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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Currently, OLED technology faces the hurdle that full-color displays can only be realized by using color filters or shadow masks, which limit OLED efficiency and resolution. Researchers are working intensely on new approaches to fabricate microdisplays characterized by high resolution while at the same time offering high efficiency and long operating life time.

The patterning of the organic layers of OLEDs is one of the greatest challenges, since conventional methods such as photolithography cannot be utilized with organic semiconductor materials. The use of electron beam technology for microstructuring was successfully demonstrated at the Fraunhofer FEP two years ago. Using its patented process, FEP was able to modify the emission of an OLED through the existing encapsulation layer to create any feature imaginable and even produce high-resolution grayscale images.

Further development of the electron beam process has now achieved full-color OLED without using color filters or shadow masks. To create red, green, and blue pixels, an organic layer of the OLED itself is ablated by a thermal electron beam process. This patterning causes a change to the thickness of the layer stack, which makes the emission of different colors possible.

This is the first major step towards the development of full-color displays without the use of restrictive color filters in the process. Elisabeth Bodenstein, developer in the Fraunhofer FEP project team, explains the advantages: “With our electron-beam process it is possible to thermally structure even these sensitive organic materials without damaging the underlying layer.”

The results were obtained by simulating and initially estimating the HTL (hole transport layer) thicknesses that are produced by the electron beam. The researchers actually achieved the decoupling of red, green, and blue emissions from the white OLED. Following proof of concept at Fraunhofer FEP, these colors were demonstrated on the first test substrates, exhibiting comparable OLED performance.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Musk Says 'Funding Secured' Claim Sparked by Saudi Meeting

Elon Musk said interest from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund gave him the confidence to drop the bombshell last week that he was considering taking Tesla Inc. private. The Saudi Kingdom's Public Investment Fund had approached Musk going back almost two years about taking Tesla off the market, he wrote in a blog post Monday, confirming that the fund recently bought an almost 5 percent stake. Musk described a July 31 meeting in which the Saudi fund's managing director expressed regret that Tesla hadn't moved forward with a go-private transaction.

[...] Several investors have since sued Musk and Tesla, claiming the company's share price had been manipulated. The Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be intensifying its scrutiny of the company and its chief executive officer after having started gathering general information about Tesla and Musk's earlier public pronouncements about manufacturing goals and sales targets.

One of Tesla's biggest critics, Vertical Group analyst Gordon Johnson, read Musk's blog post as a walk-back maneuver from his "funding secured" tweet last week. He cited Musk's statement Monday that the Saudi fund's support for taking Tesla private was "subject to financial and other due diligence and their internal review process for obtaining approvals." "He is specifically stating that funding is not secured, and I think that's a big deal," Johnson, whose $93 price target on Tesla shares is the lowest among Wall Street analysts, said on Bloomberg Television. "The question then becomes, what does the SEC do here, and do the shareholders stick with him?"

Also at CNBC.

Previously: Elon Musk Considers Taking Tesla Private

Original Submission

karthikaqpt writes:

Wearable 'microbrewery' saves human body from radiation damage

Purdue University researchers have engineered yeast "microbreweries" within disposable badges made of freezer paper, aluminum and tape. Simply adding a drop of water activates the yeast to show radiation exposure as read by an electronic device. On a commercial level, the readout device could one day be a tablet or phone. The badge could also be adapted in the future for nuclear power plant workers and victims of nuclear disasters.

[...] The success of the badge lies in the quick and measurable response of yeast to radiation: The higher the radiation dose, the higher the percentage of yeast cells that die. Wetting the badge activates the cells that are still alive to eat glucose and release carbon dioxide – the same fermentation process responsible for brewing beer and making bread rise. When carbon dioxide bubbles at the surface, ions also form. The concentration of these ions increases the electrical conductivity of yeast, which can be measured by hooking up the badge to a readout system.

"We use the change in electrical properties of the yeast to tell us how much radiation damage it incurred. A slow decrease in electrical conductivity over time indicates more damage," said Rahim Rahimi, Purdue postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old

Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, The Pirate Bay aimed to bring file-sharing to the masses. In the fifteen years that followed, the site transformed from a small community to Hollywood's resilient arch-rival, serving millions of users. And that's not the only thing that changed. Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.

While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.

One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

Related: Anti-Piracy Firm: P2P Piracy Still Relevant

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The NASA manager overseeing development of Boeing and SpaceX's commercial crew ferry ships says the space agency has approved SpaceX's proposal to strap in astronauts atop Falcon 9 rockets, then fuel the launchers in the final hour of the countdown as the company does for its uncrewed missions.

The "load-and-go" procedure has become standard for SpaceX's satellite launches, in which an automatic countdown sequencer commands chilled kerosene and cryogenic liquid oxygen to flow into the Falcon 9 rocket in the final minutes before liftoff.

[...] SpaceX's "load-and-go" procedure raised concerns after a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in September 2016. The fiery accident occurred in the final minutes of a countdown while propellants were flowing into the rocket before a hold-down engine firing, destroying the launcher and an Israeli-owned communications satellite on-board.

Officials from SpaceX said the Crew Dragon's escape system, comprising a set of high-thrust SuperDraco engines around the circumference of the capsule, would be quick enough to push the spacecraft and its crew away from such an explosion during fueling.

The abort thrusters will be activated and armed before fueling of the Falcon 9 during crewed launches.

SpaceX plans an unmanned, in-flight abort test prior to the first crewed flight, which is tentatively scheduled for April 2019.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/08/09/nasa-signs-off-on-spacexs-load-and-go-procedure-for-crew-launches/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Wired is reporting on a presentation given at Def Con 26 by Rachel Greenstadt, an associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, Greenstadt's former PhD student and now an assistant professor at George Washington University, entitled Even Anonymous Coders Leave Fingerprints. Stylistic expression is uniquely identifiable and not anonymous, that includes code especially. There are privacy implications for many developers because as few as 50 metrics are needed to distinguish one coder from another.

The researchers don't rely on low-level features, like how code was formatted. Instead, they create "abstract syntax trees," which reflect code's underlying structure, rather than its arbitrary components. Their technique is akin to prioritizing someone's sentence structure, instead of whether they indent each line in a paragraph.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The email blast from the head of my son and daughter's theater group relayed a frantic plea: "We need to raise $16,000 before the upcoming spring performances," Anya Wallach, the executive director of Random Farms Kids' Theater, in Westchester, New York, wrote in late May. If the money didn't materialize in time, she warned, there could be a serious problem with the shows: nobody would hear the actors.

Random Farms, and tens of thousands of other theater companies, schools, churches, broadcasters, and myriad other interests across the country, need to buy new wireless microphones. The majority of professional wireless audio gear in America is about to become obsolete, and illegal to operate. The story of how we got to this strange point involves politics, business, science, and, of course, money.

Story: https://www.wired.com/story/wireless-mics-radio-frequencies-fcc-saga/

Original Submission

anubi writes:

Computer Programmers get new Tech Ethics Code

The guidelines come from the Association for Computing Machinery

Technological professionals are the first, and last, lines of defense against the misuse of technology. Nobody else understands the systems as well, and nobody else is in a position to protect specific data elements or ensure the connections between one component and another are appropriate, safe and reliable. As the role of computing continues its decades-long expansion in society, computer scientists are central to what happens next.

Personally, I am quite concerned that our Congress has not attached Responsibility with Rights when it comes to software. If someone is going to claim ownership and rights to a piece of code then protect it with electronic lock or obscurity, why aren't they also held 100% responsible if that code causes mayhem?

We just had a story here about the concerns we have about a hemoglobin based meat substitute ... and what we go through to make damn sure the substance is harmless to life before we introduce it into the food chain... and even *that* has to be completely described and its molecular structure demonstrated.

Can you imagine the uproar if Chemists started releasing anything tasty, that people would eat, and call it "food"? And would our Congress grant them the right to withhold information as to what it was? Then hold them harmless for whatever it did to people?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A year in Paris is as bad for your health as smoking 183 cigarettes

A study by the European Transport & Environment association published on Friday confirmed that spending a few days in various popular European capitals is equivalent to smoking between one and four cigarettes.

[...] The Transport & Environment study compared the contamination from fine particles of the ten largest European tourist cities by converting it into the number of cigarettes smoked. The NGO used a method of calculation created by Berkeley Earth, an international climate association.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The New York Times reports:

A federal appeals court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday to bar within 60 days a widely used pesticide associated with developmental disabilities and other health problems in children, dealing the industry a major blow after it had successfully lobbied the Trump administration to reject a ban.

The order by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit came after a decade-long effort by environmental and public health groups to get the pesticide, chlorpyrifos, removed from the market. The product is used in more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal and vegetable crops including apples, almonds, oranges and broccoli, with more than 640,000 acres treated in California alone in 2016, the most recent year data is available.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The first full characterization measurement of an accelerator beam in six dimensions will advance the understanding and performance of current and planned accelerators around the world.

A team of researchers led by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville conducted the measurement in a beam test facility at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory using a replica of the Spallation Neutron Source's linear accelerator, or linac. The details are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"Our goal is to better understand the physics of the beam so that we can improve how accelerators operate," said Sarah Cousineau, group leader in ORNL's Research Accelerator Division and UT joint faculty professor. "Part of that is related to being able to fully characterize or measure a beam in 6D space -- and that's something that, until now, has never been done."

Six-dimensional space is like 3D space but includes three additional coordinates on the x, y, and z axes to track motion or velocity.

"Right away we saw the beam has this complex structure in 6D space that you can't see below 5D -- layers and layers of complexities that can't be detangled," Cousineau said. "The measurement also revealed the beam structure is directly related to the beam's intensity, which gets more complex as the intensity increases."

Previous attempts to fully characterize an accelerator beam fell victim to "the curse of dimensionality," in which measurements in low dimensions become exponentially more difficult in higher dimensions. Scientists have tried to circumvent the issue by adding three 2D measurements together to create a quasi-6D representation. The UT-ORNL team notes that approach is incomplete as a measurement of the beam's initial conditions entering the accelerator, which determine beam behavior farther down the linac.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180810132608.htm

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

DLink vulnerability lets attackers remotely change DNS server settings.

Hackers have been exploiting a vulnerability in DLink modem routers to send people to a fake banking website that attempts to steal their login credentials, a security researcher said Friday.

The vulnerability works against DLink DSL-2740R, DSL-2640B, DSL-2780B, DSL-2730B, and DSL-526B models that haven’t been patched in the past two years. As described in disclosures here, here, here, here, and here, the flaw allows attackers to remotely change the DNS server that connected computers use to translate domain names into IP addresses.

According to an advisory published Friday morning by security firm Radware, hackers have been exploiting the vulnerability to send people trying to visit two Brazilian bank sites—Banco de Brasil’s www.bb.com.br and Unibanco’s www.itau.com.br—to malicious servers rather than the ones operated by the financial institutions. In the advisory, Radware researcher Pascal Geenens wrote:

The attack is insidious in the sense that a user is completely unaware of the change. The hijacking works without crafting or changing URLs in the user’s browser. A user can use any browser and his/her regular shortcuts, he or she can type in the URL manually or even use it from mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android phones or tablets. He or she will still be sent to the malicious website instead of to their requested website, so the hijacking effectively works at the gateway level.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/08/in-the-wild-router-exploit-sends-unwitting-users-to-fake-banking-site/

Original Submission

Bobs writes:

For those who want to play around with the other form of non-dark matter:

"Plasmas have never been easy to create or exploit. But now you can make them in your own kitchen. ...

Kausik Das of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and several colleagues who have found a way to create plasmas in an ordinary kitchen microwave. Their technique opens the way for a new generation to experiment with this exotic form of matter and perhaps to develop new applications.

They also demonstrate several interesting applications for home-brewed plasmas.

News:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611740/how-to-turn-a-kitchen-microwave-into-a-plasma-etching-device/

Details:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06784

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

MLive reports:

The Perseid Meteor Shower peaks Sunday night into early Monday, and is expected to remain strong for the next few evenings, so don't miss your chance to spot some fireballs shooting across the night sky.

[...] "The Perseids are best seen between about 2 a.m. your local time and dawn," NASA said in a Perseid blog this week. "If those hours seem daunting, not to worry! You can go out after dark, around 9 p.m. local time, and see Perseids. Just know that you won't see nearly as many as you would had you gone out during the early morning hours."

According to Wikipedia:

The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift–Tuttle. The meteors are called the Perseids because the point from which they appear to hail (called the radiant) lies in the constellation Perseus.

[...] The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the peak in activity between 9 and 14 August, depending on the particular location of the stream. During the peak, the rate of meteors reaches 60 or more per hour. They can be seen all across the sky; however, because of the shower's radiant in the constellation of Perseus, the Perseids are primarily visible in the Northern Hemisphere.[⁸] As with many meteor showers the visible rate is greatest in the pre-dawn hours, since more meteoroids are scooped up by the side of the Earth moving forward into the stream, corresponding to local times between midnight and noon [...] Some can also be seen before midnight, often grazing the Earth's atmosphere to produce long bright trails and sometimes fireballs. Most Perseids burn up in the atmosphere while at heights above 80 kilometres (50 mi).

Also at: space.com, NASA, Time, and National Geographic.

Original Submission

Monsanto ordered to pay $289 million in California Roundup cancer trial

ilPapa writes:

A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged the company's glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused him cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages.

The case of school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson was the first lawsuit alleging glyphosate causes cancer to go to trial. Monsanto, a unit of Bayer AG following a $62.5 billion acquisition by the German conglomerate, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.

The jury at San Francisco's Superior Court of California deliberated for three days before finding that Monsanto had failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weed killers.

It awarded $39 million in compensatory and $250 million in punitive damages.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/10/monsanto-ordered-to-pay-289m-in-california-roundup-cancer-trial.html

Monsanto Ordered to Pay $289 Million to Man Who Claimed Glyphosate Caused His Cancer

takyon writes:

Monsanto ordered to pay $289m damages in Roundup cancer trial

Chemical giant Monsanto has been ordered to pay $289m (£226m) damages to a man who claimed herbicides containing glyphosate had caused his cancer.

In a landmark case, a Californian jury found that Monsanto knew its Roundup and RangerPro weedkillers were dangerous and failed to warn consumers. It's the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging a glyphosate link to cancer.

Monsanto denies that glyphosate causes cancer and says it intends to appeal against the ruling. "The jury got it wrong," vice-president Scott Partridge said outside the courthouse in San Francisco.

The claimant in the case, groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, is among more than 5,000 similar plaintiffs across the US.

Monsanto? Never heard of it. Did you mean Bayer AG?

Previously: Cancer Hazard vs. Risk - Glyphosate
Monsanto Faces First US Trial Over Roundup Cancer Link
Monsanto Cancer Trial Begins in San Francisco

Related: Glyphosate Linked to Liver Damage

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2