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DannyB writes:

Boeing customers cancel staggering 150 Max plane orders, deepening crisis as coronavirus roils air travel:

Boeing customers canceled a staggering number of 737 Max orders last month, deepening the crisis the company faces amid the coronavirus pandemic and the continued grounding of its bestselling plane after two fatal crashes.

The Chicago-based manufacturer on Tuesday posted 150 cancellations of its beleaguered 737 Max jets in March, the most in decades, the company said. Brazilian airline Gol canceled 34 of the narrow-body planes and leasing firm Avolon scrapped orders for 75 of them, a move it announced earlier this month. Net cancellations in the month totaled 119 thanks to 31 orders for wide-body passenger planes and military aircraft.

That brought net orders Boeing removed from its order list in [the]first three months of the year to 307 planes, a sharp turnaround for a company that just over a year ago was aiming to increase output of its planes to meet strong demand.

[...] Boeing's airline customers are now facing the steepest drop in demand ever recorded because of Covid-19 and harsh measures like stay-at-home orders to slow its spread. The pandemic comes on top of the more than year-long grounding of the 737 Max after 346 people were killed in two crashes.

Alternate source: Yahoo finance

^{_<no-sarcasm>}
I wonder. If the 737 MAX had not been grounded, would those orders have been cancelled, despite the Covid-19 downturn in airline flights.
^{_{</no-sarcasm>}}

Original Submission

wirelessduck submitted a link which brought us to:

In a number system where the real numbers could not have an infinite number of digits, how would our physics models change?

Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math.:

Strangely, although we feel as if we sweep through time on the knife-edge between the fixed past and the open future, that edge — the present — appears nowhere in the existing laws of physics.

In Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, time is woven together with the three dimensions of space, forming a bendy, four-dimensional space-time continuum — a "block universe" encompassing the entire past, present and future. Einstein's equations portray everything in the block universe as decided from the beginning; the initial conditions of the cosmos determine what comes later, and surprises do not occur — they only seem to. "For us believing physicists," Einstein wrote in 1955, weeks before his death, "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

The timeless, pre-determined view of reality held by Einstein remains popular today. "The majority of physicists believe in the block-universe view, because it is predicted by general relativity," said Marina Cortês, a cosmologist at the University of Lisbon.

However, she said, "if somebody is called on to reflect a bit more deeply about what the block universe means, they start to question and waver on the implications."

Physicists who think carefully about time point to troubles posed by quantum mechanics, the laws describing the probabilistic behavior of particles. At the quantum scale, irreversible changes occur that distinguish the past from the future: A particle maintains simultaneous quantum states until you measure it, at which point the particle adopts one of the states. Mysteriously, individual measurement outcomes are random and unpredictable, even as particle behavior collectively follows statistical patterns. This apparent inconsistency between the nature of time in quantum mechanics and the way it functions in relativity has created uncertainty and confusion.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

ACLU Sues Baltimore Police Department Over Aerial Surveillance Program:

On the first day of April, Baltimore officials approved a deal between the Baltimore Police Department [(BPD)] and Ohio-based company Persistent Surveillance Systems to use drones equipped with high-resolution cameras in order to spy on the city's residents through around-the-clock surveillance despite formal objections filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Defense Fund.

[...] On Thursday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the BPD seeking to block the program, saying that it will put everyone in the city "under constant aerial surveillance," WBALTV 11 reports.

"It is equivalent to having a police officer follow us, each of us, outside all the time in case we might commit a crime," said David Rocah, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland. "If that happened in real life, everyone would clearly understand the privacy and First Amendment implications, and it would never be tolerated."

[...] The spy planes can cover at least 90% of Baltimore's land area at any given moment. The ACLU fears that the technology can be combined with the BPD's ground cameras and license plate readers and that all of that data can be tied together and used to provide detailed information as to the identities and activities of the city's citizens.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Team designs carbon nanostructure stronger than diamonds:

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have architecturally designed plate-nanolattices—nanometer-sized carbon structures—that are stronger than diamonds as a ratio of strength to density.

In a recent study in Nature Communications, the scientists report success in conceptualizing and fabricating the material, which consists of closely connected, closed-cell plates instead of the cylindrical trusses common in such structures over the past few decades.

"Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties," said corresponding author Jens Bauer, a UCI researcher in mechanical & aerospace engineering. "This new class of plate-nanolattices that we've created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the best beam-nanolattices."

According to the paper, the team's design has been shown to improve on the average performance of cylindrical beam-based architectures by up to 639 percent in strength and 522 percent in rigidity.

[...] Bauer said the team's achievement rests on a complex 3-D laser printing process called two-photon polymerization direct laser writing. As a laser is focused inside a droplet of an ultraviolet-light-sensitive liquid resin, the material becomes a solid polymer where molecules are simultaneously hit by two photons. By scanning the laser or moving the stage in three dimensions, the technique is able to render periodic arrangements of cells, each consisting of assemblies of plates as thin as 160 nanometers.

One of the group's innovations was to include tiny holes in the plates that could be used to remove excess resin from the finished material. As a final step, the lattices go through pyrolysis, in which they're heated to 900 degrees Celsius in a vacuum for one hour. According to Bauer, the end result is a cube-shaped lattice of glassy carbon that has the highest strength scientists ever thought possible for such a porous material.

Journal Information:
Cameron Crook et al. Plate-nanolattices at the theoretical limit of stiffness and strength, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15434-2

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers which are using the board in their designs. The higher end Raspberry Pi boards are also reasonable desktop units for many typical home office uses, so they are being distributed in place of laptops to many working at home for the NHS. The Raspberry Pi is a low wattage single-board computer with convenient input-output hardware suitable for embedded applications but running a full Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, Raspbian.

As the need for ventilators grows, manufacturers are looking for control boards to serve as the brains of their devices. Recently, Intel was reportedly asked to produce 20,000 Broadwell processors to meet demand from medical companies. Because of its production abilities, Raspberry Pi Foundation is able to provide those orders quickly.

"One of the main challenges with rapidly scaling manufacture of products like this is that you may be able to surge production of the air-handling elements, but you still need to provide the control element: often the components you need are on 20-week lead times and (hopefully) we'll be out of the other side of this pandemic by then," said Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi. "Raspberry Pi 'builds to stock' rather than 'building to order,' so we generally have products either on-hand or in the pipeline with short lead times."

Even though Raspberry Pi builds to stock, the organization has still experienced a shortage of Raspberry Pi Zero Units, due to demand from consumers as well as the foundation's desire to hold stock for ventilator manufacturers. Upton says that the organization produced 192,000 Zero-line (Pi Zero / Zero W) products in Q1 but plans to increase that number to 250,000 going forward.

The BBC is reporting that Raspberry Pi-based ventilators are currently being tested in several locations. No word yet on how the certification process is going.

Related:
Raspberry Pi will power ventilators for COVID-19 patients
Raspberry Pi's $5 model is powering ventilators to fight coronavirus

Previously:
(2020) Company Prioritizes $15k Ventilators Over Cheaper Model Specified in Contract
(2020) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic
(2019) Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT
(2019) Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Compute Module 3+, the Last 40nm-Based RasPi
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
(2015) Raspberry Pi's Latest Computer Costs Just $5

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Heavy iron isotopes leaking from Earth's core:

The boundary between the liquid iron core and the rocky mantle is located some 1,800 miles (2,900 km) below Earth's surface. At this transition, the temperature drops by more than a thousand degrees from the hotter core to the cooler mantle.

The new study suggests heavier iron isotopes migrate toward lower temperatures -- and into the mantle -- while lighter iron isotopes circulate back down into the core. (Isotopes of the same element have different numbers of neutrons, giving them slightly different masses.) This effect could cause core material infiltrating the lowermost mantle to be enriched in heavy iron isotopes.

[...] Understanding the physical processes operating at the core-mantle boundary is important for interpreting seismic images of the deep mantle, as well as modeling the extent of chemical and thermal transfer between the deep Earth and surface of our planet, Lesher said.

[...] Computer simulations performed by the research team show this core material can even reach the surface, mixed with and transported by hot, upwelling mantle plumes. Some lavas erupted at oceanic hot spots such as Samoa and Hawaii are enriched in heavy iron isotopes, which Lesher and the team propose could be a signature of a leaky core.

Journal Reference:
Charles E. Lesher, Juliane Dannberg, Gry H. Barfod et al. Iron isotope fractionation at the core–mantle boundary by thermodiffusion, Nature Geoscience (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41561-020-0560-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Here's an unprecedented look at Apollo 13's damaged Service Module:

NASA's famous Apollo 13 mission launched 50 years ago, and on April 14 the oxygen tank on its Service Module exploded. As you undoubtedly know, the mission's Moon landing was canceled after the explosion, sending the three astronauts into a mad scramble with Mission Control to save their lives. Apollo 13 inspired an award-winning, eponymous film in 1995 starring Tom Hanks as commander Jim Lovell.

At Ars, we have chronicled aspects of the mission in great detail, putting it in the broader context of the Apollo Program, as well as going really deep on what exactly happened during the mission. For this story, we have a special treat—newly remastered images culled from 70mm Hasselblad photographs and stacked frames from 16mm film.

These images were processed and shared with Ars by Andy Saunders, a property developer and semi-professional photographer in northern England who is an Apollo enthusiast. In recent years, he has spent more and more time going into the Apollo archive to dig out new details from images and film. (A larger version of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module can be seen here.)

[...] While working on Apollo 13 images, Saunders said he was struck by how calm Lovell and the other two crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, appear. Much of the film he worked on was shot in the Lunar Module, after the oxygen tank exploded. The crew was exhausted, it was cold, and the astronauts found themselves in the gravest of situations. And yet they appeared to be in good spirits. "That's test pilots for you, I guess," Saunders said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Offshore energy-producing platforms in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico are emitting twice as much methane, a greenhouse gas, than previously thought, according to a new study from the University of Michigan.

Researchers conducted a first-of-its-kind pilot-study sampling air over offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Their findings suggest the federal government's calculations are too low.

U-M's research found that, for the full U.S. Gulf of Mexico, oil and gas facilities emit approximately one-half a teragram of methane each year, comparable with large emitting oil and gas basins like the Four Corners region in the southwest U.S. The effective loss rate of produced gas is roughly 2.9%, similar to large onshore basins primarily focused on oil, and significantly higher than current inventory estimates.

Offshore harvesting accounts for roughly one-third of the oil and gas produced worldwide, and these facilities both vent and leak methane. Until now, only a handful of measurements of offshore platforms have been made, and no aircraft studies of methane emissions in normal operation had been conducted. Each year the EPA issues its U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory, but its numbers for offshore emissions are not produced via direct sampling.

The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, identified three reasons for the discrepancy between EPA estimates and their findings:

• Errors in platform counts: Offshore facilities in state waters, of which there are in excess of 1,300, were missing from the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
• Persistent emissions from shallow-water facilities, particularly those primarily focused on natural gas, are higher than inventoried.
• Large, older facilities situated in shallow waters tended to produce episodic, disproportionally high spikes of methane emissions. These facilities, which have more than seven platforms apiece, contribute to nearly 40% of emissions, yet consist of less than 1% of total platforms. If this emission process were identified, it could provide an optimal mitigation opportunity, the researchers said.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference
Tara I. Yacovitch, Conner Daube, Scott C. Herndon. Methane Emissions from Offshore Oil and Gas Platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, Environ. Sci. Technol. (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b07148)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Trump signs an executive order allowing mining the moon and asteroids:

In 2015, the Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA, or H.R. 2262) into law. This bill was intended to "facilitate a pro-growth environment for the developing commercial space industry" by making it legal for American companies and citizens to own and sell resources that they extract from asteroids and off-world locations (like the moon, Mars or beyond).

On April 6th, the Trump administration took things a step further by signing an executive order that formally recognizes the rights of private interests to claim resources in space. This order, titled "Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources," effectively ends the decades-long debate that began with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.

This order builds on both the CSLCA and Space Directive-1 (SD-1), which the Trump administration signed into law on December 11th, 2017. It establishes that "Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law," and that the United States does not view space as a "global commons."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

IBM scrambles to find or train more COBOL programmers to help states:

The economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic have created a surge in demand for COBOL programmers. Last week, for example, the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to help fix problems with the software that runs the state's unemployment insurance system.

A new initiative from IBM seeks to connect states with experienced COBOL programmers—and to train a new generation of them.

"In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, our clients are facing unprecedented circumstances," an IBM press release says. Some states "are in need of additional programming skills to make changes to COBOL—a language that has been widely reported to have an estimated 220 billion lines of code being actively used today."

A new online forum, co-sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project, aims to connect COBOL programmers to people wanting to hire them.

At least this time they're offering to pay.

Previously:
COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Cannonball Record Broken During Coronavirus - 26 Hours 38 Minutes:

Only a few months have passed since we reported that the New York-to-Los Angeles Cannonball record was broken. It's allegedly been broken again. The 26 hour, 38 minute time—which beats the record set in November by more than 45 minutes—appears to be legitimate, according to Ed Bolian, a Cannonball insider and driver who set his own 28 hour, 50 minute record in 2013. Alex Roy, who set the first modern NYC-to-LA record in 2006, also said the new claim is credible based on his analysis of multiple sources.

"It was not me," Bolian was quick to point out to Road & Track, eager to quell an Internet-generated rumor that perhaps he had been the one to pull it off.

[...] All we know about this new set of scofflaws is that there were three, maybe four of them, and that they were driving a white 2019 Audi A8 sedan with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt.

We also know that their timing was awful. It doesn't seem likely that the new record-holders were keen to have news reach the public so soon, especially at a time when so many people are understandably on edge. But an exuberant friend posted a picture of the Audi on Facebook this week—situated among a number of other high-dollar cars, with its trunk open to show the auxiliary fuel tanks—along with the team's alleged time. Within a day, hundreds of people had shared the post, and social media chat groups were abuzz with Cannonball aficionados offering up opinions on the matter. (The Facebook post has since been removed; it's reproduced here via screengrab.)

"Do I think this is the best use of time while the country is staying in during a pandemic?" Bolian asked in an interview with R&T. "Probably not, but for me to say it's awful is like a cocaine dealer saying a heroin dealer is awful."

Also at NYTimes

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New Atlas:

What's wrong with the prop-powered, drone-style VTOL flying car designs we're seeing all over the place? Ignoring the energy density issues that are holding the entire electric aviation industry back, multirotors are quite noisy, and they have basically no adequate safety systems in place if the power systems fail.

A somewhat mysterious startup called Volerian claims to have a solution for both these points, and it uses a very odd propulsion system we've never run across before.

The system places a large number of flapping wings inside a series of precisely shaped ducts. The wings are driven by cams on a rotating shaft, such that they flap back and forth quickly between the walls of these ducts, much like the tails of fish. A second fixed "stator" wing is mounted further down the ducts "to further increase efficiency," presumably by messing with the swirling pressure vortices created by the flapping wings.

The company claims its furious flappers not only make less noise than a comparable multirotor setup, but that the system is safer as well. In the event of power loss, the wings can be released to flutter against the airstream coming up through the bottom of the vents as the aircraft falls, acting a bit like a parachute. Not to mention, there's no rotating decapitators in the system to worry about.

New Atlas's current issue highlights half a dozen startups that are hoping to make air taxis a reality.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/10/feds-allow-drive-up-gun-sales-ease-dealers-buyers-virus-worries/5134084002/:

Feds allow for drive-up gun sales to ease dealers', buyers' coronavirus worries

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, in new guidance to federally licensed firearm retailers, said Friday that dealers can provide drive-up or walk-up service to reduce health risks posed by the coronavirus.

[...] Licensees "may carry out the requested activities through a drive-up or walk-up window or doorway where the customer is on the licensee's property, on the exterior of the brick-and-mortar structure at the address listed on the license," the ATF said in a Friday bulletin.

Transactions may not be carried from "a nearby space" that is not part of the dealers' property unless they are participating in qualified gun shows.

Larry Keane, general counsel for the firearms industry trade group National Shooting Sports Foundation, said Friday that the organization raised the issue with the ATF more than two weeks ago as dealers sought to navigate various government orders limiting business activity.

[...] Except in the states of Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York and Washington, gun dealers have been open for business during the pandemic.

Keane said the new ATF guidance in no way alters the requirements for background checks.

Show of hands: who could ever have expected THIS?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

China Develops High Capacity QLC 3D NAND: YMTC at 1.33 Tb

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) has announced that it's developed its new 128-layer 1.33 Tb QLC 3D NAND memory chip, the X2-6070. The new chip is based on its Xtacking architecture which enables it to run with super high I/O while maximising the density of its memory arrays. YMTC has also unveiled its plan for a 128-layer 512 Gb TLC chip, the X2-9060, designed to meet more diverse application requirements.

[...] The QLC based X2-6070 has 128-layers and more than 366 billion effective charge-trap memory cells. Each memory cell has 4-bit of data, which equates to 1.33 Tb of storage capacity. Everything is proportionate to cost, and it seems like YMTC, which is newer than most to 3D NAND stacking, could again improve its Xtacking architecture in the future.

Xtacking is not a typo.

Related:
Western Digital Samples 96-Layer 3D QLC NAND with 1.33 Tb Per Die
'Unstoppable' Chinese NAND fabber YMTC to unleash 64-layer flash flood before skipping ahead to 128 – analyst
SK Hynix Finishes 128-Layer 3D NAND, Plans 176-Layer 3D NAND
Report: China-Based Yangtze Memory Starts 64-Layer NAND Production
YMTC Starts Volume Production of 64-Layer 3D NAND

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Report: TSMC CoWoS Production Line at Full Capacity as Demand Increases

Despite the downturn of events around the world, TSMC is witnessing a significant increase in demand for its Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging, according to DigiTimes' unnamed industry sources. The Taiwanese silicon manufacturer is purportedly running its CoWoS production lines at full capacity.

CoWoS as is a 2.5D method of packaging multiple individual dies side-by-side on a single silicon interposer. The benefits are the ability to increase the density in small devices as you run into the limits of how big individual dies can be produced, better interconnectivity between dies and lower power consumption.

According to DigiTimes, AMD, Nvidia, HiSilicon, Xilinx and Broadcom have placed orders for the tech, with demand for high-performance computing chips, high bandwidth memory (HBM)-powered AI accelerators and ASICs during the past two weeks.

Examples of CoWoS packaged silicon are [...] AMD's Vega VII graphics cards, as well as Nvidia's V100 cards, which have HBM on the same silicon interposer where the GPU is. With the GPU and memory so close together, memory bandwidth is significantly higher on these chips compared to those using GDDR6 memory located elsewhere on the graphics card's PCB. Additionally, the PCB becomes much smaller.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: TSMC Shows Off Gigantic Silicon Interposer
TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) Connects Multiple Interposers

Original Submission