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aristarchus writes:

In a sort of a reversal of the problem that Clair Patterson had, wherein, as you will recall, his research was contaminated by environmental lead, originating in gasoline additives, researchers attempting delicate studies of very far away phenomena need shielding, namely lead, that is not contaminated by radioactivity.
Fine article available at The Atlantic.

In 2017, Chamkaur Ghag, a physicist at University College London, got an email from a colleague in Spain with a tempting offer. The year before, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, Frank Calaprice, had learned of old Spanish ships that had sunk off the New Jersey coast 400 or 500 years ago, while carrying a cargo of lead. Calaprice obtained a few samples of this lead and sent it off to Spain, where a lab buried within the Pyrenees tested its radioactivity. It was low: just what Aldo Ianni, the then-director of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, was hoping for. Now that sunken lead was being offered to any physics laboratory willing to pay 20 euros per kilogram—a fairly high price—for it.
        Lead is mined and refined all over the world, but that centuries-old lead, sitting in a shipwreck, has a rare quality. Having sat deep underwater since before the United States of America was born, its natural radioactivity has decayed to a point where it's no longer spitting out particles. For particle physicists, that makes it exceptionally valuable.

Source of radioactive contaminants in lead? Yes, you guessed it!

Take steel: It's an excellent shield from intruding vagabond particles—so much so that Fermilab, a particle-physics and accelerator laboratory in Illinois, has used tons of it in the past few decades to shield its own experiments, says Valerie Higgins, Fermilab's historian and archivist. That steel frequently came from decommissioned warships, many of which existed around the time of, or served in, the Second World War or the Korean War, including the Astoria, the Roanoke, the Wasp, the Philippine Sea, and the Baltimore.

The timing of those conflicts matters. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear-device detonation took place in the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico. The atomic age had begun, and with each subsequent nuclear fireball, more radioactive fallout was sprinkled over the world.

During the Cold War, that radioactive atmospheric contamination got effortlessly sucked into blast furnaces when steel was made, Duffy says. This infused the final product with radiation, making it unsuitable for many physics experiments.

Thus the market in sunken lead. And a conflict between astrophysics and archeaology. Ah, science!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that you can't get a patent for implementing an otherwise abstract idea on a computer. The decision, known as CLS Bank v. Alice, has had a big impact over the last five years, invalidating a lot of broad software patents.

But a ruling this week illustrates the limits of that landmark ruling. The confusingly named United Services Automobile Association, which provides insurance and other financial products, sued Wells Fargo for infringing two patents on the concept of cashing checks with a mobile device. Wells Fargo argued that the patents were abstract—and therefore invalid—under the Alice rule.

[...] The patents cover check-cashing mobile apps that automatically snap a photo once a suitable image of the check is in the field of view.

A key claim of one of the USAA patents covers the concept of using a "processor" (aka a smartphone) to take a picture of a check and then send the check over a "communication pathway" (aka a network). USAA's supposed invention is the idea of monitoring "an image of the check in a field of view of a camera of a mobile device with respect to a monitoring criterion using an image monitoring and capture module of the mobile device"—and waiting until the image has met the criteria (is the entire check in the frame? Is there adequate light?) before snapping the picture. In other words, they patented the idea that you should wait until you have a good shot before snapping a picture.

[...] Wells Fargo argued that USAA had simply used a computer to perform the same steps any human being would take when snapping a photo of a check. Obviously if a human being was snapping a picture of a check, they would monitor the image in the viewfinder and only click the button once it showed an acceptable image.

But the court disagreed, noting that human eyes and human brains can't measure objective criteria like brightness as precisely as a computer can. USAA has argued that its approach leads to fewer bad check images being submitted. So in the court's view, the patent doesn't just cover an old-fashioned process being done on a computer—the use of the computer improves the process, yielding a patentable invention.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Feds are building an America-wide face surveillance system – and we're going to court to prove it, says ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Department of Justice (DoJ) in an effort to find out what the US federal government's systems and policies are around facial recognition.

Following a freedom-of-information request in January that Uncle Sam still has not responded to, the ACLU has demanded [PDF] the release of the TLA trio's guidelines and rules regarding what the union terms "face surveillance technology," as well as details of any contracts or pilot programs it has with private companies over the technology.

Specifically, the civil-rights warriors have filed suit in Massachusetts against the Feds, requesting the district court forces the agencies and department to cough up "public records pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act."

https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-doj-fbi-dea

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story (original):

Should we believe headlines claiming nearly half of all jobs will be lost to robots and artificial intelligence? We think not, and in a newly released study we explain why.

Headlines trumpeting massive job losses have been in abundance for five or so years. Even The Conversation has had its had its share.

Most come from a common source. It is a single study, conducted in 2013 by Oxford University's Carl Benedict Frey and Michael Osborne. This study lies behind the claim that 47% of jobs in the United States were at "high risk" of automation over the next ten or so years. Google Scholar says it has been cited more than 4,300 times, a figure that doesn't count newspaper headlines.

The major predictions of job losses due to automation in Australia are based directly on its findings. Commentaries about the future of work in Australia have also drawn extensively on the study.

In Australia and elsewhere the study's predictions have led to calls for a Universal Basic Income and for a "work guarantee" that would allocate the smaller number of jobs fairly.

Our new research paper concludes the former study's predictions are not well-founded.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is a rare form of cancer that commonly affects children, mostly under the age of five years. In the search for new therapeutic options, researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna have now discovered a new mechanism of the disease process and have developed a novel drug treatment line that is pioneering for future cancer therapies. The groundbreaking study was recently published in Nature Communications.

During their search for new therapeutic options for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), a team of researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna have discovered a new function for a special enzyme, cyclin-dependent kinase 8 (CDK8), as part of the signalling system in ALL.

Most important for future therapies is the presence of a therapeutic window: healthy blood cells are not affected by the absence of CDK8, while the leukaemic cells need CDK8 to survive.

Using leukaemia mouse models, first author Ingeborg Menzl from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Vetmeduni Vienna and her colleagues demonstrated that CDK8-deficient leukaemia cells show an increase in cell death.

“Of note is that the function of CDK8 in ALL is independent of enzymatic activity, which means that conventional kinase inhibitors are ineffective,” says Menzl. Based on this finding, the research team asked for potential interaction partners and discovered a previously unknown link between CDK8 and the mTOR signalling pathway in cancer cells.

Original Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12656-x

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Vampire bats that share food and groom each other in captivity are more likely to stick together when they're released back into the wild, find researchers in a study reported on October 31 in the journal Current Biology. While most previous evidence of "friendship" in animals comes from research in primates, these findings suggest that vampire bats can also form cooperative, friendship-like social relationships.

"The social relationships in vampire bats that we have been observing in captivity are pretty robust to changes in the social and physical environment -- even when our captive groups consist of a fairly random sample of bats from a wild colony," said Simon Ripperger  of the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin. "When we released these bats back into their wild colony, they chose to associate with the same individuals that were their cooperation partners during their time in captivity."

He and study co-lead author Gerald Carter  of The Ohio State University say their findings show that repeated social interactions they've observed in the lab aren't just an artifact of captivity. Not all relationships survived the transition from the lab back into the wild. But, similar to human experience, cooperative relationships or friendships among vampire bats appear to result from a combination of social preferences together with external environment influences or circumstances.

Carter has been studying vampire bat social relationships in captivity since 2010. For the new study, he wondered whether the same relationships and networks he'd been manipulating in the lab would persist or break down after their release in the wild, where the bats could go anywhere and associate with hundreds of other individuals.

Studying social networks in wild bats at very high resolution hadn't been possible until now. To do it, Simon Ripperger and his colleagues in electrical engineering and computer sciences developed novel proximity sensors. These tiny sensors, which are lighter than a penny, allowed them to capture social networks of entire social groups of bats and update them every few seconds. By linking what they knew about the bats' relationships in captivity to what they observed in the wild, they were able to make this leap toward better understanding social bonds in vampire bats.

Journal Reference:

Ripperger and Carter et al. Vampire bats that cooperate in the lab maintain their social networks in the wild. Current Biology, 2019 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.024

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50246324

"The US House of Representatives has passed a resolution to formally proceed with the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

The measure details how the inquiry will move into a more public phase. It was not a vote on whether the president should be removed from office.

This was the first test of support in the Democratic-controlled House for the impeachment process.

The White House condemned the vote, which passed along party lines.

Only two Democrats - representing districts that Mr Trump won handily in 2016 - voted against the resolution, along with all Republicans, for a total count of 232 in favour and 196 against."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_blue

Grubhub's New Strategy Is to Be an Even Worse Partner to Restaurants

It wants to "expand its restaurant network without officially partnering with eateries," which is to say without the restaurants' permission

The food delivery website and app Grubhub has been getting on restaurateurs' nerves for a while. In a class action lawsuit filed in January, multiple restaurants alleged that the site was sneakily charging restaurants for phone calls that weren't orders, since the calls were placed through proxy phone numbers Grubhub set up. In July, New Food Economy reported that Grubhub was buying restaurant web domains without restaurants' knowledge or consent, and though Grubhub argued it's technically allowed to do that in the contract, it was still a bad look. So what is the company doing to endear itself to restaurants that increasingly rely on third-party services to offer delivery? Become even worse partners.

Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney said in a letter to shareholders that "promiscuous" diners are partially to blame for the company's recent 43 percent stock fall, and in an earnings call yesterday said, "It's very hard to trick a consumer to pay more than they want to pay," which is sure to make consumers feel great about the honesty and transparency around their burrito orders. So in the face of increased competition and politicians looking to regulate the business, Maloney, as the New York Post writes, "has been piloting an initiative in recent months to expand its restaurant network without officially partnering with eateries." That is, listing businesses without their agreement or permission.

In a statement to Eater, Grubhub said they're adding non-partnered restaurants "so we will not be at a restaurant disadvantage compared to any other food delivery platform." It says this is an opportunity for those restaurants to get more business, "but we'll without hesitation remove any restaurant who reaches out to us and doesn't want to be listed on our marketplace," putting the onus on restaurants to either proactively check the site, or to be surprised when it starts getting Grubhub orders. Grubhub also admits "the non-partnered model is no doubt a bad experience for diners, drivers and restaurants. But our peers have shown growth – although not profits – using the tactic, and we believe there is a benefit to having a larger restaurant network: from finding new diners and not giving diners any reason to go elsewhere."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_blue

Hackers hijacked the capital's surveillance cameras days before Trump's inauguration and said it was easy but they didn't cover their tracks

Recently, The Verge reported on a string of ransomware attacks that have hit cities including Baltimore; Atlanta, Georgia; Newark, New Jersey; and 22 Texas towns. Even The Weather Channel has fallen victim.

But before those attacks, there was an attack on the nation's capital, days before the presidential inauguration. An article from The Wall Street Journal details how hackers Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru seized control of Washington, DC's surveillance cameras right before Trump's inauguration. The piece is full of twists and turns, from the small-time beginnings of the hackers' scamming careers to them eventually turning on each other.

[...] You can read the rest of the fascinating details in the full story here.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Tonight, drivers in the US will kill more pedestrians than any other night of the year. An increase in people walking in low-light conditions makes Halloween the most dangerous night of the year for pedestrians.
[...]
In "bad intervention" scenarios, the main driver (either human or machine) makes a driving decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrian, but the secondary driver intervenes with the wrong call, resulting in a collision. In bad interventions, it makes sense that the secondary driver is really the one to blame, since they overrode the correct actions of the primary driver.

This expectation matches how people reacted. When participants saw this scenario and rated how blameworthy each driver was and how much they caused the death, on a scale of 1 to 100, the secondary driver came out bearing most of the blame. This was true whether or not the secondary driver was a human or machine.

In "missed intervention" scenarios, though, things looked a little different. In these scenarios, the main driver is the one who makes the wrong call, but the secondary driver doesn't intervene to rescue the situation. In these scenarios, both drivers made an error.

Participants did apportion some blame to both drivers in these scenarios—but the human took more blame than the car.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/humans-take-more-blame-than-cars-for-killing-pedestrians/
Nature Human Behaviour, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

As Previously Reported: In the beginning of October, the essentially bankrupt Megabots Inc. put the giant robot Eagle One up for auction. fetching a winning bid of $170k U.S.

Unfortunately the winning bid wasn't real. Nor were the bids immediately prior to it. Speculation is that they were from fans trying to help out by jacking up the bidding, so the robot remains unsold.

Bad news for Megabots, but good news if you are in the market for a 15 ton two-story robot!

Eagle Prime went back up on Ebay yesterday (this auction requires bidders email the seller for approval before bids will be accepted) and there are eight days remaining as of Halloween (Auction ends Nov 08, 17:30 PST), leaving us ample time to ponder that most profound question: retirement-or-giant-robot?

Bidding has already started, with an anemic opening bid of $1. Musk has, of course, already been tagged in the discussion.

There is no 'Buy It Now'

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The United States Interior Department is grounding its fleet of more than 800 drones over concerns that the Chinese is using the devices to spy or facilitate cyberattacks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There have been growing concerns among military and Homeland Security officials that the UAVs, which are made in China or consist of Chinese-made parts, are gathering sensitive information for the Chinese government.

[...] DJI told Gizmodo in a statement that the company is "disappointed to learn of this development," adding that it has "worked with the Department of Interior to create a safe and secure drone solution that meets their rigorous requirements, which was developed over the course of 15 months with DOI officials, independent cybersecurity professionals, and experts at NASA."

[...] Last month a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill aiming to block federal agencies from purchasing UAVs from China. "China has stolen sensitive drone technology from America's businesses and military for years, and now sells it back to us from a dominant position in the commercial drone market," said one of the bill's sponsors, Senator Tom Cotton, said in a statement at the time. "Relying on drones made by our adversaries is a clear risk to our national security."

US Interior Department Grounds Drone Fleet

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to The Des Moines Register, the Coalfire penetration testers, Justin Wynn and Gary Demercurio, have had their charges reduced to Trespass (Iowa Code § 716.8(a)(1)) from the previous charges of third-degree burglary and Possession of Burglary Tools (Iowa Code § 713.7). This whole case may hinge on the penetration testers mistake in their authorization (if not actual authorization) to enter under Iowa Code § 701.6 or, as the model jury instructions put it:

The defendant claims that at the time of the act in question, he was acting under a mistake of fact as to (element of crime to which mistake of fact is directed). When an act is committed because of mistake of fact, the mistake of fact must be because of a good faith reasonable belief by the defendant, acting as a reasonably careful person under similar circumstances.
The defendant must inquire or determine what is true when to do so would be reasonable under the circumstances.
The State has the burden of proving the defendant was not acting under mistake of fact as it applies to the question of (element).

To editorialize, it seems to this humble submitter that the county better take their ball and go home, as they have quite the hill to climb against defendants with almost unlimited money. But then again, both sides are acting out of righteous indignation at this point.

Previously: Authorised Pen-Testers Nabbed, Jailed in Iowa Courthouse Break-in Attempt
Iowa Officials Claim Confusion Over Scope Led to Arrest of Pen-Testers

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

On Tuesday, Don HO, the developer of Notepad++, a free GPL source code editor and notepad application for Microsoft Windows, released version 7.8.1, prompting a social media firestorm and a distributed denial of service attack. Notepad++ v7.8.1 was designated "the Free Uyghur edition," in reference to the predominantly Muslim ethnic group in western China that faces ongoing human rights violations and persecution at the hands of Beijing.

"The site notepad-plus-plus.org has suffered DDoS attack from 1230 to 1330 Paris time," HO said in an email to The Register. "I saw the [reduced] amount of visitors via Google analytics then the support of my host confirmed the attack. The DDoS attack has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by our host [Cloudflare]."

[...] For expressing that sentiment, the project's website was DDoSed and its GitHub code repository has been flooded with angry comments in the Issues section – intended for people to report bugs or offer suggestions.

HO said Notepad++'s Tiananmen Square release didn't really attract much attention. The Charlie Hebdo release, however, got his site hacked. "The reaction of this time is more like 'Boycott Beijing 2008 OG' on the Notepad++ website, while Notepad++ was on SourceForge," he said, noting that SourceForge forum was similarly flooded by Chinese spammers in 2008.

Also at The Verge.

Related: China Forces its Muslim Minority to Install Spyware on Their Phones
Massive DNA Collection Campaign Continues in Xinjiang, China
China Installs Surveillance App on Smartphones of Visitors to Xinjiang Region
Apple Lashes Out After Google Reveals iPhone/iOS Vulnerabilities

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Advocates for genomic research in Africa are worried about fallout from a dispute that has roiled the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a major genome research center in Hinxton, U.K. Last year, whistleblowers privately accused Sanger of commercializing a gene chip without proper legal agreements with partner institutions and the consent of the hundreds of African people whose donated DNA was used to develop the chip. “What happened at Sanger was clearly unethical. Full stop,” says Jantina de Vries, a bioethicist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who has followed the dispute.

Sanger’s troubles have mounted since the beginning of the dispute, which was first made public last month. The institute says it did not commercialize the chips or profit from them, but admits in a statement that its relationship with some African partners has been “disrupted.” Stellenbosch University in South Africa has demanded that Sanger return samples. In addition, one whistleblower says she was fired because of the controversy, and a large research team has left the institute and ended a plan to study the genomes of 100,000 Africans.

More broadly, Sanger’s mishandling of the matter could erode trust between researchers and African people, setting back genomic research that could benefit them, de Vries says. “The tragedy and the scandal is that the people who will pay the price are Africans.”

Genome sequencing can reveal the genetic roots of diseases and offer clues for new drugs and personalized medicine. But whole genome sequencing costs $800 to $1200 per person. Researchers use gene chips as a cheaper shortcut to look at key spots in a person’s genome where variation might be expected. The chips can lower the cost to less than $100 per sample, but first they need to be designed based on entire genomes from a given population.

In a $2.2 million deal inked in 2017, Thermo Fisher Scientific made 75,000 gene chips, or microarrays, for Sanger based on African genomic data gathered through several collaborations. Working with a unit of the Medical Research Council in Entebbe, Uganda, researchers at Sanger sequenced nearly 2100 genomes of Ugandan people. To capture more of the variation on the continent, they partnered with other institutions in Africa to sequence the genomes of about 400 more people.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Before today, sea level rise and flooding were already forecast to wreak havoc for millions now and in the coming decades. Now, the story looks much worse—three times worse, to be precise. According to new research, hundreds of millions more people are already at risk from climate breakdown-caused coastal flooding and sea level rise than previously thought. And by the end of the century, large swathes of the coastal land we live on today could be unihabitable—even with immediate and deep emissions cuts.

This may not sound like much, but for millions of people two or three metres is the difference between safety or loss of livelihood and forced relocation. Thankfully, a handful of nations have now scanned coastal elevation using airborne laser-based radar equipment, and the new research, published in Nature Communications, uses the difference between these much more precise data and previously existing figures to recalibrate global estimates for land at risk of sea-level rise and flooding.

Based on the new model, the authors estimate not 28m but 110m people are already living below the current high tide line. And instead of 68m people living below annual flood levels, the figure is now 250m—the same number that live less than one metre above sea level. That's the equivalent of the UK, Russia, and Spain combined.

This increase in vulnerability to sea-level rise and flooding is not evenly distributed. More than 70% of those living on at-risk land are in eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. And for many of these countries, the increase in risk that the new model predicts for the coming decades is much higher than three-fold.

Of course, it's not just Asia that's vulnerable—20 other countries outside of the continent are expected to see land that is currently home to 10% of their total populations fall below end-of-century high tide lines, even if emissions peak by 2020 and are then cut deeply. This count is up from two using NASA's data. All but three are island nations, and 13 of the 20 are small developing island states.

[...] The sad reality is that coastal communities worldwide look to be set for much more difficult futures than currently anticipated. As a global community, governments must work together to do all they can to help.

Original Submission