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martyb writes:

Russia Denies OneWeb's Satellite Internet Request:

A firm that plans to launch hundreds of satellites into orbit to provide worldwide internet coverage has failed in its latest attempt to get approval in Russia.

OneWeb, whose headquarters are in the UK, was seeking to use a certain band of radio frequencies in Russia.

However, the State Commission for Radio Frequencies has denied it permission to do so.

OneWeb has been trying to get approval for its Russian operations since 2017.

The company was founded by US entrepreneur Greg Wyler. It launched its first six satellites, out of a proposed 650, into orbit in February.

In 2017, Russia's communications authority Roskomnadzor blocked OneWeb from offering services in the country.

And the Federal Security Service (FSB) said that the satellites could be used for espionage.

Of note is that OneWeb is using Russian rockets and launch sites to deploy its satellites.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Carny

Oh sh*t's, 11: VxWorks stars in today's security thriller – hijack bugs discovered in countless gadgets' network code

Wind River has patched 11 security vulnerabilities in VxWorks that can be potentially exploited over networks or the internet to commandeer all sorts of equipment dotted around the planet.

This real-time operating system powers car electronics, factory robots and controllers, aircraft and spacecraft, wireless routers, medical equipment, digital displays, and plenty of other stuff – so if you deploy a vulnerable version of VxWorks, and it is network or internet-connected, you definitely want to check this out.

This set of bugs seemingly primarily affects things like printers and gateways, we must point out.

The vulnerabilities, discovered by security outfit Armis, can be exploited to leak internal device information, crash gadgets, and – in more than half of the flaws – execute malicious code on machines. It is estimated that VxWorks runs on two billion devices as an embedded OS, though Armis reckoned 200 million gizmos are actually potentially affected. Wind River told El Reg it reckons that second figure, as an estimate, is too high.

NPC-131072 writes:

From IEEE Spectrum:

Hoping to speed AI and neuromorphic computing and cut down on power consumption, startups, scientists, and established chip companies have all been looking to do more computing in memory rather than in a processor's computing core. Memristors and other nonvolatile memory seem to lend themselves to the task particularly well. However, most demonstrations of in-memory computing have been in standalone accelerator chips that either are built for a particular type of AI problem or that need the off-chip resources of a separate processor in order to operate. University of Michigan engineers are claiming the first memristor-based programmable computer for AI that can work on all its own.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Team IDs Spoken Words and Phrases in Real Time from Brain's Speech Signals

UC San Francisco scientists recently showed that brain activity recorded as research participants spoke could be used to create remarkably realistic synthetic versions of that speech, suggesting hope that one day such brain recordings could be used to restore voices to people who have lost the ability to speak. However, it took the researchers weeks or months to translate brain activity into speech, a far cry from the instant results that would be needed for such a technology to be clinically useful. Now, in a complementary new study, again working with volunteer study subjects, the scientists have for the first time decoded spoken words and phrases in real time from the brain signals that control speech, aided by a novel approach that involves identifying the context in which participants were speaking.

[...] In the new study, published July 30 in Nature Communications [DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10994-4], researchers from the Chang lab led by postdoctoral researcher David Moses, PhD, worked with three such research volunteers to develop a way to instantly identify the volunteers' spoken responses to a set of standard questions based solely on their brain activity, representing a first for the field.

To achieve this result, Moses and colleagues developed a set of machine learning algorithms equipped with refined phonological speech models, which were capable of learning to decode specific speech sounds from participants' brain activity. Brain data was recorded while volunteers listened to a set of nine simple questions (e.g. "How is your room currently?", "From 0 to 10, how comfortable are you?", or "When do you want me to check back on you?") and responded out loud with one of 24 answer choices. After some training, the machine learning algorithms learned to detect when participants were hearing a new question or beginning to respond, and to identify which of the two dozen standard responses the participant was giving with up to 61 percent accuracy as soon as they had finished speaking.

[...] Moses's new study was funded by through a multi-institution sponsored academic research agreement with Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), a research division within Facebook focused on developing augmented- and virtual-reality technologies. As FRL has described, the goal for their collaboration with the Chang lab, called Project Steno, is to assess the feasibility of developing a non-invasive, wearable BCI device that could allow people to type by imagining themselves talking.

See also: Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind
Brain-computer interfaces are developing faster than the policy debate around them

Previously: Brain Implant Translates Thoughts Into Synthesized Speech

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

There are many ways to generate electricity—batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams, to name a few examples... and now, there's rust.

New research conducted by scientists at Caltech and Northwestern University shows that thin films of rust—iron oxide—can generate electricity when saltwater flows over them. These films represent an entirely new way of generating electricity and could be used to develop new forms of sustainable power production.

Interactions between metal compounds and saltwater often generate electricity, but this is usually the result of a chemical reaction in which one or more compounds are converted to new compounds. Reactions like these are what is at work inside batteries.

In contrast, the phenomenon discovered by Tom Miller, Caltech professor of chemistry, and Franz Geiger, Dow Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern, does not involve chemical reactions, but rather converts the kinetic energy of flowing saltwater into electricity.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ultra-thin-layers-rust-electricity.html

More information: Mavis D. Boamah et al. Energy conversion via metal nanolayers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1906601116

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original "writing on the wall," presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")

But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language's last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—"informants," in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.

In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century's end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world's population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-to-save-a-dying-language-4143017/?all

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A Chinese national living in the US has been sentenced to 37 months in prison for taking part in a scheme to import counterfeit Apple products, the Department of Justice has announced. The products, which included fake iPhones and iPads, were smuggled from China into the US. After serving time, Jianhua "Jeff" Li, 44, will also get one year of supervised release, the DOJ said Tuesday.

More than 40,000 electronic devices and accessories, as well as fake labels and packaging with Apple trademarks, were trafficked and smuggled into the US between July 2009 and February 2014.

The fake labels and phony Apple products were shipped separately to avoid detection by customs, the DOJ said.

"The devices were then shipped to conspirators all over the United States," the Justice Department said. "Proceeds were funneled back to conspirator accounts in Florida and New Jersey via structured cash deposits and then a portion was transferred to conspirators in Italy, further disguising the source of the funds.

More than $1.1 million in sales proceeds were wired from US accounts into accounts that Li controlled overseas, the agency said.

https://www.cnet.com/news/counterfeit-apple-products-land-chinese-national-3-year-prison-sentence/

Also at:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-sentenced-over-three-years-prison-trafficking-counterfeit-apple-goods-united
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/fake-apple-chinese-national-3-years-smuggling-counterfeit-goods

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/30/counterfeit-iphone-trafficker-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A wireless, wearable monitor built with stretchable electronics could allow comfortable, long-term health monitoring of adults, babies and small children without concern for skin injury or allergic reactions caused by conventional adhesive sensors with conductive gels.

The soft and conformable monitor can broadcast electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, respiratory rate and motion activity data as much as 15 meters to a portable recording device such as a smartphone or tablet computer. The electronics are mounted on a stretchable substrate and connected to gold, skin-like electrodes through printed connectors that can stretch with the medical film in which they are embedded.

"This health monitor has a key advantage for young children who are always moving, since the soft conformal device can accommodate that activity with a gentle integration onto the skin," said Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This is designed to meet the electronic health monitoring needs of people whose sensitive skin may be harmed by conventional monitors."

Details of the monitor were reported July 24 in the journal Advanced Science. The research was supported by the Imlay Innovation Fund at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, NextFlex (Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute), and by a seed grant from the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech. The monitor has been studied on both animal models and humans.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190730182428.htm

Yun‐Soung Kim, Musa Mahmood, Yongkuk Lee, Nam Kyun Kim, Shinjae Kwon, Robert Herbert, Donghyun Kim, Hee Cheol Cho, Woon‐Hong Yeo. All‐in‐One, Wireless, Stretchable Hybrid Electronics for Smart, Connected, and Ambulatory Physiological Monitoring. Advanced Science, 2019; 1900939 DOI: 10.1002/advs.201900939

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Tesla's Megapack Battery is Big Enough to Help Grids Handle Peak Demand:

Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called "peaker" power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.

Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it's possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power "every home in San Francisco for six hours." Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include "battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls." Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.

Also at cnet.

Would also have the benefit of essentially instant activation versus peaker plants which take some amount of time to spin up, even if kept warmed up and idling.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto have uncovered fossils of a large new predatory species in half-a-billion-year-old rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. This new species has rake-like claws and a pineapple-slice-shaped mouth at the front of an enormous head, and it sheds light on the diversity of the earliest relatives of insects, crabs, spiders, and their kin. The findings were announced July 31, 2019, in a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Reaching up to a foot in length, the new species, named Cambroraster falcatus, comes from the famous 506-million-year-old Burgess Shale. "Its size would have been even more impressive at the time it was alive, as most animals living during the Cambrian Period were smaller than your little finger," said Joe Moysiuk, a graduate student based at the Royal Ontario Museum who led the study as part of his Ph.D. research in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Cambroraster was a distant cousin of the iconic Anomalocaris, the top predator living in the seas at that time, but it seems to have been feeding in a radically different way," continued Moysiuk.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-voracious-cambrian-predator-cambroraster-species.html

More information: A new hurdiid radiodont from the Burgess Shale evinces the exploitation of Cambrian infaunal food sources^[$], Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 10.1098/rspb.2019.1079

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

"Come on, I worked so hard on this project! And this is publicly accessible data! There's certainly a way around this, right? Or else, I did all of this for nothing... Sigh..."

Yep - this is what I said to myself, just after realizing that my ambitious data analysis project could get me into hot water. I intended to deploy a large-scale web crawler to collect data from multiple high profile websites. And then I was planning to publish the results of my analysis for the benefit of everybody. Pretty noble, right? Yes, but also pretty risky.

Interestingly, I've been seeing more and more projects like mine lately. And even more tutorials encouraging some form of web scraping or crawling. But what troubles me is the appalling widespread ignorance on the legal aspect of it.

So this is what this post is all about - understanding the possible consequences of web scraping and crawling. Hopefully, this will help you to avoid any potential problem.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I'm simply a programmer who happens to be interested in this topic. You should seek out appropriate professional advice regarding your specific situation.

https://benbernardblog.com/web-scraping-and-crawling-are-perfectly-legal-right/

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Amazon May Start Fining Sellers for Using Ridiculously Huge Boxes:

Amazon wants to make massive, hard-to-open boxes a thing of the past, according to a Tuesday report. Last fall, the e-commerce giant asked companies to make packaging for larger items more efficient and easier to open by Aug. 1, The Wall Street Journal reports. If companies don't follow suit, they'll reportedly be charged a fine.

The changes Amazon reportedly hopes to roll out would make packages more environmentally friendly and cut back on shipping costs. Amazon wants all items to eventually meet similar standards, according to the Journal.

Vendors told the Journal they reduced the volume of their packaging anywhere from 34% to 80%. Some also cut down on the number of components used to ship their products.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

'Tickle' Therapy Could Help Slow Aging, Research Suggests:

Scientists found that a short daily therapy delivered for two weeks led to both physiological and wellbeing improvements, including a better quality of life, mood and sleep.

The therapy, called transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation, delivers a small, painless electrical current to the ear, which sends signals to the body's nervous system through the vagus nerve.

The new research, conducted at the University of Leeds, suggests the therapy may slow down an important effect associated with ageing.

This could help protect people from chronic diseases which we become more prone to as we get older, such as high blood pressure, heart disease and atrial fibrillation. The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Aging, suggest that the 'tickle' therapy has the potential to help people age more healthily, by recalibrating the body's internal control system.

[...] The autonomic nervous system controls many of the body's functions which don't require conscious thought, such as digestion, breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.

It contains two branches, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, which work against each other to maintain a healthy balance of activity.

The sympathetic branch helps the body prepare for high intensity 'fight or flight' activity, whilst the parasympathetic is crucial to low intensity 'rest and digest' activity.

As we age, and when we are fighting diseases, the body's balance changes such that the sympathetic branch begins to dominate. This imbalance makes us more susceptible to new diseases and leads to the breakdown of healthy bodily function as we get older.

Journal Reference:
Beatrice Bretherton, Lucy Atkinson, Aaron Murray, Jennifer Clancy, Susan Deuchars, Jim Deuchars. Effects of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation in individuals aged 55 years or above: potential benefits of daily stimulation. Aging, 2019; DOI: 10.18632/aging.102074

Were any of the test participants named Elmo?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/30/chrome-76-thwarts-private-browsing-mode/

As promised, Google is ready to make websites respect Incognito mode whether they like it or not. The company has released Chrome 76 for Linux, Mac and Windows, closing a loophole that let sites detect private browsing by looking for the presence of a key framework. If you're tired of sites insisting that you either sign in or use the standard mode, relief is in sight.

We've tested the new approach ourselves, and it appears to work with at least a couple of news outlets that previously stopped Incognito users who didn't sign in.

Begun, the incognito wars have!

Previously: Chrome 76 Prevents NYT and Other News Sites From Detecting Incognito Mode.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Study suggests dark-colored wing feathers may help birds fly more efficiently

A team of researchers at the University of Ghent has found evidence that suggests birds with white wing feathers close to the body and black wing tips get increased lift from their wing colors. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes their study of wing color in several species of birds and what they found.

Humans have been studying birds and other flying creatures likely since the time they could think. In a new study, researchers wondered if the color of a bird had any impact on flying efficiency. To find out, they collected several stuffed samples and brought them to their lab for study.

The experiments consisted of putting stuffed wings in a wind tunnel, heating them with infrared lights and then testing them to see what happened. They were most interested in soaring birds such as back-blacked gulls, gannets and osprey. They tested samples of each under various wind conditions to see if wing color had an impact on flying efficiency. Notably, soaring birds can at times gain altitude without even flapping their wings due to undercurrents.

Original Submission