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takyon writes:

The best science CO₂ can buy:

Do studies show that soft drinks promote obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It depends on who paid for the study.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked at studies of soft drink consumption and its relationship to obesity and diabetes published between 2001 and 2016. They found about 60 studies that were fairly rigorous in their methodology. When the studies were led by independent researchers, they showed a clear link between soda consumption and obesity or metabolic disease. But notably, 26 of the studies reported no link between sugary soft drinks and poor health.

What was different about the studies that found no connection to health problems? They were all carried out by researchers with financial ties to the beverage industry. The findings were published Monday [DOI: 10.7326/L16-0534] [DX] in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Also at LA Times and Houston Chronicle.

Previously: Sugar Industry Secretly Paid for Favorable Harvard Research in 1960s

Original Submission

takyon writes:

BlackBerry's QNX operating system will power some of Ford's new vehicles:

BlackBerry Ltd has signed a deal to work directly with Ford Motor Co to expand the carmaker's use of its QNX secure operating system, the Canadian technology company said on Monday, as Ford develops increasingly automated vehicles.

The deal with Ford is the first BlackBerry has done directly with a major automaker, though it currently sells its technology to auto industry suppliers. The company is betting its future on expanding sales of software products, including to automakers and other manufacturers, after largely ceding the smartphone market to rivals including Apple Inc, Alphabet's Google and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Panasonic Automotive currently uses QNX software in the Sync 3 infotainment console that it supplies to Ford. BlackBerry is hoping the new deal will expand use of BlackBerry's software in Ford vehicles as the two companies identify other systems where it might be used. "We can form the basis of the entire vehicle all the way from autonomous drive through to infotainment," John Wall, the head of BlackBerry's QNX unit, said in a phone interview.

Also at WSJ and USA Today.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The nation's largest oil pipeline, the Colonial Pipeline system, was shut down on Monday following an explosion that occurred during maintenance:

Colonial Pipeline Co shut down its main gasoline and distillates pipelines on Monday after an explosion and fire in Shelby, Alabama, that injured seven workers - the second time in two months it had to close the crucial supply line to the U.S. East Coast. A nine-man crew was conducting work on the Colonial pipeline system at the time of the explosion, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley told a briefing. Seven of the crew members were injured, with two evacuated by air. Four victims of the blast were taken to the UAB hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, hospital spokesman Adam Pope said.

A segment of pipeline was undergoing maintenance on Monday afternoon when it exploded. The fire had been contained as of around 9 p.m. (0100 GMT on Tuesday), according to local media reports.

Gasoline futures jumped as much as 15%:

December-delivery gasoline rose as much as 21.56 cents to $1.6351 a gallon in intraday trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange after the blast. The contract traded at $1.5675 at 9:03 a.m. in Singapore. The intraday peak was the highest for a front-month contract since June 2, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

[...] A spill in September closed Colonial for 12 days, cutting supplies to 50 million Americans in the Southeast. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley said in a tweet that the incident in Shelby County on Monday was about a mile west of the Sept. 9 incident. Colonial had planned to remove between late-October and mid-November a temporary bypass pipeline that was built around the site of the earlier spill.

Also reported at NBC, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA has found fast-spinning and orange "pumpkin stars" that appear to be the squashed result of ongoing binary mergers:

Astronomers using observations from NASA's Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the sun. The stars, which spin so fast they've been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes, are thought to be the result of close binary systems where two sun-like stars merge. "These 18 stars rotate in just a few days on average, while the sun takes nearly a month," said Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and leader of the team. "The rapid rotation amplifies the same kind of activity we see on the sun, such as sunspots and solar flares, and essentially sends it into overdrive."

The most extreme member of the group, a K-type orange giant dubbed KSw 71, is more than 10 times larger than the sun, rotates in just 5.5 days, and produces X-ray emission 4,000 times greater than the sun does at solar maximum. These rare stars were found as part of an X-ray survey of the original Kepler field of view, a patch of the sky comprising parts of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Rapidly Rotating, X-ray Bright Stars in the Kepler Field (DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/831/1/27) (DX) (arXiv:1608.07828)

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takyon writes:

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is moving to silence the remaining few independent media outlets in Turkey:

In the three and half months since a failed military coup, Turkey has sacked or suspended more than 110,000 people, launched a military incursion into Syria, and repeatedly threatened to do the same in Iraq. [...] In the latest purge, police on Monday detained the editor and senior staff of the Cumhuriyet newspaper - one of few outlets still critical of Erdogan - over its alleged support for the July putsch. A senior EU politician described it as crossing a red line against freedom of expression, while the U.S. State Department expressed deep concern.

Erdogan is riding a wave of patriotism as the ruling AK Party he founded seeks constitutional change to move Turkey to a fully presidential system which would give him greater executive powers. "What's happening domestically and in terms of Turkey's foreign policy are a political tactic to keep solid the alliance between the base of the AKP and the nationalists," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and analyst at Carnegie Europe. "This alliance is keen on harsh policies on the Kurdish issue, looks to be in favor of reinstating the death penalty, and we can't really say they regard the preservation of freedom of speech and of the media very highly," he told Reuters.

There is no sign of any easing in Turkish policy at home or abroad, given the need to ensure nationalist support for the constitutional changes that Erdogan and the ruling party want to result from a referendum, which AKP officials have said could be held next spring. The nationalist MHP opposition party, many of its fervently patriotic members supportive of Erdogan's stance since the coup, has indicated it could back the AKP in parliament as it seeks support for the referendum on the presidential system.

Also at CNN, NPR, NYT, BBC, DW, RT, and The Guardian.

Turkey has just put in an order for more "too big to fail" F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, and is heavily involved in the fight against ISIS in Syria. The U.S. State Department recently issued a travel warning for Turkey and is evacuating the civilian families of Istanbul consulate employees, after a "credible" ISIS threat to kill Americans in the country. Update: U.S. issues travel advisory for India

Meanwhile, Moroccans are protesting the death of a fish vendor, reminiscent of the Tunisian uprisings and resultant "Arab Spring" in 2010.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

CenturyLink is buying Level 3 Communications:

CenturyLink Inc. agreed to buy Level 3 Communications Inc. for about $34 billion in cash and stock, creating a more formidable competitor to AT&T Inc. in the market to handle heavy internet traffic for businesses. [...] The equity value of the deal, excluding debt, is about $24 billion. Both companies have struggled against larger competitors -- AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. -- in the business services market. Investors sent CenturyLink shares down the most in 3 1/2 years on concern the company is overpaying and piling on debt to acquire a company whose sales growth has stagnated in a hotly competitive market.

The deal will give CenturyLink another 200,000 miles of fiber:

"This transaction increases CenturyLink's network by 200,000 route miles of fiber, which includes 64,000 route miles in 350 metropolitan areas and 33,000 subsea route miles connecting multiple continents," CenturyLink said. "Accounting for those served by both companies, CenturyLink's on-net buildings are expected to increase by nearly 75 percent to approximately 75,000, including 10,000 buildings in EMEA and Latin America." Currently, CenturyLink says it operates a "250,000-route-mile US fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network." Besides Internet access, CenturyLink offers cloud and managed hosting services for enterprises.

Also at The Wall Street Journal .

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's New Horizons probe has completed the transfer of data from the Pluto-Charon flyby after around 15 months of transmissions. The data will be vetted before NASA sends the command to erase the probe's storage:

Having traveled from the New Horizons spacecraft over 3.1 billion miles (five hours, eight minutes at light speed), the final item – a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager – arrived at mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.

[...] Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could – taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015. "We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL.

The New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM) will involve a flyby of the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU₆₉ on January 1, 2019. The object is estimated to have a diameter of 30-45 km.

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takyon writes:

The BBC is reporting on MIT's "bionic spinach":

By embedding tiny tubes in the plants' leaves, they can be made to pick up chemicals called nitro-aromatics, which are found in landmines and buried munitions. Real-time information can then be wirelessly relayed to a handheld device.

The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) work is published in the journal Nature Materials [DOI: 10.1038/nmat4771] [DX].

The scientists implanted nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (tiny cylinders of carbon) into the leaves of the spinach plant. It takes about 10 minutes for the spinach to take up the water into the leaves. To read the signal, the researchers shine a laser onto the leaf, prompting the embedded nanotubes to emit near-infrared fluorescent light. This can be detected with a small infrared camera connected to a small, cheap Raspberry Pi computer. The signal can also be detected with a smartphone by removing the infrared filter most have.

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takyon writes:

The board of governors for the Thirty-Meter Telescope has chosen an alternate site for construction that could allow it to cut its losses in Mauna Kea:

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) could move to La Palma, in Spain's Canary Islands, if opposition from Native Hawaiians prevents the next-generation observatory from being built atop the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea as planned.

The decision, announced on 31 October by the TMT International Observatory's board of governors, creates an alternative path forward for the troubled mega-telescope. Its opponents blocked access to the Mauna Kea site in April 2015, halting construction, although work on the telescope's components continues at sites around the world. Native Hawaiians regard the decision to build the TMT on Mauna Kea as the continued desecration of a sacred mountaintop that hosts 13 other telescopes, some of which are being decommissioned.

In December, Hawaii's state supreme court nullified the permit that would have allowed the TMT to proceed. A fresh round of hearings began this month, with TMT officials seeking a new permit from the state's Bureau of Land and Natural Resources.

Previously:
Thirty Meter Telescope Considering Move as Hawaii Officials Open Hearing
Hawaiian Court Revokes Permit for Construction of Thirty-Meter-Telescope
Protests Temporarily Halt Thirty-Meter Telescope's Construction in Hawaii

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The ABC news website (an Australian national news service funded by the Australian government) reports on a group of high school students from Sydney Australia who have managed to recreate the active ingredient in Daraprim for a mere $20.

Daraprim has received a lot of coverage recently after Turing Pharmaceuticals who owns the patent, initially raised the price of the drug from $13.50 to $750.00, though they have since stated that the price will be reduced.

From the article:

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA is looking to bolster small satellite projects (such as CubeSats):

NASA announces the addition of its newest virtual institute to advance the field of small spacecraft systems. The Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI), hosted at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, will leverage the growing small spacecraft community, promote innovation, identify emerging technology opportunities, and provide an efficient channel for communication about small spacecraft systems with industry, academia, and other government agencies.

[...] Depending on the mission objective, a small spacecraft can range in size from a postage-stamp (under an ounce) up to the size of a refrigerator (about 400 pounds). Many recently launched NASA small spacecraft conform to the CubeSat standards - established by academia - in which a single cube (called a one-unit, or 1U) measures about 4 inches on each side, has an approximate volume of one quart, and weighs less than three pounds. The variety of sizes offers spacecraft capabilities tailored to specific science instruments, exploration sensors, or technology demonstrations.

NASA will collaborate with private companies (for example, those that are imaging the Earth or asteroids using satellites):

The White House is announcing its plan today to promote the use of small space satellites — a move aimed at strengthening the U.S.' burgeoning commercial space industry. The project, called "Harnessing the Small Satellite Revolution," is meant to spur collaboration between government agencies, including NASA, and the private sector to find practical uses for small satellites, or smallsats.

These tiny space probes — which weigh anywhere between a few hundred pounds to just a few ounces — can be valuable tools for planetary scientists, as well as provide internet access and monitor space traffic. That's why the White House is looking for ways to boost smallsat production, as well as find ways these private spacecraft can benefit the government. So as part of the new initiative, NASA will be spending up to $25 million to purchase data collected by private companies' smallsats. For now, the space agency is looking for data that can help with its study of Earth science, like detailed images of the planet's surface. NASA will also spend an extra $5 million to make this smallsat technology even more robust.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has sent a letter demanding George Hotz's company comma.ai provide information pertaining to the safety of their system (https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special-Order-Directed-to-Comma-ai).

This morning [28 Oct], Ars Technica reports that George Hotz tweeted from Shenzhen that the comma one was now cancelled (https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/791958413345382400).

comma.ai had just received a $3.1m investment from Andreessen-Horowitz in April (http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-comma-ai-andreessen-horowitz/index.html).

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Jono Bacon reports via OpenSource.com

It runs Linux, uses JACK, and the plugin standard used is LV2

Some time ago, the MOD Duo jumped onto my radar. In a nutshell, it is a guitar stomp box that comes loaded with different effects and sounds. Instead of buying the multitude of guitar pedals that many musicians string together in complex, if somewhat beautiful ways, the MOD Duo negates all that. It is a single box and what's more, it is powered by open source.

Now, when I say it is powered by open source, I don't just mean it runs Linux, but we will get to that a little later.

[...] Inside the beefy-looking steel enclosure is a computer that is loaded with software for generating lots of different guitar effects and sounds. This includes delays, reverbs, choruses, flangers, and more. When you plug this thing into you computer, you can then use a web interface to build your own virtual pedalboard:

Just like a physical pedalboard, you drag the different virtual stomp boxes onto the floor and use cables to connect them together in different ways.

When you have created your sounds, the MOD Duo will save them and you can call them directly from the hardware unit. This means you don't need a computer to use the MOD Duo to play gigs; you only use the computer to configure your pedalboards.

The interface is not just used for creating sounds, though. You can also browse additional virtual pedals and download them, and create banks of patches.

[...] For many years you have been able to plug a USB sound card into a Linux computer, set up JACK, configure your plugins, and output the audio in different ways. Although possible, this was historically complicated to set up and use.

[...] The MOD Duo changed all this. First, everything is set up and good to go on the device itself. You literally don't need to know jack about JACK. Second, the plugins have completely refreshed and simplified interfaces that look and feel like guitar pedals. Third, the overall interface for stringing these different effects together is simple, natural, and a lot of fun. For the geeks they even go so far as to offer a MOD Arduino Shield for experimenting with different sensors and a MOD software development kit.

[...] Aside from all the technical merits of the MOD Duo from an open source perspective, I also love how the team is working in this very community-oriented way. Once again, the real power of open source is not code, it is the community fabric and methodology that underpins it.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

As big as I am on privacy, I'm inclined to agree with the fine folks over at [H]ard|Ocp:

Who would give up info like their name, age, sex to a beer company for discounts and promotions on beer? Hmmmm, now that I think about it, that's a tough one. Privacy....or....free beer?

Or if, like me, you despise getting your news in video form, techinasia has a story on it as well but in text format:

Enter Glassify. The Tel Aviv-based startup is building 'smart glasses' which pair with an app on your smartphone to offer users incentivized promotions and discounts.

How it works is fairly straightforward. Consumers order their drinks at the bar and are prompted to scan the glasses over their phones when served. The glasses have an NFC chip embedded at the bottom and work with any QR scanner. There's no need to have the Glassify app pre-installed – it'll prompt you to download it when you scan a compatible glass for the first time.

"There's always an incentive for users to scan their glass," explains Ben Biron, CEO of Glassify. "This could be things like a free drink, chaser, or a food combo."

This really shouldn't be that hard of a call but free is my favorite kind of beer.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Majorana fermions were first proposed by the physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937. They are fermion particles that are also their own antiparticles. These fermions are vital to the research of superconducting materials and topological quantum computation. However, 80 years later, scientists have not found a Majorana elementary particle. Though it is hypothesized that neutrinos are Majorana fermions, there is still no evidence to support this conjecture.

In condensed matter physics, scientists found that a particlular kind of quasiparticle—Majorana zero modes (MZMs)—have characteristics similar to Majorana fermions. Recently, a research team from the Key Laboratory of Quantum Information of the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved the fabrication and manipulation of MZMs in an optical simulator.

The team led by Professors LI Chuangfeng, XU Jinshi, and HAN Yongjian implemented the exchange of two MZMs such that the non-Abelian statistics of MZMs are supported. This work is published in Nature Communications on October 25th.

Original Submission

Iceland's Election: Left-Leaning Parties (Including Pirates) Win Total of 27 Seats

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

from the the-times-they-are-a'changing dept.

Common Dreams reports

Saturday night's election results show [that] Iceland's Pirate Party [...] won 10 seats, more than tripling its three seats in the last election. The Left-Green Party also won 10 seats.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the leader of the Pirate Party, said she was satisfied with the result. "Whatever happens, we have created a wave of change in the Icelandic society", she told a cheering crowd early Sunday morning [October 30].

The left-leaning parties--the Left-Greens, the Pirates, and two allies--won a total of 27 seats, just short of the 32 required to command a majority in Iceland's Parliament, the world's oldest.

The governing center-right Progressive party lost more than half of its seats in the election which was triggered by Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson's resignation in April in the wake of the leaked Panama Papers which revealed the offshore assets of high-profile figures.

Current Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson [resigned October 30].

The anti-establishment Pirate Party, which was founded in 2012, had said it could be looking to form a coalition with three left-wing and centrist parties.

The Pirates' core issues are: direct democracy, freedom of expression, civil rights, net neutrality, and transparency, all set out in a popular, crowdsourced draft of a new national Constitution that the current government has failed to act on. They also seek to re-nationalize the country's natural resource industries, create new rules for civic governance, and issue a passport to Edward Snowden.

[Continues...]