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martyb writes:

SpaceX set to Launch Critical Dragon Demonstration Mission Tonight:

It's finally go time. For the first time since 2011 and the space shuttle's retirement, a rocket and spacecraft stand on a launch pad in Florida capable of blasting humans into space. Launch time is set for 2:49am ET (07:49 UTC) Saturday from Kennedy Space Center. NASA and SpaceX have worked toward this goal for nine years. It hasn't always been easy, but now here we are.

This particular Dragon won't carry humans, just a single mannequin named Ripley as an homage to Sigourney Weaver's iconic character in the movie Alien. Ripley will wear a flight suit and be well instrumented in order to determine conditions inside the spacecraft. "The idea is to get an idea of how humans would feel in her place basically," Hans Koenigsmann, the vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said at a news briefing Thursday.

[...] This uncrewed flight must go off smoothly before NASA and SpaceX can proceed to crewed missions and end the space agency's dependence on Russian transportation to the station. So much must go right from start to finish. It will begin about an hour before Saturday morning's launch, when NASA will be closely watching the load-and-go fueling operations of the Falcon 9 rocket, which will occur with astronauts on board during crewed flights.

NASA engineers also want to see how Dragon performs in orbit, how smoothly it docks with the space station, and the condition of the vehicle's interior once the hatch opens. (Hopefully there will be no free freon.) Then, perhaps the most critical phase of the mission will come during the return to Earth, when Dragon re-enters Earth's atmosphere and lands in the Atlantic Ocean, under parachutes. This is presently expected to occur on Friday, March 8, at around 8:45am ET.

There are some great pics in the story, well worth loading and reading all the way through.

This is a new booster (per NASA's specification) which is scheduled for a landing attempt on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

The launch is being live-streamed on YouTube. Video usually starts 15-20 minutes before launch.

Also at BBC and CNET.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...]The discovery that under certain conditions electrically-heated silicate glass defies a long-accepted law of physics known as Joule's first law should be of interest to a broad spectrum of scientists, engineers, even the general public, according to Himanshu Jain, Diamond Distinguished Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Lehigh University.

[...]He and his colleagues -- which includes Nicholas J. Smith and Craig Kopatz, both of Corning Incorporated, as well as Charles T. McLaren, a former Ph.D. student of Jain's, now a researcher at Corning -- have authored a paper published today in Scientific Reports that details their discovery that electrically-heated common, homogeneous silicate glasses appear to defy Joule's first law.

[...]"In our experiments, the glass became more than a thousand degrees Celsius hotter near the positive side than in the rest of the glass, which was very surprising considering that the glass was totally homogeneous to begin with," says Jain. "The cause of this result is shown to be in the change in the structure and chemistry of glass on nanoscale by the electric field itself, which then heats up this nano-region much more strongly."

Jain says that the application of classical Joule's law of physics needs to be reconsidered carefully and adapted to accommodate these findings.

[...]The researchers believe that this work shows it is possible to produce heat in a glass on a much finer scale than by the methods used so far, possibly down to the nanoscale. It would then allow making new optical and other complex structures and devices on glass surface more precisely than before.

"Besides demonstrating the need to qualify Joule's law, the results are critical to developing new technology for the fabrication and manufacturing of glass and ceramic materials," says Jain.

Original Submission

karthikaqpt writes:

Engineers at MIT and Penn State University have found that under the right conditions, ordinary clear water droplets on a transparent surface can produce brilliant colors, without the addition of inks or dyes. [...] The researchers have developed a model that predicts the color a droplet will produce, given specific structural and optical conditions. The model could be used as a design guide to produce, for example, droplet-based litmus tests, or color-changing powders and inks in makeup products.

https://news.mit.edu/2019/water-droplets-structural-color-0227

YouTube video

Colouration by total internal reflection and interference at microscale concave interfaces^$ (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0946-4)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Police in the United Kingdom are warning about a dangerous new trend of teens lighting plastic garbage cans on fire and inhaling their fumes.

Authorities were prompted to speak out about the bizarre new craze after several "extremely dangerous" incidents were reported in the Greater Manchester area, the Mirror reports.

Dyes used to make the trash cans - more commonly known as wheelie bins in the U.K. - emit a fume when lit on fire that can produce a high when inhaled, much like other solvents such as glue or gas. Fumes from the plastic bins, however, are "highly toxic" and reportedly more dangerous than other solvents.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-police-warn-against-new-teen-trend-of-burning-plastic-trash-cans-inhaling-fumes

Also at The Sun and Manchester Evening News.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The number of pedestrians hit and killed on U.S. roads has surged to the highest level [PDF] in almost three decades, new data indicates, while suggesting that a rise in SUVs and smartphone use may be to blame.

Last year, 6,227 pedestrians were killed in road fatalities — a 51 percent increase compared to 2009, according to a preliminary estimate published Thursday by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). The D.C.-based non-profit said the 2018 figure is the highest recorded since 1990.

Five states—Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas—accounted for 46 percent of all pedestrian deaths, despite representing just 33 percent of the U.S. population, according to Census data. California had the largest number, at 432.

U.S. Pedestrian Road Deaths

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Corresponding with the three-year anniversary of their announcement hypothesizing the existence of a ninth planet in the solar system, Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are publishing a pair of papers analyzing the evidence for Planet Nine's existence.

The papers offer new details about the suspected nature and location of the planet, which has been the subject of an intense international search ever since Batygin and Brown's 2016 announcement.

The first, titled "Orbital Clustering in the Distant Solar System," was published in The Astronomical Journal on January 22. The Planet Nine hypothesis is founded on evidence suggesting that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies that lies beyond Neptune, is influenced by the gravitational tugs of an unseen planet. It has been an open question as to whether that clustering is indeed occurring, or whether it is an artifact resulting from bias in how and where Kuiper Belt objects are observed.

To assess whether observational bias is behind the apparent clustering, Brown and Batygin developed a method to quantify the amount of bias in each individual observation, then calculated the probability that the clustering is spurious. That probability, they found, is around one in 500.

[...] The second paper is titled "The Planet Nine Hypothesis," and is an invited review that will be published in the next issue of Physics Reports. The paper provides thousands of new computer models of the dynamical evolution of the distant solar system and offers updated insight into the nature of Planet Nine, including an estimate that it is smaller and closer to the sun than previously suspected. Based on the new models, Batygin and Brown -- together with Fred Adams and Juliette Becker (BS '14) of the University of Michigan -- concluded that Planet Nine has a mass of about five times that of the earth and has an orbital semimajor axis in the neighborhood of 400 astronomical units (AU), making it smaller and closer to the sun than previously suspected -- and potentially brighter. Each astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance between the center of Earth and the center of the sun, or about 149.6 million kilometers.

-- submitted from IRC

The planet nine hypothesis (DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2019.01.009) (DX)

Orbital Clustering in the Distant Solar System (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aaf051) (DX)

Previously: CU Boulder Researchers Say Collective Gravity, Not Planet Nine, Explains Orbits of Detached Objects

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

YouTube to disable comments on videos featuring minors after child safety fears

YouTube on Thursday said it won't allow people to leave comments on some videos that feature minors, as the Google-owned video site deals with a scandal involving what one blogger called a "softcore pedophilia ring."

The company will disable comments on all videos that star "young minors" and "older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior," YouTube said.

However, the company said it'll keep comments enabled for a small number of creators who are minors. In those cases, the videos will be actively moderated and YouTube will work with the creators directly. Though the company said it's starting with a small group, it eventually wants to open up comments again to more creators.

YouTube said it's also launching software that could automatically detect and remove predatory comments.

YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

Videos of older children and teenagers will typically not have the comments disabled, unless a specific video is likely to attract predatory attention. That could include, for example, a video of a teenager doing gymnastics.

YouTube told the BBC it would use algorithms to detect which videos contained children.

Blog post. Also at TechCrunch and LA Times.

Previously: Inappropriate Comments Could Lead to Video Demonetization on YouTube

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The amount of $100 bills in circulation is surging. And it's leaving some economists scratching their heads.

The number of outstanding U.S. $100 bills has doubled since the financial crisis, with more than 12 billion of them across the world, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. C-notes have passed $1 bills in circulation, Deutsche Bank chief international economist Torsten Slok said in a note to clients this week.

[...] "By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption," [former Standard Chartered bank chief executive Peter] Sands wrote.

The global illicit money flows were "staggering" and fuel crimes from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud, Sands said. He estimated that depending on the country, tax evasion robs the public sector of anywhere between 6 percent and 70 percent of what authorities estimate they should be collecting. And despite "huge investments in transaction surveillance systems, and intelligence, less than 1 percent of illicit financial flows are seized.

[...] "The Federal Reserve and Treasury make 99 dollars for every $100 dollar bill they print and sell offshore," Colas said. "There's a natural desire to keep printing these things — the U.S. government makes a lot of money selling them."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/theres-been-a-mysterious-surge-in-100-bills-in-circulation-possibly-linked-to-global-corruption.html

Superbills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The US is banning lithium batteries from cargo holds. The result will mean that all your phones, tablets, computers, music players, games consoles, and other rechargeable devices must be carried in hand luggage and tipped out onto trays to go through the metal detectors. Expect longer lines.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access:

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.

The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.

“It’s hard to overstate how big  [UC’s move] is for us here in the U.S.,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a Washington D.C.-based group that advocates for open access. “This gives institutions that are on the fence about taking this kind of action a blueprint.”

Indeed, UC’s move could ratchet up pressure on additional negotiations facing Elsevier and other commercial publishers; consortia of universities and labs in Germany and Sweden had already reached an impasse last year with Elsevier in their efforts to lower subscription fees.

[...] UC published about 50,000 articles last year, and a substantial share, about 10,000, appeared in Elsevier journals. For subscriptions and article fees, UC paid about $11 million, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. (UC says the information is confidential under a non-disclosure agreement.)

There are still many other institutions which continue to purchase subscriptions to these journals. How far away are we from reaching a tipping point?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Supermicro hardware weaknesses let researchers backdoor an IBM cloud server

More than five years have passed since researchers warned of the serious security risks that a widely used administrative tool poses to servers used for some of the most sensitive and mission-critical computing. Now, new research shows how baseboard management controllers, as the embedded hardware is called, threaten premium cloud services from IBM and possibly other providers.

“Bloodsucking leech” puts 100,000 servers at risk of potent attacks. In short, BMCs are motherboard-attached microcontrollers that give extraordinary control over servers inside datacenters. Using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, admins can reinstall operating systems, install or modify apps, and make configuration changes to large numbers of servers, without physically being on premises and, in many cases, without the servers being turned on. In 2013, researchers warned that BMCs that came preinstalled in servers from Dell, HP, and other name-brand manufacturers were so poorly secured that they gave attackers a stealthy and convenient way to take over entire fleets of servers inside datacenters.

Researchers at security firm Eclypsium on Tuesday plan to publish a paper about how BMC vulnerabilities threaten a premium cloud service provided by IBM and possibly other providers. The premium service is known as bare-metal cloud computing, an option offered to customers who want to store especially sensitive data but don't want it to intermingle on the same servers other customers are using. The premium lets customers buy exclusive access to dedicated physical servers for as long as needed and, when the servers are no longer needed, return them to the cloud provider. The provider, in theory, wipes the servers clean so they can be safely used by another bare-metal customer.

Eclypsium's research demonstrates that BMC vulnerabilities can undermine this model by allowing a customer to leave a backdoor that will remain active once the server is reassigned. The backdoor leaves the customer open to a variety of attacks, including data theft, denial of service, and ransomware.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Skyrim mod drama gets ugly with allegations of stolen code and misappropriated donations

One of the more useful [The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim] mods, for developers but indirectly for players, is the Skyrim Script Extender, or SKSE. It basically allows for more complex behaviors for objects, locations and NPCs. How do you have a character seek shelter from the rain if there's no weather-based behaviors in their original AI? That sort of thing (though that's an invented example). SKSE goes back a long way and the creators provide much of the code for others to use under a free license, while declining donations themselves.

Another project is Skyrim Together (ST), a small team that since 2013 has (among others) been working on adding multiplayer functionality to the game — their Patreon account, in contrast, is pulling in more than $30,000 a month. The main dev there allegedly independently distributed a modified version of SKSE several years ago against the terms of the license, and was henceforth specifically banned from using SKSE code in the future.

Guess what SKSE's lead found in a bit of code inspection the other day?

Yes, unfortunately, it seems that SKSE code is in the ST app, not only in violation of the license as far as not giving credit, but in that the dev himself has been barred from using it, and furthermore that — although there is some debate here — the ST team is essentially charging for access to a "closed beta." Some say that it's just a donation they ask for, but requiring a donation is really indistinguishable from charging for something.

Response from Skyrim Together.

Related: Modder Fixes What Bethesda Couldn't -- Skyrim
Bethesda 'Creation Club' for Skyrim and Fallout 4: No "Paid Mods" Here!

Original Submission

janrinok writes in with a story idea:

Back in 1947, the US government had some surplus metallic sodium they were trying to dispose of, but they were unable to arrange transportation to deliver it to any potential buyers. Where "some" amounted to 20 tons of the highly reactive material. So they did the obvious thing. Well, obvious back then; today there would likely be environmental impact statements, OSHA regulations, etc. What they did is dumped it in dead -- contained no living creatures -- Lake Lenore in the state of Washington. It was a simple matter of rolling these 3,500 pound (1,600 kg) ingots down the steep sides and into the lake. To say the results were spectacular would be an understatement as sodium reacts violently with water. It is an exothermic reaction which liberates sodium hydroxide and copious amounts of hydrogen. Ka-Boom! This is covered nicely in the Hackaday story story at Hackaday which contains a link to this newsreel video on YouTube.

That sets the stage for a more recent development pertaining to how to actually make metallic sodium. The conventional process to create sodium metal is to heat sodium chloride (table salt) to about 800°C and then run a current in the kiloamp range through it. Again at Hackaday, they present a short piece entitled Common Chemicals Combine To Make Metallic Sodium:

Thankfully, there’s now a more approachable method courtesy of this clever chemical hack that makes metallic sodium in quantity without using electrolysis. [NurdRage], aka [Dr. N. Butyl Lithium], has developed a process to extract metallic sodium from sodium hydroxide. In fact, everything [NurdRage] used to make the large slugs of sodium is easily and cheaply available – NaOH from drain cleaner, magnesium from fire starters, and mineral oil to keep things calm. The reaction requires an unusual catalyst – menthol – which is easily obtained online. He also gave the reaction a jump-start with a small amount of sodium metal, which can be produced by the lower-yielding but far more spectacular thermochemical dioxane method; lithium harvested from old batteries can be substituted in a pinch. The reaction will require a great deal of care to make sure nothing goes wrong, but in the end, sizable chunks of the soft, gray metal are produced at phenomenal yields of 90% and more. The video [YouTube link] walks you through the whole process.

Caution: concentrated sodium hydroxide (aka lye) is terribly nasty if it gets in your eyes never mind on any other sensitive parts of your body (such as skin); do not attempt without a full face mask and other protective equipment.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mozilla updates Common Voice dataset with 1,400 hours of speech across 18 languages

Mozilla wants to make it easier for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Toward that end, it's today releasing the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data that now comprises over 1,400 hours of voice samples from 42,000 contributors across 18 languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, Hakha-Chin, Esperanto, Farsi, Basque, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Welsh, and Kabyle.

It's one of the largest multi-language dataset of its kind, Mozilla claims — substantially larger than the Common Voice corpus it made publicly available eight months ago, which contained 500 hours (400,000 recordings) from 20,000 volunteers in English — and the corpus will soon grow larger still. The organization says that data collection efforts in 70 languages are actively underway via the Common Voice website and mobile apps.

Common Voice home page. Also at Engadget.

Previously: Mozilla's "Common Voice": Voice Recognition Without Google, Amazon, Baidu, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Mozilla's Common Voice Collecting French, German, and Welsh Samples, Prepping 40 More Languages

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Tesla announces $35,000 Model 3, is closing its stores to pay for it

On Thursday afternoon, Tesla announced that it's finally ready to start selling the cheapest versions of its Model 3 electric vehicle. For $35,000—before any federal or local tax incentives—you can now order a rear-wheel drive Model 3 Standard Range. This car gets black paint and the as-yet unseen standard interior, which means manual (not power assisted) seat and steering adjustment, cloth trim, and a stripped-down audio system. Tesla says the cheapest Model 3 will have 220 miles of range, will hit 60mph (96km/h) in 5.6 seconds before topping out at 130mph (209km/h).

[...] However, these new, cheaper Teslas come at a cost. Tesla also announced that it is now moving to an entirely online sales model and will be shuttering most of its retail locations in the US. "Going to online only is incredibly helpful to us; in many parts of the US, we're unable to sell cars because of franchise laws. This substantially opens up our ability to buy cars. It's 2019—people want to buy stuff online," Musk said.

That means job losses. "There's no other way for us to achieve the savings required to produce this car and still remain profitable. There's no way around it," Musk said. However, when asked about the number or timing of job losses, Musk would not be drawn into details and dismissed the question as "not today's topic."

Tesla announcement.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2