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Submission + - Link Between Salt and High Blood Pressure 'Overstated' (time.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Diagnosed with high blood pressure? If so, you were probably told to moderate or avoid the use salt in your food. Well, a new study (abstract found that salt is not associated with systolic blood pressure after controlling for other factors. The study found that BMI, age, and alcohol consumption all strongly influenced blood pressure, and concluded that maintaining a healthy body weight was the best way to counteract it. The publication of this research follows a CDC report from Tuesday decrying the amount of salt in children's diets — a report that lists high blood pressure as one of its main concerns. The debate on this issue is far from over, and it'll take years to sort out all the contradictory evidence.

Submission + - Exomoon Detection Technique Greatly Expands List of Potential Habitable Systems

Submitted by Luminary Crush
Luminary Crush writes: Most of the detected exoplanets thus far have been gas giants which aren't great candidates for life as we know it. However, many of those planets are in fact in the star's habitable zone and could have moons with conditions more favorable. Until now, methods to detect the moons of such gas giants have been elusive, but researchers at the University of Texas, Arlington have discovered a way to detect the interaction of a moon's ionosphere with the parent gas giant from studies of Jupiter's moon Io. The search for 'Pandora' has begun.

Submission + - Munich Council say talk of LiMux demise is greatly exaggerated (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Submitted by ndogg
ndogg writes: The rumors of Munich city going back to Microsoft seem to have been greatly exaggerated. There was a review of the city's IT systems that was called for by the mayor, but it wasn't solely just to decide on whether to move back to Microsoft. And while there have been complaints about LiMux, they mostly seem to concern compatibility with OpenOffice.org, which may well be resolved by switching to LibreOffice.

Submission + - SLS needs more money ... (al.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Surprise, surprise! A GAO report finds that SLS is over budget and that NASA will need an additional $400 million to complete its first orbital launch in 2017.

NASA isn’t meeting its own requirements for matching cost and schedule resources with the congressional requirement to launch the first SLS in December 2017. NASA usually uses a calculation it calls the “joint cost and schedule confidence level” to decide the odds a program will come in on time and on budget. “NASA policy usually requires a 70 percent confidence level for a program to proceed with final design and fabrication,” the GAO report says, and the SLS is not at that level. The report adds that government programs that can’t match requirements to resources “are at increased risk of cost and schedule growth.”

In other words, the GAO says SLS is at risk of costing more than the current estimate of $12 billion to reach the first launch or taking longer to get there. Similar cost and schedule problems – although of a larger magnitude – led President Obama to cancel SLS’s predecessor rocket system called Constellation shortly after taking office.

The current $12 billion estimate for the program’s cost to achieve one unmanned launch. That is four times what it is costing NASA to get SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada to build their three spaceships, all scheduled for first manned launch before 2017. SLS not only can’t get off the ground before 2017, it can’t even get built for $12 billion!

If this isn’t the definition of a wasteful, boondoggle designed merely as pork, then what is? There is no way SLS is going to ever get the USA back into space. It should be shut down, now.

Submission + - Want To Ensure Your Personal Android Data Is Truly Wiped? Turn On Encryption (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: We've been around the block enough times to know that outside of shredding a storage medium, all data is recoverable. It's just matter of time, money, and effort. However, it was still sobering to find out exactly how much data security firm Avast was able to recover from Android devices it purchased from eBay, which included everything from naked selfies to even a completed loan application. Does this mean we shouldn't ever sell the old handset? Luckily, the answer is no. Avast's self-serving study was to promote its Anti-Theft app available on Google Play. The free app comes with a wipe feature that overwrites all files, thereby making them invisible to casual recovery methods. That's one approach. There's another solution that's incredibly easy and doesn't require downloading and installing anything. Before you sell your Android phone on eBay, Craigslist, or wherever, enable encryption and wait for it to encrypt the on board storage. After that, perform a wipe and reset as normal, which will obliterate the encryption key and ensure the data on your device can't be read. This may not work on certain devices, which will ask you to decrypt data before wiping but most should follow this convention just fine.

Comment Re:Colder than Earth? Not so fast. (Score 1) 34

No depth of troposphere can turn a Neptune or Pluto warmer than Earth.

Neptune's interior temperature is thought to be 7000K. Venus, a bit smaller than Earth, has a surface >500K hotter than its tropopause. I see no physical reason that this super-Earth couldn't have much more atmosphere than Venus. 220K from tropopause to surface would get you to liquid water.

Comment Colder than Earth? Not so fast. (Score 3, Interesting) 34

We know nothing about this planet's atmosphere. The low flux of energy from its star tells us that its stratosphere (if present) must be very cold, but says nothing about its surface temperature. It could have a much deeper troposphere, and thus a much stronger greenhouse effect than Earth has.

Comment Re:It's a gene (Score 2) 125

by yesterdaystomorrow (#47151693) Attached to: Small Genetic Change Responsible For Blond Hair

Someone in molecular and computational biology (like me) would also call the controlling element a gene. Science journalism is far too often full of such odd definitions and misunderstandings.

The "gene encodes a protein" idea still seems quite common in educational efforts that at least *ought* to have real scientists behind them. See, for example, page 4 of http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Ed.... One who monitors the science news also will frequently encounter press releases like "We sequenced organism X's genome and it contains (pick a number) genes, compared to the (human gene count du jour)." Presumably molecular biologists provided these numbers, but they appear to refer to protein coding sequences only. Oh, well, it's no sillier than counting galaxies (I'm an astrophysicist, and we pretend to do that frequently).

Comment Re:It's a gene (Score 2) 125

by yesterdaystomorrow (#47148577) Attached to: Small Genetic Change Responsible For Blond Hair

ORF (Open Reading Frame) is typically used for the case you described, and has been for some time now.

I don't think that's what I'm getting at. To switch to a different set of metaphors, "ORF" is a syntactic term while "gene" is a semantic term. Only a subset of ORFs are transcribed, as I understand it. A sequence of letters and spaces ending with a period is not necessarily a meaningful sentence.

In any case, the original article claimed that blondness was not controlled by a "gene". But by the old definition of "gene" that's nonsense. Someone working in, say, evolutionary dynamics would certainly call the controlling element here a "gene".

Comment It's a gene (Score 4, Informative) 125

by yesterdaystomorrow (#47147899) Attached to: Small Genetic Change Responsible For Blond Hair
Originally, "gene" meant "heritable element". Outside of molecular biology, it still does. That DNA can encode the construction of protein was the first connection molecular biologists discovered from genotype to phenotype. This caused them to mistakenly redefine "gene", because they supposed it was the only connection. Since they have now found other kinds of heritable elements in DNA, it is time for them to revert to the older definition, and come up with some other term for the subset of genes that encode protein.

Submission + - Male Scent May Be Compromising Biomedical Research (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out. The effect appears to be due to scent molecules that male mammals (including humans, dogs, and cats) have been emitting for eons. The finding could help explain why some labs have trouble replicating the results of others, and it could cause a reevaluation of decades of animal experiments: everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math. Male odor could even influence human clinical trials. If a male doctor injects you with a new kind of pain medication, do you feel better because of the drug—or because of his gender?

Submission + - The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties.

Submission + - Asteroid Impacts Bigger Risk Than Thought

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: The B612 Foundation, a U.S.-based nuclear test monitoring group, has disclosed that their acoustic sensors show asteroid impacts to be much more common than previously thought. Between 2000 and 2013 their infrasound system detected 26 major explosions due to asteroid strikes. The impacts were gauged at energies of 1 to 600 kilotons, compared to 45 kilotons for 1945 Hiroshima bomb. The BBC covers the story, as does Reuters.

Submission + - The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joel Werner writes in Slate that when Citicorp Center was built in 1977 it was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world but no one figured out until after it was built that although the chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, had properly accounted for perpendicular winds, the building was particularly vulnerable to quartering winds — in part due to cost-saving changes made to the original plan by the contractor. "According to LeMessurier, in 1978 an undergraduate architecture student contacted him with a bold claim about LeMessurier’s building: that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind," writes Werner. "LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.

LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs. With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby, and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye on potential windstorms. Work began immediately, and continued around the clock for three months. Welders worked all night and quit at daybreak, just as the building occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella, the strongest hurricane on record in Canadian waters, was racing up the eastern seaboard. The hurricane became stationary for about 24 hours, and later turned to the northeast away from the coast. Hurricane Ella never made landfall. And so the public—including the building’s occupants—were never notified.

Until his death in 2007, LeMessurier talked about the summer of 1978 to his classes at Harvard. The tale, as he told it, is by turns painful, self-deprecating, and self-dramatizing--an engineer who did the right thing. But it also speaks to the larger question of how professional people should behave. "You have a social obligation," LeMessurier reminded his students. "In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole."

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