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takyon writes:

Google's new DIY AI kits could help shape the future

Google just announced two new "AIY" (it's like DIY, but for artificial intelligence) kits that build upon the ideas the company set forth with its first-generation kits. This time around, however, the new kits ship with everything a student might need to build AI solutions, including a Raspberry Pi Zero WH board.

"We're taking the first of many steps to help educators integrate AIY into STEM lesson plans and help prepare students for the challenges of the future by launching a new version of our AIY kits," Billy Rutledge, Director of AIY Projects at Google, wrote in a blog post. "The Voice Kit lets you build a voice controlled speaker, while the Vision Kit lets you build a camera that learns to recognize people and objects. The new kits make getting started a little easier with clearer instructions, a new app and all the parts in one box."

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

DARKNESS, an integral field spectrograph, could be used by a ground telescope to directly image exoplanets:

The DARKNESS, shorthand for "Dark-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer" reads noise and dark current, small electric currents that flow through photosensitive devices.

Together, these elements can force errors in a variety of instruments, but DARKNESS, which UC Berkeley calls the "world's largest and most advanced superconducting camera," snaps thousands of frames-per-second without being affected by either. With this accuracy, scientists can determine the wavelength and arrival time of every single photon it views.

"This technology will lower the contrast floor so that we can detect fainter planets, says DARKNESS scientist Dimitri Mawet of the California Institute of Technology in a press statement. "We hope to approach the photon noise limit, which will give us contrast ratios close to 10^-8, allowing us to see planets 100 million times fainter than the star. At those contrast levels, we can see some planets in reflected light, which opens up a whole new domain of planets to explore. The really exciting thing is that this is a technology pathfinder for the next generation of telescopes."

[...] According to the team's paper [DOI: 10.1088/1538-3873/aab5e7] [DX], DARKNESS is "the first of several planned integral field spectrographs." "Our hope is that one day we will be able to build an instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope planned for Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii or La Palma," says UC Santa Barbara physicist and team leader Ben Mazin. "With that, we'll be able to take pictures of planets in the habitable zones of nearby low mass stars and look for life in their atmospheres."

Also at Astronomy Now.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The French government is looking to move officials away from popular apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram -- even if the French president likes using them.

As Facebook continues to reel from the Cambridge Analytica saga, the French government is taking precautions against the social media behemoth's WhatsApp service.

The French government is developing its own encrypted messaging service, Reuters reported Monday. The goal is to alleviate concerns about privacy breaches, which could result in the leaking of private conversations between top officials to foreign parties.

The French government's privacy concerns come amid a backlash against Facebook following a massive data leak concerning millions of users. WhatsApp, which provides encrypted messaging services, is owned by Facebook and shares user information with its parent company -- something that hasn't sat well with privacy regulators.

In December 2016, the European Union expressed concerns over Facebook's access to WhatsApp users' data. Just a month later, the popular social messaging platform was sued in German court over the issue, while French privacy watchdog CNIL warned WhatsApp in the same year to stop sharing user data with Facebook or risk a fine. Last month, Facebook agreed not to access any data from WhatsApp until its activities are considered compliant with a Europe-wide General Data Protection Regulation expected in May.

[...] While few details are available on the French-built messaging service, a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters the app is being designed by a "state-employed developer" and tested by "about 20 officials and top civil servants." It is hoped that the use of this app will become mandatory across the government by this summer before being rolled out to all French citizens, she added.

CNET has reached out to the French government for a comment.

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takyon writes:

Elon Musk's latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house:

Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper-stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a "giant party balloon" to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.

[...] This isn't the first time a balloon has been used to return a rocket. Legendary programmer John Carmack's rocket company attempted to use a ballute in 2012 to return a rocket body and nose cone. It didn't work as planned and, according to officials at the time, the rocket made a "hard landing" around the Spaceport America property in New Mexico.

SpaceX has yet to recover the entire Falcon 9 fairing despite adding a parachute and positioning a boat to catch it.

The TESS launch has been delayed to Wednesday.

Also at Engadget and Space.com.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Here's a month-old article from Politico Magazine about the big business of cloudscale blockchain minery in the better Washington:

Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community.

The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain," Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.

[...] As bitcoin's soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, "is nothing." The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to "running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale."

It's pretty long for an internet article but it's got pictures.

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An Anonymous Coward poses a question that is asked every few months or so:

I once read in a news article (can't find it now... sorry) that apparently if you overwrite data with other data on a hard drive that the previous data is unrecoverable. So, would overwriting the entire hard drive with cat videos be just as effective as all these other "professional" security protocols that are used?

janrinok: Data erasure is important when you want to prevent anyone from recovering whatever was written on the storage device in the first instance. But there are many potential problems including just how secure does the erasure have to be, what hardware is controlling the reading and writing to the disk, are you attempting to delete data on a spinning rust device, a more modern SSD , or a thumb drive, and who are you trying to prevent from reading the data? If you are just trying to prevent a regular Joe Soap from reading what you once securely stored on a hard drive then simple overwriting might be enough. However, if you are concerned that law enforcement or a government agency might be interested in the drive's contents then you will have to take more stringent precautions. Ultimately, many of the highest classifications of data can only be securely erased by full degaussing or the physical destruction of the device. The link details the various standards that are deemed as acceptable to securely erase data to meet specific documented requirements.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Japanese researchers have mapped vast reserves of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, enough to feed global demand on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a new study.

The deposit, found within Japan's exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.

[...] The finding extrapolates that a 2,500-sq. km region off the southern Japanese island should contain 16 million tons of the valuable elements, and "has the potential to supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world," the study said.

The area reserves offer "great potential as ore deposits for some of the most critically important elements in modern society," it said.

The report said there were hundreds of years of reserves of most of the rare earths in the area surveyed.

Source:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/11/national/japan-team-maps-semi-infinite-trove-rare-earth-elements/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Agriculture's dependence on pollinators, including both wild and domesticated bees, has increased fourfold since the 1960s. A recent study of these pollinators found that they provide up to $577 billion a year of crops, half of which comes from wild pollinators. These ratios underline the severity of their collapsing numbers. More than a third are facing extinction.

Gemma Cranston, head of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership team that participated in the study, warned that "less than half the companies sampled know which of the raw materials they source depend on pollinators", adding that there needs to be more research to get the full picture.

Source:
Plight of the bees hits unaware businesses

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Chinese Social Media Site Reverses Gay Content Ban After Uproar

Bowing to intense pressure from millions of internet users, a Chinese social media site said on Monday that it would scrap plans to censor cartoons and video games with gay themes. The site, Sina Weibo, had announced on Friday that it would target gay content as part of a campaign to remove pornographic and violent material from its site. But its efforts were almost immediately criticized as discriminatory and repressive, spawning an outpouring of #Iamgay hashtags and slogans like "gays aren't scary."

On Monday, Weibo said in a post that it would scale back its "cleanup" effort and focus on "pornographic, violent and bloody content" instead of gay material. In a nod to the intense backlash, it thanked internet users for their "discussion and suggestions." [...] Ma Baoli, the founder of Blued, a popular gay dating app, called the uproar a "historic event" in China. He said Weibo's response showed a gradual change in attitudes toward gay people.

[...] Weibo's "cleanup" campaign highlighted the intense pressure that media companies in China face to purge sites of content that the authorities deem offensive. Experts said the government's vague definition of improper content often results in companies' going to extremes to show compliance.

Weibo is China's Twitter.

See also: Weibo to ban gay, violent content from platform
'I Am Gay, Not a Pervert': Furor in China as Sina Weibo Bans Gay Content

Related: Chinese Lesbian Dating App Rela Shuts Down

Original Submission

chromas writes:

TechCrunch reports:

At a small press event in San Francisco, Microsoft today announced the launch of a secure end-to-end IoT product that focuses on microcontroller-based devices — the kind of devices that use tiny and relatively low-powered microcontrollers (MCUs) for basic control or connectivity features. Typically, these kinds of devices, which could be anything from a toy to a household gadget or an industrial application, don't often get updated and hence, security often suffers.

At the core of Azure Sphere is a new class of certified MCUs. As Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith stressed in today's announcement, Microsoft will license these new Azure Sphere chips for free, in hopes to jump-start the Azure Sphere ecosystem.

First one's free, kid!

Because it's hard to secure a device you can't update or get telemetry from, it's no surprise that these devices will feature built-in connectivity. And with that connectivity, these devices can also connect to the Azure Sphere Security Service in the cloud.

Now, you probably assume that these devices will run Windows, but you're wrong. For the first time ever, Microsoft is launching a custom Linux kernel and distribution: the Azure Sphere OS. It's an update to the kind of real-time operating systems that today's MCUs often use.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Last year, Apple’s lawyers sent Henrik Huseby, the owner of a small electronics repair shop in Norway, a letter demanding that he immediately stop using aftermarket iPhone screens at his repair business and that he pay the company a settlement.

Norway’s customs officials had seized a shipment of 63 iPhone 6 and 6S replacement screens on their way to Henrik’s shop from Asia and alerted Apple; the company said they were counterfeit.

In order to avoid being sued, Apple asked Huseby for “copies of invoices, product lists, order forms, payment information, prints from the internet and other relevant material regarding the purchase [of screens], including copies of any correspondence with the supplier … we reserve the right to request further documentation at a later date.”

The letter, sent by Frank Jorgensen, an attorney at the Njord law firm on behalf of Apple, included a settlement agreement that also notified him the screens would be destroyed. The settlement agreement said that Huseby agrees “not to manufacture, import, sell, market, or otherwise deal with any products that infringe Apple’s trademarks,” and asked required him to pay 27,700 Norwegian Krone ($3,566) to make the problem go away without a trial.

“Intellectual Property Law is a specialized area of law, and seeking legal advice is in many instances recommended,” Jorgensen wrote in the letter accompanying the settlement agreement. “However, we can inform you that further proceedings and costs can be avoided by settling the case.”

Huseby decided to fight the case.

takyon writes:

Bitcoin exchange Coinbase buys Earn.com for a reported $100M and adds key executive

Digital currency exchange Coinbase is building on a recent hiring streak with a deal to buy Earn.com announced Monday. As part of the acquisition, the crypto company will bring on Earn's founder and CEO as its first-ever chief technology officer.

Before running Earn, which lets users send and receive digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks, Srinivasan was a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Srinivasan will act as "technological evangelist" for both the industry, and for Coinbase in his new role, the company said.

"Balaji has become one of the most respected technologists in the crypto field and is considered one of the technology industry's few true originalists," Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a blog post Monday.

Coinbase did not disclose the terms of the deal but according to Recode, the offer was more than $100 million.

Earn.com sounds like a Mechanical Turk website that pays out virtual blockchain money to bubble boosters. From the website: "Get paid to learn about new crypto projects. Crypto startups use Earn.com to build their communities, get feedback on whitepapers, and airdrop tokens to qualified recipients."

Also at TechCrunch and Reuters.

Related: Coinbase Escalates Showdown on U.S. Tax Probe as Bitcoin Surges
Coinbase Ordered to Report 14,355 Users to the IRS
Coinbase is NOT Erratically Overcharging Some Users and Emptying Their Bank Accounts [Updated]

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Amazon may be owned by the world's richest man, but some employees at the company pee into bottles to avoid missing their targets by going to the toilet, says an author who went undercover at the firm's UK warehouse.

According to James Bloodworth, who applied for a job at Amazon's warehouses in Staffordshire to complete his book on low wages in the UK, the workers "picking" products for delivery do not go to toilet, as it is too far away.

"For those of us who worked on the top floor, the closest toilets were down four flights of stairs. People just peed in bottles because they lived in fear of being disciplined over 'idle time' and losing their jobs just because they needed the loo," Bloodworth said, as quoted by the Sun.

Source: https://www.rt.com/business/424256-amazon-workers-pee-into-bottles/

takyon writes:

Ketamine could become an approved treatment for depression in the UK soon:

Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

Ketamine has "shown promise" in the rapid treatment of major depression and suicidal thoughts, a US study says. Ketamine has a reputation as a party drug but is licensed as an anaesthetic. The study found use of the drug via a nasal spray led to "significant" improvements in depressive symptoms in the first 24 hours. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said it was a "significant" study that brought the drug "a step closer to being prescribed on the NHS".

The report by researchers from Janssen Research and Development, a Johnson and Johnson company, and Yale School of Medicine, is the first study into ketamine as a treatment for depression that has been done by a drug company.

[...] The study found those using esketamine had a much greater improvement in depression symptoms at all points over the first four weeks of treatment. However, at 25 days the effects had levelled out. The study's authors suggest it could offer an effective rapid treatment for people severely depressed and at imminent risk of suicide and could help in the initial stages of treatment, as most anti-depressants take four to six weeks to become fully effective.

Also at Medical Daily.

Efficacy and Safety of Intranasal Esketamine for the Rapid Reduction of Symptoms of Depression and Suicidality in Patients at Imminent Risk for Suicide: Results of a Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study (DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17060720) (DX)

Can a Framework Be Established for the Safe Use of Ketamine? (DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18030290) (DX)

Related: FDA Designates MDMA as a "Breakthrough Therapy" for PTSD; Approves Phase 3 Trials
Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People
Ketamine Reduces Suicidal Thoughts in Depressed Patients
Studies Identify How Ketamine Can Reverse Symptoms of Depression
Over Years, Depression Changes the Brain, new Study Shows

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.space.com/36381-lyrid-meteor-shower-guide.html

In late April, skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere will get a view of the Lyrid meteor shower, the dusty trail of a comet with a centuries-long orbit around the sun. The Lyrid meteors streak across the sky between April 16 and April 25, so skywatchers have a chance to see them during that window, weather permitting.

The best day to see Lyrid meteors will be extremely early in the morning on Sunday, April 22, NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke told Space.com. As with most meteor showers, the peak viewing time will be before dawn.

[...] The radiant — the point from which the meteors appear to originate — will be high in the evening sky in the constellation Lyra to the northeast of Vega, one of the brightest stars visible in the night sky this time of year. Don't look directly toward the radiant, though, because you might miss the meteors with the longest tails.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A quantum dot–powered material could help reduce the number of hospital-acquired infections, including those with drug-resistant bacteria.

A new material that harnesses the power of ambient light to produce bacteria-killing molecules could help stem the spread of hospital infections, including those with drug-resistant bacteria.

About 1 in 10 patients worldwide get an infection while receiving treatment at a hospital or other health care facility, according to the World Health Organization. "Contaminated hospital surfaces play a key role in spreading those infections," said Ethel Koranteng, a chemist at University College London, on April 5 at the Materials Research Society spring meeting.

Koranteng and colleagues developed a material to make hospital surfaces self-disinfecting. Naturally antimicrobial metals such as copper and steel are difficult to sculpt around uneven surfaces. But the new polymer-based material could be fashioned into a flexible film that covers computer keyboards, or molded into rigid, plasticlike casings that enclose phone handles, bedrails and other surfaces especially prone to contamination.

Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/material-uses-energy-ambient-light-kill-hospital-superbugs

Original Submission

BK writes:

Because, disturbingly, there is an actual product called Soylent, and this is news about it.

From The Verge:

Rosa Foods, announced Wednesday it has signed a deal to get Soylent in 450 of the big box stores across the US. Soylent CEO Bryan Crowley says the move is, "a significant step in providing more ways for consumers to get access to our brand." Walmart locations will stock the ready-to-drink bottles in "Cacao," "Vanilla Latte," and "Coffiest" flavors.

By the way, Soylent was only "people" in the movie. In the original book, "Make Room, Make Room" by Harry Harrison, Soylent was just vegetable matter. Leave it to Hollywood to screw a good SF story up. [ed.]

Original Submission