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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 + - French Cabbies Say They're Going To Block Paris Roads On Monday Over Uber

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Parisian taxi drivers have vowed to block roads leading into the French capital on Monday to protest a court's refusal to ban urban ridesharing service UberPOP. Like their counterparts in large cities across the globe, Parisian taxi drivers are fed up with what they see as unfair competition from Uber's popular smartphone taxi service. UberPOP, which uses non-professional drivers using their own cars to take on passengers at budget rates, has 160,000 users in France, according to the company. A commercial court in Paris ruled on Friday that a new law making it harder for Uber drivers to solicit business could not be enforced until the government had published full details of the restrictions. "It's the straw that breaks the camel's back," said Ibrahima Sylla, president of France Taxis, whose organisation has joined several others in calling for the early morning protest on Monday. They have urged taxi drivers to gather at the northern Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport and the southern Orly airport at 05:00 am before slowly converging on the city in a bid to block arterial highways. "This is a fight against Uber. We're fed up. Allowing UberPOP means leaving 57,000 French taxis high and dry, and thus 57,000 families. And that is out of the question," said Sylla.

Submission + - Small Bank in Kansas Creates the Bank Account of the Future 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nathaniel Popper writes at the NYT that the Citizens Bank of Weir, Kansas, or CBW, has been taken apart and rebuilt, from its fiber optic cables up, so it can offer services not available at even the nation’s largest bank. The creation of the new bank, and the maintenance of the old one, are the work of Suresh Ramamurthi and his wife, Suchitra Padmanabhan who were born in India and ended up buying the bank in Kansas in 2009 after living in Silicon Valley and passing through jobs at Google and Lehman Brothers. Their goal was to find solutions to logjams that continue to vex consumers all over the country, such as the obstacles that slow money moving from one bank to another and across international borders. The new services that CBW is providing, like instant payments to any bank in the United States, direct remittance transfers abroad and specialized debit cards that can be set for particular purchases, such as those at specific stores, or at specific times might seem as if they should be painless upgrades in an age of high-frequency trading and interplanetary space missions. But the slowness of current methods of moving money is a widely acknowledged problem in the financial industry.

In the United States the primary option that consumers have to transfer money is still the ACH payment. Requests for ACH transfers are collected by banks and submitted in batches, once a day, and the banks receiving the transfers also process the payments once a day, leading to long waits. ACH technology was created in the 1970s and has not changed significantly since. The clunky system, which takes at least a day to deliver money, has become so deeply embedded in the banking industry that it has been hard to replace. CBW went to work on the problem by using the debit card networks that power ATM cash dispensers. Ramamurthi’s team engineered a system so that a business could collect a customer’s debit card number and use it to make an instant payment directly into the customer’s account — or into the account of a customer of almost any other bank in the country. The key to CBW's system is real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring — software that can judge the risk involved in any transaction in real time by looking at 20 to 40 factors, including a customers’ transaction history and I.P., address where the transaction originated. It was this system that Elizabeth McQuerry, the former Fed official, praised as the “biggest idea” at a recent bank conference. "Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form — a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi. "We'll now be one of the first banks in the world to offer customers a reliable, compliant, safe and secure way to instantly send and receive money internationally."

Submission + - Fox News edits in 'dead cops' chants in protest coverage (thegrio.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends edited a video clip of Rev. Al Sharpton to make it seem that demonstrators had chanted calls to kill police officers during his speech on Saturday, even though the pieces of video were from two different cities.

During the broadcast they showed a clip from a protest last night in Manhattan where some people were reportedly heard chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" The video then flipped to Sharpton leading a peaceful rally where he says, "We're not saying all police are bad. We're not even saying most are bad. We're not anti-police, but we're anti-brutality. And the federal government must have a threshold to protect that."

Submission + - Last three years the quietest for tornadoes ever 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The uncertainty of science: 2014 caps the quietest three year period for tornadoes on record, and scientists really don’t understand why.

Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said there’s no consistent reason for the three-year lull — the calmest stretch since a similar quiet period in the late 1980s — because weather patterns have varied significantly from year to year. While 2012 tornado activity was likely suppressed by the warm, dry conditions in the spring, 2013 was on the cool side for much of the prime storm season before cranking up briefly in late May, especially in Oklahoma, SPC meteorologist Greg Carbin said. Then, activity quickly quieted for the summer of 2013.

Submission + - Vinyl Record Pressing Plants Struggle to Keep Up With Demand

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The WSJ reports that the revival of vinyl records, a several-year trend that many figured was a passing fad, has accelerated during 2014 with an astounding 49 percent sales increase over 2013 (line chart here). Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital, and some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable. The records are pressed at a handful of decades-old, labor-intensive factories that can't keep up with the demand; but since the increased sales still represent only about 2 percent of US music sales, there hasn't been a rush of capital investment to open new plants. Raw vinyl must now be imported to America from countries such as Thailand, since the last US supplier closed shop years ago. Meanwhile, an industry pro offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats; it turns out there were reasons for limiting playing time on each side back in the day, apart from bands not having enough decent material.

Submission + - Are gamers saints or sinners? (healthline.com)

Submitted by LesterMoore
LesterMoore writes: Why there's so much contradictory information on how video games spur violence or useful life skills in kids and the most solid conclusions to draw.

Submission + - Mobile Payments may be a big part of the next iPhone (tuaw.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that the stars are aligning in such a way as to make Apple's upcoming September event the company's biggest and most impactful event in years.

In addition to new iPhones and swirling reports of a new type of wearable device, one rumor that's been picking up steam in recent weeks centers on Apple entering the big bad world of mobile payments. Now the ability to make mobile payments is of course nothing new, but none of the the implementations introduced by a myriad of companies over the years have ever gained mainstream traction. To that end, perhaps Apple will be able to usher mobile payments into the mainstream in the same way that they revived a tablet market that was previously DOA.

So without further ado, below are a few pieces of compelling evidence which suggest that a mobile payments announcement from Tim Cook and co. may just a few days away.

Submission + - Particle physics to aid nuclear cleanup (symmetrymagazine.org)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Cosmic rays can help scientists do something no one else can: safely image the interior of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.... [M]uon tomography, is similar to taking an X-ray, only it uses naturally produced muons. These particles don’t damage the imaged materials and, because they already stream through everything on Earth, they can be used to image even the most sensitive objects. Better yet, a huge amount of shielding is needed to stop muons from passing through an object, making it nearly impossible to hide from muon tomography.

“Everything around you is constantly being radiographed by muons,” says Christopher Morris, who leads the Los Alamos muon tomography team. “All you have to do is set some detectors above and below it, and measure the angles well enough to make a picture.”

By determining how muons scatter as they interact with electrons and nuclei within the item, the team’s software creates a three-dimensional picture of what’s inside.... To prove the technology, the Los Alamos team shipped a demo detector system to a small, working nuclear reactor in a Toshiba facility in Kawasaki, Japan. There, they placed one detector on either side of the reactor core.

“When we analyzed our data we discovered that in addition to the fuel in the reactor core, they had put a few fuel bundles off to the side that we didn’t know about,” says Morris. “They were really impressed that not only could we image the core, but that we also found those bundles.”

Based on that successful test, Toshiba signed an agreement with Los Alamos and later with Decision Sciences to design and manufacture muon-detector components for use at Fukushima Daiichi.

Submission + - Coffee Naps Better For Alertness Than Coffee or Naps Alone (vox.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Caffeine is a staple of most workplaces — it's rare to find an office without a coffee pot or a fridge full of soda. It's necessary (or at least feels like it's necessary) because it's sometimes hard to stay awake sitting at a desk for hours at a time, and the alternative — naps — aren't usually allowed. But new research shows it might be more efficient for employers to encourage brief "coffee naps," which are more effective at returning people to an alert state than either caffeine or naps by themselves. A "coffee nap" is when you drink a cup of coffee, and then take a sub-20-minute nap immediately afterward. This works because caffeine takes about 20 minutes to get into your bloodstream, and a 20-minute nap clears adenosine from your brain without entering deeper stages of sleep. In multiple studies, tired participants who took coffee naps made fewer mistakes in a driving simulator after they awoke than the people who drank coffee without a nap or slept without ingesting caffeine.

Submission + - A simple inhaler shows promise preventing and treating Alzheimer's disease (healthline.com)

Submitted by LesterMoore
LesterMoore writes: Among the most promising research on Alzheimer's disease from the last year highlighted by the NIH come a few studies that suggest that blood sugar is a key factor in the disease and that a simple insulin inhaler can prevent dementia & even improve existing symptoms. Compared to failed attempts to use new pharmaceuticals, that seems like a big deal.
Iphone

Submission + - Find my iPhone used to locate plane crash in Chile (9to5mac.com)

Submitted by spagiola
spagiola writes: Late last week, a military transport aircraft with 17 people on -board went missing near Robinson Crusoe, Chile. The relatives of one of the crash victims logged into Find My iPhone and were able to isolate the coordinates of the last known whereabouts of the plane before it crashed.

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