SoylentNews

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Germany has met its total electricity needs via renewables several times (most recently needing to pay folks to use the energy being generated)--but that has been strictly on weekends.

Common Dreams reports

In what is being hailed as a major achievement, Portugal just generated [Portuguese][1] all of its electricity from renewable sources for more than four days in a row.

According to an analysis of national figures by the Sustainable Land System Association in collaboration with the Portuguese Renewable Energy Association (APREN), from the morning of [Saturday] May 7 until the early evening on [Wednesday] May 11--a total of 107 consecutive hours--"Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind, and hydro power."

[1] Translated by Google with scripts run by archive.is.

Original Submission

butthurt submitted a story which became:

Monsanto announced that it has received an unsolicited purchase offer from Bayer AG. The offer is under consideration by Monsanto's board of directors. The companies are both major sellers of pesticides and of seeds for crops. Monsanto's market capitalisation on 18 May was $42.43 billion.

According to Dow Jones Business News via NASDAQ:

Folding Monsanto's world-leading seed franchise and its trademark Roundup herbicide business into Bayer would create a company with a combined $68 billion in annual sales, marketing products ranging from Aspirin pain-relief pills to crop genetics that enable plants to withstand bugs and weedkillers. The combination would sell about 28% of the world's pesticides and about 36% of U.S. corn seeds and 28% of soybean seeds, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.

Coverage:

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch
• Reuters
• Motley Fool
• New York Times (older story)
• Bloomberg (older story)
• USA Today (older story)
• Fierce Pharma (older story)
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch (older story)
• MarketWatch (older story)

related story:
Cartoonist Fired for Criticizing Big Agriculture

Original Submission

takyon writes:

IBM researchers have created and tested phase change memory (PCM) that can store two bits per cell, and say that they see a path to three bits per cell, allowing for memory with a similar density to TLC NAND. IBM Research may be positioning PCM as a viable alternative to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint, another "post-NAND" technology with DRAM-like speeds and write endurance, and NAND-like persistence, cost, and storage density:

"Phase change memory is the first instantiation of a universal memory with properties of both DRAM and flash, thus answering one of the grand challenges of our industry," Pozidis said with regard to the research that IBM has been doing. "Reaching three bits per cell is a significant milestone because at this density the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash."

This is, of course, precisely the part of the memory hierarchy that Intel and Micron are pursuing with their 3D XPoint memory, which many speculate is based on resistive RAM (ReRAM) technologies, not PCM. At this time, 3D XPoint is implemented using a 20 nanometer process and stores data at a density of one bit per cell (SLC) and a 7 microsecond latency for reads and delivers on the order of 78,500 IOPS in a 70/30 read/write mix that is typically used to characterize storage. (These stats are courtesy of Chris Mellor over at our sister publication, The Register .) DRAM access is on the order of 200 nanoseconds, or about 35X faster than Intel's Optane 3D XPoint, but 3D XPoint is about four times faster on writes than a PCI-Express flash unit using the trimmed down NVM-Express protocol and about twelve times faster than this flash on reads.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

Multilevel-Cell Phase-Change Memory: A Viable Technology (DOI: 10.1109/JETCAS.2016.2528598)

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Early on 17 May a bolide (a bright meteor) was seen in the skies of Ontario, Québec and the northeastern United States. A museum in Maine has offered to buy the first meteorite (having a mass of at least 1 kg) from the event.

links:

• CBC News
• ABC News
• The Independent
• WTNH-TV
• dash-cam video by Plattsburgh Police Department. via American Meteor Society and Youtube
• Huffington Post (about museum)

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The CBC has a story about a brochure, The State of North America's Birds 2016, issued by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI). The brochure (not readily accessible to the blind) presents the results of

the first-ever conservation vulnerability assessment for all 1,154 native bird species that occur in Canada, the continental United States, and Mexico.

It states that 432 of those species, or 37%, "need urgent conservation action" whilst 49% warrant moderate concern and 14%, low concern. Species that inhabit the ocean and tropical forests had the greatest proportions "in crisis."

Original Submission

scruffybeard writes:

Student developers were polled via 80 spring 2016 hackathons to asses how they feel about their career options. Some of the key finding were:

1. 83% of students said they were looking for fulfilling careers, rather than simply for jobs.
2. Students plan to stay an average of 2.9 years at their first full-time job.
3. Students predict that they'll stay at later jobs for 5 years on average.
4. Students expect to earn between $70–150K right out of school.

Details of the Devpost study can be found here.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MIT researchers have developed an ingestible robot that can unfold itself and be steered throughout the body using a magnetic field:

MIT researchers and associates have developed a tiny "origami robot" that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by a physician via an external magnetic field, crawl across the stomach wall to operate on a patient. For example, it can remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

Every year, 3,500 swallowed button batteries are reported in the U.S. alone. Frequently, the batteries are digested normally, but if they come into prolonged contact with the tissue of the esophagus or stomach, they can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, which burns the tissue.

Also at MIT News.

Ingestible, Controllable, and Degradable Origami Robot for Patching Stomach Wounds

Original Submission

GungnirSniper writes:

In a reflection of the trends towards later marriage and reproduction, pet names are becoming more human. The top 100 dog names includes Max, Charlie, Buddy, Cooper, and Jack for males, and Bella, Lucy, Daisy, Molly, and Lola for females. The Pope has previously decried barren couples for favoring travel and pets over children.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases humanity has ever faced, killing more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But thanks to the most successful global vaccination campaign in history, the disease was completely eradicated by 1980. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring — small villages in Asia and Africa — and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, D. A. Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts.

Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. But Errol Moris writes in The New York Times that Henderson didn't really eliminate smallpox. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere...? The demon in the freezer.

Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TFA is interesting and worth a read, especially for its use of a shark analogy explaining the difference between risk and hazard.

Link: Glyphosate And Cancer By Derek Lowe
Additional Wired link: Does Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide Cause Cancer or Not? The Controversy, Explained

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Nearly half of parents whose child had leftover pain medication from a surgery or illness say they kept the prescription opioids at home -- representing a potential problem down the line.

Parents whose child's provider discussed what to do with the pills, however, were far more likely to dispose them properly, according to a report from the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"We found that the amount of pain medication prescribed for children is frequently greater than the amount used, and too few parents recall clear direction from their provider about what to do with leftover medication," says Matthew M. Davis, M.D., director of the poll and professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.

"This is a missed opportunity to prevent prescription drug misuse among children. Many parents simply keep extra pain pills in their home. Those leftover pills represent easy access to narcotics for teens and their friends."

Waste not, want not.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

ARM has taped out a 10nm chip using TSMC's 10nm FinFet process:

Today in collaboration with TSMC, ARM's physical IP division is announcing the tapeout of a 10nm test chip demonstrating the company's readiness for the new manufacturing process. The new test chip is particularly interesting as it contains ARM's yet-to-be-announced "Artemis" CPU core. ARM discloses that tapeout actually took place back in December 2015 and is expecting silicon to come back from the foundry in the following weeks.

The 10nm chips should be able to reach +11-12% more performance or a 30% reduction in power consumption, compared to 16nm.

ARM has also announced that it is acquiring Apical, an image processing company, for $350 million:

Prior to the acquisition, Apical had three main product lines, known as "Spirit," "Assertive Display" and "Assertive Camera". The most important of these products is Spirit, which is a processing element designed to convert raw video data into a machine-readable model. This can help with researching and understanding the movements in a scene.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

EgyptAir Flight MS804 has disappeared with 59 56 passengers and 10 crew onboard. It went missing soon after it entered Egyptian airspace, over the eastern Mediterranean.

Bloomberg, The Guardian, BBC.

janrinok adds:

The Guardian has a page with updated details.

martyb summarizes:

Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, was on its fifth flight of the day and traveling at 37,000 feet. It left Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:09pm local time (21:09 UTC/22:09 BST/07:09 AEST) en route to Cairo and disappeared from radar with 66 people on board at 2:30am (00:30 GMT/01:30 BST/10:30 AEST) approximately 280km (175 miles) north of Egypt's coast — about 45 minutes before it was scheduled to land.

Of the 66 people on board, there were 56 passengers and 10 crew (two cockpit, five cabin, three security).

At 4:26am local time (two hours after the last radar contact) a signal was received from the "plane's emergency devices — possibly an emergency locator transmitter or beacon."

"EgyptAir says the captain has 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 on the A320; the copilot has 2,766. The plane was manufactured in 2003."

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

From Phys.org:

In order to light roads, highways or bicycle lanes without electricity, Ph.D. José Carlos Rubio, from Michoacan's University of San Nicolas Hidalgo, UMSNH in Spanish, created a light-emitting cement that has a lifespan of 100 years.

"Nine years ago, when I started the project, I realized there was nothing similar worldwide, and so I started to work on it. The main issue was that cement is an opaque body that doesn't allow the pass of light to its interior," said Dr. Rubio.

He explained that common cement is a dust that when it's added to water, it dissolves as an effervescent pill. "In that moment, it starts to become a gel, similar to the one used for hair styling, but much stronger and resistant; at the same time, crystal flakes are formed—these are unwanted sub-products in hardened cement."

To address this issue, the researcher focused on modifying the micro-structure of the cement in order to eliminate crystals and make it gel completely, helping it to absorb solar energy and return it to the environment as light.

Rubio said that in 2015, global cement production was about 4 billion tons. This is where this new material can find a wide commercial market. During the day, any building, road, highway or structure made out of this new cement can absorb solar energy and emit it during the night for around 12 hours.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The U.S. Commerce Department has massively increased the taxes on a particular kind of imported Chinese steel. U.S. steelmakers are separately asking the International Trade Commission to ban all Chinese steel imports:

The US has raised its import duties on Chinese steelmakers by more than five-fold after accusing them of selling their products below market prices. The taxes specifically apply to Chinese-made cold-rolled flat steel, which is used in car manufacturing, shipping containers and construction.

The US Commerce Department ruling comes amid heightened trade tensions between the two sides over several products, including chicken parts. Steel is an especially sensitive issue. US and European steel producers claim China is distorting the global market and undercutting them by dumping its excess supply abroad.

Original Submission