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Submission + - SPAM: Genomic techniques can streamline breeding for grain quality

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Small grains researcher Juan David Arbelaez-Velez knows the secret to making perfect rice—and it's not about how you cook it. Arbelaez and his team are investigating the genetic blueprint that determines different grain attributes such as appearance, cooking time, and texture. Their paper, published in The Plant Genome, offers a strategy that will help breeders improve grain quality holistically, while cutting costs and saving time.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - China's 'biggest threat' to US is a 'tech kill-switch' (the-express.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A cybersecurity expert has delivered a chilling alert that China represents the greatest technological threat to Western countries, possessing the ability to trigger a 'killswitch' on America's power grid at will.

In response to this disclosure, the United States has initiated numerous probes into Chinese-made technology, with various investigations revealing 'malicious, mysterious computer codes' that can be remotely triggered to disable critical infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines and electrical networks.

Submission + - History is best told as a story of organised crime (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Submission + - Windows 11 = Windows 7 ? 1

Submitted by J. L. Tympanum
J. L. Tympanum writes: It looks to me like Windows 7, 10 and 11 are all the same OS, just with a different-looking window manager slapped on top. Can someone with more knowledge of Windows internals verify this claim, or refute it?

Submission + - SPAM: Engineers Weigh Up Returning to Ancient Roman Concrete Recipes

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The ancient Romans might have taught us a thing or two about manufacturing sustainable concrete that lasts for thousands of years.

A new study has rigorously analyzed the raw materials and energy demands of their ancient recipe, revealing some useful ways to improve modern cement.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Can AI think—and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: "noesis." Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It's one form of "knowing" something—but in Plato's view, it's also a property of the soul.

Lower down, but still above his "dividing line," is "dianoia," or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are "pistis," or belief, and "eikasia," imagination.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception.

Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow.
Link to Original Source

Comment Color laser (Score 1) 92

by zmooc (#65471859) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Printer Recommendation For Family With Kids?

I've been using a Konica Minolta MC7450 for over 12 years now. It's been the most reliable and cheapest (per page printed) printer I've ever owned and will probably ever own. Also, this one happened to be A3 sized (Tabloidish in freedom units) and I've been using that much more than I'd initially expected. Not saying you should get this one (it was a lucky find) but I'd definitely aim for a networked color laser printer meant for office use.

Comment Nonsense (Score 0) 155

by zmooc (#65463005) Attached to: Three Years Left To Limit Warming To 1.5C, Leading Scientists Warn

What utter nonsense. Only totally unrealistic scenarios could still limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. As in: we stop using fossil fuels today and stop eating meat today (both would collapse the economy). In reality we have known about this for a long time, starting really talking about it in 1979 and launched IPCC in 1988. We're now 46 years in the future and apart from some hiccups due to COVID and the odd economic/oil crisis, each and every subsequent year we have increased our emissions and destroyed more forests, accelerating the problem. Humanity should be ashamed of itself and no longer deserves to survive on this planet. And probably they won't.

Also, the idea that 1.5 degrees is still feasible is based not only on the unlikely idea that we will stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon but also on the assumption that the boatload of "unlikely" tipping points and feedback loops that we routinely leave out of models because of uncertainty don't do what they usually do: make things much worse than our models predicted.

Humanity and many other species are absolutely fucked. The most "extreme" action currently taken is what Extinction Rebellion is doing and that's embarrassingly little compared to the horror we're facing. It's a matter of time before some desperate people are going to do things that actually help and it will probably involve removing the culprit from this planet, which almost certainly includes you, assuming you're complicit because you're still driving a ICE car, eating meat (routinely left out of IPCC scenario's for political reasons!!!), heating your home with gas and perhaps even flying planes. If so, you're actually consciously murdering future people and the consequences WILL find you. Good riddance.

Submission + - MIT chemical engineers develop new way to separate crude oil (thecooldown.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: The Cool Down is reporting that a team of chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a new process to separate crude oil components, potentially bringing forward a replacement that can cut its harmful carbon pollution by 90%.

The original technique, which uses heat to separate crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, accounts for roughly 1% of all global energy consumption and 6% of dirty energy pollution from the carbon dioxide it releases.

"Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?" said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, as previously reported in Interesting Engineering.

The team invented a polymer membrane that divides crude oil into its various uses like a sieve. The new process follows a similar strategy used by the water industry for desalination, which uses reverse osmosis membranes and has been around since the 1970s.

The membrane excelled in lab tests. It increased the toluene concentration by 20 times in a mixture with triisopropylbenzene. It also effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.

Submission + - Caffeine Has a Weird Effect on Your Brain While You're Asleep (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Caffeine was shown to increase brain signal complexity, and shift the brain closer to a state of 'criticality', in tests run by researchers from the University of Montreal in Canada. This criticality refers to the brain being balanced between structure and flexibility, thought to be the most efficient state for processing information, learning, and making decisions.

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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