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takyon writes:

They're piping out our space data!

Any nation that hopes to have a space program needs to be able to keep an eye on its orbiting assets at all times. This means that Australia has become a key link in the global chain of ground-based tracking stations.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a deep space tracking facility at Tidbinbilla in the ACT, managed by the CSIRO, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has one in New Norcia, Western Australia. The New Norcia station plays a further role as it picks up and tracks the ESA launches from French Guiana as they curve across the Indian Ocean on their way to Earth orbit or beyond.

This means that Australia plays a critical role in many other countries' space programs. Right now, about 40 space missions – including deep space planetary explorers, Mars rovers, solar observatories and astronomical space observatories – are routinely downlinking their data through radio dishes on Australian soil. This uniquely acquired data is then piped out of the country to the eagerly waiting US and European scientific communities, bypassing our own.

If Australia is to capitalise on its strengths in space tracking as well as space science, and is to get on board with the burgeoning commercial space industry, it's time that we considered forming a space agency of our own.

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charon writes:

If the right cheese curds from the right milk are at the right temperature, fungi become "the king of the mountain," says Dennis D'Amico, a food microbiologist at the University of Connecticut who studies cheese production. Under the correct conditions, mold spores thrive on proteins, fats, sugars and the remains of the original bacteria that turned the milk into cheese. As the mold spreads throughout the cheese and its exterior, it continues the transformation that the bacteria started.

So when human teeth finally sink in, they bite into a new set of even smaller active molecules. And if the cheese is blue cheese, where the bacteria P. roqueforti dwell deep inside, enjoying a slice means consuming living fungi in the middle of their own midday snack.

The flavors, smells and textures specific to each type of cheese are due to various combinations of fungi species. A Brie or Camembert, for example, requires at least four types of mold. One, G. candidum, produces a sulfur flavor and contributes to the creaminess of the cheese. Another, P. camemberti, blossoms into a distinct white rind. The symphony of mold makes the final texture and mushroomy, sweaty taste.

But while the concerto is beautiful, the identities of all the musicians remain mysterious.

Identifying all of the active fungi in a cheese is "an endless, endless rabbit hole," says [cheesemaker Benton] Brown. Most of the moldy cheeses we have today are happy accidents, D'Amico said, the details of which can only be understood with elaborate lab analyses.

Original Article at Scienceline.org

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

News for users of the desktop environment XFCE:

xfce4-taskmanager 1.2.0

This is a new release which brings a handy feature, i.e. identifying windows by clicking on them. Just use the crosshair-button in the toolbar and click on a window. This will result in the appropriate/associated process being selected in the tree or listview.
...
xfce4-notifyd 0.3.5

This long-awaited feature release finally brings the persistence support I have been working on for a while. So you can now enable a notification log and get your "away log" easily this way. There are even some options to only get the log for certain apps or only with "do not disturb" mode enabled.
...
Thunar 1.6.11

This maintenance release brings some important fixes that have made users complain a lot in the recent past – and understandably so. Thunar was fairly unstable with copy, rename, move and drag-and-drop operations and would simply crash. While a lot of people in the community did testing (and whining :)), several folks got to work, identified the underlying issue and submitted patches (that I pushed recently).

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charon writes:

Margaret Wertheim's wide-ranging essay on mathematics, "There’s more maths in slugs and corals than we can think of" covers how mathematics is implemented by humans, animals, or natural processes. It is clever and thought-provoking. Quite long, but well worth the read. Among other topics, the author touches on music, Fourier transforms, tiling, and coral reefs.

What does it mean to know mathematics? Since maths is something we teach using textbooks that demand years of training to decipher, you might think the sine qua non is intelligence – usually 'higher' levels of whatever we imagine that to be. At the very least, you might assume that knowing mathematics requires an ability to work with symbols and signs. But here's a conundrum suggesting that this line of reasoning might not be wholly adequate. Living in tropical coral reefs are species of sea slugs known as nudibranchs, adorned with flanges embodying hyperbolic geometry, an alternative to the Euclidean geometry that we learn about in school, and a form that, over hundreds of years, many great mathematical minds tried to prove impossible.

[...] The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things materially embodying fiendishly complex pieces of mathematics. How can we make sense of this? I'd like to propose that sea slugs and electrons, and many other modest natural systems, are engaged in what we might call the performance of mathematics. Rather than thinking about maths, they are doing it. In the fibres of their beings and the ongoing continuity of their growth and existence they enact mathematical relationships and become mathematicians-by-practice. By looking at nature this way, we are led into a consideration of mathematics itself not through the lens of its representational power but instead as a kind of transaction. Rather than being a remote abstraction, mathematics can be conceived of as something more like music or dancing; an activity that takes place not so much in the writing down as in the playing out.

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DECbot writes:

from the "damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't" dept.

Ars Technica provides the scoop on a new study that should alarm practitioners of gluten-free diets--especially the 1% of Americans that suffer from celiac disease and thus are gluten-sensitive. While admittedly a small study, the researchers found many of the blood and urine samples of the gluten-free participants had elevated levels of mercury and arsenic.

Those just happen to be toxic substances that often accumulate to high levels in rice, a food that is naturally gluten-free. Rice flour and other rice products are often used as substitutes for gluten-containing ingredients in foods.

Exposure to high levels of mercury and arsenic is linked to risks of cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurological problems.

The study is very small, and it’s unclear if the elevated levels are directly linked to the participants’ self-reported diets or even if the mercury and arsenic levels are high enough to cause health effects. But the researchers say the findings raise concern.

“These results indicate that there could be unintended consequences of eating a gluten-free diet,” Maria Argos, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and lead author of the study, said in a statement. But it’s impossible to draw firm conclusions “until we perform the studies to determine if there are corresponding health consequences that could be related to higher levels of exposure to arsenic and mercury by eating gluten-free.”

Argos and colleagues reported their findings in the journal Epidemiology.

High accumulation of mercury and arsenic in rice is not a new thing. Previous research as shown that rice plants are at least ten times better at accumulating toxins from the soil than other grain plants. However, it seems that people are putting together the evidence that a high rice diet has its own set of unfortunate consequences too. In 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration proposed new regulation restricting the allowable arsenic levels in rice cereals for infants. Chew on that organically grown, fat-free, sugar-free, low salt, gluten-free, flavor-free, nutrition-free, non-GMO, PETA-approved, recycled cardboard for a while.

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jelizondo writes:

It is the 120th anniversary of the passing of a bill by the House of Congress of Indiana to change the value of pi to 3.2! [Errors in the original are copied here verbatim. -Ed]

Weird as it sounds, in effect the House voted 67-0 on H.B. 246 "Introducing a new mathematical truth" on February 5th, 1897 and referred to the Senate of Indiana.

On February 2, 1897 Representative S. E. Nicholson, of Howard County, chairman of the Committee on Education, reported to the House:

"Your Committee on Education, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, entitled a bill for an act entitled an act introducing a new mathematical truth, has had same under consideration, and begs leave to report the same back to the House with the recommendation that said bill do pass."

The bill was duly passed to the Senate on February 10th and read on the 11th, then referred to the Temperance Committee. On February 12 Senator Harry S. New, of Marion County, Chairman of the Committee on Temperance made the following report to the Senate:

"Your Committee on Temperance, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, introduced by Mr. Record, has had the same under consideration. and begs leave to report the same back to the Senate with the recommendation that said bill do pass."

On the afternoon of February 12 "Senator Bozeman called up House Bill No. 246. The bill was read a second time by title. Senator Hogate moved to amend the bill by striking out the enacting clause. The motion was lost. Senator Hubbell moved to postpone the further consideration of this bill indefinitely. Which motion prevailed."

The bill was never voted on, it was simply postponed following ridicule from the press. "Senator Hubbell characterized the bill as utter folly. The Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law. Leading papers all over the country, he said, were ridiculing the Indiana Legislature. It was outrageous that the State of Indiana should pay $250 a day to have time wasted on such frivolous matters."

A very interesting story by Will E. Edington then at DePauw University, published by the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Sorry PDF only.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree-good-shot-making-comeback/

Once 25% of the forest in the American northeast, the American chestnut tree has been nearly wiped out by a fungal disease, which started about 100 years ago. The article has a number of interesting stories including a quote from Henry David Thoreau.

The American Chestnut Foundation http://www.acf.org/ has been selectively breeding to give fungal resistance for the last 30 years, but it's slow going. It takes 4-5 years before the seedlings flower and can be crossed again. They planted 150,000 resistant hybrids last year as an initial test. Going forward they plan to sequence some candidates to help select for further work.

In parallel, another group have identified a resistant gene in wheat and inserted it into a chestnut. While a faster process, it is recognized that a single GMO variety would have no diversity and would have problems in the wild. If this goes forward, the GMO is likely to be bred by traditional means against a wide variety of other chestnuts before being released.

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charon writes:

There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." With an experiment described [February 7th] in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world's leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to "quantum entanglement."

[...] In the first of a planned series of "cosmic Bell test" experiments, the team sent pairs of photons from the roof of [Anton] Zeilinger's lab in Vienna through the open windows of two other buildings and into optical modulators, tallying coincident detections as usual. But this time, they attempted to lower the chance that the modulator settings might somehow become correlated with the states of the photons in the moments before each measurement. They pointed a telescope out of each window, trained each telescope on a bright and conveniently located (but otherwise random) star, and, before each measurement, used the color of an incoming photon from each star to set the angle of the associated modulator. The colors of these photons were decided hundreds of years ago, when they left their stars, increasing the chance that they (and therefore the measurement settings) were independent of the states of the photons being measured.

And yet, the scientists found that the measurement outcomes still violated Bell's upper limit, boosting their confidence that the polarized photons in the experiment exhibit spooky action at a distance after all.

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170207-bell-test-quantum-loophole/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

[In gaming, t]he area control genre—troops, creatures, or cubes seeking majorities on a map—is a cramped and crowded one. Though well-regarded titles like Cry Havoc, Inis, and Star Wars: Rebellion all arrived in 2016, the calendar keeps turning and the plastic miniatures keep coming. This time, though, they're positively enormous.

In Assault of the Giants, a horde of titans descend upon Faerûn, the prominent continent featured in the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms setting. This Andrew Parks design takes a conflict-oriented thematic chassis and bolts a smooth Euro-style engine to its frame. The game is a hybrid of schools, delivering carnage and tremendous 5" plastic miniatures to satisfy your eyes as well as your brain. The fact that it plays in a cool 25 minutes per player is just wax on the hood.

Game details:

• Designer: Andrew Parks
• Publisher: WizKids
• Players: 3-6
• Age: 14+
• Playing time: 90-120 minutes
• Price: $79.99 Standard Edition (Amazon)/$129 Premium Painted Edition (Amazon)/~£80 Standard Edition

---

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/assault-of-the-giants-a-great-dd-game-with-5-mega-miniatures/

Original Submission

hemocyanin writes:

A large majority of geeks are enamored with nuclear power -- it's very cool technology after all. The problem of course, is that a nuclear power plant is a complex piece of machinery and successfully building one to operate safely is a delicate task, a lesson Toshiba learned the hard way:

Those troubled projects in the American South are now threatening the Japanese icon's foundations. The value of Toshiba shares has been cut in half over the last six weeks, wiping out more than $7 billion in market value.

It appears a huge part of the problem stems from reliance on a pipe supplier. James Bernhard Jr. bought a pipe fabrication business ("Shaw") for $50k in a bankruptcy deal and then used his awesome dealmaking ability to parlay that into becoming Toshiba's plumber. Of course, in the modern world being a great businessman means sucking money down like a frat boy at a keg, and Bernhard went on to sell Shaw for $3.3 billion even while screwing up all the pipes (from TFA linked above):

After Westinghouse hired Shaw to handle construction in 2008, it wasn't long before the company's work came under scrutiny. By early 2012, NRC inspectors found steel in the foundation of one reactor had been installed improperly. A 300-ton reactor vessel nearly fell off a rail car. The wrong welds were used on nuclear modules and had to be redone. Shaw "clearly lacked experience in the nuclear power industry and was not prepared for the rigor and attention to detail required,'' Bill Jacobs, who had been selected as the state's monitor for the project, told the Georgia Public Service Commission in late 2012.

So there you have it. The reason some geeks (me for example) oppose nuclear power has nothing to do with the technology, and absolutely everything to do with the morons who run it. Businessmen being in charge of this technology means it will never achieve its potential and that it will always be dangerous, because by the time something goes wrong, they'll be spending their billions on hookers and blow in some remote private tropical island paradise, far far away from any consequences of any kind.

Original Submission

charon writes:

Of all the difficulties involved with putting a man on the Moon, "the major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust," Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute, said in an interview with the Soil Science Society of America. The Apollo 11 astronauts griped that the "particles covered everything and a stain remained even after our best attempts to brush it off." An Apollo 12 crew member moaned that the lunar module "had so much dust that when I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded."

Moondust may look soft and pillowy, but it's actually sharp and abrasive, largely the detritus of micrometeorite impacts. With no wind or moving water on the Moon's surface, moondust never erodes. Effectively, no natural process exists on the lunar surface that can round its edges. When astronauts inhale what is essentially finely powdered glass, it becomes a huge health hazard [PDF]: The powder is so jagged that a deep breath could cause it to lodge in the lungs and pierce the alveolar sacs and ducts [PDF], resulting in a lunar version of "stone-grinder's disease," or silicosis, a deadly condition that commonly killed coal miners (and still kills 100 Americans a year). To complicate matters, lunar dust also contains a lot of iron—and this iron-laden dust has recently been implicated in hypertension among Apollo astronauts [PDF].

[...] No astronaut knew more about lunar geology than [Harrison "Jack"] Schmitt. Previously, every other Apollo flyboy had had a background as a military pilot. Schmitt was the first, and only, professional scientist to walk on the Moon. As a result, the press didn't romanticize or hype the geologist astronaut. The New York Times described the 37-year-old as a "quiet, serious bachelor who does not own a television set or a stereo." As he trained to go to the Moon, completing a 53-week flight training course and logging 2100 hours of flying time, the scientist never imagined that he would wind up being allergic to the lunar dust and rocks he had spent years studying from afar.

[...] When the astronauts returned to the lunar module, it took forever to brush the dust off. Schmitt later complained [PDF] of "a lot of irritation to my sinuses and nostrils soon after taking the helmet off ... the dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it." The symptoms lasted for about two hours. His condition was consistent with the findings of Dr. Bill Carpentier, a NASA doctor who had evidence suggesting the dust could cause allergic responses [PDF].

Original Submission

charon writes:

If heat is not your thing, rejoice: A thin plastic sheet may soon provide some relief from the intense summer sun. The film, made from transparent plastic embedded with tiny glass spheres, absorbs almost no visible light, yet pulls in heat from any surface it touches. Already, the new material, when combined with a mirrorlike silver film, has been shown to cool whatever it sits on by as much as 10°C. And because it can be made cheaply at high volumes, it could be used to passively cool buildings and electronics such as solar cells, which work more efficiently at lower temperatures.

During the day most materials—concrete, asphalt, metals, and even people—absorb visible and near-infrared (IR) light from the sun. That added energy excites molecules, which warm up and, over time, emit the energy back out as photons with longer wavelengths, typically in the midrange of the infrared spectrum. That helps the materials cool back down, particularly at night when they are no longer absorbing visible light but are still radiating IR photons.

[...] So they [Xiaobo Yin and his team] bought a batch of glass powder from a commercial supplier and mixed it with the starting material for a transparent plastic called polymethylpentene. They then formed their material into 300-millimeter-wide sheets and backed them with a thin mirrorlike coating of silver. When laid across objects in the midday sun, the bottom layer of silver reflected almost all the visible light that hit it: The film absorbed only about 4% of incoming photons. At the same time, the film sucked heat out of whatever surface it was sitting on and radiated that energy at a mid-IR frequency of 10 micrometers. Because few air molecules absorb IR at that frequency, the radiation drifts into empty space without warming the air or the surrounding materials, causing the objects below to cool by as much as 10°C. Just as important, Yin notes that the new film can be made in a roll-to-roll setup for a cost of only $0.25 to $0.50 per square meter.

An abstract of the paper is available online.

Yao Zhai, et al. Scalable-manufactured randomized glass-polymer hybrid metamaterial for daytime radiative cooling, Science, 09 Feb 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aai7899

Original Submission

charon writes:

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have developed a novel approach to analyze brainwaves during sleep, which promises to give a more detailed and accurate depiction of neurophysiological changes than provided by a traditional sleep study. In a report published in the January issue of Physiology, the research team describes how applying a technique called multitaper spectral analysis to electroencephalogram (EEG) data provides objective, high-resolution depictions of brainwave activity during sleep that are more informative and easier to characterize than previous approaches. The researchers also present a visual atlas of brain activity during sleep in healthy individuals, highlighting new features of the sleep EEG — including a predictor of REM sleep — that could be of important use to clinicians and researchers.

[...] The approach used by the MGH investigators provides a paradigm shift allowing clinicians to move away from subjective sleep staging and harness the wealth of objective information contained within EEG data. In their report, the team describes how sleep oscillations are far more easily characterized using spectral estimation than by looking at EEG traces. Spectral analysis is a class of approaches that break a waveform signal into its component oscillations — repeating patterns over time — just as a prism breaks white light into its component colors. In the EEG, these oscillations represent the activity of specific brain networks during sleep and wakefulness.

"At a fundamental level, brain activity is truly organized in terms of oscillations and waves," says senior author Patrick Purdon, PhD, MGH Anesthesia. "Spectral analysis is just analyzing the signals in terms of these waves, making it the right tool — and in some ways the perfect tool — for the job." Purdon also points out that traditional sleep scoring is essentially a crude form of spectral analysis, based on recognizing the wave properties by eye.

[...] In their report the researchers use these new vivid images of brain activity to illustrate how the sleep EEG multitaper spectrogram objectively reveals the detailed architecture of an entire night of sleep in a single visualization, rather than 1,000 30-second windows. Repeating patterns of activity — which use color to reflect signal power — become apparent even to the untrained eye, allowing technicians with only a few hours of training to stage with an accuracy comparable to that of traditional sleep scoring.

An abstract of the paper is available.

Michael J. Prerau, Ritchie E. Brown, Matt T. Bianchi, Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, Patrick L. Purdon. Sleep Neurophysiological Dynamics Through the Lens of Multitaper Spectral Analysis. Physiology, 2016; 32 (1): 60 DOI: 10.1152/physiol.00062.2015

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Voters in Switzerland have rejected a plan that would have kept generous multinational tax breaks intact:

Swiss voters have rejected a plan to reform the country's corporate tax system, sending the government back to the drawing board. Business and political circles in Switzerland had supported the plan, which was designed to prevent taxes rising sharply for foreign investors. However 59% of voters opposed the plan in Sunday's referendum vote.

The government will now need to find an alternative, which may involve higher tax rates for multinational companies. "It will not be possible to find a solution overnight," said Ueli Maurer, Switzerland's finance minister. He told a press conference it could take a year to come up with a new plan, and that Switzerland risked losing foreign investment as a result.

Also at Reuters, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg:

The government is at pains to find a solution at a time when countries such as the U.S. are seeking to gain a competitive edge with their own business tax reductions and after a strong currency-induced slowdown in economic growth. Switzerland, which has succeeded in attracting big global corporations like Procter & Gamble Co. and Caterpillar Inc., already bowed to international pressure and scrapped banking secrecy after a crackdown on tax evasion by other countries.

Original Submission

charon writes:

Researchers in China have developed a way to improve the reliability and security of machines that use quantum phenomena to generate random numbers. This is crucial to the development of other related technologies, such as secure quantum communication and computer simulations used in weather forecasts.

[...] "The output of [...] pseudorandom number generators is in principle predictable," said Xiongfeng Ma, an information scientist from Beijing's Tsinghua University, who was a part of the Chinese group. "They are good enough for most applications like simulations, but not for high security crypto systems."

[...] "Even if you have a very good [quantum] random number generator, there will still be some residual bias, so there needs to be a way to test and clean the data," said Juan Carlos Garcia-Escartin, a telecommunication scientist from University of Valladolid in Spain.

This need for post-measurement processing exposes the system to potential hacking. Ma and his team have developed a way to detect if a system is compromised. The basic concept is pretty simple -- they use the random source to trigger random testing of the data, kind of like pop-quizzes for a class of students.

This involves repeatedly shuffling and dividing the output numbers into four random groups, then testing them and crosschecking their results for anomalies. If the numbers are truly random and unbiased, any manipulation by an outsider would show up in these tests. Once this testing method is implemented, then even an untrusted quantum random number generator can still be used without the fear of compromising the level of randomness generated.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Campaigners have expressed outrage at new proposals that could lead to journalists being jailed for up to 14 years for obtaining leaked official documents. The major overhaul of the Official Secrets Act – to be replaced by an updated Espionage Act – would give courts the power to increase jail terms against journalists receiving official material. The new law, should it get approval, would see documents containing "sensitive information" about the economy fall foul of national security laws for the first time.

In theory a journalist leaked Brexit documents deemed harmful to the UK economy could be jailed as a consequence.

[...] John Cooper QC, a leading criminal and human rights barrister who has served on two law commission working parties, added: "These reforms would potentially undermine some of the most important principles of an open democracy."

[...] "It is shocking that so few organisations were consulted on these proposed changes given the huge implications for public interest journalism in this country," said Ms Ginsberg.

The Law Commission sought advice from media groups including Guardian Media as well as civil liberties groups including Liberty and Open Rights Group. Other groups consulted included the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 as well as several government departments and senior politicians and lawyers.

[...] The Law Commission recommendations state that there should be "no restriction on who can commit the offence," including hackers, politicians and journalists.

[...] A Law Commission spokesman said it was "both misleading and incorrect" to suggest journalists were at any greater risk under the planned law changes.

Source: The Telegraph

Original Submission