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Fnord666 writes:

Prof. David Ma has discovered that marine-based omega-3s are eight times more effective at inhibiting tumour development and growth.

"This study is the first to compare the cancer-fighting potency of plant- versus marine-derived omega-3s on breast tumour development," said the professor in the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences. "There is evidence that both omega-3s from plants and marine sources are protective against cancer and we wanted to determine which form is more effective."

[...] Published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, the study involved feeding the different types of omega-3s to mice with a highly aggressive form of human breast cancer called HER-2. HER-2 affects 25per cent of women and has a poor prognosis.

[...] Ma found overall exposure to marine-based omega-3s reduced the size of the tumours by 60 to 70 per cent and the number of tumours by 30 per cent.

However, higher doses of the plant-based fatty acid were required to deliver the same impact as the marine-based omega-3s.

Source: https://news.uoguelph.ca/2018/01/choose-omega-3s-fish-flax-cancer-prevention-study-finds/

Journal Reference: Jiajie Liu, Salma A. Abdelmagid, Christopher J. Pinelli, Jennifer M. Monk, Danyelle M. Liddle, Lyn M. Hillyer, Barbora Hucik, Anjali Silva, Sanjeena Subedi, Geoffrey A. Wood, Lindsay E. Robinson, William J. Muller, David W.L. Ma. Marine fish oil is more potent than plant based n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in the prevention of mammary tumours. The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.jnutbio.2017.12.011

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https://www.investopedia.com/news/steve-wozniak-turns-tesla-critic-doesnt-trust-elon-musk/

Steve Wozniak spoke recently at the Nordic Business Forum in Stockholm. A clipping from the end of the short article,

After years of upgrades and new sensors, Woz sees Tesla as a company that has made major promises and delivered well under the bar. "I love that car, but the trouble is Elon Musk is portrayed in a lot of moves with a lack of faith and trust," he said. "What he says, can you really believe in him? Is he just a good salesman, like Jobs, and may not be there [in the end]?"

Wozniak went as far as to suggest that "every other car manufacturer in the world," including Audi and BMW, "are actually ahead of Tesla for self-driving cars." He then praised his Chevy Bolt EV, which he prefers to drive for everyday life.

It doesn't seem that long ago that Woz was calling out Toyota for problems with the cruise control on his Prius, but here's an update from 2010 -- https://gizmodo.com/5462205/steve-wozniak-update-on-his-prius-problems

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Fnord666 writes:

Apparently E-readers aren't the only thing Walmart is partnering with Rakuten for:

Walmart has struck a partnership with e-commerce firm Rakuten Inc to launch an online grocery delivery service in Japan, its latest effort to forge an alliance with a popular homegrown chain to crack a competitive market.

The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, said on Thursday the service will launch in the latter half of 2018.

Walmart's leadership is looking for new ways to grow its international business, which is no longer the growth engine it once was, as it has grappled with economic woes in Brazil and competition from discount retailers in Britain.

In Japan, the new service will replace Walmart's existing online grocery delivery offering and will be called "Rakuten Seiyu Netsuper." Seiyu GK is the name of Walmart's wholly-owned Japanese unit.

It will allow customers to place an order on Rakuten's online marketplace platform, which will then be fulfilled by the Walmart-Rakuten joint venture. Walmart-Rakuten will open a warehouse to service these orders in addition to using Seiyu stores, the companies said.

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acid andy writes:

Orcas, commonly known as killer whales, have been successfully trained to imitate human speech.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from institutions in Germany, UK, Spain and Chile, describe how they carried out the latest research with Wikie, a 14-year-old female orca living in an aquarium in France. She had previously been trained to copy actions performed by another orca when given a human gesture.

After first brushing up Wikie's grasp of the "copy" command, she was trained to parrot three familiar orca sounds made by her three-year old calf Moana.

Wikie was then additionally exposed to five orca sounds she had never heard before, including noises resembling a creaking door and the blowing a raspberry.

Finally, Wikie was exposed to a human making three of the orca sounds, as well as six human sounds, including "hello", "Amy", "ah ha", "one, two" and "bye bye".

The embedded clip of the audio is pretty interesting. We've all heard birds imitating sounds but the article makes a point that only a fraction of animals have the neural and vocal apparatus to do this.

How long until your next call to customer service gets outsourced to these cetaceans?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2015, Microsoft senior engineer Dan Luu forecast a bountiful harvest of chip bugs in the years ahead.

"We've seen at least two serious bugs in Intel CPUs in the last quarter, and it's almost certain there are more bugs lurking," he wrote. "There was a time when a CPU family might only have one bug per year, with serious bugs happening once every few years, or even once a decade, but we've moved past that."

Thanks to growing chip complexity, compounded by hardware virtualization, and reduced design validation efforts, Luu argued, the incidence of hardware problems could be expected to increase.

This month's Meltdown and Spectre security flaws that affect chip designs from AMD, Arm, and Intel to varying degrees support that claim. But there are many other examples.

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takyon writes:

Teenagers Are Still Eating Tide Pods, But Don't Expect A Product Redesign

If you've never seen it, a Tide Pod looks like a little rounded packet, white with two separate swirls of blue and orange liquid. To be clear, a Tide Pod is laundry detergent heavily concentrated into a single packet, meant to dissolve in water and clean a single load of laundry. But these days, it's a dare — an Internet meme, in which teenagers try to eat Tide Pods as a "challenge." The trend picked up in December, but the pace of poisonings is still getting worse. So far in January alone, poison control centers have received 134 reports of "intentional exposures" to laundry packets, Tide or others. That's compared with 53 cases the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported for all of 2017, mostly involving teenagers.

[...] Designs like this are never willy-nilly, says Chris Livaudais, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The process starts by studying the habits of a potential user to find ways to make their life better in some way. In this case, the condensed formula does away with a heavy jug and the need for measurement.

[...] The colors are already associated with liquid detergent, Livaudais says. And the swirls "might imply how active the ingredients are and how well it would do the washing job."

Jones says the swirls were indeed a design choice — indicating that the pod brings together three ingredients (cleaning, stain-fighting and brightening, he says). The pod is transparent because customers have told Tide they like to know what they're putting into the wash with their clothes.

Livaudais says industrial designers spend a lot of time mulling best and worst case scenarios for the use of products. But if someone knowingly chooses to misuse them? "That's completely out of our hands," he says.

National Poison Help hotline: 1-800-222-1222.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

First, don't call it "Vine Two". Details are starting to emerge about v2, the forthcoming video app built to replace Vine by its former co-founder Dom..

If I'd written this article, it would have consisted of one word: "Poorly".

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/how-vine-2-works/

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takyon writes:

Cambodia charges foreigners with making pornographic images

Prosecutors in Cambodia have charged 10 foreigners, including five Britons, with producing pornographic images after raiding a villa in Siem Reap. They were arrested on Thursday after images emerged of people apparently imitating sexual positions at a party in the north-western town. If convicted, they face up to a year in prison.

Two Canadians held in Cambodia for 'dancing pornographically'

A police release included photos of multiple clothed men and women straddling one another on the floor, some in sexually suggestive positions. Those photos are said to have been shared on social media prior to the arrests.

[...] [Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow with the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank,] said the Cambodian government is grappling with pressure to enforce more conservative values, an agenda that is at odds with the country's party-oriented reputation among young western travellers. Foreigners dressed in skimpy clothing while visiting religious and historical monuments have been one source of tension. "Cambodian officials have been a little frustrated," Kurlantzick said. "Partly through their own fault, they allowed a certain very seedy sex tourism culture to take place in (the capital) Phnom Penh."

He said that while the arrests are "pretty unusual," travellers should be aware that the Cambodian government is increasingly lashing out against all types of foreign influence, including boisterous tourists. "The overall environment in Cambodia has just become much more repressed over the last year," Kurlantzick said. "The country is potentially something of a tinder box because of that."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

British Prime Minister Theresa May and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are among the world leaders who've expressed alarm at the rise of virtual cash to move money offshore. The U.S. Congress held hearings this month, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called on the world's 20 biggest economies to work together to make sure cryptocurrencies don't "become the next Swiss bank account." The concern comes after a successful international crackdown on tax havens in traditional banking.

"Every country is scrambling to come up with an answer," said Drake, who serves on the boards of 25 public and private companies. "There needs to be a regulated structure that won't kill the industry."

The earliest adopters of the practice were criminals, and their involvement has risen steadily, according to a three-year study by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan Washington think tank. Next came users like Drake, who said he follows U.S. law by reporting his companies' holdings. Drake said better oversight would help legitimize the industry.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-29/crypto-as-next-swiss-bank-account-sends-governments-scrambling

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Verizon reportedly follows AT&T's lead and cancels plans to sell Huawei's latest phone amid fears of Chinese spying

Verizon is following AT&T's lead and cancelling plans to sell Huawei's Mate 10 Pro smartphone that boasts support for the upcoming super-fast 5G network, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday.

Verizon's decision is reportedly based on political pressure from the US government, which is seeing a reinvigorated fear of spying from China as US regulators urged an investigation of Chinese-made telecom equipment in December 2017. It's the same reason AT&T dropped its deal with Huawei to offer the Mate 10 Pro on January 8.

Huawei's Mate 10 Pro with 5G networking capabilities seemingly falls under the category of Chinese-made telecom equipment under investigation, as the company has been accused of having ties with the Chinese government.

Previously: U.S. Lawmakers Urge AT&T to Cut Ties With Huawei

Related: U.S. Government Reportedly Wants to Build a 5G Network to Thwart Chinese Spying

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takyon writes:

The growing trends of teleworking and spending more time at home (watching TV/streaming, online shopping, gaming, etc.) have had an effect on the U.S. national energy demand:

Changes in Time Use and Their Effect on Energy Consumption in the United States (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.01.003) (DX)

Lifestyles are changing due to information technology and other socio-technological trends. We study the energy effects induced by lifestyle shifts via tradeoffs in time spent in performing activities. We use the American Time Use Survey to find changes in times performing different activities from 2003 to 2012. The results show that Americans are spending considerably more time at home (7.8 days more in 2012 compared with 2003). This increased home time is counterbalanced by decreased time spent traveling (1.2 days less in 2012 versus 2003) and in non-residential buildings (6.7 days less in 2012 versus 2003). Increased residential time is mainly due to increased work at home, video watching, and computer use. Decomposition analysis is then used to estimate effects on energy consumption, indicating that more time at home and less on travel and in non-residential buildings reduced national energy demand by 1,700 trillion BTU in 2012, 1.8% of the national total.

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takyon writes:

The messaging platform Discord has taken down a channel that was being used to share and spread AI-edited pornographic videos:

Last year, a Reddit user known as "deepfakes" used machine learning to digitally edit the faces of celebrities into pornographic videos, and a new app has made the process much easier to create and spread the videos online. on Friday, chat service Discord shut down a user-created group that was spreading the videos, citing their policy against revenge porn.

Discord is a free chat platform that caters to gamers, and has a poor track record when it comes to dealing with abuse and toxic communities. After it was contacted by Business Insider, the company took down the chat group, named "deepfakes."

Discord is a Skype/TeamSpeak/Slack alternative. Here are some /r/deepfakes discussions about the Discord problem.

One take is that there is no recourse for "victims" of AI-generated porn, at least in the U.S.:

People Can Put Your Face on Porn—and the Law Can't Help You

To many vulnerable people on the internet, especially women, this looks a whole lot like the end times. "I share your sense of doom," Mary Anne Franks, who teaches First Amendment and technology law at the University of Miami Law School, and also serves as the tech and legislative policy advisor for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. "I think it is going to be that bad."

Merkel Trump Deepfake

Previously: AI-Generated Fake Celebrity Porn Craze "Blowing Up" on Reddit

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16948356/waymo-google-fiat-chrysler-pacfica-minivan-self-driving

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has reached a deal with one of Detroit's Big Three automakers to dramatically expand its fleet of autonomous vehicles. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced today that it would supply "thousands" of additional Chrysler Pacifica minivans to Waymo, with the first deliveries starting at the end of 2018.

Neither Waymo nor FCA would disclose the specific number of vehicles that were bought, nor the amount of money that was trading hands. The manufacturer's suggested retail price for the 2018 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan starts at $39,995. A thousand minivans would cost $40 million, so this was at the very least an eight-figure deal.

Waymo currently has 600 of FCA's minivans in its fleet, some of which are used to shuttle real people around for its Early Rider program in Arizona. The first 100 were delivered when the partnership was announced in May 2016, and an additional 500 were delivered in 2017. The minivans are plug-in hybrid variants with Waymo's self-driving hardware and software built in. The companies co-staff a facility in Michigan, near FCA's US headquarters, to engineer the vehicles. The company also owns a fleet of self-driving Lexus RX SUVs that is has been phasing out in favor of the new minivans. (The cute "Firefly" prototypes were also phased out last year.)

Also at Ars Technica and Bloomberg.

Previously: Apple Expands Self-Driving Fleet From 3 to 27 Cars

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Verge writes about a report from Le Monde that China appears to have been caught spying on the African Union via their computers and even their actual building.

The African Union, a coalition of 55 countries established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has reportedly been a victim of state-sponsored espionage after an investigation from French newspaper Le Monde revealed China was using the computers in a new building's IT division to spy on its continental neighbors.

China was able to do this because it financed and built the new building itself to act as the African Union's new headquarters and gifted [sic] it under false pretenses of cordial partnership, Le Monde reports. The spying has reportedly been happening since 2012 when the building opened in downtown Addis Ababa. The backdoor into the African Union's computer systems was first discovered in January 2017, when engineers in the IT division noticed an unusual spike of activity late into the evening when the building was no longer staffed.

Source : China denies claims it built backdoors into African Union's headquarters for spying

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

It's called Spark Controlled Compression Ignition, and Mazda made it work.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the internal combustion engine is far from dead. Recently we've seen several technological advances that will significantly boost the efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. One of these, first reported back in August 2017, is Mazda's breakthrough with compression ignition. On Tuesday, Mazda invited us to its R&D facility in California to learn more about this clever new Skyactiv-X engine, but more importantly we actually got to drive it on the road.

The idea behind Skyactiv-X is to be able to run the engine with as lean a fuel-air mixture (known as λ) as possible. Because very lean combustion is cooler than a stoichiometric reaction (where λ=1 and there is exactly enough air to completely burn each molecule of fuel but no more), less energy is wasted as heat. What's more, the exhaust gases contain fewer nasty nitrogen oxides, and the unused air gets put to work. It absorbs the combustion heat and then expands and pushes down on the piston. The result is a cleaner, more efficient, and more powerful engine. And Skyactiv-X uses a very lean mix: a λ up to 2.5.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/mazdas-skyactiv-x-shows-the-internal-combustion-engine-has-a-future/

Original Submission