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Submission + - UK bans puberty blockers for under 18s (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: Puberty blockers for under-18s with gender dysphoria will be banned indefinitely in the UK due to the “unacceptable safety risk”, the government has announced.

Health and social care secretary, Wes Streeting, said there is a need to “act with caution” and “follow the expert advice” in caring for this “vulnerable group of young people”.

Submission + - SPAM: Alzheimer's gene already shrinking brain by age of three

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Alzheimer’s gene, which dramatically raises the risk of developing dementia, is already affecting carriers by the age of three, shrinking their brains and lowering cognition, a new study suggests.

Children who carry the APOEe4 gene mutation , which raises the chance of dementia by 15 fold, were found to do less well in memory, attention and function tests.

Areas of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease, such as the hippocampus and parietal gyri, were also found to be up to 22 per cent smaller in volume.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Alan Turing's Notes Found After Being Used as Insulation at Bletchley Park (mkweb.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 2013, a restoration project for Hut 6 of Bletchley Park uncovered a collection of papers being used as roof insulation. The papers were frozen in order to preserve them while they were inspected and repaired. Now they're on display at an exhibition showing items found during the restoration process. "The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by [Turing] to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found. All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules."

Submission + - Pilot's selfies could have caused deadly air crash

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A deadly air crash that killed a pilot and passenger in Colorado last year was likely due to a loss of spatial awareness brought on in part by taking of selfies while in flight, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. An examination of the aircraft revealed no apparent problems that would have caused the accident so, based on the previous patterns of behavior, the NTSB concluded that “it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control.”

Submission + - Could Google's Test of Hiding Complete URLs in Chrome Become a Standard? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The address bar in a Web browser has been a standard feature for as long as Web browsers have been around — and that's not going to be changing. What could be, though, is exactly what sort of information is displayed in them. In December, Google began rolling-out a limited test of a feature in Chrome called "Origin Chip", a UI element situated to the left of the address bar. What this "chip" does is show the name of the website you're currently on, while also showing the base URL. To the right, the actual address bar shows nothing, except a prompt to "Search Google or type URL". With this implementation, a descriptive URL would not be seen in the URL bar. Instead, only the root domain would be seen, but to the left of the actual address bar. This effectively means that no matter which page you're on in a given website, all you'll ever see when looking at the address bar is the base URL in the origin chip. What helps here is that the URL is never going to be completely hidden. You'll still be able to hit Ctrl + L to select it, and hopefully be able to click on the origin chip in order to reveal the entire URL. Google could never get rid of the URL entirely, because it's required in order to link someone to a direct location, obviously.
Science

Submission + - Ancestor of All Placental Mammals Revealed (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The ancestor of all placental mammals—the diverse lineage that includes almost all species of mammals living today, including humans—was a tiny, furry-tailed creature that evolved shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, a new study suggests. The hypothetical creature, not found in the fossil record but inferred from it, probably was a tree-climbing, insect-eating mammal that weighed between 6 and 245 grams—somewhere between a small shrew and a mid-sized rat. It was furry, had a long tail, gave birth to a single young, and had a complex brain with a large lobe for interpreting smells and a corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The period following the dinosaur die-offs could be considered a "big bang" of mammalian diversification, with species representing as many as 10 major groups of placentals appearing within a 200,000-year interval.
Apple

Submission + - Is Apple now the PC leader? Depends on your definition of PC (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "While research companies including IDC and Gartner deemed HP the PC leader for Q4 2012, Canalys has a different perspective. The analyst firm has declared Apple the top PC vendor for the past quarter, thanks in part to the booming success of the iPad and the iPad mini. By Canalys's reckoning, Amazon, too, now beats out the likes of Acer and Asus as a leading PC vendors, having shipped 4.6 million Kindles in Q4."
Robotics

Submission + - Real-life Avatar: The first mind-controlled robot surrogate (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, using just his mind. The system must be trained so that a particular “thought” (fMRI blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward; when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in that direction. To complete the loop, the robot has a camera on its head, with the image being displayed in front of Shapira. Speaking to New Scientist, it sounds like Shapira really became one with the robot: “It was mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around,” he says. “At one point the connection failed. One of the researchers picked the robot up to see what the problem was and I was like, ‘Oi, put me down!’”"
Science

Submission + - Computer Programmers Only 5th Most Sleep Deprived Profession (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "As described in the New York Times Economix blog, the mattress chain Sleepy's analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey to find the ten most sleep deprived professions. In order, they are Home Health Aides, Lawyer, Police Officers, Doctors/Paramedics, Tie: (Economists, Social Workers, Computer Programmers), Financial Analysts, Plant Operators (undefined, but we assume "factory" and not "Audrey II"), and Secretaries. ."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - 'Twisted' waves could boost capacity of wireless spectrum (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Ogi_UnixNut
Ogi_UnixNut writes: In Venice, Italy, Physicist's have shown that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, transmitted on the same frequency but encoded in two different orbital angular momentum states, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio channels.

In principle this allows the implementation of an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques.

Potentially a boon for congested spectrum problems, although at the moment I suspect it would only work for directional links.
Space

Submission + - Town Turns Off the Lights to See the Stars

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Stargazing skies all over the world all over the world are disappearing, as the sky above New York City is Class 9 on the Bortle ranking and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. But some places are making an effort to preserve their skywatching heritage as Exmoor National Park was granted International Dark-Sky Reserve status in November and people in the Exmoor town of Dulverton were challenged to switch off their lights as part of the BBC's Stargazing Live, demonstrating that you don't need special equipment to see the stars more clearly, if you have a decent pair of binoculars. "The whole idea is to show that even a small town, which is still quite dark, can give off quite a lot of light," says astronomer Mark Thompson. The event in Dulverton gained a lot of support from local residents and businesses. "It needed a bit of organization to get everyone to say yes," says town mayor Chris Nelder. "We want people to just enjoy the night sky, to treasure the fact we have them and to look after them," adds Claire O'Connor from Exmoor National Park Authority."

Submission + - BBC show stargazing live ends. Exoplanet discovere (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by arnodf
arnodf writes: Tonight BBC's show stargazing live ended after three days of live astronomy with comedian Dara Ó Briain and professor Brian Cox. Throughout the show they were trying to make the viewers help in finding an exoplanet via Zooniverse. Thanks to the program they managed to get 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours and two volunteers discovered an exoplanet which now bears their name. From the planethunters website:

Thanks to your help and BBC Stargazing, we managed 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours. There's still more to do, and more discoveries to be made, so keep clicking!
Space

Submission + - NASA Snaps New Photo of Incoming Asteroid (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Wider than an aircraft carrier and darker than coal, asteroid 2005 YU55 is soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth and moon on its latest path through the inner solar system. This new radar image was acquired Nov. 7 by the 70-meter radio telescope at NASA's Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., and shows the approaching space rock in unprecedented detail."
Science

Submission + - Was the Spotted Horse an Imaginary Creature? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: About 25,000 years ago, humans began painting a curious creature on the walls of European caves. Among the rhinos, wild cattle, and other animals, they sketched a white horse with black spots. Although such horses are popular breeds today, scientists didn't think they existed before humans domesticated the species about 5000 years ago. Now, a new study of prehistoric horse DNA concludes that spotted horses did indeed roam ancient Europe, suggesting that early artists may have been reproducing what they saw rather than creating imaginary creatures.
Transportation

Journal Journal: .Patching your Ford 8

Journal by mcgrew

USA Toady is running an article about a Ford recall, with a twist for the automotive world: They'll let you do it yourself if you want, upgrading the "MyFord Touch system".

Apparently, folks don't like the MyFord Touch system.

Dealer phone lines and Internet chat rooms were soon buzzing with complaints. Here's why:

Slashdot Top Deals

I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something. -- Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil

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