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takyon writes:

Exoplanet discovered around neighbouring star

Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun.

Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes.

The planet's mass is thought to be more than three times that of our own, placing it in a category of world know as "super-Earths".

It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away.

Writing in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0677-y] [DX], Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's.

Barnard's Star.

Also at phys.org.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

L'Oréal's wearable sensor will track your UV exposure throughout the day

L'Oréal has announced a wearable device that measures your exposure to ultraviolet radiation that can seriously damage your skin and eyes and potentially cause skin cancer. The La Roche-Posay My Skin Track UV sensor is designed to clip onto your clothes or bag, and it relies on NFC rather than Bluetooth to transmit its data, meaning it doesn't require a battery to function. L'Oreal previously introduced a similar sensor that attached to your fingernail.

Despite the dangers of UV radiation, it can be very difficult to know exactly how much you're being exposed to. UVA rays can penetrate clouds and glass, which means you're probably exposed to them more than you think. L'Oréal's sensor has the potential to educate people about how often they're being exposed, although it won't solve the problem of people not using enough sunscreen in response.

Once your phone has the UV data, it can integrate it into Apple's HealthKit if you're using an iOS device. There will also be shortcuts to purchase skincare products from L'Oréal's skincare brand La Roche-Posay within the app.

Love the skin you're in. Especially if you're a vampire.

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takyon writes:

Samsung's next flagship processor has an NPU for on-device AI

Samsung Electronics is the latest mobile system-on-chip vendor to start using dedicated hardware for on-device machine learning. The Exynos 9 Series 9820, which will undoubtedly be used in the international versions of the Galaxy S10, has a neural processing engine (NPU) that is claimed to deliver up to seven times faster AI performance than the S9's 9810. NPUs can be used to speed up tasks like image processing and AR [(Augmented Reality)].

[...] Elsewhere, Samsung is claiming the Exynos 9820's fourth-generation custom CPU cores will provide a 20-percent boost to conventional single-core performance and 15-percent in multi-core or a 40-percent improvement in power efficiency. The GPU uses ARM's new Mali G76 cores, first seen in the Kirin 980, for what is claimed to be 40 percent greater performance or 35 percent better power efficiency.

The Exynos 9810 SoC had support for "10bit 4K120 encode & decode". The Exynos 9820 supports 8K30 and 4K150.

Also at Android Central and Wccftech.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nintendo wins $12m lawsuit against ROM sites run by a married couple

Nintendo has won a legal battle against pirate ROM websites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co. The judgement from the Arizona court has resulted in the owners of the now-defunct sites having to pay the Japanese game developer $12.23 million in damages.

The ROM site owners are married couple Jacob and Cristian Mathias, who registered the two sites under their company, Mathias Designs. Their legal troubles started this past summer when Nintendo filed a complaint with the federal court against them. In order to avoid a drawn-out legal battle the couple took down the two websites in July and put up a notice that said they were under maintenance.

As TorrentFreak notes, however, the couple soon owned up and admitted to both direct and indirect copyright as well as trademark infringement of Nintendo's games and other copyrighted content. The two ROM sites the Mathias couple ran offered pirated copies of Nintendo's retro games, including Super Mario World, Mario Kart 64, Super Mario All-Stars, and many more. People were able to download these pirate copies and play them on PC and other platforms they weren't intended for with an emulator, thereby bypassing Nintendo's hardware ecosystem entirely.

As the paperwork obtained by TorrentFreak shows, both parties – the Mathias couple and Nintendo – have now reached an agreement after the dispute was raised this summer.

Also at Motherboard.

Previously: Nintendo Sues ROM Sites
EmuParadise Removes ROMs After Nintendo Sued Other ROM Sites

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takyon writes:

Google Chrome Labs releases open source, browser-based image optimization tool, Squoosh

As web pages have advanced over the years, they have also dramatically increased in size. This has gradually contributed to pages loading slower and slower. To help web developers easily optimize their pages, Google Chrome Labs has released a new web tool called Squoosh that can downsize, compress, and reformat images.

[...] Supporting a variety of web formats like MozJPEG and WebP and traditional ones like PNG, Squoosh allows you to quickly make your images web-ready. The app is able to do 1:1 visual comparisons of the original image and its compressed counterpart, to help you understand the pros and cons of each format.

Squoosh.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Two innocent men have been burned alive by a massive lynch mob after WhatsApp rumours branded them child abductors.

A large crowd gathered outside the police station after rumours spread about the two men.

A mob dragged two men out of a police station, savagely beat them and then set them on fire, killing them, after a false rumour was spread on WhatsApp about the pair being child kidnappers.

The mother of one of the men made a desperate plea for the crowd to stop as she watched the lynching unfold on a Facebook livestream.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-46145986

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Climate change causing more severe wildfires, larger insect outbreaks in temperate forests

A warmer, drier climate is expected is increase the likelihood of larger-scale forest disturbances such as wildfires, insect outbreaks, disease and drought, according to a new study co-authored by a Portland State University professor.

The study, published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature Communications, sought to provide a more complete snapshot of disturbances in the world's temperate forests by quantifying the size, shape and prevalence of disturbances and understanding their drivers.

The study found that while many temperate forests are dominated by small-scale disturbance events -- driven largely by windstorms and cooler, wetter conditions -- there was also a strong link between high disturbance activity and warmer and drier-than-average climate conditions. Andrés Holz, a co-author and geography professor in PSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said this suggests that with a warming climate, disturbances are expected to become larger and more severe in some temperate forests including the western U.S.

"Under the warmer conditions we have been seeing, it is likely that we're going to see a higher probability of areas that tend to have very big disturbances," he said.

Among the study's findings:

Areas with low disturbance activity were largely associated with windstorms under cooler, rainy conditions, while areas with large disturbance activity were largely associated with wildfires, bark beetle outbreaks and drought under warmer, drier conditions.

In the majority of landscapes outside protected areas, disturbance patches were generally larger and less complex in shape than in protected areas. For example, human-made disturbances like logging are simpler in shape than the path a wildfire, storm or insect outbreak might take inside a protected area. But in landscapes affected by large-scale fires or outbreaks, the size and complexity of what happens inside and outside the protected areas are more comparable.

"Climate change is mimicking the footprint of disturbances in protected areas to what we are doing through land-use change outside of protected areas," Holz said. "Under warmer conditions, we might see more similarities between protected areas and their surroundings in some temperate forests globally."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Mark your calendar: All infectious diseases are seasonal

Most of us are aware of the seasonal cycle of influenza outbreaks, which for Americans peak in the winter. In a new paper, Micaela Martinez, PhD, a scientist at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, makes a case that all infectious diseases have a seasonal element. The "Pearl" article appears in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Martinez collected information from the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and peer-reviewed publications to create a calendar of epidemics for 69 infectious diseases, from commonplace infections to rare tropical diseases. A given year will see outbreaks of flu in the winter, chickenpox in the spring, and gonorrhea and polio in the summer -- to name a few of the best described seasonal outbreaks.

She found seasonality occurs not just in acute infectious diseases like flu but also chronic infectious diseases like Hepatitis B, which depending on geography, flares up with greater regularity certain times of the year. Preliminary work has shown that even HIV-AIDS has a seasonal element, thought to be driven by seasonal changes in malnutrition in agricultural settings.

[...] "Seasonality is a powerful and universal feature of infectious diseases, although the scientific community has largely ignored it for the majority of infections," says Martinez, an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences. "Much work is needed to understand the forces driving disease seasonality and understand how we can leverage seasonality to design interventions to prevent outbreaks and treat chronic infections."

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martyb writes:

R.I.P. Bill Godbout, 79:

Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro, perished November 8 due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California. He was 79.

There is a family-led GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.

Godbout was an important advocate for the industry-standard S-100 bus in its early days, as well as being a parts supplier for electronic music projects, according to 1970s microcomputing expert Herb Johnson.

Godbout was born October 2, 1939. He talked about his introduction to computing in an interview with InfoWorld magazine for their February 18, 1980 issue. "My first job out of college was with IBM. I served a big-system apprenticeship there, but I think the thing that really triggered [my interest] was the introduction of the 8008 by Intel," he said. "I was fascinated that you could have that kind of capability in a little 18-pin package."

Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote about Godbout's Silicon Valley electronics business. "Bill Godbout... bought junk on a more massive scale — usually government surplus chips and parts which were rejected as not meeting the exacting standards required for a specific function, but perfectly acceptable for other uses. Godbout, a gruff, beefy, still-active pilot who hinted at a past loaded with international espionage and intrigues for government agencies whose names he could not legally utter, would take these parts, throw his own brand name on them, and sell them, often in logic circuitry kits that you could buy by mail order."

Does anyone else remember the days of the S-100 Bus? One of my first jobs actually entailed using an Altair 8800 on which the S-100 bus was based. Though I had no personal connection with him, I recall often seeing his name mentioned in the various articles I read.

One of the long-Long timers has passed. R.I.P.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

20,667 Drunken-Driving Convictions Tainted by Bad Breathalyzer Test in New Jersey

More than 20,000 drunken-driving convictions in New Jersey could be in jeopardy after the state's highest court ruled on Tuesday that breathalyzer tests used to win those judgments were inadmissible.

The unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court stems from criminal charges brought more than two years ago against a State Police sergeant who was accused of falsifying calibration records on breath test devices that were used in five of New Jersey's 21 counties.

It is unclear how state courts and law enforcement officials will now proceed. The Supreme Court ruling does not automatically expunge all the drunken-driving convictions, but the justices did note that defendants tested by the affected breath machines could now seek to challenge their convictions. The decision also raises questions about cases that are still moving through the judicial system.

[...] The ruling is the latest development in an odd case that began more than two years ago, when Sgt. Marc W. Dennis, whose duties included calibrating breath test devices, was charged with falsely certifying that he had followed proper calibration procedures. As a result, the accuracy of all the breath tests that he calibrated, known in New Jersey as Alcotests, could not be trusted, the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled.

Also at NBC.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0824

Diabetics are hacking old insulin pumps to make them smarter — here's what happened when I tried it

There is a revolution in the Type 1 diabetes community and thousands of people are now hacking their insulin pumps for better blood sugar management. CNBC's Erin Black, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 20 years ago, decided to try out the hacked system. Here's what happened.

Type 1 diabetes is a disease that affects more than 1.2 million Americans. I'm one of them. It's a disease that impairs the body's ability to produce the hormone insulin, which normally comes from the pancreas. So insulin has to be injected.

Managing blood sugars can be very difficult, and patients use a pump to help mimic the activity of the pancreas. However, pumps don't automatically adjust insulin levels for diabetics. And the manual process is tedious and can be dangerous.

But a few years ago, people figured out how to hack their insulin pumps to make them automatically adjust insulin levels more precisely.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple's T2 chip will block some third-party repairs of new devices

Small repair shops and tech enthusiasts who attempt to fix their new Apple devices may be taking a serious risk in doing so. According to a report from The Verge, Apple confirmed that its new T2 security chip is designed to lock down devices after repair if it doesn't recognize certain authorized replacement parts.

Word of this new policy came out last month in an Apple document circulated among authorized service providers. In order to replace certain hardware components, such as the Touch ID sensor or the logic board on new Macs, the provider must run a specific piece of diagnostic software.

This program, called "AST 2 System Configuration," works in conjunction with the T2 security chip. If this step isn't performed on devices with the T2 chip, it could result in an inoperable machine.

[...] Apple only provides the special application to its own stores and authorized service providers. That means that unauthorized service providers, small repair shops, and individuals can't completely and properly replace certain parts of new Macs.

Also at Engadget, Notebookcheck, and MacRumors.

Previously: Apple's T2 Security Chip Prevents Linux From Installing on New Macs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0824

3D Printers Can Spew Toxic Cancer-Causing Chemicals, New Report Reveals

Multi-year research conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology and UL Chemical Safety suggests low-cost 3D-printing devices could pose a health risk by harming indoor air quality.

Publishing their work in two separate studies in Aerosol Science and Technology, one in 2017 and another in 2018, the researchers tested how 3D printers emitted particles when in a controlled environment. They found that as a byproduct, 3D printers generate a range of different-sized particles, including ultrafine particles, which can be inhaled into the pulmonary system, resulting in adverse effects on respiratory health.

“These printers tend to produce particles that are very small, especially at the beginning of the print process, and in an environment without good ventilation, they could significantly reduce indoor air quality,” said lead researcher Rodney Weber in a statement. 

[...]“We found that one of the overriding principles is the temperature of the filament,” said Weber. “If you use a filament that requires a higher temperature to melt, such as ABS plastic, you produce more particles than PLA plastic filaments, which require lower temperatures.”

[...] The researchers recommend a few steps you can take at home to lessen the impact on air quality when using 3D printers, including operating them only in well-ventilated areas, setting the nozzle temperature on the lowest suggested setting, keeping a distance from operating machines, and using materials and machines that have been tested and shown to have low emissions.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Would flooding the deserts help stop global warming?

Imagine flooding a desert half the size of the Sahara. Using 238 trillion gallons of desalinated ocean water to do the job. Creating millions of 1-acre-square micro-reservoirs to grow enough algae to gobble up all of Earth's climate-changing carbon dioxide. For an encore: How about spreading the water and fertilizer (the dead algae) to grow a vast new forest of oxygen-producing trees? A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Y Combinator, unveiled the radical desert flooding plan as one of four "moonshot" scenarios that it hopes innovators will explore as potential remedies to catastrophic global warming. But would it work? And should it even be tried?

With unlimited capital and political will — both far from given — experts said the scheme would stand a chance of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas levels. But while they generally believe the climate crisis has become severe enough to push even extreme options onto the table, the experts cautioned against interventions that might create as many problems as they solve. "We do not want to have this be purely profit driven," said Greg Rau, a University of California, Santa Cruz climate scientist and part of the team that helped Y Combinator craft the request for proposals. "We are trying to benefit the planet, not just make money. So we need this kind of research and development first, but then oversight and governance over how any of this is deployed."

takyon writes:

Intel has announced that it will speed up the launch of its 5G modem "by more than a half-year". It will have peak speeds of up to 6 Gbps:

2019 is shaping up to be a big year for 5G, and Intel — one of tech's biggest mobile players — has finally announced its plans for the next-generation network in the form of its new XMM 8160 5G modem. The XMM 8160 modem is set to be released to manufacturers sometime in the second half of 2019, with the first devices using the chip coming in early 2020.

Intel has big ambitions for the XMM 8160 5G. It envisions using it across phones, PCs, and broadband hubs, with peak speeds of up to 6 gigabits per second. The modem will support both the standalone and non-standalone specs for the 5G NR (New Radio) standard, as well as legacy support for 4G, 3G, and 2G networks all in one chipset. Additionally, Intel says that the modem will support both millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum as well as lower-band parts of the spectrum.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 5G NR modem will be available to device makers that want to introduce 5G support in 2019.

Also at EE Times and Engadget.

Previously: Apple Could Switch From Qualcomm to Intel and MediaTek for Modems
Intel Announces Development of 5G Modems (Due in 2019)

Related: Intel Integrates LTE Modem Into Custom Multi-Chip Module for New HP Laptop

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