Slashdot Mirror

https://newatlas.com/crops-engineered-need-less-water/53712/

Scientists have revealed that a simple genetic tweak to overexpress a single protein in crops could result in the plants needing up to 25 percent less water to produce a regular yield. It's hoped the breakthrough research will lead to a new generation of water-efficient agriculture that helps communities grow more food in areas struggling with drought and climate change.

Ok, it's not like this problem has not been researched before. Would help with California's drought problems also.

It's clear that the future of traditional war will be air power. Bombers taking off from Missouri, the heartland of the US, were used in the Iraq war. Their is no distance they can't cover with assisted fueling.

Why didn't the ships in Star Wars auto-fly and auto-target/kill?

Spielberg didn't see the future. James Cameron sort of got it with Terminator, except the machines weren't very good shots.

Automated war is terrifying.

From the ground, motion detection and enemy identification from a mile is not out of our reach (I'm sure some our working on this, it's not complicated).

It's this sort of tech that will result in a nuclear exchange (EMP = stop that shit). In my opinion.

How easy is this stuff? Here's an auto-aiming Nerf sentry turrent:
https://newatlas.com/nerf-vulc...

What's my point? I don't actually know. But automating war creates more enemies. Not waging war, not so much.

FTA: "Additionally, the inclusion of graphene in the concrete reportedly allows for a reduction of about 50 percent of other materials used, including cement. The scientists state that this factor should result in a 446 kg/tonne reduction in emitted CO2." https://newatlas.com/graphene-...

Sounds odd considering that the buses can recharge on the downhill with regen braking. Seems okay for a 45 ton dump truck https://newatlas.com/komatsu-e...

Sure, let's keep an open mind, but not so open that our brains fall out.
NGC 7603 is certainly an interesting case. Based on this paper I'm inclined to conclude that this involves 4 galaxies that are connected to a dark matter filament over vast cosmological distances (see p42 for a diagram). They do not interact with each other, but they do interact gravitationally with the filament, which also attracted an envelope of normal matter gas.

These filaments have been shown to form in cosmological simulations, and have been observed for other connected galaxies, although on a smaller scale.

Ironically for you, they are also considered to be evidence of a Big Bang expanding universe.

Found an alternate article that explains: "The most important of these commands is to shut down Kepler's radio transmitters. Though it's in a safe orbit about 94 million mi (151 million km) from the Earth, it still poses a hazard to navigation – not in the sense that it could collide with another spacecraft, but because its radio beam could accidentally blind another probe or even the highly sensitive ground antennae of the Deep Space Network." (source)

https://newatlas.com/2018-dyso...

Seems a little premature to get excited about

The team, from Lancaster University, tested their prototypes with a hairdryer, which was enough to prove its initial efficacy and win the UK national Dyson award a month ago, before being announced as the global winner today.

Plans are already in place working toward that goal https://newatlas.com/airborne-...

I own an Honor 6x. It takes good photos, but a $120 PnS camera is better, by far for almost all photographic needs.

Except when I don't have a PnS with me. Whenever I travel or go anywhere I plan to take photos, I take a PnS Canon (1/2.3" sensor) with me. New this PnS was $350, but it is available used for $120-ish today. It has lots of optical zoom, which matters for birding and other nature/landscape shooting.

Sensor size matters. Look at the differences.
https://newatlas.com/camera-se...

No, your iPhone isn't better than a $300 PnS camera either, though it is better than most cheap PnS due to the 1/2.0" sensor and F1.6 capabilities. Lacking optical zoom is a bad thing in my book.

But the old rule that the camera you have with you is the one you use still applies.

I see this replacing the "clean" engines they have to run close to land. Then they will switch to the bunker fuel engines like normal at sea and recharge these batteries. This would make the most sense for such a system.

Have you considered how much weight this adds to the ship? Batteries, even the best on the market, weigh 100 times as much as diesel fuel for the same energy output. You can argue on the specific battery technology or such if you like but this is going to be a rounding error. Then consider just how much fuel a ship burns per mile. Here's a reference I found on that:
https://newatlas.com/shipping-...

The title of worldâ(TM)s largest container ship is actually held by eight identical ships owned by Danish shipping line Mærsk. All eight ships are 1300ft (397.7m) long and can carry 15,200 shipping containers around the globe at a steady 25.5 knots (47.2 km/h, 29.3 mph) .

At five storeys tall and weighing 2300 tonnes, this 14 cylinder turbocharged two-stroke monster puts out 84.4 MW (114,800 hp) - up to 90MW when the motor's waste heat recovery system is taken into account. These mammoth engines consume approx 16 tons of fuel per hour or 380 tons per day while at sea.

This is an extreme example of a very large ship but also a fairly new design and therefore presumably reasonably efficient per ton of cargo moved. California maintains a 24 mile clean burning border out to sea from it's coasts, where ships are prohibited from burning the nasty bunker fuel mentioned in the article. To replace the 16 tons of fuel it burns in one hour, for the roughly 30 miles to clear this zone, it would need 1600 tons of batteries to get the same energy. That weighs nearly as much as the engine, or as much as 100+ cargo containers it would not be able to take as cargo. As it can carry 15,200 cargo containers this might not seem like much, but that's the reduced cargo capacity for every trip it takes for the life of the ship.

Remember that this does not reduce the total fuel burned, the batteries would have to be charged up in transit.

There's been other ways to meet these emissions demands with far less impact on the ship. Each ship already has multiple fuel tanks, simply fill one tank with "clean" fuel for while near the coasts. This not only reduces the total "dirty" fuel burned but it requires no modifications to the ship.

Another popular tactic, though not mentioned in the article, is using liquid natural gas on a dual fuel engine. These can switch from bunker fuel to far cleaner natural gas when near the ports. This does require some modification, but far less than trying to make room for a very large and heavy battery pack. The article also makes mention of the possibility of nuclear powered ships, which is where I expect us to get to eventually.

Wow, there sure are a bunch of butthurt 'robot' fanbois who like shitty machine-made hamburgers, who have mod points. I guess you fanbois would like your cheeseburgers in a can, too, so you don't have to go outside and talk to other human beings, either. Just order a case of them at a time, and wait until the FedEx driver walks away before you open the door, so there's no risk of having to interact with him at all.

Mod me down to "-9.99999E99, Troll" for all I care. I actually enjoy quality food, made by a real human being, not some shitty automation. In fact I think I'll make myself a lovely bacon cheeseburger at home tonight for dinner, using only the finest ingredients and apple-smoked bacon, lovingly made by Yours Truly. Anything made by another human being, even if you're the only one eating it, is orders of magnitude better than anything any shitty machine assembles. FFS you may as well just have a vending machine spitting out some frozen thing that gets microwaved. Guess some of you have no taste.

Reminds me of that time they didn't...

• remove the 32-bit support on all apps
• remove the iPhone's headphone jack
   
• remove the built-in floppy drive for crappy external USB ones
• remove the built-in CD drives from laptops
• remove the built-in ethernet ports from laptops (Wifi jitter outta be enough for anyone)
• remove the support for side-by-side Wintel hardware
• remove the options to replace phone and desktop components easily
   
• remove the old power cords
   
• remove the ADB mice and keyboards when USB came out... and Localtalk
• remove the various old style hard drive data formats (FAT-32 and NTFS are now OK, but there was a transition away from the iMac era formats before OSX brought more standardized support)
• removed the affordable $500 mac Mini
• removed the Xserve from their lineups
   
• remove the solid bondi themed USB keyboards in favor of tiny chicklet keyboards
   
• remove the trapezoid and oblong mice when the hockey puck mice came out
   
• remove the PowerPC version of the OS around 10.7
   
• remove the OS 9 compatibility layer
   
• remove the driver support for various classic printer hardware
   
• remove the native Flash support from the drawing board for all iPhones

Soon to... um, "never" be removed per https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312 :

In fall 2018, Apple will stop bundling open source services such as Calendar Server, Contacts Server, the Mail Server, DNS, DHCP, VPN Server, and Websites with macOS Server. Customers can get these same services directly from open-source providers. This way, macOS Server customers can install the most secure and up-to-date services as soon as they’re available.

There are a few others I've forgotten, and I'm sure there would be many more if my last personal mac were newer than my college days.

Mind you, selective memory... and I'm a PC person. PCs have had their his own share of removed features (like 16-bit DOS exe support and some new webcam hardware that became deprecated or sound cards that were poorly implemented, or XP software that just doesn't work in Windows 7 Ultimate even with the XP emulation) but at least there is a ton of FRAGMENTATION in hardware and some selectivity if you are willing to keep crazily outdated / insecure versions of the OS connected to the internet.

Android too has its own share of stuff that's been removed.

One thing I see Apple DID keep is 4 inch phone screens (though apparently you must scrape the bottom of the barrel with the iPhone SE which is apparently 24 months old - https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-16gb-storage-screw-up/ )
I sorely miss that on the Android side of the world. I bought a bottom of the barrel phone on tmobile due to its [relatively small] 5.0 inch size, SD slot and removable batteries, and sadly noticed that going smaller would require the unadvisable model of putting money down for kickstarter projects for gimmick phones that besides doubling the price had some bottom-of-the-barrel hardware AND still dared bear outdated versions of Android IIRC.

But I digress. The world is full of removals, and Apple is just as quick to do it as that unmentionable platform that was Microsoft Windows 6|7|8 Phone or your javascript framework du-jour. Not something I'd expect to last me a decade. Ironically, decade-old hardware like cars, microwave ovens, hammers, non-smart televisions, routers (hmm, is it too late for me to insert Apple's Airport Express to my list?) run reliably because they more or less stay the same every time you go to the store to replace your burned-out one.

NFC on Android has been around for 5 years. Apple is once again lagging Android, and going to try to spin it as "revolutionary" even though 75% of all smart phones have been doing this for half a decade.

Courage?

I didn't see one thing that looked like Apple was claiming this was their invention, let alone anything revolutionary. It is just a new capability for iPhones (and maybe iPads?). Nothing more, nothing less.

Try not to Hate before thinking. Is that even possible for you?

NFC on Android has been around for 5 years. Apple is once again lagging Android, and going to try to spin it as "revolutionary" even though 75% of all smart phones have been doing this for half a decade.

Courage?

No, Tesla's Autopilot ran into a motorcycle. The police officer who was hit (yes - it hit a POLICE VEHICLE) got off the bike in time; this Norwegian rider wasn't so lucky. Need we go on with more Autopilot failures?

Sailboats have actually advanced a long way in recent decades. A modern clipper ship would look quite different from the old ones.

The advantage to wind powered ships is that they don't need fuel! Think of the money the industry would save.

They don't use sails to replace the usual motors but to supplement them. If you do an image search for maps of trade winds you'll find that on some routes in some directions, the wind blows from behind for most of the trip. Some prototypes have reported a 15% or greater reduction in fuel consumption using sail.

The sails are all computer controlled and furled/unfurled by motors. The ships may use more conventional mast styles or some designs use large kite sails.

Here's an old article on a kite sail : https://newatlas.com/cargill-s...

I was curios at how Musk's rocket stacked up to the rocket that sent us to the moon. From New Atlas:

the two-stage Falcon Heavy has nine Merlin 1D main engines in each of its first stage elements burning supercooled liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,548,500 lb of thrust. Then the second stage takes over with its single Merlin 1D engine to punch 210,000 lb of thrust

That's remarkable when compared to the Atlas and Ariane rockets of today, but now let's look at the Saturn V. Its S-IC first stage has five Rocketdyne F1 engines that, when set loose, generate a staggering 7,610,000 lb of thrust as it burns kerosene and liquid oxygen.

Then comes the S-II second stage with its five Rocketdyne J-2 putting out 1,155,800 lb of thrust from a mix of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. But where Falcon Heavy has already used up its stages, the Saturn still has its S-IVB third stage and its single J-2 engine that can manage a respectable 225,000 lb of thrust.

Lots of other interesting information in the article such as size of payload and cost.

You can not put a Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine in a car, but it is advertised as providing a Brake Specific Fuel Consumption (BSFC) at maximum power is 0.278 lbs/hp/hr. which is stated as being equivalent to a thermal efficiency of 50% converting fuel to motion. Guess - this is when burning heavy fuel oil, If Methane is the fuel, thermal efficiency will be lower

The 14 cylinder version of this engine produces a maximum power output of 108,920 hp at 102 rpm.
Total displacement comes out to 1,556,002 cubic inches.
total engine weight is 2300 tons

Refence Most powerful diesel engine in the world; New Atlas Marine, Mike Hanlon, October 2nd, 2004

I wonder why no one complained about (or remembered) this thing:

https://newatlas.com/mayak-sat...

According to the website, it was designed to orbit for just a month.

csw

Unless you drive it on the highway, then it's 50 miles.

https://newatlas.com/2017-bmw-...

At 80MPH on a Wyoming highway the battery was flat after 50 miles. The range extender is only 25kW, so top speed is limited to 75MPH on flat road with no head-wind. 100% to 0% in a little over half an hour of cruising.

I doubt it would last 10 minutes in a car chase. Probably overheat the battery or motor in 5.

Citation:

https://newatlas.com/water-pur...

The military have long flight duration drones that fly around the desert and provide HD resolution video of the surrounding area. Some of the sensors provide 360 degree views like Argus-IV. These can provide 70 hours of uninterrupted video of an entire city; everything from people walking around, cars, trucks and buses driving around.

https://newatlas.com/argus-is-...

But the problem is, just for one days worth of video, it is going to take hundreds of analysts to look for things of interest such as people loading boxes into vehicles, testing weapons, and doing any kind of suspicious militia type things. So that's where the video analysis AI comes in. It can be trained to look for various types of motion related to these types of activities. Since it never gets tired, it can sift through all of the video footage, ignore the boring static imagery and categorize every bit of human motion ready for the analysts to do a review.

How about 32 hours on a laptop from 6 years ago?

That's the kind of laptop I'd want in a bunker.

Nicotine is not harmful but vaping appears to be https://newatlas.com/e-cigaret...

From the linked article:

"It is important to note that this study was small and limited, with the authors including the fact that most of the e-cigarette cohort were formerly cigarette smokers, making it difficult to clearly identify whether these results were solely related to e-cigarette use."

I'm not saying that e-cigarettes are completely harmless; I assume they are not. But I do think they are less harmful than cigarettes, by quite a bit. It's a matter of harm-reduction not complete elimination.

Nicotine is not harmful but vaping appears to be https://newatlas.com/e-cigaret...

E-Cigarettes have also been linked to inflammatory lung disease https://newatlas.com/e-cigaret...

Like this?

https://newatlas.com/laptop-ac... ...but I think the point here, if you RTFA, is that a fiber constitutes about one sensor every meter, so you get a whole lot of resolution for some pretty damn inexpensive spare glass, and this will allow scientific study of wave propagation at a greater level of detail than ever before possible.

http://newatlas.com/fermi-para...

Robots work in large factories. Not in the field repairing broken equipment or building one-offs.

Nope. And even if you were correct, that's still at best a temporary situation.

Besides, most of the big work involves things like pipeline construction or marine construction. Marine construction is already becoming automated, and pipeline construction is a prime candidate for automation, too, because it involves mostly welding the same joint on a large number of pipe segments over and over again. Even if the one-off jobs never become automated, it will still get harder and harder to make a living because fewer and fewer people will be needed.

Moreover, if we start from the assumption that we'll never get to the point where repair welding is automated, then this will still mean that many fewer welders will be needed in the future, so fewer and fewer people will go into that field. And because they'll all be doing less work, they'll have less practice, and the quality will suffer. At some point, the number of people who are still good enough to do hard repairs will drop below the amount of work to be done, resulting in skyrocketing costs, until at some point it will become so profitable to automate the work that the initial assumption becomes implausible.

OK:

AI Lawyer "Ross" has been hired by its first official law firm.

AI cancer diagnosis tool

Using AI to Predict Malicious Infrastructure Activity

Yes, there was. According to TFS, they used more precise computational models which caused the need for dark matter to go away. Note that while the story was published on slashdot on April 1st, the article is from March 30th and the paper is from February 12th.

http://newatlas.com/vacuum-com...

Well, the obvious answer to this question is to ask how much horsepower a shark can develop.

At least for one of these bad boys the answer is about 300, so there might some headroom for a laser or two.

I can't wait.

Ground Effect container carriers, that's why they need access to the river.

Now I'm wondering if a 200-ton robot WiG craft could successfully HOP the bridges on the Mississippi. Not sure if that would be impressive or terrifying. Probably both.

According to this table of the 20 most populated countries, 9 of the top 10 had an index of 40 or lower. Only the United States (#3) was higher, with a score of 74. Those 9 countries alone account for about half of the world's population and over 90% of the population of the biggest 10 countries.

Rounding out the top 20, only Japan (#11, 72), Germany (#17, 81), the UK (#19, 81), and France (#20, 69) were higher than 50 points. Turkey (#17, 41) was the only other country in the top-20-population list to score above a 40.

The cynic in me says the only reason the top 10 weren't all failing was that the bribe must've worked (just kidding!).

Here's a link to an article with a few approaches - short read.

*no* self-driving cars out there

Other than the ones Uber bought running around Pittsburgh.

But we haven't built an AI that can match a trained human.

Unfortunately all of our AIs have ended up being better than humans. They don't drink and drive, they watch the road at all times, they can look forward and back at the same time. I don't see the point in training an AI that can match a 16 year old behind the wheel, I think we can do better.

Like I said above, tell me where your goal posts are so you stop moving them on me. The second a car meets your criteria they'll move to a "But they can't do X".

There are already autonomous vehicle racing circuits. Audi's cars in 2012 were just seconds slower than a race car driver (and probably much better than the average driver) http://newatlas.com/stanford-a...

The road is 'production'. These vehicles have been running around all types of environments since the first DARPA challenge in 2004. In 2010 Audi went up Pikes Peak in one. I've seen multiple Slashdot statements claiming what these cars "can't" do that they've been doing for nearly a decade.

And Google just gave up.

Google gives up on everything.

Accidental touches galore! When are they going just embed the phone into your hand? Or better yet, direct brain stimulation?

Exactly! WTH are we who don't have 2mm thick fingers supposed to do to be able to even hold on to this thing without accidentally emailing all our porn links to grandma, use fecking telekinesis? I have enough problems with the current model (S7)! (sorry grandma...)

I think it's time for the THICK revolution to start. Tell the manufacturers that we don't want these damned wafer-thin phones, much less anything thinner. Just one manufacturer should provide a 'thick' version of their flagship phone, and advertise it as such! I would buy it (so long as it's waterproof, and has a goddamned headphone jack), and being thicker, it should be able to compete very well battery-wise without going up in flames...

Accidental touches galore! When are they going just embed the phone into your hand? Or better yet, direct brain stimulation?

This is pretty cool. I think in general it's a good idea, however I can see it causing entirely new sets of problems. As drivers we recognize the difference between what we ought to do, and what we must do. For example, there are times when crossing a double yellow line would result in my death, while there are other times I cross the double yellow line safely and without risk to avoid a hazard in my lane or on the shoulder. My concern is people will start seeing these visual aids as things they *must* do. Thus in the process of trying to adhere exactly to the virtual markings, they become oblivious to the actual hazards that are more important. In one of the pictures they show two lane markers projected, which is where the car ideally should travel. On the right there are barriers that are actual hazards that are taking up part of the lane, and to the left is the other lane, which may or may not be an actual hazard. So if I am concentrating on the projected markers (which I assume are "intelligent" because they are dynamic), will it be obvious enough that I am travelling into another lane and that I must make sure the lane is clear of other vehicles first?
http://img-2.newatlas.com/merc...

The real question though is this... if the car has that much information about the environment to project images that tell you what to do, why isn't the car doing the driving in the first place?

Actually, there appears to be an economical alternative. Natural gas can be "cracked" into hydrogen gas and carbon black by bubbling it through a column of molten tin. The carbon accumulates as a removable layer on top of the tin, and pure hydrogen comes off the top of the column. Switching to a hydrogen economy would be difficult, but it certainly is doable. Disposing of the carbon black is a problem, but is minor compared to the continued emission of CO2. Might be able to pelletize the carbon and dump it into a deep ocean trench ( I can imagine the screech coming from the environmentalist at such a suggestion! Deafening! ) Going this route would provide a solution to CO2-induced global warming, but I really doubt that government has the will or competence to do it. https://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfue... http://newatlas.com/hydrogen-p...

http://newatlas.com/google-rev...

for Property damage only Google appears to be higher than average *but* only ~54% of property damage only accidents get reported while Google reports 100% of accidents, so... Likely a push.

You are an idiot or an ignorant.

Possibly both at the same time! Let's see:

http://newatlas.com/silex-lase...

Hmmm, 1/5th the cost already affordable by nearly any "kitchen pot" dictatorship around the world. And this isn't new technology -- rumor in the physics world has it that this is how Israel has been making its bombs for decades. So right, not quite in my kitchen with my pots, but in a small warehouse somewhere? Maybe, if I have a few million and access to uranium 238 (which is, one profoundly hopes, not THAT easy to arrange, actually). In a small production facility in (pick a place loosely controlled by your favorite world group that you really don't want to have nuclear devices)? Without question. It's just a matter of time, although frankly centrifuges are already more than sufficient to build uranium bombs with or to enrich fuel-grade uranium to where you can cook out plutonium. Plutonium is, no argument, hard to squeeze off in a bomb, but enriched Uranium is laughably easy.

Thorium is arguably more of a challenge. For one thing, making U233 involves the Pa chain and a breeder reactor that makes lots of gamma rays and neutrons, so it probably isn't a good candidate for basements unless one's basement has thick lead and concrete walls and one has a degree in nuclear engineering. OTOH, separating out U233 is just chemistry once you get there. So far, it has been easier and cheaper to stick to U235 and plutonium for reasons that are well described and discussed elsewhere:

https://whatisnuclear.com/arti...

but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs. You can store the bomb grade material without any particular precautions other than keeping it subcritical and our borders are totally porous (a nation's worth of heroin addicts agree!) so again, a terror group in any country that has access to e.g. Monazite sands -- India, Australia, Madagascar, Western North Carolina... can if they wish follow this alternative route to a Uranium bomb that doesn't even require a laser OR a centrifuge (although it does require building a breeder with a chemical separation step, plus some fuel grade material to get it started). Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.

Best of all, nowadays they could trumpet to the world that they were fixing Global Warming by building thorium based nuclear self-sufficiency and all it takes in a MSR is to divert the breeder-enriched salts into a chemical extraction step and siphon off a steady supply of bomb-grade material. Material that you can even show that you NEED (in at least some capacity) to restart your reactor after fuelling or start a new one...

The point is -- to repeat myself -- that killing large numbers of people is easy enough to be nearly impossible to prevent if:

a) You don't care if you die yourself in the process;
b) You don't care who you kill, and are perfectly happy to take the lowest hanging fruit you can find if people take steps to protect one possible target (say, the super bowl). Are people going to be able to provide the same protection to every football, soccer, basketball game, forever? How about airports, train stations? How about high-profile, expensive, human filled skyscrapers in every city?
c) You have at least some money to put towards the project. To kill more than 100 people at a time will likely require some investment and a co