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takyon writes:

Scientists have discovered significant numbers of "large" micrometeorites collected from the debris found in urban rooftop gutters:

For years, amateur astronomers have been suggesting that microscopic, spherical particles collected from their roofs are actually tiny meteorites, the dust that formed our Solar System fallen to Earth. Scientists took the claim at face value but ended up being the downers again, at least initially. [...] One of those amateurs is a Norwegian artist and jazz guitarist named Jon Larsen, who created a group called Project Stardust. Larsen managed two impressive feats to get the issue revisited. One, he convinced people in Oslo to gather materials from their roof gutters (although, oddly, one sample also came from Paris). And not just a few—material came in from buildings that collectively possessed 30,000 square meters of roof.

The second feat was that Larsen got a small international team of scientists (Belgian and UK) to take this seriously. Faced with about 300kg of roof debris, the authors separated the material using a combination of magnets and physical shape—micrometeorites are spherical because they melt during atmospheric entry and are shaped by the air. From that 300kg, the researchers isolated 500 particles, all just a few hundred micrometers across, that looked like they were micrometeorites. Forty-eight of them were chosen for detailed analysis. All 48 of them appear to be genuine micrometeorites.

An urban collection of modern-day large micrometeorites: Evidence for variations in the extraterrestrial dust flux through the Quaternary (open, DOI: 10.1130/G38352.1) (DX)

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rigrig writes:

The Wine team has announced that version 2.0 of the Windows compatibility layer has been released.

The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.

[...] This is the first release made on the new time-based, annual release schedule. This implies that some features that are being worked on but couldn't be finished in time have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes.

Do any soylentils still rely on Wine for that one irreplaceable application?

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

Under the previous policy, Cubans who made it to dry land in US territory were permitted to enter the country and take advantage of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans to claim permanent US residency after one year in the country. Cubans who were interdicted at sea by the US Coast Guard, on the other hand, were returned to Cuba.

[...] On January 12, President Barack Obama announced that, effective immediately, the US government would end the so-called "Wet Foot, Dry Foot" policy, as well as the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program. In a joint statement detailing the changes in migration policy, the Cuban government agreed to accept Cuban nationals deported or returned by the US.

Through these programs, Cubans were extended preferential immigration status and a continued incentive to leave the country, which contributed to a "brain drain" of trained professionals and provided Washington and right-wing Cuban exiles the fodder for propaganda about state repression in Cuba fueling a constant stream of refugees.

Cuba has an abundance of well-trained medical personnel. Economist Dean Baker has pointed out that allowing the American Medical Association to construct artificial barriers to expanding USA's medical labor force is dumb and makes healthcare more expensive.

Also at The New York Times and Fox News.

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Phoenix666 writes:

While many people are aware of the behavioural symptoms associated with autism, probably not so many realize that autistics often also have gastrointestinal problems. With that in mind, scientists at the University of Arizona recently conducted a study in which a group of 18 autistic children received fecal transplants from donors with healthy gastrointestinal systems. Not only did the procedure help to "rebalance" their gut flora, but it also improved their behaviour.

First of all, a fecal transplant is just what it sounds like. Feces from one person are screened for disease-causing organisms, and then introduced into the recipient's digestive tract. In this case, the recipients first took antibiotics for two weeks, to wipe out their existing gut flora. They then received the fecal transplant initially in a high-dose liquid form, after which it was delivered in a lower-dose powder mixed into smoothies.

Of all the possible ways I could imagine to treat autism, that was not one of them...

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takyon writes:

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Parliament must vote on and approve of invoking Article 50 which triggers arrangements for leaving the European Union:

The Supreme Court has dismissed the government's appeal in a landmark case about Brexit, meaning Parliament will be required to give its approval before official talks on leaving the EU can begin. The ruling is a significant, although not totally unexpected, setback for Theresa May.

[...] The highest court in England and Wales has dismissed the government's argument that it has the power to begin official Brexit negotiations with the rest of the EU without Parliament's prior agreement. By a margin of eight to three, the 11 justices upheld November's High Court ruling which stated that it would be unlawful for the government to rely on executive powers known as the royal prerogative to implement the outcome of last year's referendum.

Also at NYT, WSJ, and The Guardian.

Previously: Brexit Court Defeat for UK Government

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Phoenix666 writes:

Now you can be both rubber and glue:

Rubber and steel are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to hardness, and wherever an object falls on that scale is typically where it will stay. But researchers at the University of Michigan have now developed a metamaterial that can change the stiffness of its surface, from hard to soft and back, in response to a small amount of stress.

As artificial materials that can be finely tuned for a specific purpose, metamaterials can do some pretty incredible things that you won't find in nature. Interestingly, what they're made of doesn't seem to matter: instead, their attributes stem from their structure, and by manipulating that, engineers can develop metamaterials that could replace optic lenses, make objects effectively invisible, or create vehicle parts that are both very strong and very light.

The University of Michigan team says its new metamaterial specializes in switching its surface between hard and soft states. Applying a small amount of strain allows that stiffness to be changed by several orders of magnitude, without damaging or weakening the material itself.

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CoolHand writes:

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-goes-satellite-images-earth.html

Since the GOES-16 satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral on November 19, scientists, meteorologists and ordinary weather enthusiasts have anxiously waited for the first photos from NOAA's newest weather satellite, GOES-16, formerly GOES-R.

The release of the first images today is the latest step in a new age of weather satellites. It will be like high-definition from the heavens.

The pictures from its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument, built by Harris Corporation, show a full-disc view of the Western Hemisphere in high detail—at four times the image resolution of existing GOES spacecraft. The higher resolution will allow forecasters to pinpoint the location of severe weather with greater accuracy. GOES-16 can provide a full image of Earth every 15 minutes and one of the continental U.S. every five minutes, and scans the Earth at five times the speed of NOAA's current GOES imagers.

Link to image gallery

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Hi, I'm Tony Albrecht and I'm one of the engineers on the new Render Strike Team under the Sustainability Initiative in League of Legends. The team has been tasked with making improvements to the League rendering engine, and we're excited to get our hands dirty. In this article, I'll provide a run-down on how the engine currently works - hopefully this will be the foundation on top of which I can later discuss the changes we make. It's also a great excuse for me to step through the rendering pipeline myself so that we, as a team, totally grok what's happening in there.

I'll be presenting exactly how League builds and displays a single frame of the game (remember, on high end machines this is happening over 100 times per second). The discussion here will certainly be technical, but I'm hoping it's digestible even if you don't have experience with rendering. I'll skip some of the complexity for the sake of clarity, but if anyone would like more details I certainly hope you ask.

First, a bit of brief context on the graphics libraries available to us. League has to work as efficiently as possible on a wide range of platforms. In fact, Windows XP is currently the fourth most popular OS version running the game (behind Windows 7, 10 and 8). There are over ten million games per month played on Windows XP, so to maintain backwards compatibility we have to support DirectX 9 and can only use the features it provides. We use a comparable featureset from OpenGL 1.5 on OS X machines as well (that should be changing soon).

So let's dive in!

A long article, but fascinating to see how so many steps are done so quickly to keep our gaming habit fed.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Like other politicians and government officials, President Trump's nominee for the position of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wants to have it both ways when it comes to encryption:

At his confirmation hearing, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, however, he took a much clearer position:

Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people's' digital security?

Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations.

Despite Sessions' "on the one hand, on the other" phrasing, this answer is a clear endorsement of backdooring the security we all rely on. It's simply not feasible for encryption to serve what Sessions concedes are its "many valuable and important purposes" and still be "overcome" when the government wants access to plaintext. As we saw last year with Sens. Burr and Feinstein's draft Compliance with Court Orders Act, the only way to give the government this kind of access is to break the Internet and outlaw industry best practices, and even then it would only reach the minority of encryption products made in the USA.

Related: Presidential Candidates' Tech Stances: Not Great

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Fnord666 writes:

Apparently it's the library's turn to pay a fine.

Libraries in St Louis have been bought to a standstill after computers in all the city's libraries were infected with ransomware, a particularly virulent form of computer virus used to extort money from victims.

Hackers are demanding $35,000 (£28,000) to restore the system after the cyberattack, which affected 700 computers across the Missouri city's 16 public libraries. The hackers demanded the money in electronic currency bitcoin, but, as CNN reports, the authority has refused to pay for a code that would unlock the machines.

As a result, the library authority has said it will wipe its entire computer system and rebuild it from scratch, a solution that may take weeks.

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takyon writes:

Just three ChromeOS-based devices currently support Android apps: the Asus Chromebook Flip, Acer Chromebook R11 / C738T, and Google Chromebook Pixel (2015). Soon, that list will jump to at least 61 devices:

Google said in May 2016 that select Chromebooks--laptops built entirely around its Chrome browser--would support apps originally made for Android devices. Now the company has updated the list of devices gaining access to the Google Play marketplace to include every Chromebook debuting in 2017.

[...] [That] paltry list of three devices will expand to include 61 products from Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and other manufacturers. Some of the products are expected to debut in 2017; others have already been released and will receive updates with Play Store compatibility. The flood gates have opened: Google said "all Chromebooks launching in 2017 and after" will be able to run Android apps. The platform has finally gone beyond the browser.

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takyon writes:

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) researchers are demonstrating a dense optical fiber system:

The research arm of Japanese network operator NTT is getting ready to demonstrate a system that can put 12 cores in a single 125 micron fibre, according to this announcement at The Optical Society.

That would, in a hypothetical deployment, yield an impressive throughput: 144 cores, and current Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems, each could carry 100 wavelengths, each able to run 100 Gbps. That's 1.44 million Gbps – or 1.44 petabits per second. The bottlenecks are: getting light down each individual core without the signals suffering interference or degradation, and; signal processing.

The NTT multi-core fibre contains 12 cores in a square lattice, which the researchers say fitted best inside a standard-profile 125 micron fibre. They also tested a 19 core hexagonal arrangement (first demonstrated last year), and a 10 core circular layout. While last year's 19 core layout would yield higher throughput, [it] required 250 micron fibres.

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n1 writes:

The Trump administration has frozen grants and contracts by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica, and blocked employees from providing updates on this change via social media. This could have big effects on the agency's budget and severely undercut its efforts.

In an email obtained by ProPublica, one EPA contractor writes that: "The new EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately. Until we receive further clarification, this includes task orders and work assignments."

Also, employees have been banned from providing updates to reporters or on social media. The internal memo specifies that no press releases will go out to external audiences, there will be "no blog messages" and media requests will be carefully screened. (Interestingly, the Department of Energy, a fellow federal agency, recently released new guidelines that specifically protects contractors and ensures that they can state their personal opinions.)

Source: The Verge

takyon: Here are some related stories happening at the same time:

USDA scrambles to ease concerns after researchers were ordered to stop publishing news releases, other documents
USDA disavows gag-order emailed to scientific research unit
Commerce nominee Ross promises to protect "peer-reviewed research" at NOAA
CDC postpones climate conference ahead of Trump takeover
Badlands National Park goes rogue with climate-change tweets

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randomerr writes:

Google has announced its partnership with Raspberry Pi to develop a range of smart tools that will made available in 2017. The company plans to bring its artificial intelligence, machine learning and all its other developer tools to the small computer. In a blog post, Raspberry Pi said: "The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community... Google's range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects."

[...] Both Google and Raspberry Pi are yet to reveal any specific use cases or applications that have been developed ahead of the partnership. Although they have revealed that they will be particularly focusing on AI and machine learning, and as both companies have IoT products it is likely that this will be a key field of interest.

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takyon writes:

Mississippi's Attorney General is going after Google again, this time for its handling of students' personal data:

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood is sparring with Google once more. Last year, Hood and Google wound down a court dispute over Hood's investigation into how Google handles certain kinds of online content, from illegal drug ads to pirated movies. E-mails from the 2014 Sony hack showed that Hood's investigation was spurred on, in part, by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America.

Now Hood has a new bone to pick with the search giant. Yesterday, Hood filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Google in Lowndes County Chancery Court, saying that the company is gathering personal data on students who use Google's G Suite for Education, (previously called Google Apps for Education). In a statement, Hood said that "due to the multitude of unclear statements provided by Google," his investigators don't know exactly what information is being collected.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized Google in the past for its tracking, storage, and data mining of student data.

Previously: Google Scolds MPAA on Cozy Relationship With the Mississippi Attorney General
Smoking Gun: MPAA Emails Reveal Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign
Google: First Amendment Doesn't Protect MPAA's Secrets
Google Quietly Takes Gag Off Mississippi AG After Wrecking Ads Probe

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) are creating an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based research library that opens the door to invaluable sickle cell disease research and novel therapy development.

The library comprises blood samples from ethnically diverse patients with sickle cell disease from around the world and represents the major genetic backgrounds on which the sickle cell mutation occurred. The library is outlined in the current online issue of the journal Stem Cell Reports.

iPSCs are cells that can renew indefinitely as undifferentiated cells and later can be directed to grow into any type of tissue or organ. These stem cell lines can then be used to create disease models in a lab, which allows researchers to better understand how the disease occurs and develop and test new, effective treatments against the disease.

"Sickle cell disease affects millions of people worldwide and is an emerging global health burden," said George Murphy, PhD, co-founder of the CReM and assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology-oncology at BUSM who is leading the project. "iPSCs have the potential to revolutionize the way we study human development, model life-threatening diseases, and eventually treat patients."

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is an inherited red blood cell disorder that causes abnormal hemoglobin in blood. Hemoglobin is a red blood cell protein that carries oxygen throughout the body. Red blood cells that contain normal hemoglobin are disc shaped and can easily move through the blood vessels. Sickle-shaped cells are not flexible and can stick to vessel walls, causing a blockade that can slow or stop blood from flowing properly. The lack of tissue oxygen can cause severe, chronic pain and organ damage.

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