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Phoenix666 writes:

As the cost of sequencing a person's genome plummets, demand for the computing power needed to make sense of the genetic information is growing. Nicholas New hopes some of it will be worked on by a processor that parses data using laser light, built by his U.K. startup, Optalysys.

New says his company's exotic approach to crunching data can dramatically upgrade a conventional computer by taking over some of the most demanding work in applications such as genomics and simulating weather. "The grunt work can be done by the optics," he says.

Researchers have worked on the idea of using optics rather than electronics to process data for decades, with little commercial traction. But New argues that it is now needed because manufacturers such as Intel admit that they can't keep improving conventional chips at the pace they used to

takyon: Optalysys is a company that claims it will scale to petaflops and exaflops in the near future using desktop amounts of power. However, their technology has been described as a coprocessor so it isn't clear what kind of operations it can perform. Much has been made of its partnership with The Genome Analysis Center (TGAC).

The article also mentions LightOn, which published this paper. Optical and quantum computing are both being examined for their potential to enhance machine learning. Google is researching the quantum approach.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The landscape is virtually treeless around a coastal hub town above Alaska's Arctic Circle, where even summer temperatures are too cold for northern-growing forests to take root.

Amid these unforgiving conditions, a creative kind of farming is sprouting up in the largely Inupiat community of Kotzebue.

A subsidiary of a local Native corporation is using hydroponics technology to grow produce inside an insulated, 40-foot shipping container equipped with glowing magenta LED lights. Arctic Greens is harvesting kale, various lettuces, basil and other greens weekly from the soil-free system and selling them at the supermarket in the community of nearly 3,300.

"We're learning," Will Anderson, president of the Native Kikiktagruk Inupiat Corp., said of the business launched last spring. "We're not a farming culture."

The venture is first of its kind north of the Arctic Circle, according to the manufacturer of Kotzebue's pesticide-free system. The goal is to set up similar systems in partnerships with other rural communities far from Alaska's minimal road system—where steeply priced vegetables can be more than a week in transit and past their prime by the time they arrive at local stores.

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mendax writes:

We've had this question asked before I believe but it does no harm in asking it again and again. After all, opinions change as does the software ecosystem. Quincy Larson of FreeCodeCamp.com asked this question via Medium: What programming language should you learn first? He thinks JavaScript is the way to go and his arguments are cogent and well thought out. However, I am somewhat hesitant to suggest someone learn to code in JavaScript first. My first programming language (in 1981!) was Fortran on a Control Data mainframe. The interactive environment the OS provided was pretty simple and the language provided few opportunities to hang yourself. JavaScript, by comparison, while it may not have those evil pointers of C/C++, it offers functional features and plenty of rope to hang oneself.

So, opinions please.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A threat group believed to be located in Palestine has been targeting users in Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries in a series of unsophisticated attacks whose main goal appears to be espionage.

Researchers at Vectra Networks have been monitoring the group for the past two years and determined that its operations focus on Middle Eastern political issues. The threat actor has been dubbed "Moonlight" based on the name of a command and control (C&C) domain used in the attacks.

According to Vectra, Moonlight's tools and targets are similar to the ones of a group known as Gaza Hackers Team, Gaza Cybergang and Molerats, but experts have not found a clear connection between these actors. The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas is believed to be behind Gaza Hackers Team.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Using the empirical dynamic modeling (EDM) approach developed by Scripps ecologist George Sugihara and colleagues, the scientists analyzed nearly 20 years of global influenza data from the World Health Organization's Global Health Atlas to uncover a positive association between flu outbreaks, absolute humidity, which is the amount of moisture in the air, and temperature across all latitudes. The study, led by Scripps postdoctoral researcher Ethan Deyle, found a critical temperature window of 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit (21-24 degrees Celsius). Humidity levels above and below the temperature window become a key factor in the spread of the virus.

According to the researchers, "with further laboratory testing, these population-level results could help set the stage for public health initiatives such as placing humidifiers in schools and hospitals during cold, dry, temperate winters and in the tropics, perhaps using dehumidifiers or air conditioners set above 75° F to dry air in public buildings." The study's findings were published on Oct. 31 in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The analysis allowed us to see what environmental factors were driving influenza," said Sugihara, the McQuown Chair Distinguished Professor of Natural Science and a coauthor of the study. "We found that it wasn't one factor by itself, but temperature and humidity together."

An abstract is available: Ethan R. Deyle et al, Global environmental drivers of influenza, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1607747113.

Maybe they can kill two birds with one stone and use the water pulled out of the air by dehumidifiers to fill water coolers or flush toilets.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists from the Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICP RAS) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have demonstrated that sensors based on binary metal oxide nanocomposites are sensitive enough to identify terrorist threats and detect environmental pollutants. The results of their study have been published in Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical.

Due to rapid industrial growth and the degradation of the environment, there is a growing need for the development of highly effective and selective sensors for pollutant detection. In addition, gas sensors could also be used to monitor potential terrorist threats.

"Choosing the right sensor composition can make a device at least 10 times more effective and enable an exceptionally fast response, which is crucial for preventing terrorist attacks," says Prof. Leonid Trakhtenberg of the Department of Molecular and Chemical Physics at MIPT, who is the leader of the research team and the head of the Laboratory of Functional Nanocomposites at ICP RAS.

According to the research findings, the most promising detection systems are binary metal oxide sensors, in which one component provides a high density of conductive electrons and another is a strong catalyst.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Within just a few generations, plastic has already taken over the world, and while this material enabled a revolution in manufacturing and design, plastic has also managed to become one of the biggest menaces on the planet, thanks to its convenience and ease of production. And although commercial collection and recycling of plastics is getting better and more accessible, in many areas plastics end up in the dump instead the recycling facility, essentially burying this resource, which could be used to great effect if only the machinery were available to do so.

A few years ago, Kimberly wrote about the efforts of Dave Hakkens, who created a series of machines intended to put plastic recycling into the hands of the people. His Precious Plastics project promised free and open source blueprints, plans, and instructions for building these plastics recycling machines, which included a shredder, an extruding machine, an injection device, and a compression machine, and that information is now available on the website for anyone to download and put to work.

[...] The full set of Precious Plastic V2.0 information, which includes the CAD files and blueprints as well as posters, images, and instructions, is available as a free download under an open-source license, and detailed videos are available on the website to guide people through the process.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Millions of do-it-yourself websites built with the Wix web maker were at risk of hijack thanks to a brief zero day DOM-based cross-site scripting vulnerability.

Wix boasts some 87 million users, among them two million paying subscribers.

Contrast Security researcher Matt Austin (@mattaustin) dug up the flaw he rates as severe, and attempted to get Wix to patch it under quiet private disclosure since October.

He says he heard nothing back from the web firm other than an initial receipt of the disclosure on 14 October after three subsequent update requests.

Checks appear to confirm the holes have been quietly shuttered after Austin's public disclosure. Wix has been contacted for comment.

Also covered at ComputerWorld .

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Phoenix666 writes:

Members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe are marking the return of buffalo to their reservation in central Wyoming more than a century after the animals were wiped out.

The tribe is holding a ceremony Thursday marking the release of 10 genetically pure buffalo from a federal refuge in Iowa. The National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have worked on the project.

Buffalo provided food and shelter to the Eastern Shoshone and other Indian tribes before the vast herds of the animals were slaughtered in the late 1800s.

Jason Baldes leads the buffalo restoration work for the Eastern Shoshone. He says establishing a large buffalo herd on the reservation will allow children there to experience how their ancestors traditionally used the animals and share in their spiritual importance.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The composition of Infosys' U.S. workforce is too lopsided -- overwhelmingly South Asian -- to be an accident, allege the plaintiffs in a discrimination lawsuit.

The plaintiffs, four IT workers from around the U.S., brought their discrimination lawsuit against the India-based IT services giant in 2013. This week, they filed a motion seeking class-action certification from 2009, and say the potential pool of plaintiffs may be as large as 125,000.
...
Neumark wrote that "the share of South Asian workers in Infosys' United States-based workforce, when compared to the relevant labor market, is 301.17 standard deviations higher, and the statistical likelihood that this disparity is due to chance -- as opposed to a systematic difference in hiring favoring one group over the other -- is less than 0.0000001%, or less than 1 in 1 billion."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court has ruled.

This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - beginning formal exit negotiations with the EU - on its own.

Theresa May says the referendum - and existing ministerial powers - mean MPs do not need to vote, but campaigners called this unconstitutional.

The government is appealing, with a further hearing expected next month.

• Rolling reaction to Article 50 court ruling
• Kuenssberg: Will this mean early election?
• The High Court's judgement in full
• Brexit: All you need to know

A statement is to be made to MPs on Monday but the prime minister's official spokesman said the government had "no intention of letting" the judgement "derail Article 50 or the timetable we have set out. We are determined to continue with our plan".

Plebiscites only count when plebes vote the way they're told.

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q.kontinuum writes:

After reading lots of nice high-tech ideas on how to improve the lifetime, capacity, and re-charge time of commercial batteries, it was interesting to read an article on how high-performance batteries can be built from scrap metal parts basically in a DIY manner. The targeted use-case is not so much laptops, mobile phones, or cars but rather storing energy from renewable sources like solar- or wind-power.

Take some metal scraps from the junkyard; put them in a glass jar with a common household chemical; and, voilà, you have a high-performance battery.

[...] The secret to unlocking this performance is anodization, a common chemical treatment used to give aluminum a durable and decorative finish. When scraps of steel and brass are anodized using a common household chemical and residential electrical current, the researchers found that the metal surfaces are restructured into nanometer-sized networks of metal oxide that can store and release energy when reacting with a water-based liquid electrolyte.

The team determined that these nanometer domains explain the fast charging behavior that they observed, as well as the battery's exceptional stability. They tested it for 5,000 consecutive charging cycles – the equivalent of over 13 years of daily charging and discharging – and found that it retained more than 90 percent of its capacity.

[...] "We're forging new ground with this project, where a positive outcome is not commercialization, but instead a clear set of instructions that can be addressed to the general public. It's a completely new way of thinking about battery research, and it could bypass the barriers holding back innovation in grid scale energy storage," Pint said.

Especially the last part is highly appealing to me. I'm not expert on the matter whatsoever, so I'm looking forward to reading comments on why this is too good to be true, and which caveats I overlooked. What do you think?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Department of Justice today sued DirecTV and its owner, AT&T, saying the satellite TV company colluded with competitors during contentious negotiations to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games

Dodgers games have been blacked out in much of Los Angeles because pay-TV providers have been unwilling to pay the price demanded by SportsNet LA, the Dodgers channel operated by the baseball franchise and Time Warner Cable. But the DOJ's antitrust division placed the blame for this situation on AT&T and DirecTV. In a complaint filed in US District Court in California, it alleges that DirecTV was a "ringleader" in a coordinated scheme with cable companies Cox and Charter, according to a DOJ announcement.

"Dodgers fans were denied a fair, competitive process when DirecTV orchestrated a series of information exchanges with direct competitors that ultimately made consumers less likely to be able to watch their hometown team," Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sallet said in the DOJ announcement. The lack of a competitive negotiation process is especially bad for consumers in a market like cable television, where customers have "only a handful of choices," he said.

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Phoenix666 writes:

It may sound like science fiction, but wastewater treatment plants across the United States may one day turn ordinary sewage into biocrude oil, thanks to new research at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The technology, hydrothermal liquefaction, mimics the geological conditions the Earth uses to create crude oil, using high pressure and temperature to achieve in minutes something that takes Mother Nature millions of years. The resulting material is similar to petroleum pumped out of the ground, with a small amount of water and oxygen mixed in. This biocrude can then be refined using conventional petroleum refining operations.

Wastewater treatment plants across the U.S. treat approximately 34 billion gallons of sewage every day. That amount could produce the equivalent of up to approximately 30 million barrels of oil per year. PNNL estimates that a single person could generate two to three gallons of biocrude per year.

"...a single person could generate two to three gallons of biocrude per year." Some people can manage that in a day if they eat Mexican food the night before.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Once again, large swaths of the Internet in the United States were affected by a major morning network outage today [November 2]. This time, it was the Tier 1 network service provider Level 3 Communications that was at the center of the problem, which disrupted parts of the Internet's backbone. But for the moment, it does not appear that the outage was triggered by a denial of service attack or other network attack, like the attack on DNS provider Dyn on October 21.

[...] A Level 3 spokesperson confirmed that the company's networks had been restored to normal function by 1600 Greenwich Mean Time (noon US Eastern Time) but said that no other information was available yet.

The outage had no major impact on major streaming services that use Level 3, including Netflix and the HBO Go mobile application. But it did affect some customers' voice and Internet services. Level 3 suffered another brief outage a month ago, caused by a human error.

Original Submission