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An Anonymous Coward writes:

China confirms human-to-human transmission of new coronavirus:

Human-to-human transmission of a new coronavirus strain has been confirmed in China, fueling fears of a major outbreak of the SARS-like virus as millions travel for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Zhong Nanshan, head of the National Health Commission, said on Monday patients may have contracted the new virus without having visited the central city of Wuhan where it was discovered before spreading across China and reaching three other Asian nations.

"Currently, it can be said it is affirmative that there is the phenomenon of human-to-human transmission," he said in an interview with China's CCTV state broadcaster.

Zhong said two people in Guangdong province in southern China caught the disease from family members who had visited Wuhan.

He added that 14 medical personnel helping with coronavirus patients have also been infected.

Human-to-human transmission could make the virus spread more quickly and widely.

CDC Confirms First US Case of New Coronavirus

Public health officials have confirmed the first U.S. case of a mysterious coronavirus that has already killed at least six people and sickened hundreds of others in China, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

A male traveler from China has been diagnosed in Snohomish County, Washington State with the Wuhan coronavirus, according to the CDC.

Officials said the sick male, in his 30s, is “very healthy.” He is currently being isolated at a medical center in the state “out of caution” and “poses little risk” to the public, they said. The CDC said the male reached out to local health authorities on Jan. 15 once he started experiencing pneumonia-like symptoms.

Previously:
China Reports 3rd Death, Nearly 140 New Cases of Coronavirus

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Astronomers have found nearly 1 million asteroids in our Solar System, with the vast majority located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It is far rarer to find asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun, and especially inside the orbit of Earth, due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. There are only about 20 known asteroids with orbits entirely inside that of Earth's. They are called Atira[*] asteroids.

Many of these Atira asteroids have orbits that are substantially tilted away from the plane of the Solar System, suggesting past encounters with Mercury or Venus.

Until now, scientists have theorized that Vatira asteroids might exist—those with orbits inside Venus—but had yet to find one. They would be difficult to observe because their orbits would bring them close to the Sun, leaving only a short window to find them in the dusk or dawn sky. And also because presumably they are quite rare due to the gravitational challenge of squeezing into a stable orbit so near the Sun.

But now astronomers have found a Vatira asteroid for the first time. The body, called 2020 AV2, was found earlier this month by the California Institute of Technology's Zwicky Transient Facility, and confirmed by other observatories around the world.

Wikipedia entry on Atira asteroids.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

As attacks begin, Citrix ships patch for VPN vulnerability:

On January 19, Citrix released some permanent fixes to a vulnerability on the company's Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Gateway virtual private network servers that allowed an attacker to remotely execute code on the gateway without needing a login. The vulnerability affects tens of thousands of known VPN servers, including at least 260 VPN servers associated with US federal, state, and local government agencies—including at least one site operated by the US Army.

The patches are for versions 11.1 and 12.0 of the products, formerly marketed under the NetScaler name. Other patches will be available on January 24. These patches follow instructions for temporary fixes the company provided to deflect the crafted requests associated with the vulnerability, which could be used by an attacker to gain access to the networks protected by the VPNs.

Fermin J. Serna, chief information security officer at Citrix, announced the fixes in a blog post on Sunday. At the same time, Serna revealed that the vulnerability—and the patches being released—also applied to Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway Virtual Appliances hosted on virtual machines on all commercially available virtualization platforms, as well as those hosted in Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform, and Citrix Service Delivery Appliances (SDXs).

See also:

Also at The Register

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

by David Malmquist, The College of William & Mary

Excess nitrogen is a major threat to water quality in coastal waters worldwide. Found in treated wastewater, farm and lawn fertilizers and combustion exhaust, it fuels blooms of algae that shade submerged grasses and suck oxygen from the water when they die and decay.

A new study by researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science provides additional evidence that wastewater from a poultry processing plant has a particularly significant impact on water quality and nutrient cycling. That's because it contains not only lots of nitrogen, but antibiotics and byproducts of the process the plants use to treat their wastewater. These byproducts are thought to inhibit the growth and activity of microbes that would otherwise help remove nitrogen from tidal creeks before it can enter coastal systems.

The researchers, VIMS Ph.D. student Miguel Semedo and Professor Bongkeun Song, say their study is the first to evaluate poultry-industry impacts on water quality and nutrient cycling using genetic, microbial and remote-sensing techniques. Results of their work appear in the January issue of Environmental Science & Technology. The study was supported through the Fulbright Program and Semedo's graduate fellowship from Virginia Sea Grant.

Microbes remove nitrogen from aquatic ecosystems through a process called denitrification. "Microbes perform a number of ecosystem functions," says Semedo, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Porto's Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR) in Matosinhos, Portugal. "Denitrification is one of the most vital, as it has the potential to remove excess nitrogen from the system."

Denitrifying microbes have unique genes that control the denitrification process, a series of steps that transforms nitrate and nitrite—inorganic forms of nitrogen found in wastewater—into gaseous forms such as nitric oxide, nitrous oxide and dinitrogen. The latter compounds are unusable by most organisms and thus contribute little or nothing to over-fertilization of coastal waters.

Semedo and Song conducted the study in two tidal creeks on Virginia's Eastern Shore—one with a poultry processing plant in its headwaters and one without. The creeks drain into the coastal lagoons that lie between the mainland of the Delmarva Peninsula and its offshore barrier islands.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, looking up commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It's all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.

The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it's been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world's "first true smart contact lens." But let's be clear: This is not a product you'll see on store shelves next autumn. It's in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product. In fact, the demos I tried did not even involve me plopping on a contact lens—they used virtual reality headsets and held up bulky prototypes to my eye, as though I was Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Iran said Sunday that two newly constructed satellites have passed pre-launch tests and will be transported to the nation's space center for eventual launch, without elaborating.

Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi tweeted about the development, calling it an "important research step."

Iran has not said when it will launch the satellites, but often coordinates its launches with national holidays. It will celebrate the 41st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution next month.

Iran's largely state-run media say the 90-kilogram (200-pound) Zafar satellites each have four high-resolution color cameras and will monitor and transmit data on natural resources as well as agricultural and environmental developments.

[...] Iran has sent several satellites into orbit over the past decade, and in 2013 it launched a monkey into space.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] Prof. Daniele Brida, leader of the research group Ultrafast Phenomena in Condensed Matter at the University of Luxembourg together with researchers from the University of Konstanz (Germany), the CNRS-Université Paris Sud (France) and the Center for Materials Physics (CFM-CSIC) and Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in San Sebastian (Spain), exploited light to control the motion of electrons in a metallic nanocircuit. In fact, light has the advantage that it oscillates at frequencies that are a million times higher than the ones achieved by electronic circuits.

For this reason, the control of a circuit at optical frequencies has the tremendous potential to revolutionise data processing and computing in the future.

While this goal is still far from being completely achieved, the experiments and theoretical development performed by the international team showed that it is possible to use the single electric field oscillation contained in an ultrashort laser pulse to drive electrons moving at sub-femtosecond time scales within a nanoscopic gap, creating a circuit that otherwise would be open.

The work by the researchers traces the electrons motion at those ultrafast times driven by the taming photon pulse. The story published in the prestigious journal Nature Physics, contains a detailed description of the experiments and the theoretical modeling devoted to understand how electrons move within this open gap between to metallic nanostructures.

Publication: Ludwig, M., Aguirregabiria, G., Ritzkowsky, F. et al. Sub-femtosecond electron transport in a nanoscale gap. Nat. Phys. (2019) doi:10.1038/s41567-019-0745-8

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week.

The telco "is asking creditors to help craft a turnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy by the middle of March, according to people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg wrote.

Frontier CEO Bernie Han and other company executives "met with creditors and advisers Thursday and told them the company wants to negotiate a pre-packaged agreement before $356 million of debt payments come due March 15," the report said. The move would likely involve Chapter 11 bankruptcy to let Frontier "keep operating without interruption of telephone and broadband service to its customers."

Frontier reported having $16.3 billion in long-term debt as of September 30, 2019.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

As we draw closer to the PS5's release date in late 2020, it's understandable that the rumor mill is working overtime. But, while some rumors hold a bit more weight than others, there are a few that need be taken with more than just a pinch of salt.

The latest PS5 'leak' posted on 4Chan is one such rumor, supposedly spilling a bunch of information on the PS5 reveal event which is expected to take place in February. The leak, which was reposted on Reddit, claims that the PS5 will be unveiled on February 5 at a PlayStation Meeting event for the media.

According to the leaker, the event will see Sony revealing the console's design and specs, several PS5 exclusives, a renewed focus on PlayStation Now, alongside the console's price and various other features.

• PS5 vs Xbox Series X: what we know so far
• Xbox Series X: release date, specs, design and launch titles
• Sony PS5 controller: release date, news and confirmed features

https://www.techradar.com/news/this-latest-ps5-rumor-sound-too-good-to-be-true

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Renewable energy statistics just keep topping each other. Solar power is getting cheaper. Battery storage capacity is getting better. And wind farms are getting bigger.

2019 saw the world’s biggest (at the time) offshore wind farm come online, as well as construction of the biggest offshore wind farm in the US off the coast of Atlantic City.

But a new figure blows all of these out of the water. Last week, British renewable energy developer SSE announced construction of Dogger Bank Wind Farm off the eastern coast of England in the North Sea.

With a capacity of 3.6 gigawatts (GW), Dogger Bank will be three times bigger than the world’s biggest existing wind farm, the nearby 1.2 GW Hornsea One.

Located near a seaside town called Ulrome, which is 195 miles north of London, Dogger Bank will have three separate sites—Creyke Beck A, Creyke Beck B, and Teesside A—each with a 1.2 GW capacity, and construction is slated to take two years.

The project is a collaboration between SSE and Equinor, a Norwegian energy company.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Kotaku Australia

CoolerMaster has been in the PC hardware and components business for almost 30 years now, and while most casual gamers would know CoolerMaster for their affordable peripherals, the company's stock in trade has been around cases, power supplies, coolers for CPUs, and so on.

So naturally, CoolerMaster makes their own thermal paste. Thermal paste is the grey gooey stuff ... [snip]

The only problem is that, like most companies, CoolerMaster's thermal paste comes in the form of a syringe. There's good reasons for doing so: the syringe design makes it easier when applying paste from above, particularly if you're installing a cooler when the motherboard is already mounted within the case, and it ensures you can apply the paste without getting it everywhere...
Unfortunately for CoolerMaster, there was a problem with their syringes. CoolerMaster is popular among budget gamers because their products are generally more affordable, so it's pretty common for younger PC builders to be buying CoolerMaster components. And the ones that were getting into PC building and modding with CoolerMaster gear were causing their parents to worry ... because the parents thought their kids were taking drugs.

We didn't change the shape of the syringe to make applying thermal paste a lot easier, but because we we're getting tired of having to explain parents that their kid isn't using drugs. pic.twitter.com/ClyZLDDFe9

— Cooler Master (@CoolerMaster) January 16, 2020

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Terahertz radiation is used for security checks at airports, for medical examinations and also for quality checks in industry. However, radiation in the terahertz range is extremely difficult to generate. Scientists at TU Wien have now succeeded in developing a terahertz radiation source that breaks several records: it is extremely efficient, and its spectrum is very broad—it generates different wavelengths from the entire terahertz range. This opens up the possibility of creating short radiation pulses with extremely high radiation intensity. The new terahertz technology has now been presented in the journal Nature Communications.

More information: Anastasios D. Koulouklidis et al. Observation of extremely efficient terahertz generation from mid-infrared two-color laser filaments, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-14206-x

Journal information: Nature Communications

Original Submission

canopic jug writes in with a story that was the inspiration for:

Ryan Sullivan cancelled what he thought was a "random charge for $4.99 per month from HP called 'Instant Ink'". Then his printer refused to print:

It turns out that HP requires its customers to enroll HP Instant Ink eligible printers into one of the Instant Ink plans, and continue paying a monthly subscription in order to be allowed to use the device.

But where's the need to come up with different plans coming from, you may wonder? HP explains: the company charges a fee based on the number of pages a customer prints each month, and the page count is shockingly monitored remotely.

Naturally, the scheme is not advertised as a rather unusual application of DRM, but a way for customers to save time and money. Still, it would seem HP has not exactly gone out of its way to explain all the consequences to those customers.

HP's terms of service also say that these eligible, internet-connected printers can be remotely modified in several ways, including by applying patches, updates, and "changes" – without notifying customers.

Another thing HP can see thanks to the Instant Ink program is the type of documents you print, identifying them by extension as Word, etc., documents, PDFs, or JPEG and other types of images.

Additionally, the HP cartridges have been locked to specific printers for quite a while now.

Earlier on SN:
US Customers Kick Up Class-Action Stink Over Epson's Kyboshing of Third-Party Ink (2019)
Xerox Is No More (2018)
Meg Whitman Resigns (2017)
Supreme Court Lets Consumers Refill Ink Cartridges (2017)
HP to Issue "Optional Firmware Update" Allowing 3rd-Party Ink (2016)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in the next few months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday.

No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins.

A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its capsule catapulted off the top 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Atlantic. Powerful thrusters on the capsule propelled it up and out of harm's way, as the rocket engines deliberately shut down and the booster tumbled out of control and exploded in a giant fireball.

The capsule reached an altitude of about 27 miles (44 kilometers) before parachuting into the ocean just offshore to bring the nine-minute test flight to a close and pave the way for two NASA astronauts to climb aboard next time.

Everything appeared to go well despite the choppy seas and overcast skies. Within minutes, a recovery ship was alongside the capsule and preparing to pull it from the water.

"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, said at a news conference. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."

NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.

[...] Last month, meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule ended up in the wrong orbit on its first test flight and had to skip the space station. The previous month, only two of the Starliner's three parachutes deployed during a launch abort test.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says there is 'no question' that AI needs to be regulated

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has called for new regulations in the world of AI, highlighting the dangers posed by technology like facial recognition and deepfakes, while stressing that any legislation must balance "potential harms ... with social opportunities."

"[T]here is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. It is too important not to," writes Pichai in an editorial for The Financial Times. "The only question is how to approach it."

Although Pichai says new regulation is needed, he advocates a cautious approach that might not see many significant controls placed on AI. He notes that for some products like self-driving cars, "appropriate new rules" should be introduced. But in other areas, like healthcare, existing frameworks can be extended to cover AI-assisted products.

Also at The Associated Press.

Original Submission