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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Hulu hackathon leads to eye-tracking controls for Roku

Of the 40 project ideas that came out of Hulu's annual hackathon this summer, more than a quarter addressed the needs of users with disabilities. Today, Hulu shared some of those accessibility-focused concepts.

One feature, Eye Remote for Roku, allows you to control the device using eye-tracking. We saw a similar idea pop up in a Netflix hackathon last year, and this summer, Comcast revealed an eye-control[sic] remote for users with limited mobility.

[...]While there's no guarantee that any of these will become official Hulu products, accessibility has become a larger focus of hackathons. As we saw with Microsoft's Xbox One Adaptive Controller, hackathons with a focus on inclusion can lead to breakthrough ideas.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Moog brings back its legendary Model 10 'compact' modular synth

Moog regularly releases new and exciting instruments like the Matriarch and Sirin. But it also has a rich history of iconic instruments that it's not afraid to tap into. For example, the Minimoog Model D. But its latest adventure into its archives is a bit of a different beast. Rather than bring back an iconic keyboard found on countless pop records, it's reviving the Model 10 -- a "compact" modular synth built around the 900-Series Oscillator that was the foundation of Wendy Carlos' immortal Switched-On Bach. ([engadget] Editor's Note: Why is this not on any streaming services!?)

[...] Inside its black tolex-covered wood cabinet are 11 different modules that can be connected in various ways create a whole world of rich synth tones. There are three 900-Series oscillators, as well as the legendary 907 Fixed Filter Bank, which is a large part of what gives vintage Moog synths their iconic sound.

All of these components are assembled and soldered by hand down in Asheville, NC. But the bad news: The Model 10 will only be available for a limited time and is being made to order. Those three things mean it does not come cheap. It's available through select Moog dealers starting at $9,950. So yeah, it's a hardcore enthusiasts only kind of purchase. But, that's probably a bargain compared to a vintage Model 10... if you can track one down that is.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://spacenews.com/lunar-lander-failures-offer-a-warning-to-commercial-missions/

The apparent failure of an Indian spacecraft to land on the moon this month is providing a reminder to NASA and its commercial partners of the challenges of not only the missions themselves but sharing data on problems they experience.

If Vikram crashed during landing, as many fear, it will be the second spacecraft this year to fail to land on the moon intact. Beresheet, a lander built by Israel Aerospace Industries for SpaceIL, suffered a malfunction during a landing attempt in April, causing the spacecraft to crash to the surface. Unlike Vikram, the mission team declared the landing unsuccessful shortly after losing contact.

Those failures are taking place as NASA is working with nine companies in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program on robotic lunar landers that can carry NASA research payloads to the surface of the moon. Two of those companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, have awards from NASA to carry payloads on missions scheduled for launch in 2021.

None of the nine companies have yet to fly their landers, and the recent failures provide a reminder of how difficult it is to soft-land on the moon.

"From a management perspective, we just know this is hard and it's clear that our contractor pool has a steep challenge on their hands," said Camille Alleyne, deputy manager of the CLPS program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, during a Sept. 12 panel discussion at the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14869/western-digital-announces-18-tb-eamr-hard-drive

Marking an important step in the development of next-generation hard drive technology, Western Digital has formally announced the company's first hard drives based on energy-assisted magnetic recording. Starting things off with capacities of 16 TB and 18 TB, the Ultrastar DC HC550 HDDs are designed to offer consistent performance at the highest (non-SMR) capacities yet. And, with commercial sales expected to start in 2020, WD is now in a position to become the first vendor in the industry to ship a next-generation EAMR hard drive.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 3.5-inch hard drive relies on the company's 6th Generation helium-filled HelioSeal platform with two key improvements: the platform features nine platters (both for 16 TB and 18 TB versions), and they using what WD is calling an energy-assisted magnetic recording technology (EAMR). The latter has enabled Western Digital to build 2 TB platters without using shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

Since we are dealing with a brand-new platform, the Ultrastar DC HC550 also includes several other innovations, such as a new mechanical design. Being enterprise hard drives, the new platform features a top and bottom attached motor (with a 7200 RPM spindle speed), top and bottom attached disk clamps, RVFF sensors, humidity sensors, and other ways to boost reliability and ensure consistent performance. Like other datacenter-grade hard drives, the Ultrastar DC HC550 HDDs are rated for a 550 TB/annual workload, a 2.5 million hours MTBF, and are covered by a five-year limited warranty.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xw83b/the-navy-says-the-ufos-in-tom-delonges-videos-are-unidentified-aerial-phenomena

In official statements, the US Navy has for the first time officially stated that the three UFO videos made public by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge's UFO research organization are footage of real "unknown" objects violating American airspace.

Navy spokesperson Joseph Gradisher told Motherboard that "the Navy considers the phenomena contained/depicted in those 3 videos as unidentified." Previously, the Navy never addressed the content of the videos. The terminology here is important: The UFO community is increasingly using the terminology "unidentified aerial phenomena" to discuss unknown objects in the sky.

John Greenwald, author and curator of The Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents, originally reported the news. Greenwald requested information in August from the Navy regarding the content of the three popular videos purporting to show anomalous aerial objects.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59w3zq/tom-delonge-nytimes-ufo-aliens-comparison

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canopic jug writes:

Back in May, writer Jun Wu told in her blog how Perl excels at text manipulation. She often uses it to tidy data sets, a necessity as data is often collected with variations and cleaning it up before use is a necessity. She goes through many one-liners which help make that easy.

Having old reliables is my key to success. Ever since I learned Perl during the dot com bubble, I knew that I was forever beholden to its powers to transform.

You heard me. Freedom is the word here with Perl.

When I'm coding freely at home on my fun data science project, I rely on it to clean up my data.

In the real world, data is often collected with loads of variations. Unless you are using someone's "clean" dataset, you better learn to clean that data real fast.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

Using an optical tweezer array of laser-cooled molecules to observe ground state collisions

A team of researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that they could use an optical tweezer array of laser-cooled molecules to observe ground state collisions between individual molecules. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their work with cooled calcium monofluoride molecules trapped by optical tweezers, and what they learned from their experiments. Svetlana Kotochigova, with Temple University, has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work—she also gives an overview of the work being done with arrays of optical tweezers to better understand molecules in general.

In their work, the researchers created arrays of tweezers by diffracting a single beam into many smaller beams, each of which could be rearranged to suit their purposes in real time. In the initial state, an unknown number of molecules were trapped in the array. The team then used light to force collisions between the molecules, pushing some of them out of the array until they had the desired number in each tweezer. They report that in instances where there were just two molecules present, they were able to observe natural ultracold collisions—allowing a clear view of the action.

From https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6458/1156 :

Arrays of optical tweezers have been used to trap atoms, but trapping and laser-cooling molecules in this setting is tricky. Such an approach would, however, be generalizable to many molecular species. Anderegg et al. created an optical tweezer array of calcium monofluoride molecules, which were laser cooled to their ground state (see the Perspective by Kotochigova). By distinguishing between single and multiple molecules in the tweezers, the researchers were able to observe molecular collisions. Boasting exquisite control over individual molecules, the optical tweezer array platform holds much promise for extending the applications of ultracold molecules.

More information: Loïc Anderegg et al. An optical tweezer array of ultracold molecules, Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aax1265

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

New augmented reality head mounted display offers unrivaled viewing experience

Cambridge engineers have developed a new augmented reality (AR) head mounted display (HMD) that delivers a realistic 3-D viewing experience, without the commonly associated side effects of nausea or eyestrain.

The device has an enlarged eye-box that is scalable and an increased field of view of 36º that is designed for a comfortable viewing experience. It displays images on the retina using pixel beam scanning which ensures the image stays in focus regardless of the distance that the user is fixating on. Details are reported in the journal Research.

Developed by researchers at the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) in collaboration with Huawei European Research Centre, in Munich, the HMD uses partially reflective beam splitters to form an additional "exit pupil" (a virtual opening through which light travels). This, together with narrow pixel beams that travel parallel to each other, and which do not disperse in other directions, produces a high quality image that remains unaffected by changes in eye focus.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow6430

WSJ: Amazon changed search results to boost profits despite internal dissent

Amazon changed its search algorithm in ways that boost its own products despite concerns raised by employees who opposed the move, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The change was made late last year and was "contested internally," the WSJ reported. People who worked on the project told the WSJ that "Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings so that instead of showing customers mainly the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they search—as it had for more than a decade—the site also gives a boost to items that are more profitable for the company."

The goal was to favor Amazon-made products as well as third-party products that rank high in "what the company calls 'contribution profit,' considered a better measure of a product's profitability because it factors in non-fixed expenses such as shipping and advertising, leaving the amount left over to cover Amazon's fixed costs," the WSJ said.

Amazon made the change indirectly, the WSJ reported. Instead of adding profitability into the algorithm itself, Amazon changed the algorithm to prioritize factors that correlate with profitability, the article said.

When contacted by Ars, Amazon said it does not optimize the ranking of its search results for profitability.

In a statement, Amazon said:

The Wall Street Journal has it wrong. We explained at length that their 'scoop' from unnamed sources was not factually accurate, but they went ahead with the story anyway. The fact is that we have not changed the criteria we use to rank search results to include profitability. We feature the products customers will want, regardless of whether they are our own brands or products offered by our selling partners. As any store would do, we consider the profitability of the products we list and feature on the site, but it is just one metric and not in any way a key driver of what we show customers.

---

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Reproduceability is key to science. A one-time “eureka!” could be the first step in a paradigm shift — or it could be a fluke. It’s the second, third, and hundredth measurements that put theories to the test.

That’s why recent measurements of the universe’s expansion have piqued interest. Even though astronomers have applied multiple methods relying on completely different physics, they’re still getting similar results: Today’s universe appears to be expanding faster than what’s expected based on measurements of the early universe. Can systematic errors explain this discrepancy? Or are new physics required?

Now Wendy Freedman (University of Chicago) and colleagues have posted a new, "middle-of-the-road" measurement on the astronomy preprint arXiv, adding a twist to the ongoing debate. The study will appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The world has a third pole – and it's melting quickly

Khawa Karpo lies at the world's "third pole". This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – the Chinese glaciers alone account for an estimated 14.5% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region's remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.

Whether we are Buddhists or not, our lives affect, and are affected by, these tropical glaciers that span eight countries. This frozen "water tower of Asia" is the source of 10 of the world's largest rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Mekong and Indus, whose flows support at least 1.6 billion people directly – in drinking water, agriculture, hydropower and livelihoods – and many more indirectly, in buying a T-shirt made from cotton grown in China, for example, or rice from India.

Joseph Shea, a glaciologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, calls the loss "depressing and fear-inducing. It changes the nature of the mountains in a very visible and profound way."

Yet the fast-changing conditions at the third pole have not received the same attention as those at the north and south poles. The IPCC's fourth assessment report in 2007 contained the erroneous prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This statement turned out to have been based on anecdote rather than scientific evidence and, perhaps out of embarrassment, the third pole has been given less attention in subsequent IPCC reports.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A simple arthritis drug could be an effective, low cost solution to treat patients with blood cancers such as polycythemia vera (PV) and essential thrombocythemia (ET), a breakthrough study by the University of Sheffield has shown.

Led by Dr Martin Zeidler, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Biomedical Science and Dr Sebastian Francis from the Department of Haematology at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, as well as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the study results show that methotrexate (MTX) -- a drug on the World Health Organisation list of essential medicines that is commonly used to treat rheumatoid arthritis -- significantly reduces the symptoms associated with the disease.

[...] Building on previous Medical Research Council-funded work in the Zeidler lab that identified methotrexate as an inhibitor of the JAK/STAT signalling pathway, this study examined hospital records to identify existing ET and PV patients already taking methotrexate for other diseases.

Despite the small numbers involved and the presence of background rheumatoid arthritis, these patients reported significantly lower symptom scores than patients not taking methotrexate.

The misregulation of the JAK/STAT signalling pathway in humans is central to the development of Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), the collective term for progressive blood cancers like ET and PV and is also central to many inflammatory processes such as those associated with rheumatoid arthritis.

Lab-based results showed that low doses of methotrexate acted as a powerful suppressor of JAK/STAT pathway activation -- even in cells carrying the mutated gene responsible for MPNs in patients.

Dr Zeidler said: "While we still need to undertake a clinical trial to validate these findings, our results are very encouraging and suggest that a simple drug that has been used for nearly 40 years to treat arthritis can provide significant relief to blood cancer sufferers.

"Patients we tested showed a pronounced improvement in symptoms, something conventional treatments have been unable to provide.

"Given the very low cost of MTX, this research could offer an effective therapy on a budget accessible to healthcare systems throughout the world -- marking a potentially substantial clinical and health economic benefit."

[...] The results of the study have today (17 September 2019) been published in the British Journal of Haematology.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at the University of East Anglia have discovered how nitrogen-fixing bacteria sense iron—an essential but deadly micronutrient.

Some bacteria naturally fix nitrogen from the soil into a form that plants can use. In nature, most plants get nitrogen either from soil bacteria that do this work or from plants and microbes that die and recycle their nitrogen into the soil. In agriculture, soil is enriched with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

Virtually all healthy cells, many systems regulate this delicate balance.

In many nitrogen-fixing bacteria, a protein called RirA plays a key role in regulating iron. It senses high levels of the metal and helps to shut down the production of proteins that bring in more iron.

[...] They used a technique known as time-resolved mass spectrometry to examine the sensory response of the iron-sulfur cluster of RirA when different levels of iron were available.

The results revealed a 'loose' iron atom in the cluster. When iron levels drop, this atom is rapidly lost as it is scavenged for use in other essential cellular processes.

Without it, the cluster in RirA collapses and the protein becomes inactive, which prompts the cell to produce proteins that enable the cell to take up iron from its surroundings.

Once iron levels are sufficient again, RirA regains its cluster and becomes active again, stopping the production of proteins that bring in more iron.

[...] "This is an important piece in the bigger puzzle of how life deals with iron, a nutrient it cannot do without but one it must also avoid having in excess."

'Mechanisms of iron- and O2-sensing by the [4Fe-1 4S] cluster of the global iron regulator RirA' is published in the journal eLife on Tuesday, September 17, 2019.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a story inspired by a submission, via IRC, for Fnord666.

Millions of Americans' Medical Images and Data Are Available on the Internet. Anyone Can Take a Peek.:

Hundreds of computer servers worldwide that store patient X-rays and MRIs are so insecure that anyone with a web browser or a few lines of computer code can view patient records. One expert warned about it for years.

This story was co-reported with the German public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk.

Medical images and health data belonging to millions of Americans, including X-rays, MRIs and CT scans, are sitting unprotected on the internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise.

The records cover more than 5 million patients in the U.S. and millions more around the world. In some cases, a snoop could use free software programs — or just a typical web browser — to view the images and private data, an investigation by ProPublica and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk found.

We identified 187 servers — computers that are used to store and retrieve medical data — in the U.S. that were unprotected by passwords or basic security precautions. The computer systems, from Florida to California, are used in doctors' offices, medical-imaging centers and mobile X-ray services.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow6430

Lawsuit: AT&T signed customers up for DirecTV Now without their knowledge

AT&T supervisors encouraged sales reps to create fake DirecTV Now accounts to make the online video service seem more successful than it really was, a class-action complaint alleges.

AT&T "promot[ed] and reward[ed] account fraud" such as creating the fake accounts and signing AT&T customers up for DirecTV Now "without the customer knowing," the lawsuit claims.

The new allegations were made Friday in an amended complaint as part of a lawsuit filed against AT&T in April in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T lied to investors in order to hide DirecTV Now's failure.

"AT&T misrepresented the true condition of DirecTV Now and hid the associated risks," the amended complaint says. DirecTV Now's inevitable failure was subsequently made clear when subscriber numbers began to drop, the amended complaint says:

The dramatic decline in DirecTV Now subscriber numbers was a materialization of the risks associated, including: improper sales practices, such as the creation of fake accounts, which predictably led subscribers to cancel these accounts, upon realizing they were being billed for a service they did not use; the aggressive use of promotional campaigns to artificially sustain subscriber levels; and selling the product at irrationally low prices that would ultimately need to increase.

Original Submission