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We've had multiple submissions on the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacists and counter-protesters. We lead off with a submission about the altercation which culminated with a car driven into a crowd which left 1 person dead and 19 injured. Then we continue with GoDaddy informing dailystormer.com — a white supremacist web site which called for the rally — that they had 24 hours to find another registrar for their site. They signed up with Google's domain registration service. Now there are reports that Google, too, has dropped the registration.

This story could very well cause a lot of heat, but it is my hope we can look beyond the details of this particular situation and focus discussion on the overriding questions of freedom of speech/publication raised by one of the submitters and the implications it may lead to. This saying comes to mind: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

takyon writes:

AMD's new Vega 64 GPU offers comparable performance at a similar price to Nvidia's GTX 1080, which was released over a year ago. But it does so while consuming a lot more power under load (over 100 Watts more). Vega 56, however, runs faster than the GTX 1070 at a slightly lower price:

So how does AMD fare? The answer to that is ultimately going to hinge on your option on power efficiency. But before we get too far, let's start with the Radeon RX Vega 64, AMD's flagship card. Previously we've been told that it would trade blows with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, and indeed it does just that. At 3840x2160, the Vega 64 is on average neck-and-neck with the GeForce GTX 1080 in gaming performance, with the two cards routinely trading the lead, and AMD holding it more often. Of course the "anything but identical" principle applies here, as while the cards are equal on average, they can sometimes be quite far apart on individual games.

Unfortunately for AMD, their GTX 1080-like performance doesn't come cheap from a power perspective. The Vega 64 has a board power rating of 295W, and it lives up to that rating. Relative to the GeForce GTX 1080, we've seen power measurements at the wall anywhere between 110W and 150W higher than the GeForce GTX 1080, all for the same performance. Thankfully for AMD, buyers are focused on price and performance first and foremost (and in that order), so if all you're looking for is a fast AMD card at a reasonable price, the Vega 64 delivers where it needs to: it is a solid AMD counterpart to the GeForce GTX 1080. However if you care about the power consumption and the heat generated by your GPU, the Vega 64 is in a very rough spot.

On the other hand, the Radeon RX Vega 56 looks better for AMD, so it's easy to see why in recent days they have shifted their promotional efforts to the cheaper member of the RX Vega family. Though a step down from the RX Vega 64, the Vega 56 delivers around 90% of Vega 64's performance for 80% of the price. Furthermore, when compared head-to-head with the GeForce GTX 1070, its closest competition, the Vega 56 enjoys a small but none the less significant 8% performance advantage over its NVIDIA counterpart. Whereas the Vega 64 could only draw to a tie, the Vega 56 can win in its market segment.

[...] The one wildcard here with the RX Vega 56 is going to be where retail prices actually end up. AMD's $399 MSRP is rather aggressive, especially when GTX 1070 cards are retailing for closer to $449 due to cryptocurrency miner demand. If they can sustain that price, then Vega 56 is going to be real hot stuff, besting GTX 1070 in price and performance. Otherwise at GTX 1070-like prices it still has the performance advantage, but not the initiative on pricing. At any rate, this is a question we can't answer today; the Vega 56 won't be launching for another two weeks.

Both the Vega 64 and Vega 56 include 8 GB of HBM2 memory.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

Previously: AMD Unveils the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
AMD Launches the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56 Announced

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/how-gone-homes-creators-rewound-time-to-find-their-sci-fi-future/

At most offices, the employees don't take kindly to a stranger rifling through their personal and professional effects. But most offices aren't Fullbright.

You may best know this game-development studio as the makers of Gone Home, the 2013 video game that ushered in a new era of "interactive narrative" hits. Gone Home focused on characters and plot, not action and puzzles, as its audience slowly uncovered a mysterious—and personal—story through found objects. Delightfully, similar things can be said for the company's follow-up game, Tacoma, out this week on Xbox One and Windows PCs.

I was fortunate enough to be invited into the studio's modest warehouse office space just outside downtown Portland. And between interviews, I busied myself by being a total snoop. I opened up books, flipped through greeting cards, examined toy dioramas, peered at screens, and cataloged entire walls of private notes.

The six employees on hand that day, including studio co-founders and directors Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja, didn't complain. I figured they were distracted with work on last-minute tweaks and fixes, but later I realized something else was going on. Gaynor and Zimonja have a long history of littering their games' floors, tables, and cabinets with juicy bits of story. Bioshock 2 (and its beloved, weird DLC pack, Minerva's Den) did this with audio diaries and reflective story moments. Gone Home had crumpled letters and secret family discoveries. And now, the studio's triumphant return to form, Tacoma, adds time-shifting and augmented-reality twists to Fullbright's enticing storytelling formula.

This game studio had simply trained me to do what I was doing: to pick through its belongings; to find the stories hidden in the cracks; to replay the past.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Neutrinos and antineutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles because [they are so] difficult to detect, can transform from one type to another. The international T2K Collaboration announces a first indication that the dominance of matter over antimatter may originate from the fact that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently during those oscillations. This is an important milestone towards the understanding of our Universe. A team of particle physicists from the University of Bern provided important contributions to the experiment.

The Universe is primarily made of matter and the apparent lack of antimatter is one of the most intriguing questions of today's science. The T2K collaboration, with participation of the group of the University of Bern, announced today in a colloquium held at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, that it found indication that the symmetry between matter and antimatter (so called "CP-Symmetry") is violated for neutrinos with 95% probability.

http://www.unibe.ch/news/media_news/media_relations_e/media_releases/2017_e/media_releases_2017/possible_explanation_for_the_dominance_of_matter_over_antimatter_in_the_universe/index_eng.html

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

UCLA scientists report the first evidence that a gene outside the brain controls the ability to rebound from sleep deprivation — a surprising discovery that could eventually lead to greatly improved treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders that do not involve getting a drug into the brain.

The scientists report that increasing the level of Bmal1 — a critical master gene that regulates sleep patterns — in skeletal muscle makes mice resistant to sleep deprivation.

"When we first saw the importance of the muscle, we were surprised," said senior author Ketema Paul, UCLA associate professor of integrative biology and physiology. "At first we didn't believe it, so we repeated the experiment several times. We finally realized this is not a mistake; this is real."

The research, published in the journal eLife, is the first evidence that a biological clock in the muscle can communicate with the brain, and is potentially good news for people who lose sleep because of factors including a crying newborn or a job that does not allow for normal sleep cycles, such as active military service.

Chronic sleep deprivation increases the risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, infectious diseases and other illnesses, said Paul, a neurobiologist and member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute. Having a resistance to sleep loss may reduce the risk of getting these diseases, Paul said, and his team reports evidence that increased Bmal1 in the skeletal muscle may provide this resistance.

Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/sleep-biology-discovery-could-lead-to-new-insomnia-treatments-that-dont-target-the-brain

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Ed note: Please accept my apologies for messing up the scheduling of this story. This story was supposed to post prior to launch, but an error on my part scheduled it afterwards. Note: the launch was successful, booster rocket landed back at the landing site on land, and the Dragon capsule has deployed without issue.]

According to Ars Technica, After a Month-Long Break, SpaceX Aims to Return to Flight Monday:

After standing down for a month due to Air Force maintenance on the launch range along the US East Coast, SpaceX will attempt to return to flight on Monday. Provided the weather and spacecraft cooperate, the company will launch a Dragon carrying about 3 tons of cargo to the International Space Station. Launch time is set for 12:31pm ET, and there is a 70-percent chance of "go" conditions for the instantaneous launch window.

This will be SpaceX's 11th launch attempt of 2017, with the company already having flown more rockets into space this year than in any previous calendar year. It last flew on July 5, when a Falcon 9 rocket lifted the very heavy Intelsat 35e communications satellite, nearly 7 tons, to geostationary orbit. Because the Dragon spacecraft is only going to low Earth orbit, the Falcon 9 rocket flying Monday will have plenty of propellant left behind to attempt a return to Landing Zone 1, along the Florida Coast.

According to the company, this will also be the last time a "new" Dragon cargo spacecraft flies into space. Future cargo missions will be fulfilled with refurbished Dragons that the company recovers after water landings in the Pacific Ocean. This change should allow the company to move into production of crew variants of the Dragon spacecraft.

Spaceflight Now has a timeline of the launch attempt.

SpaceX's YouTube channel will be hosting a live webcast of the launch and booster recovery.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Great 78 Project over at the Internet Archive has been professionally digitizing old 78 RPM records for a while now. These records were all made between 1898 and sometime in the 1950s. Over 20 collections have been selected for digital access and physical preservation with the help of George Blood, L.P. and the Archive of Contemporary Music. So far about 26,000 of the 78s have been added to the Internet Archive. Each disc has about 3 minutes of audio per side. Most of the discs are made from shellac and really quite brittle, perhaps even more brittle than today's digital formats.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Islamic State allegedly used PayPal and fake eBay transactions to channel money to an operative in the US, The Wall Street Journal reports. The man who allegedly received the money was American citizen Mohamed Elshinawy, who was arrested last year in Maryland. The FBI claims that Elshinawy, in his early 30s, sold computer printers on eBay as a front in order to receive the payments through PayPal.

The details have come to light because of a recently unsealed FBI affidavit, which alleges Elshinawy was part of a worldwide network that used such channels to fund ISIS. Elshinawy received $8,700 from ISIS, including five PayPal payments from senior ISIS official Siful Sujan through his technology company. Those funds were used to buy a laptop, a cellphone, and a VPN to communicate with IS, according to the affidavit. Sujan was killed in a drone strike in 2015.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/11/16130154/islamic-state-ebay-paypal-money-us

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

The Atlantic has an article on Dan McLaughlin, the "average guy" who spent six thousand hours working on becoming a professional golfer

Seven-plus years ago, aged 30 and unsure even of which hand to grip a golf club in, McLaughlin quit his job as a commercial photographer, took in lodgers to cover the mortgage, husbanded his savings for green fees, and set out to make the PGA Tour, home to the world's elite golfers.

He created a catchily named blog to document his quest, and in short order the Dan Plan commanded magazines spreads and TV spots. Along the way, it drew an avid community of followers riveted by the spectacle of a regular Joe living out an everyman fantasy. No less captivated: a salon of leading figures from the science of learning and human performance.

What could you achieve if you committed to something completely, all-in, no excuses? How far could you go? For five years, McLaughlin cast everything else aside—career, money, even relationships—to put this to the test. But then his back gave out. He pushed himself to the limit and still came up short.

The article follows Dan's attempt to follow the idea, popularised in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, that 10,000 hours of practice is the main factor in developing any skill to world class expertise.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Over at Hackaday is a pointer to The Heritage Crafts Association list of endangered crafts:

The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation and mass production, and today very few of the products you use will be hand-made. There may still be a few craftsmen with the skills to produce them by hand, but in the face of the mass-produced alternative there is little business for them and they are in inevitable decline. In an effort to do something about this and save what skills remain, the Heritage Crafts Association in the UK has published a list of dying crafts, that you can view either alphabetically, or by category of risk.

It’s a list with a British flavour as you might expect from the organisation behind it, after all for example hand stitched cricket balls are not in high demand in the Americas. But it serves also as a catalogue of some fascinating crafts, as well as plenty that will undoubtedly be of interest to Hackaday readers.

Obviously this is UK specific, as many of these crafts survive elsewhere in the world. However the links to individual crafts provide the history, techniques, and further background on each area. The hackaday comment threads also contain some additional suggestions.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

TRAPPIST-1 was known to be at least 500 million years old. Now astronomers estimate it to be between 5.4 and 9.8 billion years old:

Scientists now have a good estimate for the age of one of the most intriguing planetary systems discovered to date– TRAPPIST-1, a system of seven Earth-size worlds orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star about 40 light-years away. Researchers say in a new study that the TRAPPIST-1 star is quite old: between 5.4 and 9.8 billion years. This is up to twice as old as our own solar system, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

[...] At the time of its discovery, scientists believed the TRAPPIST-1 system had to be at least 500 million years old, since it takes stars of TRAPPIST-1's low mass (roughly 8 percent that of the Sun) roughly that long to contract to its minimum size, just a bit larger than the planet Jupiter. However, even this lower age limit was uncertain; in theory, the star could be almost as old as the universe itself. Are the orbits of this compact system of planets stable? Might life have enough time to evolve on any of these worlds?

Previously:
Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets, Including Three Potentially Habitable, Identified Around TRAPPIST-1
TRAPPIST-1h Orbital Details Confirmed

Original Submission

tonyPick submitted a story that was rewritten to become:

[Ed note: Let's preface this story with the reality that this is, in reality, a question that cannot be answered - how may warheads will be fired, where will they land, what are the weather conditions? That stated, it is an interesting thought experiment and understanding the actual science behind the question can take us away from emotional appeals to a more nuanced understanding of the actual risks. --martyb]

There's an interesting pair of articles over at The Conversation which discuss the potential impacts of smaller scale nuclear conflicts, the perceptions of them, and the risks involved in even localised conflicts.

Initially Mattia Eken argued in March that the threat is often exaggerated and overhyped:

"exec" writes:

Since 2009, hospital intensive care units have witnessed a stark increase in opioid-related admissions and deaths, according to new study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s (BIDMC) Center for Healthcare Delivery Science. Published online today ahead of print in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, the study is believed to be the first to quantify the impact of opioid abuse on critical care resources in the United States. The findings reveal that opioid-related demand for acute care services has outstripped the available supply.

Analyzing data from the period between January 1, 2009 and September 31, 2015, the researchers documented a 34 percent increase in overdose-related ICU admissions. The average cost of care per ICU overdose admissions rose by 58 percent, from $58,517 in 2009 to $92,408 in 2015 (in 2015 dollars). Meanwhile opioid deaths in the ICU nearly doubled during that same period. "This study tells us that the opioid epidemic has made people sicker and killed more people, in spite of all the care we can provide in the ICU, including mechanical ventilation, acute dialysis, life support and round-the-clock care," said the study's lead author, Jennifer P. Stevens, MD, associate director of the medical intensive care unit at BIDMC and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[...] These data not only document the scope of the opioid abuse epidemic, they also reveal its complexity. Stevens and colleagues suggest that any opioid overdose-related admission is a preventable one, and that the team's findings not only represent the need for increased acute care resources, but also for expanded opioid-abuse prevention and treatment.

The article is paywalled but there is an abstract: The Critical Care Crisis of Opioid Overdoses in the United States

Source

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

From: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/11/why-hpe-is-sending-a-supercomputer-to-the-iss-on-spacexs-next-rocket/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sending a supercomputer to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's next resupply mission for NASA, which is currently set to launch Monday.

Officially named the "Spaceborne Computer," the Linux-based supercomputer is designed to serve in a one year experiment conducted by NASA and HPE to find out if high performance computing hardware, with no hardware customization or modification, can survive and operate in outer space conditions for a full year – the length of time, not coincidentally, it'll likely take for a crewed spacecraft to make the trip to Mars.

Typically, computers used on the ISS have to be "hardened," explained Dr. Mark Fernandez, who led the effort on the HPE side as lead payload engineer. This process involves extensive hardware modifications made to the high-performance computing (HPC) device, which incur a lot of additional cost, time and effort. One unfortunate result of the need for this physical ruggedization process is that HPCs used in space are often generations behind those used on Earth, and that means a lot of advanced computing tasks end up being shuttled off the ISS to Earth, with the results then round-tripped back to astronaut scientists in space.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A University of Arkansas mathematician argues that species, such as ours, go extinct soon after attaining high levels of technology.

"I taught astronomy for 37 years," said Whitmire. "I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years."

Recently, however, he's changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity – the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical – Whitmire has concluded that instead of lagging behind, our species may be average. That's not good news.

[...] The argument is based on two observations: We are the first technological species to evolve on Earth, and we are early in our technological development.

[...] By Whitmire's definition we became "technological" after the industrial revolution and the invention of radio, or roughly 100 years ago. According to the principle of mediocrity, a bell curve of the ages of all extant technological civilizations in the universe would put us in the middle 95 percent. In other words, technological civilizations that last millions of years, or longer, would be highly atypical. Since we are first, other typical technological civilizations should also be first. The principle of mediocrity allows no second acts. The implication is that once species become technological, they flame out and take the biosphere with them.

Source: The Implications of Cosmic Silence

For background, see: Fermi's Paradox and the Drake equation.

Original Submission