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takyon writes:

Several dogs from one of the top twenty finishing teams at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race failed a drug test:

It's not your ordinary sports doping scandal: some dogs who mushed this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race have tested positive for the opioid pain reliever Tramadol, the event's governing board said Wednesday.

The Iditarod Trail Committee Board of Directors, which oversees the nearly 1,000-mile race, says that when dogs were tested six hours after finishing in Nome, Alaska, in March, several from one team came back positive for the drug. It is the first-ever positive result since Iditarod testing for prohibited substances began in 1994, officials said.

The Board announced last week that "a prohibited substance" had been found in some of the dogs. The latest information clarifies that it was Tramadol. The Associated Press reports that investigators estimate the drug could have been administered up to 15 hours before the test.

The rules will be changed to require mushers to prove that they did not intentionally administer drugs to their dogs in the case of a positive test. Currently, race officials are required to prove that the doping was intentional.

Tramadol.

Also at The Guardian and DW.

See Also: Routine On U.S. Racetracks, Horse Doping Is Banned In Europe
Report: Horsemen Keeping Tabs On Development Of New Human Drugs
Doped up greyhounds add to the disgrace dogging parimutuels in Florida

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stretch611 writes:

'A Major Distraction': Is A Megadeal Like Amazon's HQ2 Always Worth It?

Thursday marks the deadline for bids in Amazon's highly publicized search for the location of its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Cities are clamoring to land the conglomerate's project and its unparalleled promise of up to 50,000 jobs paying an average of $100,000, at one of the world's fastest-growing companies.

But with that comes some public soul-searching: How much should a city or state subsidize a wealthy American corporation in exchange for such a shiny promise? [...] Financial incentives are among numerous criteria Amazon included in its solicitation of bids. [...] By multiple estimates, Amazon has already cashed in on more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies and incentives for its warehouses, data centers and other operations.

[...] "I often thought, as governor, it would be sort of nice, if all the governors just got together and said, 'Look, we're just not going to play this anymore,' " says former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. Doyle was at the helm during the financial crisis in 2008, when General Motors shuttered plants, including a factory in Janesville, Wis. But later, the automaker said it would reopen one location, bringing back the jobs. Wisconsin put together its largest incentive package yet — Doyle says he felt an obligation to — but it lost to Michigan's even bigger offer. [...] Since then, Wisconsin has become infamous for its eye-popping $3-billion financial incentive to get a Foxconn liquid-crystal display plant.

Previously: Amazon to Invest $5 Billion in Second HQ Outside of Seattle
Cities Desperate to Become the Location of Amazon's "Second Headquarters"

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An Anonymous Coward put us out of our misery by finally delivering the result of the long awaited international giant mecha fight:

The oft-delayed giant robot fight has finally taken place. On Tuesday, Team USA's mechs scrapped it out with Japan's Kuratas in an abandoned steel mill for the world to watch. There could only be one victor, and it proved to be [snipped for your pleasure]

[25 minute broadcast of the event]

Those not familiar with the rumblings about this fight can catch up from Engadget's original coverage, and our own in 2015, and earlier this year.

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DeathMonkey brings us this story from The Independent:

Donald Trump has threatened to shut down NBC and other American networks, saying that they peddle fake news.

"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!" Mr Trump wrote in a tweet.

Mr Trump's tweet came in response to a story written by NBC, which said that Mr Trump had sought to increase America's nuclear arsenal tenfold after taking a look at a briefing slide that showed stead reduction of the US nuclear arsenal since the 1960s. The story cited three officials who were reportedly in the room when Mr Trump made the comments.

Source: Donald Trump threatens to shut down NBC and other TV news networks that criticise him

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mhajicek writes:

A man dressed as a shark has been fined under new anti-burqa laws in Austria. A PR agency has admitted the incident was a stunt designed to make a "socially relevant" point.

Police had confronted a man on Friday after he was seen promoting a new outlet of the McShark electronics store in Vienna in a costume that covered his face. When he refused to remove his shark head, he was given a fine of €150 ($176).

[...] Regional daily Österreich reported the officers acted after a call from an unidentified member of the public. Police had suspected the report came from someone who wished to prove a point about the new laws.

http://www.dw.com/en/austria-burqa-ban-man-dressed-as-shark-falls-afoul-of-new-law/a-40872491

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takyon writes:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2017/mars-electric-moons

Phobos has been considered as a possible initial base for human exploration of Mars because its weak gravity makes it easier to land spacecraft, astronauts and supplies. The idea would be to have the astronauts control robots on the Martian surface from the moons of Mars, without the considerable time delay faced by Earth-based operators. "We found that astronauts or rovers could accumulate significant electric charges when traversing the night side of Phobos – the side facing Mars during the Martian day," said William Farrell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. "While we don't expect these charges to be large enough to injure an astronaut, they are potentially large enough to affect sensitive equipment, so we would need to design spacesuits and equipment that minimizes any charging hazard." Farrell is lead author of a paper on this research published online Oct. 3 in Advances in Space Research.

[...] The solar wind is responsible for these charging effects. When the solar wind strikes the day side of Phobos, the plasma is absorbed by the surface. This creates a void on the night side of Phobos that the plasma flow is obstructed from directly entering. However, the composition of the wind – made of two types of electrically charged particles, namely ions and electrons – affects the flow. The electrons are over a thousand times lighter than the ions. "The electrons act like fighter jets – they are able to turn quickly around an obstacle -- and the ions are like big, heavy bombers – they change direction slowly," said Farrell. "This means the light electrons push in ahead of the heavy ions and the resulting electric field forces the ions into the plasma void behind Phobos, according to our models."

The study shows that this plasma void behind Phobos may create a situation where astronauts and rovers build up significant electric charges. For example, if astronauts were to walk across the night-side surface, friction could transfer charge from the dust and rock on the surface to their spacesuits. This dust and rock is a very poor conductor of electricity, so the charge can't flow back easily into the surface -- and charge starts to build up on the spacesuits. On the day side, the electrically conducting solar wind and solar ultraviolet radiation can remove the excess charge on the suit. But, on the night side, the ion and electron densities in the trailing plasma void are so low they cannot compensate or 'dissipate' the charge build-up. The team's calculations revealed that this static charge can reach ten thousand volts in some materials, like the Teflon suits used in the Apollo lunar missions. If the astronaut then touches something conductive, like a piece of equipment, this could release the charge, possibly similar to the discharge you get when you shuffle across a carpet and touch a metal door handle.

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takyon writes:

Google DeepMind researchers have made their old AlphaGo program obsolete:

The old AlphaGo relied on a computationally intensive Monte Carlo tree search to play through Go scenarios. The nodes and branches created a much larger tree than AlphaGo practically needed to play. A combination of reinforcement learning and human-supervised learning was used to build "value" and "policy" neural networks that used the search tree to execute gameplay strategies. The software learned from 30 million moves played in human-on-human games, and benefited from various bodges and tricks to learn to win. For instance, it was trained from master-level human players, rather than picking it up from scratch.

AlphaGo Zero did start from scratch with no experts guiding it. And it is much more efficient: it only uses a single computer and four of Google's custom TPU1 chips to play matches, compared to AlphaGo's several machines and 48 TPUs. Since Zero didn't rely on human gameplay, and a smaller number of matches, its Monte Carlo tree search is smaller. The self-play algorithm also combined both the value and policy neural networks into one, and was trained on 64 GPUs and 19 CPUs over a few days by playing nearly five million games against itself. In comparison, AlphaGo needed months of training and used 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs to beat Lee Sedol.

Though self-play AlphaGo Zero even discovered for itself, without human intervention, classic moves in the theory of Go, such as fuseki opening tactics, and what's called life and death. More details can be found in Nature, or from the paper directly here. Stanford computer science academic Bharath Ramsundar has a summary of the more technical points, here.

Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent.

Previously: Google's New TPUs are Now Much Faster -- will be Made Available to Researchers
Google's AlphaGo Wins Again and Retires From Competition

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Phoenix666 writes:

The State Department has not provided further details about the medical condition of the affected staffers. But government officials have suggested anonymously that the diplomats may have been assaulted with some sort of sonic weapon.

Experts in acoustics, however, say that's a theory more appropriate to a James Bond movie.

Sound can cause discomfort and even serious harm, and researchers have explored the idea of sonic weaponry for years. But scientists doubt a hidden ultrasound weapon can explain what happened in Cuba.

"I'd say it's fairly implausible," said Jürgen Altmann, a physicist at the Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany and an expert on acoustics.

Once again, the New York Times gets it wrong. James Bond is not the movie genre they're looking for.

mrpg also brings us this less-critical AP report, What Americans Heard in Cuba Attacks: The Sound.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

Donald Trump has dropped 92 places in the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, with the magazine putting his wealth at $3.1bn, down from $3.7bn last year.

[...] Forbes ranked the first billionaire president as the 248th wealthiest person in America. The year before, he was ranked 156th.

As a candidate, Trump said his net worth was more than $10bn, but Forbes pegged that figure at $4.5bn in September 2015. By Forbes' estimates, Trump's wealth has fallen 31% in two years.

According to Forbes' story:

It was another record year for the wealthiest people in America, as the price of admission to the country's most exclusive club jumped nearly 18% to $2 billion. Even at these new heights, entrepreneurs are breaking into the ranks for the first time as they mint fortunes in everything from telecom to booze to fishing. There were 22 newcomers, 14 of whom are self-made entrepreneurs. Among the most notable: Arizona iced tea cofounder Don Vultaggio; Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings; Tito Beveridge, the creator of Tito's Handmade Vodka; Chuck Bundrant, whose Trident Seafoods sells his fish to places like McDonald's and Burger King; and Rocco Commisso, founder of cable TV and broadband firm Mediacom and owner of the New York Cosmos, a soccer club based in Brooklyn.

The most notable loser was President Donald Trump, whose fortune fell $600 million to $3.1 billion. A tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign all contributed to the declining fortune of the 45th president.

If you prefer, you can just go straight to the list [Edit - that requires JS from www.forbes.com and i.forbesimg.com, JS-phobes can get just the raw numbers here -- FP].

In November, some thought that having a successful businessman at the helm would cure USA's ills. I wonder if this will increase the incidence of buyer's remorse among voters.

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rylyeh writes:

An article in Science News examines some of the challenges inherent in feeding on blood:

Jennifer Zaspel can't explain why she stuck her thumb in the vial with the moth. Just an after-dark, out-in-the-woods zing of curiosity.

She was catching moths on a July night in the Russian Far East and had just eased a Calyptra, with brownish forewings like a dried leaf, into a plastic collecting vial. Of the 17 or so largely tropical Calyptra species, eight were known vampires. Males will vary their fruit diet on occasion by driving their hardened, fruit-piercing mouthparts into mammals, such as cattle, tapirs and even elephants and humans, for a drink of fresh blood.

Zaspel, however, thought she was outside the territory where she might encounter a vampire species. She had caught C. thalictri, widely known from Switzerland and France eastward into Japan as a strict fruitarian.

Before capping the vial with the moth, "I just for no good reason stuck my thumb in there to see what it would do," Zaspel says. "It pierced my thumb and started feeding on me."

Make that eight-plus vampires. Zaspel, an entomologist now at the Milwaukee Public Museum, is still puzzling over the genetics of the moths at the two Russian field sites she visited in 2006. Males there will bite a researcher's thumb if offered, yet genetic testing so far shows the moths are part of a vast, otherwise mild-mannered species.

Not just moths, but mosquitoes, ticks, bed bugs, and bats, too.

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takyon writes:

Samsung has qualified its 8nm "low power plus" process for production 3 months earlier than planned. It is a slightly improved version of the company's 10nm process, and a stop-gap before Samsung begins production of a 7nm process using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. TSMC will release its 7nm process chips before Samsung, but won't use EUV for the initial generation. Samsung's 8LPP chips will improve power consumption by 10% and reduce die size by 10% (compared to 10LPP):

Years ago, Samsung seemed to have bet on the fact that 10nm will be a long-lasting process generation, so it prioritized it over the 7nm node. Meanwhile, TSMC decided to skip the 10nm node entirely and go straight to 7nm, with its own stop-gap at 12nm, which is essentially a slightly improved 16nm process.

TSMC seems to have gotten this one right, but Samsung could also achieve early expertise on EUV lithography, which could be the future of process technology. In other words, TSMC may have won this battle, but Samsung may ultimately win the war (or at least the next few process generation battles).

Because 7nm will arrive later than the competition, Samsung is now doing what TSMC did with its 12nm node and will offer a small update to its 10nm process, which it calls the 8LPP generation. The new 8LPP generation brings a 10% improvement in power consumption, as well as up to 10% die area reduction, which could be translated into cost savings for Samsung's customers. Samsung promises further cost-savings due to the high yield that this process generation can achieve, as it's already based on the proven 10nm process.

Also at Engadget and ZDNet.

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AnonTechie writes:

The concept of "collective intelligence" is simple — it asserts that if a team performs well on one task, it will repeat that success on other projects, regardless of the scope or focus of the work. While it sounds good in theory, it doesn't work that way in reality, according to an Iowa State University researcher.

Marcus Credé, an assistant professor of psychology, says unlike individuals, group dynamics are too complex to predict a team's effectiveness with one general factor, such as intelligence. Instead, there are a variety of factors — leadership, group communication, decision-making skills —that affect a team's performance, he said.

Anita Woolley's research supporting collective intelligence quickly gained traction in the business world when it was first introduced in 2010. The attention was not surprising to Credé. Because organizations rely heavily on group work, managers are always looking for a "silver bullet" to improve team performance, he said. However, after re-analyzing the data gathered by Woolley and her colleagues, Credé and Garett Howardson, an assistant professor at Hofstra University, found the data didn't support the basic premise of collective intelligence. Their work is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

[Source]: You would not ask a firefighter to perform open-heart surgery

[Abstract]: The structure of group task performance—A second look at "collective intelligence": Comment on Woolley et al. (2010).

Do you agree with this premise?

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takyon writes:

Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist

The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home. Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.

A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country's newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a "one-woman WikiLeaks". Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe's smallest member state.

Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.

Panama Papers. Daphne Caruana Galizia's blog.

Also at BBC and The Washington Post.

Previously: "Panama Papers" Leak Exposes Owners of Shell Companies
"Panama Papers" Compendium
Panama Papers Lead to Resignation of Pakistan's Prime Minister

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takyon writes:

A study has found an increased chance of mortality of men who received blood donated from previously pregnant women:

Each time health care workers grab a pint of blood for an emergency transfusion, they make sure the donor and recipient have compatible blood types. But they do not pay attention to the donor's sex. A new study raises questions as to whether that should change.

In the first large study to look at how blood transfusions from previously pregnant women affect recipients' health, researchers discovered men under 50 were 1.5 times more likely to die in the three years following a transfusion if they received a red blood cell transfusion from a woman donor who had ever been pregnant. This amounts to a 2 percent increase in overall mortality each year. Female recipients, however, did not appear to face an elevated risk. The study [DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.14825] [DX] of more than 42,000 transfusion patients in the Netherlands was published Tuesday in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The American Red Cross and the researchers themselves were quick to say the study is not definitive enough to change the current practice of matching red blood cell donors to recipients. But if this explosive finding is confirmed with future studies, it could transform the way blood is matched—and it would suggest millions of transfusion patients worldwide have died prematurely. "If this turns out to be the truth, it's both biologically interesting and extremely clinically relevant," says Gustaf Edgren, an expert who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an editorial about it. "We certainly need to find out what's going on." Edgren, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute and a hematologist at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, says his own research [DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0890] [DX] suggests the donor's sex makes no difference to the transfused patient. "Our data is really not compatible with this finding," he says.

Also at Reuters, Medscape, and Stat News.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Volvo Cars' performance electric car brand, Polestar, unveiled a four-seat coupe in lightweight carbon fiber as its first model Tuesday, adding to competition in a market dominated until now by Tesla.

The hybrid Polestar 1 promises a range of 150 kilometers (95 miles) on a charge, with a gasoline-powered engine to supplement that if needed. It is due to be produced at a factory in western China and released in 2019.

Volvo, owned since 2010 by Chinese automaker Geely Holding, announced in July that it would make only electric and hybrid vehicles starting in 2019.
...
The company says it will follow up with an all-electric model in 2019 and an SUV in 2021.
...
Polestar expects China, where the government is promoting electric car development, to account for about one-third of global sales, according to Ingenlath.

China is the world's biggest market for electrics and hybrids. It accounted for 40 percent of last year's global demand with sales of 336,000 units—more than double U.S. sales of 159,620.

Will China's transportation sector leap-frog Europe's and America's?

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takyon writes:

In a move intended to align with the National Space Council's call for NASA to return to the Moon, the United Launch Alliance intends to launch a Bigelow Aerospace B330 inflatable module into low Earth orbit, and later boost it into lunar orbit using a rocket which can have propellant transferred to it from another rocket:

Bigelow Aerospace, a company devoted to manufacturing inflatable space habitats, says it's planning to put one of its modules into orbit around the Moon within the next five years. The module going to lunar space will be the B330, Bigelow's design concept for a standalone habitat that can function autonomously as a commercial space station. The plan is for the B330 to serve as something of a lunar depot, where private companies can test out new technologies, or where astronauts can stay to undergo training for deep space missions.

"Our lunar depot plan is a strong complement to other plans intended to eventually put people on Mars," Robert Bigelow, president of Bigelow Aerospace, said in a statement. "It will provide NASA and America with an exciting and financially practical success opportunity that can be accomplished in the short term."

To put the habitat in lunar orbit, Bigelow is looking to get a boost from the United Launch Alliance. The B330 is slated to launch on top of ULA's future rocket, the Vulcan, which is supposed to begin missions no earlier than 2019. The plan is for the Vulcan to loft the B330 into lower Earth orbit, where it will stay for one year to demonstrate that it works properly in space. During that time, Bigelow hopes to send supplies to the station and rotate crew members in and out every few months.

After that, it'll be time to send the module to the Moon. ULA will launch two more Vulcan rockets, leaving both of the vehicles' upper stages in orbit. Called ACES, for Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, these stages can remain in space, propelling other spacecraft to farther out destinations. ULA plans to transfer all of the propellant from one ACES to the other, using the fully fueled stage to propel the B330 the rest of the way to lunar orbit.

The B330 is the giant version of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module.

Previously: Moon Base Could Cost Just $10 Billion Due to New Technologies
Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years, Permanently
Buzz Aldrin: Retire the ISS to Reach Mars
China to Send Potato Farming Test Probe to the Moon
Stephen Hawking Urges Nations to Pursue Lunar Base and Mars Landing
Lockheed Martin Repurposing Shuttle Cargo Module to Use for Lunar Orbiting Base (could they be joined together?)
ESA Expert Envisions "Moon Village" by 2030-2050
NASA and Roscosmos Sign Joint Statement on the Development of a Lunar Space Station
Bigelow Expandable Activity Module to Continue Stay at the International Space Station

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