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Science

UC Berkeley Study Finds Diluting Blood Plasma Reverses Aging In Mice (berkeley.edu) 165

Posted by BeauHD from the fountain-of-youth dept.
schwit1 shares a report from Berkeley News: In 2005, University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice -- such that they share blood and organs -- can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research into whether a youngster's blood might contain special proteins or molecules that could serve as a 'fountain of youth' for mice and humans alike. But a new study by the same team shows that similar age-reversing effects can be achieved by simply diluting the blood plasma of old mice -- no young blood needed.

In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin -- where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed -- has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. Performing the same procedure on young mice had no detrimental effects on their health. This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood. schwit1 adds: "Does this mean donating blood helps?"
Transportation

Why Expanding Highways Makes Traffic Worse (gizmodo.com) 267

Posted by BeauHD from the vicious-cycle dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Americans drove 40 percent more miles in 2019 than they did in 1994, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. More driving means more congested traffic. So to reduce congestion, it makes sense to build more highway lanes so that more cars can fit. Right? Actually, no. A new report from the policy organization Transportation for America shows that doesn't work at all. Between 1993 and 2017, the researchers found that the largest urban areas in the U.S. added 30,511 new lane-miles of roads -- a 42 percent increase. That's a faster rate of growth than population growth, which rose by 32 percent in those cities over the same time period.

But in that 24 year period, traffic congestion didn't drop at all. In fact, it rose by 144 percent even as states spent more than $500 billion on highway capital investments in urbanized areas, and a sizable portion of which went toward highway expansion. That means governments spent billions, and the end result was Americans wasting more time frustrated on the highway, sitting in cars that spew out climate-warming and neighborhood-polluting emissions. That's because when you build more highways, people start driving more and filling up the lanes in a matter of years. From 1993 to 2017, the average person drove 20 percent more miles. Right after a highway is widened, traffic does speed up, and drivers take advantage of that by "switching from other routes, driving further distances or traveling during the busiest time of the day," the report, which looked at federal and state data on traffic and freeway growth, says. "People who had previously avoided congestion -- whether by riding transit, carpooling, traveling during less congested times of day, or foregoing the trip altogether -- start driving on that route more because it has become more convenient."
Technology

Cows Wearing VR Headsets Might Produce Better Milk (engadget.com) 88

Posted by BeauHD from the what-will-they-think-of-next dept.
Moscow-area farmers are strapping modified VR headsets to cows to try and improve their milk production. Engadget reports: The project subjected cattle to a simulated summer field with colors tuned for the animals' eyes, giving them a decidedly more pleasing landscape than a plain, confining farm. And yes, the headsets were adapted to the "structural features" of cows' heads so that they could see properly. It appears to have worked, at least on a basic level. The first test reduced the cows' anxiety and boosted their overall sentiment. While it's not certain how well this affects the quality or volume of milk, there are plans for a more "comprehensive" study to answer that question. Further reading: The Moscow Times, Interfax
Star Wars Prequels

The Filmmaking Tech Behind 'The Mandalorian' Is Straight Out of the Star Wars Universe (qz.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the we're-living-in-the-future dept.
In a Quartz article, Adam Epstein writes about the filmmaking technology used to film The Mandalorian on Disney+: Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) -- the Lucasfilm subsidiary George Lucas founded in 1975 to make the visual effects for Star Wars -- deployed a real-time 3D projection system called "Stagecraft" on the Disney+ series that could, eventually, replace green-screen as the film industry standard for rendering virtual environments. The company has been testing Stagecraft for five years -- most recently on the Star Wars spin-off movie Solo in 2018. But The Mandalorian, the flagship series on Disney's new streaming service, likely marks the most extensive use yet of the new system.

Stagecraft's chief innovation is that it can project a 3D visual environment around the actors that changes in real time to match the perspective of the camera. When the camera moves, the background moves too, simulating the experience of filming in a different location. It's a significant upgrade from green-screen technology, which requires the filmmakers layer in a static image or footage after filming in front of the blank backdrop. [...] The tech has a wide range of benefits. For starters, it can draw better performances from the actors, who don't have to imagine the environment they are in, as they do when filming in front of green-screen. They can instantly be transported to any location, real or made-up, and feel as though they are there. And that's another big advantage: Stagecraft allows films and TV shows to simulate environments without actually having to send an entire production there to film. "One downside is that the displays used in Stagecraft require liquid crystals that take several years to grow," the report adds. "Growing and maintaining these crystals, which are the backbone of LCD (liquid crystal display) screens, can be expensive and time-consuming, perhaps complicating the attempts of other companies to adapt the technology."

This video from Unreal Engine shows a smaller scale version of the tech in action.
Cellphones

Researchers Created Lenses a Thousand Times Thinner To Hopefully Eliminate Ugly Smartphone Camera Bumps (gizmodo.com) 132

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
Camera bumps on smartphones may soon go away thanks to a team of researchers at the University of Utah who've developed a radically thin camera lens. Gizmodo reports: For comparison, the lens elements used in today's smartphone cameras, which gather and focus light onto a tiny sensor, are a few millimeters thick. It might not sound like much, but the best smartphone cameras use multiple elements, which quickly add up, resulting in a thin phone simply not having enough room to house all of them: hence the camera bump trend. But a team of electrical and computer engineering researchers at the University of Utah have succeeded in creating a new type of optical lens that measures just a few microns thick, or about a thousand times thinner and one hundred times lighter than what you'll find in smartphones today.

The lens the researchers created is actually made up of innumerable tiny microstructures, imperceptible to the human eye, and strategically positioned so that each one bends and redirects light towards a camera's sensor. When they're all working together, they produce the same results as a single curved element does. Manufacturing the lenses also required the team to develop a new fabrication process, a new polymer, and custom algorithms to calculate the shape and position of each microstructure. But the resulting lens can be completely flat, and made of lightweight plastic. If you've ever spent a day carrying around a camera with a big lens hanging off the front, you'll appreciate that benefit alone. The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Crime

Trump Asks Social Media Companies To Develop Pre-Crime Algorithms (theverge.com) 333

Posted by BeauHD from the predicting-the-futuer dept.
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters. While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said "we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs," and he suggested social media companies could develop new ways of catching "red flags." While the president did not specify what those "tools" might look like, Trump seemed to be suggesting that companies could use predictive software to single out potential shooters based on their activity on a platform. Crucially, this would mean taking action before a person commits violent crimes. Data-mining tools are in wide use, but creating a detection system for violence would inevitably raise a host of privacy and accountability issues.
AI

Meet Norman, the Psychopathic AI (bbc.com) 109

Posted by BeauHD from the force-fed dept.
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a psychopathic algorithm named Norman, as part of an experiment to see what training artificial intelligence on data from "the dark corners of the net" would do to its world view. Unlike most "normal" algorithms by AI, Norman does not have an optimistic view of the world. BBC reports: The software was shown images of people dying in gruesome circumstances, culled from a group on the website Reddit. Then the AI, which can interpret pictures and describe what it sees in text form, was shown inkblot drawings and asked what it saw in them. These abstract images are traditionally used by psychologists to help assess the state of a patient's mind, in particular whether they perceive the world in a negative or positive light. Norman's view was unremittingly bleak -- it saw dead bodies, blood and destruction in every image. Alongside Norman, another AI was trained on more normal images of cats, birds and people. It saw far more cheerful images in the same abstract blots.

The fact that Norman's responses were so much darker illustrates a harsh reality in the new world of machine learning, said Prof Iyad Rahwan, part of the three-person team from MIT's Media Lab which developed Norman. "Data matters more than the algorithm. "It highlights the idea that the data we use to train AI is reflected in the way the AI perceives the world and how it behaves."
Businesses

Your Love of Your Old Smartphone Is a Problem for Apple and Samsung (wsj.com) 120

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The smartphone industry has a culprit to blame for slumping sales: Its old devices remain too popular. From a report: Flashy phones of yesteryear, particularly Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxy S handsets, are getting refurbished, and U.S. consumers are snapping them up. Many shoppers are balking at price tags for new phones pushing $1,000, and improvements on latest launches in many cases haven't impressed [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. As more people hold on to devices longer, new smartphone shipments plunged to historic lows at the end of 2017. "Smartphones now resemble the car industry very closely," said Sean Cleland, director of mobile at B-Stock Solutions, the world's largest platform for trade-in and overstock phones, based in Redwood City, Calif. "I still want to drive a Mercedes, but I'll wait a couple of years to buy the older model. Same mentality." Another trend borrowed from the car industry that has helped consumers get around sticker shock: leasing. Instead of buying new phones, Sprint and T-Mobile allow subscribers to effectively lease them, allowing them to trade up for the latest device. That option, though, hasn't yet gone mainstream.

[...] Second-hand phones long found their way to Africa, India and other developing markets. But now, U.S. buyers represent 93% of the purchases made at second-hand phone online auctions run by B-Stock, compared with an about-even split between the U.S. and the rest of the world in 2013. Samsung and Apple together sell more than one out of every three phones globally and capture about 95% of the industry's profits. U.S. consumers, spurred by two-year carrier contracts and phone subsidies, were upgrading every 23 months as recently as 2014, according to BayStreet Research, which tracks device sales. Now, people are holding onto their phones for an extra eight months. By next year, the time gap is estimated to widen to 33 months, BayStreet says.
United States

Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) 366

Posted by EditorDavid from the falling-backwards dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A special Massachusetts commission recommends the state stop observing Daylight Savings TIme "if a majority of other northeast states, also possibly including New York, also do so." After a 9-to-1 vote, the head of the commission reported their conclusion after months of study: "There's no good reason why we're changing these clocks twice a year"... According to local reports, "The commission studied the pros and cons of the move and found, for example, retailers liked the idea of more daylight late in the day for shoppers... They also said there would be less crime, fewer traffic accidents and we would actually save energy."

A Maine state representative argues that it's actually harmful to observe Daylight Savings Time. "Some of those harms include an increased risk of stroke, more heart attacks, miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients, among many other undesirable complications," reports Newsweek. Maine's legislature has already passed a bill approving an end to daylight savings time -- if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also end the practice, and if voters approve the change in a referendum.
At least six states are considering changing the time zones, according to Newsweek, and when it comes to Daylight Savings Time, the Maine representative told a reporter she had just one question.

"Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?"

Comment Right to repair... software? (Score 2) 224

by greywire (#55431121) Attached to: Why We Must Fight For the Right To Repair Our Electronics

Has the idea of repairing software ever come up? Because that would be a whole other can of worms, but, considering the pervasiveness of software in almost every device, the ability to fix simple bugs (especially security bugs) would be good to have. But then you'd have to access the source code. But how many devices do we all have that are next to useless because we cannot update the software when the manufacturer is not willing to do so (for instance, phones that cannot be rooted..)..
Education

Ask Slashdot: How Can You Teach Programming To Schoolchildren? 353

Posted by EditorDavid from the ABC++ dept.
Slashdot reader SPopulisQR writes: A new school year is approaching and I wanted to ask what are appropriate programming languages for children of various ages. Specifically, 1) what coding languages should be considered, and 2) are there are any self-guided coding websites that can be used by children to learn coding using guidance and help online? Let's say the ages are 8 and 12.
I know there's lots of opinions about CS education (and about whether or not laptops increase test scores). So leave your own best thoughts in the comments. How can you teach programming to schoolchildren?
AI

Facebook's AI Keeps Inventing Languages That Humans Can't Understand (fastcodesign.com) 170

Posted by EditorDavid from the how-to-serve-man dept.
"Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language," writes Fast Company's Co.Design. "Then they stopped it." An anonymous reader summarizes their report: Facebook -- as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple -- said they were more interested in AI's that could talk to humans. But when two of Facebook's AI bots negotiated with each other "There was no reward to sticking to English language," says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Co.Design writes that the AI software simply, "learned, and evolved," adding that the creation of new languages is a phenomenon Facebook "has observed again, and again, and again". And this, of course, is problematic.

"Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought. The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another."
One of the researchers believes that that's definitely going in the wrong direction. "We already don't generally understand how complex AIs think because we can't really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse."

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