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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Adding to the steaming pile of unsubstantiated hype over probiotics, the New York Times ran an uncritical article this week suggesting that a probiotic of heat-killed bacteria can treat obesity.

Of course, the data behind the story does not suggest that. In fact, the study is so small and the data so noisy and indirect, it's impossible to come to any conclusions about efficacy. There's also the nit-picky complaint that the study deals with dead bacteria, while probiotics are generally defined as being live bacteria. More importantly, the study was authored by researchers with a clear financial stake in the treatment succeeding. They hold a patent on the treatment and have started a company based on it—two details the New York Times seems to have forgotten to mention.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/the-new-york-times-suggests-a-probiotic-can-treat-obesity-the-data-doesnt/

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takyon writes:

Jeff Bezos: World's richest man agrees $35bn divorce

The world's richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his wife MacKenzie have agreed [to] a record-breaking divorce settlement of at least $35bn (£27bn). Ms Bezos keeps a 4% stake in the online retail giant, worth $35.6bn on its own.

[...] Prior to the settlement, Mr Bezos held a 16.3% stake in Amazon. He will retain 75% of that holding but Ms Bezos has transferred all of her voting rights to her former husband. She will also give up her interests in the Washington Post newspaper and Mr Bezos' space travel firm Blue Origin.

Amazon is now [a] vast online retail business. Last year, it generated sales of $232.8bn and it has helped Mr Bezos and his family amass a fortune of $131bn, according to Forbes magazine.

[...] The divorce deal dwarfs a previous $3.8bn record set in 1999 by art dealer Alec Wildenstein and his wife Jocelyn, who became well-known for her cosmetic surgery.

MacKenzie Bezos (soon to be MacKenzie Tuttle?):

She is now the third-richest woman in the world, as well as one of the wealthiest overall.

Also at USA Today.

See also: MacKenzie Bezos to give half of her $36 billion fortune to charity

Previously: Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO Worth $137 Billion, to Divorce Wife of 25 Years
Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail
The Story Behind the Instant Classic "Bezos Exposes Pecker" Headline
Saudi Arabia's Government Allegedly Hacked Into Jeff Bezos's Phone

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1944

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/17/mp-tom-watson-wants-uk-competition-authority-to-investigate-amazons-deliveroo-stake/

European restaurant delivery giant Deliveroo this morning announced that Amazon would be gobbling up a share in the company by leading a new $575 million round of funding in it. But it looks like the e-commerce giant may be facing a little indigestion ahead.

Tom Watson, MP and deputy leader of the Labour Party, today announced that he will be asking the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate the investment, opening the door to either imposing stronger conditions on the deal or blocking it outright.

"It's called surveillance capitalism," he said today of Amazon's approach to how it uses data from customers to build and sell products. "It's a digital dystopia, and I shall be writing to the Competition and Markets Authority demanding they launch an investigation into this 'investment.' "

We have contacted Watson directly to elaborate on which violation(s) he would cite in the referral and we will update as and when we hear back. Areas that the CMA might investigate could involve whether the deal would result in unfair competition, or a misuse of data.

Additional coverage at:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/05/amazon-deliveroo-competition-regulator/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deliveroo-amazon-com/uk-competition-watchdog-to-examine-amazons-deliveroo-investment-idUSKCN1U00IR
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-and-deliveroo-cma-halts-investment-2019-7?op=1
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/05/competition-regulator-pauses-amazon-deal-with-deliveroo

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Artificial gravity breaks free from science fiction

Artificial gravity has long been the stuff of science fiction. Picture the wheel-shaped ships from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Martian, imaginary craft that generate their own gravity by spinning around in space.

Now, a team from CU Boulder is working to make those out-there technologies a reality.

The researchers, led by aerospace engineer Torin Clark, can't mimic those Hollywood creations—yet. But they are imagining new ways to design revolving systems that might fit within a room of future space stations and even moon bases. Astronauts could crawl into these rooms for just a few hours a day to get their daily doses of gravity. Think spa treatments, but for the effects of weightlessness.

[...]"Astronauts experience bone loss, muscle loss, cardiovascular deconditioning and more in space. Today, there are a series of piecemeal countermeasures to overcome these issues," said Clark, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. "But artificial gravity is great because it can overcome all of them at once."

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Sometimes we take Web and user interface design for granted—that's the point of User Inyerface, a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web and our digital devices.

According to design firm Bagaar's blog:

Over the past decennium, users have grown accustomed to certain design patterns: positions, colors, icons... Rather than looking at a UI, users tend to act instinctively and take 90% of an interface for granted.

... But what happens if we poke all good practice with a stick and stir it up? What if we don't respect our self-created rules and expectations and do everything the other way around?

The resulting website is a gauntlet of nearly impossible-to-parse interactions that are as funny as they are infuriating. In one case, the colors for the male and female selection options in a personal info form are reversed compared to expectations: the white-backgrounded one is the selection, while the blue-highlighted one is the one you're not picking—and there's no non-binary option, either, of course.

The linked web site requires Javascript, or you can just look at the pictures and captions on Ars Technica to get a feel for the ghastly gauntlet in all its "glory".

For more viewing "pleasure", please see Web Pages That Suck and Mystery Meat Navigation.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/behold-the-most-intentionally-poorly-designed-website-ever-created/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

In the minutes before a solar eclipse plunged Chile into darkness, a loudspeaker projected a deep baritone to a group of blind men and women who had traveled to the Atacama desert to "hear" what hundreds of thousands of others had come to see.

Then, a moment of silence until the sunlight, and the sound, returned.

Tourists from around the globe converged on the northern Chilean desert on Tuesday to witness the total eclipse under the world's clearest skies.

The musical experience, orchestrated by Chile's University of Valparaiso, was designed to help blind people, or those with some level of visual impairment, experience the phenomenon through a change in the frequency of sounds.

"It was exciting, incredible, a magical experience," said Octavio Oyarzún, 41, one of the thousands of people who came to the small town of Cachiyuyo, about 600 km (373 miles) north of Santiago.

[...] "This allows people who can't see the eclipse to hear it," said the scientist. "As astronomers, this excites us."

Denisse Reyes, 34, said the experience surprised her.

"I can perceive lights, I can recognize day and night, but this amazed me. I felt like I was entering the mysterious world of the planets and the solar system," she said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-eclipse-chile-blind/blind-chileans-listen-for-the-solar-eclipse-idUSKCN1TX31N

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

[An article appearing in] Nature Communications, suggests that instead of being seen as aberrations that ought to be surgically removed, extra fingers can bring benefits. The results also highlight how flexible the human brain can be, a feature that will be central to the design of brain-controlled robotic appendages.

For the study, bioengineer Etienne Burdet of Imperial College London and colleagues worked with a 52-year-old mother and her 17-year-old son, both born with six fingers on each hand. These extra fingers, positioned between the thumb and index finger, resemble thumbs in the versatile ways that they can move.

Brain scans and anatomical MRI scans revealed that the extra fingers are controlled by a dedicated brain system, along with muscles and tendons. That means that these extra fingers aren't just along for the ride, controlled by the muscles that move the other fingers, as some doctors had thought.

A short video on YouTube shows the extra dexterity in action.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/having-six-fingers-can-offer-major-dexterity-advantages

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Big Dairy is trying to get teens hooked on lattes to boost milk sales

Amid decades-long souring of milk sales in the United States, big dairy groups have now turned to sponsoring coffee bars in high schools to help skim profits from the trendy—and milk-heavy—latte drinks popular with teens, according to a report by the Associated Press.

A $5,000 dairy grant to a high school in North Dakota helped buy an espresso machine that makes 150-calorie latte drinks containing 8 ounces of milk, for instance. The school went through 530 gallons of milk just for the lattes this school year, according to the food-service director for the school district.

Likewise, a Florida dairy group offers schools grants worth $6,000 to outfit their coffee bars. The campaign is called "moo-lah for schools," which refers to lattes as "moo brew." The group says the coffee bars are an opportunity to "serve 8 oz. of milk with 2 oz. of coffee and added flavorings that fit into your school wellness policy." One of the explicit goals of the grant program is to get students who "might not normally select milk with their school meals to consume milk."

It's unclear how popular the dairy-sponsored coffee bars will be nationwide—or how successful they'll be at hooking a new generation of dairy drinkers. But it's the latest attempt by the industry to get a grip on its dwindling market. Milk consumption has declined by 40 percent since 1975.

[...] Not everyone is happy with the coffee-bar sponsorship. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages children from caffeine consumption, citing blood pressure and heart-rate effects as well as sleep problems and headaches.

Pediatricians have apparently never heard of decaf.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Neural networks can build 3D simulations of the universe in milliseconds, compared to days or weeks when using traditional supercomputing methods, according to new research.

To study how stuff interacts in space, scientists typically build computational models to simulate the cosmos. One simulation approach – known as N-body simulation – can be used to recreate phenomena ranging from smaller events, such as the collapse of molecular clouds into stars, to a giant system, such as the whole universe, obviously to varying levels of accuracy and resolution.

The individual interactions between each of the millions or billions of particles or entities in these models have to be repeatedly calculated to track their motion over time. This requires heavy amounts of compute power, and it takes several days or weeks for a supercomputer to return the results.

For impatient boffins, there's now some good news. A group of physicists, led by eggheads at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York, USA, decided to see if neural networks could speed things up a bit.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Boeing falsified records for 787 jet sold to Air Canada. It developed a fuel leak

Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015.

In a statement to CBC News, Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.

The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.

Boeing said an audit concluded it was an isolated event and "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved."

Boeing is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad following two deadly crashes that claimed 346 lives and the global grounding of its 737 Max jets.

On the latest revelations related to falsifying records for the Air Canada jet, Mike Doiron of Moncton-based Doiron Aviation Consulting said: "Any falsification of those documents which could basically cover up a safety issue is a major problem."

In the aviation industry, these sorts of documents are crucial for ensuring the safety of aircraft and the passengers onboard, he said.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

"At the early stage of fire-fighting, a fire extinguisher is equivalent to one fire engine," said Hwang Seong-phil, associate creative director at Cheil Worldwide.

"However, people don't remember where they put it and cannot find it when they need. So we came up with the idea of making a fire extinguisher which people can always keep handy in the home."

Roughly 60% of fire fatalities in South Korea in the decade to 2017 occurred in homes, according to the National Fire Agency, accounting for about 2,000 deaths in total.

Though it is mandatory to have a fire extinguisher and a smoke detector installed in homes, the agency reported that only 49% of residents actually own an extinguisher.

In 2018, Cheil Worldwide and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance manufactured and distributed 110,000 firevases to their clients. They are planning to give out another 100,000 this year.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-firevase/grab-and-throw-south-korea-makes-flower-vase-fire-extinguisher-idUSKCN1TL02D

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Antioxidants, once touted as a cancer preventive, may actually spur the disease's spread. Now scientists have figured out how.

Whether taken as a dietary supplement or produced by the body, antioxidants appear to help lung cancer cells invade tissues beyond the chest cavity, two studies report online June 27 in Cell. Experiments in mice and human tissue revealed that antioxidants both safeguard tumors against cell-damaging molecules and prompt the accumulation of the protein Bach1. As Bach1 piles up, tumors burn through glucose at higher rates, thus fueling the cancer cells' migration to new organs (SN: 1/9/16, p. 13).

"The results provide a new mechanism for how lung cancer cells can spread and may lead to new possibilities for treatment," says Martin Bergö, a molecular biologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm who led one of the new studies.

[...] Bergö and his colleagues had previously found that supplement doses of antioxidants accelerate primary tumor growth in mice, and clinical trials have unearthed similar results in humans. Now knowing how antioxidants exacerbate cancer, scientists may be able to undermine the mechanism with drugs that inhibit Ho1, block Bach1 production or prevent glycolysis, the glucose-guzzling process that fuels tumors. Ho1 inhibitors are already U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved to treat inherited disorders called porphyrias, and could potentially be repurposed to fight cancer.

"Understanding why some cancers metastasize and some don't is one of the biggest problems in lung cancer right now," says Roy Herbst, a medical oncologist at Yale Cancer Center.

Recognizing this newfound pathway as a "potent promoter of metastasis" could help doctors develop new treatments, identify which tumors to treat aggressively and better advise patients about taking vitamin supplements, Herbst says. "This pathway could be explored in other tumor types — this will definitely have some impact on the field."

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antioxidants-lung-cancer-spread-prevent

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Transport for London has been warned that proposals put forward for a safety feature to make electric buses more audible risk confusing vulnerable road users.

TfL has commissioned Aecom to come up with a recognisable noise that will help alert pedestrians and cyclists to the presence of vehicles that can be dangerously quiet.

The first electric London buses are due to be fitted with the sound in the autumn and it is hoped other parts of the country will follow.

But the possible options, including a bubbling noise and intermittent bleeps, have been greeted with scepticism by experts and campaigners.

John Welsman, from the policy team at Guide Dogs UK, who attended a TfL presentation last month, described the sounds as “all very spaceshippy” and said he would prefer electric buses to be fitted with a canned recording of the old Routemaster bus.

Welsman added: “They did play us a sound like someone blowing bubbles through a pipe. That just wouldn’t work. And there was an intermittent bleeping sound like an email alert that would increase or decrease in rapidity depending on the the speed of the vehicle. It was very irritating.”

“As a blind person I could spot the old Routemaster a mile off, because it was so distinctive, but that’s not what they are suggesting.”

He said most of the other six samplers sounded like futuristic vehicles from sci-fi films.

[...] From 1 July, under an EU regulation, all new models for electric vehicles seeking approval will have to emit a noise, known as an acoustic vehicle alerting system (Avas). Existing electric vehicles will need to be retrofitted with the sound from July 2021.

[...] TfL said its bus sound would comply with the regulation but maintained it did not have to mimic an engine noise. A spokesman said: “The regulation references a continuous sound that will increase as the vehicle accelerates, but there is no mention in the regulation that the noise needs to simulate that of an internal combustion engine.”

Spaceship buses seems like a good idea to me.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/futuristic-sounds-to-make-electric-buses-safer-hit-wrong-note

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RandomFactor writes:

[Ed. note: This article was recently published (July 6, 2019) on the Science Alert web site. As a footnote on the Science Alert story notes: "This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons." Viewing the source HTML at Aeon, I discovered it was originally published 02-Feb-2018. Though the material is somewhat dated, it was the first I'd heard of this and thought it sufficiently interesting to share with the SoylentNews community. --martyb]

Entanglement of particles, i.e. quantum nonlocality, is routinely demonstrated in particles separated by space.

But space and time are related, leading to a team of physicists demonstrating that quantum entanglement can occur across time with particles that shared no concurrent existence.

Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn't get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted.

Previous experiments involving a technique called 'entanglement swapping' had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.

One might be curious how a measurement done on one particle might be instantly reflected on another that doesn't exist yet, so here is how this was accomplished:

First, they created an entangled pair of photons, '1-2' (step I in the diagram below). Soon after, they measured the polarisation of photon 1 (a property describing the direction of light's oscillation) – thus 'killing' it (step II).

Photon 2 was sent on a wild goose chase while a new entangled pair, '3-4', was created (step III). Photon 3 was then measured along with the itinerant photon 2 in such a way that the entanglement relation was 'swapped' from the old pairs ('1-2' and '3-4') onto the new '2-3' combo (step IV).

Some time later (step V), the polarisation of the lone survivor, photon 4, is measured, and the results are compared with those of the long-dead photon 1 (back at step II).

The upshot? The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between 'temporally nonlocal' photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

The physicist's speculation on what this means is somewhat reminiscent of a cat in a box:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Counting cars in parking lots turns out to be a good way to predict how well a big box retailer is doing--and trade their stock just before quarterly reports come out. Similarly for satellite photos of field crops and activity in other industries. Quartz has the story, https://qz.com/1652293/how-to-make-money-with-rs-metrics-and-orbital-insight-space-data/

Satellite speculators have reportedly used techniques like car-counting, tracking oil inventories or watching corn fields to make profitable forecasts of equity and commodity markets. Now, research from finance professors at UC Berkeley and the University of Kentucky provides the first independent evidence that these trading strategies work—and that they’re likely being used to the detriment of small-time investors.

The space datasets in question, created by firms RS Metrics and Orbital Insight, allow sophisticated investors to gain near-realtime understanding of same-store sales growth, an important metric for understanding the business of physical retailers like Walmart, Target or Costco. Investors can then make bets on or against companies just before they disclose quarterly financial results.

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