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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://ensia.com/features/open-source-seeds/

Original Submission

fubari writes:

In the good news department: Bill Gates Launches $1 Billion Breakthrough Energy Investment Fund
Why is that good?
The cool things I see are they claim 1) a high tolerance for risk, and 2) long term thinking. They're looking at a 20 year investment window, which may be enough time to fund actual advances.

Gates wote:

"We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gas to power the future—and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market."

The group has spelled out five "grand challenges" which it says are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions around the world:

• Electricity
• Buildings
• Manufacturing
• Transportation
• Food

I hope these people do some good and I will be following their work. Seems like a concrete step for moving away from fossil fuels, as discussed at some length in A Christmas Miracle for Soylent News.

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Phoenix666 writes:

How much is a child's future success determined by innate intelligence? Economist James Heckman says it's not what people think. He likes to ask educated non-scientists -- especially politicians and policy makers -- how much of the difference between people's incomes can be tied to IQ. Most guess around 25 percent, even 50 percent, he says. But the data suggest a much smaller influence: about 1 or 2 percent.

So if IQ is only a minor factor in success, what is it that separates the low earners from the high ones? Or, as the saying goes: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

Science doesn't have a definitive answer, although luck certainly plays a role. But another key factor is personality, according to a paper Heckman co-authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month. He found financial success was correlated with conscientiousness, a personality trait marked by diligence, perseverance and self-discipline.

Why aren't you rich? You obviously slept with the wrong people!

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fliptop writes:

John Arquilla at ACM writes:

What a pity that senior leaders in the American government and intelligence community have decided to play political football with the alleged Russian hacks of John Podesta's and other Democrats' emails. By using these intrusions to gin up fears about the "integrity" of the electoral process—which is already befouled by the focus on finding and spreading dirt on the opposition—the real story is being neglected. And what is that real story? It is that, despite more than two decades of consistent public warnings that have reached the highest levels of government, cybersecurity throughout much of the world is in a shameful state of unpreparedness.

Take the United States, for example. Since the mid-1990s, there have been approximately 200 cybersecurity bills brought before Congress. Only one has passed, quite recently at that, and it only calls for voluntary information-sharing about cyber incidents. Legislation aside, there have also been several government-sponsored commissions and top-level exercises focused on understanding and illuminating the cyber threat. Each of these has signaled that "the red light is flashing;" that is, American cybersecurity is in very poor shape. Indeed, former cyber czar Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, in their book, Cyber War, list the U.S. as having the poorest cyber defenses among the leading developed countries.

TL;DR: The lesson(s) are: we must improve defenses, better use of strong encryption, and don't wait for government policy to protect you.

Previously:
Obama Orders Sweeping Review of International Hacking Tied to U.S. Elections
How Hackers Broke into John Podesta and Colin Powell's Gmail Accounts

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takyon writes:

The LA Times (archive.fo) reports that the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes changes that could lead to the deployment of weapons in space:

President Obama has signed legislation that, by striking a single word from longstanding U.S. nuclear defense policy, could heighten tensions with Russia and China and launch the country on an expensive effort to build space-based defense systems. The National Defense Authorization Act, a year-end policy bill encompassing virtually every aspect of the U.S. military, contained two provisions with potentially momentous consequences.

One struck the word "limited" from language describing the mission of the country's homeland missile defense system. The system is designed to thwart a small-scale attack by a non-superpower such as North Korea or Iran. A related provision calls for the Pentagon to start "research, development, test and evaluation" of space-based systems for missile defense. Together, the provisions signal that the U.S. will seek to use advanced technology to defeat both small-scale and large-scale nuclear attacks. That could unsettle the decades-old balance of power among the major nuclear states.

[...] Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who introduced and shepherded the policy changes in the House, said he drew inspiration from President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, which was intended to use lasers and other space-based weaponry to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Known as "Star Wars," the initiative cost taxpayers $30 billion, but no system was ever deployed.

Other NDAA changes include a 2.1% pay raise for enlisted service members and officers, a boost of 16,000 more service members (to 476,000), restructuring of Tricare, and the final nail in the coffin for the Obama Administration's promise to close detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. The bill also elevates the United States Cyber Command to the combatant command level, instead of a sub-unit of the Strategic Command, and addresses the recent National Guard bonus fiasco by requiring the Pentagon to prove that an individual soldier "did not accept their enlistment bonus in good faith", while allowing those who did make repayments to get a refund.

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takyon writes:

Long live Rudolph:

There's good news for Rudolph and his friends—an app is helping officials reduce the number of reindeer killed in traffic accidents in Finland. Some 300,000 reindeer freely wander the wilds of Lapland in Arctic Finland. An estimated 4,000 are killed every year through road accidents, officials say, and compensation to reindeer herders can be expensive.

[...] A simple, one-button interface allows drivers to tap their smartphone screens to register any reindeer spotted near roads. Using GPS technology, it creates a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) warning zone that lasts for an hour and warns other app users approaching the area. "If there are reindeer, (drivers) reduce speed," Ylinampa said. "When they have passed the warning place, then they can get back to the normal speed again."

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rob_on_earth writes:

Stanford news article on a Nature Physics paper regarding how tiny starfish larvae employ a complex and previously unknown survival mechanism involving whorls of water that either bring food to them or speed them away to better feeding grounds.

There is a beautiful hand drawn image of the vortices at the top of the article but this YouTube video showing the actual larvae swim and feed is like screen saver in places.

Nature is cool, evolution is weird.

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novak writes:

Motherboard.com has a video of the orbital trajectory of the Rosetta probe, showing the trajectory as the spacecraft approached the comet. It's a fun, non-controversial view in this rather partisan time, unless I suppose, you're a flat-earther (in which case, you brought it on yourself). You can see the numerous small delta-Vs as sharp corners in the spacecraft's trajectory, and the very unusual trajectory as the craft orbits a body with weak gravity that is decidedly not centrobaric.

Video Link

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mrpg writes:

France has opened what it claims to be the world's first solar panel road in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In October, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released its biennial Living Planet Report, detailing the state of the planet and its implications for humans and wildlife. The report warned that two-thirds of global wildlife populations could be gone by 2020 if we don't change our environmentally damaging practices.

At the Singularity University New Zealand (SUNZ) Summit we met up with Dr Amy Fletcher, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Canterbury, who spoke on the topic of public policy and exponential technology at the Summit. As part of our regular "One Big Question [OBQ]" series we asked her whether we should consider bioengineering animals that could live in the world we're creating, rather than die in the one we're destroying?

That sort of relates to the whole de-extinction debate, and again, I would pay money to see a woolly mammoth. But I do take the point that the world of the woolly mammoth is gone, whether we like it or not, same with the moa – I mean this comes up a lot in criticisms of the bring back the moa project. You've got to have huge swathes of undeveloped space - maybe we still have that, but we don't have as much as we did in the 16th century.

I guess it comes back to not making the perfect the enemy of the good. Working in conservation, extinction issues like I do, I meet a lot of people who are deeply opposed, actively opposed, say to zoos. I think in an imperfect world, I'd rather have animals in a well run and ethical zoo than not have them at all. But I do have colleagues in the animal rights movement who say, if we don't value them enough to let them live in their natural environment, then we should pay the price of having them go. It's sort of that same thing, I mean, if the alternative to living in a world of simply humans, rats, cockroaches and pigeons is bioengineering animals, I would have to say, alright yeah, we're going to have to do that.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.

[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.

Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences have published new details about the evolution of the East African Rift (EAR) Valley, one of the world's largest continental rift zones.

Christopher Scholz, professor of Earth sciences, and a team of students and research staff, have spent the past year processing and analyzing data acquired in 2015 from Lake Malawi, the result of a multinational research effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). By studying the interplay of sedimentation and tectonics, they have confirmed that rifting—the process by which the Earth's tectonic plates move apart—has occurred slowly in the lake's central basin over the past 1.3 million years, utilizing a series of faults many millions of years older.

Scholz says the nature of the tectonic activity is attributed to a strong, cold lithosphere and to strain localization on faults that occurred millions of years earlier, when the basin formed. The Earth's lithosphere includes the crust and uppermost mantle.

The team's findings are the subject of an article in the Journal of Structural Geology (Elsevier, 2016), which Scholz co-authored with lead author and Ph.D. candidate Tannis McCartney G'17.

"We collected data during a month-long research cruise aboard a converted container ship on Lake Malawi," says Scholz, a leader in sedimentary basin analysis of extensional systems. "For the first time, a crustal-scale seismic source was deployed on an African lake, revealing tantalizing, new details about the stratigraphic and structural evolution of the East African Rift System."

An abstract is available — full full article is pay-walled: Tannis McCartney et al. A 1.3 million year record of synchronous faulting in the hangingwall and border fault of a half-graben in the Malawi (Nyasa) Rift, Journal of Structural Geology (2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.jsg.2016.08.012

Can geology be a real science when their experiments aren't reproducible and their theories aren't falsifiable?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The value of the Bitcoin virtual currency has hit a three-year high with each one now worth about $900 (£730).

At the start of 2016, single coins were only worth around $435 but their value has climbed steadily all year.

The steady upward progress has continued despite regular hack attacks on virtual currency exchanges in which coins have been stolen.

Experts said the rise in value was linked to the long-term depreciation of the Chinese Yuan.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

SoylentNews had a story last month about temperatures in the Arctic that were 20°C (36°F) warmer than usual. That was just a warm up.

— Chicago Tribune

Now, storm activity around Greenland has caused a warm spell in the vicinity of the North Pole, with temperatures 50°F (28°C) higher than usual.

—The Weather Network

There was a similar pattern of unusually warm weather in the Arctic in November and December of 2015.

— USA Today

additional coverage:

• Washington Post
• Science Alert
• CBS News
• Gizmodo
• Scientific American
• WITI-TV (Fox)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Germany's DEAL project (in German), which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.

The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible."

Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research (Elsevier, like most academic journals, requires authors to sign their copyrights over, though it does not pay them for their writing, nor does it pay for their research expenses). Then, the public institutions that are producing this research have to pay very high costs to access the journals in which it appears. Journal prices have skyrocketed over the past 40 years.

No one institution can afford to boycott Elsevier, but collectively, the institutions have great power.

Germany-wide consortium of research libraries announce boycott of Elsevier journals over open access.

No full-text access to Elsevier journals to be expected from 1 January 2017 on.

Original Submission