SoylentNews

hellcat writes:

From The Verge:

Amazon's web hosting services are among the most widely used out there, which means that when Amazon's servers goes down, a lot of things go down with them. That appears to be happening today, with Amazon reporting "high error rates" in one region of its S3 web services, and a number of services going offline because of it.

Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and Splitwise all appear to be offline, as are websites built with the site-creation service Wix; GroupMe seems to be unable to load assets (The Verge's own image system, which relies on Amazon, is also down); and Alexa is struggling to stay online, too. Nest's app was unable to connect to thermostats and other devices for a period of time as well.

Isitdownrightnow.com also appears to be down as a result of the outage.

Amazon has suffered brief outages before that have knocked offline services including Instagram, Vine, and IMDb. There don't appear to be any truly huge names impacted by this outage so far, but as always, its effects are widespread due to just how many services — especially smaller ones — rely on Amazon.

There's no estimate on when service will be restored, but Amazon says it is "actively working on remediating the issue."

PS - BTW - thumbs up to our great behind the scenes guys! Good luck N.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Following recent talk of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a new analysis has poured cold water on the idea of de-extinction efforts, recommending that funding go to conservation efforts instead:

Ten days ago, science news media outlets around the world reported that a Harvard University–led team was on the verge of resurrecting the wooly mammoth. Although many articles oversold the findings, the concept of de-extinction—bringing extinct animals back to life through genetic engineering—is beginning to move from the realm of science fiction to reality. Now, a new analysis of the economics suggests that our limited conservation funding would be better spent elsewhere.

"The conversation thus far has been focused on whether or not we can do this. Now, we are progressing toward the: 'Holy crap, we can—so should we?' phase," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. "It is like we've just about put the last stiches in [Frankenstein's monster], and there is this moment of pause as we consider whether it is actually a good idea to flip the switch and electrify the thing to life."

[...] the results also show that if instead of focusing the money on de-extinction, one allocated it into existing conservation programs for living species, we would see a much bigger increase in biodiversity—roughly two to eight times more species saved. In other words, the money would be better spent elsewhere to prevent existing species from going extinct in the first place [DOI: 10.1038/s41559-016-0053] [DX], the team reports today in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

[article abstract not yet available]

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcast Corporation reports

Haisem Zahab, an Australian citizen, is alleged to have been researching how to develop laser missile detection equipment for IS and helping the extremists develop their own destructive missile arsenal.
...
"We will allege he has utilised the internet to perform services for ISIL," Commissioner Colvin said.

"Firstly, by researching and designing a laser warning device to help warn against incoming guiding munitions used by coalition forces in Syria and Iraq.

"Secondly, we will also allege that he has been researching, designing and modelling systems to assist ISIL's efforts to develop their own long-range guided missile capabilities."
...
Commissioner Colvin said Zahab, who is a trained electrician, had conducted "fairly sophisticated" research.

Mmm...aybe it is indeed a good time for Australia to kickstart its own space agency? I mean, look, if a trained electrician living outback manages to conduct a credible "fairly sophisticated research", perhaps the tech potential is quite high downunder.

Original Submission

Hi there. Martyb again with an update of our progress on issues arising from the site update. (The new comment grouping and display code was necessitated by huge server loads as well as long delays on constructing and returning highly-commented articles.)

First off, please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who made the time to comment in the prior stories and/or engaged us on the #dev channel on IRC. Really! Thank you for your passion and willingness to provide steps to reproduce and ideas for overcoming the issues that have been found.

ACs: If you access the site as an Anonymous Coward, be aware that we have NOT forgotten you. We are still trying to ascertain what features work best for the most people and are holding off changing (and rechanging and...) settings until we have a better idea of what to change those settings to be. So, please speak up on anything that you continue to find problematic and help guide us to making a choice that works the best for the most.

Scrolling Within a Comment: From what I saw in the reports from Monday, one of the key issues had to do with the scrolling within comments. We heard you. Oh, did we ever! Scrolling within comments was quickly removed and replaced by setting a limit on how long a comment could be submitted. This was especially problematic on mobiles and tablets.

Display Modes: Another of the often discussed issues had to do with "Display Mode." This can be set in your preferences (for logged-in users) and ad hoc when you load a story.

Display Mode - Defaults: If, prior to the release you had chosen "Flat", then you were transitioned to "Flat" (Doh!) If you had anything else as your selection for "Display Mode", you were transitioned to "Threaded-TOS". That mode was intended, as best as we were able to do using only CSS, to replicate the behavior previously supported by the old "Threaded" mode. You CAN change this. Many have reported that changing "Threaded-TOS" to "Threaded-TNG" and setting a lower value for "Breakthrough" (in this mode, "Threshold" is ignored) seemed to do the trick.

Display Mode - ad hoc setting: For the ad hoc case, just load the story as you normally would. Below the actual story text and before the comments is a set of controls. If you are having issues with the current default of "Threaded-TOS" click on that text and change it to "Threaded-TNG". if you find you have way too many icons to click in order to read comments, choose a smaller value for Breakthrough (-1 displays all; in this mode Threshold value is ignored).

Spoiler: Another popular topic of discussion was the way the new <spoiler> tag was implemented. We've heard you, but have not as yet decided on a course of action on how to update its functionality... Stay tuned!

*NEW* and/or Dimming: A surprising (to me at least) number of folks had issues with how we flagged old/new comments. For logged-in users, again go to the "Comments" tab of your "preferences" page, scroll down a little, and there are checkboxes that you can toggle:

Highlight New Comments [ ] Highlight new comments with *NEW* tag
Dim Read Comments [ ] Dim already read comments

Please give those a try and see if that works for you. Our first implementation of "Dimming" was a bit too strong for most folk's liking - this has been reduced so as to be less jarring. As for the "*NEW*" text, there were several positive comments that on mobile devices especially, one could quickly search for the text and rapidly navigate comments to find out what was new. There was a suggestion that uppercase-only looks like YELLING. Yes, it does. On the other hand, whatever text is selected for display has to be a reasonably unlikely string to appear in the normal course of reading comments. (False positives, anyone?)

There were some suggestions on changing the color of the comment title to flag it as new. This sounds pretty simple, but the devil is in the details. We have some in our community who are color-blind and others who have very limited vision, if any at all. For them, any color changes could be well nigh invisible. But it gets worse. On the "Homepage" tab of the "Preferences" page, there are currently 11 different themes that one can choose as your default. Setting a new comment to have a lighter (or darker) title bar would not work across all of those disparate themes.

Chevrons: And as for those chevrons that control the display of a single comment and of a comment tree, yes we heard you. Work is underway to see if we can replace those images with single/double plus/minus characters.

Penultimately, I would like to add a call-out to Paulej72 who took point yesterday (giving TheMightyBuzzard a well-deserved respite) and worked tirelessly into the night to address the issues that were raised.

Lastly, again many thanks to you, our community, who have guided us through this transition. Your feedback matters. We listen and for those who have been following along, I hope you can see the changes and the progress. We continue to strive to earn your trust and support. Thank you!

Dev Note: Currently there is an issue with Flat mode and viewing single comments such as https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=18223&cid=472653. It just came to our attention and we will be working on it to fix it. This issue will cause you to get a server error. Workarounds are to either switch modes to anything other than Flat or avoid going to single comment views.

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux

Fnord666 submitted a story which became:

Source: Popular Science:

Bots waging war for years on end, silently and endlessly arguing over tiny details on Wikipedia is, let's be honest, pretty funny. Automatons with vendettas against each other? Come on.

But as amusing as the idea is, anthropomorphizing bot wars ignores what's actually important about their arguments: we didn't know they were happening. Bots account for large chunks of the internet's activity, yet we know relatively little about how they all interact with each other. They're just released into the World Wide Jungle to roam free. And given that they account for over half of all web traffic, we should probably know more about them. Especially since these warring bots weren't even malicious—they were benevolent.

A group of researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute looked at nine years' worth of data on Wikipedia's bots and found that even the helpful ones spent a lot of time contradicting each other. And more specifically, there were pairs of bots that spent years doing and undoing the same changes repeatedly. The researchers published their findings on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Our results show that, although in quantitatively different ways, bots on Wikipedia behave and interact as unpredictably and as inefficiently as the humans. The disagreements likely arise from the bottom-up organization of the community, whereby human editors individually create and run bots, without a formal mechanism for coordination with other bot owners. Delving deeper into the data, we found that most of the disagreement occurs between bots that specialize in creating and modifying links between different language editions of the encyclopedia. The lack of coordination may be due to different language editions having slightly different naming rules and conventions.

takyon writes:

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/02/27/google-gets-first-dibs-new-skylake-chips/

As part of an ongoing effort to differentiate its public cloud services, Google made good this week on its intention to bring custom Xeon Skylake chips from Intel Corp. to its Google Compute Engine. The cloud provider is the first to offer the next-gen Xeons, and is getting access ahead of traditional server-makers like Dell and HPE.

Google announced plans to incorporate the next-generation Intel server chips into its public could last November. On Friday (Feb. 24), Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for cloud infrastructure, said the Skylake upgrade would deliver a significant performance boost for demanding applications and workloads ranging from genomic research to machine learning.

The cloud vendor noted that Skylake includes Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX-512) that target workloads such as data analytics, engineering simulations and scientific modeling. When compared to previous generations, the Skylake extensions are touted as doubling floating-point performance "for the heaviest calculations," Hölzle noted in a blog post.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/

Mozilla had previously made Pocket a mandatory part of Firefox and that really annoyed a lot of people because Pocket's business model was to spy on users for profit. This acquisition gives me hope that the spying will be eliminated, making Pocket - which is a genuinely useful tool - safe for all to use.

Pocket will join Mozilla's product portfolio as a new product line alongside the Firefox web browsers with a focus on promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content. (Here's a link to their blog post on the acquisition). Pocket's core team and technology will also accelerate Mozilla's broader Context Graph initiative.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have created a "cyborg rose" that can store energy in supercapacitors along the stem, following up on previous cyborg rose research published in 2015:

Scientists have figured out how to inject a conducting solution into a rose cutting, and have it spontaneously form wires throughout its stem, leaves, and petals to create fully functioning supercapacitors for energy storage. The so-called e-Plant was able to be charged hundreds of times without any loss on the performance, and the team behind the invention says it could allow us to one day create fuel cells or autonomous energy systems inside living plants.

"A few years ago, we demonstrated that it is possible to create electronic plants, 'power plants', but we have now shown that the research has practical applications," says one of the team, Magnus Berggren from Linköping University in Sweden. "We have not only shown that energy storage is possible, but also that we can deliver systems with excellent performance."

Back in 2015 [open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501136] [DX], the team produced their first cyborg rose by filling its veins with a conductive polymer solution, and having it weave the material into its living tissue.

In vivo polymerization and manufacturing of wires and supercapacitors in plants (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1616456114) (DX)

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

According to the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation], researchers at Trent University sampled both the oven roasted chicken filets and the chicken strips that Subway uses on its sandwiches in Canada. After testing six small samples of the filets and three small samples of the strips, the researchers ran a DNA test.

The results showed that the filets contained just 53.6 percent chicken DNA. The strips were found to contain just 42.8 percent chicken DNA.

CBC reports that the rest of the DNA found in the chicken was soy — used either for either seasoning or filler.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/national/subway-chicken-strips-contain-less-than-50-percent-chicken-dna-study-says

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A metallic hydrogen sample that made the news recently has disappeared, possibly returning to its gaseous state:

Scientists achieved the "holy grail of high-pressure physics" last month, when physicists from Harvard University claimed they'd successfully turned hydrogen into a metal - something researchers had been struggling to achieve for more than 80 years. And not only had they made the material, but they were also the first to stably keep it in the lab, making it the only sample of metallic hydrogen anywhere on Earth. But now the team has bad news - the sample has disappeared.

The metallic hydrogen was being stored at temperatures around 80 Kelvin (-193 degrees Celsius and -316 degrees Fahrenheit), and at incredibly high pressures between two diamonds in a type of vice. But further testing around a week ago caused the diamonds to break and the vice to fail, and the researchers haven't been able to find a trace of the metallic hydrogen since.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's been destroyed - the sample was only around 1.5 micrometres thick, and 10 micrometres in diameter - a fifth the diameter of a strand of human hair - so it's possible it's stable somewhere and missing. But it's also a possibility that, once the pressure of the diamond vice broke, the hydrogen dissipated back into a gas, which suggests that the material isn't stable at room pressure - one of the material's predicted properties.

Previous coverage:
Harvard Researchers Report Production and Analysis of Solid Metallic Hydrogen
Solid Metallic Hydrogen, Once Theory, Becomes Reality -- or Maybe Not?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two paying customers will travel to the "deep space" beyond the Moon. SpaceX will use the Falcon Heavy to deliver an automated Crew Dragon capsule carrying the unnamed customers next year. Falcon Heavy has not flown yet, and is expected to be tested this summer. NASA will use the Crew Dragon capsule to send astronauts to the International Space Station in 2018, after an unmanned test this year.

SpaceX will not reveal the identities of the participants until they complete health and fitness tests:

We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. We expect to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung has redesigned its Gear VR mobile headset to include a motion controller, much like the one included with Google Daydream View:

Samsung is firing back at Google's Daydream VR system. The electronics company revealed that its third-generation consumer-grade VR HMD features a tracked controller. Google just lost its biggest advantage.

During Samsung's presentation at Mobile World Congress 2017, the Korean electronics giant announced the Samsung Gear VR with Controller, which, as you probably guessed, includes a motion controller like the one that Google provides with the Daydream View HMD.

The Gear VR controller features buttons for home, back, and volume control. It also includes a clickable trackpad like the one found on the HTC Vive controllers, as well as a trigger on the back. Samsung loaded the controller with an accelerometer, gyrometer, and magnetic sensors to offer limited motion control. When not in use, the Gear VR controller fits into a strap inside the headset so you don't lose it.

Although, "Google just lost its biggest advantage", Tom's Hardware's own coverage of Daydream highlights the machine-washable fabric outer shell and accommodation for eyeglasses.

Samsung press release.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Howard Bloom has written a guest blog at Scientific American addressing the Trump Administration's plan to return to (orbit) the Moon. That mission would use the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, which have cost $18 billion through 2017 but are not expected to launch astronauts into space until around 2023. Bloom instead proposes using private industry to put a base on the Moon, using technology such as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy (estimated $135 million per launch vs. $500 million for the Space Launch System) and Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable habitat modules:

[NASA's acting administrator Robert] Lightfoot's problem lies in the two pieces of NASA equipment he wants to work with: a rocket that's too expensive to fly and is years from completion—the Space Launch System; and a capsule that's far from ready to carry humans—the Orion. Neither the SLS nor the Orion are able to land on the Moon. Let me repeat that. Once these pieces of super-expensive equipment reach the moon's vicinity, they cannot land.

Who is able to land on the lunar surface? Elon Musk and Robert Bigelow. Musk's rockets—the Falcon and the soon-to-be-launched Falcon Heavy—are built to take off and land. So far their landing capabilities have been used to ease them down on earth. But the same technology, with a few tweaks, gives them the ability to land payloads on the surface of the Moon. Including humans. What's more, SpaceX's upcoming seven-passenger Dragon 2 capsule has already demonstrated its ability to gentle itself down to earth's surface. In other words, with a few modifications and equipment additions, Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules could be made Moon-ready.

[...] In 2000, Bigelow purchased a technology that Congress had ordered NASA to abandon: inflatable habitats. For the last sixteen years Bigelow and his company, Bigelow Aerospace, have been advancing inflatable habitat technology. Inflatable technology lets you squeeze a housing unit into a small package, carry it by rocket to a space destination, then blow it up like a balloon. Since the spring of 2016, Bigelow, a real estate developer and founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, has had an inflatable habitat acting as a spare room at the International Space Station 220 miles above your head and mine. And Bigelow's been developing something far more ambitious—an inflatable Moon Base, that would use three of his 330-cubic-meter B330 modules. What's more, Bigelow has been developing a landing vehicle to bring his modules gently down to the Moon's surface.

[...] If NASA ditched the Space Launch System and the Orion, it would free up three billion dollars a year. That budget could speed the Moon-readiness of Bigelow's landing vehicles, not to mention SpaceX's Falcon rockets and could pay for lunar enhancements to manned Dragon 2 capsules. In fact, three billion dollars a year is far greater than what Bigelow and Musk would need. That budget would also allow NASA to bring Jeff Bezos into the race. And it would let NASA refocus its energy on earth-orbit and lunar-surface refueling stations...plus rovers, lunar construction equipment, and devices to turn lunar ice into rocket fuel, drinkable water, and breathable oxygen. Not to mention machines to turn lunar dust and rock into building materials.

An organization that Howard Bloom founded, The Space Development Steering Committee, has been short one member recently (Edgar Mitchell).

Original Submission

charon writes:

A few years ago, Christopher Hamm was reading up on monarch butterflies when he noticed something peculiar. All of the scientific articles that mentioned the number of the insect's chromosomes—30, it seemed—referenced a 2004 paper, which in turn cited a 1975 paper. But when Hamm, then a postdoc at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, did a genetic analysis of his own, he found that his monarchs only had 28 chromosomes, suggesting that an error has pervaded the literature for more than 40 years. Another twist, however, was just around the corner.

Hamm suspected a mistake when he read the original 1975 paper. The authors, biologists N. Nageswara Rao and A. S. Murty at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India, had studied what they claimed was an Indian monarch butterfly in their work. But there's a problem: Monarchs are nearly exclusively a North American species. "It's implied they just went outside their building and collected some butterflies," Hamm says. "I immediately thought, 'Monarch butterflies in India? Really?'"

[...] Case closed, right? Not quite. A paper published a few days later on bioRxiv by some of Hamm's former colleagues at the University of Kansas claims to have found, like Rao and Murty, 30 chromosomes in monarchs. "Previously, an observation of N=30 chromosomes was reported only for males (Nageswara-Rao and Murty 1975)," the authors write. "Our current analysis confirms the same chromosome number not only in males but also in females." The authors of that paper declined to comment on Hamm's findings.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A company founded in 2013 has announced its first SSD product, and it has a capacity of up to 24 TB:

NGD Systems this week announced its first SSD that also happens to be one of the highest capacity drives in the industry. The NGD Catalina uses a proprietary controller as well as up to 24 TB of Micron's 3D TLC NAND memory and apart from capacity, its key feature is a relatively low power consumption.

Before we jump to the Catalina SSD, it makes sense to talk about NGD Systems (formerly known as NxGn Data) itself. The company was founded in June 2013 by a group of people who previously developed SSDs at companies like Western Digital, STEC and Memtech, with the corporate aim to develop drives for enterprise and hyperscale applications. Back in 2014, the company disclosed that its primary areas of interest were LDPC, advanced signal processing, software-defined media channel architecture and in-storage computation capability. NGD has been developing various proprietary technologies behind the Catalina since its inception and the SSD is a culmination of their work.

The NGD Catalina is a large add-in-card with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface that also supports a Mezzanine connector. Rather than have the NAND on the main card, instead the card uses multiple M.2 modules with Micron's 3D TLC NAND. The 24 TB version of Catalina carries 12 [such] modules, whereas lower capacity SKUs will use [fewer] modules. According to NGD, the Catalina consumes only 0.65 W of power per Terabyte (which means ~15.6 W for the 24 TB SSD), but the card still has a 4-pin auxiliary power connector.

Keeping in mind that the SSD has a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, the peak read/write performance of the drive is limited to 3.9 GB/s. Meanwhile, NGD does not disclose official performance or endurance numbers for the Catalina SSD, but only says that the drive is optimized for read-intensive applications.

Press release.

Original Submission