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Phoenix666 writes:

Sunlight allows us to make vitamin D, credited with healthier living, but a surprise research finding could reveal another powerful benefit of getting some sun.

Georgetown University Medical Center researchers have found that sunlight, through a mechanism separate than vitamin D production, energizes T cells that play a central role in human immunity.

Their findings, published today in Scientific Reports, suggest how the skin, the body's largest organ, stays alert to the many microbes that can nest there.

"We all know sunlight provides vitamin D, which is suggested to have an impact on immunity, among other things. But what we found is a completely separate role of sunlight on immunity," says the study's senior investigator, Gerard Ahern, PhD, associate professor in the Georgetown's Department of Pharmacology and Physiology. "Some of the roles attributed to vitamin D on immunity may be due to this new mechanism."

They specifically found that low levels of blue light, found in sun rays, makes T cells move faster -- marking the first reported human cell responding to sunlight by speeding its pace.

Bad news for our basement-dwelling brethren.

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takyon writes:

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who will be resigning soon prior to joining Congress as a U.S. Senator, has filed new "pimping" charges against the CEO and other executives of Backpage. The previous set of charges were dismissed by a judge less than two weeks ago. Backpage is an online classified advertising website known for its listings of escort services:

Harris said the new charges were based on new evidence. A Sacramento County judge threw out pimping charges against the men on 9 December, citing federal free-speech laws. In the latest case, filed in Sacramento County superior court, Harris claims Backpage illegally funnelled money through multiple companies and created various websites to get around banks that refused to process transactions. She also alleged that the company used photos of women from Backpage on other sites without their permission in order to increase revenue and knowingly profited from the proceeds of prostitution.

"By creating an online brothel – a hotbed of illicit and exploitative activity – Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey, and James Larkin preyed on vulnerable victims, including children, and profited from their exploitation," Harris said in a statement.

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AnonTechie writes:

The common thought that learning by experience is most effective when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship at university has been challenged in a new study.

An analysis of more than 500 graduates found no significant difference between business schools that offered traditional courses and those that emphasise a 'learning-by-doing' approach to entrepreneurship education.

The research challenges the ongoing trend across higher education institutes (HEIs) of focussing on experiential learning, and suggests that universities need to reconsider their approach if they are to increase entrepreneurship among their students.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-entrepreneurial-textbooks.html

[PhD Thesis]: Evaluation of the Outcomes of Entrepreneurship Education Revisited

[Related]: College can cultivate innovative entrepreneurial intentions

[Source]: http://www.aston.ac.uk/news/releases/2016/december/entrepreneurial-experiences-no-better-than-textbooks-says-study/

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Moru writes:

Asheron's Call is an old and beloved game. Many current MMO's including WoW still have not been able to reproduce many of the systems created by Asheron's Call and many players haven't even seen them yet. It really deserves a place up with all the other Good Old Games.

"The allegiance system, where players swear fealty to each other, gave high levels a reason to seek new players. New players gave the person they swore allegiance to experience without losing any themselves, and this in turn would be passed up from the bottom of the pyramid to the top."

Seamless gigantic *handcrafted* world where you can run around without zoning. No randomly created monotone landscape. No instancing to separate you from your friends in dungeons.

Unfortunately, Turbine, Inc. has set a date for closing the Asheron's Call I and II servers. In the past they had mentioned releasing the server code so players could run their own servers, but that is apparently no longer an option. It is currently getting requests for remastering on Good Old Games.

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"callmeemo" writes:

Following up a previously stated desire to run off green and renewable sources, the city of Las Vegas, Nevada has effectively reached their goal.

Utilizing a vast array of solar panels, the 100-megawatt solar plant near Boulder City (named Boulder Solar 1) provides most of the energy needed to power the city's public sector -- that is, not including people's homes and businesses. That too, however, is on its way forward as solar panels are placed on homes and company rooftops; several casinos have also announced plans to move toward renewables (MGM Resorts, Wynn, and Las Vegas Sands as of reading the article sourced below). For some frame of reference on what the state normally produces, please look at the documentation on Nevada energy generation. The city has a 25-year contract to purchase 100 megawatts annually to feed into the grid. There also appears to be plans for the city to tap into the Hoover Dam, which despite being in the same state, Las Vegas has apparently never done so before.

Additional Source: The Independent

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Phoenix666 writes:

UC Berkeley scientists have discovered simple CRISPR systems similar to CRISPR-Cas9—a gene-editing tool that has revolutionized biology—in previously unexplored bacteria that have eluded efforts to grow them in the laboratory.

The new systems are highly compact, befitting their presence in some of the smallest life forms on the planet. If these systems can be re-engineered like CRISPR-Cas9, their small size could make them easier to insert into cells to edit DNA, expanding the gene-editing toolbox available to researchers and physicians.

"These are particularly interesting because the key protein in these CRISPR systems is approximately the same as Cas9, but is not Cas9. It is part of a minimal system that has obvious potential for gene editing," said Jill Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary sciences and of environmental science, policy and management.

In CRISPR-Cas systems, the Cas protein is the scissors. When targeted to a specific sequence of DNA, the Cas protein binds and severs double-stranded DNA. The new discovery nearly doubles the number of simple and compact CRISPR-Cas systems potentially useful as laboratory and biomedical tools.

"The important thing here is that we found some of these CRISPR systems in a major branch of the bacterial tree, opening the door to a whole new world of microbes that are not cultured in the lab, so we don't really know what they are and what their habits are," said co-author Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Both Doudna and Banfield are faculty scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

David Burstein et al. New CRISPR–Cas systems from uncultivated microbes, Nature (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nature21059

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Phoenix666 writes:

An Op-Ed piece from ArsTechnica:

Every once in a while, a prominent member of the security community publishes an article about how horrible OpenPGP is. Matthew Green wrote one in 2014 and Moxie Marlinspike wrote one in 2015. The most recent was written by Filippo Valsorda, here on the pages of Ars Technica, which Matthew Green says "sums up the main reason I think PGP is so bad and dangerous."

In this article I want to respond to the points that Filippo raises. In short, Filippo is right about some of the details, but wrong about the big picture. For the record, I work on GnuPG, the most popular OpenPGP implementation.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A team of international researchers recently unveiled a nano array that can identify the chemical signatures of 17 different diseases, possibly bringing us closer to the day when doctors might be able to use a medical tricorder a la Star Trek to instantly diagnose a patient's conditions.

Though it isn't exactly a new idea – Hippocrates wrote about the correlation between breath odors and disease back in 400 B.C. and traditional Chinese medicine has long seen halitosis as an indication of an unbalanced qi – using breath tests to diagnose and monitor bodily disorders and disease is a research field that has been gaining momentum in recent years. And for good reason too. It would be the ultimate diagnostic test – potentially inexpensive and painless (not to mention a godsend for anyone with a fear of needles), and it would be able to deliver results fairly quickly too.

That said, in order for this to happen, breathalyzers need to be able to identify more than one disease at any given time. The technologies developed to date have a limited scope and are designed to detect only one kind of disease, such as a particular type of cancer or diabetes. And while there have been attempts to identify a wider scope of ailments, there has been no real breakthrough at distinguishing different diseases in a breath sample – till now.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

The FBI is investigating how hackers infiltrated computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for several years beginning in 2010 in a breach senior FDIC officials believe was sponsored by China's military, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The security breach, in which hackers gained access to dozens of computers including the workstation for former FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, has also been the target of a probe by a congressional committee.

The FDIC is one of three federal agencies that regulate commercial banks in the United States. It oversees confidential plans for how big banks would handle bankruptcy and has access to records on millions of individual American deposits.

Last month, the banking regulator allowed congressional staff to view internal communications between senior FDIC officials related to the hacking, two people who took part in the review said. In the exchanges, the officials referred to the attacks as having been carried out by Chinese military-sponsored hackers, they said. The staff was not allowed to keep copies of the exchanges, which did not explain why the FDIC officials believe the Chinese military was behind the breach.

Source: Reuters

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takyon writes:

A Chinese newspaper and other sources are reporting that China is already testing an EmDrive thruster in space, aboard the Tiangong-2 space station:

[Researchers] in China have announced that they've already been testing the controversial drive in low-Earth orbit, and they're looking into using the EM Drive to power their satellites as soon as possible.

Big disclaimer here - all we have to go on right now is a press conference announcement [archive.is] and an article from a government-sponsored Chinese newspaper (and the country doesn't have the best track record when it comes to trustworthy research).

[...] But what the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) team is saying also corresponds with information provided to IB Times from an anonymous source. According to their informant, China already has an EM Drive on board its version of the International Space Station, the space laboratory Tiangong-2.

[Continues...]

charon writes:

1,800 years ago the Roman army built one of its smallest but most heavily defended forts at the site of Vindolanda, which is now a part of the Frontiers of The Roman Empire World Heritage Site.

The small garrison of a few hundred soldiers and their families took shelter behind a series of large ditches and ramparts, while outside the walls a war was raging between the northern British Tribes and Roman forces.

Once the war was over (c AD 212) the troops and their dependants pulled out of the fort, and anything that they could not carry with them on the march was tossed into the defensive ditches. The rubbish in the ditches was then quickly sealed when a new Roman town and fort was built at the site, preserving the rubbish in an oxygen free environment where the normal ravages of time, rust and decay, crawled to a halt.

In 2016, the Vindolanda archaeologists excavated the ditch and discovered an incredible time capsule of life and conflict, and amongst the debris were dog and cat skeletons, pottery, leather and 421 Roman shoes. Visitors who were lucky enough to come to Vindolanda this summer watched in amazement as shoe after shoe was found in the ditch, each one a window into the life of type of person who might have once worn it. Baby boots, small children's shoes, teenagers, ladies and men's boots, bath clogs, both indoor and outdoor shoes.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Surface meltwater that drains to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet each summer causes changes in ice flow that cannot be fully explained by prevailing theories. Now a multinational, multidisciplinary team led by ice sheet modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory is exploring how changes in extensive, sediment-choked subglacial "swamps" actually explain why the ice sheet's movement slows down in late summer and winter.

"The drainage system beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet controls how fast the ice flows towards the sea and ultimately contributes to sea-level change," said Matthew Hoffman, lead author on the project and an ice-sheet modeler at Los Alamos. "For more than a decade it's been known that the ice flow more than doubles in speed in many regions during summer, as surface melt drains to the bed and lubricates the motion. This acceleration sends ice to the sea faster. However, the motion also slows down in late summer, fall, and winter, which largely offsets the summer speedup. Exactly why it slows down as much as it does and for as long as it does has not been clear."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Early developers were struggling. They loved the landmark text editor vi but needed something that was available on more than just Unix.

They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.

Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar created his own solution and shared it for free, eventually asking only that users make a donation to a charity caring for children and families in Uganda.
...

Proponents of Vim commonly point out the same features as reasons why they use the program:

1. Light and portable: Commonly used as a command line interface, Vim can be launched with a terminal, run through a GUI, or used remotely through an SSH connection. Vim is widely used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
2. Highly customizable and full of plugins: As with so many other open-source platforms, users have run amok with creating custom configurations, features, and plugins. ...
3. Modality and no mouse functionality: It seems frustrating, but your fingers never need to leave your keyboard. Maximize productivity and coding time by using keystrokes to switch among normal, insert, command line, and visual modes. Keys have different commands based on which mode you’re in.
4. Registers: Think of these as multiple clipboards. You can store copied text and macros, which record keystrokes for playback, in different registers. Registers, which persist between uses of Vim, help you save time by executing certain text in a fraction of the time.
5. Motions and text-objects: Arguably our team’s favorite facets of Vim, motions and text-objects serve as the verbs and adjectives of the Vim language, allowing you to write your code über-productively. Motions allow you to tack on an action to built-in commands, so you can, say, delete from the current cursor position until the next occurrence of a letter. Meanwhile, text-objects are used in the context of motions, allowing you to declare commands inside or around words, paragraphs, HTML tags, and even current function blocks.

This submission prepared using the Firefox vim plugin, Vimperator.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When one of my daughters was in high school, a student in her math class stood up in disgust and exclaimed "Why do we have to learn math for 12 years when we are never going to use any of it?" You might think that as a mathematics educator I would find this statement upsetting. Instead, the student's question got me thinking about the fact that she saw no connection between the mathematics and her future, even though her curriculum was full of story problems that at the time I would have called "real-world problems." Every mathematician has probably encountered an "I'm not fond of math" confession. Choose any subject and you can probably find someone who dislikes it or does not care to practice it. But when I have talked with strangers about my experience teaching English and shop and history and physical education, I rarely (if ever) have encountered a negative response. Because math can be a pathway to many careers, the problem seems important to address.

Mathematics in its purest forms has incredible power and beauty. New mathematics is key to innovations in most science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related (STEM) fields. Often at the time new mathematics is invented, we don't yet know how it will relate to other ideas and have impact in the world. Mathematical modelers use ideas from mathematics (as well as computational algorithms and techniques from statistics and operations research) to tackle big, messy, real problems. The models often optimize a limited resource such as time, money, energy, distance, safety, or health. But rather than finding a perfect answer, the solutions are "good enough" for the real-life requirements. These problems can be motivating for mathematics students, who can relate to mathematics that solves problems that are important to them.

To solve modeling problems, mathematicians make assumptions, choose a mathematical approach, get a solution, assess the solution for usefulness and accuracy, and then rework and adjust the model as needed until it provides an accurate and predictive enough understanding of the situation. Communicating the model and its implications in a clear, compelling way can be as critical to a model's success as the solution itself. Even very young students can engage in mathematical modeling. For example, you could ask students of any age how to decide which food to choose at the cafeteria and then mathematize that decision-making process by choosing what characteristics of the food are important and then rating the foods in the cafeteria by those standards. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is providing leadership in communicating to teachers, students, and parents what mathematical modeling looks like in K–12 levels. The 2015 Focus issue of NCTM's Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School will be about mathematical modeling and the 2016 Annual Perspectives in Mathematics Education will also focus on the topic.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Russian researchers have developed a new material that converts infrared light to ultrashort pulses of ultraviolet. For this purpose, the scientists exposed silicon film to a laser so that its relief adjusted under the light wavelength and made properties of the material resonant. The result was a cheap and easy-to-make metasurface as effective as existing ones. The new technology is applicable in compact UV generators for biophotonics and medicine, and also devices for ultradense data processing in optical communications. The study was published in Nanoscale.

Biological media can reflect, absorb, scatter and re-emit light waves. Each of these processes contains information about micro- and macrostructure of the media, as well as shape and motion of its components. In this regard, deep ultraviolet is a promising tool for biology and medicine. Its application includes laser diagnostics and control of fast processes in cells, laser therapy and surgery at the molecular level.

Researchers from ITMO University and Saint Petersburg Academic University have developed a new method for nanostructures fabricating, which is able to convert infrared light to deep ultraviolet. The structure is a film with a regular massive of nanolumps – metasurface. It is generated by radiating silicon film, whose thickness is 100 nanometers, with ultrashort or femtosecond laser pulses that form its relief. On the film surface, the laser smelts such nanolumps, which resonate only with its wavelength and thus allow more radiation to be turned into ultraviolet. In other words, the laser adjusts metasurface to itself. When the relief is formed, the scientists reduce the power so the film starts converting radiation without deformation.

The researchers have managed not only to convert infrared light into violet, but also to get deep ultraviolet. Such radiation is strongly localized, has very short wavelength and distributes as femtosecond pulses. "For the first time, we've created a metasurface that stably emits femtosecond pulses of high power in the ultraviolet range," notes Anton Tsypkin, assistant of ITMO's Department of Photonics and Optical Information Technology. "Such light can be applied in biology and medicine, as femtosecond pulses affect biological objects more precisely."

S. V. Makarov et al. Self-adjusted all-dielectric metasurfaces for deep ultraviolet femtosecond pulse generation, Nanoscale (2016). DOI: 10.1039/C6NR04860A

Original Submission