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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Twitter plans to make policy changes to help combat deepfakes

Twitter said Monday it's going to make policy changes around how it deals with manipulated videos such as deepfakes and it's asking the public for help.

"We think that a lot of people will have an interest in this space," said Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde at the WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California.

Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to create videos of people doing or saying something they didn't. Social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, have been grappling with manipulated videos ahead of the 2020 elections. Earlier this year, Twitter and Facebook left up an altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made it seem like she was slurring her words, a move that drew criticism, especially from Democrats.

[...] Twitter said in a tweet that it will start gathering public feedback in the coming weeks.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Titanium has many properties that make it a great choice for use in implants. Its low density, high stiffness, high biomechnanical strength-to-weight ratio, and corrosion resistance have led to its use in several types of implants, from dental to joints. However, a persistent problem plagues metal-based implants: the surface is also a perfect home for microbes to accumulate, causing chronic infections and inflammation in the surrounding tissue. Consequently, five to 10 percent of dental implants fail and must be removed within 10-15 years to prevent infection in the blood and other organs.

New research from the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering introduces a revolutionary treatment for these infections. The group, led by Tagbo Niepa, PhD, is utilizing electrochemical therapy (ECT) to enhance the ability of antibiotics to eradicate the microbes.

[...] The novel method passes a weak electrical current through the metal-based implant, damaging the attached microbe's cell membrane but not harming the surrounding healthy tissue. This damage increases permeability, making the microbe more susceptible to antibiotics. Since most antibiotics specifically work on cells that are going to replicate, they do not work on dormant microbes, which is how infections can recur. The ECT causes electrochemical stress in all the cells to sensitize them, making them more susceptible to antibiotics.

The researchers hope this technology will change how infections are treated. Researchers focused their research on Candida albicans (C. albicans), one of the most common and harmful fungal infections associated with dental implants. But while dental implants are one exciting application for this new technology, Niepa says it has other potential applications, such as in wound dressings.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference:

Eloise Eyo Parry-Nweye, Nna-Emeka Onukwugha, Sricharani Rao Balmuri, Jackie L Shane, Dongyeop Kim, Hyun Koo, Tagbo Niepa. Electrochemical Strategy for Eradicating Fluconazole-Tolerant Candida albicans using Implantable Titanium. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2019; DOI: 10.1021/acsami.9b09977

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Successful Biological Decontamination of an Aquifer:

Researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), alongside LITOCLEAN and the University of Barcelona (UB), have achieved the biological decontamination of an aquifer containing a high concentration of the organochlorine compound perchloroethylene.

Organochlorine compounds, which are mainly toxic, are used as solvents and degreasers, and according to the Waste Agency of Catalonia (ARC), they represent almost 9 percent of the pollutants found in contaminated soils in Catalonia.

The decontamination was conducted through the biostimulation of organohalide-respiring bacteria found in the aquifer using lactate. These bacteria are capable of "breathing" the organochlorine compounds and transforming them into the non-toxic compound ethene.

[...] In the study published, researchers first applied this methodology in laboratory and observed that adding a nutrient such as lactate increased the "cleaning" activity of autochthonous bacteria, providing more energy and more optimal conditions for their growth. Researchers then conducted a successful pilot test in one of the aquifer's wells, in which two hundred days after the biostimulation most of the compound was transformed to non-toxic ethene. Later on, researchers proceeded to implement the treatment in all of the contaminated area. After one year, the monitoring analyses revealed the transformation of perchloroethylene into ethene in the majority of the aquifer's wells, and currently fulfil the parameters set down by the Catalan Water Agency.

[...] "One of the most positive parts of this project is that it has allowed us to work in real conditions and apply our laboratory conclusions to a case existing in the field," Ph.D. student Natàlia Blázquez Pallí says.

More information:
Natàlia Blázquez-Pallí et al. Integrative isotopic and molecular approach for the diagnosis and implementation of an efficient in-situ enhanced biological reductive dechlorination of chlorinated ethenes, Water Research (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2019.115106

Original Submission

Anonymous Coward in Space writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/what-is-going-on-with-nasas-space-launch-system-rocket/

In a remarkable turnaround, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Wednesday said the space agency would consider launching its first Orion mission to the Moon on commercial rockets instead of NASA's own Space Launch System. This caught virtually the entire aerospace world off guard, and represents a bold change from the status quo of Orion as America's spacecraft, and the SLS as America's powerful rocket that will launch it.

[...] During a hearing of the Senate Commerce committee to assess America's future in space, committee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker opened by asking Bridenstine about Exploration Mission-1's ongoing delays. The EM-1 test flight involves sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a three-week mission into lunar orbit, and is regarded as NASA's first step toward returning humans to the Moon. This mission was originally scheduled for late 2017, but it has slipped multiple times, most recently to June 2020. It has also come to light that this date, too, is no longer tenable.

"SLS is struggling to meet its schedule," Bridenstine replied to Wicker's question. "We are now understanding better how difficult this project is, and it's going to take some additional time. I want to be really clear. I think we as an agency need to stick to our commitment. If we tell you, and others, that we're going to launch in June of 2020 around the Moon, I think we should launch around the Moon in June of 2020. And I think it can be done. We should consider, as an agency, all options to accomplish that objective."

The only other option at this point is using two large, privately developed heavy lift rockets instead of a single SLS booster. While they are not as powerful as the SLS rocket, these commercial launch vehicles could allow for the mission to happen on schedule.

An Anonymous Coward writes in with an interesting link to a story on Ken Shirriff's blog:

http://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-invaded.html

Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this blog post, I uncover how special register groups went from an obscure feature in the Honeywell 800 mainframe to appearing in the Washington Post.

While researching old computers, I found a strange definition of "Central Processing Unit" that keeps appearing in different sources. From a book reprinted in 2017:1

"Central Processor Unit (CPU)—Part of a computer system which contains the main storage, arithmetic unit and special register groups. It performs arithmetic operations, controls instruction processing and provides timing signals."

At first glance, this definition seems okay, but a few moments thought reveals some problems. Storage is not part of the CPU. But more puzzling, what are special register groups? A CPU has registers, but "special register groups" is not a normal phrase.

It turns out that this definition has been used extensively for over half a century, even though it doesn't make sense, copied and modified from one source to another. Special register groups were a feature in the Honeywell 800 mainframe computer, introduced in 1959. Although this computer is long-forgotten, its impact inexplicably remains in many glossaries. The Honeywell 800 allowed eight programs to run on a single processor, switching between programs after every instruction.3 To support this, each program had a "special register group" in hardware, its own separate group of 32 registers (program counter, general-purpose registers, index registers, etc.).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA scientists plan to demonstrate a revolutionary technology for studying hundreds of stars and galaxies at the same time—a new capability originally created for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The technology, called the Next-Generation Microshutter Array (NGMSA), will fly for the first time on the Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy, or FORTIS, mission on October 27. The array includes 8,125 tiny shutters, each about the width of a human hair, that open and close as needed to focus on specific celestial objects.

[...] "FORTIS needed our new microshutter technology for science. We benefit from a test platform to advance the readiness of this design for use in space. It's a great synergy," said Matt Greenhouse, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Greenhouse and his colleague, Goddard technologist Mary Li, are advancing the technology with support from NASA's Strategic Astrophysics Technology (SAT) program.

[...] M33 is a spiral-disk galaxy littered with clusters of massive hot stars that have emerged within the past few million years from collapsing natal clouds of cold gas and dust. To study these bright clusters, which emit copious amounts of light at ultraviolet wavelengths, the FORTIS telescope will first locate the brightest clusters with its imager and an on-the-fly targeting algorithm will close all the tiny shutters except those coincident with the bright targets.

This will allow light to flow to the spectrograph where it will be broken into component wavelengths to reveal details about the physical conditions of the clusters and their surrounding material.

The microshutter technology gives scientists the ability to produce multiple spectra at once. This capability improves productivity on both sounding rocket missions, which offer only six minutes of observing time, or large space-based observatories, which can take up to a week to observe faint, far-away objects and gather enough light to obtain good spectra. With observing time at a premium, the ability to gather light from multiple objects at once is paramount.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Epson is facing a class-action suit from disgruntled US punters sick of being told what sort of ink cartridges to put in their machines.

Of course it is a cliché of printers that they send dismal warnings of imminent destruction if owners dare to go with cartridges bought from anywhere but the machine's manufacturer.

But the US case (PDF here) alleges that Epson went further with firmware updates that detected third-party ink in printers and simply disabled them. The suit claims the unofficial cartridges work perfectly well in machines that have not been updated.

It complains that Epson never warned users that installing the firmware would remove their ability to use third-party cartridges.

The case names complainants who own Epson WorkForce WF-3640 All-in-One Printer or an Epson XP-830 Small-in-One® printer.

[...] Epson refused to comment.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

SpaceX's Starlink division is on track to offer satellite-broadband service in the United States in mid-2020, a company official said today. Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted two tweets that show he's testing the broadband service.

"Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite," Musk wrote. Two minutes later, Musk sent a followup tweet that said, "Whoa, it worked!!"
[...]
SpaceX launched 60 satellites in May this year to test the system before preparing for a wider deployment. The company has FCC permission to deploy up to 11,943 satellites and is seeking permission to launch as many as 30,000 more.
[...]
"We need 24 launches to get global coverage," Shotwell said. "Every launch after that gives you more capacity." SpaceX previously said it could make 24 Starlink launches in 2020.
[...]
While SpaceX has said it intends to provide gigabit speeds and latency as low as 25ms, a big unanswered question is how much it will cost. SpaceX is apparently still trying to figure that out.

"Shotwell said millions of people in the US pay $80 per month to get 'crappy service,'" SpaceNews reported. "She didn't say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity."
[...]
There are some other interesting tidbits in the SpaceNews article. SpaceX wants to offer Starlink both to home Internet users and the US government, and the company is already testing with the US Air Force Research Laboratory. "So far, SpaceX has demonstrated data throughput of 610Mbps per second in flight to the cockpit of a US military C-12 twin-engine turboprop aircraft," the SpaceNews article said.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/elon-musk-sends-tweet-via-spacexs-starlink-satellite-broadband/
https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlink-broadband-services-in-2020/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UK company Reaction Engines has tested its innovative precooler at airflow temperature conditions equivalent to Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. This achievement marks a significant milestone in its ESA-supported development of the air-breathing SABRE engine, paving the way for a revolution in space access and hypersonic flight.

The precooler heat exchanger is an essential SABRE element that cools the hot airstream generated by air entering the engine intake at hypersonic speed.

"This is not only an excellent achievement in its own right but one important step closer to demonstrating the feasibility of the entire SABRE engine concept," said Mark Ford, heading ESA's Propulsion Engineering section.

The Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) is uniquely designed to scoop up atmospheric air during the initial part of its ascent to space at up to five times the speed of sound. At about 25 km it would then switch to pure rocket mode for its final climb to orbit.

In future SABRE could serve as the basis of a reusable launch vehicle that operates like an aircraft. Because the initial flight to Mach 5 uses the atmospheric air as one propellant it would carry much less heavy liquid oxygen on board. Such a system could deliver the same payload to orbit with a vehicle half the mass of current launchers, potentially offering a large reduction in cost and a higher launch rate.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Wired reports that NASA Wants to Send a Probe to the Hellish Surface of Venus and make it last.

For perspective, the longest a probe has survived on the surface of Venus is 127 Minutes. The Soviet made Venera 13 in 1981.

Since the first (crash) landing on Venus in 1966, by a Soviet probe, spacecraft have only survived a total of a few hours on the planet's surface. But NASA's new probe is being designed [to] last up to 60 days on the punishing Venusian surface. Known as the Long-Lived In-situ Solar System Explorer, or LLISSE, each of the probe's components is specially engineered to withstand the high temperature, high pressure, and reactive atmosphere that define that infernal planet.

Longevity of sixty days is being targeted for a reason,

[Tibor Kremic, chief of the space science project office at Glenn Research Center in Ohio] and his team want the probe to last that long so it can witness the transition between night and day. If they land late in a Venusian day, which lasts almost four Earth months, they think they can eke out enough battery life to make that happen. "We don't have any data on how the conditions change from day to night on Venus," says Kremic. "We're trying to capture as much of that as possible."

The probe is small and intended to hitch a ride on another spacecraft heading near Venus rather than being a separate launch. Currently the team is looking at the Venera-D mission, which is scheduled for 2026.

Related: Here's a Plan to Send a Spacecraft to Venus, and Make It Last

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Automating Satellite Collision Avoidance

ESA[*] is preparing to use machine learning to protect satellites from the very real and growing danger of space debris.

The agency is developing a collision avoidance system that will automatically assess the risk and likelihood of in-space collisions, improve the decision making process on whether or not a maneuver is needed, and may even send the orders to at-risk satellites to get out of the way.

[...] "There is an urgent need for proper space traffic management, with clear communication protocols and more automation" says Holger Krag, Head of Space Safety at ESA.

"This is how air traffic control has worked for many decades, and now space operators need to get together to define automated maneuver coordination."

[...] Because of [the current] debris environment, it is now routine for operators in highly-trafficked orbits to spend time protecting their spacecraft from potentially catastrophic collisions with space junk, by performing "collision avoidance maneuvers"—basically sending the commands to their spacecraft to get out of the way.

Such maneuvers depend on validated, accurate and timely space surveillance data, provided for example by the US Space Surveillance Network, serving as the basis of "conjunction data messages," or CDMs, warning of possible close encounter between their spacecraft and another satellite or space object.

For a typical satellite in low-Earth orbit, hundreds of alerts are issued every week. For most, the risk of collision decreases as the week goes by and more orbital information is gathered, but for some the risk is deemed high enough that further action is required.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Halfway toward LHC consolidation

The Large Hadron Collider is such a huge and sophisticated machine that the slightest alteration requires an enormous amount of work. During the second long shutdown (LS2), teams are hard at work reinforcing the electrical insulation of the accelerator's superconducting dipole diodes. The LHC contains not one, not two, but 1232 superconducting dipole magnets, each with a diode system to upgrade. That's why no fewer than 150 people are needed to carry out the 70 000 tasks involved in this work.

The project is now halfway to completion. One of the machine's eight sectors, containing 154 magnets, is now closed and the final leak tests are under way. Work is ongoing in the seven other sectors and the teams are working at a rate of ten interconnections consolidated per day.

[...] A plethora of upgrade and maintenance work is also being carried out in the tunnel on all the equipment, from the cryogenics system to the vacuum, beam instrumentation and technical infrastructures.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The secret of classic Belgian beers? Medieval super yeasts!

An international team of scientists, led by Prof. Kevin Verstrepen (VIB-KU-Leuven) and Prof. Steven Maere (VIB-UGent), has discovered that some of the most renowned classic Belgian beers, including Gueuze and Trappist ales, are fermented with a rare and unusual form of hybrid yeasts. These yeasts combine DNA of the traditional ale yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, with that of more stress-resistant feral yeasts such as Saccharomyces kudriavzevii.

"These yeasts are hybrids between two completely different species" says Dr. Jan Steensels (VIB -- KU Leuven Center for Microbiology), who coordinated the lab work of this study. "Think of lions and tigers making a super-baby."

Such interspecific hybridizations are rare and seem to be favored by the domestication process. In this case, the new hybrid yeasts combined important characteristics of both parental species, with the fermentation capacity of normal beer yeasts and the stress tolerance and capacity to form special aromas of more feral ancient yeasts like S. kudriavzevii that haphazardly made their way into the brewery.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Embattled Russian scientist sharpens plans to create gene-edited babies

Rebrikov acknowledges the scientific consensus that a bright red line now prohibits germline editing because the young CRISPR technology remains too error prone. Yet to the utter dismay of many colleagues, he has put his toes right on the line. And he is forcing Russia and the world at large to confront the key question: How, exactly, do you responsibly cross it?

Rebrikov first discussed editing embryos at a conference in Kazan, Russia, on "postgenome" technologies in October 2018, nearly 1 month before the He story would explode. "I was really surprised that in the full auditorium of 500 people he was freely speaking about this issue," says Egor Prokhortchouk, a genomics specialist at RAS's Research Center of Biotechnology in Moscow. Even though Rebrikov's study didn't violate Russian regulations, Prokhortchouk still thought it was pushing the limits of what the strict science and health ministries would allow.

Working with nonviable embryos made at his IVF clinic—part of the Kulakov National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology—Rebrikov and his co-workers used CRISPR to introduce a deletion into a gene for a protein, CCR5, that studs the surface of white blood cells. People who naturally inherit a defective CCR5 gene from both parents are highly resistant to HIV and suffer no dramatic ill effects from the protein's absence; this is the same gene that He tried to cripple in the twin girls. But Rebrikov's experiment—which joined about a dozen such human embryo-editing studies published to date, mainly from Chinese researchers—simply explored the efficiency of CRISPR. He did not discuss implanting edited embryos. "Everybody was interested in technical details and nobody asked questions about ethical things," Prokhortchouk says.

In February, however, Rebrikov disclosed his greater ambitions to Prokhortchouk and his medical students. Rebrikov and his colleagues had described the CCR5 embryo study in the Bulletin of RSMU, which led Prokhortchouk to invite him to a student journal club to discuss the paper and He's experiment. "Rebrikov insisted that he wants to create CCR5-edited babies and that this will protect them from HIV infection from their mothers," says Prokhortchouk, who was—and remains—opposed to such plans.

Rebrikov says from the outset he was not interested in preventing a specific medical ailment, but rather to prove that he could safely help people with germline editing, which he believes will one day be widely used. He wanted to build his case by finding people with rare medical situations that would warrant the risk. He hoped to identify, for example, women who were living with HIV and wanted babies but were not responding to marketed antiretrovirals, which powerfully reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission. Using IVF to create embryos homozygous for the CCR5 mutant in theory could help prevent infection from their mothers.

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have discovered a strange new organelle inside our cells that helps to prevent cancer by ensuring that genetic material is sorted correctly as cells divide.

The researchers have connected problems with the organelle (a subcellular structure) to a subset of breast cancer tumors that make lots of mistakes when segregating chromosomes. Excitingly, they found their analysis offered a new way for doctors to sort patient tumors as they choose therapies. They hope these insights will allow doctors to better personalize treatments to best benefit patients—sparing up to 40% of breast cancer patients, for example, a taxing treatment that won't be effective.

"Some percentage of women get chemotherapy drugs for breast cancer that are not very effective. They are poisoned, in pain and their hair falls out, so if it isn't curing their disease, then that's tragic," said researcher P. Todd Stukenberg of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the UVA Cancer Center. "One of our goals is to develop new tests to determine whether a patient will respond to a chemotherapeutic treatment, so they can find an effective treatment right away."

The organelle Stukenberg and his team have discovered is essential, but ephemeral. It forms only when needed to ensure chromosomes are sorted correctly and disappears when its work is done. That's one reason scientists haven't discovered it before now.