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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A family of comets reopens the debate about the origin of Earth's water

Where did the Earth's water come from? Although comets, with their icy nuclei, seem like ideal candidates, analyses have so far shown that their water differs from that in our oceans. Now, however, an international team, bringing together CNRS researchers at the Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics and Atmospheres (Paris Observatory -- PSL/CNRS/ Sorbonne University/University of Cergy-Pontoise) and the Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics (Paris Observatory -- PSL/CNRS/Sorbonne University/University of Paris), has found that one family of comets, the hyperactive comets, contains water similar to terrestrial water. The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on May 20, 2019, is based in particular on measurements of comet 46P/Wirtanen carried out by SOFIA, NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

According to the standard theory, the Earth is thought to have formed from the collision of small celestial bodies known as planetesimals. Since such bodies were poor in water, Earth's water must have been delivered either by a larger planetesimal or by a shower of smaller objects such as asteroids or comets.

To trace the source of terrestrial water, researchers study isotopic ratios¹, and in particular the ratio in water of deuterium to hydrogen, known as the D/H ratio (deuterium is a heavier form of hydrogen). As a comet approaches the Sun, its ice sublimes², forming an atmosphere of water vapour that can be analysed remotely. However, the D/H ratios of comets measured so far have generally been twice to three times that of ocean water, which implies that comets only delivered around 10% of the Earth's water.

takyon writes:

Infineon acquires Cypress Semiconductor in deal valued at $10 billion

Infineon Technologies has agreed to buy Cypress Semiconductor in a deal that values the chip maker at $10 billion.

[...] This deal indicates a continuation of the trend toward chip industry consolidation — which has swallowed many Silicon Valley companies, from Altera to NXP.

[...] Cypress was founded in 1982 by T.J. Rodgers, a brilliant chip engineer who helped the startup gain recognition for making a wide variety of memory, sensor, and internet of things chips as it grew to include thousands of employees.

Early to recognize the value of improved solar cells made from silicon, Rodgers invested in SunPower in 2002 and helped it launch an initial public offering in 2005. Cypress got a big return on that deal.

Cypress was known for its larger-than-life founder, who said outrageous things like "real men have fabs" and was a smart and fiercely independent libertarian. Regarding fabs, or wafer fabrication plants (chip factories), Rodgers was adamant that owning your own factories was the path to success in semiconductors. (That eventually proved to be wrong).

Also at AnandTech.

Related: Dialog Semiconductor to Acquire Atmel for $4.6B
Infineon Demos a 1.65 mm^2 eSIM Chip

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Credible-seeming statistics suggest that about one in seven web searches is for porn. This is not trivial - but of course it means that six in seven web searches are not.

The most-visited porn website - Pornhub - is roughly as popular as the likes of Netflix and LinkedIn. That's pretty popular but still only enough to rank 28th in the world when I checked.
...
New technologies often tend to be expensive and unreliable. They need to find a niche market of early adopters, whose custom helps the technology to develop.

Once it is cheaper and more reliable, it finds a bigger market, and a much broader range of uses.

There is a theory that pornography played this role in the development of the internet, and a whole range of other technologies. Does it stack up?

Perhaps in 10 years' time we'll be asking what role robots were created for; will the answer be "porn?"

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Europe's current Vega has demonstrated unparalleled reliability since 2012 and impressive capabilities ranging from equatorial to Sun-synchronous orbits, from orbital to suborbital missions, from single to multiple payloads.

Vega-C builds on these capabilities and will become the pillar of the Vega Space Transportation System, offering a range of payload carriers for different shapes and sizes of payloads ranging from 1 kg to 2300 kg, for access to, operations in, and return from space.

In a proof of concept flight this summer, Vega will deploy multiple small satellites using its new payload carrier system, the Small Spacecraft Mission Service, or SSMS, for the growing small satellites market. This rideshare launch will carry seven microsatellites and 35 CubeSats. The SSMS will also launch on Vega-C from 2020 offering 700 kg of extra payload capacity inside a larger fairing.

Warp drive still not available.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Use of optical neural networks in AI is an attractive idea that has long spurred significant work. Potential advantages include low power, high speed, and the ability to handle greater complexity. However, achieving this ideal is challenging, not least because manufacturing imperfections can degrade accuracy. Intel has proposed a directional approach for mitigating this problem in a blog posted last week and a paper published early in the month.

This excerpt from the blog nicely captures the work. It's written by Casimir Wierzynski, senior director, office of the CTO, artificial intelligence products group.

"We considered two architectures for building an optical neural network engine out of MZIs (Mach-Zehnder inferometer). One of them, which we called GridNet, arranges the MZIs in a grid; the other, which we called FFTNet, arranges the MZIs in a butterfly-like pattern modelled after architectures for computing Fast Fourier Transforms (but in our case the weights are learned from data, so the computation will not, in general, be an actual FFT). We then trained these two architectures in a software simulation on a benchmark deep learning task of handwritten digit recognition (MNIST).

"We found that in the case of double-precision floating point accuracy, GridNet achieved higher accuracy than FFTNet (~98% vs ~95%). However, we found that FFTNet was significantly more robust to manufacturing imprecision, which we simulated by adding noise to the amount of phase-shifting and transmittance of each MZI. After setting these noise levels to realistic levels, GridNet's performance fell below 50% while FFTNet's remained nearly constant.

"If ONNs are to become a viable piece of the AI hardware ecosystem, they will need to scale up to larger circuits and industrial manufacturing techniques. Our finding addresses both of these issues. Larger circuits will require more devices, such as MZIs, per chip. Therefore, attempting to "fine tune" each device on a chip post-manufacturing will be a growing challenge. A more scalable strategy will be to train ONNs in software, then mass produce circuits based on those parameters. Our results suggest that choosing the right architecture in advance can greatly increase the probability that the resulting circuits will achieve their desired performance even in the face of manufacturing variations."

Link to Intel AI blog: https://www.intel.ai/optical-neural-networks/#gs.fe8yao
Link to paper: https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-27-10-14009&id=411885

Source: https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/05/29/intel-suggests-new-approach-to-optical-neural-network-design/

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wirelessduck writes:

Australian Federal Police (AFP) have raided the Sydney headquarters of the public broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), after yesterday's raid on the home of a News Corp. journalist. A radio talkback host for station 2GB has also been targeted by the AFP.

The Afghan Files: Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia's special forces (2017)

• ABC raid: AFP leave Ultimo building with files after hours-long raid over Afghan Files stories
• Police raid on Annika Smethurst shows surveillance exposé hit a nerve
• ABC's Sydney headquarters raided by Australian federal police (43s video)
• 'Our laws are being upheld': Morrison shrugs off raid on journalist's home
• Scott Morrison deflects questions about raid on News Corp journalist
• Australia: The World's Most Secretive Democracy?
• Live tweeting of the raid by John Lyons (@TheLyonsDen)

Google News link. Also at NPR and Al Jazeera.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Sonic black holes produce "Hawking radiation," may confirm famous theory

Israeli physicists think they have confirmed one of the late Stephen Hawking's most famous predictions by creating the sonic equivalent of a black hole out of an exotic superfluid of ultra-cold atoms. Jeff Steinhauer and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) described these intriguing experimental results in a new paper in Nature.

The standard description of a black hole is an object with such a strong gravitational force that light can't even escape once it moves behind a point of no return known as the event horizon. But in the 1970s, Hawking demonstrated that—theoretically, at least—black holes should emit tiny amounts of radiation and gradually evaporate over time.

Blame the intricacies of quantum mechanics for this Hawking radiation. From a quantum perspective, the vacuum of space continually produces pairs of virtual particles (matter and antimatter) that pop into existence and just as quickly annihilate away. Hawking proposed that a virtual particle pair, if it popped up at the event horizon of a black hole, might have different fates: one might fall in, but the other could escape, making it seem as if the black hole were emitting radiation. The black hole would lose a bit of its mass in the process. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate. (Mini-black holes the size of a subatomic particle would wink out of existence almost instantaneously.)

Hawking's prediction has enormous implications for theoretical physics, most notably for the black hole information paradox, but it has proven extremely difficult to test experimentally. The primary challenge is nicely summarized by Silke Weinfurtner, a physicist at the University of Nottingham, in a viewpoint that accompanies the latest results: "The temperature that is associated with Hawking radiation, known as the Hawking temperature, is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole," she writes. "And for the smallest observed black holes, which have a mass similar to that of the Sun, this temperature is about 60 nanokelvin. Hawking radiation therefore produces a tiny signal, and it would seem that the phenomenon cannot be verified through observation."

So physicists have turned to so-called analogue black holes, first proposed in 1981 by University of British Columbia physicist William Unruh. He suggested a sonic analogue that he dubbed a "dumb hole," since it is sound, not light, that becomes trapped behind a kind of event horizon. It's a bit like a waterfall where the water flows faster and faster over an edge until it flows faster than the speed of sound through water. This creates the equivalent of a point of no return. The fluid is moving faster than the speed of sound, so no sound can outrun the fluid to escape in the opposite direction.

Unruh's work was theoretical, but in 2009, Steinhauer briefly created a black hole analogue out of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) made of 100,000 chilled rubidium atoms. When densely packed atoms are chilled to extremely low temperatures (billionths of degrees above absolute zero), they will collectively convert to their lowest energy state and essentially behave like one big "super atom." That is a BEC, a kind of superfluity. Steinhauer was able to create the physical realization of Unruh's dumb holes in a BEC—part of the fluid flowed faster than the speed of sound, effectively creating a supersonic region behind an event horizon that prevented sound waves from propagating in the opposite direction of the current.

DOI: Nature, 2019. 10.1038/s41586-019-1241-0

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

HP boss: Intel shortages are steering our suited customers to buy AMD

With the Windows 7 refresh cycles forecast to run and run, Intel's protracted CPU shortage is sending conservative corporate enterprise buyers into the arms of AMD – or so says HP Inc's CEO.

Dion Weisler took to the stage late last week at Wall Street financial analyst Bernstein's annual conference to discuss HP and the wider industry.

He told Bernstein IT Hardware researcher Toni Sacconaghi that HP was was having some success promoting AMD to suited customers – you know the types, those who historically never got fired for buying IBM.

"It's hard to change commercial behaviour because for the longest time Intel has done an incredible job in the commercial space of selling the value proposition of Intel. And in many cases, it may be a superior product," Weisler said.

"Commercial customers have made a decision. In times of extended shortage, a customer then has to choose between 'Do I have nothing or do I give this a try?' And when they give it a try and that's a good experience, barriers have been broken."

[...] Mikako Kitigawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said she had also heard that CPU shortages had been "impacting refresh cycles of corporate customers".

"We have also heard that corporations started considering AMD-based PCs," he told The Reg. "Even if these companies are not impacted by the shortage this time, some of them started preparing for plan B for future events like this because it is too risky to rely on a single vendor."

Weisler said he expects the Windows 7 refresh buying pattern to continue well into next year. He estimated that about a fifth of the installed based has yet to replace ageing stocks.

See also: AMD Zen-based Hygon chips start putting the squeeze on Intel in China

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser:

3-D Magnetic Interactions Could Lead to New Forms of Computing

A new form of magnetic interaction which pushes a formerly two-dimensional phenomenon into the third dimension could open up a host of exciting new possibilities for data storage and advanced computing, scientists say.

In a new paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, a team led by physicists from the University of Glasgow describe how they have been found a new way to successfully pass information from a series of tiny magnets arrayed on an ultrathin film across to magnets on a second film below.

Their breakthrough adds both a literal and metaphorical extra dimension to 'spintronics', the field of science dedicated to data storage, retrieval and processing, which has already had a major impact on the tech industry.

[...] At the nanoscale—where magnetic materials can be just a few billionths of a metre in size—magnets interact with each other in strange new ways, including the possibility of attracting and repelling each other at 90-degree angles instead of straight-on.

[...] The benefits of these 'spintronic' systems—low power consumption, high storage capacity and greater robustness—have made invaluable additions to technology such as magnetic hard disk drives, and won the discoverers of spintronics a Nobel prize in 2007.

martyb writes:

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that Carbon Dioxide Levels in Atmosphere hit Record High in May:

Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.

The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii’s largest volcano and the seventh consecutive year of steep global increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂), according to data published today by NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The 2019 peak value was 3.5 ppm higher than the 411.2 ppm peak in May 2018 and marks the second-highest annual jump on record.

[...] "It’s critically important to have these accurate, long-term measurements of CO₂ in order to understand how quickly fossil fuel pollution is changing our climate,” said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division. “These are measurements of the real atmosphere. They do not depend on any models, but they help us verify climate model projections, which if anything, have underestimated the rapid pace of climate change being observed."

The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere increases every year, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The early years at Mauna Loa saw annual increases averaging about 0.7 ppm per year, increasing to about 1.6 ppm per year in the 1980s and 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s. The growth rate rose to 2.2 ppm per year during the last decade. There is abundant and conclusive evidence that the acceleration is caused by increased emissions, Tans said.

The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are collected by NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and produce a foundational research dataset for international climate science.

The highest monthly mean CO₂ value of the year occurs in May, just before plants start to remove large amounts of the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere during the northern hemisphere growing season. In the northern fall, winter and early spring, plants and soils give off CO₂, which cause levels to rise through May.

Based on their global data, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased over 20% in the last nearly 40 years.

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McGruber writes:

A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the way in which Uber operates its business."

In a complaint filed May 31 (pdf) in federal court in Atlanta, Stephen Dickerson charges that Uber Technologies Inc. is infringing on a patent he won in 2004 (pdf) for a "communications and computing based urban transit system."

"The core of Uber's business and technical platforms for its rideshare, bikeshare, and scooter sharing services practice the transportation system of Professor Dickerson's invention; without that system, Uber literally cannot operate. Throughout its existence, Uber has egregiously infringed [Dickerson's] patent without paying any compensation for such use," Dickerson's lawsuit alleges.

[...]Last July, he sued Lyft Inc. in federal court in New York (pdf), making the same allegations he is making against Uber. In a court filing, Lyft denies it infringed on Dickerson's technology (pdf). The lawsuit is continuing. (Read a discussion of the issues in the case here (pdf).)

ARTICLE: https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/06/03/retired-georgia-tech-prof-sues-uber-claims-he.html

[Updated 20190605_120341 UTC to fix links and formatting; noted which links were to .pdf documents. --martyb]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Study Identifies Dog Breeds, Physical Traits That Pose Highest Risk Of Biting Children

New research at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center identifies dog breeds and physical traits that pose the highest risk of biting with severe injury. Doctors want parents of young children to use this information when deciding which dog to own.

The study, published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology [DOI: 10.1016/j.ijporl.2018.11.028] [DX], explores the risks of dog bite injuries to the face in children and bite severity by breed, size and head structure. Researchers found pit bulls and mixed breed dogs have the highest risk of biting and cause the most damage per bite. The same goes for dogs with wide and short heads weighing between 66 and 100 pounds.

"The purpose of this study was to evaluate dog bites in children, and we specifically looked at how breed relates to bite frequency and bite severity," said Dr. Garth Essig, lead author and otolaryngologist at Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center. "Because mixed breed dogs account for a significant portion of dog bites, and we often didn't know what type of dog was involved in these incidents, we looked at additional factors that may help predict bite tendency when breed is unknown like weight and head shape."

To assess bite severity, researchers reviewed 15 years of dog-related facial trauma cases from Nationwide Children's Hospital and the University of Virginia Health System. They looked at wound size, tissue tearing, bone fractures and other injuries severe enough to warrant consultation by a facial trauma and reconstructive surgeon and created a damage severity scale.

Researchers also performed an extensive literature search from 1970 to current for dog bite papers that reported breed to determine relative risk of biting from a certain breed. This was combined with hospital data to determine relative risk of biting and average tissue damage of bites.

That's a pity.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

There Are 472,000 Words in the Dictionary, but 120,000 were Enough to Win

Seemingly unfazed by the stage lights and television cameras, one gifted adolescent after the next approached the microphone on Thursday night and without a hint of timidity correctly spelled daunting words like "erysipelas" and "aiguillette."

In the end, after 20 rounds had distilled a group of 562 competitive spellers to just eight, those who were left remained in a merciless logjam. Shortly after midnight, after the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee announced that it was running out of challenging words, each was crowned the winner in an eight-way tie.

It turned out the winners had more in common than an aptitude for spelling: Six of them had relied on SpellPundit, a coaching company started last year by two former competitive spellers, the teenage siblings Shobha and Shourav Dasari of Spring, Tex., a Houston suburb.

[...] One of the "octochamps," Sohum Sukhatankar, 13, of Dallas said he had spent about 30 hours a week studying the 120,000 words SpellPundit had culled from the 472,000 words in the dictionary.

For an annual subscription of $600, SpellPundit offers the massive list, which is sorted by difficulty levels and guarantees that it includes all words used in the competitions. Business took off after last year's champion, Karthik Nemmani gave a shout-out to the service.

Of this year's top 50 spellers, 38 were customers, according to Ms. Dasari, 18. One selling point, the siblings say, is that their comprehensive database of words and modules saves time. The Dasaris estimate that their service, which allows users to type the words instead of spelling them aloud, makes preparation four times faster.

But yesterday, some wondered whether the service had taken some of the innocence out of the contest.

Fun fact: Correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe there would be no reason to have a spelling bee in German. There is a 1:1 correspondence between how a word sounds and how it is spelled.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser:

Billing Details for 11.9M Quest Diagnostics Clients Exposed

Quest Diagnostics Incorporated, a Fortune 500 diagnostic services provider, says that approximately 12 million of its clients may have been impacted by a data breach reported by one of its billing providers.

The company reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it received a notification from its billing collection provider American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA) that their web payment page was breached.

According to its website, AMCA is "managing over $1BN in annual receivables for a diverse client base" and it is the "leading recovery agency for patient collection," servicing "laboratories, hospitals, physician groups, billing services, and medical providers all across the country."

As detailed in the SEC notification from Quest Diagnostics, AMCA informed the company that "between August 1, 2018 and March 30, 2019 an unauthorized user had access to AMCA’s system that contained information that AMCA had received from various entities, including Quest Diagnostics, and information that AMCA collected itself."

Quest Diagnostics states that it took the following measures after being informed of the incident:

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

At least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the USA have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade, an investigation by USA TODAY Network found.

Officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women. They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk and abused their spouses.

Despite their role as public servants, the men and women who swear an oath to keep communities safe can generally avoid public scrutiny for their misdeeds.

The records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed.

Reporters from USA TODAY, its 100-plus affiliated newsrooms and the nonprofit Invisible Institute in Chicago have spent more than a year creating the biggest collection of police misconduct records.

Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.

Among the findings: