cubancigar11 writes:

The BBC reports that the year-long simulation of near isolation in preparation for a trip to Mars, has ended successfully.

A team of six people have completed a Mars simulation in Hawaii, where they lived in near isolation for a year.

Since 29 August 2015, the group lived in close quarters in a dome, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy.

[...] The Nasa-funded study run by the University of Hawaii is the longest of its kind since a Russian mission that lasted 520 days.

Having survived their year in isolation, the crew members said they were confident a mission to Mars could succeed.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," Cyprien Verseux, a crew member from France, told journalists. "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Kim Dotcom has found a way to attract more attention and potentially embarrass the U.S.... live streaming video of his court battle:

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom will be allowed to livestream his legal bid to halt his extradition to the United States, a New Zealand judge ruled Tuesday. Dotcom and three of his colleagues are appealing a December lower-court decision which allows them to be extradited to the U.S. to face conspiracy, racketeering and money-laundering charges. If found guilty, they could face decades in jail.

Dotcom's lawyer Ira Rothken told The Associated Press he was pleased with the decision. "It provides everybody in the world with a seat in the gallery of the New Zealand courtroom," Rothken said. "It's democracy at its finest." Rothken said the livestreaming would begin Wednesday on YouTube. He said there would be a 20-minute delay to prevent any evidence that was protected by the court from becoming public. The appeal is expected to last six weeks.

The case could still take years to be resolved:

Arguments for Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk are expected to take around eight days but the whole process is forecast to be a drawn-out affair. In the District Court the extradition hearing was supposed to take four weeks but actually took ten. This time around the actions of the District Court will be picked over in fine detail, concentrating closely on numerous matters of law. The United States Department of Justice isn't expected to begin its arguments for another three weeks or so. The hearing continues tomorrow but it's unlikely that any final decision will arrive even this year. Dotcom and his rivals in the US both seem prepared to take this battle all the way to the Supreme Court in New Zealand if necessary. That could take years.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://observer.com/2016/08/not-a-drill-seti-is-investigating-a-possible-extraterrestrial-signal-from-deep-space/

An international team of scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is investigating mysterious signal spikes emitting from a 6.3-billion-year-old star in the constellation Hercules—95 light years away from Earth. The implications are extraordinary and point to the possibility of a civilization far more advanced than our own.

The unusual signal was originally detected on May 15, 2015, by the Russian Academy of Science-operated RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, but was kept secret from the international community. Interstellar space reporter Paul Gilster broke the story after the researchers quietly circulated a paper announcing the detection of "a strong signal in the direction of HD164595."

The mysterious star's designation is HD164595, and it's considered to be sun-like in nature with a nearly identical metallic composition to our own star. So far, a single Neptune-like (but warmer) planet has been discovered in its orbit—HD 164595 b. But as Gilster explained, "There could, of course, be other planets still undetected in this system."

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Bill Dimm writes:

TechCrunch reports on a lawsuit being brought against Apple by owners of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus who say a design defect causes the touchscreens to become unresponsive. The loss of responsiveness is often preceded by a flickering gray bar appearing across the top of the screen. iFixit discusses a few possible sources of the "Touch Disease" problem, with the most popular theory being that the Touch IC chips lose contact with the logic board due to the phone bending.

The complaint [PDF], filed in California's Northern District federal court, alleges that Apple is aware of the design flaw and has concealed it from consumers by refusing to acknowledge or repair it. It also suggests that the 5s and 5c protected against this problem in various ways, so it's not as if Apple didn't know it was a possibility. The 6s and Plus got stiffened to prevent bending, as well.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at Hokkaido University describe a novel method of making high quality vertical nanowires with full control over their size, density and distribution over a semi-conducting substrate. The findings are reported in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.

Nanowires hold interesting properties that are not found in bulk materials, making them useful in components for novel electronic and photonic devices. There is much interest in the development of vertical, free-standing nanowires, as their versatility shows great promise. However, most current designs use bottom-up fabrication techniques that result in vertical nanowires being randomly distributed on semi-conducting substrates, limiting their usability.

Now, Ryutaro Kodaira, Shinjiro Hara and co-workers at Hokkaido University have demonstrated a novel method of making high quality vertical nanowires with full control over their size, density and distribution over a semi-conducting substrate.

The team created an indium arsenide (InAs) nanowire template from which to grow the desired heterojunction nanowires, which were composed of ferromagnetic manganese arsenide (MnAs) and semiconducting InAs. In the fabrication process, they first produced the InAs nanowire template by precisely patterning circular openings in silicon dioxide thin films, which were deposited by plasma sputtering onto wafers. Next the researchers grew single InAs nanowires in each circular hole. The MnAs nanowires formed either inside (in the middle) or on top of the InAs nanowires, by a process known as 'endotaxy' – orientated crystal growth inside another crystal.

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takyon writes:

CNET reports:

They've been a fixture of the computing industry for 60 years, but in 2018, hard drives will be pushed aside by storage systems using memory chips in PCs, an analyst firm predicts. [...] SSDs no longer are exotic. This year, 33 percent of PCs sold will come with SSDs, but that should grow to 56 percent in 2018, analyst firm TrendForce forecast Monday.

They predicted 44% adoption in 2017. SSD prices are expected to drop to $0.17/GB in 2017, a direct result of new generations of 3D/vertical NAND.

As for those 3D XPoint post-NAND devices coming from Intel and Micron, the initial capacities could be closer to 140 GB than the 16-32 GB I originally expected.

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takyon writes:

Water contaminated with some of the chemicals found in drinking water and fracking wastewater has been shown to affect hormone levels in mice:

More than 15 million Americans live within a one-mile radius of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations. UOGs combine directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to release natural gas from underground rock. Scientific studies, while ongoing, are still inconclusive on the potential long-term effects fracturing has on human development. Today, researchers at the University of Missouri released a study that is the first of its kind to link exposure to chemicals released during hydraulic fracturing to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in mice. Scientists believe that exposure to these chemicals also could pose a threat to human development.

"Researchers have previously found that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) mimic or block hormones — the chemical messengers that regulate respiration, reproduction, metabolism, growth and other biological functions," said Susan C. Nagel, Nagel, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women's health in the School of Medicine. "Evidence from this study indicates that developmental exposure to fracking and drilling chemicals may pose a threat to fertility in animals and potentially people. Negative outcomes were observed even in mice exposed to the lowest dose of chemicals, which was lower than the concentrations found in groundwater at some locations with past oil and gas wastewater spills."

Researchers mixed 23 oil and gas chemicals in four different concentrations to reflect concentrations ranging from those found in drinking water and groundwater to concentrations found in industry wastewater. The mixtures were added to drinking water given to pregnant mice in the laboratory until they gave birth. The female offspring of the mice that drank the chemical mixtures were compared to female offspring of mice in a control group that were not exposed. Mice exposed to drilling chemicals had lower levels of key hormones related to reproductive health compared to the control group.

Adverse Reproductive and Developmental Health Outcomes Following Prenatal Exposure to a Hydraulic Fracturing Chemical Mixture in Female C57Bl/6 Mice (open, DOI: 10.1210/en.2016-1242) (DX)

Original Submission

I've made no secret that I'd like to bring original content to SoylentNews, and recently polled the community on their feelings for crowdfunding articles. The overall response was somewhat lukewarm mostly on dividing where money and paying authors. As such, taking that into account, I decided to write a series of articles for SN in an attempt to drive more subscriptions and readers to the site, and to scratch a personal itch on doing a retro-computing project. The question then became: What to write?

As part of a conversation on IRC, part of me wondered what a modern day keylogger would have looked running on DOS. In the world of 2016, its no secret that various three letter agencies engage in mass surveillance and cyberwarfare. A keylogger would be part of any basic set of attack tools. The question is what would a potential attack tool have looked like if it was written during the 1980s. Back in 1980, the world was a very different place both from a networking and programming perspective.

For example, in 1988 (the year I was born), the IBM PC/XT and AT would have been a relatively common fixture, and the PS/2 only recently released. Most of the personal computing market ran some version of DOS, networking (which was rare) frequently took the form of Token Ring or ARCNet equipment. Further up the stack, TCP/IP competed with IPX, NetBIOS, and several other protocols for dominance. From the programming side, coding for DOS is very different that any modern platform as you had to deal with Intel's segmented architecture, and interacting directly with both the BIOS, and hardware. As such its an interesting look at how technology has evolved since.

Now obviously, I don't want to release a ready-made attack tool to be abused for the masses especially since DOS is still frequently used in embedded and industry roles. As such, I'm going to target a non-IP based protocol for logging both to explore these technologies, while simultaneously making it as useless as possible. To the extent possible, I will try and keep everything accessible to non-programmers, but this isn't intended as a tutorial for real mode programming. As such I'm not going to go super in-depth in places, but will try to link relevant information. If anyone is confused, post a comment, and I'll answer questions or edit these articles as they go live.

More past the break ...

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The US National Park Service (NPS) has opened a new park in the vast central interior of Maine. Last Wednesday President Obama designated the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument on 87,000 acres of land (by comparison, Acadia National Park, located on an island off the coast of Maine, is 49,000 acres). The park land consists of what appears to be three discontiguous pieces, the largest of which borders Baxter State Park (home of Mt. Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail) on its western side, and the upper reaches of the Penobscot River on the eastern side.

The park is already open to the public.

The land was donated to the US government by Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt's Bees personal care products company. Quimby, a conservationist, spent decades using the proceeds from her business fortune to buy up Maine forest land; her work was controversial because she placed them off limits to loggers, snowmobilers and hunters. Quimby sold her stake in Burt's Bees to Clorox in 2007.

The new park is controversial in central Maine as well. It is a monument rather than a national park, chiefly because creating a National Park requires an act of Congress, while a national monument can be created by executive order. Obama noted, however, that Acadia National Park was originally established as a national monument as well (in 1916; it became a national park three years later).

There was, and remains, substantial local opposition to the bestowing of the land to the NPS, for a mixture of economic and emotional reasons; in particular, the land is now permanently unavailable for commercial logging, and perhaps for rights-of-way by loggers. Prices of nearby real estate may increase, making the economics more difficult for timber companies. Quimby, the donor, was controversial, as already mentioned, as was the unilateral action by Obama in designating the monument. Some fear the imposition of new air pollution controls on local paper mills. There is distrust of the NPS and fear of the emergence of a bureaucracy that will clash with local values.

But the initial harsh reaction seems to have scaled back a bit. Promises have been made to allow access to hunters, snowmobiles, and all terrain vehicles; logging access is probably another long discussion.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A music service exclusive to owners of the Amazon Echo at half the price of competitors?

Amazon wants to launch a music subscription service that would be half the cost of rival services and run only on its Echo smart speaker, according to Recode.

The service would offer unlimited, ad-free music for $4 to $5 a month, half what Spotify and Apple Music charge, sources told the site. The internet retail giant would like to launch the service as early as next month but has yet to finalize deals with the major recording labels, sources told the site.

[...]

Amazon already offers an Amazon Music service as part of its $99 Amazon Prime annual subscription package, but subscribers have access to a limited catalog of music.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hurricane Katrina and the cleanup and rebuilding of the city in the aftermath have improved soil quality in New Orleans by reducing levels of lead:

Mielke says, prior to Hurricane Katrina, 64 percent of the children living in neighborhoods identified as high-lead areas had blood lead levels equal to or above five micrograms per deciliter. According to the Centers for Disease Control, even a low level of lead in blood has been shown to affect IQ, academic achievement and behavior. Ten years after Katrina, Mielke says the number of children with blood lead levels five and above in high-lead areas dropped to 19 percent. The median amount of lead in the soil dropped from 280 milligrams per kilogram (i.e. ppm) pre-Katrina to 132 mg/kg after the storm.

The reasons for the decrease are threefold, says Mielke. The hurricane and levee failures flooded nearly 80 percent of the city, depositing varying depths of low lead sediment from the coastal environment. Mielke says the massive cleanup that followed also helped reduce the amount of lead dust in the air and soil, as housing interiors were cleaned out and materials covered in lead-based paint were removed or repainted. Lastly, uncontaminated soil was brought in from outside the city for new construction projects.

Spatiotemporal dynamic transformations of soil lead and children's blood lead ten years after Hurricane Katrina: New grounds for primary prevention (DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2016.06.017) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's VP9 codec can (sometimes) outperform H.265/HEVC at higher resolutions:

Netflix, being one of the biggest video streaming services in the world, tested how efficient various video codecs are for a given level of quality. The company discovered that the royalty-free VP9 codec developed primarily by Google is almost as efficient as HEVC, and can sometimes be even better at resolutions of 1080p and higher.

[...] Both HEVC and VP9 promise about 50% bitrate savings for the same quality compared to h.264, but Netflix wanted to test for itself to see if this is true. Netflix sampled 5,000 12-second clips from its catalog, which includes a wide range of genres and signal characteristics. With three codecs, two configurations, three resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p), and eight quality levels per configuration-resolution pair, the company had more than 200 million encoded frames. Netflix applied six quality metrics: PSNR, PSNRMSE, SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF and VMAF. This resulted in more than half a million bitrate-quality curves. Netflix's unused cloud-based encoding infrastructure allowed the company to complete this large test in only a few weeks.

The company learned that previous research showing up to 50% bitrate savings for both HEVC and VP9 compared to h.264 turned out to be true. HEVC's x265 implementation outperformed VP9's libvpx for most resolutions and quality metrics. However, at the 1080p resolution, the difference was either much smaller (in HEVC's favor), or, in some cases, VP9 even beat HEVC in bitrate savings. The fact that VP9 performs better at 1080p or higher is not a major surprise, considering VP9 was optimized for resolutions beyond HD. Google is currently using it for YouTube, where all videos are encoded in VP9.

As the article notes, new codecs are coming. Here's a little more about VP10.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports:

The public cost of cleaning up the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster topped ¥4.2 trillion (roughly [$41] billion) as of March, and is expected to keep climbing, the Japan Times reported [August 28].

That includes costs for radioactive decontamination and compensation payments. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) will sell off its shares to eventually pay back the cost of decontamination and waste disposal, but the Environment Ministry expects that the overall price of those activities could exceed what TEPCO would get for its shares.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer burden is expected to increase and TEPCO is asking for additional help from the government.

[...] Problems still persist at the nuclear plant, most notably with the highly contaminated water being stored in tanks at the site. [...] "The situation with contaminated water at the site is a ticking time bomb and they don't seem to know what they can do--other than to construct more tanks", [said Aileen Mioko-Smith, an anti-nuclear activist with the group Green Action Japan].

takyon: ¥4.2 trillion is approximately $41 billion at today's exchange rates, not $628 billion. You can reach the author of the Common Dreams article, Nadia Prupis, by the email or Twitter account listed on this page.

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

The Price of Solar Is Declining to Unprecedented Lows: Despite already low costs, the installed price of solar fell by 5 to 12 percent in 2015

The installed price of solar energy has declined significantly in recent years as policy and market forces have driven more and more solar installations.

Now, the latest data show that the continued decrease in solar prices is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, with total installed prices dropping by 5 percent for rooftop residential systems, and 12 percent for larger utility-scale solar farms. With solar already achieving record-low prices, the cost decline observed in 2015 indicates that the coming years will likely see utility-scale solar become cost competitive with conventional forms of electricity generation.  

A full analysis of the ongoing decline in solar prices can be found in two separate Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Reports: Tracking the Sun IX focuses on installed pricing trends in the distributed rooftop solar market while Utility-Scale Solar 2015 focuses on large-scale solar farms that sell bulk power to the grid.

[...] The installed cost includes everything needed to get a solar power system up and running: the panels, the power electronics, the mounting hardware, and the installation itself. The continued decline in total installed cost is noteworthy considering the fact that the price of the solar panels (or modules) themselves has remained relatively flat since 2012. This means that the decline in installed cost observed since 2012 was largely caused by a decline in the cost of the inverters that convert the DC power produced by solar panels to AC power for the grid and other "soft" costs such as customer acquisition, system design, installation, and permitting.

[...] Going forward, the declining price of solar across all categories demonstrated by the latest Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reports coupled with the extension of the federal renewable energy investment tax credit through 2019 should drive a continued expansion of the U.S. solar market and even more favorable economics in the next few years. It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of market dynamic develops as solar approaches the tipping point where it becomes more economical than conventional forms of electricity generation.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Even though not tech related, one of my favorite actors has passed...

US actor Gene Wilder, remembered by many for his lead role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died at the age of 83, his family confirmed. The comic actor also starred in classic films such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Mr Wilder frequently collaborated with writer and director Mel Brooks as well as stand-up comedian Richard Pryor. The two-time Oscar-nominated actor was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1989. Mr Wilder's nephew confirmed the actor died on Sunday in Stamford, Connecticut, due to complications from Alzheimer's disease.

takyon writes:

Actor, director, screenwriter, and author Gene Wilder is no more:

Actor and writer Gene Wilder, who brought his signature manic energy to films such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and the role that forever ensconced him in the collective memory of a generation of children, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died. He was 83. Wilder died Monday at his home in Stamford, Conn., of complications from Alzheimer's disease, according to a statement from his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

"The decision to wait until this time to disclose his condition wasn't vanity, but more so that the countless young children that would smile or call out to him 'there's Willy Wonka,' would not have to be then exposed to an adult referencing illness or trouble and causing delight to travel to worry, disappointment or confusion," the statement read. "He simply couldn't bear the idea of one less smile in the world."

IMDB and Wikipedia.

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