Month: January 2018

A Beautiful Solution: UK, Switzerland Experiment With Using Strips of Wildflowers as Natural Pesticides

Pesticides are bad for humans, and they’ve been linked to everything from birth defects to cancer. They’re not much better for the environment: In “Sustaining the Earth, ” textbook author G. Tyler Miller–the man who literally wrote the book on environmental science–points out that over 95% and 98% of sprayed herbicides and pesticides, respectively, land on something other than what they’re trying to kill. They then contaminate and pollute the air, water and soil. We need to shift towards a natural and eco-friendly way to protect crops, and the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology may have the solution: Wildflowers. As it turns out, wildflowers are a breeding ground for parasitic wasps and hoverflies–which doesn’t sound pleasant, until you consider that those are the natural predators of cereal leaf beetles and aphids, which are both persistent and destructive crop pests. Thus the CEH is running a five-year trial in England on 15 farms, planting strips of wildflowers that run directly through crop fields. (As a side bonus, wildflowers also host bees , which help with pollinating crops.) The wildflower tactic is based on science backed up in a 2015 study published by the Royal Society’s Biological Sciences journal. “Our study demonstrates a high effectiveness of annual flower strips in promoting pest control, ” reads the report, “reducing CLB (cereal leaf beetle) pest levels below the economic threshold. Hence, the studied flower strip offers a viable alternative to insecticides.” Some farmers had previously planted wildflowers on the periphery of a field of crops, but this only protected the crops nearest the periphery. Thus CEH’s trial has been planting six-meter-wide wildflower strips 100 meters apart inside the crop fields, allowing the insect predators a convenient commute. Because harvesters are now precisely guided by GPS, the crops can be reaped while the flower strips are left intact. “The flowers planted include oxeye daisy, red clover, common knapweed and wild carrot, ” The Guardian reports. “Similar field trials are also underway in Switzerland , using flowers such as cornflowers, coriander, buckwheat, poppy and dill.” If the CEH trial turns out to be a success, the next step will be to convince farmers. “The majority of crop protection advice given in the UK, ” explains Bill Parker, director of research at the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, “is from agronomists tied to companies who make their money from selling pesticides.”

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A Beautiful Solution: UK, Switzerland Experiment With Using Strips of Wildflowers as Natural Pesticides

LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support

prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it’s the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen. LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support

Watch how 19th-century Genaille-Lucas calculating rulers work

Multiplying large numbers before calculators led to a number of ingenious inventions to make things easier, like these Genaille-Lucas rulers demonstrated by the fine folks at DONG. Via manufacturer Creative Crafthouse : In the days before calculators, methods of simplifying calculations were of much interest. In 1617 Napier also published a book describing a method to multiply, divide and extract square roots using a set of bars or rods. These became known as Napier’s Bones. (avail on our website) In the late 1800s, Henri Genaille, a French civil engineer, invented an improvement to Napier’s Bones that eliminates the need to handle carries from one digit position to the next. The problem was posed by Edouard Lucas and thus the alternate name of Genaille-Lucas Rulers (or Rods). There are also sets for division. You can get your own set online or print your own from these free files. • Genaille-Lucas Rulers (YouTube / DONG )

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Watch how 19th-century Genaille-Lucas calculating rulers work

Mysterious extraterrestrial minerals discovered in the Sahara

Libyan desert glass is a material of unknown origin scattered across a large swath of the Sahara. Among it, scientists found Hypatia stones , a strange phosphorous-nickel alloy recently determined to be extra-terrestrial. (more…)

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Mysterious extraterrestrial minerals discovered in the Sahara

DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

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DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler

Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900

A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2, 900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. “These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia, ” the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900

Pocket-sized DNA reader used to scan entire human genome sequence

Enlarge / Sequence on a stick. (credit: Oxford Nanopore ) A few years back, a company called Oxford Nanopore announced it was developing a radically different way of sequencing DNA. Its approach involved taking single strands of the double helix and stuffing them through a protein pore. With a small bit of current flowing across the pore, the four bases of DNA each created a distinct (if tiny) change in the voltage as it passed through. These could be used to read the DNA one base at a time as it wiggled through the pore. After several years of slow progress, Oxford Nanopore announced that its sequencing hardware would be as distinctive as its wetware: a USB device that could fit comfortably in a person’s hand. As the first devices went out to users, it became clear that the device had some pros and cons . On the plus side, the device was quick and could be used without requiring a large facility to support it. It could also read very long stretches of DNA at once. But the downside was significant: it made lots of mistakes. With a few years of experience, people are now starting to learn to make the most of the devices, as demonstrated by a new paper in which researchers use it to help sequence a human genome. By using the machine’s long reads—in one case, nearly 900,000 bases from one DNA molecule—the authors were able to get data out of areas of the human genome that resisted characterization before. And they were able to distinguish between the two sets of chromosomes (one from mom, one from dad) and locate areas of epigenetic control in many areas of the genome. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pocket-sized DNA reader used to scan entire human genome sequence

California Senate Defies FCC, Approves Net Neutrality Law

The California State Senate yesterday approved a bill to impose net neutrality restrictions on Internet service providers, challenging the Federal Communications Commission attempt to preempt such rules. From a report: The FCC’s repeal of its own net neutrality rules included a provision to preempt state and municipal governments from enforcing similar rules at the local level. But the governors of Montana and New York have signed executive orders to enforce net neutrality and several states are considering net neutrality legislation. The FCC is already being sued by t21 states and the District of Columbia, which are trying to reverse the net neutrality repeal and the preemption of state laws. Attempts to enforce net neutrality rules at the state or local level could end up being challenged in separate lawsuits. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Senate Defies FCC, Approves Net Neutrality Law

Naked mole rats do not die of old age according to research

With its pink hairless body and huge incisors hanging out of its mouth, the naked mole rat isn’t a particularly handsome creature. A rodent that is neither rat nor mole but the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus , the nearly blind, nearly hairless naked mole rat lives in almost complete darkness its entire life. It has also recently been discovered that these rodents live to around 35 years, as opposed to a “regular” rat’s six years, and the naked mole rat doesn’t seem to actually age before it dies. According to Phys Org : A team of researchers at Google-owned Calico Life Sciences LLC has found that the naked mole rat defies Gompertz’s mortality law. In their paper published in eLife, the group describes their study of the unusual-looking rodent and describe some of its unusual traits. Naked mole rats are very nearly hairless. They evolved that way by living in a harsh underground environment. They are also almost ectothermic (cold blooded). And now, it seems they do not age—at least in the traditional sense. Reports of long-lived mole rats prompted the team at Calico to take a closer look—they have a specimen in their lab that has lived to be 35 years old. Most “normal” rats, in comparison, live to be just six years old, and they age as they do so. The team collected what they describe as 3,000 points of data regarding the lifespan of the naked mole rat, and found that many had lived for 30 years. But perhaps more surprisingly, they found that the chance of dying for the mole rats did not increase as they aged. All other mammals that have been studied have been found to conform to what is known as Gompertz’s mortality law, which states that the risk of death for a typical mammal grows exponentially after they reach sexual maturity—for humans, that means the odds of dying double every eight years after reaching age 30. This, the researchers claim, suggests that mole rats do not age—at least in the conventional sense. They do eventually die, after all. To see these delightful creatures in action, here’s a short National Geographic clip from 2012: https://youtu.be/A5DcOEzW1wA Image by Jedimentat44

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Naked mole rats do not die of old age according to research