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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Sea sponge skeletons inspire stronger, lighter load-bearing structures:

From next-generation body armor to new treatments for tuberculosis, marine sponges have plenty to offer the world of science, and now we're seeing how they might inspire stronger and lighter skyscrapers and bridges. Engineers at Harvard University have demonstrated a new type of load-bearing structure based on the glassy skeletons of these sea creatures, which they say is more than 20 percent stronger than current solutions.

Diagonal lattice architectures are the backbone of typical covered bridges built from light and cheaper materials, making use of tightly arranged diagonal beams to evenly spread the load. Engineers have used this approach since the early 1800s, with the technique also used to support tall buildings and even the metal storage shelves you could find at your local home improvement store. But the Harvard team believes there is room for improvement.

"It gets the job done, but it's not optimal, leading to wasted or redundant material and a cap on how tall we can build," says first author of the study Matheus Fernandes. "One of the main questions driving this research was, can we make these structures more efficient from a material allocation perspective, ultimately using less material to achieve the same strength?"

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle:

Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn't the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. "If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," the researchers said.

But if genetic engineering wasn't behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world's dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What's even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

China to Launch Space Mining Bot:

The possibility of space mining has long captured the imagination and even inspired business ventures. Now, a space startup in China is taking its first steps towards testing capabilities to identify and extract off-Earth resources.

Origin Space, a Beijing-based private space resources company, is set to launch its first 'space mining robot' in November. NEO-1 is a small (around 30 kilograms) satellite intended to enter a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit. It will be launched by a Chinese Long March series rocket as a secondary payload.

This small spacecraft will not be doing actual mining; instead, it will be testing technologies. "The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital maneuver, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification and control," says Yu Tianhong, an Origin Space co-founder.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Should You Trust Apple's New Blood Oxygen Sensor?:

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, it wasn't just face masks and hand sanitizer that flew off drugstore shelves. Pulse oximeters were also in short supply, as news came out that a drop in blood oxygen could be a sign that a case of the coronavirus has taken a bad turn.

These inexpensive and noninvasive electronic devices use LED lights and photodiodes to determine the way red blood cells are absorbing light—oxygenated cells absorb more infrared light than red light, cells that aren't carrying oxygen the opposite. With that information, algorithms can calculate a level of blood oxygenation; for most healthy people that's in the high 90 percentile, in cases of COVID, the numbers dropped into the 80s. So it seemed like a good idea to have one on hand, if you could find one.

[...] accuracy remains a question with many of the pulse oximeters on the consumer market. Says Steve Xu, a physician-engineer who is medical director for the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics at Northwestern University, "It is relatively straightforward to make a pulse oximeter, even for an undergrad engineering design project, but it is really really hard to make a good one that is clinically dependable."

Is Apple's a good one? It's hard to say just yet. Besides the issues of adjusting to different skin colors, coping with motion, and other design challenges faced by all pulse oximeters, putting the sensors on top of the wrist raises the difficulty level. The devices used in hospitals as well as the standalone gadgets sold in drugstores typically clip onto a fingertip or, sometimes, an earlobe.

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kazzie writes:

News from the BBC of a SHINE (single high-level impulse noise)[*] that interfered with a Welsh village's internet connection on a daily basis.

The mystery of why an entire village lost its broadband every morning at 7am was solved when engineers discovered an old television was to blame.

[...] After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

[...] Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn't until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.

The householder would switch their TV set on at 7am every morning[sic] - and electrical interference emitted by their second-hand television was affecting the broadband signal.

The owner, who does not want to be identified, was "mortified" to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.

"They immediately agreed to switch it off and not use it again," said engineer Michael Jones.

While some properties in the surrounding area have Fibre to the Premises, several homes in the Aberhosan area are still limited to using copper-based ADSL connections.

[*] Broadband: Understanding REIN and SHINE.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Ecologists confirm Alan Turing's theory for Australian fairy circles:

Fairy circles are one of nature's greatest enigmas and most visually stunning phenomena. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has now, for the first time, collected detailed data to show that Alan Turing's model explains the striking vegetation patterns of the Australian fairy circles. In addition, the researchers showed that the grasses that make up these patterns act as "eco-engineers" to modify their own hostile and arid environment, thus keeping the ecosystem functioning. The results were published in the Journal of Ecology.

[...] The systematic and detailed fieldwork enabled, for the first time in such an ecosystem, a comprehensive test of the 'Turing pattern' theory. Turing's concept was that in certain systems, due to random disturbances and a 'reaction-diffusion' mechanism, interaction between just two diffusible substances was enough to allow strongly patterned structures to spontaneously emerge. Physicists have used this model to explain the striking skin patterns in zebrafish or leopards for instance. Earlier modeling had suggested this theory might apply to these intriguing vegetation patterns and now there is robust data from multiple scales which confirms that Alan Turing's model applies to Australian fairy circles.

[...] In 1952 when the British mathematician, Alan Turing, published his ground-breaking theoretical paper on pattern formation, he had most likely never heard of the fairy circles before. But with his theory he laid the foundation for generations of physicists to explain highly symmetrical patterns like sand ripples in dunes, cloud stripes in the sky or spots on an animal's coat with the reaction-diffusion mechanism. Now, ecologists have provided an empirical study to extend this principle from physics to dryland ecosystems with fairy circles.

Journal Reference:
Stephan Getzin, Todd E. Erickson, Hezi Yizhaq, et al. Bridging ecology and physics: Australian fairy circles regenerate following model assumptions on ecohydrological feedbacks [open], Journal of Ecology (DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.13493)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Beyond the human tragedy, what most passers-by fail to see is the cost of homelessness to us all. It includes the bills for police and ambulance call-outs, prison nights, visits to emergency departments, hospital stays and mental health and drying out clinics.

These expenses are rarely collated and tabulated to find the true cost of homelessness to the public. The costs are dispersed over so many government agencies and facilities that they are managed in a piecemeal way,

[...] we did a global scoping review of research since 2009 that examined the value of providing a secure, stable home for formerly homeless people and the wider taxpaying community. In total, we examined 100 research papers and analyzed outcomes across a range of domains including physical and mental health, emergency department use, substance use, well-being, community integration, mortality, criminal justice interaction, service use and cost-effectiveness.

The researchers cited lower health care costs and the costs of crimes committed by the homeless to support their case.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

A key component of the oxygen cycle is where plants and some types of bacteria essentially take sunlight, water, and CO2, and convert them to carbohydrates and oxygen, which are then cycled and used by other organisms that breathe oxygen. This oxygen serves as a vehicle for electrons, gaining and donating electrons as it powers through the metabolic processes. However, for half of the time life has existed on Earth, there was no oxygen present

[...] Visscher explains, "We started working in Chile, where I found a blood red river. The red sediments are made up by anoxogenic photosynthetic bacteria. The water is very high in arsenic as well. The water that flows over the mats contains hydrogen sulfide that is volcanic in origin and it flows very rapidly over these mats. There is absolutely no oxygen."

The team also showed that the mats were making carbonate deposits and creating a new generation of stromatolites. The carbonate materials also showed evidence for arsenic cycling—that arsenic is serving as a vehicle for electrons—proving that the microbes are actively metabolizing arsenic, much like oxygen in modern systems. Visscher says these findings, along with the fossil evidence, gives a strong sense of the early conditions of Earth.

One microbe's meat is another microbe's poison.

Journal Reference:
Pieter T. Visscher, Kimberley L. Gallagher, Anthony Bouton, et al. Modern arsenotrophic microbial mats provide an analogue for life in the anoxic Archean [open], Communications Earth & Environment (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-00025-2)

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martyb writes:

US has topped 200,000 COVID-19 deaths:

The US death toll from COVID-19 topped 200,000 Tuesday as daily reports of new cases still hover around 40,000 and daily deaths are in the 700s.

The grim milestone of 200,000 deaths is equivalent to the death toll from the 9/11 attacks occurring every day for 66 days. It's also equivalent to losing about the entire population Salt Lake City, Utah, or nearly the population of Rochester, New York. COVID-19 has killed more in the United States than the number of Americans who died in the five most recent wars combined (the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf War).

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, the COVID-19 death toll had already reached 200,541 deaths, stemming from more than 6.88 million cases. While these figures are based on data from state health authorities, the actual death toll is expected to be much higher.

[...] Worldwide, there have been more than 31 million cases and nearly 967,000 deaths.

A Single Death Is a Tragedy; A Million Deaths Is a Statistic.

Coronavirus count

Also at cnet, Pro Publica, The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Al Jazeera.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Bing user data exposed – includes location, search terms, sites visited

A team of security researchers has found Bing user data exposed on a server owned by Microsoft. The data comes from both iOS and Android versions of the Bing app. The data exposed includes unique user IDs, search queries, location, and even webpages visited as a result of searches[.]

Security site WizCase made the discovery. It says the database was originally password-protected, but was left unprotected between September 10 and September 16.

From WizCase:

[...] Hakcil and his team discovered a 6.5TB server and saw it was growing by as much as 200GB per day. Based on the sheer amount of data, it is safe to speculate that anyone who has made a Bing search with the mobile app while the server has been exposed is at risk. We saw records of people searching from more than 70 countries.

[...] After Hakcil confirmed the database belonged to the Bing app, the team alerted Microsoft on September 13th. They quickly responded to our message. We then reported the data leak to the MSRC – Microsoft Security Response Center and they secured it a few days later, on September 16th.

From what we saw, between September 10th – 12th, the server was targeted by a Meow attack^[0] that deleted nearly the entire database. When we discovered the server on the 12th, 100 million records had been collected since the attack. There was a second Meow attack on the server on September 14.

⁰Meow attack:

The new cyber attack appears to be a bot that seeks and destroys unsecured databases that run the Elasticsearch, Redis or MongoDB software. The name comes from it overwriting the word "meow" repeatedly in each database index that it finds. The bot overwrites all of the data, effectively destroying the contents of the database.

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Fnord666 writes:

Popular password manager could have a critical vulnerability:

A security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability in a popular password manager that could allow for remote code execution.

The password manager in question is Bitwarden and the vulnerability resides in the company's desktop app which automatically downloads updates and replaces its own code with these updates without user intervention.

Co-founder of Keytern.al Jeffrey Paul argues that the company's developers could leverage its automatic updates to install backdoors into every single installation of the password manager and steal all of the passwords stored in every desktop user's database.

In a post on GitHub, Jeffrey Paul provided further insight into the fact that Bitwarden would grant its developers full remote code execution, saying:

"The fact that, of all things, a password manager would grant FULL REMOTE CODE EXECUTION to its developers is insane. The very fact that you would ship a feature like this means you are in no way qualified to hold keys or authentication credentials that allow you to publish a new version that could, at your sole option, backdoor everyone's installations and steal all the passwords of every single user of this software."

Paul also makes the point that a third party could convince Bitwarden's developers to add a backdoor to the company's password manager. For instance, if someone had information on the developers, they could blackmail them into adding a backdoor or they could even pay them to do so as well.

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Fnord666 writes:

Why there is no speed limit in the superfluid universe:

Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects.

It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed limit would destroy the superfluid. Prior experiments in Lancaster have found that it is not a strict rule and objects can move at much greater speeds without destroying the fragile superfluid state.

Now scientists from Lancaster University have found the reason for the absence of the speed limit: exotic particles that stick to all surfaces in the superfluid.

The discovery may guide applications in quantum technology, even quantum computing, where multiple research groups already aim to make use of these unusual particles.

Journal Reference:
S. Autti, S. L. Ahlstrom, R. P. Haley, et al. Fundamental dissipation due to bound fermions in the zero-temperature limit [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18499-1)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

QR code use grows in popularity but poses hidden risks:

The use of QR codes has risen during the pandemic as they offer a perfect solution to contactless interaction. But many employees are also using their mobile devices to scan QR codes for personal use, putting themselves and enterprise resources at risk.

A new study from security platform MobileIron shows that 84 percent of people have scanned a QR code before, with 32 percent having done so in the past week and 26 percent in the past month.

In the last six months, 38 percent of respondents say they have scanned a QR code at a restaurant, bar or café, 37 percent at a retailer and 32 percent on a consumer product. It's clear that codes are popular and 53 percent of respondents want to see them used more broadly in the future. 43 percent plan to use a QR code as a payment method in the near future and 40 percent of people would be willing to vote using a QR code received in the mail, if it was an option.

However, QR codes are a tempting attack route for hackers too as the mobile user interface prompts users to take immediate actions, while limiting the amount of information available before, for example, visiting a website.

Have any Soylentils done anything interesting with QR codes?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

TI And Cadence Make PSpice Free:

We like simulation software. Texas Instruments long offered TINA, but recently they've joined with Cadence to make OrCAD PSpice available for free with some restrictions. You've probably heard of PSpice — it's widely used in academia and industry, but is usually quite costly.

[...] The program requires registration and an approval step to get a license key. The downloaded program has TI models along with other standard models. There seem to be few limits as long as you stick to the supplied library. According to the datasheet, there are no size or simulation complexity limitations in that case. If you want to use other models, you can, but that's where the limitations hit you:

Are there any Soylentils who have experience using PSpice? Is there some other similar product which is better?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

A 48,000 years old tooth that belonged to one of the last Neanderthals in Northern Italy:

A milk-tooth found in the vicinity of "Riparo del Broion" on the Berici Hills in the Veneto region bears evidence of one of the last Neanderthals in Italy. This small canine tooth belonged to a child between 11 and 12 that had lived in that area around 48,000 years ago. This is the most recent Neanderthal finding in Northern Italy.

[...] The genetic analysis reveals that the owner of the tooth found in Veneto was a relative, on their mother's side, of Neanderthals that had lived in Belgium. This makes this site in Veneto a key-area for comprehending the gradual extinction of Neanderthals in Europe.

"This small tooth is extremely important", according to Stefano Benazzi, professor at the University of Bologna and research coordinator. "This is even more relevant if we consider that, when this child who lived in Veneto lost their tooth, Homo Sapiens communities were already present a thousand kilometres away in Bulgaria".

[...] "The techniques we employed to analyse the tooth led to the following discovery: this is an upper canine milk-tooth that belonged to a Neanderthal child, aged 11 or 12, that lived between 48,000 and 45,000 years ago", as report Gregorio Oxilia and Eugenio Bortolini, who are co-authors of the study and researchers at the University of Bologna. "According to this dating, this little milk-tooth is the most recent finding of the Neanderthal period in Northern Italy and one of the latest in the entire peninsula".

Journal Reference:
Matteo Romandini, Gregorio Oxilia, Eugenio Bortolini, et al. A late Neanderthal tooth from northeastern Italy, Journal of Human Evolution (DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102867)

Original Submission