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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Raspberry Pi launches camera with interchangeable lens system for $50:

Attention tinkerers: Raspberry Pi has released a new camera for its tiny single-board computers. The "Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera" is on sale now for $50, and it will be sold alongside the older Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, which will still be the usual $25. This is a for-real camera system, so that $50 won't get you a ready-out-of-the-box Raspberry Pi camera, you'll also need to buy a lens for the—get this—interchangeable lens system that the high-quality camera supports.

Both cameras plug into the Raspberry Pi computer's camera serial interface using a ribbon cable, but the High Quality Camera looks like a massive upgrade, both in size and (hopefully) in image quality. While the $25 Camera Module V2 uses an ancient, low-end smartphone camera sensor with a microscopic lens, the High Quality Camera is a different class of product entirely. It's not a newer smartphone sensor, which is what I assumed when I first saw the news, but instead it's something that was originally intended for camcorders. It's a 12.3MP Sony IMX477 sensor with pretty huge 1.55 µm pixels and a 7.81 mm diagonal (1/2.3"-type). That's about double the sensor area of the Camera Module V2.

[...] The specs are in the same ballpark as a modern smartphone camera sensor, but the lenses for the High Quality Camera will blow your phone camera out of the water. There is an interchangeable lens system with support for off-the-shelf C- and CS-mount lenses and a back focus adjustment ring for swapping between lenses. This mount isn't as big as a DSLR lens—it's a smaller size that frequently gets used for 16mm CCTV video cameras. In addition to the native C-mount lenses out there, there are also plenty of adapters, and you can easily jump up to a real DSLR size like an EF Canon mount.

Would make for a nice camera rig on a telescope

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Florida sheriff refuses to stop Americans from witnessing historic manned space launch as NASA urges everyone to watch it online:

Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County – where the launch site is located – insisted that anyone who wanted to witness the event at the Kennedy Space Center should do so without worry, despite advice from NASA to watch remotely.

"We are not going to keep the great Americans that want to come watch that from coming here," Ivey said on Friday, calling on people to "come here just like you have for all the other beautiful launches we've had. And enjoy it."

If NASA is telling people to not come here and watch the launch, that's on them. I'm telling people what I believe as an American. And so NASA has got their guidelines, and I got mine.

Ivey – an ally of US President Donald Trump, who has also questioned Covid-19 containment measures in some states – didn't entirely dismiss fears of the lethal virus, however, advising that launch-watchers should practice "family social distancing" and remain in small groups.

[...] NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a news conference earlier on Friday that "we don't want an outbreak," voicing concerns that hundreds of thousands of spectators could flock to the space center to see the launch, risking further spread of the coronavirus.

"The challenge that we're up against right now is we want to keep everybody safe," Bridenstine said. "And so we're asking people not to travel to the Kennedy Space Center, and I will tell you that makes me sad to even say it. Boy, I wish we could make this into something really spectacular."

Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX – which partnered with NASA for the mission, providing its Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rockets to bring two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) – said much the same, asking people to "be there for the ride with us," but "in spirit more so than in physical space."

So, the Sheriff wouldn't arrest you, but there are other law enforcement organizations that might look at things differently. Being in a jail cell in close quarters with others compounds the risk of coming down with COVID-19. And, even if you were not arrested, you could still get infected (or be an asymptomatic carrier yourself) and transmit it to others who would return to who-knows-where.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

YouTube Rippers and Record Labels Clash in US Appeals Court:

In 2018, a group of prominent record labels filed a piracy lawsuit against two very popular YouTube rippers, FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com.

The labels, including Universal, Warner Bros, and Sony, hoped that the legal pressure would shut the sites down, but this plan backfired. At least in the short term.

The Russian operator of the sites, Tofig Kurbanov, fought back with a motion to dismiss. He argued that the Virginia federal court lacked personal jurisdiction as he operated the sites from abroad and didn't target or interact with US users.

The district court agreed with this assessment. In a verdict released early last year, Judge Claude M. Hilton dismissed the case. The Court carefully reviewed how the sites operated and found no evidence that they purposefully targeted either Virginia or the United States.

The record labels and the RIAA were disappointed with the outcome and swiftly announced an appeal. The landmark verdict also raised the interest of other groups, including the Motion Picture Association and EFF, which both filed amicus briefs, supporting the opposing sides.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Tracking the 'Murder Hornet': A Deadly Pest Has Reached North America:

In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had never seen anything like it.

As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer, Wash., in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside — thousands and thousands of bees with their heads torn from their bodies and no sign of a culprit.

"I couldn't wrap my head around what could have done that," Mr. McFall said.

Only later did he come to suspect that the killer was what some researchers simply call the "murder hornet."

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet's potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin.

In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first time, they have arrived in the United States.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Tiny Hero shrews have the most extreme spine in nature:

The tiny African mammals have an interlocking and highly flexible spine, new x-rays reveal — but they only deepen the intrigue.

When the Mangbetu people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo introduced Western scientists to a smoky-gray, rat-size animal, they told tales of how a grown man could stand on the mammal's back without hurting it.

That was back in 1910, and since then, studies of the animal in question — which came to be called the hero shrew — have cast light on what may account for such lore. (Another species of hero shrew was discovered, also in DRC, in 2013.)

In 2019, scientists led by Stephanie Smith, a mammologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, Illinois, took sophisticated x-rays of hero shrews. The scans showed that these little creatures have a spine unlike any other animal on Earth.

Their vertebrae have thousands of tiny, finger-like projections that allow them to lock into each other while also providing remarkable flexibility. Imagine a mammal that can scrunch up its body like an inchworm, Smith says.

What's more, their vertebrae show signs of being able to withstand greater than normal amounts of force.

"Understanding how small mammals are able to survive gives us a little bit of insight into how modern groups have been able to evolve," says Smith, whose findings were published April 28 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Journal Reference:
Stephanie M. Smith, Kenneth D. Angielczyk. Deciphering an extreme morphology: bone microarchitecture of the hero shrew backbone (Soricidae: Scutisorex) Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0457

Also at science news.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking:

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don't understand how we got "here," we run the risk of making things much worse.

When we seek to intervene in any system created by someone, it's not enough to view their decisions and choices simply as the consequences of first-order thinking because we can inadvertently create serious problems. Before changing anything, we should wonder whether they were using second-order thinking. Their reasons for making certain choices might be more complex than they seem at first. It's best to assume they knew things we don't or had experience we can't fathom, so we don't go for quick fixes and end up making things worse.

Second-order thinking is the practice of not just considering the consequences of our decisions but also the consequences of those consequences. Everyone can manage first-order thinking, which is just considering the immediate anticipated result of an action. It's simple and quick, usually requiring little effort. By comparison, second-order thinking is more complex and time-consuming. The fact that it is difficult and unusual is what makes the ability to do it such a powerful advantage.

takyon writes:

Pirated 'DVD Screeners' Will be History After Next Year's Oscars

The Academy announced this week that DVD and Blu-Ray screeners will be banned after the next Oscars ceremony. This marks the end of a long-standing tradition. Not just in the movie business, but also on pirate sites where the DVDscr tag is closely watched. Although Oscar DVD Screeners may soon be history, this doesn't mean that screener leaks will be thing[s] of the past.

[...] This year, plenty of discs will be shipped too but, after the upcoming Oscars ceremony, that will be a thing of the past. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this week that physical screeners will no longer be allowed in 2021.

"[T]he 93rd Awards season will be the final year DVD screeners will be allowed to be distributed; these mailings will be discontinued starting in 2021 for the 94th Academy Awards," the Academy writes.

The Oscars follow the same path as the Emmys, which already made the switch this year. According to the Academy, the transition is part of its sustainability efforts. This also includes a ban on physical music CDs, hard copies of screenplays, paper invites, and other things that possibly hurt the environment.

[...] Whether piracy was considered as a factor at all remains a guess. Some insiders believe that digital screeners are easier to protect and therefore more secure, but that is up for debate.

There may be fewer leak opportunities in the distribution process, but it's common knowledge that streaming platforms can be easily compromised. In fact, we have already seen several screeners being leaked from online sources. This was corroborated by pirate release group EVO last year.

"We had access to digital screeners and they are indeed easy to leak. The DRM on it is a joke. We had an account last year with three screeners on it and they were pretty much MP4 ready to encode," the EVO team informed us at the time.

Screener (promotional).

Related: First Leaked Screener of the Season: Unreleased Louis C.K. Film "I Love You, Daddy"

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takyon writes:

SpaceX's next Falcon Heavy launch could expend (destroy) the first stage center core, while landing the two side boosters on separate drone ships. This configuration could carry almost as much mass as a launch using a fully expendable Falcon Heavy:

Hot on the heels of the revelation that SpaceX's next Falcon Heavy launch is on schedule and will carry a small satellite copassenger, a US Space Force official has effectively confirmed that it will feature the first dual rocket landing of its kind.

[...] USSF-44 was the second operational launch contract won by Falcon Heavy and will send a ~3.7 metric ton (~8200 lb) satellite and an unknown number of secondary spacecraft directly to geostationary orbit (GEO) – a first for SpaceX. As far as Earth-centric orbits go, a direct-to-GEO launch is uniquely complicated and energy-intensive for the rockets that must perform them. As a result, it's long been suspected that Falcon Heavy's first GEO launch would also coincide with another first for SpaceX rocket recovery, an educated guess that has now been (partially) confirmed by the USSF.

[...] Thanks to the apparent challenges of center core recovery and the simple fact that Falcon Heavy doesn't launch nearly as much as Falcon 9, none of the three custom, highly-complex boosters have survived to be reused or inspected intact. Until the center core recovery problem can be fixed, SpaceX will thus likely have to assume that it must build a new center booster for every future Falcon Heavy launch, even if a given mission permits a landing attempt.

Thankfully, there are some circumstantial benefits to be derived if SpaceX, for example, doesn't even try to recover a Falcon Heavy center core. Speaking back in 2018, CEO Elon Musk revealed that Falcon Heavy could launch in a partially-reusable configuration – intentionally expending the center core and recovering both side boosters on two separate drone ships – with only a 10% cut to performance.

Side boosters landing on droneships & center expended is only ~10% performance penalty vs fully expended. Cost is only slightly higher than an expended F9, so around $95M.

Falcon Heavy's payload to low Earth orbit when fully expended is 63.8 (metric) tons, or 26.7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Judge Orders FCC to Hand Over IP Addresses Linked to Fake Net Neutrality Comments:

A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs that may provide new insight into the allegations of fraud stemming from agency’s 2017 net neutrality rollback.

A pair of New York Times reporters—Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel Dance—sued the FCC under the Freedom of Information Act after it refused their request to view copies of the logs. The logs will show, among other details, the originating IP addresses behind the millions of public comments sent to the agency ahead of the December 2017 net neutrality vote.

The FCC attempted to quash the paper’s request but failed to persuade District Judge Lorna Schofield, who wrote that, despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”

The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while Schofield didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure.

Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The land masses of Japan shifted from east to west to east again in the months before the strongest earthquake in the country's recorded history, a 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake that killed more than 15,500 people, new research shows.

Those movements, what researchers are calling a "wobble," may have the potential to alert seismologists to greater risk of future large subduction-zone earthquakes. These destructive events occur where one of Earth's tectonic plates slides under another one. That underthrusting jams up or binds the earth, until the jam is finally torn or broken and an earthquake results.

[...] "What happened in Japan was an enormous but very slow wobble—something never observed before," said Michael Bevis, a co-author of the paper and professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

"But are all giant earthquakes preceded by wobbles of this kind? We don't know because we don't have enough data. This is one more thing to watch for when assessing seismic risk in subduction zones like those in Japan, Sumatra, the Andes and Alaska."

The wobble would have been imperceptible to people standing on the island, Bevis said, moving the equivalent of just a few millimeters per month over a period of five to seven months. But the movement was obvious in data recorded by more than 1,000 GPS stations distributed throughout Japan, in the months leading up to the March 11 Tohoku-oki earthquake.

[...] Those movements were markedly different from the steady and cyclical shifts the Earth's land masses continuously make.

Journal Reference:
Jonathan R. Bedford, Marcos Moreno, Zhiguo Deng, et al. Months-long thousand-kilometre-scale wobbling before great subduction earthquakes, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2212-1)

-- submitted from IRC

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Gravitational waves could prove the existence of the quark-gluon plasma: Computer models of merging neutron stars predicts how to tell when this happens:

[...] When two neutron stars collide and merge into a hyper-massive neutron star, the matter in the core of the new object becomes incredibly hot and dense. According to physical calculations, these conditions could result in hadrons such as neutrons and protons, which are the particles normally found in our daily experience, dissolving into their components of quarks and gluons and thus producing a quark-gluon plasma.

In 2017 it was discovered for the first time that merging neutron stars send out a gravitational wave signal that can be detected on Earth. The signal not only provides information on the nature of gravity, but also on the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions. When these gravitational waves were first discovered in 2017, however, they were not recorded beyond the merging point.

This is where the work of the Frankfurt physicists begins. They simulated merging neutron stars and the product of the merger to explore the conditions under which a transition from hadrons to a quark-gluon plasma would take place and how this would affect the corresponding gravitational wave. The result: in a specific, late phase of the life of the merged object a phase transition to the quark-gluon plasma took place and left a clear and characteristic signature on the gravitational-wave signal.

Professor Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University is convinced: "Compared to previous simulations, we have discovered a new signature in the gravitational waves that is significantly clearer to detect. If this signature occurs in the gravitational waves that we will receive from future neutron-star mergers, we would have a clear evidence for the creation of quark-gluon plasma in the present universe."

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stormwyrm writes:

With a major pandemic sweeping the world, the standard process of clinical trials for drug approval has come under criticism as a needless source of bureaucracy and delay. Drug discovery chemist Derek Lowe in a blog post explains how clinical trials for drug approval work and the reasons behind the various requirements that the FDA and equivalent organisations around the world generally put in place before approving a new drug. He explains how most of these apparently pointless bureaucratic hurdles are actually there to help protect the integrity of the scientific process and ensure that the human subjects undergoing the trials are treated ethically. While a case can be made for relaxing some of these safeguards, especially in this time of pandemic, it is probably not a good idea to do so without at least understanding what these safeguards are for.

Determining how much of a pharmaceutical is needed to prepare for the trial. Ensuring your are actually preparing just that drug and not a polymorph. Proper laboratory and manufacturing practices to ensure the desired drug is actually prepared without impurities and contaminants. Preparing a plan for a drug trial. Demographics — age, gender, weight, current medications being taken. Getting a representative distribution of these as participants. And there's much more.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51799503

Today's average commercial solar panel converts 17-19% of the light energy hitting it to electricity. This is up from 12% just 10 years ago. But what if we could boost this to 30%? More efficient solar cells mean we could get much more than today's 2.4% of global electricity supply from the sun.

Solar is already the world's fastest growing energy technology. Ten years ago, there were only 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity globally - one gigawatt being roughly the output of a single large power station. By the end of last year, the world's installed solar power had jumped to about 600 gigawatts.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

House panel calls Bezos to testify over Amazon allegedly misleading Congress:

Jeff Bezos is being called to appear before the House Judiciary Committee about his company potentially having made misleading statements about its business practices. At issue is a report from April 23 that detailed how Amazon would use data from third-party sellers to develop and sell its own products.

The committee's request, sent out in a letter on Friday, builds on its current investigation into Amazon's "role in the digital marketplace." While it expects Bezos to agree to appear on his own, the group reserves "the right to resort to compulsory process if necessary."

[...] Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the House committee's Friday letter to Bezos.

Previously:
Amazon Reportedly Used Merchant Data, Despite Telling Congress It Doesn't

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] in 2018, a group of scientists led by Lankeswar Dey, a graduate student at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, published a paper with an even more detailed model they claimed would be able to predict the timing of future flares to within four hours. In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, those scientists report that their accurate prediction of a flare that occurred on July 31, 2019, confirms the model is correct.

The observation of that flare almost didn't happen. Because OJ 287 was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, out of view of all telescopes on the ground and in Earth orbit, the black hole wouldn't come back into view of those telescopes until early September, long after the flare had faded. But the system was within view of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which the agency retired in January 2020.

After 16 years of operations, the spacecraft's orbit had placed it 158 million miles (254 million kilometers) from Earth, or more than 600 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, Spitzer could observe the system from July 31 (the same day the flare was expected to appear) to early September, when OJ 287 would become observable to telescopes on Earth.

"When I first checked the visibility of OJ 287, I was shocked to find that it became visible to Spitzer right on the day when the next flare was predicted to occur," said Seppo Laine, an associate staff scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, who oversaw Spitzer's observations of the system. "It was extremely fortunate that we would be able to capture the peak of this flare with Spitzer, because no other human-made instruments were capable of achieving this feat at that specific point in time."

There is a nice depiction of several disk crossings on YouTube.

Also at: Dancing black holes create mega flare brighter than one trillion stars

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission