Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - The new Metric / Inches unified ruler (woodgears.ca) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: There is this schism between people who prefer metric and people who prefer inches. Metric people like nice convenient units, decimal, and being able to make easy calculations. Inches people like complicated fractional units. Matthias Wandel has come up with a new ruler to unite the two. It has nice millimetre and centimetre sized increments, but uses inches as the scale.

For example, what would be "1 cm" in metric is 37/94 inches. 2 cm is 68/80 inches and 10 centimeters is 3" 89/95. All the millimeter sized divisions are labeled, though you may need a magnifier to read them.

Lets add the equivalent of 4 cm and 5 cm

We have 1" 50/87 + 1" 92/95
= 2" + 4750/8265 8004/8265
= 2" + 12754/8265 = 3" 4489/8265

A PDF template is available for download if you want to make your own combined metric/imperial ruler.

Submission + - An OS/2 Warp Community is Merging with the Flat Earth Society (os2world.com)

Submitted by martiniturbide
martiniturbide writes: OS2World, a community known as the online reunion place of IBM's OS/2 Warp users, is merging with the Flat Earth Society. The OS/2 community expects that this action will benefit the platform by getting the funds to finally create an open source clone of it. OS2World asks every OS/2 user to start believing that the earth is flat to get the "big bucks" that will finally turn the operating system into a Windows 10, Ubuntu, MacOS X and Android competitor in the final OS Wars of all ages.

Submission + - SPAM: Amazon Announces AWS Breakers, Circuit Breakers as a Service (CBaaS) for Homes

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: SEATTLE--Apr. 1, 2019-- Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced AWS Breakers, a fully-managed, centralized circuit breaker service for the home that makes it faster and simpler for customers to monitor electrical systems for overloads and short circuits. Unlike conventional circuit breakers and fuses, whose basic function is to interrupt current flow immediately after a fault is detected to minimize damage, AWS Breakers will detect, but not interrupt, hazardous electrical conditions. Consistent with AWS Budgets, which broke new ground by eschewing legacy damage control features, AWS Breakers will instead give you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you via email or Amazon SNS to take action when fire damages to your home exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. AWS Breakers is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional AWS Regions in the coming year.

Submission + - SPAM: Men's Smoking Affects the Intelligence of Their Children and Grandchildren

Submitted by thenord
thenord writes: American scientists from the University of Florida in Tallahassee announced that children and even grandchildren of fathers who smoke may have developmental problems. In particular, such children may suffer from a marked drop in IQ and intellectual abilities.

The impact of nicotine on expectant mothers has long been recognized as a risk factor for their offspring, including the development of intelligence. Concerning the fathers, this was not so obvious, but the scientists clarified the matter.
Over the past five years, geneticists have found many hints that this "wrapper" of DNA is involved in the transfer of information between generations and allows animals and plants to adapt more quickly to new environmental conditions. Problems with the "rewriting" of special marks on its surface were associated with a predisposition to suicides, bad habits and drug addiction.
Bhide and his colleagues have discovered another unusual connection between these tags, harmful habits and the lives of subsequent generations of people or animals, watching how regular use of small doses of nicotine by male rats affected the life of their offspring and grandchildren.
In the past, biologists have already noticed that nicotine in a special way changes the structure of such marks in the oocytes of smoking mothers, making their children more susceptible to the development of attention deficit disorder and other behavioral disorders. The authors of the article decided to check whether something similar would happen if the smoker was not the mother, but the father of the child.

To do this, scientists have grown two groups of males, one of which drank normal water, and the other — a solution of nicotine — for about 12 weeks. His dose, according to biologists, approximately corresponded to how much of this substance enters the body of moderately smoking people every day.

After this, Bhide and his colleagues crossed these mice with females who had never used tobacco or pure nicotine, and followed how their young grew and developed. After they grew up, scientists crossed them with another generation of "pure" females, and made similar observations.
The results struck: despite the fact that the fathers themselves had no intellectual problems, their offspring suffered from hyperactivity, attention deficit and cognitive impairment . children and grandchildren of "smokers" were much longer looking for a way out of the labyrinth, where scientists had landed, and remembered his position much worse than their fellows from "non-smoking" couples.
When female mice from the second generation were crossed again with non-smoking animals, then their offspring had some deviations in the development of intelligence, but not so noticeable. Scientists have determined that epigenetic changes have been observed in the semen of "smoking" males, including the gene that encodes the dopamine D2 receptor — this molecule plays an important role in brain development and the learning process.

Submission + - More Mysterious Radio Wave bursts found. (arxiv.org) 1

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious. Large amounts of energy (years of output for a Sun-like star) are released in a short time (a millisecond or so) — which gets people's attention.

As yet, there is no consensus on what they involve. but the discovery of a repeating example (FRB 121102, of 2012-11-02 repeated 6 times in 2015) does constrain possibilities. Whatever causes them can't be destroyed — at least not in every event. A second repeating FRB source has now been reported. While this doesn't directly reduce the range of possible origins, more data is being accumulated to work out what these events are. This source is closer (less than redshift 0.1), so should give more detailed data to help resolve the question.

This discovery was made in the pre-commissioning phase of a new survey programme, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) ; such an early result is a good sign for understanding these phenomena relatively soon.

Submission + - Will the World Embrace the Radical Proposal To Mandate Open Access To Science? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How far will Plan S spread? Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on. Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices.

If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Submission + - PepsiCo Hello Goodness Snackbot To Tackle College Munchies On Select Campuses (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: College students used to have to fend for themselves at the campus convenient store but soon may have the snacks coming to them courtesy of a new delivery service. The PepsiCo Hello Goodness Snackbot, an autonomous delivery robot, will now run snacks around select college campuses to satiate whatever case of the munchies it can. Students, staff and faculty at the University of Pacific in Stockton, California can now order snacks between 9AM and 5PM through the Snackbot app, which is currently only available on iOS. The robot will deliver goods at 50 designated Snackbot areas across campuses. The delivery bot can go more than 20 miles on a single charge and includes a camera, headlights, and all-wheel drive to help it navigate thorugh tough terrain if need be. The bot will deliver food and drinks from PepsiCo's Hello Goodness brand, including products from Smartfood Delight, Baked Lay's, SunChips, Pure Leaf Tea, bubly, LIFEWTR, and Starbucks Cold Brew. The Snackbots are part of the company's goal of expanding the reach of their line healthier product lines to 50,000 points of presence by the end of 2019.

Submission + - Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a toxic compound, so the plant has to detoxify it."

Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots.

Submission + - NASA's warped measure of safety (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the very first manned Orion/SLS mission NASA will fly a host of new equipment for the first time. For example, the capsule’s “Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), crew displays, and other crew systems will be making their debut in Orion.” Anything else that has flown previously will essentially have done so only once, during the first unmanned test flight of SLS/Orion.

While NASA has demanded SpaceX fly the final manned version of its Falcon 9 rocket seven times before it will allow its astronauts on board, the agency plans to launch humans on SLS on only its second launch. More astonishing, that second SLS launch will include a mission taking those astronauts on a loop around the Moon.

The contrast with how the agency’s safety panel treats SpaceX versus SLS/Orion demonstrates how corrupt and unreliable that safety panel has become. They no longer really work to reduce risk. Their goal appears to promote government-built rocket systems over those manufactured by the private sector.

Submission + - SPAM: Films With Female Stars Earn More At The Box Office

Submitted by viralnews
viralnews writes: If you liked Wonder Woman and Moana partly because they were movies directed by strong female characters, it would seem that you were not alone.
The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that male stars are a more important attraction at the box office, which often explains their higher salary.
But according to a new analysis, it could have been a miscalculation, showing that movies with potential customers earn more.
The researchers analyzed the 350 most profitable films between 2014 and 2017.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Strange Waves Rippled Across Earth And Only One Person Spotted Them (forbes.com) 2

Submitted by The Grim Reefer
The Grim Reefer writes: On November 11 there were strange rumbling waves that traveled at 9,000mph across the globe, nearly undetected and unnoticed by the world. Except for one person, a seismologist, who spotted the signal and quickly put out an alert to see if other systems detected the same unusual wave.

The waves began 15 miles off the coast of the small French island of Mayotte, wedged between Madagascar and Mozambique. Seismographs picked up the waves as they traveled as far as New Zealand, Chile, Hawaii and Canada. In total, the waves were detected as far as 11,000 miles from their origin, ringing for 20 minutes or more minutes as they passed. It took only 40 minutes for the waves to travel from Mayotte to the UK and 75 minutes to reach the Hawaiian islands.

The seismologists noted the strange nature of the waves, they were unnaturally monotone and low-frequency as they traveled across the globe. When we think of seismic waves the most common association is an earthquake, which triggers a sudden release of fast moving waves at different frequencies. Toward the later tail of an earthquake's rumbling, they do emit low-frequency waves that can spread out across the globe. For this to have been the case there would have had to be a major earthquake somewhere in the region, yet none was detected.

Submission + - Music Industry Asks US Government to Reconsider Website Blocking (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the start of this decade, US lawmakers drafted several controversial bills to make it easier for copyright holders to enforce their rights online. These proposals, including SOPA and PIPA, were met with fierce resistance from the public as well as major technology companies. They feared that the plans, which included pirate site-blocking measures, went too far. In the many years that followed, the “site blocking” issue was avoided like the plague. The aversion was mostly limited to the US, as website blocking became more and more common abroad, where it’s one of the entertainment industries’ preferred anti-piracy tools.

Emboldened by these foreign successes, it appears that rightsholders in the US are now confident enough to bring the subject up again, albeit very gently. Most recently the site-blocking option was mentioned in a joint letter from the RIAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), which contained recommendations to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) Vishal Amin. The IPEC requested input from the public on the new version of its Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property Enforcement. According to the music industry groups, website blocking should be reconsidered an anti-piracy tool.

Submission + - France to close 14 nuclear & 4 remaining coal power plants. (cleantechnica.com)

Submitted by Socguy
Socguy writes: French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech on Tuesday in which he announced a raft of new energy policies, including a promise to close the country’s remaining four coal-fired power plants by 2022 and 14 of the country’s 900 MW first-generation nuclear reactors by 2035.

The generation capacity will be replaced with wind and solar.

Submission + - Amazon Starts Selling Software To Mine Patient Health Records (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is starting to sell software to mine patient medical records for information that doctors and hospitals could use to improve treatment and cut costs, the latest move by a big technology company into the health care industry. The software can read digitized patient records and other clinical notes, analyze them and pluck out key data points, Amazon says. The company is expected to announce the launch Tuesday. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division, has been selling such text-analysis software to companies outside medicine for use in areas such as travel booking, customer support and supply-chain management. The technology’s health-care application is the newest effort by Amazon to tap into the lucrative market.

Amazon officials say the company’s software developers trained the system using a process known as deep learning to recognize all the ways a doctor might record notes. “We’re able to completely, automatically look inside medical language and identify patient details,” including diagnoses, treatments, dosage and strengths, “with incredibly high accuracy,” said Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services. During testing, the software performed on par or better than other published efforts, and can extract data on patients’ diseases, prescriptions, lab orders and procedures, said Taha Kass-Hout, a senior leader with Amazon’s health-care and artificial intelligence efforts.

Submission + - China Expands Research Funding, Luring US Scientists and Students (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the past decade or so, China has been expanding its commitment to scientific research, and it shows. Chinese researchers now produce more scientific publications than U.S. scientists do, and the global ratings of Chinese universities are rising. Five years ago [professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, JaySiegel] became dean of the school of pharmaceutical science and technology at Tianjin University. He says the university president recruited him to build an undergraduate program that would attract students from all over — not just China. Siegel says the program is taught entirely in English. There's another aspect of getting a pharmaceutical science degree at Tianjin that Siegel expects students from throughout the world to find particularly attractive: The Chinese government plans to offer scholarships to cover the cost for students who enroll. Siegel says this is all part of China's effort to attract international scientists.

Slashdot Top Deals

If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for. -- W.C. Fields

Close