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Submission + - Simulating 800,000 years of California earthquake history to pinpoint risks (utexas.edu)

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: A study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America presents results from a new earthquake simulator, RSQSim, that simulates hundreds of thousands of years of seismic history in California. Coupled with another code, CyberShake, the framework can calculate the amount of shaking that would occur for each quake. The framework makes use of two of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet: Frontera, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new approach improves seismologists' ability to pinpoint how big an earthquake might occur at a given location, allowing building code developers, architects, and structural engineers to design more resilient buildings that can survive earthquakes.

Submission + - Electric Vehicles Close To 'Tipping Point' of Mass Adoption (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Electric vehicles are close to the “tipping point” of rapid mass adoption thanks to the plummeting cost of batteries, experts say. Global sales rose 43% in 2020, but even faster growth is anticipated when continuing falls in battery prices bring the price of electric cars dipping below that of equivalent petrol and diesel models, even without subsidies. The latest analyses forecast that to happen some time between 2023 and 2025. The tipping point has already been passed in Norway, where tax breaks mean electric cars are cheaper. The market share of battery-powered cars soared to 54% in 2020 in the Nordic country, compared with less than 5% in most European nations. Prof Tim Lenton, at the University of Exeter, said: “There’s been a tipping point in one country, Norway, and that’s thanks to some clever and progressive tax incentives. Then consumers voted with their wallets.”

Data from Lenton’s latest study showed that in 2019, electric vehicles in Norway were 0.3% cheaper and had 48% market share. In the UK, where electric cars were 1.3% more expensive, market share was just 1.6%. Once the line of price parity was crossed, Lenton said, “bang – sales go up. We were really struck by how non-linear the effect seems to be." BloombergNEF’s analysis predicts lithium-ion battery costs will fall to the extent that electric cars will match the price of petrol and diesel cars by 2023, while Lenton suggests 2024-2025. McKinsey’s Global Energy Perspective 2021, published on January 15, forecasts that “electric vehicles are likely to become the most economic choice in the next five years in many parts of the world."

Submission + - Could This Bold New Technique Boost Gravitational-Wave Detection? (space.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: One of the most expensive, complex and problematic components in gravitational wave detectors like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) — which made the first, historic detection of these ripples in space-time in September 2015 — is the 4-kilometer-long vacuum chambers that house all the interferometer optics. But what if this requirement for ground-based gravitational wave detectors isn't required? This suggestion has been made by a pair of physicists at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) who are developing a method that could allow extremely sensitive interferometers to operate in the "open air." Their work, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, uses the weird quantum properties of light to counteract interference from turbulence in the air to allow interferometer measurements to be made. Their method, which is a variation on the classic Young's double-slit experiment, has been demonstrated in a tabletop experiment — but gravitational wave scientists are skeptical that it could be scaled up to remove sophisticated vacuums from their detectors.

Submission + - Waymo Built a Fake City In California To Test Self-Driving Cars (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In May, Waymo revealed key details of its latest self-driving car design to Bloomberg as part of the rollout of a new program that ferries ordinary passengers around in Phoenix. Now The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal has a new piece revealing important details about Waymo's extensive infrastructure for testing self-driving cars. Madrigal reports on two Waymo projects that haven't been previously made public. One is an extensive virtual city in California, 100 miles east of Silicon Valley. Named Castle after the former Castle Air Force Base, the facility hosts a network of private roads for testing self-driving vehicles. It's a proprietary cousin of Mcity, the open vehicle testing facility we visited in 2015. At the Castle facility, Waymo builds replicas of real intersections—like a two-lane roundabout in Texas—that have given Waymo cars trouble.

Having their own extensive network of private streets allows Waymo engineers to perform repetitive tests to observe how Waymo's software reacts in carefully controlled situations. In one series of tests seen by Madrigal, another car cuts off a Waymo car at a variety of speeds and angles. The tests were designed to help engineers calibrate how hard cars brake in these kinds of situations. Brake too slowly and there's a risk of a crash. Brake too hard and passengers will get whiplash. The Castle team has amassed an extensive collection of props—traffic cones, tricycles, fake plants, dummies—that help simulate a wide variety of road situations.

Submission + - Carly Fiorina says government needs a way to 'work around' encryption (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: Carly Fiorina wants the government to be able to "work around" encryption to aid intelligence agencies and law enforcement in their investigations, she said on Monday. The Republican presidential candidate and former HP CEO shifted the focus of her campaign to national security two days before the last Republican debate of 2015. Fiorina is the latest presidential candidate to weigh in on the encryption debate that has taken on a new life since terrorist attacks in Paris and California.

Submission + - Forensic Evidence Shows The Nazis Weren't Close To The Bomb (forbes.com)

Submitted by carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: Tomes upon tomes have been written about the history of Germany's nuclear program in the 1940s (see Heisenberg's War, or The Making of the Atomic Bomb). Now, an international team has conducted nuclear forensic analysis of three WWII-era uranium samples from Germany. The results strongly suggest that in their wartime experiments, Germany's researchers never achieved a self-sustained nuclear chain reaction-- the chemical underpinning of atomic weaponry. The study appears in the journal Angewandte Chemie . Led by Maria Wallenius of the European Commission's in-house science service, researchers examined samples of uranium from two "Heisenberg cubes"- named for Werner Heisenberg, and a "Wirtz plate"-- named for Karl Wirtz. The team measured ratios of isotopes of the elements uranium, strontium, plutonium, and thorium. They also measured abundances of certain rare earth elements. They verified the samples as authentic, dating them to the early 1940s, and localizing the area where the uranium ore was mined to the Czech Republic (which was under Nazi control at the time). They also demonstrated that the isotopes of uranium-236 and plutonium-239 occur in levels matching what would be expected naturally. ”This suggests that the uranium samples have not been exposed to a significant neutron fluence," Wallenius said in a statement.

Submission + - Study: Women less likely to be shown ads for high-paid jobs on Google (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has found that women seeking jobs are less likely to be shown ads on Google for high-paying jobs than men. The researchers created more than 17,000 fake profiles, which were shown roughly 600,000 on career-finding websites (abstract). All of the profiles shared the same browsing behavior. "One experiment showed that Google displayed adverts for a career coaching service for '$200k+' executive jobs 1,852 times to the male group and only 318 times to the female group." They also noted that men were more likely to see ads for coaching services to help get such jobs. "Google allows users to opt out of behavioral advertising and provides a system to see why users were shown ads and to customize their ad settings. But the study suggests that there is a transparency and overt discrimination issue in the wider advertising landscape."

Submission + - China's Stock Crash: $3.5 Trillion Wiped Out, $2.6 Trillion Frozen (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The stock market crisis going on in China is notable for the huge numbers involved. $3.5 trillion ($3,500,000,000,000) in value has been wiped out by falling prices, and over a thousand companies have forced a pause in trading. The combined value of all of these companies exceeds $2.6 trillion, and it represents about 40% of the total market capitalization. This follows attempts by the exchanges and the government to instill confidence in trading once more, but investors are still wary. The NY Times has a detailed explanation of how the market got into trouble, and why it's not likely to fix itself overnight: "Put all these pieces together, and here’s what we have: a rise in Chinese share prices in the last year that seemed to be driven more by investor psychology than by anything fundamental. It is hard to see how the prices as of a month ago were justified, and easy to see why the sell-off of the last month would occur. That, in turn, implies that Chinese officials are fighting an uphill battle in their policy moves to try to stop the correction, and helps explain why their policy actions have had little effect so far."

Submission + - Most Doctors Work While Sick, Despite Knowing It's Bad For Patients (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new survey published in JAMA Pediatrics found that 95% of doctors believe patients are put at risk when doctors work while sick. Despite that, 83% of respondents said they had "come to work with symptoms like diarrhea, fever and respiratory complaints during the previous year." The researchers doing the survey dug into the reasons for this: first of all, given the heavy workload of most doctors, it's very difficult to find others who can take up the slack when one is recovering from an illness. Beyond that, the profession is pervaded by a culture of working through the discomfort and pain of minor maladies. According to a commentary on the research, hospital policies don't help matters — they often incentivize long hours and don't encourage ill workers to leave the premises.

Submission + - Senate advances secret plan forcing Internet services to report terror activity (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The Senate Intelligence Committee secretly voted on June 24 in favor of legislation requiring e-mail providers and social media sites to report suspected terrorist activities. The legislation, approved 15-0 in a closed-door hearing, remains "classified." The relevant text is contained in the 2016 intelligence authorization, a committee aide told Ars by telephone early Monday. Its veil of secrecy would be lifted in the coming days as the package heads to the Senate floor, the aide added.

The legislation is modeled after a 2008 law, the Protect Our Children Act. That measure requires Internet companies to report images of child porn, and information identifying who trades it, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That quasi-government agency then alerts either the FBI or local law enforcement about the identities of online child pornographers. The bill, which does not demand that online companies remove content, requires Internet firms that obtain actual knowledge of any terrorist activity to "provide to the appropriate authorities the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activity," wrote The Washington Post, which was able to obtain a few lines of the bill text. The terrorist activity could be a tweet, a YouTube video, an account, or a communication.

Also see this link (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lawmakers-want-internet-sites-to-flag-terrorist-activity-to-law-enforcement/2015/07/04/534a0bca-20e9-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html)

Submission + - Mystery Moon Swirls Caused by Blasts of Comet Gas? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Strange bright swirls have long been known to exist on the moon’s surface and their origin is steeped in mystery. Often stretching thousands of miles across the lunar landscape, scientists have tried to make connections with the elegant curved shapes with the moon’s interior magnetism or interactions between moon dirt and the solar wind, but these explanations have fallen short. Now, inspired by the Apollo moon landings and armed with a powerful computer model, researchers at Brown University think they have an alternative answer for these swirly patterns. Over the past 100 million years, many small comets impacted the moon’s pockmarked surface. Along with the icy nuclei that carved craters into the moon rock, the gaseous comet atmospheres — known as a comet’s coma — would have also blasted into the moon’s uppermost layer of regolith, possibly leaving the swirly imprint. “We think this makes a pretty strong case that the swirls represent remnants of cometary collisions,” said planetary geoscientist Peter Schultz, at Brown University.

Submission + - GoPro Drone Coming in 2016, Will Sync to Cloud (roboticstrends.com)

Submitted by stowie
stowie writes: Rumors have been swirling for some time that GoPro was developing a drone. Well, now it's official. Speaking at the Code Conference, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman announced the company’s plans to come out with a quadcopter in the first half of 2016. Woodman said “the quad is in some ways the ultimate GoPro accessory,” adding that the company is testing software that will wirelessly sync up GoPro footage to the cloud.

Submission + - Carl Sagan's solar-powered spacecraft is in trouble (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The test flight of Carl Sagan's LightSail craft is in jeopardy after a computer problem left it unable to communicate with its mission controllers. According to the Planetary Society, the hardware was launched into space with an older version of its Linux-based operating system, which shipped with a serious glitch. As the vehicle circuits the planet, it's meant to send back a packet of data, but over the first two days, this file grew too big for the system to handle. As such, it crashed, although we mean that in the software sense, rather than the coming-back-to-Earth-with-a-bump sense.

Submission + - Ways to travel faster than light without violating relativity

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: It’s one of the cardinal laws of physics and the underlying principle of Einstein’s relativity itself: the fact that there’s a universal speed limit to the motion of anything through space and time, the speed of light, or c. Light itself will always move at this speed (as well as certain other phenomena, like the force of gravity), while anything with mass — like all known particles of matter and antimatter — will always move slower than that. But if you want something to travel faster-than-light, you aren’t, as you might think, relegated to the realm of science fiction. There are real, physical phenomena that do exactly this, and yet are perfectly consistent with relativity.

Submission + - Humans Dominating Poker Super Computer (roboticstrends.com)

Submitted by IoTdude
IoTdude writes: The Claudico super computer uses an algorithm to account for gargantuan amounts of complexity by representing the number of possible Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em decisions. Claudico also updates its strategy as it goes along, but its basic approach to the game involves getting into every hand by calling bets. And it's not working out so far. Halfway through the competition, the four human pros had a cumulative lead of 626,892 chips. Though much could change in the week remaining, a lead of around 600,000 chips is considered statistically significant.

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