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jelizondo writes:

In Science Fiction, some awards have become almost meaningless as they came to be dominated by interests other than the pure enjoyment of a truly good story. The Hugo Awards, for example, have descended into a left/right catfight. They have become as meaningless as a Nobel Peace Prize.

Some, like yours truly, have entirely stopped reading about awards after getting burned once too many times and rely almost entirely on word of mouth or serendipity to find new authors and worthwhile books.

Our recent discussion of "The winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards" brought the idea (from bzipitidoo) that perhaps Soylent News could do a better job of pointing out new works of Science Fiction that could be of interest to soylentils and janrinok supported the idea, going so far as offering a kidney to the best author. (I think he's British, so he might have meant a kidney pie. ^{[Not true, but funny]})

Mind you, we would need to separate Science Fiction from Sci-Fi, Fantasy and other genres that have been mishmashed into one by most publishers and awards organizations.

So what do you think? What is the best new author/book in Science Fiction?

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

ZDNet:

Open-source champion Bruce Perens has called out Intel for adding a new restriction to its software license agreement along with its latest CPU security patches to prevent developers from publishing software benchmark results.

The new clause appears to be a move by Intel to legally gag developers from revealing performance degradation caused by its mitigations for Spectre and Foreshadow or 'L1 Terminal Fault' (L1FT) flaw speculative attacks.

"You will not, and will not allow any third party to ... publish or provide any software benchmark or comparison test results," Intel's new agreement states .

[...] Another section of the license blocking redistribution appears to have caused maintainers of Debian to withhold Intel's patch too , as reported by The Register.

[...] Updated 12:15pm ET, August 23 2018: An Intel spokesperson responded: "We are updating the license now to address this and will have a new version available soon. As an active member of the open-source community, we continue to welcome all feedback."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Would-be NASA intern loses gig after vulgar tweet to NASA alum Homer Hickam, reports say

A woman may have lost a highly coveted NASA internship following a profanity-laced back-and-forth with a user on Twitter. That user? Famed former NASA engineer and current space council adviser Homer Hickam.

The exchange, reportedly captured in screenshots that rocketed across social media, began when a user identified as Naomi H. (@NaomiH_official) made an announcement to the world: "Everyone shut the f--- up," she tweeted, Newsweek and Buzzfeed News report, citing images of since-removed tweets. "I got accepted for a NASA internship."

After a Twitter user notes Naomi's "language," Naomi replies with a sexually vulgar tweet not at all suitable for publication. "I'm working at NASA," Naomi concludes. The user Naomi told off is Homer Hickam, the former NASA engineer and inspiration of the 1999 film "October Sky," based on his memoir. "And I am on the National Space Council that oversees NASA," Hickam replies, referencing his appointment to the advisory group earlier this year.

[...] Hickam said he takes no offense at the 'f-word,' but sought to warn her that NASA might. And while Hickam did not seek to influence the internship and had no authority to do so, according to the post, use of the NASA hashtag later alerted the agency to the irreverent tweets.

takyon writes:

Baby Exoplanet Weighed for First Time

Astronomers have measured the mass of a very young alien planet for the first time, thanks to more than two decades' worth of data collected by two of the European Space Agency's star-mapping satellites.

The exoplanet — known as Beta Pictoris b — is a gas giant like Jupiter, but scientists estimate it is nine to 13 times more massive than our solar system's biggest planet. Discovered in 2008, this exoplanet orbits the star Beta Pictoris, the second brightest star in the constellation of Pictor.

Because this star is still very young, it demonstrates how planets form and evolve. However, because the star is still forming and pulsing with activity, it's challenging for astronomers to accurately measure the star's radial velocity (speed as the star moves toward and away from Earth as its planet orbits). This is a method commonly used to estimate the mass of exoplanets.

Instead, the weight of Beta Pictoris b was calculated based on the position and motion of its host star in the sky over a long period of time, according to a statement from ESA.

Beta Pictoris.

Also at ESA.

The mass of the young planet Beta Pictoris b through the astrometric motion of its host star (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0561-6) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Cave girl was half Neanderthal, half Denisovan

Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

The discovery, reported in Nature, gives a rare insight into the lives of our closest ancient human relatives. Neanderthals and Denisovans were humans like us, but belonged to different species.

"We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together," says Viviane Slon, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. "But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups."

Denisovan.

Also at Inverse, NYT, and The Atlantic.

The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel conducted a survey of 1,000 consumers and 102 "tech elites"* to celebrate the 50th year of the company's existence:

Americans are excited about the future potential of technology, but 40 percent believe emerging technologies will introduce as many new problems as solutions in the next 50 years. This finding comes from Intel's "Next 50" Study of 1,000 consumers, conducted with research firm PSB, to determine prevailing perceptions about the future of technology.

"Emerging technologies have the potential to transform many aspects of our everyday life," said Genevieve Bell, director of the 3A Institute, Florence Violet McKenzie Chair and distinguished professor at the Australian National University, and a vice president and senior fellow at Intel. "Studies like this remind us about the diversity of human experience. When we talk about the future of innovation, we're talking about a range of ideas, technologies and attitudes that will impact our lives in important ways."

Even as consumers anticipate new technologies, they remain most excited about those that are most familiar. The survey revealed that consumers expect to rely most on smartphones (87 percent) in the future. Consumers also ranked PCs (84 percent) and smart home technology (84 percent) among the most important technologies in the next 50 years.

I thought the PC was dying.

Some highlights from the PDF include: much more excitement (56-71%) about "smart home technology" than gene therapy (43-55%) (page 10), little excitement (10-14%) over full automation of jobs forcing governments to issue a universal basic income (page 13), fathers being much more excited about "AI" than mothers (page 14), and Intel highlighting the worry of social isolation caused by technology when the top concern was robots and AI destroying jobs (page 24).

_{*All technology elites are aged 25 years or older with at least a college education, have a household income of at least $100,000 and follow news about technology closely.}

Original Submission

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

California's Net Neutrality bill just passed out of committee and is on its way to be voted on by the Assembly. If you are a California voter, please take a moment now to call your assemblymember and tell them to vote "yes" on SB 822.

Senate Bill 822 was originally introduced earlier this summer and would introduce some of the most robust net neutrality protections in the country, including prohibiting blocking and throttling of data, as well as limits on zero rating—a practice where companies provide access to certain parts of the internet for “free” and charge for others. But on the first go around, when being considered by the state senate Communications and Conveyance Committee, the bill was dramatically gutted, thanks to heavy lobbying from major telecom companies like AT&T. In response, the bill’s supporters scrapped it.

The bill’s author, democratic state senator Scott Wiener, went back to the drawing board and, with the help of the bill’s proponents, managed to get more committee members to back it, including state assemblyperson Miguel Santiago, who led the original effort to dismantle the bill. He then brought the bill back from the dead.

On Wednesday, the committee held a second hearing on the bill, which drew dozens of members of the public in support. After a mild debate, which included telecom lobbyists claiming the bill was anti-competitive and would have devastating impacts on consumers (while also misrepresenting the bill’s language and taking weird digs at the Netherlands), the committee voted 8-2 to adopt the bill. It will now go to the state assembly for a vote.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

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

A team of researchers from Waseda University, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Harvard University, and the National Institute for Polar Research discovered silica mineral quartz in a primitive meteorite, becoming the first in the world to present direct evidence of silica condensation within the solar protoplanetary disk and coming a step closer to understanding solar formation and evolution.

Though previous infrared spectroscopic observations have suggested the existence of silica in young and newly formed T Tauri stars as well as in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in their last phase of life, no evidence of gas-solid condensation of silica had actually been found in primitive meteorites from the early stages of our solar system.

In this study, the scientists studied the primitive meteorite Yamato-793261 (Y-793261), a carbonaceous chondrite collected from an ice field near the Yamato Mountains during the 20th Japan Antarctic Research Expedition in 1979.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An international team of researchers has uncovered a destructive mechanism at the molecular level that causes a well-known phenomenon associated with obesity, called leptin resistance.

They found that mice fed a high-fat diet produce an enzyme named MMP-2 that clips receptors for the hormone leptin from the surface of neuronal cells in the hypothalamus. This blocks leptin from binding to its receptors. This in turn keeps the neurons from signaling that your stomach is full and you should stop eating.

This is the first time that a destructive molecular mechanism has been observed and described.

Scientists showed that when MMP-2 is blocked, leptin can still bind to the receptors and signal satiety. They hope that in the future, clinicians will be able to treat leptin resistance in humans by blocking MMP-2. They also have evidence that their findings have a broader scope.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Threatpost:

Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in the widely deployed Ghostscript package that allows bad actors to remotely take control of vulnerable systems. There's no current patch available for the multiple flaws discovered.

Ghostscript is a suite of tools used by hundreds of software suites and coding libraries, which allows desktop software and web servers to handle Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages.

Multiple bypass vulnerabilities, disclosed Tuesday, exist in the suite's optional -dSAFER feature, which is ironically supposed to prevent unsafe PostScript operations. By causing Ghostscript (or a program leveraging Ghostscript) to parse a specially-crafted malicious file, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the Ghostscript code.

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

TechCrunch:

You can tell a lot about what's going on in a home from how much electricity it's using — especially when that information is collected every few minutes and recorded centrally. It's revealing enough that a federal judge has ruled that people with smart meters have a reasonable expectation of privacy and as such law enforcement will require a warrant to acquire that data.

It may sound like a niche win in the fight for digital privacy, and in a way it is, but it's still important. One of the risks we've assumed as consumers in adopting ubiquitous technology in forms like the so-called Internet of Things is that we are generating an immense amount of data we weren't before, and that data is not always protected as it should be.

This case is a great example. Traditional spinning meters are read perhaps once a month by your local utility, and at that level of granularity there's not much you can tell about a house or apartment other than whether perhaps someone has been living there and whether they have abnormally high electricity use — useful information if you were, say, looking for illicit pot growers with a farm in the basement.

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

GeekWire:

After enduring days of record-setting, eye-watering levels of smoke in the air, the Seattle area is in for relief, thanks to a shift in wind patterns. But the debate over whether this is the "new normal," the old normal or the abnormal is likely to play out for months and years to come.

The National Weather Service is predicting a rise in onshore air flow, sweeping plumes of wildfire smoke toward the east (sorry about that, Wenatchee) and moderating temperatures. Thursday's high temperatures in the Seattle-Olympia area are expected to be 12 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today's .

[...] In his latest blog post , University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass explains the mechanism behind this week's smoky skies: An express train of lower-atmosphere winds delivered smoke from fires in the North Cascades and southern British Columbia directly into Puget Sound.

[...] Is this a taste of the new normal in an era of global warming? Not necessarily. Mass has argued persuasively that the wildfire trend actually marks a return to the "old normal" after nearly a century of aggressive fire suppression and forest mismanagement.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In most of Europe, the rates of smoking initiation among older teens have declined since the 1970s, while "new smoker" rates among younger teens have risen in recent years, according to a study published August 22, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by an international team of researchers involved in the Ageing Lungs in European Cohorts (ALEC) study, coordinated by Deborah Jarvis, Imperial College of London, UK.

Smoking is the leading cause of avoidable mortality and the strongest modifiable risk factor for a number of diseases. Many smokers initially become addicted to nicotine during adolescence, making it critical to understand smoking trends in this population.

The ALEC study pooled data from six multicenter studies, including 119,104 people from 17 countries. Information on smoking was retrospectively obtained from participants, who answered questions including "Are you a smoker," "Have you ever smoked for as long as a year?" and "How old were you when you started smoking?" Data was grouped by region of Europe and analyzed both as a whole and by region.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Most people's DNS queries – by which browsers and other software resolve domain names into IP addresses – remain unprotected while flowing over the internet.

And that's because, you may not be surprised to know, the proposed standards to safeguard DNS traffic – such as DNSSEC and DNS-over-HTTPS – have yet to be fully baked and aren't yet widely adopted.

DNSSEC, for one, aims to prevent miscreants tampering with intercepted domain-name lookups by digital signing the answers – making any forgeries obvious to software. DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS aim to do this, too, and encrypt the queries so eavesdroppers on the network can't snoop on what sites you're visiting.

Without these safeguards in wide (or any) use, DNS traffic remains unencrypted and unauthenticated, meaning they can be potentially spied on and meddled with to redirect people to malicious websites masquerading as legit sites.

Researchers from universities in China and the US recently decided to check whether or not this is actually happening, and found that traffic interception a reality for a small but significant portion of DNS queries – 0.66 per cent of DNS requests over TCP – across a global sample of residential and cellular IP addresses.

chromas (from IRC) writes:

NBC News:

Enzymes made by bacteria in the human digestive tract can strip the sugars that determine blood type from the surface of red blood cells in the lab, a new study finds. That's important, because those sugars, or antigens, can cause devastating immune reactions if introduced into the body of someone without that particular blood type. A few enzymes discovered in the past can change type B blood to type O, but the newly discovered group of enzymes is the first to effectively change type A to type O.

"That's always been the biggest challenge," lead study author Stephen Withers, a biochemist at the University of British Columbia, told reporters Aug. 21 at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Boston.

As anyone who has given blood at the Red Cross can attest, type O blood is in high demand. That's because it lacks antigens on its cell membranes, making it the "universal donor" blood type — people of any blood type can take a type O transfusion without their immune system reacting to the red blood cells. In contrast, type A, B and AB red blood cells have specific antigens on their surfaces, meaning that people with type A blood can donate only to type A or type AB recipients, and people with type B blood can donate only to those with type B or type AB. Stripping these blood types of their antigens before a transfusion could turn all blood types into universal donors, but researchers have yet to find enzymes safe and efficient enough to do the job.

Now, however, Withers and his colleagues think they might have some good candidates. In a presentation at the ACS meeting on Aug. 20, Withers shared study results showing that enzymes made with DNA extracted from human-gut microbes could remove type A and B antigens from red blood cells. [...] The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Also at BBC. ACS meeting.

Original Submission