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upstart writes:

US Navy wants to get crashed stealth fighter back -- before China can:

US Navy wants to get crashed stealth fighter back -- before China can

The F-35C, a single-engine stealth fighter and the newest jet in the US Navy fleet, crash-landed on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson during routine operations on Monday, the Navy said.

The $100 million warplane impacted the flight deck of the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier and then fell into the sea as its pilot ejected, Navy officials said. The pilot and six sailors aboard the Vinson were injured.

While damage to the Vinson was only superficial, and it and the carrier's air wing have resumed normal operations, the Navy faces the daunting task of attempting to pull the F-35 off the ocean floor in some of the most contested waters on the planet.

The Navy is giving scant details on its recovery plans for the F-35C, the first of which only became operational in 2019.

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upstart writes:

Obesity Is More Common in People With Type 1 Diabetes Than Previously Thought:

People with type 1 diabetes should be screened regularly for obesity and chronic kidney disease, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Almost half of the adults in the United States have obesity, a chronic progressive disease characterized by an individual having an excess of body fat. Obesity is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, and people with obesity are at an increased risk for many serious diseases and health conditions such as diabetes, heart and liver disease. Obesity is a main risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes, but it has not been previously seen as a major complication in type 1 diabetes.

In type 1 diabetes, the body completely stops making insulin. In type 2 diabetes, the body produces insulin, but the cells do not respond to insulin as well as they should and later in the disease often do not make enough insulin. Type 2 diabetes is more likely to occur in people who are over the age of 40, overweight, and have a family history of diabetes, although more and more younger people, are developing type 2 diabetes.

“Our study shows that obesity rates in adults with type 1 diabetes are increasing and mirror the rates in the general adult population,” said Elizabeth Selvin, Ph.D., M.P.H., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. “Our research also highlights the high risk of kidney disease in people with type 1 diabetes. Kidney disease is often considered more common in people with type 2 diabetes, but our data shows adults with type 1 diabetes actually had a higher risk of kidney disease than those with type 2.”

[...] Reference: “Obesity and Chronic Kidney Disease in U.S. Adults with Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus” 26 January 2022, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

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upstart writes:

Google Just Gave You the Best Reason Yet to Finally Quit Using Chrome:

A while back, Google said that it was on board with the idea that cookies--the little pieces of software code that websites use to do all sorts of things like keeping you logged in, to letting an advertiser know when you've clicked on their ad and then made a purchase--were bad. At least, the third-party kind--the ones that track your activity across the internet. Those types of cookies would be blocked in Chrome by 2023.

[...] Google's real problem is that it can't just shut off third-party cookies entirely since that would be very bad for its competition and might look like it was leveraging the fact that not only does it control the world's largest advertising platform, but also its most popular web browser, Chrome. Considering the attention that regulators and lawmakers are paying to big tech companies, that was a non-starter.

So, Google said it would introduce an alternative known as Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. The short version is that Chrome would track your browsing history and use it to identify you as a part of a cohort of other users with similar interests. Advertisers would then target ads to the "I like to buy expensive ski outfits," cohort, or the "I just turned 50 and have 2 kids about to enter college and want to re-finance my mortgage" cohort.

[...] Now, Google is introducing an alternative it calls Topics. The idea is that Chrome will look at your browsing activity and identify up to five topics that it thinks you're interested in. When you visit a website, Chrome will show it three of those topics, with the idea that the site will then show you an ad that matches your interest.

Google says that Chrome will allow users to view the Topics they are associated with, and give them the ability to delete them. Google isn't asking users if they'd like to be part of Topics, it's just leveraging the fact that it owns Chrome in order to force users to be a part and then giving them a way to opt out if they want. That's great, except almost no one is ever going to do that. Google knows that.

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upstart writes:

Tesla exceeded revenue estimates in Q4 2021 by more than $1 billion:

According to Tesla's shareholder deck for Q4, which was released on Wednesday, not only was the company profitable, but it exceeded analyst estimates for revenue by over a billion dollars. Not bad when you're over a billion bucks ahead of the game, right?

[...] In the production department, things were similarly rosy. The company reported that it increased overall production of all its vehicles combined by 70% versus Q4 of 2020. Of course, that's not super surprising given what 2020 was like. Interestingly, Model S and Model X production was down 19% year over year, while the Model 3 and Model Y were up by 79%, which shows the brand's continued commitment to its more affordable models.

[...] Tesla also continued to expand its Supercharger network to a total of 3,476 stations with 31,498 plugs. That's a bump of 36% in stations over 2020, which is pretty respectable, especially considering supply chain issues and their effect on everything construction-related.

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upstart writes:

IBM Watson Health Finally Sold by IBM After 11 Months of Rumors:

IBM has sold its underachieving IBM Watson Health unit for an undisclosed price tag to a global investment firm after almost a year's worth of rumors that said IBM has been trying to exit this part of its business.

In a terse Jan. 21 announcement, IBM said that Francisco Partners is acquiring the healthcare data and analytics assets from the IBM Watson Health business unit, including Health Insights, MarketScan, Clinical Development, Social Program Management, Micromedex, and imaging software offerings.

Rumors about IBM wanting to sell its Watson Health unit – which reportedly brought in $1 billion in revenue annually but has failed to make a profit – have been circulating in the press at least twice since at least February of 2021. The reports said the move was being eyed so that Big Blue could get out of the healthcare market and focus its operations and sights on the lucrative cloud computing market.

A Jan. 21 report on the sale by Bloomberg said the value of the assets involved in the transaction total more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the plans.

According to IBM's announcement, which is the first time that the company has commented on a possible sale of IBM Watson Health since the rumors began, the transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year and is subject to customary regulatory clearances.

What is unclear from the company's press release is whether the sale includes all the analytics and data holdings from Watson Health or if IBM will retain any part of that business at all. The release does not give any further details on the nature of the sale.

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upstart writes:

An Arctic hare traveled at least 388 kilometers in a record-breaking journey:

BBYY, as the adult female [hare (Lepus arcticus)] was known, made a wild dash of more than 388 kilometers [~384 miles] in 49 days — the longest distance ever recorded among hares, rabbits or any other relatives — researchers report online December 22 in Ecology.

[...] Arctic hares — which weigh roughly the same as house cats, about four kilograms [~9 pounds] — are desirable prey for foxes and wolves on the tundra. Given the hares' important role in the Arctic food web, mammalian ecologist Dominque Berteaux of the Université du Québec à Rimouski wanted to know how the animals move across the arid landscape.

In 2019, Berteaux and colleagues affixed satellite tracking collars on 25 hares captured near the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. As the hares swiftly hopped away, the researchers had no idea the creatures were beginning a mind-blowing expedition across the tundra, Berteaux says. That's because hares and their relatives, called lagomorphs (SN: 3/8/58), typically spend their lives within a single, familiar territory where food is plentiful and easy to find.

[...] For a hare to endure such a perilous journey, it must balance the need to find food without becoming food, says Dennis Murray, a terrestrial ecologist at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, who wasn't involved in the work. That makes BBYY's excursion even more impressive, he says.

Journal Reference:
Sandra Lai, Émilie Desjardins, Jacob Caron-Carrier, et al. Unsuspected mobility of Arctic hares revealed by longest journey ever recorded in a lagomorph, Ecology (DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3620)

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upstart writes:

Kirigami robotic grippers are delicate enough to lift egg yolks:

Engineering researchers from North Carolina State University have demonstrated a new type of flexible, robotic grippers that are able to lift delicate egg yolks without breaking them, and that are precise enough to lift a human hair. The work has applications for both soft robotics and biomedical technologies.

The work draws on the art of kirigami[*], which involves both cutting and folding two-dimensional (2D) sheets of material to form three-dimensional (3D) shapes. Specifically, the researchers have developed a new technique that involves using kirigami to convert 2D sheets into curved 3D structures by cutting parallel slits across much of the material. The final shape of the 3D structure is determined in large part by the outer boundary of the material. For example, a 2D material that has a circular boundary would form a spherical 3D shape.

"We have defined and demonstrated a model that allows users to work backwards," says Yaoye Hong, first author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "If users know what sort of curved, 3D structure they need, they can use our approach to determine the boundary shape and pattern of slits they need to use in the 2D material. And additional control of the final structure is made possible by controlling the direction in which the material is pushed or pulled."

upstart writes:

Major Linux PolicyKit security vulnerability uncovered: Pwnkit:

Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program. It's installed by default in every major Linux distribution.

[...] This vulnerability is easy to exploit. And, with it, any ordinary user can gain full root privileges on a vulnerable computer by exploiting this vulnerability in its default configuration. As Qualys wrote in its brief description of the problem: "This vulnerability is an attacker's dream come true."

[...] Why is it so bad? Let us count the ways:

• Pkexec is installed by default on all major Linux distributions.
• Qualys has exploited Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS in their tests, and they're sure other distributions are also exploitable.
• Pkexec has been vulnerable since its creation in May 2009 (commit c8c3d83, "Add a pkexec(1) command").
• An unprivileged local user can exploit this vulnerability to get full root privileges.
• Although this vulnerability is technically a memory corruption, it is exploitable instantly and reliably in an architecture-independent way.
• And, last but not least, it's exploitable even if the polkit daemon itself is not running.

[...] While we know Linux can be attacked, Solaris and other Unix systems may also be vulnerable. We do know, however, that OpenBSD can't be attacked by exploits using this vulnerability.

Red Hat rates the PwnKit as having a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8. This is high.

When used correctly, Polkit provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. It is also possible to use polkit to execute commands with elevated privileges using the command pkexec followed by the command intended to be executed with root permission.

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upstart writes:

Twist: MIT's New Programming Language for Quantum Computing:

Quantum computing. Unlike traditional computers that use bits, quantum computers use qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both at the same time. Coupled with a cocktail of forces from quantum physics, these refrigerator-sized machines can process a whole lot of information — but they're far from flawless. Just like our regular computers, we need to have the right programming languages to properly compute on quantum computers.

Programming quantum computers requires awareness of something called "entanglement," a computational multiplier for qubits of sorts, which translates to a lot of power. When two qubits are entangled, actions on one qubit can change the value of the other, even when they are physically separated, giving rise to Einstein's characterization of "spooky action at a distance." But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. When programming, discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.

Scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) aimed to do some unraveling by creating their own programming language for quantum computing called Twist. Twist can describe and verify which pieces of data are entangled in a quantum program, through a language a classical programmer can understand. The language uses a concept called purity, which enforces the absence of entanglement and results in more intuitive programs, with ideally fewer bugs. For example, a programmer can use Twist to say that the temporary data generated as garbage by a program is not entangled with the program's answer, making it safe to throw away.

upstart writes:

The SAT will drop the pencil and go completely digital by 2024:

The SAT standardized college admissions tests will be taken exclusively on computers starting in 2024, The New York Times has reported. The new system will spell the end to tests taken on paper with No. 2 pencils, a right of passage for American high school students since the SAT was first administered nearly a hundred years ago.

Students will instead complete the exams on laptops or tablets, either their own or devices issued by the school. If students don't have a device, the board will provide one on the test day. And if a student loses power or connectivity, "the digital SAT has been designed to ensure they won't lose their work or time while they reconnect," said the College Board, which administers the tests.

On top of the technical changes, the testing time will be shortened to two hours instead of three. It'll feature shorter reading passages with one question for each, reflecting a wider range of topics more representative of what students will see in college. For the math section, calculators will finally be allowed. And students and teachers will get test scores in days rather than weeks, with educators no longer having to deal with packing, sorting or shipping test materials.

[...] Critics have also noted that the SAT tests handicap students who don't have access to expensive test preparation courses or who can't afford to take the $55 test multiple times. The digital SAT shift "does not magically transform it to a more accurate, fairer or valid tool for assessing college readiness," Schaefer told the NYT. The College Board, meanwhile, has said that SAT scores can actually help students who don't have top-flight grade-point averages.

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upstart writes:

Liquid metal catalyst quickly converts carbon dioxide into solid carbon:

Researchers at RMIT [(Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)] have developed a new method for quickly converting carbon dioxide into solid carbon, which can be stored indefinitely or turned into useful materials. The technology works by bubbling CO2 up through a tube of liquid metal, and it's designed to be easy to integrate into the source of emissions.

[...] The RMIT team's new system uses liquid metal, specifically an alloy called Eutectic Gallium-Indium (EGaIn), which is heated to between 100 and 120 °C (212 and 248 °F). Then, carbon dioxide is injected into the mix, and as the bubbles rise, the CO2 molecules split into flakes of solid carbon. These float to the top, making it easy to collect the material.

The team says that the design of the system should be relatively easy to scale up and implement at the point of emission. The reaction occurs quickly and efficiently, and the heat required is also relatively low, and could be supplied by renewable sources. All of these are improvements on the team's earlier work, which required more hands-on steps.

[...] Solid carbon, on the other hand, is stable, and could be stored more or less indefinitely without risk of leakage. The team says this could be buried again, or, more promisingly, used for other industrial applications, such as making concrete.

The next steps for the team are to scale up the system to a modular prototype that's about the size of a shipping container.

Journal Reference:
Karma Zuraiqi, Ali Zavabeti, Jonathan Clarke-Hannaford, et al. Direct conversion of CO2 to solid carbon by Ga-based liquid metals, Energy & Environmental Science (DOI: 10.1039/D1EE03283F)

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takyon writes:

NVIDIA to drop its bid for ARM acquisition

NVIDIA faced strong opposition from regulatory bodies in their bid to purchase ARM Holdings, a British company owning the IP of its RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architectures. After numerous attempts to convince the market and governments that could oppose such a transaction, NVIDIA has allegedly given up the plans, which means that it will have to mark a $1.25 billion loss, money that should be considered a breakup fee.

NVIDIA's original plan was to pay 40 billion USD for the company. However, the US chipmaker no longer expects this transaction to close.

Also at Bloomberg and Wccftech.

Previously:

Nvidia Considering Acquisition of ARM for Over $32 Billion
Nvidia Announces $40 Billion Acquisition of Arm Holdings
Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs; UK Trade Union Speaks Out Against Deal
Nvidia's $40 Billion ARM Acquisition: "All but Dead"?
European Commission Extends Probe of Nvidia's Arm Acquisition
Nvidia Reveals FTC has Expressed Concerns Over $40 Billion Arm Deal
U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues to Block Nvidia's Arm Acquisition

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upstart writes:

The James Webb Space Telescope has reached its new home at last:

The James Webb Space Telescope has finally arrived at its new home. After a Christmas launch and a month of unfolding and assembling itself in space, the new space observatory reached its final destination, a spot known as L2.

Guiding the telescope to L2 is "an incredible accomplishment by the entire team," said Webb's commissioning manager Keith Parrish in a January 24 news conference announcing the arrival. "The last 30 days, we call that '30 days on the edge.' We're just so proud to be through that." But the team's work is not yet done. "We were just setting the table. We were just getting this beautiful spacecraft unfolded and ready to do science. So the best is yet to come," he said.

The telescope can't start doing science yet. "We're a month in and the baby hasn't even opened its eyes yet," said Jane Rigby of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Everything we're doing is about getting the observatory ready to do transformative science. That's why we're here."

There are still several months' worth of tasks on Webb's to-do list before the telescope is ready to peep at the earliest light in the universe or spy on exoplanets' alien atmospheres (SN: 10/6/21).

"That doesn't mean there's anything wrong," says astronomer Scott Friedman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is managing this next phase of Webb's journey. "Everything could go perfectly, and it would still take six months" from launch for the telescope's science instruments to be ready for action, he says.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Vodafone is switching off its 3G network to boost 4G and 5G:

Vodafone will retire its 3G network next year and refarm the spectrum to improve the speed and coverage of its 4G and 5G services.

The company's 3G network launched 17 years ago and has coexisted with Vodafone's 4G and 5G infrastructure in order to provide additional coverage in areas that LTE can't reach and to customers whose handsets are not compatible with modern standards.

However, as 4G has become increasingly available, the need for 3G and its inferior speeds and capacity is significantly reduced. Most mobile data in developed markets is transmitted via 4G, while Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology means such networks can also handle the majority of calls.

Vodafone says just 4% of all customer data is carried by its 3G network compared to 30% five years ago. Meanwhile demand for 4G data and the ongoing rollout of 5G means the 3G service is using valuable resources that could be better deployed elsewhere.

Vodafone's 3G switch off will be in phases and the company will launch a communication campaign to ensure that any customer still reliant on a 3G device is aware of the retirement. Although only a small part of the company's susbcriber base falls into this category, these customers are typically less tech-savvy than those using more modern handsets.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft: Now we're switching off Excel 4.0 macros by default:

Microsoft has disabled Excel 4.0 macros by default in the latest release of its spreadsheet software to help customers protect themselves against related security threats.

That setting, released as an optional configuration in Excel Trust Center setting in July, is now the default when opening Excel 4.0 macros (XLM), Microsoft said in a blogpost.

[...] The move to restrict Excel 4.0 macros is an attempt to counter a rise in ransomware and other malware groups using Excel 4.0 macros as part of an initial infection. State-sponsored and cybercriminal attackers started experimenting with legacy Excel 4.0 macros in response to Microsoft in 2018 cracking down on macro scripts written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

The initial Excel Trust Center settings targeted organizations that wanted VBA and legacy macros to run via the setting "Enable Excel 4.0 macros when VBA macros are enabled". This allowed admins to control the behavior of macros without impacting VBA macros.

Macros are now disabled by default in Excel in build 16.0.14427.10000 and later. Admins can still configure the setting in Microsoft 365 applications policy control.

Original Submission