Nobel Prize goes to researchers who figured out how our cells tell time

Enlarge (credit: Emmett Anderson ) Today, the Nobel Prize committee has honored three US biologists for their role in unravelling one of biology’s earliest mysteries: how organisms tell time. Microbes, plants, and animals all run on a 24-hour cycle, one that’s flexible enough to gradually reset itself, although it can take a few days after transcontinental travel. The biological systems responsible for maintaining this circadian clock require a lot of proteins that undergo complex interactions, and the new laureates are being honored for their use of genetics to start unraveling this complexity. A long-standing problem The first description of an organism’s internal clock dates all the way back to 1729, when a French astronomer (!?!?) decided to mess with a plant that opened and closed its leaves on a 24-hour cycle. He found that the cycle didn’t depend on daylight but would continue even when the plant was kept in the dark nonstop. It would take nearly 250 years to move from this observation to any sort of biological handle on the system. The change, as it has been so many times, was brought about using the fruit fly Drosophila . A genetic screen in the 1960s identified three different mutations that altered flies’ circadian clock: one that lengthened its 24-hour period, one that shortened it, and one that left it erratic. Mapping these revealed that all of them affected the same gene. From there, however, the field had to wait 20 years for us to develop the technology to clone the gene responsible for these changes, named period . Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nobel Prize goes to researchers who figured out how our cells tell time

Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

How did a 37-ton tanker suddenly vanish from GPS off the coast of Russia? AmiMoJo shares a report from Wired: The ship’s systems located it 25 to 30 miles away — at Gelendzhik airport… The Atria wasn’t the only ship affected by the problem… At the time, Atria’s AIS system showed around 20 to 25 large boats were also marooned at Gelendzhik airport. Worried about the situation, captain Le Meur radioed the ships. The responses all confirmed the same thing: something, or someone, was meddling with the their GPS… After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. “We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots, ” said a former director for Marine Transportation Systems at the U.S. Coast Guard. “Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times”… “It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system…” says Lukasz Bonenberg from the University of Nottingham’s Geospatial Institute. “You basically need to have atomic level clocks.” The U.S. Maritime Administration confirms 20 ships have been affected — all traveling in the Black Sea — though a U.S. Coast Guard representative “refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence.” But the captain of the 37-ton tanker already has his own suspicions. “It looks like the Russians define an area where they don’t want the GPS to apply.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

Laser Light Forges Graphene Into the Third Dimension

Big Hairy Ian quotes New Atlas: The wonder material graphene gets many of its handy quirks from the fact that it exists in two dimensions, as a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. But to actually make use of it in practical applications, it usually needs to be converted into a 3D form. Now, researchers have developed a new and relatively simple way to do just that, using lasers to ‘forge’ a three-dimensional pyramid out of graphene… By focusing a laser onto a fine point on a 2D graphene lattice, the graphene at that spot is irradiated and bulges outwards. A variety of three-dimensional shapes can be made by writing patterns with the laser spot, with the height of the shape controlled by adjusting the irradiation dose at each particular point. The team illustrated that technique by deforming a sheet of graphene into a 3D pyramid, standing 60 nm high. That sounds pretty tiny, but it’s 200 times taller than the graphene sheet itself. “The beauty of the technique is that it’s fast and easy to use, ” says one of the researchers. “It doesn’t require any additional chemicals or processing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Laser Light Forges Graphene Into the Third Dimension

Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

schwit1 was the first Slashdot reader to bring us the news. Newsweek reports: Archaeologists believe they have found the key to unlocking a mystery almost as old as the Great Pyramid itself: Who built the structure and how were they able to transport two-ton blocks of stone to the ancient wonder more than 4, 500 years ago…? Experts had long established that the stones from the pyramid’s chambers were transported from as far away as Luxor, more than 500 miles to the south of Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid, but had never agreed how they got there. However, the diary of an overseer, uncovered in the seaport of Wadi al-Jafr, appears to answer the age-old question, showing the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of the Nile to transport the giant blocks of stone. According to a new British documentary Egypt’s Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.’s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer’s team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95 billion years ago

Enlarge / Four billion years old? You don’t look a day over 2 billion! (credit: Tashiro et al/Nature ) You could be forgiven for thinking that the remnants of the Earth’s first life don’t want to be found. Between geology and happenstance, the earliest life has certainly covered its tracks well. While paleontologists studying dinosaurs can sometimes bring an unambiguously gigantic femur home, those who study the origins of life are usually left arguing over the significance of microscopic motes of rock. A new discovery in northernmost Labrador, made by a team led by Takayuki Tashiro of the University of Tokyo, fits into that latter category. But don’t let its abstract smallness of the evidence dull your excitement. The researchers argue they have uncovered evidence that there was life on Earth more than 3.95 billion years ago—on a planet that isn’t much more than 4.5 billion years old itself. Counting carbon Some of the evidence for early life is in the form of fossilized microorganisms. It can be difficult to rule out bacterium-shaped mineral bits that can form in other ways, but research published earlier this year identified microscopic structures that seem to fit the bill in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks that were once part of seafloor hydrothermal vents. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95 billion years ago

Fallout 1 celebrates 20th anniversary, is now totally free to own on Steam

(credit: Bethesda) What’s stopped you from playing the original 1997 version of Fallout in recent years? Can’t find your old install CD? Too busy playing other games? Afraid to once again run into a deathclaw? Bethesda wants to fix that with a 20th anniversary gift: a free copy of the very first Fallout game. The giveaway is a Steam exclusive, so you can’t head to shops like GOG or Humble to claim a copy, but it’s otherwise as simple as logging in and choosing “install game” from its Steam store listing . As of right now, you have a little over 24 hours to claim the freebie, which expires at midnight Pacific time on Saturday, September 30. (That was the game’s exact release date in 1997, if you’re keeping score.) Sadly, no other games in the series have received a discount to honor the game’s birthday, and Bethesda has not timed any other new game or content releases to honor the date. You’ll have to wait until December 12 for the next big one: Fallout 4 VR , which will launch exclusively for the HTC Vive headset on that date for $59.99. (That price will likely only include that game’s core content, as opposed to  Fallout 4 ‘s “game of the year” edition that includes its extra DLC for free.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fallout 1 celebrates 20th anniversary, is now totally free to own on Steam

Essential Phone review: Impressive for a new company but not competitive

We have a new contender in the smartphone space. “Essential” is a new OEM that came seemingly out of nowhere, announced by Andy Rubin a mere nine months ago . Rubin is the co-founder and former CEO of Android Inc., a little company that was snatched up by Google in 2005 and went on to build the world’s most popular operating system. Rubin left Google, and Essential is his new startup with ambitions in the smartphone and smart home markets. Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn have already invested in Essential, and the latest round of funding values the company at  more than a billion dollars—and this was before it even shipped a product. With the launch of the “Essential Phone,” we finally have that first product: a high-end, $700 smartphone running the operating system Rubin helped create. The phone more or less leaves Android alone, and, with the backing of hardware manufacturer Foxconn, most of the innovation here is in the hardware. Read 79 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Essential Phone review: Impressive for a new company but not competitive

SNES Classic launches with digital trove of classic instruction manuals

Enlarge / Cranky Kong pops up a lot in the Donkey Kong Country manual to tell you how bad everything is. (credit: Nintendo) Last year, the NES Classic’s launch was met with something that I argued was more interesting and valuable in the game-preservation sense: a gigantic dump of NES and Famicom instruction manuals , all free to download in PDF format. They included a range of weird and rarely seen game-instruction books from across the world, and unlike their source product, people could actually get them. We are passionate fans of the days when games actually included printed instruction manuals, so one of the first things we did with review units of the SNES Classic was tap through its menus to the “instructions” tab, then jot down the URL where Nintendo would eventually dump a similar motherload of SNES and Super Famicom instruction manuals. That day has arrived. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Disney merges its kid-friendly streaming options into a single app

Disney has combined four of its kid-friendly streaming apps into one all-encompassing one called DisneyNOW . It has everything that the separate Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior and Radio Disney apps had, but all of the content is now consolidated under a single main app. DisneyNOW has full show episodes and livestreaming of shows airing on Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD when you use a valid cable, satellite or digital service — such as Hulu and YouTube TV — login. Multiple users can create their own profiles and the app will hold their spot in shows they don’t finish and suggest content they might like based on what they watch. DisneyNOW also has games, more of which will be added monthly, and Disney Channel original movies. However, it doesn’t have theatrical releases . Disney is saving those for its Netflix rival set to launch sometime in 2019. DisneyNOW is available now on iOS, Apple TV, Android, Fire tablets and Roku with Fire TV, Android TV and web support coming in 2018. Via: TechCrunch Source: Disney

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Disney merges its kid-friendly streaming options into a single app