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Soybean science blooms with supercomputers  

Full Text:

Knowledge of the soybean in the U.S. has come a long way since its humble start, namely as seeds smuggled by ship from China in the 1700s. All the way through to the 20th century, knowledge of soybeans came from the outside through selective breeding and manipulation of its environment -- the warm weather, targeted water, loose soil, and full sunlight it needs to grow. Today, an ambitious project called Soybean Knowledge Base (SoyKB) developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia aims to find and share comprehensive knowledge from within the soybean, its genetic and genomic data, all publicly available and achieved through the use of high-performance computing.

Image credit: Scott Robinson

 
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sugi by Shouya Grigg  

sugi by Shouya Grigg

sugi after a storm

Shouya Grigg: Photos

 
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r0B0t: Marlin Makes Largest Factory Automation Investment Since 2014 - Robotics Online (press release)  

Robotics Online (press release)

Marlin Makes Largest Factory Automation Investment Since 2014 Robotics Online (press release) "To stay on top, American manufacturers need to have the best people, the best processes, and the best tools. We're investing in our team and our tools so we can deliver better wire baskets and rack products faster. This is how American companies like ...

 
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Small population size? It doesn't have to mean that species can't adapt to environmental change  
Worldwide, there are 16,938 endangered species. From the white rhino to the blue whale, numbers are dwindling in the face of poaching, habitat destruction and climate change. Although the situation may seem dire, new research gives us reason to hope. A new study shows that small populations of species can still adapt and respond to natural selection.  
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r0B0t: 'Mr. Robot' just revealed its latest mind-bending twist, but this one feels a bit familiar  

Warning: If you're not a fan of spoilers, you might want to stop here. 

Dammit, Reddit.

After weeks upon weeks of speculation over a very popular fan theory, Mr. Robot proved the internet right by pulling the curtain back on the second big reveal of its young life. 

Sam Esmail's tech-drama-turned-psychological-thriller revealed that Elliot's uneven reality has yet again escaped him. While we were led to believe he was living with his mother and recovering from his dystopic view of reality, he'd actually been entrapped in prison this whole time.

More about Usa Network, Tv Reviews, Tv Recaps, Mr Robot Season 2, and Mr Robot  
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http://twitter.com/4AnimalLife/status/766144436397015041 
@John_CITES @CITES Yes that's why #EU and all nations need to #DemandAppendix1 for #elephants, #rhinos, #pangolins & all endangered species. 
http://ifttt.com/missing_link?1471498338 

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Meet the Doctor Who Makes House Calls by Horse  
"I can't refuse to taste at least a glass, otherwise they get offended."  
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The Harvard Whisperer of Mumbai  
This businessman turned counselor gets more than half of his clients into Ivy League or equivalent schools.  
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McDonald's launches wearable then pulls it after kid feels the burn  

LED on 'Step-It' Happy Meal fitness tracker scalds child

Burger baron McDonald's' short foray into the fitness-tracking wearables caper has ended badly, with a device called “Step-It” pulled after burning at least one child's arm.…

 
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5 Ways Businesses Can Conserve Water: Going Blue to Go Green  

Image source: PhotoDune

When most businesses think about environmental sustainability practices, water conservation isn't always top of mind. But it should be. From the drought in California to water quality concerns in major cities like Flint, Michigan, water conservation is not just a business imperative- it's a global issue. Water is a limited resource. While 70 percent of the earth's surface is water, only 2.5 percent of this water is fresh water. An even small percentage is suitable for drinking, reports the Water Project. Water is a scarce resource we take for granted every day. If we continue down this same path, scientists predict worldwide water shortages will become increasingly prevalent.

Here's the good news: like many sustainability measures, simple changes can make a significant impact on daily water use. Every business uses water in different ways, of course - and some use a lot more water than others. But even making a small change, like installing low-flush toilets, can help your business conserve water. Here's how to get started integrating water conservation into your business's environmental sustainability model:

1. 
   
2. Start with a water audit. Many companies that use a significant amount of water underestimate just how much water they are using. A commercial water audit will assess how much water your business is using each day and identify conservation opportunities. Audits can also uncover costly leaks where inexpensive repairs could help stop unnecessary water loss and save your business money. Talk to your utility company about what water audit options it provides. Depending on your utility provider, you may even qualify for a free water audit or receive rebates for instituting water-saving initiatives, reports Small Biz Trends.
   
3. Educated and empower employees. No one wastes water intentionally, but without conservation education, it can be difficult for your staff to know what they're doing wrong. Engage employees in a workplace initiative for conscientious water use and management. Start a workplace challenge, publish updates on your company blog or internal newsletter, and encourage the entire team to get involved.
   
4. Know your state's status. Be informed about the major water issues facing your state and community. While California's water crisis is well known (as is general water scarcity throughout the Western states), did you know that every state in the country faces their own water challenges? This interactive water quality map from Pelican Water aggregates the most significant water issues facing our nation on a state-by-state basis. Texas, for example, faces water quality problems due to contamination from chlorine byproducts, TTHMs, and mercury. In Arizona, arsenic and lead contamination are exacerbating groundwater depletion problems. Know the issues facing your state and what your business can do to protect employees better from contamination concerns with drinking filters.
   
5. Go low-flow. Contact your building management team and request they install low-flow restrictors. For example, the difference between older toilets and new, low-flow toilets is pretty significant. Older toilets use as much as 5 gallons to flush compared with low-flow toilets that only use 1.6 gallons. Don't stop at the toilets! Low-flow faucet aerators can cut water flow down from 2.2 gallons per minute to 1.5 gallons. Pre-rinse spray valves cut water usage down from 4 gallons to 1.5 gallons. Let you building management know that going low-flow is a priority for your business!
   
6. Re-think landscaping. I live in Texas, a state notorious for scorching summers with limited rainfall. One trend I've noticed among local businesses is a push towards sustainable landscaping. That means choosing drought-hardy plants, like succulents and cacti, rather than bushes or shrubbery that requires significant water to flourish. Another option: eliminating grass. Consider replacing your grass with pebble and stone steps. Not only will you significantly reduce landscape water needs, but you will also save a bundle on upkeep costs. Just think, no more mowing, weeding, or fertilizing either! Plus, drought-tolerant landscaping sends an important message to your customers and clients that you value environmental sustainability.
   

Bottom line:

Much of the water that's wasted by small businesses is "lost" through inefficiencies in toilet/faucet usage in the restroom, landscaping, air conditioning and cooling, cleaning/washing down floors and equipment, reports NASA. Generating a profit and conserving resources are not mutually exclusive business goals. Small changes - like opting for low-flow toilets - not only save money but also protect the environment and our scarce water resources for future generations.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Proton radius mystery deepens as deuterium measurement comes up short  
Smaller than expected radius of nucleus puzzles physicists  
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'Flying Bum's' first flight was a gas, gas, gas  

We like big blimps and we cannot lie, as the Airlander takes to the sky

Video To quote Douglas Adams, “uglier things have been spotted in the sky, but not by reliable witnesses”: England's Airlander 10, nicknamed the “flying bum” for obvious reasons, has taken its first test flight.…

 
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Cultivating soybeans to combat the kudzu bug  
A few strains of wild soy are able to fight the kudzu bug by limiting the ability of its nymphs, or young, to survive. The next step is to identify which gene gives the soybeans this defense mechanism.  
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r0B0t: We Built This Robot to Explain Rape Culture to Men  
Reductress Is Devoting Its Entire Site to Rape Jokes That Punch Up: "In response to a sexual assault controversy that's currently engulfing the New York comedy scene, women's satire site Reductress has devoted its entire landing page to humor articles (primarily written by women) about rape." [warning: pointed satire about rape, rape culture, and abuse]

Articles include:

Nicole Silverberg: Have You Considered Spending $300 on a Self-Defense Class?:

My Facebook feed has been flooded with chicks talking about stuff like catcalling and assaults and rape, and I'm like, why complain when you can do something about it? When a man comes at you, you need to be able to defend yourself—which is why you should consider shelling out $300 for a self-defense class.

As my chest tattoo says, "boys will be boys," and so you need to be prepared, even if in this case, the test is a crime, and doing the homework costs you close to half a month's rent. This is your responsibility!

Marcia Belsky: How to Be an Ally to Both a Rapist and His Victim:

We've all had that classic uh-oh moment: Someone's been accused of rape and you're friends with both the rapist and his victim! What a disaster! You may be feeling cursed and alone, wondering, "How can I possibly support both of them?" It's only natural to feel this way. Luckily, there's no need for you to complicate your life just because one of your friends has destroyed the life of another friend. Here's how to be a caring and attentive ally to both a rapist and his victim.

Mo Fry Pasic: This Rapist Has Figured Out a Way to End Rape Culture:

Jeff, a yet-to-be-convicted serial date rapist, offered to share his secret on how to end rape culture. How generous! Here's his advice:

"Rape culture doesn't exist."

Wow! Jeff admits that rapes "do happen" but that culture is "not even a thing." "There are individuals who make decisions, and that's it," Jeff says. "It's like, why can't you use logic?" Good point! We should just drop it. Be the change you wish to see in the world!

Ingrid Ostby: 'Most Women Lie About Rape,' Says Man Lying About Rape:

Revelatory statements from 31-year-old Todd Ratner have been made public today just minutes after several women came forward with allegations accusing him of sexual assault.

"This is a true stat, I'm not making this up—99 percent of women are lying about rape," Ratner said, blatantly lying about rape. According to reports, Ratner wrote this across several Facebook comment threads and also shared it aloud to anyone who would listen.

Marcia Belsky: This Brave Man Hates Social Media Witch Hunts So Much He Decided To Start His Own:

Ready to be inspired?

Faced with the difficult decision of having to either listen to women or talk over them, one man spoke above the crowd in his brave yet endearing attempt to make somebody else's rape about himself. 29-year-old Dave Harrison was sick of seeing public attacks on an alleged rapist, and so he asked for that energy to be put elsewhere.

"I hate this society we live in where social media dictates how we should discuss things," Harrison tweeted this morning to his thirty thousand followers. "These witch hunts started by @AmandaNewman, @KatieLeGuin and @BethanyDiaz cannot be tolerated."

Harrison then encouraged his followers to tweet at these women in order to put an end to what he calls "social media lynch mobs."

Sarah Pappalardo: Let Me Tell You What An Actual Witch Hunt Looks Like:

Hello, it's me, Hagatha. Yes, Hagatha the Witch. It seems that a lot of people have been calling rape accusations across social media a "witch hunt," and while I'm not usually one get involved in other people's business, this one in particular has really given me pause.

Would you like to know what an actual witch hunt looks like? Cut me down from this burning stake and I'll tell you. Seriously, pull me down, I am about to burn.

Anna Drezen: Chill Ways to Just Sort of Live with It:

Hm, okay, so: You've been raped or abused or harassed by someone and the police won't help you and he's well-liked and you're traumatized and you have to do work for work but everything is currently shattered and you'd sort of rather just die than try to answer even one email. Yeee-ikes! You could start down the painful road of recovery, but that's more work for you to do. Plus it makes everyone uncomfortable, so ... have you considered just sort of burying it down deep, deep, deep where no one can find it? Here's how to pack your trauma in a lil' bindle and keep on keepin' on.

Bonus print edition headlines:

Fuck, Marry, Kill: Your Rapist, Your Abuser, or the Cops Who Did Nothing

Is It Technically Rape If I Have to Explain to Him What Counts As Rape?

We Built This Robot to Explain Rape Culture to Men 
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Study Of Sudden Cardiac Death Exposes Limits Of Genetic Testing  

Some genetic tests for a common cause of sudden heart failure can be wrong, researchers say, because the underlying science didn't take into account racial diversity.

 
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With Demand For Its Products Down, Cisco Will Cut Workforce  

The company says it will lay off 5,500 employees and, like other Silicon Valley pioneers, move into different types of business.

 
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http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/17/490222198/distilling-the-story-of-california-wine-one-label-at-a-time?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology  
Distilling The Story Of California Wine, One Label At A Time  

At the world's largest wine research library — inside UC Davis — librarians are crowd-sourcing their archives to understand the forces that shaped California's wine industry into a global powerhouse.

 
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r0B0t: God Help Us, These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk  

OpenAI, the nonprofit backed by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, wants to teach technology to talk. It has enlisted the help of a supercomputer named DGX-1 to help train its machine learning systems. (What are machine learning systems? MIT Technology Review describes them alluringly as a “network of crudely simulated neurons” that use data to glean “a probabilistic understanding of conversation.”) DGX-1 can feed prodigious amounts of natural language to OpenAI's robotic reticulation, which then takes the input as a model for its own “speech.” All the student teacher pair needs in its quest for cocktail chatter mastery is source material.

Source material—that sounds easy enough! Did the researchers prescribe a steady diet of luminous prose from English's marquee authors? Did they plunder the canon for Martin Luther King Jr.'s oratory, Virginia Woolf's collected letters, and Tennessee Williams' plays?

Nope. “We're training,” said OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy in a press release, “on entire years of conversations of people talking to each other on Reddit.”

Oh boy.

To recap: Of all the possible linguistic corpora on earth, these scientists have decided to expose their learning systems to a discourse that usually ends with someone calling someone else a fat gay loser cuck and comparing him to Hitler. And then the second guy cracks a xenophobic, sexually explicit joke about the first guy's mom. And then the first guy pretends to solve the Boston Bombing.

Have we learned nothing from Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that spewed foul racist garbage after only a few hours of interacting with trolls on Twitter? Sure, Reddit models a colloquial tone, as Sophie Kleeman at Gizmodo points out, and its many communities discuss a wide range of subjects, but it is also frequently the boneyard where all grace and decency go to die. Will OpenAI's learning systems absorb strategies for choosing careers and college majors, or only gain expertise in nihilistic lulz and platform-specific acronyms? At least, a success from the researchers on this front would break new ground: They'd have created the only brain ever to get smarter by reading Reddit.

 
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Air traffic  

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

 
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Sunset 17 Aug 2016  

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

 
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Sunset 17 Aug 2016  

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

 
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More London Summer  

vgallova posted a photo:

 
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