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RandomFactor writes:

China's leading internet search engine Baidu's stock price tumbled after its first quarter earnings year over year dropped 80% leading to its first quarterly loss since inception. Baidu posted a net loss of 327 million renminbi ($49 million), contrasted against 6.7 billion RMB profit a year earlier. Revenue increased 15% year over year.

Baidu stated that strong demand for ads in the education, retail, and business services markets failed to offset "less vibrant" demand from the healthcare, online gaming, and financial sectors. Baidu also stopped disclosing its growth in active online customers, and Hailong Xiang, the senior VP of its search unit, abruptly resigned.

Meanwhile, TAC (traffic acquisition costs) rose 41% annually and accounted for 13% of its total revenue and 18% of its marketing revenue. Those percentages were in line with previous quarters, and indicates that Baidu isn't spending too much money to lock in advertisers.

For comparison, Google and Sogou (one of several competitors in the Chinese market) spent 2-4x as much on TAC as a percentage of revenue.

Instead, Baidu is heavily investing in various Google-alike alternative technologies including smart speakers in

its virtual assistant DuerOS, its short video app Haokan, its autonomous driving platform Apollo, Mini Programs for the Baidu App, cloud services, and other ecosystem expansion efforts.

Baidu competes against Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in the Chinese market. Bytedance also suffered some from the slowdown in the past year. Alibaba and Tencent which also compete with Baidu in the online advertising and streaming video spaces, both posted significant gains.

The search giant has promoted Dou Shen, previously over its mobile products, to senior vice president to replace Xiang, and interestingly, has also rebranded its search business as its mobile business.

Whether these adjustments and investments will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.

Some previous Baidu related Articles
Baidu Entering The Driverless Car Race
Baidu's Web Browser Eliminates Privacy
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Computer Scientists are Astir After Baidu Team is Barred From A.I. Competition

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

In an article Friday on Universe Today, Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State, discusses one tantalizing possibility for explaining dark matter, which is that it may be comprised of particles called axions.

Axions are an exotic hypothetical particle invented to explain a conundrum in high energy physics having to to with [sic] charge-parity symmetry and the strong nuclear force. Like dark matter, we have not actually observed axions.

The conundrum is that by all rights the strong nuclear force should violate [CP-symmetry]. There are terms in the mathematics that very obviously break CP-symmetry, and yet we don't see any signs of symmetry breaking with the strong nuclear force in any of our experiments. So something must be going on to restore this symmetry when it ought to be broken.

The answer – or at least one potential answer – is a new kind of particle called the axion. The axion restores a certain kind of balance in the force (yes I'm aware of the Star wars reference here) so that the CP-symmetry is preserved and everyone can go about their daily lives. Of course experiments to date haven't directly revealed the existence of the axion, and there's a range of possible masses and properties that the axion could have.

Based on the relationship of galactic core objects to galaxy sizes, a team of astronomers was able to place upper bounds on axion particle mass, which will help guide future experiments.

It turns out that some of the range of possible axion properties allow that hypothetical particle to be a candidate for the dark matter.

The Dark Axions
If we let the axion be the dark matter it can generally explain all the usual dark matter observations. It can explain the rotation curves inside of galaxies. It can explain the motions of galaxies within galaxy clusters. It can be manufactured in sufficient abundance in the early Universe to fit observations of the cosmic microwave background. And so on.

Axions acting as dark matter also present a potential alternative for black holes in the center of galaxies

axions in the cores of galaxies can bundle together tightly enough to form a single massive ball that would at first blush look a lot like a supermassive black hole. It would be small, it wouldn't interact with light, and it would be incredibly massive.

He also notes that the recent imaging of Sagittarius A* does not rule out axion cores.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Researches at the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering recently published a paper in the Annals of Surgery on the development of a wireless electroceutical dressing (WED) that uses an electric field to disrupt bacterial biofilms.

Bacterial biofilms are thin, slimy films of bacteria that form on some wounds, including burns or post-surgical infections, as well as after a medical device, such as a catheter, is placed in the body. These bacteria generate their own electricity, using their own electric fields to communicate and form the biofilm, which makes them more hostile and difficult to treat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 65 percent of all infections are caused by bacteria with this biofilm phenotype, while the National Institutes of Health estimates that number is closer to 80 percent.

The research demonstrated disruption of 'biofilm aggregates', 'accelerated functional wound closure', and blunting of a variety of bacterial processes.

The dressing electrochemically self-generates 1 volt of electricity upon contact with body fluids such as wound fluid or blood, which is not enough to hurt or electrocute the patient.

This type of treatment does not interfere with traditional antibacterial tactics and shows increased effectiveness when used in combination with them. The electroceutical material also has potential application in surgery and hospital fabrics.

Marketing for the dressing for burn care was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Journal Reference:
Kasturi Ganesh Barki, et. al. Electric Field Based Dressing Disrupts Mixed-Species Bacterial Biofilm Infection and Restores Functional Wound Healing. Annals of Surgery, 2019; 269 (4): 756 DOI: 10.1097/SLA.0000000000002504

Previous coverage of biofilm disruption using ionic liquids

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

foxnews.com/tech/amazon-machines-replace-thousands-of-jobs

The machines, which were being tested in a few warehouses in recent years, are able to scan goods coming down a conveyor belt and put them in custom-built boxes a few seconds later.

The machines can pack up boxes at a rate of 600 to 700 per hour, or four to five times as fast as human workers, according to Reuters, which first reported the development.

Also at: Reuters

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

https://www.livescience.com/65470-strange-martian-water-cycle.html

There's a hole in the Martian atmosphere that opens once every two years, venting the planet's limited water supply into space — and dumping the rest of the water at the planet's poles.

[...]On Earth, summer in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemispheres are pretty similar. But that's not the case on Mars: Because the planet's orbit is much more eccentric than Earth's, it's significantly closer to the sun during its southern hemisphere summer (which happens once every two Earth years). So summers on that part of the planet are much warmer than summers in the Northern Hemisphere.

When that happens, according to the researchers' simulations, a window opens in Mars' middle atmosphere between 37 and 56 miles (60 and 90 kilometers) in altitude, allowing water vapor to pass through and escape into the upper atmosphere. At other times, the lack of sunlight shuts down Martian water cycles almost entirely.

https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL082839 Dmitry S. Shaposhnikov, Alexander S. Medvedev, Alexander V. Rodin, Paul Hartogh. Seasonal Water “Pump” in the Atmosphere of Mars: Vertical Transport to the Thermosphere (pdf; paywalled)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Science Magazine:

The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, will halt funding next year for its long-running Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNEs), which are focused on steering advances in nanotechnology to detect and treat cancer. The shift marks nanotechnology's "natural transition" from an emerging field requiring dedicated support to a more mature enterprise able to compete head to head with other types of cancer research, says Piotr Grodzinski, who heads NCI's Nanodelivery Systems and Devices Branch, which oversees the CCNEs. "This doesn't mean NCI's interest in nanotechnology is decreasing."

Nevertheless, cancer nanotechnology experts see the decision as a blow. "It's disappointing and very shortsighted given the emergence of nanotechnology and medicine," says Chad Mirkin, who directs a CCNE at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. CCNEs have spawned dozens of clinical trials for new drugs and drug delivery devices, as well as novel technologies for diagnosing disease, he says. "Cancer research needs new ways of making new types of medicines. Nanotechnology represents a way to do that," he says.

Maybe they felt there was only a tiny chance they could help treat cancer anyway.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

According to Ming Dong, director of the Academy of Medical Engineering and Translational Medicine in Tianjin University, a new 'Brain Computer Interface' (BCI) chip dubbed 'Brain Talker' which debuted Friday at the 2019 World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin, China enables a person to control a computer or other electronic device using their brainwaves and without requiring movement or verbal instruction.

Ming Dong explains "the chip can identify minor neuron information sent by the brain wave from the cerebral cortex, efficiently decode the information and greatly quicken the communication speed between the brain and machine."

Cheng Longlong, a data scientist from China Electronics Corporation, said scientists would endeavor to enhance the performance of the chip for wider use in the fields of medical treatment, education, home life and gaming in the future.

The new chip was a joint effort co-developed by Tianjin University and China Electronics Corporation which retain fully independent intellectual property rights.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Previously Reported Black hole V404 is back in the news, last time it was for stripping and eating material from a companion star in its orbit. This time it is for being a bit tipsy while it was at it.

While munching on its neighbor, V404 shot out bright jets of plasma into space. This isn't unusual for a black hole, however it normally occurs in a particular fashion. Emanating from the poles in a consistent direction.

a closer look at these jets revealed that instead they appeared to be firing in a wobbling pattern known as procession[sic].

On Monday, in the journal Nature, James Miller-Jones, and his team of researchers from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, published their observations on the 2015 event and offered an explanation for V404 Cygni's odd behaviour. The black hole is misaligned.

"We were gobsmacked by what we saw in this system — it was completely unexpected," said the University of Alberta's Gregory Sivakoff in a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

V404 is surrounded by an accretion disk approximately six million miles (9.7 million kilometers) wide. Typically this disk spinning about a black hole does so on the same axis as the black hole itself. In V404's case it does not.

That misalignment was likely caused by the force of the supernova that created the created the Black Hole in the first place and combined with a phenomenon known as frame dragging it creates the spinning [top] like wobbling effect.

Frame Dragging happens when "the intense gravitational force of the black hole pulls space-time around it as it spins."

8,000 light years from Earth, V404 is the first black hole 'observed' behaving in this fashion.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Acquire Cray for $1.3 Billion

This morning Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray are announcing that HPE will be buying out the supercomputer maker for roughly 1.3 billion dollars. Intending to use Cray's knowledge and technology to bolster their own supercomputing and high-performance computing technologies, when the deal closes, HPE will become the world leader for supercomputing technology.

Cray of course needs no introduction. The current leader in the supercomputing field and founder of supercomputing as we know it, Cray has been a part of the supercomputing landscape since the 1970s. Starting at the time with fully custom systems, in more recent years Cray has morphed into an integrator and scale-out specialist, combining processors from the likes of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA into supercomputers, and applying their own software, I/O, and interconnect technologies.

The timing of the acquisition announcement closely follows other major news from Cray: the company just landed a $600 million US Department of Energy contract to supply the Frontier supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier is one of two exascale supercomputers Cray is involved in – the other being a subcontractor for the 2021 Aurora system – and in fact Cray is involved in the only two exascale systems ordered by the US Government thus far. So in both a historical and modern context, Cray was and is one of the biggest players in the supercomputing market.

Related: Intel and Cray Will Build Aurora, U.S.'s First Exaflops Supercomputer, for $500 Million
Cray and AMD Will Build a 1.5 Exaflops Supercomputer by 2021

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190517000378

The government will switch the operating system of its computers from Windows to Linux, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said Thursday.

The Interior Ministry said the ministry will be test-running Linux on its PCs, and if no security issues arise, Linux systems will be introduced more widely within the government.

The decision comes amid concerns about the cost of continuing to maintain Windows, as Microsoft's free technical support for Windows 7 expires in January 2020.

The transition to Linux OS and the purchase of new PCs are expected to cost the government about 780 billion won ($655 million), the ministry said.

Original Submission

datapharmer writes:

At around 9:15 UTC [17 May] Salesforce pushed a database script update that was intended to add modify all permissions to a specific internal profile used by their Pardot service. Due to a scripting error View and Modify All Objects Permission was granted to all user profiles for all organizations that ever had the Pardot product, including public facing community instances. This was of course a security nightmare for customers, especially those in the Financial and Health sectors, and an emergency change was pushed around 10:00 UTC to revoke all permissions to all profiles except for administrators. No announcement was made on their status sites due to the potential for bad actors to take advantage of the security issue that was introduced until the databases could be locked down. Further action was taken around 11:00 UTC to take down PODS completely, likely to further mitigate access risk which effectively expanded the outage to customers that never used Pardot but shared an instance with customers who did.

Salesforce is holding hourly calls, and recently admitted that the script had run both in their production PODS and also in the Passive Disaster Recovery Instances, complicating the ability to recover from the issue. There is currently no ETA for recovery, though it is still their hope that they will not have any data loss. They are beginning to bring back up instances, but only administrators will have access initially and it will require additional time before administrators will be able to modify permissions and rebuild profiles and there will be a longer wait yet before profile settings can be restored from backup.

Coverage at: Geekwire, The Register, and reddit

Original Submission

jas writes:

From a modality perspective, writers and programmers do the same thing, day after day. Both careers involve spending the bulk of their work day using a computer, though the tools marketed to and preferred by either industry are often diametrically opposed. While MacBooks are often the system of choice for digital creatives, ThinkPads are often seen in the hands of IT professionals. Users of either system are among the most vocal and opinionated, among laptop brands.

While Apple users have been increasingly seen grousing about the butterfly-switch keyboard, ThinkPad users, likewise, have complained about changes that have come to newer models, bringing them more in-line with standard, consumer-focused systems. Some criticize Lenovo's stewardship of the ThinkPad brand-after acquiring IBM's PC OEM division in 2005-though the company has worked to balance ThinkPad's visual design with the changing PC market.

TechRepublic's James Sanders interviews Jerry Paradise, Lenovo's vice president of global commercial portfolio and product management about screen ratios, soldered components, engineering 5G WWAN support, the potential of Linux preinstalled from the factory, and the original butterfly keyboard.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/meditations-on-first-thinkpad-how-lenovo-adapts-to-changes-in-the-pc-industry/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Major outlets report on the passing of I. M. Pei, known for spectacular buildings around the world, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/17/im-pei-architect-audacious-daredevil-who-built-the-impossible mentions some of his better known successes like the pyramid Louvre extension in Paris and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Old gray lady is similar, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/arts/design/im-pei-buildings.html

Since I was in college in Boston in the 1970s, I'm more inclined to comment on his ego, which let him (and his firm) ignore their engineers and build the Hancock tower in downtown Copley Square. The first time the wind came up, large glass panes fell to the plaza below. For several years it was the "plywood tower" until multiple engineering fixes were applied. This Wiki article describes some of the work required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower#Engineering_flaws Pieces of fallen glass were kept as souvenirs by many Bostonians.

I believe that Pei's engineers knew in advance that the vertical "blade" shape of the tower was close enough to an airfoil shape that it was going to have large twisting forces in the wind, but the architect convinced the customer (John Hancock Insurance) to go ahead without a full study in advance. Some of your submitting AC's back story came from a detailed personal conversation with the lead engineer for the retro-fitted dynamic dampers added at the top of the building--just one part of the repair process. He recalled carrying lead bricks up the elevators (on low wind days) to fill the two 300 ton weight boxes of the damping mechanism.

This building is rumored to have gone well over double the original budget.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

"Make memories": That's the slogan on the website for the photo storage app Ever, accompanied by a cursive logo and an example album titled "Weekend with Grandpa."

Everything about Ever's branding is warm and fuzzy, about sharing your "best moments" while freeing up space on your phone.

What isn't obvious on Ever's website or app — except for a brief reference that was added to the privacy policy after NBC News reached out to the company in April — is that the photos people share are used to train the company's facial recognition system, and that Ever then offers to sell that technology to private companies, law enforcement and the military.

In other words, what began in 2013 as another cloud storage app has pivoted toward a far more lucrative business known as Ever AI — without telling the app's millions of users.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-uploaded-photos-ever-app-then-company-used-them-n1003371

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

In the "broken windows theory," as it has come to be known, such characteristics convey the message that these places aren't monitored and crime will go unpunished. The theory has led police to crack down on minor crimes with the idea that this will prevent more serious crimes and inspired research on how disorder affects people's health.
...
However, the researchers did find a connection between disorder and mental health. They found that people who live in neighborhoods with more graffiti, abandoned buildings, and other such attributes experience more mental health problems and are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. But they say that this greater likelihood to abuse drugs and alcohol is associated with mental health, and is not directly caused by disorder.

So...disorder causes mental health problems which causes crime?

Original Submission