SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

South America's mining industry supplies half the world with copper. The world's largest mines are located in the Andes. Yet just when copper production began there has remained unclear, until now. Very few artefacts from the early high cultures in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia have been preserved. Now, however, researchers of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Villigen, Switzerland, are on the trail of this mystery. Through analysis of ice from the Illimani glacier in the Bolivian Andes, they found out that by around 700 BC, copper was already being mined and smelted in South America. Their findings are published in Scientific Reports, an online journal of the Nature Publishing Group.

In South America, copper has been mined and smelted for around 2700 years. This has now been determined by researchers of the Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Villigen, Switzerland, through analyses of glacier ice from Bolivia. Copper mining in South America has enormous importance: Chile and Peru are the two largest copper producers in the world; Chile alone accounts for more than 30 percent of global copper production. Yet the beginnings of this essential industrial sector have remained obscure. The only certain evidence came from the time of the Moche culture, which flourished on the northern coast of Peru between 200 and 800 AD. Numerous copper objects from this culture, such as jewelry and ritual tools, have been found. From earlier times, however, there are few finds and no written records.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have created a tiny drone capable of pollinating plants:

The device is about the size of a hummingbird, and has four spinning blades to keep it soaring. With enough practice, the scientists were able to maneuver the remote-controlled bot so that only the bristles, and not the bulky body or blades, brushed gently against a flower's stamen to collect pollen [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2017.01.008] [DX]—in this case, a wild lily (Lilium japonicum), they report today in Chem. To ensure the hairs collect pollen efficiently, the researchers covered them with ionic liquid gel (ILG), a sticky substance with a long-lasting "lift-and-stick-again" adhesive quality—perfect for taking pollen from one flower to the next.

The current version is not autonomous and must be piloted by a human.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A NASA report on the potential for future exploration of the Jovian moon Europa has been published:

A report on the potential science value of a lander on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa has been delivered to NASA, and the agency is now engaging the broader science community to open a discussion about its findings.

[...] The report lists three science goals for the mission. The primary goal is to search for evidence of life on Europa. The other goals are to assess the habitability of Europa by directly analyzing material from the surface, and to characterize the surface and subsurface to support future robotic exploration of Europa and its ocean. The report also describes some of the notional instruments that could be expected to perform measurements in support of these goals.

Scientists agree that the evidence is quite strong that Europa, which is slightly smaller than Earth's moon, has a global saltwater ocean beneath its icy crust. This ocean has at least twice as much water as Earth's oceans. While recent discoveries have shown that many bodies in the solar system either have subsurface oceans now, or may have in the past, Europa is one of only two places where the ocean is understood to be in contact with a rocky seafloor (the other being Saturn's moon Enceladus). This rare circumstance makes Europa one of the highest priority targets in the search for present-day life beyond Earth.

Executive summary:

The Europa Lander Science Definition Team Report presents the integrated results of an intensive science and engineering team effort to develop and optimize a mission concept that would follow the Europa Multiple Flyby Mission and conduct the first in situ search for evidence of life on another world since the Viking spacecraft on Mars in the 1970s. The Europa Lander mission would be a pathfinder for characterizing the biological potential of Europa's ocean through direct study of any chemical, geological, and possibly biological, signatures as expressed on, and just below, the surface of Europa. The search for signs of life on Europa's surface requires an analytical payload that performs quantitative organic compositional, microscopic, and spectroscopic analysis on five samples acquired from at least 10 cm beneath the surface, with supporting context imaging observations. This mission would significantly advance our understanding of Europa as an ocean world, even in the absence of any definitive signs of life, and would provide the foundation for the future robotic exploration of Europa.

Europa Lander Study 2016 Report (264 pages) and older resources.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Days after the Washington Post reported on the hoarding of Tailored Access Operations tools by Harold T. Martin III, a federal grand jury has indicted the former NSA contractor:

A federal grand jury has indicted a former National Security Agency contractor on 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information.

According to prosecutors, Harold "Hal" Martin took a slew of highly classified documents out of secure facilities and kept them at his home and in his car. Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that among those materials, Martin is alleged to have taken 75 percent of the hacking tools that were part of the Tailored Access Operations, an elite hacking unit within NSA.

The indictment outlines 20 specific documents that he is accused of having taken, including "a March 2014 NSA leadership briefing outlining the development and future plans for a specific NSA organization."

Previously: NSA Contractor Harold Martin III Arrested
NSA Contractor Accused of "Stealing" Terabytes of Information, Charged Under Espionage Act
The Shadow Brokers Identify Hundreds of Targets Allegedly Hacked by the NSA

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

BBC News and the Washington Post are reporting on predictions of a partial lunar eclipse, expected to occur 10 February. According to BBC News,

Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusáková, which appears green, is expected to make its closest approach to the Earth some hours afterward.

further information:
JPL page about Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel is setting aside money to fix a hardware issue with its Atom C2000 SoCs [System on Chips], which are used in products such as servers, routers, and network attached storage:

Last week, Paul Alcorn over at Tom's Hardware picked up on an interesting statement made by Intel in their Q4 2016 earnings call. The company, whose Data Center group's profits had slipped a bit year-over-year, was "observing a product quality issue in the fourth quarter with slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints." As a result the company had setup a reserve fund as part of their larger effort to deal with the issue, which would include a "minor" design (i.e. silicon) fix to permanently resolve the problem.

[...] Jumping a week into the present, since their earnings call Intel has posted an updated spec sheet for the Atom C2000 family. More importantly, device manufacturers have started posting new product errata notices; and while they are keeping their distance away from naming the C2000 directly, all signs point to the affected products being C2000 based. As a result we finally have some insight into what the issue is with C2000. And while the news isn't anywhere close to dire, it's certainly not good news for Intel. As it turns out, there's a degradation issue with at least some (if not all) parts in the Atom C2000 family, which over time can cause chips to fail only a few years into their lifetimes.

[...] Finally, what's likely to be the most affected on the consumer side of matters will be on the Network Attached Storage front. [...] Seagate, Synology, ASRock, Advantronix, and other NAS vendors have all shipped devices using the flawed chips, and as a result all of these products are vulnerable to early failures. These vendors are still working on their respective support programs, but for covered devices the result is going to be the same: the affected NASes will need to be swapped for models with fixed boards/silicon. So NAS owners will want to pay close attention here, as while these devices aren't necessarily at risk of immediate failure, they are at risk of failure in the long term.

Intel has published an updated spec sheet (pdf).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has accused one of his employees of being a union agitator working on behalf of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW):

Earlier today, a Tesla employee wrote a post on Medium alleging that he and fellow Tesla employees at the company's Fremont, California manufacturing facility endure "excessive mandatory overtime," lower-than-average pay, and frequent injuries. Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the claims in a series of private Twitter messages to Gizmodo by calling the employee, who wrote under the name Jose Moran, a pro-union agitator working on behalf of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW).

"Our understanding is that this guy was paid by the UAW to join Tesla and agitate for a union," Musk says. The Tesla chief goes on to call Moran an employee of UAW, working on behalf of the union and not Tesla. When asked about his stance on unions, Musk describes Tesla as a "union neutral" company.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported that Tesla has paused production at its California assembly plant to prepare for the production of the company's long-awaited Model 3 sedan.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google is experimenting to see whether its game-playing AIs will learn to cooperate with each other:

When our robot overlords arrive, will they decide to kill us or cooperate with us? New research from DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.'s London-based artificial intelligence unit, could ultimately shed light on this fundamental question.

They have been investigating the conditions in which reward-optimizing beings, whether human or robot, would choose to cooperate, rather than compete. The answer could have implications for how computer intelligence may eventually be deployed to manage complex systems such as an economy, city traffic flows, or environmental policy.

Joel Leibo, the lead author of a paper DeepMind published online Thursday, said in an e-mail that his team's research indicates that whether agents learn to cooperate or compete depends strongly on the environment in which they operate.

While the research has no immediate real-world application, it would help DeepMind design artificial intelligence agents that can work together in environments with imperfect information. In the future, such work could help such agents navigate a world full of intelligent entities -- both human and machine -- whether in transport networks or stock markets.

DeepMind blog post. Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have found evidence of the existence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) cluster:

All known black holes fall into two categories: small, stellar-mass black holes weighing a few Suns, and supermassive black holes weighing[1] millions or billions of Suns. Astronomers expect that intermediate-mass black holes weighing 100 - 10,000 Suns also exist, but so far no conclusive proof of such middleweights has been found. Today, astronomers are announcing new evidence that an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) weighing 2,200 Suns is hiding at the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae.

"We want to find intermediate-mass black holes because they are the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. They may be the primordial seeds that grew into the monsters we see in the centers of galaxies today," says lead author Bulent Kiziltan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

This work appears in the Feb. 9, 2017, issue of the prestigious science journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/nature21361] [DX].

47 Tucanae is a 12-billion-year-old star cluster located 13,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Tucana the Toucan. It contains hundreds of thousands of stars in a ball only about 120 light-years in diameter. It also holds about two dozen pulsars that were important targets of this investigation.

This isn't the first time that scientists have thought they found an intermediate-mass black hole (see GCIRS 13E).

List of nearest black holes.

[1] Ed Note: Yes, I am aware that weigh is inappropriate in this context and that the proper term is mass. This is, however, a direct quote and that is what they wrote. --martyb

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have developed sensor technology for a robotic prosthetic arm that detects signals from nerves in the spinal cord.

To control the prosthetic, the patient has to think like they are controlling a phantom arm and imagine some simple manoeuvres, such as pinching two fingers together. The sensor technology interprets the electrical signals sent from spinal motor neurons and uses them as commands.

A motor neuron is a nerve cell that is located in the spinal cord. Its fibres, called axons, project outside the spinal cord to directly control muscles in the body. Robotic arm prosthetics currently on the market are controlled by the user twitching the remnant muscles in their shoulder or arm, which are often damaged. This technology is fairly basic in its functionality, only performing one or two grasping commands. This drawback means that globally around 40-50 per cent of users discard this type of robotic prosthetic.

The team in this study, published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, say detecting signals from spinal motor neurons in parts of the body undamaged by amputation, instead of remnant muscle fibre, means that more signals can be detected by the sensors connected to the prosthetic. This means that ultimately more commands could be programmed into the robotic prosthetic, making it more functional.

Elective surgery to route nerves to mounts for an extra pair of arms would be very helpful for home projects, too.

Full paper available from Nature

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two recent health insurance mergers have been blocked by judges:

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled against U.S. health insurer Anthem Inc's proposed $54 billion merger with smaller rival Cigna Corp, derailing an unprecedented effort to consolidate the country's health insurance industry.

The U.S. Justice Department sued in July to stop Anthem's purchase of Cigna, a deal that would have created the largest U.S. health insurer by membership, and Aetna Inc's planned $33 billion acquisition of Humana.

On Wednesday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the ruling against Anthem's deal, saying that the merger would have worsened an already highly concentrated market and was likely to raise prices.

Last month, a different U.S. judge ruled against Aetna's proposed deal for Humana.

Government antitrust officials argued that both deals would lead to less competition and higher prices for Americans. The acquisitions would have reduced the number of large national U.S. insurers from five to three.

Also at Bloomberg, The Hill, and WSJ.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google has developed a neural network algorithm that can create reasonable approximations of a 32×32 image from a downsized 8×8 image:

Of course, as we all know, it's impossible to create more detail than there is in the source image—so how does Google Brain do it? With a clever combination of two neural networks. The first part, the conditioning network, tries to map the the 8×8 source image against other high resolution images. It downsizes other high-res images to 8×8 and tries to make a match.

The second part, the prior network, uses an implementation of PixelCNN to try and add realistic high-resolution details to the 8×8 source image. Basically, the prior network ingests a large number of high-res real images—of celebrities and bedrooms in this case. Then, when the source image is upscaled, it tries to add new pixels that match what it "knows" about that class of image. For example, if there's a brown pixel towards the top of the image, the prior network might identify that as an eyebrow: so, when the image is scaled up, it might fill in the gaps with an eyebrow-shaped collection of brown pixels. To create the final super-resolution image, the outputs from the two neural networks are mashed together. The end result usually contains the plausible addition of new details.

Pixel Recursive Super Resolution

There is an excellent write-up on Wikipedia about various techniques for creating face hallucinations — aka an enhanced-resolution image of a face.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stanford University students have attempted to recreate a beer using a recently described 5,000-year-old recipe:

The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job's tears, a type of grass in Asia, according to the research. Traces of yam and lily root parts also appeared in the concoction.

Liu said she was particularly surprised to find barley – which is used to make beer today – in the recipe because the earliest evidence to date of barley seeds in China dates to 4,000 years ago. This suggests why barley, which was first domesticated in western Asia, spread to China. "Our results suggest the purpose of barley's introduction in China could have been related to making alcohol rather than as a staple food," Liu said.

The ancient Chinese beer looked more like porridge and likely tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today. The ingredients used for fermentation were not filtered out, and straws were commonly used for drinking, Liu said.

YouTube video (2:12).

Revealing a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in China (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601465113) (DX)

Previously: Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old Brewery in China

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

City A.M. (non-Cloudflare link) is reporting that Royal Dutch Shell has submitted to the British government its plans to dismantle its "four platforms, 154 wells and 28 pipelines" in the North Sea's Brent field, some of which have already ceased production. The company's Charlie platform continues to extract oil.

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant submitted its programme to the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS), which has invited public responses to the proposals over the next 60 days. It will then analyse the feedback and decide whether to approve the plan.

"Any decommissioning plan will be carefully considered by the government, taking into account environmental, safety and cost implications, the impact on other users of the sea and a public consultation," Reuters reported a spokesman for the BEIS said.

Additional coverage:

• Reuters
• The Independent
• Belfast Telegraph

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Amazonian rainforest was transformed over two thousand years ago by ancient people who built hundreds of large, mysterious earthworks.

Findings by Brazilian and UK experts provide new evidence for how indigenous people lived in the Amazon before European people arrived in the region.

The ditched enclosures, in Acre state in the western Brazilian Amazon, were concealed for centuries by trees. Modern deforestation has allowed the discovery of more than 450 of these large geometrical geoglyphs.

The function of these mysterious sites is still little understood -- they are unlikely to be villages, since archaeologists recover very few artefacts during excavation. The layout doesn't suggest they were built for defensive reasons. It is thought they were used only sporadically, perhaps as ritual gathering places.

The structures are ditched enclosures that occupy roughly 13,000 km2. Their discovery challenges assumptions that the rainforest ecosystem has been untouched by humans.

The archaeologists found evidence Amazonians practiced "agro-forestry" by cultivating economically valuable tree species.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

According to this, Wine now runs on Windows Subsystem for Linux.

In build 15025, wine64-development runs directly on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

This will be applauded as a great accomplishment for those who need to run Windows executables.

No word on whether Cygwin will run on Wine running on Windows Subsystem for Linux. Also of interest would be to get Wine to be able to run Windows Subsystem for Linux on Wine.

Original Submission