Realistic 3D scans from your phone

Impressive.

Sony has revealed new smartphones that can create detailed 3D scans of almost any object using the phone's camera. The company said the innovation was possible thanks to the power of the processor in its latest handsets. It unveiled a series of new devices at the Ifa technology show in Berlin.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41111442/sony-phone-app-takes-3d-clone-snaps

Cheap drone deliveries can save lives

The content is fine but the editing isn't. Not only does it have the dreaded excess of one-sentence "paragraphs" but it jumps randomly between topics. So I've fixed it.

US robotics company Zipline, which launched the world's first commercial drone delivery service, in Rwanda, says it is close to expanding to Tanzania. It has been delivering emergency blood supplies within Rwanda since 2016. Chief executive Keller Rinaudo told the TEDGlobal conference that he was in talks with Tanzania's government to open four distribution centres.

Mr Rinaudo said he hoped a deal would allow the start-up to fly a range of medical products to thousands of Tanzania's health centres. "Having an agile supply chain for healthcare makes a big difference in improving access and empowering doctors," he said at the TED event in Arusha, Tanzania.

Billions of people lack adequate access to essential medical products such as blood and vaccines, and more than five million children die every year because of a lack of access to basic medical products, according to Mr Rinaudo. The company charges between $15 and $45 (£11.60 to £34.85) per delivery, depending on product weight, urgency and distance. "Think about what it would cost to make that journey by car, and that is about what it will cost," said Mr Rinaudo.

In Rwanda, the company is serving 12 hospitals via a central distribution centre. Doctors or medical staff requiring blood contact Zipline online or via a WhatsApp message. Its deliveries then take an average of 20 minutes. The company says it receives multiple orders each day.

"It is a magically simple experience for doctors. We send them a message saying the blood is one minute away, and they walk outside to collect it," said Mr Rinaudo. The drones are launched from a catapult and fly below 500ft (152m) to avoid airspace used by passenger planes. They have an operational range of 150km (93 miles). The blood is delivered by parachute, and the drones do not land.

Sooo.... they just keep flying then ?

However, the World Bank has questioned the Silicon Valley-based company's true motivation. "Demonstration of real commercial deals in Africa will help raise its track record for the US market," said Edward Anderson, a senior technologist at the bank in Tanzania. He said that Zipline was "doing wonders in terms of making drones real in Africa" but questioned whether the deal - a commercial one requiring the government to pay per delivery - would go through.

But he [Mr Rinaudo] made no apology for pursuing a commercial strategy. "One of the most important things we are trying to show is that it is possible to tackle this problem in entrepreneurial ways. "It doesn't just have to be NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and foreign aid working on these big global issues."

If the deal goes ahead, the centres would open over the next four years, allowing blood, vaccines and other medical items to be flown to health centres. Zipline says it is also hoping to expand its service in Rwanda to deliver further medical products.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40935773

Astronomy in Houdini

Master's student project on visualising astronomy FITS files in Houdini, for which I provided a very small amount of advice.

https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProjects/MSc17/07/index.html

Astronomical data from satellites and ground telescopes are publicly available on a number of online portals and are free to use. Many interesting data, ranging from relatively small star clusters, to dark matter maps, to maps of entire sections of galaxies containing billions of stars are available. Their usage is somewhat limited, and the software to parse the data are developed specifically to serve the astronomy community. The data formats are not made for portability or speed, but for longevity and ease-of-use. Hence, the files can be a few megabytes to several gigabytes in size. Many astronomy software provides parsing and viewing of such files, but most do not cater to more than one format. The approach is more scientific, with the focus being on extraction of data points, potting graphs and in some cases, a bare-minimum 2D or 3D visualization. For this project, similar concepts have been applied, as well as general astronomical data analysis theory, to bring similar capabilities into Houdini, and build assets for use in visual effects. Three of the most widely used formats in astronomy have been chosen - FITS, CSV and AMR. The motivation for doing this project is an interest in astronomy and desire to learn Python.

https://vimeo.com/230309447

Terry Pratchett REALLY doesn't want you to see his internet history

Dammit, man !

A hard drive containing unfinished works by Terry Pratchett has been crushed by a steamroller, as per instructions left by the fantasy novelist. It is thought up to 10 incomplete novels were flattened at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. The six-and-a-half tonne Lord Jericho was used to roll over the hard drive several times before a concrete crusher finished off the remains.

Pratchett died aged 66 in March 2015. The creator of the Discworld series had been battling Alzheimer's disease. Before vanquishing the hard drive, Rob Wilkins, the writer's long-serving assistant, tweeted that he was "about to fulfil my obligation to Terry".

Richard Henry, curator of Salisbury Museum, said: "The steamroller totally annihilated the stone blocks underneath but the hard drive survived better than expected so we put it in a stone crusher afterwards which I think probably finally did it in". He said Pratchett did not want his unpublished works to be completed by someone else and released.

He added: "It's something you've got to follow, and it's really nice that they have followed his requests so specifically. It's surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller. I think a few people thought we were kidding when I first started putting out feelers to see if it was possible or not."

The pieces of the hard drive will go on display in the Terry Pratchett: His World Exhibition at the museum on 16 September.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-41093066

50 years of VLBI at Arecibo

Found another Arecibo flyer hiding in my inbox.

Saving FAST from tourists : my solution

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), government statistics released this month show that in the first half of 2017, nearly four million tourists visited “FAST” (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope). Tourism officials estimate that 10 million tourists will visit the the highly-sensitive device this year. “That will be as many as the tourists to the Great Wall in Beijing,” the official announced. “Here we have a new wonder of the world.” China did such a great job of building something impressive, that its core function is at risk of being nullified.

I suggest building an identical but non-functional decoy telescope closer to a major city. With blackjack, and hookers... in fact, forget the decoy telescope !

http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-radio-telescope-has-a-massive-touris-1798389051

No you twerps, 70% of us don't want a hard Brexit

TLDR : That claim that everyone is suddenly in favour of a hard Brexit is complete and total bollocks. It's statistical games taken to a whole new level. Nor do they even suggest people want to expel foreigners.

This was not a conventional opinion polling exercise in which a sample of respondents are asked a straightforward question and their answers published after some standard statistical adjustments for national representativeness. Instead, it was a complex and innovative process designed to “reveal” people’s underlying preferences when faced with forced trade-offs over potential outcomes.

Each person was presented with two menus of Brexit-related outcomes and asked to choose which one they preferred. The option of “neither” was not available... The mix of the two menus offered to respondents was randomly generated. After their first choice, respondents were asked to repeat the process a further four times, every time with two new randomly-generated menus of options.

One of these menu options was the “future rights of current EU nationals in Britain”. And one of the extreme options presented for this category was “all must leave”. And here is the important part. No one was directly asked: “Do you think all EU nationals should leave Britain after Brexit”?

Instead, this was an option that cropped up as part of large bundle of outcomes that respondents were asked to choose between. On the favourability index the researchers constructed this option got a score of about 29 per cent for Remainers and 42 per cent for Leavers. But that does not mean 29 per cent of Remainers support the deportation of EU nationals.As the researchers stress: “These values cannot and should not be interpreted as the raw or unconstrained percentage of respondents supporting a given feature level; instead it measures the degree to which individuals trade-off any given level for all of the others.”

It gets even worse for the hard Brexit conclusion :

As well as asking respondents to choose between various randomly-generated baskets of outcomes, the researchers also presented them with three “fixed” baskets. And these were constructed by the researchers to roughly resemble three Brexit outcomes often described as “soft”, “hard” and “no deal”. Respondents were forced to state a preference. They were not given the option of saying “don’t know” or “neither”.

Further, respondents were not given any sense by the framing of the question of the consequences of the choice of basket. For instance, in the “no deal” basket there were superficially attractive items such as “no payment” to the EU and rather anodyne-sounding ones such “some administrative barriers to trade and 2.5 per cent tariffs”. There was no mention of the fact that “no deal” would mean the UK being in breach of its international treaty obligations. There was no hint at the travel chaos and economic pain that would inevitably follow such a “cliff-edge” outcome. Similarly, the hard Brexit scenario contained no mention of the economic pain relative to the soft scenario.

http://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-report-latest-remainers-deport-eu-citizens-uk-back-hard-european-union-study-explained-a7892216.html

An early and spectacular attempt to measure parallax

Then came the Monument. It was supposed to be a grand acknowledgement of the fire, but at the time, “what Hooke really wanted was to build a very long telescope” says Maria Zack, a mathematician at Nazarene University, California. In the end, he decided to combine both.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London consists of a towering, 202-foot (61-metre) stone column, decorated with dragons and topped with a flaming golden orb. On the inside, a striking spiral staircase stretches all the way to the top, twisting up like the peel of an apple carved in a single, continuous ribbon.

Back in the 17th Century, scientists were still arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth or the other way around. Like all rational people today, Hooke was thoroughly convinced by the latter. But no one could prove it. In theory, it should have been easy, thanks to “astronomical parallax”, an apparent shift in the position of one object, against a backdrop of another.

If the Earth changes its position relative to the stars, while circling the Sun – then they should appear to jump from one place to another over the course of a year.

The catch is just how tiny these movements are. Take Gamma Draconis, a giant orange-coloured star around 900 trillion miles (1.4 quadrillion km) away. Instead of measuring the movement of objects in the sky, from planets to satellites, in metres or inches, astronomers divide up the heavens like the face of an imaginary clock. Every six months, the star moves north or south in the sky at a scale equivalent to the hands moving 22 ten-thousandths of a second. To magnify parallax enough to see it, you need a very large telescope indeed.

“He was trying to keep the two lenses aligned, 200ft apart, with only limited ways to anchor them to the telescope,” says Zack. Worse still, the Monument is next to Fish Street Hill, which was the main route to London Bridge at the time. This was one of the busiest roads in London, mere metres from his highly sensitive scientific experiment. In the end, vibrations from the traffic ruined everything.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170810-the-medieval-lab-hidden-inside-a-famous-monument

Goldfish survive frozen lakes by getting themselves drunk

I guess this would explain their three-second memory spans, if that wasn't a complete myth.

Scientists have decoded the secrets behind a goldfish's ability to survive in ice-covered lakes. They've worked out how and why the fish turn lactic acid in their bodies into alcohol, as a means of staying alive. Some goldfish were found to have levels well above legal drink-driving limits in many countries.

Thank goodness they don't know how to drive, then.

In most animals there is a single set of proteins that channel carbohydrates towards the mitochondria, which are the power packs of cells. In the absence of oxygen, the consumption of carbohydrates generates lactic acid, which the goldfish can't get rid of and which kills them in minutes.

Luckily, these fish have evolved a second set of proteins that take over in the absence of oxygen and convert the lactic acid to alcohol, which can then be dispersed through the gills. "The second pathway is only activated through lack of oxygen," author Dr Michael Berenbrink from the University of Liverpool, UK, told BBC News.

"The ice cover closes them off from the air, so when the pond is ice-covered the fish consumes all the oxygen and then it switches over to the alcohol." The longer they are in freezing, airless conditions the higher the alcohol levels in the fish become. "If you measure them in the field the blood alcohol goes up above 50mg per 100 millilitres, which is the drink-drive limit in Scotland and northern European countries," said Dr Berenbrink. "So they are really 'under the influence'."

They may not know how to drive, but they sure know how to live !

Scientists have also calculated for fun, how long it would take to produce an alcoholic drink from the fish excretions. "If you put them in a beer glass and closed them off, it would take 200 days to get it up to 4%," said Dr Berenbrink. "In nature, it just would not happen."

By next year that'll have replaced the avocado smoothie as the drink of choice for all self-respecting hipsters, I guarantee it.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40899192

The accidental Illuminati conspiracy was an attempt to promote critical thinking

At the time, Wilson worked for the men’s magazine Playboy. He and Thornley started sending in fake letters from readers talking about this secret, elite organisation called the Illuminati. Then they would send in more letters – to contradict the letters they had just written.

“So, the concept behind this was that if you give enough contrary points of view on a story, in theory – idealistically – the population at large start looking at these things and think, ‘hang on a minute’,” says Bramwell. “They ask themselves, ‘Can I trust how the information is presented to me?’ It’s an idealistic means of getting people to wake up to the suggested realities that they inhabit – which of course didn’t happen quite in the way they were hoping.”

Today, it’s one of the world’s most widely punted conspiracy theories; even celebrities like Jay-Z and Beyoncé have taken on the symbolism of the group themselves, raising their hands into the Illuminati triangle at concerts. It’s hardly instigated the mind-blowing epiphany – the realisation that it’s all fake – which the proponents of Discordianism had originally intended.

“Particularly in South Asia, conspiracy theories have been a mechanism for the government to control the people. In the West, it’s typically been the opposite; they’ve been the subject of people who lack agency, who lack power, and it’s their lacking of power that gives rise to conspiracy theories to challenge the government. Like with 9/11. If people lack power, conspiracy theories can sow the seeds of social protest and allow people to ask questions. The big change now is that politicians, particularly Donald Drumpf, are starting to use conspiracies to mobilise support.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy