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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of trash between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic waste—but the young innovator behind the project said Monday that a fix was in the works.

Boyan Slat, 24, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, said the speed of the solar-powered barrier isn't allowing it to hold on to the plastic it catches.

"Sometimes the system actually moves slightly slower than the plastic, which of course you don't want because then you have a chance of losing the plastic again," Slat said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A crew of engineers will reach the U-shaped boom Tuesday and will work for the next few weeks to widen its span so that it catches more wind and waves to help it go faster, he said.

The plastic barrier with a tapered 10-foot-deep (3-meter-deep) screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

They should try hiring dolphins.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Toward brain-like computing: New memristor better mimics synapses

A new electronic device developed at the University of Michigan (U-M) can directly model the behaviors of a synapse, which is a connection between two neurons.

For the first time, the way that neurons share or compete for resources can be explored in hardware without the need for complicated circuits.

"Neuroscientists have argued that competition and cooperation behaviors among synapses are very important. Our new memristive devices allow us to implement a faithful model of these behaviors in a solid-state system," said Wei Lu, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the study in Nature Materials.

[...] The memristor is a good model for a synapse. It mimics the way that the connections between neurons strengthen or weaken when signals pass through them. But the changes in conductance typically come from changes in the shape of the channels of conductive material within the memristor. These channels—and the memristor's ability to conduct electricity—could not be precisely controlled in previous devices.

Now, the U-M team has made a memristor in which they have better command of the conducting pathways.They developed a new material out of the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide—a "two-dimensional" material that can be peeled into layers just a few atoms thick. Lu's team injected lithium ions into the gaps between molybdenum disulfide layers.

They found that if there are enough lithium ions present, the molybdenum sulfide transforms its lattice structure, enabling electrons to run through the film easily as if it were a metal. But in areas with too few lithium ions, the molybdenum sulfide restores its original lattice structure and becomes a semiconductor, and electrical signals have a hard time getting through.

Related: This Tiny Electronic Chip Is Just 3 Atoms Thick
A New Generation of Artificial Retinas Based on 2-D Materials
Purdue University Researchers Identify Molybdenum Ditelluride as a Material for Next-Gen Memory

Ionic modulation and ionic coupling effects in MoS₂ devices for neuromorphic computing (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-018-0248-5) (DX)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The world's first-ever hiking boots to use graphene have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.

Building on the international success of their pioneering use of graphene in trail running and fitness shoes last summer, the brand is now bringing the revolutionary technology to a market recently starved of innovation.

Just one atom thick and stronger than steel, graphene has been infused into the rubber of inov-8's new ROCLITE hiking boots, with the outsoles scientifically proven to be 50% stronger, 50% more elastic and 50% harder wearing.

How long before graphene-infused tires hit the market, too?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Hackaday:

[Mark Rober] was fed up with packages going missing. He kept receiving notifications that his shipments had been delivered, but when checking his porch he found nothing there. Reviewing the CCTV footage revealed random passers-by sidling up to his porch and stealing his parcels. It was time to strike back. Over six months, [Mark] and his friends painstakingly designed, prototyped and iterated the perfect trap for package thieves, resulting in a small unit disguised as an Apple HomePod. The whole scheme is wonderfully over-engineered and we love it.

The main feature of the device is a spinning cup on the top which contains a large amount of glitter. When activated, it ejects glitter in every directions. You could say it's harmless, as it's just glitter. But then again, glitter has a way of staying with you for the rest of your life — turning up at the least expected times. It certainly leaves an emotional impression.

The trap uses an accelerometer to detect movement, geo-fencing to determine when the package has left the property, glitter and a fart spray to make the thief regret it, and smartphones to capture the thief's reaction for the enjoyment of the hacker.

Also at BBC.

See also: Jersey City PD, Amazon work together to catch package thieves
Jersey City PD nabs 12 this week in porch package sting

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Lenovo built a slider phone with 12GB of RAM

While Lenovo continues to push the Motorola brand in the West, it's also been busy doing its own thing back in China. Just last month, the company brought us the Z5 Pro all-screen slider phone which, to our surprise, packed mid-tier specs to woo the budget-conscious consumers. That's all well and good, but surely such a special form factor deserves the best specs available, right? This is where the new Z5 Pro GT comes in.

Announced at the Beijing event today, this new Android phone comes loaded with up to 12GB of RAM -- a new record for smartphones -- along with up to 512GB of storage. It's also the second smartphone confirmed to feature Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 855 chipset, though unlike OnePlus' yet-to-be-named flagship device, Lenovo's slider won't be packing 5G radio.

[...] Despite being the first 12GB RAM smartphone, the Z5 Pro GT won't be available for pre-order until January 15th next year, ahead of the official launch on the 24th. Prices range from 2,698 yuan or about $390 for the 6GB RAM + 128GB storage version, all the way to 4,398 yuan or about $640 for the 12GB RAM + 512GB storage top model.

You know what's next. 16 GB.

Also at BGR and Wccftech.

Previously: Oppo Likely to Release the First Smartphone With 10 GB of RAM
Xiaomi Announces Smartphones with 10 GB of RAM

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google to Invest More Than $1 Billion to Expand NYC Campus

Google will invest more than $1 billion to expand its New York City presence, the search giant said in a blog post Monday.

The Alphabet Inc. division said it had reached lease agreements at 315 and 345 Hudson St. and signed a letter of intent at 550 Washington St. to make up the new 1.7 million-square-foot (158,000-square-meter) campus, to be called Google Hudson Square.

Google aims to move into the new Hudson buildings by 2020 and the Washington Street location by 2022, Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in the blog post. The move could allow the company to more than double the current 7,000 people it employs in the city over the next decade.

Also at Ars Technica and CNBC.

Related: Amazon Reportedly Picks New York, Northern Virginia for HQ2
Apple Announces Plan to Build $1 Billion Campus in Texas

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

In a press release, Wave Computing has announced that the MIPS ISA will be opening up and will be free of any licensing or royalty fees with full access to its patents. This announcement covers both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) often used in embedded systems, but has been originally designed for general purpose computing. Since 2000, an estimated 8.5 billion CPUs with MIPS cores have been shipped, by a broad range of companies. The goal of this change is for participants using MIPS to promote the architectue through providing full access to the most recent versions of the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA free of charge. The program, called MIPS Open program, will be cover hundreds of MIPS' patents, with no licensing or royalty fees.

See also:

Liliputing : MIPS chip architecture is going open source
EE Times : MIPS Goes Open Source
Phoronix : MIPS Processor ISA To Be Open-Sourced In 2019

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Satellite data exposes looting of archaeological sites

Applying high-resolution satellite imagery

It has become increasingly difficult to find unlooted tombs. The prices for archaeological objects from these burials, however, have seen a vast increase. Gino Caspari from the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bern analyzed the condition of burials in a difficult-to-access region based on high-resolution satellite imagery. These data help to assess the degree of destruction inflicted upon the archaeological heritage. "We specifically chose an area of interest in Xinjiang, China. We assumed that, due to the remoteness and the heavy presence of security forces in the region, we would find a higher proportion of intact tombs," Caspari explains. However, this assumption proved to be wrong: "More than 74.5 percent of the analysed burials were already destroyed and plundered," says Caspari.

Archaeological sites severely threatened

Through conducting an on-ground survey, the researchers managed to show that high-resolution satellite imagery can provide an accurate measurement of the destruction at a particular site. Using time series of different datasets, looting can be effectively monitored. Caspari analysed data going back to 2003, and found out that since then the number of looted tombs increased substantially. "The last untouched archaeological sites of the ancient steppe nomads are under imminent threat," says Caspari.

The research, published in the journal Heritage, allows for a consequent monitoring of archaeological heritage in remote regions of Central Asia. When looting at a site is recognized in an early stage, measures for the protection of the tombs can be put in place.

Assessing Looting from Space: The Destruction of Early Iron Age Burials in Northern Xinjiang (open, DOI: 10.3390/heritage1020021) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

A pair of boffins are in hot water after the image of President Donald Trump made an unexpected cameo in a paper on how to gather animal DNA from their poop at scale.

The paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-20427-9] [DX], which was published in Nature Scientific Reports, discusses the difficulties of gaining high-quality DNA samples from wild animals in a non-invasive way. Feces is the obvious option, but it is dominated by DNA from other organisms, such as bacteria – so the authors proposed a way to enrich the desired animal's DNA from the sample.

However, the pair also buried an Easter egg in a figure depicting the method, which shows a baboon sitting next to an average-sized turd. And on that turd, is a tiny image of the leader of the free world.

[...] Here's a close-up of the image in question:

pic.twitter.com/gw9Ix3EPcu

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) December 17, 2018

[...] "The editors have become aware of unusual aspects to the 'Extract fecal DNA' illustration in figure 1. We are investigating, and appropriate editorial action will be taken once the matter is resolved," a note said.

Here is the graphic referenced:

Figure 1: | Scientific Reports

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google isn't the company that we should have handed the Web over to

Back in 2009, Google introduced SPDY, a proprietary replacement for HTTP that addressed what Google saw as certain performance issues with existing HTTP/1.1. Google wasn't exactly wrong in its assessments, but SPDY was something of a unilateral act, with Google responsible for the design and functionality. SPDY was adopted by other browsers and Web servers over the next few years, and Google's protocol became widespread.

[...] The same story is repeating with HTTP/3. In 2012, Google announced a new experimental protocol, QUIC, intended again to address performance issues with existing HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. Google deployed QUIC, and Chrome would use QUIC when communicating with Google properties. Again, QUIC became the basis for IETF's HTTP development, and HTTP/3 uses a derivative of QUIC that's modified from and incompatible with Google's initial work.

It's not just HTTP that Google has repeatedly worked to replace. Google AMP ("Accelerated Mobile Pages") is a cut-down HTML combined with Google-supplied JavaScript designed to make mobile Web content load faster. This year, Google said that it would try to build AMP with Web standards and introduced a new governance model that gave the project much wider industry oversight.

A person claiming to be a former Microsoft Edge developer has written about a tactic Google supposedly used to harm the competing browser's performance:

A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail.

The latest version of Edge addresses the YouTube issue and reinstated Edge's performance. But when the company talks of having to do extra work to ensure EdgeHTML is compatible with the Web, this is the kind of thing that Microsoft has been forced to do.

See also: Ex Edge developer blames Google tricks in part for move to Chromium

Related: HTTP/2 on its Way In, SPDY on its Way Out
Google Touts QUIC Protocol
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
The Next Version of HTTP Won't be Using TCP
HTTP/3 Explained: A Work in Progress
Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Google's Secret China Project "Effectively Ended" After Internal Confrontation

Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company's privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government.

The Beijing-based website, 265.com, is a Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be "China's most used homepage." Google purchased the site in 2008 from Cai Wensheng, a billionaire Chinese entrepreneur. 265.com provides its Chinese visitors with news updates, information about financial markets, horoscopes, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, and videos. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google's main competitor in the country. As The Intercept reported in August, it appears that Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users' searches before sending them along to Baidu.

According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an "application programming interface," or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google's privacy team, however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com. Several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely and told to shift their attention away from China.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

SpaceX, Blue Origin to launch within minutes of each other Tuesday

The billionaires' battle for commercial space supremacy continues Tuesday with planned launches from both Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and SpaceX, run by Elon Musk.

Blue Origin only announced the launch window for one of its New Shepard rockets carrying nine NASA-sponsored experiments into space a day ahead of time. Blast-off is set for 8:30 a.m. Central time from the company's west Texas launch facility.

That comes less than 20 minutes after the launch window for a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket opens at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida starting at 9:11 Eastern time. A brand new Block 5 Falcon 9 booster will loft into orbit GPS III SV01, a new, super powerful global positioning system satellite for the US Air Force. You may also hear the satellite called by its nickname, "Vespucci."

And, not to be left out of the fun, Arianespace is set to launch about 2 hours later... and then India's GSLV is set to launch at 10:30 UTC that same day!

Launch Schedule – Spaceflight Now

Update: Double scrubbing has dashed hopes of a 4-launch day.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

2018 VG₁₈ is the first solar system object to be spotted at over 100 astronomical units from the Sun. Nicknamed "Farout", the object has a diameter of around 500 km and a pinkish color:

Farout is 120 astronomical units (AU) from the sun — one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). The object is more than 3.5 times the current distance between Pluto and the sun (34 AU), and it outpaces the previous farthest-known solar system object, the dwarf planet Eris, which is currently about 96 AU from the sun. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft recently entered interstellar space at about 120 AU, leaving the sun's "sphere of influence" called the heliopause, where bodies experience the solar wind.

To be clear: The record Farout now holds is for the most-distant solar system body ever observed. That doesn't mean no other objects gets farther away from the sun than 120 AU. In fact, we know some that do. The dwarf planet Sedna gets more than 900 AU away on its highly elliptical orbit, for example, and there are probably trillions of comets in the Oort Cloud, which lies between about 5,000 AU and 100,000 AU from the sun.

Scott S. Sheppard, David Tholen, and Chad Trujillo, the team that discovered "Farout", also announced the discovery of 2015 TG₃₈₇, "The Goblin", earlier this year. They hope to find more extreme trans-Neptunian objects in order to determine the location or existence of Planet Nine.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

PLEX, this last week pushed out changes to its ROKU users (I am one). That made using PLEX nearly impossible for some people. Light and Dark gray color palate. White text on light gray background, to the point of the PLEX 1/4 screen height logo and spinning-working throbber being lost on the background.

So war ensues... See Plex.tv support forums if you must.

My question to you all, "What is TECH's responsibility to the Handicapped?".

Should good TECH also have a backdoor method allowing those with usability issues to still use the product, when TECH changes directions? What about lifetime pre-paid services that are now unusable? Should there be immediate return of funds, so we can buy the second best solution (now the best choice for us)? Should any change be signed off by a third party auditor to insure continued usability?

So again, asked differently, what is TECH's moral responsibility?

Original Submission

jas writes:

NPM[*], to put it lightly, had a challenging year. A series of high-profile incidents resulted in headaches for system administrators, as a combination of third parties abusing the NPM platform as well as bad deployments from the NPM team themselves causing adverse effects.

In an interview with TechRepublic, NPM director of security Adam Baldwin indicated that NPM, Inc. is working on solutions to improve security. "Users of Javascript in the enterprise share responsibility with NPM. We have a dedicated security team and are building products in 2019 to focus on these efforts," Baldwin said. The product hinted at is tooling being built into NPM, "starting with Enterprise, to help understand what is being run on systems." These changes are tentatively planned to be unveiled in the first half of 2019.

These plans include identifying known vulnerabilities and advanced reporting and visualization of dependency trees, in order to gain a better understanding of what is being used in deployment. In an earlier email with TechRepublic, NPM's Jonathan Cowperthwait noted that the team could improve security by "surfacing information about maintainer transfers," and "driving use of two-factor authentication."

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/heres-how-npm-plans-to-improve-security-and-reliability-in-2019/

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software):

npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. It consists of a command line client, also called npm, and an online database of public and paid-for private packages, called the npm registry. The registry is accessed via the client, and the available packages can be browsed and searched via the npm website. The package manager and the registry are managed by npm, Inc.

Original Submission