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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A big problem with dinosaurs is that there seem to be too many meat-eaters. From studies of modern animals, there is a feeding pyramid, with plants at the bottom, then plant-eaters, and then meat-eaters at the top.

A new study by scientists at the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, published in the journal Palaeontology, shows that dinosaurian meat-eaters, the theropod dinosaurs, specialised a great deal, and so broadened their food base.

The big ones, such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurs Rex, fed on other dinosaurs. But there were also lots of small meat-eaters that probably fed on other animals such as lizards and mammals. And some of the theropods even became plant-eaters.

[...] The analyses separated out three groups—the large dinosaur-eaters, the small carnivores and the herbivores. In particular, the tyrannosaurs such as T. rex were quite distinct—they had deeper jaws and more powerful teeth than any of the other theropods, and so had evidently evolved particular ways of dealing with large prey.

The other key finding is that the maniraptoriform theropods—those most closely related to birds—show the greatest amount of variation in jaw shapes. This suggests, but does not prove, that they had the greatest range of functions.

Morphological disparity in theropod jaws: comparing discrete characters and geometric morphometrics, Palaeontology (DOI: 10.1111/pala.12455)

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takyon writes:

Samsung Confirms Custom CPU Development Cancellation

The fate of Samsung's custom CPU development efforts has been making the rounds of the rumour mill for almost a month, and now we finally have confirmation from Samsung that the company has stopped further development work on its custom Arm architecture CPU cores. This public confirmation comes via Samsung's HR department, which last week filled an obligatory notice letter with the Texas Workforce Commission, warning about upcoming layoffs of Samsung's Austin R&D Center CPU team and the impending termination of their custom CPU work.

The CPU project, said currently to be around 290 team members large, started off sometime in 2012 and has produced the custom ARMv8 CPU microarchitectures from the Exynos M1 in the Exynos 8890 up to the latest Exynos M5 in the upcoming Exynos 990.

Over the years, Samsung's custom CPU microarchitectures had a tough time in differentiating themselves from Arm's own Cortex designs, never being fully competitive in any one metric. The Exynos-M3 Meerkat cores employed in the Exynos 9810 (Galaxy S9), for example, ended up being more of a handicap to the SoC due to its poor energy efficiency. Even the CPU project itself had a rocky start, as originally the custom microarchitecture was meant to power Samsung's custom Arm server SoCs before the design efforts were redirected towards mobile use.

See also:
Samsung Is Shutting Down Its Custom CPU Core Department; Will License ARM's Performance Cores for Future SoCs
Samsung Might Still Design Semi-Custom Cores; AMD-based GPU Nearing Commercialization
Samsung sadly sings of memory, all alone in the moonlight, as downturn slashes profits by 56%

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to "publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies."

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

"Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies," Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says:

A Texas academic created a stir last year by alleging that Bitcoin's astronomical surge in 2017 was probably triggered by manipulation. He's now doubling down with a striking new claim: a single market whale was likely behind the misconduct, seemingly with the power to move prices at will.

One entity on the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex appears capable of sending the price of Bitcoin higher when it falls below certain thresholds, according to University of Texas Professor John Griffin and Ohio State University's Amin Shams. Griffin and Shams, who have updated a paper they first published in 2018, say the transactions rely on Tether, a widely used digital token that is meant to hold its value at $1.

"Our results suggest instead of thousands of investors moving the price of Bitcoin, it's just one large one," Griffin said in an interview. "Years from now, people will be surprised to learn investors handed over billions to people they didn't know and who faced little oversight."

Tether rejected the claims, with General Counsel Stuart Hoegner arguing in a statement that the paper is "foundationally flawed" because it is based on an insufficient data set. The research was probably published to back a "parasitic lawsuit," the general counsel added.

[...] Griffin and Shams's hypothesis that Bitcoin was manipulated is based partly on the theory that new Tethers are created without the dollars to back them and then used to buy Bitcoin, leading to rising prices. The authors examined Tether and Bitcoin transactions from March 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, concluding that Bitcoin purchases on Bitfinex increased whenever Bitcoin's value fell by certain increments. Griffin and Shams didn't name the entity on Bitfinex that they think was responsible. They shared their updated research with Bloomberg News.

[Ed Note: If, like me, you didn't understand the term 'Whale' in the title then try this link for an explanation.--JR]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Smugglers have found an easy way to get through the vertical steel tube Mexican border wall. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/smugglers-are-sawing-through-new-sections-of-trumps-border-wall/2019/11/01/25bf8ce0-fa72-11e9-ac8c-8eced29ca6ef_story.html

The breaches have been made using a popular cordless household tool known as a reciprocating saw that retails at hardware stores for as little as $100. When fitted with specialized blades, the saws can slice through one of the barrier's steel-and-concrete bollards in minutes, according to the agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the barrier-defeating techniques.

After cutting through the base of a single bollard, smugglers can push the steel out of the way, creating an adult-size gap. Because the bollards are so tall — and are attached only to a panel at the top — their length makes them easier to push aside once they have been cut and are left dangling, according to engineers consulted by The Washington Post.

The taxpayer-funded barrier — so far coming with a $10 billion price tag — was a central theme of Trump's 2016 campaign, and he has made the project a physical symbol of his presidency, touting its construction progress in speeches, ads and tweets. Trump has increasingly boasted to crowds in recent weeks about the superlative properties of the barrier, calling it "virtually impenetrable" and likening the structure to a "Rolls-Royce" that border crossers cannot get over, under or through.

In other words, no one did any serious pen testing on the wall design, or it would have been obvious that with all that leverage, the top tie-in was easy to flex.

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RandomFactor writes:

Up until now, QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) required devices the size of a refrigerator or larger. Now researchers have developed a QKD chip a mere 3 millimeters in size.

So why is QKD so important? Right now, when we encrypt data we generally use passwords or biometric data, which can be hacked or leaked.

Quantum technology, however, allows us to encrypt the key within the message. Only the person with the exact same key as the one inside the message can open it.

"It is like sending a secured letter," says physicist Kwek Leong Chuan, from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. "Imagine that the person who wrote the letter locked the message in an envelope with its key also inside it. The recipient needs the same key to open it."

The applications for QKD such as something that can be worn on your wrist or in a smartphone are significant in commerce, security, and next generation communications. Additionally, the new solution

developed by the scientists at NTU should be relatively easy and cheap to produce, as it uses standard industry materials like silicon, that are already widely used in computer manufacturing.

Certainly easier than carrying around a refrigerator.

Journal Reference
Zhang, G., Haw, J.Y., Cai, H. et al. An integrated silicon photonic chip platform for continuous-variable quantum key distribution.^[$] Nat. Photonics (2019) doi:10.1038/s41566-019-0504-5

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Have astronomers found a new class of tiny black hole?

Black holes are the cosmic champions of hide-and-seek. Einstein predicted they existed in 1916, but it took over 100 years before a telescope as wide as the world snapped the first picture of a black hole. They're elusive beasts, avoiding detection because they swallow up light. Even so, astronomers can see the tell-tale signs of black holes in the universe by studying different forms of radiation, like X-rays. So far, that's worked -- and a huge number of black holes have been discovered by looking for these signs.

However, an entirely new detection method, pioneered by researchers at The Ohio State University, suggests there may be a whole population of black holes we've been missing.

The findings, published in the journal Science on Nov. 1, detail the discovery of a black hole orbiting the giant star 2MASS J05215658+4359220 (J05215658, for short) using data from Earth-based telescopes and Gaia satellite observations. The team shows J05215658 is being orbited by a massive unseen companion -- and they suspect it might be an entirely new class of black holes.

A noninteracting low-mass black hole–giant star binary system, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau4005)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

A new, and controversial, law went into effect this week in Russia. 'The National Digital Economy Program" was

signed by President Vladimir Putin in May, it requires Russian[sic] to route traffic through nodes under the control of the Russian Government. ISPs are obliged to install technical devices provided by the authorities to allow traffic inspection.

Of course, the concentration of the traffic through nodes controlled by Moscow and the deployment of technical hardware provided by the government could open the door to a massive surveillance

Russian authorities will be able to censor online content and to spy on persons of interest.

According to the Russian government, the law aims at ensuring that Russian sites will be reachable even if disconnected to the global internet, a scenario that could result from a cyber attack or an outage caused by an incident.

Russia also recently announced annual tests disconnecting from the global internet to assess the impacts of such a move.

Currently none of the twelve top level DNS providers are located in Russia, making the effort interesting to be sure.

Human Rights Watch and activists fear Russia aims to build a system like the Chinese Great Firewall that could be used to apply strict censorship.

The government however immediately laid such fears to rest when it "denied any intent of disconnecting Russian netizens from the Internet."

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Back in 2014-2015, during the 69^th session of the UN General Assembly, the ICT Strategy (A/69/517), was quietly approved. In it were provisions encouraging ICT collaboration and a mention of Free and Open Source Software. In line with these provisions a special open source software development lab has been established with locations in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Additional regions will be added. The labs, the United Nations Innovation Labs (UNTIL), are intended to accelerate society by addressing some of the needs assessed as being urgent.

The head of UNTIL is in an interview which might be of more symbolic value than anything else. However, it is news that the labs are getting off the ground.

UNTIL is poised to support local eco-systems in different ways, addressing as much as possible local requirements and integrating them with global requirements. UNTIL Labs, operational in Egypt, Finland, India and Malaysia, are creating cutting edge technology and can play the role of incubator and accelerator of existing solutions. The lab in India has a contract with UN-Habitat to build Afghanistan's first land registry using blockchain technology. The Lab in Malaysia is also using blockchain, to create a platform for ethical fashion in support of the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week's "Design to Sustain" initiative. The lab in Cairo is exploring new high-tech ways to improve Egypt's agricultural sector through robotics and IoT sensors to monitor field humidity and activate irrigation systems. And then there's Reboot the Earth. That was the UN's largest ever hackathon – over 1,000 youth in six countries coming up with solutions to the problem of climate change. Our collaboration didn't stop when the hackathons ended. After presenting their ideas to world leaders in NYC during the UN General Assembly week, winning teams returned to our Labs where they are receiving support to bring their ideas forward. As we speak, winners are building their solutions with UNTIL lab support, ready to present viable products at Davos next year.

We also see one of UNTIL's role as a broker of technology. Member States and the UN do not need to reinvent the wheel. There's lot of wonderful technology that already exists that could be of huge benefit if only it could reach the right beneficiaries worldwide. UNTIL is working to identify promising technologies as well as partners in Member States who could be early adopters, again, focusing on the SDG challenges, first. The first UNTIL question is always what is the 2030 challenge we want to resolve? And thereafter what technology could be adopted to resolve it?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A toe bone hints that Neandertals used eagle talons as jewelry

An ancient eagle's toe bone featuring stone tool incisions adds to evidence that Neandertals made pendants or other ornaments out of birds' talons, researchers conclude in the Nov. 1 Science Advances.

Excavations in Foradada Cave, near northeastern Spain's Mediterranean coast, have produced a roughly 39,000-year-old imperial eagle toe fossil. Stone tool marks on the bone were likely made when someone removed a talon from the bird's foot, say archaeologist Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo of Madrid's Institute of Human Evolution in Africa and colleagues. Neandertals have been linked to the style of stone artifacts found in the cave, the scientists add.

Only 12 bones from imperial eagles and other birds of prey, including seven toe bones and a talon, were found in the cave. No signs of burned sediment or cooking areas turned up, suggesting that these creatures were sought for talons and not as food, the scientists say.

This discovery joins similar finds of avian toe bones and claws at 10 southern European sites dating to between 130,000 and 42,000 years ago that have been attributed to Neandertals (SN: 3/20/15).

Citations: A. Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. The Chȃtelperronian Neanderthals of Cova Foradada (Calafell, Spain) used imperial eagle phalanges for symbolic purposes. Science Advances. Vol. 5, November 1, 2019. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax1984.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new study in the journal Science Advances says that carbon impacts from the loss of intact tropical forests has been grossly underreported.

The study calculates new figures relating to intact tropical forest lost between 2000-2013 that show a staggering increase of 626 percent in the long-term net carbon impacts through 2050. The revised total equals two years' worth of all global land-use change emissions.

The authors of the study, from WCS, University of Queensland, University of Oxford, Zoological Society of London, World Resources Institute, University of Maryland, and University of Northern British Columbia, found that direct clearance of intact tropical forests resulted in just 3.2 percent of gross carbon emissions from all deforestation across the pan-tropics. However, when they factored in full carbon accounting, which considers forgone carbon removals (carbon sequestration that would occur annually into the future if cleared or degraded forest had remained intact after year 2000), selective logging, edge effects and declines of carbon-dense tree species due to overhunting of seed-dispersing animals, they discovered that the figure skyrocketed by a factor of more than six times.

Said the study's lead author Sean Maxwell of WCS and the University of Queensland: "Our results revealed that continued destruction of intact tropical forests is a ticking time bomb for carbon emissions. There is an urgent need to safeguard these landscapes because they play an indispensable role in stabilizing the climate."

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Google is worried an antitrust probe will reveal its secrets

We're all accustomed to everyday users, competitors, regulators, and even governments looking for assurances that their important data would be protected against Google's misuse – but how often does Google have to raise its voice, to make sure its sensitive information is protected out there in the world?

Well – the shoe seems to be well on the other foot here, in a probe conducted in Texas into allegations of the giant's antitrust behavior.

According to a report from the Hill, Google is very eager to make sure that third parties, i.e., consultants hired by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to help build the case, “won't leak any confidential information to Google's rivals.”

And who knows it better than Google how “sharing” sensitive data with third parties can negatively affect those the data belongs to – Google routinely does it to their billions of users. In fact, its dominance in the tech market in many segments in the US, and in the western world, is squarely built on that “sharing” business model.

But now that a multi-state probe filed in Texas is underway, Google, formally its parent Alphabet, have their feathers ruffled at the very thought.

Google has asked the judge to impose “an order limiting how much sensitive business information the two consultants can obtain and preventing them from working with Google competitors during or after the investigation,” the Hill writes.

The subtle assertion that Google, in its core businesses, actually has any competitors in the US market aside – the giant's petition cites what appear to be rivals rather than true competitors – America's News Corp and Microsoft, and Russia's Yandex – and consultants who previously worked on these company's cases against Google.

In the petition, Google says that two of the Attorney General's consultants “work for competitors and complainants.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Spider webs don't rot easily and scientists may have figured out why

From spooky abandoned houses to dark forest corners, spider webs have an aura of eternal existence. In reality, the silk threads can last hours to weeks without rotting. That's because bacteria that would aid decomposition are unable to access the silk's nitrogen, a nutrient the microbes need for growth and reproduction, a new study suggests.

Previous research had hinted that spider webs might have antimicrobial properties that outright kill bacteria. But subjecting the webs of three spider species to four types of bacteria revealed that the spiders use a resist strategy instead, researchers report October 23 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The scientists "challenge something that has gone significantly overlooked," says Jeffery Yarger, a biochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who wasn't involved in the research. "We just assumed [the silk] has some kind of standard antimicrobial property."

Spiders spin strings of silk to trap food, wrap their eggs and rappel. Their silk webs can sport leaf debris for camouflage amidst tree canopies or leftover dead insects for a meal later. These bits and bobs lure bacteria and fungi involved in decomposition to the web, exposing the protein-rich web silks to the microbes.

"But [the microbes] don't seem to affect spider silk," says Dakota Piorkowski, a biologist at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan.

The Citation quoted below states "Our results indicate that spider silk's resistance to bacterial degradation is likely due to bacteriostatic rather than antibacterial mechanisms when nitrogen is inaccessible."

Citations:

S. Zhang et al. Nitrogen unavailability helps to protect spider silk from bacterial growth. Journal of Experimental Biology. Vol. 222, October 23, 2019. doi: 10.1242/jeb.214981.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

GDPR Fines Haven't Rocked the Data Privacy World

When it launched, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became bigger than Beyoncé. Since then, some of the hype around the law has waned, but there's still one thing that gets people excited: fines.

Under the law, data-protection regulators across Europe have boosted powers to punish companies and organizations who are found in breach of the GDPR. The most serious consequences can be fines of up to €20 million ($22.4 million) or 4 percent of a firm's global turnover, whichever is greater. These are larger than the £500,000 ($650,000) penalties that could be issued by the UK's regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, under the old data-protection rules.

Before the GDPR was enforced there were outlandish predictions that businesses would be hit with huge fines for data-protection issues. Some estimates claimed GDPR fines would be 79 times higher than those under previous rules; others said banks would be hit with fines of up to €4.7 billion ($5.3 billion) in the coming years.

Unsurprisingly there hasn't been a deluge of fines running into millions or billions of euros, but the EU's 28 data-protection regulators are slowly beginning to flex their enforcement muscles—including against big tech companies.

After the first year of the GDPR, the European Data Protection Board reported (PDF) that nations had examined 206,326 cases under the law. Helen Dixon, the Irish data-protection regulator who has jurisdiction over US tech companies because of their European headquarters in Ireland, has investigations open into at least 17 multinational firms. These include Facebook and its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram, plus Google and Twitter.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Google exec suggests Elizabeth Warren is misguided and only big tech can prevent "the next Trump situation"

A new Project Veritas report includes an undercover video, leaked documents, and statements from a whistleblower that all paint a grim picture of Google's apparent lack of fairness, and its bias.

Google's now a very powerful company, and that's upsetting both sides in the US political divide.

As a consequence, many politicians are looking for ways to contain that power – either by applying antitrust or some other type of legislation against the company.

In the comments recorded in an undercover video, Google's Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, cheerfully and not without a hint of hubris acknowledges that Google has been called to appear before Congress many times – but simply chose to ignore those invitations.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Because Internet makes a linguist's case for l33t speak, other online-text fads

The Internet has done good things to the English language.

That's the most important thing linguist Gretchen McCulloch has to say in her book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Though many prominent opinion-havers rage about the imminent death of the English language at the hands of emoji-wielding teenagers, the Internet has done no more harm to English than television, radio, or dime novels.

In fact, McCulloch makes a compelling argument that Internet language, and emoji in particular, is restoring life to the relatively emotionless medium of text. For hundreds of years, public writing was limited to formal contexts like newspapers and books, written by educated people using very formal language for the edification of other educated people. Even fiction draws a clear line between informal dialogue and formal narration. On the Internet, on the other hand, the lines are much less clear. Private, informal writing (like shopping lists or notes passed between students at the back of a classroom) is now publicly visible, and the conventions developed by individuals or small groups for writing informally can spread and interact on a global scale. To McCulloch, this is more exciting than it is scary, and reading Because Internet might convince you to feel the same.

[...] McCulloch is on a mission to make linguistics relatable—and, hear me out, she's on a roll in that respect. She does this not only through Because Internet, but also through Lingthusiasm, the podcast she co-hosts with fellow linguist Lauren Gawne. As its name suggests, Lingthusiasm shows off the hosts' enthusiasm about linguistics and calls on its listeners to get excited about a wide variety of linguistic topics, such as how vowels work, the ways people from different cultures talk about time, and why efforts to create a single world language never catch on. On Lingthusiasm, McCulloch and Gawne dispel myths about language and inspire the kind of excitement that turns curious students into scientists. And in Because Internet, McCulloch continues to demystify and delight.

Original Submission