Lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries are a promising alternative to lithium–ion batteries (LiBs), the most common rechargeable battery technology. As sulfur is abundant on Earth, these batteries could be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than LiBs, while also potentially exhibiting higher energy densities.
Despite these advantages, the deployment of Li–S batteries has so far been limited, as many of these batteries also have a low cycle life and a high self-discharge rate. In addition, the predicted high energy density of Li–S batteries often becomes far lower when in real applications, due to the high rates at which they charge and discharge.
A chemical reaction that plays a central role in ensuring the high capacity of Li–S batteries is the so-called sulfur reduction reaction (SRR). This reaction has been widely studied, yet its kinetic tendencies at high current rates remain poorly understood.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide, Tianjin University and Australian Synchrotron recently carried out a study aimed at delineating the kinetic trend of SRR, to inform the future development of high-power Li–S batteries. Their paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology, also introduces a nanocomposite carbon electrocatalyst that was found to boost the performance of Li–S batteries, attaining a discharge capacity retention of approximately 75%.
[...] Building on their observations, the researchers already introduced one electrocatalyst that was found to enhance the capacity retention and cyclic stability of an Li–S battery. In the future, their work could inspire the design of other promising catalysts, potentially contributing to the development of new high-power Li–S battery technologies.
More information: Huan Li et al, Developing high-power Li||S batteries via transition metal/carbon nanocomposite electrocatalyst engineering, Nature Nanotechnology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-024-01614-4
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]]>As spotted by German tech site DeskModder, Microsoft has begun automatically installing a Copilot app on Windows 11. The new application doesn't seem to have any functionality, and further investigation revealed that it has 0 bytes of data, suggesting that it's actually a placeholder shell for the most part. Thankfully, users can uninstall the app by simply using the built-in 'Uninstall' option in Windows.
[...] It's unclear how the Copilot app is getting installed on systems that have automatic updates turned off, but according to Ghacks, it showed up on their test PC after the Edge browser was updated to the latest version. Interestingly, the application's AppxManifest.xml lists Windows 10 as the minimum compatible version, while the maximum version is listed as Windows 12.0.0.0.
[...] Microsoft recently started rolling out Copilot to more Windows 10/11 devices, enabling users to experience the AI features on their desktop. According to the company, users can access up to ten Copilot requests before needing to sign-in with a Microsoft ID. The feature is still in preview as of now, but is enabled by default in Windows 11 version 23H2. It is, however, disabled by default in Windows 11 version 22H2.
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]]>To compare the models, they split the data into a training set and a test set. Once a model was trained on the data within the training set, they evaluated its ability to predict the test set.
The researchers found that all the models were better than the trained panel of human experts at predicting the rating a beer had received from RateBeer.
Through these models, the researchers were able to pinpoint specific compounds that contribute to consumer appreciation of a beer: people were more likely to rate a beer highly if it contained these specific compounds. For example, the models predicted that adding lactic acid, which is present in tart-tasting sour beers, could improve other kinds of beers by making them taste fresher.
"We had the models analyze these beers and then asked them 'How can we make these beers better?'" says Kevin Verstrepen, a professor at KU Leuven and director of the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology, who worked on the project. "Then we went in and actually made those changes to the beers by adding flavor compounds. And lo and behold—once we did blind tastings, the beers became better, and more generally appreciated."
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]]>Researchers explain the dissimilar smells of babies and teenagers:
A team of aroma chemists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, working with psychologist colleagues from the Technical University of Dresden, has uncovered the reasons for the dissimilar smells between babies and teenagers. The study is published in the journal Communications Chemistry.
Prior research and anecdotal evidence have shown that babies have a pleasant smell, often described as sweet. Teenagers, on the other hand, especially males, have often been described as smelling less pleasant. In this new effort, the research team sought to find out what causes the difference.
[...] The researchers found that most of the chemicals responsible for body odor were similar between the two groups of volunteers. But there were a few that made the difference. Teenage sweat, for example, had high levels of many kinds of carboxylic acids, which the assessors described as "earthy, musty or cheesy."
They also found two steroids in the teen sweat not present in the baby sweat, one of which resulted in "musk or urine-like" emanations—the other, the assessors suggested, smelled more like "musk and sandalwood." Without such chemicals, the sweat of babies smelled much sweeter.
The researchers suggest that study of the chemical compounds in teen sweat could prove fruitful for makers of odor-control products. They also suggest that more work could [be] done to better understand the impact of such odors on parents.
Journal Reference:
Diana Owsienko et al, Body odor samples from infants and post-pubertal children differ in their volatile profiles, Communications Chemistry (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42004-024-01131-4
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]]>I would like to thank you all for your patience during the recent outages. Something is causing a problem with the database itself. It appears to be running out of room and thus having problems when creating backups. This is not a new phenomenon - NCommander observed that the database was corrupted in Nov/Dec 2022, and he fixed the corruptions that were present at that time. I know that others have done similar 'repairs' over the years. Those of you who have been with us a while will know that we have had various site outages since the site's inception in 2014. We try to get the site up as quickly as possible but we currently have a single active sys-admin who has to find the time to fix the site in between running his own business and having a decent work/life balance. The cause of these corruptions has not been identified despite speculation by some individuals.
New Site
The administration associated with creating a business continues and we think that we are now at the final stage. The paperwork has to be signed by several people and this means sending mail around the USA in order to get real signatures from specific individuals. However, we think that this should only take a week or two.
Deleting Spam
For the last month or so we have been deleting Spam from the Polls and journals. Deleting content is not new. Spam, doxxing, abusive material, CEOS, inappropriate ASCII art etc has often been deleted in the last 10 years. In fact, most of our registered community have the ability to delete some material (their own journals for example), and this has happened from time to time in the past. We also delete outdated submissions on a daily basis. The site software provides a means of making such deletions and it can cope with them. The software that is being used is not new - it has been in Rehash since the site became active. We have received some positive feedback regarding this measure - the Polls and journals are looking much tidier as a result. Unfortunately, we are going to temporarily suspend this measure to simplify the investigations into the database corruption problems. So, as unsightly as they are, we will be returning to the use of Spam moderations on a hopefully temporary basis. We have, of course, also received some negative feedback but it only seems to have come from a couple of Anonymous Cowards, one of whom is our most prolific spammer.
Participation
Finally, I would like to thank the staff for their continued efforts in keeping the site online and active. The participating user count continues to climb, as does the number of pages served each day. Many usernames that have existed for a long time but appear to have been inactive for a while are reappearing and participating in the discussions. I hope that we will soon be able to restructure our site in an affordable yet more robust structure in the very near future.
Jan
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]]>Two months ago, Condé Nast bought and folded the music site Pitchfork. For many music fans that marked the end of an era of music criticism and pop culture. Slate magazine has an oral history of the late, great Pitchfork and how it started, what made it unique, and about its demise.
In January, Condé Nast announced that it was folding Pitchfork into GQ, laying off much of the staff of the influential, independent-minded music publication. The outcry was immediate. Why was one album-review website, founded nearly three decades ago in a suburban Minnesota bedroom, loved by so many music fans—and hated by so many others? Pitchfork transformed indie rock, but did pop transform Pitchfork? And does the Condé news really mean that Pitchfork is dead?
Over the past two months, Slate spoke to more than 30 Pitchfork writers, editors, and executives, past and present—as well as critics, industry luminaries, and some of the musicians whose careers Pitchfork made and destroyed—to tell the story behind the raves, the pans, the festivals, the fights, the indie spirit, the corporate takeover, and, of course, the scores. This is the complete oral history of Pitchfork.
[...] The gutting of Pitchfork is not just a loss for writers and editors, but all music fans. Spotify's algorithm can introduce you to new music but it can't contextualise it or tell its stories. Replacing media "gatekeepers" with AI ones has not enriched the culture. There are new formats for music journalism – the YouTuber Anthony Fantano is perhaps the world's most influential music critic, while Cole Cuchna's podcast Dissect is a masterclass in analysis – but like any art form, popular music deserves a thriving critical culture in the written word. While some music websites survive, notably the defiantly left-field digital magazine, the Quietus, it is striking that the alleged dinosaurs of print, led in the UK by Mojo and Uncut, have outlasted most of their supposed successors.
Condé Nast is the media company which owns one of the highly censorious, anti-FOSS "orange sites".
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]]>While it doesn't have the same relevance to public consciousness as safety problems with commercial airliners, a successful test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in May would be welcome news for the beleaguered aerospace company.
This will be the first time the Starliner capsule flies into low-Earth orbit with humans aboard. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are in the final stages of training for the so-called Crew Flight Test (CFT), a milestone running seven years behind the schedule Boeing said it could achieve when it won a $4.2 billion commercial crew contract from NASA a decade ago.
If schedules hold, Wilmore and Williams will take off inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket after midnight May 1, local time, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They will fly Starliner to the International Space Station for a stay of at least eight days, then return the capsule to a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing in the western United States, likely at White Sands, New Mexico.
The first human spaceflight with Starliner will launch under a lame-duck Boeing CEO. Dave Calhoun, who took the helm at Boeing in 2020, announced Monday he will step down at the end of the year. Boeing's chairman, Larry Kellner, will not seek reelection at the company's next shareholder meeting. Effective immediately, Boeing is also replacing the head of its commercial airplanes unit.
The last few years have not been good for Boeing. A spate of safety shortcomings in the company's commercial airline business has shattered the company's reputation. Two crashes of Boeing's 737 Max 8 airplanes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, and investigators blamed Boeing's design and software for the accidents.
[...] In a report released by the Federal Aviation Administration last month, a panel of experts found that Boeing's safety culture was "inadequate and confusing." The panel also noted a "lack of pilot input in aircraft design and operation."
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]]>American workers who have more flexibility and security in their jobs also have better mental health, according to a study of 2021 survey data from over 18,000 nationally representative working Americans.
The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, may not be surprising to those who have faced return-to-office mandates and rounds of layoffs amid the pandemic. But, it offers clear data on just how important job flexibility and security are to the health and well-being of workers.
[...] Overall, the study's findings indicate "the substantive impact that flexible and secure jobs can have on mental health in the short-term and long-term," the researchers conclude.
They do note limitations of the study, the main one being that the study identifies associations and can't determine that job flexibility and security directly caused mental health outcomes and the work absence findings. Still, they suggest that workplace policies could improve the mental health of employees.
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]]>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-regexes-use-and-as-line-anchors/
Last week I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole: why do regular expressions use $ and ^ as line anchors?1
This talk brings up that they first appeared in Ken Thompson's port of the QED text editor. In his manual he writes: b) "^" is a regular expression which matches character at the beginning of a line.
c) "$" is a regular expression which matches character before the character (usually at the end of a line)
QED was the precursor to ed, which was instrumental in popularizing regexes, so a lot of its design choices stuck.
Okay, but then why did Ken Thompson choose those characters?
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]]>Dr Andy Farnell at The Cyber Show writes about motivations behind dropping use of generative AI for graphics and moving back to manual design and editing of images. The show had been using generative AI to produce images since its first episode, but now find that it is time to rethink that policy. As the guard rails for generative AI are set up and the boundaries restricted, it gets more racist, more gendered, and less able to output edgy ideas critical of its corporate owners and its potential as an equalizing force seems dead already. So, while the show could set up its own AI instance to generate the images they desire, there is the matter of association and the decision to stop using it has been made.
Doubts emerged late last year after Helen battled with many of the generative platforms to get less racist and gendered cultural assumptions. We even had some ideas for an episode about baked bias, but other podcasters picked up on that and did a fine job of investigating and explicating.
Though, maybe more is still to be said. With time I've noticed the "guardrails" are staring to close in like a pack of dogs. The tools seem ever less willing to output edgy ideas critical of corporate gangsters. That feels like a direct impingement on visual art culture. Much like most of the now enshitified internet there seems to be an built-in aversion to humour, and for that matter to hope, love or faith in the future of humaity. The "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" are devoid of anything human.
Like the companies that make them, commercial AI tools seem to have blind-spots around irony, juxtaposition and irreverence. They have no chutzpah. Perhaps we are just bumping into the limits of machine creativity in its current iteration. Or maybe there's a "directing mind", biasing output toward tepid, mediocre "acceptability". That's not us!
As Schneier writes;
"The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the public."
Of course we have the technical chops to put a few high end graphics cards in a rack and run our own uncensored models. But is that a road we want to go down? Do we want to adopt the technology of the enemy when it might turn out to be their greatest weakness, and our humanity our greatest strength?
The Cyber Show is a long-form, English language podcast based in the UK which does deep dives into information communication technology, how it effects society, and various aspects of those effects.
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]]>The inaugural Beacon Awards has handed three prizes to projects working on safer software for CHERI-enabled hardware running on the CheriBSD operating system. For the unitiated, CHERI is an abbreviation of Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions.
The Beacon Awards is a fresh scheme from the FreeBSD Foundation, in partnership with the UK government's Digital Security by Design initiative, to reward efforts at safer software. The Digital Security by Design initiative has been around for some six years now, and it funds multiple projects in the broader security R&D field. The Register reported on Arm jumping on board in early 2019. It worked: It was awarded £36 million ($45.43 million) at the gongs last week. Naturally, there were talks about much more money… but it's good to know that some real technological developments have come out of this.
One grand prize went to the Mojo JVM. This is a memory-secure Java runtime that "can run existing Java applications with no or minimal code changes," according to the awards page. Java isn't trendy any more and applets in web pages disappeared years ago, but it remains very significant in internal business-process apps in many large companies. Its development is sponsored by The Hut Group, an etailer which occasionally pops up on the Register. The team has a 17-minute Youtube video explaining how CHERI can bring greater memory-safety to the OpenJDK JVM.
Another grand prize went to Intravisor, a new form of virtualization host for cloud software, which can run various kinds of VMs with greater isolation on CHERI-enabled hardware. This includes its own lightweight ones and unmodified Linux environments. There's more info on the GitHub page, and there was a talk about Intravisor at the 2022 FOSDEM conference.
The third grand prize went to the appropriately named Capabilities Limited for its work refactoring 1.7 million lines of existing C++ web services software to CheriBSD on Morello.
Honorable mentions went to two pieces of research by the University of Glasgow's Jeremy Singer. One is Morello Micropython, a research project that's produced a CHERI-enabled Micropython interpreter. He has also been studying adapting the Boehm garbage collector to CHERI, which he terms Capability Boehm [PDF].
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]]>Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun to step down as part of management shakeup at embattled plane maker:
Boeing Co CEO Dave Calhoun will step down by year-end, in a broad management shakeup brought on by the plane maker's sprawling safety crisis stemming from a January mid-air panel blowout on a 737 Max plane.
The plane maker also said that Stan Deal, Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO, would retire, and Stephanie Pope would lead that business. Steve Mollenkopf has been appointed the new chair of the board.
The leadership change caps weeks of turmoil at Boeing, after the mid-air incident involving an Alaska Airlines-operated Max 9 jet carrying 171 passengers turned into a full-blown safety and reputational crisis for the iconic plane maker.
The company is facing heavy regulatory scrutiny and U.S. authorities curbed production while it attempts to fix safety and quality issues. The company is in talks to buy its former subsidiary Spirit AeroSystems to try to get more control over its supply chain.
[...] Since Calhoun took the reins, the company has endured ongoing delays to production. Still, in October, Calhoun was upbeat over how fast Boeing could raise output of its Max jets, saying Boeing would get back to 38 jets a month and was "anxious to build from there as fast as we can."
But weeks after the mid-air cabin panel blowout in January, Calhoun said it's time to "go slow to go fast."
The company's crisis has frustrated airlines already struggling with delivery delays from both Boeing and its rival Airbus, and the plane maker has been burning more cash than expected in this quarter than expected.
"For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that's got to change," West said last week.
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]]>Scientists are predicting a once-in-a-lifetime nova explosion before September:
A sharp-eyed star gazer in Wyoming might catch a new star in the night sky this spring or summer. Beginning at any time now through the end of September, astronomers are expecting we can see the aftermath of a spectacular celestial event that happened 3,000 years ago.
Astronomers are awaiting a nova from T Coronae Borealis in the Northern Crown constellation, which is located between the constellations of the Boötes and Hercules. A nova is a brief moment when a flash of light from a binary star system shines brightly in the night sky.
The new light is so bright that T Coroane Borealis, ordinarily not visible to the naked eye, can potentially be spotted by Wyomingites. It won't look like much, but it's unusual to experience it from our small spot in the universe.
"Novas are a little subtle compared to supernovas," said Max Gilbraith, the planetarium coordinator for the University of Wyoming Physics and Astronomy Department. "They are called new stars because they will briefly appear as a new light in the sky for a couple of months."
Novas might be called new stars, but that's not what Wyomingites will see when it happens sometime in the next few months. Gilbraith said the bright light of a nova is a "momentary flare" from the outside of a dying star interacting with what's left of the inside of a dead star.
[...] The light of the distant nova will reach Earth sometime in the next seven months. Astronomers won't know for sure until it gets here.
[...] Gilbraith said the nova will have a similar brightness to Polaris, the North Star. People might believe that the North Star is the brightest in the sky, but it doesn't hold a candle to the truth.
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]]>Google will spend $1 billion to build a new data center in Kansas City. Monique Picou, Google VP of cloud supply chain and operations, announced the initiative at a press conference attended by both Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Missouri governor Mike Parson. The new plant is expected to provide significant benefits for Missouri's Northland economy, while Picou highlighted how Kansas City and Google can work together to bring a brighter future to the region.
Data centers are the backbone of Google's investment strategy, Picou said, especially now that the industry is reaching an important "inflection point" for tech innovation thanks to AI algorithms. Governor Parson said that the data center will support up to 1,300 jobs, a majority of which will be part of construction operations for the new plant.
Mayor Lucas said that one in every ten workers in Kansas City is involved in the technology industry, and thanks to Google, the city will keep growing its appeal for tech companies. The firm is planning to fund the North Kansas City School District's STEAM center with a $100,000 grant, and to bring its Skilled Trades and Readiness program to the area.
Mountain View is also partnering with Ranger Power and D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI) to acquire a carbon-free energy source for its data center. The plant will seemingly be fed 400 megawatts by the Missouri-based Beavertail Solar farm, an energy station located in a former coal community that will help Google achieve its ambitious goals for an all carbon-free energy consumption by 2030.
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]]>In December 2014, North Korea's cyber group Kimsuky conducted an attack on the South Korean Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP), leaking personal information of 10,000 employees, reactor blueprints, manuals, electricity charts, radiation methods and more. Despite the impact of the 2014 KHNP hack on South Korea, it has figured minimally in English-language cybersecurity literature.
[...] In 2013, North Korea used the DARKSEOUL malware to paralyze ROK broadcasting stations, banks and government sites after its long-term espionage campaign, Operation Troy. In December 2014, however, despite those precautionary steps, KHNP was hacked. Kimsuky used a Twitter account named "president of anti-nuclear reactor group" to post sensitive documents and blueprints from KHNP and threatened to leak more information unless specific reactors in Gori and Wolseong were shut down by Christmas.
[...] As with most research regarding cyber operations and the DPRK, the scarcity of publicly available information posed a challenge. This was especially true for the period from 2014 to 2022 when the Moon Jae-in administration in South Korea was reluctant to publicly attribute cyber operations to North Korea for political purposes.
[...] The 2014 KHNP hack marked a pivotal turning point for ROK cyber policy. While North Korea's Kimsuky was successful in stealing sensitive information and publicly demonstrating the vulnerabilities of the South Korean nuclear energy industry to cyberattacks.
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]]>The US must provide assurances that Julian Assange will not receive the death penalty if convicted, before a UK court rules on whether he can appeal against his extradition.
The court has adjourned its decision by three weeks to give the US government time to comply.
US authorities say the Wikileaks founder endangered lives by publishing thousands of classified documents.
His lawyers have argued that the case is form of "state retaliation".
In a High Court judgment on Tuesday, Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Johnson said that Mr Assange would be able to bring an appeal on three grounds, unless assurances were given by the United States.
These assurances are that the 52-year-old would be protected by and allowed to rely on the First Amendment - which protects freedom of speech in the US; that he would not be "prejudiced at trial" due to his nationality; and that he would not face the death penalty if he is convicted.
Judges have given the US authorities three weeks to make those assurances, with a final hearing potentially taking place on 20 May.
"If assurances are not given then we will grant leave to appeal without a further hearing," said Dame Victoria in the court's ruling.
"If assurances are given then we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal."
See also: Julian Assange faces further wait over extradition ruling
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]]>In total, 11 pythons were caught, with one exceeding 16 feet [4.9m] in length:
What would have been a bad dream for many was a massive win for the Florida wildlife experts who discovered a 7-foot-wide, 500-lb. pile of invasive Burmese pythons.
The snakes, which are not indigenous to the region and have significantly disrupted Florida's ecosystem for more than four decades, were discovered on Feb. 21 in a marsh near Naples, per the Miami Herald.
[...] According to the Miami Herald, the pythons were located using novel implants researchers inserted in male "scout snakes." Once the snakes were set free, those tracking them could follow a signal emitted from the reptiles into remote areas.
500 pounds of python caught when mating rituals revealed in Florida marsh, team says:
Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission suspects they made their way into the wilds of Florida as exotic pets that escaped or were intentionally released.
Necropsies have revealed they are eating at least 24 species of mammal, 47 species of bird and three reptile species in South Florida, according to University of Florida research.
In one case, a 31.5-pound python ate a 35-pound deer. "We see the remains of deer inside pythons often. This is concerning and it should sound an alarm." Bartoszek says.
Even more frightening is the fact they may be expanding their turf to the north and showing up in seemingly impossible places. In 2017, a python was found in open water nearly 15 miles off the coast of southwest Florida, Bartoszek wrote in a scientific note published in Herpetological Review.
The conservancy — one of Florida's largest environmental organizations — was among the first to take action, launching a ground war that has lasted more than a decade.
[...] "It's a big Everglades. I'm not declaring victory by any stretch, but we are winning key battles. We feel like we are attempting to hold the line around Naples while we all wait for additional control tools to develop," Bartoszek says.
"There's an area where we had four active scouts and they have not found us a female in that sector this season. ... We are cautiously optimistic, you can't take (1,300) snakes out of the equation and not make an impact."
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]]>https://phys.org/news/2024-03-life-blocks-stable-venus-conditions.html
If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet's blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus' cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, hosts milder temperatures that could support some extreme forms of life.
If it's out there, scientists have assumed that any Venusian cloud inhabitant would look very different from life forms on Earth. That's because the clouds themselves are made from highly toxic droplets of sulfuric acid—an intensely corrosive chemical that is known to dissolve metals and destroy most biological molecules on Earth.
But a new study by MIT researchers may challenge that assumption. Published today in the journal Astrobiology, the study reports that, in fact, some key building blocks of life can persist in solutions of concentrated sulfuric acid.
The study's authors have found that 19 amino acids that are essential to life on Earth are stable for up to four weeks when placed in vials of sulfuric acid at concentrations similar to those in Venus' clouds. In particular, they found that the molecular "backbone" of all 19 amino acids remained intact in sulfuric acid solutions ranging in concentration from 81% to 98%.
"What is absolutely surprising is that concentrated sulfuric acid is not a solvent that is universally hostile to organic chemistry," says study co-author Janusz Petkowski, a research affiliate in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).
[...] The search for life in Venus' clouds has gained momentum in recent years, spurred in part by a controversial detection of phosphine—a molecule that is considered to be one signature of life—in the planet's atmosphere. While that detection remains under debate, the news has reinvigorated an old question: Could Earth's sister planet actually host life?
In search of an answer, scientists are planning several missions to Venus, including the first largely privately funded mission to the planet, backed by California-based launch company Rocket Lab. That mission, on which Seager is the science principal investigator, aims to send a spacecraft through the planet's clouds to analyze their chemistry for signs of organic molecules.
Journal Reference:
Maxwell D. Seager, Sara Seager, William Bains, and Janusz J. Petkowski. Stability of 20 Biogenic Amino Acids in Concentrated Sulfuric Acid: Implications for the Habitability of Venus' Clouds. Astrobiology. ahead of print http://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2023.0082
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]]>https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you'd expect, including a microprocessor. This charger teardown looks at the numerous components in the charger and explains how they work together to power your laptop.
Most consumer electronics, from your cell phone to your television, use a switching power supply to convert AC power from the wall to the low-voltage DC used by electronic circuits. The switching power supply gets its name because it switches power on and off thousands of times a second, which turns out to be a very efficient way to do this conversion.
[...] One unexpected component is a tiny circuit board with a microcontroller, which can be seen above. This 16-bit processor constantly monitors the charger's voltage and current. It enables the output when the charger is connected to a Macbook, disables the output when the charger is disconnected, and shuts the charger off if there is a problem. This processor is a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, roughly as powerful as the processor inside the original Macintosh.
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]]>Doctors transplant gene-edited pig kidney into living human for 1st time - National:
Doctors in Boston have transplanted a pig kidney into a 62-year-old patient, the latest experiment in the quest to use animal organs in humans.
Massachusetts General Hospital said Thursday that it's the first time a genetically modified pig kidney has been transplanted into a living person. Previously, pig kidneys have been temporarily transplanted into brain-dead donors. Also, two men received heart transplants from pigs, although both died within months.
The patient, Richard "Rick" Slayman of Weymouth, Massachusetts, is recovering well from the surgery last Saturday and is expected to be discharged soon, doctors said Thursday.
Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the transplant surgeon, said the team believes the pig kidney will work for at least two years. If it fails, Slayman could go back on dialysis, said kidney specialist Dr. Winfred Williams. He noted that unlike the pig heart recipients who were very sick, Slayman is "actually quite robust."
[...] Dr. Parsia Vagefi, chief of surgical transplantation at UT Southwestern Medical Center, called the announcement "a big step forward." But echoing the Boston doctors, he said studies involving more patients at different medical centers would be needed for it to become more commonly available.
The experiment marks the latest development in xenotransplantation, the term for efforts to try to heal human patients with cells, tissues, or organs from animals. For decades, it didn't work — the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. More recent attempts have involved pigs that have been modified so their organs are more humanlike — increasing hope that they might one day help fill a shortage of donated organs.
[...] Pigs have long been used in human medicine, including pig skin grafts and implantation of pig heart valves. But transplanting entire organs is much more complex than using highly processed tissue. The kidney implanted in Slayman was provided by eGenesis of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pig was genetically edited to remove harmful pig genes and add certain human genes to improve its compatibility with humans.
[...] The Food and Drug Administration gave special permission for Slayman's transplant under "compassionate use" rules.
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]]>Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
For over half a century, aperiodic tilings have fascinated mathematicians, hobbyists and researchers in many other fields. Now, two physicists have discovered a connection between aperiodic tilings and a seemingly unrelated branch of computer science: the study of how future quantum computers can encode information to shield it from errors. In a paper posted to the preprint server arxiv.org in November, the researchers showed how to transform Penrose tilings into an entirely new type of quantum error-correcting code. They also constructed similar codes based on two other kinds of aperiodic tiling.
At the heart of the correspondence is a simple observation: In both aperiodic tilings and quantum error-correcting codes, learning about a small part of a large system reveals nothing about the system as a whole.
...in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them from piling up and derailing a computation. Shor's discovery was the first example of a quantum error-correcting code, and its two key properties are the defining features of all such codes.
...An infinite two-dimensional plane covered with Penrose tiles, like a grid of qubits, can be described using the mathematical framework of quantum physics: The quantum states are specific tilings instead of 0s and 1s. An error simply deletes a single patch of the tiling pattern, the way certain errors in qubit arrays wipe out the state of every qubit in a small cluster.
The next step was to identify tiling configurations that wouldn't be affected by localized errors, like the virtual qubit states in ordinary quantum error-correcting codes. The solution, as in an ordinary code, was to use superpositions. A carefully chosen superposition of Penrose tilings is akin to a bathroom tile arrangement proposed by the world's most indecisive interior decorator. Even if a piece of that jumbled blueprint is missing, it won't betray any information about the overall floor plan.
-----
I wonder... does the Penrose / Einstein principle of non-repetition preclude cylindrical, or even donut surface topology full tilings? If not, that could solve the infinite plane mapping into a physically realizable quantum computer problem. I do wonder, but not enough to give up all my other work and hobbies to pursue deeply theoretical mathematics being heavily studied by thousands of PhD mathematicians less than half my age...
Related:
Hobbyist Finds Math's Elusive 'Einstein' Tile
How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code
How Quantum Computers Will Correct Their Errors
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]]>Scientists argued that mankind had been reshaping the planet long before the 1950s:
A top panel of geologists has decided not to grant Anthropocene, or 'human age', its own distinct place in Earth's geological timeline after disagreeing over when exactly the era might have begun.
After 15 years of deliberation, a team of scientists made the case that humankind has so fundamentally altered the natural world that a new phase of Earth's existence – a new epoch – has already begun.
Soaring greenhouse gases, the spread of microplastics, decimation of other species, and fallout from nuclear tests – all were submitted as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century.
But the proposal was rejected in a contentious vote that has been upheld by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the field's governing body said in a statement published on its website on March 21.
[...] Despite this, the Anthropocene would endure as a widely used term: "It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system," the union said.
In 2009 scientists began an enquiry that ultimately concluded that the Holocene epoch – which began 11,700 years ago as the last ice age ended – gave way to the Anthropocene around 1950.
They gathered a trove of evidence to show this, including traces of radioactive material found in the layered sediment of lakes, the global upheaval of plants and animals, and omnipresent "forever chemicals".
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]]>Multiple sites are noting that the state of Tennessee has passed a law protecting a performer's right of publicity even in the era of generative AI. The right of publicity is the exclusive right to the individual's likeness whether appearance or sound or other distinguishing characteristics. It is called the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act or HB 2091 for short.
While Tennessee's preexisting law protected name, image, and likeness, it did not specifically address new, personalized generative AI cloning models and services that enable human impersonation and allow users to make unauthorized fake works in the image and voice of others. Artists and musicians at all levels are facing exploitation and the theft of their integrity, identity, and humanity. This threatens the future of Tennessee's creators, the jobs that they support across the state and country, and the bonds between fans and their favorite bands.
The ELVIS Act builds upon existing state rule protecting against the unauthorized use of someone's likeness by adding "voice" to the realm it protects.
- – Gov. Lee Signs ELVIS Act Into Law, Tennessee State Government
and
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act into law on Thursday in an effort to protect musicians from unauthorized artificial intelligence deep fakes and voice clones.
The bill, short for the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, updates the state's Protection of Personal Rights law (which protects an individual's "name, photograph, or likeness"), to include protections for artists' voices from AI misuse.
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]]>The next time you're on a walk, consider stopping by that restaurant you've never been to or the local store you keep meaning to check out. They just might be the key to a vibrant local economy, according to a new study.
In a surprise finding based on anonymized cell phone mobility records, infrequent trips to places like restaurants and sports facilities—not the everyday office visit or school drop-off—accounted for the majority of differences in economic outcomes between neighborhoods.
The lesson for urban planners and individuals, researchers said, is to embrace the unusual.
[...] The activities with the strongest predictive power included French and New American restaurants, golf courses, hockey rinks, soccer games, and bagel shops. These kinds of activities accounted for just 2% of trips but explained more than 50% of the variation in economic outcomes between neighborhoods. Wang and his collaborators didn't initially expect these leisure activities to be so tied to local economic fortunes.
[...] "Those irregular and infrequent activities are correlated with explorative behavior, the tendency of some groups to seek out opportunities, connect with different people, and create new businesses," said Esteban Moro, Ph.D., a professor at Northeastern University, who co-led the study. "Looking at those infrequent activities, we are directly looking at current and potential economic opportunities in the future."
[...] What was most surprising was that trips to the office—where we earn our money—were not strongly associated with income or property values. Rather, it's how we spend our free time that drives the economic vibrancy of cities.
Journal Reference:
Wang, S., Zheng, Y., Wang, G. et al. Infrequent activities predict economic outcomes in major American cities. Nat Cities (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00051-7
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]]>Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks:
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years.
Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.
On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.
But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he launched Onerep.
Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.
"I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).
In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product.
"Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first."
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]]>Redis has decided to move away from BSD license to dual-license Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1), ignoring many historical failures where other companies tried to move away from open source licenses (ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch, MySQL vs MariaDB, Oracle JDK vs OpenJDK, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, Terraform vs OpenTofu etc.).
The decision has not gone down well within the redis community.
Any Redis users in our community? What are your thoughts on this issue?
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]]>https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-13013/
"This is an unscheduled emergency release with important security updates to Firefox for Desktop platforms. Android is unaffected."
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2024-16/#CVE-2024-29944
Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2024-16
Security Vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox ESR 115.9.1Announced
March 22, 2024https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2024-16/#CVE-2024-29944
CVE-2024-29944: Privileged JavaScript Execution via Event Handlers
Impact critical
Description
An attacker was able to inject an event handler into a privileged object that would allow arbitrary JavaScript execution in the parent process. Note: This vulnerability affects Desktop Firefox only, it does not affect mobile versions of Firefox.
Tails 6.0 is affected. Please update Tails 6.0 to the current version when they release it.
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]]>https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-protein-human-lyme-disease.html
Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks, affects nearly half a million people in the United States every year. In most cases, antibiotics effectively clear the infection, but for some patients, symptoms linger for months or years.
Researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have now discovered that human sweat contains a protein that can protect against Lyme disease. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a genetic variant of this protein that is associated with Lyme disease in genome-wide association studies.
[...] "This protein may provide some protection from Lyme disease, and we think there are real implications here for a preventative and possibly a therapeutic based on this protein," says Michal Caspi Tal, a principal research scientist in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and one of the senior authors of the new study.
[...] "This finding opens the door to a completely new approach to preventing Lyme disease in the first place, and it will be interesting to see if it could be useful for preventing other types of skin infections too," says Kara Spiller, a professor of biomedical innovation in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University, who was not involved in the study.
The researchers note that people who have the protective version of SCGB1D2 can still develop Lyme disease, and they should not assume that they won't. One factor that may play a role is whether the person happens to be sweating when they're bitten by a tick carrying Borrelia burgdorferi.
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]]>https://phys.org/news/2024-03-backyard-insect-invisibility-devices-gen.html
Leafhoppers, a common backyard insect, secrete and coat themselves in tiny mysterious particles that could provide both the inspiration and the instructions for next-generation technology, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers.
In a first, the team precisely replicated the complex geometry of these particles, called brochosomes, and elucidated a better understanding of how they absorb both visible and ultraviolet light.
This could allow the development of bioinspired optical materials with possible applications ranging from invisible cloaking devices to coatings to more efficiently harvest solar energy, said Tak-Sing Wong, professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. Wong led the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The unique, tiny particles have an unusual soccer ball-like geometry with cavities, and their exact purpose for the insects has been something of a mystery to scientists since the 1950s. In 2017, Wong led the Penn State research team that was the first to create a basic, synthetic version of brochosomes in an effort to better understand their function.
...
"It has been unclear why the leafhoppers produce particles with such complex structures," Wang said, "We managed to make these brochosomes using a high-tech 3D-printing method in the lab. We found that these lab-made particles can reduce light reflection by up to 94%. This is a big discovery because it's the first time we've seen nature do something like this, where it controls light in such a specific way using hollow particles."
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]]>A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple's M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.
The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can't be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself.
[...]
cryptographic engineers have devised constant-time programming, an approach that ensures that all operations take the same amount of time to complete, regardless of their operands. It does this by keeping code free of secret-dependent memory accesses or structures.The breakthrough of the new research is that it exposes a previously overlooked behavior of DMPs in Apple silicon: Sometimes they confuse memory content, such as key material, with the pointer value that is used to load other data. As a result, the DMP often reads the data and attempts to treat it as an address to perform memory access. This "dereferencing" of "pointers"—meaning the reading of data and leaking it through a side channel—is a flagrant violation of the constant-time paradigm.
[...]
The attack, which the researchers have named GoFetch, uses an application that doesn't require root access, only the same user privileges needed by most third-party applications installed on a macOS system.
[...]
The GoFetch app connects to the targeted app and feeds it inputs that it signs or decrypts. As its doing this, it extracts the app secret key that it uses to perform these cryptographic operations. This mechanism means the targeted app need not perform any cryptographic operations on its own during the collection period.
[...]
The DMP on the M3, Apple's latest chip, has a special bit that developers can invoke to disable the feature. The researchers don't yet know what kind of penalty will occur when this performance optimization is turned off. (The researchers noted that the DMP found in Intel's Raptor Lake processors doesn't leak the same sorts of cryptographic secrets. What's more, setting a special DOIT bit also effectively turns off the DMP.)
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]]>TLDR**: families of the victims in Buffalo sued social media for providing a defective product that can damage the mental heath and radicalize some people. Defendants asked dismissal under the "we are only a public message board" Section 230, court says "naaah, mate, plaintiff pointed a compelling enough finger to your engagement algos which earn you the money. Those (civil) lawsuits may go ahead (and I'll keep my popcorn handy)".
YouTube, Facebook, Reddit must face lawsuits from Buffalo shooting survivors
The plaintiffs, who include family members of the victims and survivors of the shooting, argue that the platforms "negligently, defectively and harmfully designed 'products' that drove Gendron to the materials and they are therefore liable based on product liability theories."
...
Feroleto dismissed arguments brought by the social media companies that they served merely as message boards for third-party content. The defendants argue that as such, they are not liable under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act or the First Amendment."The Court has determined the complaint sufficiently pleads viable causes of action to go forward at this stage of the litigation," the order states.
straight from the legal-horse's mouth (i.e. the court order, the "verdict" as it comes)
The defendants contend that no matter how the plaintiffs frame their complaint the only conceivable actionable activity of the defendants is the hosting of third-party content on their platforms. If that is the case, even plaintiffs would acknowledge the third-party content would make the defendants immune from suit due to the CDA. However, plaintiffs contend the defendants' platforms are more than just message boards containing third-party content. They allege they are sophisticated products designed to be addictive to young users and they specifically directed Gendron to further platforms or postings that indoctrinated him with "white replacement theory."
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]]>[...] This week, a group of white hat hackers released the research from an in-depth study into a particular set of security vulnerabilities — known as "Unsaflok," named after the Dormakaba-branded Saflok door locks that they target. The study that resulted in Unsaflok's discovery was originally conducted in a hotel in Las Vegas in 2022; a city that has seen its fair share of brutal cyberattacks like the 2022 MGM casino hack. The vulnerability the researchers discovered is equal parts dangerous and simple: All it takes is a couple of quick taps with an ordinary card key, and anyone could theoretically break into a hotel room.
Saflok locking systems are installed on hotel rooms all over the world; with around 3 million doors in 13,000 properties across 131 countries estimated to have doors installed according to the researchers' disclosed information. Even though all of these doors are in different locations and under different owners, this single exploit could take advantage of every one of them.
The vulnerability revolves around the RFID keycards that the Saflok system reads, which utilize a system called MIFARE Classic. If a hacker were to obtain any two MIFARE keycards, even just from renting out a couple of rooms in a hotel themselves, they could then use a generic RFID read-write device to instantly alter their contents.
[...] The bad news is that, due to the complexity of the systems involved in managing hotel door locks, the process has been slow-going. In addition to individually updating the software in every single lock, all of the relevant keycards need to be reissued, and the front desk management software needs to be overhauled. As of March 2024, only around 36% of the affected Saflok systems have been replaced or updated, according to the researchers' report.
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]]>The Biden administration on Tuesday warned the nation's governors that drinking water and wastewater utilities in their states are facing "disabling cyberattacks" by hostile foreign nations that are targeting mission-critical plant operations.
"Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States," Jake Sullivan, assistant to the president for National Security Affairs, and Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter. "These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities."
[...] The letter extended an invitation for secretaries of each state's governor to attend a meeting to discuss better securing the water sector's critical infrastructure. It also announced that the EPA is forming a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force to identify vulnerabilities in water systems. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday.
"EPA and NSC take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems," Regan said in a separate statement.
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]]>https://nanochess.org/emulator.html
After winning the IOCCC for the first time, I had the idea of writing an emulator of the 8080 processor in 2000 characters of C, after patterning experimentally the more than 200 instructions and doing measures of byte count, I realized that it was possible and I made it. Then I added CP/M support as a extra feature. I was completely astonished when I won Best of Show of 19th IOCCC :).
[...] This emulator was developed eighteen years ago when the computers had 32-bit processors and it used a hole in the C language syntax where you could pass a pointer on an integer. In fact, this is the IOCCC objective: make C compilers to do things these shouldn't be supposed to do.
However, the C compilers for 64-bit processors don't allow it any more as pointers are 64-bit and the int types are 32-bit, so compilers stop with an error (especially in macOS because clang).
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]]>The New Weather Institute in the UK and Sweden, as part of the Save Our Snow campaign (warning for javascript), has a joint campaign to end fossil sponsorships in sports. The reasoning is that those companies are responsible for the worsening climate disaster resulting in the decreasingly short winters with reduced snowfall and thus harming the very sports which they are sponsoring. Along those lines, the institute has published a report, Dirty Snow: The Snow Thieves 2 report: how a ban on polluter sponsorships in winter sport can help save our snow (warning for PDF).
Key findings:
• Climate change is an immediate threat to winter sports. On current trends, in mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere winters are expected to continue to shrink by 4.7 days per decade. In a high emission scenario, by the end of the century, that means winter could be as short as 31 days, a single month.¹
• But, winter sports are currently being sponsored by the very companies whose pollution heats the atmosphere, melting the snow and ice they depend on.
• Using a calculation for the known relationship between emissions and snow cover loss, the existing CO2 emissions of seven polluting winter sports sponsors (Audi, Ford, SAS, Equinor, Aker, Volvo, Preem), presented here as case studies, will melt an area 1,968 square kilometres (km2) of spring snow every year. That is equal to a land surface area 437 times bigger than the ground area used for skiing of Åre, Sweden's largest ski resort and a potential bidder for the 2030 Winter Olympics; and 195 times bigger than the skiing area of Skicircus Saalbach, one of the world's largest skiing areas host of the FIS Alpine World Cup Finals 2024.
• But now, this report provides, for the first time, a new, clear formula to calculate the additional CO2 emissions that will result from any given sponsorship deal.
• We show that, depending on the sponsoring company's carbon footprint, a sponsorship deal can generate up to 100 kg of CO2e per sponsored euro.²
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]]>The first preview of Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available. The update introduces significant new features to the animation toolchain and Nanite, Epic's ambitious polygon rendering system.
Amy Hennig, known for her work on the Uncharted series, demonstrated the developments by revealing her studio's new game – 1943: Rise of Hydra. Planned for a 2025 release, the title stars Captain America and Black Panther in occupied Paris during World War II.
While the game's unveiling, which starts around the 19-minute mark in the video below, didn't include gameplay, Hennig proved that the trailer was running in real-time by exploring its scenes and characters using the Unreal Engine editor. The developers took the opportunity to showcase the newly introduced Nanite tessellation, which adds detail to objects without rendering additional polygons. They also demonstrated systems that can quickly change environmental textures and cast realistic shadows on smoke or fog.
Furthermore, Hennig explained how Unreal Engine 5's motion capture system combines with its advanced MetaHuman character creator to allow realistic facial animations recorded from live actors. Version 5.4's primary addition to animation is Motion Matching, which blends positions to animate in-game characters efficiently. Fortnite has been exhibiting the system since the launch of Chapter 5, and Epic used the GDC presentation to announce significant additions to the game's custom creation tools.
[...] Developers can download the Unreal Engine 5.4 preview on the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, or here. Linux users can find it on Epic's website.
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]]>Why was Michael David Crawford different? - well, he wasn't. In many ways he was just like many of us. By profession he was a software engineer. He wrote software for OSX. He first became well known - or reasonably so in our circles - for being on Kuro5hin. However, he was certainly different from many of us for the physical and mental health, and social problems that he experienced. Despite all of these things though he remained polite and open to having an interesting discussion on any technical issue that arose, both on Kuro5hin and subsequently here on SN. Someone who knew him far better than I did wrote about him here some 12 years ago. If you search on your favourite search engine I think that you will find his name appears quite a few times.
His journal on SN is still there for all to read although it does not do him justice. He was a 'nice guy' and intelligent too.
For example, in 2010 he was interviewed on CNN discussing employment problems that were being experienced by software engineers at that time. But this youtube link was not his only 'appearance' on that site. For some reason he thought others might want to hear him sing and elsewhere he thought that we all ought to know that he invented the internet. That last link perhaps shows the battle that he was having with mental problems yet here on this site he remained the same old 'MDC' that we had known since the start of SN and even before then for some of us.
An Anonymous Coward has reminded us:
Remember in his last words here, he begged us for help. For Theophylline or Aminophylline, or even bananas; he begged for help with "the desire to take my own life. I'll explain later, I can't just now as I cannot breathe and so am fighting for consciousness ... I Beg Of You! ... Please FIND SOME WAY I DO NOT HAVE TO DIE!"
Remember him. A good person, sometimes bewildered at the senseless cruelty of others, and at his best, indignant and retributive against those cruelties. Not a Vigilante, just a human who wanted children to be safe. Smart but too much of a misfit for society to let him live happily and productively for very long at a stretch.
MDC with hair: https://imgur.com/aQO4kyE
MDC without hair: https://imgur.com/IYPS7To
On this site it was our own takyon who broke the news to us that he had lost his struggle. But on the same day several other sites covered the loss that the community was feeling, including this page from HackerNews.
Please, if you have the time, tell us your memories of MDC. He was one of us, and he is not forgotten.
Thank you to all of those who have contributed submissions to make sure that we remembered MDC.
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]]>Scientists have compiled a list of over 16,000 chemicals present in plastic products and found that more than 4,000 of these were hazardous to human health and the environment.
The research review, known as the PlastChem report, was released on Thursday and comes ahead of the next round of negotiations for a UN treaty on global plastic pollution.
Researchers, who spent a year combing through research reports, sorted chemicals used in plastics based on their environmental and health effects – information the team hopes will inform governmental regulations and international negotiations to curb plastic use.
The review found that there are more plastic chemicals than previously known, and 4,200 (26 per cent) of these compounds, including those used as raw ingredients, stabilisers and colourants, are of concern due to their "persistent, bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic" nature.
[...] More than 400 of the chemicals identified in the report are in every major commonly used plastic product such as food packaging, and all the tested plastics leached hazardous chemicals into the environment, researchers noted.
[...] While about 1,000 plastic chemicals are regulated by global treaties such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, thousands more are not.
[...] "The PlastChem report is a wake-up call to policymakers and industry. We need more transparency and better management of chemicals of concern in plastic," Hans Peter Arp, a co-author of the report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), said.
"The future of innovation in plastic should focus on safety, sustainability, and necessity, rather than just functionality," Dr Arp said.
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]]>In sci-fi films, the rise of humanlike artificial intelligence often comes hand in hand with a physical platform, such as an android or robot. While the most advanced AI language models so far seem mostly like disembodied voices echoing from an anonymous data center, they might not remain that way for long. Some companies like Google, Figure, Microsoft, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and others are working toward giving AI models a body. This is called "embodiment," and AI chipmaker Nvidia wants to accelerate the process.
[...] To that end, Nvidia announced Project GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. As a type of AI model itself, Nvidia hopes GR00T (which stands for "Generalist Robot 00 Technology" but sounds a lot like a famous Marvel character) will serve as an AI mind for robots, enabling them to learn skills and solve various tasks on the fly. In a tweet, Nvidia researcher Linxi "Jim" Fan called the project "our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world."
[...] According to Fan, Project GR00T is a cornerstone of his newly founded GEAR Lab (short for "Generalist Embodied Agent Research"). During his time at Nvidia, Fan has specialized in using simulations of physical worlds to train AI models, and now that approach is extending to robotics. "At GEAR, we are building generally capable agents that learn to act skillfully in many worlds, virtual and real," wrote Fan in a tweet. "Join us on the journey to land on the moon."
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]]>'An act of dishonesty against the company' is among the violations cited:
SpaceX requires employees to agree to some unusual terms related to their stock awards, which have a chilling effect on staff, according to sources and internal documents viewed by TechCrunch.
That includes a provision that allows SpaceX the right to purchase back vested shares within a six-month period following an employee leaving the company for any reason. SpaceX also gives itself the right to ban past and present employees from participating in tender offers if they are deemed to have committed "an act of dishonesty against the company" or to have violated written company policies, among other reasons.
Employees often aren't aware of the "dishonesty" condition when they initially sign up on the equity compensation management platform, one former employee said.
If SpaceX bars an employee from selling stock in the tender offers, the person would have to wait until SpaceX goes public to realize cash from the shares — and it's unclear when that will happen, if it ever does.
[...] It's not uncommon for additional terms to be attached to employee stock compensation at startups, and employees who stay with the company long enough to vest stock may have acquired stock under various stock plans with various conditions. Yet no employee at startups and private companies is entitled to sell their stock without their employer's approval.
Indeed, at SpaceX, if an employee was fired "for cause," the company stated it can repurchase their stock for a price of $0 per share, according to documents viewed by TechCrunch.
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]]>https://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt:
Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one like those used in oscilloscopes. It switched the power on and off not sixty times per second, but thousands of times; this allowed it to store the power for far less time, and thus throw off less heat. "That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was," Jobs later said. "Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod Holt's design."
I found it amazing to think that computers now use power supplies based on the Apple II's design, so I did some investigation. It turns out that Apple's power supply was not revolutionary, either in the concept of using a switching power supply for computers or in the specific design of the power supply. Modern computer power supplies are totally different and do not rip off anything from Rod Holt's design. It turns out that Steve Jobs was making his customary claim that everyone is stealing Apple's revolutionary technology, entirely contrary to the facts.
The history of switching power supplies turns out to be pretty interesting. While most people view the power supply as a boring metal box, there's actually a lot of technological development behind it. There was, in fact, a revolution in power supplies in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s as switching power supplies took over from simple but inefficient linear power supplies, but this was a few years before the Apple II came out in 1977. The credit for this revolution should go to advances in semiconductor technology, specifically improvements in switching transistors, and then innovative ICs to control switching power supplies.
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]]>The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is introducing a new ratings program to encourage automakers to incorporate more robust safeguards into their partial driving automation systems. Out of the first 14 systems tested, only one earns an acceptable rating. Two are rated marginal, and 11 are rated poor.
"We evaluated partial automation systems from BMW, Ford, General Motors, Genesis, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Tesla and Volvo," IIHS President David Harkey said. "Most of them don't include adequate measures to prevent misuse and keep drivers from losing focus on what's happening on the road."
The Teammate system available on the Lexus LS is the only system tested that earns an acceptable rating. The GMC Sierra and Nissan Ariya are both available with partial automation systems that earn marginal ratings. The LS and Ariya each offer an alternative system that earns a poor rating. The Ford Mustang Mach-E, Genesis G90, Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan, Tesla Model 3 and Volvo S90 also earn poor ratings, in some cases for more than one version of partial automation.
[...]
The new IIHS ratings aim to encourage safeguards that can help reduce intentional misuse and prolonged attention lapses as well as to discourage certain design characteristics that increase risk in other ways — such as systems that can be operated when automatic emergency braking (AEB) is turned off or seat belts are unbuckled.Scores are awarded based on a battery of tests conducted over multiple trials, and some performance areas are weighted more heavily than others.
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]]>Starbucks is pulling the plug on Odyssey, its Web3 rewards program that gave members access to collectible NFTs. The company updated its FAQ on Friday to let members know that the beta program is closing on March 31, and they have a little over a week left to complete any remaining activities (called journeys). Those will shut down March 25. Users won't lose their Stamps (Starbucks' NFTs), which are hosted on Nifty Gateway, but they'll have to sign up for Nifty using their Starbucks Rewards email to access them there, if they haven't already.
[...] In a conversation with TechCrunch published just last month, Odyssey community lead Steve Kaczynski emphasized the community element, saying, "I've seen that people who live in California in the Starbucks Odyssey community are really good friends with people in Chicago and they have met up in real life at times. This never would have happened if not for Web3." But it's 2024, and brands and consumers alike have long since moved on from NFTs. (Naturally, Forum3, which worked with Starbucks on Odyssey, seems to have pivoted to AI).
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]]>https://phys.org/news/2024-03-crystals-stellar-aging-stars-delay.html
In 2019, astronomers discovered a group of white dwarfs that mysteriously stopped cooling. These "forever-young" stars remain at a near-constant surface temperature for at least eight billion years—an incredible length of time, considering the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Something is fueling these stars from within, but given that they had run out of their nuclear fuel source, scientists were unsure what could be keeping them shining so brightly. Our research, recently published in Nature, presents the solution to this conundrum.
Using information gathered by the Gaia space observatory of the European Space Agency, researchers discovered that some white dwarfs essentially stop cooling.
By studying how white dwarfs are distributed as a function of temperature (from hot to cold) in the Gaia data, astronomers noticed an accumulation of white dwarfs at intermediate temperatures. This indicates that some white dwarfs spend more time at these intermediate temperatures—eight billion years more than thought possible.
White dwarfs are weird. A mere teaspoon of material from their cores weighs several tons. Under such extreme densities, matter can behave strangely. Even though the interiors of white dwarfs are millions of degrees hot, the density is high enough that they can freeze into a solid state. They form crystals out of the carbon, oxygen and other elements present in their interiors.
The formation of these crystals normally starts at the center of the star, where density is highest. As the white dwarf cools down, more crystals are formed in successive layers until almost the whole star is completely solid.
However, this inside-out crystallization does not apply to all white dwarfs. We discovered that the heaviest elements present in white dwarfs are expelled from the crystals as they are formed, just as salt is expelled from ice crystals when seawater freezes.
The crystals become less dense than their surroundings, and float up like ice cubes in a glass of water. As the crystals do not stay in place, the core cannot simply freeze from the inside out.
The movements created by the floating crystals reshuffle the chemical layering inside the star. Gradually, the heaviest elements are transported toward the center. This releases a steady flow of gravitational energy that keeps the star shining at a near-constant temperature for billions of years.
More information: Simon Blouin, Buoyant crystals halt the cooling of white dwarf stars, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07102-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07102-y
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]]>https://niemczuk.tech/2024/02/11/detailed-macrophotography-of-PCBs
I had to create scans of a small flex PCB to capture more details than a flat scanner could give me. Of course, this task turned out harder than I imagined. I already had a good camera, but I was lacking a good macro lens. Buying one turned out to be hard because the highest magnification ratios on most macro lenses are 1:1. The better ones are, of course, pricier.
After browsing some extreme macrophotography forums, I discovered that some people use microscope objectives with their cameras.
Those microscope objectives are divided into two groups: infinity-corrected and non-infinity-corrected. What does this mean? The non-infinity-corrected objective focuses the captured image on a plane some distance after the objective. The infinity-corrected objective collimates the captured light into a parallel beam. The second type is useful if you need to Fourier transform the image by transparency masks or do other fancy scientific image transformations. Filtering light is easier if you work with a parallel beam. To use this type of objective in macrophotography, you need an additional lens to focus the parallel beam to an image on the sensor plane.
The first type of microscope objective can be used directly with your interchangeable lens camera. The only thing you need is an extension tube, which can be 3D printed in an hour. I found a great Thingiverse repository that contains extension tubes for microscopic objectives with various camera mounts. Together with the cheapest 4X non-infinity-corrected, achromatic microscope objective gives decent results.
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]]>Herb Sutter has an interesting article on his blog about approaches to improve security in C++ and modifying the language to assist with stopping programming errors that lead to exploits.
https://herbsutter.com/2024/03/11/safety-in-context/
There are two interesting insights. Firstly. most CVEs come from issues that could be dealt with with small changes to C++ that are being proposed.
The second is that even coding in languages with automatic memory allocation can still have massive vulnerabilties. Even code written in Rust has vulnerabilities so the language alone is not the whole problem.
In that context, I'll focus on C++ and try to:
- highlight what needs attention (what C++'s problem "is"), and how we can get there by building on solutions already underway;
- address some common misconceptions (what C++'s problem "isn't"), including practical considerations of MSLs; and
- leave a call to action for programmers using all languages.
tl;dr: I don't want C++ to limit what I can express efficiently. I just want C++ to let me enforce our already-well-known safety rules and best practices by default, and make me opt out explicitly if that's what I want. Then I can still use fully modern C++... just nicer.
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]]>Government wants flying taxis to take off in 2 years:
The first flying taxi could take off in the UK by 2026 and become a regular sight in our skies two years later, if a government announcement goes to plan. The Future of Flight action plan, developed with the aerospace industry, also says drones and other flying vehicles will become more autonomous. It predicts that the first pilotless flying taxi will take off in 2030.
But experts say hurdles such as infrastructure and public acceptance need to be overcome first.
There are a number of different models, but most flying taxis look like a futuristic helicopter and can usually carry about five people. They are part of a family of vehicles called "eVTOLs" - which stands for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The technology for them exists now, but it is likely that the aircraft will start off as exclusive modes of transport - replacing expensive journeys currently done by helicopters.
The Department for Transport also plans to allow drones to fly beyond visual line of sight - meaning the person controlling the drone cannot see it in the air. Some of the uses of unmanned drones include transporting medical supplies, delivering post in rural areas and tracking down criminals on the run. Their use is still in early stages, but the plan suggests drone deliveries would be commonplace by 2027.
The biggest obstacles to getting flying taxis into the air are infrastructure and public perception, says Craig Roberts, head of drones, at consultancy firm PwC.
Last year, he co-authored a report on the topic, in collaboration with the government, on the viability of the technology.
[...] No other mini airports have been built or trialled since the demonstration two years ago. But according to the government plan, the first vertiport (airport for vertical vehicles) will be operational this year.
The UK's aerospace regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, is consulting on proposals for vertiports at existing aerodromes. New regulation would almost certainly need to be created if the government's aim of bringing in autonomous air taxis by 2030 is to be met.
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]]>https://phys.org/news/2024-03-method-woodland-resource.html
Vegetation plays a vital role in regulating the percentage of precipitation reaching the ground to nourish the root systems of plants both in the canopy and undergrowth, which consequently supports the survival of the entire forest ecosystem. Water arrives to the ground via multiple mechanisms, including throughfall (water falling directly through the canopy) or stemflow (water flowing down stems and trunks), while some is intercepted by the canopy leaves and does not reach ground level.
New research, published in Water Resources Research, has focused on pour points, locations where water flowing under the branches detach. These are distinguished from the large drops falling from leaves, known as drip points.
A pour point is formed when the raindrops, initially intercepted by leaves or the top half of the branch, flow to the underside of branches, coalesce with other droplets to form a rivulet, but fall before becoming a part of stemflow.
The detachment of the rivulet can occur where multiple branches converge or where a single branch changes in angle, leading to a pour point. These are important as they considerably increase water received from the canopy to the forest floor at fixed points, thereby supporting enhanced infiltration of water to the ground.
The volume of water received at pour points is impacted by a number of factors, such as the structure of the branches, leaf surface area (foliation), and the volume of rainfall. The larger water droplets occurring at these points have more kinetic energy than normal rainfall, meaning that they create more pronounced dips in the soil upon impact, thus augmenting infiltration efficiency.
[...] Measuring the water content of soil directly below pour points, the research team found 20%–30% of the seasonal rainfall volume infiltrated to a depth of 1 m here, compared to just 5% in control test areas away from pour points. This makes pour points important zones for groundwater recharge and storage in the forest ecosystem, although in the study site one pour point was identified per ~30 m2, matching the distribution of banksia trees, being one pour point per tree on average.
This particular study site in Western Australia is important as it overlies a significant source of groundwater that supplies the population of Perth. Therefore, the ability of pour points to potentially recharge groundwater supplies at this site (and at others via other trees globally), is vital for supporting water resources management both for forests and humanity.
More information: Ashvath S. Kunadi et al, Introducing Pour Points: Characteristics and Hydrological Significance of a Rainfall‐Concentrating Mechanism in a Water‐Limited Woodland Ecosystem, Water Resources Research (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023WR035458
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]]>After a long wait (and after a query to the IRS regarding the progress of our application), fliptop has received news verbally that we have been approved by the IRS for Not For Profit status. The essential paperwork should be with fliptop by the end of the week. Once it has been received we can then move ahead to create a company. Again, we cannot guess how long this process will take but it is the final step required before the community can take control of the site and its assets.
My grateful thanks to fliptop for his efforts.
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]]>Cisco acquires Splunk in $28 billion cybersecurity deal:
The merger will "revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization," said Chuck Robbins, Cisco's chair and CEO, in a statement.
Networking giant Cisco acquired digital infrastructure company Splunk and says the merger will allow them to "supercharge" and revolutionize the way it wields artificial intelligence for its customers.
Cisco announced plans to acquire software company Splunk in September 2023 and announced the completion of the deal on Monday in a press release.
The acquisition of Splunk now makes Cisco one of the largest software companies in the world, Cisco said in the release.
"We will revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization as we help power and protect the AI revolution," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement.
[...] Cisco acquired Splunk for roughly $28 billion, or about $157 per share in cash, the companies said. Combined, Cisco and Splunk "can create new profitable revenue streams," they said.
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