SoylentNews

aristarchus writes:

According to The Daily Beast, Jenna Abrams was not a real person at all, but was part of a Russian plot to turn Americans against themselves:

Her opinions about everything from manspreading on the subway to Rachel Dolezal to ballistic missiles still linger on news sites all over the web.

[...] Her account was the creation of employees at the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian government-funded "troll farm," in St. Petersburg.

[...] Abrams' pervasiveness in American news outlets shows just how much impact Russia's troll farm had on American discourse in the run-up to the 2016 election—and illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.

While the the [sic] typical image of a Russian troll may be a hastily put together Twitter account blaring out non-stop political messages, Abrams' account went to great lengths to simulate a real, American person who existed outside of Twitter fights and amplifying racist disinformation.

Her Twitter account was created back in 2014. She had a personal website, a Medium page, her own Gmail, and even a GoFundMe page.

takyon: More Russia stuff follows:

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alabama analyzed data from more than 480,000 people who responded to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which is administered by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The goal was to study the correlation between Americans who have used psychedelics and past criminal behavior.

The researchers' results, which were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, indicate that "lifetime" psychedelic use was associated with a decrease in the chances of someone having committed theft, assault, property crime, or other violent crime in the past year. Though the results were based on information that participants voluntarily provided.

Respondents who admitted to being longtime hallucinogen users had a 27 percent lower chance of having committed larceny and 22 percent lower chance of having committed a violent crime in the past 12 months. The study found that other illicit drugs were actually associated with increased odds of committing the same offenses.

"More research is needed to figure out what factors underlie these effects," Zach Walsh, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the paper, told Science Daily. "But the experiences of unity, positivity, and transcendence that characterize the psychedelic experience may have lasting benefits that translate into real-world consequences."

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb3ea9/people-who-take-psychedelics-are-less-likely-to-commit-violent-crimes-study-says-vgtrn

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Runic Games, a Seattle-area game studio which developed the Diablo-inspired Torchlight series and its latest title Hob, has been shut down by its Chinese parent company Perfect World Entertainment:

Runic Games, the studio behind Torchlight, Torchlight II, and Hob, has been shut down. In a statement published on its official website studio head Marsh Lefler confirmed the news and thanked fans for their support.

[...] For fans of the Torchlight series, Lefler said there "will be some news coming" and he also noted that "community and multiplayer services will keep running even after the studio's lights go off."

[...] Runic is the second studio to be shuttered by its parent company, Chinese publisher Perfect World Entertainment. Motiga, the developer of Gigantic, announced its closure shortly before Runic. In a statement to Kotaku, Perfect World Entertainment said Motiga "has reduced the staff of its studio" but its game "will continue to be available on our platforms." With regards to Runic, it said the decision was part of "the company's continued strategy to focus on online games as a service."

If you like the Diablo games, I'd suggest trying out Torchlight I/II (Windows, OS X, Linux) or Path of Exile (Windows and Xbox One).

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit.

The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.

[...] The F-35 program office and Lockheed have identified steps to increase parts availability "to prevent these challenges from worsening" as aircraft numbers increase, the GAO said, but Pentagon documentation indicates "the program's ability to speed up this time line is uncertain."

The GAO also disclosed that the F-35B -- the Marine Corps version of the fighter that's scheduled to begin ship deployments next year -- won't have required maintenance and repair capabilities at sea and "will likely experience degraded readiness."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-23/f-35s-hobbled-by-parts-shortages-slow-repairs-audit-finds

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Cargill Inc., one of the largest global agricultural companies, has joined Bill Gates and other business giants to invest in a nascent technology to make meat from self-producing animal cells amid rising consumer demand for protein that's less reliant on feed, land and water.

Memphis Meats, which produces beef, chicken and duck directly from animal cells without raising and slaughtering livestock or poultry, raised $17 million from investors including Cargill, Gates and billionaire Richard Branson, according to a statement Tuesday on the San Francisco-based startup's website. The fundraising round was led by venture-capital firm DFJ, which has previously backed several social-minded retail startups.

They made the first ever chicken and duck meat that were produced without the animals.

The company expects to have a product in stores by 2021.

"They're the leader in clean meat. There's no one else that far along," says venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, whose firm led Memphis Meats' recent $17 million Series A. Before he met Valeti in 2016, Jurvetson spent almost five years researching lab-grown meat and meat alternatives, believing the market was set to explode. "They're the only one that convinced me they can get to a price point and a scale that would make a difference in the industry," he says.

Cargill is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue ($109.7 billion in 2017).

Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/cargill-bill-gates-richard-branson-backed-memphis-meats-expects-meat-from-cells-in-stores-by-2021.html

Previously: Lab-Grown Chicken (and Duck) Could be on the Menu in 4 Years

Related: Lab-grown meat would 'cut emissions and save energy'
Producing Beef has the Greatest Impact on the Environment Compared to Other Animal Based Foods
Real Vegan Cheese: Coming From a Yeast to You
Would You Try Silicon Valley's Bloody Plant Burger(s)?
Lab-Grown Pork Closer to Reality

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Will astronauts traveling to Mars remember much of it? That's the question concerning University of California, Irvine scientists probing a phenomenon called "space brain."

UCI's Charles Limoli and colleagues found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles – much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that will bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights – causes significant long-term brain damage in test rodents, resulting in cognitive impairments and dementia.

Their study appears today in Nature's Scientific Reports. It follows one last year showing somewhat shorter-term brain effects of galactic cosmic rays. The current findings, Limoli said, raise much greater alarm. (Link to study: www.nature.com/articles/srep34774)

"This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a two-to-three-year round trip to Mars," said the professor of radiation oncology in UCI's School of Medicine. "The space environment poses unique hazards to astronauts. Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel – such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making. Many of these adverse consequences to cognition may continue and progress throughout life."

Source: https://news.uci.edu/2016/10/10/mars-bound-astronauts-face-chronic-dementia-risk-from-galactic-cosmic-ray-exposure/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

CRISPR-Cas9 has been widely heralded as one of the most important scientific developments of recent years, thanks to its capacity to make edits to the human genome. Now, a more precise version of the tool has been developed by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.

[...] Sometimes, only one base pair in a length of DNA is abnormal in some way – this is called a point mutation, and it accounts for 32,000 of the 50,000 changes in the human genome that have been associated with diseases. A study published in Nature looked at changing an A base into a G; w process that could address around half of those mutations.

[...] "Standard genome-editing methods, including the use of CRISPR-Cas9, make double-stranded breaks in DNA, which is especially useful when the goal is to insert or delete DNA bases," said David Liu, who led the research, speaking to the MIT Technology Review. "But when the goal is to simply fix a point mutation, base editing offers a more efficient and cleaner solution."

This project isn't necessarily a replacement for the CRISPR – it's a different tool that allows for a different kind of edit to be made. The results could have a profound impact on the effect that hereditary diseases can have on people's lives.

Source: https://futurism.com/crispr-can-now-be-used-to-edit-individual-bases/

Programmable base editing of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA without DNA cleavage (DOI: 10.1038/nature24644) (DX)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Although drinking by U.S. adolescents has decreased during the last decade, more than 20 percent of U.S. high-school students continue to drink alcohol before the age of 14 years. This can have adverse effects on their neurodevelopment. For example, youth who initiate drinking before 14 years of age are four times more likely to develop psychosocial, psychiatric, and substance-use difficulties than those who begin drinking after turning 20 years of age. Little is known about how the age of alcohol-use onset influences brain development. This is the first study to assess the association between age of adolescent drinking onset and neurocognitive performance, taking into account pre-existing cognitive function.

AND see also: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/acer.13503

Source: http://www.newswise.com/articles/early-age-of-drinking-leads-to-neurocognitive-and-neuropsychological-damage

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

On Stack Overflow Jobs, you can create your own Developer Story to showcase your achievements and advance your career. One option you have when creating a Developer Story is to add tags you would like to work with or would not like to work with:

[...] The most disliked languages, by a fairly large margin, are Perl, Delphi, and VBA. They're followed by PHP, Objective-C, Coffeescript, and Ruby. On our team we're certainly happy to see that R is the least disliked programming language, relative to the number of people who liked it.

[...] Generally there is a relationship between a tag's growth and how often it's disliked. Almost everything disliked by more than 3% of stories mentioning it is shrinking in Stack Overflow traffic (except for the quite polarizing VBA, which is steady or slightly growing). And the least-disliked tags— R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin— are all among the fast-growing tags (Typescript and Kotlin growing so quickly they had to be truncated in the plot).

Hate away, guys, you just make my skills and willingness to write perl more valuable.

Source: What Are the Most Disliked Programming Languages?

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

This week, representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are appearing before House and Senate subcommittees to answer for their role in Russian manipulation during the 2016 election, and so far, the questioning has been brutal. Facebook has taken the bulk of the heat, being publicly called out by members of Congress for missing a wave of Russian activity until months after the election.

[...] The point is clear enough: if you're fighting Russian interference on social media, anonymity is a big problem. In some ways, it's the original sin, creating space for that first lie that lets trolls enter the conversation unnoticed. "Account anonymity in public provides some benefits to society, but social media companies must work immediately to confirm real humans operate accounts," Watts told the committee. "The negative effects of social bots far outweigh any benefits." It's a common insight among bot-hunters, and one that's become particularly popular amid this week's hearings.

[...] The problem is social. We're used to anonymity on the internet, particularly on the services where it's still available. It's hard to know what an anonymity backlash would mean for services like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan — all of which are named in Watts' testimony as playing a role in Russian disinformation.

In the background, there's an even harder question: is anonymity still worth saving? It's foundational to many people's idea of the internet, but amid widespread online harassment and Facebook itself, it's come to mean less and less. Even without Russian influence campaigns, the web's online spaces are largely associated with the ugliest parts of humanity. (4chan is a prime example.) With new pressure from Congress, bot analysts, and the public, online anonymity may not have any defenders left. In the face of that, Twitter, Reddit, and others might decide a real name policy is a small price to pay for forestalling federal regulation.

Source: Russia's Social Media Meddling Could Spell the End of Online Anonymity

Previously: Russia Bans VPNs and Tor, Effective November 1

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Source:
Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment - the Tallinn Declaration

This marks a new political commitment at EU level on significant priorities towards ensuring high quality, user-centric digital public services for citizens and seamless cross-border public services for businesses.

And
'Tallinn declaration' commits EU to increase use of open source

"When building or rebuilding ICT systems, public services should make more use of open source software solutions, the Ministers of the European Union Member States and EFTA countries agreed in Tallinn (Estonia) on 6 October. The recommendation is part of the 'Tallinn Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment'.

By signing the Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, the ministers agree that using open source solutions and open standards helps to avoid IT vendor lock-in. They call on public services to make their ICT solutions publicly available, and to encourage the private sector and civil society to reuse the software."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have re-discovered the 'shiner':

Electronic-skin technologies for prosthetics and robots can detect the slightest touch or breeze. But oddly, the sensors that make this possible do not respond effectively to a harmful blow. Now researchers report in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces the development of a jellyfish-inspired electronic skin that glows when the pressure against it is high enough to potentially cause an injury.

An electronic skin that can mimic the full range of biological skin's sensitivity has great potential to transform prosthetics and robotics. Current technologies are very sensitive, but only within a narrow range of weak pressures.

Under high pressures that could cause damage, the electronic skins' sensitivity fades. To address this shortcoming, Bin Hu and colleagues at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology turned to the Atolla jellyfish for inspiration.

This bioluminescent, deep-sea creature can feel changes in environmental pressure and flashes dramatically when it senses danger.

Original Submission

rylyeh writes:

From Quanta Magazine: Life's First Molecule Was Protein, Not RNA, New Model Suggests

Proteins have generally taken a back seat to RNA molecules in scientists' speculations about how life on Earth started. Yet a new computational model that describes how early biopolymers could have grown long enough to fold into useful shapes may change that. If it holds up, the model, which is now guiding laboratory experiments for confirmation, could re-establish the reputation of proteins as the original self-replicating biomolecule.

For scientists studying the origin of life, one of the greatest chicken-or-the-egg questions is: Which came first — proteins or nucleic acids like DNA and RNA? Four billion years ago or so, basic chemical building blocks gave rise to longer polymers that had a capacity to self-replicate and to perform functions essential to life: namely, storing information and catalyzing chemical reactions. For most of life's history, nucleic acids have handled the former job and proteins the latter one. Yet DNA and RNA carry the instructions for making proteins, and proteins extract and copy those instructions as DNA or RNA. Which one could have originally handled both jobs on its own?

For decades, the favored candidate has been RNA — particularly since the discovery in the 1980s that RNA can also fold up and catalyze reactions, much as proteins do. Later theoretical and experimental evidence further bolstered the "RNA world" hypothesis that life emerged out of RNA that could catalyze the formation of more RNA.

But RNA is also incredibly complex and sensitive, and some experts are skeptical that it could have arisen spontaneously under the harsh conditions of the prebiotic world. Moreover, both RNA molecules and proteins must take the form of long, folded chains to do their catalytic work, and the early environment would seemingly have prevented strings of either nucleic acids or amino acids from getting long enough.

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.

Original Submission

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/

Original Submission