Slashdot Mirror

derekmead writes: A study published today in Current Biology shows that wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is actually more abundant than it was before the disaster. According to the authors, led by Portsmouth University professor of environmental science Jim Smith, the recovery is due to the removal of the single biggest pressure on wildlife—humans. "The wildlife at Chernobyl is very likely better than it was before the accident, not because radiation is good for animals, but because human occupation is much worse,” Portsmouth University professor of environmental science Jim Smith says. “We were trying to emphasize that this study is a remarkable illustration of an obvious, but important message,” he said. “It is ordinary human habitation and use (farming, forestry, hunting) of land which does most ecological damage.”

StartsWithABang writes: Yes, asteroids might be humanity's undoing in the worst-case scenario. It's how the dinosaurs went down, and it could happen to us, too. The B612 foundation has been working to protect us by mapping and then learning to deflect potential threats to our planet, but their proposed mission needed $450 million, a goal they've fallen well short of. As a result, NASA has severed their partnership, which is a good thing for humanity: the risk assessment figures show that worrying about killer asteroids is largely a waste.

Jason Koebler writes: A fan has been ordered by a Washington judge to pay the Pokémon Company International $5,400 for copyright infringement after attempting to throw a Pokemon-themed party earlier this summer. Even though he canceled the free event, the Pokemon Company successfully sued Ramar Larkin Jones, for using an image of Pikachu to promote the Unofficial PAX Pokemon Kickoff Party.

derekmead writes: When Congress passed the FAA Modernization Act in 2012, it gave the agency until September 30, 2015 to fully regulate commercial drones for use in the United States. Well, it's October 1, and we're left with a patchwork of regulatory band-aids, quasi-legal "guidelines," and a small drone rule that still hasn't gone into effect yet. This news shouldn't surprise anyone. The agency has missed most every milestone—both internal and lawmaker mandated—that has been set for it. The last two years have been fraught with lawsuits, confusion on enforcement within its own local offices (some FAA agents have told pilots they can't post videos on YouTube, for example), and various conflicting guidelines as to who can fly a drone where, and for what purposes.

derekmead writes: When Congress passed the FAA Modernization Act in 2012, it gave the agency until September 30, 2015 to fully regulate commercial drones for use in the United States. Well, it's October 1, and we're left with a patchwork of regulatory band-aids, quasi-legal "guidelines," and a small drone rule that still hasn't gone into effect yet. This news shouldn't surprise anyone. The agency has missed most every milestone—both internal and lawmaker mandated—that has been set for it. The last two years have been fraught with lawsuits, confusion on enforcement within its own local offices (some FAA agents have told pilots they can't post videos on YouTube, for example), and various conflicting guidelines as to who can fly a drone where, and for what purposes.

MFingS writes: According to an article at Motherboard, shortly after 9/11, NSA director Michael Hayden requested extra computing power and Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, responded by re-routing truckloads of servers to the agency. Fiorina acknowledged providing the servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended warrantless surveillance (as well as waterboarding) and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms. Fiorina's compliance with Hayden's request for HP servers is but one episode in a long-running and close relationship between the GOP presidential hopeful and U.S. intelligence agencies.

merbs writes: Joe Haldeman wrote what is hailed by many as the best military science fiction novel ever written, 1974's The Forever War. In this interview, Haldeman discusses what's changed since he wrote his book, what hasn't, and what the future of war will really look like. Vice reports: "...The Vietnam War may have ended decades ago, but our military adventuring hasn’t. Our moment can somehow feel simultaneously like a crossroads for the technological future of combat and another arbitrary point on its dully predictable, incessantly conflict-laden trajectory. We’re relying more on drones and proxy soldiers to fight our far-off wars, in theaters far from the conscionable grasp of homelands, we’re automating robotics for the battlefield, and we’re moving our tactics online—so it seems like an opportune time to check in with science fiction’s most prescient author of military fiction."

schwit1 writes: The US military almost adopted the A-29 Super Tucano, a $4 million turboprop airplane reminiscent of WWII-era designs that troops wanted, commanders said was "urgently needed," but Congress refused to buy. "It's a great plane," says recently retired Air Force Lt. Col. Shamsher Mann, an F-16 pilot who has flown A-29s. "Pilots love it. It handles beautifully, sips gas, and can go anywhere. If you want to get into the fight and mix it up with the guys on the ground, the Super T is a great platform." The Super Tucano provided the "low-end" air-to-ground attack capability the United States simply never had in Afghanistan-a capability the Pentagon's F-35 could never hope to replicate.

HughPickens.com writes: Allison Schrager has an interesting article about how marketplaces for contraband drugs have only existed for about four years on the dark web, but they've made inroads fast. About 10%-15% of drug users in the U.K., U.S., and Australia [are believed to have] bought drugs off the net. According to Schrager, these marketplaces look remarkably similar to normal online marketplaces. Users leave detailed reviews on the quality of a vendor's product, speed of delivery, and how secure the shipping method was. There's information on where vendors are located and where they'll ship to. Some even post their refund and exchange policies. Purchasing meth from a dealer in the Netherlands feels as familiar and mundane as buying sheets from Macy's. The dark web makes transactions safer.

All the same, there are risks that Macy's customers don't run. Because there's no legal protection for illegal purchases, the bitcoin payments sit in escrow until the goods have been delivered and both parties are satisfied. That exposes the seller to exchange-rate risk, because bitcoin is an extremely volatile currency. And there is one other big source of risk: the point where the virtual world of the dark web and the world of physical reality intersect. In other words, getting drugs delivered. Certain drugs like MDMA and LSD may move mostly online. And the web may become the preferred source for affluent users and small-time pot dealers.

merbs writes: Supporters of a basic income have finally organized a proper political movement. Basic Income Action is, according to co-founder Dan O'Sullivan, "the first national organization educating and organizing the public to support a basic income. "He tells me that "Our goal is to educate and organize people to take action to win a basic income here in the U.S." This 2013 Economist article does a good job of summarizing the pro and con viewpoints on the (ahem) basic idea.

Jason Koebler writes: Optogenetics, the ability to control neurons using bursts of light, has been one of the most promising breakthroughs in neurology of this decade. It's been a boon for researchers, but its invasive nature (the brain must usually be exposed) has held the technology back. Sreekanth Chalasani of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies described a new, noninvasive method of controlling neurons using ultrasound pulses in Nature Communications. For the first time ever, he was able to manipulate a genetically modified organism using a new technique called sonogenetics.

Jason Koebler writes: The dawn of cheap genome editing techniques such as CRISPR understandably have people across the political spectrum worried about what a future of designer babies, more pathogenic viruses, deextincted species, clones, and glow-in-the-dark sushi might look like. But does putting limits on genetic engineering violate scientists' constitutional rights? The First Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to encompass not just the freedom of speech, but also the freedom of expression and expressive conduct, which likely includes acts of science, according to Alta Charo, a bioethicist and law professor at University of Wisconsin Law School, who says that science is inherently political.

An anonymous reader writes: Knots are indeed a relatively ancient art, a technology developed across centuries of trial and error and some very old, intuitive notions of symmetry and elegance. (The more 'ugly' or random a knot looks, the less likely it is to function well.) The basic physics and mechanics of knots are, however, relatively unstudied scientifically. If a knot works then it works—what more is there to ask? Quite a bit, it turns out. In a study recently accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters, engineers at MIT and Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris offer a new fundamental theory of knots based on relationships between topology, the mathematics of spatial relationships, and the basic mechanics of friction and pliability.

merbs writes: Two NYU AI researchers have created a surveillance camera that, when hooked up to a crude artificial intelligence, speaks aloud what it 'sees'. "Our idea was to raise awareness regarding the omnipresence of surveillance equipment, and the current state of technological advancement with artificial intelligence," Ross Goodwin said. "We wanted to create an entity with its own sense of social awareness, its own eyes, and an ability to communicate with humans, albeit with some glitchiness that underscores the limitations of the current technology."

merbs writes: Climate change wasn't created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed most of the pollution and gone way over their carbon budgets—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So should rich countries pay up? Researcher Damon Matthews has quantified how much historically polluting nations owe their global neighbors—and it's a lot.

An anonymous reader writes: Debian's Jérémy Bobbio, also known as Lunar, spoke at the Chaos Communication Camp about the distribution's efforts to reassert trustworthiness for open source binaries after it was brought into question by various intelligence agencies. Debian is "working to bring reproducible builds to all of its more than 22,000 software packages," and is pushing the rest of the community to do the same. Lunar said, "The idea is to get reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source. We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from a given source (PDF)."

Here is Lunar's overview of how this works: "First you need to get the build to output the same bytes for a given version. But others also must to be able to set up a close enough build environment with similar enough software to perform the build. And for them to set it up, this environment needs to be specified somehow. Finally, you need to think about how rebuilds are performed and how the results are checked."

Lasrick writes: NASA is kicking off the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, a decade-long effort to figure out just how bad things in northern US and Canada really are. The large-scale study will combine on-the-ground field studies as well as data from remote sensors—such as satellites and two season of 'intensive airborne surveys'—to improve how scientists analyze and model the effects of climate change on the region.

merbs writes: Alaska’s Permanent Fund was established in 1976, in the midst of a black gold rush; the massive Trans-Alaska pipeline was in the process of being built, and the state had reaped $900 million in revenue from the sale of drilling leases in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, in a matter of years. In a matter of a few more, it’d spent it. Alaskans soon recognized that their enormous oil reserves were nonetheless limited, so, with a kind of longterm forward-thinking rarely seen in politics today, they voted to add an amendment to the state constitution to establish a fund that would protect a portion of all incoming oil wealth for future generations. In 2014, the net income of the fund was $6.8 billion dollars and the dividend doled out $1,884 to 640,000 citizens, despite a decline in oil revenues that year.

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix revealed in a blog post that it will not renew its contract with Epix, meaning you won't be able to watch movies like The Hunger Games and World War Z through the service anymore. With the increase in cord-cutters and more original content, Netflix is positioning itself to be like any other TV channel (one that owns its own distribution model) and is betting that customers won't miss the Epix content. Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos says, "While many of these movies are popular, they are also widely available on cable and other subscription platforms at the same time as they are on Netflix and subject to the same drawn out licensing periods."

An anonymous reader writes: The iHub in Nairobi has long been at the epicentre of tech developments in Africa, and has been lauded by both Barack Obama and Satya Nadella in recent weeks. It currently has about 3000 software devs registered as members, but since last year has been building a makerspace for hardware entrepreneurs, too. Gearbox, as its called, it's just launched its first incubation program with the backing of Village Capital, offering $100,000 in investment opportunities for 12 entrepreneurs through a three month program. According to the organisers, it's the first of its kind on the continent. (It's certainly not the first hackerspace in Africa, though -- even in 2012, there were quite a few.)

merbs writes: Water access is going to be one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. As climate change dries out the already dry areas and makes the wet ones wetter, we're poised to see some radical civilizational shifts. For one, a number of densely populated areas will come under serious water stress—which analysts fear will lead to strife, thirst, and even violent conflict. With that in mind, the World Resource Institute has assembled a new report projecting which nations are most likely to be hardest hit by water stress in coming decades—nations like Bahrain, Israel, Palestine, and Spain lead the pack.

New submitter Alien7 sends an article about a group of bio-hackers who are out to bring DIY gynecological medicine to women who don't have easy access to it. Under the name GynePunks, they're assembling an arsenal of open-source tools for DIY diagnosis and first-aid care—centrifuges made from old hard drive motors; microscopes from deconstructed webcams; homemade incubators; and 3D printable speculums. ... So far the work is largely focused on diagnosis, and members of the collective are quick to note that what they’re creating is far from a comprehensive solution. It’s limited by some obvious factors—access to materials, a place to put them together, and the time to do it. But where the infrastructure does exist, and people are motivated to do so, it is very possible to establish some useful alternatives for self-care. As an example, Klau pointed to a pilot vinegar test program that’s lowered cervical cancer deaths by some 31 percent among poor women in Mumbai’s slums.

derekmead writes: NASA launched the Viking 1 spacecraft to Mars forty years ago. The probe was the first to achieve a soft landing on the planet, providing the first images and data from Mars. Politically the Viking 1 success was a huge win for the U.S. against the competing Soviet space program. Motherboard reports: "Viking 1 went on to become one of the most productive landers ever deployed on Mars, operating for 2,307 days before it finally shut down on November 13, 1982. It held the record for the longest Martian surface mission for decades, until the Opportunity rover finally beat it out in 2010 (and that little trooper is still going, by the way)."

merbs writes: The ocean is in the midst of radical, manmade change. It can seem kind of crazy that one of the most immense properties on Earth—the ocean washes over 71 percent of the planet—could be completely transformed by a swarm of comparatively tiny, fleshy mammals. But humans are indeed remaking the ocean, in almost every conceivable way. The ocean we know today—that billions swim, fish, float, and surf in—that vast planetary body of water will be of an entirely different character by the end of the century: hotter, higher, trashier, and more acidic.

citadrianne writes with an article at Motherboard that exposes an interesting under-use of the worldwide physical network that carries Internet traffic. Even though there are many thousands of miles of undersea cable (containing many times that length if you add up the various lengths of fiber), the physical body of the internet is remarkably un-useful when it comes to detecting things like seismic shifts. From the article: "Right now the current system of cables on the seafloor is deaf, dumb, and blind," said Rhett Butler, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii. "Although they carry trillions of bits of information and basically run the global economy at this point, they don't know anything about the environment they're in. They don't measure anything at all and that seems crazy."

According to Butler, AT&T and other telecom companies have paid lip service to the idea of integrating sensors into the cables, but he has watched proposal after proposal for smarter cables fall through for a variety of reasons.... "[In] a certain sense mankind has given the nod to lay cables across the open sea floor without any restrictions, so it seems to me to be a little reasonable [for the telecom companies to have] a little obligation on their part to help people out."

merbs writes: On the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb, Motherboard's Brian Merchant toured its crater with one of the last living Manhattan Project scientists. Here's the inside story of the road to the bomb, with the 90-year-old Murray Peshkin—the youngest man to work on the Project that built the bomb, and the first to set foot in its crater. From the story: "There are still nine nuclear nations that, between them, have stockpiled 16,300 weapons. And this network of decades-old nuclear armaments, some of which are still aimed at various strategic choke points around the globe, leaves civilizational scale death-becoming a technical possibility. Before all that, though, the atom bomb was one of the most successful science experiments of all time. It was the product of billions of dollars in government spending, hundreds of the world’s top scientists working in concert, in secret, in a city built from scratch in the desert, and a bygone patriotism united by common, Manichean cause: stop Hitler, defeat the Japanese."

derekmead writes: The most controversial parts of SOPA, an anti-piracy bill defeated in 2012 after a massive public outcry, may end up becoming de facto law after all, depending on the outcome in an obscure case that is working its way through the legal system without anyone noticing.

Next week, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in ClearCorrect Operating, LLC v. International Trade Commission, a case that could give an obscure federal agency the power to force ISPs to block websites. In January, The Verge reported that this very legal strategy is already being considered by the Motion Picture Association of America, as evidenced by a leaked document from the WikiLeaks Sony dump.

Jason Koebler writes: President Obama has signed an executive order authorizing a new supercomputing research initiative with the goal of creating the fastest supercomputers ever devised. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, or NSCI, will attempt to build the first ever exascale computer, 30 times faster than today's fastest supercomputer. Motherboard reports: "The initiative will primarily be a partnership between the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation, which will be designing supercomputers primarily for use by NASA, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security, and NOAA. Each of those agencies will be allowed to provide input during the early stages of the development of these new computers."

An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Sports League is the biggest organization for running video game competitions. The league has now announced that they will begin testing professional video gamers for performance-enhancing drugs. The league is getting help in making policies from anti-doping agencies that help regulate athletes in traditional sports. They say, "[W]e will be administering the first PED skin tests at ESL One Cologne this August, with a view to performing these tests at every Intel Extreme Masters, ESL One and ESL ESEA Pro League event thereafter as soon as the official PED policy is established and tournament rules updated accordingly." This announcement comes after a high-profile Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player admitted last week that he and many other players used Adderall to gain an advantage in tournaments.

derekmead writes: While the media might focus on prosthetics, the technology and techniques involved in limb salvage have advanced tremendously, too, spurred in large part by America's recent military conflicts. Now, when a soldier or civilian faces a brutal limb injury, they have choices—save the limb, or amputate. Be a limb salvage patient, or an amputee. Reconstruct the limb you were born with, out of the pieces you have left over, or lose that limb altogether. And that choice is, increasingly, a really difficult one.

citadrianne writes: An ICU patient is monitored and assessed according to 12 different variables. These include such measurements as body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, blood pH, and others. Together, they're used to formulate a quantitative answer to the question, "How bad is it, doc?" Many of these physiological signs are measured in real-time via electrodes and like a billion different varieties of catheter. Add to it barrages of lab tests done multiple times per day per patient and the need for 20 or so clinicians (per patient) to have access to all of this data, and the result is very a deep data problem. Multiply that data problem by hundreds of thousands of patients.

This is the fundamental problem that the programming language MUMPS (sometimes called just "M"), or the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, aims to solve. To its proponents, MUMPS allows for a one of a kind synthesis of programming and database management, while to to its detractors, it's a bizarre anachronism with little connection to the evolution and innovation taking place elsewhere in programming. Probably to most people that do things with computers, MUMPS/M is poorly understood, at best, and more likely to be completely unknown.

merbs writes: Tthe biggest oil spill in US history, despite incurring the largest environmental fine on the books—$18.7 billion, handed down this month—has done almost nothing to change the nation's relationship to oil. Five years after the spill, and, by BP's count, $54 billion in projected total expenses, there have been no serious legislative efforts to improve the oversight or regulation of the United States' still-expanding offshore oil operations. Public opinion of deepwater drilling barely budged during the ordeal; today, a majority of Americans favor doing even more of it.

citadrianne writes: Cures for major disease always seem just a few short years away. We constantly read about promising new treatments for cancer, diabetes, HIV, ALS, and more. While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years — sometimes greatly — we still focus doggedly on the cure. "The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy." This article takes a look at so-called "Cure Culture" — the focus on reaching for a cure when our scientific efforts may be better expended attacking a disease in other ways. It asks, "Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? ... What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? ... And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?

schwit1 writes: From The Washington Post's Lisa Rein comes news that the federal government is launching a six-month pilot program with seven agencies to post online documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. That means that information requested (whether by a journalist, nonprofit group or corporation) asks for the records under FOIA, it's not the just the requester who will get to see the results, but also the public at large. What's the problem with that? For journalists whose province is the scoop, it could mean less incentive to go through the process of asking for the record in the first place. Washington Post Investigations Editor Jeff Leen says in the story that public posting could therefore "affect long-term investigations built on a number of FOIA requests over time." An excerpt offers a similar defense of documents being released only to the requesting party: "FOIA terrorist" Jason Leopold has big issues with the approach. "It would absolutely hurt journalists' ability to report on documents they obtained through a FOIA request if the government agency is going to immediately make records available to the public," writes the Vice News reporter via e-mail. Leopold has already experienced the burn of joint release, he says, after requesting information on Guantanamo Bay. The documents were posted on the U.S. Southern Command's Web site. "I lost the ability to exclusively report on the material even though I put in all of the work filing the requests," he notes. Another reason FOIA requesters might be annoyed by a general-release policy: filing FOIA requests isn't free.

Jason Koebler writes: The brains of four rats have been interconnected to create a "Brainet" capable of completing computational tasks better than any one of the rats would have been able to on its own. Explains Duke University's Dr. Miguel Nicolelis: "Recently, we proposed that Brainets, i.e. networks formed by multiple animal brains, cooperating and exchanging information in real time through direct brain-to-brain interfaces, could provide the core of a new type of computing device: an organic computer. Here, we describe the first experimental demonstration of such a Brainet, built by interconnecting four adult rat brains."

New submitter citadrianne sends a story about the beginnings of our asteroid defense efforts, and how initial concern over an asteroid strike wasn't sustained long enough to establish consistent funding: Until a few decades ago, the powers that be didn't take the threat of asteroids very seriously. This changed on March 23, 1989, when an asteroid 300 meters in diameter called 1989FC passed within half a million miles of Earth. As the New York Times put it, "In cosmic terms, it was a close call." After this arguably close brush with total annihilation, Congress asked NASA to prepare a report on the threat posed by asteroids. The 1992 document, "The Spaceguard Survey: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth-Object Detection Workshop," was, suffice it to say, rather bleak.

If a large NEO were to hit Earth, the report said, its denizens could look forward to acid rain, firestorms, and an impact winter induced by dust being thrown miles into the stratosphere. ... After reports from the National Research Council made it clear that meeting the discovery requirement outlined in the Congressional mandate was impossible given the lack of program funding, NEOO got a tenfold budget increase from 2009 to 2014. Yet it still faces a number of difficulties. A program audit released last September described the NEOO program as a one-man operation that is poorly integrated and lacking in objectives and oversight.

derekmead writes: Elon Musk's Hyperloop gets people excited. Promise the ability to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than an hour, and you're going to get people salivating. But for as much as we've heard about it, we've had scarcely little to see—until a team of students at the University of Illinois decided to build their very own miniature hyperloop.

Mechanical engineering students at the university built a functioning 1:24 scale model of the Hyperloop, a "fourth mode of transportation" that sends pods through a partially pressurized tube at very high speeds, as part of a senior design project. It was designed to test some of the key components of Musk's design, which was outlined in a much-read, open source whitepaper (PDF) published in August of 2013. That said, there are several key differences, which keep this from truly being a proof-of-concept as to whether or not the Hyperloop will ultimately work.

derekmead writes: Elon Musk's Hyperloop gets people excited. Promise the ability to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than an hour, and you're going to get people salivating. But for as much as we've heard about it, we've had scarcely little to see—until a team of students at the University of Illinois decided to build their very own miniature hyperloop.

Mechanical engineering students at the university built a functioning 1:24 scale model of the Hyperloop, a "fourth mode of transportation" that sends pods through a partially pressurized tube at very high speeds, as part of a senior design project. It was designed to test some of the key components of Musk's design, which was outlined in a much-read, open source whitepaper (PDF) published in August of 2013. That said, there are several key differences, which keep this from truly being a proof-of-concept as to whether or not the Hyperloop will ultimately work.

MarkWhittington writes: Space visionaries dream of a time when human beings will not only settle Mars, but will terraform the Red Planet into something more Earth-like, with a breathable atmosphere, running water, and a functioning biosphere. Evidence exists that Mars was more or less Earth-like billions of years ago before the atmosphere leached away into space and the water became frozen under the ground and at the poles. Terraforming Mars is decades away from the beginning and probably centuries away from the end. But DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already genetically engineering organisms that will help turn the Red Planet blue, according to a story in Motherboard.

merbs writes: Thus far, no other candidate has said they're going to make climate change their top priority. Martin O'Malley has not only done that, but he has outlined a plan that would enact emissions reductions in line with what scientists say is necessary to slow global climate change—worldwide emissions reductions of 40-70 percent by 2050. He's the only candidate to do that, too. His plan would phase out fossil-fueled power plants altogether, by midcentury.

Jason Koebler writes with a link to Motherboard's article about research from the Schalk Lab of Albany, New York, where researchers "have just demonstrated for the first time that it's possible to turn a person's thoughts into a legible phrase using what they're calling a "brain-to-text" interface," writing "It's still still the early days of this technology—electrodes had to be placed directly on the brain and the 'dictionary' of phrases was limited. Still, brainwaves of thought patterns were turned into text at a rate much better than chance."

New submitter wienerschnizzel writes: Vice News has released a report on how they were able to trace a member of the regular Russian army from his base near the Ukrainian border toward the battlefields in the contested territory in eastern Ukraine, then back to his home in Siberia using the pictures he uploaded on his social media profile.

The methodology used is based on a report by the Atlantic Council think tank released earlier this year, which asserts that information on the movement and operations of the regular Russian troops can be easily gathered from publicly available sources (such as the social media). The Russian government still denies any involvement of Russian troops in the fights in Ukraine.

Jason Koebler reports that SpaceX is building a small-scale version of Elon Musk's hyperloop transport tube system, which can move cargo and people at speeds over 700 mph. The test track will be approximately one mile long, and its inner diameter will be between four and five feet. But while SpaceX is building the track, it's not going into full development mode. Instead, the company is turning it into a competition. Other organizations will be invited to build pods — the containers that move through the tubes — and test them inside the track. They say the competition will be geared toward university students and independent engineering teams. SpaceX expects the testing to happen next June, and they've published a document with details on the competition. They add, "The knowledge gained here will continue to be open-sourced."

AmiMoJo writes: Leicestershire Police have announced that they will be scanning every face at the popular UK Download music festival. The announcement article on Police Oracle (paywalled) reads, "the strategically placed cameras will scan faces at the Download Festival site in Donington before comparing it with a database of custody images from across Europe." The stated goal is to catch mobile phone thieves. Last year only 91 of the 120,000 visitors to the festival were arrested, and it isn't clear if the data will be deleted once checked against the database. The linked article provides at least one image of a costume that would probably trip up any facial recognition technology yet devised.

merbs writes: Reed Milewicz, a computer science researcher, wowed a major online Magic: The Gathering forum when he posted the results of an experiment to "teach" a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. Milewicz had trained a deep, recurrent neural network—a kind of statistical machine learning model designed to emulate the neural networks of animal brains—to "learn" the text of every Magic card currently in existence. Then he had it generate thousands of its own.

He shared a number of the bizarre "cards" his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names ("Shring the Artist," "Mided Hied Parira's Scepter") and freshly invented abilities ("fuseback"). Players devoured—and cheered—the results.

merbs writes: Our brains are unfathomably complex, powerful organs that grant us motor skills, logic, and abstract thought. Brains have bequeathed unto we humans just about every cognitive advantage, it seems, except for one little omission: the ability to adequately process the need for the whole species' long-term survival. They're miracle workers for the short-term survival of individuals, but the scientific evidence suggests that the human brain flails when it comes to navigating wide-lens, slowly-unfurling crises like climate change.

derekmead writes: Netflix is experimenting with pre-roll and post-roll advertisements for some of its users. For now, it's just pitching it's own original programming. However, many are concerned that they plan to serve third-party ads, but the company says they have no plans to do so. They told Mashable in a statement: "We are not planning to test or implement third-party advertising on the Netflix service. For some time, we've teased Netflix originals with short trailers after a member finishes watching a show. Some members in a limited test now are seeing teases before a show begins. We test hundreds of potential improvements to the service every year. Many never extend beyond that."

tedlistens writes: "From the burning of the Library of Alexandria to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban, to the Nazi's battle to burn as much "degenerate art" as they could find, mobs and soldiers have been quick to destroy what took societies centuries to create; what museums and collectors spent decades collecting, preserving, and documenting for the public." However, as noted by Motherboard in an article to which tedlistens links, "The digital era looks different: files can be cheaply hosted in data centers spread across several states or continents to ensure permanence. Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian born artist, educator, and activist, wants to apply that duplicability to the artifacts that ISIS has destroyed. Now, Allahyari is working on digitally fabricating the sculptures for a series called "Material Speculation" as part of a residency in Autodesk's Pier 9 program. The first in the series is "Material Speculation: ISIS," which, through intense research, is modeling and reproducing statues destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari isn't just interested in replicating lost objects but making it possible for anyone to do the same: Embedded within each semi-translucent copy is a flash drive with Allahyari's research about the artifacts, and an online version is coming.

retroworks writes: Integrated photonic devices are poised to play a key role in a wide variety of applications, ranging from optical interconnects and sensors to quantum computing. However, only a small library of semi-analytically designed devices is currently known. In an article in Nature Photonics, researchers demonstrate the use of an inverse design method that explores the full design space of fabricable devices and allows them to design devices with previously unattainable functionality, higher performance and robustness, and smaller footprints than conventional devices. The designed a silicon wavelength demultiplexer splits 1,300nm and 1,550nm light from an input waveguide into two output waveguides, and the team has fabricated and characterized several devices. The devices display low insertion loss (2dB), low crosstalk (100nm). The device footprint is 2.8×2.8m2, making this the smallest dielectric wavelength splitter.

derekmead writes: The oldest stone tools ever found have been discovered by scientists in Kenya who say they are 3.3m years old, making them by far the oldest such artifacts discovered. Predating the rise of humans' first ancestors in the Homo genus, the artifacts were found near Lake Turkana, Kenya. More than 100 primitive hammers, anvils and other stone tools have been found at the site. An in-depth analysis of the site, its contents, and its significance as a new benchmark in evolutionary history will be published in the May 21 issue of Nature.