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Phoenix666 writes:

High ozone levels and a quickly growing population are making it tough to implement regulations to reduce pollution, says a Cal State LA professor.

The quality of the air in California may be improving, but it's still dire.

That's according to the American Lung Association's recent "State of the Air 2017" report, which labeled the state and region a leader in air pollution, with the highest ozone levels.

The annual study ranks the cleanest and most polluted areas in the country by grading counties in the U.S. based on harmful recorded levels of ozone (smog) and particle pollution. The 2017 report used data collected from 2013 to 2015.

The top three regions in the country with the worst smog levels were Los Angeles-Long Beach; Bakersfield; and Fresno-Madera; Salinas, though, was recognized as one of the cleanest cities in the state and the country.

"The Los Angeles basin is exposed to the highest ozone levels in the country," explains Steve LaDochy, Ph.D., professor of geosciences and environment at California State University, Los Angeles, an expert in air pollution and climate. "It is getting better here, but it's still the worst."

The toughest CAFE standard in the country does not seem to have solved California's air pollution problem.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ron Howard has been named as the new director of Lucasfilm and Disney's untitled Han Solo movie, sources tell to The Hollywood Reporter exclusively. The official announcement is expected Thursday morning.

The move comes two days after directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were let go from the movie they had spent over four-and-a-half months directing. Creative differences over style and tone came to a head between the duo and Lawrence Kasdan, with the studio backing the veteran screenwriter.

The firing sent shockwaves around Hollywood and beyond as the movie was about three-quarters through principal photography and the replacement of a director at that stage is near-unprecedented.

Howard, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, will meet with the actors — Alden Ehrenreich is playing the iconic smuggler, Donald Glover is playing Lando Calrissian, with Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke and Thandie Newton also on the roll call — to soothe a rattled set and will pore over a rough edit to see what the project has and still needs.

Can Ron Solo save the day?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Petrol stations and motorway services will be required to install electric charge points, under plans outlined in the Queen's Speech.

The measure forms part of a government push to increase the number of electric vehicles on UK roads.

The Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill also contains plans to push driverless car technology.

It includes an extension of car insurance to cover the use of automated vehicles.

There are several trials of driverless cars ongoing in the UK.

Car insurance will be extended to automated vehicles "to ensure that compensation claims continue to be paid quickly, fairly and easily", the bill says.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The rise and fall of FireWire—IEEE 1394, an interface standard boasting high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer—is one of the most tragic tales in the history of computer technology. The standard was forged in the fires of collaboration. A joint effort from several competitors including Apple, IBM, and Sony, it was a triumph of design for the greater good. FireWire represented a unified standard across the whole industry, one serial bus to rule them all. Realized to the fullest, FireWire could replace SCSI and the unwieldy mess of ports and cables at the back of a desktop computer.

Yet FireWire's principal creator, Apple, nearly killed it before it could appear in a single device. And eventually the Cupertino company effectively did kill FireWire, just as it seemed poised to dominate the industry.

The story of how FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor serves today as a fine reminder that no technology, however promising, well-engineered, or well-liked, is immune to inter- and intra-company politics or to our reluctance to step outside our comfort zone.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

If you don't know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how it breaks down in optical illusions. For instance, the 3-D Escher-like illusions created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain's tendency to see all angles as right angles.

Some of the most dramatic illusions involve apparent motion—these appear to spin, shimmer, or shimmy even though they're completely static, like Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie–Woogie or the psychedelic pinwheels of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychologist at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Two more Japanese mathematicians, Hitoshi Arai at the University of Tokyo and his wife, Shinobu Arai, have created a new class of them, known as fuyuu, or floating, illusions.

The Arais have an extensive online gallery with commentary in Japanese, as well as an abridged English version. In addition to their own creations, they have collected inadvertent illusions from the real world, such as buildings that, viewed from certain angles, appear to switch places because of how their windows and other design elements line up.

Don't believe everything you see

Source: http://nautil.us/blog/how-japanese-floating-illusions-reverse_engineer-what-we-see

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Kepler space telescope has found 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are "Earth-like":

NASA's Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler's first four years of data. It's also the final catalog from the spacecraft's view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.

With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.

Also at Space.com, New Scientist, and CNN.

Previously: Kepler Exoplanet Results Briefing on June 19th, Conference From 19th-23rd

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The results are in: The Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids get a boost.

More than ever, it's a Raspberry Pi world, and other Linux hacker boards are just living in it. Our 2017 hacker board survey gives the Raspberry Pi 3 a total of 2,583 votes — four times the number of the second-ranked board, the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

[...] Note that by "votes" we are referring to Borda rankings that combine 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice rankings [...]

So, which if any credit-card-sized computers are you lot playing around with?

Source: http://linuxgizmos.com/2017-hacker-board-survey-raspberry-pi-still-rules-but-x86-sbcs-make-gains/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A heavily redacted Department of Defense report concludes that documents leaked to WikiLeaks had no "significant strategic impact" on the war in Afghanistan and "[had] no direct personal impact on current and former senior US leadership in Iraq":

The publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US documents leaked by the Army soldier Chelsea Manning in 2010 had no strategic impact on the American war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a newly released Pentagon analysis concluded.

The main finding of the Department of Defense report, written a year after the breach, was that Manning's uploading of more than 700,000 secret files to the open information organization WikiLeaks had no significant strategic effect on the US war efforts.

The belated publication of the analysis gives the lie to the official line maintained over several years that the leak had caused serious harm to US national security.

[...] The conclusions are contained in the final report of the information review task force that the DoD set up in the wake of the Manning leaks to look into their impact in the hope of mitigating any damage. The report was obtained by BuzzFeed's investigative reporter Jason Leopold under freedom of information laws.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Theresa May has been forced to scrap a host of her most controversial policies after the Conservatives lost their majority in the snap general election.

The Prime Minister used the Queen’s Speech to outline multiple bills on the UK’s exit from the European Union.

Legislation on trade, agriculture and immigration previously handled by the EU needs to be written into British law, meaning Brexit will dominate the next two years of Parliament.

Source: The Independent

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has played down reports it is seeking £2bn in extra funding for Northern Ireland in return for supporting the Tories. Earlier, sources told the BBC the DUP wanted £1bn invested in Northern Ireland's health service and a similar figure for infrastructure projects.

[...] Prime Minister Theresa May is seeking the support of the DUP's 10 MPs after losing her majority in the general election.

Both sides have been locked in talks for 11 days, but to date they have not confirmed a deal to prop up a Conservative minority government. On Tuesday, a senior DUP source said the party could not be "taken for granted" and urged the Conservatives to give a "greater focus" to their negotiations.

Source: BBC News

takyon writes:

AMD has launched its Ryzen-based take on x86 server processors to compete with Intel's Xeon CPUs. All of the Epyc 7000-series CPUs support 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes and 8 channels (2 DIMMs per channel) of DDR4-2666 DRAM:

A few weeks ago AMD announced the naming of the new line of enterprise-class processors, called EPYC, and today marks the official launch with configurations up to 32 cores and 64 threads per processor. We also got an insight into several features of the design, including the AMD Infinity Fabric.

Today's announcement of the AMD EPYC product line sees the launch of the top four CPUs, focused primarily at dual socket systems. The full EPYC stack will contain twelve processors, with three for single socket environments, with the rest of the stack being made available at the end of July. It is worth taking a few minutes to look at how these processors look under the hood.

On the package are four silicon dies, each one containing the same 8-core silicon we saw in the AMD Ryzen processors. Each silicon die has two core complexes, each of four cores, and supports two memory channels, giving a total maximum of 32 cores and 8 memory channels on an EPYC processor. The dies are connected by AMD's newest interconnect, the Infinity Fabric, which plays a key role not only in die-to-die communication but also processor-to-processor communication and within AMD's new Vega graphics. AMD designed the Infinity Fabric to be modular and scalable in order to support large GPUs and CPUs in the roadmap going forward, and states that within a single package the fabric is overprovisioned to minimize any issues with non-NUMA aware software (more on this later).

With a total of 8 memory channels, and support for 2 DIMMs per channel, AMD is quoting a 2TB per socket maximum memory support, scaling up to 4TB per system in a dual processor system. Each CPU will support 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes, suitable for six GPUs with full bandwidth support (plus IO) or up to 32 NVMe drives for storage. All the PCIe lanes can be used for IO devices, such as SATA drives or network ports, or as Infinity Fabric connections to other devices. There are also 4 IO hubs per processor for additional storage support.

AMD's slides at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Windows 10 does disable some third-party security software, Microsoft has admitted, but because of compatibility – not competitive – issues.

Redmond is currently being sued by security house Kaspersky Lab in the EU, Germany and Russia over alleged anti-competitive behavior because it bundles the Windows Defender security suite into its latest operating system. Kaspersky (and others) claim Microsoft is up to its Internet Explorer shenanigans again, but that's not so, said the operating system giant.

"Microsoft's application compatibility teams found that roughly 95 per cent of Windows 10 PCs had an antivirus application installed that was already compatible with Windows 10 Creators Update," said Rob Lefferts, director of security in the Windows and Devices group.

Source: The Register
Archive article: Archive.org

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A deep-sea expedition, "Sampling the Abyss", near the coast of Australia has turned up over 300 previously undiscovered species:

Last week, a month-long expedition to explore the deep sea off the coast of eastern Australia came to an end. According to Calla Wahlquist at The Guardian, the expedition, entitled Sampling the Abyss, racked up a final tally of finds that includes about 1,000 freaky deep sea creatures—a third of which have never been described before by science.

According to a press release, the venture was a collaboration between Museums Victoria, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) as well as other museums and agencies. For 31 days, a crew of 40 scientists aboard the research vessel Investigator looked into the "abyssal" areas from Tasmania to central Queensland—unexplored habitat 13,000 feet under the surface of the ocean.

"The abyss is the largest and deepest habitat on the planet, covering half the world's oceans and one third of Australia's territory, but it remains the most unexplored environment on Earth," Tim O'Hara of Museums Victoria and the project's chief scientist says in the press release. "We know that abyssal animals have been around for at least 40 million years, but until recently only a handful of samples had been collected from Australia's abyss."

Also at the Washington Post.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

How I prepare for my tabletop RPG sessions has changed a lot over the last 12 years, and open source software has been a big part of those changes. It's now a vital part of every step in the process, from collecting and sketching out ideas, to dungeon map creation, to map keying, right through to the tools used during play.

When I first started gaming, around 1980, the idea of open source was just beginning to form. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D, 1st edition) was still very new and our tools were just paper and pencil. I didn't get to play very much back then because my closest friend lived several miles away.

I got back to it in 2005 when a coworker invited me to play in his game. Four years later he couldn't continue as the DM because Life Got Busy™ so I took over as DM.

Initially, I went back to the old pencil and paper tools, just like back in 1980, to prepare for gaming sessions. Quickly, though, my work as a sysadmin and open source user changed how I prepare and run my campaign, the series of play sessions run by a DM that create the world and the challenges the other player characters (PCs) confront in AD&D or the Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

Guy had a few ideas I hadn't thought of yet. You lot care to add any of the tools you use to the list?

Source: OpenSource.com

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

People who live with cats like to joke about how these small fuzzy creatures are still wild, basically training us rather than the other way around. Now a new genetic study of ancient cat DNA reveals that we are basically right. Cats were not domesticated in the same way dogs, cows, pigs, and goats were. They have lived among us, but it wasn't until very recently that we began to change them.

Unlike dogs, whose bodies and temperaments have transformed radically during the roughly 30,000 years we've lived with them, domestic cats are almost identical to their wild counterparts—physically and genetically. House cats also show none of the typical signs of animal domestication, such as infantilization of facial features, decreased tooth size, and docility. Wildcats are neither social nor hierarchical, which also makes them hard to integrate into human communities.

Yet it's impossible to deny that cats are tame. We know that humans have lived with cats for at least 10,000 years—there's a 9,500-year-old grave in Cyprus with a cat buried alongside its human, and ancient Egyptian art has a popular motif showing house cats eating fish under chairs. Today, cats still share our homes and food, and for thousands of years they have worked alongside farmers and sailors to eradicate vermin. If we haven't domesticated cats, what exactly have we done to them?

Related:
Ancient Egyptians may have given cats the personality to conquer the world
The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) demonstrated how particles, floating on top of a glycerin-water solution, synchronize in response to acoustic waves blasted from a computer speaker.

The study, published today (Monday, June 19) in the journal Nature Materials, could help address fundamental questions about energy dissipation and how it allows living and nonliving systems to adapt to their environment when they are out of thermodynamic equilibrium.

[...] "We show that individually 'dumb' particles can self-organize far from equilibrium by dissipating energy and emerge with a collective trait that is dynamically adaptive to and reflective of their environment," said study co-lead author Chad Ropp, a postdoctoral researcher in Zhang's group. "In this case, the particles followed the 'beat' of a sound wave generated from a computer speaker."

Notably, after the researchers intentionally broke up the particle party, the pieces would reassemble, showing a capacity to self-heal.

Ropp noted that this work could eventually lead to a wide variety of "smart" applications, such as adaptive camouflage that responds to sound and light waves, or blank-slate materials whose properties are written on demand by externally controlled drives.

[...] As the sound waves traveled at a frequency of 4 kilohertz, the scattering particles moved along at about 1 centimeter per minute. Within 10 minutes, the collective pattern of the particles emerged, where the distance between the particles was surprisingly non-uniform. The researchers found that the self-assembled particles exhibited a phononic bandgap -- a frequency range in which acoustic waves cannot pass -- whose edge was inextricably linked, or "enslaved," to the 4 kHz input.

Journal Reference:
Nicolas Bachelard, Chad Ropp, Marc Dubois, Rongkuo Zhao, Yuan Wang, Xiang Zhang. Emergence of an enslaved phononic bandgap in a non-equilibrium pseudo-crystal. Nature Materials, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nmat4920

Original Submission