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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Radishes Can Likely Grow in Lunar Regolith - Universe Today:

“We’re trying to show astronauts can use horticulture to grow their own food on the Moon,” said NASA scientist Max Coleman. “We want to do one tiny step in that direction, to show that lunar soil contains stuff which can be extracted from it as nutrients for plants.”

They were about to start doing hands-on tests of soil sensors that might eventually be used on the Moon when the stay-at-home orders were issued. While the team wasn’t able to bring home any lunar simulant or the soil sensors, Coleman decided to innovate. He placed an order online for some desert sand, which doesn’t have any organic matter, so is a good stand-in for the lunar regolith simulant.

[...] He decided to use radish seeds, and ordered them online for home delivery, too.

[...] Also, radishes don’t require a lot of water to germinate, so they provide a good test of what could grow quickly in one lunar day, (28 days, with 14 straight days of sunlight.)

[...] The results were quite surprising: Radishes in the section with the least water germinated first and best, which was interesting because, Coleman said, “we want to see how little water we can get away with.”

The team’s research is helping them develop a small scientific payload on a commercial spacecraft going to the Moon, which, if selected, would be delivered to the lunar surface through the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. The team planned to develop the experiment as a suitable payload for a CLPS spacecraft in terms of size, mass, power requirement, and communication needs.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

You Can Now Boot a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft and Play Doom on it:

A new VM Computers mod has been created for Minecraft that allows players to order computer parts from a satellite orbiting around a Minecraft world and build a computer that actually boots Windows 95 and a variety of other operating systems.

[...] Within Minecraft you simply place a PC case block and then use it to create virtual hard drives to install operating systems from ISO files.

Naturally, the Minecraft community has been experimenting with the VM Computers mod, and someone has managed to get Doom running within Minecraft as a result.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Garden gnomes keep mysteriously vanishing from a B.C. neighbourhood:

TORONTO -- Neighbours in Victoria are keeping a closer eye on their gardens following a string of garden gnome thefts in the quiet neighbourhood.

Heather Boggs said she realized several of her gnomes had been stolen last Friday when she went to tend to her garden in the West Shore community and saw empty spaces where she would normally find her gnomes.

[...] Luckily the gnome-snatcher was caught in the act as Boggs' doorbell camera filmed the kidnapping as it happened.

[...] Boggs shared the footage on Facebook to warn others and found that her neighbour who lives on the same street had also been targeted.

Sher Gosling told CTV News she believes the same man stole her gnome that would usually welcome guests in front of her home.

[...] While these mythical figures might not seem valuable, for Boggs, one gnome in particular meant a great deal. Boggs is a breast cancer survivor and, as a gift to celebrate her final chemo treatment, her mother gave her a little statue for her garden.

This is, of course, not the first time a gnome has been stolen. Here's one escapade from May 11, 1989.

Stolen Lawn Dwarf Returned with Pictures from His Travels:

Grumpy the traveling lawn dwarf is back where he belongs, concrete feet planted firmly on the porch, following his whirlwind tour of Washington, New York City, Florida and elsewhere.

He even has pictures from his vacation.

takyon writes:

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon's U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public (archive)

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation's intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was "to standardize collection and reporting" on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.

While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

The lede has been buried for your protection. Do not RTFA.

Previously: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO
The US Navy is Drafting New Rules to Report UFO Sightings
US Navy Spokesman Acknowledges UFO Videos
The Pentagon Releases Official Footage of UFOs. No, Seriously!

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

Inventor Builds Functioning Haircutting Robot - Nerdist:

We all have a special relationship with our personal barber or hairstylist. There's a certain level of trust and intimacy required to let someone consistently operate sharp instruments near our head and face. However, a global pandemic made us realize they are truly among the most important people in our lives. We need them. We. Need. Them. And one man's ingenious invention has proven just how true that is. He built an impressive, complicated machine that gives haircuts. But the insane amount of work required to build one isn't the main reason it's inferior to an actual human. Nor is it the obvious safety issues and incomplete haircut it provides. It's not even the fact that it's basically an advanced Flowbee.

It's the impersonal small talk.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

As Evidence of 'Hormone Disruptor' Chemical Threats Grows, Experts Call for Stricter Regulation:

A growing number of chemicals in pesticides, flame retardants, and certain plastics have been linked to widespread health problems including infertility in women and men, diabetes, and impaired brain development, a set of reviews of hundreds of studies concludes.

[...] Published online July 21 in the journal The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the new reports focused on the health concerns and regulations to control "chemicals of concern," endocrine disruptors common in industrial and household goods. These include perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), toxins found in nonstick pans and waterproof clothing, and bisphenols, substances used in many plastics and can linings.

Exposure to certain chemicals found in industrial and household goods has been linked in new studies to obesity; to endometriosis, a painful and abnormal growth of tissue on the outside of the womb; and to polycystic ovary syndrome, a significant cause of infertility.

The recent reviews add 17 ties between certain medical conditions and endocrine disruptors to a list of 15 others already identified by a 2015 joint investigation led by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. For example, new findings suggest that PFAS, bisphenols, and certain pesticides may damage semen. In addition, the review identifies numerous new studies that link brain-related health concerns, such as IQ loss and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to flame retardants and chemicals found in certain pesticides.

Journal Reference:
Linda G Kahn, Claire Philippat, Shoji F Nakayama, et al. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: implications for human health, The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology (DOI: 10.1016/S2213-8587(20)30129-7)

Christopher D Kassotis, Laura N Vandenberg, Barbara A Demeneix, et al. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: economic, regulatory, and policy implications, The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology (DOI: 10.1016/S2213-8587(20)30128-5)

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aristarchus writes:

More interesting science from PsyPost,

New research has found that people with "dark" personality characteristics, such as psychopathy and narcissism, are less likely to comply with efforts to impede the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and more likely to stockpile goods such as food and toilet paper.

Two new studies, both published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, reinforce previous findings that the "Dark Triad" of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism is associated with ignoring preventative COVID-19 measures.

But the new research indicates that health beliefs and situational perceptions may play a more important role than personality traits alone.

Dark Enlightenment, or Dark Triads?

Journal References:
Bartlomiej Nowak, Pawel Brzoska, Jarosław Piotrowski, et al. Adaptive and maladaptive behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of Dark Triad traits, collective narcissism, and health beliefs, Personality and Individual Differences (DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2020.110232)

Marcin Zajenkowski, Peter K. Jonason, Maria Leniarska, et al. Who complies with the restrictions to reduce the spread of COVID-19?: Personality and perceptions of the COVID-19 situation [open], Personality and Individual Differences (DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2020.110199)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Coral Reefs Show Resilience to Rising Temperatures:

Rising ocean temperatures have devastated coral reefs all over the world, but a recent study in Global Change Biology has found that reefs in the Eastern Tropical Pacific [ETP] region may prove to be an exception. The findings, which suggest that reefs in this area may have adapted to heat stress, could provide insights about the potential for survival of reefs in other parts of the world. The study was published in print in July.

"Our 44-year study shows that the amount of living coral has not changed in the ETP," said James W. Porter, the paper's senior author. "Live coral cover has gone up and down in response to El Niño-induced bleaching, but unlike reefs elsewhere in the Caribbean and Indo Pacific, reefs in the ETP almost always bounce back," he said.

[...] They hypothesized that several key factors allowed the ETP reefs to bounce back.

First, corals in this area are mostly pocilloporids, a type of coral that reproduces at high rates. They also contain species of symbiotic algae that are particularly tolerant to extreme temperatures.

Patterns of weather and geography in the ETP may also play a role. Areas having heavier cloud cover or upwelling of cooler waters may survive locally and be able to reseed more severely affected reefs elsewhere.

Another important factor may be "ecological memory," meaning that ETP corals may have become conditioned to heat stress over the years, through mechanisms such as genetic adaptation and epigenetic inheritance, whereby parents pass on these survival traits to their offspring.

Journal Reference:
Mauricio Romero‐Torres, Alberto Acosta, Ana M. Palacio‐Castro, et al. Coral reef resilience to thermal stress in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, Global Change Biology (DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15126)

Encouraging news, but will coral reefs in other regions eventually follow suit?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch:

It takes about two years for Corning to develop each new generation of Gorilla Glass, the resilient material that graces a critical mass of smartphones. That process has for several update cycles focused on protecting screens against drops, fending off shatters and cracks by boosting what's known as compressive strength. The newly announced Gorilla Glass Victus, though, gives equal weight to preventing scratches. That's harder than it sounds and more useful than you'd think.

[...] There's also the fact that making glass that's both scratch and drop resistant is, well, hard. The manufacture of glass is often a game of compromise, which you can see most clearly in the quest for durable foldable phones: the stronger it is, the less it can bend. In this case, getting those two properties to play nice is less a direct contradiction than it is a process of reinvention.

Phone screens had previously been designed to resist drops, but with consumers upgrading their phones less frequently scratch-resistance has grown in importance.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

How many hot dogs can a human possibly eat? Science finally has an answer:

How many hot dogs do you think you could eat in one sitting?

You know, if you had to?

Fortunately, science has now provided an answer. Researchers analyzed 39 years of data from the annual Nathan's Famous Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest[*] and, using mathematical modeling, calculated the maximum number of hot dogs one person could possibly eat during the contest's 10-minute duration. The new study published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters.

The answer, it turns out, is 84.

[*] Contest web site and Hall of Fame.

Journal Reference:
James M. Smoliga. Modelling the maximal active consumption rate and its plasticity in humans, Biology Letters (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0096)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Slack has filed an antitrust complaint over Microsoft Teams in the EU – TechCrunch:

Workplace instant messaging platform Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing the tech giant of unfairly bundling its rival Teams product with its cloud-based productivity suite.

A spokeswoman for the Commission's competition division confirmed receipt of a complaint, telling us via email: "We confirm that we received a complaint by Slack against Microsoft. We will assess it under our standard procedures."

We've also reached out to Microsoft and Slack for comment.

Per the FT, which has a statement from Slack, the company is accusing Microsoft of illegally abusing its market power by tying its competing product, Teams, to its dominant enterprise suite, Microsoft 365.

"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers," Slack said in the statement.

In further comments to the newspaper, Slack executives said they're asking EU regulators to move quickly "to ensure Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its power from one market to another by bundling or tying products."

Slack told the newspaper it wants the Windows maker to be forced to sell Teams separately to Microsoft 365 customers at a separate price, rather than bundling it with the existing suite and absorbing the cost.

[...] For longtime tech watchers, Microsoft being accused of unfairly bundling in the EU will of course bring back plenty of memories. Although, most recently, the tech giant has been making hay out of Apple being put under formal antitrust probe in the region — with president Brad Smith claiming in a Politico video interview last month that Cupertino's app store walls are "higher" and "more formidable" than anything it threw up in years past.

Reminder: All the way back in 2004, EU antitrust regulators slapped Microsoft with the (then) biggest ever fine — around a half billion euros — for abusing a near monopoly position with its desktop OS, Windows, to try to crush competitors in the digital media player and low-end server market. So, er...

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Hackers actively exploit high-severity networking vulnerabilities:

Hackers are actively exploiting two unrelated high-severity vulnerabilities that allow unauthenticated access or even a complete takeover of networks run by Fortune 500 companies and government organizations.

The most serious exploits are targeting a critical vulnerability in F5's Big-IP advanced delivery controler, a device that's typically placed between a perimeter firewall and a Web application to handle load balancing and other tasks. The vulnerability, which F5 patched three weeks ago, allows unauthenticated attackers to remotely run commands or code of their choice. Attackers can then use their control of the device to hijack the internal network it's connected to.

[...] Attackers are exploiting a second vulnerability found in two network products sold by Cisco. Tracked as CVE-2020-3452, the path traversal flaw resides in the company's Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense systems. It allows unauthenticated people to remotely view sensitive files that among other things can disclose WebVPN configurations, bookmarks, web cookies, partial web content, and HTTP URLs. Cisco issued a patch on Wednesday. A day later, it updated its advisory.

[...] The impact of these vulnerabilities—particularly the one affecting F5 customers—is serious. These in-the-wild attacks provide ample reason to occupy the weekend of any IT administrators who have yet to patch their vulnerable systems.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

i thought it was lobsters

Crown-of-thorns starfish 'cockroach of the ocean' and much more resilient than previously thought - ABC News:

It's hard to comprehend the destruction this ethereal creature could do in its lifetime — a juvenile crown-of-thorns starfish, raised in a lab where researchers have discovered worrying new findings about its progression into adulthood.

Research published today from the University of Sydney and Southern Cross University's National Marine Science Centre in Coffs Harbour has found the crown-of-thorns starfish will eat a much more varied diet as juveniles than previously thought, making them worryingly resilient.

As juveniles the crown-of-thorns starfish are vegetarian, favouring a particular type of algae.

But the study found they they would eat much more in order to survive.

"We initially thought that they only ate crustose coralline algae but we found that they can also eat biofilm, which is a mixture of diatoms, bacteria, and other microorganisms that grow pretty much everywhere in the ocean," Dr Mos said.

The findings offer a significant change in thought on the life cycle of the crown-of-thorns starfish, and raises the spectre of it being a much more dangerous predator.

Journal Reference:
Dione J. Deaker, Benjamin Mos, Huang-An Lin, et al. Diet flexibility and growth of the early herbivorous juvenile crown-of-thorns sea star, implications for its boom-bust population dynamics, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236142)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

brexit means brexit

UK formally abandons Europe's Unified Patent Court, Germany plans to move forward nevertheless:

The UK has formally ditched the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a project to create a single pan-European patent system that would fix the confusing mess of contradictory laws currently in place.

In a written statement in the House of Commons on Monday, the British undersecretary for science, research and innovation Amanda Solloway noted that: "Today, by means of a Note Verbale, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has withdrawn its ratification of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court."

The reason is, of course Brexit. "In view of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, the United Kingdom no longer wishes to be a party to the Unified Patent Court system. Participating in a court that applies EU law and is bound by the CJEU would be inconsistent with the Government's aims of becoming an independent self-governing nation," she said.

[...] The whole idea of the UPC has been fought for over a decade now, making many its adherents borderline fanatical in making it a reality, even more so given frequent setbacks. In their unerring support, however, many seem willing to overlook or turn a blind eye to serious problems, not least of which is the mess that is the European Patent Office (EPO).

[...] The EPO is, of course, a big fan of the UPC and insists the UK leaving is a mere trifle to the larger European dream of a single patent system; a system that would give it significantly more power:

"These economic benefits for European companies and especially SMEs will not be affected by the announcement of the United Kingdom," it insisted in its submission to the German government.

"Even without the UK, the UP package will lead to significant simplification and cost reduction for the companies of the participating EU member states, which is also largely recognized by European companies."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

World's smallest imaging device can 3D-scan inside your blood vessels:

An Australian/German team has developed the world's smallest imaging device, at the thickness of a human hair. It's capable of travelling down the blood vessels of mice, offering unprecedented abilities to 3D-scan the body at microscopic resolutions.

[...] With this breakthrough, the team has built an OCT scanning device small enough to be pushed through blood vessels in the body. This ultra-thin probe can be rotated and slowly pulled backwards to build up a 3D map of its surroundings to a depth around half a millimeter below the surface. It offers unprecedented abilities to scan the vascular system of the body for the plaques, made up of fats, cholesterol and other substances, that tend to build up in blood vessel walls and lead to heart disease.

The team performed successful tests of the device in both human and mouse blood vessels, demonstrating its ability to deliver quality OCT images and the flexibility to get where it needs to go in the body. Its precisely printed lens allows the scanner to image depths five times deeper than previous attempts, and the researchers believe this tiny probe could open up new scanning options in hard-to-reach places like the cochlea of the ear and potentially even parts of the nervous system.

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