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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

KFC is working with a Russian 3D bioprinting firm to try to make lab-produced chicken nuggets:

KFC is trying to create the world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets, part of its “restaurant of the future” concept, the company announced. The chicken restaurant chain will work with Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to develop bioprinting technology that will “print” chicken meat, using chicken cells and plant material.

KFC plans to provide the bioprinting firm with ingredients like breading and spices “to achieve the signature KFC taste” and will seek to replicate the taste and texture of genuine chicken.

It’s worth noting that the bioprinting process KFC describes uses animal material, so any nuggets it produced wouldn’t be vegetarian. KFC does offer a vegetarian option at some of its restaurants; last year it became the first US fast-food chain to test out Beyond Meat’s plant-based chicken product, which it plans to roll out to more of its locations this summer.

Bioprinted nuggets would be more environmentally friendly to produce than standard chicken meat, KFC says, citing (but not linking to) a study by the American Environmental Science and Technology Journal it says shows the benefits of growing meat from cells, including reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption compared to traditional farming methods.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Laser-Textured Metal Surfaces Kill Bacteria Faster:

Copper surfaces kill microbes that come into contact with them in a matter of hours. A new technique makes the familiar metal even deadlier—by zapping it with lasers.

Bacteria “are becoming more aggressive and resistant to therapeutics; it's the same thing for viruses,” says Rahim Rahimi, a materials engineer at Purdue University and senior author of a paper on the new process, published in April in Advanced Materials Interfaces.

[...] Copper's germ-destroying power, [microbiologist Michael Schmidt] explains, comes from its ability to conduct electricity. When a microbe touches a metal surface, the substance carries electrons away from the microbe's cellular membrane. This reaction sets off a chemical process that ultimately forces open the organism's pores and destroys it.

[...] To enhance the process, Rahimi's team hit a copper sample with laser light for a few milliseconds, thereby creating nanoscale pores in the flat metal and increasing its surface area.

[...] The researchers tested this newly rugged terrain by placing several bacterial strains, including Escherichia coli and a drug-resistant Staphylococcusaureus strain, on both flat and laser-treated pieces of copper. As soon as the cells hit the textured metal, their membranes began to suffer damage; that surface completely eradicated the bacteria, in some cases much more quickly than the untreated one. The surface killed some microbes immediately on contact and took from 40 minutes to two hours to wipe out a full colony, depending on the species and concentration.

Journal Reference:
Vidhya Selvamani, Amin Zareei, Ahmed Elkashif, et al. Hierarchical Micro/Mesoporous Copper Structure with Enhanced Antimicrobial Property via Laser Surface Texturing [$], Advanced Materials Interfaces (DOI: 10.1002/admi.201901890)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Holding its own against aerospace giants like pan-European Airbus Space or French-Italian Thales Alenia, German minnow OHB has carved out a space as a national champion in satellite building.

Its latest coup was claiming a hefty slice of business from contracts signed in early July by the European Space Agency (ESA) as it builds up its Earth observation programme known as Copernicus.

Among the six new satellites, an OHB-built orbiter will keep an eye on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions stemming from human activity over the coming decades.

The aim: offering policymakers the data they need to find ways of reducing greenhouse gas output.

"Some space missions are mostly relevant to science. At OHB, we like projects that help people in their everyday lives," chief executive Marco Fuchs told AFP.

Thales Alenia may have secured the lion's share of ESA orders this time around, but OHB is "ideally positioned" to play a role in "permanent observation of the Earth in environmental, climate and security terms", Fuchs said.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Airbnb-asks-people-to-donate-money-to-hosts-15407730.php

Airbnb's latest attempt to appease hosts and customers amid a tumultuous year was met with a searing backlash on social media.

The online vacation rental marketplace, headquartered in San Francisco, initiated a feature this week offering customers the chance to donate money and "kindness cards" to hosts.

"Today we're introducing a new way to connect with your favorite hosts. Now you can create personalized kindness cards that make it easy to send a message of appreciation or encouragement, with the option to add a contribution. We hope these cards will make hosts smile, and bring a little joy your way," a message from the company to customers read.

"Airbnb has lost its f---ing head, why would I donate to my host? I can't even afford one house." Twitter user olenskae fumed.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

How to spot 5 planets and the crescent moon without a telescope this weekend:

Comet Neowise isn't the only cosmic phenomenon visible in the sky this weekend. On Sunday, July 19, skywatchers will be able to look up and spot five planets and the crescent moon — all without even using a telescope.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the moon, will be close enough and bright enough to spot with the naked eye on Sunday, NASA said.

To see the show, you'll want to set an early alarm. You'll be able to spot the five planets plus the moon about 45 minutes before sunrise if you have a clear view of the horizon, according to astronomer Dr. Jeffrey Hunt.

Four of the five planets will appear like extremely bright stars. Venus will be visible low in the east-northeast, Mars in the south-southeast, and Jupiter and Saturn in the west-southwest, the Griffith Observatory said.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Emotet botnet surges back after months of absence:

The notorious Emotet went into the dark since February 2020, but now has surged back with a new massive spam campaign targeting users worldwide.

[...] "Today, Emotet suddenly surged back to life with reply-chain, shipping, payment, and invoice spam that deliver malicious Word documents spreadsheets." states BleepingComputer.

Malware researchers Joseph Roosen confirmed that limited activity associate with the botnet was observed earlier this week, botnet operators were using weaponized documents employing old URLs.

Roosen added that the Emotet botnet is now spewing forth massive amounts of spam employing new URLs pointing to compromised WordPress sites.

[...] Researchers from Cryptolaemus, a group of experts focused on analyzing Emotet, also confirmed Emotet's resurrection. Other research groups also observed a surge back of the botnet

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for GrandFireWizard:

Mask company makes custom coverings that look like your face:

With travel companies and countries around the world finally coming down on the side of mandatory facial coverings in public, many feel anxious that surgical masks eroding their individuality. Fortunately one artist turned-accidental-entrepreneur has come up with a solution to social hygiene that is as idiosyncratic as you are.

Unsurprisingly these custom 'Face ID Masks' began as a practical joke. With surgical masks printed to order from selfie photos, the company began taking orders on the website "Resting Risk Face.com" in June.

Using user submitted photos the company makes facial coverings that match your features and skin tone – with the pledge to make the wearer "more easily recognisable during viral pandemics."

The result is uncanny. Apparently the coverings are convincing enough to "unlock devices" using facial recognition.

For artist Danielle Baskin the project had started "just for fun".

Original Submission

DECbot writes:

Changes are coming to the Twitter API that should encourage new 3rd-party and bot development.
 
XDA-Developers reports:

As you may know, Twitter's API has caused a lot of friction for 3rd-party app developers. Numerous popular Twitter clients have been pulled from the Play Store in the past due to reaching the controversial 100,000 token limit. Back in 2018, Twitter made changes that removed key features from 3rd-party developers. Those changes went into effect later that year despite a campaign from the developers of popular apps. Some of those key features will finally be made available to developers again with API v2.
 
Here's Twitter's brief explanation of what's new in API v2:

• A cleaner API that's easier to use, with new developer features like the ability to specify which fields get returned, or retrieve more Tweets from a conversation within the same response.
• Some of the most requested features that were missing from the API, including conversation threading, poll results in Tweets, pinned Tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language.

The last bullet point is what fans of 3rd-party Twitter apps should be most excited about. It's pretty crazy to think that a 3rd-party client wasn't allowed to show polls, thread conversations, or show pinned tweets. These are basic features of the social media platform that anyone would expect to see in a Twitter client, and it only harmed the Twitter experience for users who weren't using the official app. We're glad to see Twitter has opened these features up.

 
The new API will replace the Standard (free), Premium (self-serve paid), and Enterprise tiers with product tracks titled "Standard," "Academic Research," and "Business." Each track will also include Basic, Elevated, or Custom access levels. The new product tracks are meant to remove restrictions and limitations imposed on developers by the older pricing model. Twitter expects the changes will encourage a resurgence of "fun little Twitter tools and bots" within the new Standard track that were harmed by the old pricing model and rate limits.

No pricing is available at this time, but the free Standard track is has already launched while the Business and Academic/Research tracks will arrive "soon." There is a public roadmap posted on Trello for those and developers interested in testing the new features can apply here.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Replacing lithium with sodium in batteries:

An international team of scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Academy of Science and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has found that instead of lithium (Li), sodium (Na) "stacked" in a special way can be used for battery production.

[...] They found that if the atoms inside the sample are "stacked" in a certain way, then alkali metals other than lithium also demonstrate high energy intensity. The most promising replacement for lithium is sodium (Na), since a two-layer arrangement of sodium atoms in bigraphen sandwich demonstrates anode capacity comparable to the capacity of a conventional graphite anode in Li-ion batteries—about 335 mA*h/g against 372 mA*h/g for lithium. However, sodium is much more common than lithium, and therefore cheaper and more easily obtained.

Journal Reference:
Ilya V. Chepkasov, Mahdi Ghorbani-Asl, Zakhar I. Popov, et al. Alkali metals inside bi-layer graphene and MoS2: Insights from first-principles calculations [open], Nano Energy (DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.104927)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have engineered the lightest optical mirror imaginable. The novel metamaterial is made of a single structured layer that consists only of a few hundred identical atoms. The atoms are arranged in the two dimensional array of an optical lattice formed by interfering laser beams. The research results are the first experimental observations of their kind in an only recently emerging new field of subwavelength quantum optics with ordered atoms. So far, the mirror is the only one of its kind. The results are today published in Nature.
...
The mirror works with identical atoms arranged in a two-dimensional array. They are ordered in a regular pattern with a spacing lower than the optical transition wavelength of the atom, both typical and necessary characteristics of metamaterials. Metamaterials are artificially designed structures with very specific properties that are rarely found naturally. They obtain their properties not from the materials they are made of but from the specific structures they are designed with. The characteristics—the regular pattern and the subwavelength spacing—and their interplay are the two crucial workings behind this novel kind of optical mirror. First of all, the regular pattern and the subwavelength spacing of atoms both suppress a diffuse scattering of light, bundling the reflection into a one-directional and steady beam of light. Second, because of the comparatively close and discrete distance between the atoms, an incoming photon can bounce back and forth between the atoms more than once before it is being reflected. Both effects, the suppressed scattering of light and the bouncing of the photons, lead to an "enhanced cooperative response to the external field," which means in this case: a very strong reflection.

The researchers anticipate the mirror will help study quantum optical phenomena.

Journal Reference:
Jun Rui, David Wei, Antonio Rubio-Abadal, et al. A subradiant optical mirror formed by a single structured atomic layer [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2463-x)

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DECbot writes:

Michael Larabel writes in Phoronix about Microsoft's new open-source process monitor for Linux:

Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software is ProcMon for Linux, a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite.
 
Microsoft's ProcMon tool is a C++-written, open-source process monitor for Linux that makes it convenient to trace system call activity. This ProcMon Linux version is open-source under an MIT license.
 
Microsoft released the source code to their ProcMon Linux version on Thursday and is marked as a 1.0 preview release. Microsoft is also making available a Debian/Ubuntu package of this preview build.

The Phoronix article includes a gif demonstrating ProcMon. To my amateur eyes, this looks like htop without the resource monitoring and instead has some stack tracing capabilities. Has anybody given Microsoft's ProcMon a test drive? What are your thoughts?

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

US Attorney General William Barr has accused Hollywood and US tech firms of "collaborating" with the Chinese government to do business there.

Companies like Disney routinely agreed to censor films while Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple were "all too willing" to work with Beijing, he said.

Such actions risked undermining the liberal world order, Mr Barr added.

His intervention is the latest criticism of China by White House and other US officials.

Tensions between the US and China have been rising over a host of issues. The US this week removed Hong Kong's preferential trade status, after China brought in a controversial new security law for the territory.

Does working with China mean freedoms are undermined elsewhere?

Also at the Hollywood Reporter. DoJ: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

Original Submission   Alternate Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Netflix has seen a surge in sign-ups due to the coronavirus lockdown, but has warned investors that subscriber growth will slow.

The streaming giant added more than 10 million subscribers in the three months to July, bringing the total of new subscribers to 26 million in 2020.

In contrast, Netflix saw 28 million new subscribers for the whole of 2019.

"Growth is slowing as consumers get through the initial shock of coronavirus and social restrictions."

Will Netflix's library expand to accommodate the growth in subscribers?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bright House Doesn't Directly Profit From Pirating Subscribers, Court Rules

A federal court in Florida has dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement claims against ISP Bright House Networks. The company is being sued by a group of prominent record labels who argue that the Internet provider directly profited from piracy. The court disagrees, characterizing the accusations as "a sort of 'dog-whistle' theory."

Last year a group of music industry giants, including Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros, sued Bright House Networks for failing to disconnect pirating subscribers.

Bright House is owned by Charter, which was sued in a separate complaint simultaneously. In both cases, the music companies demanded compensation for their alleged losses.

The lawsuits, which are part of a broader legal campaign against ISPs, have continued on their own paths since. Both Bright House and Charter submitted motions to dismiss the claims. For Bright House, this resulted in a victory late last week.

In February, the ISP submitted a motion to dismiss the vicarious copyright infringement claims. Bright House refuted the claim that it profited directly from pirating subscribers, something which the court now agrees.

Dismissal of vicarious liability claim (PDF).

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Cloudflare outage takes down Discord, Shopify, Politico and others – TechCrunch:

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected.

Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta:

We had an issue that impacted some portions of the @Cloudflare network. It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone. 1/2

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 17, 2020

[...] Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were all affected, giving an idea of the breadth of the issue. Not only were websites down but also some status pages meant to provide warnings and track outages. In at least one case, even the status page for the status page was down.

Also at:
Cloudflare outage cuts off connections to Discord, DownDetector and others
The Cloudflare Blog

Original Submission