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Submission + - FBI Retaliates on North Korea for Sony Attacks (nationalreport.net)

Submitted by barbariccow
barbariccow writes: Wednesday evening, over 1,100 documents were leaked on the Internet by a North American hacker group, revealing a lengthy list of North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un’s most embarrassing secrets, including medical records that detail his struggles with erectile dysfunction.

Submission + - Is the Higgs Boson a Piece of the Matter-Antimatter Puzzle? (stanford.edu)

Submitted by TaleSlinger
TaleSlinger writes: Why there's more matter than antimatter is one of the biggest questions confounding particle physicists and cosmologists, and it cuts to the heart of our own existence. In the time following the Big Bang, when the budding universe cooled enough for matter to form, most matter-antimatter particle pairs that popped into existence annihilated each other. Yet something tipped the balance in favor of matter, or we – and stars, planets, galaxies, life – would not be here.

The paper is based on a phenomenon called CP – or charge-parity – violation, the same phenomenon investigated by BaBar. CP violation means that nature treats a particle and its oppositely charged mirror-image version differently.

"Searching for CP violation at the LHC is tricky," Dolan said. "We've just started to look into the properties of the Higgs, and the experiments must be very carefully designed if we are to improve our understanding of how the Higgs behaves under different conditions.”

The theorists proposed that experimenters look for a process in which a Higgs decays into two tau particles, which are like supersized cousins of electrons, while the remainder of the energy from the original proton-proton collision sprays outward in two jets. Any mix of CP-even and CP-odd in the Higgs is revealed by the angle between the two jets.

"I wanted to add a CP violation measurement to our analysis, and what Matt, Martin and Michael proposed is the most viable avenue,” Philip Harris, a staff physicist at CERN and co-author of the paper said, adding that he's looking forward to all the data the LHC will generate when it starts up again early next year at its full design strength.

"Even with just a few months of data we can start to make real statements about the Higgs and CP violation," he said.

Submission + - Neil deGrasse Tyson causes social media firestorm with tweet on aliens & hum (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Twitchy, a site that monitors interesting traffic on Twitter, took note on Sunday of a tweet by the celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson over how aliens might regard humans. He tweeted, “Aliens, seeing Humans kill over land, politics, religion, & skin color, would surely ask, ‘What the f*%k is wrong with you?’” As far as can be determined, Tyson is not personally in contact with aliens and does not have any basis to suggest that they are appalled at human behavior or that they used salty language. However, his views on morally superior aliens looking down on humans seem to track with those of C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist.

Submission + - Stem Cell Treatment to Regrow Torn Meniscus 'Very, Very Close' (healthline.com)

Submitted by LesterMoore
LesterMoore writes: In a new study, researchers put 3D model meniscus in sheep's knees. (Their joints are a lot like humans'.) The model attracted stem cells to it and supplied growth factors and eventually biodegraded. New working menisci grew and the sheep regained full mobility. Orthopedists say similar treatments for humans are "very, very close," according to one article.

Submission + - Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.

Finally along with knowledge, we’re governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we’re familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf’s law. One of the reasons that “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” substituted for Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It’s much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.

Submission + - New Apps Mark the Digital Return of the Rhythm Method

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Count natural family planning among the ways young people are hearkening back to the practices of their grandparents as Olga Khazan reports at The Atlantic that new apps are letting women know if they can have sex with their partners without a condom or a contraceptive pill using calendar-based contraception. The underlying motive is not so much trendiness as it is a dissatisfaction with the Pill, which is still the most common form of birth control for women. In a recent CDC study of 12,000 American women, 63 percent of women who stopped using the Pill did so due to its side effects (PDF). And while as of 2010, only about 22 percent of women used “periodic abstinence," an umbrella term that includes counting days, measuring temperature, and tracking cervical mucus to predict fertility, their ranks may grow as new apps and other technologies make it easier to manage the historically error-prone task of measuring, recording, and analyzing one’s cycle in order to stay baby-free.

CycleBeads, for example, is an iPhone app that allows women to track fertility based on the Standard Days Method, a system developed by Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health in which specific days of each woman’s cycle are considered infertile. While the method is not as effective for women who have cycles outside of the 26-32 day range, Leslie Heyer says that its success rate is about 95 percent for “perfect use” and 88 percent for “typical use,” which would mean it beats condoms and falls just short of the Pill. “At first [my husband and I] were worried,” says Kate, a woman who began using CycleBeads nearly three years ago after experiencing weight gain and moodiness on the Pill, “but then we got used to it and have grown to trust it. I honestly can't imagine ever going back on the Pill.”

Submission + - 2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by cyberspittle
cyberspittle writes: Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

Comment Re:Let her be a princess who like science. (Score 1) 584

by dpilot (#48521913) Attached to: Programmer Father Asks: What Gets Little Girls Interested In Science?

I never tried to mold my daughter, but I also made sure that opportunities for science and technology were there for her. There were numerous signs along the way that she was headed in the direction of the sciences. She's always been interested in critters - We used to go to the Maine seashore, and one of our big activies there was exploring tide-pools. She "adopted" woolie bears in our front yard one fall, building villages for them. When she was in 5th grade, I read "The Hot Zone" with her. For years after she kept a picture of the ebola virus on the wall of her room, and we still trade ebola news over a decade later.

She got her bachelor's and master's degree in biological sciences, and started her PhD. About a year in, she discovered that she really didn't like the life sacrifices of the PhD lifestyle required, especially of a woman. She also realized that she likes the outreach side of science more - bringing science to students and others. She's managed to find a job in that field, while her husband continues to work on his PhD.

She's one terriffic daughter and person.

Comment Re:A nice dream (Score 4, Insightful) 62

by dpilot (#48510905) Attached to: 'Mirage Earth' Exoplanets May Have Burned Away Chances For Life

Earth has been advertising itself for more like a half-billion years. An atmosphere with free oxygen is rare, at least we haven't found one yet out of the explanets we've discovered. To be sure, we haven't studied the atmosphere on very many, but at the very least we know how to do so, at least for some.

There has been some suggestion of merely chemical processes that can give rise to free oxygen in the atmosphere, but I don't know how likely (or un) those processes are, and whether they cause the levels the Earth has, especially with traces of methane present at the same time.

We know our atmosphere has been biosculpted, and that would be something others could have seen for half a billion years.

One must assume that any alien civilization capable of interstellar travel would know at least as much as we do about the relevant technologies. That would include something Keplar-like, only better. You don't want to take your first interstellar steps to a place with no relevant planets.

Submission + - A Unique World-Wide Collaboration Around an Open Source Offline Password Keeper (indiegogo.com)

Submitted by swv3752
swv3752 writes: Introducing the Mooltipass, a physical encrypted password keeper that remembers your credentials so you don't have to. With this device, you can generate and safely store long and complex passwords unique to each website you use. A personal PIN-locked smartcard allows the decryption of your credentials and ensures that only you have access to them. Simply visit a website and the device will ask for your confirmation to enter your credentials when login is required.

Over thirty people from all around the globe contributed to bring this project to where it is now, including software and firmware engineers, designers, mechanical engineers, artists, project managers, students and security engineers. Our project started a year ago with a call for feedback and contributors. It turned out that people were thrilled by the idea of an open source password keeper and didn't hesitate to commit some (if not all!) of their personal time to join this adventure. Now there is three days left to finish funding.

Submission + - Big Banks Will Vie For Your Attention With Cardless ATMs and VR

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: In the year that bitcoin began to grow up and Apple Pay was born—and massive cyberattacks—the country’s largest financial institutions want you to imagine themselves as incubators. Three of the big banks opened up innovation labs to imagine what’s next in mobile banking; some are starting their own accelerators. Meanwhile, the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years. Now an industry not exactly known for speed is approaching 2015 with an ethos that sounds more Silicon Valley than Wall Street, touting visions of fridges that shop for you, Google Glass and Oculus Rifts, and the kind of futuristic security they hope will inspire consumers to trust them and their technology in the first place.

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