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Leebert writes:

Business Insider is reporting that Apple is changing its implementation of the "pistol" emoji (🔫 \U0001F52B; "🔫") from a revolver to a toy water gun. According to Apple's announcement, the change will take effect with the release of iOS 10 this fall. Apple's announcement didn't explicitly mention the change or its rationale but the change is, predictably, ruffling some feathers.

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fork(2) writes:

Oak Ridge National Laboratory "... partners with the state of Tennessee, universities and industries to solve challenges in energy, advanced materials, manufacturing, security and physics." It grew out of the super-secret Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Denise Kiernan's book, The Girls of Atomic City chronicles the development of the lab, project, and city from several perspectives, most notably the perspective of several young women recruited to work there.

Kiernan's book also gives a wonderful introduction to Lise Meitner for those of us who aren't aware of her. Lise Meitner, together with Otto Hahn, led a small group of physicists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium which led to the development of nuclear weapons. From the Wikipedia article: "In the 1990s, the records of the [Nobel] committee that decided on [the 1944 Nobel] prize [in Chemistry, awarded for nuclear fission] were opened. Based on this information, several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust", and Meitner has received a flurry of posthumous honors, including the naming of chemical element 109 as meitnerium in 1997."

At least part of the reason Meitner was excluded may very likely have been her gender. So, it's not at all unreasonable to wonder how things in our modern, enlightened times compare with the Bad Old Days when women were actively excluded from physics.

In an article today (Aug 1) in Nature , Ramin Skibba reports on a special issue of Physical Review Physics Education Research devoted to the gender divides in physics and engineering.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

A new social network, Candid, will use machine learning to try and moderate posts:

We use a deep learning NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithm, which basically looks at what you're saying and decides ... whether it's positive or negative. So it kind of classifies things as having a negative sentiment or a positive sentiment. It then gives it a score of how kind of strong your statement is — let's say you said something about someone or you threatened someone, it classifies that as saying, "Hey this is a very strong statement," because these kinds of categories are not good in terms of social discourse. And when we do that, we basically say if this thing has a score which is more than a particular level, a cut-off, then we basically take out the whole post. So whether it's self harm or like bullying or harassment, we look for certain phrases and the context of those phrases.

On the line between moderation and censorship

I mean, here is the thing between what is "loud free speech," quote-unquote, right? At some level you should be able to say what you want to say, but on another level, you also want to facilitate, you know, what I would say constructive social discussion. ... There is a kind of a trade-off or a fine line that you need to walk, because if you let everything in, you know the fear is that social discussion stops and it just becomes a name-calling game. And that's what happens if you just leave — like certain discussions, just let them be, don't pull things down — you will see they quickly devolve into people calling each other names and not having any kind of constructive conversations.

They've succeeded in getting some free press, if nothing else.

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Dogeball writes:

This standard is being used by ads to track your mobile browsing habits across sites, connections and VPNs.

From the article:

Intended to allow site owners to serve low-power versions of sites and web apps to users with little battery capacity left, soon after it was introduced, privacy researchers pointed out that it could also be used to spy on users. The combination of battery life as a percentage and battery life in seconds provides offers 14m combinations, providing a pseudo-unique identifier for each device.

The standard suggests that false data can be provided by the client to hide the true battery status for testing purposes. It seems to me that there should be a privacy setting to randomize battery status, which privacy mode in browsers should enable by default.

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takyon writes:

NPR reports that the rise of craft breweries has helped to sustain hop growers:

Hop Growers are raising a glass to craft brewers. The demand for small-batch brews has helped growers boost their revenues, expand their operations, and, in some cases, save their farms. "Without the advent of craft brewing, a few large, corporate growers would be supplying all of the hops and local, family owned farms like ours would have gone bankrupt," says Diane Gooding, vice president of operations at Gooding Farms, a hop grower in Wilder, Idaho. "It's saved the industry."

[...] The thirst for craft beer has exploded. In 2015, the Colorado-based Brewers Association reported a 12.8 percent increase in craft-beer sales (compared to 0.2 percent for beer sales overall) and estimates the market at $22.3 billion—about one-quarter of the total U.S. beer market. Craft brews use more hops than traditional lagers produced by large brewing companies, which accounts for the surge in demand. Unlike big breweries, where hops are used to give beer its bitterness, craft breweries use "aroma" varieties of hops that have less acid (and impart less bitterness); each of the different varieties add a distinct flavor to the beer.

Craft beers contain up to five times more hops than traditional beers. The result, according to Jaki Brophy, communications director for the trade association Hop Growers of America, is "a huge impact" on commercial hop growers. In 2016, there are 53,213 acres of hops growing nationwide—the most acreage ever in production and an 18.5 percent increase over 2015. Almost all of the hops production is in Washington, Oregon and Idaho but 29 states are registered to grow the crop. Although there has been significant consolidation in the industry—the number of commercial growers decreased from 378 in 1964 and 90 in 1987 to just 44 in 2015, according to Hop Growers of America—new growers are coming online all the time.

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fork(2) writes:

According to Tech Times, NASA has "placed another mission order with SpaceX to facilitate the delivery of American astronauts to the ISS."

According to NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Lueders, the latest crew rotation mission from SpaceX combined with the two mission orders from Boeing are designed to ensure that NASA will have reliable access to the ISS aboard American spacecraft.

She added that the systems are also meant to provide lifeboat service to the space station's crew for up to seven months.

Boeing received its two spaceflight orders from NASA back in May and December 2015, while SpaceX received its first order back in November that same year. Both space companies are now preparing to fulfill their mission orders for the space agency, which includes the development and testing of necessary technologies.

According to NASA, it will announce which of the two companies will be the one to fly first post-certification mission to the ISS on a later date. The CCtCap contracts the space agency has with SpaceX and Boeing includes up to six potential space missions for each company.

[...] SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said they have made great progress with their Crew Dragon spacecraft as well as with the qualification of their docking adapter and the initial testing of their pressure vessel qualification unit.

She said that they appreciate the trust that NASA is giving their company with the granting of the second crew delivery mission order and that they are looking forward to sending astronauts from U.S. soil in 2017.

As of the moment, SpaceX is developing four Crew Dragon capsules at its manufacturing center in Hawthorne, California. Two of these spacecraft are scheduled for qualification testing while the other two are meant to be used for flight testing next year.

SpaceX has also begun modifying its Launch Pad 39A located in the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch pad is expected to be used for crew delivery missions to the ISS in the future.

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n1 writes:

Barclays will start identifying customers with voice recognition technology this week, slashing the need for customers to answer a series of questions to gain access to their accounts on the telephone.

The move represents the latest step in the industry to abolish passwords, moving to technologies which banks believe are more convenient for customers as well as more secure.

First Direct took a similar step earlier this year, while Lloyds Banking Group has experimented with a system online which can recognise customers' typing patterns to deny fraudsters access to accounts.

Source: The Telegraph

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Open4D writes:

Apparently, Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood

According to the article, ...

More than anything, Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter, wants to find a way to escape death. ... if there's one thing that really excites Thiel, it's the prospect of having younger people's blood transfused into his own veins. ... according to Thiel, it's a potential biological Fountain of Youth - the closest thing science has discovered to an anti-ageing panacea.

[...] After decades languishing on the fringes, it's recently started getting attention from mainstream researchers, with multiple clinical trials underway in humans in the U.S. and even more advanced studies in China and Korea.

[...] In Monterey, California, about 120 miles from San Francisco, a company called Ambrosia recently commenced one of the trials. Titled "Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers," it has a simple protocol: Healthy participants aged 35 and older get a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for molecular indicators of health and ageing. The study is patient-funded; participants, who range in age from late 30s through 80s, must pay $8,000 to take part, and live in or travel to Monterey for treatments and follow-up assessments.

I thought I would bring this development to the attention of the Soylent News community. I also have a question. The article claims that the practice is known as parabiosis. But Wikipedia says "parabiosis is a class of techniques in which two living organisms are joined together surgically and develop single, shared physiological systems, such as a shared circulatory system." This definition seems to include the relevant 1950s rat experiments. But I believe it does not cover the Monterey experiment, nor the kinds of human treatment that Thiel and others are seeking. Am I right about this? And if so, is there better word to use?

Also, feel free to comment any fictional examples you know of. Did Montgomery Burns ever partake, for example?

[Continues...]

butthurt writes:

The Ukraine is looking for investors for a renewable power project in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Solar energy would provide 1 GW of electrical generating capacity, greater than any project completed so far, and other energy sources such as biogas would provide an additional 400 MW, for a total of 1.4 GW (peak, the submitter assumes). The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the last unit of which which closed in 2000, was rated at 4 GW. The planned project would take advantage of electrical transmission lines originally fed by the nuclear plant.

It is hoped that the Ukraine's dependence on natural gas imported from Russia would be lessened.

The solar portion of the project is expected to cost €1 billion ($1.1 billion). Interest has been expressed by the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, as well as firms from Canada and the United States.

coverage:

• Gizmodo
• International Business Times
• The Guardian
• Bloomberg (has map of solar irradiation)

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eof writes:

MIT News reports that Seymour Papert, one of the founders of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the MIT Media Lab, and the inspiration for LEGO Mindstorms, has died.

Papert's career traversed a trio of influential movements: child development, artificial intelligence, and educational technologies. Based on his insights into children's thinking and learning, Papert recognized that computers could be used not just to deliver information and instruction, but also to empower children to experiment, explore, and express themselves. The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.

[...] Papert's life straddled several continents. He was born in 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, and went on to study at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he earned a BA in philosophy in 1949, followed by a PhD in mathematics three years later. He was a leading anti-apartheid activist throughout his university years.

Papert's studies then took him overseas – first to Cambridge University in England from 1954-1958, where he focused on math research, earning his second PhD, then to the University of Geneva, where he worked with Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories about the ways children make sense of the world changed Papert's view of children and learning.

From Switzerland, Papert came to the U.S., joining MIT as a research associate in 1963. Four years later, he became a professor of applied mathematics, and shortly after was appointed co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (which later evolved into the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL) by its founding director Professor Marvin Minsky. Together, they wrote the 1969 book, "Perceptrons," which marked a turning point in the field of artificial intelligence.

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fork(2) writes:

Writing on Popular Science, Sarah Fecht says:

In 2018, SpaceX could become the first private company to land its own spacecraft on Mars. But it doesn't plan to do so alone. NASA wants to see if SpaceX's landing tech could put astronauts on Mars, and to find out, its vowed to help the private company send an uncrewed capsule to the Red Planet.

Summarizing an article from SpaceFlightNow, she continues:

While SpaceX would fund and build the uncrewed Red Dragon capsule and the Falcon Heavy rocket it launches on, NASA would take a supportive role in the mission, providing communications through the Deep Space Network--a mesh of telescopes around the world that keeps NASA in constant contact with all its spacecraft, despite the Earth's spinning.

NASA will also help locate a landing site for the Red Dragon, Spaceflight Now reports, and will help to prevent Earth microbes from hitching a ride on the Red Dragon and contaminating Mars.

All told, NASA estimates it'll spend about $32 million dollars on the mission--quite a bargain, considering the space agency hopefully get a new landing technology out of it. The Red Dragon would fire retrothrusters to attempt a soft landing on Mars--something that's never been attempted before for such a large spacecraft. SpaceX is expecting to spend about $300 million on it.

By contrast, NASA spent $2.5 billion on the Curiosity rover and its novel "sky crane" landing method. If all goes well, the Red Dragon mission will pave the way to put people on Mars, either by NASA or SpaceX.

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fork(2) writes:

As will no doubt be reported everywhere shortly, Tesla and SolarCity have reached a deal for Tesla to buy SolarCity. The Wall Street Journal says, "The all-stock deal values SolarCity at about $2.6 billion, with SolarCity stockholders receiving 0.11 share of Tesla for each share of SolarCity, valuing them at $25.83 apiece, according to Friday's closing prices. The deal's value comes in lower than the original range of $26.50 to $28.50 per share Tesla had proposed in June. Mr. Musk said Monday he wasn't involved in talks about the valuation of the purchase."

Electric vehicle maker Tesla expects to achieve "significant" cost savings and "dramatic improvements" in manufacturing efficiency as a result of the acquisition of solar panel installer SolarCity, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday.

Musk said the combined companies will have a "stronger balance sheet," but likely will require a "small equity capital raise" next year. Both companies have been burning through cash and have projected achieving positive cash flow later this year.

Musk is the largest shareholder in both companies and is chairman of SolarCity. His cousins Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive are co-founders of SolarCity.

Source: Reuters

Additional reporting here and here.

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takyon writes:

SK Hynix will begin mass production of 4 GB HBM2 memory stacks soon:

SK Hynix has quietly added its HBM Gen 2 memory stacks to its public product catalog earlier this month, which means that the start of mass production should be imminent. The company will first offer two types of new memory modules with the same capacity, but different transfer-rates, targeting graphics cards, HPC accelerators and other applications. Over time, the HBM2 family will get broader.

SK Hynix intends to initially offer its clients 4 GB HBM2 4Hi stack KGSDs (known good stack dies) based on 8 Gb DRAM devices. The memory devices will feature a 1024-bit bus as well as 1.6 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-12C) and 2.0 GT/s (H5VR32ESM4H-20C) data-rates, thus offering 204 GB/s and 256 GB/s peak bandwidth per stack.

Samsung has already manufactured 4 GB stacks. Eventually, there will also be 2 GB and 8 GB stacks available.

Previously: AMD Shares More Details on High Bandwidth Memory
Samsung Announces Mass Production of HBM2 DRAM

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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.""

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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.

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