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canopic jug writes:

Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.

“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Imagine a drive to grandma's house or to work with fewer "left lane closed ahead" signs, fewer detour signs, fewer orange barrels and also safer travel near road crews. That may soon be possible with new technology from Purdue University researchers.
...
This technology uses electrical resistance measurements to determine when the emulsified asphalt in a chip seal has sufficiently cured and can therefore withstand traffic without sustaining damage. Such real-time measurements help ensure that the road repairs are done correctly and more quickly than using current methods.

"Typical approaches to quantify emulsified asphalt-based chip seal curing times are varied and qualitative," said John Haddock, a professor of civil engineering and the director of the Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program, who leads the research team. "Having a quantitative, real-time measurement method can help construction crews make good decisions that result in a quality chip seal project with minimal traffic disruption."

The engineers will know exactly when the asphalt can be driven on.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When tech giants like Amazon expand, other companies don't just worry about losing business. They also fret about hanging on to their employees.

Some of the industries that have defined New York City and the Washington, D.C., area will face increased competition for talent when Amazon sets up shop in their territory, with plans to hire 50,000 new workers amid the tightest job market in decades.

The expansion comes at time of fierce demand for computer programmers, mobile app developers, data scientists and cybersecurity experts. Salaries keep rising as companies from banks to retailers seek new technology professionals to expand their online presence and automate operations. Particularly in demand are software developers, with many switching jobs each year. Even some banks have eased up on their dress codes to project a hipper image.

Good news, ye techies working on Wall Street! Soon you might be able to wear jeans and t-shirts to work.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

World War II-era oil pumping under Los Angeles likely triggered a rash of mid-sized earthquakes in the 1930s and 1940s, potentially leading seismologists to overestimate the earthquake potential in the region, according to new research published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Six independent earthquakes and two aftershocks of magnitude 4.4 to 5.1 shook L.A. between 1935 and 1944, a rate of about one every two years. The area also experienced a higher rate of low-intensity earthquakes during that time frame. After 1945, the rate dropped to one moderate earthquake every seven years.

The new study re-examined historical information about the earthquakes from archived newspaper reports of earthquake damage, postcard questionnaires collected by the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and other sources pulled from old files and the dusty corners of cyberspace.

The authors used this information to refine the earthquake locations identified by early earth-motion sensors. The first seismometers in the United States began monitoring earthquake activity in the L.A. region in 1932. It is known that these early instruments could err in locating earthquake epicenters by tens of miles because of the limitations of their clocks, and because the low-sensitivity instruments were so few, according to the study's authors. Extrapolation of earthquake location from seismometer recordings relies on accurate time measurements.

The oil companies active at the time associated their activities with increased earthquakes, because the quakes would often sever pipes and shutdown production for months.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Scientists explain how wombats drop cubed poop

Wombats, the chubby and beloved, short-legged marsupials native to Australia, are central to a biological mystery in the animal kingdom: How do they produce cube-shaped poop? Patricia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, set out to investigate.

Yang studies the hydrodynamics of fluids, including blood, processed food and urine, in the bodies of animals. She was curious how the differences in wombats' digestive processes and soft tissue structures might explain their oddly shaped scat.

During the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, which will take place Nov. 18-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, Yang and her co-authors, Scott Carver, David Hu and undergraduate student Miles Chan, will explain their findings from dissecting the alimentary systems, or digestive tracts, of wombats.

"The first thing that drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird in biology. That was a mystery," said Yang. "I didn't even believe it was true at the beginning. I Googled it and saw a lot about cube-shaped wombat poop, but I was skeptical."

[...] So, why do wombats poop cubes? Wombats pile their feces to mark their home ranges and communicate with one another through scent. They pile their feces in prominent places (e.g., next to burrows, or on logs, rocks and small raises) because they have poor eye sight. The higher and more prominently placed the pile of feces, the more visually distinctive it is to attract other wombats to smell and engage in communication. Therefore, it is important that their droppings do not roll away, and cube-shaped poop solves this problem.

Yang hopes that the group's research on wombats will contribute to current understandings of soft tissue transportation, or how the gut moves. She also emphasized that the group's research involved mechanical engineering and biology, and their findings are valuable to both fields. "We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this novel method to our manufacturing process," Yang said. "We can understand how to move this stuff in a very efficient way."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Doomed star in Milky Way threatens rare gamma-ray burst

University of Sydney astronomers, working with international colleagues, have found a star system like none seen before in our galaxy.

The scientists believe one of the stars—about 8000 light years from Earth—is the first known candidate in the Milky Way to produce a dangerous gamma-ray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when it explodes and dies.

The system, comprising a pair of scorchingly luminous stars, was nicknamed Apep by the team after the serpentine Egyptian god of chaos. One star is on the brink of a massive supernova explosion.

The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, are controversial as no gamma-ray burst has ever been detected within our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

martyb writes:

New Finding of Particle Physics may Help to Explain the Absence of Antimatter:

In the Standard Model of particle physics, there is almost no difference between matter and antimatter. But there is an abundance of evidence that our observable universe is made up only of matter -- if there was any antimatter, it would annihilate with nearby matter to produce very high intensity gamma radiation, which has not been observed. Therefore, figuring out how we ended up with an abundance of only matter is one of the biggest open questions in particle physics.

[...] About ten picoseconds after the Big Bang -- right about the time the Higgs boson was turning on -- the universe was a hot plasma of particles.

"The technique of dimensional reduction lets us replace the theory which describes this hot plasma with a simpler quantum theory with a set of rules that all the particles must follow," explains Dr. David Weir, the corresponding author of the article.

"It turns out that the heavier, slower-moving particles don't matter very much when these new rules are imposed, so we end up with a much less complicated theory."

This theory can then be studied with computer simulations, which provide a clear picture of what happened. In particular, they can tell us how violently out of equilibrium the universe was when the Higgs boson turned on. This is important for determining whether there was scope for producing the matter-antimatter asymmetry at this time in the history of the universe using the Two Higgs Doublet Model.

"Our results showed that it is indeed possible to explain the absence of antimatter and remain in agreement with existing observations," Dr. Weir remarks. Importantly, by making use of dimensional reduction, the new approach was completely independent of any previous work in this model.

Journal Reference:
Jens O. Andersen, Tyler Gorda, Andreas Helset, Lauri Niemi, Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen, Anders Tranberg, Aleksi Vuorinen, David J. Weir. Nonperturbative Analysis of the Electroweak Phase Transition in the Two Higgs Doublet Model. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 121 (19) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.191802

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Appalbarry writes:

Energy News reports that a company based in the Republic of Georgia has invented a new process for recycling rubber tires into new treads. G3C Technologies' new process:

...takes scrap tires and chemically/industrially breaks them down to produce a material known as recovered black carbon[sic] (rCB). This renewed material can then be used to make brand new tires or other products typically requiring 'virgin' carbon black, such as plastic auto parts, paints, and semi-conductive parts– epitomizing the concept of circular economy and metaphorically turning the need for a 'virgin birth' of new carbon black into one of reincarnation.

Currently 46 per cent of end of life tires are disposed of through incineration, and 15% end up in landfills. As well as reducing this number, G3C's process can dramatically reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. "Production of 1 kg of virgin carbon black produces 2.4 kg of CO2 emissions, while the creation of rCB emits just 20 to 30 per cent of that total, minimizing the carbon footprint of new tire production."

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stretch611 writes:

According to TorrentFreak, the long-awaiting stealth game Hitman 2 — which comes 'protected' by the latest variant of Denuvo (v5.3) — leaked online. Aside from having its protection circumvented, this happened three days before the title's official launch on November 13.

It appears that a relatively new cracking group called FCKDRM obtained a version of Hitman 2 that was only available to those who pre-ordered the game. While several groups have been chipping away at Denuvo for some time, FCKDRM is a new entrant (at least by branding) to the cracking scene. (Note: The group is not related to the FCKDRM initiative, an anti-DRM site launched by GOG.com, even though it does use the logo.)

It should be noted that the owners of Denuvo released marketing material a few months ago suggesting that even 4 days of protection (actually even hours according to them) is worth the price of their DRM. (However, no mention of -3 days.)

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canopic jug writes:

Cryptographer Derek Zimmer at Private Internet Access blogs about a supercookie built into TLS 1.2 and 1.3. In principle, the new standards increase both securty and privacy through the use of better algorithms. In practice, the result falls short. Although the problem is worse in the older versions of TLS, a new feature in TLS, 0-RTT, actively impairs the ability to maintain privacy by skipping some renegotiation steps that pertain to generating new keys. Thus web sites and larger networks can follow individual connections as they move around, say home, work, café, etc. Browsers like Firefox contribute to the problem by enabling session IDs, Session Tickets, and 0-RTT by default even in their so-called Private Mode.

Complete steps for mitigation appear in the blog post, but the Firefox workaround is to set these values after opening about:config

The blog notes "I am currently researching mitigations for this problem in Chrome, but full mitigation does not seem possible at this time." No statement is made about whether or not this is an issue (or, if it is, whether or not there are mitigations) with any other browsers or with command line utilities such as curl or wget.

[Updated 2018-11-20 to add warning about privacy.firstparty.isolate --martyb]

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Facebook Increasingly Reliant on A.I. To Predict Suicide Risk

A year ago, Facebook started using artificial intelligence to scan people's accounts for danger signs of imminent self-harm.

[...] "To just give you a sense of how well the technology is working and rapidly improving ... in the last year we've had 3,500 reports," she says. That means AI monitoring is causing Facebook to contact emergency responders an average of about 10 times a day to check on someone — and that doesn't include Europe, where the system hasn't been deployed. (That number also doesn't include wellness checks that originate from people who report suspected suicidal behavior online.)

Davis says the AI works by monitoring not just what a person writes online, but also how his or her friends respond. For instance, if someone starts streaming a live video, the AI might pick up on the tone of people's replies.

[...] "Ever since they've introduced livestreaming on their platform, they've had a real problem with people livestreaming suicides," Marks says. "Facebook has a real interest in stopping that."

He isn't sure this AI system is the right solution, in part because Facebook has refused to share key data, such as the AI's accuracy rate. How many of those 3,500 "wellness checks" turned out to be actual emergencies? The company isn't saying.

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Appalbarry writes:

As covered by the Guardian, and CBC Radio Canada, but not the English side of CBC.

The annual Prix littéraire des collégiens has been cancelled following protests by the Quebec authors who were in the running for a $5000 prize. Authors were concerned that the prize was now being sponsored by Amazon. In a statement they said:

“Our great unease comes from the dangerous competition this giant has with Quebec bookstores. Need we remind you of the precariousness of the book trade and literary publishing? Need we mention the inhumane methods of this online giant, which constitute a danger for small traders and culture at large?” they wrote.

“Could the [award] do without the money from Amazon? Find sponsors more in line with the values ​​it stands for?” they asked. “Unfortunately, we believe that by uniting with Amazon, the prize is failing in its principal mission, which is to ‘promote Québécois literature today’ … We believe that the defence of Québécois literature and the promotion of a multinational that harms bookstores … cannot go together.”

Award organizers are now working to find alternate means of supporting the award.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

NASA to pay private space companies for moon rides

Next month, almost a half-century since the United States last landed a spacecraft on the moon, NASA is expected to announce plans for a return. But the agency will just be along for the ride. Rather than unveiling plans for its own spacecraft, NASA will name the private companies it will pay to carry science experiments to the moon on small robotic landers.

Under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), NASA would buy space aboard a couple of launches a year, starting in 2021. The effort is similar to an agency program that paid private space companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). "This a new way of doing business," says Sarah Noble, a planetary scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., who is leading the science side of NASA's lunar plans.

Scientists are lining up for a ride. "It really feels like the future of lunar exploration," says Erica Jawin, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. She and other attendees at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Maryland, last week were eager to show NASA why their small experiments would be worthy hitchhikers on the landers.

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looorg writes:

Researchers have calculated, or approximated, the cost of creating bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Then compared said cryptocurrency costs vs the cost of real actual mining for minerals. Mining bitcoins etc requires more power then most actual mining such as actual gold. An average bitcoin-dollar, or if you will a dollar worth of a bitcoin, is calculated to require about 17 megajoule of energy, while digging up a dollar worth gold requires 5 megajoule. Aluminum is still a lot more expensive then most of the cryptocoins to produce as it requires a massive 122 megajoule to create a dollar worth of.

The Carbon dioxide creation due to cryptocurrencies mining is also estimated to be between 3 and 15 million tonnes, between January 2016 and June 2018. But a Chinese bitcoin emits four times as much CO2 as a Canadian one, so it is highly dependent on the form of energy used. I didn't find any comparable numbers to how much CO2 is created from the production of Aluminum, Gold or other metals.

Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7

Bitcoin Will Burn the Planet Down. The Question: How Fast?
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-will-burn-planet-down-how-fast/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

New Peanut Allergy Drug Shows ‘Lifesaving’ Potential

[...] The goal of the treatment is not to cure the allergy or enable children to eat peanut butter sandwiches, but to reduce the risk that an accidental exposure to trace amounts will trigger a life-threatening reaction in someone with a severe allergy, and relieve the fear and anxiety that go along with severe peanut allergies.

The results, announced Sunday at a conference of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in Seattle, may lead to approval of what could be the first oral medication that ameliorates reactions in children with severe peanut allergies.

After six months of treatment followed by six months of maintenance therapy, two-thirds of the 372 children who received the treatment were able to ingest 600 milligrams or more of peanut protein — the equivalent of two peanuts — without developing allergic symptoms. By contrast, only 4 percent of the 124 children who had been given a placebo powder were able to consume the same amount of peanut without reacting.

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