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RandomFactor writes:

New Metal-Air Transistor Replaces Semiconductors

[Researchers] at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades.

The team has developed a functional proof of concept and is currently working to improve stability and efficiency.

"Unlike conventional transistors that have to sit in silicon bulk, our device is a bottom-to-top fabrication approach starting with a substrate. This enables us to build fully 3D transistor networks, if we can define optimum air gaps," says Shruti Nirantar, lead author of a paper on the new transistor published this month in Nano Letters [DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02849] [DX]. "This means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."

[...] Looking further ahead, she points out that the theoretical speed of an ACT is in the terahertz range, some 10 thousand times as fast as the speed at which current semiconductor devices work.

The approach also has a number of compelling advantages over traditional silicon semiconductors including far fewer processing steps, simpler fabrication on any dielectric surface, and better resistance to radiation.

Narantir concludes:

"With [industry] help and sufficient research funding, there is the potential to develop commercial-grade field emission air-channel transistors within the next decade—and that's a generous timeline. With the right partners, this could happen more quickly."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Satellite data business is Amazon’s next disruption target - SpaceNews.com

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos 18 years ago founded Blue Origin to make space travel cheaper and more accessible. The company on Tuesday announced a new foray into the space business by partnering with defense industry giant Lockheed Martin to provide low-cost ground infrastructure to satellite startups.

The new business venture — called AWS Ground Station — brings to bear the cloud-computing capabilities of Amazon Web Services in ground stations where satellite data is uploaded. Lockheed Martin’s contribution to the partnership is a network of distributed antennas that would supplement traditional dish antennas.

“This partnership is designed to be disruptive and lower the barrier of the cost of entry,” Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, told SpaceNews. “Startups don’t have to buy computing power or parabolic dishes. You buy what you need, services on demand.”

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The research co-led by Drs. Christelle Not and Benoit Thibodeau from the Department of Earth Sciences and the Swire Institute of Marine Science, The University of Hong Kong, highlights a dramatic weakening of the circulation during the 20th century that is interpreted to be a direct consequence of global warming and associated melt of the Greenland Ice-Sheet. This is important for near-future climate as slower circulation in the North Atlantic can yield profound change on both the North American and European climate but also on the African and Asian summer monsoon rainfall. The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[...] Interestingly, the research team also found a weak signal during a period called the Little Ice Age (a cold spell observed between about 1600 and 1850 AD). While not as pronounced as the 20th century trend, the signal might confirm that this period was also characterized by a weaker circulation in the North Atlantic, which implies a decrease in the transfer of heat toward Europe, contributing to the cold temperature of this period. However, more work is needed to validate this hypothesis.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/tuoh-oci112318.php

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Adoption of mobile payment shifts consumer spending patterns, habits

Paying for a cup of coffee with a smartphone instead of a credit card is gaining prominence among consumers – and is disrupting their spending patterns and consumption habits, according to new research co-written by a University of Illinois expert who studies operations management.

[...] Using a unique data set from one of the largest banks in China – which contained the transaction data from personal computer, offline and mobile payment channels – Xu and co-authors found that, on average, the total transaction amount increased by 2.4 percent after the adoption of the mobile payment channel, and that the total transaction frequency increased by more than 23 percent.

[...] “Switching to the mobile channel leads to more shopping overall, and it particularly affects more hedonistic shopping such as food, entertainment and travel,” Xu said. “But it doesn’t affect purchases like education or health care. So it’s changing consumer behavior.”

The greatest impact came on less costly items that are purchased frequently, such as beverages and movie tickets.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

How viruses hijack part of your immune system and use it against you

An enzyme intended to prevent autoimmune disease can be hijacked and used by some viruses to avoid immune detection. That discovery from Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators appears in PLOS Biology. There's also good news. The same team also defined how much viral genetic material is needed to reverse the process and instead activate the immune system against the virus.

This viral genetic material takes the form of RNA, the chemical cousin of DNA. RNA can be a single strand like a string or a complex structure called a double strand. Various human immune proteins recognize viral RNA because long stretches of double strands are present in the virus genetic material. Human cells create their own RNA to serve vital functions, which sometimes have short regions of double strands. If the immune system is activated by human double-stranded RNA, it would give rise to autoimmune disorders – when the immune system mistakenly attacks the body.

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] France is a major player in the nuclear industry: in 2012, about 75 percent of its electricity came from nuclear reactors. But since the Fukushima disaster that same year, the country has been pushing to retire some of its older reactors (although not as aggressively as Germany did). According to Power Magazine, in 2014 France's lower house of parliament passed a bill that would have capped nuclear power at 50 percent of the country's energy mix by 2025. Since then, the cap has been removed and reinstated by legislative bodies, and while reducing nuclear reliance to 50 percent of the country's energy mix seemed to be certain, the timeline to do it was far from certain.

[...] As France moves away from nuclear, Japan is slowly turning some of its nuclear reactors back on. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan suspended its nuclear fleet for safety inspection, leaving the country with no nuclear power. Instead, Japan currently burns more coal, oil, and natural gas. In 2015, two reactors came back online for the first time, and a handful of reactors have been approved to reconnect with the grid every year since then.

-- submitted from IRC

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takyon writes:

• George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
• As a moderate Republican and internationalist, George H.W. Bush was last of a kind
• George H.W. Bush: war hero, GOP workhorse and president who called for 'kinder, gentler nation'
• Bill Clinton: George H.W. Bush's Oval Office note to me revealed the heart of who he was
• George H.W. Bush, Public Servant

George H. W. Bush.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The Wizard of Oz Most 'Influential' Film of all Time According to Network Science:

The Wizard of Oz, followed by Star Wars and Psycho, is identified as the most influential film of all time in a study published in the open access journal Applied Network Science.

Researchers at the University of Turin, Italy, calculated an influence score for 47,000 films listed in IMDb (the internet movie database). The score was based on how much each film had been referenced by subsequent films. The authors found that the top 20 most influential films were all produced before 1980 and mostly in the United States.

Dr. Livio Bioglio, the lead author, said: "We propose an alternative method to box office takings—which are affected by factors beyond the quality of the film such as advertising and distribution—and reviews—which are ultimately subjective—for analysing the success of a film. We have developed an algorithm that uses references between movies as a measure for success, and which can also be used to evaluate the career of directors, actors and actresses, by considering their participation in top-scoring movies."

Applying the algorithm to directors, the five men credited for The Wizard of Oz are all in the top eight, with Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick ranked third, fifth and sixth respectively. When the authors used another approach to remove the bias of older movies—which, because they were produced earlier, can potentially influence a greater number of subsequent films—Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma occupied the top spots instead.

When applied to actors, the algorithm ranked Samuel L. Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise as the top three. The authors noticed a strong gender bias towards male actors; the only female in the top ten was Lois Maxwell, who played the recurring role of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond franchise.

[...] The authors suggest that their method could be used for research in the arts and by film historians. However, they caution that the results can only be applied to Western cinema as the data on IMDb are strongly biased towards films produced in Western countries.

Explore further: Automated method beats critics in picking great movies

More information: Livio Bioglio et al, "Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective", Applied Network Science (2018). DOI: 10.1007/s41109-018-0105-0

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takyon writes:

Biologists create the most lifelike artificial cells yet

No biologist would mistake the microscopic "cells" that chemical biologist Neal Devaraj and colleagues are whipping up at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for the real thing. Instead of the lipid membrane that swaddles our cells, these cell mimics wear a coat of plastic—polymerized acrylate. And although they harbor a nucleuslike compartment containing DNA, it lacks a membrane like a real cell's nucleus, and its main ingredients are minerals found in clay.

Yet these mock cells are cutting-edge, "the closest anyone has come to building an actual functioning synthetic eukaryotic cell," says synthetic biologist Kate Adamala of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not part of the work. Like real cells, the spheres can send protein signals to their neighbors, triggering communal behavior. And as Devaraj and his team revealed in a preprint recently posted on the bioRxiv site, the "nucleus" talks to the rest of the cell, releasing RNA that sparks the synthesis of proteins. The artificial nuclei can even respond to signals from other cell mimics. "This may be the most important paper in synthetic biology this year," Adamala says.

Let's see some cell division.

Communication and quorum sensing in non-living mimics of eukaryotic cells

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martyb writes:

To Predict the Future, the Brain Uses two Clocks:

That moment when you step on the gas pedal a split second before the light changes, or when you tap your toes even before the first piano note of Camila Cabello's "Havana" is struck. That's anticipatory timing.

One type relies on memories from past experiences. The other on rhythm. Both are critical to our ability to navigate and enjoy the world.

New University of California, Berkeley, research shows the neural networks supporting each of these timekeepers are split between two different parts of the brain, depending on the task at hand.

"Whether it's sports, music, speech or even allocating attention, our study suggests that timing is not a unified process, but that there are two distinct ways in which we make temporal predictions and these depend on different parts of the brain," said study lead author Assaf Breska, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.

The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, offer a new perspective on how humans calculate when to make a move.

"Together, these brain systems allow us to not just exist in the moment, but to also actively anticipate the future," said study senior author Richard Ivry, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

When good macrophages go bad: How cancer manipulates our immune system to become harder to treat

Yves DeClerck, MD, of the Children's Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases and the Saban Research Institute at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, has dedicated his career to understanding how cancer cells interact with the surrounding normal tissue to escape the effects of therapy. Research has shown that tumors with high levels of a protein called Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor 1 (PAI-1) are more aggressive and are associated with poorer outcomes. In the new study, published November 20th in the journal Cell Reports, DeClerck's team demonstrated that cancer cells use PAI-1 to trick the body's immune system into supporting the cancer.

DeClerck and his team, led by postdoctoral research fellow Marta Kubala, PhD, characterized a relationship between tumors and the immune system. "In this study, we focused on the role of immune cells called macrophages and how PAI-1 affects their activity," explains Kubala. As important players in the immune system, macrophages find and destroy cancer cells or foreign invaders like bacteria. While macrophages are normally considered anti-cancer, DeClerck's team showed that PAI-1 pushes macrophages into an alternate, pro-cancer state (called M2) by recruiting common players in the immune system -- IL-6 and STAT3 -- effectively signaling to the macrophages to support rather than attack tumor cells.

"A macrophage can either be a friend or an enemy to cancer cells," explains DeClerck, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. "The cancer communicates with the macrophages, telling them to become friendly. So, the macrophages change their behavior and support the tumor." In altering the function of surrounding, healthy tissue, the cancer is better able to survive and spread. The team around DeClerck also shows that cancer cells can use PAI-1 to promote movement of these pro-cancer M2 macrophages into the tumors, where they protect the cancer and repair any damage that chemotherapy may have inflicted. This symbolic one-two punch culminates in a stronger, more difficult-to-treat cancer.

Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 Promotes the Recruitment and Polarization of Macrophages in Cancer (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.10.082) (DX)

martyb writes:

Marriott Hack Hits 500 Million Guests:

The records of 500 million customers of the hotel group Marriott International have been involved in a data breach. The hotel chain said the guest reservation database of its Starwood division had been compromised by an unauthorised party. It said an internal investigation found an attacker had been able to access to the Starwood network since 2014.

[...] Starwood's hotel brands include W Hotels, Sheraton, Le Méridien and Four Points by Sheraton. Marriott-branded hotels use a separate reservation system on a different network.

Marriott said it was alerted by an internal security tool that somebody was attempting to access the Starwood database. After investigating, it discovered that an "unauthorised party had copied and encrypted information". It said it believed its database contained records of up to 500 million customers. For about 327 million guests, the information included "some combination" of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, account information, date of birth, gender, and arrival and departure information. It said some records also included encrypted payment card information, but it could not rule out the possibility that the encryption keys had also been stolen.

[...] The company has set up a website to give affected customers more information. It will also offer customers in the US and some other countries a year-long subscription to a fraud-detecting service.

The attacker had access since... 2014? To the records of half a billion customers? How many can invoke protections provided in GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)?

SoyCow0824 adds:

Source: Marriott breach leaves 500 million exposed with passport, card numbers stolen

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for takyon:

Study unlocks full potential of 'supermaterial' graphene

New research reveals why the "supermaterial" graphene has not transformed electronics as promised, and shows how to double its performance and finally harness its extraordinary potential.

Graphene is the strongest material ever tested. It's also flexible, transparent and conducts heat and electricity 10 times better than copper.

After graphene research won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 it was hailed as a transformative material for flexible electronics, more powerful computer chips and solar panels, water filters and bio-sensors. But performance has been mixed and industry adoption slow.

Now a study published in Nature Communications identifies silicon contamination as the root cause of disappointing results and details how to produce higher performing, pure graphene.

The RMIT University team led by Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh and Dr Rouhollah Ali Jalili inspected commercially-available graphene samples, atom by atom, with a state-of-art scanning transition electron microscope.

"We found high levels of silicon contamination in commercially available graphene, with massive impacts on the material's performance," Esrafilzadeh said.

[...] The article "Silicon as a ubiquitous contaminant in graphene derivatives with significant impact on device performance" is published in Nature Communications: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07396-3

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow0824:

Al Lowe reveals his Sierra source code collection—then puts it on eBay

Al Lowe, one of Sierra On-Line's seminal game creators and programmers, has been sitting on a pile of his original games' source code files for over 30 years, fully convinced that they are worthless.

Gallery: Taking a look back at some choice Sierra gaming moments"I’m 72 years old, and none of my kids want this junk!" Lowe said in an interview with YouTube personality MetalJesusRocks (aka Jason Lindsey, himself an ex-Sierra developer and a friend of Ars). "Does anybody?"

Lowe is about to find out, as the developer has begun posting eBay listings for his entire source-code collection. (You read that correctly. The whole shebang.) The sale's opening has been accompanied by a MetalJesusRocks video (embedded below), which offers a 12-minute tour of backed-up files, original game boxes, original hint books, and more.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Mozilla Testing DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox | SecurityWeek.Com

Mozilla is moving forward with yet another project designed to provide users with increased security: it is now testing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox stable.

Only a small group of users will enjoy the feature for now, as it is still in the testing phase, but Mozilla is determined to work with industry players for a larger rollout. When that will happen, however, remains to be seen.

Mozilla has been already testing DoH in its browser, looking into the time it takes to get a response from Cloudflare’s DoH resolver. With the test results positive, revealing great performance improvements even for the slowest users, the Internet organization has decided to move forward with its plans. 

“A recent test in our Beta channel confirmed that DoH is fast and isn’t causing problems for our users. However, those tests only measure the DNS operation itself, which isn’t the whole story,” Mozilla’s Selena Deckelmann explains. 

Original Submission