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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Electrospun fibers weave new medical innovations: Novel applications of a technology called coaxial electrospinning could improve contraceptive products and help patients with brain tumors

Steckl's lab is coming up with new applications for a fabrication process called coaxial electrospinning, which combines two or more materials into a fine fiber for use in industry, textiles or even medicine. The machine pumps two or more liquid polymers into a nozzle that drips like a leaky faucet. Once electric voltage is applied, the drip turns into a spiderweb-fine jet composed of a core of one material surrounded by a sheath of another.

"It looks deceptively simple. But the chemistry is the secret sauce," he said.

Steckl is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His latest study, published this month on the cover of the journal ChemPlusChem, outlined the many applications of a manufacturing process that combines the amazing properties of one material with the powerful benefits of another.

Electrospinning was invented in 1902 and was first applied to textiles in the 1930s. But only now are researchers realizing its full potential. Steckl's Nanoelectronics Laboratory has been preoccupied with new combinations of "ingredients" to take advantage of their unique benefits.

"The beauty is you can have combinations of polymers with properties you don't normally find in nature," Steckl said.

For example, researchers can combine a stiff core surrounded by soft, flexible or adhesive material. Or they can create a water-resistant shell surrounding a compound that dissolves quickly in water.

"Or you could put drug molecules on the inside for a treatment surrounded by pain-relief molecules on the outside," he said.

One drawback has been producing enough material for commercial use. But dozens of companies in the United States and around the world are coming up with large-scale production systems for electrospun fibers. Steckl is working with research partners at UC and other research universities to explore the possibilities.

Journal Reference:

Daewoo Han, Andrew J. Steckl. Coaxial Electrospinning Formation of Complex Polymer Fibers and their Applications. ChemPlusChem, 2019; 84 (10): 1453 DOI: 10.1002/cplu.201900281

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_red

Researchers report on a technique to extract the quantum information hidden in an image that carries both classical and quantum information. This technique opens a new pathway for quantum enhance microscopes that aim to observe ultra-sensitive samples.

Current super-resolution microscopes or microarray laser scanning technology are known because of their high sensitivities and very good resolutions. However, they implement high light power to study samples, samples that can be light sensitive and thus become damaged or perturbed when illuminated by these devices.

Imaging techniques that employ quantum light are becoming of major importance nowadays, since their capabilities in terms of resolution and sensitivity can surpass classical limitations and, in addition, they do not damage the sample. This is possible because quantum light is emitted in single photons and that uses the property of entanglement to reach lower light intensity regimes.

Now, even though the use of quantum light and quantum detectors has been experimenting a steady development over these last years, there is still a few caveats that need to be solved. Quantum detectors are themselves sensitive to classical noise, noise which may end up being so significant that it can reduce or even cancel out any kind of quantum advantage over the images obtained.

Thus, launched a year ago, the European project Q-MIC has gathered an international team of researchers with different expertise who have come together to develop and implement quantum imaging technologies to create a quantum enhanced microscope that will be able to go beyond capabilities of current microscopy technologies.

In a study recently published in Sciences Advances, researchers Hugo Defienne and Daniele Faccio from the University of Glasgow and partners of the Q-MIC project, have reported on a new technique that uses image distillation to extract quantum information from an illuminated source that contains both quantum and classical information.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191024115010.htm

Journal Reference:

Hugo Defienne, Matthew Reichert, Jason W. Fleischer, Daniele Faccio. Quantum image distillation. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (10): eaax0307 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax0307

Original Submission

$15 minimum wage didn't decimate the local economy, after all

JoeMerchant writes in quoting MarketWatch.com which claims that the minimum wage has had a positive affect on the local economy:

Critics would have you believe that upping the minimum wage in restaurants will lead to massive layoffs and closures. But since raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour nearly a year ago, the restaurant industry in New York City has thrived.

I'm a professor with a focus on labor and employment law. My research on the minimum wage Critics would have you believe that upping the minimum wage in restaurants will lead to massive layoffs and closures. But since raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour nearly a year ago, the restaurant industry in New York City has thrived.

I'm a professor with a focus on labor and employment law. My research on the minimum wage suggests a few reasons why this might be true.

The article goes on to explain why the rise in the minimum wage has not been as bad as had been predicted; in fact, it claims the both restaurant revenue and employment are up.

However, these claims are contradicted by 2 Anonymous Coward submissions, which could be from the same AC but we cannot tell, of the same story from the New York Post:

takyon writes:

Intel will launch Xeon server/HPC CPU chips on two different process nodes and with different core counts, in the same year:

Intel's next-generation Xeon lineup which includes 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Cooper Lake has been further detailed in a slide showcased by ASUS during an IoT seminar. The new Xeon lineup which is supposed to launch in 2020 would be featuring a series of new technologies along with an increase in the total number of cores and PCIe lanes compared to existing Xeon families.

Aimed at the Whitley platform, the Intel 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Cooper Lake would be launching in 2020. The 14nm Cooper Lake Xeons would launch early in Q2 2020 followed by the 10nm Xeon lineup in Q3 2020. Both families would coexist and we could see the Cooper Lake family be more tuned in terms of clock speeds compared to Ice Lake Xeons due to extensive maturation of the 14 nm process node.

[...] Intel Ice Lake-SP processors will be available in the third quarter of 2020 and will be based on the 10nm+ process node. We have seen earlier slides say that the Ice Lake family would feature up to 28 cores but the one from ASUS's presentation says that it would actually feature up to 38 cores & 76 threads per socket.

The main highlight of Ice Lake-SP processors will be support for PCIe Gen 4 and 8-channel DDR4 memory. The Ice Lake Xeon family would offer up to 64 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and would offer support for 8-channel DDR4 memory clocked at 3200 MHz (16 DIMM per socket with 2nd Gen Persistent memory support). Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors would be based on the brand new Sunny Cove core architecture which delivers an 18% IPC improvement versus the Skylake core architecture that has been around since 2015.

[...] Moving on to the Cooper Lake Xeon family which is based on the 14nm+++ process node, we are looking at up to 48 cores and 96 threads in a socketed design. The current Cascade Lake-SP family offers up to 28 cores in socketed variants while the Cascade Lake-AP SKUs which come in BGA only, offer up to 56 cores and 112 threads with TDPs as high as 400W.

There will also be a 56 core and 112 thread socketed variant in the Cooper Lake family but that is likely to be part of the Xeon-AP line of chips which feature two dies on the same interposer.

Also at Guru3D.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

All the new emoji in iOS 13.2

Apple released iOS 13.2 earlier today, and the update includes 398 new emoji. There's a bunch of brand-new ones (I love the otter) as well as emoji to represent people with disabilities, gender-neutral emoji (following in Google's footsteps), and a new way to select the skin colors of each individual in the holding hands emoji.

The new batch of emojis also help to normalize menstruation:

For too long, those of us with periods and clitorises have been brutally silenced from talking about our cramps and orgasms by Emoji's lack of yonic and vagina-related emojis. While we gab and gossip freely with eggplant dicks, the best digital icon we currently have to talk about periods and vaginas are the taco (no shade to tacos, it just sounds like a joke a 13-year-old boy would make), and the bloody syringe, which feels unnecessarily gruesome (we're trying to teach kids that periods aren't scary).

This dark time has come to an end. Apple has released iOS 13.2, and the update includes 398 new emoji, including a gorgeous menstrual-red blood drop. [...] The collection also includes a luscious, dignified and highly yonic oyster emoji, replete with a pearly clit, for all your sexting and storytelling needs.

Also at Emojipedia and SFGATE.

Previously: Unicode Consortium Adding 230 New Emojis in Emoji 12.0

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Twitter to ban all political advertising

Twitter is to ban all political advertising worldwide, saying that the reach of such messages "should be earned, not bought". "While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics," company CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.

Social media rival Facebook recently ruled out a ban on political ads.

News of the ban divided America's political camps for the 2020 election. Brad Parscale, manager of President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, said the ban was "yet another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives". But Bill Russo, spokesman for the campaign to elect Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, said: "When faced with a choice between ad dollars and the integrity of our democracy, it is encouraging that, for once, revenue did not win out."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Like every October, health authorities and medical organizations want to remind you that the decorative, over-the-counter lenses are not only illegal, they're also terrible for your eyes. And they're not telling tall tales.
[...]
Just on Tuesday, USA Today reported the case of a Cleveland woman who got decorative lenses stuck to her eyeballs. The lenses were supposed to turn her brown eyes blue but instead made them swollen and red. She had to have them removed in an emergency room.
[...]
Patient 12, on the other hand, was not so lucky. After buying cat-eye lenses at a flea market, the 26-year-old man developed a severe, painful infection called Acanthamoeba keratitis. The infection is caused by a free-living amoeba running rampant in the cornea, which can be blinding—as it was in this case. He ended up needing a corneal transplant, and three months afterwards his vision was still 20/200, which is considered legally blind.
[...]
If you really want to change the look of your eye, the FDA emphasizes that it's very important to buy FDA-approved decorative lenses through your eye doctor or another reputable vendor—with your prescription.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/heres-why-you-should-never-use-decorative-contact-lenses-in-graphic-pictures/
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/contact-lenses/list-contact-lenses

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Biomedical engineers from Duke University have demonstrated that they can create stable materials from engineered disordered proteins by altering the environmental triggers that cause them to undergo phase transitions.

This discovery shines a light on previously unexplored behaviors of disordered proteins and allows researchers to create novel materials for applications in drug delivery, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and biotechnology.

The research appeared online on Oct. 18 in Science Advances.

Proteins function by folding into 3-D shapes that interact with different biomolecular structures. Researchers previously believed that proteins needed to fold into a specific fixed shape in order to function, but in the last two decades, engineers seeking to create novel materials for biomedical applications have turned their attention to intrinsically disordered proteins, called IDPs, which dynamically shift among a wide array of structures.

IDPs are especially useful for biomedical purposes because they can undergo phase transitions –– changing from a liquid to a gel, for example, or a soluble to an insoluble state, and back again –– in response to environmental triggers, like changes in temperature. This ability has made IDPs a go-to tool for long-term drug delivery, as IDPs can be injected in liquid form into the body and then solidify into a gel depot that slowly releases medication.

But while their flexible structure makes IDPs useful in a variety of applications, researchers previously thought that this flexibility limited the stability of the resulting materials.

takyon writes:

An Army "hacker con" goes big: The return of AvengerCon

In a business park that plays home to a number of tech and cybersecurity firms situated strategically between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, there's a two-story building that looks externally like many other office buildings, remarkable this day only for the food trucks in the parking lot and the stream of people in camouflage swarming in and out. The building, called DreamPort, is a collaboration facility leased by US Cyber Command—and on October 18, it was the location of AvengerCon IV, the latest incarnation of a soldier-led cybersecurity training event that takes the shape of a community hacking conference.

The event also offered USCYBERCOM a chance to show off DreamPort—and a chance for me to meet with David Luber, the Executive Director of USCYBERCOM.

"AvengerCon is an event that is attracting the very best talent both from our DoD[*] participants and also from some of the folks that are working with us outside of the DoD," Luber said. "When you bring those very best cyber experts together, they get to learn, test out new ideas, and work in an environment that is hosted by and for DoD cyber operations community experts. They're working in a community of peers—they get to learn together, they get to fail together. And what we've seen from previous activities with AvengerCon is that it's an exhilarating, fun environment for them to work in, and they learn a ton while they're here. And the private sector benefits because as AvengerCon shows, we're all working on some of the same cyber challenges together."

[*] DoD - US Department of Defense.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Twisted Physics: Magic Angle Graphene Produces Switchable Superconductivity

Last year, scientists demonstrated that twisted bilayer graphene — a material made of two atom-thin sheets of carbon with a slight twist — can exhibit alternating superconducting and insulating regions. Now, a new study in the journal Nature^[$] [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1695-0] [DX] by scientists from Spain, the U.S., China and Japan shows that superconductivity can be turned on or off with a small voltage change, increasing its usefulness for electronic devices.

"It's kind of a holy grail of physics to create a material that has superconductivity at room temperature," University of Texas at Austin physicist Allan MacDonald said. "So that's part of the motivation of this work: to understand high-temperature superconductivity better."

The discovery is a significant advance in an emerging field called Twistronics, whose pioneers include MacDonald and engineer Emanuel Tutuc, also from The University of Texas at Austin. It took several years of hard work by researchers around the world to turn MacDonald's original insight into materials with these strange properties, but it was worth the wait.

See also: A Physics Magic Trick: Take 2 Sheets of Carbon and Twist

Previously: Graphene on the Way to Superconductivity
Graphene (With a Twist) Is Helping Scientists Understand Superconductors

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

VW Golfs in Europe will communicate with wireless safety tech

The newest generation of Volkswagen's popular Golf will get the ability to communicate directly with other cars with wireless technology called V2X -- short for vehicle to everything. The technology has been slow to catch on but has the potential to reduce accident rates, which is the reason Volkswagen's adding it to its cars in Europe.

The Golf is the first major car model to get the V2X ability, and Volkswagen and its V2X chip supplier, NXP Semiconductors, hope the milestone will encourage others to follow suit. The more vehicles and infrastructure like traffic signals with the V2X communication ability, the more useful it becomes.

"Volkswagen includes this technology, which doesn't involve any user fees, as a standard feature to accelerate V2X penetration in Europe," said Johannes Neft, Volkswagen's head of vehicle body development, in a statement Monday.

V2X has the potential to revolutionize car safety by letting cars pay better attention to their surroundings, in all directions at once simultaneously and without getting drowsy like a human driver.  V2X also could become an important foundation for autonomous vehicles, though leading companies like Waymo and Cruise aren't counting on it for now.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Someone paid $195,000 for a Pokemon card

Turns out catching 'em all can be a pricey endeavor, especially with Pokemon fever growing as the release of Sword and Shield draws near. A single Pokemon card sold for $195,000 last week, making "Pikachu Illustrator" the most expensive one in existence, according to Kotaku.

This card was never sold in packs like regular ones, but awarded to the winners of a Japanese comic contest in 1998, the auction noted. Only 39 were released, and 10 of those are believed to still exist. The artwork, by Pikachu creator Atsuko Nishida, is pretty delightful.

The buyer actually paid $224,500 for the card -- Weiss Auctions added a 15% buyer's premium to the winning bid, the auction house confirmed via email.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

UniCredit Suffers Third Breach Despite Investing Billions in Cybersecurity

Despite investing 2.4 billion euros since 2016 to upgrade its cybersecurity profile, Italian banking institution UniCredit has suffered its third recent data breach, this time impacting 3 million customers.

The company said in a short data breach announcement on its website that names, telephone numbers, email addresses and cities where clients were registered were exposed via unauthorized access to a file generated in 2015. Bank account details were not included. UniCredit told Reuters that it wouldn’t release information on how the access occurred, but it did say that has launched an internal investigation and has informed all the relevant authorities, including the police.

UniCredit was also hit with hacking incidents in September-October 2016 and June-July 2017, affecting 400,000 Italian customers. Those hacks were carried out via the network of a commercial partner, the bank said at the time.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AT&T will slash $3 billion off its capital investments next year

AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion this year. [...] The company is on pace to exceed its 2019 goal as it averaged more than $6 billion per quarter in the first three quarters. But with a forecast of $20 billion across all of 2020, AT&T expects to spend about $5 billion per quarter on capital investments going forward. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner.

[...] AT&T's capital spending will decline next year despite the company's plan to roll 5G mobile service out nationwide. AT&T already got much of the 5G spending out of the way by purchasing spectrum licenses, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors that the company's "strong spectrum position will allow for lower capital intensity" over the next three years.

AT&T has also mostly stopped its fiber-to-the-home broadband construction even though large portions of its 21-state territory still have only copper-based DSL service. Fiber deployment isn't stopping completely, as Stephenson said that "5G requires us to continue deploying fiber." But AT&T customers who can't get modern broadband speeds or reliable wireline service in their homes would welcome more capital investment in their neighborhoods.

Related: AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors
AT&T Will Give Poor People 1.5 Mbps DSL for $10 if US Allows DirecTV Merger
AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Plant Malware on the Company's Network
AT&T Turns On 5G In New York, But It Still Isn't Available To Consumers
Lawsuit: AT&T Signed Customers Up for DirecTV Now Without Their Knowledge
AT&T Considers Getting Rid of DirecTV as TV Business Tanks, WSJ Reports

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SiFive Announces First RISC-V OoO CPU Core: The U8-Series Processor IP

In the last few year's we've seen an increasing amount of talk about RISC-V and it becoming real competitor to the Arm in the embedded market. Indeed, we've seen a lot of vendors make the switch from licensing Arm's architecture and IP designs to the open-source RISC-V architecture and either licensed or custom-made IP based on the ISA. While many vendors do choose to design their own microarchitectures to replace Arm-based microcontroller designs in their products, things get a little bit more complicated once you scale up in performance. It's here where SiFive comes into play as a RISC-V IP vendor offering more complex designs for companies to license – essentially a similar business model to Arm's – just that it's based on the new open ISA.

Today's announcement marks a milestone in SiFive's IP offering as the company is revealing its first ever out-of-order CPU microarchitecture, promising a significant performance jump over existing RISC-V cores, and offering competitive PPA metrics compared to Arm's products. [...] SiFive's design goals for the U8-Series are quite straightforward: Compared to an Arm Cortex-A72, the U8-Series aims to be comparable in performance, while offering 1.5x better power efficiency at the same time as using half the area. The A72 is quite an old comparison point by now, however SiFive's PPA targets are comparatively quite high, meaning the U8 should be quite competitive to Arm's latest generation cores.

Performance gains over previous designs are substantial:

The performance increases compared to previous generation SiFive cores are extremely impressive: Against a U54 at ISO-process, the new U84 features a 5.3x performance increase in SPECint2006. When taking into account the process node improvements that allow the U84 to clock higher, the generational increases that we'd be seeing in products will be more akin to a factor of 7.2x.

In terms of PPA, compared to a U7-series CPU, IPC increases come in at 2.3x resulting in 3.1x higher performance (ISO-process). A lot of the performance increases of the U8-series come thanks to the increased frequencies capabilities which are 1.4x higher this generation, with the core scaling up to 2.6GHz on 7nm.

On the same 7nm process, the U84 lands in at 0.28mm² per core and a cluster comprising four cores and a 2MB L2 cache measure in at 2.63mm². For comparison, an Arm Cortex-A55 as measured on the Kirin 980, also on 7nm, a core with its 128KB private L2 cache comes in at 0.36mm². Given that SiFive promises of similar performance to a Cortex-A72, which in turn would be more than double the performance of an A55, it looks like SiFive's U84 core would be extremely competitive in terms of its PPA.

Related: Qualcomm Invests in RISC-V Startup SiFive

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

It's the spooky season, so let me regale you with a story about the fungus, Entomophthora muscae. This fungus is particularly fond of the house fly. By fond I mean that if its spores settle on a fly, it then penetrates the insect's outer layer, infiltrates its circulatory system and sets up shop in the brain, controlling the insect's behavior. From the inside out, the fungus feeds on the fly and directs it to crawl to a high point so the fungus can shoot it spores further into the air -- and carry on the great circle of life.

A team of scientists from the Netherlands and Denmark was intrigued by how exactly spores were ejected from the corpse of a dead fly. Because it's quite difficult to control experiments of "wild" fungus and examine how the spores are being jettisoned, the team decided to build its own zombie fungus cannon that mimicked the real thing.

And the real thing is, it's no joke -- it fires spores at about 10 meters per second (or 22 miles per hour).

The cannon's construction is detailed Tuesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, revealing some of the likely inner workings of the spooky zombie fungus' artillery.

Original Submission