“Cured” Ebola Nurse in Critical Condition
October 16th, 2015Via: Independent:
The exact nature of Ms Cafferkey’s illness is not known, but experts have expressed shock at the severity of her condition.
Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, said the news was “frankly staggering.”
“I am not aware from the scientific literature of a case where Ebola has been associated with what we can only assume as life threatening complications after someone has initially recovered, and certainly not so many months after,” he said.
Health authorities have emphasised that the risk to the general public remains low. However 58 people who had been in close contact with Ms Cafferkey are being monitored by Health Protection Scotland. 25 have been vaccinated using the jab successfully trialed earlier this year in Guinea.
Battelle DroneDefender
October 15th, 2015Via: Battelle Institute:
The Drone Papers
October 15th, 2015Via: The Intercept:
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.
Oakland: Outlaw Shipping Container Community, Containertopia
October 15th, 2015And in Texas, instant slums.
Via: sfist:
“It’s pretty much my dream post-apocalyptic cyberpunk setup,” says Luke Iseman near his 160-square-foot box home. With a camp stove and a fridge “that’s a really simple hack,” his miniature shipping container nightmare chamber sits alongside 11 others in a warehouse at an undisclosed location in Oakland. File under: Apartment Sadness?
Bloomberg reports that the 31-year-old cool guy Wharton graduate has been chased from two other locations by the authorities. But, like an idiot, Iseman has no plans to give up. “I’d rather ask forgiveness than ask permission,” the entrepreneur says in high Silicon Valley fashion.
Iseman rakes in $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures docked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. His tenants include a Facebook engineer, a SolarCity programmer, and a bicycle messenger. This, as Iseman calls it, is “Containertopia.”
The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
October 14th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Japan: Robo-Bulldozers Guided by Drones
October 14th, 2015Via: The Verge:
Komatsu is the world’s second largest construction company, a venerable Japanese brand with 94 years of history that sells forklifts and bulldozers to customers around the globe. But in its home country, Komatsu has been struggling with an aging population, a trend that has left few young workers available to operate its machines.
As Japan ramps up new construction in preparation for hosting the 2020 Olympics, experts believe it will face a serious obstacle. “The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years,” Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.
To get around this problem, Komatsu has begun creating a new service it calls Smart Construction. A team of robotic vehicles scoops rock and pushes dirt without a human behind the wheel. They are guided in their work by a fleet of drones, which map the area in three dimensions and update the data in real time to track how the massive volumes of soil and cement are moving around the site.
The drones are built by an American startup, Skycatch, and today it revealed that Komatsu is one of the principal investors in a new $25 million round of funding that the company plans on using for global expansion and R&D. The partnership will power an entirely new line of business for Komatsu: Instead of selling construction equipment to its customers, it can lease them out for a job, and use a staff of remote operators and autonomous vehicles to complete the work. One or two lightly trained humans are still required on site to take control if something goes wrong.
Naval Academy Reinstates Celestial Navigation: “After All, You Can’t Hack a Sextant”
October 14th, 2015Via: Capital Gazette:
Officials reinstated brief lessons in celestial navigation this year, nearly two decades after the full class was determined outdated and cut from the curriculum.
That decision, in the late 1990s, made national news and caused a stir among the old guard of navigators.
Maritime nostalgia, however, isn’t behind the return.
Rather, it’s the escalating threat of cyber attacks that has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars.
After all, you can’t hack a sextant.
If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy
October 13th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
…we, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
Paxil: Researchers Said a Popular Antidepressant Was Safe for Teens — It Was Actually Deadly
October 13th, 2015Via: Vox:
For years, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline was illegally persuading doctors to prescribe paroxetine, sold under the brand name Paxil, as an antidepressant for children and teenagers. They did so by citing what’s known as Study 329 — research that was funded by the drug company and published in 2001, claiming to show that Paxil is “well tolerated and effective” for kids.
That marketing effort worked. In 2002 alone, doctors wrote two million Paxil prescriptions for children and adolescents.
But now here’s the horrifying news: A major new analysis of the raw data behind Study 329, published in BMJ, suggests that the original conclusions were wildly wrong. Not only is Paxil ineffective, working no better than placebo, but it can actually cause serious side effects, including self-injury and suicide.
In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly
October 11th, 2015Oh boy, I hope someone reading this makes sure the writers for Silicon Valley include this scenario in season 3. haha
Via: New York Times:
Of all the states, California has set the most ambitious targets for cutting emissions in coming decades, and an important pillar of its plan to reach those goals is encouraging the spread of electric vehicles.
But the push to make the state greener is creating an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner.
The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. Electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another’s cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window.
…
Most people charge at home (using an electrical outlet) but also want to use public chargers, in part because the cars have a limited range — typically 80 miles. On top of this “range anxiety,” as it is called, drivers like the idea of getting a free or low-cost charge at a public station.
“Imagine going to a gas station that says, ‘Here’s free gas.’ Who wouldn’t want to muscle in and say, ‘I’ll take some free gas’?” said Ollie Danner, the founder of EVPerks, a California company that works with local and national businesses to offer coupons and other incentives to electric vehicle drivers.
…
Ms. Hull, an executive at Evernote, a software company where electric vehicles outnumber chargers 60 to 12, the scramble for chargers leads to curious behavior. The company does have a sign-up sheet for reserving charging time. But it is not uncommon for people to leave their cars too long, or for members of the public to take the spots or even, Ms. Hull said, for people to work outside deals.
“There’s an entire black market for trading spots,” she said. For example, employees will give their spots to friends or managers as favors, Ms. Hull said.
At some other Silicon Valley companies where workers own a lot of electric vehicles, employees will get a note from someone in their department when someone is about to unplug and open up a spot. The legal department might band together, for instance, or the communications department, creating little sharing fiefs.
