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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For a decade, a Mount Morgan cave in central Queensland known for the highest dinosaur track diversity on the entire eastern half of Australia has been closed to the public, restricting research to the site.

Although UQ palaeontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio has had success searching for images of the tracks, he has only recently been provided with new images of different dinosaur's footprints at the site by the Mount Morgan Historical Museum.

[...] "A typical dinosaur track of this kind look like those made by birds, but these are shaped like broad-handled forks."

Upon further inspection, Dr. Romilio revealed that the dinosaur must have created the tracks while crouched.

[...] "It's very strange behaviour, and we don't yet know why it did this," Dr. Romilio said.

"You can rule out predatory stalking behaviour, as this set of tracks was made by a two-legged plant eater called an ornithopod.

[...] "This unusual posture likely made the prehistoric animal more stable allowing them to quickly cross the muddy shore of an ancient lake."

[...] "Many of the Mount Morgan track sites were mapped in the early 2000s, although these footprints don't appear on any of them.

"It may be that these fossils had already eroded, making these, and other old photos like them, so incredibly important, as they're our only record of these creature's existence."

More information: Anthony Romilio. Additional notes on the Mount Morgan dinosaur tracks from the Lower Jurassic (Sinemurian) Razorback beds, Queensland, Australia., Historical Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2020.1755853

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200420/06583844328/fancy-that-comcasts-network-holding-up-fine-without-usage-caps.shtml

For many years in the early aughts, broadband providers insisted they needed to impose usage caps and costly overage fees to help manage network congestion. By 2015, leaked documents from Comcast revealed that was never true. In the years since, even industry CEOs have acknowledged that the limits are little more than an additional tax on captive customers in uncompetitive U.S. broadband markets.

As COVID-19 struck, ISPs quickly bowed to pressure to eliminate such restrictions so home-bound Americans weren't inundated with significantly higher bills. In a press release, Comcast makes it clear that its network has (gasp), performed perfectly well under the added load -- despite a 32% increase in upstream traffic and 18% increase in downstream traffic. There's been a 77% surge in gaming downloads, a 37% bump in streaming video consumption, and a 228% bump in VOIP and teleconferencing use. This is, Comcast says, causing no issues for Comcast:

"Our ongoing, proactive network investment to add fiber and capacity has put us in a good position to manage the increases that we are experiencing today. While the COVID-19 experience is new and unprecedented, the Internet ecosystem is flexible and performing the way it was designed. We engineer the network to handle spikes and shifts in usage, and what we have seen so far with COVID-19 is within our capacity."

Many ISPs, like Comcast, backed off the "congestion" claims a few years ago after their own memos, and numerous researchers and journalists, kept debunking them.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

On its 15th birthday, the Airbus A380 is facing retirement:

Big, burly and a bit bulbous, the Airbus A380 has never been the sleekest airliner in the skies. I'm not disputing that it's an engineering achievement, because it certainly is. The largest commercial aircraft ever to fly, it delivers a supremely smooth and quiet ride for passengers. On my first A380 flight, five years ago, it felt like we were hovering noiselessly as the British Airways giant descended over San Francisco Bay. It took the San Mateo Bridge flashing by my window to remind me that, yes, we were actually moving.

It's just that from the outside, the double-decker Airbus A380 looks like, well... a bus. Enormous? Yes, Powerful? Absolutely. Elegant? Not so much. One snarkier nickname for it is "the flying forehead." But even so, I respect what the superjumbo represents and I'll eagerly wish it a happy birthday. Fifteen years ago today, April 27, the A380 flew for the first time. Since then, it's been a hit with passengers, even if its commercial success hasn't been what Airbus originally hoped. There's nothing like it in the sky today, and as Airbus winds down production completely by 2021, hastened by the coronavirus pandemic, there never will be again.

[...] The coronavirus pandemic has now grounded almost all A380s in service, but the end of the program came in February 2019 when Airbus announced it would stop A380 production and deliver the last aircraft by 2021. "Today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a release at the time. "But, keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators." Around the same time, the first two A380s were scrapped for parts after flying for only a decade. Ten years is an incredibly short life for an aircraft -- it's not unusual to fly on planes more than twice that age.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Lenovo is joining Dell in the "OEM Linux Laptop" club:

It looks like Lenovo may upstage Dell as the big name in OEM Linux laptops—not counting specialty retailers like System76, of course. Red Hat and Lenovo are announcing pre-installed and factory-supported Fedora Workstation on several models of ThinkPad laptops at Red Hat Summit this week.

Dell's Linux support has generally been limited to one or two very specific laptops—first, the old Atom-powered netbooks and, more recently, the XPS 13 Developer Edition line. Lenovo is planning a significantly broader Linux footprint in its lineup.

Fedora Workstation will be a selectable option during purchase for the Thinkpad P1 Gen2, Thinkpad P53, and Thinkpad X1 Gen8 laptops—and Lenovo may offer even broader model support in the future. Lenovo Senior Linux Developer Mark Pearson, who will be the featured guest in the May 2020 Fedora Council Video Meeting, expresses the company's stance on forthcoming integration:

Lenovo is excited to become a part of the Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word:

One space good, two spaces bad? (This story appears near the end of the article; scroll down to see it.)

Finally, Microsoft found time to weigh in on the age-old debate of just how many spaces belong after a full stop (or "period"). Thanks to an update, Word will apparently treat two spaces as a typo and festoon a double-spaced document with red, squiggly lines unless told to ignore the rule.

A debate for the ages finally settled. Where do you stand? ⚔️ https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1253655739379470338

— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) April 24, 2020

Not everyone is impressed with change; this hack, for example, has fond memories of bashing away on the keys of a typewriter back in the day and slapping the spacebar twice between sentences [...]. It has proven a hard habit to break. Others, such as Jason Howard, senior project manager on the Windows Insider Team, called for a poll on the matter.

@Microsoft365 has thrown down the gauntlet. Apparently #MicrosoftWord will now flag double-spacing between sentences as an error.

Which side will you pick? Choose wisely...

— Jason Howard (@NorthFaceHiker) April 24, 2020

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Amazon reportedly used merchant data, despite telling Congress it doesn't:

Amazon accounts for about a third of all US Internet retail sales, but it didn't get there entirely on its own. It did so, in part, with the assistance of hundreds of thousands of smaller vendors who signed up to sell their goods on Amazon's third-party merchant marketplace, which accounts for more than half the company's retail sales. In theory, those agreements were beneficial for all involved: shoppers could easily one-stop-shop for products, merchants could rely on Amazon's front and back-end infrastructure instead of building out their own, and Amazon could get a nice consistent cut flowing in.

The calculus of who benefits most from these arrangements, however, has changed over time. Amazon now offers a wide array of its own in-house brands, making it a direct competitor to many of the merchants who rely on its platform to reach consumers. That would be challenge enough, but the behemoth also captures sales data from those third-party vendors, then uses it to launch its own product lines and undercut the smaller firms, The Wall Street Journal reports.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Here's why "baking" damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again:

Reel-to-reel tapes are experiencing a resurgence of interest among audio buffs, but they are prone to degradation, which has been a topic of active research for many years. It's well known that applying heat can often reverse the damage sufficiently to enable playback, usually by baking the tapes in an oven. Now scientists at the US Library of Congress [(LOC)] have determined precisely why this method seems to work, presenting their findings earlier this month on the American Chemical Society's SciMeetings online platform.

Project leader Andrew Davis is a polymer chemist who works in the LOC's preservation research and testing division. The LOC's mission is to ensure its collections continue to be accessible to the public, either in their original or reformatted mediums. The R&D division is responsible for providing the scientific groundwork for that mission, similar to how the Smithsonian Institute employs research scientists to maintain its collections.

"We span everything from simple analytical tests, like determining the kind of ink used on paper, to testing all building and construction materials, and ensuring the stickers on the barcodes don't damage books," Davis told Ars.

Davis emphasizes that the audiotape collection is well-maintained and tapes are not literally decaying on the shelves as I type; he works to ensure that they remain in good condition. While the LOC continues to digitize its vast collection, there is still a large number of tapes in the archives that are still in their original format. They are simply obscure enough that they might only be digitized if the LOC receives a request to listen to them.

Even for those with a digital copy, preserving the originals as long as possible is still important. "It's not impossible that the digitized version might disappear, might get corrupted, or might become inaccessible 10 to 20 years from now," Davis said. "If you have that physical object, that's always something you can come back and re-listen to, or reprocess, if the need arises."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Scientists unveil how general anesthesia works: A study in mice and rat brains reveals how general anesthesia dampens high frequency brain activity by weakening synapses:

Hailed as one of the most important medical advances, the discovery of general anesthetics -- compounds which induce unconsciousness, prevent control of movement and block pain -- helped transform dangerous and traumatic operations into safe and routine surgery. But despite their importance, scientists still don't understand exactly how general anesthetics work.

Now, in a study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Nagoya University have revealed how a commonly used general anesthetic called isoflurane weakens the transmission of electrical signals between neurons, at junctions called synapses.

"Importantly, we found that isoflurane did not block the transmission of all electrical signals equally; the anesthetic had the strongest effect on higher frequency impulses that are required for functions such as cognition or movement, whilst it had minimal effect on low frequency impulses that control life-supporting functions, such as breathing," said Professor Tomoyuki Takahashi, who leads the Cellular and Molecular Synaptic Function (CMSF) Unit at OIST. "This explains how isoflurane is able to cause anesthesia, by preferentially blocking the high frequency signals."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Good news for the wheat-sensitive among us: New research has heralded a promising step for sufferers of wheat sensitivity or allergy.:

A joint project between Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia and CSIRO has revealed key insights about the proteins causing two of the most common types of wheat sensitivity -- non-coeliac wheat sensitivity and occupational asthma (baker's asthma).

With an estimated 10 per cent of people suffering from wheat sensitivity or allergy causing a raft of chronic health issues, researchers are developing tests that will help the production of low-allergen wheat varieties in the future.

[...] "We have known for a long time that certain wheat proteins can trigger an immune response in some people, but now we have developed a way to detect and quantify these proteins," Professor Colgrave said.

"We looked [at] a group of proteins called alpha-amylase/trypsin inhibitors (ATIs), which are known to trigger the intestinal inflammation and chronic ailments associated with wheat intolerance in some people.

"These ATI proteins are commonly found in wheat and play an important role in plant defence against pests and also act as an important nutrient for plant growth and human nutrition."

Journal Reference:
Utpal Bose, Angéla Juhász, James A. Broadbent, Keren Byrne, Crispin A. Howitt, Michelle L. Colgrave. Identification and Quantitation of Amylase Trypsin Inhibitors Across Cultivars Representing the Diversity of Bread Wheat. Journal of Proteome Research, 2020; DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00059

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

NHS rejects Apple-Google coronavirus app plan:

The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.

The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen.

That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries.

[...] "Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life," said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Researchers develop high-performance ceramic fuel cell that operates on butane gas:

A Korean research team has developed a high-performance ceramic fuel cell that can operate on butane fuels. Since butane can be liquefied and thus stored and transported easily, the new technology could expand the application range of ceramic fuel cells to portable and mobile applications such as electric cars, robots and drones. Previously, ceramic fuel cells had only been considered for application to large-capacity power generation systems due to their high-temperature operation.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that Dr. Son Ji-Won's research team at KIST's Center for Energy Materials Research had developed a high-performance, thin-film-based ceramic fuel cell that could operate at mid-to-low temperatures below 600 °C using butane fuels.

Ceramic fuel cells are a type of high-temperature fuel cell that operates over 800 degrees C. This high temperature allows the use of inexpensive catalysts, such as nickel, in contrast to low-temperature fuel cells, such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells, which use high-priced platinum catalysts to supplement their low catalytic activity. Another major advantage of high-temperature fuel cells is that they can [use] various fuels other than pure hydrogen, such as LPG and LNG with low emission due to high efficiency. [...] [A] limiting factor is that their system on-off process takes a long time due to the characteristics of high-temperature operation, which restrict their application to large-scale stationary power generation systems.

[...] "This research systematically examined the possible uses of hydrocarbon fuels in ceramic fuel cells operating at low temperatures," said Dr. Son Ji-won. "The use of the portable fuels like butane at lower operating temperatures would enable the development of smaller and integrated ceramic fuel cell systems, which can be applied to portable and mobile power sources."

Journal Reference: Cam-Anh Thieu et al. "Effect of secondary metal catalysts on butane internal steam reforming operation of thin-film solid oxide fuel cells at 500–600 °C", Applied Catalysis B: Environmental (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.apcatb.2019.118349

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Khronos Group has pushed out the Open CL 3.0 provisional specification, a major update to the cross-platform API used for accelerating software performance by using the concurrent programming capabilities of GPUs and CPUs.

[...] The ability to do general-purpose computing on GPUs, which are optimised for parallel processing, as well as easily taking advantage of multi-threading on a CPU, can make a massive difference in performance, not only at the high end in supercomputers, but also on PCs and mobiles. That said, even OpenCL 1.2, released in 2011, appears to be good enough for many developers.

"OpenCL 1.2 has proven itself as the baseline needed by all vendors and markets," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. Therefore, OpenCL 3.0 [PDF] "makes all functionality beyond version 1.2 optional". While this may seem like a backward step, the idea is that a broad range of devices can have OpenCL 3.0-compliant drivers, and that developers will query for additional features, such as those introduced in OpenCL 2.x, using them only if they are available. This also means it is easy for implementers to "upgrade" drivers, simply by adding any missing OpenCL 2.x queries.

The change is a reaction to issues with the "monolithic" OpenCL 2.x specifications, which were a deterrent to adoption since it was challenging to implement everything. Khronos even suggests in its presentation [PDF] that implementers "may choose to drop OpenCL 2.x features if not relevant to target markets, to reduce costs and increase quality."

The risk is that OpenCL 1.2 is now set in stone as a base API and developers may be reluctant to move beyond it.

[...] With OpenCL 3.0, less is more: the key feature is to make the specification modular so that future enhancements can be introduced gradually and implemented by a subset of drivers according to what is appropriate for the targeted devices. This means that adoption of OpenCL 3.0 should in theory be quick, because of the ease of migrating OpenCL 1.2 drivers, even if actual functionality is little changed.

Also at AnandTech.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

The COVID-19 shutdown is making weather prediction more difficult:

The World Meteorological Organization's Global Observing System -- one third of the WMO's overarching World Weather Watch program -- was established in 1963 and provides a variety of atmosphere and ocean surface measurements to the WMO's 193 member states. These measurements are gathered from satellite and ground-based observation platforms, as well as commercial aircraft. They're then disseminated via the WMO's Global Telecommunication System (GTS) before being processed by the Global Data-processing and Forecasting System (GDPFS).

The ground and satellite components of that system are largely automated and generally immune to at least the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lars Peter Riishojgaard, Director, Earth System Branch in WMO's Infrastructure Department believes that the impact of losing those aerial observations will still be "relatively modest." However, he explained in a recent press release, "as the decrease in availability of aircraft weather observations continues and expands, we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts."

[...] More immediate is the problem with the system's aircraft-based sensors; primarily that they're no longer in the sky, collecting vital ambient temperature, wind speed and direction readings. Aircraft rely on the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay program (AMDAR) to collect the necessary data using onboard sensors, process and transmit it to relay stations on the ground via radio or satellite link.

[...] "As of March 31, the daily output of meteorological data from U.S. commercial aircraft has decreased to approximately half of normal levels," the NOAA rep continued. They were also quick to point out that "even though a decrease in this critical data will possibly negatively impact forecast model skill, it does not necessarily translate into a reduction in forecast accuracy since National Weather Service meteorologists use an entire suite of observations and guidance to produce an actual forecast."

[...] Thankfully, meteorologists won't be flying completely blind with so many airlines effectively out of commission. The ECMWF began pulling wind data from the Aeolus satellite in January. As for the NOAA, "while the automated weather reports from commercial aircraft provide exceptionally valuable data for forecast models, we also collect billions of Earth observations from other sources that feed into our models, such as weather balloons, surface weather observation network, radar, satellites and buoys," the spokesperson told Engadget. "Additionally, NOAA will soon be using COSMIC-2 GPS radio occultation satellite data to further increase observations throughout the depth of the tropical atmosphere."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Microsoft has fixed a subdomain takeover vulnerability in its collaboration platform Microsoft Teams that could [have] allowed an inside attacker to weaponized a single GIF image and use it to pilfer data from targeted systems and take over all of an organization’s Teams accounts.

The attack simply involved tricking a victim into viewing a malicious GIF image for it to work, according to researchers at CyberArk who also created a proof-of-concept (PoC) of the attack.

Microsoft neutralized the threat last Monday, updating misconfigured DNS records, after researchers reported the vulnerability on March 23.“Even if an attacker doesn’t gather much information from a [compromised] Teams’ account, they could use the account to traverse throughout an organization (just like a worm),” wrote Omer Tsarfati, CyberArk cyber security researcher, in a technical breakdown of its discovery Monday. “Eventually, the attacker could access all the data from your organization Teams accounts – gathering confidential information, competitive data, secrets, passwords, private information, business plans, etc.”

The attack involves malicious actors being able to abuse a JSON Web Token (“authtoken”) and a second “skype token”. The combination of these two tokens are used by Microsoft to allow a Teams user to see images shared with them – or by them – across different Microsoft servers and services such as SharePoint and Outlook.

[...] “Now with both tokens, the access token (authtoken) and the Skype token, [an attacker] will be able to make APIs calls/actions through Teams API interfaces – letting you send messages, read messages, create groups, add new users or remove users from groups, change permissions in groups,” researchers wrote.

[...] Researchers [...] said Microsoft quickly deleted the misconfigured DNS records of the two subdomains, which mitigated the problem.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

UN: Consequences Remain Decades After Chernobyl Disaster:

The United Nations says persistent and serious long-term consequences remain more than 30 years after the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

The world body is marking International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day on April 26, the 34th anniversary of the accident that spread a radioactive cloud over large parts of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Chernobyl: How did the world's worst nuclear accident happen?:

Efforts to downplay the scale of the disaster began within government itself — infamously exemplified by the Soviet foreign affairs minister's attempt to allay a more senior official's concern for residents' health with the assertion that they were celebrating weddings, gardening, and "fishing in the Pripyat River".

Three days later, the alarm was raised by Sweden, where the radiation was picked up at a nuclear plant.

The Soviet Union denied that an incident had occurred, but with Denmark, Finland and Norway also voicing concerns shortly afterwards, it eventually became impossible to hide the accident from the international community.

However, Moscow continued to downplay the true scale of the catastrophe, failing to tell even its own citizens to stay indoors and allowing the capital's May Day parade to go ahead a week later. The ensuing secrecy surrounding the handling of the disaster in the years that followed, and the reluctance to warn citizens of the scale of the danger they continued to face, means the true toll is continually being revised.

Original Submission