SoylentNews

butthurt writes:

On the morning of 2 June, a bright light and trails of smoke were seen in the sky over the southwestern U.S. state of Arizona. Loud noises were heard around the same time. According to a source at the Meteoroid Environment Office [Javascript required] at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

If Doppler radar is any indication, there are almost certainly meteorites scattered on the ground north of Tucson.

The event is under investigation by the American Meteor Society.

coverage:

• KNXV-TV
• KOLD-TV
• Your West Valley News
• KJZZ-FM

related story:
Bolide Seen Over Eastern North America

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/capitalize_internet_or_not/

   Internet internet Internet internet Internet internet Internet internet
   internet Internet internet Internet internet Internet internet Internet
   Internet internet Internet internet Internet internet Internet internet

What say you?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sometimes it is NOT the right time for your machine to update. To emphasize, nobody was hurt due to this instance of Windows 10 upgrading. That is just a hypothetical scenario:

When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.

The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rain forest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth, so the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically.

"If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.

"I just came here recently to act as their pilot but have IT skills as well. The guy who set these PCs up didn't know how to prevent it, or set a metered connection. I am completely livid."

[...] The Reg has been reporting a lot on the Windows 10 upgrade fiasco, and so decided to investigate, and the story checks out. A team member told us the Chinko Project team uses satellite communications for internet access and gets charged quite a lot for data, so the multi-gigabyte automatic upgrade was even more frustrating than for the rest of us. "We don't need to upgrade our internet, as the limited bandwidth we have is sufficient. But we just can't abide these forced upgrades & secret downloads," one member, who asked to remain anonymous, told El Reg. "We have donated laptops with Windows 7 & 8 all over the place that I'm trying to track down and fix."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Not infrequently, we receive a story submission to SoylentNews that consists of a single URL. Or, a story that contains but a single sentence or paragraph along with the URL. During weekends and holidays, the story submission queue tends to run dry. We have an IRC channel (#rss-bot) that gathers RSS links from around the web. Hmm.

It would be really handy if there were an automated way to "scrape" the contents of that page. In some cases, a simple redirect of the output of a text-based browser like Lynx would do the trick. Unfortunately, all too many sites subscribe to the idea that a web page needs to pull in Javascript and libraries from a myriad of other sites. Failing to do so displays a blank page.

There must be a way to do it — search engines like Google and Bing must extract the page text in order to index it. It would be best to have a general-purpose solution; having a custom template for each site is time-consuming to create and maintain (think if the site changes its layout). Our site is powered by Perl, so that would be the obvious preference.

So, fellow Soylentils, what tools and/or techniques have you used? What has worked for you?

Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way? When all you have is a hammer... what am I missing here? Is there another approach?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

What's taking vitamin A fortified "golden rice" so long to come to market? A new study blames the rice rather than anti-GMO activists:

Heralded on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 as a genetically modified crop with the potential to save millions of lives in the developing world, Golden Rice is still years away from field introduction and even then, may fall short of lofty health benefits still cited regularly by GMO advocates. "Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction. GMO opponents have not been the problem," says lead author Glenn Stone, professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

First conceived in the 1980s and a focus of research since 1992, Golden Rice has been a lightning rod in the battle over genetically modified crops. GMO advocates have long touted the innovation as a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. A problem in many poor countries, vitamin A deficiencies leave millions at high risk for infection, diseases, and other maladies, such as blindness. Some anti-GMO groups view Golden Rice as an over-hyped Trojan Horse that biotechnology corporations and their allies hope will pave the way for the global approval of other more profitable GMO crops.

A new study published in the journal Agriculture & Human Values [DOI: 10.1007/s10460-016-9696-1] reports little evidence that anti-GMO activists are to blame for Golden Rice's unfulfilled promises. "The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice-breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done," Stone says. "It has not even been submitted for approval to the regulatory agency, the Philippine Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI). A few months ago, the Philippine Supreme Court did issue a temporary suspension of GMO crop trials. Depending on how long it lasts, the suspension could definitely impact GMO crop development. But it's hard to blame the lack of success with Golden Rice on this recent action."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The origins of domesticated dogs has been much argued and a quite contentious topic. New research suggests that instead of dogs being domesticated in one location and then spreading, they were domesticated at different times and places. The research sequenced the genome of a 5000 year old dog bone found in Ireland and they compared it to the DNA of 605 modern dogs. When they created a family tree, they saw a deep divide between European and Asian dogs.

"I was like, 'Holy shit!'" says project leader Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. "We never saw this split before because we didn't have enough samples."

Their data suggests that dogs were domesticated in Asia more than 14,000 years ago and that they migrated west. However, there are dog bones that were found in Germany that are more than 16,000 years old, which means there were domesticated dogs already in Europe when the Asian dogs came over.

Some of today's dogs may carry genetic traces of that early domestication—but it's hard to find, in part because scientists are still trying to recover DNA from those ancient German dogs. "We don't know if the dogs that evolved [early] in Europe were an evolutionary dead end," Frantz says, "but we can safely say that their genetic legacy has mostly been erased from 
today's dogs."

[Continues...]

butthurt writes:

U.S. presidential candidate Donald J. Trump gave the keynote address at the 24th Annual Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota on 26 May. In the speech and the preceding press conference, he outlined his plans for the energy sector, saying that, as president, he would:

• "save the coal industry"
• "cancel the Paris climate agreement [...] and stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs"
• invite TransCanada to reapply for permission to construct the Keystone XL oil pipeline, provided it offers "a better deal" including "a piece of the profits"
• be inclined toward approval of other pipelines
• favour increased extraction of fossil fuels from public lands
• "accomplish a complete American energy independence"
• revoke executive action memos issued by the Obama administration
• "work with conservationists whose only agenda is protecting nature"
• "solve real environmental problems in our communities, like the need for clean and safe drinking water"

He has consulted North Dakota Representative Kevin Cramer, a Republican, regarding energy.

A video of the press conference and speech is available.

[Continues...]

hubie writes:

One of the objects recovered from King Tutankhamun's mummy is a beautiful dagger with a rock crystal pommel, a golden hilt, and a blade hammered from iron. What makes this knife fascinating is that Egypt was very slow to enter the Iron Age due to their lack of iron ore deposits and iron-working technology. It had been suggested that they could have obtained the iron for this knife from meteorites, because though they didn't have the technology to melt it, they could hammer it into shape. New analysis using X-ray fluorescence shows that, indeed, Tut's knife blade is composed of meteorite material.

"No one ever really doubted the meteoritic origin of that dagger," said Thilo Rehren, an archaeometallurgist at University College London, Qatar, in Doha, who was not involved with the study. "It was the logical thing to assume. The beauty of this [new] paper is that they've put it beyond doubt that this is meteoritic iron," he added.

[Continues...]

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Just in case you still thought any political party had not sold out utterly, Torrentfreak brings us this:

Last week Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz chose a panel of individuals to draft the party's platform.

As previously reported, 15 were selected, with six chosen by Clinton, five chosen by Bernie Sanders and four chosen by Wasserman Schultz. While other publications will certainly pick over the bones of the rest of the committee, one in particular stands out as interesting to TF readers.

Howard L Berman is an attorney and former U.S. Representative. He's employed at Covington & Burling as a lobbyist and represents the MPAA on matters including "Intellectual property issues in trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties, copyright, and related legislation.

Omnis circum ad Benjaminum

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Aeon has an article on research about the retrieval of memories, and the ways in which some discoveries can be used to affect behaviour and improve learning.

At Northwestern University in Illinois, Ken Paller and colleagues have found that slow-wave sleep – more commonly known as deep sleep – can cause memory reactivation because of its periods of heightened neural synchrony, when lots of neurons activate together.

Of particular interest for language-learning, Paller's lab has found that memory reactivation during slow-wave sleep can be manipulated to improve specific memories. For example, they found that if you pair a sound with a picture while awake, and then play the sound during slow-wave sleep, this improves later recall of that picture – although the effect depends on how well you had learned the pairing the first time.

The article focuses on the potential implications of this research on learning languages, and is also published on the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) blog, and there is additional background on the original presentation behind the article.

...a session chaired by Lila Davachi (NYU) at the CNS annual meeting in New York, is elucidating how memory reactivation contributes to memory persistence and integration into our everyday lives. Shohamy of Columbia University focused on how that process affects decision-making, while Ken Paller of Northwestern University, talked about the influence of sleep.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The ancient underwater remains of a long lost Greek city were in fact created by a naturally occurring phenomenon -- according to joint research from the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Athens (Greece).

When underwater divers discovered what looked like paved floors, courtyards and colonnades, they thought they had found the ruins of a long-forgotten civilization that perished when tidal waves hit the shores of the Greek holiday island Zakynthos.

But new research published today reveals that the site was created by a natural geological phenomenon that took place in the Pliocene era -- up to five million years ago.

Lead author Prof Julian Andrews, from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences, said: "The site was discovered by snorkelers and first thought to be an ancient city port, lost to the sea. There were what superficially looked like circular column bases, and paved floors. But mysteriously no other signs of life -- such as pottery."

An abstract of the paper which was published in the Journal Marine and Petroleum Geology is available.

There are, however, other cities lost to the sea in the Mediterranean that are real, such as Kekova in Turkey. There are still others in the Black Sea that Ballard discovered, which could possibly explain the origin of the Noah (and other Middle Eastern) flood myths.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 and "exec" wrote in with this story.

Bosses play no role in fostering a sense of meaningfulness at work - but they do have the capacity to destroy it and should stay out of the way, new research shows.

http://phys.org/news/2016-06-meaningful-bosses.html

They interviewed 135 people working in 10 very different occupations, from priests to garbage collectors, to ask about incidents or times when the workers found their work to be meaningful and, conversely, times when they asked themselves, "What's the point of doing this job?"

[...] The authors identified five qualities of meaningful work:

• Self-Transcendent. Individuals tend to experience their work as meaningful when it matters to others more than just to themselves. In this way, meaningful work is self-transcendent.
• Poignant. People often find their work to be full of meaning at moments associated with mixed, uncomfortable, or even painful thoughts and feelings, not just a sense of unalloyed joy and happiness.
• Episodic. A sense of meaningfulness arises in an episodic rather than a sustained way. It seems that no one can find their work consistently meaningful, but rather that an awareness that work is meaningful arises at peak times that are generative of strong experiences.
• Reflective. Meaningfulness is rarely experienced in the moment, but rather in retrospect and on reflection when people are able to see their completed work and make connections between their achievements and a wider sense of life meaning.
• Personal. Work that is meaningful is often understood by people not just in the context of their work but also in the wider context of their personal life experiences.

The researchers also identified the 'seven deadly sins' of meaninglessness: disconnecting people from their values; taking them for granted; handing out pointless work; treating staff unfairly; overriding peoples' better judgment; disconnecting people from supporting relationships; and putting them at risk.

While the challenges of helping employees find meaningful work are great, "the benefits for individuals and organizations that accrue from meaningful workplaces can be even greater," the authors write.

How meaningful is your work? Does your boss help or hinder you? How does that square with your experiences?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Using the Very Large Array of radiotelescopes in the U.S. state of New Mexico, astronomers have mapped ammonia in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The images show structures in the atmosphere as much as 100 km beneath the tops of the clouds. At that depth, pressures are about 8 times that of the Earth's atmosphere at sea level.

coverage:

• The Guardian
• space.com
• Science (#1) (full article is pay-walled)
• Science (#2) (full article is pay-walled)
• Gizmodo
• BBC News

Original Submission

devlux writes:

Hey everyone! Sorry I've been quiet for so long.

The June 7th primary in California is rapidly approaching and I've been involved in a project to create an international standard for secure electronic voting. The design work is all done and our first application of the technology is to use it to detect and uncover fraud, specifically voting machine tampering. This project is happening in phases. The first phase happens June 7th. We will be conducting an audit of the primary, effectively a parallel election.

The main goal of phase one is actually to shake out the tech make sure it's as bug free as possible and also that the blockchain that supports this tech can scale to meet the demands of a real election.

If you're interested in novel ways of using technology to help secure elections we could really use your help, because it's crunch time now.

First of all, if you live in California, we could use boots on the ground. Some of our volunteers and probably a sizable fraction of the voters will be technically illiterate. We need people on hand who can quickly troubleshoot the hardware, reboot devices and even just demonstrate the tech and walk people through the process if needs be. We've tried to make it as simple as possible. Literally, scan a QR code and press 1 button corresponding to your choice of candidate. But as simple as we've made it the process could still be confusing to some especially in the heat of the moment. If you're interested in helping out by being boots on the ground for us go here... https://www.democracycounts.org or here https://www.facebook.com/notes/election-justice-usa/independent-citizens-election-audit-to-be-conducted-in-select-precincts-in-calif/889795561147138 You can contact Dawn on facebook to be put directly into the volunteer pipeline.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

A PhD student who shot and killed a professor before killing himself claimed that the professor had stolen his code:

The student who shot and killed his engineering professor and then himself at a Los Angeles university had accused the professor of stealing his code.

In a blog post on March 10, Mainak Sarkar, 38, said Professor William Klug, 39, "is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy." He continued: "I was this guy's PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick. Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy." The post has since been taken down.

On Wednesday, nearly three months after posting it, and seemingly upset at poor grades, Sarkar drove from his home in Minnesota to Los Angeles where he confronted and gunned down Professor Klug at the university's engineering complex. Sarkar then turned the gun on himself and killed himself. The Los Angeles Times quoted an unnamed UCLA source as saying the allegation that Klug stole his student's code was "absolutely untrue."

The professor's name was found on a "kill list" written by Sarkar, along with another professor who wasn't on campus at the time of the shooting and has been confirmed to be safe. Sarkar reportedly killed his estranged wife in Minnesota before traveling to UCLA. Also at Los Angeles Times , The New York Times , CNN.

Original Submission