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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Oceanographers are carving up the world's seas like the last of the holiday turkey. A new 3D map sorts global water masses — from deep, frigid circumpolar waters to the oxygen-starved Black Sea — into 37 categories.

The map groups together marine regions of similar temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrient levels. It has been available for only a few months, and researchers are still working through how they might use it. But its international team of developers hopes that the map will help conservationists, government officials and others to better understand the biogeography of the oceans and make decisions about which areas to preserve. It could also serve as a data-rich baseline for analysing future ocean changes.

Many existing systems also attempt to classify variations in the ocean, such as lists of large marine ecosystems or the Longhurst biogeographical provinces that are defined by the rate at which ocean life consumes carbon. But these are often limited to surface or coastal ecosystems. The latest effort, known as the ecological marine units (EMUs), is the most detailed attempt yet to cover the global ocean in three dimensions.

"What's often missing is all that's between the surface of the ocean and the ocean bottom," says Dawn Wright, chief scientist of Esri, a geographic information-systems company in Redlands, California, that helped to develop the 3D map. "That's what our project will hopefully bring to the table."

Esri launched a web portal for the EMU data in September, and has been presenting the concept at conferences since then. Wright described it on 16 December in San Francisco, California, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

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Two SoylentNews readers sent us this story about new car technology.

CES 2017: Faraday Future Unveils Super Fast Quick Electric Car

Phoenix666 writes:

Start-up Faraday Future has unveiled a self-driving electric car that it says can accelerate from zero to 60mph (97km/h) in 2.39 seconds.

Faraday says the FF91 accelerates faster than Tesla's Model S or any other electric car in production.

It was shown off at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.

But Faraday Future has faced financial difficulties and one analyst said it had to challenge "scepticism" following last year's CES presentation.

The FF91 was introduced via a live demo, in which it drove itself around a car park and backed into an empty space.

Faraday Future's demo glitch

MrPlow writes:

The car looked good, except for one minor (major?) hang-up.

At one point, Nick Sampson, the company's senior vice president of research and development and engineering, was onstage with Faraday Future's main investor, LeEco chairman Jia Yueting. Sampson asked Jia to press a button on the car to prompt the "auto valet park" feature.

Nothing happened.

"OK, it seems like it's a little bit lazy tonight," Sampson said of the car before inviting Jia to give some remarks about the company.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Richard Feynman's sprawling FBI file covers two-thirds of the physicist's legendary career, from drama over his invitation to speak at a Soviet science conference to an unnamed colleague citing his hobby of cracking safes at Los Alamos as evidence he was a "master of deception and enemy of America." But the file stops abruptly in 1958, and for a very Feynmanian reason: Feynman asked them to.

After decades of Bureau inquiries, it appears a fed-up Feynman simply pulled the "I made the atomic bomb" card and asked to be left alone.

To their credit (and perhaps due to Feynman's not inconsiderable clout), the FBI obeyed Feynman's wishes, with Hoover even writing a chastising memo reminding agents not to bother the man without a damn good reason.

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The trial of a Southern California-based financial scam is now set to go to the penalty phase next Tuesday to determine how much the company and the scheme's architect, Steve Chen, should pay the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Chen's Gemcoin operation was fraudulent. "The violation took place over years and involved elaborate schemes," US District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner wrote in a summary judgment against Chen. "Defendant has shown no sign of recognition of wrongdoing and has offered no assurances against future violations." The SEC argued in court filings on December 21, 2016 that the remaining issues should be determined by the judge and not a jury and that said judge should find "in favor of sizeable penalties."

Amazingly, the amber mines did actually exist, according to a report filed late last year by the court-appointed receiver.

Some background on the Gemcoin scam and ensuing lawsuit.

How could an average person have known this was a scam? And how is this Gemcoin different, i.e. less reliable, than a more established crypto-currency like Bitcoin? Money is only money because people accept it. What makes Gemcoin a scam rather than a failed attempt at competing with Bitcoin?

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers may be near the bottom of their unprecedented crash in user share, measurements published Sunday show.

Analytics vendor Net Applications reported that the user share of IE and Edge -- an estimate of the proportion of the world's personal computer owners who ran those browsers -- dropped by seven-tenths of a percentage point in December, falling to a combined 26.2%.

That seven-tenths of a point decline was notable because it was less than half that of the browsers' average monthly reductions over the last 12, six and three months, which were 1.9, 1.8 and 1.5 points, respectively. The slowly-shrinking averages over the three different spans supported the idea that IE and Edge may be reaching rock bottom.

Microsoft's browser collapse has been unparalleled. In 2016, IE and Edge -- Net Applications pours their user share into the same "bucket" -- shed 20.1 points, representing 43% of its December 2015 share. No other browser has bled that much user share that quickly, with the possible exception of Netscape Navigator in the 1990s.

I know we love to hate Microsoft in general and IE in particular, but is Edge that bad?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

According to a story on bankinfosecurity, ATM and pay at the pump terminal attacks will increase in 2017.

Localized skimming attacks, whether waged against ATMs or self-service gas pumps, continue to wreak havoc on banks and credit unions. "It's death by a thousand cuts," one executive with a leading card issuer on the West Coast tells me.

As 2016 drew to a close, we got yet another reminder of the problem when federal prosecutors announced that a Romanian man pleaded guilty to using counterfeit cards to steal $127,000 from several New York banks in 2015, according to The Associated Press. The defendant, Illie Sitariu confessed to authorities that he and an unnamed accomplice stole card data and PINs with skimming devices and pinhole cameras they had attached to various ATMs, including those owned by Capital Region, First Niagara Bank, Trustco Bank and Berkshire Bank, according to court records.

The continued rollout of EMV support at merchant Point Of Sale terminals has forced a shift in the target.

U.S. retailers are working overtime to get their EMV POS terminals up and running. Merchants that are still accepting mag-stripe cards have seen significant upticks in chargebacks for counterfeit fraud since October 2015, when the EMV fraud liability shift took effect. In 2017, those retailers want to reduce their chargebacks as much as possible.

[...] Today, ATMs and self-service gas pumps are the easiest targets because most of these terminals are still not yet accepting chip transactions. And that likely won't change until they're impacted by the fraud liability shift.

For ATMs, Visa's liability shift takes place in October 2017. (MasterCard's shift was October 2016, but MasterCard has not reported totals for ATMs that are now accepting chip transactions on its cards.) For self-serve gas pumps, the liability shift for both Visa and MasterCard is not until October 2020.

[...] And the biggest skimming worry in 2017 will be attacks like the one waged by the Romanian and his unnamed accomplice in New York.

Skimming attacks that capture magnetic-stripe details and PINs enable fraudsters to clone debit cards that can be used at ATMs for fraudulent cash withdrawals. It's not a new scheme or a complicated one; but it is a scheme that has proven effective and profitable for criminals.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too.

A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the so-called Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D.C.

He didn't start out studying what people ate. Instead, he was interested in learning more about the hippocampus, a part of the brain that's heavily involved in memory.

[...] In the process, Davidson noticed something strange. The rats with the hippocampal damage would go to pick up food more often than the other rats, but they would eat a little bit, then drop it.

[...] "It's surprising to me that people would question that obesity would have a negative effect on the brain, because it has a negative effect on so many other bodily systems," he says, adding, why would "the brain would be spared?"

Original URL: The Wrong Eating Habits Can Hurt Your Brain, Not Just Your Waistline

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

If you were trying to enter the US on Monday, queues were much longer than usual. That's because a Christmas software update borked the main computer systems used by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

On Monday, the main passenger checking system used by CBP to check for undesirables trying to get into the Land of the Free^TM fell over.

Lines grew as returning New Year's travelers – not to mention the 100,000 people heading into the annual tech show jamboree that is CES – backed up waiting to be processed.

"CBP took immediate action to address the issue and CBP officers continued to process international travelers using alternative procedures at airports experiencing the disruption," a spokesman told The Register.

"Travelers at some ports of entry experienced longer than usual wait times, and CBP officers worked to process travelers as quickly as possible while maintaining the highest levels of security."

An investigation has been launched, but CBP says it seems that a software update for the system was rolled out on December 28 and didn't work quite as advertised. IT managers out there will be giving a knowing chuckle and rolling their eyes at this – it's not an uncommon problem but one you wouldn't expect in such a crucial system.

[...] One thing CBP is very careful to stress was that this was not a malicious attack. With the US currently embroiled in government hacking fears, it appears that this one can't be blamed on the Russians or the Chinese.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Chrysler is betting millennials will want to be as connected in their cars as they are at home with a new concept car that mixes high-tech gadgetry with a head-turning design.

The Portal concept was unveiled on Tuesday at CES in Las Vegas as Chrysler's proposal to the millennial generation and is designed to be a comfortable "third space" for a generation that is just as much at home in a coffee shop as they are at home or work.

[...] On the tech side, the Portal hits all the right notes when it comes to the current crop of concept vehicles: A large sweeping digital dashboard with many of the internal surfaces doubling as flat screens, and internet connectivity throughout.

There are an impressive 10 gadget docks so the six passengers will never be fighting over who gets to charge their device, and Chrysler said speakers direct audio to each seating zone so it's possible to each listen to their own music.

[...] The Portal is a battery electric vehicle with a 250 mile range, and supports fast-charging that can deliver a 150-mile charge in 20 minutes.

Setting aside its intended market, the car has good features that would appeal to a lot of customers.

[One thing to note is that this is a concept car, not intended for production - Fnord666]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Pentagon subcontractor has exposed the names, locations, Social Security Numbers, and salaries of US Military Special Operations Command (SOCOM) healthcare professionals.

The cleartext and openly accessible database – said to be at least 11 gigabytes in size – also included names and locations of at least two Special Forces analysts with Top Secret government clearance.

It exposed pay scales, living quarters, and residences of psychologists and other SOCOM healthcare workers.

MacKeeper researcher Chris Vickery found the leaky data store online, reporting it to Potomac Healthcare Solutions. He says the company has fixed the vulnerable system, but did not initially appear to take his warning seriously.

"It is not presently known why an unprotected remote synchronization (rsync) service was active at an IP address tied to Potomac," Vickery says.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

By suspending tiny metal nanoparticles in liquids, Duke University scientists are brewing up conductive ink-jet printer "inks" to print inexpensive, customizable circuit patterns on just about any surface.

Printed electronics, which are already being used on a wide scale in devices such as the anti-theft radio frequency identification (RFID) tags you might find on the back of new DVDs, currently have one major drawback: for the circuits to work, they first have to be heated to melt all the nanoparticles together into a single conductive wire, making it impossible to print circuits on inexpensive plastics or paper.

A new study by Duke researchers shows that tweaking the shape of the nanoparticles in the ink might just eliminate the need for heat.

By comparing the conductivity of films made from different shapes of silver nanostructures, the researchers found that electrons zip through films made of silver nanowires much easier than films made from other shapes, like nanospheres or microflakes. In fact, electrons flowed so easily through the nanowire films that they could function in printed circuits without the need to melt them all together.

Journal Reference:
Ian E. Stewart, Myung Jun Kim, Benjamin J. Wiley. Effect of Morphology on the Electrical Resistivity of Silver Nanostructure Films. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2017; DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b12289

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As tech industry leaders gather for an annual extravaganza showcasing hot new products, political uncertainty is casting a cloud over the sector.

The election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum are among the factors weighing on the outlook. And a strong US dollar may cut into spending for many consumers around the world.

With the Consumer Electronics Show kicking off this week in Las Vegas, the organizers are predicting that industry revenue would shrink for the fourth consecutive year.

Consumer Technology Association senior director of market research Steve Koenig revealed the forecast Tuesday, predicting the amount of money people around the world spend on smartphones and other gadgets this year would tally $929 billion as compared to $950 billion in 2016.

Koenig said the "underpinning" of the global forecast was "uncertainty with the election of Trump and with Brexit."

It's the end of the world as we know it.

Original Submission

charon writes:

The New York Times has a long form profile of a doctor who operates a hospice for dying patients. A fascinating look into a subject most people are afraid to even think about.

Now, at the morning meeting, [Dr. B. J.] Miller began describing the case of a young man named Randy Sloan, a patient at U.C.S.F. who died of an aggressive cancer a few weeks earlier at Zen Hospice. In a way, Sloan's case was typical. It passed through all the same medical decision points and existential themes the doctors knew from working with their own terminal patients. But here, the timeline was so compressed that those themes felt distilled and heightened.

And then there was the bracing idiosyncrasy of everything Miller's staff had been able to do for Sloan at Zen Hospice. Rabow told me that all palliative-care departments and home-hospice agencies believe patients' wishes should be honored, but Zen Hospice's small size allows it to "actualize" these ideals more fully. When Miller relayed one detail about Sloan's stay at the hospice — it was either the part about the sailing trip or the wedding — one doctor across the conference table expelled what seemed to be an involuntary, admiring, "What?"

Everything Miller was saying had a way of sharpening an essential set of questions: What is a good death? How do you judge? In the end, what matters? You got the sense that looking closely at Sloan's case might even get you close to some answers or, at least, less hopelessly far away.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found that vinyl music is not dead and forgotten, but is actually becoming popular again as witnessed by the following story:

Vinyl sales, which reached a 25-year high, and a continued increase in streaming offset decline in CD sales as music consumption rose last year, according to official music industry figures.

Vinyl sales rose by 53 per cent to top 3.2 million units – the most LPs sold since 1991. The biggest-selling vinyl artist was David Bowie, whose untimely death spurred interest in his back catalogue. Amy Winehouse's Back To Black also did well for similar reasons.

Just over 200,000 LPs were purchased in 2007. The 16-fold increase since underlines the strength of the vinyl revival.

Sales of CDs declined 11.7 per cent or more than a tenth in 2016.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Concrete isn't thought of as a plastic, but plasticity at small scales boosts concrete's utility as the world's most-used material by letting it constantly adjust to stress, decades and sometimes even centuries after hardening. Rice University researchers are a step closer to understanding why.

The Rice lab of materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari performed an atom-level computer analysis of tobermorite, a naturally occurring crystalline analog to the calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H) that makes up cement, which in turn holds concrete together. By understanding the internal structure of tobermorite, they hope to make concrete stronger, tougher and better able to deform without cracking under stress.

Their results appear this week in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces .

Tobermorite, a key element in the superior concrete Romans used in ancient times, forms in layers, like paper stacks that solidify into particles. These particles often have screw dislocations, shear defects that help relieve stress by allowing the layers to slide past each other. Alternately, they can allow the layers to slip only a little before the jagged defects lock them into place.

The researchers built the first computer models of tobermorite "super cells" with dislocations either perpendicular to or in parallel with layers in the material, and then applied shear force. They found that defect-free tobermorite deformed easily as water molecules caught between layers helped them glide past each other.

But in particles with screw defects, the layers only glided so far before being locked into place by the tooth-like core dislocations. That effectively passed the buck to the next layer, which glided until caught, and so on, relieving the stress without cracking.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission