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takyon writes:

Samsung Begins Mass Production of 12 GB LPDDR4X for Smartphones

Samsung announced late on Wednesday that it had started volume production of 12 GB LPDDR4X-4266 memory for high-end smartphones. The chip is currently the highest-density DRAM for mobile applications. The first smartphone to use Samsung's 12 GB LPDDR4X DRAM package will be the company's own Galaxy S10+ handset formally announced last month.

Samsung's 12 GB LPDDR4X package integrates six 16 Gb memory devices featuring a 4266 MT/s data transfer rate at 1.1 Volts and produced using the company's second-generation '10nm-class' process technology (also known as 1y-nm). The 12 GB memory module is 1.1 mm tall, which is a bit higher than standard quad-die LPDDR4X packages (which are thinner than 1 mm), but Samsung has managed to incorporate the device into its latest premium smartphone.

Were the previously announced 12 GB DRAM smartphones using two packages instead of this one thick package?

Related: Samsung Announces 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM, Could Enable Smartphones With 6 GB of RAM
Samsung Announces 8 GB DRAM Package for Mobile Devices
SK Hynix Announces 8 GB LPDDR4x DRAM Package for Mobile Devices
Oppo Likely to Release the First Smartphone With 10 GB of RAM
Xiaomi Announces Smartphones with 10 GB of RAM
Lenovo Announces a Smartphone With Up to 12 GB of RAM

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

John Oliver tackles robocalls by flooding FCC with spam calls:

"The host of HBO's Last Week Tonight has come up with a new way to encourage FCC commissioners to take a harder stance on robocalls: by robocalling them. On his show Sunday evening, Oliver debuted a system ... that robocalls FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow commissioners every 90 minutes.

Can we call it treason? I don't think so, this guy is foreign, from U.K. Time to deport?

martyb writes:

John Oliver Fights Robocalls. by Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC:

Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners.

In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners.

"Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes—here's some bagpipe music."

[...] When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said.

"It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls."

It would be a shame to waste all that time between phone calls doing nothing. Maybe John Oliver could be persuaded to add a 100 more people and maybe another 435 people while he's at it?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://m.phys.org/news/2019-03-black-holes-conquer-space-halo.html

A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University's Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.

Prof. Kipping described this concept in a recent study that appeared online (the preprint is also available on the Cool Worlds website). In it, Kipping addressed one of the greatest challenges posed by space exploration, which is the sheer amount of time and energy it would take to send a spacecraft on a mission to explore beyond our solar system.

[...] "So the binary black hole is really a couple of giant mirrors circling around one another at potentially high velocity. The halo drive exploits this by bouncing photons off the "mirror" as the mirror approaches you, the photons bounce back, pushing you along, but also steal some of the energy from the black hole binary itself (think about how a ping pong ball thrown against a moving wall would come back faster). Using this setup, one can harvest the binary black hole energy for propulsion."

How to travel to, create, capture, and/or contain orbiting black hole binaries is left as an exercise for the reader.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-dormant-viruses-spaceflight.amp

Herpes viruses reactivate in more than half of crew aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions, according to NASA research published in Frontiers in Microbiology. While only a small proportion develop symptoms, virus reactivation rates increase with spaceflight duration and could present a significant health risk on missions to Mars and beyond.

[...] "NASA astronauts endure weeks or even months exposed to microgravity and cosmic radiation—not to mention the extreme G forces of take-off and re-entry," says senior author Dr. Satish K. Mehta of KBR Wyle at the Johnson Space Center. "This physical challenge is compounded by more familiar stressors like social separation, confinement and an altered sleep-wake cycle."

[...] "During spaceflight there is a rise in secretion of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to suppress the immune system. In keeping with this, we find that astronaut's immune cells—particularly those that normally suppress and eliminate viruses—become less effective during spaceflight and sometimes for up to 60 days after."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Waiting for the Complete Rupture:

In April 2015, Nepal – and especially the region around the capital city, Kathmandu – was struck by a powerful tremor. An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 destroyed entire villages, traffic routes and cultural monuments, with a death toll of some 9,000.

However, the country may still face the threat of much stronger earthquakes with a magnitude of 8 or more. This is the conclusion reached by a group of earth scientists from ETH Zurich based on a new model of the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian Plates in the vicinity of the Himalayas. Using this model, the team of ETH researchers working with doctoral student Luca Dal Zilio, from the group led by Professor Taras Gerya at the Institute of Geophysics, has now performed the first high-resolution simulations of earthquake cycles in a cross-section of the rupture zone.

“In the 2015 quake, there was only a partial rupture of the major Himalayan fault separating the two continental plates. The frontal, near-surface section of the rupture zone, where the Indian Plate subducts beneath the Eurasian Plate, did not slip and remains under stress,” explains Dal Zilio, lead author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Normally, a major earthquake releases almost all the stress that has built up in the vicinity of the focus as a result of displacement of the plates. “Our model shows that, although the Gorkha earthquake reduced the stress level in part of the rupture zone, tension actually increased in the frontal section close to the foot of the Himalayas. The apparent paradox is that ‘medium-sized’ earthquakes such as Gorkha can create the conditions for an even larger earthquake,” says Dal Zilio.

[...] According to the simulations performed by Dal Zilio and his colleagues, two or three further Gorkha quakes would be needed to build up sufficient stress for an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.1 or more. In a quake of this kind, the rupture zone breaks over the entire depth range, extending up to the Earth’s surface and laterally — along the Himalayan arc — for hundreds of kilometres. This ultimately leads to a complete stress release in this segment of the fault system, which extends to some 2,000 kilometres in total.

Journal Reference:
Luca Dal Zilio, Ylona van Dinther, Taras Gerya, Jean-Philippe Avouac. Bimodal seismicity in the Himalaya controlled by fault friction and geometry. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07874-8

So... even really big earthquakes are not all they are cracked up to be?

Original Submission

Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins

mendax writes:

The New York Times has published an interesting story:

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots.

Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? Probably not, suggests a study published Thursday in Science.

“Certain sounds like these ‘f’ sounds are recent, and we can say with fairly good confidence that 20,000 or 100,000 years ago, these sounds just simply didn’t exist,” said Balthasar Bickel, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the new research.

The study concluded that the transition to eating softer foods changed how bites developed as people aged. The physical changes, the authors said, made it slightly easier for farmers to make certain sounds, like “f” and “v.”

Food innovations changed our mouths, which in turn changed our languages

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for soysheep9857

The overbite that comes from eating soft food may make "ffff" sounds more common.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/food-innovations-changed-our-mouths-which-in-turn-changed-our-languages/

Food Innovations Changed Our Mouths, Which in Turn Changed Our Languages

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Food innovations changed our mouths, which in turn changed our languages

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

martyb writes:

Live Science is reporting A Woman Had a Dangerous Allergic Reaction After Sex:

A woman in Spain developed a serious allergic reaction after a sexual encounter, which may have been triggered by her partner's semen, according to a new report of the woman's case.

The 31-year-old woman broke out in hives and experienced vomiting and difficulty breathing after engaging in oral sex with her 32-year-old male partner, the report said. The woman was diagnosed with anaphylaxis — a severe, whole-body allergic reaction that can be life-threatening.

The woman wasn't taking any medications and hadn't eaten any unusual foods that might have triggered the reaction. But her partner was taking a course of the antibiotic amoxicillin for an ear infection. Amoxicillin is related to penicillin, and the woman told doctors that she had a penicillin allergy.

The case report authors say it's likely that the woman's allergic reaction was triggered by amoxicillin that had concentrated in her partner's semen, which she was exposed to during oral sex.

BMJ Case Reports has a paywalled writeup on the incident. (Anaphylaxis probably induced by transfer of amoxicillin via oral sex)

Also at Newsweek and Motherboard.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.

It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:

who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.

Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.

The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:

Our Demands

• Green New Deal
• A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
• All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
• Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
• Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
• Preserving our public lands and wildlife
• Keeping our water supply clean

Our Solutions

• The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
• Emission standards and benchmarks
• Changing the agriculture industry
• Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
• Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
• Stop mountaintop removal/mining

In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:

world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."

At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.

How does your school treat such events?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

According to the security firm Dr. Web, of the approximately 5,000 registered Counter-Strike 1.6 game servers online, 39% are malicious.

Trojan.Belonard gets installed on a device upon connecting to a malicious game server. The Trojan exploits vulnerabilities of the game client and is able to infect both the Steam versions and the pirated builds of Counter-Strike 1.6 (CS 1.6). Once on the victim’s computer, the Trojan replaces the files of the client and creates proxies to infect other users. Such a scheme usually serves to create a network of infected computers, which can be used to promote game servers for money.

The Belonard malware promotes a particular community and displays ads to players, however its primary use is to:

promote legitimate CS1.6 multiplayer servers by adding them to the users' available server list, which the Belonard developer would do for a fee.

Additional Coverage on SCMagazine and ZDNet

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

California was declared totally drought free for the first time in more than seven years on Thursday, following unusually abundant winter rains and snowfall statewide, according to the government’s weekly report on U.S. drought conditions.

The U.S. Drought Monitor’s latest survey reflected an astonishing turnaround - at least for now - from a severe, prolonged dry spell that reduced irrigation supplies to farmers, forced strict household conservation measures and stoked a spate of deadly, devastating wildfires.

A relatively small swath of California’s southern-most region, including most of San Diego County, remains labeled “abnormally dry” on the drought map index, as does a tiny patch at the state’s extreme northern end along the Oregon border.

But this week marks the first time since mid-December of 2011 that 100 percent of the state has been classified as being free of drought, defined as a moisture deficit severe enough to cause social, environmental or economic ills. Conditions were classified as normal across 93 percent of the state.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-drought-idUSKCN1QW09A

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candidates can be assured election outcomes haven’t been manipulated.

Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.

The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don’t have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.

The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch.

“We will not have a voting system that we can deploy. That’s not what we do,” said Salmon. “We will show a methodology that could be used by others to build a voting system that is completely secure.”

Kiniy said Galois will design two basic voting machine types. The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes. Galois will bring this system to Def Con this year.

The optical-scan system will print a receipt with a cryptographic representation of the voter’s choices. After the election, the cryptographic values for all ballots will be published on a web site, where voters can verify that their ballot and votes are among them.

“That receipt does not permit you to prove anything about how you voted, but does permit you to prove that the system accurately captured your intent and your vote is in the final tally,” Kiniry said.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw84q7/darpa-is-building-a-dollar10-million-open-source-secure-voting-system

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Crytek Demos Noir, a CRYENGINE Based Real-Time Raytracing Demo on AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 – Can Run on Most Mainstream, Contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs

Crytek has showcased a new real-time raytracing demo which is said to run on most mainstream, contemporary GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. The minds behind one of the most visually impressive FPS franchise, Crysis, have their new "Noir" demo out which was run on an AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics card which shows that raytracing is possible even without an NVIDIA RTX graphics card.

[...] Crytek states that the experimental ray tracing feature based on CRYENGINE's Total Illumination used to create the demo is both API and hardware agnostic, enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12.

Related: Real-time Ray-tracing at GDC 2014
Microsoft Announces Directx 12 Raytracing API
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations
Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
Q2VKPT: An Open Source Game Demo with Real-Time Path Tracing
AMD and Nvidia's Latest GPUs Are Expensive and Unappealing
Nvidia Ditches the Ray-Tracing Cores with Lower-Priced GTX 1660 Ti

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Model Y will be a test of Tesla's popularity

Tesla announced at the end of February that it was finally ready to make and sell the long-awaited $35,000 Model 3, an affordable electric car that was part of Musk's original "master plan" for the company, published in 2006. Closing most of the company's stores and switching to a completely online sales model was how Musk was able to finally achieve this goal, and it also allowed Tesla to lower the price on its other cars.

Normally, that might be seen as a good thing. But many customers who purchased Teslas before the price drops felt jilted. One of the most vocal critics was comedian Chris Titus, who complained to his 125,000 Twitter followers on March 2nd about how his wife bought a Tesla two days before the prices dropped. "@elonmusk lost a loyal customer," Titus wrote. "[T]he people that supported you, praised you and cared about you [sic] dream got boned."

Anger about the price cuts bubbled up in China, too, which is the world's largest market for electric cars. After Tesla cut prices on all of its models there, a number of owners protested at the company's store in the Hunan province capital city of Changsha. The upset owners wrapped the store in a banner that apparently translated to "don't buy now, buy tomorrow at a discount."

[...] [There] is some data backing up the apparent change in sentiment around Tesla. In an Axios-Harris poll of 18,228 adults conducted between November and January, Tesla's ranking slid across a number of categories. It dropped from being the 14th most trusted company out of 100 to 46th. The company's "character" ranking fell from 7th to 57th, and its "ethics" ranking slid from 5th to 56th.

See also: Did Ford just tease an electric Mustang as Tesla debuts Model Y?
Tesla's Model Y sales goals 'aggressive,' analyst says

Original Submission

jas writes:

GEOS is getting a fifth shot at life, as the 1990s DOS shell—despite the name, it is not an OS, in the strictest sense of the term—has been released as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license by new owner blueway.Softworks.

Releasing PC/GEOS as open source came with significant hurdles, considering how often the platform changed hands. “After Frank S. Fischer, the former owner and long time GEOS enthusiast passed away, I worked with Breadbox's former CTO John Howard and Frank’s wife, as the new owner, to acquire the rights to give PC/GEOS a future and a new home,” Falk Rehwagen, former Breadbox employee and owner of new rights holder blueway.Softworks, told TechRepublic. “There always was the vision to make the technology available to the community to enable further developments, make it a living and developable system.”

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-life-as-an-open-source-dos-shell/

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Christchurch shootings at two mosques leave 49 dead, Australian arrested in relation to terror attack

At least one gunman with a semi-automatic weapon attacked worshippers gathering for Friday prayers in two locations: a mosque at Deans Avenue in central Christchurch and another mosque in the nearby suburb of Linwood.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed one of the people taken into custody was an Australian-born citizen.

The ABC has identified Grafton man Brenton Tarrant as the man visible in livestreamed footage of the attack.
...
Two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were found on a nearby vehicle, but defence force officers disarmed one and are still working on disarming the second.

stuff.co.nz - Black Caps v Bangladesh [cricket] test cancelled after gunmen attack Christchurch mosques

The test match between the Black Caps and Bangladesh will not go ahead.

The Bangladesh cricket team escaped the Christchurch mosque near Hagley Park where a mass shooting took place on Friday. They were due to play New Zealand a short distance away at Hagley Oval on Saturday.

stuff.co.nz - live coverage

* A gunman walked into a mosque on Deans Ave, Christchurch carrying a semi-automatic weapon and opened fire. He live streamed the attack.

* A second shooting occurred at a mosque in Linwood.

* At least 49 people were dead as of 9pm - 41 at the Central Mosque, 7 at Linwood Mosque, 1 in Christchurch Hospital.

* 48 people are in hospital with gunshots wounds as of 9pm, including young children. Other injured went to medical centres.

* A 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and is due to appear in the Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning.

* He was arrested on Brougham St in a car which had explosives and guns inside.

El Grauniad - Rightwing extremist wrote manifesto before livestreaming Christchurch shooting

The man who livestreamed himself attacking a Christchurch mosque and murdering at least 40 people identified himself online before the rampage as Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant.

On a now-deleted Twitter account, Tarrant posted multiple photos of what appear to be machine gun magazines and a link to what is being described as a manifesto for his actions.

The 74-page document starts off quoting a Dylan Thomas poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, and then moves onto a rant about white genocide.

Tarrant outlines his motivations: including to “create an atmosphere of fear” and to “incite violence” against Muslims while offering up autobiographical details.

Also on BBC, Aljazeera, CNN

Original Submission