SoylentNews

fleg writes:

In The Guardian there is a discussion on the participation of transgender people in the Olympic Games, primarily looking at Caster Semenya. Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner, was subjected to gender testing in 2009, but has been cleared to participate in the Olympic Games beginning in a few days time.

"It's a ticking timebomb," Daniel Mothowagae says quietly on a winter's night in Johannesburg as he anticipates the furore that is likely to explode when Caster Semenya runs in the Olympic Games. Apart from being described by many athletics specialists as an almost certain winner of the women's 800m in Rio, Semenya will suffer again as she is made to personify the complex issues surrounding sex verification in sport."

"The debate around hyperandrogenism is as poignant as it is thorny. In simplistic summary it asks us to decide whose rights need to be protected most. Is it the small minority of women whose exceedingly high testosterone levels, which their bodies produce naturally, categorise them as intersex athletes? Should their human rights be ring-fenced so that, as is the case now following an overturned legal ruling, they are free to compete as women without being forced to take medication that suppresses their testosterone? Or should the overwhelming majority of female athletes be protected – so they are not disadvantaged unfairly against faster and stronger intersex competitors?"

""She is proof of the benefit of testosterone to intersex athletes," Tucker argues. "Having had the restriction removed she is now about six seconds faster than she had been the last two years.""

"The Cas panel defined the crucial factor as being whether intersex athletes would have sufficient advantages to outweigh any female characteristics and make them comparable to male-performance levels. "

"Three months ago Tucker conducted a fascinating interview with Joanna Harper – who describes herself as "a scientist first, an athlete second and a transgender person third." Harper made the startling claim that we might see "an all-intersex podium in the 800 in Rio and I wouldn't be surprised to see as many as five intersex women in the eight-person final.""

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes in with an excerpt from a story by Judith D. Schwartz that appeared July 30, 2016 in Scientific American — taken from "Water in Plain Sight: Hope For A Thirsty World" ... St. Martin's Press. Copyright 2016.

Irrigation is more than just throwing water on a field—it can be a nuanced chemical conversation between humans and plants

[...] When it comes to irrigation, water is not simply water.

This is dogma to John Kempf, an Ohio farmer who has made a career of improving crop health and agriculture yields. In 2006, Kempf founded the company Advancing Eco Agriculture, a consulting service for farmers that provides testing and analysis of crop specimens and recommends various plant nutrition treatments to improve crop yields.

The sources of water used for crops—be it well, river or reservoir—vary as to the mineral salts that they carry. The degree to which salts are present in water is referred to as "hardness," generally described in terms of grains per gallon. ("Salt" in this context is not what you'd sprinkle on scrambled eggs, but the combination of elements with a positive charge [cation] and negative charge [anion].) Kempf says that poor water quality, specifically water with high levels of calcium carbonate (lime), is a problem not often acknowledged in public discussions of agriculture—but one that affects crop production and, ironically, leads to a higher use of water.

"The level of minerals affects not only plants' ability to absorb water, but also how the plant can absorb nutrition," says Kempf. "Hard water requires more energy, and therefore nutrition, to break it down. When water quality is poor, more water is required." Farms do regularly test for water quality, and he says that when a potential client's water source has more than five grains per gallon he recommends that it be treated.

"When farms irrigate with poor-quality water there are multiple effects," he says. "It ties up all the nutrients that have been applied in the form of fertilizers. It significantly suppresses soil biology. And what often happens is that sodium and calcium bicarbonates accumulate in the soil profile. This leads to salinity."

Please, read the article — it's simply too long to copy/paste here. It goes into some (minor) detail regarding agriculture's problem with nitrogen. That is, there is a lot of nitrogen, but little of it is available to plants. Excess application of nitrogen fertilizers of course end up in the water supplies, in cities, rivers, and oceans.

Once again, we are shown that nature is a delicate balancing act. One that we routinely disrupt, then wonder why our food crops aren't healthy.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The early release of a variety of soybeans resistant to the herbicide dicamba has led to criminal spraying and the death of normal soybean crops:

Dicamba has been around for decades, and it is notorious for a couple of things: It vaporizes quickly and blows with the wind. And it's especially toxic to soybeans, even at ridiculously low concentrations. Damage from drifting pesticides isn't unfamiliar to farmers. But the reason for this year's plague of dicamba damage is unprecedented. "I've never seen anything like this before," says Bob Scott, a weed specialist from the University of Arkansas. "This is a unique situation that Monsanto created."

The story starts with Monsanto because the St. Louis-based biotech giant launched, this year, an updated version of its herbicide-tolerant soybean seeds. This new version, which Monsanto calls "Xtend," isn't just engineered to tolerate sprays of glyphosate, aka Roundup. It's also immune to dicamba.

Monsanto created dicamba-resistant soybeans (and cotton) in an effort to stay a step ahead of the weeds. The strategy of planting Roundup-resistant crops and spraying Roundup to kill weeds isn't working so well anymore, because weeds have evolved resistance to glyphosate. Adding genes for dicamba resistance, so the thinking went, would give farmers the option of spraying dicamba as well, which would clear out the weeds that survive glyphosate. There was just one hitch in the plan. A very big hitch, as it turned out. The Environmental Protection Agency has not yet approved the new dicamba weedkiller that Monsanto created for farmers to spray on its new dicamba-resistant crops. That new formulation of dicamba, according to Monsanto, has been formulated so that it won't vaporize as easily, and won't be as likely to harm neighboring crops. If the EPA approves the new weedkiller, it may impose restrictions on how and when the chemical may be used.

But, Monsanto went ahead and started selling its dicamba-resistant soybeans before this herbicide was approved. It gave farmers a new weed-killing tool that they couldn't legally use.

Original Submission

Open4D writes:

EurekAlert have just published an article: Yale researchers shed light on evolutionary mystery: Origins of the female orgasm

The role of female orgasm, which plays no obvious role in human reproduction, has intrigued scholars as far back as Aristotle. Numerous theories have tried to explain the origins of the trait, but most have concentrated on its role in human and primate biology.

[...] Since there is no apparent association between orgasm and number of offspring or successful reproduction in humans, the scientists focused on a specific physiological trait that accompanies human female orgasm -- the neuro-endocrine discharge of prolactin and oxytocin -- and looked for this activity in other placental mammals. They found that in many mammals this reflex plays a role in ovulation.

Original Submission

mafm writes with the following regarding the Embedded Open Modular Architecture (EOMA68):

The goal of the EOMA (Embedded Open Modular Architecture) project is to introduce the idea of being ethically responsible about both the ecological and the financial resources required to design, manufacture, acquire and maintain our personal computing devices. The EOMA68 standard is a freely-accessible, royalty-free, unencumbered hardware standard formulated and tested over the last five years around the ultra-simple philosophy of "just plug it in: it will work".

With devices built following this standard, one can upgrade the CPU-card (consisting of CPU, RAM and some local storage) of a device while keeping the same housing (e.g. laptop). One can also use the CPU-card in different devices (e.g. unplug CPU-card from laptop, plug into desktop); or use a replaced/discarded CPU-card from a laptop for NAS storage or a micro-server. There are housings currently available for a laptop (can be 3D-printed in full, or in part to replace parts that break) and a micro-desktop; and there are plans for others like routers or tablets in the future.

There are multiple articles talking about this project and analyzing the hardware, for example from ThinkPenguin, CNXSoft or EngadgetNG. There is also a recent live-streamed video introducing the project.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

A couple of weeks ago this story was reported by The Daily Beast :

Members of an American-backed rebel group in Syria beheaded a young child in a grisly execution video.

The footage surfaced early Tuesday of members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki and a captured child in Handarat, near Aleppo. The young boy, who appears to be prepubescent, is then executed on the back of a pickup truck.

The gruesome videotaped murder of a child drew outrage on social media and the promise of an inquiry from the group's leadership, which has previously received U.S.-made weapons and American funding. The group no longer gets such backing. But it's also renewed questions about which rebels the American government has supported in Syria's ongoing civil war.

[...] State Department spokesperson John Kirby told The Daily Beast. "We strongly condemn this type of barbaric action, no matter what group is responsible. We encourage al-Zenki to investigate the incident and expect all parties to comply with their obligations under the law of armed conflict."

[...] the group's leadership issued a statement condemning the beheading. It said it formed a committee to investigate how such a crime could have happened.

More video from the incident has been released:

The victim is seen among a group of fighters from the US and Turkish backed militant group, in the same red pick-up truck that features in their video of his execution. In a chilling exchange the jihadist militants can be seen taunting the child, taking selfies, and threatening him with 'slaughter'.

When asked about his final wish, the child asks to be shot rather than slaughtered. Their shocking answer? "Slaughter. We are even worse than ISIS"

Original Submission

"exec" writes in with a story from Ars Technica — Apollo astronauts dying of heart disease at 4-5X the rate of counterparts:

Apollo astronauts who have ventured out of the protective magnetosphere of mother Earth appear to be dying of cardiovascular disease at a far higher rate than their counterparts—both those that have stayed grounded and those that only flew in the shielding embrace of low-Earth orbit. Though the data is slim—based on only 77 astronauts total—researchers speculate that potent ionizing radiation in deep space may be to blame. That hypothesis was backed up in follow-up mouse studies that provided evidence that similar radiation exposure led to long-lasting damage to the rodents’ blood vessels. All of the data was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

[...] In the new study, [Michael] Delp [at Florida State University] and coauthors compared health data on 42 astronauts that had traveled into space—seven of which got past the magnetosphere and to the Moon—to the medical records of 35 astronauts that were grounded for their careers. The death rate from cardiovascular disease among the Apollo lunar astronauts was a whopping 43 percent, which is around four to five times the rate seen in the non-fliers and low-fliers (nine and 11 percent, respectively).

To figure out if deep-space ionizing radiation or, perhaps, weightlessness might explain the apparent jump in cardiovascular disease deaths, the researchers turned to a mouse model. Mice were either exposed to a single dose of radiation, had their hind limbs elevated to prevent weight-bearing for two weeks, or received both treatments. The researchers then let the faux-astronaut mice recover for six to seven months, which in human terms would be about 20 years.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new way of fixing inactive proteins has been discovered in an algae, which uses chloroplast extracts and light to release an interrupting sequence from a protein.

Research specialist Stephen Campbell and Professor David Stern at the Boyce Thompson Institute report the discovery in the July 29 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. This repair system may have applications in agriculture and biotechnology because it could potentially be harnessed to enable proteins to become active only in the light.

Many proteins contain extra sequences, called insertions, that can disrupt their function. The current paper demonstrates that the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has the necessary toolkit to repair proteins by removing these insertions.

Campbell discovered this new repair system while purifying a protein from the chloroplasts of C. reinhardtii that can cut RNA. Upon sequencing the protein, he identified it as RB47, a protein that was not known to have any RNA-cleaving ability. Campbell noticed that the middle of the protein was missing. When he compared the protein sequence to its corresponding gene sequence, the protein was much shorter than expected.

Upon further study, Campbell found that he could detect a long version of the protein that contained an insertion and a short version that didn't. The cells make both versions when grown in the light or the dark, but only the short version can cleave RNA. The long version of the protein could be converted into the short one by mixing it in a test tube with chloroplasts from cells grown in the light and by illuminating the reaction. This process removed the interrupting insertion and restored the RNA-cutting activity of the protein. It is likely that the chloroplast maintains the machinery necessary to remove the sequence so that it can restore functionality to the protein.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/clinical-updates/digestive-diseases/study-confirms-safety-efficacy-of-ser-109
http://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/seres-shares-crash-after-microbiome-drug-flunks-phii
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_difficile_colitis

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/white-dwarf-bombards-its-companion-with-relativistic-electrons/

White dwarf bombards its companion with relativistic electrons

When observing AR Scorpii, researchers noticed that its brightness varied over a 3.5 hour period. So they labelled it a periodic variable and paid it no further attention. Now, however, a large international team of astronomers has gone back and taken a more careful look at the star. The astronomers found that AR Scorpii is much more variable than first thought, with 400 percent changes in brightness occurring within only 30 seconds. The reason for this? AR Scorpii is actually two stars, and one of them is launching relativistic electrons at the other.

The paper describing these results was published this week in Nature .

The researchers were drawn to AR Scorpii because of seven years of archival images that revealed a lot of additional variability layered on top of its well-described 3.5 hour period. Rather than peaking at a similar level each time, the output could vary by as much as a factor of four.

This caused the astronomers to look at the M-class star's output more carefully. They found that the light alternated being red- and blue-shifted over the same 3.5 hour period that its brightness varies. This typically means that the star is being pulled around by something orbiting it, which causes it to accelerate towards and away from Earth, accounting for the Doppler shift. "The 3.56 hour period is therefore the orbital period of a close binary star," the authors conclude.

Based on the strength of the red- and blue-shifts, that companion must be roughly a third of the mass of the Sun, which places it squarely in white dwarf territory.

Since the changes in brightness line up so nicely with the orbit, the authors looked more carefully at those, too. And once again, something strange was up. We know the sorts of radiation that M dwarfs and white dwarfs produce, but AR Scorpii produces more than that. "In the infrared and radio in particular," the authors write, "is orders of magnitudes brighter than the thermal emission from its component stars." While the combined luminosities of the two stars should be about 10²⁴ Watts, the maximum luminosity of the system is over 10²⁵ Watts.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New Zealand will attempt to eradicate rats and other unwanted predators by 2050:

An isolated archipelago, New Zealand once hosted almost 200 bird species, many of them, like the iconic kiwi, having become flightless over generations because of a lack of natural predators. But several recently introduced species, such as rats, possums, and weasellike carnivores called stoats, now kill about 25 million of these native birds every year. Yesterday, the country's prime minister, John Key, announced a $20 million commitment of seed money to set up Predator Free New Zealand Ltd., a company that would lead the charge in ridding the nation of the three mammals and five other foreign predators by 2050. Until now, similar eradication efforts by the country have focused on small islands; those efforts boast a 90% success rate in eliminating rodents, says James Russell, a conservation biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The new goal, Russell says, is "the modern equivalent to landing someone on Mars" and will ultimately require new technologies and billions of dollars to succeed. But he is optimistic because local communities and organizations, which could foot a large portion of the total bill, are on board.

[...] Also, once eliminated, rats will likely keep coming back in, Merrill notes. "They can do it if they can prevent the rats from jumping off the boats," he predicts. Russell says that's doable. "We are currently close to a 100% success rate in intercepting new mammal arrivals on the islands." New Zealand's track record on its smaller islands bodes well, Martin says. "This challenge is of mind-blowing proportions, but if anyone can do it, the New Zealanders can."

Original Submission

Open4D writes:

EurekAlert reports: "NASA to map the surface of an asteroid"

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will launch September 2016 and travel to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study. The science team will be looking for something special. Ideally, the sample will come from a region in which the building blocks of life may be found.

The Daily Mail points out:

Bennu crosses Earth's orbit once every six years and is set to pass between the moon and our planet in 2135.
Scientists are worried the 500-metre wide asteroid's orbit could be tweaked by Earth's gravity as it passes by, causing it to smash into our planet later in the century.

[...] 'We estimate the chance of impact at about one in 2,700 between 2175 and 2196,' [Prof. Lauretta] said.

It seems this (paywalled) Sunday Times article might be the original source for the quotes from Prof. Lauretta. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, an ancient relic from the early solar system that is filled with organic molecules," said Lauretta.

"Asteroids like Bennu may have seeded the early Earth with this material, contributing to the primordial soup from which life emerged."

[...] For scientists, the chance of obtaining chunks of a carbonaceous asteroid is exciting. For the rest of us, however, Osiris-Rex's most important task may be the measurements it makes of a bizarre and newly discovered force that can send asteroids careering around the solar system and potentially towards Earth.

"The Yarkovsky effect is the force that acts on an asteroid when it absorbs sunlight and then radiates it back into space as heat. It acts like a small thruster, constantly changing its course," said Lauretta. "Bennu's position has shifted 160km [100 miles] since 1999."

It is these forces that make Bennu's trajectory so hard to predict after 2135's near-miss. It is expected to pass Earth at a distance of about 180,000 miles, well inside the moon's orbit and close enough to alter the asteroid's path so it may hit our planet on a future orbit.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-recommends-online-court-without-lawyers/

[...] You're in a dispute over money. It's not a vast amount of money, but sometimes it's precisely these sorts of disputes that incite the highest emotions.

You feel cheated, robbed.

But then you have to hire a lawyer to defend you. Which is a cost and guarantees you nothing.

So Lord Justice Briggs, a senior British judge, has come up with a new solution: an online court for civil cases featuring claims of less than £25,000 (around $32,850).

This online court is part of his recommendations for reforming the British justice system. Yes, the one that Brits are always telling you is perfect.

The idea is that there would be user-friendly rules and that lawyers would be largely, or even entirely, superfluous.

There's another characteristic of an online court that moves the judge. He says it would be "less adversarial, more investigative."

Perhaps the lord justice has yet to acquaint himself with the interpersonal and expository skills of many who frequent Twitter and other internet forums.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

An unexpected catch:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/nyregion/in-pokemon-go-lawmakers-fear-unexpected-entrance-of-the-sexual-predator.html

In an informal investigation by Senators Jeffrey D. Klein and Diane J. Savino, staff members took a list of 100 registered sex offenders across New York City and compared it with locations where Pokémon Go players could collect virtual items or use other game features.

In 59 cases, those locations were within half a block of offenders' homes. The staff members, who played the game for two weeks, also found 57 Pokémon — which appear on players' phones as if they exist in the real world — near the offenders' homes, according to a report the senators released on Friday. Such overlap has been reported in other states, including California and North Carolina.

In New York, those discoveries prompted Mr. Klein, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, and Ms. Savino, a Staten Island Democrat, to propose two pieces of legislation, scheduled to be introduced next week.

The first would prevent moderate or high-risk sex offenders from playing so-called augmented-reality games — like Pokémon Go — and the second would require the games' creators to cross-reference their virtual landscapes with lists of offenders' homes and remove any "in-game objective" within 100 feet of them.

Original Submission

steveha writes:

The SemiAccurate web site reports that AMD is putting large solid-state drives directly onto workstation-class graphics processing cards, and calling the result "SSG". Charlie Demerjian wrote in the story that this will be a revolutionary new technology:

The first demo AMD is said to be showing is a use case for movie editing and cleanup on the GPU. What is the issue here you may ask, this is old hat and has been done on the CPU for years. Some GPUs can even assist it without slowing things down in the process, so what does SSG add? How about 8K movie streaming and cleanup in realtime. At 96FPS. Sure you can do this with traditional methods but the best of them will run the same task at 17FPS.

AMD is happy to point out this is a 5.6x speedup or so for the cost of two consumer SSDs. Before SSG, possible but slow. After SSG, fast enough for most users. The impossible, realtime 8K cleanup, is now possible.

[...] It really is the technology of the year and the impossible tasks made possible already are just the tip of the iceberg. SemiAccurate is not joking when we say this is a fundamental game changer for graphics, nothing like this has happened in years.

takyon: It is a proof of concept and is being pitched for Hollywood editing/rendering, the oil & gas industry, and medical imaging.

Original Submission