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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Letting the sunshine in may kill dust-dwelling bacteria

Researchers at the University of Oregon found that in dark rooms 12% of bacteria on average were alive and able to reproduce (viable). In comparison only 6.8% of bacteria exposed to daylight and 6.1% of bacteria exposed to UV light were viable.

[...] Dust kept in the dark contained organisms closely related to species associated with respiratory diseases, which were largely absent in dust exposed to daylight.

The authors found that a smaller proportion of human skin-derived bacteria and a larger proportion of outdoor air-derived bacteria lived in dust exposed to light that in than in dust not exposed to light. This may suggest that daylight causes the microbiome of indoor dust to more strongly resemble bacterial communities found outdoors.

[...] The authors caution that the miniature room environments used in the study were exposed to only a relatively narrow range of light dosages. Although the researchers selected light dosages similar to those found in most buildings, there are many architectural and geographical features that produce lower or higher dosages of light that may need additional study.

Daylight exposure modulates bacterial communities associated with household dust. Microbiome, 2018; 6 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s40168-018-0559-4

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Rocket Lab selects Wallops for U.S. launch site

Small launch vehicle company Rocket Lab announced Oct. 17 that it will build its second launch pad, and first in the United States, at Wallops Island in Virginia.

The company, headquartered in the United States but with much of its operations in New Zealand, said it will build Launch Complex (LC) 2 at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport, located at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility here. Construction of the pad is set to start almost immediately, with the company planning a first launch from the site in the third quarter of 2019.

Rocket Lab selected Wallops after what Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck called an "exhaustive nationwide search" for a launch site to complement its existing facility in New Zealand, known as LC-1. The company announced four finalists in July that included Wallops as well as Cape Canaveral in Florida, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska.

Wallops Island.

Also at Ars Technica.

Previously: Rocket Lab Plans to Build its Next Launch Site in the US

Related: NASA Awards Launch Contracts to Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Dandelion seeds fly using 'impossible' method never before seen in nature

Dandelion seeds fly using a method that researchers thought couldn't work in the real world, according to a study published on 17 October in Nature.

When some animals, aeroplanes or seeds fly, rings of circulating air called vortices form in contact with their wings or wing-like surfaces. These vortices can help to maintain the forces that lift the animal, machine or seed into the air.

Researchers thought that an unattached vortex would be too unstable to persist in nature. Yet the light, puffy seeds of dandelions use vortices that materialize just above their surfaces and lift the seed into the air.

Also at the University of Edinburgh and BBC.

A separated vortex ring underlies the flight of the dandelion (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0604-2) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

At Facebook, public funds join push to remove Zuckerberg as chairman

Four major U.S. public funds that hold shares in Facebook Inc on Wednesday proposed removing Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as chairman following several high-profile scandals and said they hoped to gain backing from larger asset managers. State treasurers from Illinois, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, co-filed the proposal. They oversee money including pension funds and joined activist and original filer Trillium Asset Management.

A similar shareholder proposal seeking an independent chair was defeated in 2017 at Facebook, where Zuckerberg's majority control makes outsider resolutions effectively symbolic. Rhode Island State Treasurer Seth Magaziner said that the latest proposal was still worth filing as a way of drawing attention to Facebook's problems and how to solve them. "This will allow us to force a conversation at the annual meeting, and from now until then in the court of public opinion," Magaziner said in a telephone interview.

[...] At least three of the four public funds supported the 2017 resolution as well. The current proposal, meant for Facebook's annual shareholder meeting in May 2019, asks the board to create an independent board chair to improve oversight, a common practice at other companies. It cites controversies that have hurt the reputation of the world’s largest social media network, including the unauthorized sharing of user information, the proliferation of fake news, and foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

[...] Zuckerberg has about 60 percent voting rights, according to a company filing in April.

Also at TechCrunch, Tech2, Tech Insider, CNBC, and Fortune.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

U.S. greenhouse emissions fell in 2017 as coal plants shut

Greenhouse gases emissions from the largest U.S. industrial plants fell 2.7 percent in 2017, the Trump administration said, as coal plants shut and as that industry competes with cheap natural gas and solar and wind power that emit less pollution.

The drop was steeper than in 2016 when emissions fell 2 percent, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.

EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said the data proves that federal regulations are not necessary to drive carbon dioxide reductions.

[...] While Wheeler gave the administration credit for the reductions, which mainly came from the power sector, the numbers also underscore that the administration has not been able to stop the rapid pace of coal plant shutdowns.

[...] Natural gas releases far less carbon dioxide when burned than coal and a domestic abundance of gas has driven a wave of closures of coal plants. In 2017 utilities shut or converted from coal-to-gas nearly 9,000 megawatts (MW) of coal plants.

[...] The trend of U.S. coal plant shutdowns is expected to pick up this year, with power companies expecting to shut 14,000 MW of coal plants in calendar year 2018.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.sesameworkshop.org/press-releases/puppeteer-caroll-spinney-announces-retirement-from-sesame-street/

Puppeteer Caroll Spinney today announced that he is stepping down from the roles of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, which he has performed on Sesame Street since its 1969 premiere.

"Big Bird brought me so many places, opened my mind and nurtured my soul," said Spinney. "And I plan to be an ambassador for Sesame Workshop for many years to come. After all, we're a family! But now it's time for two performers that I have worked with and respected – and actually hand-picked for the guardianship of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch – to take my alter-egos into their hands and continue to give them life."

Original Submission

Some of you will recall that I recently underwent several bouts of surgery and, despite your welcome comments and good wishes, your best guesses that I was having a sex change, having my breasts enhanced in either size or number, or receiving some fairly radical treatment for hemorrhoids, were all fairly wide of the mark. The surgery is now long past and I have made a reasonable recovery for someone of my age. But I do wish to thank you all for your comments because, almost without exception, they raised a smile when things were not going too well for me.

My wife suffers from a severe medical condition and I have been her full-time carer for over a decade now. Although I wish she had never developed the condition, I expend great effort, and also receive considerable personal satisfaction, in providing many hours of care each day so that she can remain in our home and we can continue our lives to the fullest extent possible. However, she has recently suffered from a deterioration in her condition. This was not unexpected but no-one could say when the next problems would affect her. But the result is that I now have to provide more support to her and my free time is reduced.

I joined this site at its inception and have enjoyed every minute of my time here. But I cannot dedicate the time that role of Editor-in-Chief (E-in-C) deserves and, several weeks ago, I made the difficult decision to stand down from the post. (I can hear the cheering from some in our community even here in France!) The fact that most of you will not have noticed any of this means that the transition has been successful. The entire editorial team (which is nowhere near as large as that phrase makes it sound!) has stepped up to the plate and has maintained the output as it was before, ably led by Martyb who has assumed the role as E-in-C in addition to his numerous other roles on this site. I am grateful to them for their efforts and support both during my time as E-in-C and more recently in their work in editing the stories that we read each day. Thanks guys, you do a tremendous job with relatively little recognition. I've asked the powers-that-be to increase your salaries by an appropriate percentage.[*] I am also grateful to the other folk who do so much in the background keeping this site on-line. You have all become good friends although we could be standing next to each other and wouldn't know it.

Equally important to the site's success are you - the community. You provide the submissions, the comments, the funding, and you are the reason that we have a site at all. I thank each and every one of you for your contribution; from the regular submitters, the ACs, the 'characters', and those of you who just visit to read the stories that we publish. If I have offended anyone then I apologise but being E-in-C has been likened to herding cats in the dark: an almost impossible task and one in which you are certain to make a few mistakes.

Hopefully, I will remain on the site as an editor making whatever contribution I can. But, for the next few months at least, that contribution will be minimal as I have to solve several practical problems on how to make our home function satisfactorily for us both. I trust that you will give Martyb and the team the same support in the future that I have been fortunate enough to enjoy over the past couple of years. Thank you.

--

[*] Clarification: This is an inside joke among the staff. Nobody here receives any kind of payment for their efforts on the site; we are strictly volunteers. So, a 20% raise on zero is... still zero. --martyb

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Trivial authentication bypass in libssh leaves servers wide open

There’s a four-year-old bug in the Secure Shell implementation known as libssh that makes it trivial for just about anyone to gain unfettered administrative control of a vulnerable server. While the authentication-bypass flaw represents a major security hole that should be patched immediately, it wasn’t immediately clear what sites or devices were vulnerable since neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github’s implementation of libssh was affected.

[...] only vulnerable versions of libssh running in server mode are vulnerable, while the client mode is unaffected. Peter Winter-Smith, a researcher at security firm NCC who discovered the bug and privately reported it to libssh developers, told Ars the vulnerability is the result of libssh using the same machine state to authenticate clients and servers. Because exploits involve behavior that’s safe in the client but unsafe in the server context, only servers are affected.

takyon writes:

There's nothing dystopian at all about these high-tech blinkers for humans

Ever feel like you're having too much fun in the office? Like your boss just isn't getting enough value out of your life? Fear not: Panasonic has designed a pair of high-tech blinkers* that block out your peripheral vision to help you concentrate on the job at hand.

The concept is called Wear Space, which consists of a lightweight, wraparound fabric screen that conceals a pair of Bluetooth headphones. The screen cuts your horizontal field of view by around 60 percent, while the headphones come with a built-in noise-canceling feature that can pipe in music of your choice. It charges over USB and has a battery life of 20 hours.

The Wear Space isn't an official Panasonic product (yet), but a prototype was developed by the company's Future of Life design studio. An early version was shown at SXSW earlier this year, but the creators of the Wear Space are now raising money for the device on Japanese crowdfunding site GreenFunding.

[...] *Also known as blinders. The metaphor we're going for here is the equipment used to restrict a horse's vision, so we're using the correct terminology, as recommended by the Kentucky Derby.

See also: Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Update: Launch was successful.

The BepiColombo mission to Mercury is set for launch on Saturday, October 20. The spacecraft consists of two satellites which will eventually detach and settle into two separate orbits around Mercury:

BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to the planet Mercury. The mission comprises two satellites to be launched together: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mio (Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, MMO). The mission will perform a comprehensive study of Mercury, including its magnetic field, magnetosphere, interior structure and surface. It is scheduled to launch in October 2018, with an arrival at Mercury planned for December 2025, after a flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus, and six flybys of Mercury. The mission was approved in November 2009, after years in proposal and planning as part of the European Space Agency's Horizon 2000+ program; it will be the last mission of the program to be launched.

[...] The main objectives of the mission are:

• Study the origin and evolution of a planet close to its parent star
• Study Mercury as a planet—its form, interior, structure, geology, composition and craters
• Investigate Mercury's exosphere, composition and dynamics, including generation and escape
• Study Mercury's magnetised envelope (magnetosphere) - structure and dynamics
• Investigate the origin of Mercury's magnetic field
• Verify Einstein's theory of general relativity by measuring the parameters gamma and beta of the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism with high accuracy.

The first event will be an Earth flyby on April 6, 2020, followed by a Venus flyby on October 12, 2020. The spacecraft's first Mercury flyby will be on October 2, 2021.

ESA and JAXA pages.

Previously: ESA Shows off BepiColombo Mercury Orbiters Ahead of 2018 Launch

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Qualcomm's new Wi-Fi chips are meant to rival 5G speeds

Qualcomm is launching a family of chips that can add incredibly high-speed Wi-Fi — at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second — to phones, laptops, routers, and so on. It's the start of a new generation of this super-fast Wi-Fi standard, but it isn't going to be used to speed up your typical web browsing. And whether it catches on at all remains an open question.

[...] WiGig relies on a connection standard known as 802.11ad, which can hit speeds up to 5 gigabits per second over close to 10 meters, according to Dino Bekis, the head of Qualcomm's mobile and compute connectivity group. Qualcomm's latest chips move WiGig up to a new generation of that wireless standard, called 802.11ay, which Bekis says can reach speeds twice as fast, and can do so up to 100 meter away. The Wi-Fi Alliance says the new standard "increases the peak data rates of WiGig and improves spectrum efficiency and reduces latency."

So why not just use this as normal Wi-Fi, given how fast it gets? Because that range is only line-of-sight — when there's literally nothing in the way between the transmitter and the receiver. This high-speed Wi-Fi is based on millimeter wave radio waves in the 60GHz range. That means it's really fast, but also that it has a very difficult time penetrating obstacles, like a wall. That's a problem if you want a general purpose wireless technology.

[...] It's not clear if this will really catch on, though. While there's definitely room for adoption from VR gamers, the earlier version of this tech has found minimal pickup in its couple years on the market. Asus recently made interesting use of it with the ROG Phone, which is designed for gamers. And Qualcomm says it's working with Facebook to use this tech for its Terragraph project, which wirelessly delivers home internet connections.

With 5:1 "visually lossless" compression, 10 Gbps could be enough for 5K @ 120 Hz.

Qualcomm press release.

Also at Engadget.

Related: AMD Acquires Nitero, a Maker of Wireless Chips for VR Headsets
Intel to Cease Shipments of Current WiGig Products, Focus on WiGig for VR
VirtualLink Consortium Announces USB Type-C Specification for VR Headsets
Wi-Fi Alliance Rebrands Wi-Fi Standards

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Netflix burns cash at a record pace, but investors love it

In its third quarter earnings statement on Tuesday, the company reported negative free cash flow of $859 million, the biggest figure in its history. Netflix continues to increase spending on original content as it seeks to compete with other players like Hulu, HBO and planned streaming services like Disney's, scheduled for next year. Netflix will reportedly spend at least $8 billion on content in 2018.

It would be a shame if someone were to pirate or illicitly stream that content.

Netflix has criticized the EU's local content quotas:

Netflix used its third quarter earnings report to criticize the European Union over a new content quota for streaming services. The EU, writes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the report, is "currently rewriting its audio visual rules" that will demand streaming services like Netflix "devote a minimum of 30 percent of their catalog to European works." Netflix's report acknowledged that catering to a specific audience encouraged more regional original programming for international audiences, but suggested that enforcing quotas on a streaming service could have unwanted negative effects.

Netflix is already set to spend $1 billion on European content this year.

Also at MarketWatch.

takyon writes:

Recreational cannabis is now legal in Canada... to a point. Here are some ground rules:

Adults of at least 18 years old will be allowed to carry and share up to 30 grams of legal marijuana in public, according to a bill that passed the Senate in June. They will also be allowed to cultivate up to four plants in their households and make products such as edibles for personal use.

[...] The supply of recreational marijuana could be limited, at least early on, in some stores. Officials in Nova Scotia and Manitoba said they won't have a large selection, at least not on the first day, CNN affiliate CBC News reported. [...] Marijuana will not be sold in the same location as alcohol or tobacco. Consumers are expected to purchase the drug from retailers regulated by provinces and territories or from federally licensed producers when those options are not available.

[...] Authorities will soon announce plans to pardon Canadians who have been convicted with possession of 30 grams or less of marijuana, CNN partner CTV reported. The production, distribution or sale of cannabis products will still be an offense for minors.

takyon writes:

When white dwarf meets brown dwarf, pow!

In the 1600s, western astronomers were just emerging from centuries of medieval thought, when the heavens were thought to be unchanging. You can imagine their astonishment when – in July of 1670, in what had been a blank, dark sky – some observers witnessed a bright pinprick of light that appeared, faded, reappeared, and then disappeared entirely from view. At that time, astronomers called such an event a nova or new star. This one was located in front of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and so received the name Nova sub Capite Cygni (a New Star below the Head of the Swan). Modern astronomers have learned it wasn't a new star. It wasn't even a spectacular collision of two main-sequence stars, as announced in 2015. Instead, using data from the ALMA telescope in Chile, astronomers now believe the event was a collision between an aging white dwarf star and a brown dwarf (star with too little mass to ignite thermonuclear fusion and thereby shine as most stars do).

The object in question is now called CK Vulpeculae.

The new work is based on observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The astronomers studied the debris from this explosion, which takes the form of dual rings of dust and gas resembling an hourglass with a compact central object (see image at top). Sumner Starrfield of Arizona State University is a co-author on a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He said in a statement:

It now seems what was observed centuries ago was not what we would today describe as a classic 'nova.' Instead, it was the merger of two stellar objects, a white dwarf and a brown dwarf. When these two objects collided, they spilled out a cocktail of molecules and unusual isotopes, which gave us new insights into the nature of this object.

Brown and white dwarf stars.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advising health professionals to keep an eye on some of the equipment they use to monitor pacemakers and other heart implants.

The watchdog's alert this week comes after Irish medical device maker Medtronic said it will lock some of its equipment out^[pdf] of its software update service, meaning the hardware can't download and install new code from its servers.

That may seem counterintuitive, however, it turns out security vulnerabilities in its technology that it had previously thought could only be exploited locally could actually be exploited via its software update network. Malicious updates could be pushed to Medtronic devices by hackers intercepting and tampering with the equipment's internet connections – the machines would not verify they were actually downloading legit Medtronic firmware – and so the biz has cut them off.

To get the latest patches, the software will have to be installed by hand via USB by a Medtronic technician. Both the FDA and Medtronic said there is no immediate danger to any patients or doctors.

The security bugs are not present in the implants themselves, but rather in Medtronic "programmers," which doctors and medics connect to patients' implants during and after surgery, allowing them to check battery levels, monitor heart rhythms, and adjust any settings.

[...] As a result, Medtronic said, it has cut both device models' access to the SDN, meaning the only way for hospitals and clinics to get firmware updates will be on-site by Medtronic techs. In the meantime, the FDA said the devices will continue to operate as normal and no immediate action needs to be taken.

In short, nobody's pacemaker is getting hacked any time soon, and doctors and patients have nothing to worry about, but updating the programmers is going to be a bit of a pain.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/12/medtronic_pacemaker_programmer_security/

Original Submission