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Targeted treatment for depression could benefit patients with psychosis:

According to scientists at the University of Birmingham's Institute for Mental Health, depression may be an intrinsic part of early phase psychotic disorders that should be treated together with other more prominent symptoms to improve patient outcomes.

Depression is often identified alongside psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia in the early stages of the disorder, but is not currently routinely treated. In a new study, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, the researchers set out to find out more about the associations between depression and psychosis, and particularly whether there were similarities in brain structure that could help future diagnostic pathways at an early stage.

Data was gathered from 1700 patients as part of the PRONIA study, a largescale European study which uses machine learning to find ways to predict how people with recent onset psychosis might recover.

[...] Their results showed that, in fact, there was little difference in either the patients' depressive symptoms or in the structural brain changes in patients with depression, with and without psychosis. This shows that there is no subgroup of patients with both depression and psychosis, but rather that depression may be an intrinsic part of a majority of patients' psychosis.

The team argue their findings show that treatments focused on depression may well be an effective additional first-line treatment for psychosis, to be given alongside regular interventions.

[...] The team has already embarked on a clinical trial to test the approach in patients. The ADEPP trial will test people in the first stages of psychosis who take anti-depressants alongside anti-psychotic drugs. The trial will assess over a six month period whether the anti-depressants have an effect on the patients' ability to recover from their psychosis.

Journal Reference:
Upthegrove, Rachel, Lalousis, Paris, Mallikarjun, Pavan, et al. Psychopathology and Neuroanatomical Markers of Depression in Early Psychosis, Schizophrenia Bulletin (DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbaa094)

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martyb writes:

No limit yet for carbon nanotube fibers:

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Matteo Pasquali reported in Carbon it has developed its strongest and most conductive fibers yet, made of long carbon nanotubes through a wet spinning process.

[...] "The goal of this paper is to put forth the record properties of the fibers produced in our lab," Taylor said. "These improvements mean we're now surpassing Kevlar in terms of strength, which for us is a really big achievement. With just another doubling, we would surpass the strongest fibers on the market."

The flexible Rice fibers have a tensile strength of 4.2 gigapascals (GPa), compared to 3.6 GPa for Kevlar fibers. The fibers require long nanotubes with high crystallinity; that is, regular arrays of carbon-atom rings with few defects. The acidic solution used in the Rice process also helps reduce impurities that can interfere with fiber strength and enhances the nanotubes' metallic properties through residual doping, Dewey said.

"The length, or aspect ratio, of the nanotubes is the defining characteristic that drives the properties in our fibers," he said, noting the surface area of the 12-micrometer nanotubes used in Rice fiber facilitates better van der Waals bonds. "It also helps that the collaborators who grow our nanotubes optimize for solution processing by controlling the number of metallic impurities from the catalyst and what we call amorphous carbon impurities."

The researchers said the fibers' conductivity has improved to 10.9 megasiemens (million siemens) per meter. "This is the first time a carbon nanotube fiber has passed the 10 megasiemens threshold, so we've achieved a new order of magnitude for nanotube fibers," Dewey said. Normalized for weight, he said the Rice fibers achieve about 80% of the conductivity of copper.

"But we're surpassing platinum wire, which is a big achievement for us," Taylor said, "and the fiber thermal conductivity is better than any metal and any synthetic fibers, except for pitch graphite fibers."

I wonder how useful the thermal conductivity would be in cooling computer chips?

Journal Reference:
Lauren W. Taylor, Oliver S. Dewey, Robert J. Headrick, et al. Improved Properties, Increased Production, and the Path to Broad Adoption of Carbon Nanotube Fibers, Carbon (DOI: 10.1016/j.carbon.2020.07.058)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Ariane 5 Rocket Launches 3 Spacecraft Into Orbit From Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana:

Europe's Ariane 5 has delivered two telecom satellites Galaxy-30 and BSAT-4B, and the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-2), into their planned transfer orbits. There are also four notable updates to the launch vehicle.

Arianespace announced liftoff at 23:04 BST (00:04 CEST, 19:04 local time) this evening from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, for a mission lasting about 47 minutes.

Galaxy-30, with a launch mass of 3298 kg, was the first to be released after about 27 minutes. The 2875 kg MEV-2, also housed in the upper berth of the fairing, was released about seven minutes later.

Following a series of burns controlled by Ariane's computer, the Sylda structure encasing the 3530 kg BSAT-4B was then jettisoned. BSAT-4B was released into its own transfer orbit about thirteen minutes after MEV-2.

[...] This is the first launch following the restart of operational activities at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, after the suspension of launch campaigns that was imposed on 16 March 2020 due to COVID-19 measures.

[...] Flight VA253 was the 109th Ariane 5 mission.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

British police to trial facial recognition system that detects your mood:

A British police force is set to trial a facial recognition system that infers people's moods by analyzing CCTV footage.

Lincolnshire Police will be able to use the system to search the film for certain moods and facial expressions, the London Times reports. It will also allow cops to find people wearing hats and glasses, or carrying bags and umbrellas.

The force has got funding from the Home Office to test the tool in the market town of Gainsborough, but ethical concerns have delayed the pilot's launch.

A police spokesperson told the Times that all the footage will be deleted after 31 days. The force will also carry out a human rights and privacy assessment before the trial gets the green light.

[...] "At the same time as these technologies are being rolled out, large numbers of studies are showing that there is... no substantial evidence that people have this consistent relationship between the emotion that you are feeling and the way that your face looks," AI Now's co-founder Prof Kate Crawford told the BBC late last year.

Could it be it was thrown off because everyone had a stiff upper lip?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Secret Service bought location data pulled from common apps:

The Secret Service paid a private company for access to location data generated by common smartphone apps, Motherboard reports. Internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the agency spent $35,844 for a one-year subscription to Babel Street's product Locate X, which tracks the location of devices via data harvested from popular apps.

As Motherboard notes, the glaring issue with this contract is that it allows the law enforcement agency to buy information that it would normally need a warrant or a court order to obtain.

[...] In March, Protocol reported that US Customs and Border Protection purchased Locate X, and a former Babel Street employee told Protocol that the Secret Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using the location-tracking tech. But Motherboard has the first confirmation that the Secret Service did in fact purchase Locate X.

[...] Senator Ron Wyden is reportedly planning legislation to block law enforcement from purchasing products like Locate X.

"It is clear that multiple federal agencies have turned to purchasing Americans' data to buy their way around Americans' Fourth Amendment Rights. I'm drafting legislation to close this loophole, and ensure the Fourth Amendment isn't for sale," Wyden said in a statement provided to Motherboard.

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[20200818_144907 UTC: Update 1: Launch successful, Booster landing successful, Deployment of all 3 of Planet's SkySats successful. Starlink deployment due in about 10 minutes at approximately T+26:00.]

[20200818_150438 UTC: Starlink satellites deployment due shortly (had bad info on deployment time).]

[20200818_151940 UTC: Starlink satellite deployment successful at T+46:00. One fairing was successfully caught by "Ms Tree"; the other fairing made a soft landing in the water and is being retrieved by "Ms Chief".]

[Note: this story is in addition to our usually-scheduled stories; ignore it if you are not interested. --martyb]

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

This Twist on Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox Has Major Implications for Quantum Theory:

What does it feel like to be both alive and dead?

That question irked and inspired Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. He was frustrated by the paradoxes arising from the vagaries of quantum mechanics—the theory governing the microscopic realm that suggests, among many other counterintuitive things, that until a quantum system is observed, it does not necessarily have definite properties. Take his fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment in which a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. Radioactivity is a quantum process, so before the box is opened, the story goes, the atom has both decayed and not decayed, leaving the unfortunate cat in limbo—a so-called superposition between life and death. But does the cat experience being in superposition?

Wigner sharpened the paradox by imagining a (human) friend of his shut in a lab, measuring a quantum system. He argued it was absurd to say his friend exists in a superposition of having seen and not seen a decay unless and until Wigner opens the lab door. "The 'Wigner's friend' thought experiment shows that things can become very weird if the observer is also observed," says Nora Tischler, a quantum physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Now Tischler and her colleagues have carried out a version of the Wigner's friend test. By combining the classic thought experiment with another quantum head-scratcher called entanglement—a phenomenon that links particles across vast distances—they have also derived a new theorem, which they claim puts the strongest constraints yet on the fundamental nature of reality. Their study, which appeared in Nature Physics on August 17, has implications for the role that consciousness might play in quantum physics—and even whether quantum theory must be replaced.

Journal Reference:
Kok-Wei Bong, Aníbal Utreras-Alarcón, Farzad Ghafari, et al. A strong no-go theorem on the Wigner’s friend paradox, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0990-x)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

New IBM POWER10 processor has transparent memory encryption for end-to-end security - Help Net Security:

IBM revealed the next generation of its IBM POWER CPU family: IBM POWER10. Designed to offer a platform to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing, the IBM POWER10 processor uses a design focused on energy efficiency and performance in a 7nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM's roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news-ai-blog

College student Liam Porr used the language-generating AI tool GPT-3 to produce a fake blog post that recently landed in the No. 1 spot on Hacker News, MIT Technology Review reported. Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing it was written by a human. And, he told MIT Technology Review, "it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part."

So to set the stage in case you're not familiar with GPT-3: It's the latest version of a series of AI autocomplete tools designed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, and has been in development for several years. At its most basic, GPT-3 (which stands for "generative pre-trained transformer") auto-completes your text based on prompts from a human writer.

[...] OpenAI decided to give access to GPT-3's API to researchers in a private beta, rather than releasing it into the wild at first. Porr, who is a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley, was able to find a PhD student who already had access to the API, who agreed to work with him on the experiment. Porr wrote a script that gave GPT-3 a blog post headline and intro. It generated a few versions of the post, and Porr chose one for the blog, copy-pasted from GPT-3's version with very little editing.

The post went viral in a matter of a few hours, Porr said, and the blog had more than 26,000 visitors. He wrote that only one person reached out to ask if the post was AI-generated, although several commenters did guess GPT-3 was the author.

Previously:
(2020-08-14) OpenAI's New Language Generator GPT-3 is Shockingly Good

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

NASA's Asteroid Mission Completes Final Test Before Sampling Run - ExtremeTech:

On August 11th, OSIRIS-REx completed its second dress rehearsal for the real deal. The spacecraft fired its engines to leave the "safe home orbit" and descend to around 410 feet (125 meters) above the surface. On the way down, OSIRIS-REx matched Bennu's rotation and came to an altitude of just 131 feet (40 meters) above Nightingale [crater]. In the video above[*], you can see Nightingale come into view at the top of the frame near the end. At that point, the engines fired again to move OSIRIS-REx back into a safe orbit.

With the practice runs complete, the team can focus all its efforts on the October 20th sample collection operation. On that day, OSIRIS-REx will drop all the way down and kiss the surface of Bennu with its sampling arm. A puff of nitrogen gas will (hopefully) launch particles from Bennu into the sample container. NASA hopes to collect about 60 grams of material from Bennu. Following the collection, OSIRIS-REx will head back to Earth with its precious cargo. The return capsule is currently scheduled to land in September 2023.

[*] Video on YouTube.

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takyon writes:

Intel shared a number of product announcements at its Intel Architecture Day 2020, and later, at Hot Chips 2020.

Intel's upcoming "Tiger Lake" mobile processors will improve performance with "Willow Cove" cores (a small IPC gain from "Sunny Cove", but higher clock speeds), and feature Intel Xe integrated graphics with up to 96 execution units. The chips use an upgraded "10nm" process Intel calls "10nm SuperFin", indicating improvements to the FinFET transistor technology. Intel claims this is the "largest single intranode enhancement in Intel history", with a 17-18% transistor performance jump from their original "10nm" node (and most elusive one?).

Intel's Alder Lake hybrid/heterogeneous desktop CPUs are set to be released in 2021. These will use a big/small core configuration that first appeared in Intel's Lakefield, and is similar to ARM's big.LITTLE (which was redesigned for more flexibility as DynamIQ). Alder Lake will use big "Golden Cove" cores which are the successor to Sunny/Willow Cove, and "Gracemont" Atom cores. Leaks point to configurations topping out at "8+8" (8 big cores, 8 small cores).

Intel plans to launch a high-performance discrete "Xe-HPG" GPU for gamers in 2021, but will use a third-party fab to build it. The GPUs will support real-time ray-tracing, like Nvidia and AMD's next-generation GPUs. Leaks indicate that TSMC will build the GPUs, using a "6nm" node.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Scientists determine 'Oumuamua isn't made from molecular hydrogen ice after all:

The debate over the origins and molecular structure of 'Oumuamua continued today with an announcement in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that despite earlier promising claims, the interstellar object is not made of molecular hydrogen ice after all.

The earlier study, published by Seligman & Laughlin in 2020—after observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope set tight limits on the outgassing of carbon-based molecules—suggested that if 'Oumuamua were a hydrogen iceberg, then the pure hydrogen gas that gives it its rocket-like push would have escaped detection. But scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) were curious whether a hydrogen-based object could actually have made the journey from interstellar space to our solar system.

"The proposal by Seligman and Laughlin appeared promising because it might explain the extreme elongated shape of 'Oumuamua as well as the non-gravitational acceleration. However, their theory is based on an assumption that H2 ice could form in dense molecular clouds. If this is true, H2 ice objects could be abundant in the universe, and thus would have far-reaching implications. H2 ice was also proposed to explain dark matter, a mystery of modern astrophysics," said Dr. Thiem Hoang, senior researcher in the theoretical astrophysics group at KASI and lead author on the paper. "We wanted to not only test the assumptions in the theory but also the dark matter proposition." Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Professor of Science at Harvard and co-author on the paper, added, "We were suspicious that hydrogen icebergs could not survive the journey—which is likely to take hundreds of millions of years—because they evaporate too quickly, and as to whether they could form in molecular clouds."

Journal Reference:
Thiem Hoang, Abraham Loeb. Destruction of Molecular Hydrogen Ice and Implications for 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua) [open], The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/abab0c)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/charter-can-charge-online-video-sites-for-network-connections-court-rules/

Charter can charge Netflix and other online video streaming services for network interconnection despite a merger condition prohibiting the practice, a federal appeals court ruled today.

The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturns two merger conditions that the Obama administration imposed on Charter when it bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016. The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai did not defend the merits of the merger conditions in court, paving the way for today's ruling. The case was decided in a 2-1 vote by a panel of three DC Circuit judges.

[...] The case turned largely on the question of whether the consumers who sued had standing to challenge the conditions. Even if other factors besides interconnection contributed to the price increases, "the subscribers need not show that prohibiting paid interconnection agreements caused the entirety of the price increases, or even that it caused price increases of some specific amount," judges wrote. "For standing purposes, even a small financial injury is enough, and the consumers have shown a substantial likelihood that their bills are higher because of the prohibition on paid interconnection agreements."

[...] Charter told the FCC in a filing that it doesn't "currently" plan to impose data caps or charge video providers for interconnection, but the company wants the prohibitions lifted because they "put Charter at a competitive disadvantage" and "forc[e] Charter to run its network based on arbitrary merger conditions instead of market conditions." Charter's filing also claimed that broadband plans with data caps are "often popular" with consumers.

[...] Wood [VP of policy at consumer-advocacy group Free Press] pointed to a Free Press filing to the FCC that he said shows "Charter was delivering better value and getting better financial results for itself than any other big wired ISP. So the notion that either Charter or its customers have suffered from the conditions is a joke, as is any claim by the litigants that unconditioned mergers and monopolies are somehow better for people."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

ATM Hackers Have Picked Up Some Clever New Tricks:

At last week's Black Hat and Defcon security conferences, researchers dug through recent evolutions in ATM hacking. Criminals have increasingly tuned their malware to manipulate even niche proprietary bank software to cash out ATMs, while still incorporating the best of the classics—including uncovering new remote attacks to target specific ATMs.

During Black Hat, Kevin Perlow, the technical threat intelligence team lead at a large, private financial institution, analyzed two cash-out tactics that represent different current approaches to jackpotting. One looked at the ATM malware known as INJX_Pure, first seen in spring 2019. INJX_Pure manipulates both the eXtensions for Financial Services (XFS) interface—which supports basic features on an ATM, like running and coordinating the PIN pad, card reader, and cash dispenser—and a bank's proprietary software together to cause jackpotting.

[...] Perlow also looked at FASTCash malware, used in jackpotting campaigns that the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency attributed to North Korean hackers in October 2018. North Korea has used the malware to cash out tens of millions of dollars around the world, which coordinated groups of money mules then collect and launder. FASTCash targets not the ATMs themselves but a financial card transaction standard known as ISO-8583. The malware infects software running on what are known as "payment switches," finance infrastructure devices that run systems responsible for tracking and reconciling information from ATMs and responses from banks. By infecting one of these switches rather than attacking an individual ATM, FASTCash attacks can coordinate cash-outs from dozens of ATMs at once.

"If you can do this, then you no longer have to put malware on 500 ATMs," Perlow says. "That's the advantage, why it’s so clever."

[...] "What has fundamentally changed between when Barnaby Jack presented and now?" Red Balloon's Cui says. "The same types of attacks that would have worked against laptops and laptop operating systems 15 years ago largely wouldn't work now. We've leveled up. So why is it that the machine that holds the money has not evolved? That’s incredible to me."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/fcc-beats-cities-in-court-helping-carriers-avoid-2-billion-in-local-5g-fees/

The Federal Communications Commission has defeated dozens of cities in court, with judges ruling that the FCC can preempt local fees and regulations imposed on wireless carriers deploying 5G networks. The ruling is good news for AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

The FCC voted to preempt cities and towns in September 2018, saying the move would prevent local governments from charging wireless carriers about $2 billion worth of fees over five years related to deployment of wireless equipment such as small cells. That's less than 1 percent of the estimated $275 billion that the FCC said carriers would have to spend to deploy 5G small cells throughout the United States.

Cities promptly sued the FCC, but a ruling issued [Wednesday] by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit went mostly in the FCC's favor. It wasn't a complete victory for the FCC, though, as judges overturned a portion of the FCC ruling that limited the kinds of aesthetic requirements cities and towns can impose on carrier deployments.

"The court rightly affirmed the FCC's efforts to ensure that infrastructure deployment critical to 5G... is not impeded by exorbitant fees imposed by state and local governments, undue delays in local permitting, and unreasonable barriers to pole access," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said, calling the court decision "a massive victory for US leadership in 5G, our nation's economy, and American consumers."

On the losing side were localities including Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; New York City; Los Angeles; Boston; Chicago; Washington, DC; Las Vegas; Philadelphia; Austin, Texas; and others.

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