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An Anonymous Coward writes:

More than 42 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 59 are infected with genital human papillomavirus [HPV], according to the first survey to look at the prevalence of the virus in the adult population.

The report [pdf], published on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics, found that certain high-risk strains of the virus infected 25.1 percent of men and 20.4 percent of women. These strains account for approximately 31,000 cases of cancer each year, other studies have shown.

Two vaccines are effective in preventing sexually transmitted HPV infection, and researchers said the new data lend urgency to the drive to have adolescents vaccinated.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/health/hpv-virus-survey-united-states.html

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Register reviews Lenovo's new laptop:

Lenovo's X1 Carbon ThinkPad is the company's flagship business laptop and has just been refreshed for 2017. But the new model may frustrate.

The Reg got its claws on the new model for a couple of weeks, equipped with a core i5-7200 at 2.5GHz, 8GB of RAM, Windows 10 Pro build 1607 and a 256GB solid state disk that said it has 237GB capacity. Your correspondent schlepped it around to conferences and to the office for much of the last two weeks and found a lot to like.

The battery stood out, as I found it possible to get through a day's intermittent work without needing a recharge. Lenovo claims the X1 can run for 15-and-a-half hours on battery alone, and for once that may not be just an ambitious claim.

On one day at a conference I used the X1 for several periods of 30-45 minutes taking notes during conference sessions, a dash to somewhere quiet to work, more note-taking and writing, time in the Reg content management system, and a spot of recreational surfing. Through that day the PC sometimes claimed it had 15 hours of juice. After after five-and-a-half hours of use through the day, all of it on WiFi, I ended the day with the X1 claiming it could go another four hours.

The workload matters, though: later, I used it to stream a 90-minute movie and found that feat drained the battery by nearly 30 per cent, suggesting my day at the conference may have been kind to the battery. Recharging was pleasingly rapid, even when I found an old USB battery pack in my bag and plugged it in to the USB-C port.

The reviewer also had some complaints, such as misinterpreting a single-finger slide as a right-click, even after said feature was turned off. Also, fit-and-finish was suspect with a large gap between the machine's base and sides. Further, the machine seized up on occasion under heavy load for up to 30 seconds. Resume from sleep was similarly slow, as well.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

What is “lunch shaming?” It happens when a child can’t pay a school lunch bill.

In Alabama, a child short on funds was stamped on the arm with “I Need Lunch Money.” In some schools, children are forced to clean cafeteria tables in front of their peers to pay the debt. Other schools require cafeteria workers to take a child’s hot food and throw it in the trash if he doesn’t have the money to pay for it.

In what its supporters say is the first such legislation in the country, New Mexico has outlawed shaming children whose parents are behind on school lunch payments.

Source: The New York Times

Original Submission

McGruber writes:

Delta Airlines began cancelling thousands of its flights on Wednesday, April 5, 2017, blaming the resulting delays on thunderstorms at its Atlanta hub (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/delta-flights-canceled.html). The airline still has not recovered as of Saturday, April 8 — already this morning, Delta has cancelled another 275 flights.

The resulting chaos at airports has been extensively documented in a flyertalk thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta-air-lines-skymiles/1834788-april-5-2017-delta-cancels-300-flights-due-thunderstorm.html). The thread contains pictures of people sleeping on airport floors, reports of 20-40 hour call wait times, and claims that Delta's crew-scheduling computers have crashed. In a thread at Airline Pilot Forums (http://www.11alive.com/news/local/long-lines-reported-saturday-morning-at-atlanta-airport/429759800), Delta employees are posting about waiting for work and not being called in.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists at the University of Malaya have designed a roof that can help address an environmental conflict: increasing demands for energy to increase living comfort versus a need to scale back fossil fuel use to address climate change. The conflict has driven interest in more efficient renewable energy sources, especially in emerging economies.

The roof's most visible feature is a V-shaped structure set atop a peaked roof, which guides wind into a series of turbines situated below it to generate energy as they turn. The structure also increases airflow within the building by means of vents built into the peaked roof to enhance natural ventilation. In addition, a rainwater harvester is connected to an automated cooling and cleaning system that washes solar cells embedded in the sloped roof to keep them efficient. Transparent skylights brighten the main rooms inside the building during the daytime, reducing the need for artificial lighting.

The team says that adding the roof to an existing building creates minimal visual impact and can be used in urban and rural settings.

In Malaysia, the average person uses about 4,200 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per year. The researchers say their roof could support about six people by generating more than 21,200 kWh of energy a year while saving another 1,840 kWh because of its skylights. Also, the venting system could move about 217 million cubic metres of air and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 17,768 kilos, while the rainwater harvester could collect close to 525 cubic metres of water.

Do they have homeowner's associations in Malaysia?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Dominic and James are a few key figures in a community of eccentric open source hackers gathering in a social network independent from mainstream internet. The unique properties of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) make it possible for digital information to spread easily even in the absence of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the internet's backbone. What makes that possible is a decentralized protocol based on the mechanics of word of mouth.

Scuttlebutt is decentralized in a similar way that Bitcoin or BitTorrent are. Unlike centralized systems like PayPal or Dropbox, there is no single website or server to connect when using decentralized services. Which in turn means there is no single company with control over the network.

However, Scuttlebutt differs from Bitcoin and BitTorrent because there are no "singleton components" in the network. When accessing the BitTorrent network, for instance, you need to connect to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT, think of it as a huge round table where anyone can come and take a seat). However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881. These are very lightweight servers which simply introduce you to the DHT. They still depend on the existence of ISPs and the internet backbone. Also, those systems are concerned about public information. For instance, with Bitcoin, each peer stores the entire log of all transactions ever sent by anyone.
...
In Scuttlebutt, the "mesh" suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or "log") of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds. It is unstoppable and spreads fast. Once the word is out (just an arbitrary example) that Apple is releasing a new iPhone model, there is no way to restrict that information from spreading. A person may tell that piece of information to any of their friends, and those friends may in turn spread that information onwards.

With typical gossip, however, information deteriorates as it spreads and eventually becomes harmful rumor. Scuttlebutt on the other hand makes word of mouth secure with cryptography. Each Scuttlebutt account is comprised of simply two things: an append-only diary and private/public asymmetric crypto keys. An account's identity is its public key. There are no unique usernames, because you can't guarantee two people in separate places from choosing the same username, much like you cannot forbid the name "John Smith" to be given to a newborn in Canada if it is already taken by another person in Australia.

Original Submission

lcklspckl writes:

Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year's worth of access to the company's cloud storage service, Evidence.com.

In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product.

Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally—the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016.

Axon expects "80 percent to become customers," but only needs a 20-30% conversion to make a profit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/taser-announces-free-body-cameras-cloud-storage-to-all-us-cops-for-a-year/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Maybe the stampede didn't happen because kangaroos and koalas don't stampede?

National Wind Farm Commissioner, Andrew Dyer, has just released his much anticipated first annual report.

In its first year of operation until the end of 2016, the National Wind Farm Commissioner says his office received:

• 46 complaints relating to nine operating wind farms (there were 76 operational wind farms in Australian[sic] in 2015)
• 42 complaints relating to 19 proposed wind farms
• two complaints that did not specify a wind farm.

The commissioner's office closed 67 or these 90 complaints, with the remaining 23 complaints still in process.

Of the 67 now-closed complaints, the office closed 31 because the complainant did not progress their complaint. This suggests these complaints were minor.

The office closed the file on another 32 after it sent complainants more information about their complaints.

This leaves only four, which the report describes two as being settled after negotiations between the parties, and two given the ambiguous category of "other".

The article also mentions that half of the 25,000 complaints about noise at Heathrow airport were submitted by 10 people.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Experimental physicists in the research group led by Professor Uwe Hartmann at Saarland University have developed a thin nanomaterial with superconducting properties. Below about -200 °C these materials conduct electricity without loss, levitate magnets and can screen magnetic fields. The particularly interesting aspect of this work is that the research team has succeeded in creating superconducting nanowires that can be woven into an ultra-thin film that is as flexible as cling film. As a result, novel coatings for applications ranging from aerospace to medical technology are becoming possible.

[...] Many of the common superconducting materials available today are rigid, brittle and dense, which makes them heavy.

[...] The low weight of the film is particularly advantageous. 'With a density of only 0.05 grams per cubic centimetre, the material is very light, weighing about a hundred times less than a conventional superconductor. This makes the material very promising for all those applications where weight is an issue, such as in space technology. There are also potential applications in medical technology,' explains Hartmann. The material could be used as a novel coating to provide low-temperature screening from electromagnetic fields, or it could be used in flexible cables or to facilitate friction-free motion.

In order to be able to weave this new material, the experimental physicists made use of a technique known as electrospinning, which is usually used in the manufacture of polymeric fibres. 'We force a liquid material through a very fine nozzle known as a spinneret to which a high electrical voltage has been applied. This produces nanowire filaments that are a thousand times thinner than the diameter of a human hair, typically about 300 nanometres or less. We then heat the mesh of fibres so that superconductors of the right composition are created. The superconducting material itself is typically an yttrium-barium-copper-oxide or similar compound,' explains Dr. Michael Koblischka, one of the research scientists in Hartmann's group.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.keele.ac.uk/pressreleases/2017/atmospheredetectedaroundanearth-likeplanet.html

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around the super-Earth planet GJ 1132b. This marks the first detection of an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet other than Earth itself, and thus is a significant step on the path towards the detection of life outside our Solar System. The team that made the discovery, led by Keele University's Dr John Southworth, used the 2.2 m ESO/MPG telescope in Chile to take images of the planet's host star GJ 1132. They were able to measure the slight decrease in brightness as the planet and its atmosphere absorbed some of the starlight while transiting (passing in front of) the host star.

[...] The discovery of this atmosphere is encouraging. Very low-mass stars are extremely common (much more so that[sic] Sun-like stars), and are known to host lots of small planets. But they also show a lot of magnetic activity, causing high levels of X-rays and ultraviolet light to be produced which might completely evaporate the planets' atmospheres. However, the properties of GJ 1132b show that an atmosphere can endure this for billion of years without being destroyed. Given the huge number of very low-mass stars and planets, this could mean that the conditions suitable for life are common in the Universe.

How much would this affect computing the Drake equation?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Just a few months since its first motorcycle, the Redshift, became available to the US market, Alta Motors is set to roll out a new concept model. Inspired by flat track machines, the Street Tracker is conceived as a road-legal battery-powered motorcycle built around the Redshift platform.

Californian startup Alta Motors spent six years setting up a production facility, organizing a dealer network, and developing its first model from the ground up ahead of its market launch in 2016. The Redshift is a lightweight electric off-road motorcycle available in a motocross (MX) and a street-legal supermoto (SM) version.

The American company builds the motorcycle's engine, frame and battery cases in-house, as well as all the electronic gear tasked with controlling the motor's 40 hp (29.8 kW) power and 122 lb-ft (165 Nm) torque output. These are complemented by equipment outsourced from industry leading brands, like WP suspensions and Brembo brakes.

Is there a market for silent motorcycles?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Étienne Klein may lose a science/philosophy post months after allegations of plagiarism surfaced:

Étienne Klein, a celebrated French physicist and popularizer of science, seems set to lose his post as president of the Institute for Advanced Studies for Science and Technology (IHEST) in Paris after allegations that he plagiarized more than a dozen scientists, philosophers, and writers in books and articles. A source at France's science and education ministry yesterday confirmed to ScienceInsider that a decree ending Klein's tenure has been signed by Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and State Secretary Thierry Mandon and is now awaiting the signature of French President François Hollande.

But Klein says he refuses to leave. In an open letter published last week, he wrote that an investigative panel that looked into the matter at Mandon's request has found no evidence of misconduct and that he sees no reason to step down. "My scientific integrity is absolute," Klein wrote to ScienceInsider in an email. The report has not been made public.

Klein leads a small group studying science itself at the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) near Paris, but rarely publishes in the scientific literature; his fame stems from books and articles in popular magazines, mostly about physics. He also hosts a weekly radio show about science. Hollande appointed Klein president of IHEST—which seeks to build trust in science and to reflect on its social, economic, and political aspects—in September 2016.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/health/fda-genetic-tests-23andme.html

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration said it would allow a company to sell genetic tests for disease risk directly to consumers, providing people with information about the likelihood that they could develop various conditions, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The move on Thursday is a turnaround for the agency, which had imposed a moratorium in 2013 on disease tests sold by the company, 23andMe, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. The decision is expected to open the floodgates for more direct-to-consumer tests for disease risks, drawing a road map for other companies to do the same thing.

If you could take such a test, would you? Or would you rather just take things as they come?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

This week Google released a report detailing the design and performance characteristics of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), its custom ASIC for the inference phase of neural networks (NN). Google has been using the machine learning accelerator in its datacenters since 2015, but hasn't said much about the hardware until now.

In a blog post published yesterday (April 5, 2017), Norm Jouppi, distinguished hardware engineer at Google, observes, "The need for TPUs really emerged about six years ago, when we started using computationally expensive deep learning models in more and more places throughout our products. The computational expense of using these models had us worried. If we considered a scenario where people use Google voice search for just three minutes a day and we ran deep neural nets for our speech recognition system on the processing units we were using, we would have had to double the number of Google data centers!"

The paper, "In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit​," (the joint effort of more than 70 authors) describes the TPU thusly:

"The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs (caches, out-of-order execution, multithreading, multiprocessing, prefetching, ...) that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/giant-viruses-found-austrian-sewage-fuel-debate-over-potential-fourth-domain-life

Tourists visiting the town of Klosterneuburg in eastern Austria often head for the 12th century monastery or the nearby memorial to author Franz Kafka. Virologists and evolutionary biologists, however, may one day pay homage to the town's sewage treatment plant, which has yielded a genome that appears to be from the most cell-like viruses yet [DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4657] [DX]. These oddities challenge the controversial hypothesis that so-called giant viruses are descendants of a vanished group of cellular organisms—a fourth domain of life. Instead, the study argues, these outsized viruses have more pedestrian origins.

"I found [the work] very convincing," says environmental virologist Matthias Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. "Based on the data available now, I would not put my money on the fourth domain hypothesis."