Month: December 2016

Enlarge / It may not look special, but it's a radar sensitive enough to track an insect in flight. (credit: Rothamsted Visual Communications Unit)

Researchers in the UK have turned some highly specialized radar equipment to the skies to track a staggering volume of material—3.2 kilotons of it—as it transits the skies of southern England. The material in question? Insects, about 3.5 trillion of them each year. While smaller insects seem to drift on the prevailing wind, larger ones appear to undergo a directed, seasonal migration.

The study relied on a combination of high-tech and old-fashioned hardware, shown above and below. The old-fashioned equipment was a traditional insect-catching net, albeit one that was sent aloft trailing below a miniature blimp. This was needed to pick up smaller insects—below 10mg in body mass—which couldn't be tracked using the radar. The radar was a special piece of equipment, called a vertical-looking entomological radar.

It's impressive hardware. For anything above 10mg, the radar could record "body mass, flight altitude, aerial density, displacement speed, displacement direction, and flight heading." The equipment could do all this up to about 1.2km in altitude, allowing it to catch any high-flying insects. The equipment was set up in three locations in the southern UK and sampled the movement of insects for a full decade to produce the data analyzed in this new paper. During that time, the radars tracked more than 1.8 million individual insects, which were used to extrapolate general trends.

(credit: Global Panorama / flickr)

A Google product manager has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against his employer, saying that the company's confidentiality requirements violate California labor laws.

The plaintiff has filed his case anonymously, saying he must sue as a "John Doe" because Google Director of Global Investigations Brian Katz "falsely informed approximately 65,000 Googlers that Plaintiff was terminated for 'leaking' certain information to the press." Doe says he didn't leak and Katz knew he didn't, but he was used as a "very public scapegoat."

The complaint, first reported by The Information, is scant on details about what happened between Katz and Doe, while long on criticism of Google's policies. It says Google's threats to discharge employees "who exercise their constitutional rights by providing information to the press or otherwise exercising their freedom of speech" violates the labor code as well.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Photonews )

Medical marijuana may save lives out on the road as well as in clinics, according to a new study.

When examining 19 states that had medical marijuana laws on the books by 2014, researchers found that their average rate of traffic deaths fell 11 percent after the laws were enacted. The happy side-effect wasn’t uniform, however; only seven states saw significant reductions, while two states saw increases. Nevertheless, the authors of the new report in the American Journal of Public Health argue that the data bucks the common criticism that more pot access should increase car crashes and injuries.

Drops in traffic deaths may, in part, be explained by people swapping alcohol for pot, leading to reduced drunk driving, the study’s authors speculated. To back that up, the authors note that the lives spared tended to belong to younger people, particularly 25- to 44-year-olds—an age group frequently involved in alcohol-related traffic deaths.

Enlarge / Steam's Winter Sale is joined by a user-voted series of awards, pictured above. Log in every day to cast votes for various categories. (credit: Valve Software)

Want to skip the holiday shopping lines and avoid worrying about last-minute gift shipping? Digital game downloads might be your best bet, and right now, pretty much every major retailer in the space is offering crazy markdowns.

Up first, as usual, is PC download shop Steam, where the Winter Sale kicked off on Thursday with pretty much every markdown seen in the shop's Autumn Sale from just a month ago. There are also a few new offerings. The first one I noticed is a crazy discount on the PC version of Street Fighter V. You can get the game's base package, which launched earlier this year, for less than $20, while $47 gets you the "deluxe" edition, including the full normal game and all ten DLC characters (four of which are set to unlock in 2017). Considering the just-released "season two" DLC pass still costs $30, that's about as good a Street Fighter bargain as you should expect for a while.

Steam is exploding with fighting games these days. While Mortal Kombat X isn't necessarily the best of 'em, its recently patched PC version is finally up to snuff. You can grab its full, DLC-loaded "XL" version for $13.59 in this sale, as well.

Enlarge / Semi-automated trucks are driven on the E19 highway in Vilvoorde, Belgium, on April 5, 2016 as part of the 'EU Truck Platooning Challenge 2016.' (credit: ERIC LALMAND/AFP/Getty Images)

This week, scientists and economic advisers to President Obama released a report on artificial intelligence, including the effects of automation on the US job market and economy. While the report notes the significant potential for wealth gains from increased productivity due to AI, it also warns of threats to existing jobs and an exacerbation of the wage inequality between lower-skilled, less-educated workers and those with higher skills.

In recent decades, automation has already claimed occupations such as those of switchboard operators, filing clerks, travel agents, and assembly line workers, and it is now on the cusp of replacing driving-related occupations such as taxi and Uber drivers. Automation will probably move into the trucking industry within a decade (3.8 million US jobs are related to driving). Some fast food restaurants are also experimenting with kiosks and automated ordering systems.

Estimates vary for how quickly automation will disrupt the US job market. The report cites two different attempts to predict the rate of automation. Optimistically, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that many occupations are likely to change as some of their associated tasks become automated but not go away entirely. They estimate that only 9 percent of jobs are at risk in the next decade or two. However a separate analysis by Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne, which asked a panel of experts on AI to classify occupations by how likely automation would be to replace them, found that 47 percent of US jobs are at risk.