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Submission + - Mummy Speaks (apnews.com)

Submitted by vm
vm writes: You donâ(TM)t have to wait until next Halloween to get creeped out. Using 3D printing, medical scanners, and an electronic larynx, researchers have recreated the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. The tongue has deteriorated over three millennia and all they have so far is a vowel sound but itâ(TM)s a pretty clever way to raise the dead with science.

Submission + - Company Says It's Built a Marijuana Breathalyzer (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's currently no field test equipment that detects marijuana impairment. A company in California thinks it has a solution. From San Francisco Chronicle: "By mid-2020, Hound Laboratories plans to begin selling what it says is the world’s first dual alcohol-marijuana breath analyzer, which founder Dr. Mike Lynn says can test whether a user has ingested THC of any kind in the past two to three hours. 'We’re allowed to have this in our bodies,' Lynn said of marijuana, which became legal to use recreationally in California in 2018. 'But the tools to differentiate somebody who’s impaired from somebody who’s not don’t exist.'"

We won't know if these claims are true until the testing equipment is deployed. And even then, we still won't know if the machines are accurate or the drivers they catch are actually impaired. Marijuana doesn't work like alcohol, so impairment levels vary from person to person. In addition, there's no baseline for impairment like there is for alcohol. That will have to be sorted out by state legislatures before officers can begin to claim someone is "impaired" just because the equipment has detected THC. At this point, the tech pitched by Hound Labs only provides a yes/no answer. There's a very good chance this new tech will go live before the important details — the ones safeguarding people's rights and freedoms — are worked out. The founder of Hound Labs is also a reserve deputy for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. And it's this agency that's been test driving the weedalyzer.

Submission + - SPAM: Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow Raising Claims About Advanced Space Tech

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Recently retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast gave a lecture last month that seems to further signal that the next major battlefield will be outer space. While military leadership rattling the space sabers is nothing new, Kwast’s lecture included comments that heavily hint at the possibility that the United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever. Is this mere posturing or could we actually be on the verge of making science fiction a reality?

Around the 12:00 mark in the speech, Kwast makes the somewhat bizarre claim that the U.S. currently possesses revolutionary technologies that could render current aerospace capabilities obsolete:

"The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I’ve had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these scientists. This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour."


Link to Original Source

Submission + - CNN Uses XKCD Illustration to Debunk Trump's Anti-Impeachment Map 2

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: CNN.com cites a cartoon from the geek-popular site XKCD:

"On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted a 2016 map with the words "Try to impeach this" written across it. [The map] is a county-by-county rendering of the 2016 election. And it is, as far as it goes, accurate. Trump won 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton's 487 in the last presidential election, according to the Associated Press. But the map is also quite misleading...

When you allow for actual population in the country, the map looks a lot different. This one, by cartoonist Randall Munroe on his XKCD website, is a much more accurate depiction of what the 2016 election actually looked like."

Submission + - SPAM: Trump suggests 'nuking hurricanes' to stop them hitting America 6

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Donald Trump has reportedly suggested on more than one occasion that the US military should bomb hurricanes in order to disrupt them before they make landfall.

According to US news website Axios, the US president said in a meeting with top national security and homeland security officials about the threat of hurricanes: “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?”

“They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”

Submission + - Average H-1B Worker Salary: $89,779. But Some Make Noticeably Less. (dice.com)

Submitted by SpaceForceCommander
SpaceForceCommander writes: As promised, the Trump administration has begun revealing the names of contractors that utilize H-1B workers (information that previously wasn't disclosed). If you’re interested, you can now head over to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) website and download a massive (over 100MB!) dataset of H-1B data for fiscal year 2019 (it’s under the ‘Disclosure data’ tab). Not only does this spreadsheet contain a detailed breakdown of over 412,425 H-1B cases, but it also reveals the “secondary entities” where primary employers might send H-1B workers, along with average H-1B salary for, well, pretty much everybody. For example, Amazon isn’t just a primary employer of H-1B workers (with 5,558 cases currently listed on this disclosure); it also contracts out H-1B workers from other firms (93 cases).

The sheet also contains another interesting tidbit of information: How much H-1B workers are paid. Although paychecks vary wildly from company to company, the average salary (based on the entirety of this dataset) is $89,779. As individuals, however, it's clear that many H-1B workers are making far less, raising again the much-asked question of whether they really count as "specialized" and otherwise-unobtainable labor.

Submission + - A new bill aims to protect US voters from the next Cambridge Analytica (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by rrconan
rrconan writes: A new bill aims to protect US voters from the next Cambridge Analytica. Political candidates and campaigns shouldnâ(TM)t be able to use private data to manipulate and mislead voters,â Senator Feinstein said. âoeThis bill would help put an end to such actions. Today, campaigns are legally able to conduct sophisticated online surveillance of everyone in our country in order to influence individuals based on their unique psychological characteristics.â

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Do Hugely Popular Websites Have Ultra-Basic UI Navigation?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: You follow a news story on CNN or BBC or FoxNews or Reuters. The frontpage of the news site changes so frequently that you wish there was a "News Timeline" UI element at the top of the page, letting you scrub back and forward in time (by hours, days, weeks, years) so you can see previous states of the frontpage and get a better sense of how the story developed over time. How many major news websites have this scrubbable Timeline UI element? Currently none do. Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there is only 3 basic UI elements you can use — keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos. There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association. There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order. There is no master index or master list of videos — like a phonebook — that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet. And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it? Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to "simple, limited and dumb", or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Suicide among tech workers 1

Submitted by tripleevenfall
tripleevenfall writes: At numerous points during my career in the tech industry, my workplaces have been affected by the suicide of an employee. Usually beginning with the receipt of a vague email that management has been 'saddened' that someone had 'passed away' recently, the truth soon becomes known and the questions begin circulating again. Why does suicide seem to be more common among tech workers? Is it due to lifestyle choices commonly associated with tech workers that lead to isolation? Are the personality types that choose tech work more prone to mental illnesses?

Submission + - NASA is eyeing up a nearby asteroid that contains enough gold (thesun.co.uk) 3

Submitted by pgmrdlm
pgmrdlm writes: NASA is eyeing up a nearby asteroid that contains enough gold to make everyone on Earth a billionaire.

Psyche 16 is nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is made of solid metal.

  An artist's impression of Psyche 16, an asteroid with enough gold in it to make everyone on Earth a billionaire

As well as gold, the mysterious object is loaded with heaps of platinum, iron and nikel.

In total, it's estimated that Psyche's various metals are worth a gargantuan £8,000 quadrillion.

That means if we carried it back to Earth, it would destroy commodity prices and cause the world's economy – worth £59.5trillion – to collapse.

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