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takyon writes:

Project Gutenberg Public Domain Library Blocked in Italy For Copyright Infringement:

Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to digitize and archive books, is sometimes described as the world’s oldest digital library.

Founded in 1971, Project Gutenberg‘s archives now stretch to a total of more than 62,000 books, with a focus on titles that entered the public domain after their copyrights expired. The library does carry some and in-copyright books but these are distributed with the express permission of their owners.

The project has an excellent reputation and its work is considered a great contribution to education and culture. However, it now transpires that the site has been rendered inaccessible by ISPs in Italy under the instructions of the Public Prosecutor at the Court of Rome.

[...] The seizure/blocking notice states that all of the targeted domains “distributed, transmitted and disseminated in pdf format, magazines, newspapers and books (property protected by copyright) after having illegally acquired numerous computer files with their content, communicating them to the public, [and] entering them into a system of communication networks.”

[...] “The investigation, conducted by a special unit of the Guardia di Finanza, has been developed in the context of monitoring the targeted Internet networks to combat economic and financial offenses perpetrated online.

“In this context, the operators identified some web resources registered on foreign servers which make content and magazines available to the public early in the morning, allowing users to view or download digital copies,” the court document reads. (translated from Italian)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HAMR-Jr Is a Speedy Quadrupedal Robot the Size of a Penny:

The last time we checked in with the Harvard Ambulatory MicroRobot (HAMR) was in 2018, when I spent far too much time trying (with a very small amount of what might charitably be called success) to adapt some MC Hammer lyrics for an article intro. Despite having “micro robot” right in the name, if we’re talking about insect scale, HAMR was a bit chunky, measuring about 5 centimeters long and weighing around 3 grams. At ICRA this week, we’ve been introduced to a new version of HAMR, called HAMR-Jr, which is significantly smaller: just a tenth of the weight, and comes up to about knee-high on a cockroach.

HAMR-Jr may be tiny, but it’s no slouch—piezoelectric actuators can drive it at nearly 14 body lengths (30 cm [~12 inches]) per second, at a gait frequency of 200 hertz. The actuators can be cranked up even more, approaching 300 Hz, but the robot actually slows down past 200 Hz, because it turns out that 200 Hz hits a sort of resonant sweet spot that gives the robot as much leg lift and stride length as possible.

It’s worth mentioning that even the fastest legged insects don’t reach a gait frequency of 200 Hz. While the Australian tiger beetle seems to be the world’s fastest legged insect, able to reach about 2.5 m/s (!) when chasing prey with a gait frequency of just a few tens of hertz, what’s more relevant here is probably the fastest insect relative to its size (so, fastest speed measured in body lengths per second). That award goes to a tiny species of mite found in California, able to run at nearly 200 body lengths per second. This works out to something like 0.25 m/s because the mites are seriously tiny (sesame-seed sized), but juveniles managed to hit a stride frequency of 135 Hz, which is the same ballpark as HAMR-Jr, albeit on a much smaller scale.

YouTube video

“Scaling down an insect-size microrobot, HAMR-VI into HAMR-Jr,” by Kaushik Jayaram, Jennifer Shum, Samantha Castellanos, E. Farrell Helbling, and Robert J. Wood from Harvard and UC Boulder, is being presented at ICRA 2020.

ICRA 2020: "2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - ICRA 2020, Paris, Virtual Conference, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Expect the Unexpected: Solar Orbiter to Pass Through the Tails of Comet ATLAS:

ESA's Solar Orbiter will cross through the tails of Comet ATLAS during the next few days. Although the recently launched spacecraft was not due to be taking science data at this time, mission experts have worked to ensure that the four most relevant instruments will be switched on during the unique encounter.

Solar Orbiter was launched on February 10, 2020. Since then, and with the exception of a brief shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, scientists and engineers have been conducting a series of tests and set-up routines known as commissioning.

The completion date for this phase was set at June 15, so that the spacecraft could be fully functional for its first close pass of the Sun, or perihelion, in mid-June. However, the discovery of the chance encounter with the comet made things more urgent.

Serendipitously flying through a comet's tail is a rare event for a space mission, something scientists know to have happened only six times before for missions that were not specifically chasing comets. All such encounters have been discovered in the spacecraft data after the event. Solar Orbiter's upcoming crossing is the first to be predicted in advance.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Surpassing Silicon: Paper-Thin Gallium Oxide Transistor Handles More Than 8,000 Volts:

People love their electric cars. But not so much the bulky batteries and related power systems that take up precious cargo space. Help could be on the way from a gallium oxide-based transistor under development at the University at Buffalo.

In a study published in the June edition of IEEE Electron Device Letters, electrical engineers describe how the tiny electronic switch can handle more than 8,000 volts, an impressive feat considering it's about as thin as a sheet of paper.

The transistor could lead to smaller and more efficient electronic systems that control and convert electric power — a field of study known as power electronics — in electric cars, locomotives and airplanes. In turn, this could help improve how far these vehicles can travel.

[...] Tests conducted [...] in March show the transistor can handle 8,032 volts before breaking down, which is more than similarly designed transistors made of silicon carbide or gallium nitride that are under development.

"The higher the breakdown voltage, the more power a device can handle," says Singisetti. "The passivation layer is a simple, efficient and cost-effective way to boost the performance of gallium oxide transistors."

Journal Reference:
Shivam Sharma, Ke Zeng, Sudipto Saha, Uttam Singisetti. Field-Plated Lateral Ga₂O₃ MOSFETs With Polymer Passivation and 8.03 kV Breakdown Voltage, (DOI: 10.1109/LED.2020.2991146)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Astronomers find cosmic golden needle buried for two decades:

Determined to find a needle in a cosmic haystack, a pair of astronomers time traveled through archives of old data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery surrounding a bright, lensed, heavily obscured quasar.

This celestial object, which is an active galaxy emitting enormous amounts of energy due to a black hole devouring material, is an exciting object in itself. Finding one that is gravitationally lensed, making it appear brighter and larger, is exceptionally exciting. While slightly over 200 lensed unobscured quasars are currently known, the number of lensed obscured quasars discovered is in the single digits. This is because the feeding black hole stirs up gas and dust, cloaking the quasar and making it difficult to detect in visible light surveys.

Not only did the researchers uncover a quasar of this type, they found the object happens to be the first discovered Einstein ring, named MG 1131+0456, which was observed in 1987 with the Very Large Array network of radio telescopes in New Mexico. Remarkably, though widely studied, the quasar's distance or redshift remained a question mark.

"As we dug deeper, we were surprised that such a famous and bright source never had a distance measured for it," said Daniel Stern, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and author of the study. "Having a distance is a necessary first step for all sorts of additional studies, such as using the lens as a tool to measure the expansion history of the universe and as a probe for dark matter."

Stern and co-author Dominic Walton, an STFC[*] Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy (UK), are the first to calculate the quasar's distance, which is 10 billion light-years away (or a redshift of z = 1.849).

The result is published in today's issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[*] STFC: Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Journal Reference: (not yet active at time of writing)
Daniel Stern, et al. A Redshift for the First Einstein Ring, MG 1131+0456 - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab922c)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Student Clears Up "Massive" Black Hole Confusion:

Black-holes come in various flavors and sizes, from 'small' stellar-mass black holes to supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies. Stellar-mass black holes are the final remnants of massive stars, born more than 20 to 30 times the mass of our Sun and should only form in certain mass ranges according to current theory. In this context, the claimed discovery, published in the distinguished journal Nature in November 2019, of a black hole 70 times more massive than our Sun caught the attention of the astronomical community.

The system in question, LS V +22 25 or LB-1 in short, was claimed to be a double-star system consisting of an 8 solar mass star and a 70 solar mass black hole that orbit around one another in just 80 days, very much the same way as planets orbit around stars. The data used in the original study showed two spectral signatures that moved in different ways: one clear signature belonging to the star and another, more subtle, that was interpreted as belonging to material around the black hole, thus tracing its orbital motion. Based on the motion of these two signatures, the original authors reached their controversial conclusion.

"A stellar black hole this massive challenges everything we know about massive star evolution," says Michael Abdul-Masih, a PhD student from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy in Belgium. "Theory tells us that in this mass range, when a star dies it should completely annihilate itself without leaving anything behind, and certainly not such a massive black hole."

The interpretation of the second signature has since come under scrutiny. Using higher-resolution data from the Flemish-funded Mercator Telescope on the island of La Palma (Spain), the KU Leuven team ran several simulations and concluded that the original interpretation of the system was in fact incorrect.

Journal References:
Michael Abdul-Masih, Gareth Banyard, Julia Bodensteiner, et al. On the signature of a 70-solar-mass black hole in LB-1, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2216-x)

Jifeng Liu, Haotong Zhang, Andrew W. Howard, et al. A wide star–black-hole binary system from radial-velocity measurements, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1766-2)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Atlantic's third storm has formed in record time, and it's a threat:

Last year's Atlantic hurricane season ranked among the top five most-active years on record. Its third named storm, Chantal, did not form until August 20.

By contrast, today is June 2, and the Atlantic's third named storm of the year just formed. [...]

This is the earliest ever in the Atlantic season (which, however imperfect, has records dating back to 1851) that the third named storm has formed in a given year. The previous earliest "C" storm was Colin, on June 5, 2016.

[...] The storm is trapped within a large oceanic circulation, known as a gyre, and high pressure over the northern Gulf of Mexico is also inhibiting its motion. As a result, Cristobal will probably wobble around the Bay of Campeche until at least Friday. This will cause torrential rainfall in Southern Mexico and parts of Central America this week.

[...] The bottom line is that a tropical system is likely to be in the Gulf of Mexico late this week, bound for the United States, over waters warm enough to sustain intensification. The time for preparations is definitely now.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Australian government's DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) already forked over a large sum of money to have its public servants in Services Australia (nee Centrelink/Medicare) build a front end for Australians to access Government services and payment information. Now it is looking to redo that work by paying a contractor an exorbitant amount of money for yet another government portal website, this time to the tune of an increasing amount of money to Deloitte. Dubbed "Son-of-mygov", the cost has now blown out to 23 million after it previously doubled to 19.5 million from the original contract. This is, of course, business as usual for Deloitte who charge any changes as businesses do. For the Australian tax payers who are funding this project there should be great concern as son-of-mygov has no business case with yet another business being paid to formulate one while Deloitte builds the new system.

Do we start building roads before having a plan for why a road is needed?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Phys.org reports on researchers creating synthetic Rebuilt Red Blood Cells (RRBCs) that not only match the normal characteristics of natural RBCs, but add new capabilities as well.

most artificial red blood cells have had one or a few, but not all, key features of the natural versions. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have made synthetic red blood cells that have all of the cells' natural abilities, plus a few new ones.

The newly created RRBCs have the usual characteristics of RBCs and

take up oxygen from the lungs and deliver it to the body's tissues. These disk-shaped cells contain millions of molecules of hemoglobin—an iron-containing protein that binds oxygen. RBCs are highly flexible, which allows them to squeeze through tiny capillaries and then bounce back to their former shape. The cells also contain proteins on their surface that allow them to circulate through blood vessels for a long time without being gobbled up by immune cells.

But they also have some new tricks natural cells do not, the researchers

developed modular procedures with which to load functional cargos such as hemoglobin, drugs, magnetic nanoparticles, and ATP biosensors within the RRBC interior to enable various functions, including oxygen delivery, therapeutic drug delivery, magnetic manipulation, and toxin biosensing and detection.

The RRBCs were created by

first coating donated human RBCs with a thin layer of silica. They layered positively and negatively charged polymers over the silica-RBCs, and then etched away the silica, producing flexible replicas. Finally, the team coated the surface of the replicas with natural RBC membranes.

Future studies are already planned.

Related
Artificial Blood Storable for a Year Shows Efficacy in Rabbits
Breakthrough (Mostly) Converts All Blood Types to Type O

Journal Reference:
Biomimetic Rebuilding of Multifunctional Red Blood Cells: Modular Design Using Functional Components, ACS Nano (DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b08714)

Original Submission

Zuckerberg Accused of Setting Dangerous Precedent

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Zuckerberg accused of setting dangerous precedent:

Mark Zuckerberg is setting a "dangerous precedent" by allowing a post by Donald Trump to remain on Facebook, a group of civil rights leaders has warned.

[...] In the post, the president wrote he would "send in the National Guard", and warned that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".

Mr Trump shared the same message on Twitter, where it was hidden behind a warning label, prompting an escalating row between Twitter and the White House.

Mr Zuckerberg had previously defended his decision to leave the same post up on Facebook, saying he disagreed with Mr Trump's words but that people "should be able to see this for themselves".

After meeting Mr Zuckerberg, three civil rights leaders responded that he was wrong.

[...] The joint statement, released on Monday night, was signed by Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change. It has been published online by Axios.

A Facebook spokesman said: "We're grateful that leaders in the civil rights community took the time to share candid, honest feedback with Mark and Sheryl [Sandberg, Facebook's COO].

Mark Zuckerberg on Leaked Audio: Trump's Looting and Shooting Reference "Has no History of Dogwhistling

aristarchus writes:

Mark Zuckerberg on leaked audio: Trump's looting and shooting reference "has no history of being read as a dog whistle":

martyb writes:

NASA InSight lander finally pushes its burrowing 'mole' heat probe into Mars:

NASA's InSight lander has had a pretty triumphant run on Mars investigating marsquakes and listening to the weird sounds of the red planet. There's been one sticking point, though: Mars hasn't welcomed the lander's heat probe, known as the "mole."

The heat probe is designed to hammer into Mars, burrow down deep and take the planet's internal temperature, but the probe kept popping out of the ground. NASA and the mole team have spent over a year working through possible solutions for the stuck mole, and they may finally be making some progress.

"After several assists from my robotic arm, the mole appears to be underground. It's been a real challenge troubleshooting from millions of miles away," the NASA InSight account tweeted on Wednesday.

InSight is on a mission to learn more about how rocky planets like Mars and Earth form. The heat probe could provide valuable data for scientists, but even if it doesn't work out, InSight's science mission will still be a success.

There's much more information (including an animated gif) on the mole mission's blog.

The question still remains whether the mole can continue its descent now that it's apparently below Mars' surface.

Previously:
(2020-03-19) NASA Succeeds in Banging Mole With a Shovel
(2020-02-23) Mashing May Mitigate Mars Mole Meandering
(2019-10-29) More Mars Mole Mission Misfortune
(2019-07-06) Mars Mole Mission Rues Resistanceless Regolith
(2019-06-06) NASA to Jack up Insight Lander to Assess Non-Penetrating Probe
(2019-03-05) InSight Impinges Insufficiently in Site

Original Submission

[20200604_025249 UTC: The nighttime launch was on time. First stage booster landed on the drone ship Just Read The Instructions making the fifth successful launch and recovery of this booster. (This also marks the second time that a SpaceX booster has had 5 successful launches). Satellite deployment was successful. The satellites will now use their solar arrays and ion thrusters to boost themselves to their intended orbit. The recovery ships Ms Tree and Ms Chief were in position to attempt to capture the payload fairings a few hours after launch. NB: SpaceX had its very first Falcon-9 launch 10 years ago on 2010-06-04. Well done, SpaceX!--martyb]

martyb writes:

It's been a mixed bag for SpaceX the past few days. They had a successful launch and docking of the Crew Demo 2. They also recovered the booster successfully when it landed on the autonomous drone "Of Course I Still Love You". On the other hand, a test fire of their Starship prototype SN4 (serial number 4) was not so hot. Strike that, it was too hot to handle and experience an extremely Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.

So SpaceX is at it again with another launch planned for tonight; exactly one hour from when this story was released. This time sending up another batch of Starlink satellites:

SpaceX is targeting Wednesday June 3 at 9:25 p.m. EDT, 1:25 UTC on June 4, for its eighth launch of Starlink satellites. Falcon 9 will lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A backup opportunity is available on Thursday, June 4 at 9:03 p.m. EDT, 1:03 UTC on June 5.

Falcon 9's first stage previously supported the Telstar 18 VANTAGE mission in September 2018, the Iridium-8 mission in January 2019, and two separate Starlink missions in May 2019 and in January 2020. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9's first stage on the "Just Read the Instructions" droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Starlink satellites will deploy in an elliptical orbit approximately 15 minutes after liftoff. Prior to orbit raise, SpaceX engineers will conduct data reviews to ensure all Starlink satellites are operating as intended. Once the checkouts are complete, the satellites will then use their onboard ion thrusters to move into their intended orbits and operational altitude of 550 km.

As usual, the launch will be live-streamed on YouTube. Separately, a live feed of Starlink Mission Control Audio is also being made available.

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

'Black nitrogen': Researchers discover new high-pressure material and solve a puzzle of the periodic table:

In the periodic table of elements there is one golden rule for carbon, oxygen and other light elements: Under high pressures, they have similar structures to heavier elements in the same group of elements. But nitrogen always seemed unwilling to toe the line. However, high-pressure chemistry researchers of the University of Bayreuth have disproved this special status. Out of nitrogen, they created a crystalline structure which, under normal conditions, occurs in black phosphorus and arsenic. The structure contains two-dimensional atomic layers, and is therefore of great interest for high-tech electronics. The scientists have presented this "black nitrogen" in Physical Review Letters.

[...] Elements with similar properties are placed one below the other in the same column, and thus form a group of elements. [...] In earlier high-pressure experiments, nitrogen showed no structures similar to those exhibited under normal conditions by the heavier elements of this group—specifically, phosphorus, arsenic and antimony. Instead, such similarities are observed at high pressures in the neighboring groups headed by carbon and oxygen.

In fact, nitrogen is no exception to the rule. [...] At very high pressures and temperatures, nitrogen atoms form a crystalline structure that is characteristic of black phosphorus, which is a particular variant of phosphorus. The structure also occurs in arsenic and antimony. It is composed of two-dimensional layers in which nitrogen atoms are cross-linked in a uniform zigzag pattern.

[...] It took truly extreme conditions to produce black nitrogen. The compression pressure was 1.4 million times the pressure of the Earth's atmosphere, and the temperature exceeded 4,000 degrees

More information: Dominique Laniel et al, High-Pressure Polymeric Nitrogen Allotrope with the Black Phosphorus Structure, Physical Review Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.216001

Original Submission

[Speaking as the de-facto leader of SoylentNews, I know this community is very sensitive to self-promotional "Slashvertising" and similar. Since our inception, we've prided ourselves on listening to our community and taking those views into account. I've walked a bit of a fine line with that with my original content articles both recently and in the past. I do not want to be a rule unto myself so if this post ends up crossing that line, mention it in the comments and we'll take those lessons to heart. Also, we haven't had a community roundtable here at SN in quite a long time, so I'm going to schedule one go to live on Monday.]

[NB: Yes, "original content" articles are welcome here. If anyone is considering it, please try to keep them tech-related and provide supporting links. Also provide contact info (email address) so any issues or questions can be discussed as needed. --martyb]

The simple fact is that in the last few weeks, the world, especially in the United States has become a very different place. Here in New York City, there's been constant protests and escalation between the police and protesters. In an era where drones are being used to track and monitor protesters, digital security is more important more than ever. I want to do my bit on trying to help people keep themselves safe and secure in these times.

Normally, I try not to push self-promotion here, and I've made sure that my recent original content articles are not pushing that line. I mentioned in my last article that I host a weekly hacking show called HACK-ALT-NCOMMANDER, as part of DEFCON 201, the local DEF CON group for the New Jersey area. Usually, I cover some bit of retro-tech, random reverse engineering, and other random and strange things. Not today.

This time, I've decided to cover these topics:

• email security
• a quick primer on GnuPG and S/MIME
• understanding Tor
• basic OPSEC (using Windows as a base)

I'll also be fielding questions in real-time. If you're interested, please tune in at 8PM Eastern Daylight Time (24:00 UTC) to the DEFCON 201 video streams (see links below). I may also cover aspects of securing systems for IT administrators depending on how chat directs me.

73 de NCommander, hoping that you're all safe

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

How to make the food and water Mars-bound astronauts will need for their mission:

If we ever intend to send crewed missions to deep-space locations, then we need to come up with solutions for keeping the crews supplied. For astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), who regularly receive resupply missions from Earth, this is not an issue. But for missions traveling to destinations like Mars and beyond, self-sufficiency is the name of the game.

This is the idea behind projects like BIOWYSE and TIME SCALE, which are being developed by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRiS) in Norway. These two systems are all about providing astronauts with a sustainable and renewable supply of drinking water and plant food. In so doing, they address two of the most important needs of humans performing long-duration missions that will take them far from home.

[...] In short, the ISS relies on costly resupply missions to provide 20% of its water and all of its food. But if and when astronauts establish outposts on the moon and Mars, this may not be an option. While sending supplies to the moon can be done in three days, the need to do so regularly will make the cost of sending food and water prohibitive. Meanwhile, it takes eight months for spacecraft to reach Mars, which is totally impractical.

So it is little wonder that the proposed mission architectures for the moon and Mars include in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), in which astronauts will use local resources to be as self-sufficient as possible. Ice on the lunar and Martian surfaces, a prime example, will be harvested to provide drinking and irrigation water. But missions to deep-space locations will not have this option while they are in transit.

[...] Technologies like these will be crucial when it comes time to establish a human presence on the moon, on Mars, and for the sake of deep-space missions. In the coming years, NASA plans to make the long-awaited return to the moon with Project Artemis, which will be the first step in the creation of what they envision as a program for "sustainable lunar exploration."

Original Submission