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takyon writes:

A new study of the orbits of extreme trans-Neptunian objects has supported the existence of Planet Nine, just weeks after the Outer Solar System Origins Survey cast doubt on the hypothetical object:

Two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain studied 22 "extreme" TNOs (ETNOs), which orbit the sun at an average distance of at least 150 AU and never get closer than Neptune. (Neptune lies about 30 AU from the sun and orbits on a roughly circular path.) Specifically, the duo analyzed the ETNOs' "nodes," the two points at which the objects cross the plane of the solar system. (Distant bodies such as ETNOs tend not to lie in the same plane as the sun and the solar system's eight officially recognized planets.)

The researchers found that the objects' nodes generally aggregate at certain distances from the sun (as do those of 24 "extreme Centaurs," very distant objects with some characteristics of asteroids and others of comets). In addition, they discovered a correlation between the nodes' positions and an orbital parameter known as inclination.

The new results back the Planet Nine hypothesis, said lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. "Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU," he told Spain's Information and Scientific News Service, which is known by its Spanish acronym, SINC. "We believe that what we are seeing here cannot be attributed to the presence of observational bias."

Also at EarthSky.

Evidence for a possible bimodal distribution of the nodal distances of the extreme trans-Neptunian objects: avoiding a trans-Plutonian planet or just plain bias? (DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx106) (DX)

Original Submission

Studies Suggest Healthy Adults Drink More Coffee when they Live Longer

Drinking coffee could lead to a longer life, scientist says

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Here's another reason to start the day with a cup of joe: Scientists have found that people who drink coffee appear to live longer.

Drinking coffee was associated with a lower risk of death due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and respiratory and kidney disease for African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites.

People who consumed a cup of coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die compared to those who didn't drink coffee. This association was even stronger for those who drank two to three cups a day -- 18 percent reduced chance of death.

Lower mortality was present regardless of whether people drank regular or decaffeinated coffee, suggesting the association is not tied to caffeine, said Veronica W. Setiawan, lead author of the study and an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

"We cannot say drinking coffee will prolong your life, but we see an association," Setiawan said. "If you like to drink coffee, drink up! If you're not a coffee drinker, then you need to consider if you should start."

The study, which will be published in the July 11 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, used data from the Multiethnic Cohort Study, a collaborative effort between the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and the Keck School of Medicine.

-- submitted from IRC

An Anonymous Coward also submitted this:

Two studies showed a link between coffee-drinking and a propensity toward longevity, but stopped short of proving cause and effect. [...] one downside to the research is the fact that many people stop drinking coffee -- or drink less of it -- when they are ill, a "bias that is very hard to fully overcome."

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Lagg writes:

A group named Exploring the Unbeaten Path broke into an apparently still maintained Soviet base's hangar and proceeded to record it and the space shuttles inside.

Video is included in the article, and it also features them spying on workers and security a few hundred yards away.

A group of YouTubers going by the name Exploring the Unbeaten Path traveled to the middle of nowhere to get a look at some space shuttles from the suspended Soviet-era Buran programme. Located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan, the hanger that the group would have to infiltrate is abandoned but the base is still active.

The world's first and largest space launch facility, Baikonur is leased by the Russian government and all crewed Russian missions still launch from there. Commercial and military missions are also staged at the spaceport, and soldiers patrol the area.

Although the explorers have numerous scares, they manage to get into the facility and spend a lot of time. They brought back tons of footage of the shuttles on the inside and out, even managing to fly a drone through the enormous hanger.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

As human beings, what drives us to higher levels of existence? Once we have satisfied the basics - food, shelter, a mate, children - then what? For many it's the idea of self-actualization, or realizing our full potential. But what does self-actualization look like? How do we know when we are doing it? Researchers recently published a new series of studies on what people think it means to be self-actualized.

But what does self-actualization look like? How do we know when we are doing it? When are we trying to realize our highest potential? Self-actualization is a popular idea -- in psychology, business, education and the multi-million dollar self-help industry. Everyone, it seems, wants to realize his or her full potential.

[...] By finding mates, keeping mates and caring for children, people might feel self-actualized, and they might also be furthering exactly those biologically relevant outcomes that lead to getting their genes into next generations.

[...] Or as Krems explained: "For real people, pursuing self-actualization might further biologically relevant goals."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170712145639.htm

[Also Covered By]: Individual perceptions of self-actualization: What motivates fulfilling one's full potential?

[Abstract]: Individual Perceptions of Self-Actualization: What Functional Motives Are Linked to Fulfilling One's Full Potential?

How would you go about achieving self-actualization ? Is self-actualization a relevant goal in this day and age ?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/12/536863961/michigan-laws-will-increase-penalties-for-performing-female-genital-mutilation

New legislation signed into law by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday makes female genital mutilation a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The laws apply both to doctors who conduct the procedure and parents who transport a child to undergo it. "Those who commit these horrendous crimes should be held accountable for their actions, and these bills stiffen the penalties for offenders while providing additional support to victims," Gov. Snyder said in a statement. "This legislation is an important step toward eliminating this despicable practice in Michigan while empowering victims to find healing and justice."

The governor also signed a bill allowing for a health professional's license or registration to be revoked if he or she is convicted of female genital mutilation.

Michigan is the 26th state to ban the practice; the state laws go into effect in October. The practice was banned in the United States in 1996, but Michigan's laws impose harsher penalties than the federal law. The package of bills comes amid the federal criminal trial of an emergency room doctor in Michigan, Jumana Nagarwala, charged with performing the procedure on multiple girls at a clinic in suburban Detroit. The Department of Justice says it believes the case is the first to be brought under the federal law. Another doctor and his wife are also charged in the case, the AP reports.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bloomberg reports that Oculus (Facebook) will unveil a standalone VR headset that does not require a tether or smartphone:

Facebook Inc. is taking another stab at turning its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a mass-market phenomenon. Later this year, the company plans to unveil a cheaper, wireless device that the company is betting will popularize VR the way Apple did the smartphone.

Currently VR hardware comes in two flavors: cheap headsets that turn smartphones into virtual reality players (like Samsung's $130 Gear VR) and high-end gaming rigs (like Facebook's $400 Oculus Rift) that hook up to $1,000-plus desktop computers. Facebook's new headset is designed to bridge the gap -- a device that will sell for as little as $200 and need not be tethered to a PC or phone, according to people familiar with its development. It will ship next year and represent an entirely new category.

Like current Oculus products, the new headset will be geared toward immersive gaming, watching video and social networking, said the people who asked not to be named to discuss a private matter. Code-named "Pacific," the device resembles a more compact version of the Rift and will be lighter than Samsung's Gear VR headset, one of the people said. The device's design and features aren't finalized and could still change, but the idea is that someone will be able to pull the headset out of their bag and watch movies on a flight just the way you can now with a phone or tablet.

Even $400 is not low enough.

Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.

Previously: Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [*]:

Apple still has not patched the hole allowing you to bypass the iPhone lock screen. As of iOS 10.3.2 (and the 10.3.3 beta), you can still trick Siri into getting into a person’s iPhone.

[...] Not only can someone trick Siri to turn off cellular data, but they can trick her to read unread text messages and post to Facebook—a major privacy issue.

To do it, again prompt Siri to wake up using a finger not associated with the phone's authentication. Then say, “Read messages,” and Siri will read any unread text messages from the lock screen. Or say, “Post to Facebook,” and Siri will ask you what you want to post to Facebook.

We tested this with a staffer’s iPhone 7, with someone other than the iPhone owner giving the commands. Siri let the person right in.

While we wait for Apple to patch the hole, your best option is to disable Siri from the lock screen.

It seems like Siri's been a bad girl, yet again!

-- submitted from IRC

[* Yup, the URL says "ios-9", but the headline correctly says 10, maybe they need some eagle-eyed editors? -- Ed./FP]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

It's finally adrift. When the Larsen C Ice Shelf calved yesterday [Wednesday], it sent one of the largest icebergs ever recorded slipping into a sea frosted with smaller chunks of ice. It marked the end of a decades-long splintering first seen by satellites in the 1960s. The crack stayed small for years until, in 2014, it began racing across the Antarctic ice.

The massive iceberg holds twice as much water used in the United States every year, according to calculations by Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. It weighs about 1.1 trillion tons and measures 2,200 square miles. Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie.

"The iceberg is one of the largest recorded, and its future progress is difficult to predict," said Adrian Luckman of Wales' Swansea University, who led a project tracking the crack since 2015. "It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters."

By mass, the iceberg accounts for 12 percent of the Larsen C Ice Shelf. It's large enough that maps will have to be redrawn. Larsen C was the fourth-largest ice shelf in the world. Now it's the fifth.

In this particular political moment, the calving of a major iceberg has made headlines around the world. Environmental groups connected the event to climate change and the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. But scientists have cautioned that the story of the iceberg, which will be known as A68, is more nuanced. Climate signals are not clear enough to attribute the event to rising levels of carbon dioxide, but human activity may have contributed to its calving nonetheless.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060057298

Previously:
Larsen C Calves Trillion Ton Iceberg
Larsen C Rift Branches as it Comes Within 5 km of Calving
Delaware-Sized Iceberg Could Break Off of Antarctica at Any Moment

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Hyperloop One claims that its prototype ultra-fast train has completed a first full systems test in a vacuum, reaching a speed of 70 mph. The sled was able to magnetically levitate on the track for 5.3 seconds and “reached nearly 2Gs of acceleration,” according to the company.

The test was conducted privately but Hyperloop One offered some video that included footage from testing. Based on that footage plus a few seconds of additional b-roll shared with media, a lightweight skeleton sled uses a linear motor to accelerate, levitates briefly, and then comes to a halt as the brakes are applied.

Hyperloop One was created as an answer to a challenge from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who wrote a white paper envisioning a mode of transportation that would send pods at speeds greater than 700mph using a low-friction environment and levitation using air bearings.

Source: Ars Technica

Original Submission

takyon writes:

It's "small", it's dense, and it likes to fuse hydrogen. Meet EBLM J0555-57Ab:

The smallest star yet measured has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge. With a size just a sliver larger than that of Saturn, the gravitational pull at its stellar surface is about 300 times stronger than what humans feel on Earth.

The star is likely as small as stars can possibly become, as it has just enough mass to enable the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. If it were any smaller, the pressure at the centre of the star would no longer be sufficient to enable this process to take place. Hydrogen fusion is also what powers the Sun, and scientists are attempting to replicate it as a powerful energy source here on Earth.

[...] "Our discovery reveals how small stars can be," said Alexander Boetticher, the lead author of the study, and a Master's student at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and Institute of Astronomy. "Had this star formed with only a slightly lower mass, the fusion reaction of hydrogen in its core could not be sustained, and the star would instead have transformed into a brown dwarf."

The EBLM project III. A Saturn-size low-mass star at the hydrogen-burning limit

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After a few months of development, the Pale Moon browser has released its latest iteration. Along with security features, the key release for this version seems to be centered around expanding the browser's media support.

Release notes here.

Offtopic, but somehow relevant: they also published the results of their survey in March. The feedback says a lot about the browser's user base, and highlights the direction the team will take in the future.

[What browser(s) do you use? Do you use a separate browser for certain sites? Same browser for everything you access online? What browser differences lead you to use one browser over another? -Ed.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

After exiting the Chinese market, Uber has merged its Russian business with the taxi/ridehailing side business of Yandex, Russia's dominant search engine:

After selling its Chinese business in August last year, Uber has now yielded its clout abroad again — this time to merge its Russian business with the taxi arm of Russian search engine giant Yandex. The new company will be worth $3.725 billion, both companies have announced, and span 127 cities in 6 countries (Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan).

As part of the deal, Yandex will invest $100 million and hold a majority stake of 59.3 percent, while Uber will invest $225 million and hold a stake of 36.6 percent. The remaining shares are held by company employees. Full-time Uber employees in the countries involved will join the new company. A name for the new company has not yet been announced.

Also at Recode and NYT. Uber statement.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Not one to let trivia pass unnoticed, the timing of this post has a mildly interesting significance.

Some of you may be old enough to recall the Y2K bug (or may have even helped in avoiding the predicted calamity). Thanks to an incredible effort, the world survived relatively unscathed.

So we're in the clear, now. Right?

Not quite. In the land of Unix timekeeping, there is another rollover bug coming up, when the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (Jan 1, 1970) exceeds the space provided by a signed 32 bit number: 2147483647 (January 19, 2038 at 03:14:08 UTC). [See Wikipedia's Year 2038 problem entry for more details.]

The timing of this post marks our reaching 75% of that a milestone towards that rollover amount: 1,500,000,000 seconds since the Unix epoch which works out to 2017-07-14 02:40:00 UTC. (Queue Cue horns and fanfares.)

Besides taking note of a mildly interesting timestamp, I'd like to offer for discussion: Falsehoods programmers believe about time.

What memorable time (or date) bugs have you encountered?

I once worked at a company where the DBA (DataBase Analyst) insisted that all timestamps in the database be in Eastern Time. Yes, it would fluctuate when we entered/exited Daylight Saving Time. Even better, this was central database correlating inputs from PBXs (Private Branch Exchanges) across all four time zones in the US. No amount of discussion on my part could convince him otherwise. I finally documented the situation like crazy and left it to reality to provide the final persuasion. Unfortunately, a defect in the design of their hardware manifested at a very inopportune time, and the company ended up folding.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The High Court in London ruled that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia may continue.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) had sought an order to block export licences for British-made fighter jets, bombs and other munitions which it said the Saudi-led Arab coalition was using in a campaign against Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen's civil war.

[...] "Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no 'real risk' that there might be 'serious violations' of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or cancelled," the court said.

[...] CAAT said it would appeal against the decision, and the leader of the opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, heavily criticised the government for its trade with Saudi Arabia.

"The government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive and brutal regimes, that finances terrorism and is breaching humanitarian law," Corbyn said.

Source: Reuters

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD's Threadripper 1950X (TR 1950X?) will have 16 cores for $1,000, and the Threadripper 1920X will have 12 cores for $800. They will be available in early August:

Last night out of the blue, we received an email from AMD, sharing some of the specifications for the forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper CPUs to be announced today. Up until this point, we knew a few things – Threadripper would consist of two Zeppelin dies featuring AMD's latest Zen core and microarchitecture, and would essentially double up on the HEDT Ryzen launch. Double dies means double pretty much everything: Threadripper would support up to 16 cores, up to 32 MB of L3 cache, quad-channel memory support, and would require a new socket/motherboard platform called X399, sporting a massive socket with 4094-pins (and also marking an LGA socket for AMD). By virtue of being sixteen cores, AMD is seemingly carving a new consumer category above HEDT/High-End Desktop, which we've coined the 'Super High-End Desktop', or SHED for short.

[...] From what we do know, 16 Zen cores at $999 is about the ballpark price we were expecting. With the clock speeds of 3.4 GHz base and 4 GHz Turbo, this is essentially two Ryzen 7 1800X dies at $499 each stuck together, creating the $999 price (obviously it's more complicated than this). Given the frequencies and the performance of these dies, the TDP is likely in the 180W range; seeing as how the Ryzen 7 1800X was a 95W CPU with slightly higher frequencies. The 1950X runs at 4.0 GHz turbo and also has access to AMD's XFR – which will boost the processor when temperature and power allows – in jumps of +25 MHz: AMD would not comment on the maximum frequency boost of XFR, though given our experiences of the Ryzen silicon and previous Ryzen processor specifications, this is likely to be +100 MHz. We were not told if the CPUs would come with a bundled CPU cooler, although if our 180W prediction is in the right area, then substantial cooling would be needed. We expect AMD to use the same Indium-Tin solder as the Ryzen CPUs, although we were unable to get confirmation at this at this time.

[...] Comparing the two, and what we know, AMD is going to battle on many fronts. Coming in at $999 is going to be aggressive, along with an all-core turbo at 3.4 GHz or above: Intel's chip at $1999 will likely turbo below this. Both chips will have quad-channel DRAM, supporting DDR4-2666 in 1 DIMM per channel mode (and DDR4-2400 in 2 DPC), but there are some tradeoffs. Intel Core parts do not support ECC, and AMD Threadripper parts are expected to (awaiting confirmation). Intel has the better microarchitecture in terms of pure IPC, though it will be interesting to see the real-world difference if AMD is clocked higher. AMD Threadripper processors will have access to 60 lanes of PCIe for accelerators, such as GPUs, RAID cards and other functions, with another 4 reserved by the chipset: Intel will likely be limited to 44 for accelerators but have a much better chipset in the X299 for IO support and capabilities. We suspect AMD to run a 180W TDP, and Intel at 165W, giving a slight advantage to Intel perhaps (depending on workload), and Intel will also offer AVX512 support for its CPU whereas AMD has smaller FMA and AVX engines by comparison. The die-to-die latency of AMD's MCM will also be an interesting element to the story, depending exactly where AMD is aiming this product.

There's also some details for Ryzen 3 quad-cores, but no confirmed pricing yet.

Meanwhile, Intel's marketing department has badmouthed AMD, calling 32-core Naples server chips "4 glued-together desktop die". That could have something to do with AMD's chips matching Intel's performance on certain workloads at around half the price.

Also at CNET, The Verge, and Ars Technica.

Previously: CPU Rumor Mill: Intel Core i9, AMD Ryzen 9, and AMD "Starship"
Intel Announces 4 to 18-Core Skylake-X CPUs
Intel Core i9-7900X Reviewed: Hotter and More Expensive than AMD Ryzen 1800X for Small Gains
AMD Epyc 7000-Series Launched With Up to 32 Cores

Original Submission