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Phoenix666 writes:

The head of Volkswagen's core brand is sketching out a broad restructuring emphasizing electric cars and digital technology such as autonomous vehicles and car-sharing.

Volkswagen division head Herbert Diess said Tuesday at a news conference at company headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany that the goal is "to fundamentally change Volkswagen" as it bounces back from a scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests.

The plan foresees new investments in electric-car technology and in software that would enable new ways of using and sharing cars over the longer term.

Would all this upheaval in the auto industry be happening without Tesla?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A specifically designed collection of gears is soft on one end and rigid on the other. These robust properties hold even in the event of manufacturing imperfections. This emerging research may lead to new ways of designing geared devices like satellite trackers or watches, and the study has been reported in Physical Review X.

Imagine two connected gear wheels. Turning one clockwise causes the other to turn counterclockwise. Connecting a third gear to both causes the system to get stuck. Leiden physicists Anne Meeussen and Jayson Paulose now have developed a complex assembly of gears that sticks in one place, but which operates in another. Considered as a new metamaterial, it is rigid on one end and soft on the other.

In the video below, this remarkable mechanism seems like magic, but the researchers mathematically devised it. 'The beauty of this principle is that it's a robust system,' says group leader Prof. Vincenzo Vitelli. 'We can decide which parts are soft or rigid, and the mechanism keeps working even if the gears are imperfect. This property is often called topological robustness.'

The video referenced in the story is available on YouTube.

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arslan writes:

A report from a team of scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF) tells of how they have developed a new process for creating flexible supercapacitors that can store more energy and be recharged more than 30,000 times without degrading.

Scientists have been studying the use of nanomaterials to improve supercapacitors that could enhance or even replace batteries in electronic devices. It's a stubborn problem, because a supercapacitor that held as much energy as a lithium-ion battery would have to be much, much larger. The team at UCF has experimented with applying newly discovered two-dimensional materials only a few atoms thick to supercapacitors.

[...] [The] team has developed supercapacitors composed of millions of nanometer-thick wires coated with shells of two-dimensional materials. A highly conductive core facilitates fast electron transfer for fast charging and discharging. And uniformly coated shells of two-dimensional materials yield high energy and power densities.

[...] Supercapacitors that use the new materials could be used in phones and other electronic gadgets, and electric vehicles that could benefit from sudden bursts of power and speed. And because they're flexible, it could mean a significant advancement in wearable tech, as well.

Although not yet commercially ready, the team has been working with UCF's Office of Technology Transfer to patent the new process.

The full journal article in ACS Nano is paywalled but the abstract is available,

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Phoenix666 writes:

Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.

Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.

"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.

The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S. 

Could California go it alone?

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Authorities used rubber-coated steel bullets, concussion grenades, tear gas, and water cannons against unarmed protesters near the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 26°F (-3°C) temperatures over the weekend.

Indian Country Today reports

"We have seen four gunshot wounds, three of them to the face and head", said Leland Brenholt, a volunteer medic.

[...]400 protesters, or "water protectors", attempted to dismantle a police-enforced barricade on State Highway 1806.

[...]"Water protectors are done with the military-style barricades. We are done with the floodlights and the armored military trucks. We are are done with it!" declared organizer, Dallas Goldtooth in a mid-evening Facebook post.

Their action was met with the same militarized response that the Morton County Sheriff's Department has demonstrated on protesters for weeks: the use of armored trucks, less-than-lethal ammunition, tear-gas, mace, and on this below-freezing night, water cannons.

[...]Reports from a coalition of advocacy groups near Standing Rock report hundreds of water protectors were receiving treatment for contamination by tear gas, hypothermia, and blunt traumas as a result of rubber bullets. One person, an elder, was reportedly revived after suffering cardiac arrest, organizers said.

"As medical professionals, we are concerned for the real risk of loss of life due to severe hypothermia under these conditions," read a statement from the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council.

A more measured take is available from the AP.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Each holiday season, thousands of teenagers tear gift wrap off shiny, new guitars. They giddily pluck at the detuned strings, thinking how cool they'll be once they're rock stars—even if almost all will give up before they ever get to jam out to "Sweet Child o' Mine."

For them, it's no big deal to relegate the guitar to the back of the closet forever in favor of the Playstation controller. But it is a big deal for Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the 70-year-old maker of rock 'n' roll's most iconic electric guitars. Every quitter hurts.

[...]The $6 billion U.S. retail market for musical instruments has been stagnant for five years, according to data compiled by research firm IBISWorld, and would-be guitar buyers have more to distract them than ever. So how do you convince someone to put down the iPhone, pick up a Stratocaster, and keep playing?

Seems Fender didn't get the memo: the music of the future is hip-hop and autotuners.

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tynin writes:

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25, the next big step [on] our journey into the containerized, modular future!

Fedora is a global community that works together to lead the advancement of free and open source software. As part of the community's mission the project delivers three editions, each one a free, Linux-based operating system tailored to meet specific use cases: Fedora 25 Atomic Host, Fedora 25 Server, and Fedora 25 Workstation.

Each edition is built from a common set of base packages, which form the foundation of the Fedora operating system. As with all new versions of Fedora, Fedora 25 provides many bug fixes and tweaks to these underlying components, as well as new and enhanced packages, including:

• Docker 1.12 for building and running containerized applications
• Node.js 6.9.1, the latest version of the popular server-side JavaScript engine
• Support for Rust, a faster and more stable system programming language
• Multiple Python versions — 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 — to help run test suites across several Python configurations, as well as PyPy, PyPy3, and Jython

You can get Fedora 25 from getfedora.org. It is shipping with the Linux 4.8 kernel. The default environment is Gnome 3.22 with the Wayland display server. I did a DNF upgrade from release 24 and tested it with my Intel and Radeon setup and everything has just worked out of the box. If you aren't a fan of Gnome, there are other Desktop Environments available, called Spins. Enjoy!

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Phoenix666 writes:

A mineral far below Earth's surface may hold the key to how much water is stored in the planet, a Florida State University researcher says.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Abstract], FSU Assistant Professor of Geology Mainak Mookherjee reports that water exists far deeper in Earth than scientists previously thought.

Mookherjee and Andreas Hermann from the University of Edinburgh estimate that in the deep Earth -- roughly 400 to 600 kilometers into the mantle -- water is stored and transported through a high-pressure polymorph of the mineral brucite.

Previously, scientists thought brucite was not thermodynamically stable that deep in Earth. "This opens up a Pandora's Box for us," Mookherjee said.

"We didn't think water could be stored by hydrous minerals such as brucite at these depths. But now that we know it's there, we need to figure out how much water could be effectively stored inside it."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[Editor's Note: This story is taken from information issued by Cloudflare and it refers to their experiences of IPv6. However, it remains a useful indicator on IPv6 availability and usage. Have a healthy pinch of salt to hand.]

It's 2016 and almost every site using Cloudflare (more than 4 million of them) is using IPv6. Because of this, Cloudflare sees significant IPv6 traffic globally where networks have enabled IPv6 to the consumer.

IPv6 is faster for two reasons. The first is that many major operating systems and browsers like iOS, MacOS, Chrome and Firefox impose anywhere from a 25ms to 300ms artificial delay on connections made over IPv4. The second is that some mobile networks won't need to perform extra v4 -> v6 and v6 -> v4 translations to connect visitors to IPv6 enabled sites if the phone is only assigned an IPv6 address. (IPv6-only phones are becoming very common. If you have a phone on T-Mobile, Telstra, SK Telecom, Orange, or EE UK, to name a few, it's likely you're v6-only.)

How much faster is IPv6? Our data shows that visitors connecting over IPv6 were able to connect and load pages in 27% less time than visitors connecting over IPv4. LinkedIn found an even more dramatic effect, with up to a 40% performance boost on mobile connections over IPv6. Facebook also found a significant performance increase, around 10-15% on IPv6.

IPv6 is clearly important for driving a faster, better internet, so who is driving IPv6 adoption?

In terms of countries, Belgium leads by a mile. Over the last 30 days, 56.47% of traffic (in bytes) to Belgians on Cloudflare has been over IPv6. This is largely due to Telenet, an ISP in Belgium, doing almost 96.8% of their traffic over IPv6!

The Irish numbers are artificially high due to several of Facebook's IPv6 ranges being registered in Ireland. Facebook does an enormous amount of traffic over IPv6 –– 81% of Facebook's traffic through Cloudflare is IPv6. In fact, Facebook's crawling over IPv6 actually accounts for 6.9% of Cloudflare's total outbound IPv6 traffic.

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Phoenix666 writes:

NBCUniversal announced it is doubling its investment in BuzzFeed, pumping another $200 million into the internet media company.

"NBCUniversal made an additional $200M investment to expand the strategic partnership," the companies said in a joint release.

The deepened alliance will center heavily on extending an advertising sales relationship between BuzzFeed and NBCUniversal, which is owned by US cable colossus Comcast.

Comcast invested an initial $200 million in BuzzFeed last year.

NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed have partnered on initiatives including the 2016 Rio Olympics on Snapchat and selling advertising.

"BuzzFeed has helped us engage millennial audiences with our content and extend the reach of our clients' campaigns to new platforms," NBCUniversal president of digital experiences Maggie Suniewick said in the release.

Is NBC trying to get around the damage the American presidential election did to its reputation?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On Monday the e-sports industry awards take place in London to applaud the top players in the business but not one female player has been nominated.

Competitive gaming, also known as Electronic Sports or e-sports, is growing at an incredible pace. In 2016, revenues from e-sports are predicted by professional services firm Deloitte to rise by 25% to $500m (£406m). Its regular global audience will likely top 150 million people.

Unlike in traditional sport, physical advantages in e-sports are non-existent yet the most popular games are still overwhelmingly played by men.

Recent research by the Pew Center shows men and women are equally likely to say they play video games but men are twice as likely to consider themselves "gamers". It is when gaming becomes competitive that the number of women playing drops dramatically.

Steph Harvey is one of the most successful gamers in the world. She says that the number of women in e-sports is as low as 5% and the main reason is the stereotype attached to gamers. "It's still a 'boy's club' so as a woman you're automatically judged for being different," she says.

Online abuse has been prevalent in the gaming community for years and even led to a misogynistic hate campaign.

Steph has even received online rape threats in the past: "The way I get harassed is about what they would do to my body, about why I don't deserve to be there because I use my sexuality - it's all extremely graphic."

[...] Julia Kiran is the leader of Team Secret, which in October became the top female team in the world. She thinks this reflects a common attitude: "It's always felt that female teams are not a real scene. Male players see us as a side game that doesn't count."

One of the solutions has been the creation of female teams and female-only tournaments.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A 130-million-year-old bird holds a clue to ancient color that has never before been shown in a fossil.

Eoconfuciusornis ' feathers contain not only microscopic pigment pods called melanosomes, but also evidence of beta-keratin, a protein in the stringy matrix that surrounds melanosomes, Mary Schweitzer and colleagues report November 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Together, these clues could strengthen the case for inferring color from dinosaur fossils, a subject of debate for years ( SN: 11/26/16, p. 24 ). Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, has long pointed out that the microscopic orbs that some scientists claim are melanosomes may actually be microbes. The two look similar, but they have some key differences. Microbes aren't enmeshed in keratin, for one. 

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Phoenix666 writes:

Runners who wear running shoes with no cushioning and land on the ball of their foot rather than the heel put significantly less demand on their bodies, new research suggests.

Researchers compared how quickly the force acts when runners' feet hit the ground -- known as the loading rate -- which has been shown to influence running injury risk.

The study of 29 runners found significantly lower loading rates for those who wore so-called minimal running shoes and landed on the ball of their foot, compared to people in normal running shoes, regardless of whether the latter landed on the heel or ball of the foot.

The article may be of academic interest to Soylentils.

[Editors note: I wonder if Vibram will get its money back based off this study? Also, we ran a somewhat related story a few months ago on the detriment of shoes to the foot's natural spring action...]

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"exec" writes:

Hackers Program Bank ATMs to Spew Cash

After crimes in Taiwan and Thailand, the FBI warns of similar potential attacks in U.S.

Cybercriminals who once earned millions by breaking into individual online bank accounts are now targeting the banks' own computers, with often-dramatic results.

In Taiwan and Thailand earlier this year, the criminals programmed bank ATMs to spew cash. Gang members stood in front of the machines at the appointed hour and collected millions of dollars.

Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned U.S. banks of the potential for similar attacks. The FBI said in a bulletin that it is "monitoring emerging reports indicating that well-resourced and organized malicious cyber actors have intentions to target the U.S. financial sector."

[... In Taiwan ...] By July 11, criminals had collected more than 83 million New Taiwan dollars (US$2.6 million) in cash—without using ATM cards. Twenty-two people, most from Eastern Europe, waited by ATMs to remove the money. Three suspects were later arrested and over NT$77 million recovered.

-- submitted from IRC

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n1 writes:

Donald Trump says he will issue an executive action on his first day in office to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In a video updating Americans on the White House transition, the President-elect described TPP as a "potential disaster for our country".

[...] Mr Trump said his administration instead intends to generate "fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores".

Sky Correspondent Greg Milam said: "Donald Trump has been very critical of what trade deals have done for American workers and the damage that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did in the 1990s - particularly to low-income workers in the Midwest, who it turns out voted for Mr Trump in huge numbers."

Source: Sky News

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