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takyon writes:

AMD calls out NVIDIA's partner program, G-Sync 'gamer taxes':

A promotional push by NVIDIA has apparently tied up PC builders, and raised the ire of its competitor AMD. The current leader in the graphics card market, NVIDIA has apparently developed a GeForce Partner Program (GPP) that it claims exists to "ensure that gamers have full transparency into the GPU platform and software they're being sold, and can confidently select products that carry the NVIDIA GeForce promise."

But according to AMD, that vague explanation hides an attempt to elbow competition out of high-profile system lines. A recent report by HardOCP suggests that for PC builders to be a part of the program (with access to combined marketing efforts, bundles and rebate offers) they have to exclusively align their gaming brand with NVIDIA's GeForce hardware (and not AMD's Radeon). Things came to a head yesterday when ASUS suddenly announced a new gaming line, AREZ, that apparently exists only to keep AMD Radeon-powered PCs out of its well-known ROG gaming equipment. With AMD out of the way, the ROG line can join NVIDIA's GPP.

Also at Digital Trends, Tom's Hardware, and Notebookcheck.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Update: SpaceX: All systems and weather are go for Falcon 9's launch of @NASA_TESS today at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. http://spacex.com/webcast

Update 2: SpaceX's live coverage starts at 6:36 PM EDT (22:36 UTC).

Update 3: TESS successfully separated from Falcon 9 and was deployed into a highly elliptical orbit.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is set to launch on April 16 at 6:32 PM ET (22:32 UTC) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The spacecraft was developed by MIT with seed funding in Google back in 2008. The spacecraft will perform an all-sky survey using four 24° × 24° wide field-of-view cameras that can image a total of 24° × 96° (2,304 square degrees) of sky every 30 minutes (the Sun and Moon are only about 0.2 deg² to Earth-based observers).

TESS will use a unique "P/2" 2:1 lunar resonant orbit to image stars in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The survey will image 26 observation sectors of 24° × 96° each, with some overlap at the ecliptic poles. The total survey area will be about 400 times larger than the area searched by the Kepler mission.

TESS will study about 500,000 stars, including the nearest 1,000 red dwarfs, with the goal of finding at least 3,000 new transiting exoplanet candidates. The spacecraft will study F, G, K and M type stars (spanning from F5 to M5), some of which are 30-100 times brighter than stars surveyed by the Kepler spacecraft. Many of the stars will be much closer to Earth than stars surveyed by Kepler, allowing for easier confirmation and follow-up measurements of exoplanets. 30-minute full-frame exposures will be used to search for transient events such as supernovae, star flares, and gamma-ray bursts.

Each observation sector will only be viewed for 27 days (at least in the initial phase of the mission), which will limit the exoplanets seen to those with shorter orbital periods. Potentially habitable exoplanet candidates will likely be found around red dwarfs rather than Sun-like stars. However, TESS's own orbit should remain stable for decades, which could mean that its mission will be extended to allow for a greater variety of exoplanets to be found.

realDonaldTrump writes:

"With the news of Barbara Bush's passing on Tuesday, lawmakers and officials from around the world shared fond words about the former first lady."

Bush, described as "a relentless proponent of family literacy," died at the age of 92, a spokesman for the family confirmed.

The BBC adds:

She was a fierce advocate of civil rights and went against many of her husband's Republican party supporters with her more liberal view on abortion rights.

In a statement from the White House, President Donald Trump said Mrs Bush would be long remembered for her devotion to country and family, "both of which she served unfailingly well".

Barack and Michelle Obama described her as "the rock of a family dedicated to public service" and as "an example of the humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit".

Another former US president, Bill Clinton, said Mrs Bush was "feisty in support of her family and friends, her country and her causes".

Sources:

• foxnews.com/us/2018/04/17/barbara-bush-remembered-by-politicians-lawmakers-around-world-advocate-american-family.html

• http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43805365

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Space diamonds 'came from lost planet':

A diamond-bearing space rock that exploded in Earth's atmosphere in 2008 was part of a lost planet from the early Solar System, a study suggests.

The parent "proto-planet" existed billions of years ago before breaking up in a collision and would have been about as large as Mercury or Mars.

A team has published their results in the journal Nature Communications.

They argue that the pressures necessary to produce diamonds of this kind could only occur in [a] planet of this size.

A large planetary body inferred from diamond inclusions in a ureilite meteorite (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03808-6) (DX)

Planetary formation models show that terrestrial planets are formed by the accretion of tens of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos through energetic giant impacts. However, relics of these large proto-planets are yet to be found. Ureilites are one of the main families of achondritic meteorites and their parent body is believed to have been catastrophically disrupted by an impact during the first 10 million years of the solar system. Here we studied a section of the Almahata Sitta ureilite using transmission electron microscopy, where large diamonds were formed at high pressure inside the parent body. We discovered chromite, phosphate, and (Fe,Ni)-sulfide inclusions embedded in diamond. The composition and morphology of the inclusions can only be explained if the formation pressure was higher than 20 GPa. Such pressures suggest that the ureilite parent body was a Mercury- to Mars-sized planetary embryo.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Research shows anti-hypertensive drugs improve heart rate more in patients who listen to music after taking medication. Among musical genres, classical music is the one with greatest efficiency at reducing arterial pressure; authors of the study speculate whether music acts on the patients' parasympathetic system, increasing their capability of absorbing medication.

In addition to remembering to take the medication prescribed by their cardiologists at the right times and going to the trouble of making healthy lifestyle changes, patients with high blood pressure (hypertension) can include a pleasing beneficial activity in routine treatment of the disease thanks to the discovery that listening to music significantly enhances the effect of anti-hypertensive drugs.

[...] "We've observed classical music activating the parasympathetic nervous system and reducing sympathetic activity," said the principal investigator of the FAPESP-funded project. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems constitute the autonomic nervous system, which maintains homeostasis. The sympathetic nervous system accelerates heart rate, constricts blood vessels and raises blood pressure. The parasympathetic nervous system controls the body at rest, slowing the heart, lowering blood pressure, and stabilizing blood sugar and adrenaline.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Facebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled.

The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent.

It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos; the lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law.

Facebook said the case had no merit and it would fight it vigorously.

On Monday, US District Judge James Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users - a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.

The class of people in question is Facebook users "in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored a face template after June 7, 2011", according to the court order.

In a successful class action suit, any person in that group could be entitled to compensation.

In his order, Judge Donato wrote: "Facebook seems to believe... statutory damages could amount to billions of dollars."

The decision comes days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced intensive questioning by US lawmakers over the company's collection and use of user data.

June 2011 was the date on which Facebook rolled out its "tag suggestions" feature.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A man who had previously received a face transplant has received another face transplant, following complications with an antibiotic:

The first person in the world to receive two facial transplants says he is feeling well, three months after his latest groundbreaking operation.

Jérôme Hamon had his first transplanted face removed last year after signs of rejection following a treatment with an incompatible antibiotic during a cold. The 43 year old remained in a hospital in Paris without a face for two months while a compatible donor was sought. He said: "The first [face] I accepted immediately. This time it's the same."

Mr Hamon suffers from neurofibromatosis type 1, a genetic condition that caused severe disfiguring tumours on his face. His first transplant, in 2010, was a success, but he caught a common cold in 2015 and was given antibiotics. The drug was incompatible with the immunosuppressive treatment he was having to prevent a rejection of the transplanted material. The first signs of rejection came in 2016 and last November, the face, suffering from necrosis, had to be removed.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

C|net reports:

If you were waiting until the last minute to pay your taxes and were depending on IRS.gov to make a payment from your checking account, there's some bad news.

For most of Tuesday, the last day to file taxes, the Direct Pay section of the Internal Revenue Service's website wasn't working. Instead, people planning to pay electronically saw a message reading, "This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Now there's good news -- of sorts. The site is working once again. And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters Tuesday that Americans who couldn't pay their taxes because of the outage will receive an extension. The IRS later said that individuals and businesses with a filing or payment due date of April 17 will now have until midnight on Wednesday, April 18. Taxpayers need do nothing to qualify for the extra time.

edIII writes:

Carl Kasell, the longtime NPR newscaster who breathed new life into his career as the judge on the public radio station's "Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!," has died, NPR reports. He was 84.

The radio personality reportedly died Tuesday in Potomac, Md. of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

Kasell, who was known as the steady voice of the news on NPR for more than three decades, grew up in Goldsboro, N.C. with the dream of one day getting his pipes on the air.

"Before I even started to school," he told NPR in 2009, "I sometimes would hide behind the radio, which would be sitting on a table, and pretend that I was on the air, and try to fool people that came by to listen."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Lea Kissner is back at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, armed with a crisp gray blazer, a slide deck, and a laptop with a 'My Other Car Is A Pynchon Novel' sticker on it. Since graduating in 2002, she's earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon in cryptography and worked her way up at Google, where she manages user privacy and tries to keep things from breaking. She's here to tell a hall of computer science students how she did it—and also how to create privacy-protective systems at a scale that you won't find outside a handful of massive tech companies.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-woman-who-leads-nightwatch-google-s-internal-1825227132

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Over the past decades, computers have become faster and faster and hard disks and storage chips have reached enormous capacities. But this trend cannot continue forever: we are already running up against physical limits that will prevent silicon-based computer technology from attaining any impressive speed gains from this point on. Researchers are particularly optimistic that the next era of technological advancements will start with the development of novel information-processing materials and technologies that combine electrical circuits with optical ones. Using short laser pulses, a research team led by Misha Ivanov of the Max Born Institute in Berlin together with scientists from the Russian Quantum Center in Moscow have now shed light on the extremely rapid processes taking place within these novel materials. Their results have appeared in the journal Nature Photonics.

takyon writes:

The Mayor of Los Angeles has announced that SpaceX will begin production of the BFR at the port of Los Angeles:

SpaceX can start building its "Big Fucking Rocket," now that it has officially found a home in LA. Mayor Eric Garcetti has announced on Twitter that the private space giant "will start production development of the Big Falcon Rocket (the spacecraft's tamer name, apparently)" at the port of Los Angeles. SpaceX designed the 348-foot-long behemoth to fly humanity to the moon, Mars and beyond. It will be able to carry up to [150] tons in payload, whereas Falcon Heavy can only carry [63.8] tons. "This vehicle holds the promise of taking humanity deeper into the cosmos than ever before," he added, along with an illustration of the company's massive interplanetary spacecraft.

The massive cylindrical body of the BFR's fabrication mold has been photographed at a tent at the Port of San Pedro (compare to this earlier photo of the main body tool):

Finally, it's worth noting just how shockingly busy the BFR tent was on both April 13th and 14th, as well as the 8th (the first day Pauline visited the facility). With upwards of 40 cars parked at the tent, it's blindingly clear that SpaceX is not simply using the tent as a temporary storage location – alongside the arrival of composite fabrication materials (prepreg sheets, epoxy, etc) from Airtech International, SpaceX undeniably intends to begin initial fabrication of the first BFR prototypes in this tent, although they will likely eventually move the activities to the Berth 240 Mars rocket factory. That's certainly not a sentence I ever expected to write, but it is what it is.

The BFR's height may be elongated from its planned total of 106 meters.

Related: SpaceX to Launch Five Times in April, Test BFR by 2019
SpaceX BFR vs. ULA Vulcan Showdown in the 2020s
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More

Original Submission

takyon writes:

FDA Launches Criminal Investigation Into Unauthorized Herpes Vaccine Research

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a criminal investigation into research by a Southern Illinois University professor who injected people with his unauthorized herpes vaccine, Kaiser Health News has learned. SIU professor William Halford, who died in June, injected participants with his experimental herpes vaccine in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2016 and in Illinois hotel rooms in 2013 without safety oversight that is routinely performed by the FDA or an institutional review board.

According to four people with knowledge about the inquiry, the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations is looking into whether anyone from SIU or Halford's former company, Rational Vaccines, violated FDA regulations by helping Halford conduct unauthorized research. The probe is also looking at anyone else outside the company or university who might have been complicit, according to the sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The FDA rarely prosecutes research violations, usually choosing to administratively sanction or ban researchers or companies from future clinical trials, legal experts said. Even so, the agency is empowered to pursue as a crime the unauthorized development of vaccines and drugs—and sometimes goes after such cases to send a message.

[...] Rational Vaccines was co-founded with Hollywood filmmaker Agustín Fernández III, and the company received millions of dollars in private investment from investors after the Caribbean trial, including from billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel, who for months has refused to respond to questions from KHN, contributed to President Donald Trump's campaign and is a high-profile critic of the FDA. Thiel is part of a larger libertarian movement to roll back FDA regulations to speed up medical innovation.

Three people have sued Rational Vaccines over the experimental injections.

Also at STLtoday.com.

See also: Can We Gene-Edit Herpes Away?

Previously: University Could Lose Millions From "Unethical" Research Backed by Peter Thiel

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As humankind continues to stare into the dark abyss of deep space in an eternal quest to understand our origins, new computational tools and technologies are needed at unprecedented scales. Gigantic datasets from advanced high resolution telescopes and huge scientific instrumentation installations are overwhelming classical computational and storage techniques.

This is the key issue with exploring the Universe – it is very, very large. Combining advances in machine learning and high speed data storage are starting to provide hitherto unheard of levels of insight that were previously in the realm of pure science fiction. Using computer systems to infer knowledge from observation isn’t new, but the scale at which we need to examine large data today certainly is.

Because the data are so unwieldy and complicated, new methods need to be devised to quickly annotate features that are important, sifting out valuable signals from all of the noise. Nothing is probably more difficult than finding the signal of an “echo” observed from the “sound” a pair of black holes colliding billions of light years away from Earth. This was the premise of the algorithms needed to make sense of the data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. They need to filter out a vast array of noise from the real “proton sized” signal, it is an intrinsically computationally intensive process, the main reason being just the sheer size and noiseiness of the captured data.

The team has now published two papers on their methods to use AI to find gravitational waves. First up was the initial paper, “Deep neural networks to enable real-time multimessenger astrophysics” in Physics Review D, in February 2018, with the follow-on Deep Learning for real-time gravitational wave detection and parameter estimation: Results with Advanced LIGO data in Physics Letters B, in March 2018.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://aem.asm.org/content/84/8/e00044-18.abstract

Hot-air hand dryers in multiple men's and women's bathrooms in three basic science research areas in an academic health center were screened for their deposition on plates of (i) total bacteria, some of which were identified, and (ii) a kanamycin-resistant Bacillus subtilis strain, PS533, spores of which are produced in large amounts in one basic science research laboratory.

Plates exposed to hand dryer air for 30 s averaged 18 to 60 colonies/plate; but interior hand dryer nozzle surfaces had minimal bacterial levels, plates exposed to bathroom air for 2 min with hand dryers off averaged ≤1 colony, and plates exposed to bathroom air moved by a small fan for 20 min had averages of 15 and 12 colonies/plate in two buildings tested.

Retrofitting hand dryers with HEPA filters reduced bacterial deposition by hand dryers ∼4-fold, and potential human pathogens were recovered from plates exposed to hand dryer air whether or not a HEPA filter was present and from bathroom air moved by a small fan. Spore-forming colonies, identified as B. subtilis PS533, averaged ∼2.5 to 5% of bacteria deposited by hand dryers throughout the basic research areas examined regardless of distance from the spore-forming laboratory, and these were almost certainly deposited as spores. Comparable results were obtained when bathroom air was sampled for spores.

These results indicate that many kinds of bacteria, including potential pathogens and spores, can be deposited on hands exposed to bathroom hand dryers and that spores could be dispersed throughout buildings and deposited on hands by hand dryers.

Original Submission