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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The silence of the owls describes an interesting new look at owl flight, and a recent attempt to figure out why they are so much quieter than other birds, and quieter than just about any other flying thing. Based on this paper, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010518-040436

Laboratory measurements have shown that the slight swoosh made by a barn owl is below the threshold of human hearing until the owl is about three feet away — a feat of stealth that biologists and engineers are far from completely understanding. But researchers from both disciplines are working to solve the riddle of silent flight — some with the aim of designing quieter fans, turbine blades and airplane wings.

Such owl-inspired innovations can reduce noise by as much as 10 decibels, similar to the difference in noise between a passing truck and a passing car...
...
First, Graham [1934] pointed out an unusual structure called the "comb," which literally looks like a comb projecting forward from the wing's leading edge. Second, he noted that most of the owl wing is covered with a soft layer of velvety feathers. Finally, he observed that the feathers on the trailing edge of the wing form a ragged fringe.

Most researchers still agree that the comb, the velvet and the fringe combine in some way to reduce noise, but the owl may have more tricks up its sleeve. "When all is said and done, I think we'll have a number of mechanisms, including Graham's," says Clark.

The article goes on to quantify the sound of an owl relative to human hearing. Also shows some CFD that purports to show tiny vortices shed off an owl wing, these rotate both ways and there is the possibility of destructive interference.

Journal Reference:
Justin W. Jaworski and N. Peake. Aeroacoustics of Silent Owl Flight, Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics Vol. 52:395-420 (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-fluid-010518-040436)

Once, sitting around a dying campfire in the north woods with a few friends, we all noticed a presence overhead, the barest of swishes, could have only been an owl. It was a pitch black night, we never saw a thing.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

USGS releases first-ever comprehensive geologic map of the Moon:

Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor in space.

For the first time, the entire lunar surface has been completely mapped and uniformly classified by scientists from the USGS, in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute.

[...] To create the new digital map, scientists used information from six Apollo-era regional maps along with updated information from recent satellite missions to the moon. The existing historical maps were redrawn to align them with the modern data sets, thus preserving previous observations and interpretations. Along with merging new and old data, USGS researchers also developed a unified description of the stratigraphy, or rock layers, of the moon. This resolved issues from previous maps where rock names, descriptions and ages were sometimes inconsistent.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Almost 8,000 could be affected by federal emergency loan data breach:

Almost 8,000 business owners who applied for a loan from the Small Business Administration may have had their personal information exposed to other applicants, the SBA admitted on Tuesday.

[...] A Trump administration official described the problem to CNBC:

The official said that in order to access other business owners' information, small business applicants must have been in the loan application portal. If the user attempted to hit the page back button, he or she may have seen information that belonged to another business owner, not their own.

The SBA says it discovered the flaw on March 25 and notified affected users. One victim posted a copy last Friday of a paper letter she received about the breach. The letter stated that personally identifiable information—including Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and financial data—may have been exposed. The letter said that, as of last week, there was no sign yet of the data being misused.

The SBA says that it immediately disabled the portion of its website that was exposing applicant data, fixed the problem, and re-launched the website. Affected businesses have been offered a year of free credit monitoring.

Related:
SBA reveals potential data breach impacting 8,000 emergency business loan applicants
SBA says data breach affected nearly 8,000 small businesses
Small Business Administration reports data breach in disaster loan website
A data leak is just the latest example of the Small Business Administration's struggles with shaky IT, and experts fear the worst could be yet to come

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Nintendo Confirms Breach of 160,000 Accounts:

Over the past few weeks, Nintendo gamers have been reporting suspicious activities on their accounts. According to the complaints, aired out on Twitter and Reddit, unauthorized actors were logging into victims' accounts and abusing the payment cards connected to the accounts to buy digital goods on Nintendo's online stores, such as V-Bucks, in-game currency used in Fortnite.

In a Friday statement, Nintendo said that attackers have been abusing its NNID (Nintendo Network ID) legacy login system since the beginning of April to hack into the accounts. NNID was primarily used for the Nintendo 3DS handheld and Wii U console (both now discontinued). This is different from a Nintendo account, which is used for the Nintendo Switch (Nintendo's most recent gaming console, released in 2017).

A NNID can be linked to a Nintendo account and used as a login option. If attackers were able to access a linked NNID, they could then access the linked Nintendo account. From there, they'd have access to payment methods (via PayPal or payment cards) necessary for making in-game purchases.

Nintendo did not provide further detail about how attackers had accessed NNID accounts other than to say they were "obtained illegally by some means other than our service." It has now disabled the ability to log into a Nintendo account using NNID.

In response to recent incidents related to some Nintendo Accounts, it is no longer possible to sign into a Nintendo Account using a Nintendo Network ID. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please visit our Support website for more information: https://t.co/GMrXr5OHW0

— Nintendo UK (@NintendoUK) April 24, 2020

Attackers may have also been able to access users' nicknames, dates of birth, countries and email address information, all of which were associated with the NNID, Nintendo warned. Credit card data was not accessed.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Soybull

Source: Insects' Extreme Farming Methods Offer us Lessons to Learn and Oddities to Avoid:

To picture this farm, imagine some dark blobs dangling high up in a tree.

Each blob can reach "about soccer ball size," says evolutionary biologist Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University in England. From this bulbous base, a Squamellaria plant eventually sprouts leafy shoots and hangs, slumping sideways or upside down, from its host tree's branches. In Fiji, one of the local names for the plant translates as "testicle of the trees."

Some Squamellaria species grow in clusters and teem with fiercely protective ants. As a young seedling blob plumps up, jelly bean–shaped bubbles form inside, reachable only through ant-sized doorways. As soon as a young plant cracks open its first door to daylight, "ant workers start to enter and defecate inside the seedling to fertilize it," Chomicki says.

The idea that ants tend these plants as farmers gave Chomicki one of those surprise-left-turn moments in science. In a string of papers published since 2016, he and colleagues share evidence for the idea that the Philidris nagasau ants may be the first known animals other than humans to farm plants. (The other known insect farmers cultivate fungi.) Chomicki's latest paper, in the Feb. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that ants planting seeds of their blobby crop make trade-offs, going for full sun and maximizing the rewarding, sweet flowers rather than planting in the shade, where plants would have higher nitrogen.

Until Chomicki's work, biologists accepted only three groups of fungus-farming insects as achieving the essentials of full agriculture and so rivaling human efforts. Select types of beetles, termites and ants each tamed different fungi, tending their much-needed food crop from sowing to harvest.

Journal Reference
Guillaume Chomicki, Gudrun Kadereit, Susanne S. Renner, et al. Tradeoffs in the evolution of plant farming by ants [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919611117)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Devs might be able to write software on iPad and iPhone with Xcode:

macOS and iOS software developers will soon be able to code on an iPad or even iPhone, if an unconfirmed report is correct. iPadOS 14 and the iPhone equivalent will reportedly include support for Xcode, Apple's software development environment.

This report comes from Jon Prosser, founder of YouTube channel Front Page Tech, who recently correctly predicted the launch date of the 2020 iPhone SE. On Monday, Prosser said via Twitter "XCode is present on iOS / iPad OS 14. The implications there are HUGE."

I'm not gonna say that Final Cut is coming to iPad...

But XCode is present on iOS / iPad OS 14.

The implications there are HUGE.

Opens the door for "Pro" applications to come to iPad.

I mentioned this last week on a live stream, but figured it was worth the tweet ‍♂️

— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) April 20, 2020

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MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC for Soybull.

Source: Musk says SpaceX is 'fixing' brightness from satellites:

Stargazers around the world and including many Britons have witnessed unusual constellations made up of the low earth orbit spacecraft.

SpaceX has been launching large batches of satellites as part of its Starlink project to improve global internet coverage.

The most recent launch took place on Wednesday.

Responding to a question about the brightness of the Starlink satellites on Twitter, Mr Musk said it was due to the angle of the satellites solar panels and the company was "fixing it now".

A fix could make them less visible from Earth.

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takyon writes:

TSMC Has Started The Development of The 2nm Lithography Process

Earlier this month, we saw that TSMC was getting its CoWoS interposer and 5nm production lines at full capacity. Yesterday, we found out that AMD and Nvidia bought up all of their excess capacity for next-generation GPU and CPU development. They have also been making advancements in 3nm process development, but have not been able to put much work in because many of the tools necessary are currently unavailable or hard to find due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 3nm is already a lot of work as it is, but in a recent shareholders meeting, DigiTimes was able to figure out that TSMC is already planning to start the development of the 2nm Lithographic process.

TSMC's "3nm" node has reportedly been delayed by 6 months due to the pandemic. Samsung is facing similar delays on their own "3nm" node.

TSMC's "5nm" production has not been delayed, and AMD will reportedly use an exclusive enhanced "5nm" node for Zen 4 CPUs in 2021.

Previously: TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) Connects Multiple Interposers
High Demand Reported for TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate Packaging

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Unknown activists have posted nearly 25,000 email addresses and passwords allegedly belonging to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and other groups working to combat the coronavirus pandemic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism and terrorist groups.

While SITE was unable to verify whether the email addresses and passwords were authentic, the group said the information was released Sunday and Monday and almost immediately used to foment attempts at hacking and harassment by far-right extremists. An Australian cybersecurity expert, Robert Potter, said he was able to verify that the WHO email addresses and passwords were real.

[...] The lists, whose origins are unclear, appear to have first been posted to 4chan, a message board notorious for its hateful and extreme political commentary, and later to Pastebin, a text storage site, to Twitter and to far-right extremist channels on Telegram, a messaging app.

- alternative archive.org link

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Soybull

The first frog fossil from Antarctica has been found:

Scientists have previously found evidence of giant amphibians[*] that walked Antarctica during the Triassic Period, over 200 million years ago, but no traces on the continent of amphibians like those around today (SN: 3/23/15). The shape of the newly discovered bones indicates that this frog belonged to the family of Calyptocephalellidae, or helmeted frogs, found today in South America.

The fossilized frog's modern relatives live exclusively in the warm, humid central Chilean Andes. This suggests that similar climate conditions existed on Antarctica around 40 million years ago, researchers report April 23 in Scientific Reports.

That offers a clue about how fast Antarctica switched from balmy to bitter cold (SN: 4/1/20). Antarctica quickly froze over after splitting from Australia and South America, which were once all part of the supercontinent Gondwana (SN: 10/10/19).

[*] Behind a paywall.

Journal Reference:
T. Mörs, M. Reguero and D. Vasilyan. First fossil frog from Antarctica: implications for Eocene high latitude climate conditions and Gondwanan cosmopolitanism of Australobatrachia. Scientific Reports. Published online April 23, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-61973-5.

The jokes almost write themselves. Who will be first to leap at the opportunity?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Apple Pushes Back Against Zero-Day Exploit Claims:

Company said there is no evidence that iOS bugs revealed by ZecOps earlier this week were ever used against customers.

Apple has pushed back against claims that two zero-day bugs in its iPhone iOS have been exploited for years, saying it's found no evidence to support such activity.

Apple officials made the statement in response to a widely disseminated report published Wednesday by ZecOps, which claimed that two Apple iOS zero-day security vulnerabilities affecting its Mail app on iPhones and iPads already had been exploited in the wild since 2018 by an "advanced threat operator."

"Both vulnerabilities exist at least since iOS 6 – (issue date: September 2012) – when iPhone 5 was released," ZecOps said in its report.
However, Apple said in a statement to Bloomberg's Apple correspondent Mark Gurman that he posted on Twitter that this is just not true.

"We have thoroughly investigated the researcher's report and, based on the information provided, have concluded these issues do not pose an immediate risk to our users," the company said in the statement.

Also at www.securityweek.com

Previously: A Critical iPhone and IPad Bug That Lurked for Eight Years May be Under Active Attack

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martyb writes:

Elon Musk says SpaceX Starlink satellite broadband beta testing starts in a few months:

This week [SpaceX] launched another batch of 60 satellites to bring the total size of its growing Starlink broadband constellation to more than 400. While it has the go-ahead to launch more than 12,000 satellites in the coming years, Musk said Wednesday that a "private beta" test of the service will begin in about three months, followed by a public beta about three months later for testers at northern latitudes.

In response to a Twitter user, Musk said Germany qualifies as far enough north, which could mean that much of northern Europe, Canada and the northernmost parts of the US may be eligible to try the service.

There is only so much bandwidth per satellite, so your pizza-box-sized transceiver would experience more congestion and lower throughput in an urban area than it would in a rural setting.

How many Soylentils are interested in signing up?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

GCC 10 gets security bug trap. And look what just fell into it: OpenSSL and a prod-of-death flaw in servers and apps
Static analyzer proves its worth with discovery of null-pointer error

A static analysis feature set to appear in GCC 10, which will catch common programming errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, has scored an early win – it snared an exploitable flaw in OpenSSL.

Bernd Edlinger discovered CVE-2020-1967, a denial-of-service flaw deemed to be a high severity risk by the OpenSSL team. It is possible to crash a server or application that uses a vulnerable build of OpenSSL by sending specially crafted messages while setting up a TLS 1.3 connection.

This means it's possible to disrupt or knock offline HTTPS websites that use a vulnerable version of the crypto library, by sending a prod-of-death. It can also be used by rogue servers to crash web browsers and other apps connecting in.

OpenSSL is a software library widely used to provide encrypted connections across networks and the internet. Here's the technical description from the OpenSSL maintainers of the flaw:

Server or client applications that call the SSL_check_chain() function during or after a TLS 1.3 handshake may crash due to a NULL pointer dereference as a result of incorrect handling of the "signature_algorithms_cert" TLS extension. The crash occurs if an invalid or unrecognised signature algorithm is received from the peer. This could be exploited by a malicious peer in a Denial of Service attack.

[...] The analyzer is available from the master branch of the GCC 10 source code. It's hoped the feature will be finalized in time for version 10's official release, due this month or next. The current latest version is 9.3.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Detached, double-lined, eclipsing spectroscopic binaries are crucial for astronomers testing stellar models. This is due to the fact that the masses and radii of both stars can be directly measured from the light and radial velocity curves of the system.

[...] To date, several tens of eclipsing binaries (EBs) have been detected in NGC 2264, and one of them is Mon-735, identified by observations with NASA's Spitzer spacecraft. A team of astronomers led by Edward Gillen of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, took a closer look at Mon-735 in order to get more insights into the nature of this system. For this purpose, they re-analyzed the archival Spitzer data and conducted follow-up observations of this binary using the Keck HIRES spectrograph.

[...] According to the paper, Mon-735 consists of PMS M dwarfs with masses of about 0.29 and 0.26 solar masses, radii of 0.76 and 0.75 solar radii, and effective temperatures of 3,260 and 3,213 K. The system is estimated to be between 7 and 9 million years old.

[...] "CoRoT 223992193 and Mon-735 are the first two low-mass EBs to come out of the CoRoT and Spitzer observations of NGC 2264, with more systems in preparation. These will form a powerful sample of near-coeval EB systems, formed from the same parent molecular cloud, with which to test PMS stellar evolution theory and better understand both the age of, and age spread within, the NGC 2264 region," the authors of the paper concluded.

Journal Reference:
Edward Gillen, Lynne A. Hillenbrand, John Stauffer, Suzanne Aigrain, Luisa Rebull, Ann Marie Cody. "Mon-735: A new low-mass pre-main sequence eclipsing binary in NGC 2264", arXiv:2004.04753 [astro-ph.SR] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04753

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Phoenix666 writes:

Coronavirus: Scientists brand 5G claims 'complete rubbish':

Conspiracy theories claiming 5G technology helps transmit coronavirus have been condemned by the scientific community.

Videos have been shared on social media showing mobile phone masts on fire in Birmingham and Merseyside - along with the claims.

The UK's mobile networks have reported 20 cases of masts being targeted in suspected arson attacks over the Easter weekend, including damage to a mast providing mobile connectivity to Birmingham's Nightingale Hospital.

The posts have been shared on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram - including by verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers.

TV regulator Ofcom is assessing comments made by presenter Eamonn Holmes in which he cast doubts on media outlets for their attempts to debunk the claims.

But scientists say the idea of a connection between Covid-19 and 5G is "complete rubbish" and biologically impossible.

The conspiracy theories have been branded "the worst kind of fake news" by NHS England Medical Director Stephen Powis.

[...] Many of those sharing the post are pushing a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that 5G - which is used in mobile phone networks and relies on signals carried by radio waves - is somehow responsible for coronavirus.

Tough sledding for the engineers, but concerns about 5G have been raised prior to the coronavirus.

Original Submission