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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:47 | Votes:110

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the bad-news-pandas dept.

Reports from multiple places in Japan that several species of bamboo have been found blossoming since late last year. From Japan-Forward:

While some species of bamboo produce blossoms as often as once every three years, many of them flower at extremely long intervals, between 40 to 80 years. In the case of madake 真竹 Phyllostachys bambusoides, pictured at the top of this article, they only flower once every 130 years!

Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same time, and then die, no matter where they are in the world.
...
2019 may turn out to be one of those years where major groupings of bamboo stock populations wither and die.

Reports of bamboo blossoms from central to southern Japan have been coming in:

I had never heard of bamboo blossoming before, assuming that it only spread through new shoots running underground. As always, Wikipedia has more info.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the Medical-Tourism-to-the-Rescue? dept.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world-s-cheapest-hospital-has-to-get-even-cheaper

A pulmonary thromboendarterectomy can tie up an operating room for most of a day. In the U.S., the procedure can cost more than $200,000. Shetty did it for about $10,000 and turned a profit. A cardiac surgeon by training, Shetty is the founder and chairman of Narayana Health, a chain of 23 hospitals across India that may be the cheapest full-service health-care provider in the world. To American eyes, Narayana's prices look as if they must be missing at least one zero, even as outcomes for patients meet or exceed international benchmarks. Surgery for head and neck cancers starts at $700. Endoscopy is $14; a lung transplant, $7,000. Even a heart transplant will set a patient back only about $11,000. Narayana is dirt cheap even by Indian standards, with the investment bank Jefferies estimating that it can profitably offer some major surgeries for as little as half what domestic rivals charge.

[...] Shetty's philosophy of thrift is everywhere. The surgical gowns are procured from a local company for about a third of the cost of international suppliers. The tubes that carry blood to heart-and-lung machines are sterilized and reused after each surgery; in the West, they're thrown away. The machines themselves, along with devices such as CT and MRI scanners, are used well past their warranties, kept running by a team of in-house mechanics. The operating rooms, pieces of real estate so expensive that many hospitals bill for their use by the minute, are also part of the assembly line. Whereas preparing a U.S. surgical theater for the next patient can take 30 minutes or more, Narayana has gotten the process down to less than 15, in part by keeping turnaround teams with fresh instruments, drapes, and other supplies on immediate standby, ready to roll the moment a room is available. Even patients' families are part of the upskilling model.

[...] It's all a far cry from the high-touch treatment Westerners expect, but Shetty is adamant that none of the practices compromise safety. Sterilizing and reusing clamps and tubing is permitted under the standards of the Joint Commission, a U.S.-based body that vets and accredits hospitals worldwide, including Narayana's cardiac hub. Involving properly instructed family members in the simplest care tasks isn't unheard of in Europe and North America, and some studies suggest it may improve patients' prospects. (Unlike busy nurses, relatives have just one person to focus on.)

The data appear to back Shetty up. In part because its huge volumes help surgeons quickly develop proficiency, the chain's mortality rates are comparable to or lower than those in the developed world, at least for some procedures. About 1.4 percent of Narayana patients die within 30 days following a heart bypass, according to the Commonwealth Fund, which studies public health, compared with 1.9 percent in the U.S. Narayana also outperforms Western systems in results for valve replacements and heart-attack treatment, the group found.

[...] Per capita, central-government spending on health care in India is lower than in any other major economy.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the counting-101 dept.

Are koalas dying out in Australia or not? According to the latest news, the answer is: maybe! A hormone based program has been started to reduce the numbers of koalas .....

"In one area of woodland in the central hills, 13 koalas per hectare have been recorded and we are now seeing severe impacts due to over-browsing," Natural Resources Adelaide regional director Brenton Grear said.

"Optimal koala densities to prevent over-browsing of their habitat and ensure the long-term welfare of the koalas is around one per hectare." Mr Grear said there was considerable evidence of over-browsing of preferred food trees, with severe defoliation, dead or dying trees. "In effect, one of the greatest threats to the koala population in parts of the Mt Lofty Ranges is the koala population itself," he said.

The fertility program involves capturing individual animals to administer a hormone implant in a process that takes less than 10 minutes.

.... while the Australian Koala Foundation believes koalas are now 'functionally extinct'.

Koala bears have been declared "functionally extinct," the Australian Koala Foundation [AKF] reports.

The New York Post reports that the fluffy marsupial is down to just 80,000 wild species members, meaning there aren't enough breeding adults left to support another generation of the pouched mammals.

The tree-dwelling species has been ravaged by the effects of rising temperatures and heatwaves, which have caused widespread deforestation and fatal dehydration in koalas, according to the AKF.

Only 41 of the koala's 128 known habitats in federal environments have any of the animals left.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-trust-someone-else dept.

19.4 percent of the Docker store's top 1000 containers have no root password, potentially exposing users' systems to attacks under certain conditions.

Last week, a similar flaw was found impacting the official Alpine Linux Docker image, when Talos researchers discovered that all images since v3.3 were shipping with a root account with a null password. The vulnerability meant attackers who infiltrated systems via another entry point, or users with shell (remote) access, could elevate their privileges to root within the container.

Over the weekend, security expert Jerry Gamblin built a script that checked the top 1000 docker containers from the Docker store to determine if they were impacted by the same misconfiguration.

After tweaking the script to correct for duplicates, Gamblin found that 194 of the 1000 containers he analysed had blank passwords, including images from the UK government, HashiCorp, Microsoft, Monsanto and Mesosphere.

Sources:

[Editors Comment: The submitter is employed by the first source. Alternative sources have been found for this story to verify its content.]


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-not-wait-around-to-watch dept.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ab158e

Following their encounters with the outer planets in the 1970s and 1980s, Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 are now on escape trajectories out of the solar system. Although they will cease to operate long before encountering any stars (the Pioneers already have), it is nonetheless interesting to ask which stars they will pass closest to in the next few million years. We answer this here using the accurate 3D positions and 3D velocities of 7.2 million stars in the second Gaia data release (GDR2, Gaia Collaboration 2018), supplemented with radial velocities for 222,000 additional stars obtained from Simbad.3

We adopt the same method we used for tracing the possible origin (and future encounters) of the interstellar object 'Oumuamua (Bailer-Jones et al. 2018a). We determine the asymptotic trajectories of the four spacecraft by starting from their ephemerides from JPL's Horizons system,4 propagating them numerically to the year 2900, and then extrapolating to the asymptote. Using a linear motion approximation we then identify those stars which approach within 15 pc of each spacecraft (~4500 stars in each case). Finally, we integrate the orbits of these stars and the spacecraft through a Galactic potential and identify close encounters. Statistics of the encounter time, separation, and velocity are obtained by resampling the covariance of the stellar data and integrating the orbits of the resulting samples. The uncertainties on the asymptotic spacecraft trajectories are negligible compared to those of the stars, and are therefore neglected.

Meanwhile, Fox gives us the following:

....the next star that Voyager 1 will pass will be Earth's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, in 16,700 years. However, this encounter will be unremarkable, as the craft's closest approach will be 1.1 parsecs (pc) from the star, which equates to 3.59 light-years — very, very far away. In fact, Voyager 1 is currently 1.3 pc (4.24 light-years) from the star, so this encounter won't be much closer than the craft's current location is. (Earth's sun is 1.29 pc, or 4.24 light-years, away from Proxima Centauri.)

Voyager 2 and Pioneer 11's next close encounters will also be with Proxima Centauri, while Pioneer 10's next flyby will be with the star Ross 248, a small star 10.3 light-years from Earth in the constellation Andromeda.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the technically,-wasn't-Theia-a-meteorite? dept.

Planetologists at the University of Münster in Germany have determined when the Earth got its water. The inner solar system where the Earth formed is relatively dry, so Earth shouldn't have water. It turns out that water was delivered by the impact that caused the formation of the Moon.

Planetologists at the University of Münster (Germany) have now been able to show, for the first time, that water came to Earth with the formation of the Moon some 4.4 billion years ago. The Moon was formed when Earth was hit by a body about the size of Mars, also called Theia. Until now, scientists had assumed that Theia originated in the inner solar system near the Earth. However, researchers from Münster can now show that Theia comes from the outer solar system, and it delivered large quantities of water to Earth. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Astronomy.

This is in contrast to earlier theories of how and when Earth got its water which attribute it to being there at formation or delivered later by meteorites.

Journal Reference
Gerrit Budde, Christoph Burkhardt, Thorsten Kleine. Molybdenum isotopic evidence for the late accretion of outer Solar System material to Earth. Nature Astronomy, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0779-y


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the Marvin dept.

No one is yet quite sure how human consciousness comes about, but many seem to assume that it will arise as a function of artificial intelligence. Isn't it just as reasonable to think that emotions will appear as an aspect of consciousness and the presumed will to survive? The answers to these questions have yet to emerge, but during the interim, is it a good idea to push ahead in the development of artificial intelligence when we have such a limited understanding of our own? What about the possibility of mental illness? Even if we succeed in endowing AI with a morality compatible with our own, what would we do with a super human intelligence that becomes delusional, or worse, psychotic? Would we see it coming? We can't prevent it from happening to ourselves, so what makes us think we could prevent it in a machine?

Nervously awaiting learned opinions,
VT


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the software-security-is-not-an-aftermarket-accessory dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Lack of Secure Coding Called a National Security Threat

The lack of secure coding is a pervasive and serious threat to national security, according to a new paper from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank.

Rob Roy, an ICIT fellow who was co-author of the report, suggests in an interview with Information Security Media Group that an app standards body could play an important role in improving app security.

"If there were some objective standards put in place that all software would have to abide by, then we could start to make progress," Roy says. "It may just be that there needs to be an objective standard ... and a legislative mandate that requires a certain level of assurance to provide an assured product."

The "call to action" report, "Software Security Is National Security: Why the U.S. Must Replace Irresponsible Practices with a Culture of Institutionalized Security," discusses systemic issues with the software development landscape and what needs to be done to rectify the problem of negligent coding. But solving the problem won't be easy, given the problems of speed-to-market pressures and the sheer number of IoT devices being produced, the report notes.

[Ed Note - for those Soylentils that are software developers, does your company provide training/mentoring on how to develop secure software?]


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the small-in-stature-but-big-of-heart dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Arduino's new Nano board family is more powerful and affordable

Arduino's new Nano board family is more powerful and affordable. The most basic one will set out back $9.90.

Arduino's Nano line will soon welcome four new products. They're all small boards like the classic one, making Nano a family of small boards meant for compact projects. All the new boards boast low energy consumption and processors more powerful than what the classic has. Even better, they're all pretty affordable: the most basic entry called Nano Every, which you can use for "everyday" projects and can replace the classic Nano, will even set you back as little as $9.90.

Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi said in a statement:

"The new Nanos are for those millions of makers who love using the Arduino IDE for its simplicity and open source aspect, but just want a great value, small and powerful board they can trust for their compact projects. With prices from as low as $9.90 for the Nano Every, this family fills that gap in the Arduino range, providing makers with the Arduino quality they deserve for those everyday projects."


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the use-and-abuse-case dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Deep Packet Inspection a threat to net neutrality, say campaigners

Some of Europe's biggest ISPs and mobile operators stand accused of using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to quietly undermine net neutrality rules and user privacy.

News of the troubling allegation first reached the public domain earlier this year in an analysis by German organisation epicenter.works. It claimed it had detected 186 products offered by providers that appeared to involve applying DPI to their customers' traffic. Deep packet inspection filters network traffic by looking at the contents of data packets.

[...] Now a group of academics and digital rights campaigners headed by European Digital Rights (EDRi) has sent EU authorities an open letter[pdf] pointing out the implications of this. The EDRi letter states:

Several of these products by mobile operators with large market shares are confirmed to rely on DPI because their products offer providers of applications or services the option of identifying their traffic via criteria such as Domain names, SNI, URLs or DNS snooping.

EU regulation outlaws DPI for anything other than basic traffic management, but it seems that providers in many countries have found a grey area that allows them to bend – and increasingly bypass – those rules.

The frontline of this is something called 'zero rating' whereby mobile operators attract subscribers by offering free access to a specific application – a streaming service would be one example – without that counting towards their data allowance.

By its nature, this favours larger application providers, in effect busting the principle of net neutrality that says that all applications and services should be given equal prioritisation across networks.

DPI is the technology that makes this possible because:

DPI allows IAS providers to identify and distinguish traffic in their networks in order to identify traffic of specific applications or services for the purpose such as billing them differently throttling or prioritising them over other traffic.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the employee-rules-for-contractor-pay dept.

Uber remains unprofitable at the same time its drivers work 80-hour weeks for less than minimum wage and without health care packages. They must also cover vehicle costs including fuel, maintenance, and insurance.

The ride-hailing company Uber has made its long-awaited debut as a publicly traded stock, but investor demand for the May 10 initial public offering (IPO) fell short of the company's hopes. Part of the reason is a lingering question about its workforce: Does the still-unprofitable firm deliver low-cost rides for passengers at the expense of decent treatment for drivers, and could the resulting discontent undermine Uber's business model?

The issue over whether Uber drivers are employees (entitled to company benefits such as sick pay and retirement) or contractors (entitled to nothing) has been at the center of the labor controversy since the company launched a decade ago. It is still largely unresolved.

Earlier on SN:
New Research Confirms That Ride-Hailing Companies Are Causing a Ton of Traffic Congestion (2019)
Uber and Lyft Drivers to go on Strike (2019)
Uber Posts $1 Billion Loss in Quarter as Growth in Bookings Slows (2018)
and quite a few more...


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the positive-outcomes dept.

Study finds CBD effective in treating heroin addiction

For their study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Psychiatry, [Yasmin] Hurd and her colleagues looked at 42 adults who had a recent history of heroin use and were not using methadone or buprenorphine.

Recruited from social services groups, halfway houses and treatment centers, the participants had used heroin for an average of 13 years, and most had gone less than a month without using. They had to abstain from any heroin use for the entire trial period.

The participants were divided into three groups: one group given 800 milligrams of CBD, another 400 milligrams of CBD and another a placebo. All the participants were dosed once daily for three consecutive days and followed over the next two weeks.

During those two weeks, over the course of several sessions, the participants were shown images or videos of nature scenes as well as images of drug use and heroin-related paraphernalia, like syringes and packets of powder that resembled heroin. They were then asked to rate their craving for heroin and their levels of anxiety.

A week after the last administration of CBD, those who had been given CBD had a two- to three-fold reduction in cravings relative to the placebo group. Hurd said the difference between the two CBD groups was insignificant. The research team also measured heart rate and cortisol, the "stress hormone," and found that the levels in those who got CBD were significantly lower than those who hadn't received the drug

Cannabidiol for the Reduction of Cue-Induced Craving and Anxiety in Drug-Abstinent Individuals With Heroin Use Disorder: A Double-Blind Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial (DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.18101191) (DX)

Related: Study Finds That Legalized Medical Cannabis Led to a Decline in Medicare Prescriptions
Study: Legal Weed Far Better Than Drug War at Stopping Opioid Overdose Epidemic
Opioid Commission Drops the Ball, Demonizes Cannabis
Two More Studies Link Access to Cannabis to Lower Use of Opioids


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the yo-mama dept.

CNet:

Last month, Microsoft released Community Standards for Xbox, a set of rules published on its site that it called a "roadmap for contributing to this incredible, globe-spanning community." One topic addressed is what players can't say to other players, including racial and homophobic slurs.

The company has also launched a "For Everyone" page on its website, where parents can learn about how safety and family settings work on its console. That includes making it easier for parents to create "child" and "teen" accounts that have stricter safety settings like limiting the types of games they can access and how long they can play.

At last, relief for older gamers from the terror of trash-talking 13-yr olds!


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:40AM   Printer-friendly

Phys.org:

Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbours, a new study suggests, complicating the idea that agriculture represents progress. The research also shows that a shift to agriculture impacts most on the lives of women.

[...] Every day, at regular intervals between 6am and 6pm, the researchers recorded what their hosts were doing and by repeating this in ten different communities, they calculated how 359 people divided their time between leisure, childcare, domestic chores and out-of-camp work. While some Agta communities engage exclusively in hunting and gathering, others divide their time between foraging and rice farming.

The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals that increased engagement in farming and other non-foraging work resulted in the Agta working harder and losing leisure time. On average, the team estimate that Agta engaged primarily in farming work around 30 hours per week while foragers only do so for 20 hours. They found that this dramatic difference was largely due to women being drawn away from domestic activities to working in the fields. The study found that women living in the communities most involved in farming had half as much leisure time as those in communities which only foraged.

Also, hunting comes with beer.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the there-is-no-cow-level dept.

Stanford researchers outline vision for profitable climate change solution

A relatively simple process could help turn the tide of climate change while also turning a healthy profit. That's one of the hopeful visions outlined in a new Stanford-led paper that highlights a seemingly counterintuitive solution: converting one greenhouse gas into another.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability on May 20, describes a potential process for converting the extremely potent greenhouse gas methane into carbon dioxide, which is a much less potent driver of global warming. The idea of intentionally releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere may seem surprising, but the authors argue that swapping methane for carbon dioxide is a significant net benefit for the climate.

"If perfected, this technology could return the atmosphere to pre-industrial concentrations of methane and other gases," said lead author Rob Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in Earth System Science in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

The basic idea is that some sources of methane emissions -- from rice cultivation or cattle, for example -- may be very difficult or expensive to eliminate. "An alternative is to offset these emissions via methane removal, so there is no net effect on warming the atmosphere," said study coauthor Chris Field, the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

2m29s video.

Methane removal and atmospheric restoration (DOI: 10.1038/s41893-019-0299-x) (DX)


Original Submission

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