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An Anonymous Coward writes:

‘Pandemic 1918’ and ‘Influenza’ chronicle the flu’s devastating history and uncertain future

[...] Grim eyewitness accounts chronicle the gory details of how this virus differed. Victims often bled from the nose or mouth, writhed in pain and grew delirious with fever. Their faces turned dusky blue as their lungs filled with pus. Healthy men and women in their prime were dying, sometimes within days of falling ill. And there was a smell associated with the sick, “like very musty straw,” recalled one survivor. Arnold’s graphic depictions of the carnage make for some gripping scenes, but the book is perhaps too ambitious. She zigzags between so many people and places that only the most careful reader will be able to keep track of who fell ill where.

Another book tied to the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu, Influenza, by long-time emergency room doctor Jeremy Brown, covers some of the same ground. Both Arnold and Brown, for instance, chronicle the hunt for the 1918 virus in bodies buried in Arctic permafrost and efforts to reconstruct the virus’s genetic code. But while Arnold’s book is rooted primarily in the past, Brown spends more time on recent research. He provides an in-depth look at what scientists now know about the 1918 strain, an H1N1 virus that originated in birds and spent time in an unknown mammalian host before infecting humans. In 2005, researchers managed to re-create the virus and test it in mice. The experiment provided insight into how the virus might have wrought so much damage in the lungs, but it also renewed a debate over the ethics of reconstructing deadly viruses. These kinds of experiments can help scientists better understand the inner workings of pathogens, but might also help people build biological weapons.

Two new books explore the science and history of the 1918 flu pandemic

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takyon writes:

Medical cannabis advocates suing the state over Prop 2 override have a bigger goal: challenging the Legislature's disregard of the peoples' will

The medical cannabis advocates suing the state after Monday's passage of a Proposition 2 replacement bill are seeking to overturn that law, yes — but they also want to contest what they see as government overreach in muting the voice of the people in an election.

In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in 3rd District Court by former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, the heads of the Epilepsy Association of Utah (EAU) and Together for Responsible Use and Cannabis Education (TRUCE) accuse the Legislature of abridging the rights of voters in an effort to appease The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they argue that the Utah Medical Cannabis Act violates the state constitution's provision for ballot initiatives by sweeping aside the plan approved by a majority of voters.

"For three years, we advocated on the Hill," said Christine Stenquist, president of TRUCE. "For two years, we've been in a campaign for the proposition. And when I saw it undermined so quickly on the first business day, I started to wonder: Is the initiative process in Utah just a suggestion box? Are our votes really meaning anything in this political process? How long do we just have to let politics happen to us?"

The state constitution vests legislative power equally in the Legislature and "the people of the State of Utah." Some of the architects of the Proposition 2 replacement law, however, say the lawsuit stands on shaky legal ground.

Previously: Mormon Church, Politicians, and Advocates Back Medical Cannabis Compromise in Utah

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takyon writes:

Bloodhound supersonic car project axed

A project to race a car at more than 1,000mph has been axed after it failed to secure a £25m cash injection.

The Bloodhound supersonic vehicle - built with a Rolls-Royce Eurofighter jet engine bolted to a rocket - is all but finished.

The Bristol-based team behind it was aiming to beat the existing land speed world record of 763mph (1,228km/h).

[...] The last two-to-three years have been an especially tough environment in which to raise financial support. The investment landscape is difficult, in part because of Brexit uncertainty, but principally because many large brands that might once have put their name on the side of a car to build awareness are now using other marketing tools, such as social media.

Previously: 3D-Printed Tech to Steer Bloodhound Supersonic Car
Bloodhound Supersonic Car to be Tested in October

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for boru

O2 network restored after Ericsson software outage left millions without 4G data access

O2 has blamed a global software problem for a network outage that has left frustrated customers without access to the internet and 4G services.

Mobile network O2 says its services have been restored after a technical fault left millions of customers unable to get online. The company said it would be closely monitoring data services over the coming days and promised to carry out a review to understand what went wrong. British customers reported not being able to use mobile data to access the internet and the operator's network on Thursday after disruption began at about 5am.

takyon: The problem was due to an expired software certificate.

O2 status checker.

Also at BBC, The Guardian, Forbes.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

National University of Singapore:

"The spin of the current carrying electrons, which basically represents the data you want to write, experiences minimal resistance in ferrimagnets. Imagine the difference in efficiency when you drive your car on an eight lane highway compared to a narrow city lane. While a ferromagnet is like a city street for an electron's spin, a ferrimagnet is a welcoming freeway where its spin or the underlying information can survive for a very long distance," explained Mr Rahul Mishra, who was part of the research team and a current doctoral candidate with the group.

Using an electronic current, the NUS researchers were able to write information in a ferrimagnet memory element which was 10 times more stable and 20 times more efficient than a ferromagnet.

For this discovery, Associate Professor Yang's team took advantage of the unique atomic arrangement in a ferrimagnet. "In ferrimagnets, the neighbouring atomic magnets are opposite to each other. The disturbance caused by one atom to an incoming spin is compensated by the next one, and as a result information travels faster and further with less power. We hope that the computing and storage industry can take advantage of our invention to improve the performance and data retention capabilities of emerging spin memories," said Associate Professor Yang.

The ferrimagnets are promised to make spintronics more practical.

Long spin coherence length and bulk-like spin–orbit torque in ferrimagnetic multilayers (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-018-0236-9) (DX)

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jas writes:

WordPress—the leading blogging and content management system across the web—is releasing version 5.0 on Thursday [6 Dec]. This marks the first major update in a year, and the most substantive update to the platform in several years, bringing with it a variety of speed optimizations and new features intended to make it more flexible to fit an increasing number of use cases.

The largest change coming to WordPress 5.0 is the Gutenberg editor, which completely reimagines the way writers and other content creators interact with their website. In contrast to increasingly popular markup editors used in other blogging software, the Gutenberg editor is fundamentally WYSIWYG, though with a design flexibility that allows content to be easily reformatted across screen sizes and devices.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wordpress-5-0-release-brings-brand-new-editor-for-easier-page-design/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Talk about a GAN-do attitude... AI software bots can see through your text CAPTCHAs

[...] Boffins at Lancaster University in the UK, Northwest University in the US, and Peking University in China have devised an approach for creating text-based CAPTCHA solvers that makes it trivial to automatically decipher scrambled depictions of text.

Researchers Guixin Ye, Zhanyong Tang, Dingyi Fang, Zhanxing Zhu, Yansong Feng, Pengfei Xu, Xiaojiang Chen, and Zheng Wang describe their CAPTCHA cracking system in a paper that was presented at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October and now released to the public.

As can be surmised from the title, "Yet Another Text Captcha Solver: A Generative Adversarial Network Based Approach," the computer scientists used a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) to teach their CAPTCHA generator, which is used for training their text recognition model.

First described in 2014, a GAN consists of two neural network models pitted against each other as adversaries, one simulating something and the other spotting problems with the simulation until any differences can not longer be identified.

Coincidentally, that's the same year researchers from Google and Stanford published a paper titled, "The End is Nigh: Generic Solving of Text-based CAPTCHAs." Four years on, the speed bumps limiting generic attacks have been paved over.

A GAN turns out to be well-suited for efficiently training data models. It allowed the researchers to teach their CAPTCHA generation program to quickly create lots of synthetic text puzzles to train their basic puzzle solving model. They then fine-tuned it via transfer learning to defeat real text jumbles using only a small set (~500 instead of millions) of actual samples.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In the aftermath of the Australian government passing laws that allows the government to force companies and individuals to work with officials to bypass encryption, scary implications of the new laws are being discovered. One very concerning effect is that officials can now force Australians to unlock their phone — granting the government full access to anyone's email history, personal files, pictures and other files on their phone. Senator Steele-John was quoted as saying "Far from being a 'national security measure' this bill will have the unintended consequence of diminishing the online safety, security and privacy of every single Australian,". With fines of up to $50,000 for individuals who refuse to hand over an unlocked device or cooperate with authorities, new devices and software are expected to enter the market including dual OS devices, hidden partitions, encrypted files and partitions similar to TrueCrypt, cloud only applications, device wipe pins, secondary hidden OS functions and other security measures which so far have largely only been implemented on desktop computers. This latest bungle by the Australian government may very well propel mobile device security forward decades in the same way RIAA and MPAA advanced P2P.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Seagate Starts to Test 16 TB HAMR Hard Drives

Seagate on Monday disclosed that it had begun testing the industry’s first HAMR hard drive intended for evetualy commercial release. With a capacity of 16 TB, the HDD is being used primarily for internal tests to prepare for its high-volume launch and deployment in actual datacenters in the future. Separately, Seagate announced plans to introduce HAMR-based hard drives with a 20 TB capacity in 2020.

Seagate’s 16 TB Exos HDD featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording technology are drop-in compatible with existing servers and datacenters, which essentially means that their power consumption is 12 W or below. The hard drive is helium filled, but Seagate does not disclose the number of platters the HDD uses.

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hellcat writes:

Science magazine includes this article claiming insights into human behavior that can "help conservation.":

In order of appearance, they are:

1. People have a strong tendency to avoid making difficult decisions, and as a result, they are prone to accepting whatever default option they are presented with—even when this option is not in their own, or society's, best interest.

[...] 2. People also have a cognitive bias that causes them to disproportionately weight initial information when making decisions.

[...] 3. ... there is a cognitive bias that causes people to perceive that losses hurt about twice as much as gains feel good, often referred to as loss aversion or prospect theory.

[...] 4. The decoy effect is the phenomenon that people tend to change their preference between two options when presented with a third option that is meant to be inferior in some regard (a decoy).

[...] 5. [We have an] ... innate desire for prestige, reputation, conformity, and reciprocity ... [so that our] ... decisions and actions are shaped by perceptions (whether accurate or not) of what other people do and what they approve.

[...] 6. People also behave differently when they think they are being observed.

[...] 7. ... we are also influenced by the source of our information ... [like] popular actors, athletes, or public figures.

Now that we know these, let's use them to accumulate power and own the world! But first we should use them to boost donations to SoylentNews!

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RandomFactor writes:

Mark your calendar: on January 1, 2019, works will again begin entering the public domain in the United States.

On that day, one year's worth of copyrighted works — that were first published in 1923 — will become freely available to all.

A long list of affected works is available on Lifehacker, including movies, books, music, and art.

For 20 long years, the progression of works into the public domain stopped when copyright was extended in the Sonny Bono Act in 1998 to protect Disney's "Mickey Mouse"

Speaking of Disney, they're the ones who lobbied for such long copyright terms, because in 1998 Mickey Mouse's first appearance (in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie) was close to losing its copyright. But after the Sonny Bono Act, Now that first Mickey Mouse appearance will enter the public domain in 2024.

It is an open question whether Disney will attempt to push for further extensions and changes in copyright by 2024. In the meantime however The Atlantic notes

A Google spokesperson confirmed that Google Books stands ready. Its software is already set up so that on January 1 of each year, the material from 95 years earlier that's currently digitized but only available for searching suddenly switches to full text.

Anyone else going to buy a Steamboat Willie shirt in 2024 and not one moment sooner?

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MostCynical writes:

The Guardian reports that an Amazon robot has set off bear repellant, putting 24 workers in hospital.

Twenty-four employees at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey were taken to hospital after a robot accidentally punctured a can of bear repellant.

The 255g can containing concentrated capsaicin, a compound in chilli peppers, was punctured by an automated machine after it fell off a shelf, according to local media.

The incident happened on Wednesday at a warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey, on the outskirts of Trenton.

The staff were taken to hospital "as a precaution".

The robot has not been approached for comment.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

From a Deceased Woman's Transplanted Uterus, a Live Birth

A woman who received a uterus transplanted from a deceased donor gave birth [DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31766-5] [DX] to a healthy child, researchers in Brazil said on Tuesday. It is the first such birth to be reported.

Uterine transplants from living donors have succeeded; at least 11 babies have been born this way since 2013. But a viable procedure to transplant uteri from deceased women could drastically increase the availability of the organs.

"We talk about lifesaving transplants. This is a life-giving transplant, a new category," said Dr. Allan D. Kirk, the chief surgeon at Duke University Health System, who was not involved in the research. "Biologically, organs of the living and the dead aren't all that different," he added. "But the availability of deceased donors certainly could open this up to a much broader number of patients."

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takyon writes:

MIT researchers create a robot houseplant that moves on its own

Meet Elowan, a "cybernetic lifeform" that connects a houseplant with a machine that responds to its basic need for light (and is presumably named after the sentient plant creatures in Starflight 3). When a regular plant needs light, it fires off internal electrical signals that cause it to bend and grow towards it. When Elowan needs light, these internal electrical signals are interpreted by a machine that then simply wheels the plant towards the light. The plant can essentially move itself around because it needs to.

"Plants have natural bioelectrochemical signals inside them," explains Harpeet Sareen, assistant professor at Parsons School of Design. "They get excited in response to environmental conditions and conduct these signals between tissues and organs. Such electrical signals are produced in response to changes in light, gravity, mechanical stimulation, temperature, wounding, and more. They are electrically active systems readily occurring in nature."

Add self-watering and we're good to go.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel: EUV-Enabled 7nm Process Tech is on Track

Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to produce just a handful of CPUs, ahead of an expected ramp to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) only later in 2019. Without a doubt, Intel suffered delays on its 10nm process by several years, significantly impacting the company's product lineup and its business.

Now, as it turns out, Intel's 10nm may be a short-living node as the company's 7nm tech is on-track for introduction in accordance with its original schedule.

For a number of times Intel said that it set too aggressive scaling/transistor density targets for its 10nm fabrication process, which is why its development ran into problems. Intel's 10nm manufacturing tech relies exclusively on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. To enable the fine feature sizes that Intel set out to achieve on 10nm, the process had to make heavy usage of mutli-patterning. According to Intel, a problem of the process was precisely its heavy usage of multipatterning (quad-patterning to be more exact).

By contrast, Intel's 7nm production tech will use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) with laser wavelength of 13.5 nm for select layers, reducing use of multipatterning for certain metal layers and therefore simplifying production and shortening cycle times. As it appears, the 7nm fabrication process had been in development separately from the 10nm tech and by a different team. As a result, its development is well underway and is projected to enter HVM in accordance with Intel's unannounced roadmap, the company says.

Meanwhile, an unconfirmed leak of AMD's Ryzen 3000 lineup shows a 12-core CPU at $300 and a 16-core CPU at $450.

Previously: Intel Delays Mass Production Of 10 nm CPUs To 2019
Intel Releases Open Letter in Attempt to Address Shortage of "14nm" Processors and "10nm" Delays
Intel Denies that It Will Cancel or Skip its "10nm" Process

Original Submission