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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Long-distance fiber link poised to create powerful networks of optical clocks:

An academic-industrial team in Japan has connected three laboratories in a 100-kilometer region with an optical telecommunications fiber network stable enough to remotely interrogate optical atomic clocks. This type of fiber link is poised to expand the use of these extremely precise timekeepers by creating an infrastructure that could be used in a wide range of applications such as communication and navigation systems.

"The laser system used for optical clocks is extremely complex and thus not practical to build at multiple locations," said Tomoya Akatsuka, a member of the research team from telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT). "With our network scheme, a shared laser would enable an optical clock to operate remote clocks with much simpler laser systems."

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Express, researchers from NTT, the University of Tokyo, RIKEN, and NTT East Corporation (NTT East), all in Japan, report the new low-noise fiber link.

[...] "Although optical clock networks that simply connect distant clocks have been demonstrated in Europe, our scheme is more challenging because operating remote clocks with the delivered light requires a more stable fiber link," said Akatsuka. "In addition, the country's urban environments tend to contribute more noise to fiber networks in Japan. To cope with that noise, we used a cascaded link that divides a long fiber into shorter spans connected by ultralow-noise laser repeater stations that incorporate planar lightwave circuits (PLCs)."

Optical interferometers fabricated on a small PLC chip were key for enabling a fiber link with extremely low noise. These interferometers were used in laser repeater stations that copy the optical phase of the received light to a repeater laser that is sent to a next station with fiber noise compensation. Applying noise compensation for each short span makes the laser signal less susceptible to noise and thus more stable.

Journal Reference:
Tomoya Akatsuka et al, Optical frequency distribution using laser repeater stations with planar lightwave circuits, Optics Express (2020). DOI: 10.1364/OE.383526

Journal information: Optics Express

Environmentally stable laser emits exceptionally pure light

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Git our app, you've pulled: We love open source... but not enough to share code for our own app, says GitHub:

GitHub's mobile app for developers and other team members working on projects in GitHub repositories is now generally available for users of iOS and Android.

The app was announced in November 2019 by Ryan Nystrom, director of engineering, at the Universe event and has been in beta since then, initially for iOS only, but now GA for both platforms.

Coding on a mobile device is largely not a great experience, though web-based IDEs have their place. The GitHub app however is aimed at all the other things developers do, such as raising or commenting on issues, approving pull requests (requests to merge new code), and responding to notifications such as @mentions .

Developers can drill down into pull requests and see the code that has been added or deleted. The app includes syntax highlighting for popular programming languages.

GitHub wrote the app separately for iOS and Android, using Swift for iOS and Kotlin on Google's platform. A native look and feel for each platform was favoured, rather than trying to do a cross-platform user interface or mimicking the GitHub website. In an interview, Nystrom and GitHub designer Brian Lovin explained how they mocked up a design for one platform and had the team on the other platform replicate it with appropriate adjustments. The downside of the approach is that the app works differently from visiting the GitHub website with a mobile browser, meaning more to learn.

[...] A common complaint is that the app only works with GitHub, and not with custom installations of GitHub Enterprise Server.

[...] It is a good start then, but not yet everything users hoped for. There is one oddity though. At the Universe event, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stood on stage with a backdrop declaring, "Open source has won." Yet this mobile app is not open source, though Nystrom said on Twitter: "Not right now," implying the possibility of change.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Skin-mounted electronic displays previously required long-lasting plastic. Researchers have created a bio-degradable film made from fish scales:

[Within] flexible temporary electronic displays [...] electricity-conducting and light-emitting components are layered onto a transparent film. To make them flexible enough to withstand the bending required to stay on skin or other soft surfaces, researchers have so far relied on films made of plastic -- a substance derived from fossil fuels, a limited resource and a source of pollution. Hai-Dong Yu, Juqing Liu, Wei Huang and colleagues wanted to find a more sustainable and environmentally friendly material for the film. They settled on gelatin derived from collagen in fish scales, which are usually thrown away.

Journal Reference:

Xiaopan Zhang, Tengyang Ye, Xianghao Meng, Zhihui Tian, Lihua Pang, Yaojie Han, Hai Li, Gang Lu, Fei Xiu, Hai-Dong Yu, Juqing Liu, Wei Huang. Sustainable and Transparent Fish Gelatin Films for Flexible Electroluminescent Devices. ACS Nano, 2020; DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b09880

See Also: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acsnano.9b09880/suppl_file/nn9b09880_si_001.pdf for supplemental information.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sugars like polysaccharides are found everywhere in nature and are believed to be essential for life to arise. In humans, they cover the surface of all cells and the family of polysaccharides called GAGs (glycosaminoglycans) are particularly abundant and difficult to analyse.

GAGs of the heparan sulfate type play key roles in regulating many biological functions, including inflammation, neurodegeneration and tumor metastasis. In fact, a special type of heparan sulfate called heparin is currently one the most used drugs in the clinic where it is used to prevent coagulation. Researchers are therefore intensively trying to map the detailed structures of heparan sulfates and link them to their biological functions.

So far, only a few structures have been successfully identified, but that may be about to change. In a new study in Nature Communications from the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Glycomics at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Rebecca Miller and her team have invented a new method that will boost the mapping of these structures.

"Determining the structures is a key question in the research about sugars. If we know the structure, we can determine what the cues are for specific biological functions and consider potential ways to exploit this in the development of therapeutics. This is hugely important and clinically relevant, as shown by the widely used anti-coagulant heparins, and the potential application of new heparin-based drugs for multiple diseases in the future," says Dr. Rebecca Louise Miller, corresponding author of the new study and Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics.

More information: Rebecca L. Miller et al, Shotgun ion mobility mass spectrometry sequencing of heparan sulfate saccharides, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15284-y

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Another variant of the shape-shifting Mirai botnet is attacking Zyxel network-attached storage (NAS) devices using a critical vulnerability that was only recently discovered, according to security researchers.

The variant, dubbed Mukashi, takes advantage of a pre-authentication command injection vulnerability found in Zyxel NAS storage devices, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 global threat intelligence team. A proof of concept for the vulnerability, CVE-2020-9054, was published publicly only last month.

“Mukashi brute forces the logins using different combinations of default credentials, while informing its command and control (C2) server of the successful login attempts,” Unit 42 Ken Hsu, Zhibin Zhang and Ruchna Nigam wrote in a blog post published Thursday.

Many and potentially all Zyxel NAS products running firmware versions up to 5.21 are vulnerable to compromise, they said.

“We’re aware of the CVE-2020-9054 vulnerability and already released firmware updates for the affected products immediately,’ a spokesperson for Zyxel wrote to Threatpost in response to email-based questions about the bug. 

“We’ve been proactively communicating the issue to our customers on Zyxel Forum and through direct email alerts to urge customers to install the firmware updates or follow the workaround for optimal protection,” the company representative wrote.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for the steepest terrain it's ever climbed, cresting the "Greenheugh Pediment," a broad sheet of rock that sits atop a hill. And before doing that, the rover took a selfie, capturing the scene just below Greenheugh.

[...] Before the climb, Curiosity used the black-and-white Navigation Cameras located on its mast to, for the first time, record a short movie of its "selfie stick," otherwise known as its robotic arm.

Curiosity's mission is to study whether the Martian environment could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. One tool for doing that is the Mars Hand Lens Camera, or MAHLI, located in the turret at the end of the robotic arm. This camera provides a close-up view of sand grains and rock textures, similarly to how a geologist uses a handheld magnifying glass for a closer look in the field on Earth.

By rotating the turret to face the rover, the team can use MAHLI to show Curiosity. Because each MAHLI image covers only a small area, it requires many images and arm positions to fully capture the rover and its surroundings.

"We get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie," said Doug Ellison, a Curiosity camera operator at JPL. "We thought the best way to explain it would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how it's done."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Getting rid of heat is one of the central challenges with modern technology. It doesn’t matter whether the technology is a high-end server CPU or some pathetically anemic processor in a no-brand set-top box, someone has had to think about thermal management. One of the central issues in thermal management is thermal resistance, a material's tendency to limit the flow of heat. The thicker a material, the larger the temperature gradient required to achieve the same amount of cooling because the thermal resistance increases with thickness.

Except when it doesn’t; if the heat is carried by ballistic phonons, then thermal resistance stays constant.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

[Ed. note: More and more people are staying home as a result of quarantines and social distancing. Car customization was the high-tech platform for many years. Then came computers where nerds had a different target for things to tweak and optimize. Car racing has perhaps even more followers today than ever before. Given the technical background and underpinnings, and realizing people may be looking for something to do this weekend, I thought to give this story a try. Are there any Soylentils who have any racing experience? --martyb]

Shortly after the US entry into World War 2, President Roosevelt requested that professional baseball continue to be played during the war because of its importance to maintain the morale of the nation. NBA commissioner Adam Silver expressed similar sentiment after the almost complete shutdown of professional sports due to the coronavirus outbreak. Formula 1 and NASCAR are already taking steps to resume, though with virtual races instead of cars physically on track.

Last weekend, iRacing and Podium organized the Replacements 100, which was streamed on multiple platforms including YouTube. The drivers included William Byron, whose success in iRacing helped him find the opportunity to drive real race cars, retired fan favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr., and current cup series drivers Bubba Wallace and Alex Bowman. The race was 100 laps at Atlanta Motor Speedway, which was set to host all three of NASCAR's national series last weekend before being postponed.

hubie writes:

Food security and agricultural sustainability are global issues, and how to feed a growing global population is a topic of constant concern. Urban agriculture is an area that people look to help address the issue. Urban farming provides benefits beyond the value of the food produced, but it hasn't been clear as to how much the crop yields could contribute to the needs of the community. In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers developed a methodology to estimate the current and potential food production in an urban UK setting.

The researchers estimated food production on allotments and residential gardens based on: GIS-derived data for the total area of allotments and gardens across three towns (Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes), survey data for the proportional areas of allotments and private gardens that are cultivated for food growing, and measured yields for commonly grown crops in the UK. They also considered the yields of existing fruit-bearing trees. They considered a range of scenarios from the most conservative that estimated the amount of crops that could be grown on the land presently set aside for food growing, to the maximum potential assumption where all of the available garden plots grew food. The researchers estimated the most conservative scenario resulted in production that could meet about 9% of the region's annual need (about 30 days), whereas about half of the annual need was met under the maximal potential scenario. Their methodologies and assumptions can all be found in the open-access paper.

Journal Reference:
Grafius, D.R., Edmondson, J.L., Norton, B.A. et al. Estimating food production in an urban landscape. Sci Rep 10, 5141 (2020). (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62126-4)

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Virtual reality headsets and application programs for VR are not gaining traction with users because of a chicken-and-egg dilemma, lack of VR content and slow market penetration of custom-made VR units.

Now, Purdue University researchers have created a new approach to VR that allows multiple players to interact with the same VR game on smartphones and provides new opportunities for enterprise, education, health care and entertainment applications.

The Purdue VR system, called Coterie, uses a novel way to manage the challenging task of rendering high-resolution virtual scenes to satisfy the stringent quality-of-experience (QoE) of VR. Those include high frame rate and low motion-to-photon latency, which is the delay between the movement of the user's head or game controller and the change of the VR device's display reflecting the user's movement. The new approach enables 4K-resolution VR on commodity mobile devices and allows up to 10 players to interact in the same VR application at a time.

"We have worked to create VR technology that someone can use on a typical smartphone with a Wi-Fi connection," said Y. Charlie Hu, the Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who led the Purdue team. "Our solution not only allows multiple players to participate in a VR game at the same time, but also provides a better and more cost-effective option for single-player use."

The technology is detailed in a paper published in ASPLOS 2020, an international conference for interdisciplinary systems research, intersecting computer architecture, hardware and emerging technologies, programming languages and compilers, operating systems and networking.

Journal Reference:
Jiayi Meng, Sibendu Paul, Ying Charlie Hu. Novel system allows untethered high-quality multi-player VR @PurdueRP, ASPLOS 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3373376.3378516)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Hanwang, the facial-recognition company that has placed 2 million of its cameras at entrance gates across the world, started preparing for the coronavirus in early January.

Huang Lei, the company’s chief technical officer, said that even before the new virus was widely known about, he had begun to get requests from hospitals at the centre of the outbreak in Hubei province to update its software to recognise nurses wearing masks.

[...] If three or five clients ask for the same thing . . . we’ll see that as important,” said Mr Huang, adding that its cameras previously only recognised people in masks half the time, compared with 99.5 percent accuracy for a full face image.

[...] The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails.

“The problem of masked facial recognition is not new, but belongs to the family of facial recognition with occlusion,” Mr Huang said, adding that his company had first encountered similar issues with people with beards in Turkey and Pakistan, as well as with northern Chinese customers wearing winter clothing that covered their ears and face.

Counter-intuitively, training facial recognition algorithms to recognize masked faces involves throwing data away. A team at the University of Bradford published a study last year showing they could train a facial recognition program to accurately recognize half-faces by deleting parts of the photos they used to train the software.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Some local schoolboards have already rolled out full remote learning curricula, starting Monday (seems to me there have been plans in the works for years to make something like this happen this fast.) Others appear flat-footed and clueless. We did some homeschooling with our kids a couple of years ago, and the one website that really clicked with us was (shameless plug) https://ixl.com .

I know we had a Soylent story just over a week ago asking for alternatives to the ubiquitous (and well deserved first place recommendation) Khan. Now that it's a little less abstract, and looking more certain that the kids won't be returning to physical school buildings until the fall... what do you look for in online learning services?

Our criteria were: easy for the kids to self-learn the material as presented, easy to track progress and identify areas where extra instruction might help, clear documentation of subjects covered and relative mastery of each, easy for kids to self-select appropriate subject areas to study, reasonable cost.

Khan certainly presents material clearly, and the cost can't be beat, but we found IXL to be superior in the other areas, and when you think about the tremendous number of hours invested by you and your kids in the learning system, the cost isn't really significant ($20/month for one, $24 for two).

Has anybody else taken a serious plunge into online learning and found something "better than Khan" for your purposes?

[Ed. addition follows. --martyb]

See our previous story: Student Privacy Laws Still Apply if Coronavirus Just Closed Your School and take a close look at future provider's security and privacy practices. From the article linked to in the previous story https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/watch-out-for-privacy-pitfalls-if-your-school-is-suddenly-online-only/:

canopic jug writes:

The Fed­er­al Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court of Germany (FCC) has delivered a decisive win for software users and developers around Europe. In a recently-published court decision, 2 BvR 739/17 (in German) from February, it has declared that the Act of Approval to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC) is void. The Unified Patent Court has been widely considered to be a shell for bringing software patents into Europe through the side door, in violation of international treaties which prohibit by name patents on programs for computers.

The Act of Approval to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court ("the Act of Approval") to confer sovereign powers on the Unified Patent Court is void. In its outcome, it amends the Constitution in substantive terms, though it has not been approved by the Bundestag with the required two-thirds majority. This is what the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided on a constitutional complaint in an order published today. In its reasoning, the Senate stated that, in order to safeguard their right to influence the process of European integration by democratic means, this, in principle, also entails the right of citizens that sovereign powers be conferred only in the ways provided for by the Basic Law. An act of approval to an international treaty that has been adopted in violation thereof cannot provide democratic legitimation for the exercise of public authority by the EU or any other international institution supplementary to or otherwise closely tied to the EU.

Once more for emphasis, software is protected by copyright law and that governs distribution. Patents govern usage and function, regardless of origin. So had the EPC gone through and forced software patents into Europe, neither clean room nor independent implementations would have protected either end-users, software-using businesses, or developers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Since Monday, Tesla has been under pressure from officials in Alameda County to shut down operations of its car factory in Fremont, California, to fight the spread of the coronavirus. On Thursday, Tesla finally announced it would halt vehicle manufacturing in Fremont.

"We have decided to temporarily suspend production at our factory in Fremont, from end of day March 23, which will allow an orderly shutdown," Tesla said in a post on its website.

March 23 is next Monday—a full week after officials in seven Bay Area counties ordered non-essential businesses to close down. To make sure there was no confusion about Tesla's status, Alameda County tweeted on Tuesday that Tesla was not an essential business.

But Tesla persisted. In recent weeks, Elon Musk has been a vocal skeptic of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. "Danger of panic still far exceeds danger of corona," Musk tweeted on Monday.

Previously:
Alameda County Sheriff Pressures Tesla to Shut Down Fremont Factory

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

NIST, DHS Publish Guidance on Securing Virtual Meetings, VPNs:

With people worldwide forced to work from home due to the coronavirus epidemic, NIST and DHS published a series of recommendations on how to ensure that virtual meetings and connections to enterprise networks are protected from prying eyes.

[...] The security of virtual meetings might often be an afterthought, but basic precautions can ensure that they don't lead to data breaches or other security incidents, says Jeff Greene, director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Most virtual meeting services have built-in security features, but following an organization's policies for virtual meeting security should ensure strong protection. Organizations should also consider limiting the reuse of access codes, using one-time PINs or meeting identifier codes, and adopting multi-factor authentication.

[...] "This list is not all-encompassing, nor must you use every tool for every virtual meeting. Know your organization's policies, think about the sensitivity of the topics to be discussed, factor in the logistics of the meeting, and pick the measures that make sense for each situation," Greene notes.