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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The Dangers of Cell Phone Radiation. The Right to Know. Don't Put in Your Shirt Pocket - Global Research

Of relevance to the ongoing debate on the health impacts of cell phones. First published on July 10, 2019

A landmark Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the City of Berkeley's cell phone right to know ordinance rejecting industries argument that the ordinance violates the first amendment.  The Berkeley ordinance requires retailers to inform consumers that cell phones emit radiation and that "if you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation." In upholding this decision, the panel concluded that the public health issues at hand were "substantial" and that the "text of the Berkeley notice was literally true," and "uncontroversial."

Further, the panel determined that the Berkeley ordinance did not constitute preemption.

"Far from conflicting with federal law and policy, the Berkeley ordinance complemented and enforced it."

The panel held that Berkeley's required disclosure simply alerted consumers to the safety disclosures that the Federal Communications Commission required, and directed consumers to federally compelled instructions in their user manuals providing specific information about how to avoid excessive exposure.

Industry is expected to appeal for a full court en banc review, but this reviewing "panel concluded that CTIA had little likelihood of success based on conflict preemption."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Apple has faced criticism from lawmakers for several reasons recently, including its presence in China and its repair programs. Now, The Washington Post reports that Apple is being questioned for using its focus on user privacy as a "guise for anti-competitive behavior."

The concern comes from Congressman David N. Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. Cicilline explained that he's concerned about "the use of privacy as a shield for anticompetitive behavior."

The lawmaker went on to explain that a "strong privacy law" in the United States would mean that companies like Apple would no longer have to regulate privacy themselves:

"I'm increasingly concerned about the use of privacy as a shield for anti-competitive conduct," said Rep. David N. Cicilline (R.I.), who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. "There is a growing risk that without a strong privacy law in the United States, platforms will exploit their role as de facto private regulators by placing a thumb on the scale in their own favor."

Cicilline's concern was prompted by the changes Apple made to location services in iOS 13. Essentially, Apple has cracked down on the access that third-party applications have to a user's location, and made more information about to users about when an app is using their location. Lawmakers are now concerned that Apple itself has access to additional location data that is not available to competitors.

Source: https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/26/apple-privacy-anti-trust-concern/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/raccoon-was-once-thanksgiving-feast-fit-president-180973665/

Turkey, ham, and even a bit of venison or elk would pass muster on most modern Thanksgiving tables. But a century ago, many diners would have been just as happy to see some raccoon sitting next to the gravy boat.

Americans' appetite for raccoon and small game began to diminish as meat produced in factory farms became cheaper and more widely available. As Matthew L. Miller writes for the Nature Conservancy, perceptions of the charismatic critter shifted over the decades, with raccoons gaining a reputation as mischievous nighttime pests (and rabies carriers) rather than delectable delicacies.

Still, raccoon meat's culinary legacy remains apparent in many areas of the country. The animals are sold in some markets, including by vendors in the Soulard Market in St. Louis, and directly to the public by hunters and trappers. For the past 93 years, the American Legion in Delafield, Wisconsin, has hosted a "Coon Feed" in January; the event feeds guests about 350 plates of raccoon meat. Gillett, Arkansas, has hosted a "Coon Supper" for 76 years.

[...] The exact number of raccoons set to appear on Thanksgiving tables this year is difficult to pinpoint, but at least one notable celebrity—Anthony Mackie, an actor who portrays Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—has gone on record as a fan of the practice. As he tells "Entertainment Tonight," raccoon is "honestly the best meat you'll ever have."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Company Stock Prices Fall When Women Are Added To Boards Of Directors

Turns out that many companies who seek to embrace equality by any means could actually be doing their shareholders a disservice. But hey, we thought equality of outcome was a guaranteed fast track to utopia! What happened?

In fact, many companies experience stock price declines when women are added to the board of directors, Bloomberg points out.

An analysis of 14 years of market returns across almost 1,900 companies recently revealed that when companies appoint female directors, they experienced two years of stock declines. Companies saw their stock fall by an average of 2.3% just from adding one additional woman to their board.

Kaisa Snellman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school and a co-author of the study said: "Shareholders penalize these companies, despite the fact that increased gender diversity doesn't have a material effect on a company's return on assets. Nothing happens to the actual value of the companies. It's just the perceptions that change."

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Fertility Rate in U.S. Hit a Record Low in 2018

The rate of births fell again last year, according to new government data, extending a lengthy decline as women wait until they are older to have children.

The number of births per 1,000 women in the United States has been declining even as the economy has recovered from the downturn of 2007-8. 

The fertility rate in the United States fell in 2018 for the fourth straight year, extending a steep decline in births that began in 2008 with the Great Recession, the federal government said on Wednesday.

There were 59.1 births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the country last year, a record low, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate was down by 2 percent from the previous year, and has fallen by about 15 percent since 2007.

In all, there were 3,791,712 births in the country last year, the center said in its release of final birth data for 2018.

Fertility rates are essential measures of a society's demographic balance. If they are very high, resources like housing and education can be strained by a flood of children, as happened in the postwar Baby Boom years. If they are too low, a country may find itself with too few young people to replace its work force and support its elderly, as in Russia and Japan today.

In the United States, declines in fertility have not led to drops in population, in part because immigration has helped offset them.

The country has been living through one of the longest declines in fertility in decades. Demographers are trying to determine whether it is a temporary phenomenon or a new normal, driven by deeper social change.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Babies in the womb may see more than we thought: Light-sensitive cells in immature retina are networked, suggesting bigger role in developing brain

But the light-sensitive cells in the developing retina -- the thin sheet of brain-like tissue at the back of the eye -- were thought to be simple on-off switches, presumably there to set up the 24-hour, day-night rhythms parents hope their baby will follow.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now found evidence that these simple cells actually talk to one another as part of an interconnected network that gives the retina more light sensitivity than once thought, and that may enhance the influence of light on behavior and brain development in unsuspected ways.

In the developing eye, perhaps 3% of ganglion cells -- the cells in the retina that send messages through the optic nerve into the brain -- are sensitive to light and, to date, researchers have found about six different subtypes that communicate with various places in the brain. Some talk to the suprachiasmatic nucleus to tune our internal clock to the day-night cycle. Others send signals to the area that makes our pupils constrict in bright light.

But others connect to surprising areas: the perihabenula, which regulates mood, and the amygdala, which deals with emotions.

In mice and monkeys, recent evidence suggests that these ganglion cells also talk with one another through electrical connections called gap junctions, implying much more complexity in immature rodent and primate eyes than imagined.

[...] The researchers also found evidence that the circuit tunes itself in a way that could adapt to the intensity of light, which probably has an important role in development, Feller said.

"In the past, people demonstrated that these light-sensitive cells are important for things like the development of the blood vessels in the retina and light entrainment of circadian rhythms, but those were kind of a light on/light off response, where you need some light or no light," she said. "This seems to argue that they are actually trying to code for many different intensities of light, encoding much more information than people had previously thought."

Journal Reference:

Franklin Caval-Holme, Marla B. Feller. Gap Junction Coupling Shapes the Encoding of Light in the Developing Retina. Current Biology, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.025

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Popular VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA) is set to be acquired by Kape Technologies. This will transform the company into a major player in the VPN industry. The deal has sparked a lively debate about Kape's intentions and PIA's future, but the company stresses that it remains committed to protecting the privacy of its users.

In recent years it's become a well-established brand that has had its no-logging policy tested in court, with success.

This week the company announced that some changes are afoot. PIA's parent organization LTMI Holdings is in the process of a merger acquisition by the publicly traded Kape Technologies, which also owns the Cyberghost and Zenmate VPN services.

As part of the planned deal, Kape will pay $95.5 million. Part of this will be paid in cash, Vox reports, and Kape is also planning to pay the $32.1 million in existing debt PIA has on the books.

Oh well. Nothing good lasts forever.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-to-be-acquired-by-kape/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Disclaimer: no dams were actually busted in the making of the video below. But that doesn’t mean that a scale-model homage to the WWII Dam Busters and their “Bouncing Bombs” isn’t worth doing, of course.

In a war filled with hacks, [Barnes Wallis]’ Bouncing Bomb concept might just be the hackiest. In the video below, [Tom Stanton] explains that [Wallis] came up with the idea of skipping a bomb across the surface of a lake to destroy enemy infrastructure after skipping marbles across the water.

[...] [Tom] teamed up with R/C builder [James Whomsley], who came up with a wonderful foam-board Lancaster bomber, just like RAF No. 617 Squadron used. With a calm day and smooth water on the lake they chose for testing, the R/C Lanc made a few test runs before releasing the first barrel bomb. The first run was a bit too steep, causing the bomb to just dive into the water without skipping. Technical problems and a crash landing foiled the second run, but the third run was perfect – the bomb skipped thrice while the plane banked gracefully away. [Tom] also tried a heavy-lift quadcopter run with the bomb rig, something [Barnes Wallis] couldn’t even have dreamed of back in the day.

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Irish parliament counts cost of €1m printer error

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50563977

An inquiry has begun into how staff at the Irish parliament spent more than €1m (£857,000) on a printer that was too big to fit into the building.

The printer, measuring 2.1m (6ft 8in) high and 1.9m (6ft 2 in) wide, was bought last year at a cost of €808,000.

When officials realised it would not fit, they spent an additional €236,000 tearing down walls and embedding structural steel to house the machine.

The printer was placed in storage at a cost of €2,000 a month during the work.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/works-of-at-least-230-000-required-to-fit-printer-in-oireachtas-1.4092366

Irish Govt Blows €1M On Mega-Printer Too Big For Parliament's Doors

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Officials failed to ensure there was at least 3.1 metres in height clearance to get the thing in, according to the Irish Times. In reality, there just wasn't enough space. The state-of-the-art printer is described in press reports as being 2.1 metres high and 1.9 metres wide, so either there's confusion over the measurements or you need more than 3 metres to negotiate it in.

By the time the government realized its mistake, it was too late to return the printer as the contract had already been signed. So instead, officials had to "tear down walls and embed structural steel" to fit the contraption, according to RTE on Tuesday.

But that’s not the only havoc the printer has caused. Some employees are refusing to be trained on how to use the machine, sticking a metaphorical middle finger to the government in a bid to negotiate a pay rise for using the new equipment.

What’s more, the IT department is hesitant to grant access to the printer, making it difficult to print documents from official government computers.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Interstellar comet Borisov gets the close-up ghostly glamour shot it deserves

Interstellar comet 2l/Borisov is only the second known object to visit our solar system from the great wide universe beyond. (Oddball Oumuamua was the first.) It's no wonder we can't stop staring at it.

Yale astronomers snapped a new close-up image of the comet that gives one of the best looks yet at this cosmic stranger. The image comes from the W.M. Keck Observatory's Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer in Hawaii.

We're hitting prime viewing time for the comet, which will make its closet approach to Earth in December when it zips by at a spacious distance of 190 million miles (300 million kilometers) away.

Borisov is warming up as it gets closer to our sun. According to Yale, the center of the comet is roughly a mile in width, but its tail stretches out to nearly 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers). The image shows this central mass as well as a fuzzy halo of gas and dust trailing behind it. The astronomers described it as "ghostly."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

We love coffee, tea, chocolate and soft drinks so much, caffeine is literally in our blood

In conducting mass spectrometry research, Richard van Breemen and Luying Chen worked with various biomedical suppliers to purchase 18 batches of supposedly pure human blood serum pooled from multiple donors. Biomedical suppliers get their blood from blood banks, who pass along inventory that's nearing its expiration date.

All 18 batches tested positive for caffeine. Also, in many of the samples the researchers found traces of cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug. The findings point to the potential for contaminated blood transfusions, and also suggest that blood used in research isn't necessarily pure.

"From a 'contamination' standpoint, caffeine is not a big worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society," said Chen, a Ph.D. student. "But the other drugs being in there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for those of us doing this type of research because it's hard to get clean blood samples."

[...] In addition to caffeine, the research also involved testing pooled serum for alprazolam, an anti-anxiety medicine sold under the trade name Xanax; dextromethorphan, an over-the-counter cough suppressant; and tolbutamide, a medicine used to treat type 2 diabetes.

[...] All of the pooled serum was free of tolbutamide, but eight samples contained dextromethorphan and 13 contained alprazolam -- possibly meaning that if you ever need a blood transfusion, your odds of also receiving caffeine, cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug are pretty good.

"The study leads you in that direction, though without doing a comprehensive survey of vendors and blood banks we can only speculate on how widespread the problem is," said van Breemen, the director of OSU's Linus Pauling Institute. "Another thing to consider is that we found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug interaction assay validation -- how many others are in there too that we weren't looking for?"

Journal Reference: Luying Chen, Richard B. van Breemen. Validation of a sensitive UHPLC-MS/MS method for cytochrome P450 probe substrates caffeine, tolbutamide, dextromethorphan, and alprazolam in human serum reveals drug contamination of serum used for research. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, 2019; 112983 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpba.2019.112983

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Many of the technologies we rely on, from smartphones to wearable devices and more, utilize fast wireless communications. What might we accomplish if those devices transmitted information even faster?

That's what Yuping Zeng, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, aims to discover. She and a team of researchers recently created a high-electron mobility transistor, a device that amplifies and controls electrical current, using gallium nitride (GaN) with indium aluminum-nitride as the barrier on a silicon substrate. They described their results in the journal Applied Physics Express.

Among devices of its type, Zeng's transistor has record-setting properties, including record low gate leakage current (a measure of current loss), a record high on/off current ratio (the magnitude of the difference of current transmitted between the on state and off state) and a record high current gain cutoff frequency (an indication of how much data can be transmitted with a wide range of frequencies).

This transistor could be useful for higher bandwidth wireless communication systems. For a given current, it can handle more voltage and would require less battery life than other devices of its type.

"We are making this high-speed transistor because we want to expand the bandwidth of wireless communications, and this will give us more information for a certain limited time," said Zeng. "It can also be used for space applications because the gallium nitride transistor we used is radiation robust, and it is also wide bandgap material, so it can tolerate a lot of power."

This transistor represents innovation in both material design and device application design. The transistors are made on a low-cost silicon substrate, "and this process can also be compatible with silicon Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which is the conventional technology used for semiconductors," said Zeng.

-- submitted from IRC

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takyon writes:

Microsoft Leaves Anti-Piracy Group After it Scolded EFF's New Board Chair

Microsoft has cut its ties with anti-piracy group CreativeFuture, after the group criticized the copyright track record of the new EFF board chair. This decision didn't sit well with CreativeFuture, which wrote a scathing letter arguing that Microsoft is turning its back on the copyright industries that helped the company to thrive.

In recent years CreativeFuture has been one of the most vocal anti-piracy groups. The coalition is made up of more than 550 organizations as well as hundreds of thousands of individual creators. The group lobbies lawmakers and leads the charge when it comes to many anti-piracy discussions. Its message is loud and clear: piracy is terrible and Google is enemy number one.

In recent years CreativeFuture has repeatedly pitted itself against major technology companies which it believes don't do enough to curb piracy. In this often hostile ecosystem, it found one sole tech giant at its side, Microsoft. "In an era of creative decimation perpetrated by the world's biggest technology companies, one of their very biggest made a point of joining us to stand up for copyright," CreativeFuture noted in a recent mailing.

While that sounds positive, the reason for the email isn't good. The anti-piracy coalition explains that Microsoft is the first member to ever leave the group. While the company hasn't publicly explained its motives, CreativeFuture knows why. According to the mailing, Microsoft wasn't happy with an article [archive] the group wrote about Pamela Samuelson, the new Board Chair at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

[...] "Confused and hurt, we did some digging, and discovered that Samuelson and Microsoft have a long history together, going at least as far back as 2005, when Microsoft gifted a whopping $1 million to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley," CreativeFuture writes. In addition, the coalition points out that Samuelson published a paper defending Microsoft in a lawsuit against AT&T, while the tech company continued to support the Samuelson Clinic.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill

Perhaps the third time's the charm: a group of Senate Democrats, following in the recent footsteps of their colleagues in both chambers, has introduced a bill that would impose sweeping reforms to the current disaster patchwork of US privacy law.

The bill (PDF), dubbed the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), seeks to provide US consumers with a blanket set of privacy rights. The scope and goal of COPRA are in the same vein as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018.

Privacy rights "should be like your Miranda rights—clear as a bell as to what they are and what constitutes a violation," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also co-sponsored the bill.

The press release announcing the bill also includes statements of support from several consumer and privacy advocacy groups, such as Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, and the NAACP.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new cancer-detecting tool uses tiny circuits made of DNA to identify cancer cells by the molecular signatures on their surface.

Duke University researchers fashioned the simple circuits from interacting strands of synthetic DNA that are tens of thousands of times finer than a human hair.

Unlike the circuits in a computer, these circuits work by attaching to the outside of a cell and analyzing it for proteins found in greater numbers on some cell types than others. If a circuit finds its targets, it labels the cell with a tiny light-up tag.

Because the devices distinguish cell types with higher specificity than previous methods, the researchers hope their work might improve diagnosis, and give cancer therapies better aim.

[...] Similar techniques have been used previously to detect cancer, but they're more prone to false alarms -- misidentifications that occur when mixtures of cells sport one or more of the proteins a DNA circuit is designed to screen for, but no single cell type has them all.

For every cancer cell that is correctly detected using current methods, some fraction of healthy cells also get mislabeled as possibly cancerous when they're not.

Each type of cancer cell has a characteristic set of cell membrane proteins on its cell surface. To cut down on cases of mistaken identity, the Duke team designed a DNA circuit that must latch onto that specific combination of proteins on the same cell to work. As a result they're much less likely to flag the wrong cells, Reif said.

Journal Reference:

Tianqi Song, Shalin Shah, Hieu Bui, Sudhanshu Garg, Abeer Eshra, Daniel Fu, Ming Yang, Reem Mokhtar, John Reif. Programming DNA-Based Biomolecular Reaction Networks on Cancer Cell Membranes. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2019; 141 (42): 16539 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.9b05598

Original Submission