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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41848816

Scientists who have been puzzling for years over the genetic "peculiarity" of a tiny population of orangutans in Sumatra have finally concluded that they are a new species to science.

The apes in question were only reported to exist after an expedition into the remote mountain forests there in 1997.

Since then, a research project has unpicked their biological secret.

The species has been named the Tapanuli orangutan - a third species in addition to the Bornean and Sumatran.

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mhajicek writes:

A pair of researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, in an attempt to detect and better define dark matter, have pulled off a pretty amazing science experiment. The team used 16 years worth of GPS data to turn the whole planet into a massive detector that might detect clumps of dark matter that could extend beyond the solar system.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe, which is a real bummer for us humans — as we simply have no idea what it is, what it looks like, nothing. Astrophysics has provided multiple evidence that it actually exists, but so far, it’s always been beyond our grasp. As generally tends to happen when faced with great unknowns, we do however have quite a lot of hypotheses pertaining to its nature.

"So, the two gathered data from the 32 satellites that make up the 31,000-mile-wide GPS constellation and ground-based GPS stations, retrieving figures recorded every 30 seconds for the last 16 years. Data was retrieved from sources around the world, and in particular from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They then used a model to sift through this data, looking for irregularities in atomic clock signals.

[...] Aaaaaaand they didn’t find anything. It’s a bit disappointing, sure, but it’s not really surprising given how elusive dark matter has proven itself to be up to now. It has to be said, however, that while the team didn’t find any definitive proof to support their theory, it could be that the effect is simply more subtle than anything we can pick up, or that the Earth crosses lumps of dark matter very rarely."

https://www.zmescience.com/science/earth-dark-matter-sensor-gps/

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Phoenix666 writes:

Is this a real representation of how many computers run Linux vs. Microsoft now?

Microsoft Developer @msdevUK: Did you know that 40% of #VirtualMachines in #Azure are running #Linux? #FutureDecoded #Dev

That stat is courtesy of a tweet on Oct. 31 from the Microsoft Developer UK account. The tweet, hashtagged as #FutureDecoded, seemingly is connected to information that Microsoft officials shared at the company's conference in London today.

Community Manager Brian Byrne (@BrianLinuxing) retweeted the Microsoft Developer UK tweet, adding: "Only 40%? Come on! Its more than that:)."

Previously, the most recent stat on how many VMs in Azure are running Linux dates back to June 2016, when Microsoft officials said nearly one in three Azure virtual machines were running Linux.

Or are companies and developers using Azure to test the Linux waters?

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takyon writes:

Fears Of A Black Market After Calif. Bans Some Commercial Breeding

California is now the first state to ban pet stores from selling animals from commercial breeders, thanks to a new law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in October. Animal advocates say it will reduce what they claim is the needless suffering of animals like puppies, kittens, and rabbits bred for sale. But critics say it will hurt pet store owners and force consumers to go underground. The law goes effect in January 2019.

Pet industry and commercial breeders oppose the measure, as does the American Kennel Club. They say the law will make it more difficult for Californians to obtain dogs with the characteristics and traits they want, including breeds that are recommended for health considerations. However, individual breeders would still be able to sell to customers.

California 'Puppy Mill' Ban Would Also Cover Kittens and Bunnies

[But what would you cover them with? ;) --martyb]

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takyon writes:

MIT researchers have fooled a Google image classification algorithm into thinking that a turtle is a rifle and a baseball is an espresso:

The team built on a concept known as an "adversarial image". That's a picture created from the ground-up to fool an AI into classifying it as something completely different from what it shows: for instance, a picture of a tabby cat recognised with 99% certainty as a bowl of guacamole.

Such tricks work by carefully adding visual noise to the image so that the bundle of signifiers an AI uses to recognise its contents get confused, while a human doesn't notice any difference.

But while there's a lot of theoretical work demonstrating the attacks are possible, physical demonstrations of the same technique are thin on the ground. Often, simply rotating the image, messing with the colour balance, or cropping it slightly, can be enough to ruin the trick.

The MIT researchers have pushed the idea further than ever before, by manipulating not a simple 2D image, but the surface texture of a 3D-printed turtle. The resulting shell pattern looks trippy, but still completely recognisable as a turtle – unless you are Google's public object detection AI, in which case you are 90% certain it's a rifle.

The researchers also 3D printed a baseball with pattering to make it appear to the AI like an espresso, with marginally less success – the AI was able to tell it was a baseball occasionally, though still wrongly suggested espresso most of the time.

The researchers had access to the algorithm, making the task significantly easier.

Also at The Verge.

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Whoever writes:

According to a new government report obtained by NPR, it is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming.

The report states that the last 115 years are "the warmest in the history of modern civilization."

The report "NCA4" is the nation's most authoritative assessment of climate science. The report's authors include experts from leading scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy, as well as academic scientists.

Also at Ars Technica:

The topline conclusion is obviously the degree to which observed global warming is human-caused, and the report pulls no punches: “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. Over the last century, there are no convincing alternative explanations supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

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Phoenix666 writes:

Nearly Extinct:

Add all of us up, all 7 billion human beings on earth, and clumped together we weigh roughly 750 billion pounds. That, says Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, is more than 100 times the biomass of any large animal that's ever walked the Earth. And we're still multiplying. Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak, and what happens then?

Well, we've waxed. So we can wane. Let's just hope we wane gently. Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults. One study says we hit as low as 40.

Forty? Come on, that can't be right. Well, the technical term is 40 "breeding pairs" (children not included). More likely there was a drastic dip and then 5,000 to 10,000 bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct."

Some of the survivors must have coupled with lizards. How else could there be so many lawyers today?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Cockatoos are causing trouble for Australia's national broadband network (NBN) by chewing through cables.

The birds have been gnawing through steel-braided cables on communication towers to wear down their constantly growing beaks.

NBN said replacing power and internet cables cost A$10,000 (£5,900) apiece, but internet service had not been disrupted by the birds' activity.

The company said it would protect cable ends to prevent further damage.

"That's Australia for you. If the spiders and snakes don't get you, the cockies will," said NBN's Chedryian Bresland.

Perhaps they're former NBN customers who have been reincarnated.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has beaten market expectations with a huge jump in quarterly revenues fuelled by online shopping.

Revenues for the three months to September rose 61% on the same period a year earlier, to 55.1bn yuan ($8.3bn; £6.4bn). It also raised its revenue predictions for the full-year forecast.

Alibaba is expanding from its core online businesses to investments in supermarkets and stores. "We had an outstanding quarter," Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang said in a statement. "We are seeing the early results from our efforts to integrate online and offline with our new retail strategy".

For the July to September quarter, income from operations surged 83% from a year earlier, to 16.58bn yuan.

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GeriatricGentleman writes:

Totten Glacier, the largest glacier in East Antarctica, is being melted from below by warm water that reaches the ice when winds over the ocean are strong according to research. The winds cause the surface waters to diverge (because of the effects of Earth’s rotation, surface water is transported 90° to the left of the wind direction in the southern hemisphere) allowing the warmer deep water to well up and contact the ice.

The new findings are a cause for concern because the glacier holds more than 3.5m (11 feet) of sea level rise, acts as a plug that helps lock in the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (550,000 sq kms of it!) and local surface winds are projected to intensify over the next century as a result of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/3/11/e1701681.full.pdf

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Phoenix666 writes:

D'oh!

To me, it looked like a child's crude attempt at a mosaic. About a dozen small square tiles of different colours. Glued to the wall in a geometric design vaguely resembling a face with two square eyes.

It stood out in the otherwise empty and dingy Paris flat. Once my home, I was moving back in, after nearly 20 years away. My tenants, three young single men, were showing me round before they left.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing at the cluster of tiles.

"That's by Invader," my tenant replied. "He's a street artist. He's like a French Banksy."

I quite liked Banksy, but the young man must have seen that I didn't appear overly impressed by his French counterpart.

"You must leave this," he said earnestly. "One day it will be worth a lot of money."

Being British, I nodded politely - but inwardly I chortled at the notion that a few tiles stuck on a bedroom wall could ever be considered a work of art.

[...] It was bigger, but otherwise similar to the one I'd unceremoniously stripped out of my flat.

Invader was a global phenomenon, famous in New York, Hong Kong, London, and of course Paris.

Then came the real blow. To my horror, I learned that one of his works had sold for more than €200,000 (£178,000; $233,000).

So, I had this guy named Claude staying in my place who painted a picture on the wall...what was his name, dear? Oh, right, Monet. But I wanted the room painted fuchsia so I told the painters to get rid of it.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Bosses of the new Call of Duty game say they "touch on some really dark subject matter" in the new release.

The makers say creating a title based on a conflict that claimed about 60 million lives has been a challenge.

It's been 10 years since the Call of Duty franchise based a game during World War Two.

"In no way do you want to glorify violence, but at the same time you can't ignore it," says Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey.

"We spent a lot of time working on the right balance."

[...] "It would be insincere not to touch on what was really happening," Michael explains.

"From the politics at the time, segregation among the allies, the role of women, to the Holocaust.

"By turning away from them we would not have brought the right level of awareness or be able to honour what was really happening.

Fine, but they better not cut the classic wise-cracking Brooklynite from the squad or Call of Duty and me are done.

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canopic jug writes:

The Web began dying in 2014. André Staltz writes about how and why. In a nutshell, traffic from mobile and tablet devices now surpasses that from regular desktop computers and of that traffic the overwhelming majority goes to either Faecebook or Google. Amazon is also in there. None of them have any interest in defending the open Web any more. Rather the situation is the opposite, they are aiming to carve out a section and establish very isolated walled gardens. Net Neutrality, or the lack thereof, lie at the heart of their plans based on the direction they have moved since 2014.

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takyon writes:

Qualcomm accuses Apple of helping Intel with chip software

The patent licensing battle between Apple and Qualcomm keeps getting more heated. Wednesday, Qualcomm filed another lawsuit against Apple, this time alleging Apple shared confidential Qualcomm software information with its chip rival, Intel. The breach of contract lawsuit said Qualcomm gave Apple "unprecedented access to Qualcomm's very valuable and highly confidential software, including source code." In return, Apple agreed to take steps to keep the software confidential and secure. But Qualcomm said instead it found that Apple shared information with Intel.

In one instance, Apple requested confidential software information from Qualcomm and cc'd an Intel engineer on the message, Qualcomm said.

Qualcomm wants a court to declare Apple breached the agreement and award damages, among other demands. "As the direct and proximate result of Apple's conduct, Qualcomm has suffered significant damages in an amount to be proven at trial," the filing said.

Apple also hasn't complied with Qualcomm's rights to audit Apple's compliance with the provisions of their software agreement, Qualcomm said in its lawsuit. It wants to do so to make sure Apple hasn't shared more information with Intel.

Also at Bloomberg, AppleInsider, and MacRumors.

Previously: U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues Qualcomm for Anti-Competitive Practices
Qualcomm's Good Quarter
Intel Hints at Patent Fight With Microsoft and Qualcomm Over x86 Emulation
Apple vs. Qualcomm Escalates, Manufacturers Join in, Lawsuits Filed in California and Germany
Apple Could Switch From Qualcomm to Intel and MediaTek for Modems

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Phoenix666 writes:

How's that STEM education working out?

Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists.

What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the greatest number of high-paying STEM jobs are in the “T” (specifically, computing).

Earlier this year, Glassdoor, a jobs listing website, ranked the median base salary of workers in their first five years of employment by undergraduate major. Computer science topped the list ($70,000), followed by electrical engineering ($68,438). Biochemistry ($46,406) and biotechnology ($48,442) were among the lowest paying majors in the study, which also confirmed that women are generally underrepresented in STEM majors.

So study cybersecurity, not slime molds.

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