SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Checking your phone dozens of times a day indicates unconscious behaviour, which is "extremely repetitive" say psychologists. A study by Lancaster University and the University of Lincoln is unique in that it is one of a few studies that examined smartphone usage based on what people do rather than what they can remember.

Existing research is yet to conclude whether people really are 'addicted' to their smartphones due to over reliance on people's own estimates or beliefs.

But new research into smartphone behaviour has revealed that while people underestimate time spent on their smartphones, their behaviour is remarkably consistent, thus enabling a more rigorous approach to the study of smartphone behaviours. The researchers analysed usage over 13 days using a simple smartphone app which time stamped when usage began and ended. From this data, they were able to calculate the number of total hours usage and the number of checks for each day, with a check defined as any usage lasting less than 15 seconds.

For example, the researchers found that if you check your phone 80 times today, you are likely to repeat this behaviour every day.

[...] Dr Ellis said: "To fully understand the effect of screen time on health and well-being, we probably need to consider measures of smartphone behaviour as well as self-report.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Britain ramped up a Brexit space row with the EU on Thursday, saying it will demand repayment if it is excluded from the Galileo satellite navigation project. Newspaper reports suggested London could seek £1 billion ($1.34 billion, 1.14 billion euros) in compensation for its investment in the programme.

Brussels has said it will deny London access to Galileo's encrypted signals after Brexit, citing legal issues about sharing sensitive security information with a non-member state.

A report issued by Britain's Department for Exiting the European Union said it had "strong objections" to being frozen out of the 10-billion-euro programme and called for an "urgent resolution to the exclusion". "Should the UK's future access be restricted, the UK's past contribution to the financing of space assets should be discussed," the report said. The British report suggested it may have to reopen negotiations on the £39 billion (40-45 billion euros) Brexit "divorce bill" that was agreed in December to make up for its exclusion. It said the deal agreed then had provided for Britain's continued involvement in the Galileo programme, which has important uses in both the civilian and military fields.

[...] Britain played a major role in developing Galileo, an alternative to the US's GPS, which is expected to be fully operational in 2026. It demands continued British access to the secure signal and a right to compete for contracts. Britain is looking into developing its own, separate system if the EU maintains its position, and has also raised the question of Galileo's use of Britain's overseas territories as monitoring bases.

[...] The Times newspaper reported Thursday that the decision to block Britain was being led by a "German-backed clique" in the European Commission, and that it had caused a rift with French officials, who were reportedly unhappy with the plan. Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Baltic states have also objected to denying Britain access, said the report.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Record US fentanyl bust 'enough to kill 26 million people'

Nearly 120lbs (54kg) of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic painkiller, has been seized by police in Nebraska - one of the largest busts in US history.

The drugs, seized last month, could kill over 26 million people, according to estimates by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Police found the fentanyl in a fake compartment of a lorry. The driver and a passenger were arrested.

[...] It was the largest seizure of fentanyl in state history, Nebraska State Patrol said in a Twitter post on Thursday.

[...] Just 2mg of fentanyl - or a few grains of table salt - is a lethal dosage for most people, and even exposure can cause a fatal reaction, according to the DEA.

Another estimate: they could make 260 million people pain-free for a day.

Bonus story:

Mussels test positive for opioids in Seattle's Puget Sound

Scientists at the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife have found that mussels in Seattle's waters are testing positive for opioids. The finding suggests "a lot of people" are taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound, researchers say.

Also at the Puget Sound Institute.

Related: Opioid Addiction is Big Business
Heroin, Fentanyl? Meh: Carfentanil is the Latest Killer Opioid
Cop Brushes Fentanyl Off Uniform, Overdoses
Opioid Crisis Official; Insys Therapeutics Billionaire Founder Charged; Walgreens Stocks Narcan
U.S. Life Expectancy Continues to Decline Due to Opioid Crisis
Senate Investigators Google Their Way to $766 Million of Fentanyl
"Synthetic Opioids" Now Kill More People than Prescription Opioids in the U.S.
British Medical Journal Calls for Legalizing All Drugs

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Massachusetts and Rhode Island both awarded major offshore wind contracts on Wednesday, underscoring the increasing economic viability of a kind of renewable energy that has been long considered too expensive.

The Massachusetts installation will have a capacity of 800MW. Situated 14 miles off Martha's Vineyard, the wind farm will be called "Vineyard Wind," and it has an accelerated timetable: it's due to start sending electricity back to the grid as soon as 2021. According to Greentech Media, the contract was won by Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, both companies with headquarters in Europe. The two share 50/50 ownership of the project and beat Deepwater Wind and Bay State Wind in the bidding.

Massachusetts recently approved an ambitious goal to build 1.6GW of wind energy capacity off its coast by 2027. This new contract gets the state half of the way there. According to a press release from Vineyard Wind, the owners of the project will now begin negotiations for transmission services and power purchase agreements. The press release added that the project "will reduce Massachusetts' carbon emissions by over 1.6 million tons per year, the equivalent of removing 325,000 cars from state roads."

[...] The second major contract awarded on Wednesday came from the state of Rhode Island, and it went to Deepwater Wind. Deepwater Wind built the US' first offshore wind installation ever, a six-turbine, 30MW installation off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/america-your-offshore-wind-is-coming-1-2-gw-in-contracts-awarded/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An operation that targets the nerves connected to the kidney has been found to significantly reduce blood pressure in patients with hypertension, according to the results of a clinical trial led in the UK by Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Trust, and supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The results are published in The Lancet and have been presented at the EuroPCR congress in Paris.

If the findings are confirmed in more extensive clinical trials, the surgery could offer hope to patients with high blood pressure who do not respond to drugs, and are at increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.

The international clinical trial, carried out from 2017 to 2018 at St Bartholomew's Hospital in the UK by the NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre, tested a one-hour operation called 'renal denervation', which uses ultrasound energy to disrupt the nerves between the kidneys and the brain that carry signals for controlling blood pressure.

146 patients in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom were randomised to receive either renal denervation or a 'sham procedure' -- the surgical equivalent of a placebo. Patients also remained off blood pressure medications for two months unless specified blood pressure levels were exceeded.

After two months, the renal denervation group experienced an 8.5 mm Hg reduction in blood pressure, which was a 6.3 mm Hg greater reduction compared with the sham group. More than 66 per cent of subjects treated with renal denervation demonstrated a 5 mm Hg or greater reduction in blood pressure, compared with 33 per cent in the sham group.

[...] The study has limitations including the short follow-up time of two months. This was done for safety reasons to minimise the duration of patients being off antihypertensive medications. Longer follow-up of this trial and additional numbers of treated patients will be necessary to provide greater assurance of safety and to exclude rare adverse events.

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

President Trump's practice of blocking Twitter users who are critical of him from seeing his posts on the social media platform violates the First Amendment, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday.

The ruling came in a case brought by seven Twitter users who had been blocked by the @realDonaldTrump account after they criticized the president.

The plaintiffs, who were joined in the suit by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, claimed that Mr. Trump's Twitter feed is an official government account and that blocking users from following it was a violation of their First Amendment rights.

In her ruling, Federal District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote of the plaintiffs that "the speech in which they seek to engage is protected by the First Amendment" and that Mr. Trump and Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, "exert governmental control over certain aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/business/media/trump-twitter-block.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

See also: http://time.com/4808270/sean-spicer-donald-trump-twitter-statements/:

When asked at a press briefing whether Trump's tweets qualify as official statements on behalf of the White House, Spicer said that he "is the President of the United States, so they're considered official statements by the President of the United States."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Pluto May Not Be a Planet, But It Could Be Made Out of Millions of Comets

Pluto may not be categorised as a planet any more, but it still holds plenty of fascination. For instance, how did the dwarf planet form, and why is it so different from the planets? By examining its chemical composition, researchers have come up with a new idea: Pluto is made of comets.

According to the currently accepted model, planets are formed by the gradual accretion of smaller objects - and Pluto, situated right next to the Kuiper Belt asteroid field, has long been thought to have formed the same way. So that part is nothing new.

But there are similarities between Pluto and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) believe may not be coincidental. In particular, the nitrogen-rich ice in Pluto's Sputnik Planitia.

[...] "We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta."

Also at SwRI.

Primordial N₂ provides a cosmochemical explanation for the existence of Sputnik Planitia, Pluto (DOI unknown, Journal Icarus) (arXiv)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In the field of self-driving cars, algorithms for controlling lane changes are an important topic of study. But most existing lane-change algorithms have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyze on the fly; or they're so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as never changing lanes at all.

At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation tomorrow, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new lane-change algorithm that splits the difference. It allows for more aggressive lane changes than the simple models do but relies only on immediate information about other vehicles' directions and velocities to make decisions.

[...] One standard way for autonomous vehicles to avoid collisions is to calculate buffer zones around the other vehicles in the environment. The buffer zones describe not only the vehicles' current positions but their likely future positions within some time frame. Planning lane changes then becomes a matter of simply staying out of other vehicles' buffer zones.

[...] With the MIT researchers' system, if the default buffer zones are leading to performance that's far worse than a human driver's, the system will compute new buffer zones on the fly — complete with proof of collision avoidance.

Let me know when someone finds an algorithm that can deal with unknown situations as intuitively as human beings can. Until then...

Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/driverless-cars-change-lanes-like-human-drivers-0523

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

[NB: A unicorn "is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion." --Ed.]

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

In case you missed it, the peak in the tech unicorn bubble already has been reached. And it's going to be all downhill from here. Massive losses are coming in venture capital-funded start-ups that are, in some cases, as much as 50 percent overvalued.

The age of the unicorn likely peaked a few years ago. In 2014 there were 42 new unicorns in the United States; in 2015 there were 43. The unicorn market hasn't reached that number again. In 2017, 33 new U.S. companies achieved unicorn status from a total of 53 globally. This year there have been 11 new unicorns, according to PitchBook data as of May 15, but these numbers tend to move around, and I believe the 279 unicorns recorded globally in late February by TechCrunch was the peak, where the start-up bubble was stretched to its limit.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that, on average, unicorns are roughly 50 percent overvalued. The research, conducted by Will Gornall at the University of British Columbia and Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford, examined 135 unicorns. Of those 135, the researchers estimate that nearly half, or 65, should be more fairly valued at less than $1 billion.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://medium.com/@cipherpunk/efail-a-postmortem-4bef2cea4c08

https://admin.hostpoint.ch/pipermail/enigmail-users_enigmail.net/2018-May/004995.html

Writing just for himself -- not for GnuPG and not for Enigmail and definitely not for his employer -- Robert J Hansen, an Enigmail developer and GnuPG volunteer, put together a postmortem on Efail:

Less than a week ago, some researchers in Europe published a paper with the bombshell title "Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels." There were a lot of researchers on that team but in the hours after release Sebastian Schinzel took the point on Twitter for the group.

Oh, my, did the email crypto world blow up. The following are some thoughts that have benefited from a few days for things to settle.

They say that when there's a fire in a nightclub you're at more risk of dying from the stampede than the blaze. The panic kills both by crushing people underfoot, and by clogging the exits so that people have to stay in the club longer and breathe more hot smoke-filled air. The fire is a problem but the panic is worse. That's what we saw here, and frankly I place a lot of blame for that at the feet of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Previously: PGP and S/MIME Vulnerable, Take Action Now (Update: Embargo Broken)

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

A web server set up by an enterprising student for a conference in 2004 and then forgotten about has left the University of Greenwich nursing a £120,000 ($160,000) fine from Britain's Information Commissioner (ICO).

Forgetting about a web server isn't generally a good idea, but this was a particularly dangerous oversight because it had been linked to a database containing the personal data of 19,500 University staff, students, alumni, and conference attendees.

The data also included more intimate personal data of 3,500 people covering learning difficulties, staff sickness, food allergies, and extenuating circumstances put forward by students during their studies.

You can probably guess where this is heading – eventually cybercriminals chanced upon the forgotten server and did their worst.

Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/05/22/server-what-server-site-forgotten-for-12-years-attracts-hacks-fines/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Computer History Museum has release the source code for the Eudora E-mail Client. Back when the other e-mail clients were text-based, Eudora became one of the first popular email utilities to feature a graphical user interface. It was initially created for the Macintosh computers by Steve Dorner in 1988. Some e-mail clients, especially web clients, have taken forever to catch up with Eudora's capabilities. Some pretend clients, like Outlook, may never catch up. Now is the chance. The Eudora source code is available freely for both personal and commercial use, as long as the Eudora trademark is not infringed upon.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

New laws will be introduced to tackle the internet's "wild west" that will make Britain the "safest place in the world" to be online, the culture secretary has said.

Social media companies have already taken some positive steps to protect users, but the performance of the industry overall has been mixed, according to Matt Hancock.

The government outlined proposals last year to impose an industry-wide levy on social media firms like Facebook and Twitter to fund measures to tackle online harm. It is understood the move will be subject to a further round of consultation with the sector and charities before any decision is made on pushing ahead.

A new code of practice to tackle bullying, intimidating or humiliating online content and a regular internet safety transparency report to keep tabs on online abuse could be included in new legislation.

Right, show of hands, who thinks we should move our servers to the UK and stop saying mean things to each other?

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/19/uk-government-plans-new-laws-tackle-internet-wild-west

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite first slips into the human bloodstream, injected by the bite of an infected mosquito, it does not immediately target red blood cells.

Instead, it seeks refuge inside the liver and rapidly reproduces, copying itself as many as 30,000 times in the span of 48 hours.

After building strength in numbers, the parasite leaves the liver and escapes into the blood stream, invading red blood cells and triggering the devastating disease.

The battle against malaria usually focuses on either helping people evade infected mosquitoes or developing strategies to kill the parasite after it raids red blood cells. But a team of Duke University researchers wants to take a different tactic -- disrupting the parasite while it lurks inside the liver.

In a new study, the team shows that the Plasmodium parasite tricks liver cells into pumping out a protein called aquaporin-3, and then steals the protein for itself. Using an inhibitor to disable aquaporin-3 curtails the parasite's ability to reproduce inside the liver, the researchers report in PLOS Pathogens.

"This parasite found a way to manipulate the host's liver cells to make it favorable for this replication event," said Emily Derbyshire, an assistant professor of chemistry at Duke. "This suggests that maybe we can develop drugs to try to target the host to prevent malaria."

After arriving at the liver, Plasmodium forces its way into liver cells, stealing a bit of the cell membrane to form a small pouch inside the cell. This pouch, called a vacuole, provides a safe harbor while the parasite grows and divides, stealing nutrients and proteins from the host cell along the way.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Lithium ion batteries have come a long way since their introduction in the late 1990s. They're used in many everyday devices, such as laptop computers, mobile phones, and medical devices, as well as automotive and aerospace platforms, and others. However, lithium ion battery performance still can decay over time, may not fully charge after many charge/discharge cycles, and may discharge quickly even when idle. Researchers at the University of Illinois applied a technique using 3D X-ray tomography of an electrode to better understand what is happening on the inside of a lithium ion battery and ultimately build batteries with more storage capacity and longer life.

[...] "Every time a battery is charged, the lithium ions enter the graphite, causing it to expand by about 10 percent in size, which puts a lot of stress on the graphite particles," said John Lambros, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and director of the Advanced Materials Testing and Evaluation Laboratory (AMTEL) at U of I. "As this expansion-contraction process continues with each successive charge-discharge cycle of the battery, the host particles begin to fragment and lose their capacity to store the lithium and may also separate from the surrounding matrix leading to loss of conductivity.

"If we can determine how the graphite particles fail in the interior of the electrode, we may be able to suppress these problems and learn how to extend the life of the battery. So we wanted to see in a working anode how the graphite particles expand when the lithium enters them. You can certainly let the process happen and then measure how much the electrode grows to see the global strain -- but with the X-rays we can look inside the electrode and get internal local measurements of expansion as lithiation progresses."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Fossil fuels have long been the precursor to plastic, but new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and European collaborators could help send that era up in smoke—carbon dioxide, to be exact.

Produced almost entirely from burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from 280 parts per million in the pre-industrial era to about 410 PPM today. That trend, combined with the finite supply of fossil fuels, has pushed researchers to explore methods for producing plastic from CO₂ rather than petroleum or natural gas—recycling CO₂ just as plastic is now.

Nebraska's Vitaly Alexandrov and colleagues have now detailed a catalyst-based technique that can double the amount of carbon dioxide converted to ethylene, an essential component of the world's most common plastic, polyethylene.