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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

We now know the effect of altitude on classic "Diet Coke and Mentos" fountain:

Back in 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz—the self-described mad scientists behind Eepybird—ignited an Internet sensation with their viral video of an elaborate version of the Diet Coke and Mentos fountain experiment, recreating the choreography of the Bellagio's world-famous fountain display in Las Vegas. The underlying physics and chemistry of the fountain effect is well-known.

But an intrepid pair of scientists at Spring Arbor University in Michigan wondered whether altitude, and associated changes in atmospheric pressure, would have any measurable impact on the intensity of the foaming fountain and performed a series of experiments to find out. They reported their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Chemical Education. The upshot: If you really want to get the most foaming action for your buck, conduct the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment at high altitudes.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Scientists ponder how jugglers seem to defy limits to human reaction times:

The fastest expert jugglers can make nearly 500 catches per minute, which translates into just 120 milliseconds per catch—faster than human reaction times even in high-speed sports like tennis, in which a player typically takes 200 milliseconds to adjust their performance. The Guinness world record for juggling is currently 11 balls. Troy Shinbrot, a biomedical engineer at Rutgers University, and Rutgers undergraduate math major Jonah Botvinick-Greenhouse explored the question of how expert jugglers can achieve these remarkable feats in a recent article in Physics Today.

Master jugglers are clearly very good at multitasking, and since balls aren't being thrown randomly, each ball need not be tracked and caught independently. But Botvinick-Greenhouse and Shinbrot still wondered how it was possible for jugglers with reaction times of 200 milliseconds to routinely catch balls every 120 milliseconds. "Jugglers rely on making accurate throws and predictions of where the balls will travel," the authors wrote. "The accuracy required is a measure of how unstable—and thus how difficult—a particular juggling pattern is."

Juggling has a long and glorious history dating back to ancient Egypt; there are hieroglyphics circa 1994 and 1781 BCE that historians consider to be the earliest historical record of juggling. There were juggling warriors in China (770-476 BCE)—apparently it was viewed as an effective diversionary tactic—and the practice eventually spread to ancient Greece and Rome. By the mid-1800s CE, juggling was largely practiced by circus and street performers, and it has fascinated scientists since at least 1903. That's when Edgar James Swift published a paper looking at the psychology and physiology of learning in the American Journal of Psychology, which discussed the rate at which students learned to toss two balls in one hand.

As Peter Beek and Arthur Lewbel wrote in a 1995 article in Scientific American:

[Juggling] is complex enough to have interesting properties and simple enough to allow the modeling of these properties. Thus, it provides a context in which to examine other, more complex fields... One is the study of human movement and the coordination of the limbs. Another is robotics and the construction of juggling machines. The third is mathematics: juggling patterns have surprising numerical properties.

Journal Reference:
Jonah Botvinick-Greenhouse, Troy Shinbrot. Juggling dynamics Physics Today 73, 2, 62 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4417

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Attackers can bypass fingerprint authentication with an ~80% success rate:

Today, fingerprints are widely accepted as a safe alternative over passwords when unlocking devices in many, but not all, contexts.

A study published on Wednesday by Cisco's Talos security group makes clear that the alternative isn't suitable for everyone—namely those who may be targeted by nation-sponsored hackers or other skilled, well-financed, and determined attack groups. The researchers spent about $2,000 over several months testing fingerprint authentication offered by Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, and three lock makers. The result: on average, fake fingerprints were able to bypass sensors at least once roughly 80 percent of the time.

The percentages are based on 20 attempts for each device with the best fake fingerprint the researchers were able to create. While Apple Apple products limit users to five attempts before asking for the PIN or password, the researchers subjected the devices to 20 attempts (that is, multiple groups of from one or more attempts). Of the 20 attempts, 17 were successful. Other products tested permitted significantly more or even an unlimited number of unsuccessful tries.

Tuesday's report was quick to point out that the results required several months of painstaking work, with more than 50 fingerprint molds created before getting one to work. The study also noted that the demands of the attack—which involved obtaining a clean image of a target's fingerprint and then getting physical access to the target's device—meant that only the most determined and capable adversaries would succeed.

"Even so, this level of success rate means that we have a very high probability of unlocking any of the tested devices before it falls back into the PIN unlocking," Talos researchers Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura wrote. "The results show fingerprints are good enough to protect the average person's privacy if they lose their phone. However, a person that is likely to be targeted by a well-funded and motivated actor should not use fingerprint authentication."

Original Submission

This story is a merge of 28 story submissions. Given that it was well over 18,000 words of original source material (excluding HTML markup!), a great deal of pruning was performed to get it to a manageable size. We strongly encourage folks to read the linked articles for more information.

For latest statistics, and finer granularity, see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ or https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html.

Coronavirus Cases: 1,700,741
Deaths:              102,774
Recovered:           376,572

Active Cases:
  1,221,395 Currently Infected Patients
  1,171,568 (96%) in Mild Condition
     49,872 (4%) Serious or Critical

Closed Cases:
 479,346 Cases which had an outcome:
 376,572 (79%) Recovered / Discharged
 102,774 (21%) Deaths

Data as at 11 Apr 2020, at 08:01 UTC.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Since early 2020 Netflix has cracked down on VPN users by disconnecting sessions at random and terminating SSL connections to their main website. This action is to due to content distributors pressuring Netflix to prevent users from accessing content outside of their geographical zone as they believe this is costing them in terms of profit. The end result is that users who always use a VPN to access the internet are cut from Netflix as collateral damage even if their account is registered in the same country where they connect to a VPN for. While some VPN providers have given up, NordVPN and a few others are battling on to provide their users with peace of mind while accessing services on the internet.

Can I get my money back because Netflix is not delivering the service I paid for?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Pandemic hasn't crushed broadband networks:

The sharp growth in residential-broadband traffic seen during the pandemic is starting to level off, new data shows. While Internet speeds have slowed somewhat in many parts of the United States, it turns out that even rural-broadband networks are holding up pretty well.

[...] To determine rural performance, BroadbandNow said it "aggregated speed-test results [from M-Lab] across all US ZIP codes in counties marked as non-metropolitan (Micropolitan and Noncore) under the CDC's Urban–Rural Classification Scheme."

This isn't a definitive measure of how rural-broadband networks are handling increased residential usage by people losing jobs or working at home. For one thing, there is "limited availability of speed-test data in rural communities," BroadbandNow said.

[...] The number of top cities suffering decreases in median download speeds rose to 117 last week. But the BroadbandNow report released today said things are turning around:

Internet performance in the US improved overall, with 97 cities (48.5 percent) recording download speed degradations this week (down from 117, or 59 percent last week). 139 cities (69 percent) have reported upload speed disruptions, which is also down from last week's 144, or 72 percent.

Problem areas include Baltimore, Maryland; Los Angeles, California; and Flushing, New York, where upload speeds were more than 40 percent lower than the range seen in the 10 pre-pandemic weeks.

takyon writes:

China Appointed to Influential UN Human Rights Council Panel

Last week, China was appointed to a seat on the Consultative Group of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Jiang Duan, an official at the Chinese Mission in Geneva, was nominated and confirmed by the Asia regional grouping and will hold the seat until March 2021. The appointment places China on an influential panel that oversees candidate recommendations for UN human rights experts and is likely to raise some concerns given China's less than perfect record on human rights issues.

As China has become more integrated in international organizations over the past 40 years or so, particularly within UN bodies and agencies, the scope of issue areas it is willing to not only engage with but also shape has expanded.

[...] The Consultative Group, the body to which China was just appointed, is charged with recommending candidates to fill positions according to the mandates of the Special Procedures, the Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Right of Development. The panel consists of five ambassadors, each representing the five UN regional groups, and facilitates the appointment of experts on issues of freedom of speech and religion; water and sanitation; housing; food; health; poverty; and conditions in countries such as Cambodia, Iran, Myanmar, and North Korea.

[...] In recent years, China has actively submitted proposals to the UNHRC as a member, albeit not without pushback. These resolutions have been challenged for their framing of human rights issues and the right to development within a state-centric approach, privileging the sovereignty of states over groups of people and communities. Experts have been outspoken about the implications of such proposals, raising concern that an overemphasis on dialogue and consensus might dilute the commitments to transparency and accountability. Separately, in July 2019, two coalitions of states sent competing letters to the UNHRC about China's Xinjiang policies — one criticizing China for its massive detention program and the other opposing the "politicization" of human rights issues and supporting Chinese counterterrorism and deradicalization efforts. More recently, there has been heightened international outcry about human rights in China amid the harsh measures Beijing put in place to combat the coronavirus.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Apple and Google are launching a joint COVID-19 tracing tool for iOS and Android

Apple and Google's engineering teams have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.

Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can get tested. It does this by identifying and 'following up with' people who have come into contact with a COVID-19 affected person.

The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. The next phase is a system level contact tracing system that will work across iOS and Android devices on an opt-in basis.

The system uses on-board radios on your device to transmit an anonymous ID over short ranges — using Bluetooth beaconing. Servers relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices which search for a match. A match is determined based on a threshold of time spent and distance maintained between two devices.

If a match is found with another user that has told the system that they have tested positive, you are notified and can take steps to be tested and to self quarantine.

[...] you run into technical problems like Bluetooth power suck, privacy concerns about centralized data collection and the sheer effort it takes to get enough people to install the apps to be effective.

takyon writes:

Newly engineered enzyme can break down plastic to raw materials

Plastics have a lot of properties that have made them fixtures of modern societies. They can be molded into any shape we'd like, they're tough yet flexible, and they come in enough variations that we can tune the chemistry to suit different needs. The problem is that they're tough enough that they don't break down on their own, and incinerating them is relatively inefficient. As a result, they've collected in our environment as both bulk plastics and the seemingly omnipresent microplastic waste.

For natural materials, breaking down isn't an issue, as microbes have evolved ways of digesting them to obtain energy or useful chemicals. But many plastics have only been around for decades, and we're just now seeing organisms that have evolved enzymes to digest them. Figuring they could do one better, researchers in France have engineered an enzyme that can efficiently break down one of the most common forms of plastic. The end result of this reaction is a raw material that can be reused directly to make new plastic bottles.

The plastic in question is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. PET has a variety of uses, including as thin films with very high tensile strength (marketed as mylar). But its most notable use is in plastic drink bottles, which are a major component of environmental plastic waste. PET was first developed in the 1940s, and the first living organism that can break down and use the carbon in PET was described in 2016 [DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6359] [DX]—found in sediment near a plastic recycling facility, naturally.

Journal Reference:
V. Tournier, C. M. Topham, A. Gilles et al. An engineered PET depolymerase to break down and recycle plastic bottles, Nature 580, 216–219 (2020) (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2149-4)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Pirate Bay No Longer Uses Cloudflare, Visitors Sent to 'Black Hole' * TorrentFreak:

The Pirate Bay's original and main domain has been unreachable for more than a month.

While the site operates as usual on the Tor network, visitors to ThePirateBay.org are welcomed by a Cloudflare error message mentioning that the "connection timed out."

Two weeks ago, a source familiar with the matter informed us that the infamous torrent site faces some technical issues and the admin is taking this opportunity to rewrite some code. After that, we received no updates.

Today, however, something appears to be changing. For the first time in years, the whois record for ThePirateBay.org has been updated. Instead of the domain pointing to Cloudflare's nameservers, it is now linked to the default nameservers of the domain registrar EasyDNS.

In addition, the domain's status code has changed from 'client Transfer Prohibited' to 'ok,' which means that there are no restrictions preventing it from being transferred to a new owner.

At the time of writing, all traffic to ThePirateBay.org is resolving to 127.0.0.1, which is the generic localhost IP-address. This means that the domain name is effectively null routed, with all requests dumped into a local black hole.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

China reclassifies dogs as pets instead of livestock

China's Ministry of Agriculture issued new guidelines Wednesday that reclassify dogs as pets instead of livestock, part of the country's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"As far as dogs are concerned, along with the progress of human civilization and the public concern and love for animal protection, dogs have been 'specialized' to become companion animals ... and they will not be regulated as livestock in China," the notice said.

The coronavirus is believed to have originated in horseshoe bats, which may have passed the disease to other wildlife species for sale in the markets of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected.

Following the outbreak, China banned the breeding, trading and consumption of wildlife.

Also at Reuters.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New document reveals significant fall from grace for Boeing's space program

[A] new document released by NASA reveals the broader scope of Boeing's apparent decline in spaceflight dominance. The "source selection statement" from NASA explains the space agency's rationale for selecting SpaceX over three other companies—Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra Nevada Corporation—to deliver large supplies of cargo to lunar orbit. NASA announced its selection of SpaceX for this "Gateway Logistics" contract in late March. The selection document says that SpaceX provided the best technical approach and the lowest price by a "significant" margin.

This lunar cargo contract is essentially the third in a series of three "commercial" contracts NASA has offered to buy services at a fixed price over the last dozen years. First came cargo delivery to low-Earth orbit. Final selections for that program were SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, a company now owned by Northrop Grumman, in 2008. Second came crew delivery to low-Earth orbit in 2014. The final selections were SpaceX and Boeing, with its now-troubled Starliner spacecraft.

When comparing the selection rationale for the 2014 commercial crew contracts with the rationale for the recent Gateway logistics contract, the perception of Boeing's offering could not be more stark. In 2014, Boeing was very much perceived as the gold-standard—expensive, yes, but also technically masterful. In 2020, the company was still perceived as expensive but not ultimately worthy of consideration.

[...] Six years later, the perception of Boeing's bid for the lunar cargo contract is much changed. Of the four contenders, it had the lowest overall technical and mission suitability scores. In addition, Boeing's proposal was characterized as "inaccurate" and possessing no "significant strengths." Boeing also was cited with a "significant weakness" in its proposal for pushing back on providing its software source code.

Due to its high price and ill-suited proposal for the lunar cargo contract, NASA didn't even consider the proposal among the final bidders. In his assessment late last year, NASA's acting chief of human spaceflight, Ken Bowersox, wrote, "Since Boeing's proposal was the highest priced and the lowest rated under the Mission Suitability factor, while additionally providing a conditional fixed price, I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration."

Previously: NASA Picks SpaceX for Lunar Missions

Related: Boeing to Launch Starliner Spacecraft for Second Go at Reaching the ISS after First Mission Failed

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Bacteria in rock deep under sea inspire new search for life on Mars

Newly discovered single-celled creatures living deep beneath the seafloor have given researchers clues about how they might find life on Mars. These bacteria were discovered living in tiny cracks inside volcanic rocks after researchers persisted over a decade of trial and error to find a new way to examine the rocks.

Researchers estimate that the rock cracks are home to a community of bacteria as dense as that of the human gut, about 10 billion bacterial cells per cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic inch). In contrast, the average density of bacteria living in mud sediment on the seafloor is estimated to be 100 cells per cubic centimeter.

"I am now almost over-expecting that I can find life on Mars. If not, it must be that life relies on some other process that Mars does not have, like plate tectonics," said Associate Professor Yohey Suzuki from the University of Tokyo, referring to the movement of land masses around Earth most notable for causing earthquakes. Suzuki is first author of the research paper announcing the discovery, published in Communications Biology.

Also at CNET.

Deep microbial proliferation at the basalt interface in 33.5–104 million-year-old oceanic crust (open, DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-0860-1) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

University libraries offer online "lending" of scanned in-copyright books:

The coronavirus crisis has forced the closure of libraries around the world, depriving the public of access to millions of printed books. Books old enough to be in the public domain may be available for free download online. Many recent books are available to borrow in e-book form. But there are many other books—especially those published in the mid-to-late 20th century—that are hard to access without going to a physical library.

A consortium of university libraries called HathiTrust recently announced a solution to this problem, called the Emergency Temporary Access Service. It allows participating HathiTrust member libraries to offer their patrons digital scans of books that they can "check out" and read online.

HathiTrust has a history of pushing the boundaries of copyright. It was the defendant in a landmark 2014 ruling that established the legality of library book scanning. At the time, HathiTrust was only allowing people with print disabilities to access the full text of scanned books. Now HathiTrust is expanding access to more people—though still with significant limits.

The program is only available to patrons of member libraries like the Cornell library. Libraries can only "lend" as many copies of the book as it has physical copies on its shelves. Loans last for an hour and are automatically renewed if a patron is still viewing a book at the hour's end. If you want to read a book that's currently in use by another patron, you have to wait until they're finished.

These limits distinguish HathiTrust's service from another recently announced "emergency library." Two weeks ago, the Internet Archive announced it was offering the general public the opportunity to check out 1.4 million scanned books. During the pandemic, the Internet Archive isn't limiting the number of people who can "borrow" a book simultaneously.

Previously: Internet Archive Suspends E-Book Lending "Waiting Lists" During U.S. National Emergency
Authors Fume as Online Library "Lends" Unlimited Free Books

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

Isotropy of the universe is the idea that the universe is the same in all directions, and is a founding principle of the laws of physics. However, that principle has been called into question by observations of galaxy cluster temperatures and luminosities.

https://scitechdaily.com/fundamental-principle-of-cosmology-cast-in-doubt-by-compelling-new-study/

"No matter where we look, the same rules apply everywhere in space: countless calculations of astrophysics are based on this basic principle. A recent study by the Universities of Bonn and Harvard, however, has thrown this principle into question. Should the measured values be confirmed, this would toss many assumptions about the properties of the universe overboard. The results are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, but are already available online."

The paper (open access):
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2020/04/aa36602-19/aa36602-19.html

Journal Reference (open access):
K. Migkas, G. Schellenberger, T. H. Reiprich, F. Pacaud, M. E. Ramos-Ceja and L. Lovisari. Probing cosmic isotropy with a new X-ray galaxy cluster sample through the L X – T scaling relation , 8 April 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936602

Original Submission