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Phoenix666 writes:

Neuroscientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have mapped the brain injuries -- or lesions -- that result in delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS), a group of rare disorders that leaves patients convinced people and places aren't really as they seem. In a study published in the journal Brain, Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation and the Associate Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at BIDMC and colleagues reveal the neuro-anatomy underlying these syndromes for the first time.

"How the brain generates complex symptoms like this has long been a mystery," said Fox. "We showed how complex symptoms can emerge based on brain connectivity. With a lesion in exactly the right place, you can disrupt the brain's familiarity detector and reality monitor simultaneously, resulting in bizarre delusions. Understanding where these symptoms come from is an important step toward treating them."

Ah, so that's why...

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.

The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?

I'll start us off with my supposition:

Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."

If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.

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Phoenix666 writes:

I've been using MacOSX as my primary desktop since the days of Rhapsody. But I always had Linux virtual machines running on occasions. A dwindling number of machines at home were running Linux, most notably a couple of Raspberry Pi and a Synology Diskstation. And when I installed Linux, I usually went for Ubuntu, which did a good job polishing the user experience. The build ring for Tao3D includes a number of virtual machines running several major distros for testing purpose, but it's been quite inactive for a while, and repairing it is on my short-term to-do list.

Working for Red Hat, I thought I had to use Fedora as my primary desktop. And the experience has been a bit underwhelming so far, unfortunately. In just three days, I managed to render a Mac Book Pro unbootable in OSX, had several different issues with skippy or laggy mouse cursors and even non-responsive keyboards, had a driver crash attempting to access my home Wi-Fi, found out the hard way that NFS performance is just horrible, and had to use Google for trivial things way too often.

I complained several times on this blog about what I perceived as a degradation of OSX software quality since 10.6, but this experience with Linux puts all this in some serious perspective.

Read more here.

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takyon writes:

The European Court of Justice has issued a major post-Brexit-decision ruling invalidating the UK's mass surveillance powers:

"General and indiscriminate retention" of emails and electronic communications by governments is illegal, the EU's highest court has ruled, in a judgment that could trigger challenges against the UK's new Investigatory Powers Act – the so-called snooper's charter.

Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime – including terrorism – is justified, according to a long-awaited decision by the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg.

The finding came in response to a legal challenge initially brought by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, when he was a backbench MP, and Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, over the legality of GCHQ's bulk interception of call records and online messages.

[...] Daniel Carey, the solicitor from Deighton Pierce Glynn who represented the Open Rights Group and Privacy International, said: "The court is very clear that indiscriminately retaining everyone's metadata is unlawful, which is a point my clients placed particular emphasis on. This prohibition arises out of longstanding EU legislation, which the UK played an important role in creating."

Also at NYT, WSJ, BBC, Bloomberg.

Ruling press release: The Members States may not impose a general obligation to retain data on providers of electronic communications services (PDF)

[Ed's Note: minor edit to first sentence at 232017zDec16]

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Phoenix666 writes:

A chatty source of radio waves from deep space has a little more to say. Six more blasts of radio energy, each lasting just a few milliseconds, erupted from some phenomenon outside of our galaxy, researchers report in the Dec. 20 Astrophysical Journal. This detection follows 11 previously recorded outbursts of radio waves from the same location, the only known repeater in a class of enigmatic eruptions known as fast radio bursts.

The origins of these radio bursts, 18 of which have been reported since 2007, are an ongoing puzzle ( ScienceNews: 8/9/14, p. 22 [paywalled] ). The continuing barrage from this repeating source, roughly 3 billion light-years away in the constellation Auriga, implies that whatever is causing some radio bursts is not a one-time destructive event such as a collision or explosion. Flares from a young neutron star, the dense core left behind after a massive star explodes, are a promising candidate.

The latest volley was detected in late 2015, Paul Scholz, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues report. Five blasts were recorded at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and one at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This object was first detected at Arecibo in 2012. Ten more blasts followed in May and June 2015 ( ScienceNews: 4/2/16, p. 12 ).

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An overwhelming majority of scientists, including numerous UCLA researchers, agree that we have to take action to curb the effects of climate change.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block joined leaders in higher education from more than 35 states today calling on incoming president Donald Trump's administration to protect the Earth's climate.

Chancellors and presidents from more than 170 colleges and universities signed on to the open letter calling for "aggressive climate action."

Trump has at times described climate change as a hoax and proposed withdrawing from the historic Paris climate agreement signed at the annual United Nations climate conference in 2015. An overwhelming majority of scientists, including numerous UCLA researchers, agree that climate change is caused by humans and will result in dramatic, disruptive changes within this century. UCLA research has projected that without drastic action, Los Angeles will heat up an average of 4 to 5 degrees by midcentury.

"As a university," Block said, "we have a deep commitment to research innovative solutions for tomorrow, to serve the greater public good and to educate the leaders of future generations. Strong federal and international climate action is critical to this mission."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Hi Guys, Soylent's Editors do a lot behind the scenes to keep the community going. As a gift idea for them this year, please consider submitting lots of stories over the next two days to get the queue nice and full. Then they'll be able to schedule in their appearance on the home page ahead of time and take Christmas (or Hanukkah) off to spend time with their friends and families.

If you've never submitted a story before, here are guidelines for composing a story submission. You submit it here.

My own method is to find tech/science articles from SN's RSS-bot or a dozen other sources like the BBC or sciencenews.org, grab the title, and a couple of paragraphs that communicate the gist. Often I'll add a quip, question, or note of my own, but that's up to your personal taste. It's easy and takes under 5 minutes per story.

Thanks for reading, and have a happy holiday!

[Ed Note: The week between Christmas and New Years is always slow for submissions and time is a precious commodity for all of us. The more subs in the queue, the further out we can get the story queue, and the more time we have to spend with our loved ones. Any help you can give would be appreciated!]

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takyon writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38372342

Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth's molten outer core. They describe it as a kind of "jet stream" - a fast-flowing river of liquid iron that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia. The moving mass of metal has been inferred from measurements made by Europe's Swarm satellites. This trio of spacecraft are currently mapping Earth's magnetic field to try to understand its fundamental workings.

The scientists say the jet is the best explanation for the patches of concentrated field strength that the satellites observe in the northern hemisphere. "This jet of liquid iron is moving at about fifty kilometres per year," explained Dr Chris Finlay from the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space). "That might not sound like a lot to you on Earth's surface, but you have to remember this a very dense liquid metal and it takes a huge amount of energy to move this thing around and that's probably the fastest motion we have anywhere within the solid Earth," he told BBC News.

An accelerating high-latitude jet in Earth's core (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2859) (DX)

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We recently reported on a comparison between the cost-effectiveness of solar power versus wind power, and now Phoenix666 writes:

Solar — it's not just a clean power source producing zero emissions and almost no local water impact, it's also now one of the best choices on the basis of how much energy you get back for your investment. And with climate change impacts rising, solar's further potential to take some of the edge off the harm that's coming down the pipe makes speeding its adoption a clear no-brainer.

In 2016, according a trends analysis based on this report by the Royal Society of London, the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) for oil appears to have fallen below a ratio of 15 to 1 globally. In places like the United States, where extraction efforts increasingly rely on unconventional techniques like fracking, that EROEI has fallen to 10 or 11 to 1 or lower.

Meanwhile, according to a new study by the Imperial College of London, solar energy's return on investment ratio as of 2015 was 14 to 1 and rising. What this means is that a global energy return on investment inflection point between oil and solar was likely reached at some time during the present year.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now.

The team, led by MIT professor of physics Raymond Ashoori and his postdoc Joonho Jang, used a spectroscopy technique developed in Ashoori's group. The method relies on electron "tunneling," a quantum mechanical process that allows researchers to inject electrons at precise energies into a system of interest—in this case, a system of electrons trapped in two dimensions. The method uses hundreds of thousands of short electrical pulses to probe a sheet of electrons in a semiconducting material cooled to extremely low temperatures, just above absolute zero.

With their tunneling technique, the researchers shot electrons into the supercooled material to measure the energy states of electrons within the semiconducting sheet. Against a background blur, they detected a sharp spike in the data. After much analysis, they determined that the spike was the precise signal that would be given off from a highly ordered crystal of electrons vibrating in unison.

As the group increased the density of electrons, essentially packing them into ever tighter quarters within the sheet, they found the data spike shot up to higher energies, then disappeared entirely, precisely at an electron density at which an electronic crystal has been predicted to melt.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Using sunlight to make chemical products has long been a dream of chemical engineers. The problem is that the available sunlight generates too little energy to kick off reactions. However, nature is able to do this. Antenna molecules in leaves capture energy from sunlight and collect it in the reaction centers of the leaf where enough solar energy is present for the chemical reactions of photosynthesis.
...
The researchers used relatively new materials known as luminescent solar concentrators (LSC's), which are able to capture sunlight in a similar way. Special light-sensitive molecules in these materials capture a large amount of the incoming light that they then convert into a specific color that is conducted to the edges via light conductivity. These LSCs are often used in combination with solar cells to boost the yield.
...
The researchers, led by Dr. Timothy Noël, incorporated very thin channels in a silicon rubber LSC through which a liquid can be pumped. In this way, they were able to bring the incoming sunlight into contact with the molecules in the liquid with high enough intensity to generate chemical reactions.

While the reaction they chose serves as an initial example, the results surpassed all their expectations, and not only in the lab. "Even an experiment on a cloudy day demonstrated that the chemical production was 40 percent higher than in a similar experiment without LSC material," says research leader Noël. "We still see plenty of possibilities for improvement. We now have a powerful tool at our disposal that enables the sustainable, sunlight-based production of valuable chemical products like drugs or crop protection agents."

A leaf-inspired luminescent solar concentrator for energy efficient continuous-flow photochemistry, Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed. 21 December 2016. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201611101

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n1 writes:

The BBC reports:

A French court has found International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde guilty of negligence but did not hand down any punishment.

As French finance minister in 2008, she approved an award of €404m ($429m; £340m) to businessman Bernard Tapie for the disputed sale of a firm.

The IMF board said it retained "full confidence" in her leadership.

She said she would not appeal against the ruling: "There's a point in time when one has to just stop, turn the page and move on and continue to work with those who have put their trust in me."

The French government also confirmed its confidence in Ms Lagarde, who was reappointed to a five-year term at the IMF in February.

Also at the Wall Street Journal (paywalled).

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Phoenix666 writes:

New experiments have shown that it is possible for extremely high currents to pass through graphene, a form of carbon. This allows imbalances in electric charge to be rapidly rectified.

Once again, graphene has proven itself to be a rather special material: an international research team led by Professor Fritz Aumayr from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien was able to demonstrate that the electrons in graphene are extremely mobile and react very quickly. Impacting xenon ions with a particularly high electric charge on a graphene film causes a large number of electrons to be torn away from the graphene in a very precise spot. However, the material was able to replace the electrons within some femtoseconds. This resulted in extremely high currents, which would not be maintained under normal circumstances. Its extraordinary electronic properties make graphene a very promising candidate for future applications in the field of electronics.

I love that we've arrived in an age where it's possible to measure femtoseconds.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For food and beverage advertisers, understanding consumer taste preferences is critical. New research is shedding more light on what drives the preferences of one group, known as supertasters. This research may allow advertisers to better market their products to this segment of the population.

The research of Michael LaTour, a former professor of marketing and law at Ithaca College who passed away in November 2015; his wife Kathy LaTour, an associate professor of services marketing at Cornell University; and Brian Wansink, professor of marketing at Cornell, is set to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.

The trio used three small studies to answer several questions about supertasters—individuals whose increased amount of taste bud papillae leave them prone to disliking bitter foods while preferring sweet ones—and find out more about their brand identification ability, brand loyalty and if their abilities dissipate with learning.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A revolution is under way in the teaching of computer science in schools in England - but it risks leaving girls and pupils from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities behind. That's the conclusion of academics who've studied data about the move from ICT as a national curriculum subject to computer science.

Four years ago, amid general disquiet that ICT was teaching children little more than how Microsoft Office worked, the government took the subject off the national curriculum. The idea was that instead schools should move to offering more rigorous courses in computer science - children would learn to code rather than how to do PowerPoint.

But academics at Roehampton University, who compile an annual study of computing education, have some worrying news. First, just 28% of schools entered pupils for the GCSE in computing in 2015. At A-level, only 24% entered pupils for the qualification.

Then there's the evidence that girls just aren't being persuaded to take an interest - 16% of GCSE computing entrants in 2015 were female and the figure for the A-level was just 8.5% . The qualification is relatively new and more schools - and more girls, took it in 2016 - but female participation was still only 20% for the GCSE and 10% for the A-level.

Why is it girls are not attracted to computer science? Is it some deeply embedded gender bias, or something else?

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Phoenix666 writes:

China's smoggiest city closed schools Wednesday as much of the country suffered its sixth day under an oppressive haze, sparking public anger about the slow response to the threat to children's health.

Since Friday a choking miasma has covered a large swathe of northeastern China, leaving more than 460 million gasping for breath.

Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, was one of more than 20 cities which went on red alert Friday evening, triggering an emergency plan to reduce pollution by shutting polluting factories and taking cars off the road, among other measures.

Nowhere has been hit as hard as Shijiazhuang, which has seen a huge rise in pollution.

But the city's education department waited until Tuesday evening to announce it was closing elementary schools and kindergartens, following similar moves in nearby Beijing and Tianjin.

The announcement said middle and high schools could close on a voluntary basis.

The statement on the education department's official social media account provoked anger.

Hmm, classmates in Beijing assured us air pollution in China came from Siberia.

Also at Channel NewsAsia: Chinese cities choked by dangerous smog for fifth day; factories, schools closed

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