called E₈ and the Leech lattice, respectively, that pack spheres better than the best candidates known to mathematicians in other dimensions.
...

Now, in a paper posted online on March 14, Maryna Viazovska, a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Mathematical School and the Humboldt University of Berlin, has come up with the missing function in dimension 8. Her work uses the theory of modular forms, powerful mathematical functions that, when they can be brought to bear upon a problem, seem to unlock huge amounts of information. In this case, finding the right modular form allowed Viazovska to prove, in a mere 23 pages, that E₈ is the best eight-dimensional packing.

"It's stunningly simple, as all great things are," said Peter Sarnak, of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. "You just start reading the paper and you know this is correct."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160330-sphere-packing-solved-in-higher-dimensions/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

legont writes:

The most recent cholesterol drug trial failed to improve cardiovascular health.

"There has been, and continues to be, a lot of confusion about what's going on with this class of drugs, since we don't yet have one that can be brought to the clinic to prevent heart attack and stroke in our patients," Dr. Stephen Nicholls, a professor at the University of Adelaide, said in a press release. "As we close out the trial, we're trying to understand how a drug that seems to do all the right things in terms of blood cholesterol levels doesn't then translate into reducing clinical events."

The phase 3 randomized trial for evacetrapib enrolled 12,000 patients around the world at high risk for cardiovascular events, treating them with 130 milligrams of the drug or a placebo daily for 18 months. All patients already being treated for other conditions, including with statins or other drugs to lower cholesterol, continued with their regular drug regimens.

Overall, patients treated with the drug had 37 percent lower levels of bad cholesterol and 130 percent higher levels of good cholesterol, but researchers report there was no difference in cardiovascular endpoints between the treatment and placebo groups.

Do you think the cholesterol theory of cardiovascular disease is finally dead?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Human sacrifice served the purpose of propping up and sustaining class systems, according to researchers:

Saying they found "a darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies" than has been previously suggested, a group of scientists say ritual human sacrifice promoted stratified social systems – and helped to sustain inherited class systems once they were established.

After comparing dozens of societies, the researchers found that ritualized human sacrifice was far more common in highly stratified societies than it was in egalitarian societies. Noting the high level of overlap between religious and political sectors in the societies, the scientists write, "human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a divinely sanctioned means of social control."

Acknowledging that their findings might be "unpalatable," the scientists say, "our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today."

For the study, researchers looked at 93 traditional Austronesian cultures – societies that share a family of languages and span from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Taiwan to New Zealand. For each one, they noted how segmented the society was — designating them egalitarian or either moderate or highly stratified — as well as the presence of human sacrifice in their rituals.

Also at Nature, Ars Technica, and NYT.

Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies (DOI: 10.1038/nature17159)

Original Submission

EPL writes:

IKEA Communications AB has launched the IKEA VR Experience on Steam today, allowing anyone the chance to walk through a self-constructed IKEA kitchen from the comfort of their own home. And when we say everyone, we mean everyone who has a HTC Vive, its motion controllers and a PC that is capable of running such a set-up.

The Experience was made in collaboration with the French company Allegorithmic in the Unreal Engine 4 by Epic Games and will be supported till the end of august. The blurb on the Steam store page tells us that till then you can "explore and interact with an IKEA Kitchen in Virtual Reality! Walk around freely, open drawers and put your vegetable peelings in the waste sorting station. You can even enjoy the visual impact of different material finishes and experience things from a child's point of view."

In it's press release IKEA says they believe VR will be an everyday part of our lives in 5 to 10 years and that they see it playing a major part in the lives of their customers then. They envisage using this (kind of) technology to test out different interiors and furnishings before buying furniture of accessories according to Jesper Brodin, managing director of IKEA of Sweden and Range & Supply Manager bij IKEA Group.

IKEA sees this as the first step and hopes the IKEA VR Experience will be embraced by uses to help them develop the app or virtual reality in general. They encourage users to share their ideas with them (e.g. via email VRDevelopment@ikea.com).

Press release source: http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/about_ikea/newsitem/pb_keuken_app in Dutch as I was unable to find the equivalent article on the UK or USA IKEA websites, but the Allegorithmic has English text.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

sciencedaily reports:

The first largescale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Indigenous American populations of the time.

Led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), the researchers have reconstructed a genetic history of Indigenous American populations by looking directly into the DNA of 92 pre-Columbian mummies and skeletons, between 500 and 8600 years old.

Published in Science Advances [full text - PDF warning], the study reveals a striking absence of the pre-Columbian genetic lineages in modern Indigenous Americans; showing extinction of these lineages with the arrival of the Spaniards.

"Surprisingly, none of the genetic lineages we found in almost 100 ancient humans were present, or showed evidence of descendants, in today's Indigenous populations," says joint lead author Dr Bastien Llamas, Senior Research Associate with ACAD. "This separation appears to have been established as early as 9000 years ago and was completely unexpected, so we examined many demographic scenarios to try and explain the pattern."

"The only scenario that fit our observations was that shortly after the initial colonisation, populations were established that subsequently stayed geographically isolated from one another, and that a major portion of these populations later became extinct following European contact. This closely matches the historical reports of a major demographic collapse immediately after the Spaniards arrived in the late 1400s."

[Continues...]

FakeBeldin writes:

Here are two updates on motions in two unrelated cases against Uber:

In a case in which passengers claim they were sexually attacked by the drivers, the judge will allow the suit to move ahead, dismissing Uber's petition to throw out the suit. In another case, in which a litigant claims that surge pricing is a form of price-fixing, the judge has allowed the case to move forward as well. Basically, the judge seems to view Uber as facilitating cartel-forming.

To me, these two rulings seem incompatible. The first ruling seems to be based on the view that drivers are "a part of" Uber, while the second seems to be based on the view that drivers are independent - at least, I would assume a business is not beholden to have uniform prices across the USA.

Of course, I ain't no lawyer, so curious to hear what Soylentils think: Is Uber liable for drivers like a company is for its employees, or is Uber enabling price-fixing between drivers like a cartel? Can these two views legally co-exist?

Related: Uber Drivers Granted Class-Action Status in California
California's Unemployment Dept. Says Uber Drivers are Employees

Original Submission

takyon writes:

During a keynote at GTC 2016, Nvidia announced the Tesla P100, a 16nm FinFET Pascal graphics processing unit with 15.3 billion transistors intended for high performance and cloud computing customers. The GPU includes 16 GB of High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 with 720 GB/s of memory bandwidth and a unified memory architecture. It also uses the proprietary NVLink, an interconnect with 160 GB/s of bandwidth, rather than the slower PCI-Express.

Nvidia claims the Tesla P100 will reach 5.3 teraflops of FP64 (double precision) performance, along with 10.6 teraflops of FP32 and 21.2 teraflops of FP16. 3584 of a maximum possible 3840 stream processors are enabled on this version of the GP100 die.

At the keynote, Nvidia also announced a 170 teraflops (FP16) "deep learning supercomputer" or "datacenter in a box" called DGX-1. It contains eight Tesla P100s and will cost $129,000. The first units will be going to research institutions such as the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Original Submission

Max Hyre writes:

The title pretty much says it all. According to the report:

the service will encrypt all messages, phone calls, photos, and videos moving among [the devices].

Moxie Marlinspike is involved, so they have a chance of getting it right, and no one, even WhatsApp, will be able to know what you”re saying, texting, viewing, &c. (Unless, of course, your widget is running malware, or the opposition can get their mitts on it.)-: They claim this is available on nearly a billion devices—this is a really big deal.

takyon: Alternate links with no Wired paywall: TechCrunch, Washington Post, CNET, Reuters.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Ryan O'Hare writes in the Daily Mail that a business in China is offering people the chance to be virtually cremated before being reborn through a latex womb. The Samadhi Death Simulator allows visitors to be "killed off" by their peers, before they are "cremated" in an oven, and then "resurrected" - experiencing birth through a giant latex "womb" chute. The virtual crematorium opening in Shanghai asks people to discuss a life and death scenario before deciding if they would put one of their fellow philosophers forward for death, or if they would sacrifice their own life. The person with the worst explanation is selected for death, climbs inside the giant simulator and is fed through the machine feet first, with screens all around projecting images of rolling flames. After the virtual cremation, the person moves from the slab and crawls through a latex womb on their hands and knees, simulating their rebirth.

"When we do not fully understand and take in [death], saying goodbye is really quite a complicated and difficult task," says the attraction's founder, Ding Rui. "So I thought of how to be able to come up with a premise on how to educate people on life, so as one approaches the moment just before they they face death, they don't have to think about these problems constantly." Ding and his partner Huang Wei-ping went to great lengths researching their game, investigating the cremation process that typically awaits 50% of Chinese people after death. The pair visited a real crematorium and asked to be sent through the furnace with the flames turned off. When it came to Huang's turn, he found it unbearable. "It was getting really hot. I couldn't breathe and I thought my life was over."

Original Submission