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Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica announces a writing contest:

Here's the dealy-o, faithful readers: if you'd like this copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda and this RC Nomad to be yours, we're going to make you work for it. Specifically, you need to write a short story (500 words max) set somewhere and sometime in the Mass Effect universe. Where and when is up to you—it could be during the original trilogy, or during Andromeda, or anywhere else along the timeline. It could be about the time you were an itinerant dance instructor and you met up with Commander Shepard to try to finally teach him or her the right moves; it could be a noir-themed Sam Spade-esque look at the Citadel from the perspective of a burned-out C-Sec cop; it could be a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-style comic existentialist peek behind the scenes of life on the Normandy as Shepard and crew flit around the galaxy.

It could be anything, as long as it's at least mostly work-safe. No 500-word descriptions of asari tentacle porn, please (but speaking of asari, a 500-word flash fic called "Asari, Not Sorry" about an asari debt collector in the Citadel Wards would be pretty awesome).

FanFic idea #1: Miranda, Liara, and Shepard in a hot tub, when suddenly Harbinger asks to join in.

[Ed Note: There is a caveat. "It could be anything, as long as it's at least mostly work-safe. No 500-word descriptions of asari tentacle porn, please."]

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butthurt writes:

Reuters reports that Twitter has sued to stop the U.S. government's effort to learn the identity of a Twitter user who has criticized that government's policies.

further information:
court filing

additional coverage:

• NASDAQ
• Washington Post

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Russia has posted pictures of a new ground effect vehicle, or ekranoplan. The new design is more modest than the "Caspian Sea Monster" that so alarmed Western intelligence during the Cold War, and can only be seen taxiing.

Ground effect vehicles were pioneered by Russian engineers, and take advantage of the increased lift generated by flying close to a fixed flat surface; ekranoplans were designed to operate optimally 3-6m above sea level. This ruled out use over many terrains, but with vast areas of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea to cover, the Soviet Union had a good reason to invest. It consequently developed enormous ground effect vehicles.

The late Lester Haines told the ekranoplan story here.

The giant vehicles puzzled and alarmed Western intelligence experts, who spotted the distinctive designs from reconnaissance photos and concluded that the craft, although moving at the speed of a conventional aircraft, couldn't actually "fly". Had the Soviets developed some new breakthrough in propulsion?

Actually, the craft could "fly", just not very high. A LUN-class ekranoplan developed in the 1970s bristled with weapons, making it a formidable vehicle for a surprise coastal attack. Only two were ever operational. A smaller design, the A-90 ("Orlyonok"), developed by the Central Hydrofoil Design Bureau, was also designed for attack and adapted to be amphibious.

[...] The new vehicle touted last week is a medium-sized twin turbine design operating on a frozen surface. Russian news agency TASS cited presidential advisor Alexander Bedritsky explaining the value of ground effect vehicles in the Arctic:

Ground effect vehicles, if these are produced, suit the North perfectly. They can fly over the tundra, over the sea surface and over ice. A ground effect vehicle may fly for a thousand kilometres over tundra – there are no trees and no structures.

Conquest of the Arctic to follow?

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Both Phoenix666 and takyon write in with the latest news on human cannibalism:

For Cannibals, Here's the Caloric Content of Humans—it's Just Meh

Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica reports:

According to archeological evidence, the real Paleo diet included some human flesh now and then. But as Ars has reported before, deciphering exactly why our ancient relatives dined on their fellow hominins is tricky and up for debate—was it for rituals, other social reasons, or just good eats? A new study counting up the calorie content of a Paleolithic diet—and human flesh—suggests that cannibals were not thinking with their guts.

By rough estimates, eating all the skeletal flesh off a human—not including the organs—would provide about 32,376 calories. An optimally sized hunting group of 25 male Neanderthals or Pleistocene adults (anatomically modern human) could get about a meal out of that. But if the same group tracked down a boar or cow—which are less cunning and maybe easier to hunt—they'd have three days' worth of meals out of the skeletal flesh. The findings appear Thursday in Scientific Reports.

"On a nutritional level, hominins fall where expected, in terms of calorie content when compared to fauna [animals] of a similar body weight," the study's author, archeologist James Cole of University of Brighton, concluded. "However," Cole went on, when you compare them to the large animals we know our ancestors also ate, "the calorie returns of individuals and groups of hominins are significantly less" than going after that bigger game.

So eating grandma isn't really worth it.

Human Cannibalism is for Fun and Ritual, Not the Calories

takyon writes:

Human bodies don't contain enough calories to be worth eating as a regular meal, according to a study:

A new, slightly morbid study based on the calorie counts of average humans suggests that human-eating was mostly ritualistic, not dietary, in nature among hominins including Homo erectus, H. antecessor, Neandertals, and early modern humans.

Four adult male bodies that were chemically analyzed in two studies in 1945 and 1956 were found to have an average of 125,822 calories of fat and protein. Extinct hominins may have had more muscle mass and calories than today's humans, but far less than other animals such as woolly mammoths (3.6 million calories), woolly rhinoceroses (1.26 million calories), and aurochs (979,200 calories). Other hominins could represent just as much of a threat at would-be hunters.

Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep44707) (DX)

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Phoenix666 writes:

In 2015, a team of American engineers created the MegaBots Mk. II, a 15-foot-tall, 5,400kg, paintball cannon-armed mech of nightmarish proportions. Which is impressive and all, but the question was: why? The answer came in the form of a fight-to-the-death challenge issued to Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industries, which had built its own 13-foot-tall mech called Kuratas, complete with touchscreen UI, Kinect-based interface, and twin BB Gatling guns (customers could even order one for a cool $1.35 million).

One successful $500,000 Kickstarter campaign later—launched to get the Mk. II combat-ready—the battle to end all robot battles is finally happening, albeit a year later than originally planned. This August, the revamped MegaBots Mk. III will battle Kuratas at an as yet undisclosed location. The delay to the original duel was due to problems with the venue, according to MegaBots, so the location is being kept a secret for now.

The competition is essential if we're to be prepared for the arrival of the kaiju.

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Phoenix666 writes:

An antibody treatment successfully protected nonhuman primates against the deadly Marburg and Ravn viruses even when given five days after becoming infected, according to the latest findings of a collaborative team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., and Vanderbilt University. The findings are now available in Science Translational Medicine.

There are currently no vaccines or drugs approved for human use to protect against the Marburg and Ravn viruses. These two filoviruses, which are in the same virus family as Ebola, cause severe and often lethal disease in people. The average case fatality rate of Marburg virus disease since the first recognized outbreak in 1967 is 80 percent.

Monoclonal antibodies are a technology that is currently in wide use for treating autoimmune diseases and cancers. There are more than 45 monoclonal antibodies approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency.

It's welcome news for treating the hemorrhagic fever virus, a Biosafety Level 4 agent which can liquefy your organs. The popular non-fiction work, "The Hot Zone," described its effects.

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Phoenix666 writes:

As teacher resignation letters increasingly go public -- and viral -- new research indicates teachers are not leaving solely due to low pay and retirement, but also because of what they see as a broken education system.

In a trio of studies, Michigan State University education expert Alyssa Hadley Dunn and colleagues examined the relatively new phenomenon of teachers posting their resignation letters online. Their findings, which come as many teachers are signing next year's contacts, suggest educators at all grade and experience levels are frustrated and disheartened by a nationwide focus on standardized tests, scripted curriculum and punitive teacher-evaluation systems.

Teacher turnover costs more than $2.2 billion in the U.S. each year and has been shown to decrease student achievement in the form of reading and math test scores.

"The reasons teachers are leaving the profession has little to do with the reasons most frequently touted by education reformers, such as pay or student behavior," said Dunn, assistant professor of teacher education. "Rather, teachers are leaving largely because oppressive policies and practices are affecting their working conditions and beliefs about themselves and education."

The study quoted a teacher in Boston: "I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Coupland is talking backstage at Konica Minolta's Spotlight Live event on the future of work in Berlin this week where he was a star speaker. He says the collapse of the idea of a job for life means his generation, Generation X, and later ones think very differently about work than those born earlier. "They don't perceive [a job] as being a guarantee of long-term security – that's the profound difference, he says. "There was a point when the idea of the job for life disintegrated. Now no one has any expectation of lifetime employment."

Work as we know it is coming to an end, he told the audience in Berlin, as cloud-based technologies and ever-faster download speeds are making the office obsolete. Our working days are becoming interspersed with leisure and home activities. We will need to learn to adapt to a freeform schedule, which will present a psychological challenge to those who crave structure. But Coupland believes we should not mourn the loss of the traditional office routine.

"The nine to five is barbaric. I really believe that. I think one day we will look back at nine-to-five employment in a similar way to how we see child labour in the 19th century," he says. "The future will not have the nine till five. Instead, the whole day will be interspersed with other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freeform."

Nine-to-five sounds great to people whose employers expect them to work 80-hour weeks...

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Phoenix666 writes:

This salary ranking might be of interest to Soylentils contemplating careers in medicine:

Not all doctors take home the same amount of money. Orthopedists — doctors who treat bone and muscle problems — make the most on average. Pediatricians, or those who take care of children, earn the least. And white doctors take home significantly more than their equally qualified peers of color, regardless of specialty.

This data comes from the WebMD-owned medical resource Medscape, which crunches the numbers on self-reported annual income from more than 19,200 doctors across 27 specialties for its annual Physician Compensation Report.

Friends in residency programs have often aspired to Radiology as a high-pay, low-risk specialty, but YMMV.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Orally infecting mice with a human reovirus resulted in an immune response against gluten and led to symptoms of celiac disease in the rodents, researchers reported today (April 6) in Science. Reoviruses are prevalent in humans; while children are commonly infected with them, reoviruses are not known to cause disease in people. But the results of this mouse study suggest that a reovirus infection may spur development of celiac disease in certain individuals.

"It's been hypothesized for decades that virus infection can trigger autoimmune processes. This study provides an example of that phenomenon and some mechanistic insight into how this might work for celiac disease," said Herbert Virgin, a virologist at the University of Washington, who has collaborated with some of the study's authors but was not involved in the present work.

An inflammatory immune response develops in the guts of individuals with celiac disease when they ingest foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat. People with celiac disease have a genetic predisposition to gluten intolerance, but prior epidemiological data provided hints that environmental factors, including viral infections, are also associated with initiation of the disorder.

Reovirus infection triggers inflammatory responses to dietary antigens and development of celiac disease (DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5298) (DX)

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takyon writes:

There are some new details about Microsoft's mid-cycle refresh of the Xbox One gaming console. Sony's comparable console is the PlayStation 4 Pro.

The new console seems to be using eight of the same AMD Jaguar cores as the original Xbox One, but the clock speed has been increased by about 31%, from 1.75 GHz to 2.3 GHz. Microsoft has passed on the chance to use AMD's new Zen cores, which were only recently released for desktop users.

The big gains are in the new GPU, which may be AMD Polaris or Vega-based. Peak shader throughput increases from 1.23 teraflops to over 6 teraflops, allowing for 4K (and VR?) gaming. Scorpio will have 40 "compute units" (AMD terminology), compared to the 16 of its predecessor. The GPU seems to be more powerful than an AMD RX 480. In comparison, the PS4 Pro's GPU performance is rated at 4.2 teraflops.

Scorpio will include 12 GB of GDDR5 memory, 8 GB of which will be usable by games. The Xbox One came with 8 GB of DDR3 memory, with only 5 GB usable by games. System memory bandwidth has been more than quadrupled to 326 GB/s from 68.3 GB/s, and the memory bus width has increased to 384-bit from 256-bit. The small amount of embedded memory found in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One has been cut in this new design, due to the massive increase in overall memory bandwidth.

One odd detail: both the Xbox One S (for "slim") and Project Scorpio will come with 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray optical drives, while Sony, the Blu-ray champion, did not include support for the format in the PS4 Pro. UHD Blu-ray defines optical discs with capacities of 50, 66, and 100 GB. For storage, Scorpio will come with a 1 TB hard drive (at least initially).

Will the 8-core design (with at least 7 usable by games, and likely still one thread per core) result in more multi-threading and utilization of more cores in PC games? Both the Xbox One and PS4 were released in November 2013 with 8-core x86 CPUs.

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takyon writes:

Samsung has two upcoming ultra-wide displays on its roadmap:

For readers on the leading-edge of monitor configurations, ultra-wide displays in the 21:9 aspect ratio have been on the radar for about two years. These are monitors that have a 2560x1080 display, stretching the horizontal dimension of a standard 1920x1080 Full-HD monitor and make it easier to display modern cinema widescreen format content with less black bars. They are also claimed to assist with peripheral vision when gaming beyond a standard 1920x1080 display, or when curved, help with immersive content.

So chalk up some surprise when we hear that Samsung has an even wider format panel in the works. 3840x1080 represents a 32:9 aspect ratio, and the report states that this will be a VA panel with 1800R curvature and a 3-side frameless design. Putting that many pixels in a large display gives a relatively low 81.41 PPI. This panel will be part of Samsung's 'Grand Circle' format, and by supporting up to 144 Hz it is expected that variants of this panel will be included with FreeSync/GSYNC technologies. One figure to note would be the contrast ratio – 5000:1 (static), which TFTCentral states is higher than current Samsung VA panels.

The 3840×1080 display is 49 inches. Samsung is also planning to launch a 44-inch 3840×1200 display.

Is this aspect ratio a good idea or a step backwards? It is like two 1920×1080 displays without the bezels in the middle. What about the "1800R curvature"?

[1800R curvature] means that the circle that defines the curvature of the panel has a radius of 1800 mm (70.866 inches), which is much tighter than other panels on the market (2700R or 3000R typical).

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/04/04/the-first-deuterated-drug-arrives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrabenazine

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n1 writes:

Independent Media (South Africa) reports:

The Internet ban on Cameroon's English-speaking population is cause for great concern in the language dispute, writes Azad Essa.

Millions of Cameroonians have been without the internet for 75 days after the government launched a ban on the service in English-speaking areas. The blackout, which is deliberately targeting the country's minority Anglophone population, started after lawyers began protesting against the overt use of French in English-speaking courts.

The protests spread rapidly across the country with English-speaking regions rallying against what they saw as the latest attempt by the government to "erase" their culture and heritage.

Following reports of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, President Trump authorized the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles against a base in Syria. The Russian government was notified prior to the launch as they have resources in the area that was attacked.

According to NBC News:

The United States launched dozens of cruise missiles Thursday night at a Syrian airfield in response to what it believes was Syria's use of banned chemical weapons that killed at least 100 people, U.S. military officials told NBC News.

Two U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired 59 Tomahawk missiles intended for a single target — Ash Sha'irat in Homs province in western Syria, the officials said. That's the airfield from which the United States believes the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fired the banned weapons.

There was no immediate word on casualties. U.S. officials told NBC News that people were not targeted and that aircraft and infrastructure at the site were hit, including the runway and gas fuel pumps.

Also at Al Jazeera:

The United States has launched 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Syrian government targets in retaliation for what the Trump administration charges was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack that killed scores of civilians, a US official says.

The targets hit from US ships in the Mediterranean Sea included the air base in the central city of Homs from which the Syrian aircraft staged Tuesday's chemical weapons attack, the US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[...] He [Trump] called on "civilised nations" to join US in "seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria".

Syrian state TV said "American aggression targets Syrian military targets with a number of missiles".

The poison gas attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province on Tuesday killed at least 86 people, including 27 children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Turkey said samples from victims of Tuesday's attack indicate they were exposed to sarin, a highly toxic nerve agent.

hubie writes:

In the Cordillera Septentrional mountain range of the Dominican Republic a sample of ancient amber was found to contain a perfectly preserved tick. The gut of the tick appears to contain the only known example of ancient mammalian red blood cells. The amber is believed to be from between 15 and 45 million years ago. Based upon several puncture holes in the tick, it appears that the tick was plucked off its host while it was feeding, and given the fauna believed to be in the area at the time, it is assumed that a primate was the host.

Examination of the gorgeously preserved specimen also reveals the presence of myriad parasites in the tick's gut. In modern times, similar parasites, such as Babesia microti, infect the blood cells of mammals ranging from humans to cattle.

"The fossilized blood cells, infected with these parasites, are simply amazing in their detail. This discovery provides the only known fossils of Babesia-type pathogens," Poinar said.

Full journal article is available: Fossilized Mammalian Erythrocytes Associated With a Tick Reveal Ancient Piroplasms.

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DBCubix writes:

Experts are suggesting the in-flight failure and crash of the missile launched by North Korea on Wednesday could have been the result of a "left-of-launch" attack by the United States. While these failures may have been the result of poor engineering on the part of the North Koreans, they may also have been deliberately brought down by the US.

[...] In 2014, then-President Barack Obama authorized additional research into "left-of-launch" efforts to neutralize North Korean missiles, as opposed to the more traditional deployment of anti-missile systems to destroy inbound weapons. "Left-of-launch" strategies involve electromagnetic propagation or cyber attacks against missiles immediately after launch, including through infected electronics aboard the weapon that confuse its command and control or targeting systems.

[...] Part of the beauty of a "left-of-launch" attack, said Lance Gatling, a defence analyst and president of Tokyo-based Nexial Research Inc, is that the North Koreans cannot be sure that any imported electronics have not been deliberately permitted to evade sanctions because they are infected with malware. Similarly, when a launch fails they are also unable to determine what brought the missile down.

Previously: North Korean Missiles and What the US is Doing About It

Original Submission