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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A gigantic cavity — two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall — growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.

Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/huge-cavity-in-antarctic-glacier-signals-rapid-decay

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Smartphone users are usually torn between the two choice — Android or iOS. Their dominance is such that other competing OS like Windows, BlackBerry OS, or Symbian have almost been abandoned.Those who don't want either of them can opt for Pine64's Linux phone dubbed the PinePhone which offers good hardware and software at an affordable rate of $149.

The phone's specs aren't great, but it does include a headphone jack (I wonder if it's capable of using the JACK audio system?) and the article notes that it may provide physical switches for disabling various components. The company behind it, Pine64, also produce the PineBook Linux laptop, which also use an ARM processor.

Source: https://fossbytes.com/pinephone-linux-smartphone-149/

Related: Kickstarter: Pine A64, Cheaper and More Powerful than Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2019/02/01/buddy-holly-plane-crash-clear-lake-iowa/2742144002/

One of the first tragedies to strike rock 'n' roll took place 60 years ago, when a plane carrying three of the genre's biggest stars crashed into an icy field north of Clear Lake, Iowa.

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, along with pilot Roger Peterson, died Feb. 3, 1959, following a Winter Dance Party tour stop at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake.

[...] Some called it the tour from hell, with routing that zig-zagged from Wisconsin to Minnesota to Iowa and back again to Minnesota. Tour buses, traveling 300-plus miles on a given night through the frozen rural Midwest, broke down often, leaving the musicians sick and frostbitten.

https://eu.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/01/25/buddy-hollys-winter-dance-party-lives-green-bay-60-years-later/2602426002/

https://siouxcityjournal.com/lifestyles/local/remembering-the-day-the-music-died-years-later/article_b3a07b51-3277-57ce-b3a1-c41e38f0b996.html

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/01/27/sixty-years-later-remembering-day-music-died

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takyon writes:

Penn Engineer's 'Metallic Wood' Has the Strength of Titanium and the Density of Water

High-performance golf clubs and airplane wings are made out of titanium, which is as strong as steel but about twice as light. These properties depend on the way a metal's atoms are stacked, but random defects that arise in the manufacturing process mean that these materials are only a fraction as strong as they could theoretically be. An architect, working on the scale of individual atoms, could design and build new materials that have even better strength-to-weight ratios.

In a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-36901-3], researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the University of Cambridge have done just that. They have built a sheet of nickel with nanoscale pores that make it as strong as titanium but four to five times lighter.

The empty space of the pores, and the self-assembly process in which they're made, make the porous metal akin to a natural material, such as wood.

And just as the porosity of wood grain serves the biological function of transporting energy, the empty space in the researchers' "metallic wood" could be infused with other materials. Infusing the scaffolding with anode and cathode materials would enable this metallic wood to serve double duty: a plane wing or prosthetic leg that's also a battery.

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takyon writes:

Virus lurking inside banana genome has been destroyed with CRISPR

Genome editing has been used to destroy a virus that lurks inside many of the bananas grown in Africa. Other teams are trying to use it to make the Cavendish bananas sold in supermarkets worldwide resistant to a disease that threatens to make it impossible to grow this variety commercially in future. The banana streak virus can not only be spread from plant to plant by insects like most plant viruses. It also integrates its DNA into the banana's genome. In places like west Africa, where bananas are a staple food, most bananas now have the virus lurking inside them.

[...] But Leena Tripathi at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Kenya has now used the CRISPR genome editing method to target and destroy the viral DNA inside the genome of a banana variety called Gonja Manjaya.

The plan is to use these plants to breed virus-free plants for farmers. Her team is also using CRISPR to make the bananas resistant to the virus, so they are not simply re-infected. But the legal status of genome-edited plants in the west African countries where Gonja Manjaya is grown remains uncertain. "I think right now they are in discussions about whether it requires legislation," says Tripathi.

The banana streak virus does not infect the popular Cavendish banana. But a fungal strain called Tropical Race 4 is devastating Cavendish plantations as it spreads around the world. Before the 1960s the most popular banana was the reportedly more delicious Gros Michel, which farmers had to stop growing because of the spread of another fungal strain called Tropical Race 1.

PAPER (DOI: 10.1038/s42003-019-02) (DX)

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takyon writes:

Robert Swan Named CEO of Intel

Intel today announced that its board of directors had named Robert Swan, its CFO and interim CEO, as full-time chief executive officer. Mr. Swan will be the company's first CEO with financial background. As the head of the company, Mr. Swan will continue Intel's transformation from a PC-centric to a data-centric company with a focus on improving execution and aggressive capturing addressable markets using ambitious technologies.

Robert Swan (58) becomes chief exec of Intel at a rather interesting, yet challenging time. The world is at a strategical inflection point when multiple technologies have to converge in a bid to enable the next phase of industrial and social development. To stay relevant, Intel not only needs to retain its leading position as a developer and maker of CPUs and compute platforms, but also gain new important competencies. Meanwhile, the company is facing multiple challenges. Its traditional rivals are getting stronger (partly because they are forming alliances) and new competitors are emerging. In the meantime, Intel's leadership in semiconductor production is now challenged and many of its opponents have certain advantages.

Previously: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich Quits after Fling with Coworker Revealed
AMD Responds to Radeon VII Short Supply Rumors

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MostCynical writes:

the Guardian reports that a team from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built a robot that has taught itself to play Jenga.

Jenga-playing machine can learn the complex physics involved in withdrawing wooden blocks from a tower through physical trial and error.

This differentiates it from robots that have mastered purely cognitive games such as chess and Go through visual cues.

"Playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces," said Prof Alberto Rodriguez from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The robot grouped the outcomes of approximately 300 attempts as it discovered that some blocks were harder to budge than others. "The robot builds clusters and then learns models for each of these clusters, instead of learning a model that captures absolutely everything that could happen," said the paper's lead author, MIT graduate student Nima Fazeli.

Miquel Oller, a member of the team, said: "We saw how many blocks a human was able to extract before the tower fell and the difference was not that much."

Judging from the embedded video, it plays better than I do..

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takyon writes:

Setting the table

The United Nations has designated 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (www.iypt2019.org) and, with it, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The organizing committee declared that "The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is one of the most significant achievements in science, capturing the essence not only of chemistry, but also of physics and biology."

Indeed, many nonscientists recognize the periodic table simply by the distinctive shape of its border, but within this border lie many aspects of science beyond chemistry. Science is about the interplay of experimental results and theory. A sufficient number of elements needed to be discovered and their properties and reactivity understood before systematic trends could be inferred. Science is also fundamentally about making testable predictions. Part of the success of Dmitri Mendeleev's original table published in 1869 was that he left gaps for the placement of undiscovered elements. Mendeleev predicted some properties of these elements, setting off a chain of scientific testing of hypotheses. The structure of the periodic table was later understood to arise from quantum mechanics. The elements themselves are produced by a complex chain of stellar nucleosynthesis processes, and the frontier of the periodic table—the search for stable superheavy elements—tests the limits of experimental atomic physics.

Periodic table.

See also: Ordering the elements (open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aav7350) (DX)
The quest for superheavies (DOI: 10.1126/science.363.6426.466) (DX)
Populating the periodic table: Nucleosynthesis of the elements (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau9540) (DX)
Frontiers in molecular p-block chemistry: From structure to reactivity (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau5105) (DX)
Electronic structure in the transition metal block and its implications for light harvesting (DOI: 10.1126/science.aav9104) (DX)
Rare earth elements: Mendeleev's bane, modern marvels (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau7628) (DX)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Australia is a very friendly place. Mostly. It's so friendly people send email to trees. Yes, you read that correctly. Email. To trees. "Dear Nettle, I just moved in three months ago and I'm very glad that I can talk to you through this system. I live in the first floor and I can actually see you through my window!" is an example of the mail sent to various trees around the place. Along with notes of love people send ponderous queries in like "would you consider your fingers to be your branches or your roots?". No word on whether or not any of the trees have replied.

No doubt the Labor government will bemoan the lack of NBN (National Broadband Network) access for the trees as the reason why they don't reply.

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takyon writes:

Genes behind lager yeast's cold- and sugar-loving success revealed

Lager beer is cold, crisp, dry — and worth about half a trillion dollars worldwide. Behind the world's most popular alcoholic beverage is a yeast adapted to the cold, and hungry for the sugars it will transform into bubbles and booze. That yeast is a hybrid, an amalgamation of the domesticated baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a recently discovered wild species, Saccharomyces eubayanus. Hundreds of years ago, the two species combined their strengths into a cold-fermenting strain that readily produces the crisp, light taste that came to dominate the beer market in the centuries that followed.

In a pair of new papers, University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor of Genetics Chris Todd Hittinger, his graduate student EmilyClare Baker and others show how modern lager yeast adopted the cold-loving and sugar-hungry traits essential to their success.

In one paper, to be published Feb. 1 in Science Advances, the team demonstrates that when the cold-loving S. eubayanus donated its mitochondria — the power-generating portion of the cell — to the new hybrid, it conferred cold tolerance on the strain. Today, all industrial lager strains retain the S. eubayanus mitochondria and ferment at cold temps.

In a second paper, Baker and Hittinger investigated the ability of S. eubayanus to ferment all the sugars in wort, the barley malt extract that ferments into beer. Most strains of S. eubayanus cannot ferment maltotriose, the second-most common sugar in wort. But the researchers were able to evolve a brand-new protein capable of transporting maltotriose into the cell, revealing a potential path to more aggressive fermentation of all available sugars, a key trait in producing a dry, crisp beer. The paper was published on the pre-print server bioRxiv ahead of publication in the journal PLOS Genetics.

Mitochondrial DNA and temperature tolerance in lager yeasts (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav1869) (DX)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The largest telecommunications company in Australia, Telstra, has outsourced 1500 jobs to India. It previously outsourced its directories division in 2006, while complaining about the lack of programmers available in Australia saying that only 1200 new software engineers have become available in the workforce in the last 12 months compared to 44,000 in India. This move is the latest in a series to offshore IT work to India.

How long until all of the IT in Telstra is moved to India?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Minus-56 degrees and more: Brutal cold-air outbreak is smashing records in the Midwest; here are some reports:

Temperatures dove more than 30 degrees below zero Thursday morning in the Midwest in this polar vortex outbreak’s last gasp, driving wind chills to dangerous levels and clobbering long-standing records.

Conditions in northern Minnesota took a nosedive in the early morning hours. The unincorporated community of Cotton measured an actual temperature — not wind chill — of minus-56 degrees. It was four degrees short of Minnesota’s all-time lowest temperature.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/01/31/brutal-cold-outbreak-is-breaking-records-midwest-thursday-morning/

Central Pennsylvania weather: Record cold, wind chills from -10 to 5:

SUSQUEHANNA VALLEY, Pa. —

Sunshine is expected in central Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley this afternoon, but it's still bitterly cold.

A record cold high temperature could be set this afternoon. The record of 20 degrees was set in 1966, and the WGAL Storm Team is forecasting 16.

https://www.wgal.com/article/central-pennsylvania-weather-record-cold-today/26096618

Ann Arbor breaks 108-year-old cold temperature record:

SpockLogic writes:

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States. That’s more than 13 people per day, or one person every hour and 46 minutes. It’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing—with no survivors—every single month.

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/

Florida has 8 of the most lethal metropolitan areas in the top 10. Going to visit the Mouse? Don't say you haven't been warned.

Full disclosure, I live in the #1 most dangerous area of the state and have learned to be careful.

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takyon writes:

Telesat signs New Glenn multi-launch agreement with Blue Origin for LEO missions

Canadian fleet operator Telesat has agreed to launch satellites for its future low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation on multiple New Glenn missions, Blue Origin announced Jan. 31.

The agreement, for an unspecified number of launches and satellites, makes Telesat the fifth customer to sign up to use the reusable launcher, which is slated for a maiden flight in 2021.

"Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket is a disruptive force in the launch services market which, in turn, will help Telesat disrupt the economics and performance of global broadband connectivity," Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said in a news release.

Blue Origin already has eight other New Glenn missions in backlog: one each for Paris-based Eutelsat, Sky Perfect JSAT of Japan and Thai startup Mu Space, plus five launches for low-Earth-orbit megaconstellation company OneWeb.

SpaceX's Starlink constellation would compete with Telesat's low Earth orbit broadband offering. Perhaps that factored into the choice of Blue Origin as launch provider.

New Glenn rocket.

Related: Blue Origin to Compete to Launch U.S. Military Payloads
Blue Origin Wins Contract to Supply United Launch Alliance With BE-4 Rocket Engines
The Military Chooses Which Rockets It Wants Built for the Next Decade
Blue Origin Starts Construction of Rocket Engine Factory in Alabama

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McGruber writes:

The Department of Homeland Security announced a rule change Wednesday that will transform the lottery that decides who gets the 85,000 H-1B visas granted to for-profit companies every year.

Previously, an initial lottery granted 20,000 visas only to those holding advanced degrees granted by U.S. institutions — master’s degrees or doctorates — and then a general lottery granted 65,000 visas to all qualified applicants.

The Department of Homeland Security switched the order of these lotteries, it said in a notice of the final rule change, which will bolster the odds for highly educated foreign nationals. The change reduces the likelihood that people with just a bachelor’s degree will win in the general lottery, said Lisa Spiegel, an attorney at Duane Morris in San Francisco and head of the firm’s immigration group.

The program shift could hurt technology staffing companies, also known as outsourcers, who have a reputation for flooding the lottery with applications. Three Indian firms — Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro — often account for a majority of the H-1B applications, an analysis of government data shows.

LINK:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/H-1B-visa-lottery-changing-to-favor-those-with-13574410.php

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