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Submission + - Research Shows RISC vs CISC Doesn't Matter 1

Submitted by fsterman
fsterman writes: The power advantages brought by the RISC instruction sets used in Power and ARM chips is often pitted against the X86's efficiencies of scale. It's difficult to asses how much the difference between instruction sets matter because teasing out the theoretical efficiency of an ISA from the proficiency of a chip's design team, technical expertise of its manufacturer, and support for architecture-specific optimizations in compilers is nearly impossible . However, new research examining the performance of a variety of ARM, MIPS, and X86 processors gives weight to Intel's conclusion: the benefits of a given ISA to the power envelope of a chip are minute.

Submission + - GOG Making Inroads to DRM-Free Movie Distribution

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Good Old Games is prepping to bring another medium into its trademark DRM-free digital distribution platform: movies! To get things rolling, the shop is already serving a couple of dozen indie films as we speak. Currently the bigger studios are waiting for someone else gnaw on the rock and prove that selling DRM-free movies works. "Their reaction was kind of funny because ... they know that DRM doesn't work because every single movie is on torrent sites or illegal places at launch or even before," Marcin Iwinski, CD Projekt RED and GOG joint-CEO reminds us. GOG plans to bring more movie titles on a weekly basis.

Submission + - New smartphone app can detect newborn jaundice in minutes (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Jaundice in newborns is one of the last things a parent wants to deal with, but it’s unfortunately a common condition in babies less than a week old. Skin that turns yellow can be a sure sign that a newborn is jaundiced and isn’t adequately eliminating the chemical bilirubin. But that discoloration is sometimes hard to see, and severe jaundice left untreated can harm a baby. University of Washington engineers and physicians have developed a smartphone application that checks for jaundice in newborns and can deliver results to parents and pediatricians within minutes. It could serve as a screening tool to determine whether a baby needs a blood test – the gold standard for detecting high levels of bilirubin.

“Virtually every baby gets jaundiced, and we’re sending them home from the hospital even before bilirubin levels reach their peak,” said James Taylor, a UW professor of pediatrics and medical director of the newborn nursery at UW Medical Center. “This smartphone test is really for babies in the first few days after they go home. A parent or health care provider can get an accurate picture of bilirubin to bridge the gap after leaving the hospital.”

The research team will present its results at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing in September in Seattle.

Submission + - Euro Bank Santander Commissions Study on Bitcoin's Impact on Banking (hashreport.net)

Submitted by Nikkos
Nikkos writes: Digital currency news website HashReport broke the news Monday that European megabank Santander has commissioned a study to "Analyze the impact of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on banks and devise a strategic course of action."

The study is being facilitated as a challenge through Yegii, an 'Insight Network' founded by Trond Undheim. Undheim is also a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as Managing Director at Tautec Consulting.

The challenge was initiated by Julio Faura — Head of Corporate development for Banco Santander. According to Dr. Undheim, Faura was "looking for additional outside perspective onto the topic of Bitcoin. While acquiring consulting services from top tier consulting firms can be exciting, he thought that an outsider, multidisciplinary perspective, would be particularly helpful."

Submission + - Time Warner Cable Service Is Down and No One Seems Surprised (geekrepublic.org)

Submitted by criticalmass24
criticalmass24 writes: It seems like there’s a sort of epidemic going on in the US as online services keep going down. After troubles over at Facebook and Gmail, it seems that ISPs are also getting “infected.” Time Warner Cable has been having troubles for the past few hours. While issues have been signaled in several areas of the country, it looks like the most affected area is the East Coast. Subscribers from North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, Indiana and more are reporting connectivity issues.

Submission + - Human altruism has early roots (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by i kan reed
i kan reed writes: According to Hillary Clinton, "it takes a village to raise a child".
And new research suggests that it's exactly this attitude that created an evolutionary push towards higher cooperative functions within our species, such as language and altruism. One of the earliest evolutionary distinctions between the apes that became humans and our nearest relatives, chimpanzees, is the apparent evolution of cooperative breeding. The term cooperative breeding is defined as

the caring for infants not just by the mother, but also by other members of the family and sometimes even unrelated adults

The team's research found

a close linear correlation between the degree to which a species engages in cooperative breeding and the likelihood that members of the group would help fellow animals get the food treat.

Submission + - Fukushima Thyroid Cancer Data released (asahi.com) 1

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "The number of young people in Fukushima Prefecture who have been diagnosed with definitive or suspected thyroid gland cancer, a disease often caused by radiation exposure, now totals 104, according to prefectural officials. Of these 104, including 68 women, the number of definitive cases is 57, and one has been diagnosed with a benign tumor. The size of the tumors varies from 5 to 41 millimeters and averages 14 mm."

Submission + - Climate damage 'Irreversible' according leaked climate report 1

Submitted by SomeoneFromBelgium
SomeoneFromBelgium writes: According to Bloomberg a leaked climate report of the IPPC speaks of 'Irreversible Damage'.
The warnings in the report are, as such, not new but the tone of voice is more urgent and more direct than ever.

It states among other things that global warming already is affecting “all continents and across the oceans,” and that “Risks from mitigation can be substantial, but they do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation action,”

Submission + - Air HES System to Collect Water and Generate Electricity From the Clouds (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Using a tethered airship floating high up among the clouds, the Air HES concept is designed to yield both clean water and electricity by harvesting and condensing water vapor, which it uses to spin up an electric turbine generator to create power. The developers behind the concept claim to have built a prototype to test their theory and have also conducted feasibility studies into upping the scale of their device to produce economically viable levels of water and power.

Submission + - Limiting the teaching of the scientific process in Ohio (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by frdmfghtr
frdmfghtr writes: Over at Ars Technica, there's a story about a bill in the Ohio legislature that wants to downplay the teaching of the scientific process. From the article:
"Specifically prohibiting a discussion of the scientific process is a recipe for educational chaos. To begin with, it leaves the knowledge the kids will still receive—the things we have learned through science—completely unmoored from any indication of how that knowledge was generated or whether it's likely to be reliable. The scientific process is also useful in that it can help people understand the world around them and the information they're bombarded with; it can also help people assess the reliability of various sources of information."

Submission + - What to do about repeated internet overbilling? 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T has been overbilling my account based on overcounting DSL internet usage (they charge in 50 Gigabyte units after the first 150). I have been using a Buffalo NFinity Airstation as a managed switch to count all traffic. As you may recall, this device runs firmware based on dd-wrt and has hidden telnet functionality, so I am able to load a script to count traffic directly onto the device. I have an auto-scraper that collects the data and saves it on my computer's hard disk every 2 minutes while the computer is running. While it is not running, the 2 minute counters accumulate in RAM on the device. Power problems are not normally an issue here; and even when they are I can tell it has happened. The upshot of all this is I can measure the exact amount of download bandwidth and a guaranteed overestimate of upload bandwidth in bytes reliably. I have tested this by transferring known amounts of data and can account for every byte counted, including ethernet frame headers. AT&T's billing reporting reports usage by day only, lags two days, and uses some time basis other than midnight. It is also reading in my testing a fairly consistent 14% higher whenever the basis doesn't disturb the test by using too much bandwidth too close to midnight.

AT&T has already refused to attempt to fix the billing meter, and asserts they have tested it and found it correct. Yet they refuse to provide a realtime readout of the counter that would make independent testing trivial. I've been through the agencies (CPUC, FCC, and Weights & Measures) and can't find one that is interested, AT&T will not provide any means for reasonable independent testing of the meter. It is my understanding that if there is a meter and its calibration cannot be checked, there is a violation of the law, yet I can't find an agency that can even accept such a claim (I'm not getting "your claim is meritless", but "we don't handle that"). If indeed they are not overbilling, my claim of no way to verify the meter still stands. My options are running thin here.

So that my account can be identified by someone who recognizes the case: 7a6c74964fafd56c61e06abf6c820845cbcd4fc0 (bit commitment).

Submission + - Scientists craft seamless, ultrathin semiconductor junctions (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Scientists have developed what they believe is the thinnest-possible semiconductor, a new class of nanoscale materials made in sheets only three atoms thick. The University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that two of these single-layer semiconductor materials can be connected in an atomically seamless fashion known as a heterojunction. This result could be the basis for next-generation flexible and transparent computing, better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and solar technologies.

“Heterojunctions are fundamental elements of electronic and photonic devices,” said senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering and of physics. “Our experimental demonstration of such junctions between two-dimensional materials should enable new kinds of transistors, LEDs, nanolasers, and solar cells to be developed for highly integrated electronic and optical circuits within a single atomic plane.”

The research was published online this week in Nature Materials. The researchers discovered that two flat semiconductor materials can be connected edge-to-edge with crystalline perfection. They worked with two single-layer, or monolayer, materials – molybdenum diselenide and tungsten diselenide – that have very similar structures, which was key to creating the composite two-dimensional semiconductor.

Submission + - Australian Bureau of Meteorology accused of Criminally Adjusted Global Warming (breitbart.com)

Submitted by marcgvky
marcgvky writes: The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been caught red-handed manipulating temperature data to show "global warming" where none actually exists.

At Amberley, Queensland, for example, the data at a weather station showing 1 degree Celsius cooling per century was "homogenized" (adjusted) by the Bureau so that it instead showed a 2.5 degrees warming per century.

Submission + - Some raindrops exceed their terminal velocity (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: New research reveals that some raindrops are “super-terminal” (they travel more than 30% faster than their terminal velocity, at which air resistance prevents further acceleration due to gravity). The drops are the result of natural processes—and they make up a substantial fraction of rainfall. Whereas all drops the team studied that were 0.8 millimeters and larger fell at expected speeds, between 30% and 60% of those measuring 0.3 mm dropped at super-terminal speeds. It’s not yet clear why these drops are falling faster than expected, the researchers say. But according to one notion, the speedy drops are fragments of larger drops that have broken apart in midair but have yet to slow down. If that is indeed the case, the researchers note, then raindrop disintegration happens normally in the atmosphere and more often than previously presumed—possibly when drops collide midair or become unstable as they fall through the atmosphere. Further study could improve estimates of the total amount of rainfall a storm will produce or the amount of erosion that it can generate.

Submission + - Uber Has a Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft, Says Report (theverge.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The folks over at The Verge claim that 'Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors.' Interviews and documents apparently show Uber reps ordering and canceling Lyft rides by the thousands, following a playbook with advice designed to prevent Lyft from flagging their accounts. 'Uber appears to be replicating its program across the country. One email obtained by The Verge links to an online form for requesting burner phones, credit cards, and driver kits — everything an Uber driver needs to get started, which recruiters often carry with them.' Is this an example of legal-but-hard-hitting business tactics, or is Uber overstepping its bounds? The so-called sharing economy seems just as cutthroat — if not more so — than any other industry out there.

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