SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

You have to protect yourself.

Light drinking may protect brain function:

UGA study shows that for older people it could help cognitive condition

[...] The study examined the link between alcohol consumption and changes in cognitive function over time among middle-aged and older adults in the U.S.

[...] Compared to nondrinkers, they found that those who had a drink or two a day tended to perform better on cognitive tests over time.

Even when other important factors known to impact cognition such as age, smoking or education level were controlled for, they saw a pattern of light drinking associated with high cognitive trajectories.

The optimal amount of drinks per week was between 10 and 14 drinks. But that doesn't mean those who drink less should start indulging more, says Zhang.

"It is hard to say this effect is causal," he said. "So, if some people don't drink alcoholic beverages, this study does not encourage them to drink to prevent cognitive function decline."

Journal Reference:
Ruiyuan Zhang, Luqi Shen, Toni Miles, et al. Association of Low to Moderate Alcohol Drinking With Cognitive Functions in US Adults [open], JAMA Network Open (DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.7922)

Original Submission

Stock surge makes Tesla the world’s most valuable automaker

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/stock-surge-makes-tesla-the-worlds-most-valuable-automaker/:

One share of Tesla stock traded for more than $1,130 on Wednesday, pushing the company's market capitalization to nearly $210 billion. That sent Tesla's market cap past Toyota, which is worth either $170 billion or $203 billion, depending on how you count it. Tesla is now the world's most valuable car company.

It's a remarkable milestone for a company that sells far fewer cars than its leading rivals. Toyota and its subsidiaries sold 10.7 million vehicles in 2019, while Volkswagen and its subsidiaries sold almost 11 million vehicles. Tesla sold a comparatively tiny 367,500 vehicles last year.

Tesla stock leaps again on unexpectedly strong delivery numbers

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/tesla-stock-leaps-again-on-unexpectedly-strong-delivery-numbers/:

Tesla has surprised Wall Street again with better-than-expected delivery numbers. The electric carmaker delivered 90,650 vehicles in the second quarter of 2020, up slightly from the 88,400 vehicles delivered in the first quarter. This despite the fact that Tesla's main factory in Fremont, California, was shut down by county officials for the first half of the quarter.

Tesla's stock leapt at the news. After closing at a record high of $1,120 yesterday, Tesla's shares rose above $1,200 in pre-market trading on Thursday morning.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Bizarre new planet is largest known rocky world, 40 times as massive as Earth

About 730 light-years away, not far on the scale of our galaxy, an utterly bizarre planet orbits a sun-like star. Big, dense, and tightly tethered to its home star, the planet is unlike anything astronomers have yet seen—either in our own solar system or afar.

The roasted world known as TOI-849b is the most massive rocky planet ever observed, with as much as 40 Earths' worth of material crammed inside. Perplexingly, TOI-849b's tremendous bulk suggests that it should be a giant, gassy world like Jupiter, yet it has almost no atmosphere. Explaining how such a world emerged challenges what scientists understand about how planets grow.

[...] The planet betrayed its presence by crossing the face of its star and briefly blotting out a smidgen of starlight. Those fleeting, shadowy transits revealed that the alien world circles its star every 18 hours, meaning that its surface temperature is a sweltering 2800°F.

TESS observations also showed that the planet is about 3.4 times as wide as Earth, or 85 percent as wide as Neptune—making it a world of unusual size for its position so close to its star. Up until now, astronomers have primarily observed hot Jupiters or much smaller super-Earths in such tight orbits, and nothing has populated what's known as the hot-Neptune desert.

"There really are no planets of that mass there," Fortney says. TOI-849b is the right radius to be a hot Neptune, but its mass is two to three times larger.

Further observations of the host star's gravitational wobble, made with the HARPS instrument at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, determined that while TOI-849b is roughly as wide as Neptune, it is at least twice as massive. All that bulk means TOI-849b is extremely dense. The rocky planet might have a thin veneer of atmosphere, probably composed of hydrogen and helium—but not nearly as much gas as a world that hefty should hold on to.

Chthonian planet.

Also at University of Warwick and BBC.

A remnant planetary core in the hot-Neptune desert (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2421-7) (DX)

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Geologists identify deep-earth structures that may signal hidden metal lodes

If the world is to maintain a sustainable economy and fend off the worst effects of climate change, at least one industry will soon have to ramp up dramatically: the mining of metals needed to create a vast infrastructure for renewable power generation, storage, transmission and usage. The problem is, demand for such metals is likely to far outstrip currently both known deposits and the existing technology used to find more ore bodies.

Now, in a new study, scientists have discovered previously unrecognized structural lines 100 miles or more down in the earth that appear to signal the locations of giant deposits of copper, lead, zinc and other vital metals lying close enough to the surface to be mined, but too far down to be found using current exploration methods. The discovery could greatly narrow down search areas, and reduce the footprint of future mines, the authors say. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

[...] The study found that 85 percent of all known base-metal deposits hosted in sediments-and 100 percent of all "giant" deposits (those holding more than 10 million tons of metal)-lie above deeply buried lines girdling the planet that mark the edges of ancient continents. Specifically, the deposits lie along boundaries where the earth's lithosphere-the rigid outermost cladding of the planet, comprising the crust and upper mantle-thins out to about 170 kilometers below the surface.

Up to now, all such deposits have been found pretty much at the surface, and their locations have seemed to be somewhat random. Most discoveries have been made basically by geologists combing the ground and whacking at rocks with hammers. Geophysical exploration methods using gravity and other parameters to find buried ore bodies have entered in recent decades, but the results have been underwhelming. The new study presents geologists with a new, high-tech treasure map telling them where to look.

Journal Reference:
Mark J. Hoggard, Karol Czarnota, Fred D. Richards, et al. Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0593-2)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Glass 3.0? Google acquires smart glasses maker North

Google Hardware's latest acquisition is North, a wearables computing company that most recently was making smart glasses that seemed like a successor to Google Glass. Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh announced the purchase on Google's blog, saying, "North's technical expertise will help as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts and ambient computing future."

North developed and released a pair of smart glasses called "Focals," which came the closest we've seen so far to smart glasses that looked like normal glasses. First, the company didn't neglect the "glasses" part of "smart glasses" and provided the frames in a range of styles, sizes, and colors, with support for prescription lenses. The technology was noticeably less invasive, too. Google Glass's display surface was a transparent block distractingly placed in front of the users' face, but Focal's display surface was the glasses' lens itself. A laser projector poked out from the thicker-than-normal temple arms and fired into the lens, which has a special coating, allowing the projection to reflect light into the eye.

[...] Google's smart glasses contribution was, of course, the infamous Google Glass, which launched in 2012 and basically shut down as a consumer product about two years later. (North CEO Stephen Lake actually called Google Glass "a massive failure" in a 2019 tech talk. Awkward!) Most people would think of the product as dead, but Google quietly pivoted Glass to be an enterprise product for assembly-line workers, mechanics, doctors, and other professions that might benefit from hands-free computing. New Glass hardware came out as recently as 2019, with the "Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2," which featured a modern 10nm Qualcomm SoC. With Apple reportedly building a set of smart glasses, the consumer market will probably heat up again soon.

It's back.

Also at BBC.

Previously: Google Glass 'Enterprise Edition': Foldable, More Rugged and Water-Resistant
Intel Abandons Vaunt AR (Augmented Reality) Smartglasses
Intel's Vaunt Augmented Reality Smartglasses Concept Lives on at Canadian Company North
"North Focals" $1000 Smartglasses Reviewed

Related: Apple Glasses Leaks and Rumors: Here's Everything We Expect to See

Original Submission

martyb writes:

WOW!

On June 29th, I posted a story that shared our financial status and asked for the community's support. And did you ever! As noted in that story:

So far, we have had 106 subscriptions this year which have netted us an estimated $2,794.92 (after processing fees from Stripe/Paypal) towards our goal of $3,500.00.

In short, we needed $705.08 to cover our expenses for the first half of the year (2020H1).

I am ecstatic to report that we not only covered that shortfall, but raised an additional $1254.52.

Thank You!!!

See the Subscription FAQ for a list of subscriber benefits. (Note: this is bit old; please mention in the comments if you find anything that is incorrect.)

The extra will go towards covering shortfalls from prior periods, help build our "rainy day" fund, and help us to be able to repay the $10,000.00 that our founders put up to get SoylentNews started.

I'll leave the first-half-year stats up in the "Site News" box for a few days before resetting it for the second half of the year. (That goal will be the same, $3500.00, toward which we have already raised $144.45 or 4.1% as of 20200702_120140 UTC.)

Here is the breakdown of our subscriptions for the first half of this year:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Qty	Sub Amt	Total
7	4.00	28.00
12	5.00	60.00
2	10.00	20.00
6	12.00	72.00
99	20.00	1980.00
1	20.20	20.20
4	25.00	100.00
1	26.74	26.74
4	30.00	120.00
1	33.33	33.33
1	36.60	36.60
1	39.39	39.39
6	40.00	240.00
9	50.00	450.00
1	60.00	60.00
3	100.00	300.00
1	103.50	103.50
1	113.00	113.00
3	120.00	360.00
2	200.00	400.00
1	400.00	400.00

Freeman writes:

Unscheduled fixes released for critical flaw in optional Windows codec

Microsoft has published unscheduled fixes for two critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for attackers to execute malicious code on computers running any version of Windows 10.

Unlike the vast majority of Windows patches, the ones released on Tuesday were delivered through the Microsoft Store. The normal channel for operating System security fixes is Windows Update. Advisories here and here said users need not take any action to automatically receive and install the fixes.

Also at:
Microsoft issues critical fixes for booby-trapped images – update now!

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/06/tesla-driver-blames-autopilot-for-crash-into-police-car/

A Massachusetts man is facing a negligent-driving charge after his Tesla slammed into a police car that was parked by the side of the road. According to a state trooper, the man had Tesla's Autopilot technology turned on and said that he "must not have been paying attention." The crash occurred in December, but the defendant, Nicholas Ciarlone, was only recently charged in the incident.
[...]
Tesla is aiming to build a more sophisticated self-driving system that fully understands the surrounding environment. Hopefully, Tesla's "full self-driving" software will eventually detect a situation like this and respond appropriately. But as of at least last December, the technology seems to still be a work in progress.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/small-isps-stunned-by-fcc-move-to-ban-huawei-zte-gear-during-pandemic/

Small Internet service providers are "stunned" that the Federal Communications Commission is enforcing a ban on Huawei and ZTE network gear during the ongoing pandemic.

The FCC already voted unanimously in November 2019 to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the commission's Universal Service Fund (USF). But the ban, inspired by fears that the Chinese vendors' equipment poses national security risks, is just now coming into effect, with the FCC announcing yesterday that USF money "may no longer be used to purchase, obtain, maintain, improve, modify, or otherwise support any equipment or services produced or provided by these suppliers."

The Rural Wireless Association (RWA), a trade group that represents ISPs that serve fewer than 100,000 subscribers each, said yesterday it is "stunned by [the] FCC's decision to immediately bar use of USF funds on Huawei and ZTE equipment and services during a time when it is critical to keep rural Americans connected."

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From TechCrunch

A new paper published by Disney Research in partnership with ETH Zurich describes a fully automated, neural network-based method for swapping faces in photos and videos — the first such method that results in high-resolution, megapixel resolution final results according, to the researchers. That could make it suited for use in film and TV, where high-resolution results are key to ensuring that the final product is good enough to reliably convince viewers as to their reality.

The researchers specifically intend this tech for use in replacing an existing actor's performance with a substitute actor's face, for instance when de-aging or increasing the age of someone, or potentially when portraying an actor who has passed away. They also suggest it could be used for replacing the faces of stunt doubles in cases where the conditions of a scene call for them to be used.

The mouse has the paper

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-quantum-fluctuations-jiggle-human-scale.html

The universe, as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics, is a noisy, crackling space where particles blink constantly in and out of existence, creating a background of quantum noise whose effects are normally far too subtle to detect in everyday objects.

Now for the first time, a team led by researchers at MIT LIGO Laboratory has measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on objects at the human scale. In a paper published in Nature, the researchers report observing that quantum fluctuations, tiny as they may be, can nonetheless "kick" an object as large as the 40-kilogram mirrors of the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), causing them to move by a tiny degree, which the team was able to measure.

It turns out the quantum noise in LIGO's detectors is enough to move the large mirrors by 10^-20 meters—a displacement that was predicted by quantum mechanics for an object of this size, but that had never before been measured.

Journal Reference:
Haocun Yu, L. McCuller, M. Tse, et al. Quantum correlations between light and the kilogram-mass mirrors of LIGO, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2420-8)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Indices of health under our feet

A treasure trove of information relevant to human and environmental health is hiding in an unexpected place. Samples of wastewater from homes, institutions, towns and cities around the world can now be probed for valuable data concerning community well-being, antibiotic use and resistance, recreational substance consumption and abuse, biomarkers of disease as well as environmental hazards and degradation.

This rapidly emerging health surveillance technique, termed wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), is an economical and powerful tool. It can teach us much about large populations contributing into a centralized sewerage system during the course of a full 24-hour cycle.

In a pair of new studies, Rolf Halden, director of the ASU Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering and author for the 2020 Book Environment, describes the process and highlights important new findings extracted from the municipal wastewater most of us contribute to on a daily basis.

[...] Advances in WBE technologies and applications are progressing rapidly. The method offers a low-cost strategy for obtaining health and environmental data on a local, regional, national and even continental scale. It can provide valuable information with acute spatial and temporal resolution. Because the method aggregates community-wide data, it is non-invasive and ensures the privacy of the population under study.

In addition to its ability to measure ingestion rates of drugs including cocaine and opioids, WBE has been proposed as a means of identifying exposure to agents including pesticides, personal care products, infectious pathogens, persistent organic pollutants, as well as for tracking community-wide incidence of illnesses including diabetes, allergies, stress-induced disorders and cancer.

[...] WBE represents an attractive alternative to community-wide monitoring through self-reported surveys, which may introduce sampling and reporting biases and are often comparatively costly to administer; how much more expensive, was one of the questions investigated in the study.

[...] In addition to monitoring health indices related to behavior, WBE could ultimately provide a low-cost means of carrying out infectious disease surveillance across populations, providing an early-warning system to alert researchers to disease outbreaks in near real time, within as little as 24 hours.

Journal Reference:

• Erin M. Driver, Adam Gushgari, Jing Chen, et al. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine consumption on a public U.S. university campus determined by wastewater-based epidemiology, Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138492)
• Olga E. Hart, Rolf U. Halden. Simulated 2017 nationwide sampling at 13,940 major U.S. sewage treatment plants to assess seasonal population bias in wastewater-based epidemiology, Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138406)

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Ten Years Of The Sun In One Hour – Nasa Releases Mesmerising Space Film:

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory[*] has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the sun, from its launch in February 2010 until June this year, which have now been stitched together to form the video.

While the 20 million gigabytes of picture data captured over the decade have contributed to "countless new discoveries about the workings" of the sun, according to Nasa, the images have now been arranged into a 61-minute video showing events including transiting planets and eruptions.

The film shows the major changes the sun undergoes during a solar cycle, an approximately 11-year period which sees the sun's north and south poles flip, and the emergence of sunspots as a result of gas altering the star's magnetic fields.

Every second of the 61-minute video represents images taken over a single day, with the first frame showing the sun on 2 June 2010, and the last frame captured on 1 June 2020.

[*] The Solar Dynamics Observatory is in an inclined geosynchronous orbit around Earth.

Also at phys.org which notes:

While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed toward the sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments.

YouTube video

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

'Ripple20' Bugs Impact Hundreds of Millions of Connected Devices:

A series of 19 different vulnerabilities, four of them critical, are affecting hundreds of millions of internet of things (IoT) and industrial-control devices.

The issue is based in the supply chain and code reuse, with the bugs affecting a TCP/IP software library developed by Treck that many manufacturers use. Researchers at JSOF uncovered the faulty part of Treck's code, which is built to handle the ubiquitous TCP-IP protocol that connects devices to networks and the internet, in the devices of more than 10 different manufacturers—and it's likely present in dozens more.

Affected hardware includes everything from connected printers to medical infusion pumps and industrial-control gear, according to researchers at JSOF's research lab. Treck users include "one-person boutique shops to Fortune 500 multinational corporations, including HP, Schneider Electric, Intel, Rockwell Automation, Caterpillar, Baxter, as well as many other major international vendors suspected of being of vulnerable in medical, transportation, industrial control, enterprise, energy (oil/gas), telecom, retail and commerce, and other industries," according to the research.

"The wide-spread dissemination of the software library (and its internal vulnerabilities) was a natural consequence of the supply chain 'ripple-effect,'" researchers said in a posting on Tuesday. "A single vulnerable component, though it may be relatively small in and of itself, can ripple outward to impact a wide range of industries, applications, companies and people."

The flaws, dubbed Ripple20, include four remote code-execution vulnerabilities. If properly exploited, data could be stolen off of a printer, a medical device's behavior could be tampered with, or industrial control devices could be made to malfunction.

"An attacker could hide malicious code within embedded devices for years. One of the vulnerabilities could enable entry from outside into the network boundaries; and this is only a small taste of the potential risks," according to JSOF.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for RandomFactor

A newfound spider species wears a striking red-and-white pattern on its back that resembles the grin worn by Batman's long-standing nemesis, the Joker. The resemblance is so uncanny that the researchers who described the arachnid named the species after actor Joaquin Phoenix, who portrayed the tormented, smiling villain in the 2019 film, "Joker."

Ironically, the colorful spider belongs to a genus that was named for the late punk rock icon Lou Reed, who famously wore black and rarely smiled.

Scientists discovered Loureedia phoenixi in Iran; it's the first Loureedia spider to be identified outside the Mediterranean region, they reported in a new study. The genus, first described in 2018, now includes four species.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/joker-spider-joaquin-phoenix.html

Journal Reference:
Alireza Zamani, Yuri M. Marusik. A new and easternmost species of Loureedia (Aranei: Eresidae) from Iran, Arthropoda Selecta (DOI: 10.15298/arthsel.29.2.09)

Original Submission