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Phoenix666 writes:

Satellite engineers have been puzzling over why GPS navigation systems on low-orbiting satellites like ESA's Swarm sometimes black out when they fly over the equator between Africa and South America. Thanks to Swarm, it appears 'thunderstorms' in the ionosphere are to blame.

Launched in 2013, the Swarm trio is measuring and untangling the different magnetic fields that stem from Earth's core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere and magnetosphere – an undertaking of at least four years.

As with many satellites, ESA's three Swarm satellites carry GPS receivers as part of their positioning system so that operators keep them in the correct orbits. In addition, GPS pinpoints where the satellites are making their scientific measurements.

However, sometimes the satellites lose their GPS connection. In fact, during their first two years in orbit, the link was broken 166 times.

A paper published recently describes how Swarm has revealed there is a direct link between these blackouts and ionospheric 'thunderstorms', around 300–600 km above Earth.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Three space travelers are safely back on Earth after a 115-day stay on the International Space Station.

Returning on a Russian Soyuz space capsule, U.S. astronaut Kate Rubins of NASA, Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 49 Commander Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi landed near Kazakhstan at 9:58 a.m. local time on Sunday (Oct. 30), or 11:58 p.m. EDT (0358 GMT). You can see how the landing went in this NASA video. 

"Touchdown confirmed," NASA spokesman Rob Navias said during the agency's landing webcast commentary. "After a journey of 115 days and 48.9 million miles, the Expedition 49 crew is home."

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hubie writes:

The common swift (Apus apus) is a remarkable bird found all over Europe, northern Asia and Africa. Because it migrates into sub-Saharan Africa, and because roost sites have never been found there, some scientists have speculated that it stays aloft during its entire non-breeding season.

A group of Swedish scientists attached data loggers, light sensors, and accelerometers to thirteen common swifts and monitored them for two years. They found that these birds remain airborne for 10 months of their non-breeding periods. All of the birds were airborne >99% of the time, but several didn't land at all during those 10 months. Their work is being published in the journal Current Biology .

Hedenström says that common swifts have adapted to a low-energy lifestyle, but his team does not yet know whether the birds sleep while aloft. "Most animals suffer dramatically from far less sleep loss," says Niels Rattenborg, a neurobiologist at Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. "But these birds seem to have found a trick through evolution that allows them to get by on far less sleep."

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Researchers at MIT have put together a pictorial survey http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ -- if the self-driving car loses its brakes, should it go straight or turn? Various scenarios are presented with either occupants or pedestrians dying, and there are a variety of peds in the road from strollers to thieves, even pets.

This AC found that I quickly began to develop my own simplistic criteria and the decisions got easier the further I went in the survey.

While the survey is very much idealized, it may have just enough complexity to give some useful results?

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the first time, scientists have revealed ancient gene mixing between chimpanzees and bonobos, humankind's closest relatives, showing parallels with Neanderthal mixing in human ancestry. Published in the journal Science, the study from scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their international collaborators showed that one percent of chimpanzee genomes are derived from bonobos.

The study also showed that genomics could help reveal the country of origin of individual chimpanzees, which has strong implications for chimpanzee conservation.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are great apes found only in tropical Africa. They are endangered species and are supposedly fully protected by law, yet many chimpanzees and bonobos are captured and held illegally.

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AthanasiusKircher writes:

A jury recently awarded $70 million to a California woman who used Johnson & Johnson's talc-based baby powder and claimed that it caused her ovarian cancer. Two lawsuits from earlier this year awarded a combined $127 million, and thousands of other women have filed suits against Johnson & Johnson. Meanwhile, two other lawsuits in New Jersey were thrown out by a judge who said the scientific evidence wasn't reliable enough to establish a clear cancer link. All these cases follow on an original 2013 jury finding for physician's assistant Deane Berg, which paradoxically found that baby powder could have been a factor in her cancer yet awarded her zero damages.

While these real-world juries have been forced to make decisions on whether a substance causes cancer, the metaphorical scientific "jury is still out." The American Cancer Society's review of the evidence notes:

The ACS concludes that "if there is an increased risk, the overall increase is likely to be very small." Most other cancer researchers seem to take a similarly measured approach in characterizing the current state of the evidence, such as these guidelines from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute:

"All of these studies suffer from incomplete data on patients' family history of ovarian or breast cancer, as well as the duration and frequency of powder use, says Panos Konstantinopoulos, MD, PhD, of the Gynecologic Oncology Program in the Susan F. Smith Center for Women's Cancers at Dana-Farber. "In general, population-based studies have shown a statistically significant association with ovarian cancer risk, while hospital-based studies showed that this association is not statistically significant," he says. In addition, none of the studies found that risk rose with increased exposure to the powder, and there is no evidence that talcum powder use on other parts of the body affects ovarian cancer risk.

[Continues...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Marijuana Dispensary wins $100,000!

When Sky High Holistic was subject to a police raid, it was hardly the end of the business. In fact, it ironically gave the marijuana dispensary a big boost, $100,000 to be exact.

The money comes from a lawsuit alleging police harassment of the marijuana dispensary, settled by the City of Santa Ana this week. Santa Ana has also agreed to drop charges against a dozen employees accused of illegally operating.

It's a good thing the cameras were on; The dispensary cameras, that is. Apparently, the cops hung around the establishment long after the raid occurred, playing darts and making demeaning comments about the staff. And once they got comfortable, they indulged in Sky High pot-laced edibles.

Article:

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/pot-shop-busts-cops-surveillance-cam-wins-100000
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.alternet.org/drugs/pot-shop-busts-cops-surveillance-cam-wins-100000

Previously: Police Claim Recording of Marijuana Dispensary Raid is Illegal

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Phoenix666 writes:

Uber on Thursday laid out a vision for on-demand aircraft that can whisk commuters to home or work in a fraction of the time it would take on the road.

The ride-sharing giant assessed the feasibility of what it called "vertical take-off and landing" vehicles in a 98-page white paper, inviting innovators and entrepreneurs to take flight with the idea.

San Francisco-based Uber said it will be reaching out to cities, manufacturers and others about the concept.

"Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground," said the white paper, authored by Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden and product manager Nikhil Goel.

"A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities."

Diagrams in the paper showed aircraft bodies of various designs with propellers that can rotate to allow for vertical lift-off or landing, then move into position for flying forward.

Perhaps Vitalstatistix was onto something.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The world's biggest marine park is to be be created in the Antarctic Ocean, covering a massive 1.55 million square kilometers, after a "momentous" agreement was finally reached by 24 countries and the EU.

The deal, sealed on Friday in Hobart, Australia, after years of negotiations and with Russia dropping its long-help opposition, will see a massive US and New Zealand-backed marine protected area established in the Ross Sea.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources said the Ross Sea marine park would be protected from commercial fishing for 35 years.

The marine park will cover an area roughly the size of Britain, Germany and France combined - of which 1.12 million square kilometres will be a no-fishing zone.

The sanctuary will cover more than 12 percent of the Southern Ocean, which is home to more than 10,000 species including most of the world's penguins, whales, seabirds, colossal squid and Antarctic tooth fish.

Don't kill the krill.

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Phoenix666 writes:

"The beneficial effects of rutin on BAT-mediated [brown adipose tissue] metabolic improvement have evoked a substantial interest in the potential treatment for obesity and its related diseases, such as diabetes," said Wan-Zhu Jin, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. "In line with this idea, discovery of more safe and effective BAT activators is desired to deal with obesity and its related diseases."

To make their discovery, Jin and colleagues used both genetically obese mice and mice with diet-induced obesity as models. These mice were fed a regular diet, and supplemental rutin (1 mg/ml) was added to their drinking water. Rutin treatment significantly reduced adiposity, increased energy expenditure, and improved glucose homeostasis in both the genetically obese mice and the mice with diet-induced obesity. Specifically, the researchers found that rutin directly binds to and stabilizes SIRT1 (NAD-dependent deacetylase sirtuin-1), leading to hypoacetylation of PGC1α protein, which stimulates Tfam transactivation and eventually augments mitochondrial number and UCP1 activity in BAT. Rutin functions as a cold mimetic through activating a SIRT1-PGC1α-Tfam signaling cascade and increasing mitochondrial number and UCP1 activity in BAT. Rutin also induced brown-like (beige) adipocyte formation in subcutaneous adipose tissue in both obesity mouse models.

An abstract is available:Rutin ameliorates obesity through brown fat activation. The FASEB Journal, 2016; DOI: 10.1096/fj.201600459RR; full article is pay-walled.

Mulberry trees grow wild in many places, even in Central Park.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Boing Boing reports

After North Carolina Republicans banned cities selling internet, a town decided to give it away instead

North Carolina is one of many states in which telcoms lobbyists have gotten the state house to ban towns and cities from selling high-speed internet to the public--even in places where the cable/phone duopoly refuses to supply broadband.

FCC Chairman and decidedly non-dingo babysitter Tom Wheeler pushed through FCC rules invalidating these state laws, only to have Republican lawmakers and telcoms lobbyists use the courts to win back the right to force people to buy internet service from cable or phone companies, or do without if neither wish to supply internet to them.

The town of Wilson, North Carolina was one of the places whose municipal fiber ISP was threatened by the court decision, but after a close read of the rule, they've decided that since they're only banned from selling broadband, they can safely give it away for free. Wilson is offering free broadband to people outside the town limits, whose rural homes are not adequately served by Big Telco, and who were hammered hard by Hurricane Matthew.

The plan is to offer the service for free for six months and hope that during that time the state legislature--the same one that passed the awful, nonsensical "bathroom bill"--will come to its senses and strike down the ban on municipal internet service. Lotsa luck.

Previous:
Town Loses Gigabit Connections after FCC Municipal Broadband Court Loss
FCC Considering Action on Municipal Broadband State Laws

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takyon writes:

Italy has been struck by another strong earthquake:

Towns and villages in central Italy have been hit by an earthquake for the fourth time in three months. The 6.6-magnitude quake - Italy's strongest in decades - struck close to the region where nearly 300 people were killed by a quake in August.

This time no-one appears to have died, but about 20 people were injured. The medieval basilica of St Benedict in Norcia, the town closest to the epicentre, was among buildings destroyed.

2016-10-26 17:10:37 UTC - M5.5 - 8km ESE of Sellano, Italy
2016-10-26 19:18:08 UTC - M6.1 - 3km W of Visso, Italy
2016-10-30 06:40:19 UTC - M6.6 - 6km N of Norcia, Italy

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Phoronix brings a bit of weekend cheer for those silly people inside playing video games instead of going fishing:

With Black Mesa's Halloween update released on Thursday, there is a Linux client beta of this Source game. Details via this announcement. Black Mesa is currently on sale for 60% off, putting it at just $7.99 USD.

Mind you, it's a Steam game so your box has to play nicely with Steam as a prerequisite.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Computer simulations of the formation of planets orbiting in the habitable zones of low mass stars such as Proxima Centauri by astrophysicists at the University of Bern show that these planets are most likely to be roughly the size of the Earth and to contain large amounts of water.

In August 2016, the announcement of the discovery of a terrestrial exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri stimulated the imagination of experts and the general public. This star is the nearest star to our sun, though it is 10 times less massive and 500 times less luminous. This discovery, together with the discovery in May 2016 of a similar planet orbiting an even lower-mass star (Trappist-1), convinced astronomers that such red dwarfs (as these low-mass stars are called) might be hosts to a large population of Earth-like planets.

Indeed, we already know that red dwarfs do have advanced civilizations.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Crustaceans that thrive in the vastness of the open ocean have no place to hide from their predators.

Consequently, many creatures that live at depths where sunlight fades to darkness have developed transparent bodies to be less visible when spotted against the twilight by upward-looking predators. But they also face predators with bioluminescent searchlights that should cause the clear animals to flash brightly, just like shining a flashlight across a window pane.

Well, it turns out the midwater crustaceans have camouflage for that too.

A new study from Duke University and the Smithsonian Institution has found that these midwater hyperiid amphipods are covered with anti-reflective coatings on their legs and bodies that can dampen the reflection of light by 250-fold in some cases and prevent it from bouncing back to a hungry lantern fish's eye.

Weirder still, these coatings appear to be made of living bacteria.

Now all we have to do is smear the outside of our tanks with this bacteria and they'll never see us coming.

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