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Phoenix666 writes:

A survey of more than 216,000 adolescents from all 50 states indicates the number of teens with marijuana-related problems is declining. Similarly, the rates of marijuana use by young people are falling despite the fact more U.S. states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana use and the number of adults using the drug has increased.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis examined data on drug use collected from young people, ages 12 to 17, over a 12-year span. They found that the number of adolescents who had problems related to marijuana -- such as becoming dependent on the drug or having trouble in school and in relationships -- declined by 24 percent from 2002 to 2013.

Over the same period, kids, when asked whether they had used pot in the previous 12 months, reported fewer instances of marijuana use in 2013 than their peers had reported in 2002. In all, the rate fell by 10 percent.

Those drops were accompanied by reductions in behavioral problems, including fighting, property crimes and selling drugs. The researchers found that the two trends are connected. As kids became less likely to engage in problem behaviors, they also became less likely to have problems with marijuana.

Is getting high with grandpa a buzzkill?

Original Submission

Subsentient writes:

Hi, I'm Subsentient, the original author of the Epoch Init System. It's been around a while, and it does the job I gave it well enough for me, but Epoch has failed to reach its ultimate goal of becoming a viable alternative to systemd. This is for a few reasons, among them being a total lack of parallelism, difficulty for package maintainers to easily set up services, and a codebase even I myself am ashamed to admit I wrote. I got some things right too, like good documentation, powerful service management, lack of dependencies, and unintrusiveness, but it seems it wasn't quite enough, because the most commonly requested features were true dependency support and parallelism.

I'm doing a near-complete rewrite of Epoch, save for the few parts of code that were well-written, and it will be called Epoch-ng (next generation). While dependencies, parallelism and easy package manager support are the big things, I think I'd like to get feedback on what Linux users actually want from an init system, and I'll try to write an init system that does its best to meet everyone's desires.

So, what would you like to see in an init system? What would you like to NOT see? I'll be taking this feedback seriously. :^)

-Subsentient

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres continue to puzzle researchers. When recently a team of astronomers led by Paolo Molaro of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory in Italy, conducted observations of these features, they found out something unexpected. The scientists were surprised to detect that the spots brighten during the day and also show other variations. This variability still remains a mystery.

The bright features have been discovered by NASA's Dawn spacecraft which is orbiting this dwarf planet, constantly delivering substantial information about it. These spots reflect far more light than their much darker surroundings. The composition of these features is discussed as the scientists debate if they are made of water ice, of evaporated salts, or something else.

Molaro and his colleagues studied the spots on Ceres in July and August 2015, using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), as was reported by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) earlier this year. This instrument, mounted on ESO's 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, enables measurements of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available.

By utilizing HARPS, the researchers found out unexpected changes in the mysterious bright spots. However, at the beginning they thought that it was an instrumental problem. But after double checking, they had to conclude that the radial velocity anomalies were likely real. Then the team noticed that they were connected to periods of time when the bright spots in the Occator crater were visible from the Earth. So the scientists made an association between them.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

I don't remember if this topic has been discussed before. Anyway, I think that it is an interesting topic. There are many unanswered questions, especially, regarding liability. Would you trust a surgical robot?

Today's surgical robots extend the surgeon's capacities; they filter out hand tremors and allow maneuvers that even the best surgeon couldn't pull off with laparoscopic surgery's typical long-handled tools (sometimes dismissively called "chopsticks"). But at the end of the day, the robot is just a fancier tool under direct human control. Dennis Fowler, executive vice president of the surgical robotics company Titan Medical, is among those who think medicine will be better served if the robots become autonomous agents that make decisions and independently carry out their assigned tasks. "This is a technological intervention to add reliability and reduce errors of human fallibility," says Fowler, who worked as a surgeon for 32 years before moving to industry.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/medical-robots/would-you-trust-a-robot-surgeon-to-operate-on-you

Related:

Can We Trust Robots ?

How to Build a Moral Robot

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.nature.com/news/digital-forensics-from-the-crime-lab-to-the-library-1.19998
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213014000

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Devuan, the once devil-may-care total fork of Debian, once linked to virulent internet sexism and gamer-gate affiliated image forums by Debian Developer Russel Coker, has mulled the option of enacting a Code of Conduct when one of its female members was insulted:

> https://botbot.me/freenode/devuan/2016-05-25/?page=2
>jaromil today i was scrolling through http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_...
>golinux Well, I tried but couldn't find anybody. Then nextime popped up
>jaromil jeez. we need to take precautions. and also I get the point from Sarah Mei we need a code of conduct on-line and later for on-site http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2015/02/01/the-fos...
> its never too early for that
>
>golinux One can only control one's own actions. ;)
>
>jaromil ah the wise one
...
>Wizzup he is doxed?
>jaromil that's him. we have a dossier yes

Devuan has been criticized for taking a "who gives a damn" and "real admins do it all by hand themselves every install" attitude towards security hardening scripts, and despise in particular any mention of the "bastille" linux hardening script (originally funded by Mandrake Linux).

Interestingly when Devuan was forming, the people behind Devuan cited the very person they are considering making the code of conduct against:

> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20141027
>VUA: It will be a governing body that puts the benefits of the users first, not the mystification of a "doacracy" delivering all the power to the package maintainers.
>Originally, Debian was created as a universal operating system for the users. The Free Software movement itself is there to defend users' rights. Sgryphon explains it well in this thread. ( http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=3031 )
>We will likely reproduce the governing body of Debian to follow its original mandate, with the advantage of starting small and more focused, hopefully with less pressure from the interest of commercial developers.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

For hundreds of years, historical scholars have puzzled over the sudden retreat by the Mongols—they had conquered their way out of Asia and into Russia and had won every battle they had fought making their way into Eastern Europe during the early 1200s, when they abruptly turned tail and headed back to Russia, never to return. Some have suggested it was Mongol politics while others have maintained that armies in the Eastern Europe were putting up much more of a fight than the Mongols had expected. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that the reason might be much more mundane: simple bad weather.

The horses used by the Mongols, the researchers note, survived by eating the grasses that were plentiful on the Asian and Russian steppes—grasses that were healthy and strong and easily accessible due to several years of good weather. But, tree ring data, and some evidence in historical writings suggest that the winter of 1242, was particularly bad—not because it was too cold, or too snowy, but because it was just cold enough to cause widespread freezing which led to widespread melting during the spring, which just happened to coincide with the arrival of the Mongols. The melting led to flooding, because, coincidently, that part of Hungary sits at low elevations—melting ice and snow would have puddled, preventing the grass for growing very well that spring, leaving little for the horses to eat. Also, it would have meant lots of mud, making travel very difficult. The end result, the researchers suggest, might have been the Mongols simply deciding against progressing further because it did not seem worth the trouble.

If they had stayed longer, would Europeans and Americans drink fermented mare's milk today instead of beer?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Spanish archaeologists say they have discovered an exceptional set of Paleolithic-era cave drawings that could rank among the best in a country that already boasts some of the world's most important cave art.

Chief site archaeologist Diego Garate said Friday that an estimated 70 drawings were found on ledges 300 meters (1,000 feet) underground in the Atxurra cave in the northern Basque region. He described the site as being in "the Champions' League" of cave art, among the top 10 sites in Europe. The engravings and paintings feature horses, buffalo, goats and deer, dating back 12,500-14,500 years ago.

But Garate said access to the area is so difficult and dangerous it's not likely to be open to the public.

The cave was discovered in 1929 and first explored in 1934-35, but it was not until 2014 that Garate and his team resumed their investigations that the drawings were discovered. Experts say while it's too early to say if the discovery ranks alongside Spain's most prize prehistoric cave art site, the Altamira Caves—known as the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art—Atxurra looks promising.

The craftmanship is stunning, made more impressive because the artists worked by flickering torchlight.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Conor Sen writes that we've seen over the past 12-18 months that the post-recession world we've built doesn't scale beyond its current size because it's not as cheap to scale atoms as it is to scale bits.

Consider the following: The San Francisco Bay Area is the economic center of the early 21st century but it's finding that scaling housing and infrastructure for workers is a lot harder than scaling servers and storage so jobs and people have to move to cheaper metros. Tesla wants to disrupt the auto industry but it's never produced more than 50,000 cars in a year, and suddenly has to meet demand for as many as 500,000 cars a year. That won't be cheap or easy, and it's unclear how much shareholders and lenders will be willing to finance that growth.

As they grow, Uber and Facebook are running into problems of scale. For Uber, it's finding drivers and fighting regulation. For Facebook, it's eating too much of the revenue pie for content, and maybe as it grows it's going to come under greater and greater scrutiny given its media clout. "Both will argue they're not utilities, but the vision and scale they aspire to would make them exactly that."

Finally the conservative movement is finding that the demographic groups that believe in conservatism no longer scale to form a viable national party. Trump will soon find the same to be true for his white working class coalition. The Republican Party needs a new ideology or constituency that can scale to compete with Democrats. "It's time to let Steve Jobs and Ronald Reagan rest in peace," concludes Sen, "and find new leaders who can build the world of the 2020′s."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

That's "Rays," as in, "Stingrays":

Scientists from the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center in Japan removed the electric organ from a torpedo and chemically stimulated the organ by injecting a solution of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine though a syringe. They were able to achieve more than a minute of continuous current, with a peak voltage of 91 mV and 0.25 mA of current. By increasing the number of syringes, they achieved a peak voltage of 1.5 V and a current of 0.64mA.

The environmental impact of electric power generation is a pressing international concern. There are mandates to reduce the environment impact of power generation, leading to a push away from conventional thermal and nuclear power. Recently, biofuel cells such as glucose fuel cells and microbial fuel cells have been developed to meet these mandates. However, the performance of these fuel cells remains inferior to conventional systems.

Nature, researchers recently found, may be able to teach us a better way. Scientists from the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) in Osaka began work to develop a new type of electricity generator, based on the knowledge that electric rays known as torpedoes can beat other systems by generating electric power with near 100% efficiency. The torpedo has electric organs with densely-aligned membrane proteins that convert the chemical energy of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) into ion transport energy, and a nervous system that controls the whole process.

So what they need now to meet their power needs is an...array?

Original Study

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/30/11814300/caltech-sues-apple-broadcom-over-wi-fi-patents

Apple is being sued by Caltech for using Wi-Fi chips that allegedly infringe on four of the university's patents. In a lawsuit filed last Thursday, Caltech argued that Apple knowingly used and advertised gains from patented technology in almost all of its major products from the iPhone 5 forward. Caltech is hoping to block sales of those products and to recover damages from the infringement. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Caltech says that its patents are integral to 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, the two most recent standards. Its patents are supposed to "allow for faster data transmissions," while also simplifying the hardware needed to offer Wi-Fi. The patents were granted between 2006 and 2012.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers have helped solve one of the enduring mysteries of the ancient world: why the inhabitants of Madagascar speak Malagasy, a language otherwise unique to Southeast Asia and the Pacific - a region located at least 6,000 km away. An international research team has identified that ancient crop remains excavated from sites in Madagascar consist of Asian species like rice and mung beans. This is thought to be the first archaeological evidence that settlers from South Asia are likely to have colonised the island over a thousand years ago. The findings are published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Genetic research has confirmed that the inhabitants of Madagascar do indeed share close ancestry with Malaysians, Polynesians, and other speakers of what is classed the Austronesian language family. To date, archaeological research has identified human settlements in Madagascar that belong to the first millennium. There are also findings suggesting that Madagascar may have been occupied by hunter-gatherers who probably arrived from Africa by the first or second millennium. Until now, however, archaeological evidence of the Austronesian colonisation has been missing. The team were able to identify the species of nearly 2,500 ancient plant remains obtained from their excavations at 18 ancient settlement sites in Madagascar, on neighbouring islands and on the eastern African coast. They examined residues obtained from sediments in the archaeological layers, using a system of sieves and water. They looked at whether the earliest crops grown on the sites were African crops or were crops introduced to Africa from elsewhere. They found both types, but noted a distinct pattern, with African crops primarily concentrated on the mainland and the islands closest to the mainland. In Madagascar, in contrast, early subsistence focused on Asian crops. The data suggested an introduction of these crops, both to Madagascar and the neighbouring Comoros Islands, by the 8th and 10th century.

Original Study

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A new paper suggests:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/31/chromium-supplements-appear-useless-or-worse

Original Study

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A trio of researchers has solved a single math problem by using a supercomputer to grind through over a trillion color combination possibilities, and in the process has generated the largest math proof ever—the text of it is 200 terabytes in size. In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, Marijn Heule with the University of Texas, Oliver Kullmann with Swansea University and Victor Marek with the University of Kentucky outline the math problem, the means by which a supercomputer was programmed to solve it, and the answer which the proof was asked to provide.

The math problem has been named the boolean Pythagorean Triples problem and was first proposed back in the 1980's by mathematician Ronald Graham. In looking at the Pythagorean formula: a2 + b2 = c2, he asked, was it possible to label each a non-negative integer, either blue or red, such that no set of integers a, b and c were all the same color. He offered a reward of $100 to anyone who could solve the problem.

To solve this problem the researchers applied the Cube-and-Conquer paradigm, which is a hybrid of the SAT method for hard problems. It uses both look-ahead techniques and CDCL solvers. They also did some of the math on their own ahead of giving it over to the computer, by using several techniques to pare down the number of choices the supercomputer would have to check, down to just one trillion (from 102,300). Still the 800 processor supercomputer ran for two days to crunch its way through to a solution. After all its work, and spitting out the huge data file, the computer proof showed that yes, it was possible to color the integers in multiple allowable ways—but only up to 7,824—after that point, the answer became no.

Original Study

Original Submission

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.

Original Study

Original Submission