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Submission + - 'Shadow biosphere' might be hiding strange life right under our noses (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets break might free from that mold, making it difficult for us to identify. We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life right under our noses. Scientists are now proposing some new things we should look for when it comes to identifying life in a “shadow biosphere”—an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to.

Comment Re:More of the same: (Score 1) 215

by Hartree (#49051983) Attached to: New Encryption Method Fights Reverse Engineering

I admit I haven't looked into it deeply yet, but I suspect it may be able to switch in and out of this mode. Else, you'd have to precompile every thing you run in encrypted form and not be able to use any shared libraries. The binaries would be pretty tubby and performance would suck for the reasons you give.

Run the license checks and some of the key code that's not very compute intensive in the encrypted space, and then shift context to run things you call to do the heavy work in unencrypted space.

Comment For myself: (Score 2) 645

by Hartree (#48999167) Attached to: Does Showing a Horrific Video Serve a Legitimate Journalistic Purpose?

I don't know if there is journalistic purpose in this. I only know what I feel about it. I've not watched it (or there other videos) and have no desire to.

I've seen people dying and badly injured before in real life as well as video. I'm not very squeamish about it, but it's unpleasant.

ISIS desperately wanted people to see this and have it burned into their memory. I have no desire to help them get something they want. The couple of stills I saw from it simply confirmed my opinion of them.

Beyond that, I have neither time nor memory neurons for either them or their "snuff" videos.
Medicine

Too Much Exercise May Not Be Better Than a Sedentary Lifestyle 200

Posted by Soulskill from the everything-in-moderation dept.
jones_supa writes: The importance of exercise has been arriving in spades for geek culture. However, when approaching extremes, a point is reached where vigorous jogging erodes some of the benefits light jogging has over a sedentary lifestyle. "Long-term excessive exercise may be associated with coronary artery calcification, diastolic dysfunction and large artery wall stiffening," wrote lead author Peter Schnohr of Copenhagen's Frederiksberg Hospital in a Danish study (abstract). Although previous research has found that physically active people have at least a 30% lower risk of death compared with inactive people, the ideal amount of exercise remains somewhat uncertain. In this study, strenuous joggers — people who ran faster than 11 km/h for more than 4 hours a week; or who ran faster than 11 km/h for more than 2.5 hours a week with a frequency of more than three times a week — had a mortality rate that is not statistically different from that of the sedentary group. Medical journalist Larry Husten notes that this study, while interesting, should not be taken as the final word on the subject.

Comment Purity is pretty, but sterile: (Score 1) 181

by Hartree (#48943265) Attached to: Mathematicians Uncomfortable With Ties To NSA, But Not Pulling Back

It's all clean sharp and black and white in your universe.

So, to be safe from moral hazard, maybe he should just not do math. Nobody should do math. Because it might end up being used for a bad end or be paid for by the "wrong" people.

I'll leave the moral purity to you, religious fundies, and other true believers.

It may be morally uplifting, but, sharing the world with you is going to a little chilly, because even fire has been used as a weapon.

Comment Re:In Albuquerque? Yep (Score 1) 31

by Hartree (#48870765) Attached to: Local Hackerspace Loses Solar Balloon, Creating Another UFO In New Mexico

I was in ABQ in the 90s, and they had things like the Airborne Laser 747 come through, an Antonov AN 124 delivering a Topaz space reactor (had to close Gibson Ave when it departed for worry about the jet wash being over the barriers), etc.

A lot of the interesting things didn't look all that odd unless you knew what to look for, like extra sensor ports added to them and such (Aviation Week was sometimes a good guide to those). The trestle was already closed, so they weren't getting them for EMP testing so much. Phillips Lab still got a lot of one off planes coming through for things related to R and D.

The Balloon Fiesta mass ascensions are still one of the most amazing things I've seen. I-25 was a dangerous place to be driving when that happened. everyone was looking at the balloons and not the road.
Earth

Why We Have To Kiss Off Big Carbon Now 441

Posted by samzenpus from the no-oil-for-you dept.
mdsolar writes When the fossil-fuel divestment movement first stirred on college campuses three years ago, you could almost hear Big Oil and Wall Street laughing. Crude prices were flirting with $100 a barrel, and domestic oil production, from Texas to North Dakota, was in the midst of a historic boom. But the quixotic campus campaign suddenly has the smell of smart money.

One of the biggest names in the history of Big Oil – the Rockefellers – announced last September that they would be purging the portfolio of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of 'risky' oil investments. And that risk has been underscored by the sudden collapse of the oil market. After cresting at more than $107 in mid-June, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate dipped below $50 a barrel in early January. The crash carries big costs: Goldman Sachs warned that nearly $1 trillion in planned oil-field investments would be unprofitable – even if oil were to stabilize at $70 per barrel.

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