In July, the U.S. and other nations drew up an agreement with Iran to limit the country’s nuclear program, with a goal of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. As a Congressional vote on the deal draws near, the White House is using science to sell the accord. In a video released today, Ernest Moniz—the Secretary of Energy and a bona fide nuclear physicist—explains the agreement’s limits on uranium and centrifuges, and how they would restrict Iran’s ability to build a bomb.
Video courtesy the Office of Science and Technology Policy
The science hinges on uranium enrichment. As it occurs in nature, uranium is a mix (mostly) of two isotopes: U-235 and U-238. Uranium 235 is the isotope that’s fissile—that is, it causes the runaway reaction that powers bombs and reactors alike. Naturally occurring uranium contains less than one percent U-235. The rest is U-238. To make energy, it’s necessary to boost the relative amount of U-235 to about three to five percent, according to the World Nuclear Association. That boosting is done with centrifuges. To make a bomb, the fraction of U-235 needs to be far higher—about 90 percent.
That’s why the constraints on both the size of Iran’s uranium stockpile and the number of centrifuges are crucial. With a smaller stockpile, there will be less uranium overall. But the key second element is that with fewer centrifuges, it would take much longer for Iran to make that uranium weapons grade. And that, the thinking goes, gives inspectors much greater chance of intercepting Iran’s plans before they successfully create a bomb.
The accord has its opponents, who hold valid concerns. First, many worry that the agreement’s limits—which vary by constraint but are about 10 to 15 years—aren’t long enough to do more than delay Iran’s path to a bomb. Second, there are concerns that the inspections aren’t forceful enough, since the U.S. can’t do them unilaterally and the inspectors have to give Iran 24 hours’ notice. Third, with sanctions lifted—and sanctions are the reason Iran is at the bargaining table in the first place—some worry Iran may use its newfound economic capital to cause further (non-nuclear) strife in the Middle East. The politics may be messy, but in an open letter a few weeks ago, 29 high-level U.S. scientists expressed their support for the deal anyway.
Disclosure: This reporter is a relative of one of the authors of the letter signed by 29 scientists.
A year after Twitch slipped through Google’s fingers, the empire has launched its own competitor to the billion-views-a-year live gaming market with Youtube Gaming.
Why do they care so much to have created a competitor from scratch less than a year after Amazon paid $970 million to acquire Twitch, allegedly right out of Google’s hands? A billion views a year may not sound like a huge piece of the pie when you consider that YouTube generates billions of views a day.
They care because they already depend on gaming content for significant amounts of traffic, so it’s no wonder YouTube is so interested in gaming. YouTube says that their gaming channel will bring together over 25 thousand games, with hundreds of millions of gamers. Already, gaming is a significant traffic-driving force for YouTube--the site claims that half of the top 100 channels by watch time are gaming channels.
In other words, YouTube already plays host to millions of dollars and billions of views of pre-recorded gaming content. YouTube celebrity PewDiePie, production company Rooster Teeth, and a dozen other major gaming organizations and individuals host videos on channels where people can see them anytime (many Twitch streamers also use YouTube to post recordings of their live broadcasts).
Twitch does a form of that too. The difference, however, is that Twitch is primarily a live broadcast system, which lets anybody with an XBox One and a camera peripheral host a live stream as they play through (almost) whatever they want. YouTube is about edited content--or at least it was until today.
Now live, the homepage for YouTube Gaming and the individual live pages look a lot like those of Twitch. In fact except for a few subtle design differences the interface is essentially the same.
Here is a screenshot of Twitch's homepage, below:
Screenshot of Twitch's homepage
http://www.twitch.tv/
Compare that to YouTube Gaming's homepage, shown below:
Screenshot of YouTube Gaming's homepage
https://gaming.youtube.com/
So what are the major differences that will help determine which service will win out? It’s hard to tell. YouTube has in its favor a massive number of existing users, as well as existing gaming content. That means everything you ever watched is available on YouTube Gaming now too. YouTube Gaming is less about a separate site and more about enhanced searchability, according to Alan Joyce, the Product Manager for YouTube Gaming: “All YouTube Gaming content is also available in the core YouTube experience. Gaming provides a discovery portal for the gaming content that exists on YouTube proper.”
The biggest questions for the moment are whether content producers on YouTube will want to do so live, and whether live streamers on Twitch will want to move to YouTube.
We asked a few Twitch streamers if they’d consider the move, and most of them were lukewarm on the opportunity. That lack of interest for the content producer could make sense: At the moment, they are likely getting a better deal on Twitch. YouTube has done a lot to promote the viewer experience and stream quality, however the revenue model, important for many streamers has yet to be discussed.
Twitch currently has several clear channels for making money with a stream: ads, subscribers (who pay a monthly fee for the privilege), and tips (sometimes in large amounts). YouTube’s current model rewards views only. Subscribers are irrelevant to the YouTube world, and really just another social media tool to get people back to your content.
There’s also the problem of gaining an audience: A Twitch streamer often leverages other streamers as part of a network to make gains in followers. If you move platforms, that community likely isn’t going to follow you.
There’s also concern over YouTube’s copyright protections, which could take a streamer offline if they detect, say, music in the background. Twitch does this on the back end: If they recognize a song, they’ll mute that segment of audio in the saved file. Many streamers have Spotify open in the background, treading a thin line where “live” audio playing in the room isn’t technically a violation of copyright rules.
Worst yet is the fact that, for the moment, YouTube Gaming does not have support for consoles. That means there’s a higher entry point if you want to join the community, as users will require a webcam, recording software, and a computer setup to do what both Microsoft and Sony built into their hardware already. “Regarding Xbox and PS4,” said Joyce, “we're interested in delivering YouTube Gaming for consoles, but we have nothing to announce right now.”
Still, YouTube will likely generate more views, and save Twitch streamers the hassle of moving recordings to YouTube if they want to build more revenue there. As with everything in the gaming world, there will be a lot of “wait and see” to determine who wins out. But some competition in the market can’t hurt. Users and content producers (especially the ones generating the most revenue) both stand to benefit from having alternatives where there weren’t any before.
We may be seeing the dawn of exclusivity contracts and gaming superstars within the next few months. Here’s hoping they don’t pass that cost on to viewers.
Panda Mei Xiang, seen here in a 2010 photo, lost one of her two cubs today.
Nature is cruel. Just days after giant panda Mei Xiang gave birth to twin cubs at Smithsonian's National Zoo, the smaller of the two cubs passed away.
When it was born, the cub weighed just 86.3 grams, or less than a stick of butter. It was 1,256 times smaller than its mother, who currently weighs 238 pounds. Raising twin cubs is a challenge for giant pandas, who generally are only equipped to care for a single infant at a time. The zookeepers tried to keep both panda cubs alive and healthy by giving both equal time with Mei Xiang. They left one with her, and cared for the other in an incubator, and then switched the two.
Yesterday, the zoo announced that Mei Xiang was refusing to give up the larger cub, leaving the smaller cub to the care of a dedicated team of professionals. The team was eventually able to make a switch earlier today. But when the team switched the smaller one back into an incubator earlier this afternoon, the smaller cub's weight continued to fluctuate, and the veterinary staff noticed it was having respiratory problems. It eventually died just after 2 pm today.
The larger of the two cubs is robust and thriving.
This question is not only entertaining (you might turn into spaghetti, according to some theories), but it's also important to theoretical physicists. Unfortunately, they're not even sure what happens when a single particle falls in, and it's been a big problem in physics for 40 years.
Quantum theory—the laws that govern how tiny particles work—says that anything that falls into a black hole is lost forever. But Einstein's general relativity says that's impossible: the total amount of stuff in the universe has to remain constant.
Over the years, scientists have come up with a variety of theories that try to resolve this paradox. Yesterday, at a conference in Sweden, famed physicist Stephen Hawking threw his hat into the ring.
Hawking suggests that when information falls into a black hole, it might get translated into a 2D hologram on the surface of the event horizon, the sort of membrane that surrounds the black hole. Those copies could “contain all the information that would otherwise be lost,” says Hawking.
As for the stuff that actually makes it in, he speculates that if the black hole is large and rotating, the stuff might wind up in another universe.
But these ideas have actually been around for a while. Hawking's announcements dive deeper than that. To help explain what all the hubbub's about, Popular Science talked to Grant Remmen, a theoretical physics graduate student at Caltech.
Getting Under The Hood
Nothing can escape a black hole, right? Wrong! Years ago, Hawking demonstrated that, actually, heat can escape. The stuff that black holes spit out is called "Hawking radiation" in his honor.
Hawking radiation plays a key role in most of the theories that attempt to solve the riddle of what happens to information that falls into a black hole. Because if Hawking radiation is just heat, that means the information really does disappear forever, and the laws that we think govern the universe have a big gaping hole in them.
If information doesn't leave black holes, it means there's something seriously wrong with the laws we think govern the universe.
However, if Hawking radiation also contains some other tiny bits of information, it could be enough to resolve the paradox.
Although that idea is also old, Remmen says that what Hawking appears to be doing differently is he's trying to explain how that information could be encoded onto the Hawking radiation particles.
“He's trying to get under the hood, and ask, 'If I throw information in, how exactly does it come back out?'” says Remmen. “It's one thing to say it must come out, but it's another thing to actually figure out how that happens, and that's a very important task. He's basically trying to tackle the black hole information problem in a new and more concrete way.”
As to how the information might get transcribed onto the Hawking radiation, Remmen says we'll probably have to wait until Hawking publishes a paper on it.
Helpful Holograms
So what's the deal with those holograms Hawking was talking about? How might they fix this information paradox?
“Let's say you're sitting outside an ordinary, garden-variety black hole and you drop something in,” says Remmen. “Let's say it's an encyclopedia.” You watch the book fall toward the black hole, but at a certain point, it appears to freeze on the surface of the black hole. You'd never see it cross the event horizon, even if you could wait for an infinite amount of time.
“Let's say you're sitting outside an ordinary, garden-variety black hole and you drop something in...”
“The event horizon can be thought of as a holographic screen for the interior,” says Remmen. “You can view everything that's going on in the interior in terms of things that are going on on this stretched horizon.”
Then, theoretically, if a scientist had easy access to a black hole, quantum computers, and a whole lot of time, she could theoretically use those photons and Hawking particles that emanate out from the event horizon to reconstruct the encyclopedia.
The information that comes out would be incredibly scrambled, and no sane scientist would attempt such an experiment. Still, the example shows that at least theoretically things could make sense in the universe. Which should make it a little easier for us to sleep in our beds at night.
The advent of enzyme complex CRISPR/Cas9 has ushered in a new age of genetic manipulation—it could help us cure diseases or resuscitate extinct species. One of CRISPR’s big advantages is that it’s much easier to use than its predecessors. So easy, in fact, that amateur biohackers are using it in their experiments, according to a report from Nature News.
It’s natural to be nervous about this. CRISPR is a powerful tool that scientists don’t fully understand, and it can have unintended consequences even when used cautiously. Ever since April, when a team of Chinese researchers published their findings after using CRISPR to change the genes of human embryos, the discussion has reached a fever pitch. Experts have been discussing the issue of consent (embryos can’t consent to having their genes manipulated, and the effects could be passed down for generations), the consequences of introducing an unintended change, and the effects on the ecosystem should a genetically manipulated animal break free from the lab.
But a lot of these concerns are isolated to some of the most advanced labs in the world. Yes, CRISPR is easy to use, but it’s not that easy to get the exact results you want, even for the experts. It’s highly unlikely that an amateur biohacker with little scientific knowledge could use CRISPR to create an unstoppable virus or change the human genome. It’s just too difficult.
Plus, biohackers don’t seem to be into that in the first place. The biohackers highlighted in the Nature News piece are more interested in engineering yeast to make unique beer or vegan cheese, or changing the color of a flower. On one message board, a biohacker with the alias plambe planned to use CRISPR to modify stress hormone receptors in plants in order to “deliver shit wherever I want when I want in the nucleus.”
Biohackers working with CRISPR still need to be careful—the U.S. Bioterrorism Protection Team has been casually monitoring biohackers over the past few years, the Nature News piece notes, likely to make sure they’re not making any biological weapons—but it’s unlikely any of them will be able to realize experts’ worst fears about CRISPR’s consequences. Not that they’d want to, anyway.
Facebook announced their new personal assistant within the Messenger app, M, which can make orders online, arrange dinner reservations, and book vacations.
Facebook did something strange last year: it turned off the ability to send Facebook messages from inside the Facebook apps for Android and iPhone, forcing users who wanted to use this feature to download the separate Facebook Messenger app. That move was puzzling for a long time, but with the introduction of a new digital assistant into Messenger, it's starting to make a lot more sense.
Today, messaging VP David Marcus announced Facebook M, a personal assistant backed by artificial intelligence, directly integrated into Messenger. M’s artificial intelligence algorithm is “trained and supervised by people,” according to Marcus, who writes that the service stands out because it can purchase items on your behalf, make travel arrangements, and even suggest gifts for your friends. One Facebook employee who was testing the app had his desk decorated in a French style, presumably from delivery services.
The mobile personal assistant who can actually take tasks off your hands has been attempted by a litany of startups, like Jarvis, Cubic, Magic, and (to an extent) Operator. These are mostly run by real people, however. Also, we have the usual suspects: Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, which are all fairly limited to in-phone commands.
Facebook is bringing AI into the mix. Facebook’s AI research division is a small group of 45 people split across Menlo Park, New York City, and recently Paris. But, Facebook also recently acquired Wit.ai, a small artificial intelligence startup that works mainly on turning speech and text into that they call “actionable data." The company even has similar examples as Facebook’s announcement listed on their website—the mechanics behind booking a table at a restaurant.
Wit.ai/ Screenshot
An example of Wit.ai's service.
Mercifully, the app will not yet pull in data to learn about you from Facebook, according to Wired. However Marcus says that could change in the future. Right now, M “trainers” work closely with the software to ensure accuracy, Wired says, and Facebook could be employing thousands as the app scales to the general Facebook user base.
The fusion of actual human employees and AI is something that's been attempted by few other tech services (Amazon's Mayday help service being one notable example). But given Facebook Messenger's estimated 700 million monthly users, this could be the grandest attempt yet to merge AI and human intelligence. We'll be watching it closely.
W. Zhu and J. Li, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
3D printed Microfish glow red in the presence of a toxin.
We all know that eating fish is good for your health, but what about fish shaped robots?
In a study published this month in Advanced Materials, researchers from UC San Diego announced that they'd figured out a way to 3D print tiny microrobots in the shape of fish.
The fish are just 120 microns long and 30 microns thick, much smaller than a human hair. Researchers can 3D print hundreds of the fish in seconds. The fish are printed with tiny particles of platinum in the tail which react with hydrogen peroxide. When the microfish are placed in peroxide, the tails move, propelling the fish along. The scientists can also add other particles to the materials used to print the fish, including chemicals that can detect and absorb toxins like bee venom.
In the study, they showed that the microfish could detoxify a liquid contaminated with a toxin. As the fish work, they glow red, and the swimming motion helps make sure they don't miss a drop of the contaminant.
These fish are just a proof of concept. They won't be used outside of a lab for a long time yet, but their creators have very high hopes for the fish.
“This method has made it easier for us to test different designs for these microrobots and to test different nanoparticles to insert new functional elements into these tiny structures. It’s my personal hope to further this research to eventually develop surgical microrobots that operate safer and with more precision,” one of the microfish inventors Jinxing Li said in a press release. Other possible applications include delivering drugs to targeted areas of the body, or removing toxins.
And those future drug deliveries or detoxifying treatments don't have to be done with simple fish-shaped bots. The researchers can also make printed manta rays or sharks, and could eventually even print bird shaped microbots.
Clearly, this means that one day your doctor could ask you to swallow these sharks and call her in the morning...and it wouldn't be fishy at all.
Climate change is changing the environment. Studies have shown that higher levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) are warming the planet. But it isn't easy to predict how those changes will affect life in the future. To fix that, some researchers are bringing the future to life, today, no time machines involved.
In Minnesota, scientists with the Department of Energy are pumping carbon dioxide into the air to see how wetlands respond in a project called Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental Change, or SPRUCE. The SPRUCE project set up huge enclosures, open to the air on top to see how the semi-enclosed environment would react to elevated CO2 levels and temperatures. (CO2 is heavier than air, so we're pretty sure most of it should stay in the enclosures.) The project was formally started this week.
The ten enclosures are roughly 40 feet across and 25 feet tall. Inside a few of them, researchers are keeping CO2 levels at 900 parts per million. In today's atmosphere, CO2 levels in the air are around 400 parts per million. The experimental enclosures are also equipped with heaters that can keep the temperature inside 9 degrees warmer than the temperature outside.
A wetland environment in Minnesota today. Scientists are investigating what will happen to areas like this as climate change continues.
“We think this gives us a good glimpse as to what future climates might look like,” Paul Hanson the experiment’s project coordinator, told Nature. “It allows us to cheat today’s conditions and take on the whole ecosystem, from the top of the trees to the deep peat.”
The deep peat is important, because peat, a dense, water-logged mixture of plant remains, contains large amounts of carbon that have built up over thousands of years. One third of the world's terrestrial (non-atmospheric) carbon is stored in peat bogs. Scientists think that once the peat in these wetlands warms up, it could start to release that carbon in the form of some kind of greenhouse gas. But they aren't sure if it will be CO2 or the even more potent methane, which has the potential to cause even greater levels of global warming.
Over the next 10 years, the scientists plan to keep the experiment running year-round, checking to see what happens to the ecosystem inside the cages.
Earlier this afternoon, another NASA plane crashed into the ground. On purpose. It’s been a big summer of NASA hurtling objects into the earth, with NASA deliberately crashing a Cessna in July, and earlier this week releasing a compilation of flying machine destruction footage. A “greatest hits”, if you will. Today, NASA sent another plane into the dirt:
Why? It’s not that NASA hates airplanes. Like the two tests earlier in July, NASA is looking at how an emergency transmission system holds up to rough impacts. The first crash simulation a low-level nose-first collision onto concrete, where the plane skidded on the surface. The second test was a nose-first dive into dirt, which just absorbed the plane’s impact and led to a definitely harmful and quite possibly lethal crumpling of the craft. This test was a tail-first crash into soil, which flipped the plane but didn’t crush it in on its crash-test-dummy occupants so much.
Emergency location transmitters attached to planes transmit the whereabouts of crashed planes to satellites, aiding in rescue. These crash tests are designed to see how well the transmitters work in extreme situations-- making sure than when they crash, their occupants have the best possible chance of being safely found.
Bugatti doesn’t build cars for just anybody. Its most recent supercar, the Bugatti Veyron, was limited to a run of just 450 cars, and when they were gone, they were gone. Of course, with a $2 million-plus price tag, it did take a while for those 450 Veyrons to find homes.
But the exclusive company has found a way to build a new car for everybody. Bugatti has announced that its next supercar will be featured in the PlayStation Gran Turismo racing franchise. The project, known as “Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo,” will still debut at the 2015 International Auto Show in Frankfurt, though it will not likely be a car you can sit in, or even touch.
Rather than designing a completely unrealistic pixels-only PlayStation car, the Bugatti design team worked to create a car that could take on a real-life race track -- if, that is, it were ever built in real life. While the car will likely be “outlandish,” according to the press release, it will give fans a taste of what the next drivable Bugatti might look like. (The photo shown here, from the accompanying the release, does no such thing.)
This isn’t Bugatti’s first time in a racing game. The Veyron debuted in Forza 3, and has been a fixture in that Xbox series ever since. But it is the first time the French company is designing a digital car just for the millions of gamers -- most of whom, it’s probably safe to say, will only ever drive a Bugatti made of bytes.
Leading the airshow practice is a giant KJ-2000 AEWC aircraft, flanked by J-10 fighters of the Bayi aviation aerobatics team.
Showing the Flag
Longshi Aviation Photography via www.top81.cn
A Z-10 attack helicopter escorts a Z-8 transport helicopter bearing the Chinese flag in the rehearsal for the VJ Day parade on September 3rd.
Just over a week before the Victory Day parade marking the 70th anniversary of China's defeat of Japan in World War II, the PLA and its foreign guests took over the streets of Beijing for a dress rehearsal of the big day. In addition to its 12,000 troops, 500 vehicles and 200 aircraft, China will be hosting ten foreign military parade formations, including Cambodia, Egypt, Mexico, Mongolia, Pakistan and Russia. In comparison to the 2009 National Day Parade, the Victory Day parade features more modern weapons, as well as a bigger international profile. And thus it is a prime opportunity for the PLA to show off some of its latest technology.
Tanks a lot
lt.cdjby.net
The ZTZ-99A tank is China's best tank.
The ZTZ-99A main battle tank will be one of the main parade attractions. Weighing over 60 tons, the heavily armored ZTZ-99A is the largest tank in the world that's not of US or allied design.
PGZ-07
lt.cdjby.net
Using two rapid firing, programmable 35mm cannons, the PGZ-07 can keep up with tanks, ready to swat down annoying attack helicopters.
PGZ-07 is China's frontline air defense vehicle. Its medium-armored chassis carries a twin-barreled 35mm cannon turret that fires smart shells, which are programmed to explode at precise distances, making them ideal for taking down aircraft, drones and missiles.
Missile Conga Line
lt.cdjby.net
The ATF-10 missiles are China's newest heavy anti-tank missile; any tank trying to win a duel with them would be outranged by a hefty margin.
The ATF-10 missile launcher vehicle uses a ZBD-07 armored chassis, carrying 8 ready-to-launch, fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles. The ATF-10 missile has a range of ten kilometers, making this missile akin to an anti-tank sniper able to pick off enemy armored vehicles while staying out of danger.
Anti-access on Display
antithesis via Weibo
In its first public debut, the YJ-12 supersonic antiship missile* is carried on trucks, coming after the ubiquitous YJ-83 subsonic antiship missiles.
*These are actually display mockups of the actual missiles, carrying live missiles during a parade is too dangerous.
YJ-12
Chinese Military Aviation
The YJ-12 is China's deadliest air launched anti-ship missile. With a range over 400km miles, the missile travels at speeds above Mach 3.5, meaning that once it flies from out of the horizon, the target ship has only less than 10 seconds to respond with last ditch defenses like Gatling cannons.
YJ-12 is China's deadliest anti-ship missile. An 8 meter long, 2-ton missile, the YJ-12 can reach speeds above Mach 3.5, and a range of about 400km (depending on flight profile). The YJ-12 is currently air-launched from H-6 bombers, though surface and ship launched variants are not out of the question.
DF-26
lt.cdjby.net
As one of China's newest missiles, the DF-26 IRBM can attack targets up to 4,000km away with remarkable accuracy (Chinese hypersonic gliders would extend its range even more.
DF-26 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) is perhaps the biggest star of the parade. Filling out a gap between the smaller DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) and the DF-31 and DF-41 ICBMs, it's a solid fueled, 4000km-range missile, transported on a 12X12 TEL vehicle for quick off-road launches. The DF-26's range allows it to attack targets as far away as Guam and Australia, guided by a variety of navigation technologies. While the initial DF-26 model is likely geared to attack military bases, future variants could carry anti-ship warheads or long-range hypersonic glide vehicles (which have the potential to reach Hawaii or Alaska).
Apple has confirmed the iPhone 6s announcement event for September 9 at 10am PST at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Although the company isn't saying what will be featured at the event, it has left several hints in the iPhone's voice assistant Siri. When you say to Siri "Give me a hint," the voice assistant replies with a cryptic message.
Apple event iPhone 6s
Siri/Xavier Harding
Siri won't give up any details on the upcoming Apple 2015 fall event
Apple's upcoming media event has been expected to take place on September 9 for quite some time. It's exactly the same date that Apple held their fall event in 2014 as well, when the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch was announced.
Many experts believe that Force Touch—a new feature that allows touchpads and touchscreens to determine how much pressure is applied to their surface—will be added to the iPhone 6s. Force Touch is already available in the Apple Watch, and it was added to the newest Macbook earlier this year at WWDC. In addition to new hardware, many expect iOS 9 to be rolled out to existing iPhone 6 handsets and any new ones that are announced. Other changes that are expected include a better camera, faster processor, and thicker design to prevent bending.
Self-driving trucks from Pennsylvania firm Royal Truck and Equipment will be on Florida roads by the end of the year.
The rigs, which are part of a Department of Transportation pilot program, can navigate by following a pre-programmed lead car, via remote control, or by using GPS Waypoint navigation. Daimler's self-driving tractor trailers have already been testing in Nevada under a special state-granted autonomous license. But like the Google autonomous cars on the road in California, Daimler's trucks require a human driver to be on board—the vehicles scheduled to deploy to the Sunshine State don't.
The modified medium-duty Freightliners will be used for highway construction projects, and safety was cited as a key factor in removing from the driver from the equation.
Repairing and upgrading active roadways is always a dangerous proposition, and according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, Florida is among the most perilous states for road construction workers. To address safety concerns, the rear of Royal's truck features an Impact attenuator to insulate crews from a potential collision.
For more information on Royal's groundbreaking program, check out the video.
Instagram adds support for portrait and landscape images
Instagram
The Facebook-owned photo company has finally added support for all aspect ratios
Instagram now supports portrait and landscape photos in its app, meaning you'll start seeing more rectangular photos in your feed.
Since the app's inception, Instagram has defaulted to—and only allowed—"square" (3:2) photographs in its app. Much like its filters, the default aspect ratio was meant to mimic Polaroids of yesteryear. Now, the picture sharing service is finally letting its users upload images that don't adhere to the odd format.
Taking photos within the app will continue to default to square-shaped pictures, but photos imported from other apps will preserve their look. Instead of the letterbox view, the Instagram photo feed will adjust in size accordingly.
"It turns out that nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format,"said Instagram in a statement. "Now, when choosing a photo or video, you can tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square."
The move makes sense for the mobile-first app. With newer photo apps like Snapchat fully embracing portrait mode and VSCO's support of exporting to various sizes, it's clear that there isn't one aspect ratio to rule them all. Even Youtube has given up the fight against vertical video. With increased competition in the photo space, it's clear the Facebook-owned photo company isn't afraid to take risks. While Instagram didn't alter anything drastic like remove filters, the square has been an important identifier in photos belonging to the service. But the company ditching this core part of the Instagram experience achieves something even greater: convenience for its users.
Cannabis is one of the oldest domesticated plants, but we know surprisingly little about it. That’s because, given marijuana’s status as an illicit substance in most of the world, gaining permission to conduct research into its medicinal properties or genetic heritage has been notoriously difficult. Now a team of Canadian researchers has peered into the plant’s genome to understand the different species that may account for marijuana's famous variations, and lend some insight into the plant's ancestry. The study was published yesterday in PLOS One.
If you go into a medical marijuana shop (or watch any stoner movie ever), you know that different strains of marijuana are supposed to have different effects on the body. They can be flavorful, or potent; induce relaxation or hallucinations. Marijuana farmers often work on the assumption that plants with a particular genetic ancestry have one quality or another; dealers advertise their strains' qualities by touting their genetic makeup, claiming that strains with more DNA from the C. sativa species make for a more "euphoric" high, for example.
The researchers sequenced the genes of 81 samples of marijuana and 43 samples of hemp, a different variety of the same plant with less THC, the chemical responsible for pot’s characteristic effects. The samples were all part of three species, Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and Cannabis ruderalis. The researchers found that most marijuana samples were from two species, sativa and indica. And though hemp was genetically distinct from marijuana in more genes than just those that control THC production, it was genetically similar to the indica marijuana strains. "Whether this points to different origins for hemp and marijuana, or is the result of human selection for different uses, is not clear," says Jonathan Page, one of the study authors.
But, importantly, the researchers found a lot of discrepancy between a sample's species reported by marijuana growers and those shown by the genetic tests. "Cannabis breeders and growers often indicate the percentage of sativa or indica in a cannabis strain, but they are not very accurate,” Page said in a press release. The researchers highlighted one strain, called Jamaican Lamb's Bread, that its vendors claimed to be fully C. sativa but was actually 100 percent C. indica. That might mean that the relationship between certain qualities in marijuana and the species may not be so straightforward, after all.
The researchers note that this has significant legal implications. While hemp is grown legally for clothing or paper, marijuana is illegal in many places. If an individual is caught with the plant, it may be difficult for officials to tell the difference between the two if their genes are similar.
This work provides good insight into the genetics of marijuana now, but doesn't say much about cannabis' ancestry. "We found evidence that there are genetic differences between C. sativa and C. indica, however more research needs to be done to investigate whether these genetic differences result in marijuana strains with differing therapeutic applications," Page says. The scientists hope to compile a more thorough classification system for marijuana and a more detailed view of the plant’s ancestry in future studies.
One of the pillars of scientific research--perhaps the one that makes science as definitive as it is--is that any study should be capable of being repeated under the same methods and conditions and if the research holds true, the same result will be found every time the experiment is performed--something known as a study’s reproducibility.
A group of researchers found that when they actually tried to reproduce 100 psychology studies, they managed to replicate the results in less than half the cases. Their results were published today in Science, and online as a resource for other scientists at The Reproducibility Project.
These new results piggyback on previous studies that attempted to replicate study results already published in scientific journals. This report also follows in the wake of a highly-publicized psychology study, originally published in Science about attitudes towards same-sex marriage, which was found to be inaccurate, and was retracted from Science in May.
To better understand what leads to reproducibility, a group of 270 psychologists selected 100 psychology studies from three leading journals in the field (Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition) and replicated the studies under the same methods and conditions. In most cases, the methods and conditions were able to be reproduced, however, the results themselves were only reproduced in less than half the cases, the researchers report. When they analyzed the results, they found that 97 percent of the original studies had statistically significant results but when the studies were replicated, only 36 percent of those new results were statistically significant.
The researchers note that not being able to reproduce the same results does not necessarily discredit the original study--and that was not the point of their study--but it does help to determine which factors will help predict the likelihood that a study can be reproduced with the same results.
They found that the best way to predict whether a study’s results will be replicated successfully was to look at the p-value. In statistics, the p-value helps determine the significance of the study and decide whether or not the results prove the study’s hypothesis. In technical terms, it’s the probability that the results of their study could be due simply to random chance. The higher that p-value is, the more likely it is that the results are due to chance and the less likely it is that they are significant, or prove the hypothesis of the study.
The researchers found that studies with p-values closer to 0.05--that's 5 percent likely to be due to random chance, the maximum cutoff point to claim that results are significant--were less likely to be replicated successfully, whereas ones with p-values closer to zero were more likely to be replicated with success.
This is the first open, systematic study of reproducibility in psychology studies, the researchers write, and they say they cannot extrapolate to studies across other disciplines. However, the main point of their study was to identify the factors that may help predict the likelihood that a study’s results can be reproduced successfully. They published their results online in an open database with the hope that other scientists will take part in their effort to ensure studies are reproducible--and the conclusions that follow are accurate and reliable.
The internet is flooded with photos—of your brunch, of your cat, of your estranged elementary school friend’s cousin’s wedding. 1.8 billion photos are uploaded daily, and most of them are objectively pretty terrible. Now a team of computer scientists from Princeton University and software company Adobe have created a program to make those photos just a little better, by identifying and eliminating distracting elements, according to a paper presented recently at this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Boston.
There are lots of elements of a “casual” photo that can make it terrible—bad lighting, off-angles. But one that’s often ignored is the inclusion of distracting elements, objects in the photo that distract the viewer’s attention from the image’s main focus. Photo editing software allows photographers to remove these elements from their images, of course, but for most “this effort is neither possible nor warranted,” the researchers write. They wanted to create a program that removes distracting elements from a photo with a single tap.
Photos with distractions, left, and without, right.
Before they could create the program, the researchers needed a computer model to accurately identify distracting elements that should be eliminated. They had volunteers, found through Amazon's Mechanical Turk system and through the photo editing app Fixel, sift through thousands of photos to annotate or edit out the distractors. “Please mark the areas you might point out to a professional photo editor to remove or tone-down to improve the image,” reads the prompt offered to Mechanical Turk participants. When the researchers processed the data, they found that distractors had a number of things in common—they’re usually objects, for example, and tend to appear near the border of the photos.
The researchers then used that information to create algorithms that can pick out distracting elements in a photo. The detectors each focus on a particular element of the photo and, depending on factors like its blurriness and position in the photo, determine whether or not to delete it. “"We have a specific car detector in the code because people often want to eliminate cars that wander into the frame," Ohad Fried, one of the study authors, said in a press release. "We have a face detector. If the face is large and in the center of the photo, we probably don't want to remove it. But if it is coming in from the side, it might be a photobomb."
When they tested the algorithm on photo samples, the software did well, though it sometimes deleted important elements instead. There’s room for improvement.
The researchers hope that, after further development, their algorithm may be incorporated into photo editing software.
Distraction-predicting software in action; photos on the right are the ones with distractions removed.
The brightest objects in the universe have massive black holes at their hearts.
Quasars (“quasi-stellar radio sources”) can be brighter than entire galaxies, and they’re thought to be fueled by the friction and heat of stuff that’s getting swallowed up by a black hole. (Although light can’t escape a black hole, it can escape from the event horizon—the boundary and point-of-no-return surrounding the black hole.)
Now, it turns out that the quasar nearest to Earth, located 600 million light-years away in a galaxy called Markarian 231, is actually built around two twirling black holes. It’s a first-of-its-kind type of find, and scientists think there could be a lot more quasars with binary hearts out there.
Hubble data revealed a mysterious hole in the quasar’s accretion disk, or the ring of gas that spirals around the black hole, waiting to fall in. After doing some modeling studies, scientists concluded that the system must be made of two black holes: a large one and a small one orbiting each other.
Eventually, the two black holes will collide
The larger of the pair is estimated to be 150 million times more massive than our sun, while the puny companion is only four million times the mass of the sun. In a few hundred thousand years, the two will spiral into each other, resulting in what we can only guess would be the end of the universe. (Kidding!)
The team, based partly in the U.S. and partly in China, thinks the binary formed when the two galaxies merged. The merger seems to have been good for the star-forming business: Mrk 231 births stars at a rate that is 100 times greater than our Milky Way.
“We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary black hole in Mrk 231, but also paves a new way to systematically search binary black holes via the nature of their ultraviolet light emission,” Youjun Lu of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a press release.
Renewable energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines is great for humans, but not so awesome for flying creatures. There have been reports of solar farms vaporizing birds and wind turbines smashing bats who confuse the turbines for trees. States are now required to start incorporating more clean energy (and low carbon) solutions into their power supply, but no one wants cleaner air to come at the expense of wildlife populations. So what's to be done?
One group of scientists may have found a solution, at least for the population of golden eagles in Wyoming. In a study published in PLOS One, researchers announced that they had figured out a way to chart locations where there was both plenty of wind, and fewer golden eagles, which are federally protected birds.
Instead of looking at how many birds passed over a site where a company wants to erect a wind turbine (the typical way things are done), the researchers relied on data showing the nesting locations of golden eagles in the state. They then factored in other information, including prey availability, landscape elevation (golden eagles prefer to nest in cliffs) and land use, along with the potential for various areas to be good sources of wind power. When they put everything together, they were able to model spaces in the state that would be great for wind energy, and less likely to bother golden eagles.
"Golden eagles aren't the only species affected by these energy projects, but they grab people's imaginations," Brad Fedy, co-author of the study said in a press release. "We hope that our research better informs collaboration between the renewable energy industry and land management agencies."
Other groups are also working on the problem. GPS-laden falcons are training turbine computer systems to recognize when birds are nearby, innovators are developing bird-friendly turbines, and some people are even considering wildlife refuges for the sky. Hopefully in time, both humans and birds can share the air in peace.
Speaking involves dozens of muscles, and it can be a bit tiring. For a study published in 1998, speech-language pathologist Bridget Russell, of the State University of New York at Fredonia, asked participants to read aloud using either a quiet, normal, or loud voice while she measured their breathing rates, oxygen consumption, and energy expenditure. Russell found that continuous, normal speech is no more exhausting than sitting in silence, but quiet and loud talk both interfere with normal respiration. Most affected were men who read out loud at high volume; they took in 20 percent more oxygen.
That’s on par with measurements in other species. Franz Goller, a physiologist at the University of Utah, has studied the energetic costs of singing in birds. He guessed it would be tiring: A canary erupts in 30-second bursts of song, replete with complicated trills that require rapid “mini breathing,” tens of times per second. When he ran experiments on zebra finches, though, which have comparable vocal behavior, he found their metabolic rates went up by only 5 to 35 percent while singing. That’s about as tiring as cleaning one’s feathers. Or, in human terms, Goller speculates, walking down the street.
Then again, even an easy task grows costly with repetition. “If you spend a penny on something 3,000 times a day, that’s still 3,000 pennies,” he says. “As a teacher, at the end of a day of speaking, I’m exhausted.”
This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "How Much Exercise Do We Get From Talking?”
