The human genome consists of two copies of about 3 billion base pairs of DNA using the alphabet A, C, G and T. So for each change to our DNA, we only need to store the differences from the reference genome and this usually comes in the form of a VCF file (Variant Call Format). It gives a value between -1 and 1 where

We make big square matrices of LD around certain sites in the genome to explore how similar the variants are.

Wind provided 37 per cent of our electricity in Q1 2019

The Irish Wind Energy Association, Ireland’s largest renewable energy organisation, this morning published the first of what will be regular quarterly reports on the performance of the industry and revealed that wind provided 37 per cent of Ireland’s electricity in the first quarter of 2019. “Wind energy is an Irish success story, driving down electricity costs for consumers, cutting millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions every year and securing a homegrown energy future that doesn’t depend on importing fossil fuels.” Wind energy’s share of electricity demand: 37% – up from 35% in Q1 2018

Total amount of electricity generated by wind in Q1 2019: 2,827,067 MWh – up from 2,731,000 MWh in Q1 2018.

I strongly encourage the use of sanitizers as I think it is the modern way to write C and C++. When many people describe how impossibly difficult it is to build good software in C and C++, they often think about old-school bare metal C and C++ where the code do all sorts of mysterious things without any protection. They do not bring the safety to production, since you probably do not want to use sanitizers in production or release, but as you are building and testing your code, they help you a great deal catch potential issues right away.

FatELF lets you pack binaries into one file, seperated by OS ABI, OS ABI version, byte order and word size, and most importantly, CPU architecture. FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. It’s up to the system to handle dynamic loading like it always does, once it finds the ELF record it wants to load inside a FatELF file.

What are your most important tech tools for doing your reporting? Probably 75 percent of my reporting is done by phone and email, and when I am writing I print out drafts and notes. I constantly scan social media — Twitter, mostly — for news, and in breaking news situations I sometimes find sources to quote there.

Often unbeknownst to the public, law enforcement is identifying suspects based on “all manner of ‘probe photos,’ photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database,” a study published on Thursday by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology reported. When the pixelated surveillance footage produced zero hits on the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) facial recognition system, a detective swapped the image for one of actor Woody Harrelson, claiming the suspect resembled the movie star, in order to generate hits. Image: Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology

The NYPD also fed an image of a New York Knicks player (whose name was redacted in police documents provided to the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology) into its facial recognition system in order to find a Brooklyn man wanted for assault.

Instead my solver doesn’t actually make one move at a time, but solves the puzzle by layers: given a state, find all valid moves that could be made. Let’s start with a puzzle that’s probably unsolvable, consisting just of numbers 2-5 placed in random locations on the grid:

The solver runs until it can’t make any more progress:

The generator then adds some information to the puzzle, in the form of a dot, and continues solving. So the generator will keep on adding more dots until the solver is happy:

And then the solver resumes normal operation:

This process continues either until the puzzle is solved or there is no more information to add (i.e. every space that’s reachable from a number is covered by a dot).

Image copyright
King’s College Hospital

In a UK first, doctors have used keyhole surgery to repair the spine of a baby with spina bifida while it was still inside the womb. Image caption

Baby Jaxson arrived at 33 weeks and was cared for in neonatal intensive care at King’s College Hospital. Baby Jaxson arrived early, at 33 weeks, and was looked after in neonatal intensive care at King’s.

The other objects on which physical standards are based, such as the standard meter, were already replaced years ago, but the kilogram — generally known as the kilo for short — turned out to be a harder unit to define in absolute terms. Explaining how the other basic units have been defined through basic physical constants is a bit more straightforward than it is for the kilo: The second, for example, is defined as a specific number of vibrations of an atom of cesium. The new definitions have great power, Ketterle says, because “every new method to count photons or atoms or measure frequencies will further improve the measurements of mass, since mass is no longer connected to an imprecise, man-made artifact.”

In Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Alexandra Popoff, a Russian journalist who has written books about Countess Tolstoy and about Tolstoy’s disciple Vladimir Chertkov, has turned out an excellent biography of Grossman. “Although Grossman lived all his adult life in a totalitarian Soviet state,” Popoff writes, “he had the mentality of a man from the free world.” “In the Town of Berdichev” marked Grossman’s arrival as a Soviet writer.