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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at ETH Zurich have managed to use a synthetic genetic program to instruct stem cells taken from fatty tissue to become cells that are almost identical to natural beta cells. This brings them a major step closer to a personal repair kit for diabetes sufferers.

Researchers led by Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Biotechnology and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel, have performed a feat that many specialists had until now held to be impossible: they have extracted stem cells from a 50-year-old test subject's fatty tissue and applied genetic reprogramming to make them mature into functional beta cells.

In the presence of glucose, the beta cells generated using this "genetic software" produce the hormone insulin - just like natural beta cells, which are found in the pancreas. The researchers reported this in the journal Nature Communications.

Best hold onto those love handles.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Video games are more and more realistic. So realistic, in fact, that research has consistently found that gamers feel guilty committing unjustified acts of violence within the game.

Now, a study suggests the moral response produced by the initial exposure to a video game decreases as experience with the game develops.

The findings provide the first experimental evidence that repeatedly playing the same violent game reduces emotional responses—like guilt—not only to the original game, but also to other violent video games as well.

Yet why this is happening remains a mystery, according to Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor of communication and principal investigator of the study published in the journal Media Psychology .

From: "Repeated Play Reduces Video Games' Ability to Elicit Guilt: Evidence from a Longitudinal Experiment"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Car-crazed Californians caught a glimpse of what the future of car racing might look—and sound—like at the second annual Formula E series in Long Beach on April 2, the only U.S. stop on the Formula E tour this year.

...The electric variety has additional bells and whistles, like virtual reality racing, where viewers wearing VR goggles can put themselves in the cockpit of the cars. Another feature, called Fanboost, allows spectators to vote on which driver gets an added burst of energy during the race, perhaps giving an underdog favorite the chance to make a crucial pass of a competitor.

Soylent has covered Formula E before, but it's the second paragraph that's worth chewing over. Perhaps the future of that sport lies in adding all kinds of new dimensions to it that aren't possible with today's cars.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Stanford professors say: The Electoral College distorts presidential campaigns, disenfranchises voters and drives partisanship. They suggest constitutional reforms to adopt a single national popular vote where the one-person, one-vote concept applies.

The Electoral College is responsible for disenfranchising, in effect, huge swaths of American voters, said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology who studies American politics. A single national popular or "constituency" vote would determine the president based on who won the most votes total across the country. Otherwise, McAdam said, "The great majority of American voters exercise no real political voice in the outcome of presidential elections."

The origins of the Electoral College, Brady said, date back to the Constitutional Convention, when the big states put forward a plan favoring them and the smaller states countered with their own plan. "The resulting compromise gave us the mal-apportioned Senate and the Electoral College, where a state gets the number of representatives plus the two senators," Brady said.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/april/electoral-college-bad-040816.html

[Also Covered By]: Popular vote better than Electoral College, Stanford scholars say

What do Soylentils think? Should the current US Presidential election system change to a one-person, one-vote system?

[Wikipedia lists many other voting systems; might one of these be a better alternative, and if so, why? -Ed.]

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

The New York Times reports that the Boston Globe has published a parody front page that offers a satirical view of a Donald Trump presidency. The fake page, with headlines like "Deportations to Begin" and "Markets Sink as Trade War Looms," ran as the front page of the newspaper's "Ideas" section, with an editorial denouncing Mr. Trump's candidacy on the next page. The spoof, says the editorial, was intended to take Mr. Trump's rhetoric and his policy positions to their "logical conclusion." A top story on the page opens with the paragraph: "Worldwide stocks plunged again Friday, completing the worst month on record as trade wars with both China and Mexico seem imminent." The page includes other headlines from a supposed Trump presidency, including "US soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families," and "New libel law targets 'absolute scum' in press." The mock Trump page was conceived and executed by the Globe's editorial writers, columnists and commentary editors, who make up the newspaper's editorial board, said Ellen Clegg, who added that the front-page parody "does not involve our newsroom." Trump criticized the paper's satirical stories for being "totally dishonest." "The whole front page is a make-believe story, which is really no different from the whole paper, the whole thing. I mean the whole thing is made up," said Trump. "And I think they're having a big backlash on that one."

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

-- submitted from IRC

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-supermassive-black-holes-lurking-universe.html

A near-record supermassive black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects - this one equal to 17 billion suns - may be more common than once thought, according to University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.

Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes - those with masses around 10 billion times that of our sun - have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions loaded with other large galaxies. The current record holder, discovered in the Coma Cluster by the UC Berkeley team in 2011, tips the scale at 21 billion solar masses and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The newly discovered black hole is in a galaxy, NGC 1600, in the opposite part of the sky from the Coma Cluster in a relative desert, said the leader of the discovery team, Chung-Pei Ma, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and black holes in the local universe with the goal of understanding how they form and grow supermassive.

While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the universe is to be expected - like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan - it seemed less likely they could be found in the universe's small towns.

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butthurt writes:

FierceTelecom reports that Cincinnati Bell has filed a request (PDF) (archived copy) with the Federal Communications Commission, seeking permission to stop offering its telegraphy service. According to the filing,

Telegraph Service is an unconditioned channel capable of transmitting binary signals [at] a rate of 0-75 baud or 0-150 baud in half-duplex or duplex operation.

There [are] currently no customers for CBT's Telegraph Service in its service area.

Cincinnati Bell is the only former Bell System company using the Bell name.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The "Replicant" division responsible for Google's robotics buying spree seemed to have hit a snag after its founder Andy Rubin left Google, and when it was reported that Google was interested in selling Boston Dynamics, the maker of the loud and noisy "BigDog". However, the division is still chugging along, and Japan-based subsidiary Schaft just showed off a new bipedal robot at the 2016 New Economic Summit:

There's a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as Nao, as creepy as Spot and BigDog or as anthropomorphic as Atlas, it might be more practical than all of them. It walks on two legs, but not like a man, or even a bear. This one, designed by Alphabet-owned Schaft Inc., has its own uniquely robotic form of locomotion.

The nameless robot strutted onstage at the New Economic Summit in Japan, joining Schaft co-founder Yuto Nakanishi and facing a delighted crowd. A video then played showing robots like the one on stage, but different — but all with a few things in common. Most important has to be the walking system. Rather than imitate a human gait, which is a remarkably complex controlled-falling affair, these robots have rigid legs that slide up and down like rails. This allows them to lift without bending, while joints at the top allow them to be canted in or out and "ankles" at the bottom provide stability on uneven terrain. Batteries and motors are suspended between the legs, creating a naturally low center of gravity.

It can go up and down stairs.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists are investigating the possible medicinal properties of Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensi):

Scientists have unravelled one of the secrets of a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine. The Chinese skullcap - known as Huang-Qin - is traditionally used for fever, liver and lung problems. Scientists have discovered that the plant uses a special pathway to make chemicals with potential cancer-fighting properties. They say it is a step towards being able to scale up production to make new drugs.

Prof Cathie Martin, of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, is lead researcher of the study, published in Science Advances. Working in collaboration with Chinese scientists, her team deduced how the plant, Scutellaria baicalensi, synthesises the chemicals, known as flavones. Flavones are found widely in the plant kingdom, giving some plants vivid blue flowers.

"Understanding the pathway should help us to produce these special flavones in large quantities, which will enable further research into their potential medicinal uses," said Prof Martin. "It's exciting to consider that the plants which have been used as traditional Chinese remedies for thousands of years may lead to effective modern medicines."

A specialized flavone biosynthetic pathway has evolved in the medicinal plant, Scutellaria baicalensis (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501780)

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Scores of women have reported rapes and assaults by Uber drivers and BuzzFeed has obtained internal information from Uber's customer support platform documenting thousands of complaints of sexual assault and rape over a period spanning December 2012 to August 2015. Now Jenni Avins reports at Quartz that a ride-sharing service that only uses women as drivers, Chariot for Women, is set to launch April 19 in Boston which will feature more stringent background checks and additional steps to ensure riders correctly match with their drivers. Like most ride-sharing apps, users can submit a request for a ride and will then be matched with a driver. However, unlike other services, Chariot for Women features a patent-pending technology that will provide both users and drivers with a code after a request is made that will need to be verified upon starting the ride.

But "whether it's legal or not is a different question," says Joseph L. Sulman. According to civil rights lawyers, Chariots for Women's female-only policies could put it squarely in the crosshairs of gender discrimination lawsuits, which would be difficult to win. Founder Michael Pelletz says he welcomes the legal challenge. "We want to show there's inequality in safety in our industry," says Pelletz. "We hope to go to the US Supreme Court to say that if there's safety involved, there's nothing wrong with providing a service for women."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Fiber's $300 construction fee for unlimited 5 Mbps service plan will be discontinued:

Google Fiber is no longer offering free Internet service to any customer who wants it in Kansas City. While Google Fiber is most famous for its $70-per-month gigabit plan, customers could also get slow Internet—5Mbps downloads and 1Mbps uploads—without paying a monthly service fee. The plan required only a $300 construction fee that could be paid up-front or in 12 monthly installments of $25 each.

But that plan is now gone in Kansas City, Re/code reported yesterday. The free offer was still online as recently as Wednesday, but the current offers now begin at $50 a month for symmetrical 100Mbps service. The move coincides with Google expanding free Internet service for qualifying low-income customers. Instead of providing free Internet to anyone in Google's service area, the company will instead make targeted efforts to bring poor people online.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

HIV overcomes CRISPR gene-editing attack:

CRISPR/Cas9-Derived Mutations Both Inhibit HIV-1 Replication and Accelerate Viral Escape (open, 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.03.042)

CRISPR: "Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats are segments of prokaryotic DNA containing short repetitions of base sequences. Each repetition is followed by short segments of "spacer DNA" from previous exposures to a bacterial virus or plasmid."

Cas9: " (CRISPR associated protein 9) is an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme associated with the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) adaptive immunity system in Streptococcus pyogenes , among other bacteria." ... "Apart from its original function in bacterial immunity, the Cas9 protein has been heavily utilized as a genome engineering tool to induce site-directed double strand breaks in DNA. These breaks can lead to gene inactivation or the introduction of heterologous genes through non-homologous end joining and homologous recombination respectively in many laboratory model organisms."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

An hour's drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It's the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor's land find themselves in a technological horror story. For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They've been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They've been visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They've found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All that and more because the farm's geographical coordinates where naively chosen as the default location in a widely used database of IP address to physical location mappings.

Original Submission

Walzmyn writes:

Apparently there were reports that the theorized "Planet 9" (Planet 10, Planet X...) was affecting the course of the Cassini Space Probe. JPL said Friday that this is not true:

Personally, I'd be very surprised if we found a new planet at this stage of the game. However, these guys surprise me all the time.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Yellow fever outbreak triggers vaccine alarm (DOI: 10.1126/science.352.6282.128)

Angolan yellow fever outbreak highlights dangerous vaccine shortage

The Pasteur Institute, which makes about 10 million doses a year, is one of only four facilities around the world producing yellow fever shots, joining two government-run plants in Russia and Brazil and French vaccine company Sanofi Pasteur. Their combined output has long fallen short of the world's needs, and the Angola outbreak has worsened the shortfall. Another major outbreak—for instance in Asia, where yellow fever has never gained a foothold—could be impossible to control, says Jack Woodall, a retired virologist in London, formerly of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. "I hate being alarmist," says Woodall, who's also a moderator at the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, an online alert system for disease outbreaks. "But this is something I'm really panicking about."

Original Submission