Month: January 2016

(credit: Miami Dade County)

A group of mayors from communities in south Florida has released an open letter to one of their senators, Marco Rubio, in which they call for a meeting to discuss the challenges posed by climate change. The mayors, from communities like Key Biscayne, Miami, and West Palm Beach, say that the challenge of climate change requires a strong presidential commitment to action, one they argue Rubio is lacking.

"As mayors representing municipalities across Florida, we call on you to acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change and to address the upcoming crisis it presents our communities," the letter reads. "Our cities and towns are already coping with the impacts of climate change today." Flooding at high tides, severe storm surges, and the intrusion of saltwater into municipal water supplies are all problems these cities face.

Those issues come thanks to 20cm of sea-level rise over the previous century. Studies project that the area could see up to another 30cm rise by 2050, which the mayors say "could wipe out as much as $4 billion in taxable real estate in the four-county region of Southeast Florida." If those projections are low, things get bad quickly; a 90cm rise takes out $31 billion and leaves cities and the Everglades decisively under water.

Leafcutter ants tend their fungus comb. (credit: Alex Wild)

Humans are not the only farmers on Earth. The many species of leafcutter ants that inhabit the region stretching from Argentina to the southern United States are incredibly sophisticated food growers. They spend most of their lives harvesting and processing leaves, turning them into a well-tended substrate for growing a nutritious fungus that feeds all the colony's young. A new study reveals why these ants may have evolved their complicated systems of cooperative agricultural activities in the first place.

A complex farming society

A group of researchers at the University of Oregon studied leafcutter ants in their lab colony, as well as wild ants in Colombia and Ecuador. In a paper published today in Royal Society Open Science, the scientists describe the widely studied agricultural feats of leafcutter ants.

Previous observations have revealed that some of the ants venture forth from their colonies to gather leaves that serve as food for adult ants—and as agricultural fodder for the fungus. Inside the colony, another group of ants cuts the leaves down into what the researchers call "fragments." The ants use prehensile, finger-like leg tips called tarsi to manipulate the leaves.

SoCalGas Aliso Canyon 3. (credit: SoCal Gas / Governor's Office of Emergency Services)

On Tuesday evening, Southern California’s air quality regulator sued SoCal Gas, the company that owns a leaking natural gas storage well just north of Los Angeles. The leaking well has been venting hundreds of thousands of pounds of methane per hour into the atmosphere for the last three months.

The civil lawsuit demands damages (PDF) from SoCal Gas for creating a nuisance for the residents of the nearby Porter Ranch community and for negligently operating the Aliso Canyon storage facility that houses 115 storage wells, including the leaking SS-25 well. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is asking for up to $440,000 per day that the leak continues, based on six alleged violations.

The leak began on October 23, and after several failed attempts to plug it, SoCal Gas began drilling a relief well down to the 8,500-foot-deep reservoir where the natural gas is stored. (The reservoir is just one of many cavities that once held oil and were sucked dry decades ago. SoCal Gas repurposed these reservoirs in the 1970s to store natural gas.) In the meantime, the gas has been venting into the atmosphere.

(credit: Iain Watson)

Pay-TV providers would have to make video programming available to the makers of third-party devices and software under a proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.

The FCC is planning for a software-based, cardless replacement for CableCard. Without needing a physical card that plugs into a third-party set-top box, consumers would be able to get TV channels on tablets, smart TVs, or set-top boxes that they can buy from other companies instead of renting a box from a cable company.

"Consumers should be able to choose how they access the Multichannel Video Programming Distributor’s (MVPDs)—cable, satellite, or telco companies—video services to which they subscribe," the FCC's summary of the proposal said. "For example, consumers should be able to have the choice of accessing programming through the MVPD-provided interface on a pay-TV set-top box or app, or through devices such as a tablet or smart TV using a competitive app or software. MVPDs and competitors should be able to differentiate themselves and compete based on the experience they offer users, including the quality of the user interface and additional features like suggested content, integration with home entertainment systems, caller ID and future innovations."

(credit: Kevin Lim)

"They're killing me right now... I can't breathe."

Those are among the final words of an Oakland man shouting to his sister as Oakland Police Department officers pinned him to the ground—a knee on his back—moments before he died. Hernan Jaramillo screamed those words over and again, according to grainy body cam footage from the 2013 incident that sparked a civil rights lawsuit (PDF) the city is now settling (PDF) for $450,000.

"Sir, we're not killing you," one of the handful of officers on the scene is overheard saying calmly. Minutes later, the 51-year-old man is dead. The footage has been sealed under a protective order, but the Contra Costa Times managed to get ahold of it and published it Tuesday.

The new Hangouts message that asks you to stop using Hangouts.

Remember when Google finally integrated SMS into Hangouts, bringing Google's beleaguered IM client a little closer to Apple's iMessage? It seems like Google is now backing away from this strategy. In the newest update, Hangouts 7.0, the app now pops up a dialog box suggesting that you stop using Hangouts for SMS and switch to Android's standalone SMS client, "Messenger."

Google apps usually pop up messages like this when Google is preparing to remove or stop working on a feature. Hangouts posted a similar message when it first integrated SMS, and again when it integrated Google Voice, telling users to switch to Hangouts from whatever they were currently using. The message to switch to the SMS app was predicted by a Phandroid rumor a month ago, which said that this was the first step toward removing SMS support from Hangouts. For now, Hangouts wouldn't be able to completely remove SMS support since Project Fi users rely on it, but it seems that users of other carriers will be pushed to the regular SMS app.

Besides threatening to remove a major feature, 7.0 adds a quick reply function, which lets you type out a reply right from the notification panel.

(credit: Lyft)

California drivers who sued Lyft in 2013 over whether they should be treated as employees or contractors have settled their closely watched lawsuit, court documents show.

According to a Tuesday proposed settlement, which is likely to be finalized by the San Francisco federal judge overseeing the case next, Lyft will pay $12.25 million and will re-word its labor agreement with its workers, making it harder for the company to fire drivers at any time. The plaintiffs’ lawyers will take 30 percent of that amount; the remainder will be divided among California-based drivers and go toward covering court fees. The changes to the terms of service will be applied nationwide.

The settlement in Cotter v. Lyft has no immediate legal impact on other cases brought by the same plaintiffs' lawyer, Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has introduced a slew of similar labor suits against GrubHub, DoorDash, Caviar, and Uber.

To get a detailed work up on your health, soon all you might have to do is work up a little sweat. A new wearable device that soaks in tiny volumes of perspiration from your brow or wrist can track multiple molecules leaking out of you in real-time, researchers report in Nature. The device could one day provide up-to-the-moment health reports, helping to spot conditions such as dehydration, chemical exposures, muscle fatigue, and chronic stress, and help manage diseases, such as diabetes, the authors suggest.

(credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

“Sweat is very rich in information about an individual’s health,” lead author of the study Ali Javey, of University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. “It has a lot of different chemicals in it, different proteins, different metabolites, electrolytes,” he said. And by monitoring the concentration of some of those chemicals in beads of sweat, researchers can glean useful health information.

(credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

For their first generation of sweat-scanning wearables, Javey and colleagues set up an array of off-the-shelf sensors that track sodium, potassium, glucose, lactate, and temperature. Monitoring electrolytes such as sodium and potassium may help track conditions like dehydration, Javey said. Lactate levels may be useful for tracking muscle fatigue, and glucose may help monitor blood sugar levels.