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takyon writes:

The 25G Ethernet Consortium has released a 25G/50G Ethernet specification to the public:

There's already product a-plenty on the market, but it still matters that the Google-led 25G Ethernet consortium has formalised the release of its technical specification. It follows the publication of the final report from last August's 25G/50G Ethernet plugfest. The plugfest demonstrated an impressive 882 25G link configurations (843 of which passed the test), and 360 50G link configurations (341 passed).

[...] As well as the specification (published by the 25G Consortium, registration required), the group will publish a list of certified integrators. In its statement, the 25G Consortium says the plugfest also demonstrated backwards compatibility (for example with 10 Gbps Ethernet connections).

Also at FierceTelecom. Wikipedia link.

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takyon writes:

GlobalXplorer has been launched:

A website that will let members of the public search for potential archaeological sites has been launched. It is the brainchild of space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak who set it up using prize money from the Ted conference. Describing it as "Indiana Jones meets Google Earth", she said the site would also allow the public to help prevent looting. [...] Using the [satellite imagery algorithm] technique, which is used by a growing number of researchers, she has discovered 17 potential pyramids, 3,000 settlements and 1,000 lost tombs in Egypt.

[...] [To] make sure looters do not use the site to locate potential targets, the high-resolution satellite images are broken into tens of million of small tiles which are displayed to users in a random order without the ability to navigate or pan out. The tiles do not contain any location reference or co-ordinate information.

Users are rewarded for their time with content about Peru, behind-the-scenes looks at archaeological sites and the opportunity to join archaeologists on digs. DigitalGlobe, a satellite imagery company, is providing more than 200,000 sq km of satellite imagery of Peru for users to peruse. There are plans to launch the site in other countries later this year.

6:59 TED talk.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Over 16 years of GPS space weather data has been released to the public for the first time, in a bid to help boost understanding around radiation threats to Earth's satellites, communications networks, and aircraft. The 'unprecedented' collection of data, released by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, comes from space weather sensors onboard Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, which measure charged particles in Earth's magnetic field. The detailed measurements are expected to provide an invaluable resource for space weather research and for understanding how best to protect our critical infrastructure.

"Space weather monitoring instruments developed at Los Alamos have been fielded on GPS satellites for decades," explained Los Alamos program manager, Marc Kippen. "Today, 23 of the nation's more than 30 on-orbit GPS satellites carry these instruments. When you multiply the number of satellites collecting data with the number of years they've been doing it, it totals more than 167 satellite years. It's really an unprecedented amount of information."

Source:
https://thestack.com/big-data/2017/01/31/16-years-of-gps-space-weather-data-made-publicly-available/

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takyon writes:

The lungs you were born with are not necessary to sustain your life:

In what is believed to be the first procedure of its kind in the world, doctors in Canada have saved a young mother's life by resorting to a radical solution – they removed her lungs for six days while she waited for a transplant. In April, Melissa Benoit arrived at a Toronto hospital with a severe lung infection. Doctors soon realised that Benoit, who had been born with cystic fibrosis, had just hours to live, leading them to consider the unprecedented approach.

[...] In mid-April, a team of 13 began a nine-hour surgery to remove Benoit's lungs. Filled with mucous, each lung was swollen and as hard as a football, said Keshavjee. "Technically, it was difficult to get them out of her chest." Hours later, her condition began to dramatically improve. "And literally within minutes – it was probably around 20 minutes after having taken those infected lungs out – her blood pressure normalised, and they could remove all the blood-pressure-supporting drugs and just leave her on the pumps that were providing the circulation," Keshavjee told the Canadian Press.

A small artificial lung was connected to Benoit's heart, while other devices oxygenated and circulated her blood. As they waited for replacement lungs to become available, doctors wondered how long she could be supported like this. "We didn't know if we'd get [them] in one day or one month," said Keshavjee. Six days later a pair of donor lungs became available and Benoit underwent a successful lung transplant.

Also at BBC.

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takyon writes:

A new LG 5120 × 2880 monitor is causing electronic suffering:

The spiritual successor to Apple's Thunderbolt Display, the LG UltraFine 5K monitor, which only started shipping out from the Apple online store this week, appears to suffer from a major fault: when placed within two metres (6.5ft) of a wireless router, the display starts to flicker; move it really close, and the monitor goes black and becomes unusable. An LG Electronics support person confirmed the issue, saying it "only happens for the 5K monitors we have, not other LG monitors."

If that wasn't bad enough, 9to5Mac's Zac Hall reports that his LG 5K monitor, under the duress of a nearby Wi-Fi router, can freeze the MacBook Pro that it's plugged into, forcing a reboot to bring it back. When he moved the router (an Apple AirPort Extreme) from beside the monitor to another room, everything went back to normal.

A support rep for LG Electronics confirmed that the 5K monitor can be adversely affected by a nearby wireless router and said that the issue doesn't affect any other LG monitors. Hall was asked to place the router "at least 2 metres away" from the monitor and "to let us know" if the problem still persists after that.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Dan Zhao and Simone Fabiano at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, have created a thermoelectric organic transistor. A temperature rise of a single degree is sufficient to cause a detectable current modulation in the transistor. The results have now been published in Nature Communications.

"We are the first in the world to present a logic circuit, in this case a transistor, that is controlled by a heat signal instead of an electrical signal," states Professor Xavier Crispin of the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University.

The heat-driven transistor opens the possibility of many new applications such as detecting small temperature differences, and using functional medical dressings in which the healing process can be monitored.

It is also possible to produce circuits controlled by the heat present in infrared light for use in heat cameras and other applications. The high sensitivity to heat, 100 times greater than traditional thermoelectric materials, means that a single connector from the heat-sensitive electrolyte, which acts as sensor, to the transistor circuit is sufficient. One sensor can be combined with one transistor to create a "smart pixel."

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"Fnord666" writes:

It seems that we're constantly hearing about promising new battery technologies and eventually one of them will stick.

Mike Zimmerman, a professor at Tufts University and founder of Ionic Materials, hopes that his remarkably resilient ionic battery technology will be the one that does. At a glance, his ionic battery technology appears to a legitimate shot at finally pushing the category forward in a significant way.

The reason scientists and researchers pay so much attention to battery design is because today's lithium-ion units have several downsides. As we saw recently with Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 recall, they can overheat and catch fire. Even when they work correctly, lithium-ion batteries degrade over a relatively short time as they go through recharge cycles, and they don't last all that long to begin with.

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takyon writes:

Sony has written down $977 million in its movie business, blaming a decline in physical media sales:

In a Monday statement to investors, the company attributed the "downward revision... to a lowering of previous expectations regarding the home entertainment business, mainly driven by an acceleration of market decline." [...] "The decline in the DVD and Blu-ray market was faster than we anticipated," Takashi Iida, a Sony spokesman, told Bloomberg News.

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takyon writes:

NASA has released preliminary results from the genetic study of twin brothers Scott and Mark Kelly:

The first results from NASA's Year in Space brothers are in, and show glimpses of how stressful a trip to Mars could be for the human body. Astronaut Scott Kelly captivated minds when he departed Earth in March 2015, bound for a yearlong stay at the International Space Station. Part of the excitement surrounded an experiment with his twin brother Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who stayed on Terra Firma. At this week's NASA Human Research Program workshop, researchers revealed that the trip created contrasts in their genes' regular activities.

[...] Genomic data was taken before, during and after Scott Kelly launched to the ISS aboard a Soyuz rocket in Mar. 2015. He returned in 2016, after spending 340 consecutive days in outer space. A future mission to Mars would take at least 9 months, but a round trip would be 500 days. Scott's gene expression and DNA methylation fell back to their pre-flight status shortly after he returned from the space station. What this means exactly is still unclear, but scientists are eager to learn more.

Also at The Verge.

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Fnord666 writes:

You might want to upgrade the firmware of your router if it happens to sport the Netgear brand. Researchers have discovered a severe security hole that potentially puts hundreds of thousands of Netgear devices at risk.

Disclosed by cybersecurity firm Trustwave, the vulnerability essentially allows attackers to exploit the router's password recovery system to bypass authentication and hijack admin credentials, giving them full access to the device and its settings. What is particularly alarming is that the bug affects at least 31 different Netgear models, with the total magnitude of the vulnerability potentially leaving over a million users open to attacks.

Even more unsettling is the fact that affected devices could in certain cases be breached remotely. As Trustwave researcher Simon Kenin explains, any router that has the remote management option switched on is ultimately vulnerable to hacks. While the remote management feature is disabled by default in most devices, the firm has found more than 10 thousand affected routers, but the actual number could be "over a million."

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Fnord666 writes:

Beth Mole at ArsTechnica has an article about the levels of belladonna in homeopathic teething products made by Hyland's:

After investigating reports that more than 400 babies were sickened and 10 died in connection with homeopathic teething products, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Friday that it had indeed found elevated levels of the toxic substance, belladonna, in the products.

Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, was the prime suspect of the investigation from the beginning, which Ars reported about last fall. Nevertheless, the products' maker, Hyland's, would not agree to recall the products when it was notified of the FDA's conclusion, the agency reported

In a response to Ars, Hyland's has acknowledged that there are some inconsistencies in the amount of belladonna in its products, but the company said that it has not seen any evidence from the FDA indicating that the elevated levels were toxic or excessive. [...]The FDA said it had found inconsistent amounts of belladonna in Hyland's products. Some of the amounts were "far exceeding" what was intended.

[...] As before, the FDA is urging parents to avoid the homeopathic teething products and toss any already purchased. The FDA does not evaluate or approve the homeopathic products, which have no proven health benefit.

Also: Hylands FAQ about the discontinuation.

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takyon writes:

Oxygen ions from Earth are periodically transferred to the lunar surface, according to a new study:

A small bit of Earth's air leaks into space each day. (Don't worry, it's only about 90 metric tons out of a total of about 5 quadrillion metric tons.) Some atoms and molecules near the top of our atmosphere are simply moving so fast they overcome Earth's gravitational tug. Charged particles can be accelerated to even higher speed by our planet's magnetic field. Once these émigrés escape our world, they remain inside a teardrop-shaped region of space surrounding Earth called the magnetosphere (whose rounded end is pointed toward the sun) and are eventually blown away from the sun by the solar wind and into interplanetary space.

For the largest part of each month, the moon is bombarded with high-speed, highly charged atoms spewing from the sun and carried by the solar wind. But for 5 days every month, Earth's magnetosphere passes over the moon, shielding it from the solar particles and allowing slower speed particles from Earth to take their place, says Kentaro Terada, a cosmochemist at Osaka University in Toyonaka, Japan. Moon-orbiting probes experience the same conditions, he notes.

[...] During each burst of oxygen, an estimated 26,000 ions per second passed through each square centimeter of [the Kaguya moon-orbiting probe's] sensor, the researchers say. [...] Those atoms' origin in the ozone layer might also help explain a longstanding mystery about some grains of lunar soil brought back by Apollo astronauts. A few of those grains sport higher-than-normal proportions of oxygen-17 and oxygen-18 isotopes (as compared with the universe's predominant form of the element, oxygen-16). Notably, Terada and his colleagues say, previous studies have shown that the overall proportions of oxygen isotopes in the ozone layer also are skewed toward above-average concentrations of oxygen-17 and oxygen-18.

Biogenic oxygen from Earth transported to the Moon by a wind of magnetospheric ions (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-016-0026) (DX)

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takyon writes:

The upcoming Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory is estimated to have 180 petaflops of peak performance. Here are some of the early science projects that will be run on it (descriptions at source):

• Extending Moore's Law computing with quantum Monte Carlo
• Design and evaluation of high-efficiency boilers for energy production using a hierarchical V/UQ approach
• High-fidelity simulation of fusion reactor boundary plasmas
• NWChemEx: Tackling chemical, materials and biochemical challenges in the exascale era
• Extreme-scale cosmological hydrodynamics
• Extreme-scale unstructured adaptive [computational fluid dynamics]
• Benchmark simulations of shock-variable density turbulence and shock-boundary layer interactions with applications to engineering modeling
• Lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations for particle and nuclear physics
• Metascalable layered materials genome
• Free energy landscapes of membrane transport proteins

An article at Argonne National Laboratory describes four co-design centers working towards "exascale" supercomputing:

As collaborators in four co-design centers created by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), researchers at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory are helping to solve some of these complex challenges and pave the way for the creation of exascale supercomputers.

The term 'co-design' describes the integrated development and evolution of hardware technologies, computational applications and associated software. In pursuit of ECP's mission to help people solve realistic application problems through exascale computing, each co-design center targets different features and challenges relating to exascale computing.

• Co-design Center for Online Data Analysis and Reduction at the Exascale (CODAR)
• Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations (CEED)
• Co-design Center for Particle Applications (CoPA)
• Block-Structured AMR Co-design Center

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charon writes:

Gold's glimmer is not the only reason the element is so captivating. For decades, scientists have puzzled over why theoretical predictions of gold's properties don't match up with experiments. Now, highly detailed calculations have erased the discrepancy, according to a paper published in the Jan. 13 Physical Review Letters.

At issue was the energy required to remove an electron from a gold atom, or ionize it. Theoretical calculations of this ionization energy differed from scientists' measurements. Likewise, the energy released when adding an electron — a quantity known as the electron affinity — was also off the mark. How easily an atom gives up or accepts electrons is important for understanding how elements react with other substances.

"It was well known that gold is a difficult system," says chemist Sourav Pal of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, who was not involved with the study. Even gold's most obvious feature can't be explained without calling Einstein's special theory of relativity into play: The theory accounts for gold's yellowish color. (Special relativity shifts around the energy levels of electrons in gold atoms, causing the metal to absorb blue light, and thereby making reflected light appear more yellow.)

With this new study, scientists have finally resolved the lingering questions about the energy involved in removing or adding an electron to the atom. "That is the main significance of this paper," Pal says.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chemists-strike-gold-solve-mystery-about-precious-metals-properties

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anubi writes:

A few days ago, SN ran a story on human-pig chimeras.

Here's another story about mouse-rat chimeras providing insight on a problem that's plaguing many of us... diabetes and other pancreas-related issues.

From the story:

Growing human organs in other animals is a small step closer to reality.

While human-animal chimera work is still in its infancy (and faces ethical and funding hurdles, see sidebar), hybrids of rats and mice are already hinting that growing an organ from one species in another is a viable strategy for curing some diseases. Researchers report January 25 in Nature that they grew mouse pancreases in rats. Mouse insulin-producing cells were extracted from the rat-grown organs and transplanted into diabetic mice, curing their diabetes. Transplanted cells kept the mice's blood sugar normal for more than a year even though the mice were not given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection after the first five days following the transplant. That finding raises the hope that animal-grown organs tailored to individual patients could be transplanted without fear of rejection.

Hopefully, these guys succeed!

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