SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

This Conversation Between A Passenger And An Airline Should Absolutely Terrify You:

A conversation between a passenger and an airline has gone viral, largely because people find it intensely creepy.

MacKenzie Fegan went to the airport last week. As with normal flights, she was expecting at some point to present her boarding card in order to get on her plane. However, she found all she had to do was look at a camera, and at no point was asked for her pass.

As convenient as that sounds, she had questions, which she put to the airline, JetBlue, in a now-viral thread.

Fegan had several pressing follow-up questions, such as "how" and "who exactly has my face on record?".

"Presumably these facial recognition scanners are matching my image to something in order to verify my identity," she wrote. "How does JetBlue know what I look like?"

takyon writes:

NASA Proposed Sending Japanese Astronauts to the Moon

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine secretly proposed using US rockets to send Japanese astronauts to the Moon, Japanese newspaper The Mainichi reports, citing "multiple sources" familiar with the talks.

According to the paper, Bridenstine made the proposal during an unofficial September 2019 visit in which he met with space industry leaders, including the head of the Japanese government's Space Policy Committee. Bridenstine reportedly encouraged attendees to consider a future in which Japanese astronauts joined Americans on the lunar surface.

martyb writes:

Amazons Were Long Considered a Myth. These Discoveries Show Warrior Women Were Real:

For a long time, modern scholars believed that the Amazons were little more than a figment of ancient imaginations.

[...] Some historians argued that they were probably a propaganda tool created to keep Athenian women in line. Another theory suggested that they may have been beardless men mistaken for women by the Greeks.

[...] In a landmark discovery revealed this month, archaeologists unearthed the remains of four female warriors buried with a cache of arrowheads, spears and horseback-riding equipment in a tomb in western Russia — right where Ancient Greek stories placed the Amazons.

The team from the Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences identified the women as Scythian nomads who were interred at a burial site some 2,500 years ago near the present-day community of Devitsa. The women ranged in age from early teens to late 40s, according to the archaeologists. And the eldest of the women was found wearing a golden ceremonial headdress, a calathus, engraved with floral ornaments — an indication of stature.

[...] Earlier excavations have turned up similar evidence, though not always so well preserved. In 2017, Armenian researchers discovered the remains of a woman in her 20s who they said resembled Amazon myths. They found that she died from battle injuries. Their report in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology noted that she had an arrowhead buried in her leg and that her bone and muscle structure indicated she rode horses.

The new discovery in Russia marked the first time multiple generations of Scythian women were found buried together, according to the researchers. The youngest of the bodies may have belonged to a girl roughly 12 or 13 years old. Two others were women in their 20s, according to the researchers, and the fourth was between 45 and 50.

[...] The discovery also represents the first time such a remarkably well-preserved headdress was found on a warrior woman’s head. According to the researchers, the headdress was 65 to 70 percent gold — a far higher portion than is often found in Scythian jewelry, which is typically about 30 percent.

An Early Armenian female warrior of the 8–6 century BC from Bover I site (Armenia), International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (DOI: 10.1002/oa.2838)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

IRS stops firms like TurboTax from hiding free tax-filing products in searches:

The Internal Revenue Service on Monday announced a new tax filing agreement that prevents companies from hiding free products from internet searches. The move is designed to make it easier for taxpayers to find and use free online tax-filing software.

Taxpayers making less than $69,000 a year can file their taxes for free, but ProPublica reported in April that Intuit, which makes TurboTax, makes it difficult for people to find the free option. Instead, searches for terms like "irs free file taxes" directed potential tax filers to paid versions of Intuit's service, according to the publication.

The IRS previously agreed not to make online tax filing free as long as tax-preparation companies, which make up an industry group called the Free File Alliance, offer free services to taxpayers making less than $69,000. But finding those free services was often a challenge.

Now an addendum to the Memorandum of Understanding between the IRS and the Free File Alliance prevents companies from "engaging in any practice" that would hide Free File options from "an organic internet search." In addition, the IRS is no longer prohibited from creating its own online filing system.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Researchers build a particle accelerator that fits on a chip:

On a hillside above Stanford University, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory operates a scientific instrument nearly 2 miles long. In this giant accelerator, a stream of electrons flows through a vacuum pipe, as bursts of microwave radiation nudge the particles ever-faster forward until their velocity approaches the speed of light, creating a powerful beam that scientists from around the world use to probe the atomic and molecular structures of inorganic and biological materials.

Now, for the first time, scientists at Stanford and SLAC have created a silicon chip that can accelerate electrons—albeit at a fraction of the velocity of that massive instrument—using an infrared laser to deliver, in less than a hair's width, the sort of energy boost that takes microwaves many feet.

Writing in the Jan. 3 issue of Science, a team led by electrical engineer Jelena Vuckovic explained how they carved a nanoscale channel out of silicon, sealed it in a vacuum and sent electrons through this cavity while pulses of infrared light—to which silicon is as transparent as glass is to visible light—were transmitted by the channel walls to speed the electrons along.

The accelerator-on-a-chip demonstrated in Science is just a prototype, but Vuckovic said its design and fabrication techniques can be scaled up to deliver particle beams accelerated enough to perform cutting-edge experiments in chemistry, materials science and biological discovery that don't require the power of a massive accelerator.

[...] Team members liken their approach to the way that computing evolved from the mainframe to the smaller but still useful PC. Accelerator-on-a-chip technology could also lead to new cancer radiation therapies, said physicist Robert Byer, a co-author of the Science paper. Again, it's a matter of size. Today, medical X-ray machines fill a room and deliver a beam of radiation that's tough to focus on tumors, requiring patients to wear lead shields to minimize collateral damage.

"In this paper we begin to show how it might be possible to deliver electron beam radiation directly to a tumor, leaving healthy tissue unaffected," said Byer, who leads the Accelerator on a Chip International Program, or ACHIP, a broader effort of which this current research is a part.

On-chip integrated laser-driven particle accelerator [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aay5734)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

ESO observations reveal black holes' breakfast at the cosmic dawn:

"We are now able to demonstrate, for the first time, that primordial galaxies do have enough food in their environments to sustain both the growth of supermassive black holes and vigorous star formation," says Emanuele Paolo Farina, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who led the research published today in The Astrophysical Journal. "This adds a fundamental piece to the puzzle that astronomers are building to picture how cosmic structures formed more than 12 billion years ago."

Astronomers have wondered how supermassive black holes were able to grow so large so early on in the history of the Universe. "The presence of these early monsters, with masses several billion times the mass of our Sun, is a big mystery," says Farina, who is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching bei München. It means that the first black holes, which might have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast. But, until now, astronomers had not spotted 'black hole food' -- gas and dust -- in large enough quantities to explain this rapid growth.

To complicate matters further, previous observations with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, revealed a lot of dust and gas in these early galaxies that fuelled rapid star formation. These ALMA observations suggested that there could be little left over to feed a black hole.

To solve this mystery, Farina and his colleagues used the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in the Chilean Atacama Desert to study quasars -- extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes which lie at the centre of massive galaxies. The study surveyed 31 quasars that are seen as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. This is one of the largest samples of quasars from this early on in the history of the Universe to be surveyed.

[...] In the future, ESO's Extremely Large Telescope will help scientists reveal even more details about galaxies and supermassive black holes in the first couple of billion years after the Big Bang. "With the power of the ELT, we will be able to delve even deeper into the early Universe to find many more such gas nebulae," Farina concludes.

Journal Reference:

Emanuele Paolo Farina, et. al.. The REQUIEM Survey. I. A Search for Extended Lyα Nebular Emission Around 31 z > 5.7 Quasars. The Astrophysical Journal, 2019; 887 (2): 196 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab5847

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Life could have emerged from lakes with high phosphorus:

"For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life," said first author Jonathan Toner, a University of Washington research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.

The problem is that chemical reactions that make the building blocks of living things need a lot of phosphorus, but phosphorus is scarce. A new UW study, published Dec. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds an answer to this problem in certain types of lakes.

The study focuses on carbonate-rich lakes, which form in dry environments within depressions that funnel water draining from the surrounding landscape. Because of high evaporation rates, the lake waters concentrate into salty and alkaline, or high-pH, solutions. Such lakes, also known as alkaline or soda lakes, are found on all seven continents.

The researchers first looked at phosphorus measurements in existing carbonate-rich lakes, including Mono Lake in California, Lake Magadi in Kenya and Lonar Lake in India.

While the exact concentration depends on where the samples were taken and during what season, the researchers found that carbonate-rich lakes have up to 50,000 times phosphorus levels found in seawater, rivers and other types of lakes. Such high concentrations point to the existence of some common, natural mechanism that accumulates phosphorus in these lakes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

To spur the adoption of electric vehicles and ultimately help clean up the environment, Ireland may ban the sale of purely internal-combustion-powered cars. This prohibition could take effect by 2030.

According to RTE, Ireland's National Public Service Broadcaster, the new law is expected to be published early next year [meaning 2020]. It will be bundled into Climate Action Amendment Bill 2019, which will probably be further tinkered with by a range of government departments.

Over the next decade, leaders of Ireland want at least one-third of its vehicle fleet to be electrically operated. Furthermore, by the year 2050, the government is aiming to make the nation carbon-neutral, an impressive and ambitious goal. Naturally, the transportation sector is responsible for a large amount of pollution. In 2018, it reportedly accounted for more than 20 percent of Ireland's emissions, so any reductions here can make a big difference.

If all goes according to plan, some 936,000 electrified vehicles will be on Ireland's roads by 2030. Making things a little easier, this total includes both pure EVs as well as hybrids.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers from King's have carried out the first study of microplastics in the atmosphere in London to determine what people within the city might be exposed to and where this comes from.

In the study published today in Environment International, they found that microplastics are present in the air in London at higher abundances than any other major city examined so far. Their findings indicate that cities are a likely source of microplastics to the wider environment with the weather and meteorological patterns having little influence on their abundance in this urban environment.

[...] They found that:

• Microplastics were present in every sample taken in London and greater than previously reported by any other study.
• Levels of microplastics were higher in London compared to Dongguan, China and Paris, France and Hamburg, Germany.
• Levels of microplastics in London are almost 20 times greater than in the French Pyrenees when comparing particles of the same size.
• 92% were fibrous microplastics that come from the wear down of plastic textiles including clothing, upholstery and carpets.
• The other sources include fragments from larger plastic products, films from thin plastic items such as disposable plastic bags and foam from polystyrene items.
• Microplastics can become airborne and travel as far as 95 km by the wind however local sources have a greater influence on deposition in central London.

Lead author Dr. Stephanie Wright, UKRI Rutherford Fellow in the School of Population Health & Environmental Sciences at King's said: "We found some of the highest reported levels of microplastics in atmospheric dust, with local sources appearing influential. Fibres were the most abundant for the size range we looked at, mirroring the marine environment. From where microplastics are emitted and for how long they are airborne remain unknown but are key for understanding long-range transport potential to the wider environment. An important next step in predicting risk is to estimate human exposure to airborne microplastics."

Although the impact of microplastics on humans is still relatively unknown, occupational studies indicate that workers exposed to very high levels of plastic dust suffer chronic inflammation of the airway, in some (worst) cases interstitial lung disease and tissue scarring. Despite not all sources of microplastics being known and the impact on human health, the authors suggest there can be ways to mitigate your exposure.

More information: S.L. Wright et al. Atmospheric microplastic deposition in an urban environment and an evaluation of transport, Environment International (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2019.105411

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Explore This 3D World Rendered In ASCII Art:

Pixelated RPGs are pretty standard in games like Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, but have you ever seen anything like ASCIICKER? It’s a full-color three-dimensional world rendered with ASCII art and playable in your browser. [Ed's Comment: It works with Brave and Firefox, but not with Pale Moon in our very limited testing.]

For the time being, the game exists as an experiment. There’s no storyline or goals other than exploring the world, although you can meet up with (or follow) others exploring the game — although all of the sprites look the same, so it may be difficult to have interactions. The game was created by [Gumix] and built entirely in JavaScript without using any other game engines.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

How to tell if a brain is awake: EEG may not always be a reliable reflection of consciousness:

Remarkably, scientists are still debating just how to reliably determine whether someone is conscious. This question is of great practical importance when making medical decisions about anesthesia or treating patients in vegetative state or coma.

Currently, researchers rely on various measurements from an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to assess level of consciousness in the brain. A Michigan Medicine team was able to demonstrate, using rats, that the EEG doesn't always track with being awake.

"EEG doesn't necessarily correlate with behavior," says Dinesh Pal, Ph.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology at the U-M Medical School. "We are raising more questions and asking that people are more cautious when interpreting EEG data."

Under anesthesia, an EEG will display a sort of signature of unconsciousness: reduced brain connectivity; increased slow waves, which are also associated with deep sleep, vegetative state and coma; and less complexity or less change in brain activity over time.

Building on data from a 2018 study, Pal and his team wanted to see what happened to these measures when a brain was awakened under anesthesia. To do so, they targeted an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to play a role in attention, self-processing and coordinating consciousness.

Using a drug in that part of the brain that mimics the activity of neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the team was able to rouse some of the rats so that they were up and moving around despite the fact that they were receiving continuous anesthesia. Using the same drug in the back of the brain did not awaken the rats. So, both groups of rats had anesthesia in the brain but only one group "woke up."

Then, "we took the EEG data and looked at those factors that have been considered correlates of wakefulness. We figured if the animals were waking up, even while still exposed to anesthesia, then these factors should also come back up. However, despite wakeful behavior, the EEGs were the same in the moving rats and the non-moving anesthetized rats," says Pal.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

EPA scientists warn the EPA against proposed regulation rollbacks:

The Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Advisory Board isn't down with the organization's proposed regulatory rollbacks. In the draft reports the panel has published, it warned that the rollbacks are based on weak scientific analysis and even go against established science.

One of the proposals the board criticized is the administration's plan to reduce Obama-era vehicle emissions standards for car and light truck models up to 2026. The 41 scientists in the board, many of whom were appointed by the Trump administration, said there are "significant weaknesses in the scientific analysis of the proposed rule." They explained (PDF) that the economic models used to justify the rollback have weaknesses that lead to "implausible results."

Meanwhile, they said the EPA's plan to modify the Waters of the United States rule, which defines the waterways that can be federally regulated, is not fully consistent with established science. The change would reverse a rule that limits dredging and pesticide applications near smaller streams and wetlands, and the panel says it "neglects established science" that shows how contaminated wetlands and groundwater can spread to drinking water reserves.

[...] Vermont Law School Patrick Parenteau told The New York Times, however, that the panel's recommendations could stop the rollbacks from happening. "The courts basically say if you're going to ignore the advice of your own experts you have to have really good reasons for that," he said. "And not just policy reasons but reasons that go to the merits of what the critiques are saying."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Mealworms safely consume toxic additive-containing plastic:

Tiny mealworms may hold part of the solution to our giant plastics problem. Not only are they able to consume various forms of plastic, as previous Stanford research has shown, they can eat Styrofoam containing a common toxic chemical additive and still be safely used as protein-rich feedstock for other animals, according to a new Stanford study published in Environmental Science & Technology.

The study is the first to look at where chemicals in plastic end up after being broken down in a natural system -- a yellow mealworm's gut, in this case. It serves as a proof of concept for deriving value from plastic waste.

"This is definitely not what we expected to see," said study lead author Anja Malawi Brandon, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. "It's amazing that mealworms can eat a chemical additive without it building up in their body over time."

In earlier work, Stanford researchers and collaborators at other institutions revealed that mealworms, which are easy to cultivate and widely used as a food for animals ranging from chickens and snakes to fish and shrimp, can subsist on a diet of various types of plastic. They found that microorganisms in the worms' guts biodegrade the plastic in the process -- a surprising and hopeful finding. However, concern remained about whether it was safe to use the plastic-eating mealworms as feed for other animals given the possibility that harmful chemicals in plastic additives might accumulate in the worms over time.

"This work provides an answer to many people who asked us whether it is safe to feed animals with mealworms that ate Styrofoam," said Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in Stanford's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who has led or co-authored most of the Stanford studies of plastic-eating mealworms.

[...] "This is a wake-up call," said Brandon. "It reminds us that we need to think about what we're adding to our plastics and how we deal with it."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Membrane inspired by bone and cartilage efficiently produces electricity from saltwater:

Inspired by membranes in the body tissues of living organisms, scientists have combined aramid nanofibers used in Kevlar with boron nitride to construct a membrane for harvesting ocean energy that is both strong like bone and suited for ion transport like cartilage. The research, published December 18 in the journal Joule, overcomes major design challenges for technologies that harness osmotic energy (pressure and salinity gradient differences between freshwater and ocean water) to generate an eco-friendly and widely available form of renewable energy.

Osmotic energy generators vary less from one day to the next than solar and wind energy farms, making them more reliable than these green energy staples. However, the clay, graphene oxide, MXene, and molybdenum disulfide nanomaterials commonly used in membranes tend to collapse and disintegrate in water.

While nanosheets made from boron nitride have recently shown promise, remaining stable as temperatures rise and not easily reacting with other substances, membranes made from boron nitride alone are not hardy enough to withstand water for a long time either, rapidly beginning to leak ions as they develop microscopic cracks.

"New advanced boron nitride composite membranes with novel and robust properties will solve this problem, which is in high demand now," says Weiwei Lei, the lead scientist of this project in Australia, a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University's Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM).

"Osmotic energy represents an enormous resource for humankind, but its implementation is severely limited by the availability of the high-performance ion-selective membranes," says Nicholas Kotov (@kotov_group), the lead scientist in the US, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan.

Lei, Kotov, and their colleagues set out to solve this problem by turning to the tissues of living creatures as a blueprint, observing that many different varieties of high-performance ion-selective membranes are needed to facilitate the biological reactions in their bodies. They noted that while soft tissues, such as cartilage, kidney membranes, and basement membranes, allow ions to pass through with ease, they are weak and flimsy. In contrast, bones are exceptionally strong and stiff, but without the benefit of efficient ion transport.

"We found a way to 'marry' these two types of materials to obtain both properties at the same time, using aramid nanofibers that make flexible fibrous materials similar to cartilage and boron nitride that makes platelets similar to bone," Kotov says.

Journal Reference:

Cheng Chen, Dan Liu, Li He, Si Qin, Jiemin Wang, Joselito M. Razal, Nicholas A. Kotov, Weiwei Lei. Bio-inspired Nanocomposite Membranes for Osmotic Energy Harvesting. Joule, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2019.11.010

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

In leap for quantum computing, silicon quantum bits establish a long-distance relationship:

Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than today's versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon "spin" qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published in the journal Nature.

"The ability to transmit messages across this distance on a silicon chip unlocks new capabilities for our quantum hardware," said Jason Petta, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton and leader of the study. "The eventual goal is to have multiple quantum bits arranged in a two-dimensional grid that can perform even more complex calculations. The study should help in the long term to improve communication of qubits on a chip as well as from one chip to another."

Quantum computers have the potential to tackle challenges beyond the capabilities of everyday computers, such as factoring large numbers. A quantum bit, or qubit, can process far more information than an everyday computer bit because, whereas each classical computer bit can have a value of 0 or 1, a quantum bit can represent a range of values between 0 and 1 simultaneously.

To realize quantum computing's promise, these futuristic computers will require tens of thousands of qubits that can communicate with each other. Today's prototype quantum computers from Google, IBM and other companies contain tens of qubits made from a technology involving superconducting circuits, but many technologists view silicon-based qubits as more promising in the long run.