SoylentNews

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Back in January, Skype announced it was testing end-to-end encrypted chat conversations, secured using Signal Protocol by Open Whisper Systems. Now, the feature is available for all users on Skype iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows Desktop.

There's a bit of a limitation, however: users can only participate in one private conversation per device at a time. The private conversation can be switched to another device, but anything sent and received will be tied to whatever device is currently being used.

Source: The Verge

Original Submission

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

The idea that light has momentum is not new, but the exact nature of how light interacts with matter has remained a mystery for close to 150 years. New research from UBC's Okanagan campus, recently published in Nature Communications, may have uncovered the key to one of the darkest secrets of light.

[...] To measure these extremely weak interactions between light photons, the team constructed a special mirror fitted with acoustic sensors and heat shielding to keep interference and background noise to a minimum. They then shot laser pulses at the mirror and used the sound sensors to detect elastic waves as they moved across the surface of the mirror, like watching ripples on a pond.

"We can't directly measure photon momentum, so our approach was to detect its effect on a mirror by 'listening' to the elastic waves that traveled through it," says [study co-author and UBC Okanagan engineering professor Kenneth] Chau. "We were able to trace the features of those waves back to the momentum residing in the light pulse itself, which opens the door to finally defining and modelling how light momentum exists inside materials."

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05706-3

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Is it the end of the 9 to 5 working day?

Traditional workplace hours of 9am to 5pm are now only the norm for a minority of workers, research suggests. Just 6% of people in the UK now work such hours, a YouGov survey found. Almost half of people worked flexibly with arrangements such as job sharing or compressed hours, allowing them to juggle other commitments, it found.

Anna Whitehouse, a campaigner whose own flexible working request was refused by her employer, said there were still misconceptions about such arrangements. In her case, her employer refused her request for 15 minutes flexibility at the start and end of each day to enable her to drop off and pick up her children from nursery. "They denied it because they said it would open the floodgates for other people to request the same thing." [...] Since then she has started the Flex Appeal, aimed at convincing firms to trial flexible working and also to make people aware of their right to request flexible working.

[...] Polling firm YouGov surveyed over 4,000 adults for the survey, which was commissioned by fast-food chain McDonald's.

Original Submission

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

A lawsuit filed in federal court accuses Google of invading people's privacy by tracking the whereabouts of smartphones users despite "location history" settings being turned off.

The suit filed Friday by a California man seeks unspecified damages along with class-action status to represent all US iPhone or Android smartphone users who turned off location history in order not to have their movements logged by Google.

"Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users' geolocations," the lawsuit read. "This representation was false."

The suit accuses Google of violating privacy law, and cites a news report last week confirmed by university researchers.

Also at Reuters and Gizmodo.

Related: Google Caught Tracking Android User Location Data

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft claims win over 'Russian political hackers'

Russian attempts to launch cyber-attacks against US conservative groups have been thwarted, Microsoft says. The software company said Russian hackers had tried to steal data from political organisations, including the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute think tanks. But they had been thwarted when its security staff had won control of six net domains mimicking their websites.

Microsoft said the Fancy Bear hacking group had been behind the attacks. "We're concerned that these and other attempts pose security threats to a broadening array of groups connected with both American political parties in the run-up to the 2018 elections," Microsoft said in its blog detailing its work.

The thwarted attack was likely the start of a "spear phishing" campaign, said Microsoft. This would involve tricking people into visiting the mimicked domains allowing the Fancy Bear group to see and steal login information that people use. As well as the two think-tanks, the domains seized were associated with several Senate offices and services. One domain sought to mimic Microsoft's Office 365 online service.

Russia has denied Microsoft's allegations that it targeted the right-wing think-tanks.

Also at NYT, Reuters, and The Hill.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Workers in open-plan offices are more active and less stressed than those with desks in cubicles or private offices, research suggests. This could be because they make the effort to find privacy to talk away from their desk, the researchers said. The US study used chest sensors to track movement and heart rate in hundreds of people in different buildings over three days.

The potential health benefits should not be ignored, they said.

But they said the study was observational only and factors like location of stairs and lifts could be at play too.

The University of Arizona study, published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, claims to be the first to measure activity and stress in office workers, rather than asking them in a survey.

It said office workers tended to be a sedentary group compared to other workers, making them more likely to have health issues, including heart problems, tiredness and low mood.

Being less active during working hours has also been linked to greater feelings of stress. In the study of 231 office workers in government buildings in the US, those in open-plan offices - with no partitions between desks - clocked up 32% more physical activity than workers in private offices and 20% more than those in cubicles.

And those who were more active had 14% lower levels of stress outside the office compared to those who were less active.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45247799

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

From Reuters:

A group of 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia late Monday asked a U.S. appeals court to reinstate the Obama administration's 2015 landmark net neutrality rules and reject the Trump administration's efforts to preempt states from imposing their own rules guaranteeing an open internet.

The states, led by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, filed a lawsuit in January after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted in December along party lines to reverse rules that barred internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic or offering paid fast lanes, also known as paid prioritization.

Several internet companies filed a separate legal challenge on Monday to overturn the FCC ruling, including Mozilla Corp, Vimeo Inc, Etsy Inc, and numerous media and technology advocacy groups.

The FCC handed sweeping new powers to internet providers to recast how Americans use the internet — as long as they disclose any changes. The new rules took effect in early June but major providers have made no changes in internet access.

[...] The U.S. Senate voted in May to keep the Obama-era internet rules, but the measure is unlikely to be approved by the House of Representatives or the White House.

The state attorney generals suing represent states with 165 million people — more than half the United States population — and include California, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Ice Confirmed at the Moon's Poles:

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole's ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, used data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we'd expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.

Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon's rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.

Also at The Guardian and CNET.

Direct evidence of surface exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802345115) (DX)

Original Submission

Zinho writes:

On July 24th, 2018 the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Hawaiian officials had violated George Young's rights when he was denied a permit to openly carry a loaded gun in public to protect himself. The decision in Young vs Hawaii (PDF warning) holds that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable citizens to defend themselves, and that the right to openly carry a firearm in public is implicit in the 2nd Amendment's "right to bear arms". This expands on the Heller vs DC decision, which guaranteed the right to own and keep firearms in the home.

The scope of this decision is currently limited to the 7 States covered by the 9th Circuit. There is little doubt that Hawaii will petition for an en banc review of the ruling and that no matter how that is decided, it is likely to make it to the Supreme Court. The state's only other choice would seem to be compliance with the ruling and allowing the open carry of handguns. For the time being, nothing is going to change, even in Hawaii. The court did not issue an injunction or otherwise impose any requirement for the state to immediately comply with its ruling and state authorities are simply evaluating their options.

One final link to be taken with a grain of salt: a California resident is seeking lawyers who will help file a motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against California Attorney General Becerra restraining him from enforcing California's Open Carry bans (California Penal Code sections 25850, 26350, and 26400). The same article calls out the NRA for not taking action:

In any event, you won't see any of the so-called gun-rights lawyers fighting for Open Carry because they, and the organizations which hire them, such as the NRA, CRPA, SAF, CalGuns.nuts, et., oppose Open Carry. How do we know that? They said so in their Federal court filings and/or in their oral argument before Federal judges.

I find it ironic that a Federal judge seems to be taking a more pro-arms position than the NRA itself.

Original Submission

infodragon writes:

A story of heroism and the ultimate sacrifice during the the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. I think it is safe to say we all benefit from the sacrifice these men made.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-scientists-who-starved-to-death.html

As the invading German army poured into the city looting and destroying anything of value, a group of Russian botanists holed up inside the vault of the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry with a precious collection of seeds and edible plants. This collection, containing seeds from nearly 200,000 varieties of plants of which about a quarter was edible, constituted one of the world's largest repositories of the genetic diversity of food crops. Among them were plenty of rice, wheat, corn, beans and potatoes, enough to sustain the botanists and see them through the worst days of the siege.

But the scientists hadn't barricaded themselves in the vault with food grains to save their lives, but rather to protect these seeds from the Nazis as well as from the starving people plundering through the streets in search for anything to eat.

The collection filled 16 rooms, in which no one was allowed to remain alone. Workers guarded the storage in shifts all round the clock, numb with cold and emaciated from hunger. As the siege dragged out, one by one these heroic men started dying of hunger, but not a single grain was eaten. In January 1942, Alexander Stchukin, a peanut specialist, died at his writing table. Botanist Dmitri Ivanov also died of starvation while surrounded by several thousand packs of rice that he was guarding. By the end of the siege in the Spring of 1944, nine of them had starved to death watching over all that food. Many of the crops that we eat today came from cross-breeding with varieties the scientists saved from destruction.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA Announces the GeForce RTX 20 Series: RTX 2080 Ti & 2080 on Sept. 20th, RTX 2070 in October

NVIDIA's Gamescom 2018 keynote just wrapped up, and as many have been expecting since it was announced last month, NVIDIA is getting ready to launch their next generation of GeForce hardware. Announced at the event and going on sale starting September 20th is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20 series, which is succeeding the current Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 10 series. Based on NVIDIA's new Turing GPU architecture and built on TSMC's 12nm "FFN" process, NVIDIA has lofty goals, looking to drive an entire paradigm shift in how games are rendered and how PC video cards are evaluated. CEO Jensen Huang has called Turing NVIDIA's most important GPU architecture since 2006's Tesla GPU architecture (G80 GPU), and from a features standpoint it's clear that he's not overstating matters.

[...] So what does Turing bring to the table? The marquee feature across the board is hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization to exploit the strengths of both technologies. This announcement is essentially a continuation of NVIDIA's RTX announcement from earlier this year, so if you thought that announcement was a little sparse, well then here is the rest of the story.

The big change here is that NVIDIA is going to be including even more ray tracing hardware with Turing in order to offer faster and more efficient hardware ray tracing acceleration. New to the Turing architecture is what NVIDIA is calling an RT core, the underpinnings of which we aren't fully informed on at this time, but serve as dedicated ray tracing processors. These processor blocks accelerate both ray-triangle intersection checks and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) manipulation, the latter being a very popular data structure for storing objects for ray tracing.

NVIDIA is stating that the fastest GeForce RTX part can cast 10 Billion (Giga) rays per second, which compared to the unaccelerated Pascal is a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance.

Nvidia has confirmed that the machine learning capabilities (tensor cores) of the GPU will used to smooth out problems with ray-tracing. Real-time AI denoising (4m17s) will be used to reduce the amount of samples per pixel needed to achieve photorealism.

Previously: Microsoft Announces Directx 12 Raytracing API
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations

Related: Real-time Ray-tracing at GDC 2014

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

The earliest mummies are typically associated with the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, but as an intensive examination of a 5,600-year-old mummy confirms, the methods used for this iconic funeral practice date back to well before the age of pharaohs.

The practice of mummification and the techniques used for embalming (such as the use of resins) were thought to have originated in ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom (also known as the "Pyramid Age") around 2500 BC. But this interpretation was challenged by a 2014 analysis of funeral textiles found at the southern Egyptian site of Mostagedda, which pushed back the origin of Egyptian mummification by over 1,500 years.

[...] Indeed, this embalming technique dates back to the Naqada stage of Egyptian prehistory, which is substantially earlier that the Pharaonic Period. But the analysis also revealed the use of an antibacterial conifer resin that isn't native to Egypt. This compound must have been imported, therefore, likely from the Near East in what is now Israel/Palestine.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/ancient-egyptians-mastered-mummification-long-before-th-1828360911

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI) have reversed congenital blindness in mice by changing supportive cells in the retina called Müller glia into rod photoreceptors. The findings advance efforts toward regenerative therapies for blinding diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. A report of the findings appears online today in Nature. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

"This is the first report of scientists reprogramming Müller glia to become functional rod photoreceptors in the mammalian retina," said Thomas N. Greenwell, Ph.D., NEI program director for retinal neuroscience. "Rods allow us to see in low light, but they may also help preserve cone photoreceptors, which are important for color vision and high visual acuity. Cones tend to die in later-stage eye diseases. If rods can be regenerated from inside the eye, this might be a strategy for treating diseases of the eye that affect photoreceptors."

Photoreceptors are light-sensitive cells in the retina in the back of the eye that signal the brain when activated. In mammals, including mice and humans, photoreceptors fail to regenerate on their own. Like most neurons, once mature they don't divide.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

An international team of astronomers has detected synchronous X-ray and radio mode switching between radio-bright and a radio-quiet modes in the pulsar PSR B0823+26. The discovery marks the second time that such synchronous mode switching has been observed in a pulsar. The finding is detailed in a paper published August 6 on arXiv.org.

To date, synchronous X-ray and radio mode switching has been identified only in one old and nearly aligned pulsar known as PSR B0943+10. Therefore, astronomers are interested in finding such behavior in other objects in order to improve knowledge about the poorly understood mechanisms behind this activity.

[...] PSR B0823+26, located some 1,000 light years away from the Earth, is one of the brightest radio pulsars in the Northern sky. It has a period about 530 milliseconds, a spin-down age of approximately 4.9 million years and an inferred magnetic field of around 980 billion G.

Source: Astronomers detect synchronous X-ray and radio mode switching of the pulsar PSR B0823+26

Original Submission

infodragon writes:

Recently 994 items including 49 videos and 54 sound recordings were deposited in Zimbardo's online archive at Stanford University. This newly revealed evidence challenges everything that has been taught about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/time-change-story

From the article:

We all know the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It has been a staple of introductory psychology textbooks and lectures for nearly fifty years (see Griggs, 2014).

[...] But now, a half century later, dramatic new evidence has emerged that challenges Zimbardo's account. Our textbooks and our lectures will have to be rewritten. The story of what happened in the SPE and why such brutality occurred will have to be retold.

[...] The startling new evidence tells a tale of the experimenters treating the Guards effectively as research assistants. It reveals how disturbed the Prisoners were when Zimbardo told them they could not leave the study. It raises profound intellectual, moral and even legal questions about what went on in that Stanford basement in the summer of 1971.