SoylentNews

RandomFactor writes:

Getting a ride on a stormy night can always be a challenge. That's where being a deadly poisonous cane toad has its advantages.

After receiving 68mm of rain the banks around a local lake in Kununurra, Australia flooded and thousands of cane toads were evicted from their burrows.

These guys hopped right on a 12' python named "Monty" to hitch a ride to higher ground after local rains flushed them out of their homes.

Andrew Mock, a local resident went out to check on the dam fearing it might break and caught the sight in photos and video.

About 30 seconds of video is embedded in this article.

The Twitter feed has some moments, including one comment from an amphibian biologist indicating the male toads may have had more amorous thoughts in mind. Love conquers all!

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Public Health England (PHE) has released a new film showing the devastating harms that come from smoking, and how this can be avoided by switching to an e-cigarette or using another type of quit aid.

The film has been released as part of PHE’s Health Harms campaign, which encourages smokers to attempt to quit this January, by demonstrating the personal harm to health from every single cigarette.

The film features smoking expert Dr Lion Shahab and Dr Rosemary Leonard, visually demonstrating the high levels of cancer-causing chemicals and tar inhaled by an average smoker over a month, compared to not smoking or using an e-cigarette.

The results of the demonstration visually illustrate the stark contrast between the impacts of smoking and vaping. Research estimates that while not risk-free, vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking.

Around 2.5 million adults are using e-cigarettes in England, and they have helped thousands of people successfully quit – but many smokers (44%) either believe that vaping is as harmful as smoking (22%) or don’t know that vaping poses much lower risks to health (22%).

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

The old gray lady reports that the people of Tempe AZ, a popular testing location for self driving cars, are fighting back. Here are a couple of snippets from the longer article:

The [tire] slashing was one of nearly two dozen attacks on driverless vehicles over the past two years in Chandler, a city near Phoenix where Waymo started testing its vans in 2017. In ways large and small, the city has had an early look at public misgivings over the rise of artificial intelligence, with city officials hearing complaints about everything from safety to possible job losses.

Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

[...] "There are other places they can test," said Erik O'Polka, 37, who was issued a warning by the police in November after multiple reports that his Jeep Wrangler had tried to run Waymo vans off the road — in one case, driving head-on toward one of the self-driving vehicles until it was forced to come to an abrupt stop.

His wife, Elizabeth, 35, admitted in an interview that her husband "finds it entertaining to brake hard" in front of the self-driving vans, and that she herself "may have forced them to pull over" so she could yell at them to get out of their neighborhood. The trouble started, the couple said, when their 10-year-old son was nearly hit by one of the vehicles while he was playing in a nearby cul-de-sac.

"They said they need real-world examples, but I don't want to be their real-world mistake," said Mr. O'Polka, who runs his own company providing information technology to small businesses. "They didn't ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test," added his wife, who helps run the business.

It looks like The New York Times used this article from December 11 as part of their story:

A slashed tire, a pointed gun, bullies on the road: Why do Waymo self-driving vans get so much hate?

This seems to be happening everywhere Waymo is testing, not just Tempe.

Lots of comments about this article on other sites, SoylentNews should get in on the fun too! A quote from a "media analyst" suggests that driverless cars are like scabs, hired to break a union strike.

Also at The Hill.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive

The holiday season is all about cute. You've got those ads with adorable children and those movies about baby animals with big eyes.

But when people encounter too much cuteness, the result can be something scientists call "cute aggression."

People "just have this flash of thinking: 'I want to crush it' or 'I want to squeeze it until pops' or 'I want to punch it,' " says Katherine Stavropoulos, a psychologist in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside.

About half of all adults have those thoughts sometimes, says Stavropoulos, who published a study about the phenomenon in early December in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. But those people wouldn't really take a swipe at Bambi or Thumper, she says.

"When people feel this way, it's with no desire to cause harm," Stavropoulos says. The thoughts appear to be an involuntary response to being overwhelmed by a positive emotion.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Yemen war: WFP accuses Houthi rebels of diverting food aid

The World Food Programme has demanded Yemen's rebel Houthi movement stops diverting desperately needed food aid from people in areas under its control. A survey by the UN agency said people in the capital Sanaa had not received rations to which they were entitled.

The WFP said lorries were illegally removing food from distribution areas, with rations sold on the open market or given to those not entitled to it. There was no response from the Houthis, but they have denied diverting aid.

The UN says some 20 million Yemenis are food insecure and that 10 million of them do not know how they will obtain their next meal.

[...] Earlier on Monday, the Associated Press reported that factions and militias on all sides of the conflict had blocked food aid from going to groups suspected of disloyalty, diverted it to combat units or sold it for profit.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New California divorce law: Treat pets like people — not property to be divided up

A new law being unleashed in California on New Year's Day will give pets' rights some bite in court cases. The measure provides judges with the power to consider what's in the best interests of the animal in divorce cases, instead of treating them the way they've been treated by courts in the past — as physical property.

[...] The law "makes clear that courts must view pet ownership differently than the ownership of a car, for example. By providing clearer direction, courts will award custody on what is best for the animal," [state Assembly member Bill] Quirk said after the bill was signed.

[...] Legal experts said the law means judges can take into consideration factors like who walks, feeds and plays with the pet when deciding who the animal should live with.

"Before it was an issue of who owns the dog and how you distribute the property," Favre said. "But pets aren't quite the same thing as china and sofas. They're more like children, in that they're living beings who have their own preferences." And as with children, he said, divorce can be "a trauma for animals as well."

Fur baby.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!

[...] In some early results, the agent was doing well — suspiciously well. What tipped the team off was that, when the agent reconstructed aerial photographs from its street maps, there were lots of details that didn’t seem to be on the latter at all. For instance, skylights on a roof that were eliminated in the process of creating the street map would magically reappear when they asked the agent to do the reverse process:

[...] So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect.

[...] One could easily take this as a step in the “the machines are getting smarter” narrative, but the truth is it’s almost the opposite. The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting. This could be avoided with more stringent evaluation of the agent’s results, and no doubt the researchers went on to do that.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Caltech scientists use DNA tiles to play tic-tac-toe at the nanoscale

Scientists at Caltech have created the world's smallest game board for playing tic-tac-toe out of DNA strands. What's more, it's possible to swap hundreds of DNA strands in and out at once to reconfigure the nanostructure at will, making it possible in principle to build complicated nanomachines in different custom patterns. The scientists described their work in a December paper in Nature Communications.

Back in 2006, Caltech bioengineer Paul Rothemund figured out how to fold a long strand of DNA into simple shapes, demonstrating this "DNA origami" technique by producing a smiley face. All you need is a long strand of DNA, plus several shorter strands ("staples"). Combine them in a test tube, and the shorter strands pull various parts of the long strand together so that it folds over into any number of simple shapes. DNA origami was a huge advance for nanotechnology, but to really achieve its full potential, scientists needed to be able to create larger and more complex structures.

Last year, Rothemund's Caltech colleague Lulu Qian introduced a cheap means of getting DNA origami to assemble itself into large arrays. The best part: you could create custom patterns. The array was a bit like a blank canvas, and Qian demonstrated the power of her technique (dubbed "fractal assembly") by creating the world's smallest version of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," visible only with atomic force microscopy.

rigrig writes:

UK-based human rights charity Privacy International has released a report about Android apps sharing users' data with Facebook, even if they don't have an account.

Key findings

• We found that at least 61 percent of apps we tested automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app. This happens whether people have a Facebook account or not, or whether they are logged into Facebook or not.
• We also found that some apps routinely send Facebook data that is incredibly detailed and sometimes sensitive. Again, this concerns data of people who are either logged out of Facebook or who do not have a Facebook account.

Facebook spying on people is hardly news, but I figured Soylentils might be interested to hear about which companies decided to trust the Facebook SDK.
(They only tested Android apps, but it's likely that iOS versions of also use the Facebook SDK)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Nancy Grace Roman, 'Mother Of Hubble' Space Telescope, Has Died, At Age 93

When Nancy Grace Roman was a child, her favorite object to draw was the moon. Her mother used to take her on walks under the nighttime sky and show her constellations, or point out the colorful swirls of the aurora. Roman loved to look up at the stars and imagine. Eventually, her passion for stargazing blossomed into a career as a renowned astronomer. Roman was one of the first female executives at NASA, where she served as the agency's first chief of astronomy. Known as the "Mother of Hubble," for her role in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality, Roman worked at NASA for nearly two decades. She died on Dec. 25 at the age of 93.

[...] From the get-go, Roman promoted space-based astronomy, where instrumentation is based in space unlike traditional ground-based astronomy equipment, such as telescopes. The reason behind this push is that looking through the Earth's atmosphere blurs or lessens the quality of the observation. [...] Her efforts helped lead to the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope. In her role at NASA, Roman developed and planned the Hubble Space Telescope, which is famous for its stunning images of space.

Original Submission

el_oscuro writes:

From Motherboard

When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, movies, songs, and books created in the United States in 1923—even beloved cartoons such as Felix the Cat—will be eligible for anyone to adapt, repurpose, or distribute as they please.

A 20-year freeze on copyright expirations has prevented a cache of 1923 works from entering the public domain, including Paramount Pictures' The Ten Commandments, Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim, and novels by Aldous Huxley.

Such a massive release of iconic works is unprecedented, experts say—especially in the digital age, as the last big dump predated Google.

In 2013, Paul Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducted a survey of books for sale on Amazon. He found that more books were for sale from the 1880s than the 1980s.

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

"Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ resignation, which shocked Washington’s national security establishment and rattled America’s allies, was sealed in a fateful 18-hour period that saw President Trump resolve to withdraw troops from Syria – alarming Pentagon officials who see America’s role in the region as crucial." foxnews.com/politics/behind-the-scenes-of-the-mattis-bombshell-more-resignations-expected-after-protest-exit

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Chinese draft law would prevent forced technology transfers:

A draft law aiming at protecting foreign investment and preventing the forced transfer of technology has been submitted for review at a Chinese legislators' meeting starting Sunday, People's Daily reported.

The country will protect the intellectual property rights of overseas investors, encourage voluntary technology transfers but forbid forced transfers using administrative measures, Minister of Justice Fu Zhenghua told lawmakers, according to the newspaper.

Also at CNBC, Reuters, Nikkei Asian Review, and Engadget.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ibuprofen alters human testicular physiology to produce a state of compensated hypogonadism:

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Jan 23;115(4):E715-E724. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1715035115. Epub 2018 Jan 8.

Concern has been raised over increased male reproductive disorders in the Western world, and the disruption of male endocrinology has been suggested to play a central role. Several studies have shown that mild analgesics exposure during fetal life is associated with antiandrogenic effects and congenital malformations, but the effects on the adult man remain largely unknown. Through a clinical trial with young men exposed to ibuprofen, we show that the analgesic resulted in the clinical condition named "compensated hypogonadism," a condition prevalent among elderly men and associated with reproductive and physical disorders. In the men, luteinizing hormone (LH) and ibuprofen plasma levels were positively correlated, and the testosterone/LH ratio decreased. Using adult testis explants exposed or not exposed to ibuprofen, we demonstrate that the endocrine capabilities from testicular Leydig and Sertoli cells, including testosterone production, were suppressed through transcriptional repression. This effect was also observed in a human steroidogenic cell line. Our data demonstrate that ibuprofen alters the endocrine system via selective transcriptional repression in the human testes, thereby inducing compensated hypogonadism.

tl;dr: ibuprofen can reduce testosterone production and interfere with fertility.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Devices and security systems are increasingly using biometric authentication to let users in and keep hackers out, be that fingerprint sensors or perhaps the iPhone's FaceID. Another method is so-called "vein authentication", which, as the name implies, involves a computer scanning the shape, size, and position of a users' veins under the skin of their hand.

But hackers have found a workaround for that, too. On Thursday at the annual Chaos Communication Congress hacking conference in Leipzig, Germany, security researchers described how they created a fake hand out of wax to fool a vein sensor.

"It makes you feel uneasy that the process is praised as a high-security system and then you modify a camera, take some cheap materials and hack it," Jan Krissler, who goes by the handle starbug, and who researched the vein authentication system along with Julian Albrecht, told Motherboard over email in German.

Original Submission