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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists think they've found a sure signal of extra-terrestrial life. Phosphine is highly toxic and hails from the bowels of penguins, badgers and fish, among other places that you'd never want to visit. In general, most life-forms that need oxygen like we do stay far away from phosphine. But now scientists at MIT say that phosphine can only be produced in one way: by anaerobic organisms such as bacteria that can thrive without oxygen. This means that if astronomers were able to spot phosphine in the atmosphere of another rocky planet, "it would be an unmistakable sign of extraterrestrial life," according to a release from MIT.

"Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life," explained MIT research scientist Clara Sousa-Silva. "But other things besides life make oxygen too. It's important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there's only one explanation."

Phosphine has been spotted in space, in the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, as well as in gas jets coming off the comet 67/P visited by the Rosetta spacecraft. But if it were spotted around a more Earth-like planet, it would be a sign of some sort of action below.

Sousa-Silva led a team that spent several years ruling out all possibilities that phosphine could be created by anything else but anaerobic organisms. Their conclusions were published in a paper in the journal Astrobiology in November. 

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a ruling hailed as an "immense victory for climate justice," the Netherlands' top court ruled Friday in favor of activists who have for years been seeking legal orders to force the Dutch government into cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Activists in a packed chamber of the Supreme Court in The Hague erupted into applause and cheers as Presiding Judge Kees Streefkerk rejected the government's appeal against earlier rulings ordering the government to cut emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.

The Supreme Court upheld lower courts' rulings that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.

Urgenda, the Dutch climate and sustainability organization that filed the original case, hailed the ruling as "a groundbreaking decision that confirms that individual governments must do their fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

"I am extremely happy that the highest court in the Netherlands has confirmed that climate change is a real, severe problem and that government should do what they themselves have declared for more than 10 years is necessary, namely between 25% and 40% reduction of CO2," Urgenda director Marjan Minnesma told The Associated Press outside the court.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple could be exploring the idea of launching satellites. 

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg says that Apple has "a secret team working on satellites and related wireless technology, striving to find new ways to beam data such as internet connectivity directly to its devices." The team currently consists of roughly a dozen people, the outlet adds, with the company hoping to deploy "their results within five years." 

Bloomberg cautions that while CEO Tim Cook is interested in the project, it's still early days and could be scrapped as "a clear direction and use for satellites hasn't been finalized."

While the satellites could potentially provide internet, which could then allow Apple to have less reliance on traditional wireless carriers, the report says they could also be used for other purposes such as "more precise location tracking for its devices."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Boeing's failed Starliner mission strains 'reliability' pitch:

Boeing Co’s (BA.N) stunted Friday debut of its astronaut capsule threatens to dent the U.S. aerospace incumbent’s self-declared competitive advantage of mission reliability against the price and innovation strengths of “new space” players like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, has anchored its attempt to repel space visionaries like Musk and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos partly on its mission safety record built up over decades of space travel.

While SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to send their own crewed missions to space for the first time, Boeing or Boeing heritage companies have built every American spacecraft that has transported astronauts into space. And the single-use rockets it builds in partnership with Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) have a virtually unblemished record of mission success.

“We are starting from a position of mission reliability and safety,” Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told Reuters earlier this year when asked about SpaceX and other insurgents aiming to disrupt Boeing on everything from astronaut capsules to rockets to satellites.

“There is a difference between putting cargo in space and putting humans in space, and that’s a big step. Our very deliberate, safety-based approach for things like CST-100, that will be a differentiator in the long run,” Muilenburg said.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Bing's Top Search Results Contain an Alarming Amount of Disinformation:

It is something of a problem, then, that Bing appears to be returning an alarming amount of disinformation and misinformation in response to user queries — far more than Google does, for instance. Bing's somewhat irregular results and hands-off approach to topics like suicide have attracted users' attention before, even earning the distinction of becoming a meme. And while researchers have written about Bing's troubled record on abusive content, specifically with regard to how it has handled autocomplete suggestions, there have been no broader studies of the prevalence of disinformation and misinformation in Bing's top search results. (Google, for what it's worth, has also struggled to rein in autocomplete's tendency to turn up objectionable speech).

Google, which has been the focus of intense media criticism for its failures to combat abuse on its platforms, including the gaming of its algorithms by Holocaust deniers, has made it clear that it will take new steps to "tackle the propagation of false or misleading information." As a result, Google is, for better or worse, the closest thing we have to a standard point of comparison for how search engines handle disinformation and misinformation. Thus, when we say Bing shows its users a lot of disinformation, we mean specifically that it shows a lot more disinformation than Google.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

'Epilepsy demon' discovered on 2,700-year-old clay tablet in Iraq:

A 2,700-year-old cuneiform tablet from ancient Iraq describing medical treatments has suddenly revealed a secret - a hitherto overlooked drawing of the demon that the ancient Assyrians thought caused epilepsy. It is the earliest illustration of a demon that can be associated with epilepsy.

When Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll was studying a 2,700-year-old cuneiform tablet with ancient medical treatments at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin four years ago, he accidentally discovered a partially damaged drawing on the reverse of the tablet. A drawing that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a demon with horns, tails and a snake's tongue which, according to the text, was the cause of the dreaded illness Bennu-epilepsy.

"We have known for a long time that the Assyrians and Babylonians regarded diseases as phenomena that were caused by gods, demons or witchcraft. And healers were responsible for expelling these supernatural forces and the medical symptoms they caused with drugs, rituals or incantations. But this is the first time that we have managed to connect one of the very rare illustrations of demons in the medical texts with the specific disease epilepsy, which the Assyrians and Babylonians called Bennu, explains postdoc Troels Pank Arbøll. He adds:

"Drawings of supernatural powers are very rare on cuneiform tablets with magical and medical treatments. When there is a drawing, it usually depicts one of the figures that the healers used in their rituals, not the demon itself. But here we have a presentation of an epilepsy demon as the healer who wrote the text must have imagined it."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Earth's inner core is hot, under immense pressure and snow-capped, according to new research that could help scientists better understand forces that affect the entire planet.

The snow is made of tiny particles of iron -- much heavier than any snowflake on Earth's surface -- that fall from the molten outer core and pile on top of the inner core, creating piles up to 200 miles thick that cover the inner core.

The image may sound like an alien winter wonderland. But the scientists who led the research said it is akin to how rocks form inside volcanoes.

"The Earth's metallic core works like a magma chamber that we know better of in the crust," said Jung-Fu Lin, a professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study.

The study is available online and will be published in the print edition of the journal JGR Solid Earth on December 23.

Journal Reference:

Youjun Zhang, Peter Nelson, Nick Dygert, Jung‐Fu Lin. Fe Alloy Slurry and a Compacting Cumulate Pile Across Earth's Inner‐Core Boundary. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2019; DOI: 10.1029/2019JB017792

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

If you live in a place that sees freezing temperatures, you likely have had problems with wipers that freeze and windshields that ice up. It's a pain, and even on cars with heated washer systems, it can take ages for them to warm up and start working. Nobody has time for that at 6 a.m. in Detroit in the middle of December, so Ford came up with a better idea.

The VisioWiper system takes the idea of heated washer jets and builds on them, and it's getting its debut in the Lincoln Aviator. See, the main thing that sets the VisioWiper apart from other systems is the fact that the wiper blade itself has a heating element in it, and that it also dispenses heated fluid through nozzles integrated into the blade.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.matthewdean.com/bricklink-acquisition

On November 26th 2019, BrickLink announced that it had been acquired by the Lego group. BrickLink is the most popular online aftermarket for the popular kids building toy Lego, where adult fans buy and sell everything ranging from whole sets to individual parts.

I have been a longtime admirer of both companies, yet when I heard about the acquisition I was horrified. Why did the news unsettle me?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ultraprecise 3-D printing technology is a key enabler for manufacturing precision biomedical and photonic devices. However, the existing printing technology is limited by its low efficiency and high cost. Professor Shih-Chi Chen and his team from the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop the Femtosecond Projection Two-photon Lithography (FP-TPL) printing technology.

By controlling the laser spectrum via temporal focusing, the laser 3-D printing process is performed in a parallel layer-by-layer fashion instead of point-by-point writing. This new technique substantially increases the printing speed by 1,000—10,000 times, and reduces the cost by 98 percent. The achievement has recently been published in Science, affirming its technological breakthrough that leads nanoscale 3-D printing into a new era.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5030227/

Several studies have attempted to identify an objective description of the aesthetically ideal breast, but they have all suffered in their reliability because of having several intrinsic limitations. It is therefore essential to design a template of ideal breast features in order to predict and evaluate aesthetic outcomes in both reconstructive and cosmetic breast surgery. The aim of this study was to determine the aesthetically preferred position of the nipple–areola complex on the breast.

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canopic jug writes:

Assistant professor Jeff Huang has written a sort of manifesto for preserving content on the web. He goes over seven points that should be familiar to all yet will nevertheless be found to be novel by some. New or not, they are essential to follow if one wishes to future-proof a web site. Like other best practices, such as usability design and accessibility design, which are also currently increasingly ignored, the points in the manifesto are also less work to follow than to ignore.

• Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
• Don't minimize that HTML
• Prefer one page over several
• End all forms of hotlinking
• Stick with the 13 web-safe fonts +2
• Compress and rescale your images
• Monitor for URLs

Earlier on SN:
What's One Thing I Wish I Understood Better About Web Accessibility? (2019)
How to Build and Host an Energy Efficient Web Site (2018)
Conservative Web Development (2018)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] MIT engineers have come up with an alternative to conventional ultrasound that doesn't require contact with the body to see inside a patient. The new laser ultrasound technique leverages an eye- and skin-safe laser system to remotely image the inside of a person. When trained on a patient's skin, one laser remotely generates sound waves that bounce through the body. A second laser remotely detects the reflected waves, which researchers then translate into an image similar to conventional ultrasound.

In a paper published today by Nature in the journal Light: Science and Applications, the team reports generating the first laser ultrasound images in humans. The researchers scanned the forearms of several volunteers and observed common tissue features such as muscle, fat, and bone, down to about 6 centimeters below the skin. These images, comparable to conventional ultrasound, were produced using remote lasers focused on a volunteer from half a meter away.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Pressure on FAA to approve its 737 Max jets backfires for Boeing:

A bust-up between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, the US regulator, has backed the aviation giant into a corner over the future of its 737 Max aircraft.

The aerospace group said last week that it would halt production of the plane in January after the FAA refused to authorise its return to service until 2020. The Max was grounded around the world in March following two fatal crashes, blamed on new anti-stall software, that claimed 346 lives.

Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies, said the FAA's tougher stance with Boeing and its refusal to rush the plane back into service suggested the Max would not be approved until summer at the earliest.

"My guess is that it's at least another six months [until certification] and may even be longer. It could be a year. If there were another incident, Boeing would be toast. So it feels like it's going to get done properly."

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