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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Three police officers were killed and three others injured in a shooting Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, authorities said.

While police offered few immediate details about the exact origins of the incident, they say the violent incident unfolded early Sunday when officers responded to reports of a man carrying a rifle in an area filled with grocery stores and other businesses.

Col. Michael D. Edmonson of the Louisiana State Police, the agency taking the lead on the investigation, stressed Sunday afternoon that there was no active shooting situation and that police had killed the armed attacker, who died during a shootout with officers.

The attacker in Baton Rouge was identified Sunday afternoon as Gavin Long, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. Authorities are exploring whether more than one person may have played a role in the incident, according to both officials, who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. Sunday was long's 29th birthday, according to one official.

Two of the officers fatally shot were with the Baton Rouge police force, while the third was part of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. Another deputy was in critical condition after the shooting, Edmonson said at a briefing.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/17/baton-rouge-mayors-office-at-least-2-officers-fatally-shot/

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

MentalFloss has an article mentioning the physics behind strange spinning toy behaviours.

Today I learned: If you spin a hardboiled egg fast enough, it will stand up like a top. That's cool, but why does it happen?

This essentially links to a Physics Girl video on YouTube from May, demonstrating and explaining these unexpected behaviors.

Spinning toys and tops have unusual behaviors. The famous tippe top flips itself over and spins on its stem. The PhiTOP stands up on its end, which you can also do with a hard-boiled egg. These behaviors all have to do with torque and angular momentum, like a bicycle wheel precessing around a rope due to gyroscopic behavior.

Originally spotted on Cocktail Party Physics Physics Week in Review.

The Physics Girl YouTube channel also has some more recent videos on using electromagnets to tear apart soda cans and shrinking coins, which can be a bit "popular science presenter go 'woah' a lot", but are definitely worth a few minutes of viewing time.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

On July 8, NPR's Marketplace's Scott Tong reported on the lingering effects of the worst smog event in history. From his article:

Four thousand people died, though blurry-eyed Londoners didn't even know until undertakers started to run out of coffins. Now, some longer-term effects are in, as far as asthma.

"We look at kids at many different ages at the time of the event," said University of California-San Diego economist Prashant Bharadwaj, lead author of the study in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. "And what we find is the largest effects in terms of exposure to the smog is if the kids who are exposed are particularly young. And by young, I mean less than one year of age or even in utero."

In the study, the youngest Londoners turned out to be five times more likely to have asthma. Nearly 25 percent of those in London during the Great Smog reported having asthma; those not in the city at the time reported a 5 percent rate.

ScienceDaily reports on the research findings with a link to the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

If you live in a landlocked city or state, you may never have been required to defend your al fresco lunch from a pack of hungry and determined seagulls. But it's enough of a problem in some areas of Australia, apparently, that technology has come to the rescue.

Hungry Jack's, the company that franchises and oversees Burger King's presence in Australia, decided it was time to do something about bird burglars who were snatching french fries (chips, to Australians). In a video in which seagulls are dubbed "pincer-mouthed, chip-addicted feather reptiles," the company presents its solution: A fry container that scares gulls.

"Printed on holographic paper, the glittering surface reflects light, and protects our new thick-cut chips," the company promises, noting that the new wrappers have been released in "gull-infested areas around the country."

The advertisement is available on YouTube. Comments there suggest some incredulity — "I thought shiny things attracted birds?"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Twice a year, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory does a good impression of a well-trained dog and performs a perfect 360-degree roll on command. The SDO takes an image of the sun every 12 seconds and it continues to do so during the maneuver. That's why we now have a stomach-flipping GIF showing the SDO's view of the sun during its rotation.

The purpose of the somersault is to help the observatory's Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument accurately calibrate where the edge of the sun is located. It takes seven hours to complete the move. "HMI's biannual roll lets each part of the camera look at the entire perimeter of the sun, helping it map the sun's shape much more precisely," NASA notes.

The SDO sees in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths that aren't visible to the human eye, so researchers colorized the eye-popping image so we can tell what's going on. The maneuver took place July 6 and NASA released the animated GIF of the action on Friday.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Christopher Ingraham writes in The Washington Post that a new study shows that painkiller abuse and overdose are significantly lower in states with medical marijuana laws and that when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful and deadly prescription narcotics. The researchers found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law.

The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication. But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year. As a sanity check, the Bradfords ran a similar analysis on drug categories that pot typically is not recommended for — blood thinners, anti-viral drugs and antibiotics. And on those drugs, they found no changes in prescribing patterns after the passage of marijuana laws.

The tanking numbers for painkiller prescriptions in medical marijuana states are likely to cause some concern among pharmaceutical companies. These painkiller drug companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization.

Cost-savings alone are not a sufficient justification for implementing a medical-marijuana program. The bottom line is better health, and the Bradfords' research shows promising evidence that medical-marijuana users are finding plant-based relief for conditions that otherwise would have required a pill to treat. "Our findings and existing clinical literature imply that patients respond to medical marijuana legislation as if there are clinical benefits to the drug, which adds to the growing body of evidence suggesting that the Schedule 1 status of marijuana is outdated."

Related:
Study Finds That Legalized Medical Cannabis Led to a Decline in Medicare Prescriptions

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

AT&T (NYSE: T) announced on July 13 it will release its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform to the wider telecom industry as an open source offering managed by the Linux Foundation. The goal, the company said, is to make ECOMP the telecom industry's standard automation platform for managing virtual network functions and other software-centric network capabilities.

SDN refers to Software Defined Networking.

[1] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/att-open-sources-ecomp-linux-foundation-hopes-make-it-industrys-standard-sd/2016-07-13

UPDATE: Some background might be helpful. On March 15, 2016 AT&T announced Our SDN Call to Action on their Innovation Space blog:

For almost two years now, we have been architecting and coding a large software project called ECOMP. That stands for Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy. It’s a mouthful. But it’s also important. ECOMP is an infrastructure delivery platform and a scalable, comprehensive network cloud service. It provides automation of many service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management, and SDN tasks. It is designed to work with OpenStack but is extensible to other cloud and compute environments. ECOMP is the engine that powers our software-centric network.

Now, we’re opening the hood of our network and showing you the engine. ECOMP automates the network services and infrastructure that will run in the cloud. A system like ECOMP is very powerful as it allows us to build our next generation cloud-based network in a vendor agnostic way, giving us great flexibility for deploying NFV / SDN in our network. As a model-driven platform, this framework costs less than maintaining existing network systems. And it allows us to accelerate the implementation of new services quicker than ever before. ECOMP is one of the most challenging, complex and sophisticated software projects in AT&T’s history.

So, what’s next? We have written a whitepaper on ECOMP [pdf] that we’re making publicly available starting today. We did this to give the industry an idea of our thinking and direction. On a global scale, we know the needs we have are similar to the rest of the industry and other cloud services providers.

There are several more background docs on their blog as well.

Consider that a virtual machine (VM) presents the appearance of a real machine on which software may be run. It is now relative easy and commonplace to spin up a new VM for development and production purposes. ECOMP appears to provide similar tools by which networking can be virtualized and manipulated at a higher level of abstraction and flexibility.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Google has, without fanfare, dropped its legal action that muzzled an investigation into the ad giant's conduct by the State of Mississippi.

The state's elected attorney general, Democrat Jim Hood, has taken on Wall Street, the tobacco industry and the KKK, but even he must have been surprised by Google's 44-page restraining order [PDF] in response to a wide-ranging 79-page subpoena [PDF] he filed against the corporation in 2014.

In March 2015, Google got its wish when a Mississippi district judge slapped a banning order on Hood, preventing an investigation into the California giant. Then in April this year, a US appeals court ruled that the lower court was wrong to grant that injunction. However, ten days later, after facing intense pressure, Hood withdrew his subpoena.

And now, on Wednesday this week, Google has withdrawn its attempt [PDF] to gag Hood, noting that the attorney general and Google will in future "endeavor to collaborate in addressing the harmful consequences of unlawful and/or dangerous online content."

The subpoena into Google's business practices focussed on whether the company was abiding by the terms of a 2012 non-prosecution agreement it signed with the US government's Food and Drug Administration and Rhode Island State after a multi-agency sting operation.

Google agreed to forfeit $500m as part of that deal, which raised eyebrows for several reasons — one being that $230m of the forfeiture found its way to Rhode Island.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

"Guacamole thick algae mats," "rancid milk mixed with dog shit," and "eyes and lungs searing" are how Gizmodo staff writer Maddie Stone describes her arrival at Stuart, Florida, whose St. Lucie estuary is currently suffocating under a vast, nutrient-fueled algae bloom. (See also Lake Okeechobee Algae Bloom From Hell — SoylentNews; July 14, 2016).

She writes:

Not only does the water look and smell like a sewer, it's potentially a serious health hazard. The Department of Environmental Protection has begun detecting microcystins, cyanobacteria toxins which if ingested can cause nausea, vomiting, and liver failure. Locals exposed to the rank odor of "guacamole thick" algae mats have complained of rashes, eye and skin irritation. Tourism is taking a nosedive.

[...] "This is absolutely, positively a Lake Okeechobee issue," oceanographer Zack Jud told me when I arrived at Florida's Oceanographic Society a few miles away to learn what the hell was going on. "That's where the whole crux of this problem lies."

The second largest freshwater lake located entirely within the continental US, Okeechobee used to be the beating heart of the Everglades, connecting freshwater from the Kissimmee river in the north to the sawgrass prairies stretching more than 100 miles south. That all changed in the 1930s, when the US Army Corps of Engineers erected the a vast dike system around the lake in order to drain lands for settlement and cultivation. It was the first of many decisions that would forever alter the hydrology and ecology of the Everglades.

But water was still entering the lake from the north, and it had to go somewhere. So the Army Corps dredged two canals -- one west, to the Caloosahatchee river, another east to the St. Lucie. Today, these man-made flow paths are Lake Okeechobee's overflow valves.

A combination of El Niño and tainted water usage policies combined to fire the cannon that is today's disaster.

The result is that by early spring, Lake Okeechobee was becoming dangerously full. Fearing a catastrophic dike breach, the Army Corps began discharging billions of gallons of water a day through its canals, turning the St. Lucie estuary into a freshwater ecosystem overnight.

This alone would have harmed the oysters, seagrass, and other saltwater-adapted organisms living there. But it wasn't exactly spring water entering the ecosystem. The discharges were filled with nitrogen and phosphorus-laden fertilizer, which seeps into Lake Okeechobee from farms to the north. This stuff was algae fuel.

Not surprisingly, a solution was proposed which could have alleviated at least part of the problem -- it was even mandated by a state referendum which earmarked funds for it. Mysteriously, the funds went elsewhere, apparently. Moreover, pollution regulation in Florida seems to be...limp, at best.

"My fear is that we have not seen the worst," Jud said. "With 200 square miles of algae blooming on the lake, and conditions getting more and more favorable for algae growth, and the potential for rainfall to require additional discharges, I think we have the potential for things to get much worse before they get better."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A US hacker who put the personal data of celebrities and officials online has been sentenced to two years in jail. New Yorker Mir Islam also made bogus calls that resulted in armed police storming the homes of film stars, federal workers and public figures. Islam will serve one year in jail as he has been in federal custody for the past 12 months.

The names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers of more than 50 people including First Lady Michelle Obama, FBI director Robert Mueller and CIA director John Brennan were posted by Islam to the Exposed.su website, said the DoJ. The information was used by "countless others" to carry out a variety of finance-related frauds, said the DoJ, leaving many people suffering credit problems.

In addition to "doxing" public figures in this way, Islam also engaged in another malicious hacker tactic of "swatting", which involves making calls about bogus incidents that require armed police to investigate. Many people, including actor Ashton Kutcher, music impresario Jay Z and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, were "swatted" by Islam in this way.

"This crime not only diverted first responders from actual life-threatening emergencies and wasted their valuable time and resources, but it also caused severe emotional distress to a large number of victims," said US attorney John Leonardo.

In court, Islam defended himself, saying that at the time he carried out the attacks he was suffering from depression and a bipolar disorder.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Writing at Space.com, Sarah Lewin describes some of the scientific cargo that tomorrow's Dragon9 launch will carry to the International Space Station:

SpaceX's ninth commercial cargo mission, launching early Monday (July 18), is lugging a selection of strange science to the International Space Station -- living, beating heart cells, microbes from a nuclear disaster, a tiny DNA sequencer and more.

[...] One experiment won't take up a lot of space, but it has the potential to be a huge research boon to the orbiting lab -- the space station's first DNA sequencer, which is about the size of a "fun-size Snickers bar," said Sarah Wallace, a microbiologist at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.

[...] The astronauts will also be bringing aboard live heart cells, which they will cultivate for one month to test for changes in their sizes, shapes and beating patterns.

[...] Another experiment that investigates bone loss in space will test some technology that could potentially save researchers from sending similar experiments aloft: It will compare changes in bone cells that have been flown to space with ones that got the zero-g experience on Earth, levitated magnetically in a microgravity simulator.

[...] In addition to sending up those heart and bone cells, plus some tomato seeds that will be grown in schools once they return to Earth, the spacecraft is bringing another strange visitor: microbes that emerged after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, located in Ukraine, melted down catastrophically in 1986.

[...] Researchers are also sending up a demo of a phase-change material heat exchanger, which will test wax-based and water-based substances that can melt and freeze as the temperature outside a spacecraft changes, absorbing excess heat and re-releasing it to keep the craft warm as it orbits in and out of Earth's shadow, going from blazing heat to chilling cold. They're also testing a receiver that will track ships on the ocean, computer processors to stick outside the station and check for radiation-related errors, and a more efficient solar cell.

The photo of the DNA sequencer shows that it really does resemble a "fun-size Snickers bar", though with two layers!

The "DNA sequencer" is made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies and is called MinION about which we have had a few stories posted here.

Related:
SpaceX Set to Launch 9th Dragon CRS Mission 12:45am EDT (04:45am UTC) on July 18

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has an article on progress in developing more efficient Perovskite Solar Cells.

A recent development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may lead to even more efficient perovskite cells. Researchers found that certain crystal structures had a much higher efficiency than other structures. The problem now is figuring out how to produce the crystals to increase the prevalence of that structure.

The article links to details from MIT Technology Review , and also this Chemical & Engineering news video on the process involved when making cells.

Perovskite cells are particularly interesting since they can be manufactured using a relatively simple chemical process, however as well as the efficiency problem they are prone to rapid degradation.

Researchers hope to solve the stability problem and produce highly efficient solar films using this technology. They envision light, transparent, and cheap solar cells that would be as easy to apply as wallpaper, covering any surface that has sun exposure.

Original Submission

jdavidb writes:

Neuroscientist James Fallon had been studying scans of brains and noting anatomical features that corresponded with psychopathic tendencies when he happened to take a look at brain scans of his family members. Looking at one scan, he noted that it was "obviously pathological," and decided he had to know who it belonged to. Imagine his shock when he discovered it was a scan of his own brain!

Fallon has disclosed his discovery to the world, including in a TED talk and book. Evidently Fallon is a "relatively good kind" of psychopath, a person who does not tend to feel empathy for others but still restrains his behavior to socially acceptable bounds.

Sounds like many conversations I've had through the years on the Internet. And I'm sure many would say the same about me. Maybe we should all be tested!

Do you know any good psychopaths?

[Ed. Note: I'd heard this years ago on NPR so was tempted to not run the story, but the submitter raises an interesting question. How much of a person's behavior is under their control? How much is Nature and how much is Nurture? How much do corporate and political leadership positions self-select for people who are psychopathic? What hope is there for compassion and empathy in positions of power?]

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

MS16-094, released this week, [...] closes a backdoor left in Windows RT [which] can be exploited to unlock the slab's bootloader and start up an operating system of your choice, such as GNU/Linux or Android, provided it supports the underlying hardware.

[...] Windows RT is essentially Windows 8.x ported to devices powered by 32-bit ARMv7-compatible processors. It is a dead-end operating system, though: Microsoft has stopped developing it, and mainstream support for Surface RT tabs runs out in 2017 and Windows RT 8.1 in 2018. This is why a means to bypass its boot mechanisms is highly sought.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I've been trying to make sense of the extreme precipitation that hit southern China in the past month, which has produced catastrophic flooding, particularly in cities and towns located along the Yangtze River.

El Niño refers to the periodic warming of surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean; this phenomenon occurs every few years and typically lasts about a year. (La Niña refers to the opposite, i.e. a periodic cooling). The occurrences have varied greatly in intensity. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has developed a metric called the Oceanic Nino Index (ONI), which denotes the deviation from the usual ocean surface temperature, as measured in a region ("Niño 3.4") centered at the equator in mid-Pacific longitudes. NOAA meterologists classify an El Niño period as weak, moderate, strong, or very strong (the last has been dubbed "Super El Niño" by the press), based on whether its peak ONI exceeds 0.5°C, 1.0°C, 1.5°C, or 2.0°C (ONI historical chart here).

A Super El Niño ended this past May, producing warm water that evaporates and circulates through the atmosphere by convection. During an El Niño, the normal Pacific trade winds are disrupted. But an obvious question is, why did extreme rainfall occur after the El Niño was over? It seems that the atmospheric turbulence continues for months after the ocean surface temperatures have abated.

[Continues...]