SoylentNews

aristarchus writes:

According to Extreme Tech,

NASA is going back to the Moon, and this time, it intends to stay a while. That's the news from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who announced the first company chosen to deliver a vital component of the space agency's Lunar Gateway space station. Maxar Technologies will build the power and propulsion system for the Lunar Gateway, the first step in NASA's ambitious new Artemis project that will put humans on the Moon's surface in just five years.

"This time when we go to the Moon, we're actually going to stay," Bridenstine said. "The goal here is speed. 2024 is right around the corner."

But then, there is this:

May 24 (UPI) -- Just weeks after he was assigned to lead NASA's renewed efforts to explore the moon, special assistant Mark Sirangelo has left the space agency, officials said.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Sirangelo's departure in an internal memo Thursday, Space News reported.

Sirangelo joined NASA last month as special assistant to the administrator and was tabbed to guide the agency's efforts to explore the lunar surface. Bridenstine said, however, that NASA's proposal for the "Moon to Mars Mission Directorate", which had support from the White House, was turned down by Congress.

"NASA proposed to the House and Senate a reorganization to establish a new mission directorate focused on a sustainable lunar campaign," Bridenstine said in a statement. "The proposal was not accepted at this time, so we will move forward under our current organizational structure within the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate."

The mission was first announced in March to meet Vice President Mike Pence's goal of returning humans on the moon by 2024.

Sirangelo appeared with other NASA officials this week at an advisory council to discuss exploration plans. At the meeting, he said he'd been working on the plan to return to the moon, a mission he called "daunting." Also at the meeting, Bridenstine said NASA needs an additional $1.6 billion for the 2020 budget to reach the goal.

"Given NASA is no longer pursuing the new mission directorate, Mark has opted to pursue other opportunities. I want to personally thank Mark for his service and his valuable contributions to the agency," Bridenstine said.

What is a young science-curious Soylentil to think?

Original Submission

CrossFit, Inc. Suspends Use of Facebook and Associated Services

canopic jug and an Anonymous Coward write:

CrossFit has announced in a press release that it has closed its Facebook accounts as of May 22, 2019. CrossFit is an almost 20 year old branded fitness regimen. Its press release goes into quite a bit of detail into the problems caused by use of Facebook and its subsidiary services such as Instagram and enumerates eight specific examples of deal-breakers.

Earlier on SN:
Facebook Still Tracks You After You Deactivate Your Account (2019)
Didn't Think Facebook Could Get Any Worse? Think Again. (2018)
Why No One Trusts Facebook (2014)

CrossFit, Inc. Suspends Use of Facebook and Associated Properties After Unexplained Ban

CrossFit, Inc. defends relentlessly the right of its affiliates, trainers, and athletes to practice CrossFit, build voluntary CrossFit associations and businesses, and speak openly and freely about the ideas and principles that animate our views of exercise, nutrition, and health. This website—and, until recently, CrossFit's Facebook and Instagram accounts—has long catalogued CrossFit's tireless defense of its community against overreaching governments, malicious competitors, and corrupt academic organizations.

Recently, Facebook deleted without warning or explanation the Banting7DayMealPlan user group. The group has 1.65 million users who post testimonials and other information regarding the efficacy of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. While the site has subsequently been reinstated (also without warning or explanation), Facebook's action should give any serious person reason to pause, especially those of us engaged in activities contrary to prevailing opinion.

https://www.crossfit.com/battles/crossfit-suspends-facebook-instagram

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takyon writes:

United Nations: Siri and Alexa Are Encouraging Misogyny

We already knew humans could make biased AIs — but the United Nations says the reverse is true as well.

Millions of people talk to AI voice assistants, such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. When those assistants talk back, they do so in female-sounding voices, and a new UN report argues that those voices and the words they're programmed to say amplify gender biases and encourage users to be sexist — but it's not too late to change course.

The report is the work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and its title — "I'd blush if I could" — is the response Siri was programmed in 2011 to give if a user called her a "bitch."

[...] "It is a 'Me Too' moment," Saniye Gülser Corat, Director of UNESCO's Division for Gender Equality, told CBS News. "We have to make sure that the AI we produce and that we use does pay attention to gender equality."

Also at CNET.

[Back in 2013 in Germany, Siri's voice could be selected as either male or female.

Possibly one of the earliest and best-known "computer voices" was that of Majel Barrett from ST:TOS, although a case could be made for HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. --Ed.]

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RandomFactor writes:

Venus is believed to have once been a much more hospitable place with a cooler atmosphere and liquid oceans. However tidal braking in a large ocean could have slowed Venus to its current rate of rotation (243 Earth Days to complete a Venusian day) within 10-50 million years taking it away from being habitable in a short time frame.

[The relatively habitable climate on Venus] changed billions of years ago as Venus experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, changing the landscape into the hellish world we know today. According to a NASA-supported study by an international team of scientists, it may have actually been the presence of this ocean that caused Venus to experience this transition in the first place.

On Earth, tidal torque changes the length of our day by around 20 seconds every million years.

The team simulated what Venus would be like with oceans of varying depth and a rotational period ranging from 243 to 64 sidereal Earth days. They then calculated the tidal dissipation rates and associated tidal torque that would result from each. What they found was that ocean tides would have been enough to slow it down by up to 72 Earth [days] every million years, depending on its initial rate of rotation.

This suggests that the tidal brake could have slowed down Venus to its current rotation in just 10 to 50 million years. Since it was this reduced rotation rate that caused Venus' oceans to evaporate on its Sun-facing side, leading to the runaway greenhouse effect, this tidal disruption effectively robbed Venus of its habitability in what was (from a geological standport) a pretty short time frame.

The study provide an alternative explanation of why Venus rotates the way it does which previously was assumed to be due to a massive impact slowing its rotation, additionally

These findings could also have implications for the study of extrasolar planets, where many "Venus-like" worlds have already been found.

Journal Reference : Consequences of Tidal Dissipation in a Putative Venusian Ocean (pdf)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

AMD's RX 3080 has been rumoured for quite some time, a GPU name which is designed to 1-up Nvidia's RTX 20XX series in a literal sense, copying the tactics of the company's CPU division when they released their Ryzen-based X370 platform to compete with Intel's Z270 offerings.

The idea is simple, you see two products on a shelf and you look at the numbers. X370 must be better than Z270; the number is bigger, right? It's a simple marketing tactic, and it makes sense for AMD to reuse it within the graphics card market. AMD's naming schemes have moved from RX 580 to RX Vega 64 to Radeon VII; it's not like AMD has a defined branding scheme to follow within the GPU market anymore, so why not piggyback on Nvidia? Nvidia even went to the effort of changing GTX to RTX on the high-end, simply begging to be confused with AMD's established RX graphics lineup.

[...] Now, it looks like Nvidia wants to stop AMD's games, with recent trademark applications showing that Nvidia claims ownership of the numbers 3080, 4080 and 5080, at least within the world of PC graphics. This move appears to be Nvidia's attempt to stop Radeon calling their next graphics card the RX 3080, a name which would inevitably cause confusion when Nvidia releases their RTX/GTX 30XX series, which should include a model called the RTX 3080.

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/nvidia_hopes_to_block_amd_s_rx_3080_with_a_new_trademark/1

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Phoenix666 writes:

CNBC:

If you hate [flies], then Lorenzo Maggiore is your patron saint.

"I was a weird kid, I didn't like flies," says the 57-year-old from Los Angeles. "I used to put them in my Hot Wheels cars and send them down the track. They land on poo, and then they land on your food. Anything that does that, I'm not really interested in."

Maggiore is the artistic madman behind Bug-A-Salt, a $40 "gun" which uses table salt as buckshot to stun or kill bugs, especially flies. Salt makes the product safe to use around food, and it also doesn't blow the bug to bits. "That's another thing that's beautiful about it, it leaves them whole," he says. A lot of times, Bug-A-Salt doesn't actually kill the bug, it just gets it off your table.

I liked the Make magazine article on zapping mosquitos with lasers better, myself.

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AnonTechie writes:

First American Financial Corporation, a provider of title insurance, said Friday that it had fixed a vulnerability in its website that exposed 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back 16 years.

The vulnerability would have allowed anyone to gain access to Social Security numbers, bank account details, drivers license and mortgage and tax records.

The security failure was first reported by Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity writer who last year reported a flaw in the way Facebook was storing hundreds of millions of user passwords.

First American, based in Santa Ana, Calif., said in a statement Friday afternoon that it addressed the security gap after it was notified by Mr. Krebs. "We are currently evaluating what effect, if any, this had on the security of customer information," the company's statement said. "We will have no further comment until our internal review is completed."

The incident was the latest example of an under-the-radar company that retained enormous amounts of sensitive personal and financial data but was not effectively protecting that information.

Security Gap Leaves 885 Million Mortgage Documents Exposed

Additional Coverage:

Krebs on Security

The Verge

USA TODAY

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

McMaster researchers have developed a simple and highly novel form of computing by shining patterned bands of light and shadow through different facets of a polymer cube and reading the combined results that emerge.

The material in the cube reads and reacts intuitively to the light in much the same way a plant would turn to the sun, or a cuttlefish would change the color of its skin.

The researchers are graduate students in chemistry supervised by Kalaichelvi Saravanamuttu, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology whose lab focuses on ideas inspired by natural biological systems.

The researchers were able to use their new process to perform simple addition and subtraction questions.

Additional reporting: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10166-4

Math via chemical reaction.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Global Times:

China on Thursday rolled off the production line a prototype magnetic-levitation train with a designed top speed of 600 km per hour in the eastern city of Qingdao.

The debut of China's first high-speed maglev train testing prototype marks a major breakthrough for the country in the high-speed maglev transit system.

The testing prototype, which has one car only, can check and optimize the key technologies and core system components of the high-speed maglev system and lay a technological basis for the forthcoming engineering prototype, said Ding Sansan, head of the train's research and development team and deputy chief engineer of CRRC Qingdao Sifang Co., the train builder.

China is the third-largest country in the world by area. If they successfully implement a high-speed rail network, will American objections to scale finally be overcome?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Hybrid and electric vessels are under the spotlight lately, thanks to intensified efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping, a significant source of CO2 and other pollutants. There are already several offerings of such green ships in Europe, and a Danish operator is ready to pave the way for the widespread use of fully electric powered vessels in the ferry sector.

Supported by the EU-funded E-ferry project, project partner Aeroe (Ærø) Kommune's vessel will cover distances of over 20 NM between charges. The novel all-electric ferry is set to have the largest battery pack installed at sea.

Hope they have maritime Triple-A standing by to tow them back to port...

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Snotnose writes:

Nobel prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann has died.

A polymath who discovered and organized the tiniest building blocks of matter and went on to study the most complex systems in the universe, Gell-Mann died Friday at the age of 89.

"Much of what we currently understand about particle physics was invented by Murray Gell-Mann," says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, where Gell-Mann taught for decades. "He was a towering influence in the field."

The New York Times has his obituary

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

AMD's 3rd Gen Ryzen Is The Most Exciting Processor Launch In A Decade

There have been a fair amount of rumors surrounding AMD's 3rd Gen Ryzen 'Zen 2′ processors over the last few weeks covering specifications, performance and pricing. I wrote just yesterday about the latest rumor of a supposed 16-core mainstream Ryzen CPU obtaining a huge Cinebench score and a few days ago I discussed why AMD might be considering getting rid of its low-end Threadripper CPUs too. However, leaks and rumors aside, there are far more important and genuine reasons to be excited by 3rd Gen Ryzen and what AMD will be announcing next week at Computex and after that at E3 in June.

[...] AMD could finally match or even beat Intel with Zen 2 and 3rd Gen Ryzen as lots of these issues are rumored to be solved. Memory speeds will apparently increase significantly and given the impact we've seen from relatively small boosts in memory speed, this could well see 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs offer sizeable performance gains. Thankfully, memory prices are in AMD's favor too with kits of 16GB 3,600MHz memory retailing for less than $125 - when just before Christmas that same kit would have cost you nearly $260.

[...] The latest rumor of a Cinebench score of such a CPU puts this 16-core monster on par with Intel's Core i9-9980XE – a $2,000 CPU that requires Intel's high-end desktop motherboards, yet rumors of the supposed Ryzen 9 3850X put that CPU as retailing for less than $600. While we might not see those lofty 5GHz numbers from that CPU, they might appear lower down the stack with a 12-core model, which is likely to be a favorite for general purpose users and gamers alike.

[...] The fact is, that 1st and 2nd Gen Ryzen didn't deal a death blow to Intel. It was still faster in some areas and while its CPUs and platforms usually cost more, that doesn't always matter, especially if the differences are mere 10′s of dollars and you'll be using your PC for the next few years, reaping the benefits. However, with 3rd Gen Ryzen, all the signs are that we could finally be looking at reviewers like myself recommending AMD's CPUs across the board, and not just for certain workloads.

Could it really be that AMD's offerings will be faster, with more cores, more IPC, lower energy consumption, and cheaper all at once across vast swaths of the CPU market?

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

This seems so wrong on so many counts I am at a loss for [printable] words.

Georgia Supreme Court Rules that State Has No Obligation to Protect Personal Information

Almost exactly one year after the stringent European General Data Protection Regulation came into effect (May 25, 2019), the Supreme Court of the state of Georgia has ruled (May 20,  2019) that the state government does not have an inherent obligation to protect citizens' personal information that it stores.

The ruling relates to a case that dates back to 2013. A Georgia Department of Labor employee inadvertently emailed a spreadsheet containing the names, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and email addresses of 4,457 people who had applied for benefit to about 1,000 people.

Thomas McConnell, whose details appeared on the spreadsheet, filed a putative class action against the Department of Labor, alleging negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, and invasion of privacy. That case has progressed through the legal system to the Supreme Court, and has been dismissed (PDF).

While the Supreme Court has not ruled that there can never be an obligation to protect citizens' data, it has ruled that the obligation is not automatic -- and in the McConnell case, there were no separate requirements to provide the obligation.

canopic jug writes:

Mike Masnick at Techdirt lays out, once again, the evidence rebutting Shiva Ayyadurai's claim to have invented e-mail. Shiva Ayyadurai just settled with Techdirt over his repudiated claims. No money was exchanged in the settlement but Techdirt did agree to publish Ayyadurai's claims side by side with the actual facts for comparison. Ayyadurai rose to international attention a few years ago after he claimed the mantle for himself and went around accusing detractors of racism underwritten by large corporations. Now that the issue is officially settled, Mike Masnick has written another summary.

[...] And with that, we'll (hopefully) leave this saga aside. If Ayyadurai would like to respond to this, or to supply evidence to contradict the points and evidence raised above, he is, as always, welcome to provide it. He could have done so any time since 2012 when we first wrote about him and his claims, rather than taking us to court for two and a half years. I still believe that Ayyadurai should, in fact, be praised for what he accomplished as a teenager -- building a working email system as he apparently did, at the time he did, is no small feat. Our only issue with his claims is the decision to argue that his impressive creation was actually "the invention of email." It was not.

It may take a while for Techdirt to get back on its feet both regarding finances and workflow. The trouble from that particular charlatan cost not only a lot of time but also a fair amount of money. Mike Masnick ended up accepting support from the Koch brothers in order to keep going with writing and reporting, allowing the site to keep going but at the cost of tainting its reputation somewhat. With luck the site can become independent again.

Earlier on SN:
Case Dismissed: Judge Throws Out Shiva Ayyadurai's Defamation Lawsuit Against Techdirt(2017)
The Guy who Claims to have Invented E-Mail is at it Again (2017)
The Guy who Claims he Created EMAIL is at it; Again (2017)
  [...]
Huffington Post Shows the Importance Of Fact Checking (2014)

Original Submission

chromas writes:

CBS News:

When it comes to labels on food, there's no agreed upon wording to let consumers know when to toss packaged grocery items. Public confusion over how long they can keep and safely eat products is part of the reason Americans throw away roughly a third of their food -- about $161 billion worth -- each year.

Compounding the uncertainty for consumers about when to toss food is the array of descriptions producers use to signal a product's shelf life. Those include "use by," "sell by," "freeze by," "best if used before" and "expires on," leaving the public unclear on the safety of products and causing lots of perfectly fine food to get tossed.

[...] Looking to stem the tide of still-edible food that ends of in landfills, the FDA is backing a voluntary industry effort to standardize the "best if used by" wording on packaged food, saying it should curb consumer confusion thought to contribute to about 20% of food wasted in U.S. homes.

[...] Still, the FDA's guidance may not go far in clearing up the public's misunderstanding about labels, observers said. For one, the labeling only applies to food quality, not its safety.

[...] The [Grocery Manufacturers Association] and the Food Marketing Institute in January 2017 recommended making the phrase uniform, along with use of the "use by" phrase to indicate when food should no longer be eaten for safety reasons. In a letter to the food industry, the FDA said it would not address the latter phrase "at this time."

Predicting when food is past its prime is an inexact science, according to Kevin Smith, senior advisor for food safety in the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. He said consumers should regularly examine food in their kitchen cabinets or pantries that have passed their "best if used by" dates, and throw out if they've noticeably changed in color, consistency or texture.

"Food is much safer than it was a few decades ago, largely because of refrigeration and dramatically improved manufacturing processes. But to really address the problem with food waste, the FDA should tell people something more meaningful than open it, look at it, smell it, and if it seems OK, eat away, otherwise, toss," Steinzor added.

The FDA should instead define when foods become risky to eat based on shelf life and require those dates be disclosed, she said.

Original Submission