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takyon writes:

The world's first known fossilized dinosaur brain tissue has been discovered in a pebble picked up in 2004:

British and Australian scientists have identified an unassuming brown pebble, found more than a decade ago by a fossil hunter in southern England, as the first known example of fossilized dinosaur brain tissue. The fossilized brain, found by fossil enthusiast Jamie Hiscocks near Bexhill in Sussex in 2004, is most likely from a species similar to Iguanodon - a large herbivore that lived during the early cretaceous period, some 133 million years ago.

In a report of their analysis in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London, the researchers said they believed this piece of tissue was so well-preserved because the dinosaur's brain was "pickled" in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water – like a bog or swamp – shortly after it died. "The chances of preserving brain tissue are incredibly small, so the discovery of this specimen is astonishing," said Alex Liu of Cambridge University's department of earth sciences, who worked on its identification.

Also at The Guardian and Science Magazine .

Remarkable preservation of brain tissues in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur (open, DOI: 10.1144/SP448.3) (DX)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"A former soldier cut off two of his gangrene-ridden toes with a pair of tin metal pliers without anesthetic in his living room after becoming frustrated at a six-week delay to being operated on by the National Health Service (NHS)."

[...] "He says he eventually developed gangrene and his doctor said his infected toes would have to be removed. Rather than wait six weeks for the operation, Dibbins took matters into his own hands.

He says the operation, performed without pain killers and in his living room while biting on a rolled up towel, took about an hour. His wife of 40 years was in the house but says she did not want to look.

“Knowing that it would take at least another six weeks to get me in front of a surgeon again, that’s when I bit the bullet and cut off the toes,” Dibbins told the North Devon Journal.

“I did it because it’s what had to be done. My doctor told me my toes were going to kill me."

https://www.rt.com/uk/364152-gangrene-frostbite-toes-cut/

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AnonTechie writes:

A little over 80 years ago, humanity first began broadcasting radio and television signals with enough power that they should leave Earth's atmosphere and progress deep into interstellar space. If someone living in a distant star system were keeping a vigilant eye out for these signals, they would not only be able to pick them up, but immediately identify them as created by an intelligent species. In 1960, Frank Drake first proposed searching for such signals from other star systems by using large radio dishes, giving rise to SETI: the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Yet over the past half-century, we've developed far more efficient ways to communicate across the globe than with broadcast radio and TV signals. Does searching for aliens in the electromagnetic spectrum even make sense anymore ?

[...] After all, if someone from a culture that was versed only in smoke signals and drum beats found themselves deep inside the heart of a forest, they might conclude that there was no intelligent life around. Yet if you gave them a cellphone, there's a good chance they could get reception from right where they stood! Our conclusions may be as biased as the methods we apply.

[...] But if we weren't looking for electromagnetic signals, what would we look at? Indeed, everything in the known Universe is limited by the speed of light, and any signal created on another world would necessitate that we be able to observe it. These signals — in terms of what could reach us — fall into four categories:

Electromagnetic signals, which include any form of light of any wavelength that would indicate the presence of intelligent life.

Gravitational wave signals, which, if there is one unique to intelligent life, would be detectable with sensitive enough equipment anywhere in the Universe.

Neutrino signals, which — although incredibly low in flux at great distances — would have an unmistakeable signature dependent on the reaction that created them.

And finally, actual, macrobiotic space probes, either robotic, computerized, free-floating or inhabited, which made its way towards Earth.

How remarkable that our science-fiction imaginations focus almost exclusively on the fourth possibility, which is by far the least likely !

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/10/21/are-we-looking-for-aliens-in-all-the-wrong-ways/ (requires Javascript) (archive.is).

Also covered by: Three Alternate Ways Scientists Should Hunt For Aliens

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Phoenix666 writes:

The company subbed in dandelion latex for the regular stuff in a batch of its winter tires (WinterContact TS 850 Ps) and after many miles of testing in Sweden and Germany, the company has decided dandelions are an acceptable replacement. "Winter tires typically have a higher amount of natural rubber, and the test was not to change the recipe at all, just a one-to-one swap from the rubber tree to the dandelion rubber," Zmolek told us. "They performed exactly as expected, which showed we were able to do this swap."

Right now, Continental is working with the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology, the Julius Kuehn-Institute, and the plant breeder Aeskulap to breed strains of the plant with optimized rubber yields. "The challenge is not in the technology itself, but the agronomy, so we can rely on it as a continuous source," Zmolek told us. Assuming that goes to plan, we should start to see dandelion tires on sale in the next five to ten years.

SoylentNews has touched on the subject of latex in dandelions before. It looks like one manufacturer is planning to use them in production tires.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

As we've seen in a recent story ("Customer Service Bots Are Getting Better at Detecting Your Agitation"), facial recognition software has moved beyond matching faces to trying to infer the emotional state of the face. At the heart of this effort is the assumption that, generally, facial expressions convey the same emotional state across cultures. Recent research shows this might not be the case.

In the 1960s, psychologist Paul Ekman came up with the method that has become the standard way to test this: present a collection of pictures of Westerners with different facial expressions to people living in isolated cultures and ask them what emotion was being conveyed. His research showed universality in understanding facial expressions across cultures. This has become an accepted axiom of this field ever since. However, in 2011, psychologists Carlos Crivelli and José-Miguel Fernández-Dols investigated the assumptions and methodology of the Ekman experiments. They traveled to the Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea and performed their own experiment using pictures of facial expressions.

Crivelli found that they matched smiling with happiness almost every time. Results for the other combinations were mixed, though. For example, the Trobrianders just couldn’t widely agree on which emotion a scowling face corresponded with. Some said this and some said that. It was the same with the nose-scrunching, pouting, and a neutral expression. There was one facial expression, though, that many of them did agree on: a wide-eyed, lips-parted gasping face (similar to above [link]) that Western cultures almost universally associate with fear and submission. The Trobrianders said it looked “angry.”

The work is being well received in the field, such as by social psychologist Alan Fridlund who noted that the researchers did an excellent job immersing themselves in the Trobriander culture before conducting the experiment.

Despite agreeing broadly with the study’s conclusions, Fridlund doubts it will sway hardliners convinced that emotions bubble forth from a common font. Ekman’s school of thought, for example, arose in the post–World War II era when people were seeking ideas that reinforced our common humanity, Fridlund says. “I think it will not change people’s minds. People have very deep reasons for adhering to either universality or cultural diversity.”

An abstract is available: The fear gasping face as a threat display in a Melanesian society.

[How might this affect Unicode's emoticons (i.e. code points starting at \U0001F600)? -Ed.]

Original Submission

The Washington Times reports a story about protesters on the UC Berkeley campus physically blocking white students from accessing a bridge while police stand by and watch:

The protests were a response to a Safe Space being moved from the fifth floor of a building down to the basement.

[Original version of this story had "UCLA"; corrected to: "UC Berkeley" -Ed.]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The state's Department of Transportation issued a poster telling parents to use their own judgment. How refreshing.

While the rest of America is going crazy over keeping kids safe and protected, to the point of near-suffocation, the state of Oregon is a refreshing haven of sanity. The [Oregon] Department of Transportation (ODOT) recently issued a poster addressing the question, “When can my child safely walk or ride to school alone?” Oregon has no legal minimum age requirement for children travelling to school on their own.

Rather than enumerating a list of frightening hypothetical scenarios and urging parents to hover, the ODOT poster encourages parents to use their brains in assessing a child’s readiness for independence.

Oregon has given its residents permission to make their own parenting decisions.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Men can take birth control shots to prevent pregnancy in their female partners, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Researchers are still working to perfect the combination of hormonal contraceptives to reduce the risk of mild to moderate side effects, including depression and other mood disorders.

While women can choose from a number of birth control methods, men have few options to control their own fertility. Available methods for men include condoms, vasectomies and withdrawal.

Better birth control options are needed for men. In 2012, 40 percent of all pregnancies worldwide were unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

[...] Researchers stopped enrolling new participants in the study in 2011 due to the rate of adverse events, particularly depression and other mood disorders, reported by the participants. The men reported side effects including injection site pain, muscle pain, increased libido and acne. Twenty men dropped out of the study due to side effects.

Despite the adverse effects, more than 75 percent of participants reported being willing to use this method of contraception at the conclusion of the trial.

Given the number and nature of the side-effects, the researchers have called for further study to reduce their effects.

Journal Reference:
Hermann M. Behre, et al, Efficacy and Safety of an Injectable Combination Hormonal Contraceptive for Men. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, October 27, 2016 DOI: 10.1210/jc.2016-2141

Where are the shots administered?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Oh boy, Soylent. The post-food people are back at it again with the stomach problems. This time, it’s not the Bars that are getting investigated, but their Powder 1.6 product, which is turning up similar symptoms.

The company has stopped all distribution and sales of the powder for now. It announced in a blog post yesterday that all of their products tested negative for contamination and pathogens. But they’re hoping to find out what’s making some people sick as soon as possible:

“During our review, we noticed that a handful of consumers (less than 0.1%) who consumed Powder 1.6 over the past several months reported stomach-related symptoms that are consistent with what our Bar customers described. Interestingly, we didn’t see similar complaints during the 1.5 formulation. This possible connection allows us to narrow the field considerably given there are only a few ingredients that are specific to only our bars and Powder 1.6.”

Full Article:
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-recalls-powder-after-more-complaints-of-digestive-distress
https://web.archive.org/web/20161028214707/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-recalls-powder-after-more-complaints-of-digestive-distress

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Living Planet assessment has found that global vertebrate wildlife populations have declined by 58% since 1970, and suggests that vertebrates will have declined by two-thirds in 2020:

The Living Planet Report is published every two years and aims to provide an assessment of the state of the world's wildlife. This analysis looked at data collected on 3,700 different species of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles - about 6% of the total number of vertebrate species in the world. The researchers then analysed how the population sizes had changed over time since 1970. The last report, published in 2014, estimated that the world's wildlife populations had halved over the last 40 years.

[...] However, Living Planet reports have drawn some criticisms. Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University in the United States, said that while wildlife was in decline, there were too many gaps in the data to boil population loss down to a single figure. "There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very, very sketchy," he told BBC News. "For example, if you look at where the data comes from, not surprisingly, it is massively skewed towards western Europe. When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier... there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean. They're trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number.... It's flawed."

But Dr Freeman said the team had taken the best data possible from around the world. "It's completely true that in some regions and in some groups, like tropical amphibians for example, we do have a lack of data. But that's because there is a lack of data. We're confident that the method we are using is the best method to present an overall estimate of population decline. It's entirely possible that species that aren't being monitored as effectively may be doing much worse - but I'd be very surprised if they were doing much better than we observed."

The Living Planet Report 2016 can be downloaded here.

Also at CNN.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As part of Operation Epsilon, captured German nuclear physicists were secretly recorded at Farm Hall, a house in England where they were interned. Here's how the German scientists reacted to the news (on August 6th, 1945) that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, taken from the now-declassified transcripts (pp. 116-122 of this copy):

Otto Hahn (co-discoverer of nuclear fission): I don't believe it... They are 50 years further advanced than we.

Werner Heisenberg (leading figure of the German atomic bomb effort): I don't believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their £500,000,000 in separating isotopes: and then it is possible.

It's interesting to read how the German scientists reacted, and how some of them seemed to have not wanted to succeed in doing the same thing for the Nazis.

Original Submission

Anoneemouse Coward writes:

From Science Alert:

On the eve of receiving his 2013 Nobel Prize, famed physicist Peter Higgs told The Guardian that he wouldn't be productive enough to get a job in today's academic system, where researchers are expected to constantly pump out research.

Higgs, 87, said he has never sent an email or made a mobile phone call, and published less than 10 papers after his groundbreaking 1964 prediction of the Higgs boson, which outlined how the Universe got its mass.

"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964," Higgs told Decca Aitkenhead.

Now a new survey of young researchers by Nature suggests that things have only gotten worse since Higgs' comments, with researchers today under even more pressure with less resources, and less job stability.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft has launched the Surface Studio, a 28-inch all-in-one PC reminiscent of the iMac but with touchscreen capabilities and other accessories for "content creators":

The thin aluminum 28-inch Surface Studio desktop PC that Microsoft trotted out here Wednesday isn't going to make it into most homes anytime soon. Not at $2,999 to start, and on up to $4,199 if you don't hold back on the specs. If you simply must have it, Studio goes on preorder today; it'll be available in limited quantities by the holidays. There's no question this innovative machine, which at that price is clearly aimed at business users and a more affluent subsegment of potential home buyers, is well worth paying attention to for the way it can leverage the "early 2017" arrival of Windows 10 Creators Update.

At first blush, the design brings to mind Apple's iMac, though the differences are apparent soon enough, and not just because Surface runs Windows 10 and Macs run macOS Sierra. For starters, you can push down on the Surface Studio and via its zero-gravity hinge, angle it at 20-degrees and effectively turn it into a drafting surface. When upright you'd likely use it for more typical Windows computing.

And since Surface Studio like other Surface computers uses a Windows 10 touch-display — Apple hasn't brought touchscreen capability to any of its Macs, and I'm not banking on that happening when it holds a press event for new Macs on Thursday — you can also draw or write directly on the screen using a special Surface Pen. It boasts 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity plus an eraser. Microsoft has also unveiled a hockey-puck shaped accessory called Surface Dial along with Surface Studio itself. You can rotate the puck to summon tools and zoom in on and manipulate objects on the screen; it takes advantage of a radial menu. You can directly place Surface Dial onto the the Surface Studio surface, or use it off the screen.

Also at Ars Technica, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37787493, and PCWorld.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In the next five years, every important decision, whether it's business or personal, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson. That's the vision of IBM president and CEO Ginni Rometty, in a keynote speech at IBM's World of Watson conference Wednesday.

Watson, the company's artificial intelligence-fueled system, is working in fields like health care, finance, entertainment and retail, connecting businesses more easily with their customers, making sense of big data and helping doctors find treatments for cancer patients.

The Watson system is set to transform how businesses function and how people live their lives. "Our goal is augmenting intelligence," Rometty said. "It is man and machine. This is all about extending your expertise. A teacher. A doctor. A lawyer. It doesn't matter what you do. We will extend it."

Is one woman's vision another man's nightmare?

Original Submission

RamiK writes:

Phoronix reports:

Following up on Last month's discussion.

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

Last month, a team of scientists led by Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University determined from observations of 153 galaxies that the dynamics of galaxy rotation seems to depend solely on the normal, visible matter in it (SN coverage here). It was a strong argument that rather than hypothesising dark matter to explain the oddities in galactic rotation, it may instead be necessary to modify the laws of gravity.

However, two scientists from McMaster University, Ben Keller and James Wadsley, have just recently examined the results of a detailed simulation of dark matter in galaxy formation previously done known as the McMaster Unbiased Galaxy Simulations 2 (MUGS2). The simulation was a sophisticated one that took into account various other factors such as gas dynamics, star formation, and stellar feedback, but incorporated no new physics beyond that of the standard Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model. They found that the relation that McGaugh et. al. discovered from observations of real galaxies was reproduced just about exactly by the simulation. Their paper is here. Their abstract states:

Recent analysis (McGaugh et al. 2016) of the SPARC galaxy sample found a surprisingly tight relation between the radial acceleration inferred from the rotation curves, and the acceleration due to the baryonic components of the disc. It has been suggested that this relation may be evidence for new physics, beyond ΛCDM. In this letter we show that the 18 galaxies from the MUGS2 match the SPARC acceleration relation. These cosmological simulations of star forming, rotationally supported discs were simulated with a WMAP3 ΛCDM cosmology, and match the SPARC acceleration relation with less scatter than the observational data. These results show that this acceleration law is a consequence of dissipative collapse of baryons, rather than being evidence for exotic dark-sector physics or new dynamical laws.

So now it seems that the earlier troubles with dark matter were actually the result of too naïve a simulation, and by taking into account additional known, relevant physics, the troubles disappear.

Further coverage and commentary by astrophysicist Ethan Siegel here (archive.is).

Related: Study Casts Doubt on Cosmic Acceleration and Dark Energy

Original Submission