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NASA's new Artemis spacesuits make it easier for astronauts of all sizes to move on the Moon – TechCrunch

NASA revealed new spacesuits, specifically created for the Artemis generation of missions, which aim to get the first American woman and the next American man to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The new design’s toppling feature is greater mobility and flexibility, in basically every respect. NASA unveiled both a full suit designed for use in extra-vehicular activities on the surface of the Moon, and a flight suit for use while in transit to lunar orbit.

Guided by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, the agency first demonstrated the suit that astronauts will use on the surface of the Moon (and, with modifications, eventually on Mars). It’s called the “xEMU” variant, and it looks a lot like what you might think of when you imagine “space suit” in your mind. But it’s quite different in many respects from what astronauts used to visit the surface of the Moon during the Apollo program.

It allows you to actually moonwalk, for instance: The original suit used for Moon-based activities actually only offered enough range of motion for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to be able to essentially “bunny hop” on the lunar surface, in Bridenstine’s own words. This new design allows them to move around much more dynamically, including actually walking, and offers plenty of range of motion for their arms. Combined with new gloves that actually allow astronauts to freely move their fingers, they can do things like pick up rocks off the lunar surface with relative ease.

The new spacesuit design is also designed to work with virtually everyone who could want to become an astronaut, with inclusive sizing that can accommodate anyone from the “first percentile female to the 99th percentile male,” according to Kristine Davis, an Advanced Space Suit Engineer at NASA and the person who demonstrated the xEMU variant of the suit onstage at the event on Tuesday.

“We want every person who dreams of going into space to be able to say to themselves, that yes, they have that opportunity,” Bridenstine added, regarding the suit’s inclusive design.

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YouTube gets alleged copyright troll to agree to stop trolling YouTubers

Alleged copyright troll Christopher Brady will no longer be able to issue false DMCA takedowns to other YouTubers, according to a lawsuit settlement filed today.

Under the new agreement, Brady is banned from "submitting any notices of alleged copyright infringement to YouTube that misrepresent that material hosted on the YouTube service is infringing copyrights held or claimed to be held by Brady or anyone Brady claims to represent." Brady agreed to pay $25,000 in damages as part of the settlement. He is also prohibited from "misrepresenting or masking their identities" when using Google products, including YouTube.

"This settlement highlights the very real consequences for those that misuse our copyright system. We'll continue our work to prevent abuse of our systems," a YouTube spokesperson told The Verge.

YouTube first sued Brady in August after learning that he targeted a couple of Minecraft and gaming creators — "Kenzo" and "ObbyRaidz" — by using false copyright claim takedowns. The company removed the videos, as the company is required to do when a claim is submitted. YouTube only pursued legal action after it was informed that Brady was allegedly using copyright strikes as a way to pressure creators into paying a lump sum of cash. Brady would allegedly strike two videos on a channel and then demand cash; three strikes on a channel result in it being terminated.

What a piece of garbage.

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Twitter will limit the reach of tweets by certain politicians who break its rules

In June, Twitter said it would start placing a notice over tweets from certain elected and government officials who break the company's rules. But it turns out Twitter is doing more than just slapping a warning label over offending tweets the company leaves up in the name of public interest. On Tuesday, Twitter said users won't be able to like, reply, share or retweet these tweets. Users will still be able to share the tweet with a comment.

"These actions are meant to limit the tweet's reach while maintaining the public's ability to view and discuss it," Twitter said in a blog post. The company also outlines when they're more likely to make an exception for public interest.

Twitter hasn't applied the notice yet, but the company has faced numerous complaints in the past from people who say President Donald Trump has used the social media site to spread hate speech, misinformation and threats.

The new notice applies only to elected and government officials along with candidates or nominees for political office with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, which would include Trump. Users will see a notice that states "The Twitter rules about abusive behavior apply to this tweet. However, Twitter has determined it may be in the public's interest for the tweet to remain available."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Businesses heading for the Windows 7 escape hatch and US retailers panic-buying ahead of the next round of trade tariffs helped PC shipments rise globally in Q3 at the fastest rate in seven-and-a-half years.

This is according to sales-in figures collated by number-cruncher Canalys: 70.9 million desktops, notebooks and workstations were estimated to have made their way into the channel, up 4.7 per cent year-on-year, the highest growth since Q1 2012.

On the global stage, the biggest spike was reported in Japan, where businesses are refreshing their PC estates before Microsoft pulls the plug on extended support for the venerable operating system, scheduled for January.

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New evidence supports giant asteroid impact 12 800 years ago

A research team from South Africa has discovered new evidence that suggests Earth was struck by an asteroid or meteorite 12 800 years ago. The event resulted in global consequences and the extinction of many species at the period of an episode called Younger Dryas. The study was published on October 2, 2019.

[...] Thackeray, along with researcher Philip Pieterse from the University of Johannesburg and Professor Louis Scott of the University of the Free State, found the evidence from a core drilled in a peat deposit, remarkably in a sample approximately 12 800 years old.

"Our finding at least partially supports the highly controversial Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH). We seriously need to explore the view that an asteroid impact somewhere on earth may have caused climate change on a global scale, and contributed to some extent to the process of extinction of large animals at the end of the Pleistocene, after the last ice age," Thackeray stated, noting that meteorites are abundant in platinum.

"Without necessarily arguing for a single causal factor on a global scale, we cautiously hint at the possibility that these technological changes, in North America and on the African subcontinent at about the same time, might have been associated indirectly with an asteroid impact with major global consequences," said Thackeray. "We cannot be certain, but a cosmic impact could have affected humans as a result of local changes in the environment and the availability of food resources, associated with sudden climate change."

The team gathered evidence from a pollen at Wonderkrater to show that around 12 800 years ago, a temporary cooling occurred, which is linked to the Younger Dryas temperature drop. Some scientists said this cooling in widespread sites could at least have been potentially associated with the worldwide dispersal of atmospheric dust that is rich in platinum. Furthermore, a large crater has also been found in northern Greenland beneath the Hiawatha Glacier.

"There is some evidence to support the view that it might possibly have been the very place where a large meteorite struck the planet earth 12 800 years ago," Thackeray explained. "If this was indeed the case, there must have been global consequences."

Reference:

"The Younger Dryas interval at Wonderkrater (South Africa) in the context of a platinum anomaly" - Thackeray, J.F. et al. - Palaeontologia Africana - DOI: https://hdl.handle.net/10539/28129

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Cryptocurrency's bad day continues as the SEC blocks Telegram's $1.7 billion planned token sale – TechCrunch

Cryptocurrency’s bad news day continues to get worse as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has said it has filed an emergency action and received a restraining order for the $1.7 billion planned token offering of Telegram’s blockchain.

The move from the SEC follows the continued dissolution of the corporate alliance that was supporting Facebook’s planned Libra cryptocurrency.

Telegram’s ambitious founder Pavel Durov was hoping to launch the Telegram Open Network as a payment option that would exist apart from the global regulatory system in much the same way that Libra would have done, according to initial TechCrunch reporting.

While the Telegram offering had been in the works since January 2018, it had run into problems by the middle of last year and the future of the protocol was already in jeopardy.

[...] "Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the U.S. markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold," said Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, in a statement. "We allege that the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram's business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine -- Phoenix have shown for the first time in preclinical studies that Aliskiren, a drug that inhibits the enzyme that regulates blood pressure, can delay the progression of congestive heart failure and lengthen survival rates.

More than 5 million Americans live with congestive heart failure, a chronic progressive condition that occurs when the heart muscle doesn't pump blood as well as it should.

"This FDA-approved drug has the potential to improve the quality and extend the life in properly identified heart failure patients," said Ryan Sullivan, DVM, assistant professor in the college's Department of Internal Medicine and lead author of the study, "Normalizing Plasma Renin Activity in Experimental Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Effects on Edema, Cachexia, and Survival," published in the August 2019 edition of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, as part of a Special Issue Heart Failure: From Molecular Basis to Therapy.

"That's an extra 5.6 years with loved ones that otherwise would not be possible. Obviously, further studies are needed, along with human clinical trials, but we are excited about our research direction and what those outcomes could mean for the college and the people of Arizona and beyond."

The Cardiovascular Disease Research group from the UA College of Medicine -- Phoenix Department of Internal Medicine used a new technology to evaluate changes in muscle mass and fluid retention over time in heart failure. Using this noninvasive technology, they showed that Aliskiren blocked muscle loss, prevented fluid retention and saved lives.

Journal Reference: Ryan D. Sullivan, Radhika M. Mehta, Ranjana Tripathi, Inna P. Gladysheva, Guy L. Reed. Normalizing Plasma Renin Activity in Experimental Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Effects on Edema, Cachexia, and Survival. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2019; 20 (16): 3886 DOI: 10.3390/ijms20163886

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Fire blankets can protect buildings from wildfires: Existing blanket technology can protect an isolated building from a short wildfire attack, but technological advancements are needed for severe situations

Wrapping a building in a fire-protective blanket is a viable way of protecting it against wildfires, finds the first study to scientifically assesses this method of defense.

By rigorously testing different fabric materials in the laboratory and using them to shield structures that were exposed to fires of increasing magnitude, this research, published in Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering, confirms that existing blanket technology can protect structures from a short wildfire attack. For successful deployment against severe fires and in areas of high housing density, technological advancement of blanket materials and deployment methods, as well as multi-structure protection strategies, are needed.

"The whole-house fire blanket is a viable method of protection against fires at the wildland-urban interface," says lead study author Fumiaki Takahashi, a Professor at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, who teamed up with the NASA Glenn Research Center, U.S. Forest Service, New Jersey Forest Fire Service, and Cuyahoga Community College for this study.

He continues, "Current technology can protect an isolated structure against a relatively short wildfire attack and further technological developments are likely to enable this method to be applied to severe situations."

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Blind people have increased opportunities, but employers' perceptions are still a barrier

More than 7.5 million Americans, or 2.4% of the population, are blind or have low vision. Some people are born with blindness or low vision, but most people acquire vision loss, often at older ages. Researchers estimate that the incidence of blindness and low vision will rise rapidly through 2050 as the population ages.

As researchers who study issues related to blindness and low vision, we are interested in how society, its institutions, businesses and individuals currently perceive members of this population and how these perceptions may influence opportunities, particularly in terms of employment.

[...] The large disparities in employment rates that have historically existed for people who are blind still exist today. The most recent data from the American Community Survey indicates that 44.2% of people who are blind are employed and 10% are unemployed. This compares to an employment rate of 77.2% and unemployment rate of 4.8% for people without disabilities.

Why does employment continue to be a challenge for so many people who are blind? It may be that perceptions about the capabilities of the population have not changed.

[...] Many employers have inaccessible job application sites, and people who are blind have filed lawsuits regarding their inability to use a screen reader to access job-related information on websites. Giving this group of people equal access to learn about and apply for any job of interest is an important first step. Employers should make all digital information related to jobs accessible, including the application process. Accessibility is not difficult, and much support is available for this effort.

In addition, employers and society in general should learn about how people who are blind can perform tasks for which sighted people rely on their vision. This is one of the best ways to change perceptions. Attending your local White Cane Day event is a great opportunity to learn about this population. Events such as this and National Disability Employment Awareness Month are important to increase awareness about the capabilities of people who are blind and the employment challenges they continue to face.

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Instacart shoppers are organizing a nationwide protest – TechCrunch

Instacart has long been at odds with its shoppers — the people who go to the grocery store on behalf of customers. From November 3-5, thousands of Instacart shoppers plan to protest with three demands. They want Instacart to change the default tip amount to at least 10%, ditch the service fee and commit to always giving 100% of the tip to the shopper.

“We did not arrive at the 10% figure arbitrarily, rather this is what the default tip amount was back when I and many others started working for Instacart,” Vanessa Bain, an Instacart shopper wrote on Medium this week. “We are simply demanding the restoration of what was originally promised.”

[...] Back in 2016, Instacart removed the option to tip in favor of guaranteeing its workers higher delivery commissions. About a month later, following pressure from its workers, the company reintroduced tipping. Then, in April 2018, Instacart began suggesting a 5% default tip and reduced its service fee from a 10% waivable fee to a 5% fixed fee.

“We take the feedback of the shopper community very seriously and remain committed to listening to and using that feedback to improve their experience,” an Instacart spokesperson told TechCrunch.

This protest is on the heels of a class-action lawsuit over wages and tips, as well as a tipping debacle where Instacart included tips in its base pay for shoppers. Instacart, however, has since stopped that practice and provided shoppers with back pay. Though, Fast Company recently reported that Instacart delivery drivers’ tips are mysteriously decreasing.

[...] “What’s driving us to do this is a perpetual tug of war shoppers have been engaged in with Instacart for over three years now,” Bain said. “We've held actions annually to maintain the pressure and continue the momentum of our organizing. Right now, workers are in the worst financial position we have ever been in. The introduction of algorithmic pay, coupled with their rolling out of On Demand batches (instant offers that don't require being on schedule to accept) have led to variability in pay, and the decline of pay to unprecedented levels.”

The revolt of the gig worker.

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Google avoids serving repeat ads with machine learning

Like it or not, ads keep the internet running. However, they've become obnoxious and intrusive over the years, leading some to install anti-tracking software on their devices. This makes it difficult for advertisers to show a variety of ads to those users, rather than showing the same ad over and over again. As a privacy-focused workaround, Google -- which dominates the online advertising world -- will use machine learning to manage how frequently an ad is shown to a user when third-party cookies are blocked by users.

[...] "Using traffic patterns where a third-party cookie is available, and analyzing them at an aggregated level across Google Ad Manager publishers, we can create models to predict traffic patterns when a third-party cookie isn't present," says Google. "This allows us to estimate how likely it is for users to visit different publishers who are serving the same ads through Google Ad Manager." The end result is that if Google predicts that you've already seen a particular ad on one site, it will avoid serving the ad on another.

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AMD Refreshes Embedded GPU Lineup, Launches Polaris-Based Embedded Radeon E9560 & E9390

With extremely long product cycle times and niche use cases, we don’t regularly hear from the Embedded Radeon team. In fact, prior to today, the last time the company announced anything was three years ago with the E9000 series of products. But this week with the Global Gaming Expo taking place in Las Vegas (ed: so the gambling kind of gaming), AMD’s embedded group has popped up to announce a couple of new products.

Being revealed today are the Embedded Radeon E9560, and its lower-power counterpart, the E9390. Both are based on AMD’s Polaris 10 GPU, and are designed to fit in to AMD’s existing E9000 family of embedded video cards, as part of what AMD calls its “ultra-high performance” band. The E9560 is a 36 CU part with a max TDP of 130 Watts, and will become AMD’s highest performing Embedded Radeon part yet. Meanwhile the E9390 is a 28 CU part with a lower TDP of 75W, allowing it to work in systems without an auxiliary PCIe power connector.

[...] Instead, the thrust of AMD’s announcement today is on the business side of matters. As casino gaming is a conservative, long cycle business where individual parts need to be qualified, AMD offers a limited number of products for a number of years to meet those needs. Specifically, AMD guarantees that it will offer its Embedded Radeon products for a minimum of 3 years. And, as it so happens, the last Embedded Radeon products were announced 3 years ago.

So, with the originally planned sales cycle for their E9000 parts coming to an end, AMD is refreshing their lineup of Polaris-based parts for another 3 years. The new parts being introduced today will let AMD fine-tune the upper-end of its product stack by offering both a higher performance part and a high-end part that can work off just a PCIe slot. Meanwhile the E9550, E9260, and E9175 are being renewed for another 6 years. With availability planned to go into late 2022, these parts will end up having a 6-year sales lifecycle once all is said and done.

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I tried to hack my insomnia with technology. Here's what worked.

I stopped sleeping when I was 18.

I'd just arrived at college, having moved from a tiny village to a big city for the first time in my life. London was loud and busy. I was staying in a dorm with a load of people I didn't know. There was a hospital nearby with sirens going off at all hours. I was stressed.

I developed insomnia. I tossed and turned, night after night. The more I chased sleep, the more it seemed to elude me. At its worst, I felt I'd had virtually no sleep for almost two weeks. In the end I had to take sleeping medication for almost a month to knock me back into the semblance of a proper routine. Fast-forward to today, and although I generally sleep well, insomnia still sometimes comes back to haunt me.

I'm far from alone: about a quarter of Americans experience acute insomnia every year, a statistic that's replicated elsewhere around the world. In the US alone, that's 82 million people who struggle with sleep.

Given those figures, it's no wonder there are so many tech startups hoping to cash in by "fixing" sleep for sufferers. After a period of particularly bad sleeplessness, I decided to give some of them a go. Maybe one of the sleep tech products on the market could prove a better option than just popping pills. 

Even if you don't have insomnia, there's still a decent chance you aren't getting enough sleep. The amount we need varies from person to person, but a 2016 review study concluded that most adults need more than seven hours sleep a night. Anything less than that is associated with an increased risk of obesity, dementia, diabetes and heart disease, among other issues. The number of Americans who get six hours of sleep or less each night is rising, however.

"When you disrupt your sleep over the long term, it starts to erode your health in many, many ways," says Michael Twery, director of the US National Center on Sleep Disorders Research.

Read on to see what the author tried, what worked and what didn't.

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How fake news spreads like a real virus

When it comes to real fake news, the kind of disinformation that Russia deployed during the 2016 elections, "going viral" isn't just a metaphor.

Using the tools for modeling the spread of infectious disease, cyber-risk researchers at Stanford Engineering are analyzing the spread of fake news much as if it were a strain of Ebola. "We want to find the most effective way to cut the transmission chains, correct the information if possible and educate the most vulnerable targets," says Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a professor of management science and engineering. She has long specialized in risk analysis and cybersecurity and is overseeing the research in collaboration with Travis I. Trammell, a doctoral candidate at Stanford. Here are some of the key learnings:

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The reflections in a pop star's eyes told a selfie stalker exactly how to find her

In September, a Japanese man was arrested for reportedly stalking a pop star and attacking and groping her at her home, according to Japanese news organization NHK. Allegedly, this man found the woman's home by studying photos she posted on social media, observing a train station reflected in her eyes, finding that train station using Google Street View, waiting for her at the train station, and following her home.

The man also apparently learned more about where the woman lived by studying videos she posted from inside her apartment, observing her curtains and how light came through her windows.

You may not be a pop star, but it's still a cautionary tale about how tiny details in your smartphone photos could be used to figure out one of your most private pieces of information — where you live. So maybe avoid sharing photos taken right nearby your home, or on routes you frequent. You might also go to your settings and turn off automatic geotagging of your photos, so that GPS coordinates aren't included in the metadata of every single photo you take.

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Samsung Galaxy S10 Fingerprint Reader Defeated by Silicon Case

A couple in the UK experienced a weird bug on their Samsung Galaxy S10 that allows bypassing the fingerprint reader to unlock the phone regardless of the biometric data registered in the device.

Endeavors in the past tricked biometric protection in phones from multiple brands. Hackers were able to recreate a fingerprint from high-resolution photos and transfer them onto a thin film.

Lisa and Wes Neilson's experience, though, is different and does not involve any technology, just a cheap silicon case.

Lisa got the phone as a gift from her husband and decided to put it in a protective case. She soon discovered that even if only her own fingerprint was registered in the biometric settings of the device, the phone unlocked no matter what finger was used for the process.

Apparently, the same results were obtained with her husband and her sister said both, users whose fingerprint information had never been registered on the phone.

The culprit seems to be the the silicon case, which somehow confuses Samsung Galaxy S10's fingerprint reader and allows any fingerprint to unlock the device.

This conclusion came after Lisa tested the case on her sister's Samsung and the same result was obtained, according to The Sun.

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