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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The FDA claims that people can always add more salt to their food, which is true, but they ignore that salt changes how food is cooked and adding salt to the surface of food affects taste differently than when it is evenly distributed.

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=197193

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_salt

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Facebook admitted Sunday that it had blocked links to the Wikileaks trove of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

In a Twitter post late Saturday, WikiLeaks accused the social media giant of "censorship" and gave its followers an online workaround, saying "try using https://archive.is."

The WikiLeaks allegation followed a firestorm of controversy that erupted earlier this year when former Facebook workers admitted routinely suppressing conservative news.

Source: https://nypost.com/2016/07/24/facebook-admits-to-blocking-wikileaks-links-in-dnc-email-hack/

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takyon writes:

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have found that cloned sheep age normally and in good health. The scientists are monitoring 13 cloned sheep, including four that are genomic copies of Dolly, the first cloned animal:

The birth of Dolly in 1996 made headlines and captured people's attention as it provided evidence that a living creature could be completely cloned. Now, twenty years after Dolly's birth, a team of scientists led by the University of Nottingham have declared that cloned sheep age healthily after conducting the first long-term study into the health of cloned sheep.

The scientists performed cardiovascular and metabolic assessments, blood pressure measurements and musculoskeletal scans on 13 cloned sheep and compared the results to uncloned control sheep. Results show that all cloned sheep are healthy with no signs of metabolic diseases and have normal blood pressure readings. One sheep had moderate osteoarthritis - a joint disease that also affected Dolly and raised concerns of premature ageing.

The cloned sheep were between seven to nine years old - approximately equivalent to 60 to 70 in human years, according to the University of Nottingham. Kevin Sinclair, lead author of the paper and professor of developmental biology at the University of Nottingham said the sheep were healthy considering their age.

The cloned sheep have to die before their telomere lengths can be accurately measured.

Also at NPR.

Healthy ageing of cloned sheep (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12359)

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takyon writes:

A Microsoft researcher has created software for identifying flower species:

The project came about after random cross-pollination between Microsoft Research Asia chief researcher Yong Rui and botanists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rui told the academics Redmond could use image-matching to help the botanists identify the spread of flowers throughout China, albeit with some pruning of its vast image banks.

Microsoft Research Asia senior research program manager Guobin Wu says a 20-layer deep convolutional neural network was cultivated alongside learnable filters to identify slight variations between flowers. "During the forward pass, each filter is convolved across the width and height of the input volume, computing the dot product between the entries of the filter and the input," Wu says.

Some 800,000 flower snaps were planted into the UC Berkely and open source Caffe deep learning network, leading to an impressive 90 percent species identification accuracy rate.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The CDC mentions that the assessment is based on worse case scenario projections that include assuming maximal seasonal transmission, no anti-mosquito precautions, and returning to the home country at the point of maximal viremia.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6528e1.htm

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Genes Hint that Life Originated in Hydrothermal Area

butthurt writes:

Science Magazine and the New York Times report on work published in Nature Microbiology (full article paywalled) (DOI: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.116). Searching through databases, geneticists looked for genes shared among prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea). Their goal was to identify traits of the last universal common ancestor—an organism from which all cellular life is descended.

The genes that met their criteria suggest an organism that could incorporate nitrogen from molecular nitrogen and carbon from carbon dioxide into their cells—they were autotrophs rather than heterotrophs (they did not rely on other organisms as a source of carbon). Also suggested is that the organism was thermophilic, (thriving at high temperatures) and anaerobic (not using oxygen). The researchers think it had the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway, also known as the reductive acetyl-coenzyme A pathway, in which hydrogen is oxidised, carbon dioxide is reduced, organic molecules are synthesised, and chemical energy is made available to the organism.

They say that these characteristics support the idea that life originated in hydrothermal conditions. Such conditions exist today in hot springs, underground waters in volcanic areas, and deep-sea vents.

Meet Luca, the Ancestor of All Living Things

mendax writes:

The New York Times published a story yesterday that demonstrates that with sweat and persistence, long lost relatives can be found:

A surprisingly specific genetic portrait of the ancestor of all living things has been generated by scientists who say that the likeness sheds considerable light on the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth.

This venerable ancestor was a single-cell, bacterium-like organism. But it has a grand name, or at least an acronym. It is known as Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is estimated to have lived some four billion years ago, when Earth was a mere 560 million years old.

The new finding sharpens the debate between those who believe life began in some extreme environment, such as in deep sea vents or the flanks of volcanoes, and others who favor more normal settings, such as the "warm little pond" proposed by Darwin.

The article goes on to describe how this discovery was made, and concludes:

[The genetic analysis performed in the research] pointed quite precisely to an organism that lived in the conditions found in deep sea vents, the gassy, metal-laden, intensely hot plumes caused by seawater interacting with magma erupting through the ocean floor.

No doubt there is more to be revealed on this subject.

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butthurt writes:

Pro Publica and The New York Times Magazine have each written about field drug testing by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The tests are undertaken with disposable kits containing chemicals. A sample is brought into contact with the chemicals and there may be a colour change, which is assessed by the officer. The essay tells the story of people against whom criminal charges regarding illegal drugs were filed, with the results of these field testing kits as the primary evidence in the prosecutions.

According to the essay, the use of the kits has various pitfalls which can lead to false positive results. For one thing, analytes which are legal to possess can produce the same colour change as illegal substances. For another, poor lighting which may be encountered in the field can distort the officer's perception of colours. Confirmation bias can occur. Also, officers may receive inadequate (or--the submitter supposes--incorrect) training in the interpretation of the colours. A former Houston police chief offered the opinion that

Officers shouldn't collect and test their own evidence, period. I don't care whether that's cocaine, blood, hair.

The essay mentions gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy (GC-MS), an instrumental method which is typically undertaken in a laboratory, as providing more reliable results. The submitter notes that portable GC-MS equipment does exist (1, 2).

Nationwide, 62 percent of forensics labs do not conduct further testing in cases in which a field drug test was used and the defendant made a guilty plea. However, the Houston crime laboratory has been doing such testing. They have found that false positives are commonplace. The district attorney's office for Harris County, Texas, which handles cases from Houston, has been informed about those test results and is undertaking "efforts to overturn wrongful convictions." In three years, about as many such convictions have been overturned in Harris County as in the rest of the United States.

Referenced stories:

• Pro Publica
• The New York Times Magazine

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Over the past year, technology titans including Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM have been hiring leaders in biomedical research to bolster their efforts to change medicine.

In many ways, the migration of clinical scientists into technology corporations that are focused on gathering, analysing and storing information is long overdue. Because of the costs and difficulties of obtaining data about health and disease, scientists conducting clinical or population studies have rarely been able to track sufficient numbers of patients closely enough to make anything other than coarse predictions. Given such limitations, who wouldn't want access to Internet-scale, multidimensional health data; teams of engineers who can build sensors for data collection and algorithms for analysis; and the resources to conduct projects at scales and speeds unthinkable in the public sector?

Yet there is a major downside to monoliths such as Google or smaller companies such as consumer-genetics firm 23andMe owning health data — or indeed, controlling the tools and methods used to match people's digital health profiles to specific services.

If undisclosed algorithmic decision-making starts to incorporate health data, the ability of black-box calculations to accentuate pre-existing biases in society could greatly increase. Crucially, if the citizens being profiled are not given their data and allowed to share the information with others, they will not know about incorrect or discriminatory health actions — much less be able to challenge them. And most researchers won't have access to such health data either, or to the insights gleaned from them.

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takyon writes:

Researchers have created a glasses-free 3D display prototype that exploits the limited number of viewing angles offered by movie theaters:

In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets audiences watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear. Dubbed "Cinema 3D," the prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater.

[...] The key insight with Cinema 3D is that people in movie theaters move their heads only over a very small range of angles, limited by the width of their seat. Thus, it is enough to display images to a narrow range of angles and replicate that to all seats in the theater. What Cinema 3D does, then, is encode multiple parallax barriers in one display, such that each viewer sees a parallax barrier tailored to their position. That range of views is then replicated across the theater by a series of mirrors and lenses within Cinema 3D's special optics system.

[...] Cinema 3D isn't particularly practical at the moment: The team's prototype requires 50 sets of mirrors and lenses, and yet is just barely larger than a pad of paper. But, in theory, the technology could work in any context in which 3-D visuals would be shown to multiple people at the same time, such as billboards or storefront advertisements. Matusik says that the team hopes to build a larger version of the display and to further refine the optics to continue to improve the image resolution.

Also at TechCrunch. MIT CSAIL video at YouTube (49 seconds).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two studies published on arXiv have identified the hypothetical ~10 Earth mass "Planet Nine" as an explanation for the tilt of the solar system:

Two recent studies have shown that the existence of a mysterious, hypothetical Planet Nine could explain why the planets in our Solar System don't fully line up with the Sun. Researchers have been speculating about a ninth planet since January this year, and these latest studies add more weight to the hypothesis that, at some point in time at least, there was an extra planet orbiting our Sun. In fact, if Planet Nine does exist (or did), it would help to explain something that scientists have puzzled over for decades - why the Solar System is tilted.

What does that mean? Well, basically, all of the main eight planets that orbit our Sun do so on the same plane, making the Solar System look like a disc. The problem is that the Sun spins at a different angle, with its axis roughly 6 degrees off from the rest of the planets.

In the past, researchers have attempted to explain this slant by blaming the temporary tug of a passing star, or interactions between the Sun's magnetic field and the disc of dust that formed our planets. But none of these hypotheses have fully accounted for the misalignment. But now the two new studies – [completely independent] from one another in the US and France – show that the existence of Planet Nine could explain the tilt.

Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine

The inclination of the planetary system relative to the solar equator may be explained by the presence of Planet 9

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butthurt writes:

Bloomberg reports that Nintendo's stock price fell by 18%, the maximum amount permitted in one day on the Tokyo stock exchange. The decrease occurred after the company issued guidance that the popular game Pokémon Go should not be expected to bring in much revenue for the company. The game was created by Niantic Inc., of which Nintendo has partial ownership. Nintendo's stock had "almost doubled" since its release.

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takyon writes:

Two new Kuiper Belt objects have been discovered. Neither of them will approach closer than 50 AU to the Sun (Neptune is about 30 AU from the Sun):

The search for distant solar system objects has found two more small worlds far outside the orbit of Neptune. The new objects are located beyond the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of small icy objects just beyond Neptune, of which Pluto is a member. Currently known as 2014 FZ71 and 2015 FJ345, they have the third and fourth most-distant perihelia, which is when an object has its closest approach distance to the Sun, of any known solar system objects.

In addition, the orbital motions of these objects are in resonance with Neptune's orbit, which was somewhat unexpected. Their orbital paths imply that these worlds either have interacted with Neptune in the past or are continuing to do so — despite their great distances from the ice giant planet.

BEYOND THE KUIPER BELT EDGE: NEW HIGH PERIHELION TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECTS WITH MODERATE SEMIMAJOR AXES AND ECCENTRICITIES (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8205/825/1/L13)

List of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)

Related: Newly Discovered Dwarf Planet Will be Closer Than Pluto By 2096

Original Submission

martyb writes:

While scanning through items in our #rss-bot channel for today, I came upon an interesting article at phys.org CP violation or new physics?:

Over the past few years, multiple neutrino experiments have detected hints for leptonic charge parity (CP) violation—a finding that could help explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. So far, matter-antimatter asymmetry cannot be explained by any physics theory and is one of the biggest unsolved problems in cosmology.

But now in a new study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists David V. Forero and Patrick Huber at Virginia Tech have proposed that the same hints could instead indicate CP-conserving "new physics," and current experiments would have no way to tell the difference.

Both possibilities—CP violation or new physics—would have a major impact on the scientific understanding of some of the biggest questions in cosmology. Currently, one of the most pressing problems is the search for new physics, or physics beyond the Standard Model, which is a theory that scientists know is incomplete but aren't sure exactly how to improve. New physics could potentially explain several phenomena that the Standard Model cannot, including the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem, as well as dark matter, dark energy, and gravity.

As the scientists show in the new study, determining whether the recent hints indicate CP violation or new physics will be very challenging. The main goal of the study was to "quantify the level of confusion" between the two possibilities. The physicists' simulations and analysis revealed that both CP violation and new physics have distributions centered at the exact same value for what the neutrino experiments measure—something called the Dirac CP phase. This identical preference makes it impossible for current neutrino experiments to distinguish between the two cases.

[...] "The trick is that the type of new physics we postulate in our paper manifests itself in the way in which neutrino oscillations are affected by the amount of earth matter through which the neutrino traverses," Huber said. "The more matter travelled through, the larger the effect of this type of new physics."

An abstract (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.031801 ) is available; full article is paywalled.

This is way outside my level of understanding, but I have seen references to CP violations before and find the concept fascinating Any Soylentils care to weigh in and explain what was found and what it may mean in terms that an educated but non-physicist layman might understand?

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fork(2) writes:

From the (Kansas City) Daily Star Albany :

Recent moves in Congress to restrict the use of Russian rocket engines on national security missions sparked a revolution in the U.S. commercial space program. Private businesses such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as Aerojet Rocketdyne, are lining up to offer homegrown rocket engines to NASA. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin just abolished his country's own Federal Space Agency, replacing 'Roscosmos' with a new corporation that "will design new spacecraft and implement new projects by itself."

But before you assume that Russia has been bitten by the Capitalism bug - don't. In contrast to SpaceX, which is a private venture, Russia's new-and-improved Roscosmos will be wholly owned by the Russian state.

Asserting complete control over the space effort is, to Putin's mind, a way to control costs and prevent corruption, such as when certain persons at Roscosmos famously embezzled or wasted as much as $1.8 billion in 2014. Whether the restructuring will also make space travel "cheaper," as [deputy prime minister] Rogozin hopes, remains to be seen.

SpaceX publishes a price of $61.2M USD for a Falcon 9 launch. Can Roscosmos compete with that? The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture ULA finds that price hard to beat. So do the French and Chinese. From the article:

[...] California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez described a conversation she had with France's Arianespace a few years ago: "They were telling me that their launch costs about $200 million equivalent. They said they weren't worried about UAL [sic] but could I get rid of SpaceX? Because they were going to drive them out of business!"

And over in China, officials interviewed by Aviation Week recently lamented that "published prices on the SpaceX website [are] very low." So low, in fact, that with China's own Long March rockets costing $70 million per launch, "they could not match them."

Original Submission

butthurt submitted a story that became:

Just prior to retiring, the UK's former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron arranged for a parliamentary vote on whether the Trident nuclear-armed submarine programme should be renewed.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is opposed to nuclear weapons, having said "I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations." However, some Labour MPs support Trident; Corbyn has made this a free vote.

The submarines operate out of a base at Faslane in Scotland. All the MPs belonging to the Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence, are opposed to Trident. One asked the prime minister: "Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children?” and her answer was:

Yes. And I have to say to the honourable gentleman the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour party frontbench.

One Conservative MP who is opposed to Trident criticised his own party when he said "This is a political weapon aimed rather effectively at the Labour party."

The Guardian has a page with updates on the vote. It has the text of the motion and lists the number of parliamentary seats held by each party (links added by submitter):

Conservatives - 330
Labour - 230
SNP - 54
DUP - 8
Lib Dems - 8

The motion passed by 472 votes to 117. It seems likely that it had the support of nearly all Conservative MPs and a sizable fraction of Labour.

Original Submission