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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The structure of 100-million-year old wings found fossilized in amber in Myanmar is closing the gap between dinosaurs and birds. A study of the wings published in Nature Communications on Tuesday points to the fossil most likely belonging to a type of avian dinosaur that became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago.

More impressively, the wings revealed that the plumage of those prehistoric feathered animals was very similar to modern birds. Prior to this study, most of the information scientists had about feathered dinosaurs came from imprints in fossils or individual feathers in amber.

These wings are the first to be found relatively intact and have helped to close gaps in the fossil record.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Physicists have created a novel simulation which allows users to watch how the colour of a galaxy changes over time as it evolves.

The results will be presented later today at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting 2016, and are based on a preliminary paper led by researchers at Durham University.

The relationship between colour and age of a galaxy has been established. Galaxies that appear blue are home to young stars burning brightly, and are still active with new stars forming within them.

Since larger stars reach higher temperatures, they deplete their hydrogen reserves through nuclear reactions at a faster rate, leaving older, more red-coloured stars to hobble along the galaxy.

As galaxies age and turn from blue to red, there is a green intermediate stage. The middle-aged galaxies are rare. James Trayford, lead-author of the study and PhD student working at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, told The Register that he thought that green galaxies probably made up less than ten per cent of all galaxies.

The rarity suggests that green galaxies are in a critical stage and fizzle out quickly.

[...]

According to this research, our 13.2 billion-year-old home galaxy the Milky Way is close to transitioning to green, but is white at the moment.

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butthurt writes:

Al Jazeera reports that Japan's Supreme Court has dismissed a case that challenged police surveillance of Muslims that appears to be based purely on their religion. The plaintiffs had asserted that the investigations, which may have had more than 72,000 subjects "including about 1,600 public school students," violated the rights to "privacy, equal treatment, and religious freedom" guaranteed by the Japanese constitution.

Edward Snowden had criticised the profiling, saying

People of the Islamic faith are more likely to be targeted ... despite not having any criminal activities or associations or anything like that in their background, simply because people are afraid. But in Japan, let's look seriously at that. The Aum Shinrikyo was the last significant terrorist event in Japan, and that was over 20 years ago. This wasn't a fundamental Islamic extremist group, this was a crazy doomsday cult that wanted to make their founder the new emperor of Japan.

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butthurt writes:

According to Bloomberg, rulers of Canada, the United States and Mexico have announced the North American Climate, Clean Energy and Environment Partnership. New electric transmission lines are to be built; the use of hydroelectric, other renewable, and nuclear energy is to be increased, and carbon sequestration is to be instituted. Methane releases from the petroleum, agricultural, and waste industries are to be reduced. Subsidies for fossil fuels are to be ended "by 2025."

President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico President Enrique Pena Nieto completed a one-day summit in Ottawa Wednesday, where they unveiled a commitment to see half of the continent's electricity generated by clean sources by 2025.

"For too long, we've heard that confronting climate change means destroying our economies," Obama said in a speech to Parliament Wednesday after the summit concluded, praising efforts in Canada and the U.S. to cut emissions and drive growth. "This is the only planet we've got and this may be the last shot we've got to save it. And America and Canada are going to have to lead the way."

The pledges, in what was was Obama's final North American Leaders' Summit, underscore a renewed push to strengthen an alliance that had been soured by the rejection of TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL pipeline last year. The improved continental ties were fueled in part by the election of Trudeau's pro-environment Liberal Party to power last year.

The leaders also announced changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement, "liberalizing" rules of origin for a range of products, while calling for action to address excess global steel supply and illicit financial flows that could benefit terror groups.

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HughPickens.com writes:

For years, Senator Elizabeth Warren has described herself as being of Native American heritage, a belief based on "family stories" but which didn't appear to be bolstered by any actual evidence. Scott Brown revived the dispute this week, when, acting as a surrogate for Donald Trump, he defended the presumptive Republican nominee's use of the name "Pocahontas" to describe Warren and called on Warren to undergo a DNA Test to prove her ethnicity. Now Philip Bump writes at the Washington Post that Nanibaa' Garrison, a bioethicist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Seattle Children's Hospital, says that Brown's suggestion of DNA testing really wouldn't do any good. "It's really difficult to say that a DNA test would be able to identify how much Native American ancestry a person has," Garrison says. That's because determinations of ancestry are based on "ancestry-informative markers" -- genetic flags that offer probabilities of the likelihood of certain ancestries. Most of those markers, AIMs, are "based on global populations that are outside of the U.S.," says Garrison, "primarily people of European descent, people of Asian descent and people of African descent." The problem is that DNA snippets, or markers, are inconsistent. Sometimes they are passed on and sometimes they are not, and whether they are or aren't is random. A large percentage of Native Americans may share certain genetic markers. But many Native Americans may lack the same marker, and many non–Native Americans may carry it by coincidence. Even a test that was fine-tuned to pick out Native American identity might not find any on Warren's genes, because the requisite markers simply may not have made the cut over multiple generations. "It would be impossible to go back that far," Garrison says.

But Brown's suggestion raises an interesting question. Should candidates for the highest office in the land disclose their own DNA, like tax returns or lists of campaign contributors, as voters seek new ways to weigh a leader's medical and mental fitness for public office. During the 20th century, 14 of 19 U.S. presidents suffered significant illnesses while in the White House, from Woodrow Wilson's incapacitating stroke to Ronald Reagan's colon cancer, says Harvard health policy analyst Aaron Kesselheim. More often than not, he says, the ailing presidents and their physicians withheld the medical data that would have allowed the public to judge the true extent of their condition and, more importantly, how it affected their decision-making ability. "I would be shocked if Americans and people in other countries don't want this type of data" about political candidates, says Harvard University genomics expert George Church. "It is not like we are collecting horoscope data or tea-leaf data. These are real facts, just as real as bank accounts and the influence of political action committees or family members."

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fork(2) writes:

In 2003 a joint Indonesian-Australian research team discovered the skeleton of a tiny human that it was believed had lived around 80,000 years ago in Liang Bua cave on an island in Indonesia. The skeleton's unique traits led scientists to assign a new species, Homo floresiensis, named after the island where the cave is. Much more at the Smithsonian's exhibit What does it mean to be human?.

article about new evidence which narrows the time-gap between the hobbits and modern humans.

After revised dating estimates of the original hobbit skeleton -- published in Nature in March -- placed the bones between 190,000 and 60,000 years old (it was previously believed to have survived on Flores until as recently as 12,000 years ago), and the most recent stone tools at 50,000 years old, a gap in the chronology of the sediment sequence opened up -- researchers had no idea what happened at the site between 46,000 and 20,000 years ago.

Dr Morley and colleagues, including CAS geoarchaeologist Professor Paul Goldberg and archaeologist Thomas Sutikna, were able to fill that gap, detailing environmental changes at the site between 190,000 and 20,000 years ago and revealing something rather unexpected: physical evidence of fire places that were used between 41,000 and 24,000 years ago, most likely by modern humans for warmth and/or cooking.

"We now know that the hobbits only survived until around 50,000 years ago at Liang Bua. We also know that modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia at least 50,000 years ago, and most likely quite a bit earlier" Dr Morley said.

[...]

Given that no evidence for the use of fire by Homo floresiensis during roughly 130,000 years of presence at the site has been found, Dr Morley said modern humans are the most likely candidates for the construction of the fire places.

The paper, "Initial micromorphological results from Liang Bua, Flores (Indonesia): Site formation processes and hominin activities at the type locality of Homo floresiensis" will appear in Journal of Archaeological Science today (June 30).

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bradley13 writes:

In the US: this article presents an analysis how a person's chosen college major corresponds to their IQ. The interesting thing is that the relationship has remained essentially stable over the past 70 years. At the top of the list are math, science and engineering. At the absolute bottom of the list: education.

These data show that US students who choose to major in education, essentially the bulk of people who become teachers, have for at least the last seven decades been selected from students at the lower end of the academic aptitude pool. A 2010 McKinsey report (pdf) by Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller noted that top performing school systems, such as those in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea, "recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort."

The article points out that it isn't quite this simple: Top schools place high requirements on all of their students; poor schools generally attract lower quality students in all of their programs. Still, the national averages are clear: overall, the least intelligent students go on to teach. This is an odd priority.

Educational organizations, of course, have a different view. This article claims that teacher quality declined from the 1960s through the 1990s, but has since recovered, with teachers being barely below average (48th percentile) among college graduates.

On a related note, there is a strong international correlation between teacher pay and student outcomes. The (rather obvious) theory is that higher pay attracts better candidates to the teaching profession.

No conclusions - just thought this might spark an interesting discussion...

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fork(2) writes:

In a Nature news feature, reporter Ewen Callaway looks back at Dolly the sheep's legacy, 20 years after her birth with a series of reminiscences of those who were there.

Karen Walker, embryologist, PPL Therapeutics: On the day we made Dolly, we had such a rubbish day.

Bill Ritchie, embryologist, Roslin Institute: It was 8 February 1996. I looked it up. We do know it was a rubbish day: we had various problems with infections and things.

Walker: It's a shame the building has been demolished, otherwise you could see the room in which Dolly was made. I use the word 'room' loosely, because it really was just a big cupboard, which, when Bill and I were in there, you could just get two chairs and the incubator in.

Ritchie: It literally was the cupboard. It was the storage cupboard at the end of the lab. When we got camera crews in later, they couldn't believe it, there was no room to shoot.

Walker and Ritchie were part of a project at the Roslin Institute and spin-off PPL Therapeutics, aiming to make precise genetic changes to farm animals. The scientific team, led by Roslin embryologist Ian Wilmut, reasoned that the best way to make these changes would be to tweak the genome of a cell in culture and then transfer the nucleus to a new cell.

The article contains reminiscences of about 10 of the people involved. It ends with Wilmut's comment: "It would be wrong to say my name's known all the way around the world -- but Dolly's is."

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n1 writes:

Chagos islanders, forcibly removed from their homes in 1971, have lost a legal challenge at the supreme court that could have speeded up their return.

In a majority ruling, justices at the UK's highest court said failure to disclose key Foreign Office documents would not have altered the outcome of a key House of Lords judgment in 2008.

Delivering the judgment, Lord Mance said there was "no probability" that a court would have, if it had seen the papers, made a different decision.

In 2004, the Chagossians' right of abode on the British Indian Ocean Territory was removed partially on the basis of a feasibility study, examining how they could be settled, which was never presented to the original hearing.

About 1,500 islanders were removed to make way for the US base on Diego Garcia, the largest island, in 1971. Under a deal, kept secret at the time, the US agreed to contribute to the costs of establishing the bases and waive the UK's payments for joint missile development programmes.

[...] Bancoult, who was forced into exile along with his family when he was four years old, said: "It's impossible to accept that other people can live in our birthplace but we can't. Chagossians will be on Chagos very soon. We want to be allowed to return. We implore the British government to go ahead with the exercise to allow us to go back to our homeland."

[...] A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said: "We are pleased that the supreme court was clear that additional documents would have not made any difference to the outcome of the case in 2008 and ruled in favour of the UK government.

"We remain committed to our current review of resettlement and will continue to keep parliament, Chagossians and their supporters closely informed of progress on the issue."

Source: The Guardian

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Runaway1956 writes:

From a story in The Guardian titled "US efforts to regulate encryption have been flawed, government report finds -- Weighing in on the encryption debate, a new government report says that lawmakers need to to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it." The "House Homeland Security Committee Majority Staff Report" Going Dark, Going Forward -- A Primer On The Encryption Debate (pdf) runs 25 pages. Its executive summary states:

Public engagement on encryption issues surged following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, particularly when it became clear that the attackers used encrypted communications to evade detection—a phenomenon known as "going dark." While encryption provides important benefits to society and the individual, it also makes it more difficult for law enforcement and intelligence professionals to keep us safe.

Some have framed the debate surrounding encryption as a battle between privacy and security. Our extensive discussions with stakeholders, however, have led us to conclude that the issue is really about security versus security: encryption protects critical infrastructure, trade secrets, financial transactions, and personal communications and information. Yet encryption also limits law enforcement's ability to track criminals, collect evidence, prevent attacks, and ensure public safety. Initially, lawmakers and some among law enforcement personnel believed the solution was simple: statutorily authorize law enforcement access to obtain encrypted data with a court order. Unfortunately, this proposal was riddled with unintended consequences, particularly if redesigning encryption tools to incorporate vulnerabilities—creating what some refer to as "backdoors"—actually weakened data security. Indeed those vulnerabilities would naturally be exploited by the bad guys—and not just benefit the good guys.

The global technology industry is undergoing rapid change. Consumers now demand that companies incorporate encryption into their products and services as a matter of routine practice. We are just beginning to understand the implications of this transformation. If the U.S. placed burdensome restrictions on encryption, American technology companies could lose their competitive edge in the global marketplace. Moreover, studies suggest that two-thirds of the entities selling or providing encrypted products are outside of the United States. Thus, bad actors could still obtain the technology from foreign vendors irrespective of U.S. legislative action.

Over the course of the past 12 months, Members and staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security have held more than 100 meetings and briefings, both classified and unclassified, with key stakeholders impacted by the use of encryption. As a result of our robust investigation, the Committee staff has come to understand that there is no silver bullet regarding encryption and "going dark." While we benefited tremendously from our engagement with stakeholders, we did not discover any simple solutions. No matter what path emerged, there were always troublesome trade-offs. Thus, in our estimation, the best way for Congress and the nation to proceed at this juncture is to formally convene a commission of experts to thoughtfully examine not just the matter of encryption and law enforcement, but law enforcement's future in a world of rapidly evolving digital technology.

[What say you Soylentils? Too little, too late? Finally on the right track? If you were to make a presentation to Congress, what would you recommend? --Ed.]

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aristarchus writes:

An article in InfoWorld reveals a "motion for conditional certification of collective action status" has been filed in Federal Court:

Just over a year ago, two job applicants filed a lawsuit against Google. They claimed they were rejected because of their age; both were over 40.

A federal court in San Jose, Calif., is now being asked to decide whether many others who sought jobs at Google and were also rejected can join this case.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3090134/it-careers/google-age-discrimination-lawsuit-may-become-monster.html?google_editors_picks=true

The motion is being made for a selective class-action:

Have any Soylentils interviewed with Google lately?

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mendax writes:

The Register published a story which lets us know that:

the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) should be stricken for being unconstitutional.

The civil rights group said in a filing [PDF] to the Washington, DC, District Court that the CFAA prevents researchers and whistleblowers from carrying out their work and violates both the free speech and due process clauses in the First and Fifth Amendments.

The suit ... asks that the courts invalidate the law, which has been the basis for hacking and computer crime prosecutions since its enaction by Congress in 1986.

According to the ACLU, the CFAA illegally prevents researchers from doing their jobs by restricting activities to those approved by a product's terms of service (TOS). Because the Act counts violating a TOS as "unauthorized" access, the ACLU argues that companies are able to effectively write their own criminal laws with a TOS.

The article notes:

The ACLU is filing the suit on behalf of a group of researchers who wish to investigate whether the Fair Housing Act (FHA) is being violated by real estate sites that would provide different results for users based on their race or ethnicity.

The researchers claim that in order to test for discrimination, they would need to present as different individuals of varying races and compare the results. Because falsifying this information would violate a site's terms of service, however, the researchers say they would be in danger of criminal prosecution under the CFAA.

As a result, the suit alleges, the ability of researchers to uncover FHA violations in these services is being blocked by the law, and in the process has a "chilling" effect on free speech and due process.

It's about time!

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G-forze writes:

A scientific research group named Actinides claims to have invented a process, which they call MBT, for transmuting uranium, thorium ore or nuclear waste into useful, valuable chemical elements on an industrial scale. They held a press conference in Geneva on 21st of June 2016 and claim to have patented the process in Russia.

Authors of the invention developed an industrial method of biochemical elements transmutation. That is, the artificial obtaining of certain chemical elements and their isotopes from other chemical elements with biochemical method. Without need of the reactors, cyclotrons, without use of enriched Uranium, heavy water, etc. Safe for environment and personnel. The method is possible to use for 100% deactivation of nuclear waste.

The method and the results are verified and confirmed by hundreds of tests on modern equipment. Analyses were carried out by independent experts - chemists - analysts, professors. Acts of analyzes available. The results are patented by Russian Patent Department, patent RU 2563511 dated 25 August 2015.

We have conducted more than 2000 experiments, and got stable results.

The method leads to obtaining various valuable and most valuable elements and isotopes, demanded in energy, medicine, industry. Among them Francium, Radium, Actinium, Protactinium, Americium, Berkelium, Californium, and various other isotopes. All of them in convenient form, favorable for separation and purification. Technology is ready for immediate industrial application. Our research was conducted with private money and the technology is 100% owned by the group. We can obtain these elements not in milligrams as in traditional method, but in hundreds of grams and even a Kilograms. Safe and extremely cost effective.

Their presentation

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Two Soylentils wrote in with news of a fatal accident involving a Tesla vehicle. Please note that the feature in use, called "Autopilot" is not the same as an autonomous vehicle. It provides lane-keeping, cruise control, and safe-distance monitoring, but the driver is expected to be alert and in control at all times. -Ed.

Man Killed in Crash of 'Self-Driving' Car

butthurt writes:

Tech Insider reports that an Ohio man was killed on 7 May when his Tesla Model S, with its autopilot feature turned on, went under a tractor-trailer.

Further information:

• Tesla Motors blog
• NHTSA report
• video uploaded by the victim, demonstrating use of the autopilot feature

Tesla Autopilot - Fatal Accident

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/us-regulators-investigating-tesla-over-use-of-automated-system-linked-to-fatal-crash.html

Accident is reported to have happened in May, and reported to NHTSA/DOT immediately by Tesla. But not public until the end of June -- something a bit fishy about this reporting lag.

On the other hand, the accident is described as one that might have also been difficult for an alert human to have avoided:

This was the first reporting found--by the time it makes the SN front page there may be more details. Because this is a "first" it seems likely that a detailed investigation and accident reconstruction will be performed.

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butthurt writes:

CBC News reports that Solar Voyager, a solar-powered, unpiloted boat, has been picked up by the Canadian navy after becoming tangled in fishing nets. The boat had travelled about 1000 km, from Massachusetts to the vicinity of Sable Island, Nova Scotia, on what had been intended to be a transatlantic voyage.

Previous story:
The Lonely Transatlantic Journey of a Self-Sailing Solar Ship

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