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Submission + - What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events.

Submission + - Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

Submission + - West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse is under way (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds enough water to raise global seas by several feet, is thinning. Scientists have been warning of its collapse, based on theories, but with few firm predictions or timelines.

University of Washington researchers used detailed topography maps and computer modeling to show that the collapse appears to have already begun. The fast-moving Thwaites Glacier will likely disappear in a matter of centuries, researchers say, raising sea level by nearly 2 feet. That glacier also acts as a linchpin on the rest of the ice sheet, which contains enough ice to cause another 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of global sea level rise. The study is published May 16 in Science.

“There’s been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “This study provides a more quantitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place.”

Submission + - Thorium: the wonder fuel that wasn't (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel: For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed. Besides the extraordinary costs involved, In the process of pursuing thorium-based reactors a fair amount of uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory. On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site). 'Because such disposal would violate the agency’s formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms.'

Submission + - China Using Troop of Trained Monkeys to Guard Air Base

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: No, they don't have guns and they're not trained to call down airstrikes. Instead the small troop of macaques have been trained to guard air bases from birds who often get caught in aircraft engines. Government sources say the monkeys have proven more effective than netting, scarecrows, firecrackers and soldiers with live ammunition in dealing with birds. From the article: 'The macaques are trained to respond to precise whistle commands from their handlers, according to the Chinese military, leaping into action, clambering up trees to destroy nests and scare away birds, according to an account on China’s Air Force News Web site on Sunday. The particular air force base employing the monkeys was left unidentified, described simply as being in the Beijing military zone. Base commanders in the account said the monkeys have destroyed more than 180 nests, at a pace of six to eight nests per monkey per day.'

Submission + - Astrophysicists Build a Virtual Universe (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In the most detailed effort yet, astrophysicists and cosmologists have modeled the evolution of the universe right down to the formation of individual galaxies. The results of the mammoth computer simulation neatly match multiple astronomical observations, ranging from the distribution of galaxies in massive galaxy clusters to the amounts of neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies large and small. The findings once again neatly confirm cosmologists' standard theory of the basic ingredients of the universe and how it evolved—a result that may disappoint researchers hoping for new puzzles to solve.

Submission + - In SF: An App for Auctioning Off Your Public Parking Spot (sfweekly.com)

Submitted by trbdavies
trbdavies writes: "Only in San Francisco" used to refer to issues like whether public nudity should be restricted to certain hours of the day. Now I hear it most often in connection with the interplay between the city and tech companies. SF Weekly reports on one such development: "Anyone who's visited San Francisco for 35 minutes knows that easy parking is a rare find. Enter Paolo Dobrowolny, an Italian tech bro who decided San Francisco was the perfect spot to test out his new experiment. Here's how it works: You find a parking spot, revel a little, let Monkey Parking know where you're located, and watch the bidding begin. Finally, give your spot to the wealthiest victim willing to pay the highest price for your spot. Drive away that much richer. "

Submission + - How did Egyptians move pyramid stones? Mystery may be solved (cnet.com) 3

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Alien pyramid-building theories take a blow as a new study shows Egyptians may have used water to help move the massive stones.

Throughout history, people have looked upon the ancient pyramids of Egypt and scratched their heads, wondering how all those giants blocks of stone were moved across the desert and stacked up high. Physicists from the University of Amsterdam and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter believe they have an answer as to how those stones were moved.

The first part of the equation is that stones and statues were placed on sledges and pulled across the sand. If you've ever walked on a beach barefoot, you know it's slowgoing when you're in dry sand, but much easier when you're walking on wet sand. The physicists say the correct amount of dampness in the sand halves the amount of pulling force required to move a sledge with a honking huge stone on it.

To test the idea, the scientists created a lab model of how it would work, using a small version of a sledge pulled across a tray of sand. They measured the amount of pulling force needed to move the sledge as well as the stiffness of the sand.

"Capillary bridges arise when water is added to the sand. These are small water droplets that bind the sand grains together. In the presence of the correct quantity of water, wet desert sand is about twice as stiff as dry sand. A sledge glides far more easily over firm desert sand simply because the sand does not pile up in front of the sledge as it does in the case of dry sand," the report reads.

Submission + - Microsoft fixes big IE bug -- even on Windows XP (cnet.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The browser bug was so severe that the US and UK governments had issued warnings. Surprisingly, this brings an update for the outmoded XP.

Microsoft has issued a fix for a dangerous Internet Explorer bug that left the browser highly vulnerable across every major version — including those that run on Windows XP.

The patch, delivered at 10 a.m. Thursday, comes out of Microsoft's usual Patch Tuesday cycle because of its severity. It affected IE 6 through 11, and allowed attackers to install malware on your computer without your permission that could be used to steal personal data, track online behavior, or gain control of the computer.

Submission + - AT&T reportedly considering $40 billion DirecTV acquisition (theverge.com)

Submitted by rcht148
rcht148 writes: If the idea of Comcast buying out Time Warner Cable to become the largest cable company in America wasn't enough to make you worry about media consolidation, news tonight from the Wall Street Journal just might. Reportedly, AT&T has approached DirecTV to begin "possible acquisition" talks, a deal that the WSJ says could be worth over $40 billion. If it were to happen, it would give the combined company something on the order of 26 million TV subscribers, making it second only to the hypothetical Comcast/TWC combination of 30 million.

Submission + - In 1972, Scientists Discovered a 2 Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor in W Africa

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In June 1972, nuclear scientists at the Pierrelatte uranium enrichment plant in south-east France noticed a strange deficit in the amount of uranium-235 they were processing. That’s a serious problem in a uranium enrichment plant where every gram of fissionable material has to be carefully accounted for. The ensuing investigation found that the anomaly originated in the ore from the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon, which contained only 0.600% uranium-235 compared to 0.7202% for all other ore on the planet. It turned out that this ore was depleted because it had gone critical some 2 billion years earlier, creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction that lasted for 300,000 years and using up the missing uranium-235 in the process. Since then, scientists have studied this natural reactor to better understand how buried nuclear waste spreads through the environment and also to discover whether the laws of physics that govern nuclear reactions may have changed in the 1.5 billion years since the reactor switched off. Now a review of the science that has come out of Oklo shows how important this work has become but also reveals that there is limited potential to gather more data. After an initial flurry of interest in Oklo, mining continued and the natural reactors--surely among the most extraordinary natural phenomena on the planet-- have all been mined out.

Submission + - How the USPS Killed Digital Mail (insidesources.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 2013, a startup called Outbox drew a lot of attention for its ambitious goal: digitizing everybody's snail mail. It was a nice dream; no more walking down your driveway 6 days away to clear out the useless junk it contained. But less than a year later, Outbox shut down. This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. "We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said, their business model "will never work anyway. Digital is a fad." The USPS wouldn't work with them to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business.

Submission + - In Victory for Obama, Court Backs Rules for Coal Pollution (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: In a major environmental victory for the Obama administration, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate the smog-causing pollution from coal-fired power plants that wafts across state lines from 27 Midwestern and Appalachian states to the East Coast.

The 6-to-2 ruling upholds a centerpiece of what has become a signature of President Obama’s environmental agenda: a series of new Clean Air Act regulations aimed at cutting pollution from coal-fired power plants. Republicans and the coal industry have criticized the effort as a “war on coal.”

Legal experts said the decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, signaled that the Obama administration’s efforts to use the Clean Air Act to fight global warming could also withstand legal challenges. The E.P.A. is expected to unveil in June a sweeping new climate change regulation, using the authority of the Clean Air Act to rein in carbon pollution from coal plants.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot : The gas leak problem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After many years I now have a backup of all my digital data in (at least) two physical locations. But what do people recommend to backup my physical data? And then how to prove my identity?

I call it 'gas leak', because a gas leak in my town caused an explosion that leveled the house. That would have destroyed all my paperwork that proves who I am. If I'd come home from work and said 'buy that's my house', how would I prove it knowing my key no longer fits the smoldering lock?

If I'd left my wallet at home, my bank cards would have been destroyed so I couldn't withdraw money or book into a hotel. Or if I'd left my phone at the office I wouldn't know anyone's number to call, or get anyone to vouch for me.

What preventative steps can you take?

(Since having this nightmare, I've exported my phones VCF file to an online repo, make online notes of all my bank account numbers and passport ID, keep ICE numbers with me at all times (separate from phone/wallet), and hidden a spare mobile phone and house key in a box in a nearby field, but there must be more to do!)

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