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Fnord666 writes:

You may not notice it, but our Milky Way galaxy is cruising along at 630 kilometers (~391 miles) per second. That speed is often attributed to the influence of a single gravitational source. But in a new study, a group of researchers has found that the motions of the Local Group—the cluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way—are being driven by two primary sources: the previously known and incredibly massive Shapley Supercluster and a newly discovered repeller, which the researchers dub the Dipole Repeller.

Shapley's contribution was already known, but the Dipole Repeller's hadn't been recognized prior to this study.

The researchers plotted the motions of many galaxies in the nearby Universe in a 3D model, using data from the Cosmicflows-2 database. Since the Universe is expanding, most galaxies are moving away from ours, creating a red-shift in the light they emit. But since the researchers were more interested in the other influences on a galaxy's motion, they simply subtracted the expansion's contribution. The resulting plot shows what the motions of galaxies would look like if space wasn't expanding.

The galaxies in that plot all follow different paths—some proceed through the Great Attractor in the middle of the picture, others curve around the periphery, and so on. They all seemed to have a clear destination: the Shapley Supercluster. But they also seem to have a clear origin point: the Dipole Repeller. When the researchers traced the galaxies' paths backwards, they all originate there. It looks a lot like there's something there repelling the galaxies, as if the Repeller and Shapley formed the negative and positive ends of an electrical dipole, and charges were being driven from one to the other.

That's not what's actually happening. Gravity is the dominant force acting on a galaxy, and gravity, unlike electricity, can't repel—it's only an attractive force. So what's going on?

The Dipole Repeller's true identity is probably, well, nothing. It's actually a void with much less mass than the surrounding space. This has the effect of seeming like a repeller because the nearby space has a much denser concentration of matter, creating a gravitational gradient between the two. The low-density void is the only direction from which there's no force pulling on the galaxy, or at least significantly less force than comes from every other direction.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/milky-way-is-not-only-being-pulled-its-also-pushed-by-a-void/

Journal Reference:

Nature Astronomy, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-016-0036

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

President Donald J. Trump loves his Twitter account. Much has been made of Trump's 140-character missives, which he at least in part blasts out to the world unfiltered with his own fingers (and sometimes his staff). Interpreting the data and metadata of Trump's tweets has become akin to a modern form of Kremlinology­—the art of reading the temperature of the Soviet Union's leadership by noting who was seated where in the reviewing stands at Red Square.

Twitter may not be the leading social media platform, and it may not be the friendliest place on Earth to exchange ideas. But it does offer an API that lets pretty much anyone mine its metadata. While much of the data associated with tweets is obscured by the usual Twitter clients, those who've followed the tweeting travails of our 45th president are likely aware of the fact that it contains information like what device or software tweets were posted from. In the past, Law enforcement agencies and others have used access to Twitter metadata for a variety of purposes, including surveillance, by tapping into high-volume feeds of Twitter's tweet-stream. But a great deal of information can be gathered with much simpler and accessible tools.

"As any other social media website Twitter know a lot of things about you, thanks [to] metadata," a French security researcher known as X0rz wrote in a recent blog post. "Indeed, for a 140 characters message you will get A LOT of metadata—more than 20 times the size of the initial content you typed in! And guess what? Almost all of this metadata is accessible through the open Twitter API." To demonstrate that, X0rz wrote a Python script called tweets_analyzer, a command-line tool to tap into some of Twitter's vast metadata that may not be accessible from the standard client.

Tweets_analyzer requires a Twitter account for authentication, as well as Twitter API credentials and, of course, a tweaked Python environment. It's not exactly something to be handed over blindly to the average tweeter. But in the right hands (and with a little patience due to Twitter API rate-limiting), it can help analyze accounts to identify networks of Twitter bots or trolls concealing their actual location and identity. In addition to examining the metadata associated with Twitter users and their tweets, X0rz added a "friends" analysis feature that skims information from the metadata of the accounts followed by the target account, including language, timezone and location data.

For the sake of science, I turned tweets_analyzer loose on a few Twitter accounts to see what sort of information I could uncover. I started with the most obvious of suspects: Donald Trump.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/dont-tweet-new-tool-gives-insight-into-whos-behind-twitter-eggs-and-trolls/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It's Futurism Friday at Treehugger:

If you have heard of rooftop farms, container farms, and automated indoor farms, then you might be familiar with how some forward-thinkers are combining automation and robotics with next-generation food production techniques to help feed the world in the twenty-first century.

Now, a multidisciplinary group of biologists, mechanical engineers, computer scientists and architects from Poland, Denmark, Germany, and Austria are exploring how some of these same ideas might translate into our built environment -- one that may someday be created out of an alliance between robots and plants. Flora Robotica is a project that aims to create plant-robot "biohybrids" and scaling it up to establish a "society of bio-hybrids that function in a self-organizing, distributed cognitive system capable of growth and development through interaction with humans, resulting in the creation of architectural structures."

They ought to consider carefully that robotic farmers are what got the Quarians into trouble.

Original Submission

FCC Tries Something New: Making Proposals Public Before Voting on Them

Fnord666 writes:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday announced a seemingly simple step to make the FCC's rulemaking process more open to the public: the FCC intends to release the full text of rulemakings before they're voted on instead of days after the vote.

Pai and fellow Republican Michael O'Rielly repeatedly complained about the secrecy of rulemakings when Democrat Tom Wheeler was chairman. Wheeler followed the practice of previous chairs by publicly releasing a summary of the proposed rules a few weeks before the FCC's meetings, while negotiations over the final text of orders continued behind closed doors. The actual text of rulemakings wasn't released until after the vote. In the case of net neutrality, Pai complained three weeks before the vote that he couldn't share the full text of the draft order with the public. The full text wasn't released until two weeks after the vote.

"Today, we begin the process of making the FCC more open and transparent," Pai said yesterday. He then released the text of two proposals scheduled for a vote at the commission's meeting on February 23, one on allowing TV broadcasters to use the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard and another on "giving AM radio broadcasters more flexibility in siting their FM translators."

[...] This would certainly make it easier for journalists to report on the impacts of rulemakings before they're voted on. Congressional Republicans pressed Wheeler to make releasing the text of orders in advance a standard practice, and there is pending legislation that would make it a requirement. But Wheeler said during his chairmanship that such a practice would cause long delays in rulemakings. Wheeler told Republicans in Congress in May 2015 that making the full text public in advance could make it easier for opponents to kill proposals they don't like.

[...] While Pai hasn't yet committed to making the pre-vote release of orders permanent, O'Rielly said he's confident that the pilot project will go smoothly. "If this initial attempt goes well—and I see no reason why it wouldn't—I think we will all find this to be a significant upgrade in terms of quality of feedback, quality of process, and ultimately quality of the commission's work product," O'Rielly said. O'Rielly acknowledged that the change "may make our jobs a bit more challenging," but he added that "it is the right thing to do for the American people, the practitioners before the commission and the professional press who report on commission activities."

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-tries-something-new-making-proposals-public-before-voting-on-them/

FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T and Verizon Violated Net Neutrality

Fnord666 writes:

The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that AT&T and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions. The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding.

The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps.

The FCC issued an order that "sets aside and rescinds" the Wheeler-era report on zero-rating. All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.

[...] Pai opposed Wheeler's zero-rating investigation, saying that free data offerings are "popular among consumers precisely because they allow more access to online music, videos, and other content free of charge." He has also vowed to overturn the FCC's net neutrality rules and hasn't committed to enforcing them while they remain in place. "While this is just a first step, these companies, and others, can now safely invest in and introduce highly popular products and services without fear of commission intervention based on newly invented legal theories," Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said today.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/fcc-rescinds-claim-that-att-and-verizon-violated-net-neutrality/

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Fnord666 writes:

In today's odd science news, researchers have shown that they can produce electricity by evaporating water from a chunk of soot. The research falls into the category of systems that extract electricity from waste energy around us—kind of like generating electricity from swaying buildings or powering your watch from your own movements. But this was a result that I did not expect.

The experiments that make up the new work are so simple that pretty much anyone can do them themselves. Take a hydrocarbon of choice and set it on fire so that it burns with a yellow flame. Then hold a bit of glass in the flame so that it gets covered in soot. Afterward, expose the carbon to an atmospheric plasma. Tape some electrodes to the carbon and then lower it into some water. The porous carbon drags water into itself through capillary forces, and when the water later evaporates from the carbon surface, electricity is generated. Not much, admittedly, at 53nW per square centimeter, but still enough to raise eyebrows.

It turns out that there is a commonly known mechanism that could cause this effect. Water always has some ions in it, and as it flows, it drags these ions along. So you get an electric current associated with the flow of water. In this case, the flow is induced by evaporation, but you could get the same effect by making the water flow downward via gravity. Oddly, however, that flow isn't generating most of the electricity. By controlling where the evaporation could take place and measuring the current due to flow only, the researchers behind these experiments determined that the streaming water contributed about one-fifth of the total voltage.

It's pretty clear that the researchers themselves don't really understand where the charge is coming from, but they've made every effort to eliminate possible systematic errors. They used a fan to change the rate of evaporation, which showed that the voltage varied with the evaporation rate. They opened and shut the container to start and stop evaporation, which switched the voltage on and off as well. They used deionized water for most experiments, but they performed some with varying amounts of salt to show that the current was not simply due to ion contamination.

The team ran the experiment for hours, showing that as long as there was water to evaporate, the carbon sheet produced a voltage. They also placed multiple electrodes at different heights in the carbon sheet, and the voltage got progressively higher for electrodes higher on the carbon sheet. Current cut out when electrodes were placed beyond the height of the water column in the sheet.

So I'm pretty confident that the researchers are producing electricity—they even powered a small LCD display. But I don't understand why it works.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/scientists-produce-electricity-by-evaporating-water-from-a-chunk-of-soot/

Journal:

Guobin Xue, et al.,Water-evaporation-induced electricity with nanostructured carbon materials, Nature Nanotechnology (2017) doi:10.1038/nnano.2016.300

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Companies spend nearly $100 billion on securing computers each year, yet incidents such as ransomware crippling hospitals and personal data leaking online remain common. Anthony Vance thinks that defensive measures could be more effective if we paid more attention to the hardware between our ears.

"Security professionals need to worry not only about attackers but the neurobiology of their users," said Vance, an associate professor at Brigham Young University, this week at the Enigma security conference in Oakland, California. His lab uses functional MRI scans of people's brains to reveal the unconscious mechanisms behind the way they perceive—or ignore—security warnings.

One of Vance's studies led him to collaborate with Google on tests of a new approach to displaying security warnings in the Chrome Web browser that people were less likely to dismiss offhand. Vance says Google's engineers told him they plan to add the feature to an upcoming version of Chrome. Google did not respond to a request for confirmation of when it would be added.

Multitasking is partly to blame. Vance's collaboration with Google grew out of experiments that showed when people reacted to security warnings while also performing another task, brain activity in areas associated with fully engaging with a warning was significantly reduced. People were three times less likely to correctly interpret a message when they reacted to security warnings while also performing another task.

Vance's lab teamed up with Google to test a version of Chrome modified to deliver warnings about a person's computer possibly being infected by malware or adware only when they weren't deeply engaged in something. For example, it would wait until someone finished watching a video, or was waiting for a file to download or upload, to pop up the message.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Researchers have now developed a new time-released fertilizer that slowly discharges its cargo. When applied to rice fields in Sri Lanka, crop yields increased, even when only half the typical amount of nutrients was added.

[...] A popular fertilizer is urea, a nitrogen-rich organic compound found in human urine. Urea is water soluble and volatile, which means that irrigation or a rain squall often sweeps it away in surface run-off or it escapes as a gas before it can be absorbed by plants. "Up to 70% of urea is lost to the environment,"

[...] The researchers attached urea molecules to hydroxyapatite—a constituent of human bones and teeth—in a six-to-one ratio by weight. The chemical bonds between the urea and hydroxyapatite molecules prevent the urea from decomposing too quickly. Yet, they do break down over time, which results in a controlled release of nitrogen at a rate that plants can absorb. Hydroxyapatite, which also slowly degrades, has the added benefit of being rich in phosphorus and calcium, elements that plants also need to thrive.

[...] The researchers then tested their fertilizer on a rice field in eastern Sri Lanka. They measured rice yields in three sections of a field: one that received no fertilizer, one fertilized with 100 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare of pure urea, and one fertilized with 50 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare from the urea-hydroxyapatite combo. The rows fertilized with the urea-hydroxyapatite duo yielded roughly 10% more rice than those fertilized with only pure urea, the team reports in ACS Nano.

This new fertilizer is made in a one-step process with inexpensive chemicals, unlike other controlled-release fertilizers on the market, such as polymer-coated urea. It's approximately 20% more expensive than pure urea, the researchers estimate. But it still may wind up saving farmers money, the authors contend, because it also delivers phosphorus and calcium, nutrients that normally have to be delivered by yet another set of fertilizers. "We believe that this novel formulation will be economically viable," Kottegoda says.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/slow-release-fertilizer-boosts-crop-yields-reduces-environmental-damage
Full paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.6b07781

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has completed the move of its Halley research station. The base is sited on the floating - and moving - Brunt Ice Shelf, and had to be relocated or face being dumped in the ocean. Tractors were used to tow the eight modules that make up the futuristic-looking Halley 23km further "inland".

Last month, BAS announced it would "mothball" the station for the duration of the coming Antarctic winter. The decision was made after a new crack opened in the ice shelf. This fissure is a long way (17km) from Halley's new position but it has prompted some concern about the stability of the whole area.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Humanity would understand very little about cancer, and be hard-pressed to find cures, without scientific research. But what if, when teams recreated each other's research, they didn't arrive at the same result?

That's what the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology of the Center for Open Science is attempting to do—redo parts of 50 important cancer studies and compare their results. They released their first five replications today, and it turns out that not all of the data is matching up. At least once in every paper, a result reported as statistically significant (the way scientists calculate whether an effect is caused by more than chance alone) was not statistically significant in the replicated study. In two of the cases, the differences between the initial and replicated studies were even more striking, giving the Center for Open Science researchers cause for concern

"I was surprised by the results because of all that homework that we did" to make sure the studies were being reproduced accurately, Tim Errington, Project Manager at the Center for Open Science told Gizmodo. "We thought we were crossing every T and dotting every I... Seeing some of these experimental systems not behave the same was something I was not expecting to happen."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Frogs' remarkable power to tongue-grab prey — some as big as mice or as oddly shaped as tarantulas — stems from a combo of peculiar saliva and a supersquishy tongue.
The first detailed analysis of the stickiness of frog saliva shows that the fluid can shift rather abruptly from gooey to runny, says mechanical engineer Alexis Noel of Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

[...] Noel and colleagues found that this saliva is what's called a shear-thinning liquid, which grows thinner and easier to stir or smear around when force is applied. Smacking into a fly jolts saliva from its sticky phase — more viscous than honey, she says — into the more "liquidy" phase "flowing into all the small cracks" of the insect body. As the tongue returns to the mouth, the spit thickens again, intensifying the grip.

[...] But once the fly is in the mouth, the tongue's grip needs to loosen so the fly can slide down the gullet. "Frogs actually use their eyeballs while swallowing," Noel says. Eyeballs sink from bulges to barely bumps, dipping inside the head and pushing food back toward the throat. The eyes' impact jars the saliva into a runnier phase, easing its grip on the prey.

Frogs use a viscoelastic tongue and non-Newtonian saliva to catch prey. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2016.0764

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Olimex just announced the avaliability of their TERES I DIY laptop. The name is from king of ancient times that ruled in the area of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Return of the netbook? At least once the products stop being out of stock.

This kit lets you assemble a laptop with quad core Allwinner A64 (64 bit ARM Cortex A53 cores), 1GB RAM, 11.6" inch screen 1366 x 768, 4GB eMMC, WiFi & BT, camera, 7000 mAh battery in just under a Kg. Avaliable in black or white, with US keyboard showing a nice Tux. In the assembly instructions you can see two USB ports, HDMI, 3.5 headphone jack, microSD slot, mic and side speakers. Multiple modular cards to update or fix as needed. No fans. Current price 225 EUR incl VAT.

AC opinion: the RAM is soldered and small for modern times, but it could become a plataform upon which to improve without having to throw away everything. Olimex already lists some ideas for future add ons, like FPGA based Logic Analyzer, in the instructions. All spare parts are listed already in shop, some with PCB files (Open Source Hardware, developed with KiCAD) for those wanting to do custom versions.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Transportation accounts for a huge portion of US carbon emissions. As recently as 2014, it was behind the electricity sector — 26 percent of US emissions to electricity's 30 percent. But as the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) just confirmed, as of 2016, they have crossed paths. "Electric power sector CO2 emissions," EIA writes, "are now regularly below transportation sector CO2 emissions for the first time since the late 1970s."

This is happening because power sector "carbon intensity" — carbon emissions per unit of energy produced — is falling, as coal is replaced with natural gas, renewables, and efficiency.

The only realistic prospect for reducing transportation sector emissions rapidly and substantially is electrification. How much market share EVs take from oil (gasoline is by far the most common use for oil in the US) will matter a great deal.

[...] Today saw the release of a new study from the Grantham Institute for Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative. It argues that solar photovoltaics (PV) and EVs together will kick fossil fuel's ass, quickly.

"Falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology," they conclude, "could halt growth in global demand for oil and coal from 2020." That would be a pretty big deal.

The "business as usual" (BAU) scenarios that typically dominate these discussions are outdated, the researchers argue. New baseline scenarios should take into account updated information on PV, EV, and battery costs. (The EIA doesn't expect inflation-adjusted prices of EVs to fall to $30,000 until 2030, even as multiple automakers say they'll hit that within a few years.)

[...] If these forecasts play out, fossil fuels could lose 10 percent market share to PV and EVs within a decade. A 10 percent loss in market share was enough to send the US coal industry spiraling, enough to cause Europe's utilities to hemorrhage money. It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors. "Growth in EVs alone could lead to 2 million barrels of oil per day being displaced by 2025," the study says, "the same volume that caused the oil price collapse in 2014-15."

Source: http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/2/14467748/electric-vehicles-oil-market

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A small but distinctive signal in X-rays from the Milky Way could be key to proving the existence of dark matter. That is the claim of US scientists who analysed the energy spectrum of X-rays gathered by Nasa's Chandra satellite. They found more X-ray photons with a particular energy than would be expected if they were produced only by familiar processes. Those photons could in fact have been generated by the decay of dark matter particles, say the researchers.

This is not the first time that scientists have seen extra photons with an energy of about 3,500 electronvolts (3.5 keV) in the spectra recorded by X-ray satellites. But previously, according to Kevork Abazajian, a cosmologist at the University of California, Irvine, it was not clear whether the bump, or "line", created by the photons in the otherwise smooth spectrum was merely an instrumental artefact. "This result is very exciting," said Dr Abazajian, who was not involved in the research. "It makes it more likely that the line is due to dark matter."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) published a vulnerability note yesterday about a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft Windows 8, 10 and Server editions. It reads:

Microsoft Windows contains a memory corruption bug in the handling of SMB traffic, which may allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service or potentially execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Attackers may cause a denial of service attack against affected versions of Windows by causing Windows devices to connect to a malicious SMB share. US-CERT notes that the possibility exists that the vulnerability may be exploited to execute arbitrary code with Windows kernel privileges.

Attacked systems may throw a blue-screen on successful attacks.

[...] US-CERT confirmed the vulnerability on fully-patched Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 client systems. Bleeping Computer notes that security researcher PythonResponder claimed that it affects Windows Server 2012 and 2016 as well. While there is no official confirmation of that yet, it seems likely that the Server products are also affected by the vulnerability.

[...] Microsoft has not released a security advisory yet, but it is probably only a matter of time before the company publishes a security advisory to inform customers about the vulnerability and mitigation options. US-CERT recommends to block outbound SMB connections on TCP port 139 and 445, and UDP ports 137 and 138 from the local network to the WAN. to protect Windows devices.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/02/03/smb-zero-day-affecting-windows-8-10-and-server/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Remember when Bank of America promised to stop financing coal mining? They weren't the only ones getting cold feet about this formerly dominant energy source. Now The Guardian is reporting that Deutsche Bank is committing to end financing of new coal mining and new coal-fired power plant construction.

This pledge is being made, says the bank, to back up its commitment to supporting the Paris Climate Deal. But it is also, most likely, a very prudent investment decision. With India phasing out new coal plant construction years earlier than recommended, China reducing its pipeline too, and huge utilities and whole countries alike saying they are pretty much done with coal, it's getting increasingly hard to see where the future for this industry lies.

It seems the age of fossil fuels may be drawing to a close.

Original Submission