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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs:

MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.

The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. "We sincerely apologize," a professor told us.

The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for GrandFireWizard:

Coronavirus US: People try microwaving library books amid virus fears:

A US library took to Facebook to share their outrage over people's latest attempts to disinfect public property, like library books.

"Noooooooo!!!!!! Oh no no no," Tampa Bay Library Consortium captioned a picture of a book badly burnt after borrowers tried microwaving it to kill germs.

The book was loaned out from Temple Terrace Public Library in Florida, where staff assured everyone that books were disinfected safely before being loaned out again.

"Temple Terrace and all Hillsborough County Library Cooperative libraries quarantine all materials for 72 hours after they are returned. Please do NOT attempt to microwave library materials as the RFID tags, located inside, will catch fire. Stay safe out there," they shared on Facebook.

It comes after news stories in the US that claimed people could sanitise library books by placing them in the microwave.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://uproxx.com/life/diy-magic-mushrooms-uncle-ben/

There's a subreddit for just about everything, but if you're a legit Uncle Ben's fan who is also a serious Redditor (that's a lonely island), you might be disappointed to find that the subreddit r/UncleBens isn't so much a gathering of hardcore pre-cooked rice fans, as it is an online sub-community of DIY psilocybin cultivators who are using Uncle Ben's and other supermarket staples to grow magic mushrooms.

[...] What makes Uncle Bens the perfect vessel for psilocybin, according to the r/UncleBens crew, is that mushroom cultivation "requires a sterile, nutrient-rich environment in which their spores can grow," and since Uncle Ben's rice is pre-cooked, sterilized and vacuum-sealed, it provides the necessary environment for cultivation.

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takyon writes:

Neural SuperSampling Is a Hardware Agnostic DLSS Alternative by Facebook

A new paper published by Facebook researchers just ahead of SIGGRAPH 2020 introduces neural supersampling, a machine learning-based upsampling approach not too dissimilar from NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling. However, neural supersampling does not require any proprietary hardware or software to run and its results are quite impressive as you can see in the example images, with researchers comparing them to the quality we've come to expect from DLSS.

Video examples on Facebook's blog post.

The researchers use some extremely low-fi upscales to make their point, but you could also imagine scaling from a resolution like 1080p straight to 8K. Upscaling could be combined with eye tracking and foveated rendering to reduce rendering times even further.

Also at UploadVR and VentureBeat.

Journal Reference:
Lei Xiao, Salah Nouri, Matt Chapman, Alexander Fix, Douglas Lanman, Anton Kaplanyan,Neural Supersampling for Real-time Rendering - Facebook Research, (DOI: https://research.fb.com/publications/neural-supersampling-for-real-time-rendering/)

Related: With Google's RAISR, Images Can be Up to 75% Smaller Without Losing Detail
Nvidia's Turing GPU Pricing and Performance "Poorly Received"
HD Emulation Mod Makes "Mode 7" SNES Games Look Like New
Neural Networks Upscale Film From 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone
Apple Goes on an Acquisition Spree, Turns Attention to NextVR

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Jupiter Just Sprouted a Brand New Spot:

An amateur astronomer in South Africa has detected a bright new surface feature rising above the cloud tops on Jupiter.

The largest planet in the solar system has a bright new blotch in its southern hemisphere, reports NASA. The cloudy plume, dubbed "Clyde's Spot," appears between Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot and S2-AWO A7, another big storm to the southeast.

Jupiter's new spot was discovered on the morning of May 31, 2020 by Clyde Foster, director of the Shallow Sky section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa and the astronomer for whom the feature is now named. Foster was imaging Jupiter at the time, spotting the spot with a filter that's sensitive to methane gas. Interestingly, the feature was not seen by astronomers in Australia just a few hours earlier.

[...] Known as a "convective outbreak," Clyde's spot is a plume of cloud extending up above the cloud layers. Such features are easily detectable in methane wavelengths, appearing as bright splotches. According to NASA, convective outbreaks are not uncommon within Jupiter's South Temperate belt, including one that appeared in this latitude band two years ago.

Juno will be making another perijove on July 25, 2020, at which time NASA will get another close-up view of this storm, so we'll get to see how this outbreak has changed over the days and weeks since its initial discovery.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for GrandFireWizard:

Ex-porn star's fans help remove X-rated videos:

She is one of the most searched for star's on Pornhub, but Mia Khalifa's 11 X-rated films could soon disappear for good.

The former porn star has tried and failed to have her videos removed from Pornhub and BangBros, describing her three-month stint in 2014 as a decision that will "haunt her for the rest of her life".

But now her fans have stepped in, creating a Change.org petition that has already seen nearly 2 million signatures demanding the adult sites remove the content.

"Mia and her team have provided countless financial offers to the current owners of her domain name and pornographic videos to no avail," the Justice for Mia petition read.

"Big corporations are not giving Mia Khalifa a fair chance to demand her content in court due to financial advantage.

"We are demanding her domain names be returned, her videos be removed and fairly discussed in court without putting Mia Khalifa into deep financial ruin. Mia has stated her regret for her decisions in the porn industry multiple times."

It comes after the 27-year-old begged girls to not go into the industry, slamming it as "toxic".

Original Submission

takyon writes:

British government and Bharti Global buy OneWeb, plan $1 billion investment to revive company

The British government and Indian mobile network operator Bharti Global placed the winning bid to acquire OneWeb, a broadband megaconstellation startup that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March after running out of funding, OneWeb said July 3.

OneWeb said it has secured $1 billion in new funding — $500 million from the British government to "deliver first UK sovereign space capability," and another $500 million from Indian mobile network operator Bharti Global — to recapitalize its constellation effort.

OneWeb, in a news release, said the funding will "effectuate the full end-to-end deployment of the OneWeb system," but did not specify if that system is the original 650-satellite constellation the company was pursuing prior to bankruptcy. OneWeb has 74 satellites in low Earth orbit.

"This deal underlines the scale of Britain's ambitions on the global stage," Alok Sharma, business secretary for the British government, said in a separate July 3 release from the U.K. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. "Our access to a global fleet of satellites has the potential to connect millions of people worldwide to broadband, many for the first time, and the deal presents the opportunity to further develop our strong advanced manufacturing base right here in the UK."

UK looks to challenge Elon Musk's Starlink after winning bid for bankrupt satellite company OneWeb

The U.K. government is set to try and take on Elon Musk's Starlink after it was crowned the winning bidder of failed satellite company OneWeb at an auction in New York.

[...] The $1 billion-plus rescue bid was made through a consortium involving India's Bharti Global, which through Bharti Airtel, is the third-largest mobile operator in the world, with over 425 million customers.

[...] U.K. Business Secretary Alok Sharma confirmed the government has pledged to invest $500 million and take a "significant" equity share in OneWeb, which is headquartered in London. The stake is reported to be around 20%.

Previously: OneWeb Goes Bankrupt, Lays Off Staff, Will Sell Satellite-Broadband Business
OneWeb Seeks Permission to Launch 48,000 Satellites Despite Bankruptcy

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

This scientist says he's built a jet engine that turns electricity directly into thrust:

This past autumn, a professor at Wuhan University named Jau Tang was hard at work piecing together a thruster prototype that, at first, sounds too good to be true.

The basic idea, he said in an interview, is that his device turns electricity directly into thrust — no fossil fuels required — by using microwaves to energize compressed air into a plasma state and shooting it out like a jet. Tang suggested, without a hint of self-aggrandizement, that it could likely be scaled up enough to fly large commercial passenger planes. Eventually, he says, it might even power spaceships.

Needless to say, these are grandiose claims. A thruster that doesn't require tanks of fuel sounds suspiciously like science fiction — like the jets on Iron Man's suit in the Marvel movies, for instance, or the thrusters that allow Doc Brown's DeLorean to fly in "Back to the Future."

But in Tang's telling, his invention — let's just call it a Tang Jet, which he worked on with Wuhan University collaborators Dan Ye and Jun Li — could have civilization-shifting potential here in the non-fictional world.

"Essentially, the goal of this technology is to try and use electricity and air to replace gasoline," he said. "Global warming is a major threat to human civilization. Fossil fuel-free technology using microwave air plasma could be a solution."

He anticipates this happening fast. In two years, he says, he thinks Tang Jets could power drones. In a decade, he'd like to see them fly a whole airplane.

That would all be awesome, obviously. But it's difficult to evaluate whether Tang's invention could ever scale up enough to become practical. And even if it did, there would be substantial energy requirements that could doom aerospace applications.

One thing's for sure: If the tech works the way he hopes, the world will never be the same.

Journal Reference:
Dan Ye, Jun Li, Jau Tang. Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere [open], AIP Advances (DOI: 5.0005814)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Toward lasers powerful enough to investigate a new kind of physics:

In a paper that made the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, an international team of researchers has demonstrated an innovative technique for increasing the intensity of lasers. This approach, based on the compression of light pulses, would make it possible to reach a threshold intensity for a new type of physics that has never been explored before: quantum electrodynamics phenomena.

[...] Installed in the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS) facility at INRS, the researchers limited themselves to an energy of 3 joules for a 10-femtosecond pulse, or 300 terawatts (10¹² W). They plan to repeat the experiment with an energy of 13 joules over 5 femtoseconds, or an intensity of 3 petawatts (10¹⁵ W). "We would be among the first in the world to achieve this level of power with a laser that has such short pulses," says Professor Kieffer.

"If we achieve very short pulses, we enter relativistic problem classes. This is an extremely interesting direction that has the potential to take the scientific community to new horizons," says Professor Kieffer.

Journal Reference:
S. Yu. Mironov, S. Fourmaux, P. Lassonde, et al. Thin plate compression of a sub-petawatt Ti:Sa laser pulses, Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/5.0008544)

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Derek Lowe over at Science has a roundup of the status of current (article published 29 June 2020) Coronavirus vaccine trials/research.

This roundup of current vaccine research/trials includes information about many vaccine trials, broken down by vaccine types. These types include (quotes are all from TFA:

• Viral Vectors

This class uses some other infectious virus, but with its original genetic material removed. In its place goes genetic instructions to make coronavirus proteins, and when your infected cells do that, it will set off an immune response.

Number of trials (per TFA): 9

• Genetic Vaccines

These take DNA or RNA coding for coronavirus proteins and inject that directly into the bloodstream. "Directly" isn't quite the right word, though – for these things to work, they have to be formulated and modified to survive destruction in the blood, to be taken up through cell membranes, and to be used for protein production once they're inside.

Number of trials (per TFA): 8

• Recombinant protein vaccines

Here we get to a technique that really is used for human vaccines. The previous two categories force your own cells to make viral antigen proteins, but here you're making them industrially and just injecting them directly. The advantage can be that such protein production can be accomplished in many different ways and is already done on a large scale. That said, every new protein is a new project, with its own idiosyncrasies.

Number of trials (per TFA): 6

• Attenuated Virus Vaccines

This is another well-precedented vaccination technique. It involves producing a weakened form of the actual infectious virus, one that is not capable of causing damage but can still set off the immune system. There are several ways to do this, and it's a bit of an art form involving taking the virus through a huge number of replications in living cells as you select for variants that are less and less harmful.

Number of trials (per TFA): (None listed)

• Inactivated Virus Vaccines

This is also one that's also been used in medical practice for many years, and it's another inactivation step beyond the attenuated viruses. Heat or chemical agents are used to damage the virus to the point that it can no longer infect cells at all, but the plan is for there to be enough of the viral material left unaltered to still raise an immune response.

Number of trials (per TFA): 4

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Software is making it easier than ever to travel through space, but autonomous technologies could backfire if every glitch and error isn’t removed.

When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space.

Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was the sprawling dashboard of lights and switches and knobs that once dominated the space shuttle’s interior. All of it was replaced with a futuristic console of multiple large touch screens that cycle through a variety of displays. Behind those screens, the vehicle is run by software that’s designed to get into space and navigate to the space station completely autonomously.

[...] But over-relying on software and autonomous systems in spaceflight creates new opportunities for problems to arise. That’s especially a concern for many of the space industry’s new contenders, who aren’t necessarily used to the kind of aggressive and comprehensive testing needed to weed out problems in software and are still trying to strike a good balance between automation and manual control.

Nowadays, a few errors in over one million lines of code could spell the difference between mission success and mission failure. We saw that late last year, when Boeing’s Starliner capsule (the other vehicle NASA is counting on to send American astronauts into space) failed to make it to the ISS because of a glitch in its internal timer.

[...] There’s no consensus on how much further the human role in spaceflight will—or should—shrink. Uitenbroek thinks trying to develop software that can account for every possible contingency is simply impractical, especially when you have deadlines to make.

Chang Díaz disagrees, saying the world is shifting “to a point where eventually the human is going to be taken out of the equation.”

Which approach wins out may depend on the level of success achieved by the different parties sending people into space. NASA has no intention of taking humans out of the equation, but if commercial companies find they have an easier time minimising the human pilot’s role and letting the AI take charge, than[sic] touch screens and pilot-less flight to the ISS are only a taste of what’s to come.

MIT Technology Review

Which approach, do you think, is the best way to go forward ??

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

From Ars Technica:

[...] BMW is planning to move some features of its new cars to a subscription model, something it announced on Wednesday during a briefing for the press on the company's digital plans.

[...] the Bavarian carmaker has plans to apply that model to features like heated seats. BMW says that owners can "benefit in advance from the opportunity to try out the products for a trial period of one month, after which they can book the respective service for one or three years." The company also says that it could allow the second owner of a BMW to activate features that the original purchaser declined.

From Roadshow:

These options will be enabled via the car or the new My BMW app. While some will be permanent and assigned to the car, others will be temporary, with mentioned periods ranging from three months to three years.

[...] So, yes, you could theoretically only pay for heated seats in the colder months if you like, or perhaps save a few bucks by only enabling automatic high-beams on those seasons when the days are shortest.

Also at Hot Hardware, The Drive, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, TechSpot, SlashGear & Forbes.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

New Zealand's ancient monster penguins had northern hemisphere doppelgangers:

New Zealand's monster penguins, which lived 62 million years ago, had doppelgangers in Japan, the U.S. and Canada, a study published today in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research has found.

Scientists have identified striking similarities between the penguins' fossilized bones and those of a group of much younger Northern Hemisphere birds, the plotopterids.

These similarities suggest plotopterids and ancient penguins looked very similar and might help scientists understand how birds started using their wings to swim instead of fly.

Around 62 million years ago, the earliest known penguins swam in tropical seas that almost submerged the land that is now New Zealand. Paleontologists have found the fossilized bones of these ancient waddlers at Waipara, North Canterbury. They have identified nine species, ranging in size from small penguins, the size of today's Yellow-Eyed Penguin, to 1.6-meter-high monsters.

Plotopterids developed in the Northern Hemisphere much later than penguins, with the first species appearing between 37 and 34 million years ago. Their fossils have been found at a number of sites in North America and Japan. Like penguins, they used their flipper-like wings to swim through the sea. Unlike penguins, which have survived into the modern era, the last plotopterid species became extinct around 25 million years ago.

Journal Reference:
Gerald Mayr, James L. Goedert, Vanesa L. De Pietri, et al. Comparative osteology of the penguin‐like mid‐Cenozoic Plotopteridae and the earliest true fossil penguins, with comments on the origins of wing‐propelled diving, Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research (DOI: 10.1111/jzs.12400)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Dish buys prepaid carrier Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion:

After nearly a decade of trying to break into the wireless market, Dish just became the newest national wireless carrier. Today, Dish announced the $1.4 billion acquisition of Boost Mobile. With this purchase, Dish secures its place in the retail wireless market and will serve more than nine million customers.

The deal is the result of T-Mobile's Sprint merger. In order to gain FCC approval and quell fears that the merger would hurt competition, T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to several demands, including divesting Boost Mobile, one of Sprint's prepaid brands. Rumors circulated last year that Dish would buy Boost for $6 billion. Obviously, the final price is nowhere near that amount.

"This marks an important milestone in DISH's evolution as a connectivity company," Dish CEO and president Erik Carlson said in a statement. "It positions us well as we continue to build out the first virtualized, standalone 5G network in America."

Also at Ars Technica and cnet.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Crystal structure discovered almost 200 years ago could hold key to solar cell revolution (SD)

The study in Science, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, revealed that a molecular additive -- a salt based on the organic compound piperidine -- greatly improves the longevity of perovskite solar cells.

[...] One path to the marketplace is a tandem cell made of both silicon and perovskites that could turn more of sunlight's spectrum into energy. Lab tests on tandem cells have produced efficiencies of 28%, and efficiencies in the mid-30s seem realistic, Labram said.

"Tandem cells might allow solar panel producers to offer a performance beyond anything silicon alone might achieve," he said. "The dual approach could help remove the barrier to perovskites entering the market, on the way to perovskites eventually acting as stand-alone cells."

Journal Reference:
Yen-Hung Lin, Nobuya Sakai, Peimei Da, et al. A piperidinium salt stabilizes efficient metal-halide perovskite solar cells [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba1628)

Longevity has been a long-standing concern for hybrid perovskite photovoltaics. We demonstrate high-resilience positive-intrinsic-negative perovskite solar cells by incorporating a piperidinium-based ionic compound into the formamidinium-cesium lead-trihalide perovskite absorber. With the bandgap tuned to be well suited for perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells, this piperidinium additive enhances the open-circuit voltage and cell efficiency. This additive also retards compositional segregation into impurity phases and pinhole formation in the perovskite absorber layer during aggressive aging. Under full-spectrum simulated sunlight in ambient atmosphere, our unencapsulated and encapsulated cells retain 80 and 95% of their peak and post-burn-in efficiencies for 1010 and 1200 hours at 60° and 85°C, respectively. Our analysis reveals detailed degradation routes that contribute to the failure of aged cells.

Original Submission