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Taking a Landslide's Temperature to Avert Catastrophe:

The disaster Veveakis is referring to occurred at the Vajont Dam, one of the tallest in the world at 860 feet, in northern Italy in 1963. After years of attempting to mitigate a slow, incremental landslide of roughly an inch per day in the adjoining mountainside by lowering the water level of the lake behind the dam, the landslide suddenly accelerated without warning. Nearly 10 billion cubic feet of rock plummeted down the gorge and into the lake at almost 70 miles per hour. That created a tsunami more than 800 feet tall that crashed over the dam, completely wiping out several small towns below and killing nearly 2,000 people.

Before the catastrophe occurred, scientists did not believe any potential landslide would result in a tsunami more than 75 feet tall.

[...] In 2007, Veveakis put the pieces together and developed a model that fit the scientific observations of the disaster. It showed how water seeping into rock above an unstable layer of clay caused a creeping landslide, which in turn heated up and further destabilized the clay in a feedback loop until it rapidly failed.

"Clay is a very thermally sensitive material and it can create a shear band that is very susceptible to friction," said Carolina Segui, a PhD candidate in Veveakis's laboratory and first author of the new paper. "It's the worst material to have in such a critical place and is a nightmare for civil engineers constructing anything anywhere."

Phoenix666 wrote in with a story which inspired:

Archaeologists Find Roman Iron Age Board Game in Norway:

Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn in western Norway. Dotted with monuments and grave mounds, the scenic location overlooking Alversund played an important role in Norwegian history.

The site at Ytre Fosse turned out to be a cremation patch. Amidst the fragments of pottery and burnt glass, archaeologists found a surprise: rare Roman Iron Age dice and board game pieces.

"This is wonderfully exciting. Such discoveries have not been made so many times before in Norway or Scandinavia. The special thing here is that we have found almost the whole set including the dice," said Morten Ramstad from Bergen University Museum to NRK.

[...] The pieces are of a very rare type, known to be from the Roman Iron Age, dated to around AD 300. The haul included 13 whole and five broken game chips along with an almost completely intact elongated dice.

The dice is marked with number symbols in the form of point circles and have the values ​​zero, three, four and five. Less than 15 of these have been found in Norway. Similar dice were found in the famous Vimose weapon-offering site at Fyn in Denmark.

[...] The gaming board at Vimose was also preserved, so we have some idea of what board games may have been played during the period in Scandinavia. Inspired by the Roman game Ludus latrunculorum, board games seem to have been a popular hobby amongst the Scandinavian elite of the time.

Guess they'll have to push the founding date of Gen Con a little further back than 1968...

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Life-saving coronavirus drug 'major breakthrough':

A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus.

The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.

The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

[...] The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions, and it appears that it helps stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.

[...] In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, around 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and were compared with more than 4,000 who did not receive the drug.

For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."

[...] Dexamethasone has been used since the early 1960s to treat a wide range of conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.

[...] The drug is given intravenously in intensive care, and in tablet form for less seriously ill patients. So far, the only other drug proven to benefit Covid patients is remdesivir, an antiviral treatment which has been used for Ebola.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

COVID-19 hospitalizations could mean significant out-of-pocket medical costs for many Americans:

For their study, the researchers analyzed out-of-pocket costs for pneumonia and other upper respiratory illness hospitalizations from January 2016 through August 2019 as a potential indicator of likely COVID-19 costs. The researchers found that these out-of-pocket costs were particularly high for so-called consumer-directed health plans -- which typically feature lower premiums, compared to standard plans, but higher deductibles that can be paid via tax-advantaged health savings accounts.

[...] Many big-name health insurers have voluntarily waived out-of-pocket cost sharing for COVID-19 treatment. However, employer-sponsored "self-insured" health insurance plans are not required to adhere to such waivers. Thus, tens of millions of Americans have high-deductible insurance plans that, in cases of COVID-19 hospitalization, may expose them to relatively high out-of-pocket costs.

[...] To get a sense of the likely cost burden on patients hospitalized for COVID-19, Eisenberg and colleagues examined de-identified insurance claims for 34,395 unique hospitalizations from January 2016 through August 2019. They looked at out-of-pocket costs incurred by people who had been hospitalized during the 2016-2019 study period with pneumonia, acute bronchitis, lower respiratory infections, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. (Claims data on actual COVID-19 cases were not available in the database at the time of the study.) The cases examined did not include those for people ages 65 and over, who are normally covered by Medicare. The out-of-pocket costs included deductible payments, copayments, and coinsurance payments.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactorIsLazy:

Bigger than big: Linux kernel colonel Torvalds claims 5.8 is 'one of our biggest releases of all time':

All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.

Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."

Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."

While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.

See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AMD Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APU Runs Crysis Without Any Cooling Solution:

Fritzchens Fritz over at Twitter, who has provided several close-up die shots of CPUs and GPUs in the past, has managed to run a Ryzen 4000 APU without any cooling solution attached to it. Using the Ryzen 3 4300U, a four core and four-thread processor that's clocked at a base clock of 2.7 GHz base and 3.7 GHz boost clock, the chip was tested under an intense scenario where it was provided no active or even passive cooling.

[...] The CPU doesn't even feature an IHS to carry off the heat from the die which makes this little test even more brutal but the chip didn't even break a sweat. This was mostly achieved using the Renoir Mobile Tuning tool that helps set the original temperature limit down to 90C.

[...] But it's not the Cinebench R15 score that makes this little test interesting but rather a full run of the Crysis benchmark. The APU also houses five enhanced Vega compute units which equates to a total of 320 stream processors running at 1400 MHz. Like the CPU, the GPU also has to manage thermal limits by reducing clock speeds but despite no cooling solution, the chip was able to run a complete loop of the Crysis benchmark without a hiccup.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Locked iPhones rendered almost useless in Australia's COVIDSafe tracking efforts:

Software engineer Richard Nelson, who was part of a team of researchers that found other bugs in COVIDSafe, has detailed a bug affecting iPhone users, rendering their device basically useless when it comes to tracking efforts.

A locked iPhone with an expired ID cannot generate a new ID. Without an ID, Nelson said the device will record other devices around it, but cannot be recorded by others.

"A device in this state will record other people around it, but will not be recorded by others. If all relevant devices are in this state, no encounters are logged," he wrote.

"One could imagine Alice packing her bag, putting her iPhone in and going out for the day to a football game. With her device in this state, nobody else will record her presence, and if anyone around her tested positive she would not be contacted."

takyon writes:

Research sheds new light on intelligent life existing across the Galaxy

Is there anyone out there? This is an age-old question that researchers have now shed new light on with a study that calculates there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations throughout our Galaxy. This is an enormous advance over previous estimates which spanned from zero to billions.

One of the biggest and longest-standing questions in the history of human thought is whether there are other intelligent lifeforms within our Universe. Obtaining good estimates of the number of possible extraterrestrial civilizations has however been very challenging.

A new study led by the University of Nottingham and published today in The Astrophysical Journal [DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225] [DX] has taken a new approach to this problem. Using the assumption that intelligent life forms on other planets in a similar way as it does on Earth, researchers have obtained an estimate for the number of intelligent communicating civilizations within our own galaxy -the Milky Way. They calculate that there could be over 30 active communicating intelligent civilizations in our home Galaxy.

The abstract:

We present a cosmic perspective on the search for life and examine the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations in our Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information. Our calculation involves Galactic star formation histories, metallicity distributions, and the likelihood of stars hosting Earth-like planets in their habitable zones, under specific assumptions which we describe as the Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong conditions. These assumptions are based on the one situation in which intelligent, communicative life is known to exist—on our own planet. This type of life has developed in a metal-rich environment and has taken roughly 5 Gyr to do so. We investigate the possible number of CETI civilizations based on different scenarios. At one extreme is the Weak Astrobiological Copernican scenario—such that a planet forms intelligent life sometime after 5 Gyr, but not earlier. The other is the Strong Astrobiological Copernican scenario in which life must form between 4.5 and 5.5 Gyr, as on Earth. In the Strong scenario (under the strictest set of assumptions), we find there should be at least 36 (+175/-32) civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average lifetime, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 yr (since we know that our own civilization has had radio communications for this time). If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17,000(+33,600/-10,000) lt-yr away and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, likely far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future, and making interstellar communication impossible. Furthermore, the likelihood that the host stars for this life are solar-type stars is extremely small and most would have to be M dwarfs, which may not be stable enough to host life over long timescales. We furthermore explore other scenarios and explain the likely number of CETI there are within the Galaxy based on variations of our assumptions.

Somewhere between 4 and 211 (or 0 and 1) civilizations.

Also at The Guardian and USA Today.

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takyon writes:

Quantum Satellite Links Extend More Than 1,000 Kilometers

A space-based, virtually unhackable quantum Internet may be one step closer to reality due to satellite experiments that linked ground stations more than 1,000 kilometers apart, a new study finds.

[...] In 2017, scientists in China used the satellite nicknamed Micius, which is dedicated to quantum science experiments, to connect sites on Earth separated by up to roughly 1,200 kilometers via entanglement. Although those experiments generated about 5.9 million entangled pairs of photons every second, the researchers were able to detect only one pair per second, an efficiency rate far too low for useful entanglement-based quantum cryptography.

Now, the same researchers have achieved their goal of entanglement-based quantum cryptography using the Micius satellite. The scientists, who detailed their findings [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2401-y] [DX] online in the 15 June edition of the journal Nature, say they again connected two observatories separated by 1,120 kilometers. But this time, the collection efficiency of the links was improved by up to four-fold, which resulted in data rates of about 0.12 bits per second.

The scientists employed two ground stations, in Delingha and Nanshan, in China. Each site had a newly built telescope 1.2 meters wide that was specifically designed for the quantum experiments.

To boost the efficiency of the quantum cryptography links, the researchers focused on improving the systems used to acquire, orient toward and track targets at both the satellite and ground stations. They also made sure to improve the receiving and collection efficiencies of the lenses and other optical equipment on the ground.

Also at New Scientist and NYT.

Previously: China's "Quantum-Enabled Satellite" Launches
China's Quantum Communications Satellite Beats Record
Unbreakable: China Doubles Down On Quantum Internet
Quantum Video Chat Links Scientists on Two Different Continents
Why This Intercontinental Quantum-Encrypted Video Hangout is a Big Deal

Related: Quantum Ghost Imaging Spy Satellites

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

South African bank to replace 12m cards after employees stole master key:

Postbank says employees printed its master key at one of its data centers and then used it to steal $3.2 million.

The Sunday Times of South Africa, the local news outlet that broke the story, said the incident took place in December 2018 when someone printed the bank's master key on a piece of paper at its old data center in the city of Pretoria.

The bank suspects that employees are behind the breach, the news publication said, citing an internal security audit they obtained from a source in the bank.

The master key is a 36-digit code (encryption key) that allows its holder to decrypt the bank's operations and even access and modify banking systems. It is also used to generate keys for customer cards.

[...] Following the discovery of the breach, Postbank will now have to replace all customer cards that have been generated with the master key, an operation the bank suspects it would cost it more than one billion rands (~$58 million).

This includes replacing normal payment cards, but also cards for receiving government social benefits. Sunday Times said that roughly eight to ten million of the cards are for receiving social grants, and these were where most of the fraudulent operations had taken place.

"According to the report, it seems that corrupt employees have had access to the Host Master Key (HMK) or lower level keys," the security researcher behind Bank Security, a Twitter account dedicated to banking fraud, told ZDNet today in an interview.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The US military is getting serious about nuclear thermal propulsion:

[...] the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its intent to have a flyable nuclear thermal propulsion system ready for a demonstration in 2025.

Through this Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO program, the defense agency seeks technology that will allow for more responsive control of spacecraft in Earth orbit, lunar orbit, and everywhere in between, giving the military greater operational freedom in these domains.

"Activity in cislunar space is expected to increase considerably in the coming years," Tabatha Thompson, a DARPA spokeswoman, told Ars. "An agile nuclear thermal propulsion vehicle enables the DOD to maintain Space Domain Awareness of the burgeoning activity within this vast volume."

In "Phase 1" of its solicitation, DARPA has asked industry for the designs of both a nuclear thermal reactor and an operational spacecraft upon which to demonstrate it. This initial phase of the program is to last 18 months. Subsequent phases will lead to detailed design, fabrication, ground tests, and an in-space demonstration. No contracts have yet been awarded, and award values will be determined by industry submissions.

The propulsion system is thought to make travel around the Solar System quicker.

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takyon writes:

The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals (archive)

One study promised that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. Another paper warned that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients.

The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, were retracted shortly after publication, following an outcry from researchers who saw obvious flaws.

The hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process and opened the door to fraud, threatening the credibility of respected medical journals just when they are needed most.

[...] "The problem with trust is that it's too easy to lose and too hard to get back," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published one of the retracted papers in early May. "These are big blunders."

If outside scientists detected problems that weren't identified by the peer reviewers, then the journals failed, he said. Like hundreds of other researchers, Dr. Kassirer called on the editors to publish full explanations of what happened.

See also: US FDA pulls its emergency approval of chloroquine use for COVID-19

[NB: This follows up on "Doubt Looms Over Hydroxychloroquine Study That Halted Global Trials" which was part of 2020-06-15 Roundup of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2, Coronavirus) Stories --martyb]

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takyon writes:

Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher In A New Era of Gaming

A new generation of gaming consoles is due to hit the market later this year, and the hype cycle for the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 has been underway for more than a year. Solid technical details (as opposed to mere rumors) have been slower to arrive, and we still know much less about the consoles than we typically know about PC platforms and components during the post-announcement, pre-availability phase. We have some top-line performance numbers and general architectural information from Microsoft and Sony, but not quite a full spec sheet.

[...] Solid State Drives were revolutionary for the PC market, providing immense improvements to overall system responsiveness. Games benefited mostly in the form of faster installation and level load times, but fast storage also helped reduce stalls and stuttering when a game needs to load data on the fly. In recent years, NVMe SSDs have provided speeds that are on paper several times faster than what is possible with SATA SSDs, but for gamers the benefits have been muted at best. Conventional wisdom holds that there are two main causes to suspect for this disappointment: First, almost all games and game engines are still designed to be playable off hard drives because current consoles and many low-end PCs lack SSDs. Game programmers cannot take full advantage of NVMe SSD performance without making their games unplayably slow on hard drives. Second, SATA SSDs are already fast enough to shift the bottleneck elsewhere in the system, often in the form of data decompression. Something aside from the SSD needs to be sped up before games can properly benefit from NVMe performance.

Microsoft and Sony are addressing both of those issues with their upcoming consoles. Game developers will soon be free to assume that users will have fast storage, both on consoles and on PCs. In addition, the new generation of consoles will add extra hardware features to address bottlenecks that would be present if they were merely mid-range gaming PCs equipped with cutting-edge SSDs. However, we're still dealing with powerful hype operations promoting these upcoming devices. Both companies are guilty of exaggerating or oversimplifying in their attempts to extol the new capabilities of their next consoles, especially with regards to the new SSDs. And since these consoles are still closed platforms that aren't even on the market yet, some of the most interesting technical details are still being kept secret.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

China is furious that environmental readings have exposed lies around COVID-19 deaths. The data collected shows a clear mismatch from the information released by the Chinese government about how many people died and at what time. This is a very sensitive subject with China engaging in a cold trade war with Australia over the origins of COVID-19 while providing support to affected smallers countries as calls are made for China to pay billions in penalties due to their coverup.

Before Beijing's crackdown, China's bureaucracy had been conducting business as usual – analysing, assessing and reporting on everything about its citizenry. The researchers from Washington University and Ohio State University say they have tracked down this early government data and combined it with reports in state-controlled and social media.

Among this data was the activities of eight crematories in Wuhan. By January 25 these were inexplicably operating around the clock.

Based on such sources, the researchers argue the total number of infections and fatalities before February was at least ten times that of the official figure announced by Beijing.

[...] The study tracked the sale [of] funeral urns to verify these estimates. In the January-March period during which the crematoriums were operating at peak levels, some 36,000 had been distributed.

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RandomFactor writes:

One of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory teams is asking for help training an AI to drive Mars rovers

You may be able to help NASA's Curiosity rover drivers better navigate Mars. Using the online tool AI4Mars to label terrain features in pictures downloaded from the Red Planet, you can train an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically read the landscape.

Is that a big rock to the left? Could it be sand? Or maybe it's nice, flat bedrock. AI4Mars, which is hosted on the citizen science website Zooniverse, lets you draw boundaries around terrain and choose one of four labels. Those labels are key to sharpening the Martian terrain-classification algorithm called SPOC (Soil Property and Object Classification).

The goal is to have the AI be able to autonomously avoid pitfalls such as caused Spirit to get stuck and end its mission after seven years of exploration.

"In the future, we hope this algorithm can become accurate enough to do other useful tasks, like predicting how likely a rover's wheels are to slip on different surfaces," [Hiro Ono, an AI researcher at JPL] said.

In the tool, you will view terrain images from Mars rovers, draw polygons around sections of them and assess them as Sand, Consolidated Soil, Bedrock, and Big Rocks.

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