SoylentNews

Water has long played a role in armed struggle, from the Allied bombing of German dams during World War II to Saddam Hussein’s draining of Iraq’s southern marshes in the 1990s to punish residents for an anti-government rebellion. Now Erin Cunningham reports in the Washington Post that Islamic State militants are increasingly using water as a weapon, cutting off supplies to villages resisting their rule and pressing to expand their control over the country’s water infrastructure. The Islamic State “understands how powerful water is as a tool, and they are not afraid to use it,” said Michael Stephens. "A lot of effort has been expended to control resources in Iraq in a way not seen in other conflicts."

The White House was so alarmed in August when Islamic State fighters briefly seized the Mosul Dam — located on the Tigris River that runs through Baghdad — that it backed a major operation by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to wrest it back. “If that dam was breached, it could have proven catastrophic, with floods that would have threatened the lives of thousands of civilians and endangered our embassy compound in Baghdad,” said Obama. Last month, the Islamic State used its control of the Sudur mini-dam north of Baghdad to cut off water to Balad Ruz, a predominantly Shiite area of Diyala province. According to the town’s mayor, the militants lined the roads to the dam with improvised explosive devices, and the government was forced to hire trucks to bring potable water to the residents. “They can threaten many parts of the country if they control the water,” says Abdul Majid Satar. "They want to control it at any price"

Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe that in recent years, the position of postdoctoral researcher has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank as postdocs are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand. “It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” says Gary McDowell, a 29-year old biologist doing his second postdoc. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.” The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs. This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train from about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 to 56,800 in 2009, flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

Possible solutions span a wide gamut, from halving the number of postdocs over time, to creating a new tier of staff scientists that would be better paid but one thing people seem to agree on is that simply adding more money to the pot will not by itself solve the oversupply. Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands recently organizing a Future of Research conference in Boston that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change. “How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. “Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run."

Highway driving, which is less complex than city driving, has proved easy enough for self-driving cars, but busy downtown streets—where cars and pedestrians jockey for space and behave in confusing and surprising ways—are more problematic. Now Will Knight reports that Michigan's Department of Transportation and 13 companies involved with developing automated driving technology are constructing a 30-acre, $6.5 million driverless town near Ann Arbor to test self-driving cars in an urban environment. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms and mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems. “I think it’s a great idea,” says John Leonard, a professor at MIT who led the development of a self-driving vehicle for a challenge run by DARPA in 2007. “It is important for us to try to collect statistically meaningful data about the performance of self-driving cars. Repeated operations—even in a small-scale environment—can yield valuable data sets for testing and evaluating new algorithms.” The testing facility is part of broader work by the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Facility that will include putting up to 20,000 vehicles on southeastern Michigan roads. By 2021, Ann Arbor could become the first American city with a shared fleet of networked, driverless vehicles. "Ann Arbor will be seen as the leader in 21st century mobility," says Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Transportation Research Institute. "We want to demonstrate fully driverless vehicles operating within the whole infrastructure of the city within an eight-year timeline and to show that these can be safe, effective and commercially successful."

Susan Page writes at USA Today that Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA and Secretary of the Department of Defense, says Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve. "I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," says Panetta, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Panetta also says that decisions made by President Obama over the past three years have made that battle more difficult — an explosive assessment by a respected policymaker of the president he served. Not pushing the Iraqi government harder to allow a residual US force to remain when troops withdrew in 2011, a deal he says could have been negotiated with more effort "created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it's out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed." It is no surprise to Panetta that the assessment in his new book "Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace" is drawing White House ire. "Look, I've been a guy who's always been honest," Panetta says. "I've been honest in politics, honest with the people that I deal with. I've been a straight talker. Some people like it; some people don't like it. But I wasn't going to write a book that kind of didn't express what I thought was the case."

Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that although 30 percent of Americans don't drink at all and another 30 percent consume, on average less than one drink per week, the top 10 percent of American drinkers - 24 million adults over age 18 - consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week accounting for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. That works out to a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels, 18 bottles of wine, or three 24-can cases of beer. "I agree that it’s hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day," says Philip J. Cook author of "Paying the Tab," an economically-minded examination of the costs and benefits of alcohol control in the US. But "there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey." The shape of this usage curve follows a Pareto Distribution which states that the top 20 percent of buyers for most any consumer product account for fully 80 percent of sales. "One consequence is that the heaviest drinkers are of greatly disproportionate importance to the sales and profitability of the alcoholic-beverage industry," writes Cook. "If the top decile somehow could be induced to curb their consumption level to that of the next lower group (the ninth decile), then total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent."

Jeremy Hsu reports that the US Navy has been testing a large-scale swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. In the test, large ship that the Navy sometimes calls a high-value unit, HVU, is making its way down the river’s thalweg, escorted by 13 small guard boats. Between them, they carry a variety of payloads, loud speakers and flashing lights, a .50-caliber machine gun and a microwave direct energy weapon or heat ray. Detecting the enemy vessel with radar and infrared sensors, they perform a series of maneuvers to encircle the craft, coming close enough to the boat to engage it and near enough to one another to seal off any potential escape or access to the ship they are guarding. They blast warnings via loudspeaker and flash their lights. The HVU is now free to safely move away. Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), points out that a maneuver that required 40 people had just dropped down to just one. “Think about it as replicating the functions that a human boat pilot would do. We’ve taken that capability and extended it to multiple [unmanned surface vehicles] operating together… within that, we’ve designed team behaviors,” says Robert Brizzolara. The timing of the briefing happens to coincide with the 14-year anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 sailors. It’s an anniversary that Klunder observes with a unique sense of responsibility. “If we had this capability there on that day. We could have saved that ship. I never want to see the USS Cole happen again.”

Nellie Bowles writes in Recode that three of the most prominent high tech entrepreneurs involved with Tony Hsieh’s project to build a startup city in Downtown Las Vegas have recently committed suicide, sending the tight-knit community into a tailspin. In January 2013, Jody Sherman, the 48-year-old founder of Ecomom, one of the most prominent Vegas tech-funded startups, shot himself while in his car. His company had been going south. In January 2014, 24-year-old Ovik Banerjee, who was part of the first Venture for America group in Vegas and an integral member of the Downtown Project team, leapt from his Town Terrace apartment in downtown. In May 2014, Matt Berman, the 50-year-old founder of Bolt Barber, the flagship shop at the center of the Container Park, was found in his home in an apparent suicide by hanging. Whether or not the suicides are statistically significant, the deaths have clearly shaken the entrepreneurs.

According to Alyson Shontell, in a social media age where word of success and failure travels fast, entrepreneurs say it's harder than ever to run a company — and it's harder than ever to fail. "It was a hell of a lot of work for not a hell of a lot of return," says Dave McClure, an investor in Ecomom and the entrepreneur behind investment firm 500Startups. "And then there are days when you sit in a corner and cry. You can't really do anything else. You don't have a social life. You don't really want to interact with family and friends because there's just not much context for them. Your world revolves around your startup and it's all about trying to survive and not look like an idiot in front of employees." "In the past, failure was very contained," another entrepreneur says. "When you failed, you felt bad around your family, the people you raised money from, but it wasn't as public. Failure in an era of social media and social video and global events is a very public thing. Jody [Sherman] put himself out there this time and became very respected for what he was doing. That possibility of very public shame is something that didn't exist before." Brad Feld writes that if you are ever considering committing suicide, reach out to someone and ask for help. "It’s ok to fail. It’s ok to lose. It’s ok to be depressed. If you are contemplating suicide, get help. If you have an entrepreneurial friend contemplating suicide, do your best to get them help."

Mo Costandi writes at The Guardian that a new study shows that losing one’s sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins. “Olfactory dysfunction was an independent risk factor for death, stronger than several common causes of death, such as heart failure, lung disease and cancer,” the researchers concluded, “indicating that this evolutionarily ancient special sense may signal a key mechanism that affects human longevity.” Jayant Pinto of the University of Chicago prepared special felt-tipped pens scented with five common odors—fish, leather, orange, peppermint and rose—and presented them one by one to volunteers. After each presentation, the volunteer was shown pictures and names of four possible answers, and was asked to select the correct one. Getting one answer wrong was considered okay, or “normosmic”, but two or three errors labelled a person as “hyposmic”, or smell-deficient, and four or five counted them as “anosmic”, or unable to smell. Five years later, the researchers tracked down as many of the same participants as they could, and asked them to perform this smell test a second time. During the five-year gap between the two tests, 430 of the original participants (or 12.5% of the total number) had died. Of these, 39% who had failed the first smell test died before the second test, compared to 19% of those who had moderate smell loss on the first test, and just 10% of those with a healthy sense of smell. Despite taking issues such as age, nutrition, smoking habits, poverty and overall health into account, researchers found those with the poorest sense of smell were still at greatest risk.

The researchers stress that it is unlikely to be a cause of death itself, arguing only that it is a harbinger for what is to come. The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odours. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.

Tricia Romano reports at the Seattle Times that Susie Lee and Katrina Hess have developed Siren, a new online dating app designed to protect against men who inundate women with messages that are by turns gross, hilarious, objectifying and just plain sad. As online dating options have grown, Lee noticed that her friends' frustration did, too: With every good introduction often came a slew of lewd ones. "I just started looking (at online dating options) and very quickly realized how many things are out there and how immediately my 'creepy meter' went up," Lee says. Lee hopes to change the nature of the messages and put women in the driver’s seat.

The free iPhone app, currently launched to a select market in Seattle in August, allows women to peruse men’s pictures and their answers to the “Question of the Day” (“You found a magic lamp and get three wishes. What are they?”) and view their Video Challenges (“Show us a hidden gem in Seattle”). If a woman is suitably impressed by a man’s answers, she can make herself visible to him. Only then can he see what she looks like. "It’s a far more thoughtful — and cautious — approach than the one taken by the dating app of the moment, Tinder, which is effectively a “hot or not” game, with little information beyond a few photos, age and volunteered biographical tidbits," writes Romano. "And the implicit notion that it’s a “hookup” app can be uncomfortable for some women." Lee and Hess are betting that men are less shallow and want more repartee. And they know that women want a little more flirtation than crude references. After all, Siren’s motto is “Charm Someone’s Pants Off.” “Before the ‘pants off,’ it’s more about charming someone,” says Hess. “Be charming.”

David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, writes in the NYT that every year he gives his students The Talk, not as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion. According to Barash many students worry about reconciling their beliefs with evolutionary science and just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of his students are troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material. "There are a couple of ways to talk about evolution and religion, says Barash. "The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible. Stephen Jay Gould called them “nonoverlapping magisteria,” noma for short, with the former concerned with facts and the latter with values." But Barash says magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish. "As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God."

The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity - that just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator. "Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon." Next to go is the illusion of centrality. "The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism." Finally there is a third consequence of evolutionary insights: a powerful critique of theodicy, the effort to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering. "But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things. The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator."

Barash concludes The Talk by saying that, although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass his course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastic routines. "And while I respect their beliefs, the entire point of The Talk is to make clear that, at least for this biologist, it is no longer acceptable for science to be the one doing those routines."