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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Russian scientists have studied the Zhokhov site of an ancient population, which is located in the high-latitude Arctic. They have described in detail the way of life of the ancient people who lived there. Despite the area's sparse population, the ancient people communicated with representatives of other territories and even exchanged goods with them through trade fairs.

[...] The scientists conducted excavations in permafrost and have already investigated a significant part of the monument—about 571 square meters. Many tools were found made of stone, bones, horns, tusks and wood. These are hunting weapons, parts of sleds and home utensils. Among the lithic artifacts, there are many microprismatic blades, which were used as side-blades for composite tools that served as spears, darts, arrow points and knives. Most of them were produced of silicious rocks of local origin, while some of them were made of exotic raw materials unusual for this part of the world, including obsidian and volcanic glass. The researchers found 79 such items. The ancient people appreciated this material for its splitting ability and valued its extremely thin and sharp cutting edges. This material has high research value because each deposit of obsidian carries its own unique geochemical signature, which can identify the source of the material. Thus, researchers can learn more about contacts with people from other regions.

There is no obsidian source nearby Zhokhov Island. The closest area with such a source is located near Krasnoye lake in the lower reaches of the Anadyr River in Chukotka, which is some 1,500 km in a straight line, a travel distance of more than 2,000 km. It would seem that the ancient people could not travel such a distance physically. The authors studied the unearthed obsidian objects via X-ray fluorescence, a nondestructive method that reveals the geochemical properties of samples and thus provides a method to locate the source of the material.

Similar evidence of extensive pre-historic trade networks have been found in the Americas as well.

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edinlinux writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/25/697052006/anger-can-be-contagious-heres-how-to-stop-the-spread

In this era of "incite outrage-at-the-moment-to-get-that-click" clickbait news and postings pushed to us by mainstream media and social networks, is it a wonder that society is in the current state that its in..?

This article at NPR states that even if you're not aware of it, it's likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today. This can happen during our most basic exchanges, say on your commute to work. "If someone smiles at you, you smile back at them," says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Yale University. "That's a very fleeting contagion of emotion from one person to another."

But it doesn't stop there. Emotions can spread through social networks almost like the flu or a cold. And, the extent to which emotions can cascade is eye-opening.

For instance, Christakis' research has shown that if you start to become happier with your life, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy too. And your partner is more likely to feel better as well. The happiness can even spread to people to whom you're indirectly connected.

To document this, Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town, over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. "We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network," Christakis says.

It's not just happiness that spreads, unhappiness and anger can be contagious, too. Should negative-clickbait be banned as a social threat?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The world's forests are increasingly taking up more carbon, partially offsetting the carbon being released by the burning of fossil fuels and by deforestation in the tropics, according to a new study.

The findings, published in the journal Biogeosciences, suggest that forests are growing more vigorously, and therefore, locking away more carbon. Even so, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still on the rise.

[...] The increased plant growth in global forests could be due to several factors, including higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warmer temperatures and increased availability of nitrogen.

Perhaps we should re-forest the deserts of the world.

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Phoenix666 writes:

CBS News:

Chinese electric car startup Nio aspires to be the Tesla of China. To achieve that, its founder and CEO William Li wants his customers to feel like they're part of an exclusive club.
...
To begin with, Nio offers its customers the Nio app. In addition to providing practical assistance to Nio drivers, such as dispatching a mobile charging station to revive a dead battery, the app also connects customers to an entire social network of other Nio owners.

Li has also built a handful of private social clubs called Nio Houses. Located in large Chinese cities, Nio Houses feature a car showroom on the first floor and a private clubhouse on the second floor, which is only open to Nio car owners. Nio Houses offer numerous perks, including courses on topics like flower arranging and espresso making, and private rooms where Nio owners can hold business meetings.

The age-old advertising strategy of "Keeping up with the Wangs."

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canopic jug writes:

We should each take privacy seriously, even online, and there is a distinction between privacy and security. The latter is a choice, the former is a right. Despite that it is not feasible for most people to read the terms and conditions for the online services which they use, especially when these terms of service weigh in with multiple tens of thousands of words per document.

Private text messages aside, who really cares about data privacy, right? If your photos, contacts, calendar, email, browsing history, search history, musical tastes, files, thousands of status updates, likes, shares and physical movements are all in the cloud, who really cares?

Please read that last paragraph again and let it sink in – that is probably more data than your nearest and dearest have about you. Yet generally speaking, people don’t seem to be concerned that such volumes of data are out there and being used without our consent.

PayPal’s terms and conditions are longer than Hamlet! The vast majority of people will not have the time, or inclination, to read and decipher thousands of words in legalese to work out where their data is going. Ipso facto, this data is being shared without our consent, regardless of whether we have accepted the terms and conditions or not.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Thirty-million-page backup of humanity headed to moon aboard Israeli lander

On Thursday night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity and sent it on its way to the surface of the moon. On board Beresheet is a specially designed disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human civilization built to last billions of years into the future.

The backup for humanity has been dubbed "The Lunar Library" by its creator, the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF).

"The idea is to place enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost," the nonprofit's co-founder Nova Spivack told me via email.

The AMF also placed a small test archive on Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster that was launched in the direction of Mars aboard the first Falcon Heavy demonstration mission last year. That archive consisted of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy encoded in a disc made of quartz silica glass made to last millions of years as the Roadster orbits the sun. The AMF has also placed a solid-state copy of Wikipedia on board a cubesat from SpaceChain in low-Earth orbit.

Part of the motivation for the far-out project is to leave a copy of humanity's knowledge not just in the cloud, but far beyond the clouds, should the impacts of climate change or a potential nuclear war do us or the planet in at some point in the future.

"While I am optimistic that humanity will rise to the challenge and develop a multinational  planetary defense initiative to mitigate these planetary risks, it is also prudent to have a plan B," Spivack said. "Instead of one backup in one place our strategy is 'many copies, many places' -- and we plan to send updates on a regular basis."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

New flaws in 4G, 5G allow attackers to intercept calls and track phone locations

A group of academics have found three new security flaws in 4G and 5G, which they say can be used to intercept phone calls and track the locations of cell phone users.

The findings are said to be the first time vulnerabilities have affected both 4G and the incoming 5G standard, which promises faster speeds and better security, particularly against law enforcement use of cell site simulators, known as “stingrays.” But the researchers say that their new attacks can defeat newer protections that were believed to make it more difficult to snoop on phone users.

“Any person with a little knowledge of cellular paging protocols can carry out this attack,” said Syed Rafiul Hussain, one of the co-authors of the paper, told TechCrunch in an email.

Hussain, along with Ninghui Li and Elisa Bertino at Purdue University, and Mitziu Echeverria and Omar Chowdhury at the University of Iowa are set to reveal their findings at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego on Tuesday.

[...] Given two of the attacks exploit flaws in the 4G and 5G standards, almost all the cell networks outside the U.S. are vulnerable to these attacks, said Hussain.  Several networks in Europe and Asia are also vulnerable.

Given the nature of the attacks, he said, the researchers are not releasing the proof-of-concept code to exploit the flaws.

[...] Hussain said the flaws were reported to the GSMA, an industry body that represents mobile operators. GSMA recognized the flaws, but a spokesperson was unable to provide comment when reached. It isn’t known when the flaws will be fixed.

[...] The paper comes almost exactly a year after Hussain et al revealed ten separate weaknesses in 4G LTE that allowed eavesdropping on phone calls and text messages, and spoofing emergency alerts.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Insurers Hand Out Cash and Gifts To Sway Brokers Who Sell Employer Health Plans

Human resources directors often rely on independent health insurance brokers to guide them through the thicket of costly and confusing benefit options offered by insurance companies. But what many don't fully realize is how the health insurance industry steers the process through lucrative financial incentives and commissions. Those enticements, critics say, don't reward brokers for finding their clients the most cost-effective options.

Here's how it typically works: Insurers pay brokers a commission for the employers they sign up. That fee is usually a healthy 3 to 6 percent of the total premium. That could be about $50,000 a year on the premiums of a company with 100 people, payable for as long as the plan is in place. That's $50,000 a year for a single client. And as the client pays more in premiums, the broker's commission increases.

Commissions can be even higher, up to 40 or 50 percent of the premium, on supplemental plans that employers can buy to cover employees' dental costs, cancer care or long-term hospitalization.

Those commissions come from the insurers. But the cost is built into the premiums the employer and employees pay for the benefit plan.

Now, layer on top of that the additional bonuses that brokers can earn from some insurers. The offers, some marked "confidential," are easy to find on the websites of insurance companies and broker agencies. But many brokers say the bonuses are not disclosed to employers unless they ask. These bonuses, too, are indirectly included in the overall cost of health plans.

These industry payments can't help but influence which plans brokers highlight for employers, says Eric Campbell, director of research at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

"It's a classic conflict of interest," Campbell says.

There's "a large body of virtually irrefutable evidence," Campbell says, that shows drug company payments to doctors influence the way they prescribe. "Denying this effect is like denying that gravity exists." And there's no reason, he says, to think brokers are any different.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486

Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market?

It wasn't just all price. It was literally this "develop at home" issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a "real server". And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.

Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just a rounding error. Something that sounded entirely fictional a couple of decades ago.

Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it. Trying to sell a 64-bit "hyperscaling" model is idiotic, when you don't have customers and you don't have workloads because you never sold the small cheap box that got the whole market started in the first place.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Channeling the late Steve Jobs, Linux kernel king Linus Torvalds this week dismissed cross-platform efforts to support his contention that Arm-compatible processors will never dominate the server market.

Responding to interest in Arm's announcement of its data center-oriented Neoverse N1 and E1 CPU cores on Wednesday, and a jibe about his affinity for native x86 development, Torvalds abandoned his commitment to civil discourse and did his best to dampen enthusiasm for a world of heterogeneous hardware harmony.

"Some people think that 'the cloud' means that the instruction set doesn't matter," Torvalds said in a forum post. "Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test 'at home' (and by 'at home' I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)."

For Torvalds, this supposedly unavoidable preference for hardware architecture homogeneity means technical types will gladly pay more for x86 cloud hosting, if only for the assurance that software tested in a local environment performs the same way in the data center.

Jobs during his time as Apple's CEO took a similar stance toward native application development, going so far as to ban Adobe's Flash technology on devices running iOS in 2010. For Jobs, cross-platform code represented a competitive threat, bugs, and settling for lowest-common denominator apps.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Virgin Galactic: Rocket reaches space again in test flight (Update)

Virgin Galactic's rocket plane reached space for a second time in a test flight over California on Friday, climbing higher and faster than before while also carrying a crewmember to evaluate the long-awaited passenger experience.

The winged spaceship soared at three times the speed of sound to an altitude of 55.8 miles (89.8 kilometers) before gliding to a safe landing at Mojave Air and Space Port in the desert north of Los Angeles, Virgin Galactic said.

In addition to chief pilot David Mackay and co-pilot Mike "Sooch" Masucci, the crew included Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, Beth Moses.

Moses, described as an expert micro-gravity researcher who is in charge of evaluating the passenger cabin, floated free to test elements of the interior.

Virgin Galactic is working toward commercial operations that will take passengers on supersonic thrill rides to the lower reaches of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the Earth below.

[...] A major goal of Friday's flight was evaluating its handling during descent with its twin tails rotated upward relative to the fuselage.

The "feathered" configuration is used to slow and stabilize the craft as it falls back into the thickening atmosphere. The name came from designer Burt Rutan comparing the mechanism to the feathers of a badminton shuttlecock. The tails rotate back to normal position for the glide to Earth.

Altitude and speed were not specific targets for the flight, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said in an interview earlier this week.

"If we have sort of a nominal-duration burn we will get up pretty high, but that is not one of the formal test goals for this one," he said.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sea level rise, driven by climate change, is causing increased flooding during high tides along much of the U.S. coastline. Though such floods are usually minor, a new study suggests that car traffic patterns could help reveal how floods harm an area’s business revenues.

Tidal flooding events “are not one in a hundred years or one in a thousand years. They’re once a week,” says Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at Stanford University.

Though increasingly frequent, such floods often last only a few hours. That can make it hard to tally the economic losses they cause. Hino and her colleagues sought to quantify those impacts by looking at parking data in the historic downtown of Annapolis, Md., located on the Chesapeake Bay. 

The team first built a database of flood events using flood images posted to social media at the same times that tide gauge readings showed high water levels, in order to eliminate rain-caused flooding. Hino’s team estimates there were 44 tidal floods in 2017, classified as minor, modest or severe.

The team then looked at parking transactions in a nearby lot for changes in parking revenues. Flood events coincided with drops in visitation ranging from 37 to 89 percent, depending on the severity of the flooding, the researchers found. That contributed to about 3,000 fewer visitors, or a 1.7 percent decrease, in 2017, according to the study published online February 15 in Science Advances.

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Apparition writes:

Redox OS (the Unix-like microkernel OS written in Rust) is working on a native Coreboot payload along with bug fixes and a new release.

Lead Redox OS developer Jeremy Soller tweeted that "it's time for Redox OS to become a Coreboot payload." It looks like Redox OS is working on native Coreboot payload support for this interesting Rust operating system rather than first needing to use one of the bootloaders as a Coreboot payload before hitting Redox OS.

[...] The Redox OS twitter also went on to outline they are working on fixes to their networking stack, fixes to curl / cargo / git, advancing towards the state of being able to self-host itself (build Redox OS on Redox OS), improving the relibc C library implementation, porting more applications to running on Redox OS, and at that point to also prepare a new release. And, yes, exploring Coreboot payload capabilities.

Previously: Microkernel, Rust-Programmed Redox OS's Devs Slam Linux, Unix, GPL

Original Submission

martyb writes:

SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Gets NASA Thumbs-Up for March Test Flight :

NASA and SpaceX got together on Friday and scrutinized the Crew Dragon Demo-1 mission to determine if it's truly ready to launch to the International Space Station in March. So far, so good.

The result of the flight readiness reviews is that NASA is confirming the targeted launch time of 11:48 p.m. Pacific on Friday, Mar. 1 (2:48 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, Mar. 2) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The capsule will ride to space on a Falcon 9 rocket.

Crew Dragon won't have any humans on board for this initial test flight, but it will carry supplies and equipment to the ISS.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Dragon aces final NASA review, now set for test flight on March 2

On Friday, key NASA officials gathered in a large meeting room at Kennedy Space Center. Here, for decades, NASA managers reviewed analyses about the next space shuttle mission and, more often than not, cleared the vehicle for launch. But after 2011, there were no more crew vehicles to review.

That changed this week when NASA convened a "flight readiness review" for SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft for its initial test flight, without people on board. By Friday evening, the meeting was over and, among the NASA and SpaceX officials, the verdict was in—Dragon was ready for its demonstration mission as part of the commercial crew program on March 2. Launch time for the Falcon 9 rocket is 2:48am ET (07:48 UTC), from Kennedy Space Center. "I'm ready to fly," NASA's commercial crew program manager, Kathy Lueders, said succinctly.

The mood was ebullient among NASA leadership as well as SpaceX's top official on the scene, Hans Koenigsmann, the company's vice president of build and flight reliability. He, too, had participated in the flight readiness review in the storied room where so many shuttle meetings had been held. "It was a really big deal for SpaceX, and me personally," he said.

[...] This will not be a pro forma test. Although Lueders and the other NASA officials are comfortable with the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for this test flight, there are still some issues they want to close out before astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launch into space on an identical rocket and capsule.

NASA is still gathering data about the rocket and spacecraft's composite overwrap pressure vessels, or COPVs, which are essentially bottles that store rocket fuels at extremely high pressures. Engineers also want to ensure that there is enough margin in the Dragon's parachutes for a safe landing under various conditions, and study some concerns about the propellant feed system in the Dragon spacecraft. Finally, a mannequin will fly inside the vehicle during the test flight to determine stresses on humans during the flight.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Channels like VAXXED TV, LarryCook333, iHealthTube, and other anti-vaccination channels on YouTube have been seeing their videos demonetized starting Friday.

“We have strict policies that govern what videos we allow ads to appear on, and videos that promote anti-vaccination content are a violation of those policies”

the policy referenced by YouTube states:

Harmful or dangerous acts

Video content that promotes harmful or dangerous acts that result in serious physical, emotional, or psychological injury is not suitable for advertising. Some examples include videos depicting painful or invasive surgical or cosmetic procedures, or pranks involving sexual harassment or humiliation.

According to YouTube, this includes anti-vaxxer content.

Youtube has also introduced an information panel pertaining to vaccines. Looking through some anti-vax channels, the following text and link is displayed below anti-vax videos:

Vaccine controversies
Vaccine hesitancy, a reluctance or refusal to vaccinate or have one's children vaccinated, has been identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten global health threats of 2019.[1][2] Hesitancy results from public debates around the medical, ethical and legal issues related to vaccines.
Wikipedia

Most may agree with the target of these actions (particularly with measles making a tragic comeback in the U.S. due to loss of herd immunity resulting from reduced vaccination rates), but the process still has those 'unaccountable', 'untransparent', 'arbitrary', 'unappealable' characteristics that have become the norm with large social media providers.

Pinterest is also taking measures to reduce the spread of anti-vax propaganda on its platform

So how exactly is Pinterest doing this? By blacklisting search terms like “vaccines” from the platform, along with sites that spread this sort of health misinformation.

Additional coverage of anti-vax demonitization Here and here
A sampling of previous coverage of the 'vaccine controversy' on SoylentNews here and here

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft Reveals HoloLens 2 with More than 2x Field of View & 47 Pixels per-Degree

Microsoft today revealed HoloLens 2 at MWC 2019 in Barcelona. The headset features a laser-scanning display which brings a field of view that's more than 2x the original HoloLens and 47 pixels per degree.

HoloLens visionary Alex Kipman took to the stage in Barcelona to introduce HoloLens 2 which addresses many of the key criticisms of the original headset: field of view, comfort, and hand-tracking.

Kipman says that HoloLens 2 "more than doubles" the field of view of the original HoloLens, though hasn't yet specified exactly what the field of view is. The original HoloLens field of view was around 35 degrees, so HoloLens 2 is expected to be around 70 degrees.

[...] HoloLens 2 is also designed to be more comfortable, with much of the headset's bulk balanced in the back of the headset. Kipman said HoloLens 2 "more than triples the comfort" over the original HoloLens... though the exact weight, and how they came to that specific figure, is unclear. Still, the front portion of the headset is said to be made entirely from carbon fiber to cut down on weight and offers a convenient flip-up visor.

HoloLens 2 also brings hand-tracking which goes much further than the coarse gesture control in the original headset. Now with full hand-tracking, users can interact much more directly with applications by touching, poking, and sliding controls directly rather than using abstract gestures.

Also at Engadget.

See also: HoloLens 2 Specs Reveal 2–3 Hour 'Active' Battery Life, Optional Top Strap, & More
Mozilla is bringing Firefox to Microsoft's HoloLens 2

Previously: HoloLens - Microsoft's Augmented Reality Product
Microsoft Giving $500,000 to Academia to Develop HoloLens Apps
Microsoft Announces Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, and HoloLens Dev Edition
Microsoft HoloLens and its 24-Core Chip
HoloLens 2 to Include Machine Learning Accelerated Hardware
Ford Using Microsoft HoloLens to Help Design Cars
Leaked Microsoft Documents Describe Plans for Surface Tablets, Xbox, "Andromeda", and HoloLens
HoloLens to Assist Surgeons at UK's Alder Hey Children's Hospital
U.S. Army Awards Microsoft a $480 Million HoloLens Contract

Original Submission