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hubie writes:

Pain and reward are powerful motivators. Most often seen to have a yin-yang relationship, they are often employed as the carrot-and-stick to influence the behavior in a person. Because they are seen to have a complementary relationship, much of the research on brain imaging tended to investigate the pain and reward processing regions separately.

There are two dominant theories regarding the pain/pleasure interaction. The competition hypothesis proposes that when presented with a reward, this not only activates the reward-processing neurons in the brain, but also suppress the pain-processing neurons and vice versa. The second theory, the salience hypothesis, proposes that these neurons are not linked and that neuron activity depends upon the degree of motivation resulting from the pain or pleasure. Most research has investigated and supported the competition hypothesis.

A new paper by Cui et al., argues that there actually is good support for the salience hypothesis. They point out that most of the previous studies were cue-based, where a subject was presented with a cue that either pain or reward would be presented, thus allowing them time to weigh the trade-offs, and they argue this would pit the two neural regions against each other and thus preordain support the competition hypothesis. Cui et al. devised an experiment where combinations are presented, such as a reward being given when shown a picture of someone being inflicted by pain. Their results show good support for the salience hypothesis, but they point out that there could be different time scales involved between the two processing regions in the brain.

It is worth noting that the salience hypothesis and competition hypothesis are not antagonistic to each other. One possibility is that they are both true, but manifest in different temporal stages of processing. To our knowledge, the literature lacks high-temporal-resolution data that could directly address this possibility.

So if your boss gives you a raise, that is a good motivator for you, and if they fire your co-worker, that also could be a good motivator. However, if Cui et al. are correct, perhaps the best motivator for you is to give you a raise AND fire your co-worker.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Call them the RoboBats. In a recent article in Science, Harvard roboticists demonstrate that their flying microrobots, nicknamed the RoboBees, can now perch during flight to save energy -- like bats, birds or butterflies.

"Many applications for small drones require them to stay in the air for extended periods," said Moritz Graule, first author of the paper who conducted this research as a student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. "Unfortunately, smaller drones run out of energy quickly. We want to keep them aloft longer without requiring too much additional energy."

[...] "A lot of different animals use perching to conserve energy," said Kevin Ma, a post-doc at SEAS and the Wyss Institute and coauthor. "But the methods they use to perch, like sticky adhesives or latching with talons, are inappropriate for a paperclip-size microrobot, as they either require intricate systems with moving parts or high forces for detachment."

Instead, the team turned to electrostatic adhesion -- the same basic science that causes a static-charged sock to cling to a pants leg or a balloon to stick to a wall.

Please, please design them to power themselves by consuming mosquitoes.

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takyon writes:

Uber is testing a driverless Ford Fusion on the streets on Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University. It's all part of a plan to liberate itself of the drivers/contractors/employees/meatparts it currently depends on:

Uber's big inconvenience is the fact it needs drivers, and so this line of research is about eliminating that final piece of the puzzle to boost profits even more. Uber isn't alone - rival ride-sharing service Lyft announced a tie-up with Chevrolet to use autonomous driving as well, but it's Uber that seems unstoppable in its goal to be the dominant force in global ground travel.

Uber said in its statement that real-world testing was "critical to our efforts to develop self-driving technology", and explained a trained driver was still monitoring operations in the car at all times. The company has also recently joined a coalition with Google and several car makers to help steer the regulations needed to make self-drive cars a reality. Together with Ford, Volvo and Lyft, they aim to lobby lawmakers and regulators on some of the legal barriers that would need to be changed before driverless cars could hit the roads.

Statement on Uber's website.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken another image of Mars in opposition:

The Red Planet and Earth are nearing what is called opposition, when their orbits line them up with the Sun - and put them very close to each other. This occurs every 780 days or so, and enables the super-sharp HST to see surface details that are just 30km across. Hubble has imaged Mars at this time routinely since its launch in 1990.

More details and images at HubbleSite.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google has lifted the lid off of an internal project to create custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for machine learning tasks. The result is what they are calling a "TPU":

[We] started a stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications. The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law). [...] TPU is an example of how fast we turn research into practice — from first tested silicon, the team
had them up and running applications at speed in our data centers within 22 days.

The processors are already being used to improve search and Street View, and were used to power AlphaGo during its matches against Go champion Lee Sedol. More details can be found at Next Platform, Tom's Hardware, and AnandTech.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The AP via the New Zealand Herald reports [nzherald.co.nz] that the Canadian-American television journalist Morley Safer died on Thursday 19 May at the age of 84. He had worked for CBS News for 52 years, including 46 years with the network's 60 Minutes [wikipedia.org] programme. He had retired from the company earlier in May.

He is noted for reporting the burning [pbs.org], after gunfire was said to have come from the area, of the Vietnamese village of Cam Ne by U.S. Marines in 1965. After the telecast, President Lyndon Johnson demanded Safer's dismissal [cbsnews.com], threatening to expose Safer's supposed "communist ties."

Safer said that his most important broadcast was a 1983 report [cbsnews.com] on Lenell Geter [people.com], an engineer who had been wrongly convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison. Geter was released the next year.

To promote its retrospective "Morley Safer: A Reporter's Life" which was broadcast 15 May, CBS uploaded the videos "Morley Safer retires from CBS News" [youtube.com] and "A look at Morley Safer's legendary 60 Minutes career." [youtube.com]

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports:

[May 19, the US House of Representatives] approved an amendment to the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill that should ease access to medical marijuana for veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), serious wounds, and other debilitating conditions.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a similar measure in its version of the appropriations bill last month. And later [May 19], the Senate as a whole passed the appropriations bill.

[...] the measure would bar the spending of federal funds to enforce a Veterans Health Administration policy that prohibits VA physicians from recommending medical marijuana, even in states where it is legal. Once the measure becomes law, VA docs would no longer face penalties for discussing medical marijuana with patients or for providing recommendations for patients to participate in state-legal medical marijuana programs.

With the ban in place, even in states with medical marijuana laws, veterans must go outside the VA system to get a recommendation or even discuss medical marijuana with their doctors. That VA policy actually expired at the beginning of this year, but would remain in force without congressional action. And Congress has acted.

[...] The two chambers will take up reconciling [the] differences between the two versions of the appropriations bills before sending them to the president.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

May 16 marks 50 years since the start of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, one of the most traumatic periods in China's long history.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/china-not-celebrating-cultural-revolution-s-50th-anniversary-n571951

But the Cultural Revolution is still a sore subject and the government rarely refers to the period most Chinese call the "ten years of chaos."

A 1981 Communist Party directive saying the decade represented "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people" is the only official acknowledgement that "serious mistakes" were made during the decade.

According to Zhang, the historian, any official introspection similar to South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission risks appearing to criticize Mao and the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

It is particularly tricky to mark the anniversary given parallels being drawn between Mao's era and the political fervor swirling around current president, Xi Jinping.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

CNNMoney, Sputnik (owned by the Russian government) and International Business Times UK report that a participant in the Tor Project left the United States for Germany after she was approached by an agent from the FBI's Los Angeles office. She has posted her account of the incident on her blog (PDF) and on Github. She writes that she bought a return airline ticket on the advice of lawyers, but has not returned.

From the IB Times article:

It reportedly started with a house visit from the FBI and escalated to the threat of a federal subpoena. For one member of the Tor Project's core development team, named Isis Agora Lovecruft, the past six months have been characterised by stress, confusion and underhand threats at the hands of US law enforcement. Now, she has publicly accused the agency of harassment.

[...] According to Lovecruft, discussions then started about what the FBI was investigating. Naturally, the conversation turned to Tor network – used by privacy-conscious users to help stay anonymous while surfing the web and partly funded by the US government.

"My lawyer and I discussed what the FBI could possibly want," Lovecruft wrote. "Theories ranged from attempted entrapment, to the recent and completely unethical Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) attacks on the live Tor network, to a Grand Jury subpoena for someone else, to some shady request for a backdoor in some software I contribute to."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

Public skepticism is growing over a new report that claims genetically modified (GE or GMO) foods are safe for consumption, particularly as information emerges that the organization that produced the report has [strong economic] ties to the biotechnology industry.

Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects [Redirects to a PDF], released [May 17] by the federally-supported National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, states not only that GMO crops are safe to eat, but that they have no adverse environmental impacts and have cut down on pesticide use.

[...] One day before publication, the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch (FWW) reported in an issue brief (PDF) that the National Research Council (NRC)--the National Academy of Sciences' research arm--has deep ties to the biotech and agricultural industries, which FWW says have "created conflicts of interests at every level of the organization."

The NRC and the National Academy of Science take millions of dollars in funding from corporations like Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical, FWW reported in its issue brief, Under the Influence: The National Research Council and GMOs (PDF).

Representatives from those companies\u2014along with Cargill, General Mills, and Nestle Purina, among other GMO-friendly businesses--also sit on the NRC's board that oversees GMO projects. NRC has not publicly disclosed those ties, FWW said. In fact, more than half of the invited authors of the new report have ties to the industry.

According to the issue brief, not only does the NRC have a history of bias toward the industry, it has also worked to silence critics of GMOs and of the companies that sit on its board.

Related: National Academy of Sciences on GMOs: Safe, but Not Always Effective

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

At issue is Tor malware that enabled the FBI to bust child porn ring.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/judge-says-suspect-has-right-to-review-code-that-fbi-has-right-to-keep-secret/

A US federal judge in Tacoma, Washington has put himself in a Catch 22: ruling a man charged with possessing child pornography has the right to review malware source code while also acknowledging that the government has a right to keep it secret.

"The resolution of Defendant's Third Motion to Compel Discovery places this matter in an unusual position: the defendant has the right to review the full NIT code, but the government does not have to produce it," US District Judge Robert Bryan wrote on Wednesday. "Thus, we reach the question of sanctions: What should be done about it when, under these facts, the defense has a justifiable need for information in the hands of the government, but the government has a justifiable right not to turn the information over to the defense?"

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, May 10th, and again from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Thursday May 12th, all the coal-fired electrical generating stations in Britain were shut down. It is claimed to be the first time this has happened "since the era of central electricity generation began with the construction of the UK's first coal plant in 1882."

Earlier in the evening, there had been a shortage of electricity due to unplanned shut-downs of coal- and gas-burning plants, failure of the cross-Channel HVDC cable, and unusually light winds. E.ON was paid £1,250 per megawatt-hour, 30 times the typical rate, for running its Connah's Quay Power Station after a Notification of Inadequate System Margin was proclaimed at 7 p.m.

Coverage:

• Energy Live News (Tor-friendly link)
• Telegraph
• The Atlantic
• The Guardian

submitter's note: The 14 January 1982 New Scientist had a story about the coal-powered generating station opened in London in 1882, which was the world's first. Presumably it had down-time.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The northern plains on Mars has a large, smooth region suggestive of once harboring an ocean, but there are no signs of an ancient shoreline. New research from Rodriguez, et al., published in Nature Science Reports , looked at features such as sedimentary deposits, boulder alignments, and backwash channels, and they infer that the region was hit by at least two Tsunamis, most likely caused by meteor strikes.

The evidence suggests that two separate tsunamis stormed through the ocean—which encircled the north pole and could have been one third the size of the entire globe—some millions of years apart. The new signs of a Martian ocean sustained for millions of years between meteorite impacts bolster the possibility that the Red Planet offered a tolerable environment for life at the time, the researchers said.

From the open access paper abstract:

It has been proposed that ~3.4 billion years ago an ocean fed by enormous catastrophic floods covered most of the Martian northern lowlands. However, a persistent problem with this hypothesis is the lack of definitive paleoshoreline features. Here, based on geomorphic and thermal image mapping in the circum-Chryse and northwestern Arabia Terra regions of the northern plains, in combination with numerical analyses, we show evidence for two enormous tsunami events possibly triggered by bolide impacts, resulting in craters ~30 km in diameter and occurring perhaps a few million years apart. The tsunamis produced widespread littoral landforms, including run-up water-ice-rich and bouldery lobes, which extended tens to hundreds of kilometers over gently sloping plains and boundary cratered highlands, as well as backwash channels where wave retreat occurred on highland-boundary surfaces. The ice-rich lobes formed in association with the younger tsunami, showing that their emplacement took place following a transition into a colder global climatic regime that occurred after the older tsunami event. We conclude that, on early Mars, tsunamis played a major role in generating and resurfacing coastal terrains.

Original Submission

-- 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