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takyon writes:

Researchers Claim to Find New Solution to Spectre, Meltdown

The researchers call their solution Dynamically Allocated Way Guard (DAWG) and revealed it in a recent paper. This name stands in opposition to Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and is said to prevent attackers from accessing ostensibly secure information through exploiting flaws in the speculative execution process. Best of all, DAWG is said to require very few resources that CAT isn't already using and can be enabled with operating system changes instead of requiring the in-silicon fixes many thought were needed to address the flaws.

[...] Here's how the researchers summarized their approach with DAWG:

"Unlike existing mechanisms such as CAT, DAWG disallows hits across protection domains. This affects hit paths and cache coherence, and DAWG handles these issues with minimal modification to modern operating systems, while reducing the attack surface of operating systems to a small set of annotated sections where data moves across protection domains, or where domains are resized/reallocated. Only in these handful of routines, DAWG protection is relaxed, and other defensive mechanisms such as speculation fences are applied as needed."

Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Plant hormone makes space farming a possibility

With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from the University of Zurich have shown. The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants' growth—even under the challenging conditions found in space.

The idea of establishing colonies for people to live on the moon or on other planets has been bounced around for a while now—and not just by NASA, but also by private entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The prospect of colonization and long-term human space expeditions raise the issue of sustainably providing food for people in space. One possible answer is to cultivate crops in situ. However, the soils on the moon and on other planets are lower in nutrients compared to Earth-based soil. The alternative—transporting nutrient-rich soil and fertilizers into space—comes with a high economic and ecological cost.

Plant-fungal symbiosis promotes plant growth

When looking for a possible solution, the research group working with Lorenzo Borghi of the University of Zurich and Marcel Egli of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts concentrated on the process of mycorrhiza, a symbiotic association between fungi and plant roots. In this symbiosis, the fungal hyphae supply the plant roots with additional water, nitrogen, phosphates and trace elements from the ground. In return, they get access to sugar and fat produced by the plant. This symbiosis is stimulated by hormones of the strigolactone family, which most plants secrete into the soil around their roots. The process of mycorrhization can greatly increase plant growth and thereby substantially improve crop yields—especially in soil that is low in nutrients.

Simulated microgravity and the antagonistic influence of strigolactone on plant nutrient uptake in low nutrient conditions (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41526-018-0054-z) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Scientists grow functioning human neural networks in 3D from stem cells

A team of Tufts University-led researchers has developed three-dimensional (3D) human tissue culture models for the central nervous system that mimic structural and functional features of the brain and demonstrate neural activity sustained over a period of many months. With the ability to populate a 3D matrix of silk protein and collagen with cells from patients with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other conditions, the tissue models allow for the exploration of cell interactions, disease progression and response to treatment. The development and characterization of the models are reported today in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

The new 3D brain tissue models overcome a key challenge of previous models -the availability of human source neurons. This is due to the fact that neurological tissues are rarely removed from healthy patients and are usually only available post-mortem from diseased patients. The 3D tissue models are instead populated with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that can be derived from many sources, including patient skin. The iPSCs are generated by turning back the clock on cell development to their embryonic-like precursors. They can then be dialed forward again to any cell type, including neurons.

[...] Compared to growing and culturing cells in two dimensions, the three-dimensional matrix yields a significantly more complete mix of cells found in neural tissue, with the appropriate morphology and expression of receptors and neurotransmitters, according to the paper.

Also at ZDNet and Motherboard.

Functional and Sustainable 3D Human Neural Network Models from Pluripotent Stem Cells (DOI: 10.1021/acsbiomaterials.8b00622) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wants to fix 'filter bubbles' on the social network

[...] Dorsey noted that the site by design allows users to follow certain accounts, which could skew their perception of the world. If users followed a certain topic or interest, they might see more tweets from people with different viewpoints, he said.

Twitter needs to give users more tools to break down these bubbles, Dorsey acknowledged.

But as social media sites face allegations that it's suppressing conservative voices, these companies are also grappling with free speech concerns.

Also at CNBC, WIRED

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.

But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today's global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.

The article asserts that much of today's slavery is being driven by the demand for electronic goods.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Australian Communications Minister is proposing "game changing" laws crack down on Piracy by forcing search engines such as Google to filter content results thereby removing the path people have to finding illegal content online.

[...] Under the proposed laws to be introduced to Parliament today, authorities will also be able to force search engines like Google to stop "unashamedly facilitating crime" by promoting pirate sites that allow internet users to illegally download music or films.

Graham Burke, chief executive of Australian film company Village Roadshow, last night hailed the new laws as game-changing for the industry while slamming Google for acting "as evil as Big Tobacco" in its online behaviour.

"We stand ready to be co-operative with Google. We see good Google and bad Google. But bad Google is as evil as Big Tobacco was 30 years ago. They know what they're doing. They know they're facilitating and enabling crime and it's time for them to clean their act up," he told News Corp.

He accused Google of "unashamedly facilitating crime" by taking people to criminal pirate websites.

Does the Australian government really need to give weapons to special interest groups to enforce civil laws the majority of people do not support?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Days after President Donald Trump's surprise victory, Zuckerberg brushed off assertions that the outcome had been influenced by fictional news stories on Facebook, calling the idea "pretty crazy ."

But Facebook's blase attitude shifted as criticism of the company mounted in Congress and elsewhere. Later that year, it acknowledged having run thousands of ads promoting false information placed by Russian agents. Zuckerberg eventually made fixing Facebook his personal challenge for 2018.

[...] The war room is a major part of Facebook's ongoing repairs. Its technology draws upon the artificial-intelligence system Facebook has been using to help identify "inauthentic" posts and user behavior. Facebook provided a tightly controlled glimpse at its war room to The Associated Press and other media ahead of the second round of presidential elections in Brazil on Oct. 28 and the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 6.

"There is no substitute for physical, real-world interaction," said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook's director of elections and civic engagement. "The primary thing we have learned is just how effective it is to have people in the same room all together."

More than 20 different teams now coordinate the efforts of more than 20,000 people—mostly contractors—devoted to blocking fake accounts and fictional news and stopping other abuses on Facebook and its other services. As part of the crackdown, Facebook also has hired fact checkers, including The Associated Press, to vet new stories posted on its social network.

To assess the factual content of news stories published by agencies like the Associated Press, Facebook is hiring the Associated Press.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Royale-lly Screwed: Epic Sues YouTubers Promoting Fortnite Cheats

Part of Fortnite's appeal is that it offers a level playing field. People can't unlock new weapons, start a match with equipment, or augment their abilities by grinding for in-game upgrades. Everyone drops out of the Battle Bus with the same tools, a glider and a pickaxe so their skill will determine whether they catch the 'dub or take an L. So it may not come as a surprise that Epic Games is suing two YouTubers for upsetting that balance with cheats.

TorrentFreak has reported that Epic's lawsuit targets Brandon "Golden Modz" Lucas, a cheat distributor and content creator whose YouTube channel has 1.7 million followers, and Colton "Exentric" Contor, who has over 7,000 followers. The cheat in question combined an aimbot with ESP features that offered information that players would otherwise have no way of knowing. It reportedly cost $55 (30 days) or $300 (unlimited) from the Golden Godz website.

[...] The suit appeared to have a quick impact. Golden Modz's last video was published on October 12, and the Golden Godz website currently says that "No packages exist at this time," even though a dialog box claims that "Payment systems are back up and new packages have been added!" The site claims to offer various "services" for several Call of Duty games and Grand Theft Auto: Online; all of them appear to have been pulled.

Also at Polygon.

Fortnite.

Previously: Epic Games Sues 14-Year-Old after He Files a DMCA Counterclaim for a How-to-Cheat Video
U.S. Federal Judge Blocks Man From Selling GTA V Cheating Software

Related: Game About Net Neutrality Receives Grant from Epic Games
Epic Games (Developer of the Unreal Engine) Shows Off "Siren" Demo
Sony Faces Growing 'Fortnite' Backlash At E3
Fortnite's Android Version Bypasses Google Play to Avoid 30% "Store Tax"
Epic's first Fortnite Installer allowed hackers to download and install anything on your Android phone

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

ScienceNews:

Twisters are twirling away from Tornado Alley.

From 1979 to 2017, annual tornado frequency slightly decreased over the region, which stretches across the central and southern Great Plains of the United States, a study finds. Conversely, a higher number of storms touched down in areas east of the Mississippi River over the same period, researchers report October 17 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

"The great Tornado Alley is still No. 1 in terms of [overall] frequency," says coauthor Victor Gensini, an applied climatologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. But more tornadoes in communities ill-prepared to face the relatively unfamiliar storms, such as in the southeastern United States, could mean more infrastructure damage and loss of life.

The Deep South should get to work on its tornado shelters?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Discover Magazine:

A few years earlier, and about 1,700 miles to the southeast, another Brazilian geologist happened upon a different, equally peculiar cave. Heinrich Frank, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, was zipping down the highway on a Friday afternoon when he passed a construction site in the town of Novo Hamburgo. There, in a bank where excavators had eaten away half of a hill, he saw a peculiar hole.

Local geology doesn't yield such a sight, so Frank went back a few weeks later and crawled inside. It was a single shaft, about 15 feet long; at its end, while on his back, he found what looked like claw marks all over the ceiling. Unable to identify any natural geological explanation for the cave's existence, he eventually concluded that it was a "paleoburrow," dug, he believes, by an extinct species of giant ground sloth.

"I didn't know there was such a thing as paleoburrows," says Frank. "I'm a geologist, a professor, and I'd never even heard of them."

[...] Until the early 2000s, in fact, hardly any burrows attributed to extinct megafauna had been described in the scientific literature. That's especially curious because, after his chance discovery in Novo Hamburgo, Frank caught the burrow bug and began finding them in droves.

takyon writes:

Samsung Shares SSD Roadmap for QLC NAND And 96-layer 3D NAND

At Samsung's Tech Day event today in San Jose, the company shared their SSD roadmap for transitioning to 96-layer 3D NAND and introducing four bit per cell (QLC) NAND flash memory. Successors have been named for most of their current SSDs that use three bit per cell (TLC) NAND flash and are being updated with 96-layer 3D TLC, and new product lines using QLC NAND have been introduced.

[...] The enterprise SAS product line is not seeing any major changes to performance or available capacities, but the update from the PM1643 to the PM1643a does improve random write performance by about 20%. The largest model remains 30.72TB. The high-end enterprise NVMe drives are getting a major controller update that brings PCIe 4.0 support in addition to the NAND upgrade. This allows for much higher performance across the board, most notably with sequential read speeds reaching 8GB/s on the new PM1733 compared to 3.5GB/s on the PM1723b. The maximum available capacity has caught up to the SAS product line with the introduction of a 30.72TB model.

[...] Samsung also mentioned that in Q2 2019 they are planning to introduce a higher-performing 512Gb QLC die to complement their current 1Tb die. Samsung compared the performance of this new 512Gb die against an unspecified competitor's 1Tb QLC, claiming that Samsung's high-performance QLC will have 37% lower read latency and 45% lower program latency.

[...] The first products featuring the second generation of Samsung's low-latency Z-NAND flash memory will be the SZ1733 and SZ1735, high-end enterprise NVMe SSDs that differ primarily in the amount of overprovisioning. Samsung has announced that their second generation of Z-NAND will include a MLC version, but these drives are using the SLC version. Like the TLC-based PM1733, the new Z-NAND SSDs will also feature dual-port capability and PCIe 4.0 support. Sequential reads of up to 12GB/s are claimed, but this product line is all about random I/O, which Samsung hasn't detailed yet. Samsung demoed a 4TB model, significantly larger than the 800GB maximum for the first-generation SZ985.

Z-NAND (PDF) has lower latency than normal NAND, and could be compared to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint.

Related: Western Digital and Samsung at the Flash Memory Summit
Samsung Announces a 128 TB SSD With QLC NAND
Samsung Announces Production of 1-4 TB Consumer 3D QLC NAND SSDs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

New 100-mile electric van matches diesel vans on price, Workhorse says

Electric-vehicle maker Workhorse announced today that it has begun initial production of a 100-mile range electric delivery truck called the NGEN-1000. The truck is meant to replace diesel-powered delivery trucks, but this vehicle weighs less than half of what a comparable internal combustion van usually weighs.

In a press release, Workhorse said that it "believes this weight reduction, coupled with the 100-mile range, will have cost-savings implications that will make the EV alternative to traditional fleet delivery vehicles all the more appealing."

Workhorse CEO Stephen S. Burns added that the van would have "an off-the-lot cost on par with traditional fuel delivery vehicles, and substantial savings from there."

The truck will come in four sizes, up to a maximum of 1,000 cubic feet of storage. It also has all-wheel-drive and a 6,000-pound carrying capacity.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Who needs street lights? Chinese city plans fake moon

In Chengdu, there is reportedly an ambitious plan afoot for replacing the city's street lights: boosting the glow of the real moon with that of a more powerful fake one.

The capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan plans to launch an illumination satellite in 2020. According to an article in People's Daily, the artificial moon is "designed to complement the moon at night", though it would be eight times as bright. The "dusk-like glow" of the satellite would be able to light an area with a diameter of between 10 and 80km (six to 50 miles), while the precise illumination range could be controlled within tens of metres – enabling it to replace street lights.

The vision was shared by Wu Chunfeng, the chairman of the private space contractor Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co (Casc), at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship event held in Chengdu last week. Wu reportedly said testing had begun on the satellite years ago and the technology had now evolved enough to allow for launch in 2020. It is not clear whether the plan has the backing of the city of Chengdu or the Chinese government, though Casc is the main contractor for the Chinese space programme.

Also at The Guardian and Inverse.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC)

The upper atmosphere of Venus, with similar pressure, density, gravity, and radiation protection to that of the surface of the earth, is relatively benign at 50 km. A lighter-than-air vehicle could carry either a host of instruments and probes, or a habitat and ascent vehicle for a crew of two astronauts to explore Venus for up to a month. Such a mission would require less time to complete than a crewed Mars mission.

A recent internal NASA study of a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) led to the development of an evolutionary program for the exploration of Venus, with focus on the mission architecture and vehicle concept for a 30 day crewed mission into Venus's atmosphere.

Key technical challenges for the mission include performing the aerocapture maneuvers at Venus and Earth, inserting and inflating the airship at Venus, and protecting the solar panels and structure from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. With advances in technology and further refinement of the concept, missions to the Venusian atmosphere can expand humanity's future in space.

What is needed?

The first proof of concept identified candidate materials and evaluated them, finding FEP-Teflon (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene-Teflon) to maintain 90 percent transmittance to relevant spectra even after 30 days of immersion in concentrated sulfuric acid. The second proof of concept developed and verified a packaging algorithm for the airship envelope to inform the entry, descent, and inflation analysis.

Also at The Conversation.

Previously: Cloud Cities on Venus?

Original Submission

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