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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Popular Mechanics reports

Pioneered by the defence department's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD), the new direct energy weapon has the ability to stop a cart in its tracks without harming the vehicle or its driver.

"The jammer works by targeting the car's engine control unit causing it to reboot over and over, stalling the engine. Like an invisible hand, the microwaves hold the car in place." David Law, who leads JNLWD's technology division, said in March: "Anything that has electronics on it, these high-powered microwaves will affect. As long as the [radio] is on, it holds the vehicle stopped."

[...] "The RFVS system uses high-power magnetron tubes to generate intense RF pulses that interfere with a vehicle's electronics, rendering it temporarily inoperable. The engine cannot be restarted while the RF is on but is readily restarted once the RF is turned off. Thus, the RFVS system allows for the maintenance of a safe keep-out zone in situations that might otherwise require the use of lethal force. The defined measure of success for this system is a demonstrated, effective capability against more than 80% of the candidate target-vehicle-class list, which includes passenger cars and large vehicles."

A video shows demonstrations of the weapon against cars and boats.

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takyon writes:

ExoMars returns first images from new orbit

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has returned the first images of the Red Planet from its new orbit.

The spacecraft arrived in a near-circular 400 km altitude orbit a few weeks ago ahead of its primary goal to seek out gases that may be linked to active geological or biological activity on Mars.

[...] The image captures a 40 km-long segment of Korolev Crater located high in the northern hemisphere. The bright material on the rim of the crater is ice.

[...] A long period of data collection will be needed to bring out the details, especially for particularly rare – or not even yet discovered – ingredients in the atmosphere. Trace gases, as hinted at from their name, are only present in very small amounts: that is, less than one percent of the volume of the planet's atmosphere. In particular, the orbiter will seek evidence of methane and other gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological activity. The camera will eventually help characterise features on the surface that may be related to trace gas sources.

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter

Also at Space.com.

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realDonaldTrump writes:

"Seoul's Defense Ministry said Monday it will pull back dozens of its frontline loudspeakers on Tuesday.

It says Seoul expects Pyongyang to do the same.

South Korea had turned off its loudspeakers ahead of Friday's summit talks, and North Korea responded by halting its own broadcasts." foxnews.com/world/2018/04/30/latest-s-korea-to-remove-loudspeakers-at-border.html

Seoul had blasted propaganda messages and K-pop songs from border loudspeakers since the North's fourth nuclear test in early 2016. The North quickly matched the South's action with its own border broadcasts.

"South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Monday that President Trump deserves to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and end the decades-long war between the North and South.

---

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takyon writes:

Suborbital test flight moves Blue Origin closer to launching people

The privately-developed New Shepard booster, designed and built by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin, took off from a launch pad in West Texas, briefly flew into space with an instrumented capsule, and returned to a rocket-assisted landing Sunday in another test before humans climb aboard the suborbital spaceship.

[...] A live webcast of the test flight provided by Blue Origin showed the vehicles coasting to an apogee of roughly 351,000 feet, or about 107 kilometers, around four minutes into the mission. The rocket achieved a top speed of around 2,200 mph (3,540 kilometers per hour), according to data released by Blue Origin. Ariane Cornell, who hosted Blue Origin's launch webcast, said engineers intended to "push the envelope" of the New Shepard's capabilities, aiming to reach an altitude of 350,000 feet, around 20,000 feet higher than the rocket's typical target. "That's the altitude we've been targeting for operations," Bezos tweeted after Sunday's flight.

The two vehicles then made their descents, and the New Shepard booster fell back through the atmosphere, deployed an airbrake and reignited its throttleable BE-3 engine to slow its velocity for touchdown. Four landing legs extended from the base of the New Shepard booster just before it settled gently on a landing pad around 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the rocket's launch site.

The rocket landed about seven minutes after liftoff, while the crew capsule deployed three parachutes and fired retro-rockets to cushion the craft's landing on the desert floor approximately 10 minutes after launch. A live view from a flying drone captured spectacular views of the capsule's final descent.

Also at TechCrunch.

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chromas writes:

Here's a bit o' history of cars in video games:

From Wipeout to Ridge Racer to Motorhead, the original PlayStation marked the inflection point where home console hardware finally caught up with the outsized ambitions of simulation-minded developers everywhere. At the same time, the success of classics like Gran Turismo on the sales charts helped cement the genre as a commercial force. But it was 1994’s Road and Track Presents: The Need for Speed—a mouthful of a title, especially for the starting point of a much-vaunted franchise—that served as one of the very first truly excellent home driving games. Developed by EA and originally consigned to the doomed early disc-based machine known as the 3DO, art lead Markus Tessmann distinctly recalls working around both the strict hardware limitations of the ailing console and the somewhat-strained budget assigned to the unproven team.

According to Tessmann, EA had cajoled him out of his decade-long career making top-flight 3D graphics for feature films and commercials with the promise that his expertise would help them make cutting-edge 3D games. But after etching a handful of traditional pixel-art games for the Sega Genesis, Tessmann began to grow exasperated. That is, until he heard about their next project. “They told us that they wanted us to make a driving game for the 3DO, and I thought that was great,” he says. “But then they told us that they wanted it to be a 2D game similar to Sega’s OutRun, or the hit game of the time, Road Rash. Just 2D bitmaps of cars that we’d scale, to give the illusion of depth. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? That makes no sense. It’s the 3DO, not the 2DO.”

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T-Mobile, Sprint to merge in all-stock deal

realDonaldTrump writes:

"T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. agreed on Sunday to merge in an all-stock transaction, following on-again, off-again talks to combine the two companies." foxbusiness.com/markets/t-mobile-sprint-to-merge-in-all-stock-deal

T-Mobile and Sprint to Attempt Merger

takyon writes:

T-Mobile and Sprint have reached an agreement to merge. The combined company would be called T-Mobile. Now they face the regulators, and are already arguing for it as a move for America to remain competitive with China on 5G:

T-Mobile and Sprint reached a $26.5 billion merger agreement Sunday that would reduce the U.S. wireless industry to three major players — that is, if the Trump administration's antitrust regulators let the deal go through. The nation's third- and fourth-largest wireless companies have been considering a combination for years, one that would bulk them up to a similar size as industry giants Verizon and AT&T. But a 2014 attempt fell apart amid resistance from the Obama administration.

Consumers worry a less crowded telecom field could result in higher prices, while workers unions are concerned about potential job losses.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure acknowledged that getting regulatory approval is "the elephant in the room," and one of the first things the companies did after sending out the deal's news release was to call Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The companies stressed that they plan to have more employees following the combination, particularly in rural areas, than they do as stand-alone companies now. They also emphasized that the deal would help accelerate their development of faster 5G wireless networks and ensure that the U.S. doesn't cede leadership on the technology to China.

And they said the combination would allow them to better compete not only with AT&T and Verizon but also with Comcast and others as the wireless, broadband and video industries converge. "This isn't a case of going from 4 to 3 wireless companies — there are now at least 7 or 8 big competitors in this converging market," T-Mobile chief executive John Legere said in a statement.

T-Mobile press release. Also at Bloomberg.

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An Anonymous Coward sends us a link:

The Guardian reports

[...] With customers locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB[*] computer crisis has been one of the worst in recent memory. The bank, its chief executive, Paul Pester, admitted on Thursday, was “on its knees” and it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.

[...] By March 2017, the nightmare for customers that was going to unfold a year later appeared inevitable. “It was unbelievable – hardly even a prototype or proof of concept, yet it was supposed to be fully tested and working by May before the integration work started,” the insider continued. “Senior staff were furious about the state it was in. Even logging in was problematic.”

[...] However, only hours after the switch was flicked, systems crumpled and up to 1.9m TSB customers who use internet and mobile banking were locked out. “I could have put money on the rollout being the disaster it has been, with evidence of major code changes on the hoof over last weekend and into this week,” the insider said.

[...] Customers reported receiving texts saying their cards had been used abroad, that they had discovered thousands of pounds in their accounts they did not have – or that mortgage accounts had vanished, multiplied or changed currency. One bemused account holder showed his TSB banking app recording a direct debit paid to Sky Digital 81 years from now. Some saw details of other people’s accounts and holidaymakers complained that they had been left unable to pay restaurant and hotel bills.

TSB, to customers’ fury, at first insisted the problems were only intermittent. At 3.40am on Wednesday 25 April, Pester tweeted that the system was “up and running”, only to be forced to apologise the next day and admit it was actually only running at 50% capacity.

[*] [Update added for our non-UK community. --martyb] TSB Bank was originally founded as "Trustee Savings Bank plc" on November 27, 1985:

TSB Bank plc is a retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom, which is a subsidiary of the Sabadell Group. TSB Bank operates a nationwide network of 550 branches across England, Scotland and Wales. TSB launched in its present form on 9 September 2013, with more than 4.6 million customers and over £20 billion of loans and customer deposits, and is headquartered in Edinburgh.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

BBC News reports that "ice cores were gathered from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean in the spring of 2014 and summer of 2015" and the researchers "found concentrations of over 12,000 particles per litre of sea ice - which is two to three times higher than" than they had seen previously.

Arctic sea ice is an important temporal sink and means of transport for microplastic
orcid.org/0000-0003-1531-1664

Previously: Microplastics in Arctic Ice

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takyon writes:

Joy Reid, an MSNBC host, apologized in December for "homophobic content" on a "now-defunct blog". This month, a Twitter user found similar material by using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, although robots.txt is now in effect. This time around, Reid blamed hackers (archive) for inserting these posts into the blog, before admitting that it could not be proven (archive) that the blog had been hacked/manipulated:

Joy Reid, the MSNBC host who accused hackers of inserting homophobic posts into her now-defunct blog, said on Saturday that while she continued to deny having written the offensive language, security experts could not conclusively say her blog was breached. "I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me," she said on her morning show, "AM Joy." "But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don't believe me." She hired a cybersecurity expert to see if her former blog had been manipulated, she said, but "the reality is, they have not been able to prove it."

The posts containing the offensive language, which Mediaite wrote about on Monday, said that "most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing" and that "a lot of heterosexuals, especially men, find the idea of homosexual sex to be ... well ... gross." They also allegedly showed Ms. Reid arguing against legalized gay marriage and criticizing commentators who supported it, including Rachel Maddow, who is now one of Ms. Reid's colleagues at MSNBC.

The Internet Archive responded to claims that its database might have been manipulated:

This past December, Reid's lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that "fraudulent" posts were "inserted into legitimate content" in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn't know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).

When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.

We let Reid's lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid's being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.

Also at CNN.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Aquaporins are proteins that serve as water channels to regulate the flow of water across biological cell membranes. They also remove excess salt and impurities in the body, and it is this aspect that has led to much interest in recent years in how to mimic the biochemical processes of aquaporins potentially for water desalination systems.

An international team of researchers co-led by Georges Belfort has discovered water, in the form of "water wires," contained in another molecule -- the imidazole -- a nitrogen-based organic compound that could be used as a potential building block for artificial aquaporins. The findings were recently published in Science Advances by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Belfort is Institute Professor and professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Belfort's colleague, Mihail Barboiu, a research leader at the European Membranes Institute (EMI) in France, has synthesized and studied the dynamics of a ring structure of the imidazole embedded in a supported lipid bilayer (i.e., in a synthetic model of a biological membrane surrounding a cell). EMI operates under the auspices of several organizations, including France's National Center for Scientific Research (abbreviated CNRS in French).

X-ray studies by Barboiu and dynamic computer simulations by CNRS researcher Marc Baaden show that the imidazole's ring structure makes the molecule an ideal candidate to learn about how artificial aquaporins could be developed. In theory, assembled imidazole molecules act like an aquaporin by allowing water molecules to enter and possibly flow through the center of the ring structure while keeping out other molecules.

Still, there was no direct proof that water existed inside the imidazole water channel. To find out, Barboiu enlisted the help of Belfort and Poul Petersen, assistant professor of chemistry at Cornell University.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Kevin Beaumont reports that, by compromising a router at Equinix in Chicago, attackers were able to forge DNS responses for myetherwallet.com, with users "redirected to a server hosted in Russia, which served the website using a fake certificate." Victims' online wallets were drained of cryptocurrency.

Also at The Verge and Ars Technica which said

Amazon lost control of a small number of its cloud services IP addresses for two hours on [April 24] when hackers exploited a known Internet-protocol weakness that let them to redirect traffic to rogue destinations. By subverting Amazon's domain-resolution service, the attackers masqueraded as cryptocurrency website MyEtherWallet.com and stole about $150,000 in digital coins from unwitting end users. They may have targeted other Amazon customers as well.

Wikipedia on BGP

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Electronicsweekly.com reports

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to stack solution-processed organic solar cells on top of vacuum-processed cells, creating an tandem solar cell with 15% efficiency.

"For the last couple of years, efficiency for organic photo-voltaics was stuck around 11 to 12%," said Michigan physicist Xiaozhou Che.

The top solution-processed non-fullerene-acceptor cell absorbs infra-red up to 950nm, and the bottom fullerene-based cell absorbs visible light starting at 350nm.

"By themselves, the cells achieve 10 to 11% efficiency. When we stack them together, we increase light absorption and efficiency improves to 15% with an anti-reflection coating," said Che [...]

High fabrication yield organic tandem photovoltaics combining vacuum- and solution-processed subcells with 15% efficiency (DOI: 10.1038/s41560-018-0134-z) (DX)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Washington Post reports that NASA "has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development," Resource Prospector. From Wikipedia:

Resource Prospector is a cancelled mission concept by NASA of a rover that would have performed a survey expedition on a polar region of the Moon. The rover was to attempt to detect and map the location of volatiles such as hydrogen, oxygen and lunar water which could foster more affordable and sustainable human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System bodies.

The mission concept was still in its pre-formulation stage, when it was scrapped in April 2018. The Resource Prospector mission was proposed to be launched in 2022.

takyon: Meanwhile, NASA is "pushing hard on deep space exploration" with the Moon as its goal.

Also at Space.com, The Verge, and Fortune.

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janrinok writes:

A state-owned French art museum has discovered that more than half of its collection consists of worthless fakes and experts fear that other public galleries may also be stuffed with forgeries.

An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist's death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist's birthplace in southern France, were fakes.

Many of the forged oil paintings, watercolours and drawings were bought with £140,000 of municipal funds over the past few decades. Others were given to the museum by two local groups that raised money to buy them by appealing for donations. Some were bequeathed by a private collector.

Yves Barniol, the mayor of Elne, near the Spanish border, said: "It's a catastrophe. I put myself in the place of all the people who came to visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It's intolerable and I hope we find those responsible."

[...] Art experts estimate that at least 20 per cent of paintings owned by major museums across the world may not be the work of the purported artists.

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takyon writes:

Microsoft's corporate vice president of communication Frank X. Shaw has given the company's take on the conviction of Eric Lundgren for allegedly ordering unauthorized copies of Windows:

In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us to carefully review the publicly available court documents. All of the information we are sharing in this blog is drawn from those documents. We are sharing this information now and responding publicly because we believe both Microsoft's role in the case and the facts themselves are being misrepresented.