Many airports undertake stormwater projects to accommodate facility expansion, address obsolescence, and respond to evolving regulatory requirements. Often, stormwater infrastructure is installed or upgraded on a project-by-project and piecemeal basis, resulting in mismatches of sizes, material types, ages, and conditions. When airports are considering expanding or improving their stormwater facilities, the immediate need for stormwater infrastructure modification may not be clear, and a benefit–cost ana...

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Synthesis 34: Subsurface Utility Engineering Information for Airports examines ways in which information on subsurface utilities is collected, maintained, and used by airports, their consultants, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to help increase the effectiveness of, and enhance safety during, infrastructure development programs at airports. The report also compares the current state of technology and effective processes from other industry se...

Astronomy is advancing to the point where we can see planets forming around young stars. This was an unthinkable development only a few years ago. In fact, it was only two years ago that astronomers captured the first image of a newly-forming planet. Now there are more and more studies into how planets form, including …

Continue reading "More Pictures of Planet-Forming Disks Around Young Stars"

The post More Pictures of Planet-Forming Disks Around Young Stars appeared first on Universe Today.

One of the most fascinating things about planet Earth is the way that life shapes the Earth and the Earth shapes life. We only have to look back to the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) of 2.4 billion years ago to see how lifeforms have shaped the Earth. In that event, phytoplanktons called cyanobacteria pumped the …

Continue reading "New Data Show How Phytoplankton Pumps Carbon Out of the Atmosphere at an Enormous Scale"

The post New Data Show How Phytoplankton Pumps Carbon Out of the Atmosphere at an Enormous Scale appeared first on Universe Today.

The Big Questions series features perspectives from the five recipients of the Department of Energy Office of Science's 2019 Distinguished Scientists Fellows Award describing their research and what they plan to do with the award. Ian Foster is the director of Argonne National Laboratory's Data Science and Learning Division.

The production of formate from CO2 is considered an attractive strategy for the long-term storage of solar renewable energy in chemical form.

Nearly everyone on Earth is familiar with corn. Literally. Around the world, each person eats an average of 70 pounds of the grain each year, with even more grown for animal feed and biofuel.

We got Storm when he was 13 weeks old as a companion for our Border Collie, Shadow. We decided on a Labrador because they were the opposite of BC's. Storm

Platform.sh removes a major pain point for developers: having to invest time in managing servers, virtual machines, or containers. Instead, Platform.sh enables developers to focus 100% of their time on their code. Since the beginning, Platform.sh has provided instant cloning capability, so dev teams can work on perfect copies of their production sites in the cloud for every Git branch. Now, in partnership with Lando, we’re extending that capability to the desktop.

Xdebug is an indispensable tool for every PHP developer. PHP’s favorite real-time debugger, it supports breakpoints, more detailed debug output, and deeper introspection of PHP code to determine just what it’s doing (and what it’s doing wrong). Sadly, it comes at a huge cost in performance, though, making it unsuitable for production. Not on Platform.sh, though. Xdebug is now available on all Grid environments, secure and without a performance loss.

The platforms, providers, and infrastructures which together make up the contemporary Internet play an increasingly central role in the business of governing human societies. Although the software engineers, administrators, business professionals, and other staff working at these organisations may not have the institutional powers of state organisations such as law enforcement or the civil service, … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: The role of intermediaries, platforms, and infrastructures in governing crime and abuse →

Decades-old theory may require a rethink thanks to Japanese probe

The Moon is believed to have formed from the leftovers of a proto-Earth smashing into a Mars-sized Theia nearly 4.5 billion years ago.…

It's like three buses showing up at once carrying $8bn

India’s largest mobile carrier, Jio, has just scored a third new investor in three weeks!…

Familial dysautonomia (FD) is the most prevalent form of hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy (HSAN). In FD, a germline mutation in the Elp1 gene leads to Elp1 protein decrease that causes sympathetic neuron death and sympathetic nervous system dysfunction (dysautonomia). Elp1 is best known as a scaffolding protein within the nuclear hetero-hexameric transcriptional Elongator protein complex, but how it functions in sympathetic neuron survival is very poorly understood. Here, we identified a cytoplasmic function for Elp1 in sympathetic neurons that was essential for retrograde nerve growth factor (NGF) signaling and neuron target tissue innervation and survival. Elp1 was found to bind to internalized TrkA receptors in an NGF-dependent manner, where it was essential for maintaining TrkA receptor phosphorylation (activation) by regulating PTPN6 (Shp1) phosphatase activity within the signaling complex. In the absence of Elp1, Shp1 was hyperactivated, leading to premature TrkA receptor dephosphorylation, which resulted in retrograde signaling failure and neuron death. Inhibiting Shp1 phosphatase activity in the absence of Elp1 rescued NGF-dependent retrograde signaling, and in an animal model of FD it rescued abnormal sympathetic target tissue innervation. These results suggest that regulation of retrograde NGF signaling in sympathetic neurons by Elp1 may explain sympathetic neuron loss and physiologic dysautonomia in patients with FD.

The pandemic coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is rapidly spreading across the globe. In this issue of the JCI, Chen and colleagues compared the clinical and immunological characteristics between moderate and severe COVID-19. The authors found that respiratory distress on admission is associated with unfavorable outcomes. Increased cytokine levels (IL-6, IL-10, and TNF-α), lymphopenia (in CD4+ and CD8+ T cells), and decreased IFN-γ expression in CD4+ T cells are associated with severe COVID-19. Overall, this study characterized the cytokine storm in severe COVID-19 and provides insights into immune therapeutics and vaccine design.

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) affects at least 10% of newborns globally and leads to the development of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). Despite its high incidence, there is no consensus on the implications of PAE on metabolic disease risk in adults. Here, we describe a cohort of adults with FASDs that had an increased incidence of metabolic abnormalities, including type 2 diabetes, low HDL, high triglycerides, and female-specific overweight and obesity. Using a zebrafish model for PAE, we performed population studies to elucidate the metabolic disease seen in the clinical cohort. Embryonic alcohol exposure (EAE) in male zebrafish increased the propensity for diet-induced obesity and fasting hyperglycemia in adulthood. We identified several consequences of EAE that may contribute to these phenotypes, including a reduction in adult locomotor activity, alterations in visceral adipose tissue and hepatic development, and persistent diet-responsive transcriptional changes. Taken together, our findings define metabolic vulnerabilities due to EAE and provide evidence that behavioral changes and primary organ dysfunction contribute to resultant metabolic abnormalities.

Senator Max Baucus, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, releases a staff discussion draft on international business tax reform. Continue reading →

Online criminals have been systematically targeting TurboTax, filing fraudulent tax returns of individuals, and diverting their tax refunds to prepaid debit, cards, stealing their personal information, and using and impairing their credit ratings. Continue reading →

“Thank you all very much for being here and for all the support that you have given me over the years: as the mayor of this great city, as Vermont’s only congressman and now as a U.S. senator. Thanks also … Continue reading →

IBM today announced its Health Cloud and Watson cognitive computing capabilities will support health data entered by customers in iOS apps using Apple's ResearchKit and HealthKit frameworks. The move, which complements IBM’s new Watson Health business unit, will arm medical researchers with a secure, open data storage solution, as well as access to IBM’s most sophisticated data analytics capabilities.

ISS, ISS A/S, a leading global provider of facility services, has signed a commercial agreement with IBM to use the power of Watson IoT to transform the management of over 25,000 buildings around the world.

Each year, weather-related power outages cost the U.S. economy as much as $33 billion a year. Additionally, one severe weather event has the potential to impact the daily lives and routines of millions of people. As 2017 marks the fifth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, The Weather Company, an IBM Business (NYSE: IBM) and Zpryme are releasing the results of a survey that found that U.S. utility companies still feel underprepared for weather-related outages and that their reactive approach to outage prediction leads to lost time and resources.

IBM today announced that Faurecia, one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers, has selected IBM Cloud as a support of a major business transformation designed to accelerate digital manufacturing.

IBM and Stone Ridge Technology today announced a performance milestone in reservoir simulation designed to help improve efficiency and lower the cost of production. Working with NVIDIA, the companies shattered previous published results using one-tenth the power and 1/100th of the space. The news demonstrates the ability of NVIDIA GPUs to simulate one billion cell models in a fraction of the published time, while delivering 10x the performance and efficiency than legacy CPU codes.

IBM today announced that CipherHealth, a SaaS healthcare provider, has deployed IBM Power Systems™ infrastructure to run its technology platform that helps healthcare providers reduce re-admissions and improve the patient experience by providing effective patient engagement from pre-hospitalization through to post-discharge. The move to the new infrastructure has halved CipherHealth’s monthly infrastructure costs, and improved its data processing times by nearly 90 percent.

IBM today announced that according to results from International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker®(June, 2017) IBM has achieved market growth by 3x compared with the total Linux server market which grew at +6 percent. The improved performance are the result of success across IBM Power Systems including IBM’s OpenPOWER LC servers and IBM Power Systems running SAP HANA as well as the OpenPOWER-Ready servers developed through the OpenPOWER Foundation.

IBM and Sesame Workshop today announced that Georgia’s Gwinnett County Public Schools, one of the nation’s top urban school districts, has completed an initial pilot of the industry’s first cognitive vocabulary learning app, built on the IBM and Sesame intelligent play and learning platform. The new platform, powered by IBM Cloud, enables an ecosystem of software developers, researchers, educational toy companies, and educators to tap IBM Watson cognitive capabilities and Sesame Workshop’s early childhood expertise to build engaging experiences to help advance children’s education and learning. The cognitive vocabulary app is one of the first of many cognitive apps, games, and educational toys that will be built over time on this new platform, as a result of the two companies’ collaboration announced last year.

IBM today announced that IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide IoT Platforms 2017 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US42033517, July 2017). The report highlights IBM’s Watson IoT Platform on IBM Cloud, which today is being used by thousands of clients and partners across six continents including BMW, KONE, HARMAN and more.

The Weather Company, an IBM Business, and PRISA Noticias, one of the world’s leading Spanish-language media groups and owner of EL PAÍS newspaper, announced today a collaboration to combine the most accurate forecasts with one of the Spanish-speaking world’s largest media groups. The Weather Company will provide in-depth weather data and forecasts, as well as tailored content across PRISA properties. In turn, PRISA Noticias will provide locally relevant articles, photos and video content within the Spanish versions of The Weather Channel app and website (weather.com). The collaboration will also enable local marketers to access advanced data-driven advertising solutions from IBM Watson Advertising (formerly The Weather Company’s ad sales business) across both companies’ properties.

IBM today announced an expansion of its mobile portfolio for enterprises as it continues to create analytics-driven and cognitive enabled enterprise iOS apps that enable organizations to accelerate digital reinvention and transform how businesses engage across industries.

IBM announced today that Acrow, one of Australia’s leading suppliers of scaffolding and formwork for the construction industry, has selected IBM and IT Easy , to implement a total infrastructure refresh built around IBM Cloud, mobile, and network technology.

IBM today announced that Vissensa, a UK-based managed service provider (MSP), has taken delivery of the IBM Enterprise Cloud System, which will help the company offer new and improved cloud services to its customers.

IBM today announced plans to acquire Promontory Financial Group, a global market-leading risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm. Upon close, the capabilities of Promontory combined with IBM's deep industry expertise and Watson’s cognitive capabilities will directly address the massive operational effort and manual cost of escalating regulation and risk management requirements.

IBM and Box today announced a global partnership that will combine the best-in-class technologies and resources of both companies to transform work in the cloud. Together, the companies plan to integrate their existing products and services and develop new, innovative solutions targeted across industries and professions ranging from medical teams working on complex cases to individuals negotiating consumer loans by mobile phone to engineers and researchers identifying patterns in patents, reports and academic journals.

IBM today announced new offerings to its Watson Data Platform, including data cataloging and data refining, which is designed to make it easier for developers and data scientists to analyze and prepare enterprise data for AI applications, regardless of its structure or where it resides. By improving data visibility and helping to better enforce data security policies, users can now connect and share data across public and private cloud environments.

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group have joined an initiative launched by UBS and IBM in 2016 to build a new global trade platform based on blockchain technology. This new platform, called Batavia, is built to be openly accessed by organisations of all sizes anywhere in the world, and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade, whether goods are being transported by air, land or sea.

IBM today announced that M-Industry, one of the world’s largest private label consumer goods company and subsidiary of Switzerland’s largest retailer and supermarket chain, Migros Group, has launched a new IBM designed mobile offering to transform how product promoters work.

A.P. Moller –Maersk and IBM today announced their intent to establish a joint venture to provide more efficient and secure methods for conducting global trade using blockchain technology.

As companies look to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain competitive advantage and increase productivity, IBM today unveiled a new data science and machine learning platform and an elite consulting team to help them accelerate their AI journeys.

IBM today announced it is building an industry-first insurance platform on the IBM Cloud that aims to improve the processes and economics for new product development, underwriting, and benefits delivery.

IBM today announced sweeping advances in its all-flash storage solutions and software to significantly drive down the costs of data and extend its solutions for hybrid and private cloud environments.

Twitter and IBM today announced a landmark partnership that will help transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. The alliance brings together Twitter data that distinctively represents the public pulse of the planet with IBM’s industry-leading cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services.

El actual entorno tecnológico impulsa a las empresas a transformar sus modelos de negocio en un escenario en donde, según la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), el 25% de la economía mundial será digital en los próximos cinco años. De esta forma, el uso de nuevas tecnologías se vuelve la pieza clave para asegurar tanto competitividad, como su alto desempeño.

IBM anunció hoy la primera plataforma de servicios basada en IBM Watson y construida en IBM Cloud para aumentar la inteligencia humana y ayudar a mejorar las operaciones de los proveedores de servicios a través de tecnologías cognitivas.

El Grupo BBVA acaba de formalizar un acuerdo con IBM para que esta firma asuma la operación y transformación de la infraestructura tecnológica actual de BBVA y el procesamiento de datos en América Latina y EE.UU., actualmente gestionada por su filial ATA en México.