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Submission + - Urban foxes may be self-domesticating in our midst (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In a famous Siberian experiment carried out the 1950s, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation. The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark.

Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication.

Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. And males and females had very similar skull shapes. All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome.

Submission + - New Office.com website rolling out to Microsoft 365 users next month

Submitted by techtsp
techtsp writes: Microsoft Office is working to roll out a new web interface. As a result, the Office.com web portal will receive a major design overhaul in the days to come. Apparently, the company is nearly finished working on the new Office.com layout, which will soon be rolled out to all Microsoft 365 subscribers worldwide. Although Microsoft will start rolling out the new Office.com to Microsoft 365 customers sometime next month, a complete rollout is likely to be finished by July 2020. Microsoft aims to improve page loading performance for office.com and portal.office.com users by removing redirection from portal.office.com. Hence, users will land on the new and improved office.com.

Comment Eliminates Need for Pro Versions (Score 1) 55

by evenmoreconfused (#60001356) Attached to: You Can Now Manage Windows 10 Devices Through G Suite

Does this mean we can lose the domain, and along with it the need for an extra $100 per station to buy Pro versions of Win 10?

The only things we use Pro versions for are Group Policy and WSUS, which only (really) work on domains. If G-suite can do the management without needing a domain, home versions (which can’t join domains) should work fine!

Submission + - Air Pollution Falls By Unprecedented Levels In Major Global Cities (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lockdowns restricting travel and industry imposed to halt the spread of coronavirus have resulted in unprecedented reductions in deadly air pollution around the world, new analysis shows. Major cities that suffer from the world's worst air pollution have seen reductions of deadly particulate matter by up to 60% from the previous year, during a three-week lockdowns period. Researchers from IQAir — a global air quality information and tech company — studied 10 major cities around the world which have relatively high numbers of coronavirus cases and Covid-19 lockdown measures.

The study compared levels of harmful microscopic particulate matter known as PM 2.5. The pollutant, which is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, is considered particularly dangerous as it can lodge deep into the lungs and pass into other organs and the bloodstream, causing serious health risks. Seven out of the 10 cities studied, including New Delhi, Seoul, Wuhan and Mumbai, saw significant improvements in air quality. Those with historically higher levels of PM2.5 pollution witnessed the most substantial drops in pollution. The report was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which this year is focused on climate action.

Submission + - US Accused Of 'Modern Piracy' For Redirecting Face Mask Shipment From Germany (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Berlin's police chief Barbara Slowik apparently told Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper, that a shipment of 200,000 3M face masks was rerouted to the United States. Andreas Geisel, a Berlin interior senator, also confirmed that the masks were "confiscated." German broadcaster RBB stated that the shipment was diverted by American authorities. “We consider this an act of modern piracy. This is not how you deal with transatlantic partners,” Geisel said. "Even in times of global crisis there should be no wild west methods. I am urging the [German] federal government to demand the U.S.A. respect international rules,” the senator wrote in a statement. In related development on medical supplies, Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday it would be a "mistake" for the U.S. to limit exports of medical supplies to Canada in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic after Minnesota manufacturing giant 3M said it has received a request from the Trump administration to stop exporting N95 respirators to Canada and Latin America as demand grows in the U.S. Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his state, which has been especially hard-hit, had looked to China for ventilator supplies and had obtained 1,000 from the Chinese government with the help of billionaires Joseph and Clara Tsai and Alibaba founder Jack Ma, despite the on-going trade war against China launched by the U.S.

Submission + - SETI@Home Search For Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs," for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now. Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper.

Submission + - I need suggestions for rugged ARM systems 7

Submitted by pecosdave
pecosdave writes: I need suggestions for commercially made ARM systems that will work in temperature ranges from -35F to 140F (-37C to 60C) for an engineering project. These things are going to be in metal boxes on the side of Texas Highways. The existing Intel systems we're using in other areas are all fan-less, but I'm not going to rule out systems with fans. Considering the extremes of Texas temperatures I'm actually contemplating putting fans on top of our fan-less systems anyways.

Almost everything I can find pre-made with ARM is a bare board, or something not nearly as temperature tolerant as some Intel systems I can find. The very nature of an ARM processors should be more tolerant simply because they produce less heat, but I can't seem to find any manufacturers exploiting that fact.

Comment Re: Guess (Score 1) 370

Actually the first BASIC I learned was Wang BASIC on a Wang 2200 (in 1975, five years before the IBM PC came out), but I didnâ(TM)t think anyone would remember that.

However, I had already learned a half-dozen languages in college before that (COBOL, 360/ASM, FORTRAN, PL/1, etc), and IITRAN in high school in 1970.

Submission + - Canal+ commits copyfraud, gets Banksy video removed from YouTube (boingboing.net)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: In October, a delightful prank by the artist Banksy involved a painting of his shredding itself shortly after a Sotheby's bidder committed to spending £1.04m to buy it.

Banksy shot his own video of the stunt and posted it to Youtube. The video was widely reused by news networks in their coverage of the prank, including by the French giant Canal+. Canal+ didn't just make a fair use of Banksy's video, though: they also fraudulently claimed copyright over his footage with Youtube's ContentID filter, resulting in his video being censored.

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