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canopic jug writes:

Investments in and development of wind power in the US are very unevenly distributed. That is shown in four animated maps at Vox in their article, the stunningly lopsided growth of wind power in the US, in 4 maps. They explore why a huge swath of the country has almost no wind turbines at all.

[...] The major driver to invest in wind in many states is renewable portfolio standards, which mandate a minimum amount of electricity to come from renewable sources, like hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants. While federal incentives like the production tax credit, which benefits wind energy installations, apply across the country, state-level programs make a major difference on the ground.

“The states that have stronger RPSs are the places where you see renewables being deployed more actively,” said Ian Baring-Gould, a technology deployment manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “In places that don’t have RPSs, the utilities don’t have as much motivation to develop renewables.”

Take a wild guess which states don’t have RPSs

Wind speeds are not even around the country, so turbine distribution is not expected to be either. However, there is a long way to go before the turbine distribution reaches parity with the potential.

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takyon writes:

NASA has launched InSight, a Mars lander that will study the interior of Mars and measure "Marsquakes":

Initially flying through early-morning fog, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air force Base's Space Launch Complex 3 to send NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander on a six-month journey to Mars.

[...] InSight is a 794-pound (360-kilogram) robotic lander designed to study the interior structure of Mars. With its two solar panels deployed the lander is 19 feet 8 inches (6 meters) long. Based on the design of NASA's 2008 Phoenix lander, the spacecraft is designed to use its eight-foot (2.4 meter) robotic arm to place a seismometer, a wind and thermal shield to protect that instrument and a self-burrowing temperature probe on the Martian surface. The probe will use these science instruments and a radio experiment called RISE to study the deep interior of Mars to learn about how all rocky planets, including the Earth, formed. The InSight mission is part of NASA's Discovery Program.

"The Discovery Program is all about doing firsts, getting to places that we've never been to before, and this mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability to compare that with the Earth," said NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green during a NASA pre-launch briefing on May 3. "This is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way is today."

NASA's next Mars mission will be Mars 2020, a rover currently scheduled to launch in July 2020. InSight is the Discovery Program's 12th mission. The next two to launch will be Lucy (2021) and Psyche (2022). NASA will launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) no earlier than May 19.

Also at BBC and USA Today.

See also: Are We There Yet? How scientists and engineers handle a spacecraft's months-long journey to Mars

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

From hot and nutrient-poor deserts to alternating dry and wet intertidal zones, right through to the highest water pressure and permanent darkness in the deep sea: in the course of its development over millions of years, life has conquered even the most extreme places on earth.

[...] Life scientists around the world are currently investigating the manner in which the symbiotic interaction of microorganisms and hosts, in the functional unit of a metaorganism, supports the colonisation of such extreme habitats. An international research team under the leadership of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1182 "Origin and Function of Metaorganisms” at Kiel University has now presented an inventory of mechanisms, with which the interactions of hosts and symbionts support life under extreme environmental conditions, or even make it possible at all.

Together with colleagues from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the researchers have now described in detail for the first time in the scientific journal Zoology how microorganisms can promote the growth and the evolutionary fitness of different organisms in extreme locations.

takyon writes:

Cadence and Micron Demo DDR5-4400 IMC and Memory, Due in 2019

Cadence this week introduced the industry's first IP interface in silicon for the current provisional DDR5 specification developed by JEDEC. Cadence's IP and test chip [are] fabricated using TSMC's 7 nm process technology, and is designed to enable SoC developers to begin on their DDR5 memory subsystems now and get them to market in 2019-2020, depending on high-volume DDR5 availability. At a special event, Cadence teamed up with Micron to demonstrate their DDR5 DRAM subsystem. In the meantime, Micron has started to sample its preliminary DDR5 chips to interested parties.

Cadence's DDR5 memory controller and PHY achieve a 4400 MT/s data rate with CL42 using Micron's prototype 8 Gb DDR5 memory chips. Compared to DDR4 today, the supply voltage of DDR5 is dropped from 1.2 volts to 1.1 volts, with an allowable fluctuation range of only ±0.033 V. In this case, the specifications mean that an 8 Gb DDR5 DRAM chip can hit a considerably higher I/O speed than an 8 Gb commercial DDR4 IC today at a ~9% lower voltage. JEDEC plans that eventually the DDR5 interface will get to 6400 MT/s, but Cadence says that initial DDR5 memory ICs will support ~4400 MT/s data rates. This will be akin to DDR4 rising from DDR4-2133 at initial launch to DDR4-3200 today. Cadence's DDR5 demo video can be watched here.

takyon writes:

Medieval astronomical records, such as the Bayeux Tapestry, could help narrow down the location (or at least infer the existence) of the hypothetical Planet Nine:

Scientists suspect the existence of Planet Nine because it would explain some of the gravitational forces at play in the Kuiper Belt, a stretch of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But no one has been able to detect the planet yet, though astronomers are scanning the skies for it with tools such as the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

Medieval records could provide another tool, said Pedro Lacerda, a Queen's University astronomer and the other leader of the project.

"We can take the orbits of comets currently known and use a computer to calculate the times when those comets would be visible in the skies during the Middle Ages," Lacerda told Live Science. "The precise times depend on whether our computer simulations include Planet Nine. So, in simple terms, we can use the medieval comet sightings to check which computer simulations work best: the ones that include Planet Nine or the ones that do not."

Also at Queen's University Belfast.

Related: "Planet Nine" Might Explain the Solar System's Tilt
Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Study of ETNOs Supports Planet Nine's Existence
Passing Star Influenced Comet Orbits in Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The signs are undeniable at this point.

The very first sign was when Microsoft refused to port Visual Studio (VS) to 64 bit. While VS is indeed a large codebase, MS had no qualms doing the same for Microsoft Office. The fact that they no longer want to invest too much resources into it should point to the fact Visual Studio is very much in maintenance mode now.

Visual Studio was always paid software. But in 2014 MS introduced the Community Edition. The only real difference between it and the Pro (paid) version is the 'Code Lens' feature. Another sign that MS no longer sees Visual Studio as driving any meaningful revenue.

[...] Visual Studio Code continues to release enhancements every single month, moving at a fast pace. Compare that to Visual Studio Pro, whose development seems pretty much only about updating its integration of the various Language Services to the latest version.

With Microsoft's focus shifting from Windows to Azure, it is but natural that they no longer want an IDE that runs only on Windows. Thus comes in VS Code, a free, cross platform IDE that supports all modern languages.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Physicists at the world’s leading atom smasher are calling for help. In the next decade, they plan to produce up to 20 times more particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than they do now, but current detector systems aren’t fit for the coming deluge. So this week, a group of LHC physicists has teamed up with computer scientists to launch a competition to spur the development of artificial-intelligence techniques that can quickly sort through the debris of these collisions. Researchers hope these will help the experiment’s ultimate goal of revealing fundamental insights into the laws of nature.

At the LHC at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, two bunches of protons collide head-on inside each of the machine’s detectors 40 million times a second. Every proton collision can produce thousands of new particles, which radiate from a collision point at the centre of each cathedral-sized detector. Millions of silicon sensors are arranged in onion-like layers and light up each time a particle crosses them, producing one pixel of information every time. Collisions are recorded only when they produce potentially interesting by-products. When they are, the detector takes a snapshot that might include hundreds of thousands of pixels from the piled-up debris of up to 20 different pairs of protons. (Because particles move at or close to the speed of light, a detector cannot record a full movie of their motion.)

From this mess, the LHC’s computers reconstruct tens of thousands of tracks in real time, before moving on to the next snapshot. “The name of the game is connecting the dots,” says Jean-Roch Vlimant, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who is a member of the collaboration that operates the CMS detector at the LHC.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

It's strong, stretchy, and compatible with the human body

Silk has been valued for millennia, but in recent years, scientists have paid attention to the material because it's extraordinarily strong, making it useful for bulletproof vests and body armor. The potential of silk is more than just protecting the outside of our anatomy, however, and researchers are now engineering silk so it can one day heal our wounds, hold up our bones, and become part of our bodies.

[...] One possibility is that silk can heal our wounds faster. In a study published recently in the journal Advanced Science, scientists engineered silkworms to spin a light-activated material that disinfects. First, the researchers identified all the natural proteins that could be activated by a specific type of light to create a chemical reaction that kills pathogens, according to Young Kim, a materials scientist at Purdue University and co-author of the paper.

Then, the scientists genetically engineered silkworms by inserting this protein, called mKate 2, into their DNA. These silkworms then produced a red, glowing silk activated by visible green light, like a regular LED light. When the scientists put some E. coli bacteria on the red silk and shined a green light on it for an hour, the survival rate of the bacteria fell by 45 percent. This process is very similar to using hydrogen peroxide to disinfect a cut, says Kim. The fluorescent silk and the light together generate chemicals similar to hydrogen peroxide.

The silk doesn't distinguish harmful pathogens (like E. coli) from benign ones, but, as Kim points out, neither does hydrogen peroxide. And we don't yet know the minimum time the light needs to shine on the silk to be effective. But the discovery is an exciting one, and the material could be used in devices that purify air and water and many areas of health. In another recent paper, Kim and his team figured out the exact physical properties that make silk so cooling, which is useful for treating inflammation. This finding could help us make silk even cooler, or engineer other fabrics to be more cooling as well. Between the self-cooling effects of silk and these bacteria-killing properties, it could be an ideal material for advanced bandages.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/4/17318362/silk-health-medicine-wounds-genetic-engineering-strength

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2144807/california-overtakes-uk-become-worlds-fifth-largest

California's gross domestic product rose by US$127 billion from 2016 to 2017, surpassing US$2.7 trillion, the data said. Meanwhile, the UK's economic output fell slightly over that time when measured in US dollars, due in part to exchange rate fluctuations.

The data demonstrate the sheer immensity of California's economy, home to nearly 40 million people, a thriving technology sector in Silicon Valley, the world's entertainment capital in Hollywood and the nation's salad bowl in the Central Valley agricultural heartland. It also reflects a substantial turnaround since the Great Recession.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Republican FCC commissioner Michael O'Rielly broke a federal law preventing officials from advocating for political candidates when he told a crowd that one way to avoid policy changes was to "make sure that President Trump gets reelected," according to a newly released letter from government officials. O'Rielly was warned by the officials about making similar comments in the future.

The Hatch Act bars many federal employees from using their offices to influence an election. During the conservative CPAC conference in February, which was also attended by FCC chairman Ajit Pai, O'Rielly was asked about how to avoid rapid swings in policy ushered in by a new administration. "I think what we can do is make sure as conservatives that we elect good people to both the House, the Senate, and make sure that President Trump gets reelected," he responded, adding that there would also be a fight in the US Senate over net neutrality rules.

[...] The office said it has sent a warning letter to O'Rielly this time, but will consider other infractions "a willful and knowing violation of the law" that could lead to legal action.

O'Rielly's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17308418/fcc-commissioner-orielly-trump-law

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Sony has filed a patent which proposes the use of blockchain technology as a way to supplement DRM (digital rights management) in PS4 games. Right now, DRM on PS4 games is handled by third-party operators, but it seems like Sony wants to take matters into their own hands.

[...]There are a few implications here for PlayStation owners. For one, the future of being able to play a game on your friend’s consoles with your account (something which is currently allowed by Sony) is uncertain. Since blockchain authentication is more secure, and since ownership is repeatedly verified along the blockchain, there’s a chance only the purchasing user will be able to play games or consume other digital media on their device. There’s also the question of whether a user’s console will need to run the DRM process itself, and if so, whether any power will be taken up by this process.

Because everything's better with blockchain!

Source: https://techraptor.net/content/sony-files-patent-for-blockchain-based-drm-on-games

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Last winter, as an FBI hostage rescue team took up an elevated position to assess an unfolding crisis, agents heard the buzz of small drones approaching.

Soon, the tiny unmanned aircraft had the team surrounded, swooping past in a series of "high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them," Joe Mazel, head of the agency's operational technology law unit, told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver on Wednesday. The swarm caused the group to lose situational awareness of the target.

"We were then blind," Mazel said, according to a Defense One account of the session at the conference focusing on unmanned technologies. "It definitely presented some challenges."

Also at https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/4/17318080/criminals-drones-swarm-fbi-raid

Original Submission

takyon writes:

North Korea has switched from the UTC+08:30 offset, which it has used since 2015, back to UTC+09:00 (Korea Standard Time), matching South Korea in a "first practical step" towards reunification:

North Korea has changed [its] time zone to match the South after last week's inter-Korean summit, according to state media. At 23:30 local time (15:00 GMT) on Friday the country's clocks moved forward 30 minutes to midnight. The reset is "the first practical step" to speed up Korean unification, the official KCNA news agency said.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump says he has a date for his meeting with the North's leader, Kim Jong-Un. "We now have a date and we have a location, we'll be announcing it soon," Mr Trump told US journalists outside the White House on Friday, adding that he was expecting "very, very good things" to come out it. Mr Trump will host South Korea's president Moon Jae-in at the White House on 22 May to discuss the upcoming meeting.

Related: Massachusetts Commission Considering a Potential Move to the Atlantic Time Zone
President Trump Tweets about Nuclear Talks with North Korea
U.S. and North Korean Representatives Holding Secret Talks to Plan for Summit
Kim Jong-un Crosses Into South Korea for Summit
South Korea to Remove Loudspeakers at Border

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Interesting bit to be found at The Conversation:

Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham: the UK's first ever public Flat Earth Convention. It was well attended, and wasn't just three days of speeches and YouTube clips (though, granted, there was a lot of this). There was also a lot of team-building, networking, debating, workshops – and scientific experiments.

Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts. The weekend in no small part revolved around discussing and debating science, with lots of time spent running, planning, and reporting on the latest set of flat earth experiments and models. Indeed, as one presenter noted early on, flat earthers try to "look for multiple, verifiable evidence" and advised attendees to "always do your own research and accept you might be wrong".

While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don't trust is scientists, and the established relationships between "power" and "knowledge". This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA Terminates GeForce Partner Program

Just as quickly as it came into being, NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program has come to an end.

In a short article posted to their website today, NVIDIA's Director of Product Marketing, John Teeple, announced that the program has been cancelled. In making the unexpected decision, Teeple stated "The rumors, conjecture and mistruths go far beyond its [the GeForce Partner Program's] intent. Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program" and that "today we are pulling the plug on GPP to avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we're doing to bring amazing advances to PC gaming." No further information was provided on just what canceled entails, and what this means for existing program partners.

NVIDIA's GeForce Partner Program is been [sic] divisive, to put it lightly. After news of it broke in March and was confirmed by NVIDIA, the program quickly attracted a good deal of negative attention out of concerns over what it meant for the competitive market, and a general degree of mean spiritedness. Adding fuel to the fire, few details of the program were ever confirmed by NVIDIA – with the company seeing little benefit in doing so – which left a great void open for rumors and unsourced reports of all kinds.

Also at PCWorld.

Previously: AMD Blasts Nvidia Over GeForce Partner Program, G-Sync

Original Submission