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Phoenix666 writes:

A Purdue University study shows that honeybees collect the vast majority of their pollen from plants other than crops, even in areas dominated by corn and soybeans, and that pollen is consistently contaminated with a host of agricultural and urban pesticides throughout the growing season.

Christian Krupke, professor of entomology, and then-postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Long collected pollen from Indiana honeybee hives at three sites over 16 weeks to learn which pollen sources honeybees use throughout the season and whether they are contaminated with pesticides.

The pollen samples represented up to 30 plant families and contained residues from pesticides spanning nine chemical classes, including neonicotinoids - common corn and soybean seed treatments that are toxic to bees. The highest concentrations of pesticides in bee pollen, however, were pyrethroids, which are typically used to control mosquitoes and other nuisance pests.

"Although crop pollen was only a minor part of what they collected, bees in our study were exposed to a far wider range of chemicals than we expected," said Krupke. "The sheer numbers of pesticides we found in pollen samples were astonishing. Agricultural chemicals are only part of the problem. Homeowners and urban landscapes are big contributors, even when hives are directly adjacent to crop fields."
...
"If you care about bees as a homeowner, only use insecticides when you really need to because bees will come into contact with them," she said.

Organic vegetables with a few insect-caused holes taste better than unblemished supermarket ones.

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maxwell demon writes:

Today, the German Federal Constitutional Court decided that under certain conditions, artistic freedom can take precedence over copyright.

As dw.com reports, the specific case the court was about sampling two seconds of a Kraftwerk song without permission:

The legal dispute originated when electro-pop legends Kraftwerk complained, angered at [musician Moses] Pelham "sampling" a two-second segment of the 1977 track "Metall auf Metall" and using it on an endless loop for rapper Sabrina Setlur's song. Initially, Kraftwerk won an injunction from Germany's top criminal court (the BGH) - prompting Pelham to use his only remaining recourse for appeal and to apply for the Constitutional Court to reconsider the verdict.

In particular,

The court ruled that composers can, under certain conditions, incorporate external audio clips into their own music without asking permission and do not have to pay royalties. If the copyright infringement is only "marginal," the court said, then artistic freedom takes precedence over the intellectual property rights of the original musician.

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martyb writes:

Phys.org has just published a story, Pluto extreme close-up best yet:

These images, which were taken while the New Horizon's probe was still 15,850 km (9,850 mi) away from Pluto (just 23 minutes before it made its closest approach), extend across the hemisphere that the probe was facing as it flew past. It shows features ranging from the cratered northern uplands and the mountainous regions in Voyager Terra before slicing through the flatlands of "Pluto's Heart" – aka. Tombaugh Regio – and ending up in another stretch of rugged highlands.

The width of the strip varies as the images pass from north to south, from more than 90 km (55 mi) across at the northern end to about 75 km (45 mi) at its southern point. The perspective also changes, with the view appearing virtually horizontal at the northern end and then shifting to an almost top-down view onto the surface by the end.

The crystal clear photographs that make up the mosaic – which have a resolution of about 80 meters (260 feet) per pixel – offer the most detailed view of Pluto's surface ever. With this kind of clarity, NASA scientists are able to discern features that were never before visible, and learn things about the kinds of geological processes which formed them.

This includes the chaotic nature of the mountains in the northern hemisphere, and the varied nature of the icy nitrogen plains across Tombaugh Regio – which go from being cellular, to non-cellular, to a cross-bedding pattern. These features are a further indication that Pluto's surface is the product of a combination of geological forces, such as cryovolcanism, sublimation, geological activity, convection between water and nitrogen ice, and interaction between the surface and atmosphere.

[...] The most distant flyby in the history of space exploration, and yet we've obtained more from this one mission than multiple flybys were able to provide from one of Earth's closest neighbors. Fascinating! And what's more, new information is expected to be coming from the New Horizons probe until this coming October. To top it off, our scientists are still not finished analyzing all the information the mission collected during its flyby.

(Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and the Associate Vice President of Research and Development at the Southwest Research Institute)

On July 14, 2015, at 11:49 UTC, the New Horizons space craft made its closest approach of 12,500 km (7,800 mi) above the surface of Pluto with a relative velocity of 13.78 km/s (49,600 km/h; 30,800 mph). This transpired at a distance of 4.5 light-hours from Earth, i.e. approximately 4.8×10¹²km away.

Direct link to the eye candy image and a silent, but annotated, video of the fly by identifying characteristics of each region.

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tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has an article on a neat reworking of a classic Casio digital watch frame; the F-91W, originally introduced in 1991.

The result is a watch that tells time in binary, has a built-in compass, and with some more work will be updatable through an IR receiver that he also managed to fit in there somehow. Now he has the watch that Casio would make today, if fashion had stayed stuck firmly in the early 1990s. (Or not. Apparently, Casio still makes and sells the F-91W. Who knew?)

Anyway, back to an epic and pointless hack. Have a look at the tiny, tiny board that [Lukas] made. Marvel in the fact that he drove the original LCD screen. Dig the custom Kicad parts that match the watch's originals. To get an accurate fit for the case, [Lukas] desoldered the piezo buzzer contact and put the board onto a scanner, which is a great trick when you need to get accurate dimensions. It's all there, and well-documented, in his GitHub, linked above.

A really awesome piece of work, although it probably wouldn't be a good idea to wear it at the airport...

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Diogenes was a Greek philosopher who lived from 412-323 BCE that had an interesting life and a controversial philosophy.

Does anyone know of other great examples or have any personal stories of great troll moments?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

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hubie writes:

The Council of the European Union is one of the two chambers of the EU's legislative branch. One of its multiple responsibilities is to coordinate member states' policies by brokering compromises between the member states. The Council is composed of 10 specialized Council configurations where each configuration deals with a distinct policy area. Every six months a different member state holds the Presidency of the Council. The Council configurations meet regularly, and one of the advantages of holding the presidency is that the presiding member state draws up the agenda for the Council and chairs all meetings, and ministers from the presiding member state chair the Council configuration meetings.

The current six-month presidency term is held by the Netherlands. One of the many positions important to them is Open Science.

As part of the most recent meeting of the Competitiveness Council, they announced an agreement on an ambitious new open access (OA) target whereby all scientific papers should be freely available by 2020. What makes this particularly challenging is that even the Netherlands, who is leading this charge and was heading down this path independently, were planning to achieve OA by 2024. As expected, there are plenty of details to be worked out:

The council's statement is also slightly ambiguous on what exactly should be accomplished by 2020. It calls for "immediate" OA, "without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes." Many non-OA journals currently allow authors to make their papers available—for instance in an institutional repository—6 or 12 months after publication, but the essence of immediate OA is that a paper is freely available when it gets published. How short journal-imposed embargoes would have to become to qualify as "immediate" OA remains unclear. Harnad says the deposit in an institutional repository should be "immediately upon acceptance for publication (because if the 2019 scientific article output is deposited in 2021, that is not OA in 2020)."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Just how accurate is your go-to news outlet on climate and environmental coverage? That’s a question that Climate Feedback, a group that uses scientists to review news articles similar to the way they’d review a research paper, wants to answer.

Last week, Climate Feedback announced the Scientific Trust Tracker, a feature that will track news outlets' accuracy on climate change, one scientist-reviewed story at a time. Right now, the Trust Tracker has preliminary data for five outlets: The New York Times, Mashable, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. Climate Feedback's community of scientific reviewers--which include actively-publishing scientists specializing in climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, and other related topics--has reviewed and annotated articles from these outlets, pointing out their strong and weak points. Taking these reviews into account, the Trust Tracker creates a "reliability index" for news outlets' climate coverage.

[...] So far, the Wall Street Journal has fared most poorly in its treatment of climate change. Of the four articles that Climate Feedback scientists reviewed from WSJ, all were dubbed "flawed" with "low" or "very low" scientific credibility. Two of the articles were op-eds by prominent climate confusionist Bjorn Lomborg, who has long criticized many efforts to mitigate climate change as useless or too expensive.

[...] Other outlets have fared better. Four Mashable articles--all by Andrew Freeman--have been reviewed by Climate Feedback scientists, and none were found to be objectionable.

As more and more articles are reviewed by scientists, the Scientific Trust Tracker's data will become more and more comprehensive, [said Emmanuel Vincent, founder of Climate Feedback].

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takyon writes:

ARM has detailed the smaller, faster, and more efficient Cortex A73:

In terms of performance ARM claims it will exceed the A72 in all important metrics relevant to mobile workloads. Examples were scarce but on workloads such as BBench (Website loading benchmark) the A73 is claimed to be up to 10% better performance than the A72 – on the same process and frequency. SIMD/NEON (FFMEG Codec) workloads are supposed to improve by up to 5%, mostly a side-effect from the better memory subsystem. Memory sees the largest gains with up to 15% improvement (JMC Stream Copy 64b).

[...] More importantly it's power consumption which sees the largest improvements. We see up to 25% power reduction in integer workloads and up to ~30% in floating point and L2 cache memory operations. ARM publishes that the A73 uses at least 20% less power than the A72 at the same process and frequency.

[...] The A73 is up to 25% smaller than the A72 when implemented on the same process with the same performance targets. The A72 is already getting quite small on new process nodes so the A73 will seem quite tiny on future nodes such as 10nm.

Also covered at Ars Technica: ARM's newest CPU design wants to make throttling a thing of the past.

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Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

Pascal Reid and Michell Espinoza are Bitcoin traders. According to their lawyers, they have no criminal record.

According to press coverage, the FBI found them, not as the result of an investigation into illegal activity but by going through a directory of Bitcoin traders.

The FBI then sent undercover agents to buy Bitcoins with cash the agents said was dirty. Both men were arrested and hit with money laundering charges. As of April Espinoza was locked up pending trial but Reid was able to post $100,000 bail. They face "up to 25 years", but beware of the words "up to" in press coverage. The actual sentence would likely be completely different.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25529602/bitcoin-money-laundering-charges-will-test-digital-currency

Their defense is going to be, or at least going to include, an argument that since Bitcoin is not actually money they could not have been engaged in money laundering.

They're in serious trouble. If I remember the numbers right, 97% of Federal defendants plead out rather than risk going to trial, where 3 out of 4 defendants are convicted and sentences are Draconian. UPDATE: In fact, Reid has already copped a plea: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article80421072.html:

... Pascal Reid, ...pleaded guilty to acting as an unlicensed money broker and was sentenced to probation. Under his unusual plea deal, he agreed to teach law enforcement about Bitcoin.

"Probation" is less benign than it sounds and he now has to face the job market with a conviction on his record. On probation, having a job can be a condition of staying out of prison.

I don't know how Federal probation works, but the director of probation in Bell County Texas "says that if he ever faced a choice between prison and probation, he'd skip working with his own department and instead go to prison." -- http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2016/04/dmn-watchdog-probation-fees-turn-pos.html

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takyon writes:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has said that Edward Snowden "performed a public service":

The former US attorney general Eric Holder has said the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden performed a "public service" by starting a debate over government surveillance techniques.

Speaking on a podcast hosted by David Axelrod, a former campaign strategist for Barack Obama, Holder emphasized, however, that Snowden must still be punished.

"We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made," Holder said, in an hourlong discussion on The Axe Files. "Now, I would say that doing what he did – and the way he did it – was inappropriate and illegal."

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hubie writes:

In 2014, the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 59 small streams in the Southeastern United States for 108 different pharmaceutical compounds and detected one or more pharmaceuticals in all 59 streams. The average number of pharmaceuticals detected in the streams was six. The research was posted online as an open access paper on May 24 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

The most common pharmaceutical chemicals detected are:

• Metformin: Used to treat Type II diabetes, this chemical was detected in 89 percent of samples
• Lidocaine: Used as a pain reliever, this chemical was detected in 38 percent of samples
• Acetaminophen: Used as a pain reliever, this chemical was detected in 36 percent of samples
• Carbamazepine: Used to treat seizures, this chemical was detected in 28 percent of samples
• Fexofenadine: Used as an anti-histamine, this chemical was detected in 23 percent of samples
• Tramadol: An opioid pain reliever, this chemical was detected in 22 percent of samples

Although much uncertainty remains as to how pharmaceuticals affect aquatic organisms, some adverse effects have been documented. Antibiotic/antibacterial contaminants – detected in at least 20 percent of streams – can affect aquatic microbial communities, altering the base of the food web. Antihistamines, frequently detected in this study, affect neurotransmitters for many aquatic insects. And metformin, nearly ubiquitous in the streams studied, can affect the reproductive health of fish.

None of the compounds detected exceeded the benchmarks for human health concerns. Among all compounds detected, the two groups most observed were nicotine-related compounds (71 percent of samples) and caffeine-related compounds (detected in 49 percent of samples).

[Continues...]

hubie writes:

A tsunami is a wave, or series of waves, associated with a single event disturbance; something pushes on the water in a specific location causing a wave to propagate outward. The most infamous tsunamis were caused by large seismic events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, or underwater landslides.

There is a lesser-known class of tsunami, outside of coastal regions at least, that is caused by meteorological conditions and is called a meteotsunami. This is caused by an atmospheric disturbance, typically associated with a combination of a rapid atmospheric pressure change and strong winds, such as one would get with a strong convective storm front. Not every storm generates them because the conditions need to be optimized, such as having the speed of the atmospheric disturbance match the local shallow wave speed in the water. Meteotsunamis are very common in oceans around the world and have generated surges as high as 6 meters, though these large destructive events are very rare.

Meteotsunamis also occur in lakes, but they largely go unrecognized because they are mostly very small events, or they get confused with seiches, which is when water sloshes back-and-forth in an enclosed region much like water in a bathtub. A pair of University of Wisconsin researchers looked back at 20 years of historical tide and atmospheric weather data and they determined that the Great Lakes are subject to frequent meteotsunamis, and that they, not seiches, are the most likely cause of some of the worst beach disasters seen on the lakes. Their paper presents meteotsunami statistics and their associated causative storms to develop a predictive tool in the hopes of developing a warning system for the Great Lakes.

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A summary of the Inspector General report from FactCheck.org:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that her decision to use a private email account and server for government business while secretary of state was "allowed" by the State Department. She has said "my predecessors did the same thing," and insisted she "fully complied with every rule" in preserving her work emails.

We have taken issue with those claims, and now so does the State Department Office of Inspector General, which issued a report on May 26 that contradicts several of Clinton's claims about her emails:

• The IG report cited department policies dating to 2005 that require "normal day-to-day operations" to be conducted on government servers, contrary to Clinton's claim that her server was allowed. It also said she "had an obligation" to discuss her email system with cybersecurity officials, but there's "no evidence" that she sought or received their approval.
• The IG report said Clinton should have turned over her emails before she left office — not 21 months after she left. "[S]he did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act," the report said.
• Clinton has said her emails "were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department" because she emailed department officials at their government accounts. The IG report said that is "not an appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record."

The IG report also said the only other secretary of state to use personal email "exclusively" for government business was Colin Powell, contrary to Clinton's claim that her "predecessors" — plural — "did the same thing." The IG also said that, like Clinton, Powell did not comply with policies on preserving work-related emails.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TFA mentions this new finding raises the possibility of using Wnt modulators as a treatment, but I'd wait until this is confirmed in mammals before entertaining the idea.

It may be interesting to look into the side effects of anti-Wnt chemotherapy and see if any mimic autistic traits.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/neuroscientists-illuminate-role-of-autism-linked-gene-0524

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canopic jug writes:

There is a summary in the New York Times about how Governments Turn to Commercial Spyware to Intimidate Dissidents. The actual report is entitled Keep Calm and (Don't) Enable Macros: A New Threat Actor Targets UAE Dissidents published by the University of Toronto in Canada. The report details the companies and methods used to target journalists, activists, and dissidents so they can be removed and silenced. The bag of tricks includes fake web sites, documents with embedded macros, javascript, and even impersonation.

In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, has been jailed and fired from his job, along with having his passport confiscated, his car stolen, his email hacked, his location tracked and his bank account robbed of $140,000. He has also been beaten, twice, in the same week.

Mr. Mansoor's experience has become a cautionary tale for dissidents, journalists and human rights activists. It used to be that only a handful of countries had access to sophisticated hacking and spying tools. But these days, nearly all kinds of countries, be they small, oil-rich nations like the Emirates, or poor but populous countries like Ethiopia, are buying commercial spyware or hiring and training programmers to develop their own hacking and surveillance tools.

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