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takyon writes:

Researchers have found evidence of cheesemaking in the Swiss Alps dating back to the 1st millennium BC:

An international team led by the University of York and Newcastle University looked at the composition of residues left on fragments of ceramic pots found at six sites in the Swiss Alps. The shards of pottery were known to date from Neolithic times to the Iron Age. The researchers found that the residue on those from the 1st millennium BC - the Iron Age - had the same chemical signatures associated with heating milk from animals such as cows, sheep and goats, as part of the cheesemaking process.

The ceramic fragments examined as part of this study were found in the ruins of stone buildings similar to those used by modern alpine dairy managers for cheese production during the summer months.

Although there is earlier evidence for cheese production in lowland settings, until now virtually nothing was known about the origins of cheesemaking at altitude due to the poor preservation of archaeological sites.

Also at Futurity. Mirrored at Newcastle University.

Chemical Analysis of Pottery Demonstrates Prehistoric Origin for High-Altitude Alpine Dairying (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151442)

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The European Union's interoperability page reports

The primary school in Saint Léger en Yvelines (France) has nearly completely switched to using free software reports the village's deputy mayor Olivier Guillard. "Do not underestimate the task", he advises others on the forum of Etalab, France's open government portal, "and, most of all, persist".

Saint Léger en Yvelines is a commune some 50 km west of Paris. The village has one school, with 6 classes, and includes pre-school. The Jean Moulin school is attended by all of the around 30 children in the commune up to the age of 11. On [April 15], deputy mayor Guillard published his recommendations for others that want to "free their schools from the commercial agenda of proprietary software vendors". Free software is unhindered by the constraint of financial profitability, he argues: there is no planned obsolescence and no lock-in to specific hardware.

Olivier Guillard urges rigorous testing of solutions before suggesting them to teachers. Just as important is to convince the teachers of the benefits of free software. He also recommends being proactive on maintenance and monitoring.

He cautions patience. The school's transition to free software took years, he writes. "Seven years of convincing. Seven years to find free software alternatives for each new commercial offering. Seven years of creating a dialogue and building communication channels with teachers dedicated to digitisation of education."

The school has not rid itself of proprietary software completely. Whiteboard solutions and office documents exchanged in France's education sector forces teachers to use proprietary software, for which the school keeps apart two PCs with proprietary office tools, the deputy mayor writes.

Blogger, Linux advocate, and retired 1-man school IT staff Robert Pogson has a short (two paragraph) post. [It offers several open-source software alternatives as well as hardware recommendations — fair use precludes including the whole post here. -Ed.]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/us-goes-shopping-iran-s-nuclear-bazaar-will-buy-heavy-water-science

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Steve Wozniak has spoken out against Apple's tax affairs, saying all companies ought to pay 50 per cent in taxes.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live he said: "I don't like the idea that Apple might be unfair--not paying taxes the way I do as a person.

"I do a lot of work, I do a lot of travel and I pay over 50 per cent of anything I make in taxes and I believe that's part of life and you should do it."

Asked if Apple should pay that amount, he replied: "Every company in the world should."

According to Woz, money was never a factor when he started the biz with Steve Jobs 40 years ago. He added: "Steve Jobs started Apple Computers for money, that was his big thing and that was extremely important and critical and good."

Europe is currently scrutinising Ireland's tax arrangements with Apple over an alleged sweetheart deal with the company. Some have speculated the probe could lead to Apple paying $8bn in back taxes, even though the case is against the Irish government.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/astrazeneca-partners-its-way-genomic-bounty

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"exec" writes:

RMIT University researchers have trialled a quantum processor capable of routing quantum information from different locations in a critical breakthrough for quantum computing.

The work opens a pathway towards the "quantum data bus", a vital component of future quantum technologies.

[...] Quantum Photonics Laboratory Director Dr Alberto Peruzzo said after more than a decade of global research in the specialised area, the RMIT results were highly anticipated.

"The perfect state transfer has emerged as a promising technique for data routing in large-scale quantum computers," Peruzzo said.

"The last 10 years has seen a wealth of theoretical proposals but until now it has never been experimentally realised.

Source: EurekAlert!

-- submitted from IRC

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bitstream writes:

Researchers at Linköping university in Sweden has accomplished a record for fullerene-free polymer solar cells. Usually fullerenes are required for solar cells on plastic film, but they can be unstable. Now they have demonstrated that it's possible to accomplish high efficiency without using fullerenes.

In recent years, polymer solar cells have emerged as a low cost alternative to silicon solar cells. In order to obtain high efficiency, fullerenes are usually required in polymer solar cells to separate charge carriers. However, fullerenes are unstable under illumination, and form large crystals at high temperatures.

Now, a team of chemists led by Professor Jianhui Hou at the CAS has set a new world record for fullerene-free polymer solar cells by developing a unique combination of a polymer called PBDB-T and a small molecule called ITIC. With this combination, the sun's energy is converted with an efficiency of 11%, a value that strikes most solar cells with fullerenes, and all without fullerenes.

More at phys.org and the article Fullerene-free polymer solar cells with over 11% efficiency and excellent thermal stability (DOI: 10.1002/adma.201600281).

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oaklandwatch writes:

Over 7,500 sys-admins, app developers, and other IT professionals from over 50 countries are gathering this weekend in Austin, Texas for The OpenStack Foundation's OpenStack Summit 2016. Red Hat and VMWare are among the sponsors for an event which includes "a semi-annual opportunity for contributors to the open source software to gather to determine the requirements for the next software releases and collaborate with other community members," according to one technology site. They described the last summit as "a mind-spinning display of frankness that would be inconceivable at a vendor conference," and this edition includes sessions called "Horror Stories: How we keep breaking the Scheduler at Scale!" and "Interoperability: The Elephants in the Room". Seeing their developer community as active co-creators, the summit aims to promote the open source software and manage its user and development communities. OpenStack was developed in 2010 as a joint Open Source project between NASA and Rackspace, and a new OpenStack product called BareMetal now allows virtual machines to be installed directly onto hardware instead of hosting through an operating system.

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n1 writes:

[Ed. note: This is one of the longest stories I've seen submitted to the site. I was unsuccessful in my attempts to shorten it. As I found it to be well-written, I have decided to post it in its entirety — in my view it is well worth the read.]

Tom Secker has been continuing his research and reporting on the engagement of the security services in the entertainment industry. A recent two part edition of his podcast, ClandesTime covers prolific author Tom Clancy, his books and the subsequent adaptations into film.

From ClandesTime 074 – The Secret World of Tom Clancy Part I – The Films:

Tom Clancy was one of the most popular spy authors of all time, but was he a spy himself? What are the nature of his government connections? How were the film adaptations of his novels supported by the Pentagon and the CIA? What script changes were made by the DOD in exchange for their support? In Part I of this two-part podcast we examine five Tom Clancy films – The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. I outline the government involvement in each adaptation and the censorship involved in their production.

[...] a reasonably high number of American spy authors, at least some of the more prominent ones have been CIA or ex-CIA. E Howard Hunt, William F Buckley Jr. and Charles McCarry spring to mind. But the most successful authors like Robert Ludlum, Alan Furst and Tom Clancy do not appear to have been spooks. And I should say – I am a fan of several of these authors, I even like Ian Fleming despite the misogynistic and colonialist overtones to pretty much everything he ever wrote.

Essentially, there is no evidence that Tom Clancy was a spy, he never actually worked for intelligence or military intelligence or even private intelligence, at least as far as we know. But he was something. He moved in that world to some extent, he was certainly much closer to being a state propagandist than other authors are or were.

[...] since the beginning all of the movie adaptations of Tom Clancy's books have been supported by the Pentagon and/or the CIA. This often came at a price, and occasionally the script changes brought to bear by the government had the effect of pissing off Clancy himself. This does raise the question of the extent to which Clancy was on board with the DOD and CIA's overall propaganda missions. However, even the one film – Clear and Present Danger – that the DOD heavily altered and the CIA refused to properly support still had some CIA consultancy and the DOD worked for months to get the script into a shape they were happy with.

What this proves is that there are differences between what is tolerated in book format and what is tolerated in film format. The usual assumption is that people who read books are more intelligent, which is often true. As such they can be subjected to more controversial information without the state being too bothered about it. By contrast, for the plebs who go to the cinema and mindlessly munch popcorn, the DOD and CIA only wants good images of themselves.

From ClandesTime 075 – The Secret World of Tom Clancy Part II: The Government Connections:

[Continues.]

n1 writes:

Britain's efforts to help find a buyer for Tata Steel's UK assets will comply with European Union state aid regulations, business secretary Sajid Javid said on Sunday, insisting any deal would not be a bailout or nationalization.

Indian conglomerate Tata said last month that it planned to sell its entire British steelmaking operation. The prospect of at least 10,000 job losses has prompted the government to offer financial support in the hope of securing a buyer.

Javid said last week that the government could take a 25 per cent equity stake as part of a support package worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, he said any deal would be structured to avoid running foul of EU rules on state aid.

Source: The Times of India.

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n1 writes:

A team of independent investigators, probing the disappearance and alleged killing of 43 college students at the hands of criminal gangs in 2014 in Mexico, is set to dispute the government's account of what happened, reports said Friday.

[...] The international panel faced a sustained campaign of harassment, stonewalling and intimidation, The New York Times reported. The panel of experts alleged that the investigators endured planned attacks from Mexican news media and a refusal by the government to turn over documents or grant interviews with essential figures.

[...] The Mexican government had earlier concluded that the 43 students, who were in the city of Iguala in southwestern Mexico as part of a protest, were kidnapped by police officers working for criminal gangs, who then killed and incinerated them in a garbage dump of a nearby town.

The attorney general, who led the government probe, reportedly called the office's finding the "historic truth."

The independent investigators have opposed this version and maintained that the government's account of the events was based in part on confessions apparently extracted by torture. The panel also dismissed the theory that the students were burnt beyond identification at a rubbish dump as physically impossible.

Source: The International Business Times

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takyon writes:

Reuters reports:

Monkeys resembling today's capuchins accomplished the astonishing feat of crossing at least 100 miles (160 km) of open ocean 21 million years ago to get from South America to North America eons before the two continents joined together.

Scientists said on Wednesday they reached that conclusion based on the discovery of seven little teeth during excavations involving the Panama Canal's expansion, showing monkeys had reached the North American continent far earlier than previously known.

The teeth belonged to Panamacebus transitus, a previously unknown medium-sized monkey species. South America at the time was secluded from other continents, with a strange array of mammals evolving in what 20th century American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson called "splendid isolation."

Also at Science Magazine.

First North American fossil monkey and early Miocene tropical biotic interchange (DOI: 10.1038/nature17415)

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takyon writes:

A field of mysterious "halo" craters has been discovered on Pluto:

The region is far west of the hemisphere NASA's New Horizons spacecraft viewed during close approach last summer. The upper image – in black and white – sports several dozen "haloed" craters. The largest crater, at bottom-right, measures about 30 miles (50 kilometers) across. The craters' bright walls and rims stand out from their dark floors and surrounding terrain, creating the halo effect.

In the lower image, composition data from New Horizons' Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) indicate a connection between the bright halos and distribution of methane ice, shown in false color as purple. The floors and terrain between craters show signs of water ice, colored in blue. Exactly why the bright methane ice settles on these crater rims and walls is a mystery; also puzzling is why this same effect doesn't occur broadly across Pluto.

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takyon writes:

Researchers at the University of California at Irvine have reported a method to increase the strength of nanowires that could allow lithium-ion batteries to last for hundreds of thousands of charge cycles rather than just thousands:

Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons. The problem they have encountered, however, is that nanowires are also extremely fragile and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, known as "cycling." For example, in a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking. UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai solved the brittleness conundrum by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination, they said, is reliable and resistant to failure.

[...] Thai, the study's leader, cycled the nanowire-enhanced electrode up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires. "All nanowire capacitors can be extended from 2000 to 8000 cycles to more than 100,000 cycles, simply by replacing a liquid electrolyte with a... gel electrolyte," the researchers wrote in their paper. The result: commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.

Also at UCI News and Popular Science.

100k Cycles and Beyond: Extraordinary Cycle Stability for MnO₂ Nanowires Imparted by a Gel Electrolyte (open, DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00029)

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canopic jug writes:

Peter N. M. Hansteen asks the question, "Does Your Email Provider Know What A "Joejob" Is?" in his blog and provides some data and discussion. He provides anecdotal evidence which seems to indicate that Google and possibly other mail service providers are either quite ignorant of history when it comes to email and spam, or are applying unsavory tactics to capture market dominance.

[Ed Note: I had to look up "joe job" to find out what it is. According to wikipedia:

A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them (see also e-mail spoofing), but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages.

]

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