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Phoenix666 writes:

Renewable power surges as pandemic scrambles global energy outlook, new report finds:

The pandemic-induced global economic meltdown has triggered a drop in energy demand and related carbon emissions that could transform how the world gets its energy -- even after the disease wanes, according to a report released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA)[*].

The precipitous drop in energy use is unparalleled back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. But not all energy sources are suffering equally. Efforts to shift toward renewable energy could be hastened, as fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil, have borne the brunt of the decline. Use of renewable energy, meanwhile has risen, thanks to new projects coming online, and the low cost of turning wind turbines or harvesting sunlight.

[*] Link to the IEA report.

Prices for fossil fuel have plunged, while the costs of maintaining those supply chains (eg. storage) remain constant.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A research team including research scientist Atsuko Kobayashi from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and research scientist Mizuho Koike from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have found nitrogen-bearing organic material in carbonate minerals in a Martian meteorite. This organic material has most likely been preserved for 4 billion years since Mars' Noachian age. Because carbonate minerals typically precipitate from the groundwater, this finding suggests a wet and organic-rich early Mars, which could have been habitable and favorable for life to start.

[...] Martian meteorites are pieces of Mars' surface that were themselves blasted into space by meteor impacts, and which ultimately landed on Earth. They provide important insights into Martian history. One meteorite in particular, named Allan Hills (ALH) 84001, named for the region in Antarctica it was found in 1984, is especially important. It contains orange-coloured carbonate minerals, which precipitated from salty liquid water on Mars' near-surface 4 billion years ago. As these minerals record Mars' early aqueous environment, many studies have tried to understand their unique chemistry and whether they might provide evidence for ancient life on Mars. However, previous analyses suffered from contamination with terrestrial material from Antarctic snow and ice, making it difficult to say how much of the organic material in the meteorite were truly Martian. In addition to carbon, nitrogen (N) is an essential element for terrestrial life and a useful tracer for planetary system evolution. However, due to previous technical limitations, nitrogen had not yet been measured in ALH84001.

This new research conducted by the joint ELSI-JAXA team used state-of-the-art analytical techniques to study the nitrogen content of the ALH84001 carbonates, and the team is now confident they have found the first solid evidence for 4-billion-year-old Martian organics containing nitrogen.

-- submitted from IRC

More information: Mizuho Koike et al, In-situ preservation of nitrogen-bearing organics in Noachian Martian carbonates, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15931-4

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Offspring may inherit legacy of their father's Toxoplasma infection

Studying mice infected with the common parasite Toxoplasma, the team discovered that sperm of infected fathers carried an altered 'epigenetic' signature which impacted the brains of resulting offspring. Molecules in the sperm called 'small RNA' appeared to influence the offspring's brain development and behaviour.

'Intergenerational inheritance' of similar epigenetic changes from men exposed to extreme trauma has been well documented. This latest research, published in Cell Reports, has raised the question of whether Toxoplasma infections – or even possibly other infections – in men before conception could impact the health of subsequent generations.

The research was led by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers Dr Shiraz Tyebji and Associate Professor Chris Tonkin, in collaboration with Professor Anthony Hannan at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health.

[...] Associate Professor Tonkin said people could carry the dormant Toxoplasma parasite for decades, and that this had been associated with the appearance of symptoms of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Runaway1956 provide a submission which inspired this story.

Possibly paywalled: There's finally a Supreme Court battle coming over the nation's main hacking law (Alternative URL)

The Supreme Court is finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet.

The justices agreed to hear a case this fall that argues law enforcement and prosecutors have routinely applied the law too broadly and used it to criminalize not just hacking into websites but also far more innocuous behavior – such as lying about your name or location while signing up on a website or otherwise violating the site's terms of service.
If the court agrees to narrow how prosecutors can use the law, it would be a huge victory for security researchers.

They routinely skirt websites' strict terms of service when they investigate them for bugs that cybercriminals could exploit.

It would also make the Internet far safer, they say. That's because current interpretations of the 1986 law, known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse act (CFAA), have made researchers wary of revealing bugs they find because they fear getting in trouble with police or with companies, which can also sue under the law in civil courts.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Three things in life are certain: Death, taxes, and cloud-based IoT gear bricked by vendors. Looking at you, Belkin:

On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the "off" switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.

It's not unusual for a manufacturer to call time on physical hardware. [...]

But this is a little different, because Belkin isn't merely ending support. It also plans to decommission the cloud services required for its Wemo NetCam devices to actually work.

"Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network, without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications," Belkin said on its official website.

"If you use your Wemo NetCam as a motion sensor for your Wemo line of products, it will no longer provide this functionality and will be removed as an option from your Wemo app," the company added.

Adding insult to injury, the ubiquitous consumer network gear maker only plans to refund customers with active warranties, which excludes anyone who bought their device more than two years ago. The window to submit requests is open from now until 30 June.

Customers will also have to provide the company with the original receipt, showing how much they paid for the unit. Though it shouldn't be too hard to fish out an Amazon invoice from an inbox, if you bought the unit from a bricks-and-mortar retailer, there's a chance you won't have that information to provide.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

One man's effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.

Florida man John Parziale was furious when he discovered in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party vendors – cartridges he had already bought and installed.

That month, HP emitted a remote firmware update, without alerting users, that changed the communication protocol between a printer's chipset and the electronics in its inkjet cartridges so that only HP-branded kit was accepted. The result was that Parziale's printer would no longer work with his third-party ink. He saw a series of error messages that said he needed to replace empty cartridges and that there was a "cartridge problem."

Parziale sued the IT titan in its home state of California, arguing he would never have bought the HP printers if he knew they would only work with HP-branded ink cartridges. At the time, the cartridges he bought to go with the machine did in fact work and were printing merrily right up to the point the DRM-style update was sent.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ubuntu "mini.iso" Minimal Install .ISO for 20.04 LTS.

Compared to the DVD-sized downloads for some distributions, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS mini.iso is only 74 MB.

I prefer using the mini.iso, but they moved it to a legacy directory. You can use the path on their downloads server, which appears to be HTTP only, or you can get an HTTPS connection to download it. Here is an example, from a mirror:

• Directory
• mini.iso, The File Itself
• Checksums, GPG signatures, Files List, Directory
• Checksums [*]
• GPG signatures [*]
• Files List [*]

[*] These are my preferred sources.

Why?

Since they've moved mini.iso to a "legacy" directory, I would guess they plan to discontinue the mini.iso install method sometime in the future?

Fix for a possible problem install:

A user on Reddit experienced a problem in this thread:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When asked to recall how generous they were in the past, selfish people tend to remember being more benevolent than they actually were, according to a series of experiments by Yale psychologists and economists at University of Zurich published April 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

[...] In their first lab experiment, conducted at the University of Zurich with economists Michel Maréchal and Ernst Fehr, the researchers presented subjects with a pot of money and asked them to decide how much to keep and how much to give to anonymous strangers. After answering some intervening survey questions, participants then were asked to recall how much they had given to the anonymous strangers. Crucially, participants received bonus money if they recalled their decisions accurately.

Even with a financial incentive, stingier subjects tended to recall giving more money than they actually did.

In another pair of experiments conducted in the lab and online, the researchers asked subjects what they thought was a fair distribution of money before asking them to divide the pot. The researchers found that only those subjects who had given less than what they personally deemed fair recalled being more generous than they actually were.

A final pair of online studies showed that subjects only misremembered their stinginess when they felt personally responsible for their decisions. When participants were explicitly instructed by the experimenters to give lower amounts, and so felt no responsibility for their actions, they remembered their giving behavior accurately.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc

In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?

You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.

[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Pentagon Has Finally Declassified Those Grainy UFO Videos From The US Navy:

After years of speculation, defence officials have now declassified and released three grainy videos from the Navy that have been circulating online for a while now, causing all sorts of speculation.

The mysterious footage was captured using infrared cameras in November 2004 and January 2015, and leaked to the public a few years ago.

[...] "DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," the US Department of Defence said in a statement.

"The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterised as 'unidentified'."

But that characterisation is not for a lack of trying. For five years, from 2008 through 2011, the Pentagon had a top-secret program investigating UFOs and the potential threats they could pose to aircraft and other aerial activities.

See the linked story for the videos.

Also on the Beeb, The Guardian, even The Daily Beast.

takyon writes:

$50 ODROID-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM

Hardkernel has just launched an update to its ODROID-C2 board, with ODROID-C4 SBC equipped with a 2.0 GHz Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor combined with up to 4GB RAM, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 video output, and the usual 40-pin I/O header.

That makes it a worthy competitor to Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, especially since it supports Ubuntu 20.04, CoreELEC, Android 9, and LineageOS operating systems, and comes with a proper heatsink for cooling for just $50 plus shipping.

[...] Besides benchmarks and power consumption, the boards also differ in terms of features. For example, Raspberry Pi 4 offers dual HDMI output and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, while ODROID-C4 comes with a single HDMI port, and WiFi/Bt is optional via a USB dongle. On the other hand, ODROID-C4 comes with four USB 3.0 ports, and offers support for eMMC flash module, while RPi 4 features 2x USB 3.0 + 2x USB 2.0 ports, and does not offer an eMMC option.

ODROID.

See also: Raspberry Pi 4 vs ODROID-C4 Features Comparison

Also at Notebookcheck and LinuxGizmos.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] When it began observations in 2000, TAMA300 was one of the world's first large-scale interferometric gravitational wave detectors. At that time TAMA300 had the highest sensitivity in the world, setting an upper limit on the strength of gravitational wave signals; but the first detection of actual gravitational waves was made 15 years later in 2015 by LIGO. Since then detector technology has improved to the point that modern detectors are observing several signals per month. The scientific results obtained from these observations are already impressive and many more are expected in the next decades. TAMA300 is no longer participating in observations, but is still active, acting as a testbed for new technologies to improve other detectors.

The sensitivity of current and future gravitational wave detectors is limited at almost all the frequencies by quantum noise caused by the effects of vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic fields. But even this inherent quantum noise can be sidestepped. It is possible to manipulate the vacuum fluctuations to redistribute the quantum uncertainties, deceasing[sic] one type of noise at the expense of increasing a different, less obstructive type of noise. This technique, known as vacuum squeezing, has already been implemented in gravitational wave detectors, greatly increasing their sensitivity to higher frequency gravitational waves. But the optomechanical interaction between the electromagnetic field and the mirrors of the detector cause the effects of vacuum squeezing to change depending on the frequency. So at low frequencies vacuum squeezing increases the wrong type of noise, actually degrading sensitivity.

To overcome this limitation and achieve reduced noise at all frequencies, a team at NAOJ composed of members of the in-house Gravitational Wave Science Project and the KAGRA collaboration (but also including researchers of the Virgo and GEO collaborations) has recently demonstrated the feasibility of a technique known as frequency dependent vacuum squeezing, at the frequencies useful for gravitational wave detectors.

-- submitted from IRC

More Information: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10672

Original Submission

takyon writes:

GPUs Unleashed: Intel Releases First Unlocked GPU Driver For OEM Systems

While Intel's integrated GPUs have made immense strides over the past decade, there's been one particular legacy they've been unable to break free from: OEM driver locking. Due to the large degree of customization and optimization that OEMs sometimes do to their systems, some OEMs have insisted on having video drivers "locked" to their platforms, so that only video drivers that they've customized and distributed can be installed.

This structure has always offered at least a modicum of utility, ensuring that newer drivers don't break things or otherwise interfere with those system customizations. But as desktops and laptops live longer than ever, OEM have demonstrated a shorter attention span than Intel when it comes to driver updates. As a result, unfortunate system owners have found themselves stuck in a bind with older (and even some newer) systems, where there are newer drivers with important bug fixes for games and applications, but those drivers can't be installed because they haven't been customized and approved by the OEM.

Thankfully, it looks like the days of Intel OEM driver locking are finally behind us. Yesterday evening Intel released a new version of its Windows 10 GPU driver, version 26.20.100.8141, that's fully unlocked, allowing it to be installed on virtually all OEM systems for the first time. And while there are a handful of catches, ultimately this driver should work with most OEM systems that are running a current, supported version of Windows 10 on top of an Intel Gen9 or later iGPU.

Also at ZDNet and Wccftech.

See also: Intel Sends Initial Linux 5.8 Graphics Driver Updates - Adds Ability For Tapping Full EU Perf, More Tiger Lake Bits
Intel Landing More Driver Work Needed For Discrete GPU Linux Support
Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre1 Released With More Work Towards Gen12 + Discrete GPUs
Intel Gen11+ Graphics See An Easy Bump On Mesa 20.1-devel

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

UNSW Science's Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism—one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).

"The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force," Professor Webb says.

"It's a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck's constant and the electron charge, and it's a ratio of those things. And it's the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nonverbal learning disability (NVLD), a poorly understood and often-overlooked disorder that causes problems with visual-spatial processing, may affect nearly 3 million children in the United States, making it one of the most common learning disorders, according to a new study by led by Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The study, the first to estimate the prevalence of NVLD in the general population, was published online today in JAMA Network Open.

"NVLD is a huge and hidden public health burden," said Jeffrey Lieberman, Chair of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "This important work might never have come to light if not for the support of dedicated advocate and their philanthropic support. We hope that these findings raise awareness of the disorder and lead to an understanding of its neurobiology and better treatments."