Month: January 2016

(credit: Scott K. Johnson/Suzanna Soileau-USGS/Hanna-Barbera)

“In June, NOAA employees altered temperature data to get politically correct results.”

At least, that's what Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) alleged in a Washington Post letter to the editor last November. The op-ed was part of Smith's months-long campaign against NOAA climate scientists. Specifically, Smith was unhappy after an update to NOAA’s global surface temperature dataset slightly increased the short-term warming trend since 1998. And being a man of action, Smith proceeded to give an anti-climate change stump speech at the Heartland Institute conference, request access to NOAA's data (which was already publicly available), and subpoena NOAA scientists for their e-mails.

Smith isn't the only politician who questions NOAA's results and integrity. During a recent hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) leveled similar accusations against the entire scientific endeavor of tracking Earth’s temperature.

At the turn of the last century, German physician Heinrich Koch identified four critical criteria for determining whether or not a particular microbe causes a disease. The ideas behind them were crucial for advancing medicine and formalizing the germ theory of disease. Over the last century, these postulates have been updated as medicine has advanced.

In what may end up being the most recent of these updates, biologists Allyson Byrd and Julia Segre propose some adjustments to these classic medical postulates intended to bring them in line with analytic techniques based on DNA sequencing and the most current understanding of bacterial communities. Just as the previous updates to Koch’s postulates did, these proposed amendments incorporate cutting-edge scientific knowledge and add nuance to our understanding of the causes of disease.

Koch’s original postulates are that, if a microorganism causes a disease, then:

Nintendo has altered a controversial scene for the western version of Fire Emblem: Fates, a 3DS RPG originally released in Japan last year. The scene features a gay character who has her drink spiked by a male protagonist.

In the Japanese version, players are able to bond two characters together in battle, which can result in marriage. A gay female character, Soleil, is shown to have difficulty talking to other women, so a male protagonist secretly spikes her drink with a "magic powder" to make women appear to as men, and men appear at women.

Once the magic wears off, Soleil is then attracted to the male protagonist, and ends up proposing, saying that she fell in love with the female version of him, but now loves him as a male.

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Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and creator of the JavaScript programming language, has unveiled his latest project: Brave, a Web browser that blocks ads by default... and then replaces those blocked ads with its own ads. Brave Software, the company behind the eponymous browser, will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue generated in this way.

Brave is an open-source Web browser. There's a Brave GitHub repository for Mac/Windows/Linux, iOS, and Android. It looks like the iOS version, ironically enough, is based on Firefox for iOS, and the PC version is based on Chromium (an open-source project that somewhat parallels the development of Chrome). At first glance, it looks like the Android version of Brave is based on Bubble.

If you want to try out Brave, you have to download and build the browser from a GitHub repo. You can sign up to be a beta tester, which presumably grants you some pre-built binaries, but there's currently a waiting list.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles Apple's iPhones, has made a ¥600 billion bid (about £3.6 billion) to purchase troubled Japanese electronics maker Sharp, according to reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. While the acquisition hasn't yet been approved, a decision to accept or reject the bid is expected before the end of January.

The ¥600 billion bid is the latest in a string of attempts to take over the embattled Japanese company, which received a ¥225 billion (£1.4 billion) bailout from banks last year following what it described as "very severe conditions." In 2012, Foxconn made an offer of $806 million (£569 million) for a 10 percent stake in Sharp, which quickly fell apart. This was followed by Foxconn founder Terry Gou purchasing a minority stake in a Sharp subsidiary for $617 million (£436 million). The company was also in talks to acquire Sharp's LCD business unit in September of last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Foxconn may receive pushback from the Japanese government, which doesn't want to cede control of Sharp to a foreign company. The Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, a government-backed investment fund, is said to be making its own bid of ¥300 billion (£1.8 billion). While the INCJ bid would keep Sharp under Japanese control, Foxconn's higher bid and willingness to take on the company's debt could see officials side in its favour.