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takyon writes:

Off-shore aquaculture using existing technologies could provide the entire world's seafood needs using a very small percentage of the global ocean area, although economic, environmental, and social constraints still exist:

Mapping the global potential for marine aquaculture (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0257-9) (DX)

Here, we map the biological production potential for marine aquaculture across the globe using an innovative approach that draws from physiology, allometry and growth theory. Even after applying substantial constraints based on existing ocean uses and limitations, we find vast areas in nearly every coastal country that are suitable for aquaculture. The development potential far exceeds the space required to meet foreseeable seafood demand; indeed, the current total landings of all wild-capture fisheries could be produced using less than 0.015% of the global ocean area. This analysis demonstrates that suitable space is unlikely to limit marine aquaculture development and highlights the role that other factors, such as economics and governance, play in shaping growth trajectories. We suggest that the vast amount of space suitable for marine aquaculture presents an opportunity for countries to develop aquaculture in a way that aligns with their economic, environmental and social objectives.

[...] We found that over 11,400,000 km² are potentially suitable for fish and over 1,500,000 km² could be developed for bivalves. Both fish and bivalve aquaculture showed expansive potential across the globe, including both tropical and temperate countries (Figs. 1 and 2 and Supplementary Table 3). However, as would be predicted by metabolic theory, many of the areas with the highest GPI were located in warm, tropical regions. The total potential production is considerable: if all areas designated as suitable in this analysis were developed (assuming no further economic, environmental or social constraints), we estimate that approximately 15 billion tonnes of finfish could be grown every year—over 100 times the current global seafood consumption.

Found at NextBigFuture.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Long distance trucking is a grossly inefficient way to move goods from one place to another. But the state of Hesse in Germany is about to embark on a trial which could help improve that inefficiency considerably. As business Green reports, 10 km of highway in Hesse will soon be equipped with overhead charging cables to be used by hybrid trucks to run on electricity when juice is available, and to switch back to diesel when it's not. It's all part of Siemens' eHighway initiative which the company claims would double energy efficiency compared running on gas, and slash emissions even more if those cables are charged from renewables.

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takyon writes:

Four people have been arrested in connection with the leak of S07E04 of Game of Thrones:

An India-based media technology company said Wednesday that it regrets the recent leak of an episode of the popular HBO series Game of Thrones by four of its current and former employees.

Indian police have detained the four suspects, but said their motive for leaking the episode titled The Spoils of War was unclear. The fourth episode in the television series' seventh season leaked three days before its planned Aug. 6 air date and quickly circulated online.

And now, here comes S07E06:

HBO in Spain has aired, apparently by mistake, the sixth episode of Games of Thrones' seventh season a week ahead of schedule.

The episode was available to Spanish subscribers early Tuesday for about an hour before being removed. The 71-minute episode is due to be officially available Aug. 21.

Previously: HBO Hacked, Leak of Game of Thrones s07e04 Unrelated

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canopic jug writes:

Caitlin Johnstone writes in a blog post over at Medium that corporate censorship is ramping up while people are distracted by the menace of government censorship.

It is true that it is the most controversial and repulsive speech which is most severely in need of protection, and that a government which is granted the power to silence Nazis can be expected to use that power to silence political dissent. But there is no danger of this ever happening in the United States, because corporate censorship can be used to silence anti-establishment voices with far less pushback.

Egged on by the resurfacing of obnoxious and sometimes illegal groups, more groups are pushing for, and sometimes getting, full online silence from other voices. Those in power will have corporations do any of the dirty work that might generate push back.

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takyon writes:

Following a number of CEOs pulling out of President Trump's American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum, President Trump tweeted that the initiatives have been ended:

Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!

The CEOs of Merck, Intel, 3M, and other companies had already left:

3M Co. Chief Executive Officer Inge Thulin stepped down from the White House's manufacturing council, adding to the corporate exodus as the backlash grows to President Donald Trump's ambivalent response to racially-charged violence in Virginia over the weekend.

Thulin joined the White House panel in January "to advocate for policies that align with our values and encourage even stronger investment and job growth -- in order to make the United States stronger, healthier and more prosperous," the CEO said Wednesday in a statement tweeted by 3M. "After careful consideration, I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance these goals."

Update: The members of the Strategic and Policy Forum reportedly disbanded the group before President Trump's tweet:

The quick sequence began late Wednesday morning when Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump's closest confidants in the business community, organized a conference call for members of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum. On the call, the chief executives of some of the largest companies in the country debated how to proceed. After a discussion among a dozen prominent C.E.O.s, the decision was made to abandon the group altogether, said people with knowledge of the details of the call.

Also at Bloomberg:

Trump made the announcement on Twitter, less than an hour after one of the groups was said to be planning to inform the White House that it would break up. [...] Trump appeared to be making an effort to get ahead of the news as the councils began to disintegrate. The strategy forum, which is led by Blackstone Group LP's Stephen Schwarzman, planned to inform the White House Wednesday before making the announcement public, according to another person familiar with the matter, who wasn't authorized to discuss the news publicly.

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Zipf writes:

When I was hired, my firm had its main office in the suburbs. I felt pretty good about the location and environment and purchased a house nearby. At that time, many employees and managers lived in the area. Since then, the firm has changed hands, and the original office space, as part of an ineffectual cost-saving move, has been reduced in half. Ineffectual because the new lease no longer included utilities. The "savings" were spent opening a new office in the city, and a bunch of young sales hires were made for a small bullpen type office. There are no cubicles in the city, and the few offices are reserved for a handful of lucky first movers. Now they are looking for cost savings again. The firm's plan is to shut down the office in suburbia because "having everyone in the same location inspires the best ideas."

Can someone point to some research (e.g., from HBR [Harvard Business Review] or similar) indicating that R&D teams may be best served by being in distraction-free environments separated from the gossip and hubbub of sales? Or that accommodating workers who want to be away from the city may save on labor expenses and employee turnover?

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janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Physicists at the University of Bonn have managed to create optical hollows and more complex patterns into which the light of a Bose-Einstein condensate flows. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new generation of computers. The researchers are now presenting their results in the journal Nature Photonics.

Light particles (photons) occur as tiny, indivisible portions. Many thousands of these light portions can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled.

The artist's rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green).

The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates.

Prof. Martin Weitz from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn attracted attention among experts in 2010 when he produced a Bose-Einstein condensate from photons for the first time.

In his latest study, Prof. Weitz' team experimented with this kind of super-photon. In the experimental setup, a laser beam was rapidly bounced back and forth between two mirrors. In between was a pigment that cooled the laser light to such an extent that a super-photon was created from the individual light portions. "The special thing is that we have built a kind of optical well in various forms, into which the Bose-Einstein condensate was able to flow," reports Weitz.

Journal Reference: David Dung, Christian Kurtscheid, Tobias Damm, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger, Martin Weitz & Jan Klärs: Variable Potentials for Thermalized Light and Coupled Condensates, Nature Photonics, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2017.139

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UCLA researchers have discovered a new way to activate the stem cells in the hair follicle to make hair grow. The research, led by scientists Heather Christofk and William Lowry, may lead to new drugs that could promote hair growth for people with baldness or alopecia, which is hair loss associated with such factors as hormonal imbalance, stress, aging or chemotherapy treatment.

The research was published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

[...] Cellular metabolism involves the breakdown of the nutrients needed for cells to divide, make energy and respond to their environment. The process of metabolism uses enzymes that alter these nutrients to produce "metabolites." As hair follicle stem cells consume the nutrient glucose -- a form of sugar -- from the bloodstream, they process the glucose to eventually produce a metabolite called pyruvate. The cells then can either send pyruvate to their mitochondria -- the part of the cell that creates energy -- or can convert pyruvate into another metabolite called lactate.

"Our observations about hair follicle stem cell metabolism prompted us to examine whether genetically diminishing the entry of pyruvate into the mitochondria would force hair follicle stem cells to make more lactate, and if that would activate the cells and grow hair more quickly," said Christofk, an associate professor of biological chemistry and molecular and medical pharmacology.

The research team first blocked the production of lactate genetically in mice and showed that this prevented hair follicle stem cell activation. Conversely, in collaboration with the Rutter lab at University of Utah, they increased lactate production genetically in the mice and this accelerated hair follicle stem cell activation, increasing the hair cycle.

davidjohnpaul writes:

In further proof that security's only as strong as the weakest link, an Internet-connected fish tank has been used to gain access to a casino's internal network. While exact details have not been published, it has been claimed that 10 GB of data were sent outside the network. As more things become Internet-connected, it's likely these stories will become even more common.

Hackers are constantly looking for new ways to access people's data. Most recently, the way was as simple as a fish tank.

The hackers attempted to acquire data from a North American casino by using an Internet-connected fish tank, according to a report released Thursday by cybersecurity firm Darktrace.

The fish tank had sensors connected to a PC that regulated the temperature, food and cleanliness of the tank.

"Somebody got into the fish tank and used it to move around into other areas (of the network) and sent out data," said Justin Fier, Darktrace's director of cyber intelligence.

The casino's name and the type of data stolen were not disclosed in the report for security reasons, Darktrace said. The report said 10 GB of data were sent out to a device in Finland.

"This one is the most entertaining and clever thinking by hackers I've seen," said Hemu Nigam, a former federal prosecutor for computer crimes and current chief executive of SSP Blue, a cybersecurity company.

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takyon writes:

Uber has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges related to the privacy of its customers' data:

Uber Technologies, Inc. has agreed to implement a comprehensive privacy program and obtain regular, independent audits to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the ride-sharing company deceived consumers by failing to monitor employee access to consumer personal information and by failing to reasonably secure sensitive consumer data stored in the cloud.

In its complaint, the FTC alleged that the San Francisco-based firm failed to live up to its claims that it closely monitored employee access to consumer and driver data and that it deployed reasonable measures to secure personal information it stored on a third-party cloud provider's servers.

"Uber failed consumers in two key ways: First by misrepresenting the extent to which it monitored its employees' access to personal information about users and drivers, and second by misrepresenting that it took reasonable steps to secure that data," said FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. "This case shows that, even if you're a fast growing company, you can't leave consumers behind: you must honor your privacy and security promises."

Wait a second, will Uber even exist in 20 years?

Also at Reuters, Ars Technica, TechCrunch and NYT.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.

This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.

This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Millions of people die every year from dehydration as a result of exposure and illness. In humans, even the most minor dehydration can compromise the kidneys causing lifelong, irreparable issues or even death. However, some animals living in desert environments are able to survive both acute and chronic dehydration. While these animals, like cactus mice, have evolved over time to deal with environmental stressors like dehydration, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found it's not the physical makeup that is helping them survive, but rather their genetic makeup.

"Initially, we thought that maybe their kidneys are structurally different from people, but they're not," said Matt MacManes, assistant professor of genome enabled biology at UNH and lead author of the study. "However, when exposed to acute dehydration, no kidney injury was apparent, which would definitely be the case for humans exposed to similar levels of dehydration, suggesting their genes may be what's preventing widespread kidney damage."

"The kidney is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to dehydration," continues MacManes. "The exciting outcome of this research is that the molecular toolkit of the cactus mouse has orthologues, or related genes, in humans. These provide the potential for development of drugs or other therapies that could help protect the human body from the damages of dehydration." Such a response could be extremely valuable in a wide variety of situations -- for people with renal failure, where water is severally limited due to geography or possibly global climate change, for troops deployed in the desert, and perhaps even in space travel.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference: Matthew David MacManes. Severe acute dehydration in a desert rodent elicits a transcriptional response that effectively prevents kidney injury. American Journal of Physiology - Renal Physiology, 2017; 313 (2): F262 DOI: 10.1152/ajprenal.00067.2017

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takyon writes:

NASA sent rodents to infest the ISS along with an HPE supercomputer:

NASA's future deep space exploration – including to Mars – is an unprecedented venture in spaceflight, requiring us to tackle challenges we've never faced before. For instance, we know the human body changes significantly while in space, and we'll need to find ways to address those effects. NASA is conducting research to learn more about the long-term impact of extended human spaceflight. One experiment that just launched, Rodent Research-9, is contributing to this goal by sending rodents to the International Space Station, to study how a lack of gravity in space affects blood vessels, eyes and joints.

Using transport and habitat technology developed at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, the mice will fly to the space station aboard the 12th SpaceX resupply mission, and return to Earth about a month later. Due to biological similarities to humans, the mouse is a good choice of model organism for research aimed at understanding biological changes caused by the space environment. By studying rodents in the short term, NASA can make predictions about long-term human biological change in space, with applications here on Earth as well.

[...] For Rodent Research-9, the agency's space biology program is sponsoring three scientists from different universities to address different issues. NASA's bio-specimen sharing allows the three investigators to work with the same group of mice, without having to send three different missions to the space station. The three complementary research investigations will be combined into one cost-effective mission, addressing questions that are fundamental to human space exploration.

Rodents, meet human guinea pigs.

Technical mission page. Story reprint.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel will announce its Coffee Lake processors on August 21. They will be the last generation of 14nm(++) Core processors before 10nm Cannon Lake and Ice Lake, which is described as using a "10nm+" process:

In an unusual move for Intel, the chip giant has ever so slightly taken the wraps off of one of their future generation Core architectures. Basic information on the Ice Lake architecture has been published over on Intel's codename decoder, officially confirming for the first time the existence of the architecture and that it will be made on Intel's 10nm+ process.

The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th generation Intel® Core™ processor family. These processors utilize Intel's industry-leading 10 nm+ process technology.

This is an unexpected development as the company has yet to formally detail (let alone launch) the first 10nm Core architecture – Cannon Lake – and it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. Equally as interesting is the fact that Intel is calling Ice Lake the successor to their upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake processors, which codename bingo aside, throws some confusion on where the 14nm Coffee Lake and 10nm Cannon Lake will eventually stand.

[...] Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel's Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++.

Tick Tock has given way to plus signs everywhere.

Coffee Lake will include the first mainstream 6-core chips from Intel, including the Intel Core i5-8600K and i7-8700K.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

South Carolina has become the sixth U.S. state to sue opioid makers over their marketing practices and contribution to the opioid epidemic:

The lawsuit by South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, filed in Richland County Court of Common Pleas in Columbia, accuses the company of the unfair and deceptive marketing of opioid painkillers. Wilson claimed Purdue has told doctors that patients who receive prescriptions for opioids generally will not become addicted and those who appeared to be were only "pseudoaddicted" and needed more of the drugs.

[...] Since a 2007 settlement with South Carolina, Purdue has continued to downplay the addictiveness of its opioid products and overstated the benefits compared to other pain management treatments, according to the lawsuit. "While there is a time and place for patients to receive opioids, Purdue prevented doctors and patients from receiving complete and accurate information about opioids in order to make informed choices about their treatment options," Wilson said in a statement.

Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue denied the allegations and said it shares the concerns of South Carolina officials about the crisis and is committed to finding solutions. Purdue and other drugmakers have been sued over opioid products by Oklahoma, Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri and New Hampshire as well as cities and counties in California, Illinois, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and New York.

Is this Big Pharma's Tobacco Moment?

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takyon writes:

Unsealed court filings in the Waymo vs. Uber case include texts between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski, the engineer accused of stealing secrets from Waymo/Google:

On March 19, 2016, before Uber acquired Otto, Levandowski and Kalanick exchanged messages catching up on their recent "jam" session. The pair were apparently trying to prod an engineer, whose name is redacted in the filings.

"Internet, electricity, self driving cars and key things will always find a way," Levandowski texted Kalanick, linking to a YouTube clip from the 1987 movie "Wall Street." In the clip, the main character gives a famous speech of why "greed is good." "Here's the speech you need to give ;-)."

Kalanick briefly updated Levandowski on Uber's food delivery business, then wrote, "The way you keep China in check is showing up when they ask every once in a while."

But Uber was losing $1 billion a year in China, and by August, Uber sold its Chinese business to rival Didi Chuxing.

Kalanick was also eager to partner with Google as it sought to enter into the ride-hailing market, and dismissive of Tesla's autonomous mode safety claims.

The best exchanges:

9/19/2016 Levandowski: We're going to take over the world

9/19/2016 Levandowski: One robot at a time

10/7/2016 Kalanick: Down to hang this eve and mastermind some shit

Original Submission