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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Galactic cosmic ray model works without physics, and that is bad:

Way back when the world was young and I still attended physics conferences, I got very excited by galactic cosmic rays. There seemed to be more cosmic rays than expected coming from the center of our galaxy. Those excess cosmic rays might be evidence for dark matter, which would be a big breakthrough if confirmed. Later modeling of cosmic ray sources showed that the extra cosmic rays were probably not coming from the annihilation of dark matter. But, now it seems we are back to square one, because that model may not have been accurate.

[...]Except that the fitting procedure turns out to be not so robust after all. A pair of scientists performed the fitting procedure on model data but modified the availability of the types of sources that could be fit (called templates) and played with the amount of cosmic rays from dark matter. They found that the model almost always drove the dark matter contribution to zero. The net result was that, even if up to 15 percent of the cosmic ray flux was due to dark matter, the model would still report a dark matter contribution that was near zero.

The researchers also tested the fit on real data. They took observational data and modified it by adding a dark matter contribution to it. As with the model data, they found that the fitting procedure attributed all the dark matter signal to other sources. Only if they set the dark matter contribution to around 15 percent or higher would it start showing up in the fitting results.

Although the results might be explained by a coincidence, it seems more likely that the statistical procedure is simply not good enough. The consequence is that the dark matter explanation for the cosmic ray excess is back on the table.

Revival of the Dark Matter Hypothesis for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess Rebecca K. Leane, Tracy R. Slatyer. Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 241101 – Published 11 December 2019.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

The surprisingly complicated physics of why cats always land on their feet:

Scientists are not immune to the alluringly aloof charms of the domestic cat. Sure, Erwin Schrödinger could be accused of animal cruelty for his famous thought experiment, but Edwin Hubble had a cat named Copernicus, who sprawled across the papers on the astronomer's desk as he worked, purring contentedly. A Siamese cat named Chester was even listed as co-author (F.D.C. Willard) with physicist Jack H. Hetherington on a low-temperature physics paper in 1975, published in Physical Review Letters. So perhaps it's not surprising that there is a long, rich history, spanning some 300 years, of scientists pondering the mystery of how a falling cat somehow always manages to land on their feet, a phenomenon known as "cat-turning."

"The falling cat is often sort of a sideline area in research," physicist and cat lover Greg Gbur told Ars. "Cats have a reputation for being mischievous and well-represented in the history. The cats just sort of pop in where you least expect them. They manage to cause a lot of trouble in the history of science, as well as in my personal science. I often say that cats are cleverer than we think, but less clever than they think." A professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Gbur gives a lively, entertaining account of that history in his recent book, Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Driver training was reportedly too much of "a bottleneck" for Amazon:

Amazon is rapidly dispensing with carriers such as FedEx for its retail deliveries, bringing the logistics business in-house to ship more Prime packages more quickly. The speed and money savings, though, seem to be coming at the cost of health and safety concerns—and a new report says the company is well aware, and Amazon is letting it happen anyway.

Internal documents show the company had plans to implement driver safety training courses but scrapped them in order to get drivers up and running faster, ProPublica and BuzzFeed News report.

"We chose not to have onroad practical training because it was a bottleneck" to getting drivers on the road, a senior manager wrote.

It was just one of many examples the reporters found of Amazon ignoring evidence its logistics business was overburdened.

[...] Amazon strenuously objected to the new story, calling the report "another attempt by ProPublica and BuzzFeed to push a preconceived narrative that is simply untrue."

The company told ProPublica it provided more than 1 million hours of safety training to employees and contractors in the last year but did not say how many of its 750,000 worldwide employees participated in said training. Amazon also said it spent $55 million on "safety improvement projects" last year—"about one-fifth of 1% of the $27.7 billion the company spent on shipping last year," the reporters write.

"Nothing is more important to us than safety," the company added.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/us-colleges-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-devices-tracking-locations-of-hundreds-of-thou-2154310 :

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.

"They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change."

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

In response we have:

How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System:

This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: "Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands," read the Washington Post link.

Vick countered with an offer to students:

If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.

We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Bring the charging port to you:

As electric vehicles gain in popularity, building the infrastructure necessary to charge them all will be a costly endeavor. However, Volkswagen may have a solution. VW Group Components introduced a new mobile robot concept that could autonomously help charge EVs wherever they are located, essentially making any parking spot a charging port.

The robot, which is autonomous, can move what VW calls battery wagons – 25-kilowatt-hour battery packs – to a vehicle where the robot then connects the battery wagon to the vehicle. Summoning the robot happens either via a mobile app or vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. The robot uses various cameras, laser scanners, and ultrasonic sensors to operate autonomously, including recognizing and reacting to obstacles.

VW says the robot and battery wagons could help charge vehicles in areas where installing sufficient EV charging infrastructure could be costly – like an underground parking structure or other difficult-to-renovate locations. Drivers looking for a parking spot in a parking structure could park anywhere, regardless of whether there are any open charge ports, and have VW's mobile robot wheel a battery wagon over to begin charging the vehicle.

Also at Digital Trends

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Tencent details how its MOBA-playing AI system beats 99.81% of human opponents:

In August, Tencent announced it had developed an AI system capable of defeating teams of pros in a five-on-five match in Honor of Kings (or Arena of Valor, depending on the region). This was a noteworthy achievement — Honor of Kings occupies the video game subgenre known as multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs), which are incomplete information games in the sense that players are unaware of the actions other players choose. The endgame, then, isn't merely AI that achieves Honor of Kings superhero performance, but insights that might be used to develop systems capable of solving some of society's toughest challenges.

A paper published this week peels back the layers of Tencent's technique, which the coauthors describe as "highly scalable." They claim its novel strategies enable it to explore the game map "efficiently," with an actor-critic architecture that self-improves over time.

As the researchers point out, real-time strategy games like Honor of Kings require highly complex action control compared with traditional board games and Atari games. Their environments also tend to be more complicated (Honor of Kings has 10^600 possible states and and 10^18,000 possible actions) and the objectives more complex on the whole. Agents must not only learn to plan, attack, and defend but also to control skill combos, induce, and deceive opponents, all while contending with hazards like creeps and fully automated turrets.

[...] The Tencent researchers say that they plan to make both their framework and algorithms open source in the near future, toward the goal of fostering research on complex games like Honor of Kings.

Want to play a game?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Google Chrome impacted by new Magellan 2.0 vulnerabilities:

A new set of SQLite vulnerabilities can allow attackers to remotely run malicious code inside Google Chrome, the world's most popular web browser.

The vulnerabilities, five, in total, are named "Magellan 2.0," and were disclosed today by the Tencent Blade security team.

All apps that use an SQLite database are vulnerable to Magellan 2.0; however, the danger of "remote exploitation" is smaller than the one in Chrome, where a feature called the WebSQL API exposes Chrome users to remote attacks, by default.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained:

Ars recently had the opportunity to spend some quality time touring the restored Apollo "Mission Control" room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. We talked with Sy Liebergot, a retired NASA flight controller who took part in some of the most famous manned space flight missions of all time, including Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. The feature article "Going boldly: Behind the scenes at NASA's hallowed Mission Control Center" goes in depth on what "Mission Control" did during Apollo and how it all worked, but there just wasn't room to fit in detailed descriptions and diagrams of all of the different flight controller consoles—I'm no John Siracusa, after all!

But Ars readers love space, and there was so much extra information that I couldn't sit on it. So this is a station-by-station tour of Historical Mission Operations Control Room 2, or "MOCR 2." As mentioned in the feature, MOCR 2 was used for almost every Gemini and Apollo flight, and in the late 1990s was restored to its Apollo-era appearance. You can visit it if you're in Houston, but you won't get any closer than the glassed-in visitor gallery in the back, and that's just not close enough. Strap yourselves in and prepare for an up-close look at the MOCR consoles, Ars style.

[Ed Note - This is an older story but still quite interesting.]

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takyon writes:

The US officially raises the tobacco buying age to 21

A new law in the United States that prohibits the sale of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21 is now in effect, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed the new minimum age into law as part of a sweeping spending bill. On Friday, the FDA noted on its website that "it is now illegal for a retailer to sell any tobacco product -- including cigarettes, cigars and e-cigarettes -- to anyone under 21. FDA will provide additional details on this issue as they become available."

The increased age restriction for tobacco purchases is one of several provisions outside of the spending measures themselves attached to the broader $1.4 trillion spending agreement.

Also at ABC.

Previously: California to Permit Assisted Suicide Starting June 9th, Could Raise Smoking Age to 21
California's Legal Smoking Age Set to Rise to 21
Tobacco Roundup
U.S. Surgeon General Decries Teenage Vaping
Oregon Becomes the Fifth State to Raise the Tobacco Age Limit to 21
San Francisco Bans E-Cigarette Sales

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takyon writes:

NASA mission to track near Earth objects takes shape

A revamped NASA mission to search for near Earth objects from space has secured funding to start development as the agency works out details about how it will be managed.

The fiscal year 2020 "minibus" spending bill signed into law by President Trump Dec. 20 that provides $22.63 billion for NASA includes $35.6 million to start development of the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveillance Mission. That mission would fly a small space telescope with an infrared camera to discover and track NEOs, helping identify any that pose an impact risk to the Earth.

[...] NEO Surveillance Mission is the successor to NEOCam, a similar mission concept that was one of the finalists in the most recent round of the Discovery program. While NASA did not select NEOCam in early 2017 for development, it did provide funding to allow work to continue on its infrared detectors.

Zurbuchen said at the meeting that the reason for going from NEOCam to NEO Surveillance Mission was because the goals of the mission were not strictly scientific. The mission is designed to meet a congressionally mandated goal to identify all NEOs at least 140 meters in diameter, which represent those large enough to do damage on a regional or global scale in the event of an impact.

"The only reason we want every 140-meter object is not because we need it to do all the science," he said. "It's because we want to understand whether one of them is on a collision course over time to Earth."

Previously: NASA's Asteroid-Finding NEOCam Cancelled

Related: Americans Polled on Attitudes Toward the Space Program

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Russia claims it has successfully tested its own internet:

Russia has ramped up the balkanization of its technology and infrastructure over the past few months. The government's "sovereign internet" law -- which allows content to be blocked in an "emergency situation" -- took effect in November, and President Vladimir Putin recently signed a law that bans the sale of devices without pre-installed Russian apps. Today, Russia's Ministry of Communications announced that it has successfully tested a countrywide alternative to the internet, according to the BBC. How this network functions isn't clear, but the Ministry of Communications claims that users didn't notice any changes to their typical web use during the testing phase.

Countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have already restricted what their citizens can access and how they can communicate with one another on the internet. Russia's project -- nicknamed Runet -- presumably follows suit and lets the government filter content through its own censors. Runet "would get ISPs and telcos to configure the internet within their borders as a gigantic intranet, just like a large corporation does," Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at the University of Surrey, said to the BBC. This type of infrastructure would even make it difficult for VPNs to access blocked content. With all that said, it's difficult to tell just how successful this test was, or how far along Russia is in its goal to create its own Great Firewall.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

General Motors has asked regulators to allow it to test a limited number of autonomous cars without a steering wheel. Currently, all self-driving cars have one in place, with most also including a back-up driver ready to step in if something goes awry. The NHTSA is expected to respond to General Motors' request soon.

[...] Cruise, the autonomous-car unit of General Motors, wants to start testing its self-driving cars sans steering wheel. Indeed, it's already produced a video (above) showing what such a design might look like.

Current National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regulations, which were created at a time when self-driving cars were the stuff of science fiction, mean that vehicles have to include essential safety features such as a steering wheel and brake pedal. But the emergence of robot cars has put these rules under the spotlight. According to a recent Reuters report, the NHTSA has confirmed it's in talks with GM, which is asking for permission to test a limited number of autonomous cars without steering wheels or any other type of manual controls. GM first raised the idea with the NHTSA at the beginning of 2018, and last week James Owens, the agency's acting administrator, appeared to be warming to the idea. "I expect we're going to be able to move forward with these petitions soon — as soon as we can," Owens told Reuters, adding that it would "definitely" arrive at a decision sometime next year. He described the removal of manual controls from a self-driving car as "a big deal" because it would be the first time for such action to be taken — marking a major milestone in the road to autonomous cars. But U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who has been discussing GM's petition with the NHTSA, sounded a note of caution, noting how on a number of occasions autonomous-car companies have had to reevaluate their ambitious plans. Even GM said recently that it would have to delay the launch of a proposed robo-taxi service because its technology isn't quite ready.

Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/gm-requests-green-light-to-ditch-steering-wheel-in-its-self-driving-cars/

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Amazon wants to patent technology that could identify shoppers by their hands:

Today, visitors to Amazon Go cashierless stores need to scan an app to get in. In the future, Amazon may instead ask to just scan their hands instead.

The US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Amazon on Thursday for a touchless scanning system that would identify people not by their faces but by characteristics associated with the palms of their hands, including wrinkles and veins.

The application filing does not mean the company is definitely developing such technology, but the New York Post reported in September that Amazon was testing technology that would allow Whole Foods customers to scan their hand to pay at checkout rather than swiping a card. If the tech does make it to the real world, it seems the company might be considering using it in its Amazon Go stores: Many of the inventors listed on the application are employees working on Amazon Go, including Dilip Kumar, who has been the head of technology for Amazon Go and is vice president for Amazon's physical retail initiatives.

The filing is a glimpse at Amazon's ideas for putting its own tech-forward spin on how people shop in brick-and-mortar stores, now that it dominates many types of online shopping in the US. But a new potential method for identifying people using biometrics will also likely raise questions for a company that is already facing increased scrutiny over privacy concerns related to its products, ranging from its Alexa voice assistant to its Ring home security gadgets.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

FAA announces new system for remotely identifying and tracking drones:

The Federal Aviation Administration is implementing a new system that will allow comprehensive nationwide tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—commonly known as drones. The new system will enable regulators, law enforcement, and other interested parties to track drone movements and in some cases obtain identifying information. All new drones will be required to comply with the proposed rules within three years after the regulations go into effect—but that's still months away.

The lack of a comprehensive system for drone identification and tracking has been a long-standing barrier to the adoption of commercial drone technology. Companies like Amazon and UPS, for example, have long dreamed of making package deliveries using unmanned vehicles. But such efforts were blocked by law enforcement agencies worried about unidentified drones being used for terrorism, drug smuggling, or other crimes.

The new proposal will create a comprehensive realtime database with information about almost every unmanned vehicle in the sky. That will allow law enforcement to quickly identify registered vehicles. And it will make it easier to catch vehicles that are flying without authorization.

In the new system, each UAV would be assigned a unique identifier. During each flight, a drone will be required to transmit its identity and location over the Internet to an online service provider authorized by the FAA to be part of the location-tracking system. A vehicle flying more than 400 feet from its base station will also need to broadcast this information directly from the aircraft.

To enhance privacy, vehicle operators will have the option to generate a random session ID for each trip instead of broadcasting a vehicle's manufacturer-assigned serial number on every trip. The new system is welcomed by commercial drone operators. Indeed, CNBC reports that the most common complaint from the commercial drone industry is that the FAA is moving too slowly.

Also at:
The FAA wants to track all drones flying in the US
FAA proposes nationwide real-time tracking system for all drones

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

How birds drop 'unnecessary' genes can help us understand evolution:

Humans, the latest tally suggests, have approximately 21,000 genes in our genome, the set of genetic information in an organism. But do we really need every gene we have? What if we lost three or four? What if we lost 3,000 or 4,000? Could we still function? Humans have variation in their genomes, but the overall size does not vary dramatically among individuals, with the exception of certain genetic disorders like Down's syndrome, which is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 and all the genes that it carries.

Each gene in a genome provides the code for a protein that affects our lives, from the growth of our hair to allowing us to digest certain foods. Most of the genes found in the human genome are probably safe for now, but there are some organisms that, over time, have cut down their genome to live in various habitats.

Scientists previously thought that every gene in an organism's genome was essential for survival because humans have little variation in our genome sizes from person to person. However, studies using animals with smaller, streamlined genomes have proven this untrue.