By timothy from
Slashdot's transparency-transchmarency department:
An anonymous reader writes: For the past two and a half months, Canadian law professor Michael
Geist has been writing a daily series on the trouble with the
Trans Pacific Partnership. The 50 part series wrapped up today with
the
case against ratifying the TPP. While the focus is on
Canadian issues, the series hits on problems that all 12 countries
face: unbalanced intellectual property rules, privacy risks, dangers
to the Internet and technology, cultural and health regulation, and
investor-state settlement rules that could cost countries billions
of dollars.
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By timothy from
Slashdot's nougat-on-the-outside department:
vikingpower writes: The European Space Agency's second mission to Mars, ExoMars, was successfully launched from the Baikonur launch pad today. ExoMars will search for traces of life, either past or present, on the Red Planet, and is the precursor to a more full-fledged mission to Mars in 2018, comprising a rover. It consists of an orbiter and of Schiaparelli, a lander built by European industry and scheduled to land in October this year. Both missions are cooperations between ESA and RosKosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. If one of them met their ultimate goal -- proving there is or was life on Mars — the excitement here on Earth would be unimaginable.
Mark Whittington adds a link to The Guardian's coverage and a bit of detail: The Russian-made launch vehicle lobbed a probe into space, the Trace Gas Orbiter, that will enter orbit around Mars later in 2016 and search for methane in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Methane can have a number of sources, but one of them is the waste product of microbial life. Both the Mars Express orbiter and the Mars Curiosity rover have detected some measure of methane, which could be produced by geological processes as well.
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By timothy from
Slashdot's obscure-but-low-hanging department:
An anonymous reader writes with an intriguing story at Quanta Magazine, which begins: Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits. "We've been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before," said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. "It's crazy."
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By timothy from
Slashdot's confidence-levels department:
mdsolar writes: Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released March 11. "In the past, many scientists have been cautious of attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. People frequently ask questions such as, 'Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?' Science can't answer that because there are so many relevant factors for hurricanes. What this report is saying is that we can attribute an increased magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events to climate change,' said David Titley, professor of practice in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and founding director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.
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By timothy from
Slashdot's why-we're-all-gathered-here-today department:
prisoninmate writes: At the end of January we reported the fact that the oldest long-term supported kernel branch, Linux 2.6.32, is about to reached its end of life in February 2016, as announced by Willy Tarreau, who said that there might be another point release in a few weeks if important things need to be fixed. Well, it took a little bit longer than two weeks, and on March 12, he published details about the last maintenance release in the series, Linux kernel 2.6.32.71 LTS, along with the official end of life announcement, recommending users to move to the Linux 3.2 branch.
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By timothy from
Slashdot's transparency-transchmarency department:
An anonymous reader writes: For the past two and a half months, Canadian law professor Michael
Geist has been writing a daily series on the trouble with the
Trans Pacific Partnership. The 50 part series wrapped up today with
the
case against ratifying the TPP. While the focus is on
Canadian issues, the series hits on problems that all 12 countries
face: unbalanced intellectual property rules, privacy risks, dangers
to the Internet and technology, cultural and health regulation, and
investor-state settlement rules that could cost countries billions
of dollars.
Read Replies (0)