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MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for FatPhil.

China's mega-dump already full - 25 years early

China's largest dump is already full - 25 years ahead of schedule.

The Jiangcungou landfill in Shaanxi Province, which is the size of around 100 football fields, was designed to take 2,500 tonnes of rubbish per day.

But instead it received 10,000 tonnes of waste per day - the most of any landfill site in China.

[...] The Jiangcungou landfill in Xi'an city was built in 1994 and was designed to last until 2044.

The landfill serves over 8 million citizens. It spans an area of almost 700,000 square metres, with a depth of 150 metres and a storage capacity of more than 34 million cubic metres.

Until recently, Xi'an was one of the few cities in China that solely relied on landfill to dispose of household waste - leading to capacity being reached early.

Earlier this month, a new incineration plant was opened, and at least four more are expected to open by 2020. Together, they are expected to be able to process 12,750 tonnes of rubbish per day.

The move is part of a national plan to reduce the number of landfills, and instead use other waste disposal methods like incineration.

The landfill site in Xi'an will eventually become an "ecological park".

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

China says its courts trump Hong Kong's on face mask ruling

China's top legislature has insisted Hong Kong courts had no power to rule on the constitutionality of legislation under the city's Basic Law, as it condemned a decision by the high court to overturn a ban on face masks worn by pro-democracy protesters.

The statement on Tuesday came a day after the high court ruled that the face mask ban - introduced through colonial-era emergency laws - was unconstitutional.

[...] "Whether the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region comply with the Basic Law of Hong Kong can only be judged and decided by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress," Yan Tanwei, a spokesman for the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, said in a statement.

"No other authority has the right to make judgments and decisions," he added.

[...] Protests started in June with rallies that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets in a largely peaceful call for the withdrawal of a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited to mainland China for trial.

They have since evolved into a series of demands for greater democracy and freedoms as well as an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality. Protesters worry China is encroaching on the freedoms given to Hong Kong when the United Kingdom returned the territory to China under what was known as "one country, two systems" in 1997.

fliptop writes:

Is 6 years in prison excessive for launching DDoS attacks against Websites that caused only intermittent downtime?

An Ohio man was sentenced last month to six years in prison for a series of DDoS attacks against websites for the city of Akron, Ohio, and the Akron police department.

The man, 33-year-old James Robinson, was arrested in May 2019 and pleaded guilty to all accusations, most of which were easy to prove, as Robinson had publicly documented all the attacks on the @AkronPhoenix420 Twitter profile while they happened.

The account contains a litany of tweets about DDoS attacks Robinson allegedly carried out. Targets included websites for the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and NATO. These attacks never caused any mass outages, and two cyber-security firms which provide DDoS mitigation services said they were never aware of his activities until his arrest in 2018.

The FBI tracked down Robinson after the suspect accessed the AkronPhoenix420 Twitter account on one occasion from his home IP address. He also associated his personal mobile phone number with the same Twitter account, helping authorities confirm his identity.

[...] In interrogations following his arrest, Robinson told investigators he had grudges against the city's police force.

[...] Ironically, the operator of eight DDoS booter services that allowed people like Robinson to rent the firepower to carry out these types of attacks only got a 13-month prison sentence.

Original Submission

shrewdsheep writes:

In a new attempt to dethrone humans in game-play, DeepMind takes on Starcraft II. The results are published in Nature.

DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab’s more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature.

Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game’s playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the upper echelons of pro play. It also limited AlphaStar to only viewing the portion of the map a human would see and restricted the number of mouse clicks it could register to 22 non-duplicated actions every five seconds of play, to align it with standard human movement.

Still, the AI was capable of achieving grandmaster level, the highest possible online competitive ranking, and marks the first ever system to do so in StarCraft II. DeepMind sees the advancement as more proof that general-purpose reinforcement learning, which is the machine learning technique underpinning the training of AlphaStar, may one day be used to train self-learning robots, self-driving cars, and create more advanced image and object recognition systems.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the little brown bat—a small mouse-eared bat with glossy brown fur—a warm, dry place to roost is essential to the species' survival. Reproductive females huddle their small furry bodies together to save thermal energy during maternity season (summer), forming "maternity colonies." In the face of severe population losses across North America, summer access to an attic or other permanent sheltered structure, as opposed to just trees or rock crevices, is a huge benefit to these bats.

In a new study published in the Ecological Society of America's journal Ecosphere, researchers with Ohio University, University of Kentucky, and the US National Park Service investigate and describe the conservation importance of buildings relative to natural, alternative roosts for little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone's iconic high-elevation landscape provides abundant natural roosting places but not many buildings. The study involved four visitor areas with several buildings that are known to host bold little brown bats, which are among the few bat species that will make their homes in structures that are actively used by people, allowing humans to get up close and personal. Sometimes, the investigation even involved researchers capturing them by hand.

[...]Over the summers of 2012-2015, researchers tracked individual bats in the park. Using temperature-sensitive radio-transmitters, the researchers measured roost preferences and body temperature regulation in adult male and female bats roosting in buildings, trees, and rocks.

Their results show that reproductive females roost in attics in the study area on 84% of all days for which they collected data, while males roost exclusively in rock crevices or trees. It appears then that outside of maternity colonies, adult males and non-reproductive females will roost by themselves or in small aggregations.

More information: Joseph S. Johnson et al, Buildings provide vital habitat for little brown myotis ( Myotis lucifugus ) in a high‐elevation landscape, Ecosphere (2019). DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.2925

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

On thing keeps me awake at night, and during the day, for that matter: GRBs. Gamma Ray Bursts. If one occurred relatively close to the earth, and was aimed right at us, well, things would not go well. And now, Looks like they may be stronger than thought..

An international team of astronomers has detected a pair of gamma-ray bursts with energies more powerful than anything ever seen before. GRBs are the strongest explosions known in the cosmos, but these latest observations suggests we’ve significantly underestimated their true potential.

Three new papers published today in Nature describe two new gamma-ray bursts—GRB 190114C and GRB 180720B—both of which yielded the highest-energy photons ever recorded for GRB events. The unprecedented observations are casting new light—quite literally—onto these mysterious cosmic events and the mechanics behind them.

Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be triggered when gigantic stars collapse into black holes, causing a supernova. The resulting explosion produces a powerful, concentrated jet that shoots material into space at 99.99 percent the speed of light. The rapidly accelerating particles within the jet produce gamma rays through complex interactions with magnetic fields and radiation. The ensuing gamma rays continue to travel through interstellar space, some of which eventually reach Earth. When they come into contact with our atmosphere, gamma rays trigger a particle cascade that in turn generates a phenomenon known as Cherenkov light, which can be detected by specially equipped telescopes.

Details:

The first of these high-energy events, GRB 180720B, happened on July 20, 2018, and is described in a paper led by astronomers from the Max Planck Institute, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchotron (DESY), the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), and several other institutions. The second event, GRB 190114C, occurred on January 14, 2019, and is described in two new papers (here and here), both led by Razmik Mirzoyan from the Max Planck Institute for Physics. Over 300 scientists from around the world were involved in the research.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Using drones deployed in the air and GoPros underwater, Oregon State University marine ecologist Leigh Torres recently completed her fourth field season documenting previously unseen behaviors of gray whales—and gathering their poop—off the Oregon coast.

Torres and her team use a 17-foot inflatable boat to track gray whales right off the shoreline, around Newport, Ore. Once they see a whale, they drop a GoPro underwater to see what the whale is eating and deploy the drone overhead to watch behaviors and gather data about the size of the whales to understand more about their health.

And, if they are lucky, the researchers spot and gather poop, which further helps them understand whales' health and biology.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Write AI code once, run anywhere—it's not Java, it's Intel's oneAPI

Saturday afternoon (Nov. 16) at Supercomputing 2019, Intel launched a new programming model called oneAPI. Intel describes the necessity of tightly coupling middleware and frameworks directly to specific hardware as one of the largest pain points of AI/Machine Learning development. The oneAPI model is intended to abstract that tight coupling away, allowing developers to focus on their actual project and re-use the same code when the underlying hardware changes.

This sort of "write once, run anywhere" mantra is reminiscent of Sun's early pitches for the Java language. However, Bill Savage, general manager of compute performance for Intel, told Ars that's not an accurate characterization. Although each approach addresses the same basic problem—tight coupling to machine hardware making developers' lives more difficult and getting in the way of code re-use—the approaches are very different.

[...] When we questioned Savage about oneAPI's design and performance expectations, he distanced it firmly from Java, pointing out that there is no bytecode involved. Instead, oneAPI is a set of libraries that tie hardware-agnostic API calls directly to heavily optimized, low-level code that drives the actual hardware available in the local environment. So instead of "Java for Artificial Intelligence," the high-level takeaway is more along the lines of "OpenGL/DirectX for Artificial Intelligence."

For even higher-performance coding inside tight loops, oneAPI also introduces a new language variant called "Data Parallel C++" allowing even very low-level optimized code to target multiple architectures. Data Parallel C++ leverages and extends SYCL, a "single source" abstraction layer for OpenCL programming.

In its current version, a oneAPI developer still needs to target the basic hardware type he or she is coding for—for example, CPUs, GPUs, or FPGAs. Beyond that basic targeting, oneAPI keeps the code optimized for any supported hardware variant. This would, for example, allow users of a oneAPI-developed project to run the same code on either Nvidia's Tesla v100 or Intel's own newly released Ponte Vecchio GPU.

Related: Intel Xe High Performance Computing GPUs will use Chiplets

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel's Xe for HPC: Ponte Vecchio with Chiplets, EMIB, and Foveros on 7nm, Coming 2021

Today is Intel's pre-SC19 HPC Devcon event, and with Raja Koduri on stage, the company has given a small glimpse into its high-performance compute accelerator strategy for 2021. Intel disclosed that its new hardware has the codename 'Ponte Vecchio' and will be built on a 7nm process, as well as some other small interesting bits.

[...] For high-performance computing, the presentation highlighted three key areas that the Xe architecture will be targeting. First is a flexible data-parallel vector matrix engine, which plays into the hands of AI acceleration and AI training in a big way. The second is high double precision (FP64) throughput, which has somewhat been disappearing of late due to reduced precision AI workloads, but is still a strong requirement in traditional HPC workloads like, weather, oil and gas, and astronomy. (We should point out that the diagram shows a 15x7 block of units, and Intel's Gen architecture uses 7 threads per execution unit.) The third tine in this trident is that Intel's HPC efforts will have a high cache and memory bandwidth, which the slides suggest will be directly coupled to individual compute chiplets ensuring a fast interconnect.

So in this case, enter Ponte Vecchio, named after the bridge that crosses the river Arno in Florence, Italy. This will be Intel's first 'exascale class' graphics solution, and is clearly using both chiplet technology (based on 7nm) and Foveros/die stacking packaging methods. We further confirmed after our call, based on discussions we had with Intel earlier in the year, that Ponte Vecchio will also use Intel's Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology, joining chiplets together. Pulling all the chips into a single package is fine, meanwhile GPU-to-GPU communication will occur through a Compute eXpress Link (CXL) interface, layered on top of PCIe 5.0.

Intel's 2021 Exascale Vision in Aurora: Two Sapphire Rapids CPUs with Six Ponte Vecchio GPUs

As part of today's announcement, Intel has put some information on the table for a typical 'Aurora' [supercomputer] compute note. While not giving any specifics such as core counts or memory types, the company stated that a standard node will contain two next generation CPUs and six next generation GPUs, all connected via new connectivity standards.

Those CPUs will be Sapphire Rapids CPUs, Intel's second generation of 10nm server processors coming after the Ice Lake Xeons. The announcement today reaffirmed that Sapphire Rapids is a 2021 processor; and likely a late 2021 processor, as the company also confirmed that Ice Lake will have its volume ramp through late 2020. Judging from Intel's images, Sapphire Rapids is set to have eight memory channels per processor, with enough I/O to connect to three GPUs. Within an Aurora node, two of these Sapphire Rapids CPUs will be paired together, and support the next generation of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (2nd Gen Optane DCPMM). We already know from other sources that Sapphire Rapids is likely to be DDR5 as well, although I don't believe Intel has said that outright at this point.

See also: Intel Xe GPU Architecture Detailed – Ponte Vecchio Xe HPC Exascale GPU With 1000s of EUs, Massive HBM Memory, Rambo Cache
AnandTech Exclusive: An Interview with Intel's Raja Koduri about Xe

Original Submission

Teckla writes:

Brad McQuaid, MMORPG developer, the creator of "EverQuest" and the Chief Creative Officer of Visionary Realms, has died at the age of 51, according to a tweet from Pantheon MMO's official account. McQuaid died on November 18. Brad McQuaid's cause of death has not been made public.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

China Weighing a Takeover Bid From an American Semiconductor – is it Payback Time for the Recent U.S. Scuttling of Chinese Takeovers?

China's antitrust regulator is scrutinizing the attempt by Diodes Inc. – an American manufacturer and supplier of discrete, logic, analog and mixed-signal semiconductors – to acquire the Taiwan-based Lite-On Semiconductor Corp. along with its Shanghai-based affiliate, On-Bright Electronics Inc. According to Bloomberg, the scrutiny was necessitated by fears in China that the $428 million deal would deliver the Chinese affiliate of Lite-On into American hands and compromise national interests.

As a reference, Diodes Inc. has a market capitalization of $2.33 Billion and a trailing twelve-month income of $138.3 million. On the other hand, On-Bright – the Chinese maker of chipsets for power management that's listed in Taipei – has a market cap of NT$9.88 billion ($324 million).

The Texas-based Diodes Inc. had launched its bid in August for Lite-On Semiconductor which, as per regulatory filings, holds almost a third of the Chinese Bright-On firm. The deal was expected to conclude by April 2020. Moreover, a Lite-On Semiconductor representative informed Bloomberg that Diode had filed for an antitrust review by Chinese authorities in mid-September.

This development marks the growing suspicion that American M&A activities presently garner in China. The State Administration for Market Regulation in China seems to be receptive to the cautionary note emanating from multiple industry organizations regarding this acquisition. Consequently, the regulator may call for the exclusion of the Chinese affiliate from this deal.

Diodes Incorporated and Lite-On.

Related: How China Plans to Lead the Computer Chip Industry

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX Starship Mk. 1 fails during cryogenic loading test

SpaceX's first full-scale Starship prototype – [Mark 1 (Mk. 1)] – has experienced a major failure at its Boca Chica test site in southern Texas. The failure occurred late in the afternoon on Wednesday, midway through a test of the vehicle's propellant tanks.

The Mk. 1 Starship – which was shown off to the world in September as part of SpaceX's and Elon Musk's presentation of the design changes to the Starship system was to fly the first 20 km test flight of the program in the coming weeks.

The main event of today, the Mk. 1 Starship's first cryogenic loading test, involved filling the methane and oxygen tanks with a cryogenic liquid.

During the test, the top bulkhead of the vehicle ruptured and was ejected away from the site, followed by a large cloud of vapors and cryogenic liquid from the tank.

There will be no attempt to salvage Starship Mk1, with focus instead shifting to Mk3 (in Texas) and Mk2 (in Florida):

Minutes after the anomaly was broadcast on several unofficial livestreams of SpaceX's Boca Chica facilities, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Starship Mk1's failure in a tweet, telegraphing a general lack of worry. Of note, Musk indicated that Mk1 was valuable mainly as a manufacturing pathfinder, entirely believable but also partially contradicting his September 2019 presentation, in which he pretty clearly stated that Mk1 would soon be launched to ~20 km to demonstrate Starship's exotic new skydiver landing strategy.

Musk says that instead of repairing Starship Mk1, SpaceX's Boca Chica team will move directly to Starship Mk3, a significantly more advanced design that has benefitted from the numerous lessons learned from building and flying Starhopper and fabricating Starship Mk1. The first Starship Mk3 ring appears to have already been prepared, but SpaceX's South Texas focus has clearly been almost entirely on preparing Starship Mk1 for wet dress rehearsal, static fire, and flight tests. After today's failure, it sounds like Mk1 will most likely be retired early and replaced as soon as possible by Mk3.

Above all else, the most important takeaway from today's Starship Mk1 anomaly is that the vehicle was a very early prototype and SpaceX likely wants to have vehicle failures occur on the ground or in-flight. As long as no humans are at risk, pushing Starship to failure (or suffering unplanned failures like today's) can only serve to benefit and improve the vehicle's design, especially when the failed hardware can be recovered intact (ish) and carefully analyzed.

Video of the rupture is available on NASASpaceFlight's forums. Start with this forum post and continue down the page for other pictures and videos.

Previously: SpaceX Provides Update on Starship with Assembled Prototype as the Backdrop

Related: The SpaceX Starship Pushback: NASA Administrator's Scolding and More
SpaceX's Starship Can Launch 400 Starlink Satellites at Once
Artemis Program Requires More Cash to Reach Moon by 2024; SLS Could Cost 1,000x More Than Starship

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Google outlines plans for mainline Linux kernel support in Android

It seems like Google is working hard to update and upstream the Linux kernel that sits at the heart of every Android phone. The company was a big participant in this year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a yearly meeting of the top Linux developers, and Google spent a lot of time talking about getting Android to work with a generic Linux kernel instead of the highly customized version it uses now. It even showed an Android phone running a mainline Linux kernel.

But first, some background on Android's current kernel mess.Currently, three major forks happen in between the "mainline" Linux kernel and a shipping Android device (note that "mainline" here has no relation to Google's own "Project Mainline"). First, Google takes the LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel and turns it into the "Android Common kernel"—the Linux kernel with all the Android OS-specific patches applied. Android Common is shipped to the SoC vendor (usually Qualcomm) where it gets its first round of hardware-specific additions, first focusing on a particular model of SoC. This "SoC Kernel" then gets sent to a device manufacturer for even more hardware-specific code that supports every other piece of hardware, like the display, camera, speakers, usb ports, and any extra hardware. This is the "Device Kernel," and it's what actually ships on a device.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Decoding how some animals pause pregnancies could unlock new cancer treatments

Putting your pregnancy on pause until the time is right to give birth sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but for many mammals what's known as "embryonic diapause" is an essential part of raising their young.

Although scientists have known since the 1850s that some animals have this ability, it is only now becoming clear how it could teach us valuable lessons about human pregnancy, stem cells, and cancer.

More than 130 species of mammal can pause their pregnancies. The pause can last anywhere between a couple of days and 11 months. In most species (except some bats, who do it a little later) this happens when the embryo is a tiny ball of about 80 cells, before it attaches to the uterus.

It's not just a single group of mammals, either. Various species seem to have developed the ability as needed to reproduce more successfully. Most carnivores can pause their pregnancies, including all bears and most seals, but so can many rodents, deer, armadillos, and anteaters.

More than a third of the species that take a breather during gestation are from Australia, including some possums and all but three species of kangaroo and wallaby.

The record-holder for pregnancy pause time is the tammar wallaby, which has been studied extensively for its ability to put embryos on hold for up to 11 months.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Back in 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled that it's illegal for the police to attach a GPS tracking device to someone's car without a warrant. But what if you find a GPS tracking device on your car? Can you remove it?

A little more than a year ago, the state of Indiana charged a suspected drug dealer with theft for removing a government-owned GPS tracking device from his SUV. This month, the state's Supreme Court began considering the case, and some justices seemed skeptical of the government's argument.

"I'm really struggling with how is that theft," said Justice Steven David during recent oral arguments.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission