Stocks End Rocky Month Lower as Trump Widens Trade War
Wall Street is no fan of Tariff Man.
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Friday, May 31, 2019
Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google
According to The New York Times, the Justice Department is exploring whether to open a case against Google for potential antitrust violations (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) relating to search and its other businesses, "putting renewed scrutiny on the company amid a growing chorus of criticism about the power of Big Tech." From the report: An investigation into how Google arranges search results could revive a case closed in 2013 by another government agency, the Federal Trade Commission. The five F.T.C. commissioners voted unanimously at the time against bringing charges against the company. Google agreed to make some changes to search practices tied to advertising. But this year, with a new antitrust task force announced in February, the trade commission renewed its interest in Google. In recent weeks, the commission referred complaints about the company to the Justice Department, which also oversees antitrust regulations, according to two people familiar with the actions. The commission has also told companies and others with complaints against Google to take them to the Justice Department. The task force had been looking into Google's advertising practices and influence in the online advertising industry, according to two of the people. One of the people said the agency was also looking into its search practices. Most of Google's revenue comes from advertisements tied to its search results. If the Justice Department opens a formal investigation, it will be its first major antitrust case against a big tech company during the Trump administration. Google, Facebook and Amazon have come under intense bipartisan criticism, and calls to break up the firms have become a talking point in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
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In-situ measurement of 3D protein structure inside living eukaryotic cells
(Tokyo Metropolitan University) Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully determined the high-resolution three-dimensional structure of proteins inside living eukaryotic cells. They combined 'in-cell' nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a bioreactor system and cutting-edge computational algorithms to determine protein structures in crowded intracellular environments for the first time. The technique promises insight into the intracellular behavior of disease-causing proteins and novel drug screening applications, allowing in-situ visualization of how proteins respond to biochemical stimuli.
from EurekAlert! - Technology, Engineering and Computer Science http://bit.ly/2HPJ3Wm
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In-situ measurement of 3D protein structure inside living eukaryotic cells
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully determined the high-resolution three-dimensional structure of proteins inside living eukaryotic cells. They combined 'in-cell' nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a bioreactor system and cutting-edge computational algorithms to determine protein structures in crowded intracellular environments for the first time. The technique promises insight into the intracellular behavior of disease-causing proteins and novel drug screening applications, allowing in-situ visualization of how proteins respond to biochemical stimuli.
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Use of Male Mice Skews Drug Research Against Women, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The male mind is rational and orderly while the female one is complicated and hormonal. It is a stereotype that has skewed decades of neuroscience research towards using almost exclusively male mice and other laboratory animals, according to a new study. Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments -- even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women -- on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behavior of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Shansky is calling for stricter requirements to include animals of both sexes in research, saying the failure to do so has led to the development of drugs that work less well in women. One example that the report mentions is with the sleeping drug Ambien, which had been tested in male animals and then men in clinical trials. It "was later shown to be far more potent in women because it was metabolized more slowly in the female body," the report says. "Across all drugs, women tended to suffer more adverse side effects and overdoses."
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Timeline: The deadliest mass shootings in the US
Three of the deadliest mass shootings in the US modern history have occurred since October 2017.
from Al Jazeera English http://bit.ly/2WFNKtM
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12 people killed in Virginia Beach shooting; suspect dead
Officials say 'disgruntled' employee opened fire on Virginia Beach municipal centre before being fatally shot by police.
from Al Jazeera English http://bit.ly/2MpujS8
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Teen Makes His Own AirPods For $4
samleecole writes: Apple's AirPods are a tragedy. Ecologically, socially, economically -- they're a capitalist disaster. The opposite of AirPods, then, is this extremely punk pair of DIY wireless earbuds that someone on Reddit hacked together using an old pair of wired Apple headphones and some hot glue. "I started this project roughly two months ago when my friend got a new pair of AirPods for his birthday and I thought to myself, 'that's quite a lot of money for something I can make at home,'" Sam Cashbook, who is 15, told Motherboard in a Reddit message. Cashook started watching videos of people making their own AirPods, but mostly found people chopping the wires off of Apple headphones as a joke. He decided to take his own approach. He bought a hands-free bone conduction headset from eBay, and took apart the casing to reveal the electronics. Then, he desoldered the wires from the original speaker in the headset, and connected his old Apple earbud speaker to the headset's printed circuit board. Maybe a little uglier, but the headphones work well, he said. The set has buttons for power, pausing music, volume controls and skipping tracks, and the battery is rechargeable.
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Ask Slashdot: Why Is 3D Technology Stagnating So Badly?
dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D. 3D Games will look as good as movies or reality. Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with. High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores. Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world. TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D. 3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware. 3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap." Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?
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Facebook Reportedly Thinks There's No 'Expectation of Privacy' On Social Media
Facebook wants to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal by arguing that it didn't violate users' privacy rights because there's no expectation of privacy when using social media. CNET reports: "There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy," Facebook counsel Orin Snyder said during a pretrial hearing to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to Law 360. The company reportedly didn't deny that third parties accessed users' data, but it instead told U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria that there's no "reasonable expectation of privacy" on Facebook or any other social media site. Chhabria appears set on letting at least some of the lawsuit continue, saying in an order before the hearing (PDF) that the plaintiffs should expect the court to accept their argument that private information was disclosed without express consent.
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Google Struggles To Justify Why It's Restricting Ad Blockers In Chrome
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Google has found itself under fire for plans to limit the effectiveness of popular ad blocking extensions in Chrome. While Google says the changes are necessary to protect the "user experience" and improve extension security, developers and consumer advocates say the company's real motive is money and control. In the wake of ongoing backlash to the proposal, Chrome software security engineer Chris Palmer took to Twitter this week to claim the move was intended to help improve the end-user browsing experience, and paid enterprise users would be exempt from the changes. Chrome security leader Justin Schuh also said the changes were driven by privacy and security concerns. Adblock developers, however, aren't buying it. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill, for example, argued this week that if user experience was the goal, there were other solutions that wouldn't hamstring existing extensions. "Web pages load slow because of bloat, not because of the blocking ability of the webRequest API -- at least for well crafted extensions," Hill said. Hill said that Google's motivation here had little to do with the end user experience, and far more to do with protecting advertising revenues from the rising popularity of adblock extensions. The team behind the EFF's Privacy Badger ad-blocking extension also spoke out against the changes. "Google's claim that these new limitations are needed to improve performance is at odds with the state of the internet," the organization said. "Sites today are bloated with trackers that consume data and slow down the user experience. Tracker blockers have improved the performance and user experience of many sites and the user experience. Why not let independent developers innovate where the Chrome team isn't?"
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Towards a new era of small animal imaging research
Thanks to a collaborative effort between McGill University, Montreal Canada and the University of Antwerp, Belgium this no longer needs to be the case. A new study, published in NeuroImage by researchers from the Molecular Imaging Center Antwerp (MICA) and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute of McGill University, describes a new PET imaging platform capable of simultaneously scanning multiple animals while they are awake.
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Bacteria's protein quality control agent offers insight into origins of life
The discoveries not only offer new directions for fighting the virulence of some of humanity's most dangerous pathogens, they have implications for our understanding of how life itself evolved.
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Scientists design organic cathode for high performance batteries
Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a new, organic cathode material for lithium batteries. With sulfur at its core, the material is more energy-dense, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly than traditional cathode materials in lithium batteries.
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Heartburn drugs linked to fatal heart and kidney disease, stomach cancer
A study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System has linked long-term use of such popular heartburn drugs -- called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) -- to fatal cases of cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and upper gastrointestinal cancer. More than 15 million Americans have prescriptions for PPIs.
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Emergency room or doctor's office?
A new study in the journal Heliyon, published by Elsevier, examines the relationship between the way individuals perceive and respond to threats (threat sensitivity) and where they most frequently seek medical care. The study investigates the association between the healthcare utilization practices of African American men in a low-income urban neighborhood and their relative levels of threat sensitivity, insurance status, and ages.
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Resistance to Fusarium head blight holding in Illinois, study says
Illinois wheat growers, take heart. A new University of Illinois study shows no evidence of a highly toxic Fusarium head blight (FHB) variant, known as NA2, in the wheat-growing region of the state. The study also reinforces the effectiveness of wheat resistance to the fungal disease.
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Moto Z4 Brings Back Headphone Jack, Is 5G Ready For $500
Motorola's $500 Moto Z4 is finally official, bringing an updated design with a near-notchless 6.4-inch OLED display, headphone jack, and support for the company's Moto Mods. Other specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, 4GB of RAM with 128GB of storage (expandable via microSD to 2TB) and Android 9.0 Pie, with Motorola promising an update to Q in the future. CNET reports: To improve photography Motorola has added what it calls "Quad Pixel technology," which uses pixel-binning to allow for 48-megapixel shots with the rear lens, following a trend of other recent higher-end midrange phones including OnePlus' 7 Pro. Around front is a 25-megapixel shooter which takes advantage of the same "Quad Pixel" tech. Motorola says both sensors should offer improved details and colors as well as better low-light performance. The company has even added its own rival to the Pixel 3's Night Sight called Night Vision. In some brief hands-on time with the phone, the phone feels more premium than the rival cheaper Pixel 3a, which starts at $399. Videos looked sharp on the OLED display and the Night Vision did a solid job of enhancing images taken in a dark room. Whether the Z4 can rival the Pixel 3A's camera or if its cheaper price can top the value of $669 OnePlus 7 Pro's performance remains to be seen. An optical fingerprint sensor is built into the display, similar to the technology used on OnePlus' 6T and 7 Pro. As with the OnePlus phones, setup was seamless and unlocking was responsive during our brief use of the phone. Wireless charging isn't present nor is IP-rated water resistance (Motorola says the phone can withstand spills and rain). The phone will be available from Verizon on June 13, and will support the carrier's 5G network via the 5G Moto Mod (sold separately).
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FedEx To Deliver Packages 7 Days a Week
According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, FedEx will deliver packages seven days a week starting next year, adding an extra operating day to accommodate America's online shopping habits. From the report: The delivery giant also plans to bring to customers' doorsteps many of the packages it currently drops at local post offices. The shift will seek to lower costs by building density along FedEx Ground routes, while also shifting some two million packages daily out of the U.S. Postal Service's network. The changes aim to serve an e-commerce shopping market where consumer habits don't mesh with working schedules, because many deliveries arrive at homes while shoppers are at work. It also adds capacity to FedEx's network by using existing facilities an extra day to handle what the company expects will be a doubling of small package shipments in the U.S. by 2026.
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Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform App Dream Is Dead and Buried
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft has spent years pushing developers to create special apps for the company's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and today, it's putting the final nail in the UWP coffin. Microsoft is finally allowing game developers to bring full native Win32 games to the Microsoft Store, meaning the many games that developers publish on popular stores like Steam don't have to be rebuilt for UWP. This is a big shift for Microsoft's Windows app store, particularly because games are one of the most popular forms of apps that are downloaded from app stores. Previously, developers were forced to publish games for Windows 10 through the Universal Windows Platform, which simply doesn't have the same level of customization that game developers have come to expect from Windows over the years. The writing has been on the wall for UWP for months now. Microsoft recently revealed its effort to switch the company's Edge browser to Chromium and away from UWP to make it available on Windows 7, Windows 8, and macOS. Microsoft's Joe Belfiore admitted in an interview with The Verge earlier this month that UWP was a "headwind" for Edge. "It's not that UWP is bad, but UWP is not a 35-year-old mature platform that a ridiculously huge amount of apps have been written to," Belfiore said at the time. Microsoft even recently put its touch-friendly UWP versions of Office on hold, preferring to focus on the web, iOS, Android, and its desktop apps instead. Office was always the centerpiece for UWP and a good example of how to build a more demanding app on Microsoft's new platform. Microsoft is finally listening to app and game developers and not trying to force UWP on them anymore. "Ultimately, this is good news for both developers and Windows users," the report concludes. "We might now start to see more games in the Microsoft Store that work how PC gamers expect them to and hopefully more apps."
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Most Windows 10 Users Are Running the Update From Over a Year Ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's original grand plan for Windows 10 was an operating system that was always up-to-date. Updates were intended to be mandatory, and while you could delay them a bit, you couldn't opt out of them entirely. And the software giant was committed to rolling out two major feature updates a year. Fast forward to now, and things are very different. You can delay, or avoid, most updates, including feature updates -- assuming you're even offered them in the first place. AdDuplex monitors the state of adoption for the various Windows 10 versions, and its latest figures, for May, show the October 2018 Update (1809) is still only on 31.3 percent of systems (up from 29.3 percent in April), and the May 2019 Update (1903) is currently to be found on just 1.4 percent of devices.
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Metadata is the Biggest Little Problem Plaguing the Music Industry
From a report: Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn't that they had missed out on payments for a single song -- it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years. The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren't. Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it's one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. "Every second that goes by and it's not fixed, I'm dripping pennies," said the musician. Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there's no need to verify the accuracy of a song's metadata before it gets released, and there's no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. As a result, the problem is way bigger than a name being misspelled when you click a song's credits on Spotify. Missing, bad, or inconsistent song metadata is a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table that never gets paid to the artists who earned that money.
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The Galaxy Note 10 Won't Have Headphone Jack or Buttons, Report Says
The Galaxy Note 10 will reportedly be Samsung's first flagship to remove the headphone jack, taking one of the last wired audio options off the flagship market. From a report: The Note 10 will have no 3.5mm connector, or exterior buttons (power, volume, Bixby) will be replaced by capacitive or pressure-sensitive areas, likely highlighted by some kind of raised 'bump' and/or texture along the edge (i.e., a faux button). We don't know if it's Samsung's intent to carry over both of these changes to the Galaxy S11 in 2020. Both changes had been previously rumored, but we can now provide stronger confirmation. The Note line has always been fertile ground for Samsung's more forward-looking changes to its smartphones' industrial design and general philosophy, as it's a phone that's long been adored by some of Samsung's most ardent fans -- the sort of people who tend to be early adopters of new technology.
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Apple Expected To Remove 3D Touch From All 2019 iPhones in Favor of Haptic Touch
Four years after 3D Touch debuted on the iPhone 6s, the pressure-sensitive feature appears to be on the chopping block. From a report: Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts "confirmed" that 3D Touch "will be eliminated" in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month. This isn't the first time we've heard this rumor. The Wall Street Journal said the same thing back in January. Apple already replaced 3D Touch with Haptic Touch on the iPhone XR in order to achieve a nearly edge-to-edge LCD on the device, and it is likely the feature will be expanded to all 2019 iPhones. Haptic Touch is simply a marketing name for a long press combined with haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine. Apple commentator John Gruber adds: 3D Touch is a great idea but Apple never rolled it out well, and it was never discoverable. I wouldn't be surprised if most people with 3D Touch-enabled iPhones have no idea it exists. In and of itself, the lack of discoverability isn't necessarily a problem. That's how power user features often work. Right-clicking on the Mac, for example, is in the same boat. What 3D Touch never got right is that power-user shortcuts should be just thatâ-- shortcuts for tasks with more obvious ways to do them. Now imagine if right-clicking only worked on certain high-end Macs, but didn't work on others. That's what happened with 3D Touch. I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, but is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn't get used much because there's not much you can do with it.
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