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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Earlier this summer, Francis Thackeray published a short paper in the South African Journal of Science suggesting that lichens had deposited manganese upon the surfaces of hominin bone from the Dinaledi Chamber. Knowing that lichens depend upon light for their growth, Thackeray suggested that the Dinaledi bones had once been exposed to light for long enough to explain the lichen growth and manganese deposition.

Thackeray proposed that the geological evidence was somehow wrong, and that the Dinaledi Chamber had once been open to the surface. He elaborated on this view in an essay written for The Conversation:

Our team, including geologists and geochemists, has now published a response to Thackeray. We review some of the ways that manganese and other trace elements from dolomitic limestone can be deposited on fossil bone, and present additional evidence from the bone surfaces that rules out lichen involvement.

The Dinaledi bones bear traces of manganese and iron oxides. Some of the staining is dendritic, with very tiny features that suggest microbial involvement. The deposition process happens within sediment, in the dark

Several of the hominin fossils have linear tide marks of manganese or iron oxides. These mark an interface of air and sediment in which these bones were embedded.

Looking through a microscope, the bones bear many different patterns of mineral staining and calcite deposition. Some of the fossils have calcium carbonate deposition on top of manganese staining; others have manganese deposition on top of calcium carbonate. Some have successive encrustations of iron oxide, manganese, and iron oxide, as visible in this photo:

Additionally, some fossils have manganese deposits that have been removed by gastropod activity; others have manganese formed on top of old gastropod markings. All of this evidence is consistent with a long history of manganese and iron oxide deposition on the fossils within their current sedimentary environment.

None of this geochemical activity requires light.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"We are temporarily adjusting the Galaxy Note7 production schedule in order to take further steps to ensure quality and safety matters," a company spokesperson said. Production of the phone has been temporarily suspended, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

The development is the latest in a string of embarrassing setbacks for Samsung over the Note 7, one of its flagship smartphones. It comes aftercell phone carriers in the United States and Australia said they would stop offering replacement Note 7s following concerns that the new versions are no safer from fire risk than the originals.

Soon after the Galaxy Note 7 hit stores in August, some users reported that their phones were catching fire. Samsung (SSNLF) recalled about 2.5 million of the devices worldwide last month, blaming faulty batteries for overheating the phones and causing them to ignite.

Replacement phones were supposed to solve the issue, and users started trading in their old devices. But some customers have been reporting the same dangerous problems with their new phones.

In the past week, an American user reported his replacement phone caught fire, even though it wasn't plugged in. And on Wednesday, smoke started billowing from a replacement Galaxy Note 7 aboard a Southwest Airline plane before it departed, prompting the flight's cancellation.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has said it is investigating the incident on the plane.

TuanAnh Nguyen, a research analyst at Canalys, said the production halt would cost Samsung billions of dollars in lost sales over the next six to nine months. It should now abandon the product entirely, he said. "Samsung needs to quickly put an end to the Note 7 line so as not to get deeper into trouble with recalls and faulty devices which will tarnish its brand," Nguyen said.

UPDATE:

Official: Samsung Halts All Sales of Galaxy Note 7, Recommends Powering Down and Getting a Refund |

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for exec

Moments ago, Samsung confirmed that they are halting all sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note 7 across the globe. Not only that, but they are recommending that owners of the phone turn them off and “take advantage of the remedies available.” Those remedies are returning the phone at the place of purchase for a refund …

Source: http://www.droid-life.com/2016/10/10/official-samsung-halts-sales-galaxy-note-7-recommends-powering-getting-refund/

All sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7 have now been halted.

Previously:

Samsung Recalls Galaxy Note 7 due to 'Exploding' Batteries
Florida Man Sues Samsung Over Galaxy Note 7 that Exploded in His Pants
Samsung Faces the Prospect of a Second Galaxy Note 7 Recall

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A biography of Adolf Hitler published two years before his autobiography Mein Kampf may also have been written by Hitler:

In the early fall of 1923, when Adolf Hitler was still mostly known for his frenzied speeches at Munich beer halls, a slim biography was published that lauded him as the savior of the German nation and even compared him to Jesus. The book, "Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches," was credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerber, a German aristocrat and war hero. Scholars have said that Hitler sought Mr. von Koerber out for the biography because he needed a conservative figure without links to the Nazi Party to help legitimize him as a leader.

However, new research says Hitler penned the work himself. This suggests that Hitler had designs on taking power earlier than many historians have previously thought and manipulated public opinion to get there.

"Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches" was published two years before "Mein Kampf," the autobiography and manifesto that historians consider the moment Hitler went from political propagandist to leader in waiting. The von Koerber biography was published shortly before Hitler helped lead a bungled coup in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

"It's 1923, and Hitler suddenly decides he needs to boost his national profile," said Thomas Weber, a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, who uncovered documents in Mr. von Koerber's archival papers that he argues reveals Hitler as the biography's true author. The documents included a sworn statement by the publisher's widow.

Dusty old Godwin meme.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

Users of Stylish [a web browser extension "that can apply a user-supplied style sheet to a web page, in addition to the Cascading Style Sheets provided by the website itself"] who have set their styles to auto-update may have noticed that they become corrupt in the process since October 6, 2016.

This is caused by an infrastructure move after ownership of the project was transferred to another party.

[...] Probably the biggest issue right now is that users are reporting that styles are not delivered in working condition during updates. It seems to be a transport issue and not one of storage.

[...] It is highly suggested to turn off automatic updates for userstyles until the issue is resolved.

[...] The issues [share] similarities with how the then-popular userscripts.org website stopped working from one day to the next. Lets hope that this is not a repeat of that.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

There is an interview with Joel Spolsky on GeekWire which reports that companies should Just shut up and let your devs concentrate:

If you want to attract and keep developers, don't emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.

That's the view of Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow, a popular Q&A site for programmers, who spoke this morning at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.

"Facebook's campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers," Spolsky said in an interview with GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. "But developers don't want to overhear conversations. That's ideal for a trading floor, but developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don't want to work there."

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

Can you even remember what a new Mac smells like?

Is it distinctive? Does it have something unique about it? Or is that smell merely the result of your excessive excitement at buying one?

I only ask because Twelve South, which makes Apple accessories, has released something called the New Mac Candle.

It's made of 100 percent soy wax. I assume that's a good thing. You, though, will be wondering what a new Mac smells like. In candle odor terms, that is. New Macs smell of mint, peach, basil, lavender, mandarin and sage, according to Twelve South.

What does a new PC smell like? And thus, a new meme is born...

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have developed an "ink" for creating synthetic bone implants that induce bone regeneration:

A Northwestern Engineering research team has developed a 3-D printable ink that produces a synthetic bone implant that rapidly induces bone regeneration and growth. This hyperelastic "bone" material, whose shape can be easily customized, one day could be especially useful for the treatment of bone defects in children.

[...] Shah's 3-D printed biomaterial is a mix of hydroxyapatite (a calcium mineral found naturally in human bone) and a biocompatible, biodegradable polymer that is used in many medical applications, including sutures. Shah's hyperelastic "bone" material shows great promise in in vivo animal models; this success lies in the printed structure's unique properties. It's majority hydroxyapatite yet hyperelastic, robust and porous at the nano, micro and macro levels. "Porosity is huge when it comes to tissue regeneration, because you want cells and blood vessels to infiltrate the scaffold," Shah said. "Our 3-D structure has different levels of porosity that is advantageous for its physical and biological properties."

While hydroxyapatite has been proven to induce bone regeneration, it is also notoriously tricky to work with. Clinical products that use hydroxyapatite or other calcium phosphate ceramics are hard and brittle. To compensate for that, previous researchers created structures composed mostly of polymers, but this shields the activity of the bioceramic. Shah's bone biomaterial, however, is 90 percent by weight percent hydroxyapatite and just 10 percent by weight percent polymer and still maintains its elasticity because of the way its structure is designed and printed. The high concentration of hydroxyapatite creates an environment that induces rapid bone regeneration. [...] That's not to say that other substances couldn't be combined into the ink. Because the 3-D printing process is performed at room temperature, Shah's team was able to incorporate other elements, such as antibiotics, into the ink.

Also at Nature Research Highlights (DOI: 10.1038/538008a).

Hyperelastic "bone": A highly versatile, growth factor–free, osteoregenerative, scalable, and surgically friendly biomaterial (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf7704) (DX)

Previously:
A Novel Hybrid Polymer Simplifies 3-D Printing of Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Partial transcripts of Hillary Clinton's Wall Street speeches have been released by WikiLeaks along with other emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. Bernie Sanders had called on Clinton to release transcripts of the speeches, for which she is estimated to have earned around $26 million, during the Democratic primary:

Transcripts of private speeches by US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have been released by the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks. In one of the extracts, Mrs Clinton told bankers that they were best-placed to help reform the US financial sector. [...] The excerpts include comments made at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs in October 2013 in which Mrs Clinton spoke of the need to consult Wall Street over financial reform. "The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry," Mrs Clinton said. At another speech presented to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she spoke of her "dream" for a common trade market. "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere," Mrs Clinton said.

John Podesta blames the Russians. The emails were posted a few days after the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks.

Here is "The Podesta Emails; Part One" press release at WikiLeaks, which emphasizes Clinton involvement with the sale of Uranium One to Russian interests:

As Russian interests gradually took control of Uranium One millions of dollars were donated to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 from individuals directly connected to the deal including the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer. Although Mrs Clinton had an agreement with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors to the Clinton Foundation, the contributions from the Chairman of Uranium One were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons. When the New York Times article was published the Clinton campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, strongly rejected the possibility that then-Secretary Clinton exerted any influence in the US goverment's review of the sale of Uranium One, describing this possibility as "baseless".

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

There's plenty of room at the bottom:

For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market. Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged.

A research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. For comparison, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick. "We made the smallest transistor reported to date," said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab's Materials Science Division. "The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics."

[...] "This work demonstrated the shortest transistor ever," said Javey, who is also a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. "However, it's a proof of concept. We have not yet packed these transistors onto a chip, and we haven't done this billions of times over. We also have not developed self-aligned fabrication schemes for reducing parasitic resistances in the device. But this work is important to show that we are no longer limited to a 5-nanometer gate for our transistors. Moore's Law can continue a while longer by proper engineering of the semiconductor material and device architecture."

MoS₂ transistors with 1-nanometer gate lengths (DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4698) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

LinkedIn has introduced a feature that could make it easier for users to look for a better job discreetly:

LinkedIn has removed an obstacle preventing some members from using the professional social network from finding their next job: The possibility of their current boss finding out. On Thursday, the company released its Open Candidates feature which now lets members privately notify recruiters that they're open for opportunities without exposing themselves to their current company.

[...] In research conducted in the past year, LinkedIn claimed that 77 percent of professional workers are open to their next opportunity. However, with social media, the fear has been that any signal made on a profile could get back to an employer, which is why the Open Candidates feature lets anyone operate stealthily. It's perfect for those who are open to change, but aren't precisely set on making a move ... yet. "This is a signal to recruiters that you want to hear from them," explained Eric Owski, LinkedIn's head of talent brand products. [...] So far, this feature has been tested in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Owski said that 40,000 people per day have opted-in for this experience, with close to 1 million candidates total, out of the 450 million on the social network.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports

For quite some time now the FTC has been making lots of noises about the problems of the patent system and patent trolls in particular. While the US Patent Office itself has done little to address the problem, the FTC has recognized the harm patent trolling is doing to innovation and consumers. More than five years ago, the FTC released a big report on patent trolling and the problems it causes--suggesting that the Patent Office should start getting rid of vague patents with "indefinite" claims. That has happened a little bit, but much more because of the Supreme Court forcing the issue, rather than the USPTO listening to the FTC.

However, since then, it's appeared that the FTC has only grown more concerned. Basically every year we report that the FTC is investigating patent trolls in some form or another. [...] Since [2013], though, it's been mostly crickets.

[...]And now, finally, after all these years, the FTC has released its big report. It appears that 22 patent trolling operations responded to the subpoenas, though many had "affiliates and other related entities" allowing the FTC to study many more patent trolling operations overall. The study lumps patent trolls (they prefer the euphemistic "Patent Assertion Entities" or PAEs) into two categories: litigation trolls and portfolio trolls.

In short, litigation trolls are the smaller guys with just a small number of patents, who would threaten and sue companies (and quickly reach settlements) over those few patents. It's more of a "mom & pop" shakedown kind of business.

Portfolio trolls are the bigger, well funded operations, that have a massive portfolio of patents and play a more comprehensive shakedown game, going to lots of big companies and basically saying "you infringe on some of our patents, so give us a bunch of money to not figure out which ones." Think: Intellectual Ventures or Acacia.

[...]The study also looked at wireless chipset manufacturers (i.e., companies that actually implement products) to compare them to patent trolling operations. The key question here: do the actual implementers use patents in the same way to "protect" their business. As you might expect, they don't act very similar at all:

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

But there is one place where smart technology might make a difference, and that is in the kitchen. I have been dismissive of smart fridges and internet connected ranges before, but after reading Jennifer Tuohy’s article The Smart Kitchen: The Next Big Hope for the Internet of Things in TriplePundit, I realize that you cannot look at these appliances in isolation. She writes:

What is the largest producer of waste and second largest user of energy in the home? The kitchen. …I believe the smart kitchen is the next big thing for the smart home, the residential arm of IOT. If manufacturers can figure out a way to make smart products in the kitchen that reduce waste and energy use and increase convenience, then we will have a win for the planet, the consumer and business.

Is a smart kitchen a good idea, or the set up for an episode of, "Murder, She Wrote?"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Hawaiki Cable, which would create trans-Pacific competition for those shipping bits across the ocean to Australia and New Zealand, plans to get its Australian landing in place by August 2017.

That information comes via its environmental impact statement, published in this PDF.

In the document, the company says it will be using the Coogee cable landing, which is part of the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Southern Sydney Cable Protection Zone.

Other cables in the zone are the southern landings of Australia-Japan Cable and Southern Cross Cable, Telstra's Endeavour Cable, and the venerable Tasman 2 cable.

Surveying is due to begin in December 2016, the filing states, and it notes that the cable layers will try not to upset whales during their migration season. Here's the cetacean clause:

“Surveying activities have been scheduled to start and complete in December 2016, avoiding the sensitive window of whale migratory season. Delays in the commencement of cable surveying could push the survey into January/February 2017; should this occur, surveying activities are still well ahead of the whale migratory season which commences in May and continues through to November. Hence sufficient contingency period has been allowed to restrict surveying activities outside of migration season”.

Original Submission

Since the launch of SoylentNews in February of 2014, there have been 274,870 comment moderations made against the 412,100 comments that our community has posted to our site. Who has posted the most comments? Who garnered the most up-moderations? The most down-moderations?

Such simple questions, but they led to a fun bit of DB querying. The results surprised me, and I thought others might be interested, as well. Most surprising to me was the assessment of comments from Anonymous Cowards.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

According to a new study, the fossil fuel industry's natural gas leakage rate has declined, but that has been counteracted by increases in production:

Yesterday, a study led by Stefan Schwietzke, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said that a detailed study of atmospheric samples, some taken from ancient ice cores and others taken recently, shows that the leakage rate from natural gas production has declined in recent decades, despite a sharp increase in natural gas production and distribution.

While accountants and engineers in the oil and gas industry may take some comfort in the finding, the net effect is that the atmosphere still sustained damage, according to the author of the study. "All the efficiency gains have been almost 100 percent counterbalanced by increased production," Schwietzke explained in an interview, referring to recent company efforts to find and minimize leaks. The study used carbon isotopes, a kind of chemical fingerprint, to identify sources of methane leaks and found that fossil fuel industry emissions plus natural geological methane seepage have not increased over time. However, it also concluded that measurements used by previous studies appear to have underestimated the size of these emissions. They are "60 to 110% greater than current estimates," the study said.

Upward revision of global fossil fuel methane emissions based on isotope database (DOI: 10.1038/nature19797) (DX)

Here we re-evaluate the global methane budget and the contribution of the fossil fuel industry to methane emissions based on long-term global methane and methane carbon isotope records. We compile the largest isotopic methane source signature database so far, including fossil fuel, microbial and biomass-burning methane emission sources. We find that total fossil fuel methane emissions (fossil fuel industry plus natural geological seepage) are not increasing over time, but are 60 to 110 per cent greater than current estimates owing to large revisions in isotope source signatures. We show that this is consistent with the observed global latitudinal methane gradient. After accounting for natural geological methane seepage, we find that methane emissions from natural gas, oil and coal production and their usage are 20 to 60 per cent greater than inventories. Our findings imply a greater potential for the fossil fuel industry to mitigate anthropogenic climate forcing, but we also find that methane emissions from natural gas as a fraction of production have declined from approximately 8 per cent to approximately 2 per cent over the past three decades.

Original Submission