Month: July 2017

Enlarge / PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 06: French Minister of Ecological and Inclusive Transition Nicolas Hulot holds a press conference in order to present his climate plans on July 6, 2017 in Paris, France. (Photo by Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

In an address on Thursday, France’s environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, said that the country would aim to phase out electricity from coal-fired plants by 2022 and end the sale of gas and diesel internal combustion cars by 2040.

This first goal should be relatively easy to attain. France relies heavily on nuclear energy—more than 70 percent of the country’s energy mix is nuclear—and coal-fired plants only contribute to around four percent of France’s electric production. Hulot also said that he hoped to reduce the amount of nuclear energy in the country’s energy mix down to 50 percent by 2025, although, according to Le Monde, the environment minister admitted he does “not have all the answers.”

In addition, Hulot noted a law would be proposed later this year to potentially end any new operating licenses for oil, gas, and coal mining.

United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

Hobby Lobby, the US crafts supply company known for its pro-Christian branding, apparently has a side interest in smuggling rare archaeological artifacts.

The company made headlines when it won a Supreme Court case in which it argued that the family-owned company should not have to pay for birth control for employees under the ACA, because doing so violated the owners' religious freedom as Christians. Apparently their Christian values did not extend to concerns about smuggling rare artifacts from the dawn of Western civilization.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

Live sports streaming is a hot commodity for Internet companies, and now some have their sights on the 2018 World Cup. According to a Bloomberg report, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are looking to obtain online streaming rights for World Cup game highlights. Fox Sports is the exclusive rights holder for the 2018 World Cup, to be hosted by Russia, and those social media websites are reportedly bidding tens of millions of dollars for the rights to stream highlights of games broadcast in the US.

Whether Fox will sell the rights for these game highlights to one company or spread them out among many companies is unclear. It's worth noting that Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are only bidding for highlights—not the rights to stream full World Cup matches. Fox reportedly paid $400 million for multi-year rights to the World Cup and will air games on broadcast and cable television.

But highlights may be in higher demand for the 2018 World Cup because many broadcasted games will be shown at odd times thanks to the Russian time difference. Short sports clips, like highlights, lend themselves well to social media, but they could be sought out even more during the next World Cup by soccer fans who can't watch games at 2 am.

Enlarge (credit: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg / Getty Images News)

A federal judge in California has decided to allow Twitter’s lawsuit against the attorney general’s office to go forward. She rejected arguments that the social media giant should not be allowed to be precise in its transparency reports when describing how it responds to the government’s requests for user data.

Twitter has argued that, just as it has been precise in other areas of its transparency report, so too should it be allowed to say precisely how many national security orders it has received from American authorities. For now, under federal law, it is only allow to describe those numbers in vague ranges, such as “0 to 499,” and “500 to 999,” and so forth. Lawyers for Twitter say that this law constitutes a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights and is “prior restraint,” a concept of blocking legitimate speech before it is uttered.

Attorneys from the Department of Justice claimed in a hearing in federal court in Oakland, California, earlier this year that if Twitter is allowed to specifically say how many national security orders it has received, that potential adversaries could somehow use that number to inflict harm.

Enlarge / Melanoma cells. (credit: NCI)

With swift shots to the arm, doctors safely and effectively prime our immune systems to fight off deadly infectious diseases. Now, with tightly crossed fingers, they plan to do the same for cancers.

In two early clinical trials involving 19 patients with skin cancer, personalized vaccines appeared safe and effective at spurring immune responses to attack and destroy tumors. The vaccines worked by coaching killer immune cells—T cells—to destroy tumors by seeking out uniquely mutated proteins on each patient's one-of-a-kind cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

The results of the two trials, both published this week in Nature, follow years of basic research and animal studies on this strategy. Researchers are optimistic, but there are big hurdles ahead of these small trials, including bigger trials with more patients and controls. If those go well, researchers will likely have to figure out how to streamline creating vaccines for individual patients, which is currently tedious and expensive.

Enlarge (credit: Nora Karol Photography/Getty Images)

The US State Department wants to team up with other government agencies and Hollywood in a bid to create a "fake Twitter feud" about the importance of intellectual property rights. As part of this charade, the State Department's Bureau of Economic Affairs says it's been seeking the participation of the US Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and "others."

To make the propaganda plot seem more legitimate, the State Department is trying to enlist Stanford Law School and "similar academic institutions" to play along on the @StateDept feed on Twitter.

"We're not going to participate," Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology at Stanford Law School, told Ars in an e-mail. He recently received an e-mail (PDF) and a telephone call from the State Department seeking his assistance.

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: VasenkaPhotography)

If you’ve ever been skeptical about whether carpool policies actually work, Indonesia would like to have a word with you. Jakarta, one of the biggest metropolitan areas on Earth, had a carpool policy that seemed to be particularly susceptible to abuse. Abruptly, in March 2016, the Jakarta government announced that the policy would end in a week.

This gave a group of economists at Harvard and MIT just enough time to collect traffic data before the policy ended and compare it to the aftermath. What they found wasn’t pretty: that unpopular carpool policy was making a big difference to traffic, which got even nastier after the policy ended.

But the carpool lane is empty!

Traffic congestion is not only a rage-inducing black hole for time; it's also terrible for climate change and air quality. Some of the worst hotspots for traffic congestion are in the developing world, where there is limited public transit and where rapid growth has happened in the era of car-centric design. Jakarta, which has a population of more than 30 million, has some of the worst traffic in the world.