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Whoever writes:

The lawmakers in Wisconsin voted in favor of an incentives package worth up to $3B for Foxconn. The total value of the package depends on the number of jobs that Foxconn creates in the state, so, effectively, the state is paying about $500,000 for each new job.

Most of the incentive is in the form of cash payments from the state to Foxconn, not just tax waivers. The cost to the residents of the state is about $1,200 per household.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40890714

Scientists have solved the puzzle of the so-called "Frankenstein dinosaur", which seems to consist of body parts from unrelated species. A new study suggests that it is in fact the missing link between plant-eating dinosaurs, such as Stegosaurus, and carnivorous dinosaurs, like T. rex. The finding provides fresh insight on the evolution of the group of dinos known as the ornithischians. The study is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters [open, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0220] [DX].

[...] The Frankenstein dinosaur, more properly called Chilesaurus, puzzled experts when it was first discovered two years ago. It had the legs of an animal like a Brontosaurus, the hips of a Stegosaurus, and the arms and body of an animal like Tyrannosaurus rex. Scientists simply did not know where it fitted in the dino family tree. In the currently accepted family tree, the ornithischian group was always thought to be completely unrelated to all of the other dinosaurs. Palaeontologists regarded these creatures as an odd-ball group. But a reassessment by Mr Baron published in March in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/nature21700] [DX] indicated that ornithischians were more closely related to the meat-eaters, such as T.rex, than previously thought.

Also at Science Magazine.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nestle is being sued over the origins of Poland Spring Water:

Nestle's marketing and sales of Poland Spring water has been "a colossal fraud perpetrated against American consumers," 11 people claim in a federal class action. Filing their suit Tuesday in Connecticut, where Nestle is based, the lead plaintiffs are from the Nutmeg State as well as New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. They say they would not have paid a premium for the water had they known it did not actually come from eight purported natural springs in Maine.

Rather than being "100% Natural Spring Water," the "products all contain ordinary groundwater that defendant collects from wells it drilled in saturated plains or valleys where the water table is within a few feet of the earth's surface," lead plaintiff Mark J. Patane says in the complaint. "The vast bulk of that groundwater is collected from Maine's most populous counties in southwestern Maine, only a short distance from the New Hampshire border," the complaint continues.

As required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, all bottled spring water must be collected either at the source of a naturally occurring spring or from a well that draws from a natural spring. "In hydro-geological parlance, all such well water must be 'hydraulically connected' to a genuine spring," the complaint states. But the class says that's not the case for defendant Nestle Waters North America's eight sites in Maine.

Nestle rebuttal.

People will pay for water in a bottle?!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Oxford researchers [...] (Vincent Taylor, Alastair Beresford and Ivan Martinovic) [...] [looked] at how the same library in two different apps could expose information from a higher-privilege app to one with lower privilege.

They write that this “intra-library collusion” (ILC) happens “when individual libraries obtain greater combined privileges on a device by virtue of being embedded within multiple apps, with each app having a distinct set of permissions granted”.

As the paper explains, shared libraries can borrow permissions an app doesn't have [...] That's a threat, because library re-use across different apps isn't a bug, it's a feature: it makes app development more efficient and keeps apps small by letting them use code pre-loaded to a device.

While noting that attackers are standardising their own libraries, the researchers focussed their effort on advertising libraries [...] handling location, app usage, device information, communication data like call logs and messages, access to storage (including, for example, a user's files which can indicate their interests), and the microphone.

Of more than 15,000 apps with more than a million downloads, the researchers went to work decompiling apps to identify the libraries they linked to. Those they successfully decompiled, they analysed for their intra-library collusion potential.

The 18 most popular libraries include familiar names:

canopic jug submitted a story which was edited to become:

A basic right in the U.S.A. has been the Freedom of Speech, yet of late it has been under heavy threat. United States Foreign Service Officer (ret.) and author of Hooper's War Peter Van Buren at We Meant Well blogs about Five Bad Arguments to Restrict Speech.

"Open discussion, debate, and argument are the core of democracy. Bad ideas are defeated by good ideas. Fascism seeks to close off all ideas except its own."

The blog entry itself is rather long and contains numerous links to supporting material. Here is the list; below the fold includes an elaboration on the statement and a summary. Read the blog itself for more details and exposition.

1. The First Amendment Only Applies to Government?
2. What's Said May Provoke Violence in the Room (A Clear and Present Danger)
3. What's Said May Provoke Violence Outside (Public Safety)
4. Speech Can or Should Be Restricted Based on Content (Hate Speech)
5. Free Speech Should Not Be Subject to the Heckler's Veto

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA's Mars 2020 mission, which will look for signs of past life on Mars, will use smart methods originally developed to find the oldest life on Earth, according the mission's Deputy Project Scientist, Dr Ken Williford. The 2020 mission builds on the successes of prior rovers, to make coordinated measurements that could detect signs of ancient life - or biosignatures - in their original spatial context. These techniques, known as "spatially resolved biosignature analysis" derive from geochemical analysis of early life on Earth.

Speaking at the Goldschmidt conference in Paris where he is presenting the methods to be adopted, Dr Ken Williford (who is also Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Astrobiogeochemistry Laboratory) said:

[...] New scientific methods for searching for the most ancient evidence for life on Earth have led to a leap forward in capabilities for biosignature detection. Rather than using "bulk" geochemistry techniques that measure the average composition of a rock, Mars 2020 is developing new capabilities including X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy to map the elemental, mineral, and organic composition of rocks at high spatial resolution, with analytical spot sizes about the width of a human hair. Understanding the spatial distribution of chemical features preserved in ancient rocks is key to determining whether or not they were formed by life.

takyon writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/17/new-sperm-creation-method-could-overcome-genetic-male-infertility-study

A common genetic cause of male infertility has been overcome in mice using a technique that creates healthy sperm in the laboratory, scientists have shown. The research raises the future prospect of hope for men who cannot father children because they have three instead of two sex chromosomes. But such a treatment, even if shown to be safe, would not be allowed in the UK without a change in the law that bans the use of artificially produced sperm to make babies. An estimated one in 500 boys are born with an extra X or Y sex chromosome that can disrupt the formation of mature sperm, leading to infertility.

Scientists at London's Francis Crick Institute, working with Japanese colleagues, used a stem cell technique to produce sperm from small pieces of connective tissue taken from the ears of infertile male mice. The mice either had an extra female X or male Y chromosome in addition to the usual XX or XY pairing. During the process of transforming the fibroblast connective tissue cells into multi-purpose stem cells, some of the unwanted extra chromosomes were lost. The researchers selected those stem cells lacking the extra chromosome and used chemical signals to coax their development into immature sperm cells.

Once injected into the testes of a host mouse, the cells matured to become healthy and properly functioning sperm. These were then used to fertilise eggs and produce healthy, fertile offspring. Lead scientist Dr Takayuki Hirota, of the Francis Crick Institute, said: "Our approach allowed us to create offspring from sterile XXY and XYY mice. "It would be interesting to see whether the same approach could one day be used as a fertility treatment for men with three sex chromosomes."

Fertile offspring from sterile sex chromosome trisomic mice (DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9046) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A voting machine supplier for dozens of US states left records on 1.8 million Americans in public view for anyone to download – after misconfiguring its AWS-hosted storage.

ES&S says it was notified by UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery of the vulnerable database that contained personal information it collected from recent elections in Chicago, Illinois. The records included voters' names, addresses, dates of birth, and partial social security numbers. Some of the records also included drivers' licenses and state ID numbers.

"The backup files on the AWS server did not include any ballot information or vote totals and were not in any way connected to Chicago's voting or tabulation systems," ES&S said in a statement on Thursday.

[...] A spokesperson for UpGuard confirmed to The Register that the vulnerable service was an AWS S3 silo accidentally set up to be open to the public. Strangely, only Chicago's data was exposed by a misconfiguration.

[...] Chicago's election board, meanwhile, says it is "deeply troubled" to hear of the exposure, but applauded ES&S for taking quick action.

"We have been in steady contact with ES&S to order and review the steps that must be taken, including the investigation of ES&S’s AWS server," said Chicago Election Board chairwoman Marisel Hernandez in a statement.

"We will continue reviewing our contract, policies and practices with ES&S. We are taking steps to make certain this can never happen again.”

This isn't the first time UpGuard found voter data sitting out in the open on AWS. Earlier this year the security firm caught a Republican analytics company who failed to put any access restrictions on an S3 instance that contained the personal details of nearly 200 million US voters within a 1.1TB database collected prior to the 2016 presidential election. ®

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.space.com/37844-nasa-launches-communications-satellite-tdrs-m.html

TDRS-M is headed for geosynchronous orbit, about 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers) above Earth. It will join nine other operational spacecraft in NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation, which together allow the nearly continuous transmission of data from Hubble, the ISS and other near-Earth research and exploration craft to mission controllers on the ground.

The TDRS satellites and their associated ground terminals make up NASA's Space Network (not to be confused with the agency's Deep Space Network[¹], a different system that handles data from far-flung spacecraft such as the Cassini Saturn orbiter and the New Horizons probe).

"TDRS-M is going to be critical to our future operation and the future of the Space Network," Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation, said during a pre-launch news conference yesterday (Aug. 17).

Indeed, the newly launched satellite should allow the Space Network to continue supporting communications through at least the mid-2020s, NASA officials said.

Also at Spaceflight Now.

[¹ The Deep Space Network's activity is available online at https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html. --Ed.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/08/16/robots-ulcers-mice/

Tiny robots powered by bubbles have successfully treated an infection in mice.

The achievement is another step forward in a field that has long shown promise, and is only now beginning to deliver. The therapeutic robots in this case were tiny spheres of magnesium and titanium coated with an antibacterial agent and about the width of a human hair. They were released into the stomach, where they swam around and delivered a drug to the target before dissolving.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego targeted their treatment, which they refer to as "micromotors" to Helicobacter pylori, a species of bacteria that causes ulcers. To treat such infections, drugs must first neutralize the acidity of the stomach, something normally done with a class of drugs called proton pump inhibitors that stop acid production. This can have unpleasant side effects, however, so it's less than ideal.

The micromotors accomplish the same task by exploiting the reaction between magnesium and gastric acid, temporarily raising pH levels and creating bubbles of hydrogen that serve as propulsion for the tiny beads. A sticky coating on their surface allows them to stick to the walls of the stomach once they reach it, and when the pH level reaches a certain point, after about 20 minutes, the antibacterial agent is released into the stomach. After delivering their payload, the micromotors dissolve and the stomach returns to its normal acidity within a day.

Also at UC San Diego.

Micromotor-enabled active drug delivery for in vivo treatment of stomach infection (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00309-w) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Australian researchers hail breakthrough after ‘life-changing’ tolerance persists for up to four years

[...] A small clinical trial conducted at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute has led to two-thirds of children treated with an experimental immunotherapy treatment being cured of their allergy. Importantly, this desensitisation to peanuts persisted for up to four years after treatment.

“These children had been eating peanut freely in their diet without having to follow any particular program of peanut intake in the years after treatment was completed,” said the lead researcher, Prof Mimi Tang.

Peanut allergy is the most common cause of anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction, and one of the most common causes of death from food allergy.

To combat this Tang, an immunologist and allergist, pioneered a new form of treatment that combines a probiotic with peanut oral immunotherapy, known as PPOIT. Instead of avoiding the allergen, the treatment is designed to reprogram the immune system’s response to peanuts and eventually develop a tolerance.

[...] Forty-eight children were enrolled in the PPOIT trial and were randomly given either a combination of the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus with peanut protein in increasing amounts, or a placebo, once daily for 18 months.

At the end of the original trial in 2013, 82% of children who received the immunotherapy treatment were deemed tolerant to peanuts compared with just 4% in the placebo group.

Four years later, the majority of the children who gained initial tolerance were still eating peanuts as part of their normal diet and 70% passed a further challenge test to confirm long-term tolerance.

Tang said the results were exciting and had been life-changing for participants. “The way I see it is that we had children who came into the study allergic to peanuts, having to avoid peanuts in their diet, being very vigilant around that, carrying a lot of anxiety with that and, at the end of treatment and even four years later, many of these children who had benefited from our probiotic peanut therapy could now live like a child who didn’t have peanut allergy.”

[...] If confirmed by larger clinical studies, the broader hope is that this treatment can have an impact on the high rates of food allergy among children.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a new method to 3D-print laboratory- grown cells to form living structures.

The approach could revolutionise regenerative medicine, enabling the production of complex tissues and cartilage that would potentially support, repair or augment diseased and damaged areas of the body.

[...] In research published in the journal Scientific Reports, an interdisciplinary team from the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford and the Centre for Molecular Medicine at Bristol, demonstrated how a range of human and animal cells can be printed into high-resolution tissue constructs.

Interest in 3D printing living tissues has grown in recent years, but, developing an effective way to use the technology has been difficult, particularly since accurately controlling the position of cells in 3D is hard to do. They often move within printed structures and the soft scaffolding printed to support the cells can collapse on itself. As a result, it remains a challenge to print high-resolution living tissues.

[...] The cells were contained within protective nanolitre droplets wrapped in a lipid coating that could be assembled, layer-by-layer, into living structures. Producing printed tissues in this way improves the survival rate of the individual cells, and allowed the team to improve on current techniques by building each tissue one drop at a time to a more favourable resolution.

To be useful, artificial tissues need to be able to mimic the behaviours and functions of the human body. The method enables the fabrication of patterned cellular constructs, which, once fully grown, mimic or potentially enhance natural tissues.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Common phenomenon could be key to understanding mechanism of unconventional superconductivity

A potential new state of matter is being reported in the journal Nature, with research showing that among superconducting materials in high magnetic fields, the phenomenon of electronic symmetry breaking is common. The ability to find similarities and differences among classes of materials with phenomena such as this helps researchers establish the essential ingredients that cause novel functionalities such as superconductivity.

[...] The high-magnetic-field state of the heavy fermion superconductor CeRhIn₅ revealed a so-called electronic nematic state, in which the material's electrons aligned in a way to reduce the symmetry of the original crystal, something that now appears to be universal among unconventional superconductors. Unconventional superconductivity develops near a phase boundary separating magnetically ordered and magnetically disordered phases of a material.

"The appearance of the electronic alignment, called nematic behavior, in a prototypical heavy-fermion superconductor highlights the interrelation of nematicity and unconventional superconductivity, suggesting nematicity to be common among correlated superconducting materials," said Filip Ronning of Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead author on the paper. Heavy fermions are intermetallic compounds, containing rare earth or actinide elements.

"These heavy fermion materials have a different hierarchy of energy scales than is found in transition metal and organic materials, but they often have similar complex and intertwined physics coupling spin, charge and lattice degrees of freedom," he said.

The work was reported in Nature by staff from the Los Alamos Condensed Matter and Magnet Science group and collaborators.

stormwyrm writes:

Despite the recent whinging about whether or not the maps on the Pioneer and Voyager space probes might have been a big mistake that might lead to Earth being invaded by hostile aliens, it turns out that the pulsar maps included on these probes are actually worthless for determining the location of our Solar System. Pulsars were first discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, and at the time they were believed to be unique and stable landmarks suitable for that purpose. However, subsequent discoveries have shown that they are not actually as stable and reliable as they were first believed. Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang has an article on this:

[...] While fear-mongers foolishly claim that hostile aliens could follow the Voyager maps back to Earth, the maps themselves are actually among the most useless information aboard Voyager. According to Frank Drake, who worked on the Voyager message with Carl Sagan:

"We needed to put something on the Voyager that said where it came from, and how long it was traveling... There was a magic about pulsars ... no other things in the sky had such labels on them. Each one had its own distinct pulsing frequency, so it could be identified by anybody, including other creatures after a long period of time and far, far away."

Although these identifiers were thought to be unique and stable, we now know that long-term changes will render this map useless. If you tried to identify Earth by the presence of Pangaea, you'd be sorely disappointed. By sending the messages we did with Voyager, we actually delivered a much more challenging problem to any aliens "lucky" enough to come upon it. The idea to send pulsar positions and frequencies was a brilliant one, but by the time anyone receives it, they'll only encounter one of the most difficult-to-decipher riddles we could have possibly imposed.

In summary, it turns out that pulsars are far from being as unique, rare, and stable as they were believed to be in the 1970s when they came up with the idea. There are an estimated one billion neutron stars in the Milky Way, and almost all of these will look like pulsars somewhere in space because their spin and magnetic axes aren't perfectly aligned and so they will beam radio waves in some direction. The pulsar periods are also not as unique as they were at the time believed, so any extraterrestrial finding the Voyager plaque will have a hard time figuring out which fourteen pulsars out of a billion are described. Second, the properties of a pulsar can change in unpredictable fashion. Pulsars have since been observed to appear and disappear as the orientations of their spins relative to Earth change due to various factors, such as their motion in space and events internal to the pulsar itself such as starquakes and pulsar speedup. If one really wanted to tell aliens were we were it would have been better to give them a description of the Solar System, with the astronomical properties and description of our sun and the planets. It is, after all, how we identify exoplanet systems today.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Just when you thought that anime character designs couldn't get any more generic, machine learning comes to the rescue:

A collaborative team from Fudan University, Carnegie Mellon University, Tongji University and Stony Brook University have created a generative adversarial network (GAN) that can generate high-quality anime character drawings with just minimal input from humans. You can check the demonstration website and make your own anime renders by inputting some basic preferences.

You can choose hair and eye color and then decide on what accessories you might like such as glasses, hats or ribbons. The site will then generate a character for you based on your inputs. There are some things that could be improved for sure, but overall, it's a really fun application.

Researchers used a technique called DRAGAN to train the AI. The demo site was built on ReactJS. The scientists have summed up the full process in more detail in this technical report. The source code is also available from here.

Of course, designing a character is only the first step. How about a custom Gatebox holographic waifu? Or import your character into an advanced VR fantasy world powered by petaflops GPUs. Which is just a stopgap measure until you jack into the Matrix directly, allowing you to caress your loved one (as far as your brain is concerned).

Is this what happens when you poach Carnegie Mellon University's top scientists?

"Moe" (pronounced "mo-ayyy") refers to "kawaii"/cute characters.

Original Submission