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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports

Gov. Brian Sandoval said [June 5] he intends to sign a bill that supporters expect will bring the rooftop solar industry back to Nevada.

During a ceremony to sign the major bills implementing the two-year, $8.2 billion general fund budget, Sandoval said he will be signing Assembly Bill 405, a bill making it worthwhile for homeowners to invest in rooftop solar and participate in net metering. Net metering is where people with rooftop systems get a credit for the excess energy they return to the grid.

[...] The passage of AB405 has been praised by the solar industry.

A statement from Tesla said the bill will not only bring back solar energy to Nevada and enable the industry to innovate and grow sustainably, it will create thousands of jobs and bring millions of dollars in economic benefits to the state.

"Tesla will begin selling rooftop solar and residential storage products in Nevada, and we look forward to bringing even more jobs to the state in the years ahead to help provide residents with affordable rooftop solar and energy storage choices", the statement said.

GlobeNewswire adds Sunrun Announces Plans to Re-Enter Nevada Solar Market

"The near unanimous bipartisan support for legislation to reinstate net metering and establish a bill of rights for solar customers is a reflection of overwhelming public demand for affordable, clean energy options", said Lynn Jurich, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Sunrun. "Thanks to the hard work of Governor Sandoval and Nevada State Legislators, we can now say with confidence that Sunrun is coming back to Nevada."

Nevada's solar industry came to a halt in late 2015 when new rules limited the credit rooftop solar customers would receive for the clean energy they provide to the grid. The abrupt shift in regulations forced Sunrun to cease operations in the state, leading to the elimination of hundreds of local jobs.

Previous:
Nevada Regulators Reject Request to Halt New Rooftop Solar Rules

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Phoenix666 writes:

In recent years, dust storms have returned, driven mainly by drought. But Shook — and others — say farmers are making the problem worse by taking land where grass used to grow and plowing it up, exposing vulnerable soil.

"The first soil storm that I saw was in 2013. That was about the height of all the grassland conversion that was happening in this area," he says.
 
This is where federal policy enters the picture. Most of that grassland was there in the first place because of a taxpayer-funded program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture rents land from farmers across the country and pays them to grow grass, trees and wildflowers in order to protect the soil and also provide habitat for wildlife.

It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. Ten years ago, there was more land in the CRP than in the entire state of New York. In North Dakota, CRP land covered 5,000 square miles.
 
But CRP agreements only last 10 years, and when farming got more profitable about a decade ago, farmers in North Dakota pulled more than half of that land out of the CRP to grow crops like corn and soybeans. Across the country, farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014.

The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of farmers to migrate and gave us the term "Okies." Are we in for a repeat?

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stormwyrm writes:

Observations made in 2013 by University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her students showed that our galaxy, and much of the Laniakea Supercluster as well, resides in a great cosmic void. Building upon this work of his adviser, Ben Hoscheit made observations of 120,000 galaxies to measure how the density of galaxies changes with distance from the Milky Way. The findings, presented at the June 6 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, show that the Milky Way indeed resides in a vast cosmic abyss some two billion light years across, with the Milky Way being within a few hundred million light years of its centre, where galaxies are much fewer and farther between than in most of the rest of the universe. This could explain the discrepancies between measurements of the Hubble Constant which use relatively nearby supernovae and Cepheid variables to measure it (71.9 ± 2.7 km/s/Mpc) and those which use more distant observations like the cosmic microwave background (67.74 ± 0.46 km/s/Mpc). The nearby supernovae and Cepheids would be accelerating more quickly and yielding that bigger value for the Hubble constant because they are feeling an extra gravitational pull from the matter at the edges of the void we are in. This obviously does not affect the CMB or anything much further away. From the UW–Madison press release:

takyon writes:

SK Hynix is currently developing 96-layer and 128-layer 3D NAND with 3 bits per cell, but may be skipping quad-level cell 3D NAND for some time:

The 64-layer 3D NAND about to land from Micron and Toshiba certainly sounds impressive, but it pales in comparison to what Sk Hynix is working on for future release. The company is developing 96-layer and 128-layer 3D NAND flash. The new flash won't be available for a few years, but that makes it no less exciting. We have yet to see 72-layer 3D from Sk Hynix in our lab, but it will begin shipping soon in the PC401 using 256Gbit TLC die, according to the UNH-IOL list of tested products.

The information we found about the successor to 256Gbit 72-layer 3D TLC shows 96 layers with 512Gbit die capacity. The follow up to that is a massive 1Tbit die from 128-layer TLC from the other South Korean SSD manufacturer with full vertical integration.

Toshiba (or whichever company acquires Toshiba's memory division) may be more likely to introduce QLC 3D NAND.

Previously:
SK Hynix Plans 72-Layer 512 Gb NAND for Late 2017
64-Layer 3D NAND at Computex

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fleg writes:

In a maximum security mental health facility in Montreal is a "cave-like" virtual reality vault that's used to show images of child sexual abuse to sex offenders. Patients sit inside the vault with devices placed around their penises to measure signs of arousal as they are shown computer-generated animations of naked children.

"We do develop pornography, but these images and animations are not used for the pleasure of the patient but to assess them," said Patrice Renaud, who heads up the project at the Institut Philippe-Pinel. "It's a bit like using a polygraph but with other measurement techniques."

The system, combined with other psychological assessments, is used to build up a profile of the individual's sexual preferences that can be used by the court to determine the risk they pose to society and by mental health professionals to determine treatment.

[...] The patients sit on a stool inside the chamber wearing stereoscopic glasses which create the three-dimensional effect on the surrounding walls. The glasses are fitted with eye-tracking technology to ensure they aren't trying to trick the system by avoiding looking at the critical content.

Source: The Guardian

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians' couches and subsisting on the small sums he received for giving talks at universities around the world. He also had a fondness for devising math problems and offering bounties to anyone who could solve them.

"Over the years it was kind of a habit he had to say, 'Here's a nice problem, I thought about it for a while, and I don't see how to solve it. Maybe it's a $25 problem or possibly a $100 problem,'" said Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, and a longtime friend of Erdős's.

In offering small prizes, Erdős was continuing a tradition that flourished in Poland in the early 20th century in cafés where young mathematicians gathered to match wits and push against the frontiers of mathematics.

[...] In that culture, it was also common for mathematicians to back a newly posed problem with a prize — a bottle of wine or a nice meal to whoever could pull the sword from the stone.

-- submitted from IRC

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looorg writes:

In some sort of odd hipster nostalgia mixup you will soon be able to order the QUAKE soundstrack on vinyl (LP-record) direct from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NIN). Price unknown (I just assume it's not the $0 that it is currently listed as).

While I still own quite a few LP-records and a player I don't think I enjoyed the Quake soundtrack enough to buy one of these records. I could probably think of a few other games I would rather have the soundtrack on LP-record for, mostly various C64 games.

https://store-uk.nin.com/collections/music/products/quake-ost-1xlp-1

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takyon writes:

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and measure a star's mass by examining the slight gravitational microlensing it caused on the light of a star behind it:

Weighing a star is hard. In fact, binary stars are the only ones scientists can directly gauge, because their orbits around each other reveal their masses. Now, a team of astronomers has succeeded in measuring the mass of an isolated star using a technique first suggested by Albert Einstein in 1936. The method exploits the fact that a large mass, like a star, can bend the path of light. Although the effect is tiny, measuring the deflection can reveal the mass of the light-bending star.

[...] [A] team of astronomers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada had a hunch that the keen-eyed view of the Hubble Space Telescope might be able to detect such a shift. They started by looking for stars that might be coming into alignment, and found that Stein 2051 B—a white dwarf just 18 light-years from Earth—was due to pass almost directly in front of another star in March 2014. When it did, the team captured the slightest shifts in position of the background star. That shift let the team calculate that Stein 2051 B's mass is about two-thirds the mass of the sun [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal2879] [DX], 0.675 solar masses, they report today in Science.

Also at Space.com:

The scientists behind the new work said no one, before now, has ever used the displacement of a background star to calculate the mass of an individual star. In fact, there is only one other example of scientists measuring this displacement between individual stars: During the 1919 total solar eclipse, scientists saw the sun displace a few background stars. That measurement was possible only because of the sun's proximity to Earth.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

I'm about to start a session with Woebot, billed as the first chatbot clinically shown to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. And I'm skeptical. Chatbots do everything these days, from helping people manage bank accounts and practice language skills to keeping them company when they can't sleep. But can an AI really get into my head the way a therapist would?

Turns out Woebot, created by a Stanford University psychologist, is more about getting me into my own head -- and teaching me to better manage the chatter in there. Using brief daily conversations, mood tracking, curated videos and word games, the new bot relies on principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a short-term, goal-oriented treatment that aims to rewire the thoughts that negatively affect how we feel.

[...] A few brief exchanges in, and it's clear Woebot's been programmed to be approachable and playful, charming even. At times it's even easy to forget Woebot's a robot as it asks questions about my mood and energy level and cheerfully points me to a YouTube video on the power of positive self-talk.

I'm not alone in liking Woebot's tone. Participants in the Stanford study described Woebot as "a friend" and a "fun little dude."

Woebot, however, stresses early in our first chat that it's a robot that can't, and shouldn't, replace a human. It also tells users that if they're in crisis, they can type "SOS" at any time to get a list of resources, and includes a reminder about calling 911 (112 in Europe) if things get really bad.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Of late, [Robert] Zubrin has been bothered by another potential difficulty between humans and the exploration and settlement of Mars—planetary protection. This is the prime-directive-style notion that humans should not contaminate other worlds with Earth-based microbes and, on the flip side, that humans should not introduce any potentially dangerous pathogens to Earth.

[...] This is not a problem that NASA or would-be explorers should take all that seriously with regard to Mars, Zubrin argued during a characteristically fiery talk in late May. He made his remarks at the International Development and Space Conference in St. Louis, which is held by the National Space Society and dedicated to the settlement of space.

Zubrin asserted that Mars almost certainly has no life to be infected by Earth and no extant life which might eventually infect Earth. Mars has no liquid water on the surface, where temperatures are well below freezing, and an ultraviolet light would kill any new life.

[...] An overly zealous Planetary Protection community could also effectively kill human exploration on Mars, he argued, because there is no way to sterilize a crew, especially if the unthinkable happens. "If you maintain this pretense, a human expedition to Mars is impossible," he argued. "You cannot guarantee that a human mission to Mars won't crash, in which case you'll be scattering human microbes all over the surface."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

NewNic writes:

The Republican-controlled house and senates of Kansas voted to increase taxes and to override the governor's veto of a bill to increase taxes.

The current governor pushed through tax cuts, intended to grow Kansas' economy, but during the tax cuts, Kansas' growth was lower than the country's overall growth.

The increase follows years in which the state was unable to balance its budget, and the funding for education was found to be unconstitutionally low.

In my view, state budgets are likely to take a hit from Trump's stealth tax increase: by reducing funding for programs and forcing the states to step in, the states will have to find extra money to fill the gaps.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As governments around the world face the ongoing threat of extremism, US ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says tech companies have a social "responsibility" to take better care of what appears on their platforms.

And he says companies should go as far as filtering their feeds and opening encryption access.

Speaking today at the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, the head of the US intelligence community during the Obama administration said the issue was controversial, but Silicon Valley needed to play ball on national security.

"I do think there is a role to play here in some screening and filtering of what appears in social media," he said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

This is the Enigma machine that enabled secret Nazi communications. Efforts to break that encoding system ultimately helped make D-Day possible.

[...] In terms of global politics, encryption was pretty straightforward during World War II. One nation tapped its linguists and mathematicians -- and relied on the heroism of men who boarded sinking U-boats -- to crack the encryption tech of an enemy force.

The world's gotten a lot more complicated since then.

Just as in World War II, law enforcement and spy agencies today try to read the communications of criminals, terrorists and spies. But now that almost everyone uses encryption, a government's ability to break it doesn't just worry our country's enemies -- it concerns us, too.

And despite the advances in computing and encryption since Bletchley Park, we haven't come close to agreeing on when it's okay to break encryption.

[...] Burr, who saw the inside of public controversies over the government breaking encryption during his time at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says there's no clear path forward.

"There's just a big dilemma there," he says. Creating ways to break encryption "will weaken the actual strength of your security against bad guys of ability. And you have to count among those the state actors and pretty sophisticated and organized criminals."

In their laser-focused effort to crack Nazi encryption, codebreakers like Turing and soldiers like Fasson and Grazier were unlikely to have imagined a world like this. But here it is: the catch-22 of computerized encryption. And it's not going away anytime soon.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Announcing a New Paper on NASA's Mars Exploration Program: Not all is well with the future of Mars exploration

NASA's robotic Mars Exploration Program is on a troubling path of decline—and decisions must be made now in order to stop it. This is the conclusion my colleague Jason Callahan and I reached as we prepared a new report for The Planetary Society: Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA's Mars Exploration Program (pdf). I urge you to download it and read it yourself.

[...] [We] found a fundamental contradiction in NASA's extant Mars plans: there is not much of a program within the Mars Exploration Program. Currently, NASA has a single mission development—the Mars 2020 rover (InSight, which launches in 2018, is part of the Discovery program). There have been no new mission starts for Mars since 2013, one of the longest droughts in recent history.

But the existing Mars missions are aging and won't last forever. A new orbiter is badly needed to relay high-speed communications with ground missions and to provide high resolution mapping of the surface to support landing attempts by NASA and others (not to mention provide important science). Yet the latest budget release for 2018 contained no new start for this critical mission.

Also at The Verge.

Other upcoming Mars missions include SpaceX's Red Dragon lander, the Emirates Mars Mission, the EU's ExoMars 2020, a Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover mission, Japan's Mars Terahertz Microsatellite, and India's Mangalyaan 2.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Preliminary results from a new study show that partners of people who have insomnia may try to be supportive by engaging in a range of behaviors that unintentionally contradict treatment recommendations.

Results show that 74 percent of partners encouraged an early bedtime or late wake time, which is in direct conflict with the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI). Forty-two percent also encouraged doing other things in bed, such as reading or watching TV, and 35 percent encouraged naps, caffeine or reduced daytime activities.

"It is possible that partners are unwittingly perpetuating insomnia symptoms in the patient with insomnia," said lead author Alix Mellor, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow and coordinator of the Researching Effective Sleep Treatments (REST) project in the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. "It is therefore important for more data to be collected to determine whether insomnia treatments may better benefit patients and their partners by proactively assessing and addressing bed partner behaviors in treatment programs."

[...] Results also show that bed partners made accommodations that affected their own functioning, including their sleep and life outside of work. This may explain why partners who attempted to be helpful experienced more anxiety, even though the insomnia patients perceived the relationship to be more satisfying.

-- submitted from IRC

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takyon writes:

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/darpa-announces-topological-excitations-electronics-program/

DARPA's Topological Excitations in Electronics program, announced today, aims to investigate new ways to arrange these moments in novel geometries that are much more stable than the conventional parallel arrangement. If successful, these new configurations could enable bits of data to be made radically smaller than possible today, potentially yielding a 100-fold increase in the amount of storage achievable on a chip. It could also enable designs for completely new computer logic concepts and even for topologically protected "quantum" bits—the basis for long-sought quantum computers.

“We’ve known for some time that there are some magnetic interactions that favor the magnetic moments being canted in a v-shape rather than the parallel arrangement, which yield a much more stable structure than having them all in parallel,” said Rosa Alejandra “Ale” Lukaszew, a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “The canted interaction doesn’t allow the electrons to line up parallel to each other, so in order to fit them in a small region they must be configured in a special pattern. These unique geometric patterns, called topological excitations, are very stable and maintain their geometry even when shrunk to very small sizes. But only recently have we had the multiscale models, advanced metrology tools, and understanding of proper material combinations to fully explore this phenomenon.”

Another unique characteristic about topological excitations is that they can be moved at significant speed with a small amount of current, allowing for fast read and write operations if, for example, they are placed on a track that runs in front of a read/write head, Ale said. Such an approach would make it possible to explore novel, 3-D approaches to chip design, enabling storage capabilities of 100 Terabits per square inch, 100 times more than the current limit of 1 Terabit per square inch in laboratory demos.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/darpa-intel-qualcomm-graph-analytics,34665.html

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it has selected five participants for its Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program to develop a high-performance data handling platform. Intel and Qualcomm will be among the five participants that will help the agency build the new graph analytics platform.

[...] A main objective of the HIVE program is to create a graph analytics processor, which can more efficiently find and represent links between data elements and categories. These could include person-to-person interactions, and disparate links such as geography, change in doctor visit trends, or social media and regional strife.

[...] DARPA believes that such a graph processor could achieve a "thousandfold improvement in processing efficiency," over today's best processors. That should enable the real-time identification of strategically important relationships as they unfold in the field, rather than after-the-fact in data centers.

Original Submission