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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When investigating how tumors grow, or how pharmaceuticals affect different types of cells, researchers have to understand how molecules within a cell react—and interact. This is possible with modern laser microscopy. Until now, however, molecules in cell specimens had to be labelled with fluorescent substances in order to make them visible, and this can distort the very behavior of the molecules. Research groups from Bielefeld University and the University of Hong Kong have developed a laser microscope that works without having to label the molecules. For this, the researchers innovated a unique compact fibre laser instead of the solid-state lasers that had previously been used. The new microscope generates far less noise when in use than customary designs, making it suitable for use in operating rooms. The researchers presented their innovative technology in the journal Light: Science and Applications, which is published by Springer Nature.

"Label-free microscopic imaging is currently a hot topic in biomedical research," says Professor Dr. Thomas Huser, a biophysicist who leads the Biomolecular Photonics research group at Bielefeld University. His team worked together with Professor Dr. Kenneth K.Y. Wong's research group at the University of Hong Kong on the fibre laser microscope.

"Staining with fluorescent markers is generally unsuitable for in-vivo tissues," says Huser. "Label-free microscopy is needed, for instance, to investigate how various new types of cells develop from stem cells. It also allows for a tumor to be demarcated from normal tissue without staining. And we can ascertain how pharmaceutical compounds react with molecules in the muscle tissue cells of the heart and liver, as well as other cells."

Journal Reference:
Cihang Kong, Christian Pilger, Henning Hachmeister, et al. High-contrast, fast chemical imaging by coherent Raman scattering using a self-synchronized two-colour fibre laser [open], Light: Science & Applications (DOI: 10.1038/s41377-020-0259-2)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Colorado State University:

Samples were collected during the NSF-funded SOCRATES field campaign, led by research scientist and coauthor Paul DeMott. Graduate student Kathryn Moore sampled the air in the marine boundary layer, the lower part of the atmosphere that has direct contact with the ocean, aboard the Research Vessel Investigator as it steamed south from Tasmania to the Antarctic ice edge. Research scientist and first author Jun Uetake examined the composition of airborne microbes captured from the ship. The atmosphere is full of these microorganisms dispersed over hundreds to thousands of kilometers by wind.

Using DNA sequencing, source tracking and wind back trajectories, Uetake determined the microbes' origins were marine, sourced from the ocean. Bacterial composition also was differentiated into broad latitudinal zones, suggesting aerosols from distant land masses and human activities, such as pollution or soil emissions driven by land use change, were not traveling south into Antarctic air.

It looks like Maatsuyker Island off the south coast of Tasmania is the cleanest air you're going to get.

Journal Reference
Jun Uetake, Thomas C. J. Hill, Kathryn A. Moore, et al. Airborne bacteria confirm the pristine nature of the Southern Ocean boundary layer [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2000134117)

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martyb writes:

African-American George Floyd's death has led to marches, demonstrations, acts of violence, and looting across the USA and in other parts of the world. Emotions are running high. We will not attempt to accuse or defend anyone here. Just attempt to lay out the information we have and offer it up for the community to discuss. Many comments about this incident have been posted to unrelated stories on this site. This is, therefore, an attempt to provide one place on SoylentNews where people are encouraged to discuss it. So as to not derail other stories on the site, I kindly ask you focus those comments here.

Wikipedia has a page about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd (permanent link to the page as it appeared at the time of writing):

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African-American man, was killed in the Powderhorn community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. While Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on a city street during an arrest, Derek Chauvin, a white American Minneapolis police officer, kept his knee on the right side of Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; according to the criminal complaint against Chauvin, 2 minutes and 53 seconds of that time occurred after Floyd became unresponsive.[3][4][5][6][7] Officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas K. Lane participated in Floyd's arrest, with Kueng holding Floyd's back, Lane holding his legs, and Thao looking on and preventing intervention by an onlooker as he stood nearby.[8]:6:24[9][10]

The arrest was made after Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a market.[11] Police said Floyd physically resisted arrest.[12][13] Some media organizations commented that a security camera from a nearby business did not show Floyd resisting.[14][15] The criminal complaint filed later said that based on body camera footage, Floyd repeatedly said he couldn't breathe while standing outside the police car, resisted getting in the car and intentionally fell down.[16][17][18][19] Several bystanders recorded the event on their smartphones, with one video showing Floyd repeating "Please", "I can't breathe", "Mama", and "Don't kill me" being widely circulated on social media platforms and broadcast by the media.[20] While knee-to-neck restraints are allowed in Minnesota under certain circumstances, Chauvin's usage of the technique has been widely criticized by law enforcement experts as excessive.[21][22][23] All four officers were fired the day after the incident.[24]

[...] Charges: Third-degree murder (Chauvin) Second-degree manslaughter (Chauvin)

This has been extensively covered by the media. Some outlets attempt to put their own interpretations on their coverage with their selection of video footage and with their commentary. It is difficult to find a simple video of the incident. Here is one that has coverage from the time of initial encounter of the police the officers with George Floyd up through his being taken away by ambulance. The video is a composite of shots from a restaurant's surveillance camera (Dragon Wok), Officer body cam, and bystander cell phones. YouTube footage: Full George Floyd Available Footage (21:12). If anyone has more complete footage of the arrest, please mention it clearly (with a link) in the comments.

Lastly, this is a hard time for everybody. Pandemic. Lock-down. Unemployment. Fears. Please be mindful of others' circumstances when commenting. We are a community sprung from a time of challenge. Let us continue to be here for one-another during this difficult time. SoylentNews is People.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Orbital Use Fees Proposed As the Most Effective Way to Solve the Space Junk Problem:

The most effective way to solve the space junk problem, according to a new study, is not to capture debris or deorbit old satellites: it's an international agreement to charge operators "orbital-use fees" for every satellite put into orbit.

Orbital use fees would also increase the long-run value of the space industry, said economist Matthew Burgess, a CIRES Fellow and co-author of the new paper. By reducing future satellite and debris collision risk, an annual fee rising to about $235,000 per satellite would quadruple the value of the satellite industry by 2040, he and his colleagues concluded in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Space is a common resource, but companies aren't accounting for the cost their satellites impose on other operators when they decide whether or not to launch," said Burgess, who is also an assistant professor in Environmental Studies and an affiliated faculty member in Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. "We need a policy that lets satellite operators directly factor in the costs their launches impose on other operators."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Third European Service Module for Artemis Mission to Land Astronauts on the Moon:

It's official: when astronauts land on the Moon in 2024 they will get there with help from the European Service Module. The European Space Agency signed a contract with Airbus to build the third European Service Module for NASA's Orion spacecraft that will ferry the next astronauts to land on the Moon.

NASA's Artemis program is returning humans to the Moon with ESA's European Service Module supplying everything needed to keep the astronauts alive on their trip in the crew module – water, air, propulsion, electricity, a comfortable temperature as well as acting as the chassis of the spacecraft.

The third Artemis mission will fly astronauts to Earth's natural satellite in 2024 – the first to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 following a hiatus of more than 50 years.

ESA's director of Human and Robotic Exploration David Parker said: "By entering into this agreement, we are again demonstrating that Europe is a strong and reliable partner in Artemis. The European Service Module represents a crucial contribution to this, allowing scientific research, development of key technologies, and international cooperation – inspiring missions that expand humankind's presence beyond Low Earth Orbit."

[...] The first European Service Module is being handed over to NASA at their Kennedy Space Center for an uncrewed launch next year, and the second is in production at the Airbus integration hall in Bremen, Germany.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Dangerous SHA-1 crypto function will die in SSH linking millions of computers:

Developers of two open source code libraries for Secure Shell—the protocol millions of computers use to create encrypted connections to each other—are retiring the SHA-1 hashing algorithm, four months after researchers piled a final nail in its coffin.

The moves, announced in release notes and a code update for OpenSSH and libssh respectively, mean that SHA-1 will no longer be a means for digitally signing encryption keys that prevent the monitoring or manipulating of data passing between two computers connected by SSH—the common abbreviation for Secure Shell. (Wednesday's release notes concerning SHA-1 deprecation in OpenSSH repeated word for word what developers put in February release notes, but few people seemed to notice the planned change until now.)

Cryptographic hash functions generate a long string of characters that are known as a hash digest. Theoretically, the digests are supposed to be unique for every file, message, or other input fed into the function. Practically speaking, digest collisions must be mathematically infeasible given the performance capabilities of available computing resources. In recent years, a host of software and services have stopped using SHA-1 after researchers demonstrated practical ways for attackers to forge digital signatures that use SHA-1. The unanimous agreement among experts is that it's no longer safe in almost all security contexts.

"Its a chainsaw in a nursery," security researcher Kenn White said of the hash function, which made its debut in 1995.

martyb writes:

A new theorem predicts that stationary black holes must have at least one light ring:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany and Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal have recently introduced a theorem that makes predictions about the light rings around stationary black holes. Their theorem, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that equilibrium black holes must, as a general rule, have at least one light ring in each of their sense of rotation.

"Remarkably, the properties of light rings can encode much relevant black hole information," Pedro Cunha and Carlos Herdeiro, the two researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org via email. "Measuring these properties grants a direct window into the elusive and yet fairly uncharted regime of very strong gravity close to a black hole. At this moment it is still unclear whether Einstein's theory of general relativity remains a good description of the laws of gravity under such extreme conditions. Therefore, a key question is: does any black hole model, in any theory of gravity, need to have a light ring?"

[...] "In our paper, we introduce a generic and mathematically innovative argument that establishes that an equilibrium black hole must indeed have, as a rule, at least one standard light ring in each rotational sense," Cunha and Herdeiro said. "To analyze light rings, typically, one considers families of solutions of a given theory of gravity, like general relativity, or some particular model of modified gravity. Here, however, the argument is of a topological nature."

[...] "The prediction that black holes always have light rings and they are always outside the horizon has important consequences," Cunha and Herdeiro say. "For instance, it implies that the silhouette of a black hole, known as the black hole shadow, is generically different and usually larger than what one would expect the size of the black hole itself to be. So the shadow should always be a magnification of the black hole."

SomeGuy writes:

Wired is reporting that Walmart employees have serious concerns about the effectiveness of the company's anti-shoplifting "AI" technology (reprint), including unnecessarily breaking COVID-19 related social distancing guidelines.

[...] The employees said they were "past their breaking point" with Everseen, a small artificial intelligence firm based in Cork, Ireland, whose technology Walmart began using in 2017. Walmart uses Everseen in thousands of stores to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks. But the workers claimed it misidentified innocuous behavior as theft, and often failed to stop actual instances of stealing.

[...] The coronavirus pandemic has given their concerns more urgency. One Concerned Home Office Associate said they worry false positives could be causing Walmart workers to break social-distancing guidelines unnecessarily. When Everseen flags an issue, a store associate needs to intervene and determine whether shoplifting or another problem is taking place. In an internal communication from April obtained by WIRED, a corporate Walmart manager expressed strong concern that workers were being put at risk by the additional contact necessitated by false positives and asked whether the Everseen system should be turned off to protect customers and workers.

Before COVID-19, "it wasn't ideal, it was a poor customer experience," the worker said. "AI is now creating a public health risk."

[...] at least 20 Walmart associates have now died after contracting the coronavirus, according to United For Respect.

[...] A spokesperson for Walmart said the company has been working diligently to protect customers and its workforce, and believes the rate at which associates have contracted Covid-19 is lower than that of the general US population.

[...] The company said it has taken a number of steps to ensure people are protected during these interactions, including regularly cleaning self-checkout kiosks and providing employees with protective equipment. In addition, workers are given handheld devices that allow them to handle most interventions from a distance, the company said.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New stretchable, self-healing and illuminating electronic material for wearables and soft robots:

Imagine a flexible digital screen that heals itself when it cracks, or a light-emitting robot that locates survivors in dark, dangerous environments or carries out farming and space exploration tasks. A novel material developed by a team of NUS researchers could turn these ideas into reality.

The new stretchable material, when used in light-emitting capacitor devices, enables highly visible illumination at much lower operating voltages, and is also resilient to damage due to its self-healing properties.

This innovation, called the HELIOS (which stands for Healable, Low-field Illuminating Optoelectronic Stretchable) device, was achieved by Assistant Professor Benjamin Tee and his team from the NUS Institute for Health Innovation & Technology and NUS Materials Science and Engineering.

[...] Unlike existing stretchable light-emitting capacitors, HELIOS enabled devices can turn on at voltages that are four times lower, and achieve illumination that is more than 20 times brighter. It also achieved an illumination of 1460 cd/m² at 2.5 V/µm, the brightest attained by stretchable light-emitting capacitors to date, and is now comparable to the brightness of mobile phone screens. Due to the low power consumption, HELIOS can achieve a longer operating lifetime, be utilized safely in human-machine interfaces, and be powered wirelessly to improve portability.

The researchers say the material promises durability and efficiency.

Journal Reference
Yu Jun Tan, Hareesh Godaba, Ge Chen, et al. A transparent, self-healing and high- κ dielectric for low-field-emission stretchable optoelectronics, Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0548-4)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russia's Elbrus 8CB Microarchitecture: 8-core VLIW on TSMC 28nm

All of the world's major superpowers have a vested interest in building their own custom silicon processors. The vital ingredient to this allows the superpower to wean itself off of US-based processors, guarantee there are no supplemental backdoors, and if needed add their own. As we have seen with China, custom chip designs, x86-based joint ventures, or Arm derivatives seem to be the order of the day. So in comes Russia, with its custom Elbrus VLIW design that seems to have its roots in SPARC.

Russia has been creating processors called Elbrus for a number of years now. For those of us outside Russia, it has mostly been a big question mark as to what is actually under the hood – these chips are built for custom servers and office PCs, often at the direction of the Russian government and its requirements. We have had glimpses of the design, thanks to documents from Russian supercomputing events, however these are a few years old now. If you are not in Russia, you are unlikely to ever get your hands on one at any rate. However, it recently came to our attention of a new programming guide listed online for the latest Elbrus-8CB processor designs.

The latest Elbrus-8CB chip, as detailed in the new online programming guide published this week, built on TSMC's 28nm, is a 333 mm² design featuring 8 cores at 1.5 GHz. Peak throughput according to the documents states 576 GFLOPs of double precision, with the chip offering four channels of DDR4-2400, good for 68.3 GB/s. The L1 and L2 caches are private, with a 64 kB L1-D cache, a 128 kB L1-I cache, and a 512 kB L2 cache. The L3 cache is shared between the cores, at 2 MB/core for a total of 16 MB. The processor also supports 4-way server multiprocessor combinations, although it does not say on what protocol or what bandwidth.

It is a compiler focused design, much like Intel's Itanium, in that most of the optimizations happen at the compiler level. Based on compiler first designs in the past, that typically does not make for a successful product. Documents from 2015 state that a continuing goal of the Elbrus design is x86 and x86-64 binary translation with only a 20% overhead, allowing full support for x86 code as well as x86 operating systems, including Windows 7 (this may have been updated since 2015).

Previously: Russian Homegrown Elbrus-4C CPU Released

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word: Which works better for business?:

Have you been thinking of reassessing which word processor your business should standardize on? The obvious choices are the two best known: Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But which is better?

Several years ago, the answer to that would have been easy: Microsoft Word for its better editing, formatting and markup tools; Google Docs for its better collaboration. But both applications have been radically updated since then. Word now has live collaboration tools, and Google has added more sophisticated formatting, editing and markup features to Docs.

TFA requires free registration, but the question is an interesting one: Have Google Docs arrived at parity with, or surpassed, Microsoft Word for business needs? How much work is required to transition existing documents, macros, and workflows?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Plum pickings: ancient fruit ripe for modern plates:

An Indigenous fruit which is one of the earliest known plant foods eaten in Australia could be the next big thing in the bush foods industry.

The University of Queensland research team is led by bush foods researcher Associate Professor Yasmina Sultanbawa, who said the green plum not only tasted delicious but contained one of the highest known folate levels of any fruit on the commercial market.

"This is really exciting because folate is an important B-group vitamin, and what's great about the green plum is that the folate is in a natural form so the body absorbs it more easily than in a capsule," Dr Sultanbawa said.

[...] "There is recent evidence discovered in West Arnhem Land which shows the green plum was eaten by Aboriginal people as far back as 53,000 years ago."

Will mass cultivation disrupt aboriginal communities?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Christo, the artist who wrapped the world, dies at 84:

Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist, best known for his monumental installations that wrapped some of the world's most celebrated buildings and played with people's perceptions of landscape and the outdoors, died on Sunday at his home in New York.

He was 84.

[...] At the time of his death, Christo was working on a project to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 25,000 square metres (269,100 square feet) of recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue and 7,000 metres (23,000 feet) of red rope.

It will still go ahead.

Whether you liked his work or not, he was one of a kind.

Also at: The Guardian, The New York Times, and npr.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers control cattle microbiomes to reduce methane and greenhouse gases:

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have learned to control the microbiome of cattle for the first time which could inhibit their methane production, and therefore reduce a major source of greenhouse gasses.

[...] The animal microbiome is a scientifically unexplored area. It protects against germs, breaks down food to release energy, and produces vitamins and exerts great control over many aspects of animal and human physical systems. Microbes are introduced at birth and produce a unique microbiome that evolves over time.

Mizrahi and his group have been conducting a three-year experiment with 50 cows divided into two groups. One group gave birth naturally, and the other through cesarean section. That difference was enough to change microbiome development and composition microbiome of the cows from each group.

Changing the birthing method changed the microbiome of the calves.

Journal Reference:
Ori Furman, Liat Shenhav, Goor Sasson, et al. Stochasticity constrained by deterministic effects of diet and age drive rumen microbiome assembly dynamics [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15652-8)

Previously:
(2019-06-19) Seaweed Feed Additive Cuts Livestock Methane but Poses Questions
(2018-09-01) Researchers Feed Seaweed To Dairy Cows To Reduce Emissions

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Tiny Three-Dimensional Chessboards Could Lead to "Paper Electronics":

Researchers at The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University introduced a new liquid-phase fabrication method for producing nanocellulose films with multiple axes of alignment. Using 3D-printing methods for increased control, this work may lead to cheaper and more environmentally friendly optical and thermal devices.

[...] Many existing optical devices, including liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) found in older flat-screen televisions, rely on long needle-shaped molecules aligned in the same direction. However, getting fibers to line up in multiple directions on the same device is much more difficult. Having a method that can reliably and cheaply produce optical fibers would accelerate the manufacture of low-cost displays or even "paper electronics" — computers that could be printed from biodegradable materials on demand.

[...] In newly published research from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University, nanocellulose was harvested from sea pineapples, a kind of sea squirt. They then used liquid-phase 3D-pattering, which combined the wet spinning of nanofibers with the precision of 3D-printing. A custom-made triaxial robot dispensed a nanocellulose aqueous suspension into an acetone coagulation bath.

[...] "Our findings could aid in the development of next-generation optical materials and paper electronics," says senior author Masaya Nogi. "This could be the start of bottom-up techniques for building sophisticated and energy-efficient optical and thermal materials."

Journal Reference:
Uetani, Kojiro, Koga, Hirotaka, Nogi, Masaya. Checkered Films of Multiaxis Oriented Nanocelluloses by Liquid-Phase Three-Dimensional Patterning, Nanomaterials (DOI: 10.3390/nano10050958)

Original Submission