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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Should the Olympics require countries to post a bond if their athletes win a medal, so that if they are discovered to have cheated the people most affected can receive compensation?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Artificial muscles—materials that contract and expand somewhat like muscle fibers do—can have many applications, from robotics to components in the automobile and aviation industries. Now, MIT researchers have come up with one of the simplest and lowest-cost systems yet for developing such "muscles," in which a material reproduces some of the bending motions that natural muscle tissues perform.

The key ingredient, cheap and ubiquitous, is ordinary nylon fiber.

The new approach to harnessing this basic synthetic fiber material lies in shaping and heating the fibers in a particular way, which is described in a new paper in the journal Advanced Materials by Seyed Mirvakili, a doctoral candidate, and Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Previously, researchers had come up with the basic principle of using twisted coils of nylon filament to mimic basic linear muscle activity. They showed that for a given size and weight, such devices could extend and retract further, and store and release more energy, than natural muscles. But bending motions, such as those of human fingers and limbs, proved more challenging and had not yet been achieved in a simple and inexpensive system until the new work at MIT.

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Phoenix666 writes:

When are brilliant scientists the most brilliant? What age are you likely to be when the Nobel committee comes calling? Pick one of the following answers:

• You need a lot of expertise and wisdom to make a big breakthrough. You need professional connections, lots of research money, and big laboratories. Scientific breakthroughs come from people in middle age, or maybe even at the end of their careers.
• It's the young upstarts who have lots of energy and fresh ideas. After all, the old scientists are stuck in ideas from the past. They're already past their prime. They're tired and don't have much energy any more. Am I talking about myself at the ripe old age of 56? I didn't get much sleep last night, and my knees are kind of sore :)

A new study gives us the answer: None of the above. There's no relationship between age and creative scientific contribution. The authors of the study analyzed 2,856 physicists, working from 1893 to the present. They found that the best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It's lots of hard work. The scientists who do the most experiments, and test the most hypotheses, are the ones with the big contributions. The researchers found that once they'd controlled for productivity, age doesn't add any additional predictive power.

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Celestial writes:

Microsoft is now selling third-parties access to its Windows 10 telemetry data via subscription.

Microsoft struck a deal with security company FireEye recently according to a report on Australian news magazin[e] Arn [sic] which gives FireEye access to all Windows 10 Telemetry data.

The report states that FireEye in return will provide Microsoft with the company's iSIGHT Intelligence software for Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection on Windows 10 devices.

[...] Windows Defender is built-in to Windows 10 and enabled by default unless other security software is recognized by the operating system.

[...] The news article suggests that the partnership benefits Microsoft, and specifically the reputation and credibility of the commercial version of Windows Defender.

A press release by FireEye on November 3, 2016 provides additional details on the deal. The company's iSIGHT Intelligence software is available through Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP) but not the free version of Windows Defender.

WDATP customers gain access to several technical indicators that are provided by the software. These include the main motivation of the attacker, related tools, information about target sectors and geographies, and a description of the actor and operation.

According to the report on ARN, security teams may also get their hands on Windows 10 Telemetry data via subscription billing models.

Third-parties will get access to telemetry data of all Windows 10 devices. An overview of what that may include is provided on this Technet page.

Neither FireEye, Microsoft or ARN reveal details on the range of Telemetry data that FireEye gains access to.

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n1 writes:

Patients could be forced to show their passports before being granted NHS [UK's National Health Service] care as part of a bid to crack down on foreign visitors, a senior official has said.

The Department of Health is examining whether patients should have to show two forms of ID to get some elements of NHS care, saying this was "controversial" but already happening in some places.

Chris Wormald, the most senior civil servant at the Department of Health, said in a hearing at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the NHS has a "lot further to go" when it comes to reclaiming money from foreign visitors.

[...] "Now it is obviously quite a controversial thing to do to say to the entire population you now have to prove identity."

[...] But PAC chairwoman Meg Hillier expressed concern about British residents that don't have photo ID and those who would struggle to find a utility bill.

"I have constituents who have no photo IDs," she said.

"Because they have never travelled they have no passport, they have no driver's licence because they have never driven, they still live at home because they can't afford to move out so they've never had a utility bill in their name.

"(They are) perfectly entitled to health care - British born, British resident - how are you going to make sure that people have access easily to the National Health Service without having to go through a very humiliating and impossible to meet set of demands?"

Source: The Independent

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Phoenix666 writes:

The 2015 Renewable Energy Data Book shows that U.S. renewable electricity grew to 16.7 percent of total installed capacity and 13.8 percent of total electricity generation during the past year. Published annually by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on behalf of the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the data book illustrates U.S. and global energy statistics, including renewable electricity generation, renewable energy development, clean energy investments, and technology-specific data and trends.

[...] The 2015 Renewable Energy Data Book compiles recently available statistics for the 2015 calendar year. Key insights include:

• Renewable electricity accounted for 64 percent of U.S. electricity capacity additions in 2015, compared to 52 percent in 2014.
• Renewable electricity generation increased 2.4 percent in 2015. Solar electricity generation increased by 35.8 percent (11.7 terawatt-hours), and wind electricity generation increased by 5.1 percent (9.3 terawatt-hours), while generation from hydropower dropped by 3.2 percent (-8.2 terawatt-hours).
• The combined share of wind and solar as a percentage of renewable generation continued to grow in the U.S. in 2015. Hydropower produced more than 44 percent of total renewable electricity generation, wind produced 34 percent, biomass produced 11 percent, solar (photovoltaic and concentrating solar power) produced 8 percent, and geothermal produced 3 percent.
• Wind electricity installed capacity increased by more than 12 percent (8.1 gigawatts) in a year, accounting for more than 56 percent of U.S. renewable electricity capacity installed in 2015.
• U.S. solar electricity installed capacity increased by 36 percent (5.6 gigawatts), accounting for nearly 40 percent of newly installed U.S. renewable electricity capacity in 2015.
• In 2015, California continued to have the most installed renewable electricity capacity of any U.S. state (nearly 31 gigawatts), followed by Washington (nearly 25 gigawatts) and Texas (more than 19 gigawatts).California has a diverse mix of renewables led by solar PV, hydropower, and wind. In Washington, the main contributor to renewable capacity is hydropower, while wind is the largest contributor in Texas.
• Oklahoma had the highest growth rate (30 percent) in installed renewable electricity capacity additions in 2015, followed by North Carolina (27 percent), Utah (27 percent), and Kansas (27 percent). Additions in wind capacity were the main contributor to growth in Oklahoma and Kansas, whereas additions in solar PV capacity accounted for most of the growth in North Carolina and Utah.
• Installed renewable electricity capacity increased to more than 29 percent of total electricity capacity worldwide in 2015. Renewables accounted for more than 24 percent of all electricity generation worldwide.

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Phoenix666 writes in with news of researchers finding a cause and potential treatment for swelling arising from a concussion:

A team of biomedical engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have identified a cause of fluid swelling of the brain, or cellular edema,that occurs during a concussion.

The researchers discovered that pre-treating the cells with an existing, FDA-approved drug used for epilepsy and altitude sickness reduces the expression of a specific protein that causes swelling.

Their findings were published in a recent issue of Nature’s Scientific Reports .

“Our study found that mild traumatic brain injury resulted in increased expression of a protein called aquaporin-4, which caused a massive cellular influx of fluid, leading to increased astrocyte cell volume and injury,” said Kartik Balachandran, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. “We then worked with a drug called Acetazolamide. Our results showed that Acetazolamide minimized cell swelling and injury, suggesting a therapeutic role for this drug in reducing the detrimental effects of concussions.”

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charon writes:

Researchers are using specialized atomic force microscopes to gain a much greater understanding of how molecules move and join together.

In extreme slow-motion, a molecule of medicine entering a cell receptor would look a little like a Soyuz space capsule docking at the International Space Station. It would brake here, boost there; rotate, translate and then, with a light jolt, lock into place.

In real time, large molecules interact in nanosecond speed, practically instantaneously, making them nearly impossible to watch. But scientists are a step closer to being able to observe their moves -- play-by-play -- thanks to novel fine-tuning of an atomic scale instrument by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The advancement could someday help researchers figure out why some drugs work well and others less so, and measure details about the workings of life at their root.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Each year more than 2 million people develop antibiotic resistance in the United States, and researchers hope their work will help identify new antibiotics to effectively treat diseases.

"This is the first time that we are using Big Data to look into microbial chemistry and characterize antibiotics and other drug candidates," said Hosein Mohimani, a computer scientist at the University of California San Diego and the paper's first author. "Although proteomics researchers have been routinely using huge spectral datasets to find important peptides, all traditional proteomics tools fail when it comes to new drug discovery. "

The algorithms the researchers developed scour mass-spectrometry data to discover so-called peptidic natural products (PNPs) -- widely used bioactive compounds that include many antibiotics.

Mass spectrometry allows researchers to identify the chemical structure of a substance by separating its ions according to their mass and charge. By running mass spectrometry data against a database of chemical structures of known antibiotics, the researchers were able to detect known compounds in substances that had never been analyzed before.

This is the first time that this kind of Big Data analysis was possible. The researchers were able to get around the well-known issue of false positives by using statistical analysis to determine the significance of each match between spectra and the antibiotics database. "We got the idea from particle physics," Mohimani said. Researchers used a statistical approach called the Markov Chain Monte Carlo to compute the probability of rare events and to throw false positives out.

Abstract.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Female vervet monkeys manipulate males into fighting battles by lavishing attention on brave soldiers while giving noncombatants the cold shoulder, researchers said on Wednesday.

After a skirmish with a rival gang, usually over food, females would groom males that had fought hardest, while snapping at those that abstained.

When the next battle came along, both those singled out for attention and those aggressively shunned would participate more vigorously in combat, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. [Paywalled, abstract only]

Female grooming and aggression "both appear to function as social incentives that effectively promote male participation in intergroup fights", a research team from Switzerland and South Africa reported.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn't been publicly announced.

Apple hasn't refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn't currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's plans.

Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

CNN Wire reports via KTLA TV in Los Angeles

Hillary Clinton's campaign is being urged by a number of top computer scientists to call for a recount of vote totals in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

[...] The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides [on November 17].

The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners.

[...] [It was noted that] Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic voting machines, which the group said could have been hacked.

Their group told Podesta and Elias that while they had not found any evidence of hacking, the pattern needs to be looked at by an independent review.

[...] A former Clinton aide declined to respond to questions about whether they will request an audit based on the findings.

Additionally, at least three electors have pledged to not vote for Trump and to seek a "reasonable Republican alternative for president through Electoral College" according to a [November 16 statement] from a group called the Hamilton Electors, which represents them.

"The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as the last line of defense", one elector, Michael Baca, said in a statement, "and I think we must do all that we can to ensure that we have a reasonable Republican candidate who shares our American values."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new application that promises to be the "Photoshop of speech" is raising ethical and security concerns. Adobe unveiled Project Voco last week. The software makes it possible to take an audio recording and rapidly alter it to include words and phrases the original speaker never uttered, in what sounds like their voice.

One expert warned that the tech could further undermine trust in journalism. Another said it could pose a security threat. However, the US software firm says it is taking action to address such risks.

[...] "It seems that Adobe's programmers were swept along with the excitement of creating something as innovative as a voice manipulator, and ignored the ethical dilemmas brought up by its potential misuse," he told the BBC. "Inadvertently, in its quest to create software to manipulate digital media, Adobe has [already] drastically changed the way we engage with evidential material such as photographs.

"This makes it hard for lawyers, journalists, and other professionals who use digital media as evidence.

"In the same way that Adobe's Photoshop has faced legal backlash after the continued misuse of the application by advertisers, Voco, if released commercially, will follow its predecessor with similar consequences."

The risks extend beyond people being fooled into thinking others said something they did not. Banks and other businesses have started using voiceprint checks to verify customers are who they say they are when they phone in. One cybersecurity researcher said the companies involved had long anticipated something like Adobe's invention.

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charon writes:

Doctors are concerned that stocks of anti-venom are running low around the world.

Dr. Richard Clark from UC San Diego Health is an expert in treating snake bite victims. He said, "I think the big deal about antivenoms and shortages in the world right now is that drug companies that make any kind of pharmaceutical product, only make it if it's profitable. And the problem with antivenoms is they tend to be fairly expensive to produce."

It's expensive to produce and there is not enough demand -- so little in fact, that the pharmaceutical company that produced antivenom products stopped making them in 2003. The Food and Drug Administration stepped in and extended the expiration dates of the last remaining supplies to last until June 2016. Clark says it will likely last even longer.

"So, there's still expired antivenom around that we know still works. One day that will be gone unless a company starts to make the coral snake antivenom again," said Clark.

In a case of a lifesaving drug, is it unreasonable to expect a pharmaceutical company to continue making it even though they would make higher profits elsewhere? Is this a good place for governmental incentives?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There aren't many companies that insist staff start work every day at such an oddly specific time as Pivotal Software.

Employees at the US firm's 20 global offices all have to be at work and ready to go at exactly 9.06am. At that precise time a cowbell is rung, or a gong is hit, and all workers gather for a brief stand-up meeting that lasts for between five and 10 minutes. Then the firm's programmers hit their computers, with no other meetings or distractions for the rest of the day.

Pivotal's founder and chief executive Rob Mee says it is all about making the working day as efficient as possible.

"I realised that programmers, if left to their own devices, may roll in at 10am," he says. "And if they haven't eaten adequately they will be hungry by 11am, so they'll stop for food, which then makes the afternoon too long. It is not very efficient. "So we thought, 'let's provide breakfast for everyone.' It gives them a reason to get here." So all employees get a free breakfast before work starts at 9.06am.

But why 9.06am? "We thought that if we made it 9am, developers psyching themselves up for the day would think, 'well if it is 9am I'll be late,'" says Mr Mee. "So then we thought, 'why don't we make it 9.05am,' but that is too precise, as programmers don't like over-optimising, so we went with 9.06am. Then it became something fun."

And at the end of the day everyone has to leave the office at 6pm sharp because staff aren't allowed to work into the evening. Mr Mee explains the reasoning: "Programmers don't programme well if they are too tired, so we don't want them working late into the night."

While Pivotal's approach to morning punctuality may seem endearingly nerdish, the business is in fact one of the most successful companies most people have never heard of. Valued at $2.8bn (£2.4bn), its investors include computer groups Dell Technologies and Microsoft, conglomerate General Electric, and car giant Ford.

Do you think it is a good idea? Would it be acceptable to you?

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