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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Maybe some of have already seen this, but I hadn't seen it until it bit me in the ass today. Amazon is listing some of its standard products as Prime only, meaning only Prime members are allowed to buy it. Prime is an Amazon subscription service that gives you free 2-day shipping (to your local post office, not to your door), streaming services, and a bunch of other 'benefits'. They have gone to great lengths to push this $99 a year service on people, including delaying normal shipments and preventing you from buying what you want. I no longer qualify to reorder a SSD I bought last week since I'm not willing to become a member (nor can I try the 30 trial as I did that back when Prime was new). All that SSD research time wasted.

We were worried about net neutrality. It seems in the future we'll have to worry about subscribing to every store we want to do business with just to have the privilege of buying from them. I'll bet money within a couple years you won't qualify for sales like Cyber Monday unless you're a subscriber. I can easily see that spreading to every store: "Pay $10 at the door for big savings on all our in-store, on sale items." Stores used to give you discounts for going to them, now you'll have to pay for the honor of shopping there.

Here's an article about it.

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Phoenix666 writes:

even though the question of how individual atoms and molecules behave is at the heart of all fields of natural science, until recently, nobody had ever seen a single molecule move on its intrinsic ultrafast timescale. In order to literally watch their motion, one would need a microscope many billions of times more rapid than the fastest high-speed cameras, which has until now remained way out of reach.

An international team of scientists based in Regensburg, Germany, has now tackled this challenge. Their aim was to revolutionize the way in which researchers look at the nanoworld: advancing from images to moving images of molecules. To do so, they developed an unprecedented ultrafast microscope. They combined the most powerful tool researchers have to access ultrafast time scales, femtosecond laser pulses, with highly advanced scanning tunneling microscopy capable of imaging individual molecules. The principle of this microscopy technique is similar to a record player.

A sharp needle is moved across a surface to reveal its relief. But in scanning tunneling microscopy, the tip of this needle is as sharp as a single atom. Also, it does not touch the surface, but hovers over it while electrons move between the tip and surface thanks to a quantum mechanical effect called tunneling. As a result, the tip serves as a probe that is sensitive to corrugation smaller than a single molecule.

The researchers in Regensburg developed a novel scheme by controlling the tunneling process by ultrafast light pulses so short that each pulse only contained one single oscillation cycle of the lightwave. This mechanism gives them total quantum control over a select electron within a single molecule with simultaneous femtosecond temporal and sub-ångström spatial precision. As a result, they realized a microscope that not only allows them to image individual molecules, but also to "see" them move on their intrinsic time scale.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have sequenced the genome of the black blow fly, an insect commonly found throughout the United States, southern Canada and parts of northern Europe.

Black blow flies have environmental, medical and forensic uses, functioning as nature's recyclers, as wound cleansers and as forensic timekeepers. They have a blue or green sheen and are similar in size to common houseflies.

The female genome was found to contain 8,312 genes; the male genome had 9,490 genes.

"There is nothing special about black blow flies (scientific name Phormia regina), but that lack of uniqueness is why scientists are interested in studying them," said Christine Picard, assistant professor of biology and forensic scientist, who led the team that sequenced the genome.
...
Black blow flies feed on decaying flesh and help consume dead vertebrates throughout the environment. Black blow fly larvae, or maggots, are used medically to debride human wounds, as the insects physically remove dead tissue while simultaneously excreting antimicrobial compounds into the wound. With an excellent sense for smelling recently dead tissue, black blow flies are usually the first insects to colonize a human body, frequently within minutes after death. Females lay eggs on recently deceased corpses, setting a "clock" that enables forensic investigators to estimate the postmortem interval, or minimum time since death.

+1 Interesting, But Gross?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Melanin is the natural molecule in animals' skin, hair and the iris of eyes that gives them color and helps protect them from ultraviolet light. Someday soon, the pigment could be found in unexpected places such as sofa cushions or clothing -- but not for its hue. Scientists have found that adding a small amount of melanin to polyurethane makes it far stronger than the material by itself. Their study appears in the ACS journal Biomacromolecules.

From durable foam seating and insulation to glossy coatings and stretchy textiles, polyurethane is used in a huge range of products. Although already fairly versatile, polyurethane still has room for improvement. To make it more durable, scientists have tried adding fillers, including silica, carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide. But these efforts have often led to the enhancement of only one physical property at a time, such as tensile strength -- how hard a material can be pulled before it snaps -- but not toughness -- how much energy it can absorb without breaking. Mingqing Chen, Weifu Dong and colleagues wanted to try a new approach: adding melanin, a biomolecule increasingly used in various other materials.

The researchers found that polyurethane containing just 2 percent melanin, extracted from the ink sacs of cuttlefish, had improved tensile strength and toughness. These properties were enhanced about 10 fold, increasing from 5.6 megapascals and 33 megajoules per cubic meter in plain polyurethane to 51.5 MPa and 413 MJ/m3, respectively. Polyurethane by itself could stretch 770 percent before breaking, whereas the melanin-infused version stretched 1,880 percent before rupturing.

Adding melanin to polyurethane made it much stronger.

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AnonTechie writes:

Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests. The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.

Dr Tim Fawcett and Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Exeter, found, using statistical analysis of the number of citations to 2000 articles in a leading physics journal, that articles are less likely to be referenced by other physicists if they have lots of mathematical equations on each page. [...] Dr Higginson said: "We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics.

"This is an important issue because it shows there could be a disconnection between mathematical theory and experimental work. This presents a potentially enormous barrier to all kinds of scientific progress."

http://phys.org/news/2016-11-physicists-mathematics.html

[Abstract]: Statistical Analysis of the Effect of Equations on Citations

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Apparently influenza A flus come in two main varieties, the H1 and the H7. When you had your first flu when you were young you got good defenses against that subfamily according to researchers from the University of Arizona and UCLA. This explains why sometimes old and sick people can weather an influenza better than young and healthy people. This insight might have important implications in case of a pandemic.

The research team studied two avian-origin influenza A ("bird flu") viruses, H5N1 and H7N9, each of which already has caused hundreds of spillover cases of severe illness or death in humans. Both strains are of global concern because they might at some point gain mutations that allow them not only to readily jump from birds into humans, but also spread rapidly between human hosts.

Analyzing data from every known case of severe illness or death from influenza caused by these two strains, the researchers discovered that whichever human influenza strain a person happened to be exposed to during his or her first infection with flu virus as a child determines which novel, avian-origin flu strains they would be protected against in a future infection. This effect of "immunological imprinting" appears to be exclusively dependent on the very first exposure to flu virus encountered in life — and difficult to reverse.

[...] In their latest paper, Worobey and co-authors not only show that there is a 75 percent protection rate against severe disease and 80 percent protection rate against death if patients had been exposed to a matched virus as children, but also that one can take that information and make predictions about H5N1, H7N9 and other potential causes of future pandemics.

"If either of these viruses were to successfully jump from birds into humans, we now know something about the age groups that they would be hit the hardest," Worobey said, adding that efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine hinge on such insights because "such a vaccine would likely target the same conserved protein motifs on the virus surface that underlie this age-specific pattern."

https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/birth-year-predicts-odds-if-flu-pandemic-were-strike

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

After a decade of planning, designing and building, the Florida State University-based National High Magnetic Field Laboratory now has the strongest magnet in the world for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a powerful technique used to study molecular structures in proteins and materials. The 33-ton engineering marvel, called the series connected hybrid (SCH) magnet, successfully broke the record this week during a series of tests conducted by MagLab engineers and scientists.

The instrument reached its full field of 36 tesla Tuesday afternoon. Tesla is a unit of magnetic field strength. For example, a strong refrigerator magnet is .01 tesla, and a typical MRI machine is 1.5 to 3 tesla.

[...] What makes the SCH unique is that it can create a very high magnetic field that is also of very high quality. For magnets, quality means a field that remains constant over both the time it takes to run an experiment and the space in which the experiment takes place in the magnet. Unlike most of the physics research done in magnets, NMR requires fields that are very stable and homogeneous.

At 36 tesla, the SCH is more than 40 percent stronger than the previous world-record NMR magnet (the MagLab's Keck magnet) and more than 50 percent more powerful than the highest field high-resolution NMR magnet, a 23.5 tesla system in Lyon, France.

In NMR, scientists use magnets and radio waves to locate a specific element (commonly hydrogen) in proteins and other samples, which helps them figure out those complex structures. A powerful technique in health research, scientists use it, for example, to pinpoint a virus' vulnerability to drugs.

Source: http://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2016/11/09/national-maglab-racks-new-world-record-hybrid-magnet/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-operated-23-tor-hidden-child-porn-sites-deployed-malware-from-them/

As Ars has reported, federal investigators temporarily seized a Tor-hidden site known as Playpen in 2015 and operated it for 13 days before shutting it down. The agency then used a "network investigative technique" (NIT) as a way to ensnare site users.

However, according to newly unsealed documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI not only temporarily took over one Tor-hidden child pornography website in order to investigate it, the organization was in fact authorized to run a total of 23 other such websites.

Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told Ars that "it's a pretty reasonable assumption" that at one point the FBI was running roughly half of the known child porn sites hosted on Tor-hidden servers. Lewis runs OnionScan, an ongoing bot-driven analysis of the Tor-hidden darknet. Her research began in April 2016, and it shows that as of August 2016, there were 29 unique child porn related sites on Tor-hidden servers.

"Doing the math, it's not zero sites, it's probably not all the sites, but we know that they're getting authorization for some of them," she said. "I think it's a reasonable assumption—I don't think the FBI would be doing their job if they weren't."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

As Donald Trump emerged as the winner of the American presidential campaign Tuesday night, 100,000 people in the Unites States visited Canada's immigration website, contributing to a crash.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed that visitors from the U.S. made up half the traffic on its website when it "started to experience difficulties" around 11 p.m. on Nov. 8. The usual proportion of visitors from the U.S. ranges from 8.8 to 11.6 per cent.

In total, 200,000 users were on the website when it crashed, compared to 17,000 users at the same time the previous week.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-immigration-website-crash-presidential-election-1.3845080

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Working with physicists from the University of Rome, a team led by Professor Cordt Zollfrank from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) built the first controllable random laser based on cellulose paper in Straubing. The team thereby showed how naturally occurring structures can be adapted for technical applications. Hence, materials no longer need to be artificially outfitted with disordered structures, utilizing naturally occurring ones instead.
...
Two components are necessary for a laser: First of all, a medium which amplifies light. And secondly, a structure which retains the light in the medium. A classic laser uses mirrors to order and shine light in a single direction in a targeted, uniform fashion.

This also takes place uniformly in the microscopic structure of a random laser, but in different directions. Although the development of the random laser is still in its infancy, in the future it could result in lower-cost production. This is because random lasers have the advantage that they are direction-independent and function with multiple colors, just to name a few benefits.
...
However, the light waves can still be controlled despite their random nature, as the team led by Claudio Conti of the Institute for Complex Systems in Rome discovered, with whom Daniel Van Opdenbosch and Cordt Zollfrank collaborated. With the help of a spectrometer, they were able to differentiate the various laser wavelengths generated in the material and localize them separately from one another.

Van Opdenbosch described the procedure: "The test setup used to map the samples consisted of a green laser whose energy could be adjusted, microscope lenses, and a mobile table which allowed the sample to be moved past. That way, our colleagues were able to determine that at different energy levels, different areas of the material radiate different laser waves." In light of this analysis, it is possible to configure the laser in any number of ways and to determine the direction and intensity of its radiation.

This knowledge puts potential practical applications within reach. "Such materials could, for example, be useful as micro-switches or detectors for structural changes," said Van Opdenbosch.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Tinier than the AIDS virus -- that is currently the circumference of the smallest transistors. The industry has shrunk the central elements of their computer chips to fourteen nanometers in the last sixty years. Conventional methods, however, are hitting physical boundaries. Researchers around the world are looking for alternatives. One method could be the self-organization of complex components from molecules and atoms. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Paderborn University have now made an important advance: the physicists conducted a current through gold-plated nanowires, which independently assembled themselves from single DNA strands. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Langmuir.

At first glance, it resembles wormy lines in front of a black background. But what the electron microscope shows up close is that the nanometer-sized structures connect two electrical contacts. Dr. Artur Erbe from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research is pleased about what he sees. "Our measurements have shown that an electrical current is conducted through these tiny wires." This is not necessarily self-evident, the physicist stresses. We are, after all, dealing with components made of modified DNA. In order to produce the nanowires, the researchers combined a long single strand of genetic material with shorter DNA segments through the base pairs to form a stable double strand. Using this method, the structures independently take on the desired form.

"With the help of this approach, which resembles the Japanese paper folding technique origami and is therefore referred to as DNA-origami, we can create tiny patterns," explains the HZDR researcher. "Extremely small circuits made of molecules and atoms are also conceivable here." This strategy, which scientists call the "bottom-up" method, aims to turn conventional production of electronic components on its head. "The industry has thus far been using what is known as the 'top-down' method. Large portions are cut away from the base material until the desired structure is achieved. Soon this will no longer be possible due to continual miniaturization." The new approach is instead oriented on nature: molecules that develop complex structures through self-assembling processes.

An abstract is available; full article is pay-walled.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Before we have self-healing cars or buildings, we need strong materials that can fully self-repair in water-free environments. Self-healing materials work very well if they are soft and wet, but research groups have found that the ability to self-repair diminishes as materials dry out. Scientists at Osaka University are beginning to bridge this gap with rigid materials that can repair 99% of a cut on the surface in semi-dry conditions. They present their prototypes, which are the first to combine physical and chemical approaches to self-healing, on November 10 in Chem.

"The combination of physical and chemical self-healing enables materials to exhibit rapid and efficient self-healing even in a dried, hard state," says senior author Akira Harada, a supramolecular polymer chemist at Osaka University. "Only a small amount of water vapor is needed to facilitate self-healing in the dried film state. In other words, water serves as a non-toxic glue in the self-healing process," adds co-author Yoshinori Takashima, an associate professor at Osaka University.

Material engineers use several strategies to generate self-healing materials. They can physically embed the material with microcapsules or pathways filled with healing agents or build the material by using molecules, such as polyrotaxane, that change shape in response to damage—also called stress relaxation. Chemical self-healing materials use reversible bonds ranging from reversible chemical reactions to intermolecular interactions such as hydrogen bonding.

Harada's lab combined physical and chemical self-healing mechanisms in their materials by using polyrotaxane as a backbone structure cross-linked by reversible interactions, in this case between boronic acid and diols. The polyrotaxane structure enables stress relaxation in recovery from a shallow dent, and the reversible nature of the bonds enables chemical self-healing from a deep cut. The combined approach allowed the materials to recover up to 80% of their strength within 10 minutes (without the combination, the materials could repair only up to 30% of their strength after an hour).

The approach helped materials regain 80% of strength in 10 minutes after being damaged.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Understanding how carbon dissolves in water at the molecular level under extreme conditions is critical to understanding the Earth's deep carbon cycle -- a process that ultimately influences global climate change.

Contrary to current geochemical models, the carbon dissolved in water-rich fluid at the bottom of the Earth's upper mantle is not in the form of carbon dioxide but rather in carbonate and bicarbonate ions. That is the conclusion of scientists at UChicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering, who simulated the fate of dissolved carbon dioxide under high pressures and temperatures in the upper mantle, about 410 miles below the surface of the Earth. Their results were published in the Oct. 12 issue of Science Advances.

Journal: The fate of carbon dioxide in water-rich fluids under extreme conditions. Science Advances, 2016; 2 (10): e1601278 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601278 (abstract) and full article.

Dinosaur becomes oil becomes gas becomes CO2 becomes plant becomes dinosaur?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Quantum computing is about to get more complex. Researchers have evidence that large molecules made of nickel and chromium can store and process information in the same way bytes do for digital computers. The researchers present algorithms proving it's possible to use supramolecular chemistry to connect "qubits," the basic units for quantum information processing, in Chem on November 10. This approach would generate several kinds of stable qubits that could be connected together into structures called "two-qubit gates."

"We have shown that the chemistry is achievable for bringing together two-qubit gates," says senior author Richard Winpenny, Head of the University of Manchester School of Chemistry. "The molecules can be made and the two-qubit gates assembled. The next step is to show that these two-qubit gates work."

Traditional computers organize and store information in the form of bits, which are written out in long chains of 0s and 1s, whereas quantum computers use qubits, which can be 1, 0, or any superposition between those numbers at the same time, allowing researchers to do much more powerful computations. However, large assemblies of qubits that are stable enough to be applied to perform algorithms don't yet exist.

Winpenny and his collaborators address this problem in their algorithm designs, which combine large molecules to create both two qubits and a bridge between the units, called a quantum gate. These gates are held together through supramolecular chemistry. Studies of the gates show that the quantum information stored in the individual qubits is stored long enough to allow manipulations of the information and hence algorithms. The time information that can be stored is called the coherence time.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Campaign Asia reports that gadget maker Lenovo will stop marketing smartphones with its own brand name and adopt the Moto label from here on out.

The company acquired Motorola from Google for $2.91 billion in 2014. It previously announced plans to phase out the 'Motorola' name for handsets at the beginning of this year; the new change comes along with a shake-up of the company's leadership.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out for the Moto brand. As Android Police noted, there's a risk of diluting the sensible nomenclature that Moto currently uses to differentiate its high-end, mid-range and budget phones; Lenovo makes a wide variety of handsets, including the first one to feature Google's Project Tango AR tech.

Original Submission