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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers found that students perform better in science where they read stories about how famous scientists struggled rather than when they read stories about what those scientists achieved.

The researcher tested how kids reacted to prospects of careers in science and math. When the kids were told how brilliant, what geniuses Einstein and other famous scientists and mathematicians were, their propensity to consider careers in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) went down. When they were told stories about how those same people struggled, their propensity to consider careers in STEM went up.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A high percentage of children, teens and young adults with migraines appear to have mild deficiencies in vitamin D, riboflavin and coenzyme Q10 -- a vitamin-like substance found in every cell of the body that is used to produce energy for cell growth and maintenance.

These deficiencies may be involved in patients who experience migraines, but that is unclear based on existing studies.

"Further studies are needed to elucidate whether vitamin supplementation is effective in migraine patients in general, and whether patients with mild deficiency are more likely to benefit from supplementation," says Suzanne Hagler, MD, a Headache Medicine fellow in the division of Neurology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and lead author of the study.

The study was not set up to test the role of supplements in migraine mitigation, so they cannot say anything about that yet. But if supplements prove out, it would be a welcome, easy fix for a debilitating condition.

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Phoenix666 writes:

All 36 countries that committed to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change complied with their emission targets, according to a scientific study released today. In addition, the Kyoto process and climate-related policies, represented a low cost for the countries involved -- up to 0.1% of GDP for the European Union and an even lower fraction of Japan's GDP. This is around one quarter to one tenth of what experts had estimated after the agreement was reached in 1997, for delivering the targets set 15 years ahead. The US never ratified the Treaty and Canada withdrew, but all the rest continued and Kyoto came into force in 2005.

The results, reported in the Climate Policy journal, are the first published results to use the final data for national GHG emissions and exchanges in carbon units which only became available at the end of 2015. They show that overall, the countries who signed up to the Kyoto Protocol surpassed their commitment by 2.4 GtCO2e yr -1 (giga-tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year).

It would be interesting to see a full cost-benefit to compliance for those countries, with all externalities quantified and factored in.

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canopic jug writes:

Microsoft will buy LinkedIn for $196 per share, or about $26.2 billion. The respective companies' boards are alleged to have unanimously approved the sale. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will keep his title and report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. It is claimed that LinkedIn will continue to operate as an independent brand.

Reuters, CNBC, USA Today, WSJ, NYT.

It's quick and easy to delete your Linked-In account in ten steps.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

""Biohackers" are putting microchips and magnets in their bodies for everything from unlocking the front door to detecting moon earthquakes."

"Tim Shank can guarantee he'll never leave home without his keys. Why? His house keys are located inside his body.

Shank, the president of the Minneapolis futurist group TwinCities+, has a chip installed in his hand that can communicate electronically with his front door and tell it to unlock itself. His wife has one, too.

"You have mental checklists as you're coming and going out of your home," Shank says. "One of those things is my wallet, keys, all those things I have with me. Once you start to eliminate all those things, you start to see all the mind space it actually clears not to have to worry about them."

In fact, Shank has several chips in his hand, including a near field communication (NFC) chip like the ones used in Apple Pay and similar systems, which stores a virtual business card with contact information for TwinCities+. "[For] people with Android phones, I can just tap their phone with my hand, right over the chip, and it will send that information to their phone," he says. In the past, he's also used a chip to store a bitcoin wallet.

Shank is one of a growing number of "biohackers" who implant hardware ranging from microchips to magnets inside their bodies."

>>>>> Continue to full article:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3059769/ive-got-you-under-my-skin-the-new-frontier-of-digital-implants

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

By obliterating the broken immune systems of patients with severe forms of multiple sclerosis, then sowing fresh, defect-free systems with transplanted stem cells, researchers can thwart the degenerative autoimmune disease—but it comes at a price.

In a small phase II trial of 24 MS patients, the treatment halted or reversed the disease in 70 percent of patients for three years after the transplant. Eight patients saw that improvement last for seven and a half years, researchers report in the Lancet. This means that some of those patients went from being wheelchair-bound to walking and being active again. But to reach that success, many suffered through severe side effects, such as life threatening infections and organ damage from toxicity brought on by the aggressive chemotherapy required to annihilate the body’s immune system. One patient died from complications of the treatment, which represents a four percent fatality rate.

Moreover, while the risks may be worthwhile to some patients with rapidly progressing forms of MS—a small percentage of MS patients—the researchers also caution that the trial was small and did not include a control group.

“Larger clinical trials will be important to confirm these results,” study coauthor Mark Freedman of University of Ottawa said in a statement. “Since this is an aggressive treatment, the potential benefits should be weighed against the risks of serious complications associated with [this stem cell transplant], and this treatment should only be offered in specialist centres experienced both in multiple sclerosis treatment and stem cell therapy, or as part of a clinical trial,” he added.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

This week, we're delving into the mailbag of tales generated by recent On-Calls about the reader paid £35k to do nothing for three months and another paid to do nothing for a year.

Reader “Henry” reckons he has them covered with a three-year stint of paid nothing. Henry tells us he once worked as a “software engineer/statistician in the manufacturing division of a large computer manufacturer” where “I had just come off writing an advanced language compiler and run-time, and before that working on an operating system.” At that time the company decided it needed to work on a manufacturing quality initiative. Henry's twin skill sets made him a fine candidate and he scored the job.

“I was ready ready to hit the ground running … just as soon as management reached consensus on the quality measurements to be done,” Henry tells us.

That consensus was some time in coming, so “In the next two years, I coached a different manager through his Master’s in computer science, but mostly played a lot of a character-cell predecessor of Civilization.”

After two years of that, Henry decided he needed a slightly more productive gig. So he had himself assigned to “a distributed system research team composed of academics at a nearby engineering school.”

Henry's first assignment there was “to port all the distributed systems software to DOS … just as soon as project management decided which of three candidate network stacks to use.”

Cue another year of waiting and playing, this time Battlezone, “For a year, before I quit.”

Can any Soylentils beat this?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An Irish property company is expected to secure planning permission for a 25,550 square meter facility on the outskirts of Cork City that will offer much reduced data latency times between the US and Europe. JCD Group’s rapid movement with plans for the centre on the site of a disused electronics factory in the city is in stark contrast to the quagmire engulfing Apple’s plans for a site in Galway which has drawn fire from the local populations of humans, badgers and bats.

The €200m development led by property group JCD Group centres on the 32 acre former Mitsui Denman plant on Little Island. As well as the expected construction jobs, the plant should deliver about 150 jobs. Crucially, the development will have a 60MW connection into an adjacent substation due in 2017 – meaning locals won't see their lights flicker every time Kim Kardashian uploads another nude selfie.

According to the Irish Examiner the cost of the site is around €100,000 per acre. For an admittedly crude comparison, we happen to know you could pick up some fine secluded agriculture land in picturesque County Cavan for less than €10,000 per acre.

Sadly though you’d be missing out on the Cork site’s proximity to the Hibernia Network subsea cable, which the developers are banking on to deliver the shortest available data latency between Europe and the US East Coast.

Silicon Republic adds that other data centres are on the Cork drawing board, including a proposed EMC facility. The city is also home to offices for Qualcomm, IBM, Pivotal and Eventbrite, and a biotech cluster.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/10/bernerslee_warns_of_spying

Speaking at the Decentralized Web Summit conference in San Francisco run by the Internet Archive, the engineer [Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee] joined other internet notables including "father of the internet" Vint Cerf and Mozilla head Mitchell Baker in discussing how to strengthen the open internet as well as ensure its contents are retained over time.

"The web is already decentralized," Berners-Lee told attendees. "The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one social network, one Twitter for micro-blogging. We don't have a technology problem; we have a social problem."

[...] founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web. We have the ability to change all that."

The conference featured the developers of many tools that aim to retain the internet's decentralized nature, such as Blockstack, Ethereum, Interledger, IPFS and others.

It's not just the World Wide Web, it's the entire internet: your phone reports on your location at all times, apps on it flush contents of your phone to the owners of the app, almost all websites do some sort of tracking (most of them using Google Analytics), e-mail providers happily hand over anything to anyone asking, and the rest is vacuumed up automatically by the NSA.

So with that in mind: how are Soylentils protecting themselves online aside from the usual (i.e. not running javascript or 'use a VPN')?

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"exec" writes:

Watch more than two hours of "Orange is the New Black" in a single night? You're devouring it. Watch just an episode or two of "Fuller House?" You, my couch potato friend, are savoring.

That's the scale on which Netflix now judges how its audience is consuming its content. The company's newly announced Binge Scale shows how members watch a series in either a slow progression or an all out marathon.

Netflix examined over 100 TV series on a global level and figured out how long it takes for a viewer to finish a whole run. The company found that series that tend towards the thriller side of the genre scale -- say, "Breaking Bad "-- make it harder to stop watching (devour). But more deliberative dramas like "Mad Men" have us watching at a slower pace (savor).

So next time you sit down to watch a series, will you savor or devour?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Bobs writes:

New study details from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-rio-superbacteria-exclusive-idUSKCN0YW2E8 "Exclusive: Studies find 'super bacteria' in Rio's Olympic venues, top beaches":

The Zika thing seems bad, but this sounds imminently deadly to athletes and provides the potential for the Olympics to rapidly spread these infectious super-bugs around the world.

I don't like being 'alarmist', but this appears to be a likely, credible threat to world health. How logical is it to be concerned about this? Are Soylents aware of any good, practical way for participants and attendees to the Olympics in Brazil to reduce the risk of exposure and infection and then spreading this? Are you planning on attending?

Other Soylent discussion on Zika / Olympics:

• Why Concerns for Global Spread of Zika Means Rio de Janeiro's 2016 Olympics Must Not Proceed"
• Maybe "It's Not the Zika Virus".

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Yahoo may have lost some of its shine over the years, but it's still luring in big name bidders.

Dan Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, and AT&T each bid about $5 billion for Yahoo's core business, patents and real estate assets, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Verizon is also reportedly in the game and made a bid between $3.5 billion to $4 billion for just Yahoo's core business, said Bloomberg.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been trying for four years to resuscitate the once mighty internet media and search site. In February, she put out a call to would-be buyers, saying Yahoo's board is ready to "engage on qualified strategic proposals."

[...] To sweeten the deal, Yahoo is also reportedly offering up a portfolio of about 3,000 patents, including some that date back to the company's founding and include its early search technology.

It looks increasingly likely that Yahoo will be sold. For those of you who use its e-mail or other products, what are your plans? How much does it depend on who the new owner will be? Do you think this will be a positive or a negative for Yahoo?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A man who became an unintended victim of random police brutality has received a $100,000 settlement from the city of Seattle:

The city of Seattle has agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a Seattle high-school teacher who was pepper-sprayed by a police officer after giving a speech at the city's Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally and march last year.

Jesse Hagopian, a history teacher at Garfield High School, said in his complaint that he was walking on a sidewalk and talking to his mother on his cellphone when a female officer pepper-sprayed him on Jan. 19, 2015.

The incident was recorded on video, which showed the officer waving a canister and screaming at passers-by to back up before spraying some of them.

Seattle PD's internal affairs department recommended a one-day suspension for Officer Sandra Delafuente, but the Seattle Police Chief gave a "verbal reprimand" instead, and later praised Delafuente as a "wonderful role model" with "a great record" to The Seattle Times.

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takyon writes:

A study by Newcastle University researchers has found that three-person in vitro fertilization is safe (does not adversely affect embryos) and can be routinely performed. Three-person IVF allows the transfer of donor mitochondria into an embryo in order to prevent mitochondrial disease:

Published today in the journal Nature, scientists at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Disease at Newcastle University report the first in-depth analysis of human embryos created using a new technique designed to reduce the risk of mothers passing on mitochondrial disease to their children, which is debilitating and often life-limiting.

[...] Today researchers, in a study involving over 500 eggs from 64 donor women, publish results that indicate that the new procedure does not adversely affect human development and will greatly reduce the level of faulty mitochondria in the embryo. Their results suggest that the technique will lead to normal pregnancies whilst also reducing the risk of babies having mitochondrial disease. The results of this study will be considered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's (HFEA) Expert Scientific Panel. The HFEA will ultimately decide whether to issue the first licence to a clinic. A licensed clinic would allow couples affected by mitochondrial disease to have the choice of whether to use pronuclear transfer to try and have healthy children.

Also at the BBC. You can fill out this form to donate eggs or sperm to the Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life.

Towards clinical application of pronuclear transfer to prevent mitochondrial DNA disease (DOI: 10.1038/nature18303)

Previously: UK Approves Three-Person IVF Babies
U.S. Panel Gives Tentative Endorsement to Three-Person IVF

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takyon writes:

Scientists at Leiden University have found evidence that a "second layer" of information in DNA can influence protein expression:

Leiden theoretical physicists have proven that not only the genetic information in DNA determines who we are, but also DNA's mechanics. Helmut Schiessel and his group simulated many DNA sequences and found a correlation between mechanical cues and the way DNA is folded.

[...] Now for the first time, Leiden physicist Helmut Schiessel and his research group provide strong evidence that this second layer of information indeed exists. With their computer code they have simulated the folding of DNA strands with randomly assigned mechanical cues. It turns out that these cues indeed determine how the DNA molecule is folded into so-called nucleosomes. Schiessel found correlations between the mechanics and the actual folding structure in the genome of two organisms—baker's yeast and fission yeast. With this finding we know that evolutionary changes in DNA—mutations—can have two very different effects: the letter sequence encoding for a specific protein can change or the mechanics of the DNA structure can change, resulting in a different packaging and accessibility of the DNA and therefore a different frequency of production of that protein.

Multiplexing Genetic and Nucleosome Positioning Codes: A Computational Approach (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156905)

Original Submission