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martyb writes:

Hubble Uncovers a 'Heavy Metal' Exoplanet Shaped Like a Football:

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveal magnesium and iron gas streaming from the strange world outside our solar system known as WASP-121b. The observations represent the first time that so-called "heavy metals" -- elements heavier than hydrogen and helium -- have been spotted escaping from a hot Jupiter, a large, gaseous exoplanet very close to its star.

Normally, hot Jupiter-sized planets are still cool enough inside to condense heavier elements such as magnesium and iron into clouds.

But that's not the case with WASP-121b, which is orbiting so dangerously close to its star that its upper atmosphere reaches a blazing 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit[*]. The temperature in WASP-121b's upper atmosphere is about 10 times greater than that of any known planetary atmosphere. The WASP-121 system resides about 900 light-years from Earth.

"Heavy metals have been seen in other hot Jupiters before, but only in the lower atmosphere," explained lead researcher David Sing of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "So you don't know if they are escaping or not. With WASP-121b, we see magnesium and iron gas so far away from the planet that they're not gravitationally bound."

Ultraviolet light from the host star, which is brighter and hotter than the Sun, heats the upper atmosphere and helps lead to its escape. In addition, the escaping magnesium and iron gas may contribute to the temperature spike, Sing said. "These metals will make the atmosphere more opaque in the ultraviolet, which could be contributing to the heating of the upper atmosphere," he explained.

The sizzling planet is so close to its star that it is on the cusp of being ripped apart by the star's gravity. This hugging distance means that the planet is football[**] shaped due to gravitational tidal forces.

[*] Approximately 2500° C

[**] American football; think of a rugby ball for our internationalists.

Journal Reference:
David K. Sing, et. al. The Hubble Space Telescope PanCET Program: Exospheric Mg ii and Fe ii in the Near-ultraviolet Transmission Spectrum of WASP-121b Using Jitter Decorrelation. The Astronomical Journal, 2019; 158 (2): 91 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab2986

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/tv-networks-stuff-in-more-commercials-despite-vows-to-cut-back

Notice more TV ads lately? You're not imagining it.

The amount of commercial time on cable TV keeps increasing as networks try to make up for shrinking audiences by stuffing more ads into every hour of television. That's despite years of promises to cut back on ads.

Last quarter, commercial time rose 1%, according to Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC. After declining in 2017, the volume of ads increased every quarter last year and expanded again in the first half of 2019, he said. Fox was the only major cable network group to lower its ads last quarter, cutting them by 2%, Nathanson said.

As TV viewership declines and more consumers jump to streaming services like Netflix, media companies have only a couple of options to generate the advertising revenue that Wall Street expects: They can raise prices, run more commercials or do a little of both.

"Look at the decline in ratings," Nathanson said. "Everyone's got pressure to make their quarterly numbers. Long-term, it's a very bad decision, but you don't want to miss your numbers and have your stock go down."

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martyb writes:

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Heat Wave Results in Highest U.S. Electricity Demand Since 2017:

From July 15 through July 22, 2019, a heat wave extending from the Midwest to the Atlantic coast brought extremely high temperatures and humidity to those regions. The high temperatures resulted in elevated demand for electricity to power air conditioners, dehumidifiers, fans, and other cooling equipment. In the hour ending at 6:00 p.m. ET on Friday, July 19, hourly electricity demand in the Lower 48 states peaked at 704 gigawatts (GW), according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) U.S. Electric System Operating Data. Electricity demand has not been this high since July 20, 2017, nearly two years ago, when electricity demand in the Lower 48 states hit 718 GW.

NB: The EIA site was giving errors when trying to access the details page for this story. The summary provided here is available on the EIA's main page which is linked to at the top of the story.

[ed: works for me]

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martyb writes:

https://vintagetek.org/tektronix-schematic-cartoons/:

Tektronix schematic draftsman redrew the engineers schematic for release in the instrument manuals. They must have had some jokers in the group because small cartoons found their way into some of the manuals and schematics. The schematic cartoons are subtle humor likely focused on the names the engineers gave some of the circuits or components. While we think we have found most of the cartoons, every now and then one of our restoration engineers shouts out from his bench that he found another. Send us a note if you find one that we have not. We are still looking for whatever instrument has this "Pilot Light".

[...] Cartoons also found their way into other documents including the 1956 Employee Handbook and ServiceScope. Arnold Rantala was a draftsman and drew a number of early cartoons. The April 1965 ServiceScope featuring Spectrum Analyzers has a number of nice cartoons including some on this block diagram.

Back in the day, I remember hearing you should get your signal generators from Hewlett Packard and your displays and analyzers from Tektronix. Good to see that Tek folk had a sense of humor, too!

For their VAX systems, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) went against the norm of providing a time-of-day clock (TOD clock) and had, instead, a time-of-year clock (TOY clock).

In this day and age of political correctness, what other companies take a light-hearted look at things and reveal it to the world? SpaceX comes to mind with the names of their drone ships on which they land their boosters (e.g. "Of Course I Still Love You"). Any others?

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow7671.

Sorry, you're not getting $125 from the Equifax settlement, FTC says

Remember that $125 you could have gotten from the Equifax Inc. data-breach settlement? Yeah, never mind.

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that, due to an overwhelming response, cash payments aren't going to be anywhere near $125 each, and urged consumers to sign up for the free credit monitoring offered as an alternative.

About 147 million people were affected by the 2017 Equifax EFX, -0.64% breach, but only $31 million was set aside for payments as part of the $700 million settlement, announced last week. A quick bit of math shows that for everyone to have gotten $125 from that pot, there would have to be only 248,000 claimants. While the FTC didn't give a number, they said there were already "an enormous number of claims filed."

"A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up only getting a small amount of money," the FTC said in a blog post Wednesday.

"So, if you haven't submitted your claim yet, think about opting for the free credit monitoring instead," the FTC said. "Frankly, the free credit monitoring is worth a lot more."

[...] The agency noted that consumers who had to pay out-of-pocket expenses due to the breach are still entitled to reimbursement if they submit a claim, as that money comes from a separate fund.

To get more information, or to find out if your data was exposed in the breach or file a claim, go to ftc.gov/Equifax.

Another quick bit of math reveals that if every one of the 147 million people affected opted for the $125 payout, the settlement pool would have needed to contain $18.375 billion; the payout fund totaled 0.17% of that: $31 million. Putting it another way, they set aside $0.21 for each potential claimant.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

She Was Arrested at 14. Then Her Photo Went to a Facial Recognition Database.

The New York Police Department has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces.

For about four years, internal records show, the department has used the technology to compare crime scene images with its collection of juvenile mug shots, the photos that are taken at an arrest. Most of the photos are of teenagers, largely 13 to 16 years old, but children as young as 11 have been included.

Elected officials and civil rights groups said the disclosure that the city was deploying a powerful surveillance tool on adolescents — whose privacy seems sacrosanct and whose status is protected in the criminal justice system — was a striking example of the Police Department's ability to adopt advancing technology with little public scrutiny.

Several members of the City Council as well as a range of civil liberties groups said they were unaware of the policy until they were contacted by The New York Times.

Police Department officials defended the decision, saying it was just the latest evolution of a longstanding policing technique: using arrest photos to identify suspects.

"I don't think this is any secret decision that's made behind closed doors," the city's chief of detectives, Dermot F. Shea, said in an interview. "This is just process, and making sure we're doing everything to fight crime."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://bestasciitable.com/

To understand why Control+i inserts a Tab in your terminal you need to understand ASCII, and to understand ASCII you need know a bit about its history and the world it was developed in. Please bear with me (or just go the table).

Teleprinters

Teleprinters evolved from the telegraph. Connect a printer and keyboard to a telegraph and you've got a teleprinter. Early versions were called "printing telegraphs".

Most teleprinters communicated using the ITA2 protocol. For the most part this would just encode the alphabet, but there are a few control codes: WRU ("Who R U") would cause the receiving teleprinter to send back its identification, BEL would ring a bell, and it had the familiar CR (Carriage Return) and LF (Line Feed).

This is all early 20th century stuff. There are no electronic computers; it's all mechanical working with punched tape. ITA2 (and codes like it) were mechanical efficient; common letters such as "e" and "t" required only a single hole to be punched.

These 5-bit codes could only encode 32 characters, which is not even enough for just English. The solution was to add the FIGS and LTRS codes, which would switch between "figures" and "letters" mode. "FIGS R W" would produce "42". This worked, but typo'ing a FIGS or LTRS (or losing one in line noise) would result in gibberish. Not ideal.

Terminals

In the 1950s teleprinters started to get connected to computers, rather than other teleprinters. ITA2 was designed for mechanical machines and was awkward to use. ASCII was designed specifically for computer use and published in 1962. Teleprinters used with computers were called terminals (as in "end of a connection", like "train terminal"). Teleprinters were also called "TeleTYpewriter", or TTY for short, and you can still find names like /dev/tty or /bin/stty on modern systems.

Original Submission

hemocyanin writes:

Animated arduino powered graduation caps are pretty common, but perhaps not in Florida. When one recent Florida grad placed such a device on his mortar board, the police incited a (minor) bomb scare, confiscated the cap mounted display, and the bomb squad destroyed it. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/student-causes-bomb-scare-at-graduation-with-decorative-ensemble/ar-AAFchE5

Can Cevik, a computer engineering graduate, said he was just trying to be festive earlier this week when he taped a battery-powered digital device to his graduation cap, displaying the message "FIU 2019." ... "Just to clear things up, my cap had an Arduino Uno with a 7-segment display on it and was powered by a 9V battery; it was not an explosive," he said. ... They eventually cleared him to enter the venue, but only after providing him with a new -- plain -- graduation cap. ... Police then called the bomb squad and destroyed the original cap. ... FIU Police Captain Delrish Moss told local reporters that officers acted out of an abundance of caution.

"While that seems very innocent and looks very innocent, it also has the potential to scare people," Moss told local Fox affiliate WSVN. "A police officer spotted it and took the necessary precautions."

This article has a picture of the cap (which appears to be a pretty low effort affair). https://www.waaytv.com/content/national/513449462.html

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aristarchus writes:

As anyone who has been paying attention knows, Edwin Hubble's discovery of the "standard candles" of Cepheid variable stars expanded our universe by magnitudes. Prior to Hubble, "nebulae" that were galaxies, like the Andromeda Nebula, were thought to be within our local neighborhood. But now we know, etc., etc..

But now, we have a new model of our own galaxy (γαλαξίας in Greek: The myth is that somehow Heracles managed to be suckling at the breast of Hera, who when she realized who the infant was, ripped him from her breast and spewed milk across the heavens, the Milky Way), 3D-imaged with Cepheid variables. Article is at Science Mag^[$], as well as elsewhere.

Cepheids help to map the Galaxy

Cepheid variable stars pulsate, which allows their distances to be determined from the periodic variations in brightness. Skowron et al. constructed a catalog of thousands of Cepheids covering a large fraction of the Milky Way. They combined optical and infrared data to determine the stars' pulsation periods and mapped the distribution of Cepheids and the associated young stellar populations across the Galaxy. Their three-dimensional map demonstrates the warping of the Milky Way's disc. A simple model of star formation in the spiral arms reproduced the positions and ages of the Cepheid population.

Science, this issue p. 478^[$].

Science 02 Aug 2019:
Vol. 365, Issue 6452, pp. 478-482
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau3181^[$]

Also at Popular Science.

Original Submission

[UPDATE (20190802_112243 UTC): SpaceX tweeted:

Team is setting up an additional static fire test of Falcon 9 after replacing a suspect valve. Will confirm updated target launch date for AMOS-17 once complete. (3:06 PM - 1 Aug 2019)

Here's hoping everything is nominal. --martyb]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Static fire test of Falcon 9 complete and team is assessing data—targeting August 3 for launch of AMOS-17 from Pad 40 in Florida

— SpaceX (@SpaceX)

While a successful static fire test isn't considered a huge milestone anymore, it's particularly important in this case because the customer, Spacecom, previously lost a satellite payload on a SpaceX flight in 2016. As a result, this launch will be provided to Spacecom free of charge, after that anomaly during the static fire testing resulted in an explosion of the launch vehicle and Spacecom's AMOS-6 satellite.

The new satellite, known as AMOS-17, will provide telecommunications access across the Middle East, Africa and Europe and will eventually finish up in a geostationary orbit around the Earth.

The launch schedule at Spaceflight Now has better data on the launch date and time:

Launch time: 2252-0020 GMT on 3rd/4th (6:52-8:20 p.m. EDT on 3rd)
Launch site: SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Amos 17 communications satellite. Built by Boeing and owned by Spacecom Ltd. of Israel, Amos 17 will provide high-throughput broadband connectivity and other communications services over Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Delayed from May 27, June and July.

SpaceX regularly provides a live stream of its launches; this story will be updated when such a link becomes available to us.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

New data show much faster growth in wages and incomes.

Wages and salary figures have been going up faster than previously estimated, with the year-over-year increase revised from 3.6% to 5.5%. Even after adjusting for inflation, that is 4.1%.

Overall personal income is up, transfer receipts (welfare) are down, and savings is up. Americans are relying less on the government and saving more of what they earn. Personal savings is 8.1%, not the 6.1% that had been estimated. Consumer spending is up despite the increase in savings. The fact that spending isn't accompanied by a household debt increase makes the economic expansion more durable.

The numbers for the first quarter of 2019 look particularly good for reducing income inequality. Corporate profits declined while wages grew at an annualized rate of 10.1%.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/08/01/warning-issued-over-google-chrome-ad-blocking-plans/#75c4a925219a

Google's plans to limit ad blockers in Chrome have already led many users to consider switching browsers. People's anger was made worse by the confirmation that the only people who will avoid the changes to the way ad blockers work in Chrome will be Google's enterprise users. Advertising is at the heart of Google's business model and so unsurprisingly, users have been questioning the software giant's motives.

And now, another prominent voice has entered the debate. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the move will not help security and in fact, will probably hinder it.

The plans, dubbed Manifest V3, represent a major transformation to Chrome extensions including a revamp of the permissions system. As a result, modern ad blockers such as uBlock Origin—which uses Chrome's webRequest API to block ads before they're downloaded–won't work. This is because Manifest V3 sees Google halt the webRequest API's ability to block a particular request before it's loaded. The plans are earmarked for release into the Google Canary channel around now.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Surveys by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveal that, in the past 4 years, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas have surpassed acceptable levels of drug resistance against two drugs that constitute the backbone of HIV treatment: efavirenz and nevirapine.

[...] The WHO conducted surveys from 2014 to 2018 in randomly selected clinics in 18 countries, and examined the levels of resistance in people who had started HIV treatment during that period.

More than 10% of adults with the virus have developed resistance to these drugs in 12 nations (see ‘Resistance rises’). Above this threshold, it’s not considered safe to prescribe the same HIV medicines to the rest of the population, because resistance could increase. Researchers published the findings this month in WHO report.

[...] Overall, 12% of women surveyed had a drug-resistant form of HIV, compared with 8% of men.

Particularly concerning, says the report, is the high level of resistance in infants with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2012 and 2018, about one-half of newly diagnosed infants in nine of the countries in this region had a form of HIV that was resistant to efavirenz, nevirapine or both.

[...] The prevalence of resistance in people who restarted efavirenz and nevirapine after interrupting treatment was much higher (21%) than in first-time users (8%).

[...] In response to the evidence, the WHO has recommended that countries use dolutegravir, which is more effective and tolerable than other therapies, as the go-to HIV drug.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In March, the Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine, a drug that produces psychedelic effects, to treat depression—the first psychedelic ever to clear that bar. Meanwhile the FDA has granted "breakthrough therapy" status—a designation that enables fast-tracked research—to study MDMA (also called "ecstasy") as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin as a treatment for major depression.

While these and other psychedelic drugs show promise as treatments for specific illnesses, FDA approval means doctors could also prescribe them for other, "off-label" purposes—including enhancing the quality of life of people who do not suffer from any disorder. Hence if MDMA gains approval as a treatment for PTSD, psychiatrists could prescribe the drug for very different purposes. Indeed, before the federal government banned MDMA, therapists reported striking success in using MDMA to improve the quality of intimate relationships. Recent research bolsters these claims, finding that the drug enhances emotional empathy, increases feelings of closeness, and promotes thoughtfulness and contemplativeness.‌

Similarly, while psilocybin has shown potential as a treatment for depression and anxiety, physicians could also prescribe the drug to promote the well-being of healthy individuals. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave psilocybin to healthy participants with no history of hallucinogen use, nearly eighty percent reported that their experiences "increased their current sense of personal well-being or life satisfaction 'moderately' or 'very much'"—effects that persisted for more than a year.‌

Yet while the FDA generally does not regulate physicians' prescribing practices, a federal law called the Controlled Substances Act bars them from writing prescriptions without a "legitimate medical purpose." Although this prohibition aims to prevent doctors from acting as drug traffickers, the law does not explain which purposes qualify as "legitimate," nor how to distinguish valid prescriptions from those that merely enable patients' illicit drug abuse.‌

Would prescribing a psychedelic drug simply to promote empathy or increase "life satisfaction" fall within the scope of legitimate medicine—or would these practices render the physician a drug dealer?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An ongoing age-discrimination lawsuit against IBM by one of its former star cloud salesmen has this week blown the lid off Big Blue's inner struggle to reinvent itself as a hip'n'cool place for millennials.

Buried in court paperwork filed by lawyers acting on behalf of ex-IBMer Jonathan Langley, is, among other explosive insights, the revelation by one-time IBM HR veep Alan Wild that 50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff have been axed in the past five or so years. In their place, adults in their twenties, who typically flock to the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, Oracle, Intel, LinkedIn, SAP, Uber, Boeing, HP, and so on, rather than IBM.

The enterprise tech titan fears it is therefore missing out on top emerging talent, and is battling to make its workplace more enticing for uni grads. Older employees are bearing the brunt, it is alleged.

Langley, who was let go from IBM at the age of 59 in 2017, last year sued the venerable computing giant in Texas, USA, accusing it of unfairly ditching older capable staff to replace them with so-called early professional hires, which is IBM code for people who obtained their degree within the past three years.

IBM denies any wrongdoing, and says it does not discriminate on age – however, when testifying under oath for the court case, Wild, who left Big Blue in late 2018, appeared to contradict the IT giant's position.

Wild said in his deposition that IBM wanted potential hires to see Big Blue not as “an old fuddy duddy organization,” but as “cool and trendy” instead. “To do that, IBM set out to slough off large portions of its older workforce using rolling layoffs over the course of several years,” he said, again under oath.

As a result, IBM has laid off between 50,000 and 100,000 employees – a little under a third of its global workforce – while aggressively hiring as well. As a result, around 50 per cent of its new hires have been hired in the past five years, and now half of its total workforce are millennials, according to Big Blue’s CEO Ginni Rometty.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is set to launch operations in 2025. A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now 6 ½ years away from "First Plasma," officials announced.

Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity.

The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core.

"Manufactured by India, the ITER cryostat is 16,000 cubic meters," ITER officials said in a release. "Its diameter and height are both almost 30 meters and it weighs 3,850 tons. Because of its bulk, it is being fabricated in four main sections: the base, lower cylinder, upper cylinder, and top lid."

[...] Thirty-five nations are cooperating on the project to bring fusion power to the masses.

Achieving controlled fusion reactions that net more power than they take to generate, and at commercial scale, is seen as a potential answer to climate change. Fusion energy would eliminate the need for fossil fuels and solve the intermittency and reliability concerns inherent with renewable energy sources. The energy would be generated without the dangerous amounts of radiation that raises concerns about fission nuclear energy.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-nuclear-fusion-experiment-clears-milestone/?fbclid=IwAR0n9_ECQPV8c4WFUI11lqXeZF9l0xz2oEqJxOYXEwONA05zGhgZiMWWfBE

Original Submission