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Velonews has an update on a topic we covered previously.

It seems that the present method for checking for hidden motors involves an iPad with an external inductive sensor. This gives frequent false positives and as such the race officials tend to ignore it...

"Doctor Bernd Valeske inspected a bike slowly," read the article. "Halfway down the seat tube, he stops, the display reads 10 out of 10 intensity. Is the cylindrical battery truly here?

"Valeske continues, and surprise, the tablet shows another alarm, 10 out of 10, at another point in the same tube. Then a third one in the cassette and a fourth in the down tube."

Valeske put the frame under an X-ray that revealed the prohibited motor was only in the third location. The other alarms were just natural magnetic fields produced by the materials.

The article explained that the UCI's inspectors will let the bike pass in the case of such false positives because they are in a rush to test so many bicycles at the start of races. At the Tour de France, 22 teams of nine riders each raced. Riders each have one or two spare bikes.

Valeske passed the tablet over an induction magnet wheel that cost 20,000 euros. The display remained at zero as he passed the wheel and indicated it was "clean." An X-ray machine, however, showed the plates and wires of the high-tech motor.

Such wheels can produce 60 watts. Hidden frame motors may generate 250. The UCI has only caught one cheating cyclist in its reported 42,500 tests over two years. Belgian Femke Van den Driessche, then 19, was caught using a bike with a motor in its tube at the 2016 cyclocross worlds.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

CynoSure Prime, a "password research collective", has reversed the hashes of nearly 320 million hashed passwords provided by security researcher Troy Hunt through the Pwned Passwords searchable online database.

Their effort, pulled off with the help of two other researchers, revealed many things:

• Interesting statistics regarding these real world passwords exposed in data breaches,
• The fact that this database also contains some 2.5 million email addresses and 230,000 email/password combinations (Hunt intends to purge that data from the database), and
• Some bugs in the Hashcat password recovery tool.

"The longest password we found was 400 characters, while the shortest was only 3 characters long. About 0.06% of passwords were 50 characters or longer with 96.67% of passwords being 16 characters or less," the collective shared.

"Roughly 87.3% of passwords fall into the character set of LowerNum 47.5%, LowerCase 24.75%, Num 8.15%, and MixedNum 6.89% respectively. In addition we saw UTF-8 encoded passwords along with passes containing control characters."

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/09/05/researchers-reverse-320-million-hashed-passwords/

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

Recently, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research wrote in an investor note that Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE: WMT) will ramp up its focus on deep neural networks for its OneOps cloud business and that the retailer will tap NVIDIA's (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processing units (GPUs) to make this happen.

[...] Chowdhry thinks the ramp-up of Wal-Mart's cloud will happen over the next six months and will be "incrementally positive" to NVIDIA's GPU business. These rumors come after reports surfaced in June that Walmart was asking some of its technology customers to move off of Amazon's Web Service (AWS) cloud business. Chowdhry thinks the Wal-Mart cloud, running on NVIDIA's GPUs, will be one-tenth the size of AWS. If it pans out, this would be a significant move for the retail giant and could bring more GPU sales for NVIDIA.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/09/04/nvidias-processors-may-soon-power-wal-marts-deep-learning-push.html

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Universities Space Research Association has upgraded to a D-Wave system with 2,031 "qubits":

The Universities Space Research Association (USRA), as part of joint an ongoing joint collaboration with NASA and Google Inc. to operate a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has upgraded its current quantum annealing computer to a D-Wave 2000Q system. The computer offers the promise for solving challenging problems in a variety of applications including machine learning, scheduling, diagnostics, medicine and biology among others.

The newly upgraded system, which resides at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, has 2031 quantum bits (qubits) in its working graph–nearly double the number of qubits compared to the previous processor. It has several system enhancements that enable more control over the adiabatic quantum computing process allowing it to solve larger and more complex optimization problems than were previously possible.

According to Dr. David Bell, Director of the USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, "The Quantum AI Lab, in its first four years of operation, has supported diverse research by industry, academia and government research organizations. This has included research on the use of quantum computing for a range of applications including machine learning, planning and scheduling, diagnostics, medicine, biology, and finance."

"Computer time" will be offered free of charge to researchers.

Previously: Google and NASA Still on Board With D-Wave, Upgrade to 2048 "Qubits"
IBM and D-Wave Quantum Computing Announcements

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The January rumours were true and on Friday Oracle laid off the core talent from the Solaris and SPARC teams, in effect finally killing what they had left of Sun Microsystems. When Oracle aquired Sun, there were a lot of valuable assets, each of which, except VirtualBox, has been squandered and abandoned. Simon Phipps enumerates the main ones and what happened to them.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft has detected strong winds near Venus's equator:

Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft orbiting Venus has spotted extremely strong winds near the planet's equator blowing at speeds of over 178 mph (286 km/h). The newly discovered, high-velocity winds could provide important hints about the dynamics of the Venusian atmosphere.

[...] Strong winds were imaged by Akatsuki's IR2 infrared camera in mid-2016. Using a novel automated cloud tracking method, a group of researchers led by Takeshi Horinouchi of Hokkaido University in Japan was able to distinguish winds exhibiting a maximum rotational speed near the equator. They refer to this phenomenon as the equatorial jet.

"Here we report the detection of winds at low latitude exceeding 80 meters per second using IR2 camera images from the Akatsuki orbiter taken during July and August 2016," the scientists wrote in a paper published on August 28 in Nature Geoscience [DOI: 10.1038/ngeo3016] [DX]. "The angular speed around the planetary rotation axis peaks near the equator, which we suggest is consistent with an equatorial jet, a feature that has not been observed previously in the Venusian atmosphere."

takyon writes:

A North Carolina man has been charged with murder after killing his wife during what he claims was a dream. Audio from a 911 call the man made has been released:

A Raleigh, North Carolina, man accused of killing his wife told a 911 dispatcher that he took too much cold medicine and woke up to find her "dead on the floor."

Early Friday morning, Matthew Phelps, 28, called 911 and told the dispatcher, "I had a dream and then I turned on the lights and she's dead on the floor." "I have blood all over me and there's a bloody knife on the bed," Phelps said. "I think I did it." "I can't believe this," he said.

The Raleigh Police Department released the audio from the 911 call but redacted some information and altered the caller's voice.

Phelps told 911, "I took more medicine than I should have." He said he "took Coricidin Cough & Cold," explaining, "a lot of times I can't sleep at night." The dispatcher asked if the victim was awake, and Phelps responded, "She's not breathing. Oh my God."

Coricidin Cough & Cold is made by Bayer. It contains an antihistamine, chlorpheniramine maleate, and a cough suppressant, dextromethorphan hydrobromide. Dextromethorphan (DXM) is used recreationally for its dissociative effects.

Bayer, the makers of Coricidin, said in a statement, "Bayer extends our deepest sympathies to this family." "Patient safety is our top priority, and we continually monitor adverse events regarding all of our products," Bayer said, adding, "There is no evidence to suggest that Coricidin is associated with violent behavior."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

Most of us have heard of solar water heaters. Now there's a solar water cooler, and the technology may sharply lower the cost of industrial-scale air conditioning and refrigeration.

The new water coolers are panels that sit atop a roof, and they're made of three components. The first is a plastic layer topped with a silver coating that reflects nearly all incoming sunlight, keeping the panel from heating up in the summer sun. The plastic layer sits atop the second component, a snaking copper tube. Water is piped through the tube, where it sheds heat to the plastic. That heat is then radiated out by the plastic at a wavelength in the middle region of the infrared (IR) spectrum, which is not absorbed by the atmosphere and instead travels all the way to outer space. Finally, the whole panel is encased in a thermally insulating plastic housing that ensures nearly all the heat radiated away comes from the circulating water and not the surrounding air.

Researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, recently placed three water cooling panels—each 0.37 square meters—atop a building on campus and circulated water through them at a rate of 0.2 liters every minute. They report today in Nature Energy that their setup cooled the water as much as 5°C below the ambient temperature over 3 days of testing [DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.143] [DX]. They then modeled how their panels would behave if integrated into a typical air conditioning unit for a two-story building in Las Vegas, Nevada. The results: Their setup would lower the building's air conditioning electrical demand by 21% over the summer.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/mpif-mww090117.php

At the end of the Stone Age and in the early Bronze Age, families were established in a surprising manner in the Lechtal, south of Augsburg, Germany. The majority of women came from outside the area, probably from Bohemia or Central Germany, while men usually remained in the region of their birth. This so-called patrilocal pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age.

The findings, published today in PNAS, result from a research collaboration headed by Philipp Stockhammer of the Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology and Archaeology of the Roman Provinces of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In addition to archaeological examinations, the team conducted stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses. Corina Knipper of the Curt-Engelhorn-Centre for Archaeometry, as well as Alissa Mittnik and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and the University of Tuebingen jointly directed these scientific investigations. "Individual mobility was a major feature characterizing the lives of people in Central Europe even in the 3rd and early 2nd millennium," states Philipp Stockhammer. The researchers suspect that it played a significant role in the exchange of cultural objects and ideas, which increased considerably in the Bronze Age, in turn promoting the development of new technologies.

For this study, the researchers examined the remains of 84 individuals using genetic and isotope analyses in conjunction with archeological evaluations. The individuals were buried between 2500 and 1650 BC in cemeteries that belonged to individual homesteads, and that contained between one and several dozen burials made over a period of several generations. "The settlements were located along a fertile loess ridge in the middle of the Lech valley. Larger villages did not exist in the Lechtal at this time," states Stockhammer.

[DOI not yet available]

Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706355114) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bitcoin peaks above $5,000 for first time

Bitcoin has crossed the $5,000 (£3,862) threshold for the first time. The virtual currency peaked at $5,103.91 in the early hours of Saturday, according to CoinDesk's price index. The record high helped push the total value of publicly traded crypto-currencies - including Ethereum and the Bitcoin-offshoot Bitcoin Cash - to more than $176bn. However, there has since been a sell-off. At time of writing, Bitcoin was 12% off its peak, at $4,485.

According to coindesk.com, one Bitcoin is worth $4085.63 at this moment (20170905_023428 UTC).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ockel will sell a smartphone-sized (phablet-sized?) Windows 10 PC that includes full DisplayPort, HDMI, and Gigabit Ethernet ports:

The Sirius A is easily as tall as, if not slightly taller than, my 6-inch smartphones, the Mate 9 and LG V30, and the requirements for PC ports means that it is also wider, particularly on one side which has two USB 3.0 ports, a HDMI 1.4 port, a DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet (alongside internal WiFi) and two different ways to charge, via USB Type-C or with the bundled wall adaptor. The new model was a bit heavier than the prototype from last year, namely because this one had a battery inside – an 11Wh / 3500 mAh battery, good for 3-4 hours of video consumption I was told. The weight of the prototype was around 0.7 lbs, or just over 320 grams. This is 2-2.5x a smartphone, but given that I carry two smartphones anyway, it wasn't so much of a big jump (from my perspective).

Perhaps the reason for such a battery life number comes from the chipset: Ockel is using Intel's Cherry Trail Atom platform here, in the Atom x7-Z8750. This is a quad-core 1.60-2.60 GHz processor, with a rated TDP of 2W. It uses Intel's Gen8 graphics, which has native H.264 decode but only hybrid HEVC and VP9, which is likely to draw extra power. The reason for Cherry Trail is one of time and available parts – Intel has not launched a 2W equivalent processor with its new Atom cores, and also Ockel has been designing the system for over a year, meaning that parts would have had to have been locked down. That aside, they see the device more as a tool for professionals that need a full windows device but do not want to carry a laptop. With Windows 10 in play, Ockel says, the separate PC and tablet modes take care of a number of pain points with Windows touch screen interactions.

Note the vaguely triangular shape.

Indiegogo project funded in November 2016.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

There's competition in an overfoveated but underserved segment of the display market:

TPV Technology is demonstrating a preliminary version of its upcoming 8K ultra-high-definition display at IFA trade show in Germany. The Philips 328P8K monitor will be a part of the company's professional lineup and will hit the market sometimes next year.

Philips is the second mass-market brand to announce an 8K monitor after Dell, which has been selling its UltraSharp UP3218K for about half of a year now. The primary target audiences for the 328P8K and the UP3218K are designers, engineers, photographers and other professionals looking for maximum resolution and accurate colors. Essentially, Dell's 8K LCD is going to get a rival supporting the same resolution.

At present, TPV reveals only basic specifications of its Philips 328P8K display — 31.5" IPS panel with a 7680x4320 resolution, a 400 nits brightness (which it calls HDR 400) and presumably a 60 Hz refresh rate. When it comes to color spaces, TPV confirms that the 328P8K supports 100% of the AdobeRGB, which emphasizes that the company positions the product primarily for graphics professionals. When it comes to connectivity, everything seems to be similar to Dell's 8K monitor: the Philips 8K display will use two DP 1.3 cables in order to avoid using DP 1.4 with Display Stream Compression 1.2 and ensure a flawless and accurate image quality.

It is noteworthy that the final version of the 328P8K will be equipped with a webcam (something the current model lacks), two 3W speakers as well as USB-A and at least one USB-C port "allowing USB-C docking and simultaneous notebook charging". In order to support USB-C docking with this 8K monitor, the laptop has to support DP 1.4 alternate mode over USB-C and at present, this tech is not supported by shipping PCs. In the meantime, since in the future USB-C may be used a display output more widely, the USB-C input in the Philips 328P8K seems like a valuable future-proof feature (assuming, of course, it fully supports DP 1.4 alt mode over USB-C).

Previously: Dell Announces First "Mass-Market" 8K Display

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

Interesting article on smartphone addiction, written by a 45-year-old who suffered from it.

We touch our smartphones -- tap, click, swipe -- more than 2,500 times a day. That's probably 100 times more often than we touch our partner. The reason we do it is that the phone constantly demands attention by sending us notifications. It does so every time someone wants to connect with us, every time something changes in an app, every time an artificially intelligent entity decides we need information. Notifications have a barely veiled commercial purpose: Once we start playing with the phone, we're likely to open more apps, see more ads, buy more stuff.

It's relatively easy to retake control; I went into my phone's settings and banned every one of the 112 apps from sending notifications. Now, I only check my personal and corporate email accounts, as well as two messenger apps, when I want to, not when my device wants me to. That means my friends must wait longer than they used to for a response. They haven't noticed -- or at least they haven't commented on it. We overestimate the need for immediacy in communication; perhaps our kids don't because they live their addiction to a greater extent than we do, but an adult finds it easy to wait for a response.

Recovering addicts know it's impossible to be perfectly clean: Even if you don't use your favorite substance, you miss it. At the end of his opium essay, Cocteau wrote wistfully that perhaps "the young" might someday discover "a regime that would allow one to keep the benefits of the poppy" without getting addicted. That remains impossible for drugs but maybe not for smartphones.

I can sympathize. I went through a massively stressful period a couple of years ago, which involved being on-call for a project basically 24/7. Continuous status notifications and emails. This got me into the habit of leaving those notifications on, and every time any sort of message arrived, I'd check the phone, which would lead to using the phone, even if the message itself was unimportant.

The continuous flood of interruptions makes you feel needed, important, connected, or whatever. It also destroys your ability to concentrate (when working), or to participate in your family's life (when at home). Turning off all notifications was a very, very good thing...

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2017/08/042.html

Human antidepressants are building up in the brains of bass, walleye and several other fish common to the Great Lakes region, scientists say. In a new study, researchers detected high concentrations of these drugs and their metabolized remnants in the brain tissue of 10 fish species found in the Niagara River. [...] "These active ingredients from antidepressants, which are coming out from wastewater treatment plants, are accumulating in fish brains," Aga says. "It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned.

[...] "The levels of antidepressants found do not pose a danger to humans who eat the fish, especially in the U.S., where most people do not eat organs like the brain," Singh says. "However, the risk that the drugs pose to biodiversity is real, and scientists are just beginning to understand what the consequences might be."

[...] The highest concentration of a single compound was found in a rock bass, which had about 400 nanograms of norsertraline — a metabolite of sertraline, the active ingredient in Zoloft — per gram of brain tissue. This was in addition to a cocktail of other compounds found in the same fish, including citalopram, the active ingredient in Celexa, and norfluoxetine, a metabolite of the active ingredient in Prozac and Sarafem. More than half of the fish brain samples had norsertraline levels of 100 nanograms per gram or higher. In addition, like the rock bass, many of the fish had a medley of antidepressant drugs and metabolites in their brains.

Evidence that antidepressants can change fish behavior generally comes from laboratory studies that expose the animals to higher concentrations of drugs than what is found in the Niagara River. But the findings of the new study are still worrisome: The antidepressants that Aga's team detected in fish brains had accumulated over time, often reaching concentrations that were several times higher than the levels in the river.

Also at Detroit Free Press.

Selective Uptake and Bioaccumulation of Antidepressants in Fish from Effluent-Impacted Niagara River (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b02912) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/neanderthals-were-distilling-tar-200-thousand-years-ago-in-europe/

Despite many recent discoveries that show Neanderthals were technologically and socially sophisticated, there's still a popular idea that these heavy-browed, pale-skinned early humans were mentally inferior to modern Homo sapiens. Now we have even more corroboration that they were pretty sharp. A fascinating new study reveals that Neanderthals were distilling tar for tool-making 200 thousand years ago—long before evidence of tar-making among Homo sapiens. And an experimental anthropologist has some good hypotheses for how they did it, too.

One of humanity's earliest technological breakthroughs was learning to distill tar from tree bark. It was key to making compound tools with two or more parts; adhesives could keep a stone blade nicely fitted into a wooden handle for use as a hoe, an axe, or even a spear. Scientists have discovered ancient beads of tar in Italy, Germany, and several other European sites dating back as much as 200 thousand years, which is about 150 thousand years before modern Homo sapiens arrived in Western Europe. That means the people who distilled that tar had to be Neanderthals.

[...] [Paul] Kozowyk and his fellow researchers [...] set about trying to make tar using only the tools Neanderthals had available. These included fire, ash, birch bark, sharp stones, and mesh woven from sticks. Kozowyk and his team tested three ways to make tar from birch bark, and they measured tar output, temperature, and complexity of the task.

[...] Neanderthals might have figured out how to make tar by accident when a stray piece of birch bark began to ooze tar near the fire. Then it would have been a relatively simple matter for the ancient people to figure out that tar was sticky and ultimately to deduce that it could be used to secure their tools better.

Experimental methods for the Palaeolithic dry distillation of birch bark: implications for the origin and development of Neandertal adhesive technology (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08106-7) (DX)

Original Submission