SoylentNews

JoeMerchant writes:

Modi Hails India's Arrival as Space Power After it Shoots Down Satellite in Test:

India shot down one of its own satellites in low-Earth orbit with a ground-to-space missile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, hailing his country's first test of such weaponry as a breakthrough establishing it as a military space power.

India would only be the fourth country to have used such an anti-satellite weapon after the United States, Russia and China, said Modi, who heads into general elections next month.

"Our scientists shot down a live satellite 300 kilometers away in space, in low-Earth orbit," Modi said in a television broadcast.

"India has made an unprecedented achievement today," he added, speaking in Hindi. "India registered its name as a space power."

Elections are coming up, and more than one politician is trying to make their name as the Space General of the future.

[Updated 2019-03-28 to properly quote source article.--martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong

The pain radiated from the top of Annette Monachelli’s head, and it got worse when she changed positions. It didn’t feel like her usual migraine. The 47-year-old Vermont attorney turned innkeeper visited her local doctor at the Stowe Family Practice twice about the problem in late November 2012, but got little relief.

Two months later, Monachelli was dead of a brain aneurysm, a condition that, despite the symptoms and the appointments, had never been tested for or diagnosed until she turned up in the emergency room days before her death.

Monachelli’s husband sued Stowe, the federally qualified health center the physician worked for. Owen Foster, a newly hired assistant U.S. attorney with the District of Vermont, was assigned to defend the government. Though it looked to be a standard medical malpractice case, Foster was on the cusp of discovering something much bigger—what his boss, U.S. Attorney Christina Nolan, calls the “frontier of health care fraud”—and prosecuting a first-of-its-kind case that landed the largest-ever financial recovery in Vermont’s history.

Foster began with Monachelli’s medical records, which offered a puzzle. Her doctor had considered the possibility of an aneurysm and, to rule it out, had ordered a head scan through the clinic’s software system, the government alleged in court filings. The test, in theory, would have caught the bleeding in Monachelli’s brain. But the order never made it to the lab; it had never been transmitted.

The software in question was an electronic health records system, or EHR, made by eClinicalWorks (eCW), one of the leading sellers of record-keeping software for physicians in America, currently used by 850,000 health professionals in the U.S. It didn’t take long for Foster to assemble a dossier of troubling reports—Better Business Bureau complaints, issues flagged on an eCW user board, and legal cases filed around the country—suggesting the company’s technology didn’t work quite like it said it did.

Until this point, Foster, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about electronic medical records, but he was quickly amassing clues that eCW’s software had major problems—some of which put patients, like Annette Monachelli, at risk.

martyb writes:

Twitter Birth-Year Hoax Locks Users Out of Accounts:

Twitter has warned users to ignore a hoax suggesting an alternative colour scheme will appear in the app if they change their birth year to 2007.

Instead, users who fall for the scam will be locked out of their accounts because Twitter prohibits anyone under the age of 13 from using the site.

[...]Twitter has automatically prevented users under 13 from using the social network since May last year and its terms of use state that the social network is "not directed to children."

Within the EU, companies aren't allowed to create contracts of service with users under 13 without parental permission, according to the recently adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Twitter said that anyone locked out of their account erroneously could follow instructions in an email they should have received from Twitter or fill out an online form.

SocialEngineering++

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Farmers have been getting screwed by a combination of DRM linked to DMCA legalisms that effectively make farmers into criminals if they modify their own farming equipment, forcing them to choose between breaking the law or paying extortionate fees to equipment manufacturers for both hardware and software fixes.

Elizabeth Warren recently announced a new broad policy agenda focused on helping farmers. But buried in it is something everybody here can get behind too - the right to repair:

Consolidation is choking family farms, but there’s a whole lot of other ways in which big business has rigged the rules in their favor and against family farmers. I will fight to change those rules.

For example, many farmers are forced to rely on authorized agents to repair their equipment. Companies have built diagnostic software into the equipment that prevents repairs without a code from an authorized agent. That leads to higher prices and costly delays.

That’s ridiculous. Farmers should be able to repair their own equipment or choose between multiple repair shops. That’s why I strongly support a national right-to-repair law that empowers farmers to repair their equipment without going to an authorized agent. The national right-to-repair law should require manufacturers of farm equipment to make diagnostic tools, manuals, and other repair-related resources available to any individual or business, not just their own dealerships and authorized agents. This will not only allow individuals to fix their own equipment — reducing delays — but it will also create competition among dealers and independent repair shops, bringing down prices overall.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google makes emails more dynamic with AMP for Email

Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail (which shares its parent company with TechCrunch), Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails.

[...] With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment — all without leaving your web-based email client.

Some of the companies that already support this new format are Booking.com, Despegar, Doodle, Ecwid, Freshworks, Nexxt, OYO Rooms, Pinterest, and redBus. If you regularly get emails from these companies, then chances are you'll receive an interactive email from them in the coming weeks.

[...] [Not] everybody is going to like this (including our own Devin Coldewey).

Also at The Verge, 9to5Google, and Engadget:

As you might imagine, Google is determined to keep this secure. It reviews senders before they're allowed to send AMP-based email, and relatively few will support it out of the gate (including Twilio Sendgrid, Litmus and SparkPost).

Previously: Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email

Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
Google Moving to Relinquish Control Over Accelerated Mobile Pages

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.projectcensored.org/medical-students-losing-dexterity-to-perform-surgeries-due-to-smartphone-usage-and-lack-of-creative-hands-on-education/

Surgery students spend so much time swiping on flat, two-dimensional screens that they are losing the ability to perform simple tasks necessary to conduct life-saving operations, such as stitching and sewing up patients. As a result, students have become less competent and confident in using their hands—leading to very high exam grades despite a lack of tactile knowledge.

Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, argues that two-dimensional flat screen activity is substituting for the direct experience of handling materials and developing physical skills. Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, by cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that’s broken, learning woodwork, or holding an instrument.

Kneebone now notices that medical students and trainee surgeons are not comfortable cutting or tying string because they don’t have practical experience developing and using these skills. He also mentioned that colleagues in various branches of medicine have made the same observation.

See also this BBC news item: Surgery Students ‘Losing Dexterity to Stitch Patients’.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Democrats' Net Neutrality Bill Survives First Vote:

A bill backed by House Democrats to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality protections passed its first hurdle Tuesday.

Democrats pushed the Save the Internet Act through the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee in an 18-11 vote that fell along party lines. The legislation codifies rules that were repealed in December 2017 by the Republican-led FCC. As part of this repeal, the FCC abdicated its authority to protect consumers online to the Federal Trade Commission.

The bill introduced by Democrats is an attempt to end a nearly two-decade-old fight over how best to prevent broadband companies from abusing their power as gatekeepers to the internet. Specifically, it prevents broadband providers from blocking, slowing down or charging for faster access to the internet. But it also restores the FCC's authority as the "cop on the beat" when it comes to policing potential broadband abuses.

Republicans have criticized the legislation as giving the FCC too much authority to regulate ISPs.

What are the odds that it will pass?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Emergency Declared in NY over Measles: Unvaccinated Barred from Public Spaces:

Plagued by a tenacious outbreak of measles that began last October, New York's Rockland County declared a state of emergency Tuesday and issued a directive barring unvaccinated children from all public spaces.

Effective at midnight Wednesday, March 27, anyone aged 18 or younger who has not been vaccinated against the measles is prohibited from public spaces in Rockland for 30 days or until they get vaccinated. Public spaces are defined broadly in the directive as any places:

[W]here more than 10 persons are intended to congregate for purposes such as civic, governmental, social, or religious functions, or for recreation or shopping, or for food or drink consumption, or awaiting transportation, or for daycare or educational purposes, or for medical treatment. A place of public assembly shall also include public transportation vehicles, including but not limited to, publicly or privately owned buses or trains...

The directive follows an order from the county last December that barred unvaccinated children from schools that did not reach a minimum of 95 percent vaccination rate. That order—and the directive issued today—are intended to thwart the long-standing outbreak, which has sickened 153 people, mostly children.

What were they waiting for? A pox on them all?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for ‘Stubborn’ Number 33:

A number theorist with programming prowess has found a solution to 33 = x³ + y³ + z³, a much-studied equation that went unsolved for 64 years.

Mathematicians long wondered whether it’s possible to express the number 33 as the sum of three cubes — that is, whether the equation 33 = x³+ y³+ z³ has a solution. They knew that 29 could be written as 3³ + 1³ + 1³, for instance, whereas 32 is not expressible as the sum of three integers each raised to the third power. But the case of 33 went unsolved for 64 years.

Now, Andrew Booker, a mathematician at the University of Bristol, has finally cracked it: He discovered that (8,866,128,975,287,528)³ + (–8,778,405,442,862,239)³ + (–2,736,111,468,807,040)³ = 33.

Booker found this odd trio of 16-digit integers by devising a new search algorithm to sift them out of quadrillions of possibilities. The algorithm ran on a university supercomputer for three weeks straight. (He says he thought it would take six months, but a solution “popped out before I expected it.”) When the news of his solution hit the internet earlier this month, fellow number theorists and math enthusiasts were feverish with excitement. According to a Numberphile video about the discovery, Booker himself literally jumped for joy in his office when he found out.

martyb writes:

How Your Office job is Affecting Your Metabolism:

The idea that long bouts of uninterrupted sitting might be bad for your health has gotten lots of attention over the past decade. The reason may seem obvious: If you’re sitting all the time, you’re not exercising. But emerging evidence suggests that there’s a deeper connection between sedentary time and lack of exercise, with the combination of both worse than either one on its own.

In a new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers at the University of Texas show that four days of prolonged sitting induces a state that they call “exercise resistance.”

They had 10 volunteers complete two four-day protocols that involved sitting around for more than 13 hours a day while taking fewer than 4,000 steps. At the end of one of the four-day periods, they did a vigorous one-hour treadmill workout.

Normally a one-hour workout would produce a set of metabolic benefits that persist for at least a day. Your insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance, both of which are associated with heart health, improve immediately. And your postprandial lipemia – the rise in triglycerides circulating in your blood after a fatty meal, which may contribute to blocked arteries – will be attenuated.

But when the researchers fed their volunteers a high-fat, high-sugar slurry of melted ice cream and half-and-half creamer the next day, their blood sugar, insulin and triglyceride levels shot up by the same amount regardless of whether they’d exercised the night before. After all the sitting, their workout no longer packed its usual health punch.

If exercise after extended sitting didn't help, why bother exercising?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Experimental physicists Tomasz Skwarnicki, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, assisted by Liming Zhang, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, analyzed data from the Large Hadron Collider and uncovered three new pentaquarks.

(Normal matter particles, or baryons, consist of three quarks. Pentaquarks are subatomic particles consisting of four quarks and one antiquark. The anti-quark and one quark offset each other creating an exotic baryon particle comprised of five quarks.)

What is unique about each of these three pentaquarks is that its mass is slightly lower than the sum of its parts—in this case, the masses of the baryon and meson. "The pentaquark didn't decay by its usual easy, fall-apart process," Skwarnicki says. "Instead, it decayed by slowly and laboriously rearranging its quarks, forming a narrow resonance."

Skwarnicki notes

"Pentaquarks may not play a significant role in the matter we are made of," he says, "but their existence may significantly affect our models of the matter found in other parts of the universe, such as neutron stars."

There is also a theorized stable pentaquark that could conceivably be produced in appropriately energetic situations, so there might even be a few laying about.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Most places have standing start 1/4 mile drag races, or even shorter for purpose-built dragsters to limit the top speed. In Texas it seems they have standing start mile (~1.6km) drag races with street legal cars like this one — https://www.motor1.com/news/315168/ford-gt-hits-300-mph/ (482 kph):

It goes without saying this is far from being a stock Ford GT, but the modifications it has gone through have not removed the vehicle’s street-legal status. It’s said to have a little over 2,000 horsepower at the wheels, but in reality, the car actually has more power, closer to 2,500 hp according to M2K Motorsports. The difference comes from the limitations of the dyno used to measure the sheer power of the upgraded 5.4-liter V8 engine since it simply can’t handle the entire output.

This car started as a 2006 model, the second series of production Ford GTs, this batch looked much like the originals, but were about 10% larger. From the video (available on YouTube), it looks pretty stock externally except for the parachute (brake) strapped to the tail.

The aerodynamic drag on the vehicle at 300 mph is 25 times as much as when it is traveling at 60 mph and 9 times as much as when it is traveling at 100 mph.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

For the first time ever, the FAA has approved the routine commercial use of drones to carry a product.

The WakeMed program will start by flying patients’ medical samples one-third of a mile (.5 kilometer) from a medical park to the main hospital building for lab testing at least six times a day five days a week, Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said in an interview. Vials of blood or other specimens will be loaded into a secure box and carried to a drone launching pad, where they will be fastened to the aircraft and flown to another building. He said the flights will technically be within sight of operators on either end of the route, and they are authorized to fly above people.

Samples are typically driven on the ground and the goal of this project is to cut down how long it typically takes to transport time-sensitive samples to their destination for testing.

the North Carolina program could expand to flying miles-long routes between Raleigh-area WakeMed buildings in the coming months, Raptopoulos said. He also said medical specimen flights could start at one or two more hospitals in other cities later in 2019.

Other approvals by the FAA have been for limited tests and demos.

North Carolina is one of nine sites participating in the FAA’s pilot program to accelerate integrating drones for new uses ranging from utility inspections to insurance claims. The test sites get leeway trying new innovations while working closely with the federal officials in charge of regulating the drones.

Can we get a black-helicopter drone that doesn't make any noise?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Southwest Boeing 737 Max makes emergency landing in Orlando; FAA cites engine issue unrelated to recent crashes

The crew of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 Max declared an emergency shortly after takeoff and returned to Orlando's main airport on Tuesday after reporting an engine problem, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The FAA grounded this type of aircraft earlier this month following two fatal crashes of the popular model.

Airlines aren't allowed to fly passengers under the FAA's order. The Southwest plane, which was not carrying passengers, was bound for Victorville, Calif., where the carrier is storing the aircraft in a facility in the western Mojave Desert.

[...] The FAA said it is investigating the Southwest incident on Tuesday and that the issue was not related to other concerns about the 737 Max that led the agency to ground the plane.

Also at CNN.

See also: Boeing is handling the 737 Max crisis all wrong

Previously: Second 737 MAX8 Airplane Crash Reinforces Speculation on Flying System Problems
Boeing 737 Max Aircraft Grounded in the U.S. and Dozens of Other Countries
DoJ Issues Subpoenas in 737 Max Investigation
Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash
Airline Cancels $4.9 Billion Boeing 737 MAX Order; Doomed Planes Lacked Optional Safety Features

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple just announced Apple News Plus, a news subscription service for $9.99 a month

Apple announced a new subscription news service, Apple News Plus, on Monday during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Starting Monday, the company said, Apple News Plus will curate articles from more than 300 news outlets and magazines via the Apple News app for $9.99 a month.

Apple says magazines and articles included with the Apple News Plus subscription will appear in a new tab on the Apple News app in a redesign released later Monday as part of an iOS software update.

Apple News Plus will feature content from several major news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times as well as the more than 300 magazines that were included with Texture, the digital magazine app Apple purchased last year. Notably absent among national news brands are The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Though Apple's app offers a significant discount for publications like The [Wall Street] Journal, which charges $19.50 a month for an all-access digital subscription, it appears that Apple subscribers will not have full access to all the partners' content. Reports Monday cited an internal memo as saying only some Journal articles, for example, would be offered via Apple News Plus, with The Journal's business reporting remaining exclusive to direct subscribers.

Apple Arcade Announced: New Game Subscription Service Coming To iOS, Mac, Apple TV This Year

takyon writes:

Apple announces Apple Card credit card

At Apple's "show time" services event today, it announced a new Apple Card credit card, promising to improve things about the credit card experience with simpler applications, no fees, lower interest rates, and better rewards.

To get an Apple Card, users will be able to sign up on their iPhone in the Apple Wallet app and get a digital card that they can use anywhere Apple Pay is accepted "within minutes." Customers will also be able to track purchases, check balances, and see when their bill is due right from the app. There will be a physical titanium card, too, but there's no credit card number, CVV, expiration date, or signature. All of that authorization information is stored directly in the Apple Wallet app.

Apple also says that it'll use machine learning and Apple Maps to label stores that you use in the app, and use that data to track purchases across categories like "food and drink" or "shopping." [...] Like many of Apple's products, privacy is a big push here. "Apple doesn't know what you bought, where you bought it, and how much you paid for it," said Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay. All of the spending tracking and other information is stored directly on the device, not Apple's servers. The company also promises that "Goldman Sachs will never sell your data to third parties for marketing and advertising."

Other companies have offered 3-4% cash back for certain purchases.

Also at Ars Technica.

See also: Apple's 2%-cash-back credit-card rewards are interesting, but I'm convinced people are overlooking the best part
Apple's new credit card holds a lot of promise, but read the fine print before signing up
Tim Cook says Apple Card is a game changer. Experts are not so sure
Apple's move into banking raises the bar for fintech, traditional credit cards

Original Submission