SoylentNews

takyon writes:

A new study has found that the plastic pollution dumped in the oceans has harmful effects in fish:

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time the devastating physiological and behavioral effects on fish exposed to the tiny bits of plastic pollution clogging the world's oceans. Lab experiments with European perch larvae showed exposure to microplastic particles at levels present in seas inhibited hatching of fertilized eggs, stunted larval growth, reduced activity levels, and made them more susceptible to predators, increasing mortality rates, researchers said on Thursday.

"For me, the key finding and biggest surprise in this study was the fact that larvae preferentially ate microplastic particles and literally stuffed themselves with the microbeads," ignoring their natural food source of zooplankton, said marine biologist Oona Lönnstedt of Uppsala University in Sweden.

There is increasing concern among scientists about the effect of pervasive plastic pollution on marine ecosystems. This study was the first to look at direct effects of microplastic particles on fish development, Lönnstedt said.

Also at PBS NewsHour and the Washington Post.

Ecologically relevant data are policy-relevant data (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf8697)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A NASA grant will explore the possibility of flying small robotic craft onto asteroids in order to harvest them and manufacture rudimentary propulsion that would allow the rock to be steered to another location in the solar system:

A few decades from now, asteroids may be flying themselves to mining outposts in space, nobly sacrificing their abundant resources to help open the final frontier to humanity. That's the vision of California-based company Made In Space, which was recently awarded NASA funding to investigate how to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecraft. The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable.

[...] The converted asteroids wouldn't resemble the traditional idea of spacecraft, with rocket engines and complex electronic circuitry. Rather, everything would be mechanical and relatively primitive. For example, the computer would be analog, akin, perhaps, to the Antikythera mechanism invented by the ancient Greeks to chart the motion of heavenly bodies, Dunn said. And the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, thereby pushing the space rock in the opposite direction (as described by Newton's Third Law of Motion), he added. "At the end of the day, the thing that we want the asteroid to be is technology that has existed for a long time. The question is, 'Can we convert an asteroid into that technology at some point in the future?'" Dunn said. "We think the answer is yes."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bloomberg reports that Samsung could launch new smartphone models with significantly more bendability than its previous "Edge" models:

Samsung Electronics Co. is considering introducing two new smartphone models that will feature bendable screens, including a version that folds in half like a cosmetic compact, people familiar with the matter said. The devices using organic light-emitting diodes could be unveiled as soon as early 2017, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. That would likely give it a head start on new Apple Inc. iPhones. The second Samsung model will have a 5-inch screen when used as a handset, that unfurls into a display that's as large as 8 inches, similar to a tablet, the people said.

Samsung, the biggest supplier of OLED panels for mobile products, has pioneered the development of new screen formats with its multi-sided Edge smartphones. Using advanced display technology may help the company recapture customers from Apple and boost earnings that have slumped for the past two years.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Guinea Worm Disease is on the verge of eradication:

Guinea worm is going down. Way down. From more than 3 million cases of Guinea worm disease a year in the 1980s, the world tally in 2016 stands at just two confirmed cases. Both are in Chad and are believed to have been contained before they had a chance to spread. (There are also two suspected cases, one in Chad and one in Ethiopia.) If Guinea worm is pushed into extinction, then Guinea worm disease would be just the second human disease to be eradicated after smallpox.

It's not a fatal condition but it's pretty horrible. There's a good reason the Guinea worm's nickname is "fiery serpent." Guinea worm larvae live in fresh water. When people drink from contaminated ponds and other bodies of stagnant water, they can become infected with the parasite. The larvae turn into worms that can grow to be up to 3 feet long. After about a year, the worm creates a blister, typically on the legs or feet, for its slow and painful exit.

When the worm first erupts, the person suffers a burning sensation and often seeks comfort by submerging the wound in a lake or a stream. The worm takes this opportunity to release a cloud of tens of thousands of larvae into the water. Other people end up drinking that larvae-laden water, which starts the cycle all over again. There's no medication to kill the worms. The only treatment is to slowly pull or cut the worm out of the infected person's body.

91-year-old former President Jimmy Carter may get his wish to see the last guinea worm die before he does.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Here's a machine learning chip startup:

Chip startups come and go. Generally, we cover them because of novel architectures or potential for specific applications. But in some cases, like today, it is for those reasons and because of the people behind an effort to bring a new architecture into a crowded, and ultimately limited, landscape.

With $100 million in "patience money" from a few individual investors who believe in the future of sparse matrix-based computing on low-power and reprogrammable devices, Austin-based Knupath, has spent a decade in stealth mode designing and fabricating a custom digital signal processor (DSP) chip to target deep learning training, machine learning-based analytics workloads, and naturally, signal processing. The company, led by famed NASA administrator Dan Goldin, has already fulfilled a $20 million contract for its first generation DSP-based system and has an interesting roadmap ahead, which will include the integration of FPGAs, among other devices.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

BBC News reports that, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, "at least 1,782" public toilets have closed around the UK in the past ten years. A possible reason is tight council budgets. Some facilities have been converted to other uses: for example, one was made into a night club whilst others were turned into bars and restaurants serving wine, vodka, noodles and fast food. A spokesperson for the British Toilet Association expressed concern over "people being forced to urinate in the streets" in areas lacking public toilets.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new project from George Church and other scientists will attempt to synthesize entire human genomes from scratch:

Leading genomics experts have announced Genome Project-Write (HGP-write), which aims to synthesize entire genomes of humans and other species from chemical components and get them to function in living cells.

As explained in Science [open, 10.1126/science.aaf6850], the goal of HGP-write is to reduce the costs of engineering large genomes, including a human genome, and to develop an ethical framework for genome-scale engineering and transformative medical applications.

Original Submission

Demose writes:

GNU has set plans to challenge the likes of PayPal and national banks the world over. Taler (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve) is a electronic currency with an open protocol standard. Taler's use from a user's standpoint:

1. The customer selects an exchange (i.e. by visiting the respective website or selecting from a list of exchanges in the application) and asks the wallet to create bank transfer instructions to withdraw a certain amount of electronic cash. The bank transfer instructions will contain an access code that must be included in the subject of the transaction, as well as the wire details for the exchange (i.e. a SEPA account number).
2. The customer then instructs his bank to transfer funds from his account to the Taler exchange using these instructions provided by the wallet (top left).
3. Once the funds have arrived, the wallet will automatically withdraw the electronic coins. The customer can use the wallet to review his remaining balance at any time. He can also make backups to secure his digital coins against hardware failures.
4. When visiting a merchant that supports Taler, an additional payment option for Taler is enabled in the checkout system. If the customer selects payments via Taler, the wallet displays the secured contract from the merchant and asks for confirmation. Taler does not require the customer to provide any identity information to the merchant. Transaction histories and digitally signed contracts can be preserved in the wallet for future review by the customer, or even use in court.

takyon writes:

Tails or The Amnesic Incognito Live System is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity. All its outgoing connections are forced to go through Tor, and non-anonymous connections are blocked. The system is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB, and will leave no digital footprint on the machine unless explicitly told to do so. The Tor Project has provided financial support for its development.

Major changes in version 2.4 of Tails include an update of the Tor Browser to version 6 (6.0.1), the enabling of Icedove's (email client) automatic configuration wizard, various package updates with security fixes, and the enabling of Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery for IPv4:

If any system on the path to the remote host has a MTU smaller than the standard Ethernet one, then Tails will receive an ICMP packet asking it to send smaller packets. Our firewall will drop such ICMP packets to the floor, and then the TCP connection won't work properly. This can happen to any TCP connection, but so far it's been reported as breaking obfs4 for actual users.

Download here. The Installation Assistant should be updated later.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

from the compassionate-conservative? dept.

AlterNet reports:

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson Thursday told Newsmax TV"[1] he would "certainly look into pardoning" Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information exposing illegal wiretapping practices at the National Security Administration, if he were elected president in November.

"This is someone who has divulged information that we would not know about currently--and that's the United States government spying on all of us as U.S. citizens", Johnson told "Hard Line" host John Bachman. "I don't want to see him in prison."

[...] Johnson's statement is at odds with both the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump (who has called Snowden a traitor) and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton (who said she thinks the whistleblower should stand trial for leaking classified documents). Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders offered tepid support for Snowden, saying he "played a very important role in educating the American public", but added the former NSA security contractor "did break the law".

Johnson is also at odds with President Barack Obama.

[...] It should be noted that while Johnson's position on Edward Snowden--as well as his vocal support of pot legalization--signals the kind of progressive policies some want, Johnson still supports privatizing prisons, abolishing the [minimum] wage and child labor laws, cutting government welfare, and initiating preemptive military strikes against suspected terror targets, among other regressive policies. His beliefs are conservative enough to draw the support of self-described GOP operative and legendary dirty trickster Roger Stone, who similarly supports Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Just some context.

[1] Newsmax puts its content behind scripts and the URL redirects when you don't run those; it also is video-centric (Flash). archive.is will run the scripts for you.

Original Submission

"exec" submitted from IRC:

Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs (open, DOI: 10.1145/2851486)

For attackers, ramming the gates of cryptography is not the only option. They can instead undermine the fortification by violating basic assumptions made by the cryptographic software. One such assumption is software can control its outputs. Our programming courses explain that programs produce their outputs through designated interfaces (whether print, write, send, or mmap); so, to keep a secret, the software just needs to never output it or anything that may reveal it. (The operating system may be misused to allow someone else's process to peek into the program's memory or files, though we are getting better at avoiding such attacks, too.)

Yet programs' control over their own outputs is a convenient fiction, for a deeper reason. The hardware running the program is a physical object and, as such, interacts with its environment in complex ways, including electric currents, electromagnetic fields, sound, vibrations, and light emissions. All these "side channels" may depend on the computation performed, along with the secrets within it. "Side-channel attacks," which exploit such information leakage, have been used to break the security of numerous cryptographic implementations; see Anderson, Kocher et al., and Mangard et al. and references therein.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

For many drivers, the app Waze is a godsend, providing real-time, crowdsourced traffic tips to motorists desperate for alternatives to congested thoroughfares but to some residents of the formerly quiet neighborhoods through which Waze has rerouted countless commuters, the app has destroyed their quality of life. Steve Hendrix writes at the Washington Post that when traffic on Timothy Connor's quiet Maryland street in Tamoka Park, MD suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew that Waze was to blame for routing cars around a around a months-long road repair through his neighborhood. "I could see them looking down at their phones," says Connor. "We had traffic jams, people were honking. It was pretty harrowing." So Connor became a Waze Warrior. Every rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to deflect some of the flow. Neighbors filed false reports of blockages, sometimes with multiple users reporting the same issue to boost their credibility. "It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know," says Bates Mattison. "In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood."

But Waze was way ahead of them. It's not possible to fool the system for long, according to Waze officials. For one thing, the system knows if you're not actually in motion. More important, it constantly self-corrects, based on data from other drivers. "The nature of crowdsourcing is that if you put in a fake accident, the next 10 people are going to report that it's not there," says Julie Mossler, Waze's head of communications. The company will suspend users they suspect of "tampering with the map."

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

A new device that combines chemistry and synthetic biology could prove key to renewable fuels and even chemicals—and combating climate change

        By David Biello on June 2, 2016

A tree's leaf, a blade of grass, a single algal cell: all make fuel from the simple combination of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide through the miracle of photosynthesis. Now scientists say they have replicated—and improved—that trick by combining chemistry and biology in a "bionic" leaf.

Chemist Daniel Nocera of Harvard University and his team joined forces with synthetic biologist Pamela Silver of Harvard Medical School and her team to craft a kind of living battery, which they call a bionic leaf for its melding of biology and technology. The device uses solar electricity from a photovoltaic panel to power the chemistry that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, then adds pre-starved microbes to feed on the hydrogen and convert CO2 in the air into alcohol fuels. The team's first artificial photosynthesis device appeared in 2015—pumping out 216 milligrams of alcohol fuel per liter of water—but the nickel-molybdenum-zinc catalyst that made its water-splitting chemistry possible had the unfortunate side effect of poisoning the microbes.

So the team set out in search of a better catalyst, one that would play well with living organisms while effectively splitting water. As the team reports in Science on June 2, they found it in an alloy of cobalt and phosphorus, an amalgam already in use as an anticorrosion coating for plastic and metal parts found in everything from faucets to circuit boards. With a little charge, this new catalyst can assemble itself out of a solution of regular water, cobalt and phosphate—and phosphate in water actually is good for living things like the Ralstonia eutropha bacteria that make up the back half of the bionic leaf. Run an electric current from a photovoltaic device through this solution at a high enough voltage and it splits water. That voltage is also higher than what is needed to induce the cobalt to precipitate out of the solution and form the cobalt phosphide catalyst, which means when the bionic leaf is running there are always enough electrons around to induce the catalyst's formation—and therefore no excess metal left to poison the microbes or bring the bionic leaf's water-splitting to a halt. "The catalyst can never die as it's functioning," Nocera says, noting that the new artificial leaf has been able to run for up to 16 days at a stretch.

This story appears to be an update on a previous story by the same author - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bionic-leaf-makes-fuel-from-sunlight/
Maybe the most informative link is this - http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/bionic-leaf-turns-sunlight-into-liquid-fuel/
Similar stories appear in the Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Magazine, and Washington Post.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Uber's convenient $100 million settlement with drivers may not be enough to appease them:

Uber's $100m settlement with thousands of its drivers has spun around, mounted the curb and is careering back toward a California courthouse.

Following the filing of objections [PDF] from drivers who take issue with terms of the settlement that they say only favors Uber and plaintiff lead attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, the judge overseeing the case said he also has concerns with the deal.

US District Judge Edward Chen said in a hearing in San Francisco this week that he was concerned the deal contained provisions that would too broadly shield Uber from liability concerning alleged violations of US labor laws.

This after a collection of the Uber drivers who had been part of the class action case against Uber told the court that they believe Liss-Riordan inked a settlement deal with Uber that was not in their best interests, but rather leaves them with "nothing to improve our conditions or compensate our losses."

[...] Should the settlement offer be voided, the two sides would have to negotiate a new deal or face having the case end up in front of a jury.

Previously: Uber Settles Class Action Lawsuits With California and Massachusetts Drivers

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

An engadget story has the following to say about KeePass2 and developer Dominik Reichl:

Original Submission