SoylentNews

charon writes:

Beetles wear a body armor that should weigh them down -- think medieval knights and turtles. In fact, those hard shells protecting delicate wings are surprisingly light, allowing even flight.

Better understanding the structure and properties of beetle exoskeletons could help scientists engineer lighter, stronger materials. Such materials could, for example, reduce gas-guzzling drag in vehicles and airplanes and reduce the weight of armor, lightening the load for the 21st-century knight.

But revealing exoskeleton architecture at the nanoscale has proven difficult. Nebraska's Ruiguo Yang, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering, and his colleagues found a way to analyze the fibrous nanostructure. Their findings were featured recently on the cover of Advanced Functional Materials.

The lightweight exoskeleton is composed of chitin fibers just around 20 nanometers in diameter (a human hair measures approximately 75,000 nanometers in diameter) and packed and piled into layers that twist in a spiral, like a spiral staircase. The small diameter and helical twisting, known as Bouligand, make the structure difficult to analyze.

Yang and his team developed a method of slicing down the spiral to reveal a surface of cross-sections of fibers at different orientations. From that viewpoint, the researchers were able to analyze the fibers' mechanical properties with the aid of an atomic force microscope. This type of microscope applies a tiny force to a test sample, deforms the sample and monitors the sample's response. Combining the experimental procedure and theoretical analysis, the researchers were able to reveal the nanoscale architecture of the exoskeleton and the material properties of the nanofibers.

Zaheri, Espinosa, et al. Exoskeletons: AFM Identification of Beetle Exocuticle: Bouligand Structure and Nanofiber Anisotropic Elastic Properties Advanced Functional Materials DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201770031

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Fitbits and Apple Watches and the like may have their uses, but they don't appear to be effective in weight loss.

I once received a lot of blowback for an Upshot article in which I showed (with evidence) that exercise is not the key to weight loss. Diet is. Many, many readers cannot wrap their head around the notion that adding physical activity, and therefore burning more calories, doesn't necessarily translate into results on the scale.

Well, here we go again because some of those folks also believe that fitness devices — Fitbit, Vivosmart, Apple Watch — must be helpful in losing weight. Unfortunately, evidence doesn't support this belief either.

[...] What was needed was a large, well-designed study that truly teased out the contribution of wearable tech to weight loss programs. Last year, the results of such a study, the IDEA trial, were published.

[...] At the end of the two years, which is pretty long for a weight loss study, those without access to the wearable technology lost an average of 13 pounds. Those with the wearable tech lost an average of 7.7 pounds.

It's hard for many to accept, so I'm going to state the results again: Those people who used the wearable tech for 18 months lost significantly less weight than those who didn't.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

GamingOnLinux covers Valve's new foray into VR Gaming on Linux.

Valve have put up SteamVR for Linux officially in Beta form and they are keen to stress that this is a development release.

You will need to run the latest Steam Beta Client for it to work at all, so be sure to opt-in if you want to play around with it.

VR on Linux will exclusively use Vulkan, so it's going to be a pretty good push for Vulkan if VR becomes more popular. Vulkan is likely one of the pieces of the puzzle that held it back, since Vulkan itself and the drivers are still so new.

On NVIDIA, you need to have the 375.27.10 "Developer Beta Driver", which can be found here. There's also this PPA for Ubuntu users. It's likely it needs some newer Vulkan extensions not found in the current stable drivers.

For AMD GPU owners, you need a very recent build of the open source radv driver (Mesa), Valve provide this pre-release on their github page.

Intel GPUs are not supported and it's probable it will be a long time until they are, since VR generally requires some beefy hardware to run smoothly. It's possible they may work in future, but I imagine the Intel 'anv' Vulkan driver needs more work done.

GoL also covered shortly after that Valve's announcement of Destinations & Dota VR Hub now available on Linux..

Destinations lets you explore both real and imaginary places in virtual reality with friends. Visit and learn about different countries, explore your favorite game environment, or play games with other players – invite your friends and go explore!

Dota 2 VR Hub [...] lets you watch live matches, replays and more in your VR headset. You can do a VR theatre with up to 15 friends too, which sounds pretty sweet.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Russia Today has a story looking back at the history of the Soyuz-U rocket, on the occasion of its final launch. According to the story, the Soyuz-U has flown either 788 or 789 times, the first mission taking place in 1973 when it was used to loft "a Soviet military surveillance satellite" and the most recent carrying

The story calls it "the longest-serving rocket in history."

Additional coverage:

• russianspaceweb.com
• TASS
• NASASpaceflight.com

Original Submission

AMD Ryzen Improves IPC by 52%, not 40%

takyon writes:

AMD Ryzen 7 desktop chips are now available for pre-order, and will be released generally on March 2nd. The cheapest "Ryzen 7" 8-core chip will be $329, but has 16 threads just like the $399 and $499 versions (there had been some concern that it might not have multi-threading). Ryzen 3 and 5 series quad-core and hex-core chips will be released later.

AMD held a "Tech Day" to share details about its new chips. Over the past year or two, AMD has said that their goal was to improve instructions per clock (IPC) by 40% with Zen/Ryzen. Now they are saying that they have achieved that... by improving IPC by 52%. It's an impressive number that would not have been possible had Ryzen's predecessor, the Bulldozer architecture, been competitive with Intel's CPUs (on single-threaded performance). However, keep in mind that comparisons between Ryzen and Bulldozer or certain Intel Core i7 CPUs are still based on information provided by AMD.

The 8-core design features 4.8 billion transistors and "200 meters of wiring".

YouTuber removes footage of Ryzen Overclock World Record

wantkitteh writes:

YouTube tech pundit Austin Evans uploaded a video earlier today containing footage of AMD's Ryzen launch event. Shortly afterwards, the video was made private, then replaced with a re-edited version of the piece with a couple of changes. A section in which Austin outed the Vega video card by name was edited and overdubbed with the description "a really cool graphics card".

Another section of the video showed an overclocking competition held at the event with a number of well-known LN2 overclocking experts seeing just how far they could push the new Ryzen chips. This whole section was removed, including footage of "a Ryzen chip" running at just over 5.1GHz, followed by the OCers celebrating as a run on Cinebench's R15 multi-threaded performance test set a new world record.

Comments on the video asking why the video was replaced and uploaded confirm that the Vega mention and OC section were removed. Austin Evans did not explain exactly why these changes were made, merely saying "YOU SAW NOTHING" in the comments section.

The 5.1GHz figure is from my memory. I think it might have been 5.16GHz more exactly, but I'm not completely sure about that and obviously can't verify it from the original video.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Scientists analyzed genetic data gathered from various early European skeletons, and found that "for later migrations from the Pontic Steppe during the late Neolithic/Bronze Age" there were "approximately five to 14 migrating males for every migrating female". This third wave of "Yamnaya" migration mainly contributed to autosomal DNA:

Call it an ancient thousand man march. Early Bronze Age men from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe swept into Europe on horseback about 5000 years ago—and may have left most women behind. This mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, sending men into the arms of European women who interbred with them, and leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans. "It looks like males migrating in war, with horses and wagons," says lead author and population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Europeans are the descendants of at least three major migrations of prehistoric people. First, a group of hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe about 37,000 years ago. Then, farmers began migrating from Anatolia (a region including present-day Turkey) into Europe 9000 years ago, but they initially didn't intermingle much with the local hunter-gatherers because they brought their own families with them. Finally, 5000 to 4800 years ago, nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today's 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans' genetic ancestry.

To find out why this migration of Yamnaya had such a big impact on European ancestry, researchers turned to genetic data from earlier studies of archaeological samples. They analyzed differences in DNA inherited by 20 ancient Europeans who lived just after the migration of Anatolian farmers (6000 to 4500 years ago) and 16 who lived just after the influx of Yamnaya (3000 to 1000 years ago). The team zeroed in on differences in the ratio of DNA inherited on their X chromosomes compared with the 22 chromosomes that do not determine sex, the so-called autosomes. This ratio can reveal the proportion of men and women in an ancestral population, because women carry two X chromosomes, whereas men have only one.

Ancient X chromosomes reveal contrasting sex bias in Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian migrations (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1616392114) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have observed enough planetary transits to confirm the existence of seven "Earth-sized" exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, an ultra-cool (~2550 K) red dwarf star about 39.5 light years away. Three of the exoplanets are located inside the "habitable zone" of their parent star. These three orbit from 0.028 to 0.045 AU away from the star:

Astronomers using the TRAPPIST–South telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as other telescopes around the world, have now confirmed the existence of at least seven small planets orbiting the cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. All the planets, labelled TRAPPIST-1b, c, d, e, f, g and h in order of increasing distance from their parent star, have sizes similar to Earth.

The exoplanets are presumed to be tidally locked. The six closest to TRAPPIST-1 have been determined to be rocky, while the seventh, TRAPPIST-1h, requires additional observations to determine its characteristics due to its longer orbital period.

Mass estimates for the planets range from 0.41 Earth masses (M_⊕) to 1.38 M_⊕. Radii range from 0.76 Earth radii (R_⊕) to 1.13 R_⊕.

Spitzer, Hubble, and other telescopes will continue to make observations of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, but the best data will likely come from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch in late 2018. JWST will allow the atmospheres and temperatures of many exoplanets to be characterized, which will help to settle whether the "habitable zones" of red dwarf stars are actually hospitable.

Artist illustrations and data for the TRAPPIST-1 system compared to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth.

Here's a website dedicated to the star.

Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 (DOI: 10.1038/nature21360) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket found this fat:

Around 35-40 per cent of a child's BMI -- how fat or thin they are -- is inherited from their parents, a new study has found. For the most obese children, the proportion rises to 55-60 per cent, suggesting that more than half of their tendency towards obesity is determined by genetics and family environment.

The study, led by the University of Sussex, used data on the heights and weights of 100,000 children and their parents spanning six countries worldwide: the UK, USA, China, Indonesia, Spain and Mexico. The researchers found that the intergenerational transmission of BMI (Body Mass Index) is approximately constant at around 0.2 per parent -- i.e. that each child's BMI is, on average, 20 per cent due to the mother and 20 per cent due to the father.

[...] The study also shows how the effect of parents' BMI on their children's BMI depends on what the BMI of the child is. Consistently, across all populations studied, they found the 'parental effect' to be lowest for the thinnest children and highest for the most obese children. For the thinnest child their BMI is 10 per cent due to their mother and 10 per cent due to their father. For the fattest child this transmission is closer to 30 per cent due to each parent.

The intergenerational transmission of body mass index across countries (DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2016.11.005) (DX)

Original Submission

Celestial writes:

A man in Russia has been convicted of murder and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for repeatedly stabbing his friend to death after a heated argument over AMD and Nvidia graphics card coolers.

[...] two Russian friends started arguing over which Graphics processor is better, nVida[sic] or AMD, and one of them ended up being killed in the most gruesome manner.

Aleksander Trofimov, 37, hacked his friend to death [in Russian] with a knife, after hitting him twice in the head. His friend, Evgeny Lylin, died instantly as a result. The murderer was so offended at the victim, he stabbed his dead body 11 times after a while.

The incident took place in the quite[sic] town of Saransk, Russia. The friends used to work together as colleagues a few years ago, and kept in touch ever since. Aleksander invited his friend for a few drinks, and both of them got drunk.

This led to the discussion about which cooler of a GPU is better [sic], nVidia or AMD. The discussion soon took a turn for the worst and Aleksander ended up murdering his friend for claiming that AMD was better.

Although the incident took place over an[sic] year ago, Aleksander got convicted and sentenced only recently. He was handed a nine and a half year prison sentence for the crime.

Additional coverage, in Russian, at http://by24.org/2017/02/17/russian_programmer_killed_and_burned_collegue_because_of_nvidia_features/.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research.

The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it's retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox.

"Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources," the CyberX researchers wrote. "In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39032748

Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists. They found that there had been 6,600 releases from these fracked wells over a ten-year period in four states. The biggest problems were reported in oil-rich North Dakota where 67% of the spills were recorded. The largest spill recorded involved 100,000 litres of fluid with most related to storing and moving liquids.

[...] A [previous] study carried out by the US Environment Protection Agency on fracking in eight states between 2006 and 2012 concluded that 457 spills had occurred. But this new study, while limited to just four states with adequate data, suggests the level of spills is much higher. The researchers found 6,648 spills between 2005 and 2014.

"The EPA just looked at spills from the hydraulic fracturing process itself which is just a few days to a few weeks," lead author Dr Lauren Patterson from Duke University told BBC News. "We're looking at spills at unconventional wells from the time of the drilling through production which could be decades."

Patterson, et.al. Unconventional Oil and Gas Spills: Risks, Mitigation Priorities, and State Reporting Requirements Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b05749

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Baidu has released an implementation for an algorithm that is intended to reduce GPU bottlenecks when training neural networks:

Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) announced an implementation of the ring allreduce algorithm for the deep learning community, which will enable significantly faster training of neural networks across GPU models. As neural networks have grown to include hundreds of millions or even over a billion parameters, the number of GPU nodes needed to do the training has also increased. However, the higher the number of nodes grows, the less efficient the system becomes in terms of how much computation is done by each node. Therefore, the need for algorithms that maximize the performance across the highly parallel system has also increased.

Using all the GPU nodes more efficiently means the neural network training can be done faster and that the company training a neural network doesn't have to spend as much on hardware that would otherwise be underutilized. Baidu has taken one algorithm, called the "ring allreduce," from the high-performance computing (HPC) world and brought it to deep learning to increase the efficiency of its GPU nodes. The ring allreduce algorithm could speed up the training of an example neural network by 31x across 40 GPUs, compared to using a single GPU.

[...] The group released its ring allreduce implementation as both a standalone C++ library as well as a patch for TensorFlow.

It was recently announced that Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology would build TSUBAME3.0 using Nvidia Pascal P100 GPUs with the goal of creating "Japan's fastest AI supercomputer":

Projections are that it will deliver 12.2 double-precision petaflops and 64.3 half-precision (peak specs). [...] Increasingly, we're seeing Nvidia refer to half-precision floating point capability as "AI computation." Half-precision is suitable for many AI training workloads (but by no means all) and it's usually sufficient for inferencing tasks.

With this rubric in mind, Nvidia says TSUBAME3.0 is expected to deliver more than 47 petaflops of "AI horsepower" and when operated in tandem with TSUBAME2.5, the top speed increases to 64.3 petaflops, which would give it the distinction of being Japan's highest performing AI supercomputer.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For those of us who enjoy wordplay, Mark Dominus' blog post about the best english language anagram is great fun.

A few years ago I mentioned in passing that in the 1990s I had constructed a listing of all the anagrams in Webster's Second International dictionary. (The Webster's headword list was available online.)

[...] The list starts with aal ala and ends with zolotink zolotnik which exemplify the problems with this simple approach: many of the 46,351 anagrams are obvious, uninteresting or even trivial. There must be good ones in the list, but how to find them?

I looked in the list to find the longest anagrams, but they were also disappointing: cholecystoduodenostomy duodenocholecystostomy

[...] This example made clear at least one of the problems with boring anagrams: it's not that they are too short, it's that they are too simple. Cholecystoduodenostomy and duodenocholecystostomy are 22 letters long, but the anagrammatic relation between them is obvious[.]

This gave me the idea to score a pair of anagrams according to how many chunks one had to be cut into in order to rearrange it to make the other one. On this plan, the "cholecystoduodenostomy / duodenocholecystostomy" pair would score 3, just barely above the minimum possible score of 2. Something even a tiny bit more interesting, say "abler / blare" would score higher, in this case 4. Even if this strategy didn't lead me directly to the most interesting anagrams, it would be a big step in the right direction, allowing me to eliminate the least interesting.

The method and results are laid out in the source post.

For those who don't wish to read the source post, his best pairing is cinematographer megachiropteran.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft is partnering with Stryker to help redesign operating rooms:

For as much as many are focused on the gaming and consumer-level productivity potentialities of XR, much of the progress in the field is happening in other markets, like industry and medicine. To wit, Microsoft announced that it's partnering with a medical technology company called Stryker to use HoloLens to design better operating rooms.

In a blog post, Microsoft explained that, "Everything from lighting, to equipment, tools, and even patient orientation, varies depending on who is using the operating room at any given moment. Equipment placement is critical as it effects [sic] ergonomics, efficiency, and task load, all of which have the potential to burden staff and slow procedures." To design better operating rooms, the company said, heads of multiple surgical disciplines need to physically meet to solve these issues, and a 3D design environment can help them do so much more efficiently.

From the blog post:

You may not be aware of it, but surgical disciplines from general, to urologic, orthopedic, cardiac, and ear nose and throat (ENT) use shared operating rooms. These specialties have widely different needs when it comes to operating room configuration and setup. Everything from lighting, to equipment, tools, and even patient orientation, varies depending on who is using the operating room at any given moment. Equipment placement is critical as it effects ergonomics, efficiency, and task load, all of which have the potential to burden staff and slow procedures.

Today, for hospitals to successfully design operating rooms that will accommodate these various medical disciplines, a critical meeting must take place. In this meeting, the heads of each surgical discipline, along with their staff, are physically present to outline the desired layout and implementation needed to successfully complete their procedures. This is a complicated and time-consuming process where people and a complex array of technology and equipment are shuffled around to determine what goes where, and when, to see how it will all fit.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In September 1885, a bunch of librarians spent four days holed up in scenic Lake George, just over 200 miles north of New York City. In the presence of such library-world luminaries as Melvil Dewey—the well-organized chap whose Dewey Decimal System keeps shelves orderly to this day—they discussed a range of issues, from the significance of the term "bookworm" to the question of whether libraries ought to have a separate reference-room for ladies.

They then turned their attention to another crucial issue: handwriting. As libraries acquired more books, card catalogs needed to expand fast in order to keep track of them. Though the newly invented typewriter was beginning to take hold, it took time and effort to teach the art of "machine writing." Librarians still had to handwrite their catalog cards. And this was causing problems.

"The trouble in handwriting," said Mr. James Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, "is that there is apt to be too much flourishing."

Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. "The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor," read a New York State Library School handbook. "Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters," wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. "Inks called black vary much in color," scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.

Dewey and his crew of "a dozen catalogers and librarians" spent, in his estimation, "an hour daily for nearly an entire week" hashing out the rules of library hand. They started by examining hundreds of card catalogs, looking for penmanship problems and coming up with ways to solve them. They concluded that the "simpler and fewer the lines the better," and decided that, while a slant was best avoided, a slight backward slant was acceptable. Then they got to the more nitty-gritty stuff, such as whether to opt for a "square-topped 3" or a "rounded-top 3." (The rounded-top 3 won out, as it is less likely to be mistaken for a 5 during hasty reading.)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission