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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/19/tech/north-face-facebook-ads/index.html:

Outdoor apparel brand The North Face has become the best-known company yet to commit to an advertising boycott of Facebook in light of the social media platform's handling of misinformation and hate speech — a move that could open the door for other brands to do the same.

The brand's decision responds to a pressure campaign by top civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, known as #StopHateForProfit, which on Wednesday began calling for advertisers to suspend their marketing on Facebook in the month of July.

"We're in," The North Face tweeted. "We're out @Facebook #StopHateForProfit."

Hours later, outdoor equipment retailer REI said it will join the boycott.

[...] The activists demanding change face an enormously ambitious task. Facebook is the second-largest player in US digital marketing after Google, and last year generated $69.7 billion from advertising worldwide.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists find huge ring of ancient shafts near Stonehenge:

Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.

Experts from a group of British universities led by the University of Bradford say the site consists of at least 20 huge shafts, more than 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter and 5 meters (16 feet) deep, forming a circle more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter.

The new find is at Durrington Walls, the site of a Neolithic village about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Stonehenge,

Researchers say the shafts appear to have been dug around 4,500 years ago, and could mark the boundary of a sacred area or precinct around a circular monument known as the Durrington Walls henge.

The hollows were initially thought to be natural voids in the limestone before the larger picture emerged to show a circle.

Also at BBC and ITV.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

To evade detection, hackers are requiring targets to complete CAPTCHAs:

CAPTCHAs, those puzzles with muffled sounds or blurred or squiggly letters that websites use to filter out bots (often unsuccessfully), have been annoying end users for more than a decade. Now, the challenge-and-response tests are likely to vex targets in malware attacks.

Microsoft recently spotted an attack group distributing a malicious Excel document on a site requiring users to complete a CAPTCHA, most likely in an attempt to thwart automated detection by good guys. The Excel file contains macros that, when enabled, install GraceWire, a trojan that steals sensitive information such as passwords. The attacks are the work of a group Microsoft calls Chimborazo, which company researchers have been tracking since at least January.

Previously, Microsoft observed Chimborazo distributing the Excel file in attachments included in phishing messages and later spreading through embedded Web links. In recent weeks, the group has begun sending phishing emails that change things up again. In some cases, the phishes include links that lead to redirector sites (usually legitimate sites that have been compromised). In other cases, the emails have an HTML attachment that contains a malicious iframe tag.

Either way, clicking on the link or attachment leads to a site where targets download the malicious file, but only after completing the CAPTCHA (which is short for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The purpose: to thwart automated analysis defenders use to detect and block attacks and get attack campaigns shut down. Typically the analysis is performed by what are essentially bots that download malware samples and run and analyze them in virtual machines.

Requiring the successful completion of a CAPTCHA means analysis will only happen when a live human being downloads the sample. Without the automation, the chances of the malicious file flying under the radar are much better. Microsoft has dubbed Chimborazo’s ongoing attack campaign Dudear.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Experiments show hummingbirds see colors you’ve never dreamed of:

The “V” in “ROYGBIV” stands for violet, sure, but that’s not actually the same thing as purple. There is no purple wavelength of light—it requires a mixture of both red and blue wavelengths. That makes it a “nonspectral color”—in fact, it's the only non spectral color humans see. It requires our brains to interpret signals from both red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones in our eyes and to see that as a separate color.

[...] Working in Colorado over several summers, the researchers set up a pair of feeders for their experiments—one containing that delicious sugar water and one just containing boring old water. On top of each was a special LED light containing UV, blue, red, and green LEDs behind a diffuser, allowing the researchers to light up the feeder in a variety of nonspectral colors.

[...] The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments.

Journal Reference:
Mary Caswell Stoddard, Harold N. Eyster, Benedict G. Hogan, et al. Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919377117)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://northcoastsynthesis.com/news/logic-before-ics/

So, you want a simple digital logic function in a synthesizer. Maybe it's an AND gate, or a couple of XORs, maybe as much as a shift register. How will you build it?

Today it often makes sense to just throw in a microcontroller chip. They're cheap and versatile. The same microcontroller can be programmed to serve many different purposes, so you can keep just a few types of them in stock, buy them in huge quantities, and that keeps costs down. If you need more speed, then it may make sense to use FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), but very few synthesizer circuits really need that much speed.

Twenty or thirty years ago, before microcontrollers were cheap, the usual way of doing a small amount of digital logic was to throw in a couple of MSI (medium-scale integration) logic chips, such as the 7400 or 74LS00 series based on bipolar transistors or the 4000 series based on CMOS. These were small logic building blocks, typically a few gates on each 14-pin or 16-pin DIP chip. There were dozens of popular chips in these series and a few hundred less-common ones. They first existed in the late 1960s but weren't cost-effective and readily available to hobbyists until the mid-1970s. Such chips still exist and you still see a lot of them in DIY designs, but they're gradually falling out of production as cheaper microcontrollers become more appealing to the large commercial interests that are most of the market.

Even further into the past, integrated circuits of any kind were too expensive to be the first choice for hobbyists, and we had to build things out of one active device (transistor or even tube) at a time. I used this kind of logic in my MSK 012 Transistor ADSR. Logic gates built with the minimum number of transistors are barely digital at all: they may be better understood as analog amplifier circuits that happen to be amplifying digital signals. The chips we usually use today, and the gates inside them, have become more complicated and involve more transistors as transistors have become cheaper, but they can be understood as just evolutionary developments from the simplest possible gates.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

What Is a Side Channel Attack?:

Modern cybersecurity depends on machines keeping secrets. But computers, like poker-playing humans, have tells. They flit their eyes when they've got a good hand, or raise an eyebrow when they're bluffing—or at least, the digital equivalent. And a hacker who learns to read those unintended signals can extract the secrets they contain, in what's known as a "side channel attack.".

Side channel attacks take advantage of patterns in the information exhaust that computers constantly give off: the electric emissions from a computer's monitor or hard drive, for instance, that emanate slightly differently depending on what information is crossing the screen or being read by the drive's magnetic head. Or the fact that computer components draw different amounts of power when carrying out certain processes. Or that a keyboard's click-clacking can reveal a user's password through sound alone.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/21/pinal-county-sheriff-mark-lamb-positive-covid-19-enforce-mask/3232821001/

During a Saturday phone interview with The Arizona Republic of the USA TODAY Network, Sheriff Mark Lamb said the White House called him on June 13 and asked that he be present when Trump signed an executive order that would hold law enforcement to a higher standard when they used force.

Lamb said he flew into Washington Monday evening and visited the White House Tuesday when he tested positive for COVID-19. He later visited an infirmary and was tested a second time, which also came back positive.

"I was surprised," Lamb said regarding the positive test result. "I mean, if I looked back, I would say that I was a little rundown from, you know, a long weekend. But I didn't have any symptoms."

[...] Lamb said he likely contracted COVID-19 at a campaign event he held on June 13, He initially planned for it to be a "come pick up a yard sign" event, but more people showed up than anticipated.

[...] However, Lamb said he didn't wear a mask or practice social distancing at the campaign event and estimated that the majority of the 200 people who attended the event in San Tan Valley, Arizona, weren't wearing masks either.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Indonesia's Mt Merapi erupts, spewing ash 6 km high:

Indonesia's Mount Merapi, one of the world's most active volcanoes, erupted twice on Sunday, sending clouds of grey ash 6,000 metres into the sky, the country's geological agency said.

The two eruptions lasted around seven minutes, according to the agency, and prompted local authorities to order residents to stay outside a three-kilometre no-go zone around the rumbling crater near Indonesia's cultural capital Yogyakarta.

The volcano had a similarly-large eruption on February 13 of this year. Eruptions there are not uncommon but it is dangerous to drop one's guard:

Mount Merapi's last major eruption in 2010 killed more than 300 people and forced the evacuation of some 280,000 residents.

It was Merapi's most powerful eruption since 1930, which killed around 1,300 people, while another explosion in 1994 took about 60 lives.

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RandomFactor writes:

Massive white tarpaulins are being used to protect Alpine glaciers from melting over the summer.

In northern Italy, the Presena glacier has lost more than one third of its volume since 1993.

Once the ski season is over and cable cars are berthed, conservationists race to try and stop it melting by using white tarps that block the sun's rays.

"This area is continuously shrinking, so we cover as much of it as possible," explains Davide Panizza, 34, who heads the Carosello-Tonale company that does the work.

From around 30,000 square metres (36,000 square yards) covered in 2008 when the project began, his team now places 100,000 square metres under wraps.

The tarps themselves are "geotextile tarpaulins that reflect sunlight, maintaining a temperature lower than the external one, and thus preserving as much snow as possible," according to Panizza.

Installation and removal of the tarps takes approximately six weeks each to complete. Similar systems are in place on a few Austrian glaciers as well.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Among other things, he covered the Apollo moon landings, the rise of recombinant DNA technology and the emergence of AIDS.

RIP David Perlman, the Dean of American Science Writing:

The world will sorely miss the wit and wisdom of David Perlman, long admired as the senior statesman of American science writing, who passed away on June 19, 2020, at age 101. He was born during the 1918 flu pandemic and died in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and science editor emeritus was remarkable not only for his longevity—including more than seven decades in the news business—but for the extraordinary breadth of his coverage, from space shots to fossil remains, women's reproductive health and nuclear disarmament.

Dave's enthusiasm for each story was infectious; his curiosity about all things science was limitless. He entertained and informed generations of newspaper readers and inspired a cadre of American journalists to cover the wonders of science, as well as its influential—and sometimes controversial—role in modern society. I was one of the many "kiddos" fortunate enough to know Dave, first as a mentor and then as a lifelong colleague and friend.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Australia's conservative government announced plans Friday to double university fees for humanities students, in a bid to push people into more useful, "job-relevant" courses like maths and science.

Under the proposal—which critics panned as an "ideological assault"—the cost of degrees like history or cultural studies will rise up to 113 percent to around US$29,000, while other courses such as nursing and information technology will become cheaper.

Education Minister Dan Tehan—an arts graduate with two advanced degrees in international relations—said the government wanted to corral young people towards "jobs of the future" to boost the country's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

"If you are wanting to do philosophy, which will be great for your critical thinking, also think about doing IT," Tehan said.

The plan would help pay for an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and for cost cuts for courses like science, agriculture, maths and languages.

[...] "I'm an arts graduate and so is the minister for education so I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that we're completely unemployable," said opposition lawmaker Tanya Plibersek.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New system uses wind turbines to defend the national grid from power cut:

Lead researcher Professor Xiao-Ping Zhang, Director of Smart Grid in the Birmingham Energy Institute, comments: "By 2030 wind is expected to provide half the UK's power, so it's important that we can use the wind farms provide a vital safety mechanism of controlling frequency dips of UK's national power grid. Our proposed frequency control system for wind turbines could revolutionise the UK's power grid's frequency control and, importantly, uses our existing infrastructure of wind turbines and it will not need additional devices and investments."

The most recent severe power cut, in August 2019, caused blackouts across the Midlands, South East, South West, North West and North East of England, and Wales. The incident was triggered by two almost simultaneous unexpected power losses at Hornsea and Little Barford due to lightning strikes.

[...] "As the UK increases its reliance on wind power, it will become even more important to find effective ways to use the turbine systems to provide this service and maintain effective regulation of the grid. Current methods of using wind turbines to regulate electricity struggle to provide consistent support because of variable wind speeds and other system conditions," adds Professor Zhang.

The method proposed by the Birmingham team harnesses the potential of wind turbines to operate at variable speeds to provide the flexibility required to respond to fluctuations in supply and demand.

Zhang (2020): "Fast Frequency Support From Wind Turbine Systems by Arresting Frequency Nadir Close to Settling Frequency," IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy, vol. 7, pp. 191-202, 2020, doi: 10.1109/OAJPE.2020.2996949.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world: Quantum teleportation is an important step in improving quantum computing:

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics -- albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

[...] "We provide evidence for 'entanglement swapping,' in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and 'quantum gate teleportation,' a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation," Nichol says. "Our work shows that this can be done even without photons."

The results pave the way for future research on quantum teleportation involving spin states of all matter, not just photons, and provide more evidence for the surprisingly useful capabilities of individual electrons in qubit semiconductors.

Journal References:

Haifeng Qiao, Yadav P. Kandel, Sreenath K. Manikandan, et al. Conditional teleportation of quantum-dot spin states [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16745-0)

Qiao, Haifeng, Kandel, Yadav P., Deng, Kuangyin, et al. Coherent multi-spin exchange in a quantum-dot spin chain, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02277)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The United States Navy is testing power beaming satellite technology.

Recently, one of [the] groups at America's Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) hit a milestone in the development of power satellite technology by launching their Photovoltaic RF Antenna Module (PRAM) test satellite.

The idea underlying power satellites is called "power beaming". Power beaming systems use one of three different frequencies of light to transmit significant amounts of power over a distance wirelessly. Last year NRL had a successful demonstration of a land-based power beaming system using an infrared laser.

Doing it from space presents a whole new set of challenges though, and not necessarily just technical ones. Dr Paul Jaffe, the technical lead on the PRAM project, described the process of being selected for an orbital launch as equivalent to Shark Tank – numerous PIs pitching their ideas for a trip to orbit. After several years of trying, PRAM finally got it's time to shine on an X-37B launch on May 17th.

PRAM won't actually shine though – it's surface is covered in black solar panels, and its innards consist of the first hardware ever launched to orbit that converts solar energy into microwaves.

Although it won't actually beam power back to Earth, the 30cm PRAM satellite will test and gather metrics to compare with Earth based systems, including

• Efficiency of conversion of solar energy to microwaves
• Thermal management using the radiative cooling system
• Power Density
• Base station design
• Optimal Illumination orbit

Addressing fears around use of the platform as a weapon, Dr. Jaffe notes "If you put a magnifying glass in front of your WiFI router, it doesn't start melting anything."

Related:
China Plans Space-Based Solar Power Stations

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Whales are disturbed by engine noise from boats:

To get their patrons the best possible view, whale watching companies and the captains of their ships tend to position vessels as close as they can.

[...] "Unlike humans, the dominant sense in whales is not sight -- it is hearing," Australian biologist Kate R. Sprogis, research fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark, said in a news release. "As such, a whale may not be able to see a whale-watch boat at 100 meter distance, but they are likely to hear it, so it makes sense to consider this when stipulating whale-watching guidelines."

Using underwater speakers and drone cameras, scientists tested the effects of different decibel levels on the behavior of humpback whales in the Exmouth Gulf, located off the western coast of Australia.

[...] When researchers subjected mothers and calves to boat-noise levels of 172 decibels, a very loud boat, from a distance of 100 meters, the mothers and calves spent 30 percent less time resting, swam at faster speeds and doubled their breathing rates.

When the boats moved further away, disturbed whales usually returned to resting. However, previous studies suggest repeated disturbances can leave moms without the energy to feed their calves and evade predators.

Journal Reference:
Kate R Sprogis, Simone Videsen, Peter T Madsen. Vessel noise levels drive behavioural responses of humpback whales with implications for whale-watching, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.56760)

Original Submission