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South Carolina County Sprays for Zika, Kills Honey Bees

captain_nifty and -- OriginalOwner_ wrote in with stories on this tragedy:

As Found here:

Following cases of Zika in the area, the county dispersed insecticides through aerial spraying using aircraft. They did not notify local populations, leading to the mass death of area bee keepers' entire population of honeybees.

This seems especially bad, given the context of continuing decline in bee populations:

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

Common Dreams reports

Millions of honeybees are dead in Dorchester County, South Carolina, and local beekeepers say the mass death was a result of the county spraying the area with the controversial pesticide Naled on [August 28] in an effort to combat Zika-spreading mosquitoes.

[...] A single apiary in Summerville, South Carolina lost 2.5 million bees in 46 hives, according to a local resident [...] Kristina Solara Litzenberger.

[...] "Without honeybees, we have no food", Litzenberger added. "Additionally, one can only deduct that if that much damage was caused to the bees, how will this affect people, wildlife, and the ecosystem?"

Beekeepers are supposed to be warned prior to any pesticide spraying, so that they can cover their hives to protect them. But local bee owners say they were not given any warning about Sunday's spraying, according to the local news station WCBD--and this was also the first time the community was subjected to aerial spraying, rather than spraying from trucks.

[...] Naled is a particularly dangerous pesticide, as the Miami Herald reported earlier this month:

Several studies suggest that long-term exposure to even low levels of Naled can have serious health effects for children and infants as well as wildlife, including butterflies and bees, for whom exposure can be lethal. Some studies suggest it might have neurological and developmental effects on human fetuses, including on brain size, echoing the severe consequences that eradication of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries the Zika virus is meant to prevent.

[...] The EU banned the chemical's use in Europe in 2012.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

On Thursday, Nintendo 3DS Direct YouTube stream -- featuring a doughnut hungry Reggie -- announced a bevy of upcoming titles for its dual screen handheld console.

Leading the announcements was a 3DS port of Super Mario Maker, the Mario series level creator released on WiiU last year. While 3DS players will be able to play most existing WiiU uploaded courses via the 100 Mario challenge mode, they will not be able to upload courses themselves, though they will have the ability to create and share courses using local multiplayer or Nintendo's Streetpass. Another WiiU port, of Yoshi's Wooly World, was also announced, along with updates for the existing Hyrule Warriors Legends, another 3DS port of a WiiU title.

Ports aside, the stream featured several other upcoming 3DS games, including a new Phoenix Wright title, a new 2D Pikmin game, Pokemon Sun and Moon, Mario Party Star Rush, and Shin Megami Tensei IV. There are also new updates for Mii-Plaza (for people who live in non-rurally depopulated areas).

The stream came only days after the latest Nintendo NX rumors, which suggest that the upcoming console will be some kind of hybrid portable, with detachable controllers. The Wall Street Journal (Paywalled) also reported today the other long standing rumor that the NX will use game cartridges instead of CDs. Despite flying speculations, Nintendo has so far remained relatively quiet on the NX, with CEO Reggie Fils-Aim only recently commenting that "For us, it's not about specs, it's not about teraflops, it's not about the horsepower of a particular system. For us, it's about the content". After lackluster sales of the WiiU, and with approaching hardware upgrades for the Xbox One and PS4, Nintendo strategy appears to be another gamble on innovation, but will they replicate the success of the original Wii? The NX is (rumored) to be due sometime in 2017.

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Zz9zZ writes:

From The Guardian :

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it "very unlikely" that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa's top climate scientist.

[...] But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

[...] [Director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin] Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From a Science article:

Phase III trials are currently in progress and should be completed by 2020.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v537/n7618/full/nature19323.html
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02477800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aducanumab

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Booga1 writes:

The Missouri Automobile Dealers Association sued the Missouri Revenue Department and now a judge has ruled in their favor on part of their claims in Missouri.

Cole County Judge Daniel Green ruled that the Missouri Revenue Department violated state law when it gave the California-based manufacturer a license for a University City dealership in 2013 and a franchise dealer license for a Kansas City dealership in 2014. That allowed the automaker to sell cars directly to customers instead of through a dealership serving as a middleman.

[...] Tesla has faced similar roadblocks to selling its cars in several states with dealership laws similar to Missouri's. In some of those states, legislators have been looking at ways to tweak laws and let the company operate.

Previously: Tesla Direct Sales Blocked in New Jersey

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.nature.com/news/iran-releases-physicist-after-five-years-in-jail-1.20505
http://www.nature.com/news/the-week-in-science-5-11-august-2016-1.20385

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butthurt writes:

OpenBSD 6.0 has been released. Among the changes listed in the release announcement are removal of Linux emulation, systrace, the usermount option, and the VAX port.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Reports of additional attacks against banks that use SWIFT, the global financial transaction messaging network, came to light Wednesday. The attacks were reportedly persistent, sophisticated and in some cases successful, impacting an undisclosed number of financial institutions.

It's the latest development since February when cybercriminals used SWIFT to steal $81 million in a Bangladesh Bank heist. Reports of the latest bank attacks come from a private letter obtained by the Reuters news agency sent by SWIFT to its clients informing them of the attacks and urging them to shore-up their cyber defenses.

The letter told clients that SWIFT customer "environments" have been compromised and that the possibility of a "threat is persistent, adaptive and sophisticated – and it is here to stay," according to the Reuters.

The letter said attackers were attempting to use customer environments to send fraudulent payment instructions for SWIFT-enabled transfers. The letter informed clients that the attempted thefts surfaced in June and that cybercriminals had stolen an undisclosed sum of money from a number of different unnamed victims.

SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a private network used by financial organizations to send and receive transactions.

While details are scant on the most recent attacks, SWIFT said weak local security that allowed attackers to compromise networks and send bogus messages requesting bank transfers was the common thread between attacks.

Since the February theft, SWIFT has been stepping up efforts to prod banks to tighten security. Earlier this month SWIFT announced a security tools campaign that introduced an updated two-factor authentication system in its products to help customers protect access to SWIFT interfaces.

Previously: Bangladesh Central Bank Exposed to Hackers by Cheap Switches, No Firewall

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/whistleblower-sues-duke-claims-doctored-data-helped-win-200-million-grants

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.nature.com/news/tasmanian-devils-show-signs-of-resistance-to-devastating-facial-cancer-1.20508
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160830/ncomms12684/full/ncomms12684.html

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

Reviled Florida State Attorney Angela Corey lost her reelection bid on [August 30], prompting widespread celebration as the woman The Nation once suggested was "the cruelest prosecutor in America" was ousted.

"Corey's loss is an encouraging sign that the public will no longer tolerate overzealous and unprincipled criminal prosecutions, including women and children", University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks said in a statement.

Corey, whose eight-year tenure in Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit Court saw her charge 77 children as adults in 2016 alone and sentence more people to death than any other Florida prosecutor, gained widespread notoriety for her inadequate prosecution of Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, and for seeking a 60-year sentence for Marissa Alexander, a domestic violence survivor with three children, for firing a warning shot in the direction of her abusive husband. (Alexander spent three years in prison.)

[...] Corey was defeated by unknown opponent and corporate lawyer Melissa Nelson, who will now face off with write-in candidate Kenny Leigh in the general election--although Jacksonville media noted that no write-in candidate has ever been elected to the state attorney position in Florida, and that Leigh has yet to make a single campaign appearance.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

DGIST announced on Tuesday August 2, 2016 that Professor Choi Hong-soo's research team from the Department of Robotics Engineering developed ciliary microrobots with high propulsion efficiency in highly-viscous fluid environments in the human body such as blood by mimicking the movement of paramecia's cilia.

Professor Choi's research team succeeded in fabricating the world's first ciliary microrobots utilizing ultra-fine three-dimensional processing technology and asymmetric magnetic drive technology by applying microorganism's ciliary movement, which thus far had only been theorized but never put into practice.

Microfluidic environments in which microorganisms move include highly viscous environments like the human body's internal fluids; thus, in a macro environment, it is difficult to create propulsion with swimming-based mechanisms such as inertia-based symmetrical rowing like that used by large animals such as humans. As such, microorganisms moving in highly-viscous environments utilize various other propulsion techniques such as spiral drive motion, progressive wave motion, ciliary asymmetric reciprocating motion, and the like.

Microrobots that use propulsion mechanisms such as spiral drive motion and progressive wave motion were first realized and implemented at the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland; University of Twente, Netherlands; and Harvard University, USA. However, the development of microrobots that move utilizing ciliary motion has thus far been absent due to the difficulty of producing a microstructure with a large number of cilia as well as with asymmetrical drive.

Professor Choi's research team has produced a ciliary microrobot with nickel and titanium coating on top of photo-curable polymer material, using three-dimensional laser process technology and precise metal coating techniques.

The full journal article is available.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Roger Tsien shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his "development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP)". Fluorescent proteins revolutionized molecular biology and has contributed to a better understanding of many fields.

Tsien also helped Douglas Prasher, who made substantial contributions that enabled the study of GFP but had to resort to driving a shuttle bus after losing funding because his work was undervalued at the time, by giving Prasher a job in his lab after receiving the Nobel Prize.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/09/01/roger-tsien-1952-2016
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/aug/31/roger-tsien-dies/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Y._Tsien
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

You know a language has arrived when its toolchain ships as a standard component with operating systems.

Rust, Mozilla's language for safe and speedy systems level programming, has landed a prime-time slot in the next edition of Fedora Linux, according to the change set for the first public alpha for Fedora 25.

This doesn't mean that any system components in Fedora will be authored with Rust -- yet. But it does mean that Fedora users, many of whom are developers, will have easy access to Rust's ecosystem in their Fedora environments.

[...]Fedora's rationale for including Rust stems from both the language's growing popularity and its potential relevance to Fedora's user base. Aside from citing Rust's presence in the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey as one of the most loved languages, Red Hat noted, "Mozilla is starting to use Rust in Firefox, and now Fedora's Firefox maintainers could enable those components."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Solar Industry Magazine reports

Following a long local--and national--campaign, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a pro-solar ballot measure during the state's primary election on [August 30].

Passed with 73% of the vote, Amendment 4 implements a change to the state constitution and clears the way for the legislature to implement new tax laws that advocates say will end prohibitive tax liabilities and help boost Florida's fledgling distributed solar market.

According to Vote Solar, a big proponent of the measure, Amendment 4 was placed on the ballot after garnering unanimous support from state policymakers in March. Specifically, the amendment authorizes the state legislature to abate ad valorem taxation and exempt tangible personal property tax on solar or renewable energy source devices installed on commercial and industrial property. This reflects an extension of the existing ad valorem abatement for solar and renewable energy devices on residential property. Once implemented by the legislature, the tax incentives of the amendment will begin in 2018 and extend for 20 years.

[...] The ballot summary says, "This amendment establishes a right under Florida's constitution for consumers to own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use. State and local governments shall retain their abilities to protect consumer rights and public health, safety and welfare, and to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do."

The Florida Supreme court narrowly approved the amendment's language in a 3-4 vote, and in her dissenting opinion[PDF][1], Justice Barbara Pariente deemed the ballot measure a "wolf in sheep's clothing".

[1] Unable to resolve host address.

Previous: Florida Supreme Court Removes Barrier to Widespread Solar Power

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