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takyon writes:

Antarctica 'gives ground to the ocean'

Scientists now have their best view yet of where Antarctica is giving up ground to the ocean as some of its biggest glaciers are eaten away from below by warm water.

Researchers using Europe's Cryosat radar spacecraft have traced the movement of grounding lines around the continent. These are the places where the fronts of glaciers that flow from the land into the ocean start to lift and float. The new study reveals an area of seafloor the size of Greater London that was previously in contact with ice is now free of it.

[...] On the face of it, the results are pretty much as expected. Of the 1,463km² of grounded ice that has been given up, most of it is in well documented areas of West Antarctica where warm ocean water is known to be infiltrating the undersides of glaciers to melt them.

Dr Konrad explained: "If you take 25m per year as a threshold, which is sort of the average since the end of the last ice age, and you say anything below this threshold is normal behaviour and anything above it is faster than normal - then in West Antarctica, almost 22% of grounding lines are retreating more rapidly than 25m/yr. "That's a statement we can only make now because we have this wider context."

The new data-set confirms other observations that show the mighty Pine Island Glacier, one of the biggest and fast-flowing glaciers on Earth, and whose grounding line has been in retreat since the 1940s, appears now to have stabilised somewhat.

Net retreat of Antarctic glacier grounding lines (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z) (DX)

Related: Delaware-Sized Iceberg Could Break Off of Antarctica at Any Moment
Secrets of Hidden Ice Canyons Revealed

Original Submission

LoRdTAW writes:

Valve has directly responded to the Steam communities' worries that Steam Machines and by extension SteamOS, Valve's Linux powered gaming OS, were silently being discontinued. tl;dr: No, they aren't dropping SteamOS or the Steam Machine. In fact, they have more in the pipeline for Linux so stay tuned.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/

We've noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it'd make sense to address some of the points we've seen people take away from it.

While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven't significantly changed. We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.

takyon writes:

Quantum Correlations Reverse Thermodynamic Arrow of Time

A team of physicists has made heat flow spontaneously from a cold quantum object to a hot one. The experiment underscores the intimate relationships between information, entropy and energy that are being explored in the nascent field of quantum thermodynamics.

The team, based in Brazil, took a molecule that consisted of a carbon atom, a hydrogen atom and three chlorine atoms. They then generated a magnetic field to align the nuclear spins of the two quantum particles, or "qubits" — the carbon and hydrogen nuclei. This caused the nuclei to become linked, or correlated, turning them into a single, inseparable whole, a two-qubit quantum state.

[...] If the total entropy suddenly decreased in a regular, uncorrelated system, it would violate the second law. But here, the researchers take the correlation into account. The weakening of the correlation is akin to a "fuel driving the heat from the colder to the hotter body," said David Jennings, a physicist at Imperial College London. The cold qubit gets colder, the hot qubit hotter. In other words, heat flows from cold to hot. This occurs because of "a trade-off between correlations and entropy," said Roberto Serra, a physicist at the Federal University of ABC and the head of the research group behind the study.

The operation effectively reverses the arrow of time, at least in this isolated system. "The thermodynamic arrow of time relies on the notion that the entropy of a closed system can only increase or remain constant, but never decrease," Micadei said. "By creating in the lab an isolated system where the entropy decreases, in the system the arrow of time should point to the opposite direction."

Also at Oregon Public Broadcasting, which bravely names the molecule.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Case Western Reserve University researchers make dynamic advances with new atomically thin device

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University are developing atomically thin "drumheads" able to receive and transmit signals across a radio frequency range far greater than what we can hear with the human ear. But the drumhead is tens of trillions times (10 followed by 12 zeros) smaller in volume and 100,000 times thinner than the human eardrum. The advances will likely contribute to making the next generation of ultralow-power communications and sensory devices smaller and with greater detection and tuning ranges.

[...] The work represents the highest reported dynamic range for vibrating transducers of their type. To date, that range had only been attained by much larger transducers operating at much lower frequencies—like the human eardrum, for example.

"What we've done here is to show that some ultimately miniaturized, atomically thin electromechanical drumhead resonators can offer remarkably broad dynamic range, up to ~110dB, at radio frequencies (RF) up to over 120MHz," Feng said. "These dynamic ranges at RF are comparable to the broad dynamic range of human hearing capability in the audio bands."

Electrically tunable single- and few-layer MoS2 nanoelectromechanical systems with broad dynamic range (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao6653) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued its first-ever mandatory recall for kratom-containing "food products", because the company selling them did not comply with the agency's request for a voluntary recall:

FDA orders kratom product recall over Salmonella; first such mandatory move in history

Federal drug regulators issued their first-ever mandatory recall Tuesday to a company selling several products containing the herbal supplement kratom and contaminated with Salmonella.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it issued the order because Triangle Pharmanaturals of Las Vegas refused to cooperate.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that the kratom Salmonella outbreak was linked to 11 hospitalizations among 28 people who caught the strain.

The FDA is advising consumers to discard the products that are part of the mandatory recall, which it says include, but isn't limited to: Raw Form Organics Maeng Da Kratom Emerald Green, Raw Form Organics Maeng Da Kratom Ivory White, and Raw Form Organics Maeng Da Kratom Ruby Red. The company, which promotes itself as a consulting firm, may "manufacture, process, pack and/or hold additional brands of food products containing powdered kratom, FDA says.

Related:
FDA Blocks More Imports of Kratom, Warns Against Use as a Treatment for Opioid Withdrawal
FDA Labels Kratom an Opioid
CDC Warns of Salmonella Infections Linked to Kratom

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A disputed paper that raised questions about the safety of CRISPR has been retracted:

A scientific paper that purported to lay bare serious flaws in the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR and briefly tanked shares of genome-editing companies has been retracted by its publisher.

The paper [DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4293] [DX], published last year in Nature Methods, claimed that CRISPR wreaked havoc on the genome, causing hundreds of unintended mutations in mice — and that the algorithms typically used to detect these changes were routinely missing them.

[...] Two months after publication of the paper, Nature Methods published an "an expression of concern" about the paper in July. The retraction notice, appended Friday, goes further, saying the authors did not use mice that had been bred in their own laboratory — so they could not know if any genetic mutations were the result of their intervention with CRISPR editing, or if it stemmed from variations in the mice's own genomes.

Nature Methods editorial discussing the retraction: CRISPR off-targets: a reassessment (open, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4664) (DX)

Previously: CRISPR Safer than Thought; Misleading Study Found Shared Mutations in Closely Related Mice

Original Submission

takyon writes:

In a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that unknown users are operating IMSI catchers in Washington, D.C.:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is acknowledging for the first time that foreign actors or criminals are using eavesdropping devices to track cellphone activity in Washington, D.C., according to a letter obtained by The Hill.

DHS in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) last Monday said they came across unauthorized cell-site simulators in the Washington, D.C., area last year. Such devices, also known as "stingrays," can track a user's location data through their mobile phones and can intercept cellphone calls and messages.

[...] DHS official Christopher Krebs, the top official leading the NPPD, added in a separate letter accompanying his response that such use "of IMSI catchers by malicious actors to track and monitor cellular users is unlawful and threatens the security of communications, resulting in safety, economic and privacy risks."

DHS said they have not determined the users behind such eavesdropping devices, nor the type of devices being used. The agency also did not elaborate on how many devices it unearthed, nor where authorities located them.

Also at Ars Technica and CNN.

Related: Police: Stingray Device Intercepts Mobile Phones
ACLU Reveals Greater Extent of FBI and Law Enforcement "Stingray" Use
US IRS Bought Stingray, Stingray II, and Hailstorm IMSI-Catchers
EFF Launches the Cell-Site Simulator Section of Street Level Surveillance
NYPD Making Heavy Use of Stingrays
New York Lawmakers Want Local Cops to Get Warrant Before Using Stingray
New Jersey State Police Spent $850,000 on Harris Corp. Stingray Devices

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

When Apple unveiled the iMac Pro in December, it did so with an assist from third-party developers. The company showcased creators who were working on applications that applied the iMac Pro's capabilities to new things previously not possible on prior, less-capable Mac hardware. Most notably, more than one dev was using the iMac Pro for virtual reality (VR) development, something Apple had announced its intentions to support at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June of last year.

One of the participating studios, Survios, had been approached by Apple to port its new title Electronauts to macOS. Electronauts is a virtual music-production tool that allows the user to DJ quantized music with various 3D tools, as if they were standing on a stage surrounded by equipment.

After hearing about Electronauts in December, Survios invited Ars out to its studio in the Los Angeles municipality of Culver City (one of the United States' most concentrated hot beds of both VR and indie game development) to hear more about exactly what was involved in porting VR software to the Mac.

It may still be early days for VR on Mac, but at least one longtime development studio sees potential for the platform after experiencing Apple's support firsthand.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/everything-a-vr-studio-had-to-do-to-port-to-the-mac/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA has awarded a contract to create a relatively quiet supersonic jet plane to Lockheed Martin:

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, California, was selected for the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration contract, a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract valued at $247.5 million. Work under the contract began April 2 and runs through Dec. 31, 2021.

Under this contract, Lockheed Martin will complete the design and fabrication of an experimental aircraft, known as an X-plane, which will cruise at 55,000 feet at a speed of about 940 mph and create a sound about as loud as a car door closing, 75 Perceived Level decibel (PLdB), instead of a sonic boom.

NASA plans to fly the "X-plane" over U.S. cities starting in 2022 in order to "collect data about community responses to the flights".

Also at Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, and Wired.

Previously: NASA Quesst Project - Quiet Supersonic Transport
Concorde Without the Cacophony: NASA Thinks It's Cracked Quiet Supersonic Flight
NASA Tests Light, Foldable Plane Wings for Supersonic Flights
Trump Administration Supports NASA's Quieter Supersonic Plane Design

Original Submission

martyb writes:

It seems Intel has had some second thoughts about Spectre 2 microcode fixes:

Intel has issued new a new "microcode revision guidance" that confesses it won't address the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws in all of its vulnerable processors – in some cases because it's too tricky to remove the Spectre v2 class of vulnerabilities.

The new guidance (pdf), issued April 2, adds a "stopped" status to Intel's "production status" category in its array of available Meltdown and Spectre security updates. "Stopped" indicates there will be no microcode patch to kill off Meltdown and Spectre.

The guidance explains that a chipset earns "stopped" status because, "after a comprehensive investigation of the microarchitectures and microcode capabilities for these products, Intel has determined to not release microcode updates for these products for one or more reasons."

Those reasons are given as:

• Micro-architectural characteristics that preclude a practical implementation of features mitigating [Spectre] Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715)
• Limited Commercially Available System Software support
• Based on customer inputs, most of these products are implemented as "closed systems" and therefore are expected to have a lower likelihood of exposure to these vulnerabilities.

Thus, if a chip family falls under one of those categories – such as Intel can't easily fix Spectre v2 in the design, or customers don't think the hardware will be exploited – it gets a "stopped" sticker. To leverage the vulnerabilities, malware needs to be running on a system, so if the computer is totally closed off from the outside world, administrators may feel it's not worth the hassle applying messy microcode, operating system, or application updates.

"Stopped" CPUs that won't therefore get a fix are in the Bloomfield, Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0 and E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale, Wolfdale Xeon, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon families. The list includes various Xeons, Core CPUs, Pentiums, Celerons, and Atoms – just about everything Intel makes.

Most [of] the CPUs listed above are oldies that went on sale between 2007 and 2011, so it is likely few remain in normal use.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Thousands of voting machine vendor employees' work emails and plaintext passwords appear in freely available third-party data breach dumps reviewed by CSO, raising questions about the security of voting machines and the integrity of past election results.

While breached sites, like LinkedIn after the 2012 breach, force users to change their passwords, a significant number of people reuse passwords on other platforms, making third-party data breaches a gold mine for criminals and spies.

For many years voting machine vendors have claimed that voting machines were air gapped — not connected to the internet — and were thus unhackable. Kim Zetter debunked that idea in The New York Times in February.

[...] CSO found five voting machine vendors in the third-party data breaches we reviewed, including more than two thousand credentials for the defunct Diebold, now owned by Dominion Voting.

[...] The breached credentials include key members of management, engineering, and operations teams for these companies. One case of password reuse over the last ten years would have been enough for an attacker to gain a foothold in a voting machine vendor's network and potentially compromise the integrity of voting machines — and election results.

Source: CSO

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Wrinkled sagging skin is probably the most visible sign of aging, but hidden within the body, blood vessel walls loose elasticity too, becoming more vulnerable to hypertension. The two processes are partly due to decreases of the same protein as people and animals age. A team of researchers at the Center for Self-Assembly and Complexity, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have synthesized the first contrast agent to observe and measure elastin, the protein that gives strength to blood vessel walls, and flexibility to skin. Beyond cosmetics, the dye could be useful to better understand the role of elastin in biological processes and to verify the health of blood vessels and organs.

"Since elastin is located in the subcutaneous tissue, it is difficult to visualize with current methods. Moreover, it is a complex protein to work with as it has various forms, variable chemical linkages, and it is renownedly difficult to make a model for computational study. For the screening, we used intact elastin from throughout the whole body to avoid such problems," explains CHANG Young-Tae, corresponding author of the study.

The research team developed the first near-infrared fluorescent contrast agent for elastin, called ElaNIR (Elastin Near-InfraRed), capable of detecting the elasticity of tissues in living animals. The method is based on near-infrared rays with wavelengths of 700-900 nanometers which can reach elastin because of their excellent skin permeability. Moreover, ElaNIR was selected from a collection of fluorescence molecules that emit near-infrared rays. Generally, fluorescent materials tend to stick to other substances, resulting in a blurred image area around the target. On the other hand, ElaNIR has an equal number of positive and negative charges within the same molecule, which has been shown to minimize non-specific binding to serum proteins, normal tissues, and organs, which provides cleaner images.

[...] "All current techniques estimate the age of the skin indirectly, for example via skin moisture. This is the first probe to directly measure skin elastin in living organisms, both painlessly and without biopsy," concludes Chang.

ElaNIR will be provided free of charge to researchers seeking opportunities for collaboration or application.

Dongdong Su, et. al. Seeing Elastin: A Near-Infrared Zwitterionic Fluorescent Probe for In Vivo Elastin Imaging. Chem, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2018.02.016

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

FirstEnergy Solutions (FES)--together with its subsidiaries FirstEnergy Generation and FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company--announced its bankruptcy [April 1] after years of short-sighted business decisions and executive mismanagement that resisted investing in clean, renewable energy, and its workers. The company now has a serious obligation to protect its workers and their benefits from the bankruptcy process, as well as meet its environmental responsibilities--particularly if its coal and nuclear power plants are retired or sold.

FES has power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

In response, Mary Anne Hitt, Director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, released the following statement:

"FirstEnergy Solutions' bankruptcy is a cautionary tale for utilities, investors, and public officials who think the coal and nuclear industries will somehow rebound in the coming years. They will not. America's 21st century energy market demands cheap, flexible energy resources that can rapidly shift with electricity demands and don't pollute local air and water. Coal and nuclear plants are too expensive and too dirty to compete in the modern market.

"FirstEnergy Solutions is in bankruptcy because it continually ignored America's shift to clean energy by investing in uneconomic coal and nuclear plants which have been losing money for years. Now it's time for the company to accept its mistakes and concentrate on protecting its workers and their benefits during the bankruptcy process, while also meeting its environmental obligations--particularly if its plants are decommissioned or sold. FES must do everything it can to help those being harmed by its negligent business practices and focus on transitioning them to new economic opportunities."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

The Kepler planet-hunting telescope was designed to do one thing: gather data from a single portion of the sky often enough to catch rare, brief events. The events it was looking for were slight dips in light that happened as a planet passed in between its host star and Earth. But it captured other transient events as well. Some of these other events were supernovae—the explosion of massive stars—and Kepler captured two just as the explosion burst through their surface.

But at least one of the brief events Kepler observed was so odd it wasn't originally recognized as a supernova. It was only after the observatory's data was released to the entire research community that people started proposing that something so bright was most likely a supernova. Now, researchers are offering an analysis of why this event looked so strange.

[...] So what was so odd about KSN 2015K? While the object was clearly bright enough to be a supernova, it was on an accelerated schedule, taking only two days to reach peak brightness. It was already fading out after only a week, and it was gone at three weeks. By contrast, another recent supernova was still brightening roughly two weeks after it was first detected. More generally, this new event was about eight times faster than we'd expect from a type Ia supernova. This makes KSN 2015K a "fast evolving luminous transient," or FELT.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/kepler-caught-strange-supernova-sudden-surge-rapid-decay/

Also at The Register.

A fast-evolving luminous transient discovered by K2/Kepler (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0423-2) (DX)

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/52208/title/French-Universities-Cancel-Subscriptions-to-Springer-Journals/

French research organizations and universities have cancelled their subscriptions to Springer journals, due to an impasse in fee negotiations between the publisher and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.

After more than a year of discussions, Couperin.org and SpringerNature, which publishes more than 2,000 scholarly journals belonging to Springer, Nature, and BioMedCentral, have failed to reach an agreement on subscriptions for its Springer journals. The publisher’s proposal includes an increase in prices, which the consortium refuses to accept.

Original Submission