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fork(2) writes:

Dubbed the "Cislunar 1,000 Vision," an initiative outlined by American launch provider ULA (United Launch Alliance) foresees a self-sustaining economy that supports 1,000 people living and working in Earth-moon space roughly 30 years from now. The basic outline is to develop re-fueling capability in Earth-moon space, perhaps by propellant made using water extracted from the moon or asteroids. This, in turn, will make it more economically feasible to get to destinations more distant. From the Space.com article:

For example, a rocket could carry just enough fuel to get to low Earth orbit and then refuel its upper stage in space to get a payload to the much more distant geosynchronous transfer orbit.

"I can potentially do that whole mission cheaper if I can get propellant cheap enough in low Earth orbit," Sowers said. George Sowers is vice president of advanced programs for Colorado-based ULA.

The concept stems from an analysis and ongoing technical work by ULA involving a souped-up Centaur rocket stage called ACES (Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage), a tanker called XEUS, and a "kit" that augments an ACES stage, allowing the vehicle to land horizontally on the lunar surface and to be stocked with moon-mined fuel for transport.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A woman who wants to use her dead daughter's frozen eggs to give birth to her own grandchild has won a Court of Appeal battle. The 60-year-old woman was appealing against the UK regulator's refusal to allow her to take her only child's eggs to a US clinic. Her daughter, who died in 2011, was said to have asked her mother to carry her babies.

The mother lost a High Court case last year. She was subsequently granted permission to challenge the decision at the Court of Appeal in London, before a panel of three judges.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36675521

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Rosetta probe will be crash-landed on Comet 67P on Friday 30 September, the European Space Agency has confirmed.

The manoeuvre, which is expected to destroy the satellite, will bring to an end two years of investigations at the 4km-wide icy dirt-ball. Flight controllers plan to have the cameras taking and relaying pictures during the final descent. Sensors that "sniff" the chemical environment will also be switched on. All other instruments will likely be off.

Flight dynamics experts have still to work out the fine details, but Rosetta will be put into a tight ellipse around the comet and commanded to drop its periapsis (lowest pass) progressively. A final burn will then put the satellite on a collision course with the duck-shaped object. Mission managers have previously talked about bringing Rosetta down in a place dubbed "Agilkia" - the location originally chosen to land its surface robot, Philae, in November 2014. In the event, Philae bounced a kilometre away, but Agilkia's relatively flat terrain is an attractive option still, although other targets are being studied.

[...]

But having already spent 12 years in space, battling huge temperature swings and damaging radiation, not to mention a much-reduced fuel load - there is little confidence Rosetta will still be operable so far into the future. The crash-landing on the other hand offers the opportunity to get some very close-in science to complement the more distant remote sensing it has been doing.

Controllers will try to maintain contact with the satellite for as long as possible during the final descent.

[...]

In 2001, the US space agency's Near Shoemaker probe put down on the asteroid Eros so gently that it continued to work for a further two weeks at the surface before engineers eventually determined to terminate communications. This will not be the case with Rosetta, however. Controllers are expected to program an auto shutoff, which will be triggered at the moment the satellite hits 67P. Even if by chance its antenna were to survive the crush, Rosetta will not be calling home.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

After a U.S. federal judge cancelled a non-disclosure order, Ladar Levison made a public statement about his former e-mail service, Lavabit. The statement confirmed that Levison's shut-down of the service came in response to U.S. government actions against Lavabit user Edward Snowden.

That fact, which had been widely believed, was confirmed in March when the e-mail address <Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com> was mistakenly left in a court document being made public.

coverage:

• Computer World
• Engadget
• TechCrunch
• Sky Valley Chronicle

[Ed's Note: Corrected spelling of Ladar Levison's name.]

Original Submission

fleg writes:

interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously. Its described as a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard

Over time they noticed a "disparity in interview performance on the platform between men and women."

We had amassed over a thousand interviews with enough data to do some comparisons and were surprised to discover that women really were doing worse. Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn't faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.

They decided to run an experiment to investigate bias against women in technical interviews. They did this by making men sound like women and women sound like men and then looked at how that affected interview performance.

Result?

Contrary to what we expected, masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability).

So whats going on?

Women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. And the numbers for two bad interviews aren't much better.

However...

Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren't great, I'm massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it's not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it's about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.

The article is worth reading in full as there's a bunch of details.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

A NASA press release promotes a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters . The ChemCam instrument aboard the agency's Curiosity rover examined certain Martian minerals which had high concentrations of manganese. The authors of the paper conclude that "the lack of correlation between Mn and elements such as S, Cl, and C, reveals that these deposits are Mn-oxides." The discovery is thought to indicate that the atmosphere of Mars formerly contained oxygen.

From the NASA.gov article:

"The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes," said Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. "Now we're seeing manganese oxides on Mars, and we're wondering how the heck these could have formed?"

Microbes seem far-fetched at this point, but the other alternative -- that the Martian atmosphere contained more oxygen in the past than it does now -- seems possible, Lanza said. "These high manganese materials can't form without lots of liquid water and strongly oxidizing conditions. Here on Earth, we had lots of water but no widespread deposits of manganese oxides until after the oxygen levels in our atmosphere rose."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

We have been made aware that there were some problems with our site's automatic notification of subscriptions expiring. We are looking into it. I was surprised to find that mine had run out and suspect that others may be similarly unaware.

Please take a moment to load the Subscription Page and verify your status. We appreciate your support and cannot run this site without it. This is a purely volunteer effort here -- none of the staff receive any financial remuneration for their efforts. Your contributions go entirely to keeping this site running.

Please accept my deep and heartfelt thanks to all of you who contribute to the site in other ways: those who helped get the site off the ground in the beginning whether they moved on or stayed. Those who submit stories, post and moderate comments, edit the stories, support our systems, maintain and update the software, and all-round do what they can to make this a community for all of us — we need all of you.

On behalf of all the staff here at SoylentNews, I thank you in advance for your support.

[Update — 2016-06-30 12:45:00 UTC] Many, many thanks to all of you who have updated their subscriptions!

Since this story originally posted, we've had 14 people renew; by my rough calculations, we are now at approximately $2688 towards our $3000 goal for funding this site for the first half of the year. As was noted in the comments, it is possible to give a gift subscription to another user on the site -- just enter their UID on the form. Also, one can change the amount from that offered to a larger value, if you wish. We have one member whose subscription ends in 2026!

Original Submission

"fork(2)" writes:

Red tape...arghhh! Under the heading "Reforming the Bureaucracy", ushistory.org says:

How can the ordinary citizen feel connected to government when everything is so impersonal? Public criticism of bureaucratic inefficiency is commonplace. In response, many people, including most Presidents, have tried to reform and reorganize the bureaucracy.

Interestingly, there is an actual theory of red-tape.

The theory makes a distinction between rules that are at their origin dysfunctional ("rule-inception red tape") and rules that initially served a useful function but transformed into red tape ("rule-evolved red tape"). Specific causes of each type red tape are identified. A distinction is made regarding the internal vs. external production and impact of red tape and a typology is developed which is used in hypotheses about red tape. Finally, the question of government red tape is considered. A model of the relationship between external control and red tape is presented. The model implies that most factors leading to red tape are not an inherent function of government. However, two inherent factors of government are cited, each of which gives rise to red tape.

The only thing anywhere near as frustrating as government red-tape is university red-tape.

[Continues...]

butthurt writes:

ZME Science reports on a Nature article (full article is paywalled) (DOI: 10.1038/nature18599) about a disease called disseminated neoplasia. The disease is a group of cancers which are thought to spread via seawater. They affect mussels, cockles, and golden carpet shell clams.

Among mussels and cockles, the cancer cells come from the same species, but the cancer infecting golden carpet shell clams comes from a different species, Venerupis corrugata , the pullet carpet shell.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction event, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But Joshua A. Krisch writes at This Week that the asteroid that decimated the dinosaurs also wiped out roughly 93 percent of all mammalian species. "Because mammals did so well after the extinction, we have tended to assume that it didn't hit them as hard," says Nick Longrich. "However our analysis shows that the mammals were hit harder than most groups of animals, such as lizards, turtles, crocodilians, but they proved to be far more adaptable in the aftermath." Mammals survived, multiplied, and ultimately gave rise to human beings.

So what was the great secret that our possum-like ancestors knew that dinosaurs did not? One answer is that early mammals were small enough to survive on insects and dying plants, while large dinosaurs and reptiles required a vast diet of leafy greens and healthy prey that simply weren't available in the lean years, post-impact. So brontosauruses starved to death while prehistoric possums filled their far smaller and less discerning bellies. "Even if large herbivorous dinosaurs had managed to survive the initial meteor strike, they would have had nothing to eat," says Russ Graham, "because most of the earth's above-ground plant material had been destroyed." Other studies have suggested that mammals survived by burrowing underground or living near the water, where they would have been somewhat shielded from the intense heatwaves, post-impact. Studies also suggest that mammals may have been better spread-out around the globe, and so had the freedom to recover independently and evolve with greater diversity. "After this extinction event, there was an explosion of diversity, and it was driven by having different evolutionary experiments going on simultaneously in different locations," Longrich says. "This may have helped drive the recovery. With so many different species evolving in different directions in different parts of the world, evolution was more likely to stumble across new evolutionary paths."

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The Daily Mail reports that Solar Impulse 2 has crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The aircraft is propelled by electric motors that receive power from photovoltaic cells and storage batteries. The flight from New York City to Seville took 71 hours.

Previously: Solar Impulse 2 Set for Next Leg in Round-the-World Flight

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The Independent reports on an article in Nature (full article is paywalled) (DOI: 10.1038/nature18307) in which the effects of the actions to which governments committed themselves at December's Paris climate summit are predicted. The authors estimate "a median warming of 2.6–3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100" if those policies are followed; they say more drastic action will be needed if warming is to be kept to 2 degrees or less.

Original Submission

frojack writes:

The LA Times reports that the Secretary of State's Office certified that a random sample showed sufficient signatures among the 600,000 petitions turned in to qualify the Legalization of Marijuana initiative for the November 8 election ballot.

If the random sample of petition qualifies, one would think that the initiative will pass handily. California is a lot more conservative than you might think once you get out of the big cities. But there is no doubt the big cities supplied most of the signature for the petitions. However, this is one issue that may not be decided along party lines, as both sides seem to be gravitating toward legalization.

It might have something to do with the statistics that are starting to filter in from the legalized states.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought. The Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy.

The research, led by UNSW Australia Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium specimen since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak in 1958.

"Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region," says Associate Professor Curnoe, Director of the UNSW Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre (PANGEA). "We've found that these very ancient remains most closely resemble some of the Indigenous people of Borneo today, with their delicately built features and small body size, rather than Indigenous people from Australia."

The study, by Curnoe and researchers from the Sarawak Museum Department and Griffith University, is published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The Deep Skull was discovered by Tom Harrisson of the Sarawak Museum during excavations at the West Mouth of the great Niah Cave complex and was analysed by prominent British anthropologist Don Brothwell. In 1960, Brothwell concluded the Deep Skull belonged to an adolescent male and represented a population of early modern humans closely related, or even ancestral, to Indigenous Australians, particularly Tasmanians.

"Brothwell's ideas have been highly influential and stood largely untested, so we wanted to see whether they might be correct after almost six decades," says Curnoe. "Our study challenges many of these old ideas. It shows the Deep Skull is from a middle-aged female rather than a teenage boy, and has few similarities to Indigenous Australians. Instead, it more closely resembles people today from more northerly parts of South-East Asia."

[...]

"We need to rethink our ideas about the region's prehistory, which was far more complicated than we've appreciated until now."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Intel is considering selling its security business as the company tries to focus on delivering chips for cloud computing and connected devices, according to a news report.

The Intel Security business came largely from the company's acquisition for US$7.7 billion of security software company McAfee. Intel announced plans to bake some of the security technology into its chips to ensure higher security for its customers.

With the surge in cyberthreats, providing protection to the variety of Internet-connected devices, such as PCs, mobile devices, medical gear and cars, requires a fundamentally new approach involving software, hardware and services, the company said in February 2011, when announcing the completion of the McAfee acquisition.

Intel has been talking to bankers about the future of its cybersecurity business for a deal that would be one of the largest in the sector ... a group of private equity firms may join together to buy the security business if it is sold at the same price or higher than what Intel paid for it.

[...] The company rebranded its McAfee business as Intel Security in 2014.

The security sector has seen a lot of interest from private equity buyers. Symantec said earlier this month it was acquiring Web security provider Blue Coat for $4.65 billion in cash, in a deal that will see Silver Lake, an investor in Symantec, enhancing its investment in the merged company, and Bain Capital, majority shareholder in Blue Coat, reinvesting $750 million in the business through convertible notes.

Intel said in April that it was cutting 12,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, by mid-2017 as it tries to evolve from chips for PCs to silicon for data centers and the Internet of Things.

Original Submission