SoylentNews

DannyB writes:

NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade

The flight from the Kennedy Space Center would send NASA astronauts to the space station

It’s been nearly 10 years since the last NASA astronauts launched from United States soil — a long, ignominious streak that’s been compounded by delays and technical challenges.

But now, finally, the space agency on Friday set the date for when it will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27.

While the date could change — in spaceflight they often do — the announcement marks a significant milestone in NASA’s winding, at times tortuous, journey to regain its human spaceflight wings since it retired the space shuttle in 2011.

[...] This time, though, the launch will be markedly different than any other in the history of the space agency. Unlike Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the space shuttle era, the rocket will be owned and operated not by NASA, but by a private company — SpaceX, the hard-charging commercial space company founded by Elon Musk.

For all the company’s triumphs, and its experience flying cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, it has never flown a single human being into space, a significant and dangerous challenge. NASA has spent years working with the California-based company to ensure its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft can safely deliver astronauts to orbit. And the flight would be the culmination of years of work, which has at times seen setbacks and delays.

[...] With a successful launch, SpaceX would accomplish an upset over its rival, Boeing, which also has been under contract from NASA to fly crews to the space station as part of NASA’s “commercial crew program.

SpaceX is screwing up the grading curve for everyone else.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

With all of the Pandemic precautions that have been put into effect, many people are turning to "free" on-line conferencing services. As the saying goes, "If you are not paying for the service, you are the product". And, even if paid for (by yourself or by an employer), that does not mean freedom from having your information mined for advertising or other purposes.

I've not used any of the following, so please forgive me if I got the product names incorrect. Here are some of the big "free" services that I've seen mentioned: Zoom (whose security issues have been cited many times on SoylentNews), Apple (Group Facetime), Google (Hangouts), Facebook (Facebook Live) and Microsoft (Teams).

I suspect many Soylentils have now acquired some experience with on-line conferencing. I am hoping to draw upon your experience. Better still, I would love to see development and proliferation of alternatives to the "Big Names". Solutions that are self-hosted and as free as reasonably possible from the prying eyes of the big, data-warehousing corporations. Open source — free as in beer and libre — would be good, too

[Ed Note: I debated whether or not to run this submission. This could be perceived as a relatively innocuous change. But what's next? Back in 1982 there was a huge outcry when National Geographic "moved" the Great Pyramids closer together. Back then, technological advances increased the ease by which images could be manipulated without detection. Technology has continued marching forward. Now, the same manipulations are starting to appear with video. What's next? What are the limits. Where does it end? I saw an opportunity for discussion and decided to run the story.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

With great digital platforms comes great digital enhancements? Following on from changes to Star Wars no one asked for (Who shot first?) comes Disney+ hilariously censors nudity in classic movie Splash:

One film in particular, Splash, made its debut on Disney+ in February, but some detail-oriented fans are only now noticing a bit of a hairy situation in the movie that they didn’t see before. Viewer Allison Pregler pointed out on Twitter that one scene in the 1984 rom-com on Disney+ looks different than the original version, thanks to some CGI movie trickery.

[...] Pregler noticed that the scene where Madison (Daryl Hannah) kisses Allen (Tom Hanks) on a beach, then turns around and dives into the water was, uh, a little different.

If you’re unfamiliar with Splash, it’s about a man who falls in love with a mermaid. So, in this scene, Madison doesn’t have any clothes on because she’s on land, and when she pivots towards the ocean, the version available on Disney+ shows CGI hair on her backside instead of bare flesh.

Disney+ didn't want butts on their platform so they edited Splash with digital fur technology pic.twitter.com/df8XE0G9om

— Allison Pregler 📼 (@AllisonPregler) April 13, 2020

If you look quickly you could miss the edit, but it’s not a subtle one. While Madison’s hair ends at her lower back, the CGI hair looks like a second layer applied underneath, so you can clearly see the gap between where the real hair ends and where the edit begins.

Follow the Twitter link to see the "updated" video.

According to the story submitter: "Can't say I really noticed in the first place."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The question of "how did supermarkets sell out of months worth of toilet paper in days" has been answered in part:

John-Paul Drake, an executive with South Australian supermarket chain Drakes, said he refused to give the man a refund.

"I had my first customer yesterday who said he wanted to get a refund on 150 packets of 32-pack toilet paper and 150 units of one-litre sanitiser." In 150 packs of 32-roll toilet paper there would be 4800 individual rolls.

Mr Drake said the man had come into the store to get his money back after website eBay refused to allow him to sell the items online.

[...] In a later LinkedIn post, Mr Drake said the customer hadn't bought the loo roll and hand sanitiser in one trip, but claimed that he had run a sophisticated operation that saw up to 20 people visit several Drakes stores buying a pack in each one.

If you don't need it then don't buy it.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Federal Communications Commission is set to approve a new 5G cellular network despite claims from the Department of Defense that it will interfere with Global Positioning System (GPS) services.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today asked fellow commissioners to approve an "application to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band that would primarily support 5G and Internet of Things services." The application is from Ligado, formerly known as LightSquared, which for nearly a decade has sought permission to build a wireless network using frequencies near those used for GPS. A previous failure to obtain FCC approval helped push LightSquared into bankruptcy.

[...] The base-station power reduction is "from 32dBW to 9.8dBW," and Ligado committed to a 23MHz "guard-band using its own licensed spectrum to further separate its terrestrial base station transmissions from neighboring operation," the FCC said.

"As such, Ligado is now only seeking terrestrial use of the 1526-1536MHz, 1627.5-1637.5MHz, and 1646.5-1656.5MHz bands. The Order is conditioned to reflect these technical requirements. It also requires Ligado to protect adjacent band incumbents by reporting its base station locations and technical operating parameters to potentially affected government and industry stakeholders prior to commencing operations, continuously monitoring the transmit power of its base station sites, and complying with procedures and actions for responding to credible reports of interference, including rapid shutdown of operations where warranted," the FCC said.

[...] Ligado previously planned a 4G network, but the years-long delay resulted in the switch to 5G.

-- submitted from IRC

See Wikipedia's GPS Signals - Overview of Frequencies as well as this list on RF Wireless World.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Amazon fires three workers who criticized warehouse conditions:

Amazon has fired two tech workers after they spoke out publicly against warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic. User experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both active members of the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, had offered match donations up to $500 for warehouse workers, citing insufficient protections.

The company which had warned both employees about violating company policies earlier this year, confirmed the firings in a statement emailed to CNET. "We support every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies," an Amazon spokesperson said. "We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.

Amazon on Tuesday confirmed it also fired Bashir Mohamed, a Minnesota warehouse employee who was involved in organizing worker demonstrations. BuzzFeed earlier reported on his termination.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists may have solved one of the most puzzling and persistent mysteries in neuroscience: why some people are "right-brained" while others are "left-brained."

The answer lies in how certain genes on each side of the brain are switched "on" and "off" through a process called epigenetic regulation. The findings may explain why Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders frequently affect one side of the body first, a revelation that has far-reaching implications for development of potential future treatments.

The study was led by Van Andel Institute's Viviane Labrie, Ph.D., and published in the journal Genome Biology.

"The mechanisms underlying brain asymmetry have been an elephant in the room for decades," Labrie said. "It's thrilling to finally uncover its cause, particularly given its potential for helping us better understand and, hopefully one day, better treat diseases like Parkinson's."

[...] The findings also give scientists a vital window into the various biological pathways that contribute to symptom asymmetry in Parkinson's, including brain cell development, immune function and cellular communication.

"We all start out with prominent differences between the left and right sides of our brains. As we age, however, our hemispheres become more epigenetically similar. For Parkinson's, this is significant: people whose hemispheres are more alike early in life experienced faster disease progression, while people whose hemispheres were more asymmetric had slower disease progression," Labrie said. "Many of these changes are clustered around genes known to impact Parkinson's risk. There is huge potential to translate these findings into new therapeutic strategies."

Labrie is already starting to look at this phenomenon in other neurological diseases like Alzheimer's.

Peipei Li, Elizabeth Ensink, Sean Lang, Lee Marshall, Meghan Schilthuis, Jared Lamp, Irving Vega, Viviane Labrie. Hemispheric asymmetry in the human brain and in Parkinson's disease is linked to divergent epigenetic patterns in neurons. Genome Biology, 2020; 21 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s13059-020-01960-1

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Why didn't the universe annihilate itself? Neutrinos may hold the answer:

Alysia Marino and Eric Zimmerman, physicists at CU Boulder, have been on the hunt for neutrinos for the last two decades.

That's no easy feat: Neutrinos are among the most elusive subatomic particles known to science. They don't have a charge and are so lightweight—each one has a mass many times smaller than the electron—that they interact only on rare occasions with the world around them.

They may also hold the key to some of physics' deepest mysteries.

In a study published today in the journal Nature, Marino, Zimmerman and more than 400 other researchers on an experiment called T2K come closer to answering one of the big ones: Why didn't the universe annihilate itself in a humungous burst of energy not long after the Big Bang?

The new research suggests that the answer comes down to a subtle discrepancy in the way that neutrinos and their evil twins, the antineutrinos, behave—one of the first indications that phenomena called matter and antimatter may not be the exact mirror images many scientists believed.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

YouTube borked when users enable Firefox anti-fingerprinting:

Firefox users have recently started to notice that YouTube does not display videos properly when they enable the browser's anti-fingerprinting technology for better privacy.

When the privacy.resistFingerprinting privacy feature is enabled in Firefox, the feature will make the browser more resistant to fingerprinting scripts.

As fingerprinting can be used to track a user between different properties and even sites, it is a common feature suggested in Firefox privacy hardening guides.

A recent change on YouTube, though, is causing videos to have display problems when this feature is enabled.

[...] BleepingComputer has been able to reproduce this issue in both Firefox 72 and the recently released Firefox 75, so this is not an issue caused by Mozilla.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Future technologies that could enable quicker trips to Mars and robotic exploration of ocean worlds might have started out as NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC). The program, which invests in early-stage technology ideas from NASA, industry and academic researchers across the country, has selected 23 potentially revolutionary concepts with a total award value of $7 million.

Among the selections are 16 new concepts and seven studies that previously received at least one NIAC award. A full list of the 2020 Phase I, II and III selections can be found here.[*]

"NIAC is an innovative program that encourages researchers—and the agency—to think outside of the box for solutions that could overcome challenges facing future science and exploration missions," said Walt Engelund, the deputy associate administrator for programs within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). "We're excited about the new concepts and to see how additional time and resources advances the research selected for follow-on Phase II and III studies."

[...] The selected Phase I and II studies will explore the overall viability of a technology and develop them into mission concepts. Areas researchers will study include mapping asteroids and other small bodies in the solar system with hopping probes, making pharmaceuticals on-demand in space, and extracting water on the Moon. Several of the concepts could inform capabilities relevant to NASA's Artemis program, which will land the first woman and next man on the Moon in 2024 and establish a sustainable presence on and around the Moon by 2028.

NASA selected the proposals through a peer-review process that evaluates innovation and technical viability. All projects are still in the early stages of development, with most requiring a decade or more of technology maturation, and are not official NASA missions.

[*] It seems there is no link provided in the original story; it appears to be intended to link to: NIAC 2020 Phase I, Phase II and Phase III Selections.[--martyb]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

AMD is once again hoping to muscle in on Intel's bread and butter with a new line of second-generation Epyc processors aimed squarely at the HPC, cloud, and enterprise markets.

[...] Specifically, the eight-core 7F32 costs $2,100 apiece, when ordering 1,000 at a time, and will take on Intel's eight-core Xeon Gold 6250 and 6244. In the middle, the 24-core 7F72 is AMD's answer to the 24-core Xeon Gold 6248R and Platinum 8268, and costs $2,450 apiece. At the high end, 16-core 7F52 is gunning for the 16-core Xeon Gold 6242 and 6246R models, and supports a maximum of 4TB 3200MHz RAM, compared to Intel's 2933MHz 1TB, and is priced $3,100 apiece for orders with quantities of at least 1,000. Yes, the part numbers are a bit odd.

Among the vendors planning to integrate the new Epyc chips at launch are HPE with Nutanix, Dell, and Supermicro, which will all be selling rack-mount servers equipped with the new AMD chips. IBM, meanwhile, says it will bundle the new Epyc gear into its bare-metal cloud units.

AMD said the chips were aimed at the HPC and cloud markets, although enterprise is going to be a particular focus.

-- submitted from IRC

[Ed note: Just found an anandtech.com article with many more details, don't have time to "patch" it in, but very much worth the read! See: AMD's New EPYC 7F52 Reviewed: The F is for ^HIGH Frequency. --martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Vaccine skeptics actually think differently than other people:

In 2000, the measles virus was declared eliminated from the United States. Despite cases coming in from outside the country, there were few outbreaks because most people were vaccinated against measles. And then 2019 happened.

The U.S. saw 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states -- the greatest number reported since 1992, with nearly three-fourths linked to recent outbreaks in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles.

After events like this, many people express confusion about others' hesitancy or unwillingness to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, a concept called vaccine skepticism. As vaccine skepticism has become increasingly widespread, two researchers in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences have suggested a possible explanation.

In an article published recently in the journal Vaccine, Mark LaCour and Tyler Davis suggest some people find vaccines risky because they overestimate the likelihood of negative events, particularly those that are rare.

The fact that these overestimations carry over through all kinds of negative events -- not just those related to vaccines -- suggests that people higher in vaccine skepticism actually may process information differently than people lower in vaccine skepticism, said Davis, an associate professor of experimental psychology and director of the Caprock FMRI Laboratory.

"We might have assumed that people who are high in vaccine skepticism would have overestimated the likelihood of negative vaccine-related events, but it is more surprising that this is true for negative, mortality-related events as a broader category," Davis said. "Here we saw an overestimation of rare events for things that don't have anything to do with vaccination. This suggests that there are basic cognitive or affective variables that influence vaccine skepticism."

[...] "Do some people encode scary stories -- for instance, hearing about a child that has a seizure after getting vaccinated -- more strongly than others and then consequently remember these anecdotes more easily?" he asked. "Do they instead have certain attitudes and search their memory harder for evidence to support this belief? Is it a bit of both? How can you counteract these processes?

"I'm excited that we're finding basic, cognitive factors that are linked with vaccine skepticism: It could end up being a way of reaching this diverse group."

Mark LaCour, Tyler Davis. Vaccine skepticism reflects basic cognitive differences in mortality-related event frequency estimation. Vaccine, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.02.052

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

The secret behind "unkillable" Android backdoor called xHelper has been revealed:

In February, a researcher detailed a widely circulating Android backdoor that's so pernicious that it survives factory resets, a trait that makes the malware impossible to remove without taking unusual measures.

The analysis found that the unusual persistence was the result of rogue folders containing a trojan installer, neither of which was removed by a reset. The trojan dropper would then reinstall the backdoor in the event of a reset. Despite those insights, the researcher still didn't know precisely how that happened. Now, a different researcher has filled in the missing pieces. More about that later. First, a brief summary of xHelper.

The malicious Android app poses as a performance enhancer that removes old and unneeded files. Antivirus provider Malwarebytes has detected it on 33,000 devices, mainly located in the United States, while AV from Russia-based Kaspersky Lab found it on 50,000 devices. There's no evidence xHelper has ever been distributed through Google Play.

Once installed, xHelper installs a backdoor that remotely installs apps downloaded from an attacker-controlled server. It also executes commands as a superuser, a powerful privilege setting that gives the malware unfettered system rights. Besides that, the backdoor has access to sensitive data, including browser cookies used to sign in to sites automatically. Once the backdoor is installed, the fake cleaner app disappears from the main screen and program menu and can only be viewed by inspecting the list of installed apps in the system settings.

Previously:
Android Users Hit With 'Unkillable Malware'

Original Submission

We received three different submissions pertaining to the effects of smoking on COVID-19. One study suggests that those who smoke have a reduced likelihood of hospitalization. The comingling of separate data for male and female patients and analysis based on that data seems unusual to me. The second report is not restricted to hospitalizations, but only to those who tested positive for the virus. Their results also suggested a lessened number of self-identified smokers than smoking rates in the general public would suggest. The third and final story submission introduced vaping to the discussion, and comes to the opposite conclusion in suggesting that smoking or vaping may increase the risk of contracting COVID-19.

Confounding these analyses is that all reports of smoking are self-reported. I can well imagine if someone had tried to quit smoking, and had convinced their spouse they had indeed stayed stopped, they would be reluctant to reveal in their spouse's presence that they were a smoker. If anything, though, would that not run counter to the possibility of a protective effect? As with most things pertaining to the virus, it is likely too early to tell for certain, but it does add another dimension to the discussion. Assuming that smoking does have a preventative effect, what could be the cause? Increased residue in the lungs makes it harder for the virus to latch onto the lung's cells and infect? Could it be that chemicals in the smoke serve to impair the virus's ability to survive in the lungs and cause an infection?

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Satellite galaxies of the Milky Way help test dark matter theory:

A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside, reports tiny satellite galaxies of the Milky Way can be used to test fundamental properties of "dark matter"—nonluminous material thought to constitute 85% of matter in the universe.

Using sophisticated simulations, the researchers show a theory called self-interacting dark matter, or SIDM, can compellingly explain diverse dark matter distributions in Draco and Fornax, two of the Milky Way's more than 50 discovered satellite galaxies.

The prevailing dark matter theory, called Cold Dark Matter, or CDM, explains much of the universe, including how structures emerge in it. But a long-standing challenge for CDM has been to explain the diverse dark matter distributions in galaxies.

The researchers, led by UC Riverside's Hai-Bo Yu and Laura V. Sales, studied the evolution of SIDM "subhalos" in the Milky Way "tidal field"—the gradient in the gravitational field of the Milky Way that a satellite galaxy feels in the form of a tidal force. Subhalos are dark matter clumps that host the satellite galaxies.

"We found SIDM can produce diverse dark matter distributions in the halos of Draco and Fornax, in agreement with observations," said Yu, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and a theoretical physicist with expertise in particle properties of dark matter. "In SIDM, the interaction between the subhalos and the Milky Way's tides leads to more diverse dark matter distributions in the inner regions of subhalos, compared to their CDM counterparts."

[...] "Our challenge was to understand the origin of Draco and Fornax's diverse dark matter distributions in light of these newly measured orbital trajectories," Yu said. "We found SIDM can provide an explanation after taking into both tidal effects and dark matter self-interactions."

Journal Reference
Omid Sameie, Hai-Bo Yu, Laura V. Sales et al. Self-Interacting Dark Matter Subhalos in the Milky Way's Tides, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.141102)

Also at phys.org.

Original Submission