SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

A team from University of Leicester - Department of Engineering has, for the first time ever, vibration-mapped the famous London bell Big Ben in order to reveal why it produces its distinct harmonious tone.

The group, from the Advanced Structural Dynamics Evaluation Centre (ASDEC), measured four of Big Ben's chimes, taking place at 9AM, 10AM, 11AM and 12 noon. The ASDEC team used a measurement technique called 'laser Doppler vibrometry'. This involved creating a 3D computer model of Big Ben and then using lasers to map the vibrations in the metal of the bell as it chimed.

ASDEC, working with the BBC, measured the structural dynamics of Big Ben in an unprecedented level of detail after being given exclusive access to the iconic structure. Using two Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometers, the team was able to characterise Big Ben without touching it providing high-density vibration measurements without any loss of accuracy or precision.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2017/march/university-of-leicester-researchers-measure-big-ben2019s-bong

[Also Covered By]: Researchers measure Big Ben's bong

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

NASA has just published its 2017-2018 software catalog, which lists the many apps, code libraries and tools that pretty much anyone can download and use. Of course, most of it is pretty closely tied to... you know, launching spacecraft and stuff, which most people don't do. But here are a few items that might prove useful to tinkers and curious lay people alike.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/02/nasa-released-a-ton-of-software-for-free-and-heres-some-you-should-try/

NASA has just published its 2017-2018 software catalog

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Despite advancements in fuel-saving technologies over the last 25 years, on-road fuel economy for all vehicles is up only one mile per gallon during that time.

In an update to research conducted two years ago, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute say that actual, on-road fuel economy for the entire fleet of vehicles (including cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles) has improved from 16.9 mpg in 1991 to 17.9 mpg in 2015.

"One fundamental problem with improving the average fuel economy of the on-road fleet is that improvements in fuel economy for new vehicles take a long time to substantially influence fuel economy of the entire on-road fleet," said Sivak, a research professor at UMTRI. "This is the case because it takes many years to turn over the fleet."

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-gas-mileage-gallon-early-90s.html

[Abstract]: On-Road Fuel Economy of Vehicles in the United States: 1923-2015 [PDF]

What do you think, could it be a conspiracy by oil companies ??

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

Update: March 1, 2017 Today IBM told Ars Technica that it "has decided to dedicate the patent to the public" and it filed a formal disclaimer at the Patent Office making this dedication. While this is just one patent in IBM's massive portfolio, we are glad to learn that it has declared it will not enforce its patent on out-of-office email.

On January 17, 2017, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted IBM a patent on an out-of-office email system. Yes, really.

United States Patent No. 9,547,842 (the '842 Patent),"Out-of-office electronic mail messaging system," traces its history to an application filed back in 2010. That means it supposedly represents a new, non-obvious advance over technology from that time. But, as many office workers know, automated out-of-office messages were a "workplace staple" decades before IBM filed its application. The Patent Office is so out of touch that it conducted years of review of this application without ever discussing any real-world software.

The '842 Patent describes technology that would have been stupefyingly mundane to a 2010 reader. A user inputs "availability data" such as a "start date, an end date and at least one availability indicator message." The system then uses this data to send out-of-office messages. The only arguably new feature it claims is automatically notifying correspondents a few days before a vacation so that they can prepare in advance for a coworker's absence. From a technological perspective, this is a trivial change to existing systems. Indeed, it is like asking for a patent on the idea of sending a postcard, not from a vacation, but to let someone know you will go on a vacation.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/stupid-patent-month-ibm-patents-out-office-email

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Climate Change News reports

In 2016, China's solar capacity grew a staggering 81.6% to 77GW, double the total installed in the US. Wind power grew 13.2% to 149GW--roughly a third of all wind energy is located in China.

[...] [For] the third year in a row, the world's biggest polluter has cut back its use of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. [...] Coal use fell 4.7%. It is the largest year on year drop in a decline that has now been repeated since 2014.

[...] Greenpeace cautioned, [however,] that this was a measure of the physical weight of coal burned. When measured in energy units, the drop was just 1.3%. This could be due to an improvement in coal quality or discrepancies in reporting.

[...] Xu Zhaoyuan, head of research division at the industrial economy department of the Development Research Centre of China's State Council, said [...] "I don't think coal consumption is going to rebound in the next several years, but will rather plateau, meaning it will remain stable or decrease slowly."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The answer, strangely, is not "Chuck Norris":

Two recent publications suggest that life, in the form of ancient, simple organisms called methanogens, could survive the harsh conditions found near the surface of Mars, and deep in its soils. Using methanogens to test for survivability is particularly relevant because scientists have detected their byproduct, methane, in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is strongly associated with organic matter, though there are non-organic sources of the gas, including volcanic eruptions.

Scientists aren't yet sure what the presence of Martian methane means. But one possibility is that tenacious life flourishes on Mars despite the rocky soil, thin atmosphere and scarcity of liquid water.

"We consider methanogens ideal candidates for possible life on Mars because they are anaerobic, and non-photosynthetic, meaning that they could exist in the subsurface," said Rebecca Mickol, a Ph.D. candidate at the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Science. "Just a few millimeters of Martian regolith is enough to protect the organisms from the dangerous UV and cosmic radiation that hits the surface. Additionally, methane has been detected in the Martian atmosphere, via multiple space-based and ground-based sources, including the Martian rover, Curiosity. Although these findings are still controversial, the presence of methane on Mars is particularly exciting because most methane on Earth is biological in origin."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Chemical compounds that emit light are used in a variety of different materials, from glow-in-the-dark children's toys to LED lights to light-emitting sensors. As the demand for these compounds increases, finding new efficient methods for their production is essential.

[...] Researchers, led by Prof. Julia Khusnutdinova, designed compounds whose photoluminescence depended on weak interactions between atoms within the single compound molecule itself. As a result, they obtained the tunability of the aggregation-based system confined to a single molecule, without the need for intermolecular aggregation.

[...] "We found that we could change the color produced by the compound based on what other groups of atoms were bound to the ligand," illuminates Filonenko. "Larger groups would cause the rings to move closer together, shifting the color to the orange-yellow range, while smaller substituents would make the rings move apart, turning the emission color red. The ability to tune the wavelength of light emitted from these molecules provides a huge advantage over the traditional metal-ligand PL complexes".

The tunability and controllability of these complexes makes them an attractive candidate for many applications. "We see a high potential for these compounds to be used as sensors due to their very high sensitivity to the surrounding environment," revealed Filonenko.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On February 27, World Health Organization published its first ever list of the top 12 "priority pathogens."

The list was drawn up in a bid to guide and promote research and development (R&D) of new antibiotics, as part of WHO's efforts to address growing global resistance to antimicrobial medicines.

The list highlights in particular the threat of gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. These bacteria have built-in abilities to find new ways to resist treatment and can pass along genetic material that allows other bacteria to become drug-resistant as well.

[...] "Antibiotic resistance is growing, and we are fast running out of treatment options. If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we most urgently need are not going to be developed in time."

[...] The most critical group of all includes multidrug resistant bacteria that pose a particular threat in hospitals, nursing homes, and among patients whose care requires devices such as ventilators and blood catheters. They include Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas and various Enterobacteriaceae (including Klebsiella, E. coli, Serratia, and Proteus). They can cause severe and often deadly infections such as bloodstream infections and pneumonia.

These bacteria have become resistant to a large number of antibiotics, including carbapenems and third generation cephalosporins – the best available antibiotics for treating multi-drug resistant bacteria.

More analysis at NPR: WHO's First-Ever List Of The Dirty Dozen Superbugs

Original Submission

AMD Ryzen 7 Launches

takyon writes:

Reviews and benchmarks for AMD's Ryzen 7 8-core desktop CPUs flooded out at 9 AM EST/6 AM PST:

Along with the new microarchitecture, Zen is the first CPU from AMD to be launched on GlobalFoundries' 14nm process, which is semi-licenced from Samsung. At a base overview, the process should offer 30% better efficiency over the 28nm HKMG (high-k metal gate) process used at TSMC for previous products. One of the issues facing AMD these past few years has been Intel's prowess in manufacturing, first at 22nm and then at 14nm - both using iterative FinFET generations. This gave an efficiency and die-size deficit to AMD through no real fault of their own: redesigning older Bulldozer-derived products for a smaller process is both difficult and gives a lot of waste, depending on how the microarchitecture as designed. Moving to GloFo' 14nm on FinFET, along with a new microarchitecture designed for this specific node, is one stepping stone to playing the game of high-end CPU performance.

Ryzen 5 chips will be released sometime in "Q2", and are presumed to have 4 to 6 cores with hyperthreading enabled. One of these has been revealed: the Ryzen 5 1600X. It has 6 cores, and equivalent clock (3.6 GHz) and turbo (4.0 GHz) speeds to the $500 8-core flagship Ryzen 7 1800X. Ryzen 3 chips will be released in the second half of the year, and include quad-cores with no hyperthreading.

The Intel Core i7-7700K maintains a lead in single-threaded performance, but the Ryzen 7 chips lead in many multi-threaded benchmarks (sometimes beating the $1089 Intel Core i7-6900K).

takyon writes:

Researchers have used "scientific fitness trackers" to track the sleeping habits of elephants. It turns out that they don't sleep very much at all:

Wild African elephants sleep for the shortest time of any mammal, according to a study. Scientists tracked two elephants in Botswana to find out more about the animals' natural sleep patterns. Elephants in zoos sleep for four to six hours a day, but in their natural surroundings the elephants rested for only two hours, mainly at night.

The elephants, both matriarchs of the herd, sometimes stayed awake for several days. During this time, they travelled long distances, perhaps to escape lions or poachers. They only went into rapid eye movement (REM, or dreaming sleep, at least in humans) every three or four days, when they slept lying down rather than on their feet.

Prof Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, said this makes elephant sleep unique. "Elephants are the shortest sleeping mammal - that seems to be related to their large body size," he told BBC News. "It seems like elephants only dream every three to four days. Given the well-known memory of the elephant this calls into question theories associating REM sleep with memory consolidation."

Also at Wits University and Reuters.

Inactivity/sleep in two wild free-roaming African elephant matriarchs – Does large body size make elephants the shortest mammalian sleepers? (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171903) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's Solar Probe Plus will travel extremely close to the Sun after years of repeated gravity assists from Venus. It is expected to reach a velocity of 200 km/s, becoming the fastest man-made object ever. The mission will study the Sun's magnetic fields, corona, solar wind, and nearby plasma:

The mission is designed to survive the harsh environment near the Sun, where the incident solar intensity is approximately 520 times the intensity at Earth orbit, by the use of a solar shadow-shield. The solar shield, at the front of the spacecraft, is made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite. The spacecraft systems, and the scientific instruments, are located in the umbra of the shield, where direct light from the sun is fully blocked. The primary power for the mission will be by use of a dual system of photovoltaic arrays. A primary photovoltaic array, used for the portion of the mission outside 0.25 AU, is retracted behind the shadow shield during the close approach to the Sun, and a much smaller secondary array powers the spacecraft through closest approach. This secondary array uses pumped-fluid cooling to maintain operating temperature.

The ESA's Solar Orbiter will orbit further from the Sun and at a high inclination, allowing it to capture imagery from the Sun's poles:

At nearly one-quarter of Earth's distance from the sun, Solar Orbiter will be exposed to sunlight 13 times more intense than what we feel on Earth. The spacecraft must also endure powerful bursts of atomic particles from explosions in the solar atmosphere," ESA said in a statement. "To withstand the harsh environment and extreme temperatures, Solar Orbiter must be well equipped. It will exploit new technologies being developed by ESA for the mission BepiColombo to Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. This includes high-temperature solar arrays and a high-temperature high-gain antenna."

Solar Orbiter is expected to last seven years, orbiting with an orbital inclination of about 25 degrees relative to the sun's equator. If the mission is extended, more gravity assists at Venus will be used to change the spacecraft's inclination to 34 degrees. This will allow the spacecraft to pursue different science goals in the extended mission, ESA said.

While Solar Orbiter will approach the Sun at a distance of around 60 solar radii (0.284 au), Solar Probe Plus will approach as close as around 8.5 solar radii (0.04 au).

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The NROL-79 launch is reported by spaceflightnow.com, which says the secret payload was likely two satellites for the Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS). NOSS is operated by the U.S. Navy; its satellites intercept radio emanations from ships and locate the ships by time difference of arrival.

According to space.com the launch was the first for the National Reconnaissance Office in 2017. It had originally been scheduled for 1 December,

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

North American Energy News reports today on a breakthrough in battery technology that could dramatically improve electric vehicle performance.

Thirty-seven years after co-inventing the technical breakthrough that made lithium-ion batteries commercially viable, 94-year old engineering professor John Goodenough has developed a solid-state battery he thinks will solve the high cost and low range holding back EV adoption.

[...] The solid-state batteries have three times the energy density (the measure of how much electricity can be stored in the battery) of conventional Li-ion EV batteries, but experts suggest it could be another fifteen years before they're commercially viable.

[...] But higher energy density isn't the solid-state battery's only advantage: cells can be made from earth-friendly materials. "The glass electrolytes allow for the substitution of low-cost sodium for lithium. Sodium is extracted from seawater that is widely available," Braga said.

The solid-state battery also performs well at -20 degrees Celsius, a big advantage for markets with cold weather climate, like Canada.

The engineers describe their new technology in a recent paper published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

That's the good news. Now, what does the innovation mean for future EV batteries?

The short version is, don't get excited too soon. Chris Robinson of LUX Research says translating laboratory breakthroughs into commercialized products is "no small feat."

"This will have no tangible effect on electric vehicle adoption in the next 15 years, if it does at all. A key hurdle that many solid-state electrolytes face is lack of a scalable and cost-effective manufacturing process," he said in an email.

A key issue for potentially disruptive technologies is creating a scalable, low-cost manufacturing process.

"The authors note that input materials are affordable, but the automotive companies buying batteries don't care about material costs, they are concerned about the total price of a complete battery," said Robinson.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) comet has been found to release more semiheavy water following its closest approach with the Sun:

The team focused on Lovejoy's water, simultaneously measuring the release of H₂O along with production of a heavier form of water, HDO. Water molecules consist of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. A hydrogen atom has one proton, but when it also includes a neutron, that heavier hydrogen isotope is called deuterium, or the "D" in HDO. From these measurements, the researchers calculated the D-to-H ratio – a chemical fingerprint that provides clues about exactly where comets (or asteroids) formed within the cloud of material that surrounded the young sun in the early days of the solar system. Researchers also use the D-to-H value to try to understand how much of Earth's water may have come from comets versus asteroids.

The scientists compared their findings from the Keck observations with another team's observations made before the comet reached perihelion, using both space- and ground-based telescopes, and found an unexpected difference: After perihelion, the output of HDO was two to three times higher, while the output of H₂O remained essentially constant. This meant that the D-to-H ratio was two to three times higher than the values reported earlier.

"The change we saw with this comet is surprising, and highlights the need for repeated measurements of D-to-H in comets at different positions in their orbits to understand all the implications," said Lucas Paganini, a researcher with the Goddard Center for Astrobiology and lead author of the study, available online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters [DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aa5cb3].

Semiheavy water.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have found over 200 new minerals that exist only due to human activity:

Scientists have identified 208 new minerals that owe their existence wholly or in part to humans. Many in the list have been found down old mine tunnels or on slag heaps where water and even fire have had the opportunity to work up novel compounds.

It is another example, the researchers argue, of our pervasive influence on the planet. New minerals and mineral-like compounds are now being formed faster than at anytime in Earth's history, they say. "These 200 minerals are roughly 4% of the total known minerals, but they all occurred in the last couple of thousand years, most in the last couple of hundred years," explained Robert Hazen from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.

[...] It is further evidence, if more were needed, that Earth has now entered a new epoch. Currently, geologists label the time since the last ice age, 11,700 years ago, as the Holocene. But there is a push to introduce a new classification to reflect the immense, planet-wide changes driven by humans in recent decades - and for it to be called the Anthropocene Epoch. The list of new man-mediated minerals bolsters the case.

Also at The Washington Post, Scientific American, and The Guardian.

On the mineralogy of the "Anthropocene Epoch" (DOI: 10.2138/am-2017-5875) (DX)

Original Submission