SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Zhaoxin's x86-Compatible CPUs for DIY Enthusiasts Now Available

Zhaoxin, a joint venture between Via Technologies and the Chinese government, has been selling processors for various client systems for years, but recently the company rolled out its latest CPUs that some of the local PC makers position as solutions for DIY enthusiasts. At least initially, Zhaoxin's KaiXian KX-6780A will be available only in China.

Zhaoxin's KaiXian KX-6780A is an eight-core x86-64 processor with 8 MB of L2 cache, a dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, modern I/O interfaces (PCIe, SATA, USB, etc.), and integrated DirectX 11.1-capable graphics (possibly S3 based but unknown). The CPU cores are in-house designed LuJiaZui cores, built around a superscalar, multi-issue, out-of-order microarchitecture that supports modern instruction sets extensions like SSE 4.2 as well as AVX along with virtualization and encryption technologies. The processor is made using TSMC's 16 nm process technology.

Zhaoxin formally introduced its KaiXian KX-6000-series CPUs back in 2018, but it looks like higher-end models like the KX-U6780A and the KX-U6880A are entering the consumer market this quarter.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000: A Chinese x86 SoC

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

According to Boing Boing, Australia's location corrected:

Australia sits on a fast-moving tectonic plate and is drifting north several inches a year. As its GPS coordinates haven't been updated since 1994, the discrepancy has grown to six feet and has begun causing trouble. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the continent's location is being fixed.

That report, "NSW and Victoria just jumped 1.8 metres north" reports:

The change is being made to fix a 1.8 metre inaccuracy that has crept into our GPS coordinates, caused by Australia slowly drifting north.

[...]Australia sits atop one of the fastest-moving tectonic plates in the world. We move about seven centimetres north-east every year.

[...]In the days of paper maps our tectonic drift did not pose a real problem. The continent might move but the distance from Melbourne to Sydney stayed the same. That meant Australia could get away with the slight inaccuracy that has crept in since we last set our coordinates in 1994.

[...]Because Australia’s underlying map data is now off by about 1.8 metres, it throws off the accuracy of the GPS location. The blue dot is accurate, but the underlying map is not.

"Effectively the coordinate you have from your GPS has already moved the 1.8 metres – it's the mapping data that has been left behind," says Dr John Dawson, director of positioning at Geoscience Australia, the federal government department supervising the fix.

The governments of New South Wales and of Victoria updated their map data on January 1. All Australian states and territories expect to have their coordinates updated by June.

Help, my country is trying to escape.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

More dangerous vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs:

Intel  has released information about two potentially dangerous flaws in the processor architecture of its CPUs. The chip manufacturer had already provided security updates for similar gaps in May and November 2019. Although the new vulnerabilities seem to be less critical than the previous ones, side-channel attacks are still possible.

Intel will again be supplying updates for its processors in the coming weeks to increase security against modified side-channel attacks. Currently, the so-called “CacheOut” vulnerability (identifier: CVE-2020-0549) exists, through which data can leak out of the CPU’s cache memory. A modification of Intel’s microcode updates is intended to protect users with the new patch against the attack vectors Microarchitectural Data Samping (MDS) and Transactional Asynchronous Abort (TAA).

The current vulnerability allows the exploit to selectively choose which data it wants to access. The attack—referred to by Intel as L1D[*] Eviction Sampling (L1DES)—causes an exception: data loaded during a running process of a speculative execution is discarded due to a triggered error. The attackers have now modified their approach and can load the data to be read out into unused filling buffers.

Until now, reducing the vulnerability has been associated with a severe performance degradation because, according to VUSec (Systems and Network Security Group at the Vrije University of Amsterdam), the processor’s L1D cache has to be completely emptied again at each context switch. This is mainly relevant for cloud operators, because attackers can read data beyond a virtual machine. With the help of the new microcode update, the flaws in the architecture can be corrected in the coming weeks.

[*] L1D is explained on Wikipedia as: "The first CPUs that used a cache had only one level of cache; unlike later level 1 caches, it was not split into L1d (for data) and L1i (for instructions)."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sea Jellies Triple Swimming Speed Through Cybernetic Implants

It's going to be a very, very long time before robots come anywhere close to matching the power-efficient mobility of animals, especially at small scales. Lots of folks are working on making tiny robots, but another option is to just hijack animals directly, by turning them into cyborgs. We've seen this sort of thing before with beetles, but there are many other animals out there that can be cyborgized. Researchers at Stanford and Caltech are giving sea jellies a try, and remarkably, it seems as though cyborg enhancements actually make the jellies more capable than they were before.

[...] The researchers, Nicole W. Xu and John O. Dabiri, chose a friendly sort of sea jelly called Aurelia aurita, which is "an oblate species of jellyfish comprising a flexible mesogleal bell and monolayer of coronal and radial muscles that line the subumbrellar surface," so there you go. To swim, jellies actuate the muscles in their bells, which squeeze water out and propel them forwards. These muscle contractions are controlled by a relatively simple stimulus of the jelly's nervous system that can be replicated through external electrical impulses.

To turn the sea jellies into cyborgs, the researchers developed an implant consisting of a battery, microelectronics, and bits of cork and stainless steel to make things neutrally buoyant, plus a wooden pin, which was used to gently impale each jelly through the bell to hold everything in place. While non-cyborg jellies tended to swim with a bell contraction frequency of 0.25 Hz, the implant allowed the researchers to crank the cyborg jellies up to a swimming frequency of 1 Hz.

Peak speed was achieved at 0.62 Hz, resulting in the jellies traveling at nearly half a body diameter per second (4-6 centimeters per second), which is 2.8x their typical speed. More importantly, calculating the cost of transport for the jellies showed that the 2.8x increase in speed came with only a 2x increase in metabolic cost, meaning that the cyborg sea jelly is both faster and more efficient.

Low-power microelectronics embedded in live jellyfish enhance propulsion (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz3194) (DX)

Original Submission

Cascade from IRC writes:

First peanut allergy drug approved in the US:

The US has approved its first treatment for peanut allergies in children.

The drug AR101, or Palforzia, uses oral immunotherapy, with children given tiny but increasing amounts of peanut protein over a six-month period under medical supervision.

After that, users must continue to take a daily dose to be able to tolerate accidental exposure.

The treatment is not a cure and makers warn that the risk of a potentially fatal anaphylactic reaction remains.

And patients must continue to avoid peanuts in their diet.

[...] Palforzia, which has been approved for use in patients aged between four and 17, comes in the form of a powder which is sprinkled on food.

Last year, scientists at King's College London said that oral immunotherapy offered "protection but not a cure" for peanut allergies, with treatment only effective while patients continued taking small amounts of the allergen.

Additional Details: BusinessWire

FDA News Release

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ancestry declined to give law enforcement access to its DNA database, the company said Tuesday.

Ancestry received a request from law enforcement to access its genetic database in 2019, but the company said no, according to a transparency report released in late January. The warrant, reported earlier on Monday by Buzzfeed, came from a court in Pennsylvania, but the DNA analysis company said it was improperly served. The warrant could have let law enforcement officers have access to 16 million DNA profiles from the company's customers.

The transparency report comes at a time when law enforcement agencies around the country have cracked dozens of murder, rape and assault cases, some from decades ago, using a technique called genetic genealogy. The practice relies on investigators having access to a large cache of DNA profiles, and raises concerns among privacy watchdogs.

An Ancestry spokesperson said in a statement that the company hasn't received any followup since it fought the warrant. The company said it declined law enforcement access to its database as part of its larger commitment to user privacy.

"Not only will we not share customer information with law enforcement unless compelled to by valid legal process, such as a court order or search warrant, we will also always advocate for our customers' privacy and seek to narrow the scope of any compelled disclosure, or even eliminate it entirely," the spokesperson said.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

Neural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone:

When watching old film footage that's plagued with excessive amounts of grain, gate weave, soft focus, and a complete lack of color, it's hard to feel connected to the people in the clip, or what's going on. It looks like a movie, and over the years that medium has taught our brains that what they're seeing on screen might not actually be real. By comparison, the experience of watching videos of friends and family captured on your smartphone is completely different thanks to 4K resolutions and high frame-rates. Those clips feel more authentic and while watching them there's more of a connection to the moment, even if you weren't actually there while it was being shot.

[...] L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat doesn't have the same effect on modern audiences, but Denis Shiryaev wondered if it could be made more compelling by using neural network powered algorithms (including Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI and DAIN) to not only upscale the footage to 4K, but also increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second. You might yell at your parents for using the motion smoothing setting on their fancy new TV, but here the increased frame rate has a dramatic effect on drawing you into the action.

[...] The results are far from perfect; we're hoping Shiryaev applies one of the many deep learning algorithms that can colorize black and white photos to this film as well, but the obvious potential of these tools to enhance historical footage to increase its impact is just as exciting as the potential for it to be misused.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The death cap mushroom is highly toxic. However, some of its toxins can also be healing: amanitins are potential components for antibody-based cancer treatments. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, German scientists have now introduced a new synthetic route for α-amanitin. Their method seems suitable for production on a larger scale, finally making enough of the toxin available for further research.

Amanitins inhibit the enzyme RNA polymerase II with high selectivity, which leads to cell death. When transported into tumor cells by antibodies, the toxin could fight tumors. Until recently, however, the only source of amanitins was the mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) themselves, which limited the possibilities for experimentation.

More information: Mary-Ann J. Siegert et al. A Convergent Total Synthesis of the Death Cap Toxin α-Amanitin, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2019). DOI: 10.1002/anie.201914620

The mushroom known as "Destroying Angel" might save lives?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with a story which inspired:

Among U.S. States, New York's Suicide Rate Is The Lowest. How's That?

In 2017, 1.4 million adults attempted suicide, while more than 47,000 others did kill themselves, making suicide the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the rate has been rising for 20 years.

Like other states, [the] state of New York has seen its rate increase. But New York has consistently reported rates well below those of the U.S. overall. Compared with the national rate of 14 suicides per 100,000 people in 2017, New York's was just 8.1, the lowest suicide rate in the nation.

[...] Experts say there's no easy explanation for the state's lowest-in-the-nation rate. "I can't tell you why," said Dr. Jay Carruthers, a psychiatrist who is the director of suicide prevention at the New York State Office of Mental Health.

[...] There's no single answer, but a number of factors probably play a role, according to Carruthers and other experts on suicide.

upstart from IRC writes:

Ancient poop reveals what happened after the fall of Cahokia:

Tens of thousands of people once lived in Cahokia, the city at the heart of the mound-building Mississippian culture (which dominated the midwestern and southeastern United States from 700 to 1500 CE). And then, around 1450, they all left. Now, sediment cores from nearby Horseshoe Lake suggest that the area didn't stay deserted for long.

The study looked for the chemical signature of ancient human feces, which washed into nearby Horseshoe Lake over the centuries along with layers of soil, pollen, and other material. When bacteria in your gut break down cholesterol, they produce a chemical called coprostanol, which can survive in soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. More coprostanol in the soil means more people living (and pooping) in the area around the lake.

[...] "A lot of discussions around Cahokia stop around 1400 [CE], around when Cahokia is said to have been abandoned," White told Ars in a 2019 interview. "I think we're kind of adding sort of a new layer to the story in that area."

[...] For about a century after the city's demise, the surrounding region looked like a ghost town, according to the sediment cores. Then, around 1500 CE, more coprostanol started washing into the lake again—people were back. But they were living in a very different landscape than the old Cahokians; these layers of sediment contain more pollen from trees and grasses, suggesting that woods and prairie had started to reclaim the former maize fields.

[...] White says the coprostanol study provides an important example of indigenous people's resilience and persistence in the face of social upheaval and environmental challenges. "Throughout the history of archaeological research, Native American disappearance has been emphasized more than Native American persistence," he and his colleagues wrote. That's especially true at Cahokia, where so much attention has focused on the city's abandonment.

A.J. White. Looking Beyond Cahokia’s Famous Population Decline; American Antiquity, 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2019.103.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

By combining low-power magnetic fields, which agitates nanowires, with laser heating and drug delivery, target [cancer] cells can be killed efficiently.

[...]Iron was the obvious material to make the nanowires, says Jürgen Kosel, who leads the group at KAUST, which includes Jasmeen Merzaban and Boon Ooi, and who co-led the work with researchers from CIC biomaGUNE in San Sebastian, Spain.

[...]Applying low-power magnetic fields, the team agitated the nanowires in a way that opened the membrane of target cells, inducing cell death.

[...]core-shell nanowires strongly absorb near-infrared light, heating up as they do so. Because light at this wavelength can penetrate far into the body, the nanowires could be heated using lasers directed at the tumor site. "The core-shell nanowires showed an extremely high photothermal conversion efficiency of more than 80 percent, which translated into a large intracellular heat dose," Martínez-Banderas says.

Finally, the anticancer drug doxorubicin was attached to the nanowires via pH-sensitive linkers. As the tumor environment is typically more acidic than healthy tissue, the linker selectively degraded in or near tumor cells, releasing the drug where it is needed. "The combination of treatment resulted in nearly complete cancer cell ablation and was more effective than individual treatments or the anticancer drug alone," Martínez-Banderas says.

Journal Reference:
Martínez-Banderas, A. I., Aires, A., Quintanilla, M., Holguín-Lerma, J. A., Lozano-Pedraza, C., Teran, F.J., Moreno, J.A., Perez, J.E., Ooi, B.S., Ravasi, T., Merzaban, J.S., Cortajarena, A.L. & Kosel, J. Iron-based core−shell nanowires for combinatorial drug delivery and photothermal and magnetic therapy. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 11, 43976-43988 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b17512 - article

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Some materials show promise promoting bone regeneration by enhancing its natural electrical properties, according to a review in the journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials.

[...]Scientists discovered that bone was a piezoelectric material in 1957. Since then, they have found that piezoelectricity occurs when bone collagen fibers slide against each other. This leads to the accumulation of charges and the generation of a tiny current, which opens up calcium ion channels in bone cells called osteocytes. This triggers a cascade of signaling pathways that ultimately promote bone formation.

"Piezoelectricity is one of several mechanical responses of the bone matrix that allows bone cells to react to changes in their environment," explain biomedical engineer Zong-Hong Lin of Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University and medical doctor Fu-Cheng Kao of Taiwan's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, who led the review.

Researchers are seeking to leverage this property to improve bone regeneration and repair. For example, they are exploring materials to fabricate tiny, self-powered electric generators that can be implanted inside or outside bone to stimulate its natural healing processes.

Journal Reference:
Fu-Cheng Kao et al. The application of nanogenerators and piezoelectricity in osteogenesis, Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1080/14686996.2019.1693880

Let's hope it pans out. Skele-Gro tastes awful.

Original Submission

chromas from IRC writes:

Private equity firms are gobbling up data centers:

Merger and acquisition activity surrounding data-center facilities is starting to resemble the Oklahoma Land Rush, and private-equity firms are taking most of the action.

New research from Synergy Research Group saw more than 100 deals in 2019, a 50% growth over 2018, and private-equity companies accounted for 80% of them.

[...]The question becomes is this necessarily a good thing? Private equity firms have something of a well-earned bad reputation for buying up companies, sucking all the profit out of them and discarding the empty husk.

But John Dinsdale, chief analyst for Synergy, said not to worry, that the private equity firms grabbing data centers are looking to grow them. “This is a heavily infrastructure-oriented business where what you can take out is pretty directly related to what you put in. A lot of these equity investors are looking to build something rather than quickly flipping the assets,” he said via e-mail.

He added “In these types of business there isn’t that much manpower, HQ or overhead there to be stripped out.” Which is true. Data centers are pretty low-staffed. It was a national news item several years ago that Apple’s $1 billion data center in rural North Carolina would only create 50 jobs. That’s true for most data centers.

So larger data centers are, apparently, good, but how does that affect the competition landscape with fewer players?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The systemd-homed service, which enables portable home directories, has been merged into the code for systemd and will be included in the forthcoming 245 release.

Systemd releases are typically every three to four months, and version 244 was finalised at the end of November 2019. The new merge includes over 21,000 additions to systemd. Once 245 is out, it will be up to individual Linux distributions to decide when to update it. Use of the new home directories service is optional.

[...]Each directory it manages encapsulates both the data store and the user record of the user so that it comprehensively describes the user account, and is thus naturally portable between systems without any further, external metadata.

Home directories in the new system support several storage mechanisms and may be located on a removeable drive. The user record is cryptographically signed so the user cannot modify it themselves without invalidating it. There is an option for encryption with fscrypt (applies encryption at the directory level), or mounting from a CIFS network share, or in a partition encrypted with LUKS2 (Linux Unified Key Setup). This last is the most secure approach.

[...]One use case is where a user has a PC running Linux in both their home and office, and is able to carry their home directory with them on a portable storage device. The advent of cloud storage has made this less of a problem than would have been the case a few years back, and a common reaction to the new systemd approach is that the problems it fixes are not pressing and may be outweighed by potential incompatibilities. ®

See the file: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/blob/homed/docs/HOME_DIRECTORY.md for more information on what systemd-homed is intended to do, an how.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the better part of a year, SpaceX has gotten the lion's share of attention when it comes to mega-constellations and satellite Internet.

[...] But it was actually another company, OneWeb, that launched the first six satellites of its mega-constellation back in February, 2019. Initial tests of those satellites went well, the company said last summer. Now OneWeb is preparing for its second launch of 34 satellites on board a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The launch is scheduled for 4:42pm ET (21:42 UTC) on Thursday, February 6.

On the eve of Thursday's launch, Ars spoke with OneWeb Chief Executive Officer Adrián Steckel about the company's plans and how it will compete with half a dozen other firms looking at providing Internet from space.

[...] "Right now, we’re the largest buyer of launch in the world," Steckel said. "In the future, as we look to our next phase of deployment, we're willing to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, Blue Origin, or whoever."

OneWeb has taken a different approach than SpaceX in terms of how it plans to interact with customers on the ground. SpaceX has opted to offer direct-to-consumer services with the intention of selling user terminals to acquire satellite from space and essentially functioning as a new Internet provider. OneWeb plans to partner with existing telecommunications companies, Steckel said.

[...] It's a model the company believes makes sense because the right answer for getting regulatory approval and delivering service in the United States or the Philippines or Indonesia will vary, Steckel said. "We're going to be doing business with partners around the world," Steckel said. "Our style is not confrontational. We're using a different model. It's a big world."

OneWeb plans to offer its first customer demonstrations by the end of 2020 and provide full commercial global services in 2021.

Original Submission