Day's Headlines: Bathroom Challenge; 'Science' Delayed; Planned Parenthood Keeps the Cash; Zika's 25%; Slimy Slabs; Fukushima Deniers; The Israeli Hostility Games; Direct Gene Editing; Dragon(no)fly; Unexplainable Spaaaace (bum, bum, BUUUM); Robot Hotel; Brain Eye Chip; Bombing for Clarity; and Big Flight Data

Friday, August 12, 2016

Bathroom Challenge; 'Science' Delayed; Planned Parenthood Keeps the Cash; Zika's 25%; Slimy Slabs; Fukushima Deniers; The Israeli Hostility Games; Direct Gene Editing; Dragon(no)fly; Unexplainable Spaaaace (bum, bum, BUUUM); Robot Hotel; Brain Eye Chip; Bombing for Clarity; and Big Flight Data

Society

Barack Obama's transgender bathroom guidelines challenged by more than a dozen states independent.co.uk

The states will appear before a federal judge in Fort Worth on Friday to argue that the Obama administration’s directive presents “unlawful changes” in US law.

Also see 13 states to ask court to stop White House transgender bathroom policy washingtonexaminer

That lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nebraska, includes Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Idaho to delay submitting new science standards sfgate

State officials say new K-12 science standards — which include for the first time references to global warming and the Big Bang theory — won't be submitted to the conservative Idaho Legislature until 2018 after receiving a surprise rejection from lawmakers earlier this year.

Judge rejects Ohio law to cut Planned Parenthood funds over abortion reuters

U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett said the law was unconstitutional and would cause "irreparable injury" to Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and Southwest Ohio and their patients.

Pestilence

Officials: 1 in 4 people in Puerto Rico will have Zika by year's end cbsnews

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico has reported 1,914 new Zika cases over the past week. Health Secretary Ana Rius said Friday there are 10,690 cases altogether, including 1,035 involving pregnant women. Zika has been tied to severe birth defects.

Creatures

The Jefferson Memorial Is Slowly Being Covered in Slime popsci

It may sound disgusting, but the slime or gunk covering [teeth, stream bed, and Jefferson Memorial] is biofilm, a crazy community of various microbes living communally. While some biofilms can be made up of one type of bacteria, many are combinations of bacterial species with fungi, algae, yeasts and others.

(I guess this counts as a creature...)

Japan

Shikoku Electric restarts Ikata reactor japantoday

The government aims to bring more reactors back online after the Fukushima crisis led to a nationwide halt of nuclear plants, as it plans to have nuclear power account for 20 to 22% of the country’s total electricity supply in 2030 to cut greenhouse emissions and lower imported fuel costs.

Isreal

Israeli athletes in Rio endure ‘shocking’ hostility, taunting by Muslim nations washingtontimes

Animosity toward the 47-member delegation has triggered a reprimand from the International Olympic Committee and alarm from Jewish groups such as the Anti-Defamation League adl.org, which issued a statement this week decrying anti-Israel “hostility” in Rio de Janeiro.

CRISPR

Directly reprogramming a cell's identity with gene editing phys.org

...researchers at Duke University duke.edu have developed a strategy that avoids the need for the extra gene copies [of previous methods]. Instead, a modification of the CRISPR genetic engineering technique is used to directly turn on the natural copies already present in the genome.

Research

Dragonfly shows simulated flight potential phys.org t

Futuristic dragonflies are flapping their wings in the Biomimetics Lab at the University of Auckland's Bioengineering Institute abi.auckland.ac.nz. Soon they may be lifting off their podiums and taking to the air.

Space

Mystery object in weird orbit beyond Neptune cannot be explained newscientist

“I hope everyone has buckled their seatbelts because the outer solar system just got a lot weirder.” That’s what Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queens University, Belfast qub.ac.uk tweeted on Monday.

The reason this 'mystery object' is 'weird' is because it violates the evolutionary understanding of the universe. The reason she says 'weirdER' instead of just 'weird' is because there are MANY issues with the planets and moons in our solar system that violate the evolutionary underpinnings of the models used :) A good resource for understanding these is a DVD series by Spike Psarris creationastronomy. I don't generally recommend resources here that are for sale, but since you didn't ask I just did. creation.com has an article from him on another hitch in explaining the solar-system: Mercury—the tiny planet that causes big problems for evolution creation

Robots

Takeover: A second robot-run hotel to open in Japan cnet

A hit on sites like Trip Advisor, the hotel has some of the world's oddest front-desk staff in the form of two animatronic velociraptors, along with a creepily human-looking android, all of which speak multiple languages. In addition to the check-in assistants, automated bag-carrying bellhops take luggage to your room, while a heavy duty servo-arm deals with the cloakroom.

Check out this video from Travel Advisor by someone who visited the hotel...v

Tech

Samsung turns IBM's brain-like chip into a digital eye cnet

The result is a camera that can keep track of what's going on at a remarkable 2,000 frames of video per second. Ordinary digital cameras typically max out at 120fps. The higher speed is useful for creating 3D maps, safety features on self-driving cars and new forms of remote controls that recognize gestures.

Communication

US Air Force's plan to improve radio communications? Plasma bomb the atmosphere foxnews

The Air Force is asking for help in developing plasma bombs, which would be delivered to the atmosphere by tiny cube satellites and then detonated to release ions upon arrival. The Air Force is working with several research teams, each of which is tasked with coming up with their own design for the plasma bombs. The first stage of the project is theoretical, requiring researchers to come up with an atmospheric plasma delivery method. Selected researchers then will be invited to test their proposal in a vacuum chamber simulator and eventually on exploratory flights.

You can almost hear the conspiracy theorists minds a'churning...

Big Data

NASA pulls together national data to sleuth out air traffic improvement mysteries phys.org

For the first time ever, air traffic researchers can view and analyze archived flight data collected and merged from all air traffic facilities across the U.S., with fast update rates ranging from one second to 12 seconds for every flight's position. Previously, researchers only had access to national flight data that was similar to internet flight tracking, with one-minute flight updates and no information about flights on the ground at airports. Or, they had access to separate flight data sets from 77 different Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic facilities, which made research very challenging. NASA's newly improved tool, the Sherlock Air Traffic Management (ATM) Data Warehouse, merges all of the air traffic facility data to produce analysis-ready, end-to-end flight information at these improved resolutions for the entire U.S. airspace.

No comments :

Post a Comment