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Phoenix666 writes:

A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists discovered two geologically young craters—one 16 million, the other between 75 and 420 million, years old—in the Moon's darkest regions.

"These 'young' impact craters are a really exciting discovery," said SwRI Senior Research Scientist Dr. Kathleen Mandt, who outlined the findings in a paper published by the journal Icarus. "Finding geologically young craters and honing in on their age helps us understand the collision history in the solar system."

Key to this discovery was the SwRI-developed Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LAMP uses the far-ultraviolet Lyman-alpha band skyglow and light from ultraviolet-bright stars LAMP to "see" in the dark and image the permanently shaded regions of the Moon. Using LAMP and LRO's Mini-RF radar data, the team mapped the floors of very large, deep craters near the lunar south pole. These deep craters are difficult to study because sunlight never illuminates them directly. Tiny differences in reflectivity, or albedo, measured by LAMP allowed scientists to discover these two craters and estimate their ages.

Not sure how Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) helps planetary scientists understand collision history in the solar system, but hat's off to them for doing so.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

HelpNetSecurity reports

In May 2016, the Special Investigations team at Forcepoint revealed the existence of a botnet campaign that is unique in targeting a very small number of individuals while in tandem, herding thousands of victims into general groups.

The discovery, known as Jaku, offers vital insight into the workings and characteristics of a botnet, as well as specific understanding of a targeted attack that differs from the scattergun approach of broader botnet activities. It also sheds light onto why the victims of botnets are targeted, and how their usage of pirated or counterfeit software and movies leaves them vulnerable to attack.

Regarding the victims, the analysis claims:

We saw a strange, unexplainable variants in the geographic distribution of botnet victims, but could pinpoint that they were being targeted both geographically and linguistically. We don't know specifically how, as data came in from all over the world, but the fact that there were no victims all across Russia, other than a scattering in Moscow, suggests this could be a language-focused attack.

We also found that the number of corporate victims was low and the attackers were allowed much less dwell time within corporate systems, than non-corporate systems. Less than 1% of computers affected were a member of a Microsoft Windows domain, and the vast majority of victims appear to be people using unlicensed versions of software and cracked versions of Codex used to watch illegally downloaded movies. Indeed, more than half of the victims' computers were running counterfeit copies of Microsoft Windows.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers published a highly publicized study of 14 "Biggest Loser" contestants on May 2nd. The study found that contestants rapidly regained weight that they had lost during the course of the show, and the researchers concluded that the contestants were fighting against their own metabolism and "biologically determined" body weight.

Not so fast. Former "Biggest Loser" contestants and show staff have told the New York Post that one of the show's doctors gave contestants substances such as Adderall and ephedra. Contestants were isolated from their families, report being pressured and psychologically manipulated, and suffered severe health problems and weight regain towards the end of the show and after leaving. The doctor in question, Rob Huizenga, disputes the claims:

Lezlye Donahue survived Hurricane Katrina. Going on "The Biggest Loser," she says, was worse than that. "It's my biggest nightmare," she says, "and it's with me to this day."

Following a controversial study that claims to explain why almost all "Biggest Loser" contestants regain massive amounts of weight, numerous ex-"Losers" reached out to the New York Post to dispute its findings — exclusively revealing that the show encouraged contestants to take street drugs while starving themselves and to lie about how much weight they were losing.

The federally funded study, conducted by Dr. Kevin Hall at the National Institutes of Health and published two weeks ago, says changing metabolic rates, hormone levels, and genetic predispositions explain post-show weight gain. What's missing, former "Losers" reportedly tell the Post, is any examination of the show's secret tactics, which include providing illicit drugs to contestants and submitting them to questionable medical exams by the show's resident doctor, Rob Huizenga, known as "Dr. H." Huizenga collaborated with Hall on the NIH's study.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The Minecraft community is one of the most video-centric gaming groups online, with hundreds of thousands of players routinely streaming and sharing gameplay and mods through YouTube and Twitch without issue. Nintendo, on the other hand, is one of the most restrictive game publishers when it comes to video, with a history of taking videos of its games offline and threatening to shut down livestreamed tournaments. It has also had problems sharing ad revenue with video creators.

When those two sides effectively merged through the recently released "Super Mario Mash-Up Pack" for the Wii U version of Minecraft, problems were bound to arise. And arisen they have, with a number of YouTubers publicly complaining about Nintendo making copyright claims on their Minecraft videos.

The issue appears to stem from the game's use of Super Mario 64 music, which is actually included as part of the Mash-Up Pack but still triggers a copyright match with the original Nintendo 64 game.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/nintendo-issues-copyright-claims-on-mario-themed-minecraft-videos/

Original Submission

b0ru writes:

A recent study of Messier 4 (M4), and other local globular clusters, appears to partially contradict our current understanding of stellar evolution.

Using the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES), a team of astronomers from the Monash University, the Australian Astronomical Observactory (AAO) and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) were able to detect the chemical composition of the stars in M4. Their observations revealed that approximately half of the stars in the cluster appear to have skipped the red giant phase of their evolution, and proceeded directly to the white dwarf stage. This remarkable transition is contrary to computational simulations and our current understanding of stellar evolution;

The exact process which causes this transition remains unknown. The team hope that, with further observation with HERMES, they may shed light thereon, and better our understanding of stellar evolution.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-clues-ancient-giant-asteroid-australia.html

Scientists have found evidence of a huge asteroid that struck the Earth early in its life with an impact larger than anything humans have experienced.

Tiny glass beads called spherules, found in north-western Australia were formed from vaporised material from the asteroid impact, said Dr Andrew Glikson from The Australian National University (ANU).

"The impact would have triggered earthquakes orders of magnitude greater than terrestrial earthquakes, it would have caused huge tsunamis and would have made cliffs crumble," said Dr Glikson, from the ANU Planetary Institute.

"Material from the impact would have spread worldwide. These spherules were found in sea floor sediments that date from 3.46 billion years ago."

The asteroid is the second oldest known to have hit the Earth and one of the largest.

Dr Glikson said the asteroid would have been 20 to 30 kilometres across and would have created a crater hundreds of kilometres wide.

Original Study

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-scientists-metadata-reveal-surprisingly-sensitive.html

... a new analysis by Stanford computer scientists shows that it is possible to identify a person's private information – such as health details – from metadata alone. Additionally, following metadata "hops" from one person's communications can involve thousands of other people.

The researchers set out to fill knowledge gaps within the National Security Agency's current phone metadata program, which has drawn conflicting assertions about its privacy impacts. The law currently treats call content and metadata separately and makes it easier for government agencies to obtain metadata, in part because it assumes that it shouldn't be possible to infer specific sensitive details about people based on metadata alone.

The findings, reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the first empirical data on the privacy properties of telephone metadata. Preliminary versions of the work, previously made available online, have already played a role in federal surveillance policy and have been cited in litigation filings and letters to legislators in both the United States and abroad. The final work could be used to help make more informed policy decisions about government surveillance and consumer data privacy.

The computer scientists built a smartphone application that retrieved the previous call and text message metadata – the numbers, times and lengths of communications – from more than 800 volunteers' smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. The researchers then used a combination of inexpensive automated and manual processes to illustrate both the extent of the reach – how many people would be involved in a scan of a single person – and the level of sensitive information that can be gleaned about each user.

Original Study

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

PC Gamer reports

OmniBus, aka the game about the bus that couldn't slow down, is releasing on May 26. In case you missed it, I played a bit of an early build a couple of months ago, and found it to be very stupid but also reasonably fun. It's not often that a game lets you smash a bus through giant bowling pins, so we should be grateful it exists, really.

[As is typical], there are a bunch of incentives for you to buy OmniBus quickly: the day one "Game of the Year" edition comes with a 10 per cent discount on Steam. Meanwhile, there's the Ultimate Bus Driver edition, which comes with the game's digital soundtrack and a real life bus.

Yeah, a real life bus. It's a 1977 MCI Charter Bus, and I don't know how much buses usually cost in the United States, but I'm tempted to assume that the $7,500 asking price for the Ultimate Bus Driver edition is a bit of a bargain. You'll have to pick it up from Austin, Texas, though.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Elsevier reports that dirty laundry smells bad because of certain chemicals called volatile organic compounds, which can’t always be washed out on an eco-friendly 20˚C cycle. Researchers identified six volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on dirty t-shirts and socks.. “The need to conserve the environment by reducing the wash temperature and the use of biodegradable washing products have grown in importance in the new millennium, making this type of research more high profile,” says Professor John Dean.

The researchers gave 6 men and two women a new pair of socks. They asked the volunteers to wash their feet with tap water and dry them before wearing the socks for at least 10 hours, in a specified type of shoe. They then put each sock into a separate sample bag and stored them in the dark overnight. The researchers graded each sock and t-shirt on a scale of 0 (no malodor) to 10 (malodorous) by smelling them.

The team then identified six main VOCs contributing to the smell: butyric acid (strong, rancid butter-like odor), dimethyl disulfide (unpleasant, onion-like odor, like rotting flesh), dimethyl trisulfide (powerful odor), 2-heptanone (banana-like fruity odor), 2-nonanone (fruity, floral, fatty, herbaceous odor) and 2-octanone (apple-like odor). “The work is fascinating as it links an everyday event - the washing of clothes - with cutting-edge research,” says Dean. “In this particular research project we applied a new and innovative analytical technique for the detection of volatile compounds found in laundry items. We hope this provides a way of analyzing the effectiveness of different washing techniques.”

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Netflix has launched a speedtest service at Fast.com

Advantages:

• no advertising
• no Flash
• IPv6 capable

Disadvantages:

• requires JavaScript
• begins download test immediately upon page load
• does not test upload speed

What other sites do you use? How accurate are they? How do you test your connection?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/22/479057698/study-chinas-government-fabricates-about-488-million-social-media-posts-every-ye

For years, the Chinese government has been widely suspected of hiring thousands of paid commenters using fabricated accounts to argue in favor of the government on social media sites. This presumed army of trolls is dubbed the "50 Cent Party," because of the rumored rate of pay per post – 50 cents in Chinese Yuan, or about $0.08.

But new research finds that those presumptions are inaccurate. Actually, the Chinese government's use of fabricated posts is "way more sophisticated than anybody realized," Harvard professor Gary King tells The Two-Way. King and two other researchers, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts, analyzed a set of leaked emails from an Internet Propaganda Office in Zhanggong, which is in southern China.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-punished-nsa-whistleblowers

[There] is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well. His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane's failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake's identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge. The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Matt Richtel writes in the NYT that roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers. But don't call them accidents as a growing number of safety advocates campaign to change a 100-year-old mentality that they say trivializes the single most common cause of traffic incidents: human error. "When you use the word 'accident,' it's like, 'God made it happen,' " says Mark Rosekind. "In our society, language can be everything." Rosekind says that the persistence of crashes — driving is the most dangerous activity for most people — can be explained in part by widespread apathy toward the issue. Changing semantics is meant to shake people, particularly policy makers, out of the implicit nobody's-fault attitude that the word "accident" conveys. The state of Nevada just enacted a law to change "accident" to "crash" in dozens of instances where the word is mentioned in state laws, like those covering police and insurance reports and at least 28 state departments of transportation have moved away from the term "accident" when referring to roadway incidents.

The word 'accident' was introduced into the lexicon of manufacturing and other industries in the early 1900s, when companies were looking to protect themselves from the costs of caring for workers who were injured on the job, says historian Peter Norton. "Relentless safety campaigns started calling these events 'accidents,' which excused the employer of responsibility," says Norton. When traffic deaths spiked in the 1920s, a consortium of auto-industry interests, including insurers, borrowed the wording to shift the focus away from the cars themselves. "Automakers were very interested in blaming reckless drivers," says Norton. But over time the word has come to exonerate the driver, too, with "accident" seeming like a lightning strike, beyond anyone's control. "Labeling most of the motor vehicle collision cases that I see as an attorney as an 'accident' has always been troubling to me," says Steven Gursten. "The word 'accident' implies there's no responsibility for it."

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Strange Remains has an article on the history of Optography; the attempt to retrieve the last image seen by the eyes before death, and the 19th century experiments of Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne.

He believed it was possible to develop images, like photographs, from the eyes of the dead. Kühne called the image fixed on the corpse's retina an optogram, and the process of developing this image optography
...
Kühne's research was inspired by the work of physiologist Franz Christian Boll. In 1876, Boll discovered a pigment in the rods of the human retina that bleaches in the light and is restored in the dark. Kühne took this observation a step further by demonstrating that retinal pigment, which he called "visual purple" (also known as rhodopsin), remains after death unless the retinas are exposed to light.

A fascinating, and slightly macabre look at an early piece of the history of forensic science.

Link Spotted at Cocktail Party Physics Week in Review

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

According to io9 J.J. Abrams announced that Paramount Pictures' lawsuit against Axanar Productions was "going away.".

The report comes from a Star Trek event in Los Angeles, at which the trailer for Justin Lin's new film Star Trek Beyond debuted:

io9 was at the fan event, where Abrams noted that Star Trek Beyond's director, Justin Lin, was outraged at the legal situation that had arisen.

Axanar is a kickstarter-funded fan film covering events preceding the original Star Trek, and the team responded to the io9 article with cautious optimism

While we're grateful to receive the public support of JJ Abrams and Justin Lin, as the lawsuit remains pending, we want to make sure we go through all the proper steps to make sure all matters are settled with CBS and Paramount.

Paramount's legal manoeuvrings, and IPR claims, have been covered previously on Soylent.

Original Submission