Petr Tvaruzek

It’s diamonds all the way down. That’s according to new research suggesting more than a quadrillion tons of diamond are nestled within the Earth’s interior—1000 times more than previously thought.

A study published on Monday estimates that one to two percent of “craton roots” contain the glittery stuff, approximately 90 to 150 miles beneath the Earth’s surface. These roots are the deepest sections of “cratons,” which are rock layers extending upwards of 200 miles through the Earth’s crust and mantle.

The estimate is that “there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before,” Ulrich Faul, co-author and research scientist at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, told MIT News.

The team looked at decades of global seismic data from the US Geological Survey. For years, seismic receivers have been collecting sound wave data—caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, and other phenomena—noting their speeds and intensities, MIT News reports. From this data, seismologists can map the origin point of an earthquake. They can also chart virtual maps of the Earth’s interior by analyzing the speed at which sound waves move through it. Different speeds relate to varying densities, temperatures, and rock compositions, which is how scientists determined that Earth possesses a liquid core, Discover Magazine notes.

But it was an anomaly that caught the team’s attention. Basically, that sound waves have a habit of speeding up when traveling through craton roots.

“The velocities that are measured are faster than what we think we can reproduce with reasonable assumptions about what is there,” Faul told MIT News. “Then we have to say, ‘There is a problem.’ That’s how this project started.”

After generating a 3D model of this scenario, the team virtually compiled rocks to test how sound waves would move through them. According to the study, rock containing 1 to 2 percent diamond (in addition to peridotite and eclogite) produced a match. “Cratons are a tiny bit less dense than their surroundings,” Faul explained. “So we found that you just need [this percentage] for cratons to be stable and not sink.”

This theory would also make sense, as diamonds are naturally formed by the conditions present in craton roots.

Faul called the results “circumstantial evidence,” but described them as the only logical conclusion to the various possibilities they tested.

The study was published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, and led by Joshua Garber, an earth science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Several of the boys stuck in a Thai cave already knew hardship as refugees from Myanmar. One multilingual boy acted as interpreter with rescuers.

The U.S. government is struggling to reunite immigrant families it separated at the border with Mexico and only about half the children under age 5 will be back with their parents by a court-ordered deadline of Tuesday, a government attorney told a judge on Monday.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: On July 3rd, narrative designer Jessica Price tweeted a 29-tweet thread dissecting the challenges of writing player characters in an MMORPG. A streamer who goes by Deroir responded, "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly," and shared a three-tweet explanation of how narrative design influences player expression in the sort of games that Price narratively designs. Price both replied directly to Deroir, tweeting "thanks for trying to tell me what we do internally, my dude," and retweeted his response with the caption "today in being a female game dev: 'Allow me -- a person who does not work with you -- to explain to you how you do your job....'" Price's suggestion that Deroir was mansplaining game development -- an area where he does not have the same knowledge or experience -- sparked anger among the ArenaNet community. She subsequently responded to those criticizing her on Twitter. [Here's the first lines of that tweet. "Since we've got a lot of hurt manfeels today, lemme make something clear: this is my feed. I'm not on the clock here. I'm not your emotional courtesan just because I'm a dev. Don't expect me to pretend to like you here. The attempts of fans to exert ownership over our personal lives and times are something I am hardcore about stopping."] Price was fired shortly after. Although many fans are comparing this to something like working in a restaurant -- be polite to the customer, or get fired -- Price says it's impossible to talk about this incident without larger context about systematic online harassment, particularly the sometimes abusive relationship between fans and game developers and the failure of game companies to address it. "Game companies are generally unwilling to be honest with themselves about how they're complicit in creating and sustaining that environment," she tells The Verge... Price adds that she believes her firing was an emotional reaction on the part of ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brien. "He fired me personally, and the meeting was mostly him venting his feelings at me," she says. "I understand being afraid when you see the Reddit mob coming for you, but if people with less power can weather it -- and we do, regularly -- so can he...." "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," wrote one user on the Guild Wars 2 subreddit. "Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of reddit. We're literally running the company now..." ArenaNet also fired Peter Fries, a writer who'd worked for them for 12 years, apparently for defending Price in a series of now-deleted tweets. (For example, "Here's a bit of insight that I legitimately hope [Deroir] reflects on: she never asked for his feedback.") "The message is very clear, especially to women at the company," Jessica Price tells the Verge. "If Reddit wants you fired, we'll fire you. The quality of your work doesn't matter."

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It’s not about creativity. It’s about letting us tell our own stories.

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"Suddenly, calls and texts went unreturned," writes LinkedIn's editor at large, describing a recruiter who suddenly discovered the candidate she'd wanted to hire failed to respond to 12 messages, including emails like "Please let me know that you have not been kidnapped by aliens. I'm worried about you," and even a snail-mailed greeting card. Recruiters complain that prospective employees are now borrowing a practice from dating -- and "ghosting" recruiters and employers to let them know that they're not interested. "Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up." Long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side? Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?

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schwit1 tipped us off to new arrests made with genealogical evidence -- and growing interest in open source genealogy databases. Fast Company reports: In the last week, police have arrested two suspects in unrelated cold cases thanks to data gleaned from open-source ancestry site GEDMatch, reports the New York Times. That's the same open-source ancestry site that was used to track down the alleged Golden State Killer earlier this year. One of the arrests this week was of a 66-year-old nurse who is suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl in 1986. The other arrest is of a 49-year-old DJ who strangled a schoolteacher in 1992. Thanks to data from GEDMatch, Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981. It all reminds me of that scene in "The Circle" where they demo technology that finds "a randomly-selected fugitive from justice -- a proven menace to our global community" -- within 20 minutes. Last month DNA-based investigations also led to the arrest of the suspected murderer of two vacationers in 1987, and helped identify a suicide cold case from 2001. Now an Ohio newspaper reports: Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture. The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not. But the push is running up against privacy concerns.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Friday a report by the Axios news website, that cited sources as saying President Donald Trump wanted the United States to withdraw from the World Trade Organization, was wrong.

After 17 months in office, President Trump has yet to seal many major deals on trade, security, health care, immigration or gun control.

Constant repetition of the lie makes truth meaningless. Say a falsehood over and over and it takes on the shape of reality.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is used in the production of a wide variety of food and drink products. But with at least five CO2 producers across northern Europe offline, a shortfall in the gas is causing shortages in beer, fizzy drinks, and meat. From a report: Britain is particularly affected because the seasonal shutdown of the plants has meant that the UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left. The British Beer and Pub Association, along with individual beer producers and pubs, has warned of the crisis caused by the shortage. Without naming companies, the trade association said the shortfall has caused beer production shortages. Heineken, the UK's biggest brewer, said its CO2 supplier was facing "a major issue" in the UK. Meanwhile, one of Britain's biggest pub chains, Wetherspoons, said it'll be forced to pull a number of beers and fizzy drinks from its menu soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban campaigned on a nationalist, anti-immigrant platform. Providing help to those who enter the country illegally will now be punishable by up to a year in jail.

A database listing the names and locations of employees working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—pulled from publicly-available information on LinkedIn—was removed from major web platforms on Tuesday, just hours after its publication by programmer and artist Sam Lavigne.

GitHub, a site for coders to collaborate on open source projects, removed Lavigne’s repository, which featured a user interface for scanning the scraped data, including ICE employees’ self-provided photos, job descriptions, and work history. "We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” a GitHub spokesperson wrote Motherboard in an email. “In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party's privacy."

Medium also removed Lavigne's original blog post, which linked to the database and explained the rationale behind the project. Lavigne told Motherboard on Tuesday that he created the database in an effort to increase transparency about the individuals carrying out the Trump administration’s family separation and child detention program, which has drawn fire from the UN Human Rights Commission. Lavigne’s use of public data mirrors a 2015 project by Transparency Toolkit, which scraped LinkedIn for information about National Security Agency employees. Medium spokespeople did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

Read More: This Programmer Scraped LinkedIn to Find People Who Work at ICE

A Twitter account named "ICE Human Resources," which tweeted out names, job descriptions and profile pictures taken from Lavigne's database, was suspended by Twitter, according to a screenshot shared on Twitter by its creator Russel Neiss. Twitter spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

The information was taken from public LinkedIn profiles using a custom script, and so did not include street addresses or telephone numbers, although frequently did include location information at the town or city level. Critics on Twitter accused Lavigne of "doxxing" the employees and called his project “misguided.” Fox News even covered the response.

ICE spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

GitHub also appears to be taking down repositories that mirror Lavigne’s database, not just Lavigne’s own page. While Lavigne's original GitHub repository was online, I "forked" it, or made my own copy on GitHub This morning my own copy of the repository was deactivated. When I reached out to GitHub support to question the removal of data—which was of use for journalistic research—I received a response stating simply: "In general, whenever a repository is disabled for a Terms of Service violation, its forks are also disabled. "

A mirror of Lavigne’s original repository was posted to GitLab, an alternative code hosting website, but at the time of writing that repository is offline. GitLab spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

LinkedIn—the social network for employment where Lavigne sourced his data—is currently engaged in a legal battle to prevent third parties from scraping information on its site.

“We oppose how US immigration authorities are separating families at the border, but we can’t allow the illegal use of our member data,” LinkedIn spokesperson MK Juric wrote Motherboard in an email. “We will take appropriate action to ensure our members’ data is protected and used properly." Juric clarified that LinkedIn did not request that Lavigne’s database be taken offline, and that GitHub and Medium acted on their own.

Online commentators remarked on the speed with which action was taken against Lavigne’s pages, while forms of abuse against him were allowed to persist. In the wake of the publication of the database, many tweets addressed to Lavigne contained threats of violence.

Additional reporting by Jordan Pearson.

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New submitter DuroSoft writes: It has been over a year since Microsoft unveiled its open source GVFS (Git Virtual File System) project, designed to make terabyte-scale repositories, like it's own 270GB Windows source code, manageable using Git. The problem is that the GNOME project already has a virtual file system by the name of GVfs that has been in use for years, with hundreds of threads on Stack Overflow, etc. Yet Microsoft's GVFS has already surpassed GVfs in Google and is causing confusion. To make matters worse, Microsoft has officially refused to change the name, despite a large public backlash on GitHub and social media, and despite pull requests providing scripts that can change the name to anything Microsoft wants. Is this mere arrogance on Microsoft's part, laziness to do a quick Google search before using a name, or is it something more sinister?

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The president instructed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “prepare immediate steps” to stop the closing of unprofitable plants around the country.

(Reuters) - Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who resigned on Tuesday, had offered to leave office in exchange for dismissal of a felony computer tampering charge against him in a wider scandal, a prosecutor's spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

(Reuters) - The teen charged with shooting 17 people dead at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, boasted of plans to commit mass murder in a series of cell phone videos recorded by him before the rampage and released on Wednesday by prosecutors.

Officers in Germany recently caught 21 families trying to travel a few days before official vacations, when tickets often cost less. The fine is up to $1,200.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. trade war with China is "on hold" after the world's largest economies agreed to drop their tariff threats while they work on a wider trade agreement, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday.

Ride-hailing apps are convenient for city residents, but they’ve had devastating effects on the livelihood of taxi drivers and on the streets.

Gregory Counts and VanDyke Perry were found guilty of a rape that the woman now says “never happened.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration rolled out a long-awaited overhaul of U.S. arms export policy on Thursday aimed at expanding sales to allies, saying it will bolster the American defense industry and create jobs at home.

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The International shipping industry is a major emitter of greenhouse gases but has been slow to address the problem.