By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's space-junkyards department:
There's already nearly 5,000 satellites orbiting earth, "and many of them are non-functioning space debris now, clogging up orbital paths for newer satellites," reports Universe Today. Yet over the next five years we expect to launch up to 2600 more -- which is prompting a search for solutions to "the growing problem of space debris in Low-Earth Orbit."
Some exotic-sounding solutions involve harpoons, nets, magnets, even lasers. Now NASA has given Purdue University-related startup Vestigo Aerospace money for a six month study that looks at using drag sails to de-orbit space junk, including satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other debris, safely...Drag sails are a bit different than other methods. While the harpoons, lasers, and nets proposed by various agencies are meant to deal with the space junk that's already accumulated, drag sails are designed to be built into a satellite and deployed at the end of their useful life... Once deployed, they would reduce an object's velocity and then help it deorbit safely.
Currently, satellites deorbit more or less on their own terms, and it's difficult to calculate where they may strike Earth, if they're too large to burn up on re-entry... [D]rag sails offer an affordable, and potentially easy-to-develop method to ensure future satellites don't outlive their usefulness.
The company was started by a Purdue associate professor of engineering who tells the site they're building in scalability, so their sails can handle satellites that weigh one kilogram -- or one ton.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's game-giving-for-graphics department:
Long-time Slashdot reader dnix writes:
Apparently having a lot of people playing Fortnite is good for the open source community too. Epic Games' MegaGrants program just awarded the Blender Foundation with $1.2 million over the next three years...to further the success of the free and open source 3D creation suite.
It's part of the company's $100 million "MegaGrants" program, according to the announcement.
"Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem," said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. "Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's survey-says department:
GitLab's CEO and co-founder says there was one big takeaway from their recent "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps": that early adopters of a strong Devops model experience greater security. "Security teams in a longstanding DevOps environment reported they are three times more likely to discover bugs before code is merged," according to the GitLab blog, "and 90% more likely to test between 91% and 100% of code than teams who encounter early-stage DevOps."
But after polling over 4,000 software professionals, the survey also found positive results from another workplace arrangement, which they report under the headline "Remote work works."
According to our survey respondents, working remotely leads to greater collaboration, better documentation, and transparency.
In fact, developers in a mostly remote environment are 23% more likely to have good insight into what colleagues are working on and rate the maturity of their organization's security practices 29% higher than those who work in a traditional office environment.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's trying-too-hard department:
Google's Go programming language will not add a try() function in its next major version, "despite this being a major part of what was proposed," reports the Register:
Error handling in Go is currently based on using if statements to compare a returned error value to nil. If it is nil, no error occurred. This requires developers to write a lot of if statements. "In general Go programs have too much code-checking errors and not enough code handling them," wrote Google principal engineer Russ Cox in an overview of the error-handling problem in Go.
There was therefore a proposal to add a built-in try function which lets you eliminate many of the if statements and triggers a return from a function if an error is detected. The proposal was not for full exception handling, which is already present in Go via the panic and recover functions. That proposal has now been abandoned. Robert Griesemer, one of the original designers of Go, announced the decision in a post Tuesday...
"Based on the overwhelming community response and extensive discussion here, we are marking this proposal declined ahead of schedule. As far as technical feedback, this discussion has helpfully identified some important considerations we missed, most notably the implications for adding debugging prints and analyzing code coverage.
"More importantly, we have heard clearly the many people who argued that this proposal was not targeting a worthwhile problem. We still believe that error handling in Go is not perfect and can be meaningfully improved, but it is clear that we as a community need to talk more about what specific aspects of error handling are problems that we should address."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's here-and-there department:
Microsoft "continues to plug away at making holoportation possible," reports ZDNet:
In a new demonstration, officials showed off a scenario where a life-sized holographic representation of a person could be beamed into a scenario with real-time simultaneous language translation happening -- a communication scenario on which Microsoft has been working for years. At Microsoft's Inspire partner show (which is co-located with its Ready sales kick-off event) on July 17, Microsoft demonstrated such a scenario on stage during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote. Azure Corporate Vice President Julia White donned a HoloLens 2 headset and [demonstrated] a full-size hologram of herself translated simultaneously into Japanese and maintaining her speech cadence and patterns. [Microsoft later said that the life-sized hologram was created at Microsoft's Mixed Reality Capture Studios.]
Microsoft pulled off the demo by combining a number of its existing technologies, White said, including Azure speech-to-text, Azure Speech Translation and neural text-to-speech. The text-to-speech from Azure Speech Services allows apps, tools and devices to convert text into natural human-like synthesized speech. Users can create their own custom voice unique to them.
In a video of the demo, White first appears to be holding a smaller version of her hologram in the palm of her own hand.
She jokingly telling the audience, "Let me introduce you to Mini-Me."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's cruel-summer department:
Layzej shared this article from the Washington Post:
Boosted by a historic heat wave in Europe and unusually warm conditions across the Arctic and Eurasia, the average temperature of the planet soared to its highest level ever recorded in June. According to data released Monday by NASA, the global average temperature was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.93 Celsius) above the June norm (based on a 1951-to-1980 baseline), easily breaking the previous June record of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.82 Celsius), set in 2016, above the average.
The month was punctuated by a severe heat wave that struck Western Europe in particular during the last week, with numerous all-time-hottest-temperature records falling in countries with centuries-old data sets. Notably, 13 locations in France surpassed their highest temperature ever recorded. The heat wave's highest temperature of 114.6 degrees Fahrenheit (45.9 Celsius), posted in Gallargues-le-Montueux, was 3.2 degrees above the old record, set during an infamous heat wave in July and August 2003.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's hot-Santa department:
Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes the CBC:
Weather watchers are focused on the world's most northerly community, which is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. "It's really quite spectacular," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's chief climatologist. "This is unprecedented." The weather agency confirmed that Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record of 21 C [69.8 F] on Sunday. On Monday, the military listening post on the top of Ellesmere Island had reached 20 C [68 F] by noon and inched slightly higher later in the day.
A government report in April found that Canada was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and this new article points out that recently records have been beaten "not by fractions, but by large margins." For example, the Alert station's average temperature had been a cool 44.6 F, and Environment Canada's chief climatologist says a deviation of this magnitude is like the city of Toronto reaching a high of 107.6 F.
"It's nothing that you would have ever seen."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's let's-make-money department:
Forbes notes that other financial transaction platforms hope to benefit from Facebook's struggles in launching its Libra cryptocurrency -- including Celo.
The key value proposition of the assets running on top of the [Celo] platform is that they are immune to the wide swings in volatility that have plagued leading crypto assets in recent years. Many are designed to mirror the price movements of traditional currency, and most have names that reflect their fiat brethren, such as the Gemini Dollar. This is a critical need for the industry, as no asset will be able to serve as a currency if it does not maintain a consistent price. However, rather than being a centralized issuer that supports the price pegs with fiat held in banks, Celo has built a full-stack platform (meaning it developed the underlying blockchain and applications that run on top), that can offer an unlimited number of stablecoins all backed by cryptoassets held in reserve.
Furthermore, Celo is what is known as an algorithmic-based stablecoin provider. This distinction means that rather than being a centralized entity that controls issuances and redemptions, the company employs a smart-contract based stability protocol that automatically expands or contracts the supply of its collateral reserves in a fashion similar to how the Federal Reserve adjusts the U.S. monetary supply... Additionally, a key differentiator for Celo from similar projects is that for the first time its blockchain platform allows users to send/receive money to a person's phone number, IP address, email, as well as other identifiers. This feature will be critical to the long-term success for the network because it eliminates the need for counterparties in a transaction to share their public keys with each other prior to a transaction.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's trying-too-hard department:
Google's Go programming language will not add a try() function in its next major version, "despite this being a major part of what was proposed," reports the Register:
Error handling in Go is currently based on using if statements to compare a returned error value to nil. If it is nil, no error occurred. This requires developers to write a lot of if statements. "In general Go programs have too much code-checking errors and not enough code handling them," wrote Google principal engineer Russ Cox in an overview of the error-handling problem in Go.
There was therefore a proposal to add a built-in try function which lets you eliminate many of the if statements and triggers a return from a function if an error is detected. The proposal was not for full exception handling, which is already present in Go via the panic and recover functions. That proposal has now been abandoned. Robert Griesemer, one of the original designers of Go, announced the decision in a post Tuesday...
"Based on the overwhelming community response and extensive discussion here, we are marking this proposal declined ahead of schedule. As far as technical feedback, this discussion has helpfully identified some important considerations we missed, most notably the implications for adding debugging prints and analyzing code coverage.
"More importantly, we have heard clearly the many people who argued that this proposal was not targeting a worthwhile problem. We still believe that error handling in Go is not perfect and can be meaningfully improved, but it is clear that we as a community need to talk more about what specific aspects of error handling are problems that we should address."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's before-the-black-box department:
This week the BBC told the remarkable story of the man who invented the "black box" flight recorders -- and of all the resistance he enountered along the way.
dryriver shared this summary:
In 1934, a passenger plane name Miss Hobart crashed into the sea off the coast of Australia. Among those killed was Anglican missionairy Rev Hubert Warren, whose last gift to his 8 year old son David had been a crystal radio set.
Young David Warren spent hours a day tinkering with the radio, eventually learning enough electronics engineering to build his own radios and sell them to other people. David Warren later grew to be a Rocket Scientist working for Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories. In 1953, the department loaned him to an expert panel trying to solve a costly and distressing mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner and the great hope of the new Jet Age, keep crashing? David Warren was confronted with a daunting problem -- how to determine from heavily deformed crashed plane fragments what had happened to the plane while it was in the air... Warren had an interesting idea -- what if every plane in the sky had a mini recorder in the cockpit...?
Warren's superior did not approve of the idea and told him to stick to chemicals and fuels.
When Warren got a new boss, the new boss was more sympathetic, but told him to do the R&D for it in complete secrecy. Since it wasn't a government-approved venture or a war-winning weapon, it couldn't be seen to take up lab time or money. "If I find you talking to anyone, including me, about this matter, I will have to sack you." When Warren first floated the idea of a cockpit recorder publicly, the pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening."
Undeterred, Warren took to his garage and invented the first "Black Box" flight recorder.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's giant-leaps-for-mankind department:
It's exactly one half century from that moment in time when men first walked on the moon, writes NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.
"Today, on the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA looks back with heartfelt gratitude for the Apollo generation's trailblazing courage as we -- the Artemis generation -- prepare to take humanity's next giant leap to Mars."
The lethargic lull of scientific fatalism afflicted portions of America then as it sometimes does today. There is nothing inevitable about scientific discovery nor is there a predetermined path of cutting-edge innovation. Long hours of arduous study and experimentation are required merely to glimpse a flicker of enlightenment that can lead to greater heights of human achievement...
The Apollo program hastened ground-breaking technological advancements that continue to bestow benefits to modern civilization today. Flame resistant textiles, water purification systems, cordless tools, more effective dialysis machines and improvements to food preservation and medicine are just some of the innovative wonders generated during that era. Furthermore, NASA's utilization of integrated circuits on silicon chips aboard the lunar module's computer unit helped jumpstart the budding computer industry into the massive enterprise it is today. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Apollo missions was their ability to inspire young Americans across the country to join science, technology, engineering and math related fields of study...
After more than 50 years, the benefits of human space exploration to humanity are clear. By proud example, the Apollo program taught us we cannot venture aimlessly into the uncharted territory of future discovery merely hoping to happen upon greater advancement. Technological progress is a deliberate choice made by investing in missions that will expand our limits of understanding and capability...
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's don't-bug-me department:
"Everyone knows security needs to be baked into the development lifecycle, but that doesn't mean it is," writes ZDNet, reporting on a new survey they say showed that "long-standing friction between security and development teams remain."
The results came from GitLab's "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps" survey of over 4,000 software professionals.
Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a priority. Worse still, 68% of security professionals feel fewer than half of developers can spot security vulnerabilities later in the life cycle. Roughly half of security professionals said they most often found bugs after code is merged in a test environment.
At the same time, nearly 70% of developers said that while they are expected to write secure code, they get little guidance or help. One disgruntled programmer said, "It's a mess, no standardization, most of my work has never had a security scan." Another problem is it seems many companies don't take security seriously enough. Nearly 44% of those surveyed reported that they're not judged on their security vulnerabilities.
ZDNet also cites Linus Torvalds' remarks on the Linux kernel mailing list in 2017, complaining about how security people celebrate when code is hardened against an invalid access. "[F]rom a developer standpoint, things really are not done. Not even close. From a developer standpoint, the bad access was just a symptom, and it needs to be reported, and debugged, and fixed, so that the bug actually gets corrected. So from a developer standpoint, the end point of hardening is just the starting point, and when you think you're done, we're really only getting started."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's stopping-at-Starbucks department:
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources...
In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's vulnerable-voting department:
"Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines," reports NBC News.
Microsoft also said its AccountGuard service has already spotted 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations -- 95% of which were located in the U.S.
The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election. The system uses an encrypted tracking code to allow a voter to verify that his or her vote has been recorded and has not been tampered with, Microsoft said in a blog post...
Edward Perez, an election security expert with the independent Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Microsoft's move signals that voting systems, long a technology backwater, are finally receiving attention from the county's leading technical minds. "We think that it's good when a technology provider as significant as Microsoft is stepping into something as nationally important as election security," Perez told NBC News. "ElectionGuard does provide verification and it can help to detect attacks. It's important to note that detection is different from prevention."
Microsoft also said its notified nearly 10,000 customers that they've been targeted or compromised by nation-state cyberattacks, according to the article -- mostly from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
"While many of these attacks are unrelated to the democratic process," Microsoft said in a blog post, "this data demonstrates the significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics, or achieve other objectives."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's Mario-where-are-you department:
It was the best-selling game of June, with IGN calling it "the most accessible game design tool ever created, and that core is just one part of a greater whole..."
Since its launch three weeks ago, fans have already built over 2 million custom stages, NPR notes -- but the real news is that Super Mario Maker 2 finally represents a shift in Nintendo's attitude towards its fan community:
It's Nintendo's reliance on the creative spirit of these dedicated players that makes the Super Mario Maker series such a quietly radical property within the Nintendo canon... By loosening its grip on a beloved property and tossing the keys to the player community, Nintendo feeds into the fan-obsessive tendencies they've previously refused. With the Super Mario Maker series, Nintendo acknowledges the history of competitive speedrunning, tournament play, and even the masochistic fan games that have made their games visible and interesting in an entirely different way. It's the rare Nintendo game that is depending on those players, creators, and spectators to keep it alive. Super Mario Maker 2 has only been out for a few weeks, but already we've seen how the game's deceptively complex course editor has led to the community making some astounding levels...
Nintendo has always been old-school in the way they rely on offline experiences, downplaying the kind of online communities that other developers prioritize. Ironically, it is that indifference that has made fan communities formed around Nintendo games feel singular and special -- they're smaller, more intimate, and regulated by the players themselves. With the Super Mario Maker franchise, Nintendo finally acknowledges the power and influence of its most obsessive fans -- by creating something that couldn't thrive without them.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's it's-only-a-dark-matter-wound department:
sciencehabit shared this article from Science magazine:
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up most of the mass of the universe, has proved notoriously hard to detect. But scientists have now proposed a surprising new sensor: human flesh. The idea boils down to this: If a certain type of dark matter particle existed, it would occasionally kill people, passing through them like a bullet. Because no one has died from unexplained gunshot-like wounds, this type of dark matter does not exist, according to a new study... [It's title? "Death by Dark Matter."]
This experiment doesn't rule out heavy macro dark matter altogether, says Robert Scherrer, a co-author and theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University. It merely eliminates a certain range of them. Heavier macro dark matter would not occur frequently enough to measure, notes Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan, and other forms wouldn't kill people. "There is probably still room for very heavy dark matter," says Paolo Gorla, a particle physicist at Italy's underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory, who is not involved with the study.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's peekaboo-I-see-you department:
A contractor for Russia's intelligence agency suffered a breach, revealing projects they were pursuing -- including one to deanonymize Tor traffic.
An anonymous reader shared this report from ZDNet:
The breach took place last weekend, on July 13, when a group of hackers going by the name of 0v1ru$ hacked into SyTech's Active Directory server from where they gained access to the company's entire IT network, including a JIRA instance. Hackers stole 7.5TB of data from the contractor's network, and they defaced the company's website with a "yoba face," an emoji popular with Russian users that stands for "trolling..." Per the different reports in Russian media, the files indicate that SyTech had worked since 2009 on a multitude of projects.
In February ZDNet reported that Russia disconnected itself from the rest of the internet in a test -- and suggests today that it was a real-world test of one of these leaked "secret projects" from the Russian intelligence agency. But the other projects include:
Nautilus-S - a project for deanonymizing Tor traffic with the help of rogue Tor servers. Nautilus - a project for collecting data about social media users (such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn). Reward - a project to covertly penetrate P2P networks, like the one used for torrents. Mentor - a project to monitor and search email communications on the servers of Russian companies. Tax-3 - a project for the creation of a closed intranet to store the information of highly-sensitive state figures, judges, and local administration officials, separate from the rest of the state's IT networks.
ZDNet also reports that the Tor-deanonymizing project, started in 2012, "appears to have been tested in the real world," citing a 2014 paper which found 18 malicious Tor exit nodes located in Russia.
Each of those hostile Russian exit nodes used version 0.2.2.37 of Tor -- the same one described in these leaked files.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's streaming-sandworms department:
An anonymous reader quotes Android Authority:
Studios like Disney and NBCUniversal are making preparations to launch their own streaming services, and they are planning to take back their back catalog of films and TV series with them. That's also what's happening with WarnerMedia, the AT&T-owned entertainment group that operates, among many other things, HBO, Warner Bros, and CNN. Recently, the conglomerate announced its own upcoming dedicated streaming service, HBO Max... Unconfirmed reports from Hollywood trade news outlets claim that HBO Max will cost between $16 and $17 a month. The service will be ad-free, although some reports have indicated that WarnerMedia might launch an ad-supported version of HBO Max at some point after the official launch in 2020. If that happens, it's likely the cost to sign up will be much less...
While HBO Max will have quite a lot for subscribers to watch from WarnerMedia's library of content, it will have its own range of original TV shows and movies that will be found exclusively on the streaming service. They will be known as Max Originals. Here's what has been announced for HBO Max so far, which includes a couple of spin-offs from current and upcoming Warner Bros. series:
Dune: The Sisterhood: Based on the classic Dune sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert, this 10-part series will focus on the Bene Gesserit group of women in this universe. Denis Villeneuve, who is directing the upcoming feature film adaptation of Dune, will also direct the pilot episode of the series.
Gremlins -- The Animated Series: The mischievous and destructive creatures from the two Gremlins feature films will return as an animated series on HBO Max...
A beta version of the service may launch before the end of 2019, according to Deadline.
The studio's announcement also promised that HBO Max woud also include previously-announced HBO programs, including:
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's I'll-be-seeing-you department:
"Fight For the Future, a tech-focused nonprofit, on Thursday released its Ban Facial Recognition map, logging the states and cities using surveillance technology," reports CNET -- noting that "surveillance technology" in this case includes Amazon's Ring doorbell security cameras.
A CNET investigation earlier this year highlighted the close ties between Ring and police departments across the US, many of which offer free or discounted Ring doorbells using taxpayer money. The cameras have helped police create an easily accessible surveillance network in neighborhoods and allowed law enforcement to request videos through an app. The arrangement has critics worried about the erosion of privacy. Until the release of Fight for the Future's map, there was no comprehensive directory of all the police departments that had partnered with Ring. Now you can find them by going on the map and toggling it to "Police (Local)." It lists more than 40 cities where police have partnered with Amazon for Ring doorbells....
The map is far from complete. Police departments aren't always up front about the technology that they're using. On the interactive map, Fight for the Future asked visitors to send it any new entries to add to the map.... The map also has filters for airports, stores and stadiums that are using facial recognition, as well as states that provide driver's license photos to the FBI's database of faces... .
Fight for the Future's map also features a filter for regions where facial recognition use by government is banned. For now, that's only in San Francisco; Somerville, Massachusetts; and Oakland, California.
The group's deputy director told CNET that the map's goal is allowing people "to turn their ambient anxiety into effective action by pushing at the local and state level to ban this dangerous tech.
"No amount of regulation will fix the threat posed by facial recognition," he added. "It must be banned."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's cutting-calories department:
The New York Times reports positive results from the first major clinical study of caloric restriction (funded by America's National Institutes of Health) in which 143 healthy volunteers ate (on average) 300 calories less each day:
They lost weight and body fat. Their cholesterol levels improved, their blood pressure fell slightly, and they had better blood sugar control and less inflammation. At the same time, a control group of 75 healthy people who did not practice caloric restriction saw no improvements in any of these markers. Some of the benefits in the calorie restricted group stemmed from the fact that they lost a large amount of weight, on average about 16 pounds over the two years of the study. But the extent to which their metabolic health got better was greater than would have been expected from weight loss alone, suggesting that caloric restriction might have some unique biological effects on disease pathways in the body, said William Kraus, the lead author of the study and a professor of medicine and cardiology at Duke University.
"We weren't surprised that there were changes," he said. "But the magnitude was rather astounding. In a disease population, there aren't five drugs in combination that would cause this aggregate of an improvement...." The researchers looked at measures of quality of life and discovered that the calorie-restricted group reported better sleep, increased energy and improved mood.... One question the study could not answer was whether caloric restriction could extend life span in humans the way that it can in other animals... But ultimately, caloric restriction did have a beneficial impact on a wide range of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease, two conditions that cause death and disability for millions of Americans, especially as they get older.
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