Tag: climate-change

House Passes Email Privacy Act, Requiring Warrants For Obtaining Emails

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. House of Representatives has passed H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, sending it on to the Senate and from there, hopefully anyhow, to the President. The yeas were swift and unanimous. The bill, which was introduced in the House early last year and quickly found bipartisan support, updates the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, closing a loophole that allowed emails and other communications to be obtained without a warrant. It’s actually a good law, even if it is arriving a couple of decades late. “Under current law, there are more protections for a letter in a filing cabinet than an email on a server, ” said Congresswoman Suzan Delbene during the debate period. An earlier version of the bill also required that authorities disclose that warrant to the person it affected within 10 days, or 3 if the warrant related to a government entity. That clause was taken out in committee — something trade groups and some of the Representatives objected to as an unpleasant compromise. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue Reading:
House Passes Email Privacy Act, Requiring Warrants For Obtaining Emails

First Successful Gene Therapy Against Human Aging?

An anonymous reader writes: For the first time data may show that a human being has been successfully rejuvenated by gene therapy, claims Bioviva USA. “In September 2015, then 44 year-old CEO of Bioviva USA Inc. Elizabeth Parrish received two of her own company’s experimental gene therapies: one to protect against loss of muscle mass with age, another to battle stem cell depletion responsible for diverse age-related diseases and infirmities.” Bypassing America’s FDA, the controversial therapies were described by the MIT Technology Review as “do-it-yourself medicine, ” saying it “raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators.” “The treatment was originally intended to demonstrate the safety of the latest generation of the therapies, ” reports Bioviva’s web site. “But if early data is accurate, it is already the world’s first successful example of telomere lengthening via gene therapy in a human individual.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
First Successful Gene Therapy Against Human Aging?

CERN Releases 300TB of Large Hadron Collider Data Into Open Access

An anonymous reader writes: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has released 300 terabytes of collider data to the public. “Once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly, ” said Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector. “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data preservation coordinator, this is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data, ” she said in a news release accompanying the data. Much of the data is from 2011, and much of it is from protons colliding at 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts). The 300 terabytes of data includes both raw data from the detectors and “derived” datasets. CERN is providing tools to work with the data which is handy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
CERN Releases 300TB of Large Hadron Collider Data Into Open Access

The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive Being Tested By NASA May Finally Be Explained

MarkWhittington writes: The EmDrive, the so-called “impossible” space drive that uses no propellant, has roiled the aerospace world for the past several years ever since it was proposed by British aerospace engineer Robert Shawyer. In essence, the claim advanced by Shawyer and others is that if you bounced microwaves in a truncated cone, thrust would be produced out the open end. Most scientists have snorted at the idea, noting correctly that such a thing would violate physical laws. However, organizations as prestigious as NASA have replicated the same results, that prototypes of the EmDrive produces thrust. How does one reconcile the experimental results with the apparent scientific impossibility? MIT Technology Review suggested a reason why. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive Being Tested By NASA May Finally Be Explained

Disney’s FaceDirector changes facial expressions in movies

The new tool out of Disney Research’s labs could turn an ingénue’s semi-decent attempt into a finely nuanced performance. This software called FaceDirector has the capability to merge together separate frames from different takes to create the perfect scene. It does that by analyzing both the actor’s face and audio cues to identify the frames that correspond with each other. As such, directors can create brand new takes during post-production with zero input from the actor. They don’t even need specialized hardware like 3D cameras for the trick — it works even with footage taken by regular 2D cams. According to Disney Research VP Markus Gross, the tool could be used to lower a movie’s production costs or to stay within the budget, say, if it’s an indie film that doesn’t have a lot of money to spare. “It’s not unheard of for a director to re-shoot a crucial scene dozens of times, even 100 or more times, until satisfied, ” he said. “That not only takes a lot of time — it also can be quite expensive. Now our research team has shown that a director can exert control over an actor’s performance after the shoot with just a few takes, saving both time and money.” Considering the lab also developed a way to make dubbed movies more believable and to take advantage of incredibly high frame rates , we wouldn’t be surprised if filmmakers arm themselves with an arsenal of Disney Research tools in the future. It’s probably hard to visualize the way FaceDirector works without seeing an example, so make sure to watch the video below to see it in action. Source: Disney Research (1) , (2)

Originally posted here:
Disney’s FaceDirector changes facial expressions in movies

Is This California Pier the First Victim of El Niño?

Southern California residents witnessed a foreign substance falling from the sky as rain swept through the region over the last 24 hours. The storm also brought huge waves to the coast which ended up smashing the city of Ventura’s pier. Read more…

More:
Is This California Pier the First Victim of El Niño?

Bill Gates is launching a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is set to reveal a massive clean energy project on Monday, during the first day of the United Nations climate change summit in Paris. According to Reuters , which originally reported the news, the French government has confirmed that the ex-CEO-turned-philanthropist will launch the Clean Tech Initiative, a push to commit countries to double their budgets on clean energy tech research and developments by 2020. But Gates won’t be working on this multibillion dollar fund alone: The US, Australia, Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Norway, Saudi Arabia and South Korea will all be backing the plan, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters .

Visit site:
Bill Gates is launching a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund

LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

Cities beefing up their smart infrastructure have tapped the ubiquitous streetlamp to track traffic data and measure pollution . Now, in Los Angeles, some streetlights will help keep the communications network intact after an emergency. Read more…

Taken from:
LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

Beautiful Pieces of the 1893 World’s Fair Discovered In Storage In Chicago

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the prototypical World’s Fair. It brought together wonders of engineering, the latest technologies and consumer products, and music and art from far-off lands. Sadly, almost all of its buildings are no more—but in Chicago, three lovely fragments of one have resurfaced . Read more…

Follow this link:
Beautiful Pieces of the 1893 World’s Fair Discovered In Storage In Chicago

Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy

An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he’s written an article for Quartz explaining why: “I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century’s progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem.” He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren’t doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy