hubie writes:As described over at ScienceDaily, a paper in Science out of the University of Minnesota found that those signs put up by various highway departments informing the drivers of how many people have died on that section of the road apparently are distracting enough to cause more accidents than if they weren't put up in the first place.
Taking a page from Elon Musk's SpaceX construction project in Boca Chica (Texas), the state of Maine's largest city (Portland) will be using SPMTs (Self-Propelled Mobile Transports) this coming weekend.It all starts at 7 PM (EDT) on Friday April 22 and continuing through 11 AM on Monday April 25, 2022. "It" is the replacement of a bridge on one of the busiest roads in the state: I-295. The whole highway will be closed, the existing overpass will be demolished, the rubble will be removed, and the previously-constructed replacement overpass will take a ride on the SPMTs to its new home... and you can watch it all happen on-line!The $20.8 million project has a web site: https://verandaplan.org/Linking to active content on their site is non-trivial, but try: https://verandaplan.org/livestream. Here's a short YouTube video of the bridge being moved in preparation for the actual "moving day".The time has come: Veranda Street bridge project starts this week:Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
upstart writes:mRNA quality control identified as novel drug target for Alzheimer's and related dementias:Alzheimer's disease and similar disorders are often marked by the presence of pathological forms of proteins that cause neurons to die. Besides the amyloid beta proteins, which have received a lot of attention, there are also the tau proteins. Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio discovered a new mechanism whereby pathological forms of tau proteins cause cell death, which they believe can be treated with drugs.These proteins are created from messenger RNA (mRNA) that carry nonsense mutations. Clearing out these aberrant mRNAs occurs through a process called nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). The researchers noticed that pathological tau protein buildup was associated with disruptions in the NMD process. Instead of trying to figure out how to clear out the proteins, they think they can attack the cause of the NMD disruptions.
upstart writes:Rotating blue laser light reveals unimagined dynamics in living cells:University of Freiburg scientists have employed a microscopy technique known as rotating coherent scattering (ROCS) to resolve cellular-level detail without the need to rely on fluorescence imaging. This means they can make "movies" to study the dynamics of cells because they take images at 100 frames per second. It uses a rapidly rotating blue laser beam, causing lightwaves to scatter at the structures of cells to generate images. They use blue laser light because objects as small as cells and viruses scatter much more light in the blue than in the red, allowing them to get "brighter" pictures. The laser is also directed in at an oblique angle to increase the contrast of the image, much as how you'd look for smudges on surfaces by looking at light reflected at low angles.
hubie writes:The most complicated and expensive part of the supply chain is the last-mile delivery, where the costs can account for up to 28% of the total transportation cost and is projected to increase. The two main issues driving these costs will be the continual rise of e-commerce as well as rapid global urbanization, so there is a need for ways to optimize the delivery process to reduce costs. Urbanization leads to continued growth of traffic, which leads to transportation delays, higher fuel costs, and larger environmental impacts. These factors have led companies to consider deliveries by drone, but drones have limited battery capacities. Instead of looking at company delivery trucks as mobile charging stations from which to launch drones, a group of researchers considered utilizing public transportation vehicles to serve that purpose.The idea of letting drones recharge or hitch rides on buses and trams to conserve energy was first introduced by Stanford researchers. The researchers in this work extended that idea to using multiple drones and multiple warehouses operating around the actual transportation nodes of a city (Bremen, Germany) and found that this is an attractive and viable approach that can be implemented in the real world.Journal Reference:
DannyB writes:Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users' smart homesThe app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.
hubie writes:The Central Valley of California makes up only 1% of U.S. farmland, but produces 40% of the nation's produce despite only receiving 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) of rainfall a year. That kind of productivity is due to massive pumping of groundwater for irrigation. After decades of pumping, parts of California are literally sinking and water is getting harder to get at (wells in the Tulare Basin have to be drilled a kilometer deep).Groundwater in this region comes from two sources that are separated by a dense layer of clay. The water on top of the clay resides in loose soil and this water gets replenished with rainfall and snowmelt runoff. The water below the clay is the aquifer and this is not replenished. A major problem is that nobody knows where the pumped water is being pulled from, nor how much of it remains.A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory came up with a new method to monitor changes between the two water sources.
upstart writes:NASA Mars Perseverance Rover: Digging Into Drill Data:You probably think that the drill being employed on Perseverance Rover is bound to be special, but do you know just how clever it is? The problem that the drill has to balance is getting maximum life from the drill bit itself while achieving the job of collecting samples of rock and sediment.
zafiro17 writes:https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/04/16/apple_m2_chips/Apple is seemingly testing four next-generation M2 processors on software developed by third-party app makers in at least nine Mac models that are likely to be upcoming laptops and desktops.Two years ago, the iGiant debuted its homegrown Arm-compatible M1 processor to power computers and iPads; the shift marked a departure from using x86 Intel silicon for its PCs. Instead of purchasing off-the-shelf processors, Apple – which was already designing its own mobile system-on-chips – wanted a custom design for its macOS products.Now it appears the M1's successor, the M2, is edging closer to launch, judging from developer logs leaked to Bloomberg that signal there is "widespread internal testing" of the chip family at Apple.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
zafiro17 writes:It's 2022 and most of us are glued to one internet device or another for 23 hours of the day. So where does your attention go? Software, for this discussion, can mean: apps installed on your laptop/desktop, operating systems, desktop environments/windowing applications, web software/software as a service, apps on a smartphone, etc. - broadly defined.Use this as an opportunity to spread some love for software that you find helpful, useful, efficient, or rewarding.Keep the conversation going.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
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