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coolgopher writes:

Stratolaunch, the giant aircraft designed to lift rockets into the stratosphere for drop-and-launch has been rolled out for the first time.

The initial construction on the massive plane Paul Allen has been quietly building in the California desert is complete, and the vehicle, which would be the world's largest plane with a wingspan wider than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, was wheeled out of its hangar for the first time on Wednesday.

[...] But why is Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks, building such a massive plane? It's not to carry passengers, but rather rockets. The bigger the plane, the larger the rockets, or the greater the number.

Allen's Stratolaunch company has partnered with Orbital ATK to "air launch" the company's Pegasus XL, a rocket capable of delivering small satellites, weighing as much as 1000 pounds, to orbit. The rockets would be tethered to the belly of the giant plane, which would fly them aloft, and once at an altitude of 35,000 feet or so, the rockets would drop and "air launch" to space.

"With airport-style operations and quick turn-around capabilities," the company said it believes "air launch" is a cheaper and more efficient way to get satellites into space than rockets that launch vertically and can be extraordinarily expensive.

See also:
The Register
Ars Technica (pictures)

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

DragonflEye consists of a living, slightly modified dragonfly that carries a small backpack of electronics. The backpack interfaces directly with the dragonfly's nervous system to control it, and uses tiny solar panels to harvest enough energy to power itself without the need for batteries. Draper showed us a nifty looking mock-up of what the system might look like a few months ago, but today, they've posted the first video of DragonflEye taking to the air.

The unique thing about DragonflEye (relative to other cyborg insects) is that it doesn't rely on spoofing the insect's sensors or controlling its muscles, but instead uses optical electrodes to inject steering commands directly into the insect's nervous system, which has been genetically tweaked to accept them. This means that the dragonfly can be controlled to fly where you want, without sacrificing the built-in flight skills that make insects the envy of all other robotic micro air vehicles.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/drapers-genetically-modified-cyborg-dragonfleye-takes-flight

[Video]: https://vimeo.com/219709402

[Additional Info and Interview]: For lots more on DragonflEye

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When the lights go out and the entire world is thrust into the technological nether, we'll need board games like Turing Tumble. Created programmer Paul Boswell – he's well known for programming complex games for Texas Instruments calculators – and maker Alyssa Boswell, the Turing Tumble lets you use small parts to create logic flows in order to solve puzzles.

Boswell created the game to teach everyone how to program. It rose out of frustration. In his work at the University of Minnesota he found himself stuck with scientists who couldn't manage programming or computational analysis.

[...] The game is simple. The set of marbles roll one at a time from the top of the board through a series of pins and "logic" pieces. When the marble hits a flipper at the bottom it releases another ball – creating a computing cycle.

"Players add logic to the game board by placing six different types of parts onto the board. The 'Bit' is a particularly important one. Each time a ball runs over it, it flips to point the opposite direction. Pointing to the left is like a '0', and pointing to the right is like a '1.' Gear bits are the most interesting part, though. Gear bits are just like bits, except that they can be connected to one another so that when one is flipped, it flips the connected gear bits, too. It's these parts that make the computer Turing-complete," said Boswell.

Seems reminiscent of the Digi-Comp II.

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takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/will-surgery-sap-your-brain-power

Many of us can recount a similar story about a friend, colleague, or loved one—usually elderly—whose mental condition deteriorated after a visit to an operating room. "The comment that 'So-and-so has never been the same after the operation' is pervasive," says anesthesiologist Roderic Eckenhoff of the University of Pennsylvania.

Often, surgical patients are beset by postoperative delirium—delusions, confusion, and hallucinations—but that usually fades quickly. Other people develop what has been dubbed postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD), suffering problems with memory, attention, and concentration that can last months or even a lifetime. POCD not only disrupts patients' lives, but may also augur worse to come. According to a 2008 study, people who have POCD 3 months after they leave the hospital are nearly twice as likely to die within a year as are surgical patients who report no mental setbacks. With the ballooning senior population needing more surgeries, "this is going to become an epidemic," says anesthesiologist Mervyn Maze of the University of California, San Francisco.

What causes POCD, what makes some patients susceptible, and how best to protect their faculties are unclear. And some scientists still question whether surgery is to blame. Two prominent anesthesiologists called the idea that operations cause persistent mental declines a fallacy.

Yet more researchers and doctors are awakening to surgery's risks for the brain. Last year, the American Society of Anesthesiologists launched a Brain Health Initiative to spur research into the factors that make people vulnerable and to pinpoint preventive measures. Scientists now have a prime suspect for the cause of POCD: inflammation of the brain. And clinical trials are testing interventions that include drugs, changes in operating room procedures, and mental training. "I believe we are on the verge of some diagnostic and therapeutic advances," says Joseph Mathew, a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Battery powered cars will soon be cheaper to buy than conventional gasoline ones, offering immediate savings to drivers, new research shows.

Automakers from Renault SA to Tesla Inc. have long touted the cheaper fuel and running costs of electric cars that helps to displace the higher upfront prices that drivers pay when they buy the zero-emission vehicles.

Now research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025. Batteries currently account for about half the cost of EVs, and their prices will fall by about 77% between 2016 and 2030, the London-based researcher said.

"On an upfront basis, these things will start to get cheaper and people will start to adopt them more as price parity gets closer," said Colin McKerracher, analyst at the London-based researcher. "After that it gets even more compelling."

The secret is in the battery.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The spin axis of Saturn's moon Enceladus may have reoriented due to a collision with another body:

Saturn's icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus may have tipped over in the distant past, according to recent research from NASA's Cassini mission. Researchers with the mission found evidence that the moon's spin axis -- the line through the north and south poles -- has reoriented, possibly due to a collision with a smaller body, such as an asteroid.

Examining the moon's features, the team showed that Enceladus appears to have tipped away from its original axis by about 55 degrees -- more than halfway toward rolling completely onto its side. "We found a chain of low areas, or basins, that trace a belt across the moon's surface that we believe are the fossil remnants of an earlier, previous equator and poles," said Radwan Tajeddine, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.

[...] Whether it was caused by an impact or some other process, Tajeddine and colleagues think the disruption and creation of the tiger-stripe terrain caused some of Enceladus' mass to be redistributed, making the moon's rotation unsteady and wobbly. The rotation would have eventually stabilized, likely taking more than a million years. By the time the rotation settled down, the north-south axis would have reoriented to pass through different points on the surface -- a mechanism researchers call "true polar wander."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

[...] an international team of researchers from the University of Tuebingen, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the University of Cambridge, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, looked at genetic differentiation and population continuity over a timespan of around one and a half millennia, and compared these results to modern populations. The team sampled 151 mummified individuals from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq, along the Nile River in Middle Egypt, from two anthropological collections hosted and curated at the University of Tuebingen and the Felix von Luschan Skull Collection at the Museum of Prehistory of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz.

In total, the authors recovered mitochondrial genomes from 90 individuals, and genome-wide datasets from three individuals. They were able to use the data gathered to test previous hypotheses drawn from archaeological and historical data, and from studies of modern DNA. "In particular, we were interested in looking at changes and continuities in the genetic makeup of the ancient inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq," said Alexander Peltzer, one of the lead authors of the study from the University of Tuebingen. The team wanted to determine if the investigated ancient populations were affected at the genetic level by foreign conquest and domination during the time period under study, and compared these populations to modern Egyptian comparative populations. "We wanted to test if the conquest of Alexander the Great and other foreign powers has left a genetic imprint on the ancient Egyptian population," explains Verena Schuenemann, group leader at the University of Tuebingen and one of the lead authors of this study.

[...] The study found that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations in the Levant, and were also closely related to Neolithic populations from the Anatolian Peninsula and Europe. "The genetics of the Abusir el-Meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300 year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule," says Wolfgang Haak, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. The data shows that modern Egyptians share approximately 8% more ancestry on the nuclear level with Sub-Saharan African populations than with ancient Egyptians. "This suggests that an increase in Sub-Saharan African gene flow into Egypt occurred within the last 2,000 years," explains Stephan Schiffels, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. Possible causal factors may have been improved mobility down the Nile River, increased long-distance trade between Sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt, and the trans-Saharan slave trade that began approximately 1,300 years ago.

Ancient Egyptians were not African per se, but their modern descendants are more mixed.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When the 2018 Toyota Camry comes out later this year, it will come with a new generation infotainment system in the dashboard that Toyota calls Entune 3.0. Behind the scenes, this new system relies on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), an open-source operating system hosted by The Linux Foundation.

The Camry marks the first production win for AGL, and the Linux proponents behind it couldn't have asked for a more popular car to host its debut. Toyota sold an average of 396,000 Camrys in the US every year over the past decade.

Automotive infotainment systems, which usually combine navigation, digital audio, hands-free phone calling and third-party apps, have been developed by automakers and equipment suppliers alike, leading to fragmentation and disparate interfaces unique to each brand of vehicle. AGL attempts to make a unified dashboard operating system, freeing automotive software engineers from individual platform development.

The current-generation Entune system in Toyota vehicles works reasonably well, providing in-dash navigation, the ability to play music from connected smartphones and Toyota's own app integration system, which lets drivers search Yelp or perform more general online searches to find destinations. The adoption of AGL could give Toyota a more future-proof system, with software that can be updated as cars age.

Toyota, which had been a member of the AGL group, chose to use it as the basis for Entune 3.0, its newest in-dash infotainment system. The new Entune will use what Toyota calls App Suite Connect for app integration, although there is no word yet as to which apps it will support. Lower-trim Camrys will integrate the Scout app for navigation, using the driver's smartphone. Higher-trim cars will come with a new onboard navigation system with over-the-air map updates. Toyota also notes the Camry includes a Wi-Fi hotspot supported by a 4G/LTE data connection.

It comes with a steering wheel, but everything can also be controlled from the command prompt..."user@camry:~$ sudo service car start"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have long tried to explain the origin of a mysterious, large and anomalously cold region of the sky. In 2015, they came close to figuring it out as a study showed it to be a "supervoid" in which the density of galaxies is much lower than it is in the rest of the universe. However, other studies haven't managed to replicate the result.

Now new research led by Durham University, submitted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests the supervoid theory doesn't hold up. Intriguingly, that leaves open a pretty wild possibility – the cold spot might be the evidence of a collision with a parallel universe. But before you get too excited, let's look at how likely that would actually be.

The cold spot can be seen in maps of the "cosmic microwave background" (CMB), which is the radiation left over from the birth of the universe. The CMB is like a photograph of what the universe looked like when it was 380,000 years old and had a temperature of 3,000 degrees Kelvin. What we find is that it is very smooth with temperature deviations of less than one part in 10,000. These deviations can be explained pretty well by our models of how the hot universe evolved up to an age of 380,000 years.

However the cold spot is harder to work out. It is an area of the sky about five degrees across that is colder by one part in 18,000. This is readily expected for some areas covering about one degree – but not five. The CMB should look much smoother on such large scales.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Registered child sex offenders in Australia will be stuck in a giant penal colony (known as Australia) under a proposed law:

Australia's estimated 20,000 registered child sex offenders would lose their passports under a new law that government officials say is aimed at preventing convicted pedophiles from victimizing children overseas. Officials call the proposal a "world first" in the fight against child sex tourism.

"This new legislation represents the toughest crackdown on child sex tourism by any government, anywhere," Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said, adding that Australia is "determined to prevent the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young children overseas."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

They are the army of workers who man Facebook's front line, tasked with removing offensive and terror-related material from the internet giant's site.

But a Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered the multi-billion pound social networking site employs hundreds of young Filipinos – some with limited English skills – who work gruelling shifts and say they earn just £1.81 an hour.

They are forced to decide in seconds whether or not to delete videos, pictures and posts which are too graphic or violent.

Staff face being sacked if they fail to meet strict quotas that mean they have to assess hundreds of extreme posts every shift.

Source: The Daily Mail

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Ran Bar-Zik, a web developer at AOL, has discovered and reported a bug in Google Chrome that allows websites to record audio and video without showing a visual indicator.

The bug is not as bad as it sounds, as the malicious website still needs to get the user's permission to access audio and video components, but there are various ways in which this issue could be weaponized to record audio or video without the user's knowledge.

[...] In a private conversation, Bar-Zik told Bleeping Computer he discovered the bug at work while dealing with a website that ran WebRTC code.

[...] When a website receives this permission, it can run JavaScript code that records audio or video content, before sending it over the Internet to the other participants of an WebRTC stream. This recording process is done via the JavaScript-based MediaRecorder API.

[...] Because the permission to access audio and video data was granted for an entire domain, the Israeli developer realized he could start a headless Chrome window (popup) where he could run the code to record audio and video.

Because Chrome shows the red circle and dot icon in a window's tab, the icon doesn't appear for the popup because this headless window doesn't have a tab bar.

Source: BleepingComputer

Original Submission

John Miller writes:

President Donald Trump plans to make good on his campaign vow to withdraw the United States from a global pact to fight climate change, a source briefed on the decision said on Wednesday, a move that promises to deepen a rift with U.S. allies.

White House officials cautioned that details were still being hammered out and that, although close, the decision on withdrawing from the 195-nation accord - agreed to in Paris in 2015 - was not finalized.

[...] The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump was working out the terms of the planned withdrawal with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, an oil industry ally and climate change doubter.

[...] The CEOs of Dow Chemical Co, ExxonMobil Corp, Unilever NV and Tesla Inc all urged Trump to remain in the agreement, with Tesla's Elon Musk threatening to quit White House advisory councils of which he is a member if the president pulls out.

Source: Reuters

On Twitter, Trump indicated that an announcement was coming soon.

"I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days," he wrote. "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

[...] Opponents of the climate deal were concerned after White House economic advisor Gary Cohn told reporters that the president was "evolving on the issue" during his trip overseas.

His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly channelled support for the deal behind the scenes at the White House, encouraging climate change activists that Trump might change his mind. Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, also supported remaining in the treaty.

Source: Brietbart

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HPCwire reports:

The bottom line is that the President's FY18 budget proposes to spend $508 million on exascale-related activities. This is a 77 percent increase over the FY17 enacted levels. The intent of this funding is to put the U.S. on track to have a productive exascale system by 2021. Funding is divided between two DOE programs, the Office of Science and the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA request directs $161 million for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and another $22 million to begin construction of the physical infrastructure for the exascale system. The Office of Science (SC) money ($347 million) would go to the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program. (See Tiffany Trader's coverage in HPCwire for a detailed look at the numbers.)

Both the NNSA and SC exascale activities will be the subject of debate as the President's FY18 budget request moves forward in Congress. However, given the cuts that were seen in the rest of the DOE budget, getting to this point could be considered a minor miracle. Getting the increases to the NNSA exascale budget was likely to be relatively easy. President Trump said he was going to increase the federal government budget's emphasis on national security and set aside about $1 billion for the NNSA. Using part of that to add to the ASC program must have been straightforward. That being said, there must have been a tremendous amount of work and planning needed to create the budget justification material.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will deploy Summit in 2018, with an estimated 200 petaflops of performance. The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory is planning a 180 petaflop supercomputer, Aurora, to be operational by 2019.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A number of companies have made announcements related to 64-layer 3D NAND production and products at Computex 2017:

64-layer NAND, and subsequently products with the technology, will make the largest splash at Computex 2017 this week. Toshiba, Western Digital, and SanDisk have product announcements in queue, with others set to follow. Toshiba already released some information about the technology at Dell World, so the other shoe has to drop from manufacturing partner WD. This is the moment many of us have waited for.

In short, Toshiba/WD are supposed to take us out of the NAND recession by delivering third-generation 3D NAND called BiCS FLASH.

BiCS FLASH may gain praise for reducing the strain on NAND supply, but our readers will be left behind for several quarters. SanDisk has said for years that the future focus will be on 3-bit per cell NAND (or TLC). That philosophy carried over to infect Western Digital after the SanDisk acquisition. No one talks about BiCS MLC for use in the client space, even though 3D TLC is unproven technology for high-performance products (outside of Samsung).

Phoenix666 writes:

A story in The Conversation may be of interest to Soylentils:

"Fake news" is the buzzword of 2017. Barely a day goes by without a headline about president Donald Trump lambasting media "bias", or the spread of "alternative facts".

Many articles on the subject suggest that social media sites should do more to educate the public about misinformation, or that readers should think more critically about the sources of news stories before sharing them. But there are fundamental problems with this. First, there isn't a clear definition of what "fake news" really is. And second, it overlooks important aspects of people's psychological makeup.

"Fake news" can be classified in a number of ways and represented as a series of concentric circles. First, in the centre of the concentric model, we have actual fake news. These are the stories that we commonly see shared on sites such as News Thump and The Onion. These satirical stories are written for comedic purposes and are put together to entertain.

Next, we have propaganda articles. Typically, these pieces do not actually contain any real news value. They may, for example, detail an individual's past behaviour and suggest that that it reflects something about their current intentions. Alternatively, these pieces may contain some kernel of truth, but this may be twisted in such a way that it totally misleads audiences and misrepresents a story's true news value.

These propaganda articles take numerous forms. The Huffington Post, for example, included a caveat about Donald Trump's alleged bigotry whenever mentioning him in a story before the US election last November, while British readers will likely recall the Daily Mail's much-maligned attacks on former Labour leader Ed Miliband's late father in 2013, calling him a "man who hated Britain".

Finally, and occupying the outermost ring of the model, there are the stories that are technically true, but reflect the subtle editorial biases of the organisation publishing them. This reporting is commonplace within the mainstream media, through selective storytelling and politically-driven editorials. Whether this is reflected in the left-wing bias of The Guardian or the right-wing approach of the Murdoch media empire, this practice is less malicious and more a political interpretation of events.

There once was a precise word for the term "fake news" is trying to describe. Oh yes, it's "propaganda."

Original Submission