Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: sswj)

Over the truly long term, Earth’s climate has a geological thermostat built in that helps moderate change. If things get warmer, chemical weathering of exposed rock speeds up—a reaction that gradually removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But on a timescale much more relevant to our lives, there is actually something sort of similar going on. Humanity’s aging concrete infrastructure is taking up CO₂, too. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s not nothing.

The manufacturing of cement produces CO₂ emissions. The raw material that goes into cement is principally limestone—calcium carbonate. At high temperature, molecules of CO₂ escape, leaving just calcium oxide behind, which is what we call “lime.” So in addition to the burning of fossil fuels to heat the material, you’re converting some bedrock (the calcium carbonate) into atmospheric CO₂.

But this process gets reversed as cement sits around and slowly deteriorates—the lime reacts with water and atmospheric CO₂ to make calcium carbonate again. While researchers doing the accounting for global greenhouse gas emissions have worked carefully to track the CO₂ produced by cement manufacturing (it kicks in about five percent of total fossil fuel and industry emissions) the reverse process has never really been tallied at a global scale.

Enlarge / A driver uses a phone while behind the wheel of a car in New York City. (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

If you're traveling on Thanksgiving weekend, you likely already have one of the most dangerous road hazards on your mind—fellow drivers who are paying more attention to their smartphones than to what's on the road.

"Distracted driving" has been getting more attention because the government calculates that it is prevalent and is causing more car crashes. Today, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration published guidelines calling on smartphone makers to create a "Driving Mode" that shuts down app-use while a car is in motion.

The 96-page voluntary guidelines (PDF), intended to reduce "driver distraction," also call for cars to be more easily "paired" with mobile devices so that drivers can access them through an in-vehicle interface.

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos. (credit: Getty | Michael Kovac )

If you think your Thanksgiving dinner conversation will be awkward and stressful this year, just be glad you and your family weren’t involved with Theranos.

As the once highly regarded blood-testing company crumbles under technological scandals and regulatory sanctions, the death toll of relationships among neighbors, friends, families, and long-standing partners is mounting. With lawsuits, investigative reports, and new accounts from a whistleblower, the company’s culture and inner-workings—which Theranos worked hard to obfuscate—are finally becoming clear. And what’s emerged are patterns of dishonesty, callousness, and litigiousness—if not outright belligerence.

Test of blood

Perhaps most startling of the recent revelations is the identity and family drama of one Theranos whistleblower: Tyler Shultz, grandson of George Shultz, the former secretary of state, who also happens to be a Theranos advisor. An exposé by The Wall Street Journal lays out how in the course of eight months, Tyler Shultz went from a bright-eyed Theranos employee to disgruntled whistleblower, personally disparaged by Theranos’ then-president and desperately trying to convince his grandfather to wash his hands of the doomed company.

People tend to get highly emotional about issues they regard as matters of morality, and they generally attempt to avoid or even punish individuals they regard as immoral. The heated response to moral issues is the exact opposite of what many people consider rational behavior.

Or so many of us would like to think. As it turns out, a new study indicates that people regard rationality itself as a matter of moral behavior. While the study identifies a group of people who tend to take a strong and persistent moral stand about rationality, it also shows that the even the control populations tend to do this. The results could go a long way toward explaining why people have self-segregated over ideological issues and respond so heatedly to policy issues.

The study

The study comes courtesy of a team of three researchers (Tomas Ståhl, Maarten Zaal, and Linda J. Skitka), who were motivated in part by people like the New Atheists and organized groups of skeptics. These individuals, in the researchers' view, have engaged in something akin to a crusade, trying to get everyone to abandon faith and adopt a science-focused world view. The researchers "suggest that advocates of science are frequently anything but value-neutral or amoral in their convictions about the superiority of beliefs based on rationality and scientific evidence," and they then set out to gather some evidence.

Enlarge / I'm going to assume these will be nicknamed "the Steamies." (credit: Valve Software)

It has become a PC gaming tradition for fans to put off some of their game purchases until a major sale, and Steam has led that discount charge with promotions timed for major holidays like Thanksgiving. It should come as no surprise, then, that Steam's autumn sale has arrived with major discounts for PC gamers. But this year, the promotion is joined by a first for the games shop: the Steam Awards.

Seeing as how this is Steam, the awards on offer are not exactly traditional, nor is the process for awarding them.

For starters, every game sold via Steam is eligible for an award. "Unfinished" early access titles and years-old classics have equal footing in the nomination process. The only eligibility requirement is that the game has a live Steam Store page. Should you wish to nominate a game, visit its store page and then click the giant purple nomination button, at which point nine radio checkmarks appear.

Enlarge / President-elect Donald Trump walks through the lobby of the New York Times Building following a meeting with editors of the paper on November 22, 2016. (credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images News)

President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times in a Tuesday interview that he would incentivize Apple to “build a big plant” in the United States.

During that interview, Trump touched on numerous subjects, changing his tune on several campaign positions. He backed off threats he made during his campaign to prosecute his political rival, Hillary Clinton, over her use of a personal e-mail server while she was Secretary of State.

However, Trump indicated to columnist Thomas Friedman that he is going to double-down on bringing factory jobs back to America, especially in the Rust Belt from Michigan to Pennsylvania.

Enlarge / The Chromecast running Google Cast/Chromecast technology from Google/Alphabet.

The Chromecast is Google's most popular hardware product, but the company has never really been sure what to call it. After launching a scheme to rename much of the Chromecast ecosystem to "Google Cast" earlier this year, Google seems to be flip-flopping on the branding and going back to "Chromecast" again.

"Google Cast" has long been the name of the Chromecast APIs for developers. Google brought the "Google Cast" name to consumer devices this March as a branding for OEMs that integrate Google Cast technology into their products. In a blog post, Google said the new branding would "better reflect that Google Cast technology is now supported across a wide range of devices such as Chromecast, TVs, displays, and speakers."

Eight months later, Google has changed its mind, and the new name for third parties is "Chromecast built-in."

Samsung HQ in Gangnam, Seoul. (credit: amftkrm / flickr)

South Korean prosecutors raided the headquarters of Samsung Group today, as well as the nation's largest pension fund. The moves are seen as part of a broadening investigation into influence-peddling that involves South Korean President Park Geun-hye.

The Wall Street Journal described the raid as a "daylong sweep" of Samsung's headquarters in the Gangnam area of Seoul. They also raided South Korea's National Pension Service. With $460 billion in assets, NPS is the world's third-largest pension fund and is a major shareholder in many South Korean companies.

NPS cast a vote in favor of a merger of two Samsung affiliates, Samsung C&T Corp and Cheil Industries, last year. WSJ says it wasn't clear if today's raids were connected to that vote; Reuters, citing the Yonhap news agency, says there was a connection.