Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Anniversary: Scientists in the Public Interest (sagepub.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This special issue of the subscription Journal of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is free access in celebration of the Bulletin's 70th anniversary. 'Scientists in the Public Interest' is a must-read, with articles from Frank von Hippel, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Oppenheimer, Gavin Schmidt, and many more. From the introduction: 'Since a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project founded it in 1945, the Bulletin has aimed to present the analyses of top scientific and policy experts in language that is accessible to high government leaders and everyday citizens alike, with the rather ambitious goal of saving humanity from itself. The list of those whose work has graced the Bulletin’s pages gives heft to the term “expert”: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mikhail Gorbachev populate only a tiny portion of that roster of great minds. And the brilliance behind the Bulletin is by no means confined to its past. Its Board of Sponsors now includes 17 Nobel laureates, along with Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, and other luminaries.1 The magazine’s Science and Security Board, which sets the now-ubiquitous Doomsday Clock each January, is home to a revolving cast of leading scientific and public policy lights who provide the magazine’s readers with expertise on nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, climate change, synthetic biology, and other potentially catastrophic threats to the future of humanity.'

Submission + - Maybe chocolate isn't that good for you after all.

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The CBC is running a pair of stories debunking chocolate's benefits to the average consumer:

Scientists have zeroed in on a family of fragile molecules known as cocoa flavanols. Research suggests they can relax blood vessels, improve blood flow and, as Small found in his study, even increase activity in a part of the brain involved with age related memory loss. But those flavanols largely disappear once the cocoa bean is heated, fermented and processed into chocolate. In other words, making chocolate destroys the very ingredient that is supposed to make it healthy.

There are lots of foods that contain potentially healthy flavanols, along with other bioactive compounds in complex combinations. So the question is: Would academic scientists in publicly funded institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate industry wasn’t supporting so much of the research?

Link to the second story

Submission + - The Tragedy of the American Military (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Excellent, excellent read by James Fallows: The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

Submission + - Looking back at US-Cuba relations: the good, the bad, and the ugly (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: A terrific look back through the last few decades at all the things that went wrong in the US-Cuba relationship, starting with the 1959 revolution that saw Fidel Castro come to power.The section on the CIA's internal review of the Bay of Pigs debacle is rather comical, in a sad way: 'The 150-page document, written by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, found fault with nearly all aspects of the endeavor, which included few personnel who even spoke Spanish; the report “was so offensive to agency officials that Director John McCone ordered all but one copy destroyed.'" It's difficult to learn from one's mistakes with that attitude.

Submission + - 48,000 Federal Employees Potentially Affected by Second Background Check Hack (nextgov.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Office of Personnel Management is alerting more than 48,000 federal employees their personal information may have been exposed following a breach at KeyPoint Government Solutions, which conducts background investigations of federal employees seeking security clearances.

"As we examine the potential impact on DHS employees, we are committed to ensuring the privacy of our workforce and will take all appropriate measures to safeguard it,"
Was the PII encrypted?
Is there a DHS requirement that all PII be encrypted?

Submission + - Geoengineering Climate Cooling With Microbubbles

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Scientists from the University of Leeds have proposed that brighter ships' wakes, created by reducing their component bubbles' sizes, could increase their reflectivity and produce a cooling effect on the climate. The technology is touted as being available and simple, but side-effects might include such things as wetter conditions in some regions. Still, compared to many speculative geoengineering projects, "The one advantage about this technology — of trying to generate these tiny 'micro-bubbles' — is that the technology does already exist," according to Leeds' Prof Piers Forster.

Submission + - Preventing a man-made pandemic (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: More than at any time since the Cold War, scientists are tinkering with viruses to make them more deadly and more able to spread. Could the latest science be militarized and misused to make biological weapons? Fortunately, there are ways to make sure that it is not. Filippa Lentzos, a senior research fellow at King’s College London, studies contemporary and historical understandings of the threat of biological weapons, bioterrorism, and the strategic use of infection in conflict. She writes here about how states can go about fostering responsible science, especially in the area of "gain-of-function" research, where scientists tinker with viruses to make them more deadly and more easily spread. As she puts it: "...an effective regulatory framework to prevent gain-of-function research from causing man-made pandemics requires both scientists and states to play their part."

Submission + - Robots sell themselves in this California store (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: What better way to sell telepresence technologies than having the store employees themselves appear via robot? At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots.

Submission + - Smithsonian Museum Digitizes Entire Collection, Plans Release on New Year's Day

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art, will release their entire collections online Jan. 1, 2015, providing unprecedented access to one of the world’s most important holdings of Asian and American art. The vast majority of the 40,000 artworks have never before been seen by the public, and more than 90 percent of the images will be in high resolution and without copyright restrictions for noncommercial use. The Freer and Sackler galleries are the first Smithsonian and the only Asian art museums to digitize and release their entire collections, and in so doing join just a handful of museums in the U.S. The release is the result of a massive staff effort to photograph and create digital records for its objects, requiring almost 6,000 staff hours in the past year alone and resulting in more than 10 terabytes of data and 50,000 images. The galleries also hosted the Smithsonian’s Rapid Capture Pilot Project, an emerging method of quickly and efficiently digitizing vast numbers of smaller objects.

Submission + - Canadian Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Warrantless Cellphone Searches (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprising decision, a split Supreme Court of Canada ruled this morning that police can search cellphones without a warrant incident to an arrest. The majority established some conditions, but ultimately ruled that it could navigate the privacy balance by establishing some safeguards with the practice. Michael Geist notes that a strongly worded dissent disagreed, emphasizing the privacy implications of access to cellphones and the need for judicial pre-authorization as the best method of addressing the privacy implications. The U.S. Supreme Court's June 2014 decision in Riley addressed similar issues and ruled that a warrant is needed to search a phone.

Submission + - The shale boom won't stop climate change; it may make it worse. (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Energy expert H-Holger Rogner walks through the realities of the shale-gas boom, the 'game-changer' that has brought about a drop in energy prices and greatly reduced carbon emissions. But despite the positive impact on carbon emissions, Rogner points out that the cheap gas brought about by fracking shale may already be affecting investments into renewable energy, nuclear energy, and energy efficiency by offering more attractive investment opportunities: 'At today’s prices of $4 to $5 per million British thermal units, gas-fired electricity holds a definite competitive advantage over new nuclear construction and unsubsidized renewables.' But natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide. 'A much higher share of natural gas in the energy mix would eventually raise emissions again, especially if gas not only displaces coal but also non-fossil energy sources. Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas.' Terrific information.

Submission + - Sony to Name North Korea as Source of Hack Attack (recode.net)

Submitted by seven of five
seven of five writes: Sony Pictures will officially name North Korea as the source of a hacking attack that has exposed sensitive files and brought down its corporate network last week. An announcement could come as soon as today.

Submission + - Cloak and Dagger from Tripoli: How Libya Gave Up its WMD (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: This is the first installment of a five-part series exploring the painstaking diplomacy and intelligence efforts that led Libya and its quixotic leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, to relinquish that country's weapons of mass destruction. Author William Tobey is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He was most recently deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, managing the US government’s largest program to prevent nuclear proliferation and terrorism by detecting, securing, and disposing of dangerous nuclear material. A fascinating story.

Submission + - Shale: Gas, Oil...and Nuclear Waste? (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Chris Neuzil is a senior scientist with the National Research Program of the US Geological Survey who thinks the qualities of shale make it the perfect rock in which to safely and permanently house high-level nuclear waste. Given the recent discovery that water is much more of an issue than originally thought for the tuff rock at Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Utah, the unique qualities of shale, along with its ubiquitous presence in the US, could make shale rock a better choice for the 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel currently sitting above ground at nuclear power facilities throughout the country. France, Switzerland, and Belgium are all considering repositories in shale, but it hasn't been studied much in the US. 'Shale is the only rock type likely to house high-level nuclear waste in other countries that has never been seriously considered by the US high-level waste program. The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads. It is an opportunity to include shale in a truly comprehensive examination of disposal options.'

Submission + - Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering on 2012 Election 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a political party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state’s 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "”If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."

The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"

Slashdot Top Deals

Never trust a computer you can't repair yourself.

Close