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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There are many reasons to avoid the plethora of direct-to-consumer DNA tests on the market these days. Recent data suggests that many may produce alarming false positives for disease risks, while others that claim to predict things like athletic abilities and wine preferences are simply dubious. Another, perhaps less-common concern is that an at-home genetic analysis may unveil completely unexpected, deeply disturbing information that you just can’t prepare for.

That was the case for Washington state’s Kelli Rowlette (née Fowler), who took a DNA test with the popular site Ancestry.com back in July 2017.

Rowlette was likely expecting to discover new details about her distant ancestors, but she instead learned that her DNA sample matched that of a doctor in Idaho. The Ancestry.com analysis predicted a “parent-child” relationship. Befuddled and in disbelief, Rowlette relayed the findings to her parents, Sally Ashby and Howard Fowler. According to a lawsuit the family filed in the US District Court of Idaho, she told her parents she was disappointed that the results were so unreliable.

But little did she know that her parents—who previously lived in Idaho—had trouble conceiving her and, in 1980, underwent an unusual fertility procedure with a doctor near their Idaho Falls home. The name of that doctor was Gerald E. Mortimer—who happened to have a DNA sample with Ancestry.com that matched Rowlette’s.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The diversity of animals is one of the most fascinating aspects of nature. All habitats on the planet, be it land, water, or air, are occupied by species with incredible adaptations to their environment. One way to address the question of how this diversity has evolved is by comparing genes across different species. During evolution, genes can be created, get mutated or duplicated, and even can get lost.

To investigate to what extent gene losses can contribute to different adaptations, Michael Hiller and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden developed a computational method to identify gene losses and systematically searched the genomes of 62 mammals to analyze which genes are lost in which species.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, highlight a number of previously unknown gene losses that may have occurred as a consequence of a previous, existing adaptation, or – and more interesting – that may have played a direct role in the evolution of a new morphological or physiological adaptation.

A genomics approach reveals insights into the importance of gene losses for mammalian adaptations (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03667-1) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Zero-width characters are invisible, ‘non-printing’ characters that are not displayed by the majority of applications. F​or exam​ple, I’ve ins​erted 10 ze​ro-width spa​ces in​to thi​s sentence, c​an you tel​​l? (Hint: paste the sentence into Diff Checker to see the locations of the characters!). These characters can be used to ‘fingerprint’ text for certain users.

Well, the original reason isn’t too exciting. A few years ago I was a member of a team that participated in competitive tournaments across a variety of video games. This team had a private message board, used to post important announcements amongst other things. Eventually these announcements would appear elsewhere on the web, posted to mock the team and more significantly; ensuring the message board was redundant for sharing confidential information and tactics.

The security of the site seemed pretty tight so the theory was that a logged-in user was simply copying the announcement and posting it elsewhere. I created a script that allowed the team to invisibly fingerprint each announcement with the username of the user it is being displayed to.

I saw a lot of interest in zero-width characters from a recent post by Zach Aysan so I thought I’d publish this method here along with an interactive demo to share with everyone. The code examples have been updated to use modern JavaScript but the overall logic is the same.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A 2nd 'Big Bang' could end our universe in an instant — and it's all because of a tiny particle that controls the laws of physics

Our universe may end the same way it was created: with a big, sudden bang. That's according to new research from a group of Harvard physicists, who found that the destabilization of the Higgs boson — a tiny quantum particle that gives other particles mass — could lead to an explosion of energy that would consume everything in the known universe and upend the laws of physics and chemistry.

As part of their study, published last month in the journal Physical Review D [open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.97.056006] [DX], the researchers calculated when our universe could end. It's nothing to worry about just yet. They settled on a date 10¹³⁹ years from now, or 10 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years in the future. And they're at least 95% sure — a statistical measure of certainty — that the universe will last at least another 10⁵⁸ years.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have compared the amount of phosphorus in two nebulae, finding much more in Cassiopeia A than the Crab Nebula. As phosphorus is an important element for Earth-based life, forming the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), areas of the cosmos with sparse phosphorus could have less life or life based on a different set of chemical compounds:

When astronomers look for parts of the galaxy that could contain life, they generally search for elements like oxygen and carbon. But another element essential to life could be the key to finding systems in the Milky Way that have the right conditions for living organisms. [...] Phosphorus is relatively rare in the universe, the rarest of the six elements required for life as we know it. It is created in trace amounts in some stars' natural evolution, but the majority of the universe's phosphorus is fused in supernovae. The element, atomic number 16, only accounts for about 0.0007 percent of all matter.

Greaves and fellow Cardiff astronomer Phil Cigan are presenting new research at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool that compares the amount of phosphorus in the stellar dust of two supernova remnants—Cassiopeia A (Cas A) in the constellation Cassiopeia, and the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus. The early results suggest that the Crab Nebula contains significantly less phosphorus than Cas A.

The discrepancy comes as a surprise, as computer models suggested the two collections of stellar dust, created by the same type of supernova, should contain similar amounts of phosphorus. Understanding this difference could help us understand how levels of this crucial element are distributed across the stars. [...] If unknown processes cause some stellar explosions to produce more phosphorus than others, then life could be isolated to phosphorus-rich areas of the galaxy. At this point, however, only Cas A and the Crab Nebula have been studied with telescope spectroscopy to determine their chemical compositions. "As far as I know, phosphorus has not been looked for in any other supernova, of any type," says Greaves.

Also at Phys.org (Royal Astronomical Society).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have observed 12 X-ray emitting binary systems near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, pointing to a population of thousands of black holes within a 6 light year wide region of space:

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy appears to have a lot of company, according to a new study that suggests the monster is surrounded by about 10,000 other black holes. [...] For decades, scientists have thought that black holes should sink to the center of galaxies and accumulate there, says Chuck Hailey, an astrophysicist at Columbia University. But scientists had no proof that these exotic objects had actually gathered together in the center of the Milky Way.

[...] Isolated black holes are almost impossible to detect, but black holes that have a companion — an orbiting star — interact with that star in ways that allow the pair to be spotted by telltale X-ray emissions. The team searched for those signals in a region stretching about three light-years out from our galaxy's central supermassive black hole. [...] What they found there: a dozen black holes paired up with stars, according to a report in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/nature25029] [DX].

Black holes with binary companions are thought to be rare but are easier to spot than isolated black holes, leading to the high estimate.

Also at BBC and The Register.

Original Submission

We had submissions from two Soylentils concerning recent employee reaction to Google's participation in the Pentagon's "Project Maven" program:

Google Workers Urge C.E.O. to Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.

The letter [pdf], which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash between Silicon Valley and the federal government that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

Google Employees on Pentagon AI Algorithms: "Google Should Not be in the Business of War"

takyon writes:

Thousands of Google employees have signed a letter protesting the development of "Project Maven", which would use machine learning algorithms to analyze footage from U.S. military drones:

DeathMonkey writes:

Local cops have responded to more than a dozen calls of raccoons acting "extremely strange."

[...] This March, residents of Youngstown, Ohio, began noticing something weird about their local raccoon population. The animals were coming out during the day and standing on their back legs, bearing their teeth and staggering around like extras in a George Romero movie, WKBN reports.

"[The raccoon] would stand up on his hind legs, which I've never seen a raccoon do before, and he would show his teeth and then he would fall over backward and go into almost a comatose condition," Robert Coggeshall, who was walking his dogs when he spotted the raccoon in question, told WKBN. Eventually, the raccoon would shake itself out of the daze, rise back up to its hind legs, and stagger forward, before repeating the whole process over again. It was, to put it in Coggeshall's words, "extremely strange."

[...] No one is certain exactly what is causing the weird-ass behavior, but the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says the raccoons may be suffering from a disease called distemper, rather than rabies.

'Zombie Raccoons' Are Traumatizing an Ohio Town

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

When people hear "Appalachia," stereotypes and even slurs often immediately jump to mind, words like "backwards," "ignorant," "hillbilly" or "yokel." But Appalachian attitudes about technology's role in daily life are extremely sophisticated—and turn out to be both insightful and useful in a technology-centric society.

[...] In a recent study, my colleagues and I used focus groups and interviews to explore how people use technology in rural Appalachia. These open-ended methods allow participants to discuss their experiences and opinions in their own terms. For instance, most technology surveys don't ask people why they don't own the latest phone or computer—they just assume people would if they could.

Those studies miss key insights our research was able to identify and explore. When we gave people a chance to tell their own stories about technology, we most often heard about two themes.

The first, which we called "resistance," appeared in people's doubts about the concept that more technology is always better. They also carefully considered whether the potential usefulness of new technologies was worth the privacy sacrifices inherently required to use them.

People also described their intentional choices about how much technology to use and for what purposes—as well as intentional choices not to use technology in some situations. We called this theme "navigation."

Source: https://theconversation.com/resisting-technology-appalachian-style-94245

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

When people interact with most personal digital assistants or chatbots today, the experience is a lot like speaking into a walkie-talkie or texting: First one party says or writes something, and then the other party digests that information and responds.

It's effective, but Li Zhou, engineer lead for XiaoIce, Microsoft's wildly popular artificial intelligence-powered social chatbot in China, notes that it has one big drawback.

"People don't actually talk that way," Zhou said.

Instead, he notes, when most people are on the phone or chatting in person, they are both talking and listening at the same time – often predicting how the other person might finish a sentence, and maybe interrupting someone when appropriate or breaking an awkward silence to offer a new thought based on the information they are gathering.

Now, Microsoft believes it has created the first technological breakthrough that can allow people to have a conversation with an AI-powered chatbot that is more like that natural experience a person might have when talking on the phone to a friend.

The company recently incorporated these advances into XiaoIce, a social chatbot that has more than 200 million users in Asia, and it is working to apply the same breakthroughs to other social chatbots including Microsoft's Zo in the United States.

Source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/xiaoice-full-duplex/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

It's a new type of display, enabled by a "multi-view" pixel. Unlike traditional pixels, each of which emit one color of light in all directions, Misapplied Sciences says its pixel can send different colors of light in tens of thousands or even millions of directions.

They call it a "magic pixel."

"Multiple people can be looking at the same pixel at the same time, and yet perceive a completely different color," said Albert Ng, the company's CEO and co-founder. "That's each individual pixel. Then, we can create displays by having arrays of these multi-view pixels, and we can control the colors of light that each pixel sends. After coordinating all those light rays together, we can form images at different locations."

The result: a display that lets many different people see completely different content on the same screen, simultaneously. When combined with location technology and sensors, similar to those already embedded in a smartphone, the company says this content can be targeted in real time from public displays to specific locations, people and objects, essentially following them in three-dimensional space as they move through the world.

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/breakthrough-parallel-reality-display-technology-promises-personalize-world-without-goggles/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

It's no secret that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is a mess. Originally written by a confused and panicked Congress in the wake of the 1980s movie War Games, it was supposed to be an "anti-hacking" law, but was written so broadly that it has been used over and over again against any sort of "things that happen on a computer." It has been (not so jokingly) referred to as "the law that sticks," because when someone has done something "icky" using a computer, if no other law is found to be broken, someone can almost always find some weird way to interpret the CFAA to claim it's been violated. The two most problematic parts of the CFAA are the fact that it applies to "unauthorized access" or to "exceeding authorized access" on any "computer... which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communications." In 1986 that may have seemed limited. But, today, that means any computer on the internet. Which means basically any computer.

[...] There is a case happening now, brought by some researchers and journalists, trying to get the CFAA declared unconstitutional for making scraping of the open internet a crime. On Friday, in a little-noticed, but highly-entertaining ruling [pdf], the district court let the case proceed, but also made some important points about the CFAA, making it clear that the law should be narrowly applied (which actually harms the "is this unconstitutional" question, since the more limited the law is, the less likely it's unconstitutional).

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180401/22565539541/court-says-scraping-websites-creating-fake-profiles-can-be-protected-first-amendment.shtml

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Richard Stallman writes in the Guardian:

Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.

Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy's sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU's approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.

The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Computer searches telescope data for evidence of distant planets

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets.

Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself. The scale of the search demands automation: There are nearly 750 million possible light sources in the data accumulated through NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission alone.

In tests, the machine-learning system agreed with human identifications of debris disks 97 percent of the time. The researchers also trained their system to rate debris disks according to their likelihood of containing detectable exoplanets. In a paper describing the new work in the journal Astronomy and Computing, the MIT researchers report that their system identified 367 previously unexamined celestial objects as particularly promising candidates for further study.

Computer-aided discovery of debris disk candidates: A case study using the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) catalog (DOI: 10.1016/j.ascom.2018.02.004) (DX)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

There’s no way to sugarcoat this message: Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg believes North America users of his platform deserve a lower data protection standard than people everywhere else in the world.

In a phone interview with Reuters yesterday Mark Zuckerberg declined to commit to universally implementing changes to the platform that are necessary to comply with the European Union's incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Rather, he said the company was working on a version of the law that would bring some European privacy guarantees worldwide — declining to specify to the reporter which parts of the law would not extend worldwide.

"We're still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing," Reuters quotes Zuckerberg on the GDPR question.

This is a subtle shift of line. Facebook's leadership has previously implied the product changes it's making to comply with GDPR's incoming data protection standard would be extended globally.

[...] On the speculation front, consent under GDPR for processing personal data means offering individuals "genuine choice and control", as the UK's data watchdog explains it. So perhaps Facebook isn't comfortable about giving North American users that kind of autonomy to revoke specific consents at will.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-universal/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Now you see it: Invisibility material created by UCI engineers

"Basically, we've invented a soft material that can reflect heat in similar ways to how squid skin can reflect light," said corresponding author Alon Gorodetsky, an engineering professor. "It goes from wrinkled and dull to smooth and shiny, essentially changing the way it reflects the heat." Potential uses include better camouflage for troops and insulation for spacecraft, storage containers, emergency shelters, clinical care, and building heating and cooling systems.

"We were inspired both by science fiction and science fact – seeing dinosaurs disappear and reappear under an infrared camera in 'Jurassic World' and seeing squid filmed underwater do similar things," said Gorodetsky. "So we decided to merge those concepts to design a really unique technology."

Made of sandwiches of aluminum, plastic, and sticky tape, the material transforms from a wrinkled grey to a glossy surface when it is either pulled manually or zapped with voltage.

Products that reflect heat, such as emergency blankets, have existed for decades. But in the past several years, inventors in Gorodetsky's lab and others have pushed to create dramatically improved versions via bio-inspired engineering. One focus has been to imitate how squid and other cephalopods can nearly instantaneously change their skin to blend into their surrounding environment. Now, he and his team have done it, creating prototypes that can next be scaled up into large sheets of commercially useable material. Patents are pending.

Adaptive infrared-reflecting systems inspired by cephalopods (open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar5191) (DX)

By drawing inspiration from cephalopod skin, we developed adaptive infrared-reflecting platforms that feature a simple actuation mechanism, low working temperature, tunable spectral range, weak angular dependence, fast response, stability to repeated cycling, amenability to patterning and multiplexing, autonomous operation, robust mechanical properties, and straightforward manufacturability. Our findings may open opportunities for infrared camouflage and other technologies that regulate infrared radiation.

Original Submission