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takyon writes:

The Cassini spacecraft has imaged the dumpling/walnut/ravioli-shaped Pan, a shepherd moon in Saturn's Encke Gap with a mean radius of around 14.1 km:

Even as it nears a sad end in September, the Cassini spacecraft is continuing to delight as it makes some of its final orbits through the Saturn system. As part of these "ring-grazing" maneuvers, the spacecraft has just returned the best-ever images of the small, walnut-shaped moon Pan. [...] In earlier research, [Carolyn] Porco and other planetary scientists have suggested that Pan, as well as Daphnis and some of the other small moons in the Saturn system, were once denser cores that had about one-third to one-half their present size.

Also at NASA JPL, Science Magazine and The Verge.

Raw images.

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takyon writes:

A D-Wave computer has been used for a machine learning vision task (treat references in the article to "quantum computer" or "qubits" with a qubit of salt):

Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision. The team used a D-Wave 2X computer, an advanced model from the Burnaby, Canada–based company that created the world's first quantum computer in 2007.

[...] In the new study, physicist Edward Boyda of St. Mary's College of California in Moraga and colleagues fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into the D-Wave 2X processor, which contains 1152 qubits. The researchers asked the computer to consider dozens of features—hue, saturation, even light reflectance—to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree. "Classification is a tricky problem; there are short trees, tall trees, trees next to each other, next to buildings—all sorts of combinations," says team member Ramakrishna Nemani, an earth scientist at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Division in Mountain View, California.

After it was trained, the D-Wave was 90% accurate in recognizing trees [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172505] [DX] in aerial photographs of Mill Valley, California, the team reports in PLOS ONE. It was only slightly more accurate than a conventional computer would have been at the same problem. But the results demonstrate how scientists can program quantum computers to "look" at and analyze images, and opens up the possibility of using them to solve other complex problems that require heavy data crunching.

The 1,152 "qubit" system is not D-Wave's latest product.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://qz.com/914002/youre-a-completely-different-person-at-14-and-77-the-longest-running-personality-study-ever-has-found/

In previous studies covering a decade or two, personalities could be recognized as roughly similar. Not this time!

Full paper here, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5144810/ and a longer review here https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/02/07/longest-ever-personality-study-finds-no-correlation-between-measures-taken-at-age-14-and-age-77/

Next (tongue in cheek) question, is this result unique to Scots, or does it apply to non-miserly groups as well?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In Feb/March 2017, we opened a usage survey for anyone to fill out, which was a public request to users, past and present alike, to indicate which parts of Pale Moon should have focus, and to decide in part on development direction. This was done in the spirit of "Your Browser, Your Way"™ -- you, the user, should have a say in what your browser will be shaped like!

This page provides an analysis of the results, and provides our (dev) response to some of the comments our survey respondents left.

[...]

About 80% of the respondents use Pale Moon as their primary web browser to surf the web. The other 20% uses either a different browser or multiple (other) browsers to varying degrees. Of course it is fantastic to see so many users using Pale Moon as their main (or only) web browser of note.

Among our users responding to the survey, the main reasons for not using Pale Moon as their primary browser have been:

      1. Extension compatibility with Firefox extensions. Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to provide exact compatibility with Firefox extensions because we are not Firefox. Because of our different application code, we are also not able to provide compatibility with WebExtensions at this time, because those use HTML for user interface elements instead of XUL. We are, however, working on providing an as broad as possible support for the three main extension formats in use: XUL, bootstrapped and SDK (in the form of PMkit); the technologies that Mozilla is going to completely abandon in November 2017 with Firefox 57.

      2. Website compatibility. As long as websites keep specifically checking for and catering to (specific versions of) only 3 or 4 "mainstream" browsers, you will always have some sites that will not cooperate with using an independent alternative. On the browser side, there is very little we can do to prevent this. As a user, however, you have the power to convince websites to give this attention by contacting webmasters of troublesome sites and making them aware of their restrictions.

      3. "Firefox is more secure". There is still a percentage of people that take arbitrary version numbers as a criterion at face value to determine what is, in their opinion, "outdated" or "insecure". Once more here the affirmation that Pale Moon is most definitely as secure, if not more so, than the current mainstream browsers. Our versioning is also independent of the versioning used by Mozilla. Security vulnerabilities that become known in the Mozilla platform code ar evaluated regularly and ported across if applicable.

      4. "Chrome is faster". This may be, depending on what you use to measure "speed"; in our experience though, there is no significant difference between any of the modern browsers when it comes to real-world speed. In fact, Pale Moon has regularly shown to perform very well in comparison on lower-end computers. Your Mileage May Vary in this respect.

[...]

Pretty much a unanimous vote here (even among the 20% who don't use Pale Moon as their main browser) that extensions are essential to the browser. Totally expected, and maybe Mozilla can draw a lesson from this.

This also underwrites the need for what we've been working on to restore: as much compatibility with Jetpack-style extensions as possible through PMkit.

http://www.palemoon.org/survey2017/

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takyon writes:

Anxious to see FBI Director James Comey retire? According to the man himself, you're going to have to wait:

The FBI director has no plans to leave the post before the end of his 10-year term. "You're stuck with me for about 6 1/2 years," James Comey said at a cyber conference in Boston on Wednesday, urging conference organizers to invite him to speak again.

In recent days, NPR and other news outlets have reported Comey pressed the Justice Department without success to issue a public denial of President Trump's tweet that the FBI and President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said this week that Trump still has confidence in Comey's ability to lead the FBI. Comey, who served as deputy U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush and who was named FBI director by Obama, has demonstrated a nearly unique ability to draw critics from both ends of the political spectrum.

Comprehensive coverage of the Comey saga.

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takyon writes:

Everspin has been selling MRAM components, but is now introducing standalone products:

Magnetoresistive RAM manufacturer Everspin has announced their first MRAM-based storage products and issued two other press releases about recent accomplishments. Until now, Everspin's business model has been to sell discrete MRAM components, but they're introducing a NVMe SSD based on their MRAM. Everspin's MRAM is one of the highest-performing and most durable non-volatile memory technologies on the market today, but its density and capacity falls far short of NAND flash, 3D XPoint, and even DRAM. As a result, use of MRAM has largely been confined to embedded systems and industrial computing that need consistent performance and high reliability, but have very modest capacity requirements. MRAM has also seen some use as a non-volatile cache or configuration memory in some storage array controllers. The new nvNITRO family of MRAM drives is intended to be used as a storage accelerator: a high-IOPS low-latency write cache or transaction log, with performance exceeding that of any single-controller drive based on NAND flash.

Everspin's current generation of spin-torque MRAM has a capacity of 256Mb per die with a DDR3 interface (albeit with very different timings from JEDEC standard for DRAM). The initial nvNITRO products will use 32 or 64 MRAM chips to offer capacities of 1GB or 2GB on a PCIe 3 x8 card. MRAM has high enough endurance that the nvNITRO does not need to perform any wear leveling, which allows for a drastically simpler controller design and means performance does not degrade over time or as the drive is filled up—the nvNITRO does not need any large spare area or overprovisioning. [...] Everspin did not have complete performance specifications available at time of writing, but the numbers they did offer are very impressive: 6µs overall latency for 4kB transfers (compared to 20µs for the Intel SSD DC P3700), and 1.5M IOPS (4kB) at QD32 (compared to 1.2M IOPS read/200k IOPS write for the HGST Ultrastar SN260).

[...] By the end of the year, Everspin will be shipping their next generation 1Gb ST-MRAM with a DDR4 interface, and the nvNITRO will use that to expand to capacities of up to 16GB in the PCIe half-height half-length card form factor, 8GB in 2.5" U.2, and at least 512MB for M.2.

Worse than NAND, 3D XPoint, and DRAM? Who is this for? If it is at a speed tier in between DRAM and XPoint, maybe the larger capacity versions can compete.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dr. Lowe, from In the Pipeline, writes about an apparent cure for sickle-cell disease and the challenges of expanding expensive cures to developing countries:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/08/gene-therapy-needs-machines
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603762/this-lab-in-a-box-could-make-gene-therapy-affordable/
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1609677
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Federal lawmakers are investigating how a former Iraqi insurgent fighter was able to lie about his identity and still get through America's 'extreme' vetting process.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to find out why the terror suspect's pending arrest was allegedly spiked just over a week before the election. Trump had run on a tough-on-terror platform and had been critical of President Obama's refugee policy.

"When [Joint Terrorism Task Force] and the U.S. Attorney's office for the Western District of Texas sought to prosecute this refugee, the local law enforcement and prosecutors allegedly 'met resistance' from officials within the National Security Division's Counter Terrorism section in Washington DC," Committee chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said in a March 6 letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/08/iraqi-insurgent-fighter-allegedly-lied-about-identity-got-through-extreme-vetting.html

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mrpg writes:

A puff of this, and the world transforms into a colorful kaleidoscope of dancing patterns and waves of sound; a sip of that, and the muscles in your body relax like jello.

We know different drugs make us experience the world around us in very different ways — and their after-effects are often nowhere near as pleasant as the immediate results they produce.

So what exactly are these drugs doing to prompt these feelings?

[Ed. Note: the rest of this article is infographics.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Several Missouri counties have taken opioid matters into their own hands:

Fed up that Missouri is the only state that doesn't track the prescription and sale of opioids, some of its biggest cities and counties have created their own monitoring system to help combat the increasingly popular and highly addictive drugs.

Forty-nine states have established prescription drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs, which require pharmacies to report controlled substances dispensed to an electronic database. Advocates say monitoring helps stop "pill shopping" by people who seek multiple prescriptions from several doctors, either to feed their own addictions or to re-sell the drugs. They also can flag physicians who might be overprescribing such drugs. Although the Missouri Legislature had considered adopting a drug monitoring program several times, it has always opted against doing so, largely over privacy concerns, including the potential for health records to be hacked.

Leaders of St. Louis County, the city of St. Louis, Jackson County, St. Charles County and a few non-urban counties have banded together to start their own monitoring program, which is scheduled to go online next month. Though the consortium includes only a small percentage of Missouri's 115 counties, it covers nearly 2.5 million of the state's 6 million residents.

[...] There were more than 33,000 deaths related to heroin or prescription opioids in the U.S. in 2015, including 1,066 in Missouri, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which considers it a public health crisis. The CDC says prescription drug monitoring programs have succeeded at their goals: Florida had more than 50 percent fewer oxycodone overdose deaths in 2012 after its program began and New York State saw a 75 percent drop in patients visiting multiple prescribers for the same drug in 2013, a year after its program was established.

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GeriatricGentleman writes:

Wellington (capital of New Zealand) is looking for 100 qualified IT professionals and will pay for flights and accommodation from anywhere and introduce them to employers like Weta Digital, Xero etc.

But of course there is a catch...I lived and worked in Wellington for a few years: it is a fairly small and affordable city to live in, treats ex-pats well, has an amazing vibrant inner city, magnificent scenery and on a good day is truly wonderful. However, good days are few and far between and you have to tie down small children and old people when the wind blows - which is most days.

Anyway, for all those who aren't enamoured of your current Trump ridden, Brexit pending, war torn or whatever environment - here's a chance to do something about it. You have a couple of weeks before it closes up shop.
https://www.wellingtonnz.com/work/looksee-wellington/

Yeah, I know - this sounds like an ad. I would like to know about other peoples experiences as ex-pats though. What makes a good place to live and work for you?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Buffalo News reports that Solar City (Tesla) now plan to drop Silevo's high efficiency cell design in favor of a well tested Panasonic design. Article also covers employment in the Buffalo area, money supplied for the factory and equipment by NY State. The change of course seems to be at least partly to changes in the solar panel market and also problems with Solar City's business model.

"Tesla will oversee factory operations in Buffalo, and will manufacture solar roof tiles there," a SolarCity spokesperson said Tuesday. "Panasonic will manufacture solar cells at the factory, with support from the Silevo team, including cells for the solar roof tiles that will be a hybrid of the Panasonic and Silevo architecture. Panasonic will also manufacture solar panels in Buffalo."

The new arrangements reflect deep changes that have taken place, both at the company and within the solar marketplace, since SolarCity first bought Silevo nearly three years ago. The way the solar panel factory will operate has been in flux ever since Tesla said that it planned to partner with Panasonic in the operation of the Buffalo gigafactory in the months leading up to its November acquisition of SolarCity.

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Rivenaleem writes:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/cg-actors-logan-never-knew-149013.html

A long article going into great detail about how they staged, shot & digitally manipulated scenes in the movie Logan replacing the faces on stuntmen with the respective actor. When I watched the movie, I knew that X-24 had been de-aged and touched up a bit, but I never noticed any of the other scenes, in particular the Limo scene they describe in the article that was heavily modified.

While Hollywood has been relying on digital doubles for many years, the work in Logan is particularly seamless, even if the scenes are relatively brief and do not involve an avatar delivering any dialogue. It's perhaps another example of where things are headed with digital actors and how they can be used to help tell the stories directors are wanting to tell. Cartoon Brew sat down with the studio behind the digital Hugh Jackmans and Laura, Image Engine in Vancouver, who worked under overall vfx supervisor Chas Jarrett, to discuss how the the cg 'digi-doubles' were brought to life.

After being given the task of re-creating cg heads for Keen and Jackman, Image Engine's team immediately knew what it was up for. "Everyone knows Logan, for instance, and that's the biggest challenge," Image Engine visual effects supervisor Martyn Culpitt told Cartoon Brew. "We're literally looking at a real Hugh and a digital Hugh side by side in some shots."

The studio had completed plenty of digital human-type work before, but mostly as either human-esque creatures or as cg stunt doubles – never full-frame actors intended to be indistinguishable from the real actor. That meant Image Engine had to ramp up on their digital human pipeline, while also capitalizing on work they'd previously done in the area. "We basically had to build the whole system from scratch," said Culpitt.

Of particular note, their lighting software is open source.

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takyon writes:

A handful of Malaysian citizens have been barred from leaving North Korea as relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate:

North Korea barred Malaysians from leaving the country on Tuesday, sparking tit-for-tat action by Malaysia, as police investigating the murder of Kim Jong Nam in Kuala Lumpur sought to question three men hiding in the North Korean embassy. Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak accused North Korea of "effectively holding our citizens hostage" and held an emergency meeting of his National Security Council. The United Nations called for calm between Malaysia and North Korea and urged them to settle their differences through "established diplomatic practice."

The moves underscored the dramatic deterioration in ties with one of North Korea's few friends outside China since the murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half-brother at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Feb. 13. Malaysia said the assassins used VX nerve agent, a chemical listed by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction.

[...] There are 11 Malaysians in North Korea, according to a Malaysian foreign ministry official, including three embassy staff, six family members, and two others.

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

The last major prediction of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, gravitational waves, was the most controversial and difficult to verify of them all. It wasn't until 1993 that gravitational waves were indirectly observed in the behaviour of neutron star binaries, and not until 2015 that they were finally directly detected. Even Einstein himself for a time had doubts that they were real, and he even attempted to publish a paper that tried to argue that gravitational waves were a mere artefact of the mathematics, which turned out to be flawed. Oddly enough, it was Richard Feynman, who is much better known for his work on quantum electrodynamics, who came up with an argument that convinced many of the doubters. Rather than arguing the mathematical subtleties of relativity, he came up with a physical explanation that not only demonstrated that gravitational waves must carry energy, but later inspired the design of LIGO, the first apparatus that detected gravitational waves directly. Paul Halpern has an article where he tells the whole story. From the article:

Enter Richard Feynman, who had distaste for unnecessary abstraction. If gravitational radiation is real, it must convey energy. Rather than debating the technical question of whether or not the pseudotensor definition of gravitational energy was correct, he turned instead to a far more intuitive line of reasoning, what has come to be known as the "sticky bead argument."

In his thought experiment, Feynman imagined a thin stick on which one mass is fixed and a second mass, slightly separated from the first, is free to slide back and forth, like a curtain on a rod. These two masses would be analogous to a pair of charges embedded in a vertical receiving antenna used to pick up radio signals. Just as a pulse of electromagnetic radiation would cause such charges to oscillate, the same would happen in the "gravitational antenna" if a gravitational wave passed through—with the maximum effect occurring if the wave were transverse: at right angles to the stick. Upon the impact of a gravitational wave, one of the masses would accelerate relative to the other, sliding back and forth along the stick. The rubbing movement would generate friction between the free mass and the stick, releasing heat in the process. Therefore the gravitational radiation must convey energy. Otherwise, how else did the energy arise?

Original Submission