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canopic jug writes:

There are three northern white rhinoceroses left. The last male of this subspecies lives in Kenya and is already quite old for his kind of animal. He is ailing now.

But recently, a secondary and much deeper infection was discovered beneath the initial one and Sudan was taking longer to recover, "despite the best efforts of his team of vets who are giving him 24-hour care", the organisation said.

There are two other white rhinos left in the world – a female named Najin and daughter Fatu, both also living at the conservancy in Kenya. Health problems or their ages – around 28 and 17, respectively – have left them unable to reproduce.

Wildlife experts and conservationists expressed deep regret over the prospect of the northern white rhino completely dying out. Technically, the species is already classified as extinct because it no longer exists in the wild, conservationists said.

The last few there and elsewhere have been protected 24/7 by heavily armed guard to try to slow down poaching. However, poaching and the other underlying reasons for the impending extinction are unlikely to be solved within the next few decades.

Sources:
Last male northern white rhino Sudan falls ill as species edges closer to extinction. South China Morning Post
The world's last male northern white rhino is on death watch. CNN

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Physicians spend less time than ever with patients — just 27 percent of the workday, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2016.

The main culprit:  electronic health records. Doctors find themselves increasingly glued to computers, acting as glorified data entry administrators.

Even when they’re in the same room as patients, doctors interacted with them only 52 percent of the time. However, the study also found a contra-indicator: doctors who used some kind of document support — a medical scribe or dictation service — spent more time interacting directly with patients.

That’s a dynamic LexiconAI hopes to capitalize on using GPU-infused AI.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Network guru Wesley George noticed the strange traffic earlier this week as part of a larger attack on a DNS server in an effort to overwhelm it. He was taking packet captures of the malicious traffic as part of his job at Neustar's SiteProtect DDoS protection service when he realized there were "packets coming from IPv6 addresses to an IPv6 host."

The attack wasn't huge – unlike this week's record-breaking 1.35Tbps attack on GitHub – and it wasn't using a method that is exclusive to IPv6, but it was sufficiently unusual and worrying to flag to the rest of his team.

Computers behind 1,900 IPv6 addresses were attacking the DNS server as part of a larger army of commandeered systems, mostly using IPv4 addresses on the public internet. Anyone running an IPv6 network needs to, therefore, ensure they have the same level of network security and mitigation tools in place as their IPv4 networks – and fast.

"The risk is that if you don't have IPv6 as part of your threat model, you could get blindsided," Neustar's head of research and development Barrett Lyon told us.

takyon writes:

The U.S. Government Acountability [sic] Office (GAO) has warned that the launch of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is likely to be delayed again, which could cause the budget cap set by the U.S. Congress to be exceeded:

The U.S. Government Acountability [sic] Office (GAO), a non-partisan group that investigates federal spending and performance, has issued a report on the James Webb Space Telescope that has astronomers worried. "It's likely the launch date will be delayed again," the report concludes — an ominous statement, given that any further delays could risk project cancellation.

Last year NASA announced a delay in the telescope's launch to sometime between March and June 2019. The 5- to 8-month delay came from problems integrating spacecraft components, especially its complex, five-layered sunshield, which must unfold perfectly when the telescope is deployed. Right after requesting the change in launch readiness date, the mission learned of further delays from its contractor, Northrum Grumman, due to "lessons learned from conducting deployment exercises of the spacecraft element and sunshield."

The mission now has 1.5 months of schedule reserve remaining, the GAO finds. Delays during integration and testing are common, "the phase in development where problems are most likely to be found and schedules tend to slip." The project has a total of five phases of integration and testing, and has made significant progress on phases three and four, with the fifth phase beginning in July.

GAO's 31-page report, February 2018: JWST: Integration and Test Challenges Have Delayed Launch and Threaten to Push Costs Over Cap.

Also at Science Magazine.

Previously: Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Delayed to Spring 2019
Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Could be Further Delayed

Related: James Webb Space Telescope Vibration Testing Completed
NASA Considering Flagship Space Telescope Options for the 2030s
WFIRST Space Observatory Could be Scaled Back Due to Costs
JWST: Too Big to Fail?
Trump Administration Budget Proposal Would Cancel WFIRST

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new progress in the scaling of semiconductor quantum dot based qubit has been achieved at Key Laboratory of Quantum Information and Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information & Quantum Physics of USTC [University of Science and Technology, China]. Professor GUO Guoping with his co-workers, XIAO Ming, LI Haiou and CAO Gang, designed and fabricated a quantum processor with six quantum dots, and experimentally demonstrated quantum control of the Toffoli gate.

[...] The Toffoli gate is a three-qubit operation that changed the state of a target qubit conditioned on the state of two control qubits. It can be used for universal reversible classical computation and also forms a universal set of qubit gates in quantum computation together with a Hadamard gate.

Furthermore, it is a key element in quantum error correction schemes. Implementation of the Toffoli gate with only single- and two-qubit operations requires six controlled-NOT gates and ten single-qubit operations.

As a result, a single-step Toffoli gate can reduce the number of quantum operations dramatically, which can break the limit of coherence time and improve the efficiency of quantum computing. Researchers from Guo's group found the T-shaped six quantum dot architecture with openings between control qubits and the target qubit can strengthen the coupling between qubits with different function and minimize it between qubits with the same function, which satisfies the requirements of the Toffoli gate well.

Using this architecture with optimized high frequency pulses, researchers demonstrated the Toffoli gate in semiconductor quantum dot system in the world for the first time, which paves the way and lays a solid foundation for the scalable semiconductor quantum processor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a Thursday blog post, the CEO of Playsaurus wrote that the company that sent him the letter, GTX Corporation, is a “patent troll.” CEO Thomas Wolfley called GTX’s demands to avoid “costly litigation” over Playsaurus’ use of electronic “Rubies” in its games “meritless.”

In a brief phone interview with Ars on Friday, Wolfley told Ars that receiving the demand letter was disconcerting.

“I kind of feel like it’s as if someone walked into my home with a knife and asked me for $35,000, except it’s legal,” he said. “I’ve been stressed out this whole week.”

[...] In the blog post, Wolfley continued that GTX’s legal efforts were “abusive and unethical,” noting that $35,000 was half the annual salary of an employee. He also wrote:

As I am a major owner of Playsaurus, I see this as a personal attack, and the cost in my own time and well-being has already been significant and draining. It is a shame that the United States legal system can’t provide a quick and easy way for us to punish them for these actions.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Developers of Ethereum, the world's No. 2 digital currency by market capitalization, have closed a serious security hole that allowed virtually anyone with an Internet connection to manipulate individual users' access to the publicly accessible ledger.

So-called eclipse attacks work by preventing a cryptocurrency user from connecting to honest peers. Attacker-controlled peers then feed the target a manipulated version of the blockchain the entire currency community relies on to reconcile transactions and enforce contractual obligations. Eclipse attacks can be used to trick targets into paying for a good or service more than once and to co-opt the target's computing power to manipulate algorithms that establish crucial user consensus. Because Ethereum supports "smart contracts" that automatically execute transactions when certain conditions in the blockchain are present, Ethereum eclipse attacks can also be used to interfere with those self-enforcing agreements.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Purdue researcher Luis Solorio has helped create a lifelike cancer environment out of polymer to better predict how drugs might stop its course.

Previous research has shown that most cancer deaths happen because of how it spreads, or metastasizes, in the body. A major hurdle for treating cancer is not being able to experiment with metastasis itself and knock out what it needs to spread.

Studies in the past have used a 3-D printer to recreate a controlled cancer environment, but these replicas are still not realistic enough for drug screening.

"We need a much finer resolution than what a 3-D printer can create," said Solorio, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

Rather than 3-D printing, Solorio and a team of researchers have proposed 3-D writing. The device that they developed, a 3-D jet writer, acts like a 3-D printer by producing polymer microtissues as they are shaped in the body, but on a smaller, more authentic scale with pore sizes large enough for cells to enter the polymer structure just as they would a system in the body.

3-D jet writing is a fine-tuned form of electrospinning, the process of using a charged syringe containing a polymer solution to draw out a fiber, and then deposit the fiber onto a plate to form a structure. This structure is a scaffold that facilitates cell activity.

[...] "Ideally, we could use our system as an unbiased drug screening platform where we could screen thousands of compounds, hopefully get data within a week, and get it back to a clinician so that it's all within a relevant time frame," Solorio said.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Friends make you happy, healthy, and they'll be there for you when the rain starts to pour. But how many of them do you need? Turns out the show Friends had the science all figured out.

Back in the early 90s, British anthropologist Dr. Robin Dunbar came to an interesting conclusion: humans could likely only maintain social relationships with an average of 148 individuals due to the size of our brain's neocortex, or what's known as Dunbar's Number. More social information processing demands requires more cognitive resources, and we only have so much brain power. Basically, we tend to top out at having 150 meaningful relationships in our lives, whether they're family, friends, or casual acquaintances. Your Facebook might have hundreds or thousands of "friends," but a good chunk of them, if not most, are out of mind.

Later on, Dunbar's research led to the concept of "Dunbar's layers", where the emotional closeness between individuals was taken into account. This meant that your relationships looked more like layers instead of a cloud of 150 people. The closest layer has three to five people, the next layer has 15 people, then 50, and so on. That inner layer is what makes up your "vital friendships," or your inner circle of close friends. These are people that you should have in your life to meet up with regularly, talk about personal matters, and maintain a strong emotional connection. In the show Friends, each main character—Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe, Monica, and Chandler—these five people in their life, making it a pretty decent model to follow on a biological and sociological level. If you can manage to maintain three to five close friendships in the same way, you're far more likely be content. After all, who wouldn't be better off with people who will always be there for you?

https://lifehacker.com/this-is-how-many-friends-you-need-to-be-happy-1823425885

Do you agree with this premise ? If yes, where do you stand on the "number of friends" scale ?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

European agency concludes controversial 'neonic' pesticides threaten bees

Controversial insecticides known as neonicotinoids pose a danger to wild bees and managed honey bees, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, said in a report released today. Bayer, a maker of so-called neonics, disputed EFSA's findings. But the report is likely to give a boost to those pushing for tighter European regulation of the chemicals.

"This report certainly strengthens the case for further restrictions on neonicotinoid use," entomologist Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., said in a statement. The European Commission last year proposed—but has not yet adopted—extending a partial ban on neonics to all field crops.

Related: Landmark Study: Honeybee Queens Severely Affected by Neonicotinoid Pesticides
Neonicotinoid Can Cause Brain Damage in Bats; Bumblebee Species Added to Endangered List
Extensive Study Concludes Neonicotinoid Pesticides Harm Bees
Lithium Chloride May Help in Fixing Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Original Submission

Robotron writes:

MIT Tech Review reports on a new study which used computer model to analyze wealth distribution in society. It concludes that the majority of riches do not result from talent, intelligence or hard work - but luck. Those who succeed most in modern society are born well and experience several 'lucky events' which they exploit, but are of mediocre talent. The study's abstract states that the model has potential for encouraging investment in the genuinely gifted, and summarizes:

"...if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Previously Unknown "Supercolony" of Adelie Penguins Discovered in Antarctica

For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining—or so biologists have thought. A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on this species of penguin.

In a paper released on March 2nd in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown "supercolony" of more than 1,500,000 Adélie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

Also at BBC and Smithsonian.

Multi-modal survey of Adélie penguin mega-colonies reveals the Danger Islands as a seabird hotspot (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-22313-w) (DX)

Original Submission

Justin Case writes:

Ball lightning is a frequently reported but currently unexplained phenomenon, in which a glowing ball floats in midair, passes through walls, and otherwise defies physical common sense. Now, scientists have created a synthetic electromagnetic knot called a skyrmion, in a quantum gas. Its behaviors and properties are similar to those reported for ball lightning, and may finally make it possible to study something that has previously been outside the realm of science, for lack of repeatable observations.

Starting with a Bose-Einstein condensate, and adding a magnetic field, they produced

objects [that] can move like independent particles, shifting from place to place within a material while maintaining their knotted configuration. And like a tight knot in a thread, skyrmions are difficult to undo, making them relatively stable structures.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Using several large datasets describing health care visits, geographic movements and demographics of more than 150 million people over nine years, researchers at the University of Chicago have created models that predict the spread of influenza throughout the United States each year.

[...] In the paper, they liken the typical outbreak to a forest fire. To spread, a fire needs flammable, dry tinder, an initiating spark and wind to hasten its movement. In the southern U.S., people have a high degree of social connectivity. The number of close friends, friends who are also neighbors, and communities of people who all know each other is much higher than the country at large, meaning they have lots of opportunities to spread the flu.

This high social connectivity is the flammable material. The spark is the warm, humid weather of the southern coast, and the wind is the collective movement of all these people, over short distances by land, as they drive from county to county.

http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30756

Source: Massive data analysis shows what drives the spread of flu in the U.S.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The world's top eight DNS providers now control 59 per cent of name resolution for the biggest Websites - and that puts the Web at risk, according to a group of Harvard University researchers.

The group was led by Harvard's Shane Greenstein, and warned that since 2011, the "entropy" of the DNS (referring to how widely distributed it is) has fallen, becoming concentrated in "a small number of dominant cloud services companies".

That state of affairs, the group's research paper (PDF) argued, creates fragility if attackers find a weakness in those DNS services.

[...] For the namespaces they measured, the team found the top eight providers grew their market share from 24 per cent to 59 per cent from 2011 to 2017, and the top four went from 17 per cent to nearly 50 per cent.

[...] The other trend they found was that unsurprisingly, in a world awash with easy-to-use cloud services, external DNS hosting has overtaken in-house DNS servers.

For companies worried that this might leave them open to a Mirai-style botnet taking out their DNS provider, the solution is simple, the paper said.

Organisations should diversify their pool of nameservers by taking DNS management services from multiple providers, the paper said. Compared to the costs of a day's downtime, this is " a comparatively costless and therefore puzzlingly rare decision".

Original Submission