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Phoenix666 writes:

Now, an international team of researchers—including researchers from Oxford University's Department of Materials, the University of Münster, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Exeter—has produced the world's first all-photonic nonvolatile memory chip. The new device uses the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST)—the same as that used in rewritable CDs and DVDs—to store data. This material can be made to assume an amorphous state, like glass, or a crystalline state, like a metal, by using either electrical or optical pulses. In a paper published in Nature Photonics, the researchers describe the device they've created, which uses a small section of GST on top of a silicon nitride ridge, known as a waveguide, to carry light.

The team has shown that intense pulses of light sent through the waveguide can carefully change the state of the GST. An intense pulse causes it to momentarily melt and quickly cool, causing it to assume an amorphous structure; a slightly less-intense pulse can put it into an crystalline state.

Later, when light with much lower intensity is sent through the waveguide, the difference in the state of the GST affects how much light is transmitted. The team can measure that difference to identify its state—and in turn read off the presence of information in the device as a 1 or 0. 'This is the first ever truly non-volatile integrated optical memory device to be created,' explains Clarendon Scholar and DPhil student Carlos Ríos, one of two lead authors of the paper along with Matthias Stegmaier. 'And we've achieved it using established materials that are known for their long-term data retention—GST remains in the state that it's placed in for decades.'

What's the most likely application for this power, AI, VR, or other?

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Appalbarry writes:

Today it's 3+ million student records, plus associated sensitive and possibly embarrassing information, on an unencrypted hard-drive that has been lost by the government of British Columbia.

The media coverage, as usual, ranges from sensational to clueless, but this Globe and Mail story sums things up pretty well.

Sensitive personal information about millions of students is at risk because British Columbia's Ministry of Education has misplaced a hard drive containing documents that were stored without a fundamental safety measure: data encryption. ... The data was gathered in 2011 with good intentions. Files related to 3.4 million students and teachers who attended schools in B.C. and the Yukon between 1986 and 2009 were backed up onto two external hard drives to ensure that they would be preserved in case of a catastrophic failure of the central database.

The data is being described as including most BC residents between the ages of 22 and 47, and as well as school records, includes information about "psychological assessments, describing in-care status, substance abuse, family problems," as well as records of interactions with police.

Not to worry though! The minister responsible called the breach "low risk," and assures us that "there is no indication of fraud or identity theft as a result of the misplaced drive."

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Phoenix666 writes:

In a new study, scientists have opened a band gap in graphene by carefully doping both sides of bilayer graphene in a way that avoids creating disorder in the graphene structure. Delicately opening up a band gap in graphene in this way enabled the researchers to fabricate a graphene-based memory transistor with the highest initial program/erase current ratio reported to date for a graphene transistor (34.5 compared to 4), along with the highest on/off ratio for a device of its kind (76.1 compared to 26), while maintaining graphene's naturally high electron mobility (3100 cm2/V·s).

The researchers, led by Professor Young Hee Lee at Sungkyunkwan University and the Institute for Basic Science in Suwon, South Korea, have published their paper on the new method for opening up a band gap in graphene in a recent issue of ACS Nano.

"We successfully demonstrated a graphene transistor with a high on/off ratio and mobility by chemical methods and showed its feasibility as a memory application with a significantly improved program/erase current ratio," first author Si Young Lee, at the Institute for Basic Science and Harvard University

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takyon writes:

Volkswagen has issued a statement regarding the emissions cheating incident:

Discrepancies relate to vehicles with Type EA 189 engines, involving some eleven million vehicles worldwide. A noticeable deviation between bench test results and actual road use was established solely for this type of engine. Volkswagen is working intensely to eliminate these deviations through technical measures. The company is therefore in contact with the relevant authorities and the German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA – Kraftfahrtbundesamt).

To cover the necessary service measures and other efforts to win back the trust of our customers, Volkswagen plans to set aside a provision of some 6.5 billion EUR recognized in the profit and loss statement in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. Due to the ongoing investigations the amounts estimated may be subject to revaluation. Earnings targets for the Group for 2015 will be adjusted accordingly.

Volkswagen does not tolerate any kind of violation of laws whatsoever. It is and remains the top priority of the Board of Management to win back lost trust and to avert damage to our customers. The Group will inform the public on the further progress of the investigations constantly and transparently.

From The Register:

To put that in perspective, Volkswagen's profits for the last financial year were €10.85bn (US$12.1bn), so the firm is banking on having to pay out at least half of its profits, and possibly a lot more. The EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) has already said that the company could be liable for up to $18bn in fine and fix costs, and that was when only half a million cars were thought to be dodgy. As a result, the wheels have fallen off the company's stock price. Shares have nearly halved in value since the firm admitted using the emission-control software, and they are likely to fall further as the scandal unfolds.

Volkswagen's CEO Martin Winterkorn has already issued a public apology for his firm's conduct, and his position is looking increasingly untenable. Rumors of his forced retirement are already circulating, although these are being denied at present.

The case could also have an interesting knock-on effect in the software field. Technically, Volkswagen's software was covered under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, meaning tinkerers couldn't have examined and altered the code. The EPA has been lobbying with car companies to make sure the DMCA continues to make engine management software off limits to tinkerers. But based on its experience with Volkswagen, the agency may be changing that stance.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been quick to pounce on the DMCA connection.

The BBC reports that this affects 11 million vehicles worldwide, although many of those have passed local emission controls satisfactorily. Neverthless, the same or similar software is believed to be fitted in all those vehicles. The EPA found the "defeat device", the device that allowed VW cars to emit less during tests than they would while driving normally, in diesel cars including the Audi A3 and the VW Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models.

Update: Volkswagen chief executive Martin Winterkorn resigns.

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Phoenix666 writes:

scientists at UCLA have used a powerful microscope to image the three-dimensional positions of individual atoms to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter, which is several times smaller than a hydrogen atom.

Their observations make it possible, for the first time, to infer the macroscopic properties of materials based on their structural arrangements of atoms, which will guide how scientists and engineers build aircraft components, for example. The research, led by Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, is published Sept. 21 in the online edition of the journal Nature Materials.

One step closer to The Diamond Age.

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Happy Birthday To You! Guess Who Can't Be Sued? The Answer's Me & You. Public Domain: A Judge Rules.

halcyon1234, innocent_white_lamb, and jdavidb, all write with variations on the same story:

"Happy Birthday" has just been released into the public domain, thanks to a court ruling by a federal judge in LA.

Judge George H. King ruled Tuesday afternoon that a copyright filed by the Summy Co. in 1935 granted only the rights to specific arrangements of the music, not the actual song itself.

"Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics," wrote King. "Defendants, as Summy Co.'s purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics."

"'Happy Birthday' is finally free after 80 years," said Randall Newman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, which included a group of filmmakers who are producing a documentary about the song. "Finally, the charade is over. It's unbelievable."

Of course, the trail of vultures isn't quite over yet. Class-action suites are already lining up to claim a share of the $2 million+ per year that Warner Music was reportedly earning off the song.

From the article, "Mark C. Rifkin, one of Nelson's attorneys, said the plaintiffs will pursue Warner for royalties paid since "at least" 1988, and could also ask the company to repay royalties that have been collected all the way back to 1935. It's not clear how much money that could entail."

"Movies and television shows have been made to look ridiculous all my life by singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fella" at birthdays instead of "Happy Birthday" so they don't have to pay a licensing fee. Today this wrong has been righted!"

Let's celebrate this victory for sane copyright by reproducing some multi-million dollar lyrics: Happy birthday to you / Happy birthday to you / Happy birthday dear $username / Happy birthday to you.

It's nice to get to take back a part of our culture.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The creators of Pepper the 'emotional robot' have forbidden users from 'having sex' with it, creating 'sexy apps' for it or reprogramming it to stalk people.

One thousand people paid £1,300 to buy the 'companion bot' within one minute of it going on sale in Japan this June, and then £250-a-month in rent.

Japan-based SoftBank included a clause in the ownership contract which said using the robot for 'the purpose of sexual or indecent behavior' breaks this rental agreement.

Disturbingly, computer pranksters have already reprogrammed the iPad hanging from its neck to give Pepper 'virtual breasts' which makes it shake its hips and moan when touched. [The female developer who created the virtual breasts app for Pepper says it was 'for the purposes of testing sexual harassment'.]

It has reignited the debate around so-called 'sexbots', with one roboticist telling MailOnline that machines which humans can realistically fall in love with are only 'years away'.

In a special holiday bonus, the summary is the article, less the pictures. The observant can read it now, and atone tomorrow. Others can debate whether the submission ought to have been categorized as 'hardware' or 'software.'

Related: Sex With Robots: the Debate

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Phoenix666 writes:

Bigorexia can affect men and women, but one expert suggested many cases go unreported.

Rob Willson, chair of the Body Dysmorphic Disorder Foundation, said: 'We know about 10 per cent of men in the gym may have muscle dysmorphia.'
...
'Muscle dysmorphia is a preoccupation with the idea that one isn't big enough, isn't muscular enough,' he told BBC journalists.
...
Mr Willson said men are increasingly conditioned to think that they need to look a certain way if they want to feel successful, powerful and attractive.

'We're seeing an increased pressure on men to look muscular, create a "V" shape and have a six pack,' he added.
...
The NHS (National Health Service) states body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), an umbrella term which includes muscle dysmorphia, may be genetic or caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Life experiences may also be a factor, with bigorexia possibly more common in people who were bullied or abused as a child.

Why would this trend tick up now rather than in decades past when macho male archtypes were more prevalent in media?

takyon: Original article at BBC.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For adults, memories tend to fade with time. But a new study has shown that there are circumstances under which the opposite is true for small children: they can remember a piece of information better days later than they can on the day they first learned it.

While playing a video game that asked them to remember associations between objects, 4- and 5-year-olds who re-played the game after a two-day delay scored more than 20 percent higher than kids who re-played it later the same day.

"An implication is that kids can be smarter than we necessarily thought they could be," said Kevin Darby, a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study. "They can make complex associations, they just need more time to do it."

The study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is the first to document two different but related cognitive phenomena simultaneously: so-called "extreme forgetting" -- when kids learn two similar things in rapid succession, and the second thing causes them to forget the first -- and delayed remembering -- when they can recall the previously forgotten information days later.

"Extreme forgetting." Finally, an explanation for why repeating instructions to children doesn't work.

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fleg writes:

From Venture Beat:

Hackers have somehow infiltrated cat-GIF-meme-photo-sharing site Imgur to direct overwhelming volumes of traffic at 4chan, the freewheeling-forum that hosts some of the Web's darker conversations.

Naturally, this problem was uncovered over at Reddit. "When an Imgur image is loaded from /r/4chan, imgur loads a bunch of images from 4chan's content delivery network or 8chan (unclear at this point, might be both), which causes a DDoS to those sites."

Reddit thread which originally reported it here. From another thread on reddit:

"This isn't a DDOS. It's targeting 8chan users and leaving javascript code in their local storage that causes their browsers ping back to a command and control server each time they hit an 8chan page. Thus far the C&C server hasn't sent out any commands (or stopped issuing commands before this was discovered). Over the evening whoever authored this has been updating and changing their code. It only effects very specific imgur images/pages. Why is not yet known."

Update: Newer articles.

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Phoenix666 writes:

the [Apple] team that has been working on an electric car (possibly self-driving) under the codename 'Titan' has made enough progress for the company to give the project "committed" status, with a target shipping date of 2019 (which isn't exactly the same thing as a commercialization date in Apple jargon, so the actually launch could be later).
...
The size of the team working on the 'Titan' EV was apparently increased from 600 people to 1,800, which is a lot. It's also telling that Apple has been poaching many Tesla employees lately (and vice versa). You'd think that if Apple couldn't show these people - especially the higher level employees - something really promising to convince them to come over, they would stick with Tesla, a company that is doing many exciting things and not exactly what you'd think of when you think of employee-retention challenges...

The traditional view is that competition would be bad for Tesla, but in this case competition might benefit both by accelerating the conversion from gas-powered cars to EVs.

takyon: Paywalled WSJ report and abridged MarketWatch version.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Americans are sending more than twice as much trash to landfills as the federal government has estimated, according to a new study.

It turns out that on average Americans toss 2.3 kilograms (five pounds) of trash per person per day into its landfills, according to an analysis of figures from the same study, which is based on actual landfill measurements instead of government estimates.

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency relied on estimates to determine how much trash was being sent to landfills. But in 2010, the agency required most municipal landfills to measure and report how much trash was heading into the dumps, as part of an effort to lower heat-trapping methane emissions. Researchers at Yale University looked at the records for more than 1,200 landfills and calculated amounts, predominantly based on weights.

They figured it was 263 million metric tons (289 million tons) in 2012, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. For the same year, EPA estimated the figure to be 123 million metric tons (135 million tons).

The Yale team calculated that in 2013, waste sent to landfills rose to 268 million metric tons (294 million tons). With 316 million people, that comes to 849 kilograms (1,871 pounds) per person in that year, the last for which there are figures.

Estimates of solid waste disposal rates and reduction targets for landfill gas emissions [abstract]

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AnonTechie writes:

As technology upends industries and lifestyles at breakneck pace, the Old Continent is not producing any of the online giants like Google, eBay or Facebook. Its best and brightest prefer to emigrate to Silicon Valley, or sell their ideas on to U.S. firms before they have a chance to establish themselves.

The European Union's top executives in Brussels are trying to rectify that with a long-term plan of reforms and incentives but face an uphill battle. The 28-nation bloc is, above all, lacking in the risk-taking culture and financial networks needed to grow Internet startups into globally dominant companies.

Europe's relatively cautious attitude to investment stands out as one of the biggest hurdles—and among the most difficult to change. Investors in Europe want to see that a young company can generate revenue from the start. Europe's many high-technology companies are focused on manufactured goods that can be sold right away to generate revenue—industrial equipment, energy turbines, high-speed trains, medical devices, and nuclear energy.

By contrast, Internet companies often have little to no revenue at the beginning. Twitter and Facebook, for example, first focused on building up their user numbers. Only once they were established as global forces did they put more attention to making money, through advertising and other strategies.
This difference in mentality stands out as one of the key reasons that Europe has fewer venture capital firms and less investment in startups than the U.S. or Asia.

Over the past five years, U.S. venture capitalists spent $167 billion on new business ideas compared with some $20 billion by their European counterparts, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

http://phys.org/news/2015-09-europe-isnt-googles-facebooks.html

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have "teleported" or transferred quantum information carried in light particles over 100 kilometers (km) of optical fiber, four times farther than the previous record.

The experiment confirmed that quantum communication is feasible over long distances in fiber. Other research groups have teleported quantum information over longer distances in free space, but the ability to do so over conventional fiber-optic lines offers more flexibility for network design.
...
"Only about 1 percent of photons make it all the way through 100 km of fiber," NIST's Marty Stevens says. "We never could have done this experiment without these new detectors, which can measure this incredibly weak signal."

Until now, so much quantum data was lost in fiber that transmission rates and distances were low. The new NTT/NIST teleportation technique could be used to make devices called quantum repeaters that could resend data periodically in order to extend network reach, perhaps enough to eventually build a "quantum internet." Previously, researchers thought quantum repeaters might need to rely on atoms or other matter, instead of light, a difficult engineering challenge that would also slow down transmission.

Quantum teleportation over 100 km of fiber using highly efficient superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors

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jdavidb writes:

Well, that didn't take long at all. Drug CEO Will Lower Price of Daraprim After Hike Sparked Outrage.

Daraprim was previously discussed on SoylentNews today.

I'd still like to see a good generic alternative become available so that this can't happen again.

takyon: Also at BBC. Martin Shkreli has not said how much the price will be cut, and is planning to make his Twitter account private, according to NBC. Daraprim's chemical name is Pyrimethamine, aka 5-(4-Chlorophenyl)-6-(diethoxymethyl)-2,4-pyrimidinediamine.

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"gewg_" writes:

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

A British semiconductor company that supplies chips to Apple said [September 21] it is acquiring Silicon Valley's Atmel in a $4.6 billion deal that strengthens both companies to compete for business in the coming Internet of Things.

The acquisition has a smaller Dialog Semiconductor, based in the United Kingdom with 1,500 worldwide employees, buying Atmel, based in San Jose with 5,200 global employees, for more than Dialog's market value. Dialog is issuing new shares and borrowing to finance the purchase.

[...] Mergers among semiconductor companies have reached record levels in the past year as smaller companies combine forces to cope with the rising cost of making chips.

[...] Other chip companies that have combined forces recently include Cypress Semiconductor, which acquired Spansion; Avago Technologies, which acquired Broadcom and LSI; and Intel, which recently announced it is acquiring Altera in a deal aimed at strengthening its cloud offerings.

The Register adds:

In July, there were also reports that Chinese government owned chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup was bidding $23bn to buy Micron, the USA's top DRAM and flash manufacture.

The Dialog-Atmel transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016.

Are any Soylentils still using AVRs? Any problems getting silicom?

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