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AnonTechie writes:

A truly wonderful (30 minutes) visual experience:

On Friday, November 16, a unique film and musical experience, inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic Deep Field image, premieres at the Kennedy Space Center. The film, titled Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe, features a variety of Hubble's stunning imagery and includes 11 computer-generated visualizations of far-flung galaxies, nebulas, and star clusters developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), in Baltimore, Maryland. Those visualizations not only depict the awesome beauty of the universe, but also express the three-dimensional nature of celestial objects.

Deep Field is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Grammy award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, multi award-winning artists 59 Productions, and STScI.

The film paints the incredible story of the Hubble Deep Field, an extraordinary portrait of the universe revealed by Hubble when it was pointed at a tiny and completely dark patch of sky for a total exposure time of about six days. What it revealed was an image that contained over 3,000 galaxies scattered across space and time.

New film celebrates Hubble Space Telescope

[Video]: Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe

[YouTube]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDiD8F9ItX0

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Startling Microbe Discovery Just Revealed a Whole New Branch of Our Tree of Life

Microscopic organisms found in dirt collected from a hike through Nova Scotia mean we're going to have to add another branch to the tree of life. The strange organisms simply don't fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom we've classified up until now. The tiny critters in question represent two species of the group of microbes called hemimastigotes, and based on a detailed genetic analysis, one of them has never been spotted before.

According to the team of researchers from Dalhousie University in Canada, the two species are eukaryotes (with complex cells, like humans), and protists (outside the animal, plant, and fungi kingdoms). But they don't fit the patterns of the existing 10 kingdoms that make up the Eukaryota domain. "This discovery literally redraws our branch of the tree of life at one of its deepest points," says one of the researchers, Alastair Simpson. "It opens a new door to understanding the evolution of complex cells – and their ancient origins – back well before animals and plants emerged on Earth."

Hemimastigophora is a novel supra-kingdom-level lineage of eukaryotes (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0708-8) (DX)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

No Evidence to Support Link Between Violent Video Games and Behaviour :

In a series of experiments, with more than 3,000 participants, the team demonstrated that video game concepts do not 'prime' players to behave in certain ways and that increasing the realism of violent video games does not necessarily increase aggression in game players.

The dominant model of learning in games is built on the idea that exposing players to concepts, such as violence in a game, makes those concepts easier to use in 'real life'. This is known as 'priming', and is thought to lead to changes in behaviour.  Previous experiments on this effect, however, have so far provided mixed conclusions.

Researchers at the University of York expanded the number of participants in experiments, compared to studies that had gone before it, and compared different types of gaming realism to explore whether more conclusive evidence could be found

[...] "The findings suggest that there is no link between these kinds of realism in games and the kind of effects that video games are commonly thought to have on their players.

"Further study is now needed into other aspects of realism to see if this has the same result. What happens when we consider the realism of by-standing characters in the game, for example, and the inclusion of extreme content, such as torture?

"We also only tested these theories on adults, so more work is needed to understand whether a different effect is evident in children players."

Journal Reference:
David Zendle, Daniel Kudenko, Paul Cairns. Behavioural realism and the activation of aggressive concepts in violent video games. Entertainment Computing, 2018; 24: 21 DOI: 10.1016/j.entcom.2017.10.003

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A closer look at Royole's foldable display

The FlexPai's anticipated December release seemingly came out of nowhere. Like competitors, Royole had shown off its proprietary folding technology as part of a standalone demos, but it hadn't teased the arrival of a smartphone until the device was ready to ship. It's a far cry, certainly, from the not ready for prime time prototype Samsung marched out on stage last month.

At an event in Shenzhen, CEO Bill Liu told TechCrunch that the company was built around the desire to bring the technology to market. "We started from the flexible displays and flexible sensors," he explained. "We started the company with a focus on the flexible displays and sensors. And then along the way, we realized this could be a huge application for the technology."

[...] It's a difficult problem and Royole solved it with in-house technologies. No one can take that away from the company. I can't say my initial apprehensions were ultimately dissuaded, however. The FlexPai mostly works as desired, but the execution isn't what ultimately the kind of premium product one would expect, given the ultra-premium price tag (around $1,300 American).

Liu happily dropped the phone a couple of times on stage, in an attempt to put to rest any durability question. While the display ultimately didn't crack or scratch, the flexible material looks almost like cellophane and sports crinkles that catch the light — the clarity also leaves something to be desire.

As far as portability, it's true that you can fold it up and stuff it in your pocket, though it's pretty chunky when you do so. Ultimately, these are first generation products — and likely a result of a company pushing to be first to market, knowing full well that companies like Samsung were breathing down its neck.

Don't be an early adopter.

Previously: Royole Beats Samsung and Others in Race to Create the First Foldable Smartphone
Google Will Support Foldable Devices; Samsung Announces 2019 Foldable Phone

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Make-A-Wish Website Crammed with Coin-Mining Malware:

Researchers with Trustwave say the (now clean) WorldWish.org site was compromised via a Drupal exploit and seeded with malicious JavaScript that enlisted the CPU cycles of visitor's machines to covertly generate cryptocurrency.

It seems that the site was using an older version of the Drupal CMS that was vulnerable to CVE-2018-7600, the remote code execution bug known for marketing purposes as "Drupalgeddon 2." The successful exploit of the vulnerability gives an attacker the current user's access level and, in the case of web servers, this means the ability to access and modify pages.

In the context of a crypto-jacking attack, the compromised page has a short script embedded into it that calls another server to get the actual cryptocoin mining script. That server can also be obfuscated by changing its address or bouncing the connection off other servers. When a user visits the infected page, the mining script is called and the user's machine is used to generate cryptocurrency for the attacker.

Having been widely reported since May, the Drupal bug is now easy to scan for and target for attack, thanks to readily available exploit scripts. This means anyone from novice cybercriminals to large, organized groups could be behind the attack.

[...] "For all we know this is one poor administrator trying to handle an international website with a lot of users," Sigler explained.

"We have seen time and time again where security gets overlooked."

Protecting against the attack is easy enough: Make sure Drupal (and all other web server apps) are updated and fully patched. Admins should also keep a close eye on any changes or unusual activity on their pages that could signal an attack.

What kind of person would compromise a site that grants wishes to dying youngsters?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Star Citizen' Reaches $200 Million in Funding

Dedicated Star Citizen fans have pushed the game's crowdfunding revenue to a new milestone with the game now having raised over $200,000,000.

Currently playable in an alpha version that's available after purchasing one of the various game packs, the most common starter packs totaling around $45, Star Citizen and its developer and publisher Cloud Imperium Games have been raising money for the game for several years. According to the live stats for Star Citizen's crowdfunding progress, the game has raised $200,024,490 at the time of publishing with exactly 2,121,588 "Star Citizens" contributing to the game. That equates to just over $94 spent on the game per person.

[...] Star Citizen is currently in development and has a playable alpha with no official release date announced for the full game.

It'll come out of Beta around the $1 billion mark.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released
Star Citizen Developers Sued by Crytek
Star Citizen Begins Selling a $27,000 DLC Pack
'Star Citizen' Court Documents Reveal the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200 Million Game (the story was updated with a correction stating that the actual number was a little over $190 million)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

De Beers Fights Fakes With Technology as China's Lab-Grown Diamonds Threaten Viability of the Real Gems.

The South China Morning Post writes that the dominant diamond player De Beers is reacting badly to the arrival of large numbers of good, tiny, lab-grown diamonds. The synthetics challenge the widely-promoted assertion that diamond prices only go up. However, labs are now able to produce chemically identical gem-quality stones, indistinguishable by the naked eye from mined diamonds, in quantities pushing 200k carats of diamonds per month. Synthetic diamonds still only account for %1 of rough diamond sales globally, but that is expected to expand to between 7.5% to 15% by 2020.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Dynamic audiovisuals increase spectator attention, but inhibits conscious processing

Scene changes inhibit a spectator's blink rate, thus increasing their attention. It also produces a flow of brain activities from the occipital lobe towards the frontal lobe. These are the conclusions reached by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Pablo de Olavide University, Sevilla. The study, recently publishd [sic] in the journal Neuroscience, deals with what happens after the scene changes from a triple approach: frequency in blinking, electric activity in the brain and functional connectivity associated with the brain.

The research also concluded that the editing style influences a spectator's perception. Scene changes presented in a dynamic and chaotic style, such as video-clips, produce more activity in the visual processing areas when compared to more continuous and orderly scene changes. Likewise, the activity in frontal areas in charge of more complex processes is superior when the editing style is more continuous and orderly.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Back at the start of the year, a set of attacks that leveraged the speculative execution capabilities of modern high-performance processors was revealed. The attacks were named Meltdown and Spectre. Since then, numerous variants of these attacks have been devised. In tandem, a range of mitigation techniques has been created to enable at-risk software, operating systems, and hypervisor platforms to protect against these attacks.

A research team—including many of the original researchers behind Meltdown, Spectre, and the related Foreshadow and BranchScope attacks—has published a new paper disclosing yet more attacks in the Spectre and Meltdown families. The result? Seven new possible attacks. Some are mitigated by known mitigation techniques, but others are not. That means further work is required to safeguard vulnerable systems.

The previous investigations into these attacks have been a little ad hoc in nature: examining particular features of interest to provide, for example, a Spectre attack that can be performed remotely over a network or Meltdown-esque attack to break into SGX enclaves. The new research is more systematic, looking at the underlying mechanisms behind both Meltdown and Spectre and running through all the different ways the speculative execution can be misdirected.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/spectre-meltdown-researchers-unveil-7-more-speculative-execution-attacks/?comments=1

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

We Need an FDA For Algorithms

In the introduction to her new book, Hannah Fry points out something interesting about the phrase "Hello World." It's never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which is frequently the entire output of a student's first computer program—is supposed to be attributed to the program, awakening for the first time, or to the programmer, announcing their triumphant first creation.

Perhaps for this reason, "Hello World" calls to mind a dialogue between human and machine, one which has never been more relevant than it is today. Her book, called Hello World, published in September, walks us through a rapidly computerizing world. Fry is both optimistic and excited—along with her Ph.D. students at the University of College, London, she has worked on many algorithms herself—and cautious. In conversation and in her book, she issues a call to arms: We need to make algorithms transparent, regulated, and forgiving of the flawed creatures that converse with them.

I reached her by telephone while she was on a book tour in New York City.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI

When the Boston public school system announced new start times last December, some parents found the schedules unacceptable and pushed back. The algorithm used to set these times had been designed by MIT researchers, and about a week later, Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, emailed asking me to cosign an op-ed that would call on policymakers to be more thoughtful and democratic when they consider using algorithms to change policies that affect the lives of residents. Kade, who is also a Director's Fellow at the Media Lab and a colleague of mine, is always paying attention to the key issues in digital liberties and is great at flagging things that I should pay attention to. (At the time, I had no contact with the MIT researchers who designed the algorithm.)

I made a few edits to her draft, and we shipped it off to the Boston Globe, which ran it on December 22, 2017, under the headline "Don't blame the algorithm for doing what Boston school officials asked." In the op-ed, we piled on in criticizing the changes but argued that people shouldn't criticize the algorithm, but rather the city's political process that prescribed the way in which the various concerns and interests would be optimized. That day, the Boston Public Schools decided not to implement the changes. Kade and I high-fived and called it a day.

[...] A few months later, having read the op-ed in the Boston Globe, Arthur Delarue and Sébastien Martin, PhD students in the MIT Operations Research Center and members of the team that built Boston's bus algorithm, asked to meet me. In very polite email, they told me that I didn't have the whole story.

There's more to it than first meets the eye.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Drinking coffee may reduce your chances of developing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's

A new study out of the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the Krembil Research Institute, suggests there could be more to that morning jolt of goodness than a boost in energy and attention. Drinking coffee may also protect you against developing both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

"Coffee consumption does seem to have some correlation to a decreased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease," says Dr. Donald Weaver, Co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute. "But we wanted to investigate why that is -- which compounds are involved and how they may impact age-related cognitive decline."

[...] "The caffeinated and de-caffeinated dark roast both had identical potencies in our initial experimental tests," says Dr. Mancini. "So we observed early on that its protective effect could not be due to caffeine."

Dr. Mancini then identified a group of compounds known as phenylindanes, which emerge as a result of the roasting process for coffee beans. Phenylindanes are unique in that they are the only compound investigated in the study that prevent -- or rather, inhibit -- both beta amyloid and tau, two protein fragments common in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, from clumping. "So phenylindanes are a dual-inhibitor. Very interesting, we were not expecting that." says Dr. Weaver.

As roasting leads to higher quantities of phenylindanes, dark roasted coffee appears to be more protective than light roasted coffee.

"It's the first time anybody's investigated how phenylindanes interact with the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," says Dr. Mancini. "The next step would be to investigate how beneficial these compounds are, and whether they have the ability to enter the bloodstream, or cross the blood-brain barrier."

---

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Planetary Society reports:

Representative John Culberson, an 8-term Texas Republican and staunch supporter of NASA and planetary exploration, lost his re-election bid to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher last week. Many factors played into this outcome, but one bears consideration by space advocates: his support for the scientific search for life at Europa was seen as a weakness and attacked accordingly.

Over the past four years, Culberson used his chairmanship of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations subcommittee to increase spending on NASA and missions to search for life on Europa. He directed hundreds of millions of dollars to this effort and played a critical role in getting the Europa Clipper mission officially adopted by NASA and the White House. And he did this without cannibalizing other NASA programs. His motivation was passion, not parochialism, as the prime benefactor of these federal dollars was California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located far outside his Houston-area congressional district.

Original Submission

An elderly friend died last year and among other things I inherited a couple of bottles of Creme de Menthe. For anyone unfamiliar, it's bright green and very minty -- 60 proof / 30% alcohol by volume. I'm not a regular drinker, and I am one of those weirdos that believes in waste-not, want-not, so I felt obligated to find a way to (slowly) consume it. My eventual choice was to pour a shot or two over a bowl of chocolate ice cream -- not bad, compare to mint chocolate-chip ice cream, with a little kick.

Any other suggestions?

[An Anonymous Editor suggested Creme de Menthe Brownies (located at the bottom of the page).]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A 3D printer with a recycling device is headed to the International Space Station

The International Space Station's first 3D printer with its own recycling machine is en route to the orbital laboratory aboard a Northrop Grumman spacecraft.

The Cygnus spacecraft launched early Saturday morning aboard an Antares rocket, carrying 7,400 pounds of supplies to aid dozens of investigations and research projects conducted on the space station, NASA said in a news release.

The load includes the space station's first all-in-one 3D printer and recycler, known as the "Refabricator," NASA said. It will be able to take plastic materials and old 3D-printed parts on the space station and recycle them into new 3D-printer "ink" that will allow astronauts to make new tools in space.

The technology will also "greatly reduce the need to continually launch large supplies of new material and parts for repairs and maintenance," NASA said. That, in turn, should reduce the cost of the resupplying the space station.

The demand for plastic wrenches aboard the ISS will be satisfied.

Also at Space.com and Yahoo!:

The space station marks its 20th year in orbit on Tuesday. The first section launched on Nov. 20, 1998, from Kazakhstan.

2014: Open for Business: 3-D Printer Creates First Object in Space on International Space Station

Original Submission