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Phoenix666 writes:

Netflix is raising another $1.6bn (£1.2bn) from investors to finance new shows and possibly make acquisitions.

The video streaming service plans to spend up to $8bn on content next year to compete with fast-growing rivals.

Netflix will issue bonds to investors, although the interest rate it will pay has yet to be decided, the company said in a statement.

Netflix plans to release 80 films next year, but some analysts are wary about its cash burn and debt interest costs.

The company's latest debt fundraising is its largest so far, and the fourth time in three years it has raised more than $1bn by issuing bonds.

Earlier this month, Netflix said it would raise prices in countries including the UK and US for the first time in two years.

Has Netflix added enough original material to make up for the licensed content they've dropped and the price increase they mean to enact?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have used the CRISPR gene editing technique to create pigs with less body fat. The GMO pigs may be better from both a cost and animal welfare standpoint:

Here's something that may sound like a contradiction in terms: low-fat pigs. But that's exactly what Chinese scientists have created using new genetic engineering techniques.

In a paper [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1707853114] [DX] published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report that they have created 12 healthy pigs with about 24 percent less body fat than normal pigs.

The scientists created low-fat pigs in the hopes of providing pig farmers with animals that would be less expensive to raise and would suffer less in cold weather. "This is a big issue for the pig industry," says Jianguo Zhao of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the research. "It's pretty exciting."

[...] The animals have less body fat because they have a gene that allows them to regulate their body temperatures better by burning fat. That could save farmers millions of dollars in heating and feeding costs, as well as prevent millions of piglets from suffering and dying in cold weather. "They could maintain their body temperature much better, which means that they could survive better in the cold weather," Zhao said in an interview.

Previously: "Double-Muscled" Pigs Created Using Simple Gene Modification
eGenesis Bio Removes PERV From Pigs Using CRISPR
PETA Claims That Cambodian Farmers Are Breeding "Double-Muscled" Mutant Pigs

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Obesity leads to the release of cytokines into the bloodstream which impact the metabolism of breast cancer cells, making them more aggressive as a result. Scientists from Helmholtz Zentrum München, Technical University of Munich (TUM), and Heidelberg University Hospital report on this in 'Cell Metabolism'. The team has already been able to halt this mechanism with an antibody treatment.

The number of people with obesity is increasing rapidly worldwide. The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) recently reported that according to the WHO the number of children and adolescents with obesity increased tenfold between 1975 and 2016. Severe overweight can lead to various health impairments. Besides inducing cardiovascular diseases, obesity for example also promotes the development of cancer and metastases.

The current study elucidates an as yet unknown mechanism making breast cancer more aggressive. The enzyme ACC1* plays a central role in this process," said Dr. Mauricio Berriel Diaz, deputy director of the Institute for Diabetes and Cancer (IDC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München. He led the study together with Stephan Herzig, director of the IDC and professor for Molecular Metabolic Control at TUM and Heidelberg University Hospital. "ACC1 is a key component of fatty acid synthesis," said Berriel Diaz. "However, its function is impaired by the cytokines leptin and TGF-β." The levels of these cytokines are increased particularly in the blood of severely overweight subjects.

Source: https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/en/news/latest-news/press-information-news/article/42901/index.html

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Back in September, IBM was left red-faced when its global load balancer and reverse DNS services fell over for 21 hours.

At the time, IBM blamed the outage on a third-party domain name registrar that was transferring some domains to another registrar. The sending registrar, IBM said, accidentally put the domains in a "hold state" that prevented them being transferred. As the load balancer and reverse DNS service relied on the domains in question, the services became inaccessible to customers.

IBM's now released an incident summary [PDF] in which it says "multiple domain names were mistakenly allowed to expire and were in hold status."

The explanation also reveals that the network-layer.net domain was caught up in the mess, in addition to the global-datacenter.com and global-datacenter.net domains that IBM reported as messed up in September.

It's unclear if IBM or its outsourced registrar was responsible for the failure to renew registration for the domains.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have created a model that suggests that the peak energy of gamma ray lasers could be massively increased:

Previous simulations have suggested that as laser peak powers reach lofty petawatt levels, the laser field itself can start to run into fundamental limits. Those limits are tied to strong-field quantum electrodynamic (QED) effects, which can, through complex feedbacks, eventually sap the energy of the laser field driving them. As a result, it's generally been assumed that efficient gamma-ray production from these new petawatt-peak-power lasers would be limited to energies well under a billion electron volts (GeV).

Now, researchers from Sweden, Russia and the United Kingdom have re-crunched the numbers, and suggested that this fundamental limit might not be so fundamental after all (Phys. Rev. X, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevX.7.041003). The team's modeling suggests that, by tweaking the laser pulse intensity and duration in the right way, it's possible to tune the system to minimize the energy-depleting effects and maximize the creation of gamma rays. This, says the team, would allow the radiation from the high-power laser to be "converted into a well-collimated flash of GeV photons."

Thus far, the scenario, requiring lasers with peak powers on the order of 10 PW, has been proved out only on the computer. But the authors hope to see it verified in practice as such powerful lasers start [to] come on line with the maturing of the ELI and other projects—a development that, they maintain, "could enable a new era of experiments in photonuclear and quark-nuclear physics."

Original Submission

edIII writes:

Hundreds of Mysterious Stone 'Gates' Found in Saudi Arabia's Desert

Google Earth has unlocked the gates to ancient mysteries around the world.

For years, amateur and professional archaeologists have used the search engine's satellite imagery to discover mysterious earthworks in Kazakhstan, Roman ruins, a forgotten fortress in Afghanistan and more. In the past decade, Google Earth also has helped identify thousands of burial sites and other "works of the old men," as they're called, scattered across Saudi Arabia.

Now, archaeologists have uncovered nearly 400 previously undocumented stone structures they call "gates" in the Arabian desert that they believe may have been built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.

"We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there's a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped," said David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and author of a paper set to appear in the November issue of the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.

"You can't see them very well from the ground level, but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

October 19th was the deadline to submit bids to become the host city for Amazon's second headquarters. 238 proposals were submitted:

Amazon.com Inc's $5 billion second headquarters and its promise of up to 50,000 jobs attracted 238 proposals from 54 states, provinces and districts in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the company said on Monday.

Regions and cities in 43 U.S. states from Maine to Alaska, as well as Washington, D.C., submitted bids by the Oct. 19 deadline, Amazon said. The states that did not bid were Arkansas, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Canadian bids came from the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec. Mexican bids emanated from the states of Chihuahua, Hidalgo and Queretaro. Other bidders included Puerto Rico, which is struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and is in the process of restructuring its sagging finances in court.

Details of the bids, including tax breaks and other incentives being offered to entice the internet retailer, were scarce as some bidders cited competitive reasons or nondisclosure policies.

New Jersey offered $7 billion in tax credits for a Newark headquarters, while Chicago offered $2.25 billion of incentives, including tax credits, property tax breaks, $450 million in infrastructure improvements, $250 million in "Neighborhood Opportunity Funds", and potentially free land. The mayor of Stonecrest, an Atlanta suburb, offered 345 acres of industrial land on which a new city called Amazon could be built, with Jeff Bezos as mayor-for-life.

Also at First Post, NYT, and the Chicago Tribune.

Previously: Amazon to Invest $5 Billion in Second HQ Outside of Seattle
Cities Desperate to Become the Location of Amazon's "Second Headquarters"
Is A Mega-Deal Like Amazon's HQ2 Always Worth It?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.statnews.com/2017/10/20/shingles-vaccine-approval/

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a second shingles vaccine, giving pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline a go-ahead to market Shingrix in the United States.

The FDA approval marks the second regulatory green light for the vaccine in a week's time. Last Friday Shingrix was approved for sale in Canada. Regulatory filings are also in the works for the European Union, Australia, and Japan, GSK said.

The vaccine offered 98 percent protection in the first year and that protection remained at 85 percent or higher three years after vaccination — stronger protection than the only other shingles vaccine on the market, Merck's Zostavax.

GSK has been keenly awaiting the FDA's ruling, eager to get to market a vaccine analysts estimate could reach $1 billion a year in sales by 2022.

Also at FiercePharma and The Pharma Letter.

Wikipedia's entry for shingles (aka herpes zoster).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Due to popular demand, Cambridge University has made Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis freely available online:

Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate.

Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people". He added: "Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. "It's wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis - hopefully they won't be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!"

[...] Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD - most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. Previously, to read Hawking's PhD in full, people had to pay £65 to the university library to scan a copy or physically go to the library to read it.

Here it is (not responding as I try to load it).

Also at Varsity.

[Access to the document remains intermittent at this time. - Ed]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Linux Foundation has created one open-data licence framework to rule them all, allowing users to collaborate on data-driven projects.

Today at the Open Source Summit in Prague, executive director Jim Zemlin announced the Community Data License Agreement, which is designed for non-proprietary data.

The org says data producers can now share the goods "with greater clarity about what recipients may do with it".

One branch "puts terms in place to ensure that downstream recipients can use and modify that data, and are also required to share their changes", while the other does not oblige users to share those changes.

The idea is to accelerate machine learning in open source.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It's an old article, but if you use vi/m it's always good to read a refresher. I've been using the editor for almost 30 years and always learn something new:

If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.

The open source text editor Vim (Vi IMproved) will be used here to present the ideas about effective editing, but they apply to other editors just as well. Choosing the right editor is actually the first step towards effective editing. The discussion about which editor is the best for you would take too much room and is avoided. If you don't know which editor to use or are dissatisfied with what you are currently using, give Vim a try; you won't be disappointed.

[...] The point is that you need to get to know these commands. You might object that you can't possibly learn all these commands - there are hundreds of different movement commands, some simple, some very clever - and it would take weeks of training to learn them all. Well, you don't need to; instead realize what your specific way of editing is, and learn only those commands that make your editing more effective.

There are three basic steps:

        1. While you are editing, keep an eye out for actions you repeat and/or spend quite a bit of time on.
        2. Find out if there is an editor command that will do this action quicker. Read the documentation, ask a friend, or look at how others do this.
        3. Train using the command. Do this until your fingers type it without thinking.

Original Submission

edIII writes:

Interbreeding with Neandertals[1] restored some genetic heirlooms that modern humans left behind in the ancient exodus from Africa, new research suggests.

Those heirlooms are versions of genes, or alleles, that were present in humans' and Neandertals' shared ancestors. Neandertals carried many of those old alleles, passing them along generation after generation, while developing their own versions of other genes. A small number of humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and settled in Asia and Europe. These migrants "lost" the ancestral alleles.

But when the migrants or their descendants interbred with Neandertals, Eurasians reinherited the ancestral heirlooms along with Neandertal DNA, John "Tony" Capra reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

Unfortunately, a few of the genes identified are associated with disease.

[1] Though most often spelled Neanderthal, Neandertal is also a valid spelling.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Air Force adds more than $40 million to SpaceX engine contract

The U.S. Air Force has provided SpaceX with an additional $40.7 million to support continued development of the company's Raptor engine.

A Defense Department contract announcement Oct. 19 stated that the Air Force was modifying an existing agreement with SpaceX, originally awarded in January 2016, by providing the company with $40.766 million "for the development of the Raptor rocket propulsion system prototype for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program."

The statement didn't include additional information about the nature of the work other than that it would be completed by the end of April 2018. The work, according to the announcement, would be carried out at NASA's Stennis Space Center, which hosts engine testing for the Raptor, as well as SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California and Los Angeles Air Force Base, home to the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center.

The Raptor engines are one of the components needed for SpaceX's upcoming super heavy-lift launch vehicle now known as the BFR. Falcon Heavy uses Merlin 1D rocket engines.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Vector, Virginia Space announce upcoming orbital launches from Wallops

This past week, it was announced that nanosatellite launch service provider Vector had inked a deal with the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority (more commonly known as Virginia Space) to conduct three commercial flights out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) over the course of the next two years with possibly five additional launches in the offing.

The agreement was announced by Virginia State Governor Terry McAuliffe with an "engineering unit" of the company's Vector-R launch vehicle being transported from the company's headquarters located in Tucson, Arizona, to MARS. Along for the journey was a Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL) – used to erect the rocket into the vertical position.

Vector will also conduct a series of ground and simulated propellant loading operations with the engineering unit and TEL.

Vector is hoping to launch satellites at a cost of $2-3 million per launch using the Vector-R rocket.

MARS is a pretty bad name for a spaceport in Virginia.

Wallops Flight Facility.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HRL Laboratories (a research center owned by General Motors and Boeing) has found that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) can improve learning:

Done in collaboration with McGill University in Montreal and Soterix Medical in New York, the study was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)'s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program. Published October 12, 2017, in the journal Current Biology, tDCS in animals showed learning accelerated by about 40% when given 2 mA noninvasively to the prefrontal cortex without increased neuronal firing. This study showed it was modulated connectivity between brain areas, not neuron firing rates, that accounted for the increased learning speed.

The behavioral task in this experiment was associative learning. The macaques had to learn arbitrary associations between a visual stimulus and a location where they would get a reward—a visual foraging task. The initial foraging trials took about 15 seconds, and once the animal learned the location of the reward, it took approximately 2 seconds to recall and find the target. Subjects in the control condition required an average of 22 trials to learn to obtain the reward right way[sic]. With tDCS they required an average of 12 trials.

"In this experiment we targeted the prefrontal cortex with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages," said Dr. Praveen Pilly, HRL's principal investigator on the study. "That is the region that controls many executive functions including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval. It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects. It is also the target of choice in most published behavioral enhancement studies and case studies with transcranial stimulation. We placed the tDCS electrodes on the scalp in both our control and stimulation conditions. The behavioral effect was revealed when they learned to find the reward faster."

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Facilitates Associative Learning and Alters Functional Connectivity in the Primate Brain (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.020) (DX)

Previously: Cognitive Enhancement May Not be All It's Cracked Up To Be.
Zapping Your Brain may Reduce Depression, Ease Pain

Original Submission