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Submission + - 'Female' Hurricanes Are Deadlier (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Hurricane names help to make public safety messages memorable, but new research shows that the choice of name may influence how people react to evacuation orders. Although the World Meteorological Organization assigns the storms alternating male and female names, historical records show that those with more feminine names had higher death tolls. Could people be avoiding evacuation because they assume that female-named storms will be gentler? Researchers tested this idea with written scenarios that described an upcoming storm and asked respondents how dangerous they expected the storm to be and whether they would follow a voluntary evacuation order. No matter which names they used—Victor/Victoria, Christopher/Christine, or selections from the upcoming hurricane name lists—respondents who read about male-named hurricanes judged them as riskier and said they would be more likely to evacuate than people who read about hurricanes with female names.

Submission + - Strange New World Discovered: The 'Mega Earth' (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Meet “mega-Earth” a souped-up, all-solid planet that, according to theory, should not exist. First spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, the planet is about 2.3 times larger than Earth. Computer models show planets that big would be more like Neptune or the other gas planets of the outer solar system since they would have the gravitational heft to collect vast amounts of hydrogen and helium from their primordial cradles. But follow-up observations of the planet, designated as Kepler-10c, show it has 17 times as much mass as Earth, meaning it must be filled with rock and other materials much heavier than hydrogen and helium. “Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory,” astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, told Discovery News. “It’s nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory,” he said.

Submission + - Red Dwarfs Could Sterilize Alien Worlds of Life (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Red dwarf stars — the most common stars in the galaxy — bathe planets in their habitable zones with potentially deadly stellar winds, a finding that could have significant impacts on the prevalence of life beyond Earth, new research shows. About 70 percent of stars are red dwarfs, or M-type stars, which are cooler and smaller than the sun. Any red dwarf planets suitable for liquid water, therefore, would have to orbit much closer to their parent star than Earth circles the sun. That presents a problem for life — at least life as we know it on Earth, says physicist Ofer Cohen, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Cohen and colleagues used a computer model based on data from the sun’s solar wind — a continuous stream of charged particles that permeates and defines the solar system –- to estimate the space environment around red dwarf stars. “We find that the conditions are very extreme. If you move planets very close to the star, the force of this flow is very, very strong. Essentially it can strip the atmosphere of the planet unless the planet has a strong magnetic field or a thick atmosphere to start with,” Cohen told Discovery News.

Submission + - Private Group Re-establishes Contact With ISEE-3 Comet Probe (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: A 35-year old space probe has come back to life after a 16-year slumber thanks to the world's largest single-aperture radio telescope. Using the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, the ISEE-3 Reboot Project has re-established contact with the mothballed ISEE-3 space probe. The private organization took control of the unmanned ex-NASA spacecraft and is commanding it to execute functions as part of an assessment of its health before returning it to exploration service.

Submission + - Mojolicious 5.0: The Very Modern Perl Web Framework (kraih.com) 1

Submitted by Kvorg
Kvorg writes: Back in 2012 Slashdot noticed how a the time of Perl 5.16 the modern Perl projects, including Mojolicious, form a new and expanding movement of a Perl Renaissance. With Perl 5.20 and Mojolicious 5.0, the Modern Perl Renaissance is ever more striking.

Faster, neater, sharper with its asynchronious APIs, Mojolicious is the modern age swiss-army toolchest in your pocket, and it cuts it beyond the web, too. It is extremely flexible with its advanced request routing, plugin system, perl templating and hook API. But its adherence to the modern interfaces and standards and its implementation of advanced features in support tools, DOM and CSS selectors makes it a joy to program with.

Mojolicious with its filosophy of optimized code-generation (think metaprogramming), enabled-by-default support for endcodings and UTF-8, zero dependency deployment with wide support for existing CPAN packages, zero downtime restarts and fully tested implementations remind us of how fun and flexible programming in scripting langauges use to be. Of course, integrated documentation and a very supportive bundled development server don't hurt, either.

The new Perl release with new postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations makes it all even more fun.

Submission + - Concert industry fights FCC's auction of RF spectrum (fohonline.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Ever since last year, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced plans to auction off the 608 to 698 MHz UHF spectrum — the UHF TV channels 36 through 51 — the pro audio community has been justifiably worried. After all, many pro users have far-too-vivid memories of the last reallocation of TV channels 52 to 69 (the so-called “700 MHz band” from 698 to 806 MHz) in 2008, which were made illegal for pro wireless applications after June 12, 2010.

This time around, nearly the entire 600 MHz band could possibly be up for grabs to the highest bidder at an auction slated for the summer of 2015. With major deep-pocket players in the telecom industry anxious and ready to bid as much as $20 billion, it is unlikely that pro audio users could possibly compete on a cash basis against these corporate giants, such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others.

However, leading manufacturers of pro wireless have been very active in working with the FCC to make the commission aware of the needs of our industry, and there may be a ray of hope on the horizon.

The first good news came from an announcement late last year by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that the Broadcast Television Spectrum Incentive Auction — originally scheduled for 2014 — was rescheduled to next year, which would give the FCC more time to examine the issue.

Another breakthrough came in February of this year, when a contingent of audio wireless manufacturers (Audio-Technica, Lectrosonics, Sennheiser and Shure), along with production professionals and broadcast industry representatives, arranged a meeting with some FCC Commissioners and the Incentive Auction Task Force — essentially those working on FCC guidelines regarding the proposed 600 MHz band sale.

The results of that were a positive sign and the open dialog laid down by these meetings began to increase the FCC’s awareness of the needs of the pro wireless community to hopefully reach a resolution — or at least compromise — well before any frequency reallocations reach the auctioneer’s final hammer.

Submission + - Hunt Intensifies for Aliens on Kepler's Planets (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Could ET be chatting with colleagues or robots on sister planets in its solar system? Maybe so, say scientists who last year launched a new type of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, project to eavesdrop on aliens. Using data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a team of scientists spent 36 hours listening in when planets in targeted solar systems lined up, relative to Earth’s perspective, in hopes of detecting alien interplanetary radio signals. “We think the right strategy in SETI is a variety of strategies. It’s really hard to predict what other civilizations might be doing,” Dan Werthimer, director of SETI research at the University of California Berkeley, told Discovery News. So far the search hasn't turned up any artificial signals yet, but this marks a change in strategy for radio searches for ETI with Kepler data taking a focused lead.

Submission + - Computer science could untangle a messy problem in theoretical physics (nature.com)

Submitted by bmahersciwriter
bmahersciwriter writes: "Computational complexity is grounded in practical matters, such as how many logical steps are required to execute an algorithm. But it could resolve one of the most baffling theoretical conundrums to hit his field in recent years: the black-hole firewall paradox, which seems to imply that either quantum mechanics or general relativity must be wrong."

Submission + - Why David Deutsch's New Theory of Reality is Deeper Than Quantum Mechanics

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1948, the Bell Labs mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon published The Mathematical Theory of Communication (pdf). In it, he laid out the basic process of communication and formally introduced ideas such as information, the role of transmitters and receivers as well as the idea of a channel and its capacity to carry information. This theory now forms the basis of all digital communication so it's no exaggeration to say that it has been hugely influential. By contrast, no equivalent theory exists for quantum information, despite decades of work by quantum theorists. That could all change now thanks to the work of David Deutsch, a theoretical physicist, who has developed a theory that links classical and quantum information using a deeper theoretical framework. Deutsch's new approach is called constructor theory and it turns the conventional approach to physics on its head. Physicists currently ply their trade by explaining the world in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion. This leads to a distinction between what happens and what does not happen. By contrast, Deutsch’s new fundamental principle is that all laws of physics are expressible entirely in terms of the physical transformations that are possible and those that are impossible. In other words, the laws of physics do not tell you what is possible and impossible, they are the result of what is possible and impossible. So reasoning about the physical transformations that are possible and impossible leads to the laws of physics. He uses this approach to develop a number of principles that all physical laws must follow, both those that are known and those that are unknown. Consequently, constructor theory must be deeper than all known physical theories such as quantum mechanics and relativity. He draws an analogy between this and conservation laws which are deeper than all other physical laws which must follow them. It's too early to say what impact Deutsch's new approach will have. But he has a spectacular record in physics having been a pioneer of quantum computation in the 1980s and one of the chief exponents of the multiverse, both of which have become mainstream ideas.

Submission + - Robots Will Pave the Way to Mars (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: There's a lot of skepticism swirling around NASA's plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030's, not to mention all those private missions. If we want to have sustainable (read: not bank-breaking) space exploration, the argument goes, there's no way we can do it the way we've been going to the moon and low-Earth orbit. We have to find a way to exploit space resources and cut down on the amount of stuff we need to launch from Earth. That's not a new idea. But this article in IEEE Spectrum suggests research on resource extraction and fabrication in low and zero gravity might actually be making progress...and that we could take these technologies quite far if we get our act together.

Submission + - Goodbye, Ctrl-S (medium.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write.

Submission + - Dump world's nuclear waste in Australia says Ex-PM Hawke (sourceable.net)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "The former Labor leader added that Australia bore a responsibility to assist with the safe disposal of radioactive waste, given the ample space the country possesses.

“If Australia has – as we do – the safest remote locations for storing the world’s nuclear waste, we have a responsibility to make those sites available for this purpose,” he said.

Hawke based this conclusion on a 25-year old report made by Ralph Slayter, whom the former prime minister appointed as Australia’s first chief scientist back in 1989. According to Slayter’s report, some of the remote reaches of the Northern Territory and Western Australia could provide apt dumping grounds for radioactive waste."

Submission + - Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped in Arctic Ice (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Humans produced nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012, but where does it end up? A new study has found plastic debris in a surprising location: trapped in Arctic sea ice. As the ice melts, it could release a flood of floating plastic onto the world.

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