SoylentNews

takyon writes:

In a televised event, Russia's President Vladimir Putin spoke to a group of students about a number of topics, including AI and drones:

Russian president Vladimir Putin spoke about the potential power of artificial intelligence to students on Friday, saying "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world," according to Associated Press. He then said "it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position," indicating that Russia would cooperate with other countries in the development of AI. While Russia is seen as skilled in technological propaganda, it has little presence in mainstream AI research.

Putin also envisioned a future for war where drones, ostensibly controlled by artificial intelligence, would fight proxy wars between countries. "When one party's drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender," he said.

Russian companies have been actively researching autonomous weapons, such as drones, robots and missiles, which would be able to pick targets and fire on their own. Documents from the US military show similar strategies, where swarms of drones would assist troops with real-time intelligence gathering and air support.

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, King's College London and Barts Cancer Institute discovered that acute myeloid leukemia (AML) - the most common acute leukemia affecting adults - causes bone marrow to 'leak' blood, preventing chemotherapy from being delivered properly. Drugs that reversed bone marrow leakiness boosted the effect of chemotherapy in mice and human tissue, providing a possible new combination therapy for AML patients.

"We found that the cancer was damaging the walls of blood vessels responsible for delivering oxygen, nutrients, and chemotherapy. When we used drugs to stop the leaks in mice, we were able to kill the cancer using conventional chemotherapy," says Diana Passaro, first author of the paper and researcher at the Francis Crick Institute.

As the drugs are already in clinical trials for other conditions, it is hoped that they could be given the green light for AML patients in the future.

[...] "Our findings suggest that it might be possible to predict how well people with AML will respond to chemotherapy," says Dominique Bonnet, senior author of the paper and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.

"We've uncovered a biological marker for this type of leukemia as well as a possible drug target. The next step will be clinical trials to see if NO blockers can help AML patients as much as our pre-clinical experiments suggest."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

HPE says it has closed the $8.8bn deal to spin off much of its software business with Micro Focus.

The enterprise giant said that the deal – which sees HPE merge the unwanted portion of its software operation with the UK-based Micro Focus to create what analysts estimate to be the seventh-largest software vendor in the world – had been finalized.

"With the completion of this transaction, HPE has achieved a major milestone in becoming a stronger, more focused company, purpose-built to compete and win in today's market," said HPE CEO Meg Whitman.

"And, this transaction will deliver approximately $8.8bn to HPE and its stockholders."

First announced in September 2016, the reverse-takeover agreement sees HPE selling off its IT management, big data, and security lines to Micro Focus, which will try to make the products more successful than they were under the former HP Inc.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/hpe_8bn_micro_focus_software_spinoff/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe's first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium.

Two papers on their work were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe's very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars.

Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics, and Eric Cotner, a UCLA graduate student, developed a compellingly simple new theory suggesting that black holes could have formed very shortly after the Big Bang, long before stars began to shine. Astronomers have previously suggested that these so-called primordial black holes could account for all or some of the universe's mysterious dark matter and that they might have seeded the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of galaxies. The new theory proposes that primordial black holes might help create many of the heavier elements found in nature.

The researchers began by considering that a uniform field of energy pervaded the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Scientists expect that such fields existed in the distant past. After the universe rapidly expanded, this energy field would have separated into clumps. Gravity would cause these clumps to attract one another and merge together. The UCLA researchers proposed that some small fraction of these growing clumps became dense enough to become black holes.

Their hypothesis is fairly generic, Kusenko said, and it doesn't rely on what he called the "unlikely coincidences" that underpin other theories explaining primordial black holes.

The paper suggests that it's possible to search for these primordial black holes using astronomical observations. One method involves measuring the very tiny changes in a star's brightness that result from the gravitational effects of a primordial black hole passing between Earth and that star. Earlier this year, U.S. and Japanese astronomers published a paper on their discovery of one star in a nearby galaxy that brightened and dimmed precisely as if a primordial black hole was passing in front of it.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3p-Browser-Market-Share

According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.

The company is reporting a 3.37% Linux marketshare for August 2017, a rise from 2.53% a month prior and the first time they have reported the Linux desktop marketshare above 3%.

They report Windows meanwhile at 90.7%, macOS at 5.94%, and the other operating systems statistically at zero. Their monthly report can be found here.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) provides a rebuttal, the supposed decline of copyleft, to assertions from Black Duck regarding the uptake of reciprocal versus non-reciprocal licenses. In the rebuttal, the FSF works to stem a cascade of articles and blogs which have proliferated based on some initial disinformation. While there does seem to be an increase in the use of non-reciprocal licensing in general there are several possible explanations and the rebuttal goes into detail and backs each possibility with data. In short, both styles of licensing are increasing in popularity

Original Submission

https://qz.com/1066966/how-many-cars-were-destroyed-by-hurricane-harvey/ and also at other news outlets.

For Harvey victims, it's going to be rough if they lost their car, Houston is a very car-dependent city. Like many states, Texas only requires liability insurance — only those that bought comprehensive coverage will be able to claim the loss on insurance.

Ideally most of these flooded cars will be scrapped, as it's very likely water damage to electrical systems and other parts are not cost effective to repair professionally. However, there will be "new" and used cars on the market that have been underwater (to a greater or lesser extent). Many will be sold "as is" and some of them will be cleaned up and sold fraudulently as if they were not damaged. Buyer beware, these cars will be shipped all over in search of buyers (marks?)

After Katrina, friends of mine with time on their hands bought several new-flooded Honda Civics (which they were familiar with from building "street stock" race cars). They pulled out the interior and then the full wiring harness. Bought new harness from Honda and replaced everything, and had perfectly good near-new cars for pennies on the dollar (and a few days of hard labor).

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Original URL: Volcanic carbon dioxide drove ancient global warming event

New research, led by the University of Southampton and involving a team of international scientists, suggests that an extreme global warming event 56 million years ago was driven by massive CO₂ emissions from volcanoes, during the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean.

[...] The PETM [Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum] is the most rapid and extreme natural global warming event of the last 66 million years. It lasted for around 150 thousand years and global temperatures increased by at least 5°C - a temperature increase comparable with projections of modern climate beyond the end of this century. While it has long been suggested that the PETM event was caused by the injection of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere; the ultimate trigger, the source of this carbon, and the total amount released, have up to now all remained elusive.

[...] The team found that the PETM was associated with a total input of more than 10,000 petagrams of carbon from a predominantly volcanic source. This is a vast amount of carbon - some 30 times larger than all the fossil fuels burned to date and equivalent to all current conventional and unconventional fossil fuel reserves. In their computer model simulations, it resulted in the concentration of atmospheric CO₂ increasing from 800 parts per million to above 2000 ppm. The Earth's mantle contains more than enough carbon to explain this dramatic rise and it would have been released as magma, pouring from volcanic rifts at the Earth's surface.

Professor Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton said: "How the ancient Earth system responded to this carbon injection at the PETM can tell us a great deal about how it might respond in the future to man-made climate change. For instance, we found that Earth's warming at the PETM was about what we would expect given the CO2 emitted and what we know about the sensitivity of the climate system based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. However, compared with today's human-made carbon emissions, the rate of carbon addition during the PETM was much slower, by about a factor of 20."

Dr Philip Sexton from the Open University in Milton Keynes continues: "We found that carbon cycle feedbacks, like methane release from gas hydrates which were once the favoured explanation of the PETM, did not play a major role in driving the event. On the other hand, one unexpected result of our study was that enhanced organic matter burial was important in ultimately drawing down the released carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean and thereby accelerating the recovery of the Earth system. This shows the real value of studying these ancient warming events as they provide really valuable insights into how Earth behaves when its climate system and carbon cycle are dramatically perturbed."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Without much fanfare, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will return to Earth on Saturday night—it will be Sunday morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan—aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Quietly, she will have spent 288 days in space, or nearly 10 months. The duration of her spaceflight will fall short of only one other US astronaut, Scott Kelly, who returned to Earth in 2016 with a lot more attention after 340 days.

Whitson is known around NASA's Johnson Space Center as perhaps the agency's most efficient astronaut in space, regularly getting ahead of her timelines, research, and maintenance tasks for each day. Mission controllers typically have to come up with extra work. Partly because of this, she is one of only a handful of NASA astronauts to have been selected to serve three rotations on the International Space Station.

As a result of these three long duration spaceflights, the biochemist has now logged 665 days in space. This cumulative time in space easily ranks her as the American flier with the most experience in orbit, far above the 534 days tallied by NASA's Jeff Williams and 520 days of Scott Kelly. Whitson only lags behind seven Russian men, several of whom spent time both on the International Space Station as well as Russia's Mir station.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/americas-new-ironman-is-headed-home-from-space-its-peggy-whitson/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/01/europe-unveils-worlds-most-powerful-x-ray-laser

The world's most powerful X-ray laser has begun operating at a facility where scientists will attempt to recreate the conditions deep inside the sun and produce film-like sequences of viruses and cells.

The machine, called the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), acts as a high-speed camera that can capture images of individual atoms in a few millionths of a billionth of a second. Unlike a conventional camera, though, everything imaged by the X-ray laser is obliterated – its beam is 100 times more intense than if all the sunlight hitting the Earth's surface were focused onto a single thumbnail.

The facility near Hamburg, housed in a series of tunnels up to 38 metres underground, will allow scientists to explore the architecture of viruses and cells, create jittery films of chemical reactions as they unfold and replicate conditions deep within stars and planets.

Scientists are already engaged in a fierce competitive bidding process to be the among the first to get time on its six beamlines.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The European Space Agency (ESA) is reporting on some early results of its Gaia mission. Close approaches of our solar system by other stars could disrupt the orbits of objects in the Oort cloud causing some of them to hurtle sunward.

Understanding the past and future motions of stars is a key goal of Gaia as it collects precise data on stellar positions and motions over its five-year mission. After 14 months, the first catalogue of more than a billion stars was recently released, which included the distances and the motions across the sky for more than two million stars.

By combining the new results with existing information, astronomers began a detailed, large-scale search for stars passing close to our Sun.  

So far, the motions relative to the Sun of more than 300 000 stars have been traced through the Galaxy and their closest approach determined for up to five million years in the past and future.

Of them, 97 stars were found that will pass within 150 trillion kilometres [1 million AU], while 16 come within about 60 trillion km [400 thousand AU].

While the 16 are considered reasonably near, a particularly close encounter of one star, Gliese 710, in 1.3 million years' time, stands out. It is predicted to pass within just 2.3 trillion km or about 16 000 Earth–Sun distances, well within the Oort Cloud.

The star is already well-documented, and thanks to the Gaia data, the estimated encounter distance has recently been revised. Previously, there was a 90% degree of certainty that it would come within 3.1–13.6 trillion kilometres. Now, the more accurate data suggest that it will come within 1.5–3.2 trillion km, with 2.3 trillion km most likely.

The report The completeness-corrected rate of stellar encounters with the Sun from the first Gaia data release was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201731453 PDF (2.26 MB)

[Note: 1 Astronomical Unit ~ 150 million Kilometers]

I find it fascinating that, in astronomy, a light-fortnight is considered 'close' and a million years is considered 'soon'.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.businessinsider.com/roku-files-for-an-initial-public-offering-2017-9

Roku has made official what's been rumored: It wants to go public.

The digital media player maker publicly filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday - the first big step for a company seeking an initial public offering (IPO) of its shares.

The company plans to list shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker "ROKU."

[...] As of June 30, Roku had 15.1 million active accounts on its service, according to the filing. Customers using Roku devices or TV's with its interface streamed 6.7 billion hours of internet video in the first half of 2017 - up 62% from the same period in 2016, the company said in the filing.

Original Submission

Tech Review warns of a possible investment scam?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608749/in-a-sign-of-gene-editing-frenzy-startup-pitches-editing-without-crispr/

Having something better than CRISPR would be high-impact. But Homology's scientific results aren't yet widely accepted. In fact, several scientists told MIT Technology Review that they believe the claims are probably wrong.

"What's surprising is this company raised so much money on something thought to be untrue in the scientific community," says David Russell, a researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle. "I think there is just a gene-editing frenzy."

Something about specially designed viruses that don't have to "slash open" human genes to change them. Sounds like something the herd (Wall St speculators) would be happy to get behind.

The paper has not yet been published, but here are some additional links to further information:

From Dr. Lowe's "In the Pipeline" blog - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/08/31/good-craziness-and-bad-craziness
Conference abstract on the research - http://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/4399/presentation/1352
AAV vectors -- use in gene therapy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeno-associated_virus#Use_in_gene_therapy

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/30/distant-galaxy-sends-out-15-high-energy-radio-bursts/

Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe, has detected 15 brief but powerful radio pulses emanating from a mysterious and repeating source – FRB 121102 – far across the universe.

Fast radio bursts are brief, bright pulses of radio emission from distant but largely unknown sources, and FRB 121102 is the only one known to repeat: more than 150 high-energy bursts have been observed coming from the object, which was identified last year as a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years from Earth.

Also at: Universe Today, phys.org, and Newsweek,.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Following a controversy over Google's Eric Schmidt pressuring the New America Foundation into removing a critical blog post and firing the scholar who wrote it, a former Forbes journalist now working at Gizmodo has written about an incident in which Google allegedly pressured Forbes to kill a negative story:

The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.

Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."

Hill described what happened next:

Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)

It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.

If true, does it reflect worse on Google or the clickbait and scriptwall outlet Forbes?

Original Submission