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Phoenix666 writes:

Technology uses plant biomass waste for self-powered biomedical devices:

An innovation turning waste material into stretchable devices may soon provide a new option for creating self-powered biomedical inventions.

A team from Purdue University used lignin to create triboelectric[*] nanogenerators. TENGs help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power. Lignin is a waste byproduct from the pulp and paper industries, and it is one of the most abundant biopolymers on Earth.

[...] Wu said the lignin-based triboelectric devices also could function as self-powered sensors to detect and monitor the mechanical activities from the human body in applications such as health monitoring, human-machine interface, teleoperated robotics, consumer electronics and virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Journal Reference:
Yukai Bao, Ruoxing Wang, Yunmei Lu, Wenzhuo Wu. Lignin biopolymer based triboelectric nanogenerators [open], APL Materials (DOI: 015794APM)

[*] Triboelectric effect.

One man's kitchen scraps are another man's cyber-machines.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Drones are expected to play a role in coastguard search and rescue (SAR) operations in the near future.

The [UK's] Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) wants to make greater use of the technology as part of a new SAR contract to be awarded in 2024.

The contract also covers the continued provision of rescue helicopters, including those based in Scotland, and search planes.

[...] The coastguard said unmanned aircraft could potentially visit rescue sites ahead of air, sea or land-based recovery teams.

Images and other information gathered by drones could help develop the emergency services response to a situation.

How long before terrestrial drones follow their airborne brethren into service?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Data Breach at Bank of America:

Bank of America Corporation has disclosed a data breach affecting clients who have applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Client information was exposed on April 22 when the bank uploaded PPP applicants' details onto the US Small Business Administration's test platform. The platform was designed to give lenders the opportunity to test the PPP submissions before the second round of applications kicked off.

The breach was revealed in a filing made by Bank of America with the California Attorney General's Office. As a result of the incident, other SBA-authorized lenders and their vendors were able to view clients' information.

Data exposed in the breach consisted of details relating not only to individual businesses, but also to their owners. Compromised data may have included the business address and tax identification number along with the owner's name, address, Social Security number, phone number, email address, and citizenship status.

[...] In a breach notification document, a spokesperson for the bank said: "There is no indication that your information was viewed or misused by these lenders or their vendors. And your information was not visible to other business clients applying for loans, or to the public, at any time."

[...] Bank of America is offering clients affected by the breach free two-year membership of Experian's identity theft protection program.

Disclaimer: SoylentNews PBC has an account with Bank of America, but has not made an application to the PPP. In fact, since all SoylentNews staff are volunteers and have never been paid for their services, there was never any need or reason to apply for PPP.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Astronomers have captured an image of a super-rare type of galaxy—described as a "cosmic ring of fire"—as it existed 11 billion years ago.

The galaxy, which has roughly the mass of the Milky Way, is circular with a hole in the middle, rather like a titanic doughnut. Its discovery, announced in the journal Nature Astronomy, is set to shake up theories about the earliest formation of galactic structures and how they evolve.

"It is a very curious object that we've never seen before," said lead researcher Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D). "It looks strange and familiar at the same time."

The galaxy, named R5519, is 11 billion light-years from the Solar System. The hole at its centre is truly massive, with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. To put it another way, it is three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged.

"It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way," said Dr. Yuan, who is an ASTRO 3-D Fellow based at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, in the state of Victoria.

"Most of that activity is taking place on its ring—so it truly is a ring of fire."

Journal Reference:
Tiantian Yuan, Ahmed Elagali, Ivo Labbé, et al. A giant galaxy in the young Universe with a massive ring, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1102-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Leaked draft details Trump's likely attack on technology giants:

The Trump Administration is putting the final touches on a sweeping executive order designed to punish online platforms for perceived anti-conservative bias. Legal scholar Kate Klonick obtained a draft of the document and posted it online late Wednesday night.

[...] The document claims that online platforms have been "flagging content as inappropriate even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse."

The order then lays out several specific policy initiatives that will purportedly promote "free and open debate on the Internet."

First up is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

[...] Trump's draft executive order would ask the Federal Communications Commission to clarify Section 230—specifically a provision shielding companies from liability when they remove objectionable content.

[...] Next, the executive order directs federal agencies to review their ad spending to ensure that no ad dollars go to online platforms that "violate free speech principles."

Another provision asks the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether online platforms are restricting speech "in ways that do not align with those entities' public representations about those practices"—in other words, whether the companies' actual content moderation practices are consistent with their terms of service. The executive order suggests that an inconsistency between policy and practice could constitute an "unfair and deceptive practice" under consumer protection laws.

Trump would also ask the FTC to consider whether large online platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become so big that they've effectively become "the modern public square"—and hence governed by the First Amendment.

[...] Finally, the order directs US Attorney General William Barr to organize a working group of state attorneys general to consider whether online platforms' policies violated state consumer protection laws.

[Ed Note - The following links have been added]

Follow Up Article: Trump is desperate to punish Big Tech but has no good way to do it

The Executive Order: Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 model with 8 GB of RAM:

Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has upped the ante by releasing a Raspberry Pi 4 B with a generous 8GB of RAM. Launching today for $75, the Raspberry Pi 4 B (8GB) is identical to other Raspberry Pi 4 B models in every way, except for its RAM capacity. So what do you do with all that memory, and is spending $20 more than the price of the $55 4GB model worth it?

The short answer is that, right now, the 8GB capacity makes the most sense for users with very specialized needs: running data-intensive server loads or using virtual machines. As our tests show, it's pretty difficult to use more than 4GB of RAM on Raspberry Pi, even if you're a heavy multitasker.

A beta version of a 64-bit Raspbian OS, which is being renamed to "Raspberry Pi OS", is available. The existing 32-bit Raspbian can use all the RAM, but with a limit of up to 3 GB per process.

Some changes have been made to the board:

The back of the board adds silkscreen for certifications, as well as existing modifications for Raspberry Pi 4 Rev 1.2 to avoid damaging the board when inserting a MicroSD card. But the top of the board has more modification around the USB-C port, USB Type-A ports, and a chip between the VLI PCIe to USB chip and AV jack is just gone. So it's possible further USB-C issues have been fixed, and some improvements have been made to USB host ports maybe with regards to powering up external hard drives.

[Update from Eben Upton about hardware changes:

These are the regulator changes I mention in the post. The disappeared chip near the USB connector is the old regulator. The new stuff near the USB-C is the new regulator. The input clamp component has moved across to the USB area to make room.

Several iterations of the Raspberry Pi 4's firmware have reduced power consumption and heat. A beta-level firmware update from earlier in the week added USB boot support.

Phoenix666 writes:

New Zealand sits on top of the remains of a giant ancient volcanic plume:

Back in the 1970s, scientists came up with a revolutionary idea about how Earth's deep interior works. They proposed it is slowly churning like a lava lamp, with buoyant blobs rising as plumes of hot mantle rock from near Earth's core, where rocks are so hot they move like a fluid.

According to the theory, as these plumes approach the surface they begin to melt, triggering massive volcanic eruptions. But evidence for the existence of such plumes proved elusive and geologists had all but rejected the idea.

Yet in a paper published today, we can now provide this evidence. Our results show that New Zealand sits atop the remains of such an ancient giant volcanic plume. We show how this process causes volcanic activity and plays a key role in the workings of the planet.

Journal Reference:
J.-P. Macquart, J. X. Prochaska, M. McQuinn, et al. A census of baryons in the Universe from localized fast radio bursts, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2300-2)

The remains of Mt. Doom after the hobbits got finished with it?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Half the matter in the universe was missing—we found it hiding in the cosmos:

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot.

The sum of all the ordinary matter that cosmologists measured only added up to about half of the 5% what was supposed to be in the universe.

This is known as the "missing baryon problem" and for over 20 years, cosmologists like us looked hard for this matter without success.

It took the discovery of a new celestial phenomenon and entirely new telescope technology, but earlier this year, our team finally found the missing matter.

[...] But when radio waves pass through matter, they are briefly slowed down. The longer the wavelength, the more a radio wave "feels" the matter. Think of it like wind resistance. A bigger car feels more wind resistance than a smaller car.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Media Corruption? Car Safety Recalls Reported Less When Manufacturers Advertise More:

A new study looked at the relationship between advertising by car manufacturers in U.S. newspapers and news coverage of car safety recalls in the early 2000s. The study found that newspapers provided less coverage of recalls issued by manufacturers that advertised more regularly in their publications than of recalls issued by other manufacturers that did not advertise, and this occurred more frequently when the recalls involved more severe defects.

[...] "Because media coverage affects a variety of outcomes, it's vital that news outlets provide unbiased and accurate information to consumers so they can make well-informed decisions," says Ananya Sen, assistant professor of information systems and economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, who coauthored the study. "Our findings demonstrate a robust supply-side bias due to advertising revenue, one that may be quite dangerous."

Advertising accounts for nearly 80 percent of newspapers' total revenue in the United States, with total ad spending by the automotive sector surpassing $20 billion in 2006. The study's authors contend that newspapers' reliance on advertising raises concerns that editorial decisions may be vulnerable to the influence of advertisers, especially large ones.

Phoenix666 writes:

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough:

In many ways it’s a rite of passage in America: being ripped off by your cable company and trying to figure out how they did it. Now a lawsuit against Charter Communications is seeking to uncover just that.

The biggest scam of all – pressuring or forcing subscribers to “rent” the clunky, technologically outdated cable box at a greatly inflated price – is still in place, despite a brief effort by the FCC in 2016 to shut it down.

And then there are hidden costs – such as “broadcast TV fees” and “regional sports fees” – raking in tens of millions of dollars in pure profit for unscrupulous cable companies, despite Consumer Reports focusing on the topic for a number of years, and now Congress even starting to pay attention.

But although we have all grown used to our cable fees rocketing the second you are off the special two-year contract rate, requiring you to call up the company and threaten to move to a competitor until you are offered the next incredible special deal, Charter may have pushed things too far with its latest special offer: a two-year flat fee deal that somehow, it is claimed, grew more expensive every month.

Five Charter Communications customers, based in Ohio and Kentucky, have formally accused [PDF] the company of a bait-and-switch scam for its cable TV service. The biz advertised a fixed monthly rate, they say, but far from being fixed, every few months it cost a little more.

Are the cable companies to blame, or the sports and movie channels that are charging more?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Microsoft senior program manager Rich Turner took to Twitter in recent days to remind everyone that it really is time to move on from Windows' ancient command processor, cmd.exe.

"Cmd is in maintenance mode," said the Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux pusher, "it should not be used for interactive shell work."

[...] To be fair, cmd has been a little whiffy for a while now. As the original default command line interpreter for the Windows NT (and OS/2) era, it has its roots in the old COMMAND.COM days of DOS and Windows 95, and provided a way for admins to move their ageing batch files and scripts into a brighter, DOS-free world.

[...] Microsoft has long punted an alternative to users in the form of the vastly more capable PowerShell, which appeared in Windows-only form back in 2006 before going cross-platform and open source 10 years later (briefly acquiring the suffix "Core" as it did so).

Many organisations, however, have plenty of legacy cmd scripts still running behind the scenes. The engine running those scripts is now in "maintenance mode", meaning that something pretty major would have to go wrong before anyone in Redmond goes tinkering. Every time a change is made, explained Turner, "something critical breaks".

[...] Turner's pointer to PowerShell is not without its own problems. While PowerShell 7 may be the future, what is currently lurking in the big box of Windows is version 5.1, which, like cmd, is in maintenance mode and has received only the odd fix or three as it waited for the Core incarnation to get closer to parity.

Lee, a 20-year Microsoft veteran and principal software engineer manager, chimed in that the gang "can't update inbox to PS7 until we reconcile the LTS support gap between .NET and Windows".

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"If you want to hide something in solid media, this is different," [professor Guoliang] Huang said. "In solid media, the wave is more complicated than the radar wave because in solid media we not only have a compression wave but we also have a shear wave. In civil engineering, we deal with earthquakes—seismic waves, which have longitudinal and shear waves, and most of the damage is cause by the shear wave."

Huang said there is no natural material that satisfies the long-standing problem of transformation-invariance, wherein non-standard properties are needed after certain transformations. He said the ultimate purpose of his research is to model, design and fabricate materials that will fill in this "behavioral gap." The new class of cloaking or polar materials his team created is composed of a functionally graded lattice embedded in an isotropic continuum background. The layers were 3-D printed and manually assembled.

"We experimentally and numerically investigated the characteristics of the proposed cloak and found very good cloaking performance under both tension and shear loadings," Huang wrote in his paper, one of two research papers Huang and his team had published by the Physical Review of Letters on the subject of polar materials.

[...] "The results that the University of Missouri team has recently published are encouraging," said Dr. Dan Cole, program manager, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "This research could lead to new strategies for steering mechanical waves away from critical regions in solid objects, which could enable novel capabilities in soldier protection and maneuvers."

Journal Reference
Xianchen Xu, Chen Wang, Wan Shou, et al. Physical Realization of Elastic Cloaking with a Polar Material, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.114301)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

U.S. Army signs deal with SpaceX to assess Starlink broadband

The U.S. Army will experiment using Starlink broadband to move data across military networks. An agreement signed with SpaceX on May 20 gives the Army three years to test out the service.

The Army and SpaceX signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement known as a CRADA, an Army source told SpaceNews.

The project will be overseen by the Combat Capabilities Development Command's C5ISR Center based at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

CRADAs are commonly used by the military to evaluate technologies and services from the private sector before it commits to buying them. The Army in this case wants to be able to assess the performance of the Starlink low Earth orbit internet service when connected to military systems. The Army will seek answers to key questions such as what ground equipment it will need to use Starlink and how much systems integration work could be required.

Also at Ars Technica.

Update: Army's evaluation of Starlink broadband to focus on reliability, vulnerability

The upcoming evaluation of SpaceX's Starlink broadband by the U.S. Army will look primarily at the reliability of the service and potential vulnerabilities of the satellites to hostile attacks, a senior Army official said May 27.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Research has shown that, while people in their 20s often leave rural communities, a higher percentage of young adults in their 30s choose rural communities, Schmitt-Wilson said. Still, most of the research on migration of young adults to rural communities focuses on "returners," or those choosing to move home to the community they were raised in, she added.

[...] The researchers found that while study participants were candid about challenges associated with life in rural areas of Montana—such as a lack of amenities and geographic and social isolation—they also highlighted a number of benefits.

"Those benefits included the quality of life they experience in their rural communities, including family-centered environments, low cost of living, unconditional support provided by community members, intergenerational friendships, increased sociability and unique opportunities for personal and professional growth available for young adults in rural communities," Schmitt-Wilson said.

If urban centers are in lockdown and their amenities are gone, would young people still choose city life or would places like rural Montana do?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Women with Neandertal gene give birth to more children

One in three women in Europe inherited the receptor for progesterone from Neandertals – a gene variant associated with increased fertility, fewer bleedings during early pregnancy and fewer miscarriages. This is according to a study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

[...] Progesterone is a hormone, which plays an important role in the menstrual cycle and in pregnancy. Analyses of biobank data from more than 450,000 participants – among them 244,000 women – show that almost one in three women in Europe have inherited the progesterone receptor from Neandertals. 29 percent carry one copy of the Neandertal receptor and three percent have two copies.

"The proportion of women who inherited this gene is about ten times greater than for most Neandertal gene variants," says Hugo Zeberg. "These findings suggest that the Neandertal variant of the receptor has a favourable effect on fertility."

Neanderthals.

Journal Reference:
Hugo Zeberg, Janet Kelso, Svante Pääbo. Neandertal Progesterone Receptor [open], Molecular Biology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msaa119)

Original Submission