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Phoenix666 writes:

For decades, marine chemists have faced an elusive paradox. The surface waters of the world's oceans are supersaturated with the greenhouse gas methane, yet most species of microbes that can generate the gas can't survive in oxygen-rich surface waters. So where exactly does all the methane come from? This longstanding riddle, known as the "marine methane paradox," may have finally been cracked thanks to a new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

According to WHOI geochemist Dan Repeta, the answer may lie in the complex ways that bacteria break down dissolved organic matter, a cocktail of substances excreted into seawater by living organisms.

In a paper released in the November 14, 2016 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, Repeta and colleagues at the University of Hawaii found that much of the ocean's dissolved organic matter is made up of novel polysaccharides -- long chains of sugar molecules created by photosynthetic bacteria in the upper ocean. Bacteria begin to slowly break these polysaccharides, tearing out pairs of carbon and phosphorus atoms (called C-P bonds) from their molecular structure. In the process, the microbes create methane, ethylene, and propylene gasses as byproducts. Most of the methane escapes back into the atmosphere.

It turns out aquatic cattle are not to blame.

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charon writes:

The Washington Post reports that weather conditions at the North Pole are abnormally warm for the beginning of winter.

It's polar night there now — the sun isn't rising in much of the Arctic. That's when the Arctic is supposed to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the vast Arctic Ocean is supposed to grow and thicken.

[...] "It's about 20C [36 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean, along with cold anomalies of about the same magnitude over north-central Asia," Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, said by email Wednesday.

"The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice, and plenty of warm/moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream."

No one quoted in the article speaks about Global Warming, but they all think the situation in the Arctic is anomalous and are interesting in learning more about its causes.

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charon writes:

Researchers in California have discovered that the traces our skin leaves behind on everything we touch can give them an amazing amount of information about our lives, habits, and well-being. Dr. Pieter Dorrestein and his team at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences performed a study which focused on phones, and are already working on another with other personal objects:

"By analyzing the molecules they've left behind on their phones, we could tell if a person is likely female, uses high-end cosmetics, dyes her hair, drinks coffee, prefers beer over wine, likes spicy food, is being treated for depression, wears sunscreen and bug spray -- and therefore likely spends a lot of time outdoors -- all kinds of things," said first author Amina Bouslimani, PhD, an assistant project scientist in Dorrestein's lab. "This is the kind of information that could help an investigator narrow down the search for an object's owner."

There are limitations, Dorrestein said. First of all, these molecular read-outs provide a general profile of person's lifestyle, but they are not meant to be a one-to-one match, like a fingerprint. To develop more precise profiles and for this method to be more useful, he said more molecules are needed in the reference database, particularly for the most common foods people eat, clothing materials, carpets, wall paints and anything else people come into contact with. He'd like to see a trace molecule database on the scale of the fingerprint database, but it's a large-scale effort that no single lab will be able to do alone.

No doubt such a database will be built by law enforcement agencies allowing them to trace your movements without your assistance.

Lifestyle chemistries from phones for individual profiling (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1610019113) (DX)

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charon writes:

Just in time for American Thanksgiving, here is a moderately scientific overview of the journey to greatness of the humble cranberry.

The cranberry — one of only a few commercial fruits native to North America — might have even sat beside a roast turkey at the first Thanksgiving feast.

But how did the tart cranberry become an industrial crop, with 800 million pounds grown annually, when other native fruits are so much sweeter? It wasn't just the health benefits, clever marketing, or Grandma's cranberry chutney — it was a happenstance of evolution. Cranberries float.

And they are delicious in milk. Bon appétit!

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charon writes:

A medical research team has created a prototype of a new type of pill which unfolds inside the stomach so it can release a drug slowly over ten days or more.

The new device, which has been tested in pigs, could be a potential solution not only for patients with chronic diseases, but also as a way to treat conditions in third world countries that require long-term therapies, such as malaria. The researchers published the results of their proof-of-concept study in the journal Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday.

The pill had to overcome some major hurdles. The stomach contains extremely strong muscles that ensure every last drop of food makes its way out into the small intestine, so it's hard for pills to have staying power. To combat this, the researchers designed the drug so that when swallowed, the capsule opens up into a sort of star. This shape prevents the pill from leaving the stomach and entering the small intestine.

[...] Once the pill releases the last dose, it breaks apart and can finally pass out of the stomach and into the small intestine.

It's still in early stages of development, but this could be a life-saving development for the up to 50% of patients who do not take their medications as prescribed.

Full paper at this link.

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martyb writes:

Soon to be upon us is Black Friday — the time of year when retailers try and outdo each other to corner extra sales. In recent years, retailers have been springing their deals earlier and earlier trying to get a jump on the other retailers. Some amazing deals can be had if you know where and when to look.

In light of that, what things are you hoping for? New computer? Mobile phone? Tablet? Game?

Alternatively, what great deals have you found (both on-line and brick-and-mortar)?

I think it would be wonderful if someone, by posting a wishlist item here, were able to find a great deal known by someone else in the community.

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"exec" writes:

The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas' Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil, and consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources. 

The estimate of continuous oil in the Midland Basin Wolfcamp shale assessment is nearly three times larger than that of the 2013 USGS Bakken-Three Forks resource assessment, making this the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date.

"The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more," said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program. "Changes in technology and industry practices can have significant effects on what resources are technically recoverable, and that's why we continue to perform resource assessments throughout the United States and the world."

https://www.usgs.gov/news/usgs-estimates-20-billion-barrels-oil-texas-wolfcamp-shale-formation

-- submitted from IRC

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Courthouse News reports

President-elect Donald Trump will pay [$21 million,] the bulk of a $25 million class action settlement, to students who sued the businessman-turned-world leader nearly seven years ago in California, just days before the first San Diego case was set to go to trial.

The class attorneys told U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel at a hearing in San Diego federal court [November 18] that all 7,000 class members in the two San Diego cases--Low v. Trump University and Cohen v. Trump--would get at least half if not all of what they spent on a Trump University real estate education. Attorney Jason Forge said they were able to "maximize recovery" for Trump University students by waiving their attorney's fees and litigating the case on behalf of the students for free.

[...] Class attorney Rachel Jensen said the students can finally "pay off their credit cards and move on with their lives".

[...] The Low case included Trump University students in California, New York, and Florida, who sued Trump in 2010 over claims he defrauded them when they invested up to $35,000 to learn insider real estate secrets from instructors purportedly handpicked by Trump. The president-elect turned out to have little involvement in the school and his attorneys said he relied on "sales puffery" common in advertising to capitalize on Trump's name.

New York's Attorney General followed suit, suing Trump University in 2013. At the heart of that case was the title "university", which New York's Department of Education had warned the real estate school it could not use because it was not an accredited institution.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes with an article from the MIT Technology Review:

Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.

But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.

The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.

To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.

[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.

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takyon writes:

Reuters reports:

Deutsche Bank has nominated its chairman for a second term after an internal probe cleared him of accusations that he was partly to blame for the bank's poor cooperation with authorities in a probe into rate-rigging, a source close to the bank said. Paul Achleitner was nominated at a meeting of the lender's supervisory board in late October, the source said on Sunday. Shareholders will vote on the extension of his term at the annual meeting next spring.

Several shareholders said on Friday that a renewal of Achleitner's contract was imperiled by Deutsche's poor earnings and faltering share price. "The bank needs stability and continuity," said the source about his nomination. Last year, Germany's largest lender agreed to settle a case over the alleged manipulation of interbank rates such as Libor for a record $2.5 billion with U.S. and British authorities, which had accused the bank of obstructing their investigation.

[...] A motion calling for an additional external investigation was voted down at the annual general meeting in May. Any evidence of wrongdoing would have made it an uphill battle for Achleitner to secure a second term as chairman. Deutsche is still investigating some former top executives, the paper said.

What was the Libor rate-rigging scandal?

The Libor scandal was a series of fraudulent actions connected to the Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) and also the resulting investigation and reaction. The Libor is an average interest rate calculated through submissions of interest rates by major banks across the world. The scandal arose when it was discovered that banks were falsely inflating or deflating their rates so as to profit from trades, or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were. Libor underpins approximately $350 trillion in derivatives. It is currently administered by NYSE Euronext, which took over running the Libor in January 2014.

Related: Three Convicted in Libor Rigging Trial
Deutsche Bank Nearing Multi-Billion Dollar Settlement with U.S. Dept. of Justice

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Richard Simmons has officially shut down his legendary exercise studio in Beverly Hills. Slimmons had its last class yesterday morning, and although the iconic exercise guru wasn't present, he did have a message for the 60-ish people who showed up one last time to sweat to the oldies. They'd come from near and far, diehards and newbies alike, whose ages ran the gamut from 25 to 94. Simmons wrote a note for the class that the studio manager read aloud, and it was later posted to Facebook

(via Archive.org)

Start "Sweatin' to the Oldies"!

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GreatOutdoors writes:

A Republican trifecta in Washington next year will likely see action on a bill to remove firearm suppressors from National Firearms Act regulation after 82 years.
The Hearing Protection Act was introduced last October by U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., and currently has 78 bipartisan co-sponsors from 34 states. Since then, the HPA has been among the top 10 most-viewed bills on Congress.gov almost every week since it was introduced.

However, with a slim Republican majority in the Senate unable to override a near-certain veto from President Obama, the bill has been in doldrums.
Now, with the White House under new management next year, advocates for the measure feel signs are looking up and will likely return to the next Congress with a fresh mandate.

Why is this important? Safety has been increasing in nearly every aspect and product since the beginning of time, but allowing people to protect their hearing by adding silencers to their weapons has been a tough road for gun owners for a long while.

“Imagine for a second that we lived in a world where you had to pay a $200 tax to buy a pair of earplugs,” Knox Williams, president of the American Suppressor Association, the industry trade group for the devices, told Guns.com on Wednesday. “Now, imagine that even after paying that tax you still had to wait 8 months before you could bring your earplugs home with you. As silly as that sounds, it’s the world we live in with suppressors in the NFA.”

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JNCF writes:

NPR reports on different interpretations of a recent study involving young mice and prolonged audiovisual stimulation:

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mrpg writes:

UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) released a policy brief [PDF] about the impact of automation in developed and developing countries.

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Appalbarry writes:

Off and on for several years I've been part of a local political forum using Blogger.

Usually a new topic will be posted every week, and group of thirty or forty enthusiastic people will generate fifty to a hundred comments.

The challenge is that we're overwhelmed by Anons, who go off wildly in all directions, dwell endlessly on personal vendettas, and lately get far too close to outright libel of other people. Consensus in the past has been that allowing Anons is good thing, but we're realizing that we really need to be able to moderate their comments.

What we really want is something simple enough for non-experts, not needing our own hosting, that will allow us to:

1. Post topics for discussion
2. Let "named" posters comment without a delay for moderation.
3. Allow Anon comments but hold them for moderation.

The good thing about Blogger is that it doesn't seem to get blasted with comment spam, as seems to be the case with WordPress blogs for instance. The bad thing is that your only choice with Anons is either all-in, or all-out. Either you cut them out entirely, or you give them full rein to wreak havok.

We'd appreciate being pointed to something similar to Blogger, but just a little bit more featured, and not part some large environment like Google Groups or Facebook. Although letting people log in using Facebook, Twitter, or Google IDs (or Open ID, whatever) is good too.

I'm in the process of checking out Weebly and whatever else Google throws at me, but am hoping that the Soylent community can suggest something more appropriate that can be up and running with minimal fuss.

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