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Phoenix666 writes:

everybody in London is breathing toxic levels of PM2.5 particles. And the fact that the largest sources of PM2.5 particles are tires and brake dust suggests that electrification is at best only a partial answer.

We also have to drive a whole lot less.

Fortunately, London appears to be pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy when it comes to greener transportation, including electric buses to a massive investment in cycle infrastructure, the goal really does appear to be easing gridlock and rethinking how we get from one place to another.

London's cycle superhighways have already shown they can deliver 70% increases in cycling, and now Mayor Sadiq Kahn has announced an entirely new, fourth superhighway bringing segregated lanes to Southeast London for the first time.

Instead of car tire and brake dust, Londoners will be able to inhale healthier bike tire and brake dust.

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Phoenix666 writes:

biomedical engineers have developed a range of surgical sealants that can bond tissues to stop leakages. Yet, "currently available sealants are not suitable for most surgical applications and they do not work alone without the need for suturing or stapling because they lack an optimal combination of elasticity, tissue adhesion and strength. Using our expertise in creating materials for regenerative medicine, we aimed to create an actual fix for this problem in a multi-disciplinary effort with clinicians and bioengineers," said Ali Khademhosseini, Ph.D., Associate Faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Recently published in Science Translational Medicine, a study performed by a team led by Khademhosseini at the Wyss Institute and Nasim Annabi, Ph.D., at Northeastern University presents a robust solution for the efficient repair of wounds in mechanically challenging body areas. The team also included researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston and the University of Sydney in Australia. The researchers demonstrated that a sealant, based on elastin—a human, resilience-imparting protein present in all elastic tissues such as the wall of arteries, skin, and lungs—can be photochemically tuned to effectively seal incisions in arteries and lungs of rats and to repair wounds in the lungs of pigs, all suture and staple-free.

The prank possibilities of this glue are endless.

N. Annabi el al., Engineering a highly elastic human protein–based sealant for surgical applications, Science Translational Medicine (2017). DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aai7466

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Phoenix666 writes:

Hot-air balloon pilot Richard Varney typically spends his weekends transporting tourists around central Massachusetts in a huge, multicolored balloon. But on a recent Sunday, Varney drove to a local community college and learned to fly a different type of aerial vehicle. "I want to try something new," he said as he watched an instructor demonstrate how to steer a $2,000 drone equipped with a camera. "This could help me launch a side business taking aerial photos of local towns."

Varney isn't the only one betting on this as a new vocation. At least 15 community colleges across the country now have courses that teach people how to pilot drones, according to research conducted by MIT Technology Review. The trend accelerated over the past year, after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rule that requires people who operate drones commercially to take a test and get certified as "remote pilots."

Some four-year colleges and private companies are also training people to be drone pilots, but the community-college programs are particularly interesting because they attract diverse types of students, including adults looking to change careers. In fact, many community colleges offer drone classes through their "workforce development" and "workforce solutions" departments, which are designed to impart practical skills that people can apply immediately to their jobs or use to get new jobs, rather than conferring credits toward a college degree.

No career prospects for drone pilots in private detective agencies or reality pr0n either?

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rylyeh writes:

John Nash's notion of equilibrium is ubiquitous in economic theory, but a new study shows that it is often impossible to reach efficiently.

In 1950, John Nash — the mathematician later featured in the book and film "A Beautiful Mind" — wrote a two-page paper that transformed the theory of economics. His crucial, yet utterly simple, idea was that any competitive game has a notion of equilibrium: a collection of strategies, one for each player, such that no player can win more by unilaterally switching to a different strategy.

Nash's equilibrium concept, which earned him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, offers a unified framework for understanding strategic behavior not only in economics but also in psychology, evolutionary biology and a host of other fields. Its influence on economic theory "is comparable to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences," wrote Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago, another economics Nobelist.

When players are at equilibrium, no one has a reason to stray. But how do players get to equilibrium in the first place? In contrast with, say, a ball rolling downhill and coming to rest in a valley, there is no obvious force guiding game players toward a Nash equilibrium.

"Economists have proposed mechanisms for how you can converge [quickly] to equilibrium," said Aviad Rubinstein, who is finishing a doctorate in theoretical computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. But for each such mechanism, he said, "there are simple games you can construct where it doesn't work."

It's always nice to see another win in the game theory column. The iterated prisoner's dilemma triumphs again! Seriously, this has big ramifications for economics. I think in the same way that W. Brian Arthur re-defined Adam Smith's theory of the 'Ideal Agent'.
 
Read the article at quantamagazine.org:

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Phoenix666 writes:

Members of Congress want answers about a multinational drug company's deal to save its patents by handing them off to a Native American tribe.

Last month, Allergan gave the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe six patents that protect Restasis, the company's blockbuster eye drug. The goal is a sophisticated legal strategy to avoid having the US Patent Office proceed with a process called inter partes review, which is a kind of quasi-litigation in which opponents of a patent can try to have them revoked. Lawyers for Allergan are hoping that the principle of sovereign immunity, in which Native American tribes are treated as sovereign nations in certain ways, will protect their patents from government review.

The strategy may well succeed. IPR proceedings against patents held by public universities have been canceled on at least two occasions, when the Patent Trial and Appeals Board held that the universities benefit from sovereign immunity because they are state actors. The St. Regis Mohawk tribe will be paid an annual royalty of $15 million as long as the patents are valid.

The move is a legal maneuver to avoid challenges to their patent.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/congress-will-investigate-drug-company-that-gave-its-patents-to-mohawk-tribe/

takyon: Allergan.

Previously: Allergan Pulls a Fast One

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Phoenix666 writes:

New vehicle infotainment systems can take drivers' eyes and attention off the road and hands off the wheel for dangerous periods of time, according to new research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Drivers using in-vehicle technologies like voice-based and touch screen features were visually and mentally distracted for more than 40 seconds when completing tasks like programming navigation or sending a text message. Removing eyes from the road for just two seconds doubles the risk for a crash, according to previous research. With one in three U.S. adults using infotainment systems while driving, AAA cautions that using these technologies while behind the wheel can have dangerous consequences.

AAA has conducted this new research to help automakers and system designers improve the functionality of new infotainment systems and the demand they place on drivers.

"Some in-vehicle technology can create unsafe situations for drivers on the road by increasing the time they spend with their eyes and attention off the road and hands off the wheel," said Dr. David Yang, executive director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. "When an in-vehicle technology is not properly designed, simple tasks for drivers can become complicated and require more effort from drivers to complete."

Does keeping your eyes on the road really matter when traffic is stand-still anyway?

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takyun writes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/fda-declares-there-s-no-love-in-granola-warns-bakery-company

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released a warning letter to Nashoba Brook Bakery, reprimanding the West Concord, Massachusetts-based baker and wholesaler about the ingredients it lists in its granola.

One, in particular.

"Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient 'Love,'" the agency wrote in the Sept. 22 letter. "'Love' is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient."

Nashoba Chief Executive Officer John Gates said the FDA's take on love as an ingredient "just felt so George Orwell."

Ars Technica additionally reports that was not all that the FDA found:

During a recent bakery inspection, FDA agents discovered: dirt and filth caked onto ceiling vents and sprinklers directly above ready-to-eat foods; parts of the floor and ceiling that were missing for some reason; equipment, including bowls and cooling racks, that wasn't cleaned or maintained; and counters, shelves, and food production surfaces that were coated with an unknown residue.

Insects also proved worrisome. At one point, an FDA inspector noticed a one-inch-long, unidentified crawling insect directly underneath a batch of pastries. Last, the FDA reported that employees weren't following proper hygiene practices. One baker repeatedly dipped a blue bracelet into raw dough while mixing it.

For your reading pleasure, here is the warning letter.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the lowRISC project's blog:

A high quality, upstream RISC-V backend for LLVM is perhaps the most frequently requested missing piece of the RISC-V software ecosystem… As always, you can track status here and find the code here.

RV32

100% of the GCC torture suite passes for RV32I at -O0, -O1, -O2, -O3, and -Os (after masking gcc-only tests). MC-layer (assembler) support for RV32IMAFD has now been implemented, as well as code generation for RV32IM.

RV64

This is the biggest change versus my last update. LLVM recently gained support for parameterising backends by register size, which allows code duplication to be massively reduced for architectures like RISC-V. As planned, I've gone ahead and implemented RV64I MC-layer and code generation support making use of this feature. I'm happy to report that 100% of the GCC torture suite passes for RV64I at O1, O2, O3 and Os (and there's a single compilation failure at O0). I'm very grateful for Krzysztof Parzyszek's (QUIC) work on variable-sized register classes, which has made it possible to parameterise the backend on XLEN in this way. That LLVM feature was actually motivated by requirements of the Hexagon architecture - I think this is a great example of how we can all benefit by contributing upstream to projects, even across different ISAs.

[...] Community members Luís Marques and David Craven have been experimenting with D and Rust support respectively.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud under a no-bid contract issued last week, even as lawmakers lash the embattled company about a massive security breach that exposed personal information of as many as 145.5 million Americans.

A contract award for Equifax's data services was posted to the Federal Business Opportunities database Sept. 30 — the final day of the fiscal year. The credit agency will "verify taxpayer identity" and "assist in ongoing identity verification and validations" at the IRS, according to the award.

The notice describes the contract as a "sole source order," meaning Equifax is the only company deemed capable of providing the service. It says the order was issued to prevent a lapse in identity checks while officials resolve a dispute over a separate contract.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/03/equifax-irs-fraud-protection-contract-243419

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"exec" writes:

Astronomers have identified a bumper crop of dual supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. This discovery could help astronomers better understand how giant black holes grow and how they may produce the strongest gravitational wave signals in the Universe.

The new evidence reveals five pairs of supermassive black holes, each containing millions of times the mass of the Sun. These black hole couples formed when two galaxies collided and merged with each other, forcing their supermassive black holes close together.

The black hole pairs were uncovered by combining data from a suite of different observatories including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Sky Explorer Survey (WISE), and the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

"Astronomers find single supermassive black holes all over the universe," said Shobita Satyapal, from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who led one of two papers describing these results. "But even though we've predicted they grow rapidly when they are interacting, growing dual supermassive black holes have been difficult to find."

Seeing double: Scientists find elusive giant black hole pairs

-- submitted from IRC

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Phoenix666 writes:

Solar power grew faster than any other source of fuel for the first time in 2016, the International Energy Agency said in a report suggesting the technology will dominate renewables in the years ahead.

The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar powered by photovoltaics, or PVs, grew by 50 percent, with almost half of new plants built in China.

"What we are witnessing is the birth of a new era in solar PV," Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said in a statement accompanying the report published on Wednesday in Paris. "We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be higher than any other renewable technology through 2022."

Solar Grew Faster Than All Other Forms of Power for the First Time
International Energy Agency

Solar power will only work until the sun burns out, but dinosaurs are forever.

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"exec" writes:

Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists at McMaster University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Their calculations suggest that wet and dry cycles bonded basic molecular building blocks in the ponds' nutrient-rich broth into self-replicating RNA molecules that constituted the first genetic code for life on the planet.

The researchers base their conclusion on exhaustive research and calculations drawing in aspects of astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and other disciplines. Though the "warm little ponds" concept has been around since Darwin, the researchers have now proven its plausibility through numerous evidence-based calculations.

[...] The spark of life, the authors say, was the creation of RNA polymers: the essential components of nucleotides, delivered by meteorites, reaching sufficient concentrations in pond water and bonding together as water levels fell and rose through cycles of precipitation, evaporation and drainage. The combination of wet and dry conditions was necessary for bonding, the paper says.

Original URL: Did life on Earth start due to meteorites splashing into warm little ponds?

Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1710339114) (DX)

-- submitted from IRC

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takyon writes:

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, an experimental inflatable habitat/room attached to the International Space Station, will continue to be used for storage and radiation testing in the near future rather than being jettisoned to burn in Earth's atmosphere:

In a procurement filing, NASA said it was planning to issue a sole-source contract to Bigelow Aerospace in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 for engineering and other services related to extended use of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). The planned contract, whose value was not disclosed, will cover three years with two additional one-year options.

BEAM was launched to the ISS in April 2016 and, a month and a half later, attached to the station and expanded to its full size. NASA planned to keep BEAM at the station for two years in order to perform engineering tests about the suitability of such expandable, or inflatable, modules for future use on the station or other missions. At the end of the two-year period, NASA planned to jettison BEAM and allow it to destructively reenter the atmosphere.

NASA now sees BEAM, in additional to an engineering testbed, as a place for additional storage on the ISS. "BEAM continues to demonstrate positive performance in space and initial studies have shown that it can be used long-term on the ISS to support the government's needs for on-orbit stowage and for technology demonstrations," the agency said in its procurement filing.

The agency expects to use BEAM to store more than 100 Cargo Transfer Bags, a standard unit of cargo storage on the station that measures about half a cubic meter. That will free up the equivalent of about four payload racks in other modules of the station for research. NASA will also continue to study the module's effectiveness for radiation and debris shielding.

Also at Ars Technica.

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takyon writes:

Physicists have "confirmed" that we "aren't" "living" in a computer "simulation":

Scientists have discovered that it's impossible to model the physics of our universe on even the biggest computer.

What that means is that we're probably not living in a computer simulation.

Theoretical physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin from the University of Oxford and the Hebrew University in Israel applied Monte Carlo simulations (computations used to generate probabilities) to quantum objects moving through various dimensions and found that classical systems cannot create the mathematics necessary to describe quantum systems. They showed this by proving that classical physics can't erase the sign problem, a particular quirk of quantum Monte Carlo simulations of gravitational anomalies (like warped spacetime, except in this case the researchers used an analogue from condensed matter physics).

Therefore, according to Ringel and Kovrizhin, classical computers most certainly aren't controlling our universe.

Which type of computers are we being simulated on?

Also at Newsweek.

Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and quantum complexity (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1701758) (DX)

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takyon writes:

Santa is real dead:

Turkish archaeologists have dashed the hopes of millions of children by claiming to have uncovered the likely burial place of Saint Nicholas.

Surveys have uncovered an intact temple and burial grounds below St Nicholas church in the province of Antalya, where he is believed to have been born, archaeologists told the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. "We have obtained very good results but the real work starts now," said Cemil Karabayram, the director of surveying and monuments in Antalya. "We will reach the ground and maybe we will find the untouched body of Saint Nicholas."

Revered for his gift-giving and aid to the poor, the 4th-century saint gave rise to the legend of Santa Claus. In recent years, the church in Demre district in Antalya, near his birthplace, has been restored and draws many visitors. Demre is built on the ruins of Myra, the city where Saint Nicholas, revered by many denominations in Christianity, is believed to have lived.

Also at CNET.

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