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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On 5 November, Texas residents will decide whether to sustain CPRIT[*], the second largest public source of cancer funding in the United States after the federal government. At stake is its generous support for 123 tenure-track faculty like [Francesca] Cole, who investigates cancer and DNA repair. Most scientists use fruit flies or zebra fish, but she could afford to build a large team that probes DNA repair using more sophisticated—and expensive—animal models: 25 different genetically modified mice strains. "The CPRIT investment made a huge difference to my research success," says Cole, who has since won a prestigious New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Texas residents appear likely to approve the ballot initiative, which would give CPRIT another $3 billion through bond sales; a recent poll found that two-thirds of voters support it. Yet some dissent remains from fiscal conservatives. State Senator Charles Schwertner (R) told the Austin American-Statesman in January that although CPRIT's goals are "unquestionably noble," funding cancer research is not a role for state government. He introduced a bill to have CPRIT become a self-sufficient agency, but it failed to advance.

[...] After a smooth first few years, a scandal broke out in 2012 over a $18 million incubator award to MD Anderson that had not undergone scientific peer review. That, along with concerns that politics was skewing grant decisions, prompted CPRIT's chief scientific officer, Nobel laureate and biochemist Alfred Gilman, to resign in protest, along with most of its scientific council and many grant reviewers. After more problems led to a 10-month hold on new grants and a governance overhaul, the agency got back on track.

CPRIT has awarded more than $2.4 billion for 1447 awards split among clinical and translational research, recruitment, basic research, training, and prevention. It has supported shared resources such as bioinformatics facilities and advanced microscopes. The agency touts its practical impact, saying 36 cancer companies have used its money to launch, grow, or move to the state. They, in turn, have raised more than $3 billion from investors. A recent analysis commissioned by CPRIT concluded that the money it pumps into the economy generates $1.4 billion in annual economic activity and supports 10,000 jobs. And one "immediate" result of CPRIT's $250 million in prevention grants has been cancer screening and other services for 320,000 Texans a year, Willson says.

doi:10.1126/science.aaz8812

[*] CPRIT: Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The issue was spotted by a British woman whose husband was able to unlock her phone with his thumbprint just by adding a cheap screen protector.

When the S10 was launched, in March, Samsung described the fingerprint authentication system as "revolutionary".

The scanner sends ultrasounds to detect 3D ridges of fingerprints in order to recognise users.

Samsung said it was "aware of the case of S10's malfunctioning fingerprint recognition and will soon issue a software patch".

[...] After buying a £2.70 gel screen protector on eBay, Lisa Neilson found her left thumbprint, which was not registered, could unlock the phone.

She then asked her husband to try and both his thumbs also unlocked it.

And when the screen protector was added to another relative's phone, the same thing happened.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, proposed legislation he said would bring meaningful punishments for companies that violate people's data privacy, including larger fines and potential jail time for CEOs.

[...] The Mind Your Business Act is an update to Wyden's Consumer Data Protection Act, which he proposed last November. The lawmaker said he spent the past year listening to privacy experts on what to add to the original proposal.

The new bill allows for state attorneys general to enforce the data privacy regulations and allows for privacy watchdogs to sue companies on behalf of people affected by data violations. It also imposes tax penalties on companies when their CEOs lie about privacy practices, which would be based on the executive's salary.

[...] Several lawmakers have proposed their own data privacy bills, though there haven't been any clear front-runners. Tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook have also called for a data privacy law, though critics argue that these pushes are specifically to weaken strong state legislation already in place.

[...] Wyden is also looking to create a national Do Not Track system in which people can opt-out of targeted advertising and having their data sold and shared by tech companies. People would also be able to review what data a tech company has collected on them and who it's shared with.

"It is based on three basic ideas: Consumers must be able to control their own private information, companies must provide vastly more transparency about how they use and share our data; and corporate executives need to be held personally responsible when they lie about protecting our personal information," Wyden said.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe.

"Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner orbits around the black hole," explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. "Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions."

Supermassive black holes already existed when the Universe was young -- just a billion years after the Big Bang. But how these extreme objects, whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time to grow in such a relatively short timespan, is an outstanding question among astronomers. This new ALMA discovery could provide a clue. "Counter-rotating gas streams are unstable, which means that clouds fall into the black hole faster than they do in a disk with a single rotation direction," said Impellizzeri. "This could be a way in which a black hole can grow rapidly."

[...]Impellizzeri and her team used ALMA's superior zoom lens ability to observe the molecular gas around the black hole. Unexpectedly, they found two counter-rotating disks of gas. The inner disk spans 2-4 light-years and follows the rotation of the galaxy, whereas the outer disk (also known as the torus) spans 4-22 light-years and is rotating the opposite way.

"We did not expect to see this, because gas falling into a black hole would normally spin around it in only one direction," said Impellizzeri. "Something must have disturbed the flow, because it is impossible for a part of the disk to start rotating backward all on its own."

Journal Reference:
C. M. Violette Impellizzeri, Jack F. Gallimore, Stefi A. Baum, Moshe Elitzur, Richard Davies, Dieter Lutz, Roberto Maiolino, Alessandro Marconi, Robert Nikutta, Christopher P. O’Dea, Eleonora Sani. Counter-rotation and High-velocity Outflow in the Parsec-scale Molecular Torus of NGC 1068. The Astrophysical Journal, 2019; 884 (2): L28 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab3c64

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

[NASA engineer David Burns] posted [a report] to the NASA Technical Reports Server under the heading "Helical Engine", and, on paper, it works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds - those close to the speed of light in a vacuum. It has not yet been reviewed by an expert.

[...]As a thought experiment to explain his concept, Burns describes a box with a weight inside, threaded on a line, with a spring at each end bouncing the weight back and forth. In a vacuum - such as space - the effect of this would be to wiggle the entire box, with the weight seeming to stand still, like a gif stabilised around the weight.

Overall, the box would stay wiggling in the same spot - but if the mass of the weight were to increase in only one direction, it would generate a greater push in that direction, and therefore thrust.

According to the principle of the conservation of momentum - in which the momentum of a system remains constant in the absence of any external forces - this should be not completely possible.

[...]According to special relativity, objects gain mass as they approach light speed. So, if you replace the weight with ions and the box with a loop, you can theoretically have the ions moving faster at one end of the loop, and slower at the other. But Burns' drive isn't a single closed loop. It's helical, like a stretched out spring - hence "helical engine".

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Turkey 'effectively holding 50 US nuclear bombs hostage' at air base

An estimated 50 US nuclear bombs are effectively being held hostage in Turkey as Washington attempts to find a diplomatic way of responding to the country's invasion of Syria, officials are reported to have warned.

The withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria – creating a power vacuum that has allowed Turkey and Russia to move into the region and displace Washington's Kurdish allies – has caused international outcry.

And as even his supporters accuse the White House of betraying its allies, Donald Trump has been forced to escalate his opposition to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatening to "destroy" his counterpart's economy and contract America's alliance with Ankara.

However, the rapid pace of withdrawal and the tumultuous decline of relations between the two countries has left administration officials scrambling to find a plan for the nuclear weapons stored under American control at the shared Incirlik Air Base in south east Turkey, reports said.

Officials from the State Department and Energy Department, which manages Washington's nuclear arsenal, met at the weekend to consider how they might retrieve an estimated fifty tactical nuclear weapons held at the site, according to The New York Times.

One official told the paper the bombs were now effectively Mr Erdogan's hostages. It is feared that removing the weapons could signal the end of relations between the Nato allies, while leaving them in place could put the weapons of mass destruction at risk.

The conundrum comes just a month after Mr Erdogan said it was "unacceptable" that Turkey was not allowed its own supply of the weapons under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty the country signed in 1980.

[...] Meanwhile Russia has been able to assert its dominance in parts of the country previously secured by the US, stepping into the void left by the country to serve as a power broker between Turkey and Syria.

Following the withdrawal, the chair of the US Senate's armed services committee Jack Reed said: "This president keeps blindsiding our military and diplomatic leaders and partners with impulsive moves like this that benefit Russia and authoritarian regimes.

"If this president were serious about ending wars and winning peace, he'd actually articulate a strategy that would protect against a re-emergence of Isis and provide for the safety of our Syrian partners.

"But he has repeatedly failed to do that. Instead, this is another example of Donald Trump creating chaos, undermining US interests, and benefiting Russia and the Assad regime."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9088

In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course

Free and open source software enables the world as we know it in 2019. From Web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. And in the larger tech industry, free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world.

Free software is a gift, a gift that made the world as we know it possible. And from the start, it seemed like an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it initially made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. These companies weren't unwilling to use free software, it was simply too radical and by extension too political. It had to be renamed: "open source."

Once that happened, open source software took over the world.

Recently, though, there's been a disturbance in the open source force. Within the last year, companies like Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9088

The Lines of Code That Changed Everything

Back in 2009, Facebook launched a world-changing piece of code—the "like" button. "Like" was the brainchild of several programmers and designers, including Leah Pearlman and Justin Rosenstein. They'd hypothesized that Facebook users were often too busy to leave comments on their friends' posts—but if there were a simple button to push, boom: It would unlock a ton of uplifting affirmations. "Friends could validate each other with that much more frequency and ease," as Pearlman later said.

It worked—maybe a little too well. By making "like" a frictionless gesture, by 2012 we'd mashed it more than 1 trillion times, and it really did unlock a flood of validation. But it had unsettling side effects, too. We'd post a photo, then sit there refreshing the page anxiously, waiting for the "likes" to increase. We'd wonder why someone else was getting more likes. So we began amping up the voltage in our daily online behavior: trying to be funnier, more caustic, more glamorous, more extreme.

Code shapes our lives. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has written, "software is eating the world," though at this point it's probably more accurate to say software is digesting it.

Culturally, code exists in a nether zone. We can feel its gnostic effects on our everyday reality, but we rarely see it, and it's quite inscrutable to non-initiates. (The folks in Silicon Valley like it that way; it helps them self-mythologize as wizards.) We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV—pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don't sit around compiling lists of the world's most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much.

So Slate decided to do precisely that. To shed light on the software that has tilted the world on its axis, the editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives? About 75 responded with all sorts of ideas, and Slate has selected 36. It's not a comprehensive list—it couldn't be, given the massive welter of influential code that's been written. (One fave of mine that didn't make the cut: "Quicksort"! Or maybe Ada Lovelace's Bernoulli algorithm.) Like all lists, it's meant to provoke thought—to help us ponder anew how code undergirds our lives and how decisions made by programmers ripple into the future.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow9088.

Amazon Prime Video is confusing its customers with bait-and-switch tactics, survey shows:

Maybe you know the feeling. You’re scrolling around on Amazon Prime Video, minding your own business, and you stumble upon the perfect Saturday night movie. But when you go to click on it, you realize—wait a tick—it’s only available to rent or buy.

In other words, Amazon is asking you, the person who already pays for a Prime Video membership, to pay even more money to watch a sappy romantic comedy (no judgment) that you never would have actively sought out.

Well, if you’ve ever experienced that bait-and-switch sensation, you have plenty of company. In fact, almost 30% of the most popular titles on Amazon Prime Video aren’t actually included in a Prime Video membership, according to a new report from analyst firm MoffettNathanson.

The firm, with help from third-party market researchers, looked at polling data from almost 19,000 streaming TV viewers to determine which shows and movies were the most popular on Amazon’s popular streaming platform. The top show, not surprisingly, was the Emmy-winning Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, with just over 10% of respondents citing it as their favorite. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan was No. 2, followed by The Boys. About 5% of respondents cited movies, The Office, or Friends as their favorite title on Amazon.

[...] “To clarify, most of the ‘not on service’ shows are available for purchase on Amazon, but are not included with a Prime Video membership,” the analysts wrote. “So, consumers are confusing the streaming service for the Amazon video store.”

[Editor's Comment. Removed duplicate line from last paragraph--JR]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

We're free in 3... 2... 1! Amazon unhooks its last Oracle database, nothing breaks and life goes on

Amazon has turned off its final Oracle database, completing a migration effort that has involved "more than 100 teams" in the consumer biz.

Amazon's cloudy unit, AWS, regularly takes a pop at enterprise database vendors while promoting its own Relational Database Service (RDS), which offers Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible), PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, as well as Oracle and SQL Server.

At the 2018 Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said: "The world of... the old-guard commercial-grade databases has been a miserable world for the last couple of decades for most enterprises... Databases like Oracle and SQL Server are expensive, high lock-in and proprietary."

What he did not say is that one of the victims of what he called "abusive and constraining relationships" with other database vendors was Amazon itself, which used Oracle in its retail operation for services including Alexa, Prime video, Kindle and Amazon Music, as well as for fulfilment, payments, ordering and advertising.

This is (mostly) no longer the case. AWS evangelist Jeff Barr reports that "75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases" were migrated to AWS database services.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites

SpaceX has asked the International Telecommunication Union to arrange spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites. SpaceX, which is already planning the world's largest low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation by far, filed paperwork in recent weeks for up to 30,000 additional Starlink satellites on top of the 12,000 already approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC, on SpaceX's behalf, submitted 20 filings to the ITU for 1,500 satellites apiece in various low Earth orbits, an ITU official confirmed Oct. 15 to SpaceNews.

[...] In its filings, SpaceX said the additional 30,000 satellites would operate in low Earth orbit at altitudes ranging from 328 kilometers to 580 kilometers.

[...] It is not guaranteed that, by submitting numerous filings, SpaceX will build and launch 30,000 more satellites. Tim Farrar, a telecom analyst critical of SpaceX, tweeted that he was doubtful the ITU will be able to review such big filings in a timely manner. He sees the 20 separate filings as a SpaceX effort to "drown the ITU in studies" while proceeding with its constellation.

Nothing a Starship can't launch.

Starlink.

More coverage:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Previously: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
SpaceX Seeks Approval for 1 Million Starlink Ground Stations, Faces Pentagon Audit
FCC Approves SpaceX Lowering Orbit of Internet Satellites

Related: SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
SpaceX Starlink Satellite Prototypes Include Packed, Flexible Solar Arrays
SpaceX to Launch 60 Starlink Satellites at Once, and More
SpaceX Satellites Pose New Headache for Astronomers
Most of SpaceX's Starlink Internet Satellites are Already on Track
Three of SpaceX's Starlink Satellites have Failed
Near Collision Between ESA and SpaceX Satellite

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung is investing an additional ₩13.1 trillion ($11 billion) in the R&D and production of quantum dot-enhanced organic light-emitting diode (QD-OLED) panels:

The QD-OLED technology promises to simplify (i.e. lower the cost of) production of OLED-based televisions and monitors, as well as enabling wider color gamuts, which is something expected from next-generation content. Contemporary WOLED panels from LG Display use a blue or white (yellow + blue) OLED emitter stack, and a WRGB color filter system on top with a variety of additional layers behind, between, and ahead of them. By contrast, a QD-OLED panel uses an OLED emitter stack (some believe, with two emitting stacks) with a quantum dot RGB color filter (also called quantum dot color converter, or QDCC) system on top.

Today's OLED panels feature 22 layers, whereas a QD-OLED panel may cut the number to 13, which means fewer deposition stages, lower material and production costs, and, perhaps, better yield. The QD-OLED technology is still considered to be rather challenging as Samsung has to solve light management issues. Meanwhile, according to Display Supply Chain, one square meter of an QD-OLED panel will cost around $26, whereas one square meter of a contemporary OLED panel costs approximately $95.

Related:
Claims of Industrial Espionage Plague OLED Development
Bright Blue PHOLEDs Almost Ready for TV
SEL Develops 8K OLED Displays for Tablets and Laptops
VESA Expands DisplayHDR Specification to Include OLED and Emissive Displays

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The UK's most powerful (publicly known) supercomputer will use only AMD's Epyc CPUs (no GPUs or other accelerators):

Cray has landed a £79m deal to construct Blighty's 28-petaFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer, which will use second-generation AMD Epyc processors.

The contract was confirmed on Monday in an email from the British government's UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) organization to boffins.

The 750,000-ish-core supercomputer is significantly more powerful than its predecessor, the 2.6-petaFLOPS Cray XC30 Archer, which has 118,000 CPU cores inside racks of Intel Xeon E5 v2 processors. The UK's most powerful publicly known super, the 2.7-petaFLOPS 50,000-core Dell-EMC-Intel Cumulus, meanwhile, lives at the University of Cambridge.

The system includes "5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD Rome 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, for 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory".

An older article explains the choice of a homogeneous, CPU-only system.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

It's an admission that appears to have caught Google's devices chief by surprise. After being challenged as to whether homeowners should tell guests smart devices - such as a Google Nest speaker or Amazon Echo display - are in use before they enter the building, he concludes that the answer is indeed yes.

"Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way," Rick Osterloh begins. "It's quite important for all these technologies to think about all users... we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity."

And then he commits. "Does the owner of a home need to disclose to a guest? I would and do when someone enters into my home, and it's probably something that the products themselves should try to indicate."

Considering all the stakeholders seems potentially exhausting.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At first, teachers at Sky Valley Education Center simply evacuated students and used fans to clear the air when the fluorescent lights caught fire or smoked with noxious fumes. When black oil dripped onto desks and floors, they caught leaks with a bucket and duct-taped oil-stained carpets.

Then came the tests that confirmed their suspicions about the light ballasts.

"Sure enough ... it was PCB oil," said Cynthia Yost, who was among teachers who sent pieces of carpet and classroom air filters to a lab. Tests found elevated levels of the toxic chemicals, used as coolant in the decades-old ballasts that regulated electrical current to the lamps.

Millions of fluorescent light ballasts containing PCBs probably remain in schools and day care centers across the U.S. four decades after the chemicals were banned over concerns that they could cause cancer and other illnesses. Many older buildings also have caulk, ceiling tiles, floor adhesives and paint made with PCBs, which sometimes have been found at levels far higher than allowed by law.

Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has not attempted to determine the scope of PCB contamination or assess potential health risks, in large part because of lack of funding, political pressure and pushback from industry and education groups, according to dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of documents examined by The Associated Press.

Members of Congress who promised three years ago to find money to help address PCBs and other environmental problems in the nation's schools never introduced legislation.

And an EPA rule that would have required schools and day cares to remove PCB-containing ballasts moved slowly under the Obama administration, then was quashed by President Donald Trump within days of his inauguration.

That was the final straw for Tom Simons, a former EPA regulator who worked for years on the rule and said getting rid of ballasts was the least the EPA could do to protect children.

"We thought it was a no-brainer: There are millions out there. These things are smoking and dripping, so let's put this through," said Simons, who retired shortly after Trump took office.

Wikipedia entry on PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls).

Original Submission