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takyon writes:

The Cassini spacecraft has taken the closest-ever images of Saturn's 40.8 × 35.4 × 18.8 km moon Atlas. The images were taken on April 12th from a closest approach of about 11,000 km.

Next up is a final flyby of Titan on April 22nd, and the Cassini Grand Finale from April 26th to September 15th.

Previously: Cassini Spacecraft to Begin Diving Between Saturn and its Rings This Month

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butthurt writes:

Betanews reports on an announcement from Microsoft regarding its Windows 10 operating system:

additional coverage:
Computerworld

related story:
Microsoft Kills Windows Vista On April 11: No Security Patches, No Hot Fixes, No Support, Nada

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers in the Pacific Northwest have developed a new, automated technology to analyze the potential for rockfalls from cliffs onto roads and areas below, which should speed and improve this type of risk evaluation, help protect public safety and ultimately save money and lives.

Called a "rockfall activity index," the system is based on the powerful abilities of light detection and ranging, or LIDAR technology. It should expedite and add precision to what's now a somewhat subjective, time-consuming process to determine just how dangerous a cliff is to the people, vehicles, roads or structures below it.

This is a multi-million dollar global problem, experts say, of significant concern to transportation planners.

It's a particular concern in the Pacific Northwest with its many mountain ranges, heavy precipitation, erosion of steep cliffs and unstable slopes, and thousands of roads that thread their way through that terrain. The evaluation system now most widely used around the world, in fact, was developed by the Oregon Department of Transportation more than 25 years ago.

Makes more sense than signs that read, "Watch for Falling Rock," even if it's less lyrical.

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takyon writes:

The USDA will stop using sodium cyanide "bombs" in Idaho (at least temporarily) following an incident that put a 14-year-old in the hospital and killed his dog:

About a month after an anti-predator device spit sodium cyanide in the face of an unsuspecting boy and killed his dog, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it is ending its use of the M-44 mechanisms in Idaho indefinitely.

"We take seriously the incident in Idaho," Jason Suckow, western regional director of the USDA's Wildlife Services agency, told conservation groups in a letter Monday. "We immediately responded by removing all M-44s from the area, initiating an inquiry into the incident, and launching a review of current [Wildlife Services] operating procedures."

Suckow noted the agency has "removed all M-44s currently deployed on all land ownerships in Idaho" and has refrained from planting new ones.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For Mazhar Adli, the little glowing dots dancing about on the computer screen are nothing less than the fulfillment of a dream. Those fluorescent dots, moving in real time, are set to illuminate our understanding of the human genome, cancer and other genetic diseases in a way never before possible.

Adli, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, has developed a way to track genes inside living cells. He can set them aglow and watch them move in three dimensions, allowing him to map their positions much like star charts record the shifting heavens above. And just as the moon influences the tides, the position of genes influences the effects they have; thus, 3D maps of gene locations could lead scientists to a vastly more sophisticated appreciation of how our genes work and interact—and how they affect our health.

"This has been a dream for a long time," Adli said. "We are able to image basically any region in the genome that we want, in real time, in living cells. It works beautifully. ... With the traditional method, which is the gold standard, basically you will never be able to get this kind of data, because you have to kill the cells to get the imaging. But here we are doing it in live cells and in real time."

Thus was a new drinking game born, to watch genes migrate when you do a shot.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Hydrogen fuel cell cars could one day challenge electric cars in the race for pollution-free roads—but only if more stations are built to fuel them.

Honda, Toyota and Hyundai have leased a few hundred fuel cell vehicles over the past three years, and expect to lease well over 1,000 this year. But for now, those leases are limited to California, which is home to most of the 34 public hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S.

Undaunted, automakers are investing heavily in the technology. General Motors recently supplied the U.S. Army with a fuel cell pickup, and GM and Honda are collaborating on a fuel cell system due out by 2020. Hyundai will introduce a longer-range fuel cell SUV next year.

"We've clearly left the science project stage and the technology is viable," said Charles Freese, who heads GM's fuel cell business.

Like pure electric cars, fuel cell cars run quietly and emission-free. But they have some big advantages. Fuel cell cars can be refueled as quickly as gasoline-powered cars. By contrast, it takes nine hours to fully recharge an all-electric Chevrolet Bolt using a 240-volt home charger. Fuel cells cars can also travel further between fill-ups.

Would you rather trade in your gas-guzzler for a hydrogen fuel cell car, or an electric car?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An Uber engineer accused of data theft against Google must privately explain the circumstances behind invoking his Fifth Amendment right to the judge in the case:

During a Wednesday court hearing, a federal judge said that if an Uber engineer accused of a massive data theft from his former employer is going to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to protect against self-incrimination and not hand over materials demanded as part of a recent subpoena and upcoming deposition, then he must at least explain himself privately to the judge.

"What I've told you is that you can submit the privilege log to me, in camera, without giving it to anyone else and I can evaluate it, which aspects, if any would be incriminating," US District Judge William Alsup said, addressing a lawyer representing the engineer, Anthony Levandowski, during the hearing. "I'm not ruling against the ultimate assertion of the privilege, but you've got to do more than just say in court, Fifth Amendment—you have to do a privilege log and go through the process."

The case pits Waymo against Uber, which in turn is in a tense situation with one of its own employees, Levandowski, the head of its self-driving division. Levandowski is now set to be deposed by Waymo lawyers this Friday at their San Francisco offices. He must also respond to a subpoena by handing over materials that he is accused of stealing— thousands of secret documents from his time with Waymo parent company, Google. On Wednesday, Judge Alsup quashed four of the six distinct items requested in the subpoena, but allowed first the most substantive, the allegedly "misappropriated materials," to stand. (The third item, "All communications between You and Uber between January 2015 and August 2016," will also remain.)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

A bill recently introduced in Texas seeks to obliterate the Federal Reserve's much-maligned monopoly on currency by establishing gold and silver as legal tender — but the groundbreaking legislation, if passed, would also prohibit those precious metals from being seized by State authorities.

[...] Senator Bob Hall introduced the bill last month, which, the Tenth Amendment Center explains, "declares specifically that certain gold and silver coins are legal tender, and prohibits any tax, charge, assessment, fee, or penalty on any exchange of Federal Reserve notes (dollars) for gold or silver. The bill authorizes the payment of taxes and fees in gold & silver in certain circumstances. It would also prohibit the seizure of gold or silver by state authorities."

Would this matter in a nation where money is mostly plastic nowadays anyway?

Source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/texas-bill-gold-silver-money-federal-reserve/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Cmn32480

Oscar Wilde once said that life imitates art, and science and engineering is often no exception to this. Science fiction certainly provides science types with plenty of inspiration for inventions, including holograms, teleportation, and even sonic screwdrivers.

Star Trek's all-purpose medical device, the Tricorder, has also inspired a fair few people to recreate its near-magical ability to instantly diagnose a patient. As it happens, the non-profit X-Prize Foundation were so keen to get one invented that they started a global competition to see if any mavericks would succeed.

Rather remarkably, one team has emerged victorious in their endeavor. A family-led team from Pennsylvania, appropriately named Final Frontier Medical Devices, have bagged themselves a sum of $2.5 million, with a second-place prize of $1 million going to the Taiwan-based Dynamical Biomarkers Group.

The objective of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition was to create a lightweight, non-invasive, handheld device that can identify 13 health conditions (12 diseases, and the very absence of disease) in 90 minutes to 24 hours with no additional help or counsel from medical professionals. Five vital health metrics, like heartbeat and respiratory function, were also required to be constantly monitored.

Source: IFLScience!

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new CRISPR-related tool cuts RNA in a way that can be used to diagnose the presence of viruses or diseases:

Far to the right side of the decimal point—beyond milli, micro, nano, pico, and femto—lives the atto, the metric prefix representing 10^-18. Slap it in front of a unit of concentration, such as molar, and it means that something exists in an extraordinarily small amount—think one part per quintillion. That's the realm of SHERLOCK, a new diagnostic system that can detect attomolar levels of viruses in a sample and also distinguish Zika from its close relative, dengue. This exquisitely sensitive and specific tool promises to help detect diseases that other diagnostics miss, and it's simple and cheap to use. Sexier still, it exploits a variation of CRISPR, the genome-editing method that has become the rage in biology. "It's very nice work and very well done," says Erik Sontheimer, an RNA specialist who did early CRISPR work and is at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Harvard University's George Church, who co-founded a CRISPR therapeutics company with one of SHERLOCK's inventors but is not involved with this work, sums up his reaction in one word: "Wow."

Scientists recognized as early as 2010 that they might be able to transform CRISPR into a virus detection device [open, DOI: 10.1128/AEM.01109-10] [DX]. But earlier efforts at making a viral detector became overshadowed by CRISPR's wild success at editing genomes. [...] SHERLOCK differs from the CRISPR-Cas9 system in fundamental ways. It uses an RNA guide that gloms onto RNA, not DNA, and an enzyme called Cas13a cuts the genetic material. Once Cas13a snips the target, it starts indiscriminately cutting any RNA it encounters. A team lead by bioengineer James Collins and CRISPR genome-editing pioneer Feng Zhang, both from the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has now shown that these "collateral" cuts can form the basis for the SHERLOCK diagnostic. "Nature has a lot of very amazing tools," Zhang says. The researchers demonstrate that SHERLOCK can detect viral and bacterial infections, cancer mutations found at low frequencies, and subtle DNA sequence variations known as single nucleotide polymorphisms that are linked to other diseases. (SHERLOCK, a somewhat strained acronym coined by the team, stands for specific high sensitivity enzymatic reporter unlocking.)

Nucleic acid detection with CRISPR-Cas13a/C2c2 (DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9321) (DX)

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takyon writes:

A meta-analysis of studies has found that spinal manipulation can have a modest effect on pain and mobility:

One of the most common reasons people go to the doctor is lower back pain, and one of the most common reasons doctors prescribe powerful, addictive narcotics is lower back pain. Now, new research published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association offers the latest evidence that spinal manipulation can offer a modestly effective alternative.

Researchers analyzed 26 studies involving more than 1,700 patients with lower back pain. The analysis found spinal manipulation can reduce lower back pain as measured by patients on a pain scale, like this one from zero to 10. Spinal manipulation, which is typically done by chiropractors and physical therapists, involves applying pressure and moving joints in the spine.

Patients undergoing spinal manipulation experienced a decline of 1 point in their pain rating, says Dr. Paul Shekelle, an internist with the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Rand Corp. who headed the study. "So if it had been a 7 it would be a 6, or if it had been a 5 it would be a 4," Shekelle says. That's about the same amount of pain relief as from NSAIDs, over-the-counter nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication, such as ibuprofen.

The study also found spinal manipulation modestly improved function. On average, patients reported greater ease and comfort engaging in two day-to-day activities, such as finding they could walk more quickly, were having less difficulty turning over in bed or were sleeping more soundly.

Have you used "alternative" methods for back pain relief? Can I relieve two pain points by combining spinal manipulation with an NSAID? Is this just a way for the VA to reduce costs, or is it aimed at the war on opiates?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Experiments conducted high in the skies over New Mexico suggest that balloon-borne sensors could be useful in detecting the infrasound signals generated by small, extraterrestrial debris entering Earth's atmosphere, according to a report at the 2017 Seismological Society of America's (SSA) Annual Meeting.

Infrasound, sometimes called low-frequency sound, is sound waves that occur at frequencies lower than the limit of human hearing. Infrasound signals can remain strong as they travel over large distances, making them useful for pinpointing the location and size of events such as nuclear explosions, meteorite strikes, volcanic eruptions and sometimes earthquake ruptures.

Ground sensors can detect these signals, but very small infrasound signals can be swamped out by wind and other ambient noises gathered by these devices. So researchers including Eliot Young of the Southwest Research Institute and Daniel Bowman of Sandia National Laboratories are looking for quieter places to position these sensors— in this case tethering them to high-altitude balloons.

"Balloons are good for this because they float in the ambient wind field, which eliminates the wind noise that you would get with a ground sensor," explains Young. "The temperature of Earth's atmosphere is also such that it creates an infrasound waveguide—a place in the stratosphere where infrasound energy is concentrated and doesn't dissipate in the normal way."

The article is clearly a cover story for the real goal of the balloons, to eavesdrop on the elephants who are plotting to rise up.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have determined that comb jellies came before sponges by analyzing the appearance and placement of genes throughout the branches of life:

For the last decade, zoologists have been battling over the question, "What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree?" Was it the sponges, as they had long thought, or was it a distinctly different set of creatures, the delicate marine predators called comb jellies? The answer to this question could have a major impact on scientists' thinking about how the nervous system, digestive tract, and other basic organs in modern animals evolved.

Now, a team of evolutionary biologists from Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a new approach designed specifically to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues like this. The new approach comes down squarely on the side of comb jellies.

The method and its application to this and 17 other controversial phylogenetic relationships were published online April 10 by the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The article is titled "Resolution of contentious relationships in phylogenomic studies can be driven by one or a handful of genes."

Contentious relationships in phylogenomic studies can be driven by a handful of genes (DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0126) (DX)

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

The Trump administration's anti-science bent has reached the Department of Justice (DOJ), with Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying [April 10] that the department is ending the National Commission on Forensic Science.

The 30-member panel was described by ThinkProgress as "a group of scientists, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other experts tasked by the Obama administration in 2013 with raising standards for the use of forensic evidence in criminal proceedings".

In its place, a senior forensic advisor will be appointed "to interface with forensic science stakeholders and advise department leadership", Sessions' statement said.

[...] "The reliance of law enforcement on questionable science and the overstatement of the reliability of that science has been a leading cause of the wrongful conviction of innocent people", said National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) president Barry Pollack on Monday. "The reason the National Commission on Forensic Science has been so important is that it includes leading independent scientists, allowing an unbiased expert evaluation of which techniques are scientifically valid and which are not. NACDL is terribly disappointed that even while acknowledging the crucial role played by the National Commission on Forensic Science, the Attorney General has chosen to disband it."

Additional Coverage:

• Washington Post
• New York Times
• Wired
• Daily News

Previous: Forensic Hair Matches: More Junk Science from the FBI

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The film starts out with a game developer named Victor promoting a new augmented reality game. The game allows players to "create, customize and grow your very own creature." Victor says he believes the future of home entertainment has to be interactive; we don't just want to sit around staring at a screen—we want to be a part of our own entertainment.

Victor explains that the technology works by superimposing computer-generated imagery over real-world objects by projecting a digital light field directly into your eye. He insists the game isn't dangerous to players' vision, but on the contrary, it gives them a sort of "super vision."

After meeting Walter, Victor's virtual pet, we also meet his daughter, Anna, and her virtual pet.

Victor says Strange Beasts gives players a "friend for life." But as we watch him sitting alone in his apartment swiping in mid-air at images only he can see, we start to feel uneasy.

[...] It's debatable and somewhat subjective whether these artificial interactions have made our quality of life better or worse. Studies have shown that people feel more isolated than they used to. Does technology help us connect with others in new and improved ways, or does it give us an excuse not to connect authentically?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission