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The 6-year-in-the-making Chilcot Report into the Iraq War has been published

Dogeball writes:

The inquiry commissioned by the British government into the Iraq War, covering the decision by the UK government to support the US, the preparation for the war, how the war was conducted, and how the aftermath was handled up until 2007, has been published.

The report contains 2.6 million words and is organized into 12 volumes.

In his speech at the publication ceremony, Sir John Chilcot stated that "We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort."

Opponents of the war hope that this report will allow legal action to be taken against Tony Blair, however legal experts have expressed that this will not happen.

Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the UK Labour Party, is expected to apologise on behalf of his party's involvement (although he personally voted against the war), while Alex Samond, former leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, may propose that Blair be impeached, which amounts to a gesture that would prevent Blair from ever taking office again.

Other sources.

takyon writes:

Google is analyzing eyeball scans using machine learning in order to help determine which patients need treatment:

Famous eye hospital Moorfields has agreed to give Google's DeepMind access to one million anonymous eye scans as a part of a machine learning study intended to spot early signs of sight loss. Explicit patient consent is not required because the scans are historic, meaning the results won't affect the care of current patients. Under the project, the hospital will also have access to related anonymous information about their eye conditions and disease management.

[...] Professor Sir Peng Tee Khaw, director of biomedical research at Moorfields, said the research could "revolutionise" the way professionals carry out eye tests, leading to earlier detection and treatment of common eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration. "With sight loss predicted to double by the year 2050, it is vital we explore the use of cutting-edge technology to prevent eye disease," he said. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, said: "We set up DeepMind because we wanted to use AI to help solve some of society's biggest challenges, and diabetic retinopathy is the fastest growing cause of blindness worldwide."

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fork(2) writes:

Researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin have quantified the physical limitations of the performance of cloaking devices. From an article on phys.org:

The researchers' theory confirms that it is possible to use cloaks to perfectly hide an object for a specific wavelength, but hiding an object from an illumination containing different wavelengths becomes more challenging as the size of the object increases.

[Researchers Alu and Monticone] created a quantitative framework that now establishes boundaries on the bandwidth capabilities of electromagnetic cloaks for objects of different sizes and composition. As a result, researchers can calculate the expected optimal performance of invisibility devices before designing and developing a specific cloak for an object of interest. Alu and Monticone describe their work in the journal Optica.

Cloaks are made from artificial materials, called metamaterials, that have special properties enabling a better control of the incoming wave, and can make an object invisible or transparent. The newly established boundaries apply to cloaks made of passive metamaterials -- those that do not draw energy from an external power source.

[...] The researchers' framework shows that the performance of a passive cloak is largely determined by the size of the object to be hidden compared with the wavelength of the incoming wave, and it quantifies how, for shorter wavelengths, cloaking gets drastically more difficult.

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HughPickens.com writes:

In the Star Trek world there is virtual reality, personal replicators, powerful weapons, and, it seems, a very high standard of living for most of humanity while in Star Wars there is widespread slavery, lots of people seem to live at subsistence, and eventually much of the galaxy falls under the Jedi Reign of Terror. Why the difference? Tyler Cowen writes about some of the factors differentiating the world of Star Wars from that of Star Trek:

1. The armed forces in Star Trek seem broadly representative of society. Compare Uhura, Chekhov, and Sulu to the Imperial Storm troopers.
2. Captains Kirk and Picard do not descend into true power madness, unlike various Sith leaders and corrupted Jedi Knights.
3. In Star Trek, any starship can lay waste to a planet, whereas in Star Wars there is a single, centralized Death Star and no way to oppose it, implying stronger checks and balances in the world of Star Trek.
4. Star Trek embraces egalitarianism, namely that all humans consider themselves part of the same broader species. There is no special group comparable to the Jedi or the Sith, with special powers in their blood.
5. Star Trek replicators are sufficiently powerful it seems slavery is highly inefficient in that world.

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fork(2) writes:

From a post on CSO:

Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in Android devices with Qualcomm chipsets in order to extract the encrypted keys that protect users' data and run brute-force attacks against them.

The attack was demonstrated last week by security researcher Gal Beniamini and uses two vulnerabilities patched this year in Qualcomm's implementation of the ARM CPU TrustZone.

The ARM TrustZone is a hardware security module that runs its own kernel and Trusted Execution Environment independent of the main OS. On Qualcomm chips, the Trusted Execution Environment is called QSEE (Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment).

If you haven't already figured it out..here's the punchline:

Furthermore, because Android manufacturers can digitally sign and flash TrustZone images to any device, they can comply with law enforcement requests to break Android full-disk encryption.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

While the Tor browser is based on Firefox ESR, it is modified with additional privacy and security settings to protect users of the browser while using the program. Considering that Tor browser is used by some in critical situations, whistleblowing, publishing news or communication, it is only natural that a stronger focus on privacy and security is necessary.

Mozilla acknowledges these modifications, and plans to integrate some of them in Firefox natively. In fact, the company has already begun to integrate some in Firefox, and plans to integrate others in the future.

Tor-specific privacy settings are often not suitable for Firefox's mainstream audience. That's why you need to enable these settings manually in Firefox before they become available.

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GungnirSniper writes:

From the overly-devotional department.

Australian-born young-Earth-creationist Ken Ham has lead the fundamentalist Christian Answers in Genesis organization in opening the Creation Museum in 2007 and now the Ark Encounter, a 100 million dollar theme park complete with a 155.5 meter long "recreation" of Noah's Ark. The attraction includes baby dinosaurs in pens among its exhibits as well as a Tower of Babel. The organization had been inadvertently helped by Bill Nye's debate with Ken Ham, which led him to say he was "heartbroken and sickened for the Commonwealth of Kentucky."

Church and State separatists were ideologically opposed to the tax breaks offered, including millions in state tax incentives and the sale of $62 million in junk bonds. Ken Ham's group won a federal ruling that they could hire Christians only.

"We are a religious group and we make no apology about that, and (federal law) allows us that," Ham said. "We're requiring them to be Christians, that's the bottom line."

The Daily Mail also has photos of the ark being constructed.

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tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Laughing Squid is this neat optical illusion where objects in a mirror change shape from cylindrical to rectangular, and vice-versa.

Dr. Kokichi Sugihara, an engineering professor at Meji University in Japan has created an absolutely astonishing optical illusion in which white cylinders appear to change shape in the mirror. This amazing illusion won second place in the 2016 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Since this video came out, Make Anything recreated and revealed how this trick was accomplished.

Original YouTube Video and the Make Anything explanation and 3d printer file.

Original Submission

"fork(2)" writes:

In April 2016, the National Center for Health Statistics released a study (pdf) of the national trends in suicide. In the introduction the report said:

Suicide is an important public health issue involving psychological, biological, and societal factors. After a period of nearly consistent decline in suicide rates in the United States from 1986 through 1999, suicide rates have increased almost steadily from 1999 through 2014. While suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing and among the leading causes of death for those demographic groups, suicide among middle-aged adults is also rising. This report presents an overview of suicide mortality in the United States from 1999 through 2014.

As the subtitle to his article in Foreign Policy about the report, Fredrik Deboer summarized the report with one simple sentence: "The country's suicide rate keeps rising, but nobody plans on doing anything about it."

Appropriate for an introspective look at ourselves on this anniversary of the creation of the US, that article was re-run today (July 4) in Business Insider .

Suicide is an age-old problem, one that is unlikely to be solved with any individual policy changes or technological innovations. The causes, conditions, and means of suicide are too diverse, and the problem too widespread, to imagine that we will ever prevent this problem, in the same way we've been able to prevent many diseases through the widespread availability of vaccination. Instead, we'll have to chip away at it steadily, trying to rescue more and more people out of poverty and hopelessness through robust redistributive social programs and through education and awareness-raising. We'll also need to actually invest in our mental health system, to identify those who need help and provide such help to those who seek it. To do so, we should have the national conversation we've put off for too long and become more comfortable discussing a topic that still retains a powerful taboo. The time is now; suicide has already cost us far too much.

If you, or someone you know, even expresses the thought of committing suicide... that is a major warning sign and help should be sought immediately. The longer the thought persists, the more it becomes ingrained and the harder it is to get free of it.

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n1 writes:

From the BBC:

Cars made before 2005 may have to pay an additional charge for entering the congestion zone in London, under proposals put forward by the mayor.

Diesel cars could have to pay an additional charge to come into inner London by 2019 and buses should be retrofitted to meet European standards.

The mayor said they must act because nearly "9,500 Londoners" a year were dying from respiratory problems.

[...] Announcing his plans on the 60th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, the mayor also wants to:

Charge £10 for the most polluting vehicles in the Congestion Charge Zone. This will be on top of the current congestion charge

Bring in the Ultra Low Emission zone - where all vehicles must meet exhaust emission standards or face a charge - a year earlier in 2019 and extend it to the North and South Circular by 2020

Operate the cleanest buses in the dirtiest parts of London by creating "clean bus corridors"

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Conventional balloons, called "zero-pressure" balloons have been used for years to study phenomena as diverse as atmospheric chemistry and cozmic microwave background. But they don't last long. During the daytime, sunlight heats and expands the helium. At night, the contracting helium requires that the balloon must drop ballast to avoid drifting too low. Zero-pressure balloons can only achieve long flights during summertime near the poles, when constant daylight allows them to stay afloat for weeks at a time.

As an alternative, the helium in "superpressure balloons" is pressurized. Because their volume doesn't change as they're headed/cooled, they can remain at a constant altitude.

On May 17, NASA launched a monster superpressure balloon from Wanaka, New Zealand. From an article by Patrick Monahan in Science :

The latest and largest pressurized balloon to be launched by NASA has set a record for endurance: the longest midlatitude flight by a large scientific balloon. Packing 532,000 cubic meters of helium and measuring 114 meters in diameter, the balloon circled the Southern Hemisphere for 46 days, lofting a gamma ray telescope to the edges of space. Nightly dips in altitude forced a premature end to the voyage yesterday, but the flight still marks a milestone in NASA's efforts to develop so-called superpressure balloons as a low-cost alternative to satellites.

[...] Yesterday, NASA brought the balloon down near the coast of Peru, 32 kilometers north of the town of Camana. Plans are already underway to retrieve the balloon and its payload from the mountainous area. Careful study of the balloon may help NASA avoid the same altitude dips in future flights. Still, the wayward balloon hauled in some novel astrophysical data. It carried the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), a gamma ray telescope that aims primarily to probe how elements are forged in supernovae. COSI observed the gamma rays emitted by radioactive nuclei in the supernova debris, and may be able to measure their polarization -- observations that are hard to make from the poles because of background gamma radiation from cosmic rays channeled toward the poles by Earth's magnetic field.

NASA decided to end the balloon's flight yesterday (July 4) because of problems.

[Continues...]

chewbacon writes:

The BBC is reporting the personal information of over 150,000 members and 700,000 private messages on the dating website Muslim Match have been leaked online. Personal information includes name, Skype handles, IP address, and email addresses. Breach database Have I Been Pwned? reported a third of the emails exposed were already in their database from prior breaches. The company said, while they are investigating the breach, they have suspended site operations until after the end of Ramadan this week.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

As was reported in SoylentNews on June 25, The Heinlein Prize Trust awarded its commercial space prize to Jeff Bezos "for his vision and leadership in commercial space activities that have led to historic firsts and re-usability in the commercial spaceflight industry." Rich Smith, in The Motley Fool writes:

[...] In fact, Blue Origin's really big win is something barely mentioned in the Heinlein Prize's press release: "Blue Origin reached a commercial agreement with a private launch company to develop the BE-4 engine which could be used to power the next generation of U.S. launch vehicles."

Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) tapped Blue Origin to "expand production capabilities for the American-made BE-4 engine that will power the Vulcan." Vulcan, as you will recall, is the new rocket that Lockheed and Boeing are building to replace United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Atlas V line of space rockets -- and compete with SpaceX's cheaper Falcon line of rockets.

Because Boeing and Lockheed Martin focus their space efforts on building rocket ships, they generally outsource engine work to subcontractors. On Vulcan, Aerojet Rocketdyne is building one possible engine variant, while Blue Origin is building another -- and by all indications, Blue Origin's BE-4 is the engine Boeing and Lockheed would prefer to use in ULA's new rocket.

[...] Through its BE-4 contract with ULA, Blue Origin is killing two birds with one rock(et). It's developing an engine powerful enough to give its own rocket ships true orbital velocity that will permit spaceflight. At the same time, it's generating revenue from sales of this engine to ULA -- revenue that it can then reinvest in its own business to further its own spaceflight efforts.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Arielle Dollinger writes at The New York Times that the town of North Hempstead on Long Island has approved the construction of bat houses in several parks to attract more bats to the area because despite their less-than-desirable reputation, bats possess a remarkable ability to control insects — especially disease-carrying mosquitoes. "Bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes per hour," says Judi Bosworth. "That's extraordinary. A pesticide couldn't do that."

As mosquito season heats up, bringing with it the threat of the West Nile and Zika viruses, the bats make very welcome neighbors. Aedes albopictus, known as the Asian tiger mosquito, is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting and as of October, 490 cases of West Nile and 37 deaths resulting from it have been recorded in New York since 2000. The myths surrounding bats have long shaped public perception of the night creatures. "I grew up and I always heard, you know, these old wives' tales, that bats will swoop down on your head and get tangled in your hair," says Bosworth. "Bats really have been very maligned."

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hellcat writes:

From the Penn Gazette July 2016

... a trio of Penn professors is helping to develop an entirely different approach to programming that has the potential to eliminate software bugs completely. Steve Zdancewic, Stephanie Weirich, and Benjamin Pierce, all professors of computer and information science, are part of a newly launched project called DeepSpec that intends to bring the rigor and precision of mathematics to the world of computers—so that programmers can prove the accuracy of their code with the same complete confidence that mathematicians establish truths about numbers or geometry.

My 2¢? If only those who write the original specs could also be trusted to "do no evil."

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