North Korea
North Korea 'will test missiles weekly', senior official tells BBC bbc
"We'll be conducting more missile tests on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis," Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-Ryol told the BBC's John Sudworth. He said that an "all-out war" would result if the US took military action.
[OPINION] America Can’t Do Much About North Korea theatlantic
Antisemitism
'Beware of Jews' sign appears in Stamford Hill bbc
The sign depicts the silhouette of an orthodox Jewish man wearing a traditional Fedora hat and was spotted on a lamppost in Stamford Hill on Tuesday.
Israel
Jordanian official: Moving US embassy to Jerusalem would be ‘catastrophic’ jta.org
An embassy move would be a “red line” for Jordan, would “inflame the Islamic and Arab streets” and serve as a “gift to extremists,” [Jordanian minister Momani] said, adding that Jordan would use all possible political and diplomatic means to try and prevent such a decision.
Politics
Welcome to Washington’s new normal: One Trump drama after another washingtonpost
Trump summoned two dozen television executives and news anchors to his offices Monday to berate them as dishonest and disobedient. He sought to strong-arm the British government to appoint his Brexit ally, Nigel Farage ukip.org, as ambassador to the United States. He dropped his threat to prosecute Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, disregarding his “lock her up” campaign chant and incurring the wrath of some reliable supporters.
Then there was Tuesday’s meeting with the New York Times, the newspaper Trump loves to mock as “failing.” It was scheduled, then canceled, then rescheduled. And once the president-elect settled in at the Grey Lady’s wikipedia.org boardroom, he softened his position on climate change, floated the idea that his son-in-law could broker peace in the Middle East, voiced new doubts about the effectiveness of torturing terrorism suspects, savaged Republicans who wavered on his candidacy and left unresolved concerns about how — or even whether — he would disassociate himself from his global business holdings to avoid conflicts of interest.
Society
University of Virginia professors: Stop quoting Thomas Jefferson washingtonexaminer
"Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students 'are not of ordinary significance only: They are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,'" Sullivan wrote, the Cavalier Daily reported. "I encourage today's U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility."
But this quotation of the father of the University of Virginia virginia.edu was too much for 469 faculty and students, who drafted a letter in protest.
Society
Facebook to stop ads that target, exclude races usatoday
Facebook will also require advertisers to affirm that they will not place discriminatory ads on Facebook and will offer educational materials to help advertisers understand their obligations, Egan said.
Banking
Wells Fargo’s Scandal Is a Harbinger of Doom time v
In the financial sector, scandal is the gift that keeps on giving. Publicly shamed by Senator Elizabeth Warren senate.gov after his bank opened as many as 2 million unauthorized accounts to goose profits, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who had been reluctant to part with any of his own compensation following revelations of the scandal, has finally agreed to give up unvested equity worth about $41 million, and forgo his $2.8 million salary while the bank is being investigated. Warren called the act “a small step in the right direction, but nowhere near real accountability,” and said he should return every dime he’s made during the period where fraud was happening.
Also see California's Sanctions Against Wells Fargo theatlantic and Wells Fargo may not be the end: Clawbacks expected to become a bigger issue usatoday
Space
Out of control? China’s Tiangong 1 space station will fall to Earth — somewhere — in 2017 washingtonpost
Chinese officials appeared to admit during a Sept. 14 news conference in Jiuquan that they had lost control of the station.
Also see China's Tiangong-1 space station 'out of control' and will crash to Earth theguardian
Big Data
Liberal, Moderate or Conservative? See How Facebook Labels You nytimes
You may think you are discreet about your political views. But Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has come up with its own determination of your political leanings, based on your activity on the site.
Society
Compromise Reached in Bill to Criminalize Undercover Filming at Abortion Facilities christiannews.net
Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Echo Park) proposed the measure earlier this year in light of the undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress exposing Planned Parenthood’s provision of baby bodily organs to procurement companies.
Archeology
King Solomon-era Palace Found in Biblical Gezer haaretz
The monumental building dates to the 10th century BCE, the era associated with King Solomon, who is famed for bringing wealth and stability to the newly-united kingdom of Israel and Judah. The American archaeological team also found a layer featuring Philistine pottery, lending credence to the biblical account of them living in the city until being vanquished by King David.
Space
SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket wsj
Scheduled to occur before the end of the year, the mission announced on Tuesday will be the first one to use the lower stage and nine main engines of a Falcon 9 rocket that experienced the rigors of a blastoff and acceleration through the atmosphere on a previous launch. No other commercial space company or military contractor has achieved such a landmark by recovering and reusing the entire lower stage intact, after an initial orbital flight.
Egypt
Egypt blames EU-Turkey deal for refugee spike euobserver
"You see what has happened as a result of the deal with Turkey. The closing of the Balkan route and the deal in north Africa, the pressure has increased on Egypt," [foreign minister ambassador Hisham Badr] told MEPs in the European parliament's foreign affairs committee.
Robots
Researchers discover machines can learn by simply observing, without being told what to look for sheffield.ac.uk
The discovery, published in the journal Swarm Intelligence springer, takes inspiration from the work of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test, which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human. In this test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.
AI
Kawasaki Developing Artificial Intelligence For Motorcycles motorcycle
The AI wouldn’t just allow a motorcycle to talk to a rider; Kawasaki kawasaki says the AI will use a technology called an “Emotion Engine” to interpret a rider’s emotions and perhaps even develop its own personality. Cue the “Knight Rider” theme now.
DNA
How DNA could store all the world’s data nature
“We sat down in the bar with napkins and biros,” says Goldman, and started scribbling ideas: “What would you have to do to make that work?” The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.”
Variation in 'junk' DNA leads to trouble medicalxpress
Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as "junk" DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease.
A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. genome.cshlp.org
Medical
Contacts May One Day Be Used to Deliver Glaucoma Medication drugs
The new study showed that the drug-dispensing lenses were able to effectively lower the eye pressure in monkeys with glaucoma at least as much as the standard eye drops used to treat the disease.
Reconstructing the 6th century plague from a victim scienmag
Before the infamous Black Death, the first great plague epidemic was the Justinian plague, which, over the course of two centuries, wiped out up to an estimated 50 million (15 percent) of the world's population throughout the Byzantine Empire—-and may have helped speed the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.
No one knows why it disappeared.
Other...
View smart nanotechnology glass is in 250 commercial buildings nextbigfuture v
Interesting, though this is mostly a commercial for the product...
Society
Transgender 'woman' arrested for voyeurism in Target changing room washingtontimes
Police responded to a call on Monday from a woman who said she noticed someone reaching over her stall and taking pictures while she was trying on clothes, the Post Register reported. The victim confronted the perpetrator, who ran out of the store.
Also see Transgender 'woman' accused of videotaping 18-year-old in Target fitting room pix11, where at least the police are shown with some remaining sanity:
Smith is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in Bonneville County and was booked as a male into the Bonneville County Jail bonnevillesheriff on a $30,000 bond.
Censorship
Google, Facebook quietly move toward automatic blocking of extremist videos reuters
The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for "hashes," a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
Society
Prince William appears on cover of gay magazine Attitude theguardian
The second-in-line to the throne appears in the July issue of Attitude magazine, discussing the mental health implications of homophobic, bi-phobic and transphobic bullyings.
AI
WHY AI? currentoldnews.blogspot
Back before I started this blog, when I used to email links of current event stories, a friend cornered me at church one day. Cocking his head a little funny, he said something to the effect of: "You sure email a lot of stuff about AI!"
His confused, perplexed response to AI articles as "current (old) news" was understandable - and perhaps you share his sentiments. And I admit - it is a little unusual because it is so sci-fi and out there, seeming more at home in a movie than in a newspaper.
In my first long-form article on this blog, I ramble on a bit as to why I include AI articles so often in these daily lists of news. 'Long' is a key word. Grab your coffee before clicking the link :)
Building AI Is Hard—So Facebook Is Building AI That Builds AI wired
No joke. Inside Facebook, engineers have designed what they like to call an “automated machine learning engineer,” an artificially intelligent system that helps create artificially intelligent systems. It’s a long way from perfection. But the goal is to create new AI models using as little human grunt work as possible.
Tech
Personal aircraft aiming to take off from your home phys.org
Founded in February 2015 by four engineers and doctoral students from the Technical University of Munich in Germany, Lilium has already proved the concept with several scale, 25 kg prototypes and is now developing its first ultralight vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.
The dream continues...:D
Watch robo cockroach buddies help one another climb stairs theverge v
It's a simple demonstration, meant to show how smaller robots like this can work together to overcome tasks they can't handle alone. The UC Berkeley scientists from the university's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have been playing with their roach and bug designs for a while now, and suggest the bots will eventually find a place in disaster rescue scenarios.
Cambridge scientists lay claim to world’s tiniest engine, a million times smaller than an ant heralddemocrat
It’s at [the] microscopic scale that scientists at the University of Cambridge say they’ve constructed a working engine. The prototype motor, which the physicists described Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies on lasers, gold particles and the exploitation of a nifty physics principle called van der Waals forces.
Looking to light highways with light-emitting cement phys.org
During the day, any building, road, highway or structure made out of this new cement can absorb solar energy and emit it during the night for around 12 hours.
Why We Should Care About the Autonomous Robot That Just Performed Surgery on a Pig fortune
The significance of this, beyond its meaning in the medical world, is that surgery strikes most of us as just about the last job we could imagine a robot doing. But robots are clearly on their way to doing it.
Bacteria
HOW BACTERIA CREATE THEIR OWN ICE popsci
Analyses...revealed that [it] uses proteins in its cell membrane to slightly change the position of nearby water molecules so that they would fit more neatly into a lattice, as they are in ice. The bacterium can then use vibrational energy to remove heat from the area around it, coalescing the water molecules into solid ice.
