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Submission + - Electric vehicles fail at a lower rate than gas cars in extreme cold (electrek.co)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Electric vehicles often get bad press about their performance in the cold. Now, Electrek presents actual data comparing failure rates of EVs versus ICE cars, thanks to our friends in Norway. Everywhere in the world, internal combustion engine vehicles fail in the cold a lot more often than electric vehicles, but that’s mostly due to the fact that there are a lot more of them. In Norway, almost 1 in 4 cars on the road is electric, which makes it easy to adjust per capita. The country has been experiencing extreme cold conditions since the beginning of the year, and Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles. This means that electric cars are almost twice as good as fossil cars in the cold. To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.

Submission + - A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover. But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. “I’ve found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” he added. Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. [...] While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

Submission + - Facebook Secretly Killed Users Batteries, Former Engineer Claims (nypost.com)

Submitted by WankerWeasel
WankerWeasel writes: The report implies that the “feature” has been used on customer phones without their knowledge or permission, though stops short of categorically stating this. The New York Post reports:

Facebook can secretly drain its users’ cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit.

The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward.

“I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses,” said Hayward, 33, who claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit that he was fired in November for refusing to participate in negative testing.

Hayward said he refused because of the potential risk posed by draining someone’s battery when they might potentially need it for things like 911 calls, Crash Detection, and Fall Detection. He said that Facebook might even be unknowingly draining the batteries of phones belonging to police and rescue workers.

Submission + - Intimate photos by Roomba vacuums leaked online (futurism.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Those few images posted privately to contract worker shop talk groups may just be the tip of the privacy iceberg when it comes to robot vacuums and other smart home products that collect a ton of invasive data.”

That sucks

Submission + - The Poem That Passed the Turing Test

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: In 2011, the editors of one of the nation’s oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called “For the Bristlecone Snag” for publication in its Fall issue. The poem seems environmentally themed, strikes an aggressive tone, and contains a few of the clunky turns of phrase overwhelmingly common to collegiate poetry. It’s unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.
Image

Want to Eat Chocolate Every Day For a Year? 158

Posted by samzenpus from the dental-nightmare dept.
Scientists from the University of East Anglia are studying the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, and need 40 female volunteers who would like to eat chocolate every day for a year. The chocolate loving 40 must be post-menopausal and have type 2 diabetes so it can be determined if the flavonoid compounds in chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease. Dr Peter Curtis, of the UEA's School of Medicine, said, "Our first volunteers are about to return for their final visit to see if the markers of heart health - such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels — have changed. A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease."

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