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takyon writes:

Apple threatens to boot Epic—including Unreal Engine—off Mac and iOS

The new legal battle between game developer Epic and iPhone-maker Apple continues to heat up, as Epic says Apple will be cutting it off from the developer platform for Mac and iOS before the end of this month.

Epic wrote in a court filing (PDF) that Apple said its membership in the Developer Program will be terminated as of August 28. According to Epic, Apple's move threatens not only Fortnite but also every game that uses Unreal Engine: "By August 28, Apple will cut off Epic's access to all development tools necessary to create software for Apple's platforms—including for the Unreal Engine Epic offers to third-party developers, which Apple has never claimed violated any Apple policy," Epic said.

How Apple's battle with Epic Games could affect hundreds of other games beyond Fortnite

If Apple disables Epic's developer account, then the company won't be able to maintain the Unreal Engine for iPhones and other Apple computers. Unreal is a long-standing set of technologies for displaying 3D graphics. Other game-makers license it from Epic so they don't have to re-build the same functions from scratch, and it's used in many popular games, although it's more popular on consoles and PCs than for mobile games.

Also at The Verge and VentureBeat.

Previously:
Fortnite Maker Sues Apple after Removal of Game From App Store

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takyon writes:

Hot Chips 2020: Marvell Details ThunderX3 CPUs - Up to 60 Cores Per Die, 96 Dual-Die in 2021

Today as part of HotChips 2020 we saw Marvell finally reveal some details on the microarchitecture of their new ThunderX3 server CPUs and core microarchitectures. The company had announced the existence of the new server and infrastructure processor back in March, and is now able to share more concrete specifications about how the in-house CPU design team promises to distinguish itself from the quickly growing competition that is the Arm server market.

[...] Marvell started off the HotChips presentation with a roadmap of its products, detailing that the ThunderX3 generation isn't merely just a single design, but actually represents a flexible approach using multiple dies, with the first generation 60-core CN110xx SKUs using a single die as a monolithic design in 2020, and next year seeing the release of a 96-core dual-die variant aiming for higher performance.

The use of a dual-die approach like this is very interesting as it represents a mid-point between a completely monolithic design, and a chiplet approach from vendors such as AMD. Each die here is identical in the sense that it can be used independently as standalone products.

Some details about the CPUs and the 4-way SMT were given in the presentation. TDPs will range from 100 Watts to 240 Watts.

Previously: Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads

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Phoenix666 writes:

Electric car charging stations head to Love's Travel Stops across the US:

[Electrify America] announced Tuesday a new collaborative effort with Love's to install charging stations at its stops across the US. Five locations are already open as of today in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Utah and Florida. Crucially, the stops now open helped complete a nationwide charging route from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.

The new stations will charge at rates up to 350 kilowatts and can add up to 20 miles of range per minute. Ultimately, Electrify America's goal is to continue chipping away at America's range anxiety about electric cars. With more places to charge, it will be mighty difficult to run out of juice. Of course, the company's also bound to invest the cash as part of a Volkswagen dieselgate settlement here in the US...

Will such partnerships vanquish range anxiety for electric vehicles (EVs)?

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Phoenix666 writes:

U.S. Army Report Describes North Korea's Cyber Warfare Capabilities:

A report published recently by the U.S. Army describes North Korea's cyber warfare capabilities and provides information on various units and their missions.

The 332-page report, titled "North Korean Tactics," details North Korean forces and their actions, and one chapter focuses on electronic intelligence warfare, which Pyongyang allegedly uses to collect information on its enemies, deceive its enemies, and launch disruptive and destructive attacks, particularly ones aimed at communication and information systems and infrastructure.

North Korea's electronic warfare includes both lethal and non-lethal methods. Non-lethal methods include electronic jamming and signals reconnaissance, while lethal methods can include physical destruction of targets supporting its enemy's decision-making process.

South Korea estimates North Korea's cyberwarfare unit, Bureau 121, has 6,000 members.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Medical Xpress:

On December 9 2008, 45-year-old Connie Culp became the first person in the United States, and only the fourth in the world, to receive a face transplant. Connie's transplant took a team at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio more than 22 hours to perform and allowed her to eat solid food again, to smell, and to breathe independently. Four years earlier, Connie had been shot in the face by her husband, who was subsequently imprisoned for seven years for aggravated attempted murder. Sadly, Connie died on July 29 2020, of an as yet unspecified infection.

[...] Understanding the psychological effects of living with visible facial difference, as well as a new face, is very important. Every surgical solution has emotional consequences, which are less documented than physical results. This reflects the context in which face transplants take place. Scientific medicine tends to focus on physical rather than mental measurements, and on the immediate "before and after" rather than the prolonged, complex work of psychological healing.

Surgical teams around the world are beginning to assess the quality of life outcomes of face transplants, but progress is slow. International comparisons are difficult to make, even in physical terms. Nine face transplant patients have died, and two faces have been rejected, but there are few examples of long term, holistic follow-up. Given Connie's work in raising public awareness of the impact of living with facial difference, there will be no more appropriate legacy than a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of face transplants.

The psychological wounds of the procedure may be harder to heal than the physical ones.

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takyon writes:

Rust Core Team + Mozilla To Create A Rust Foundation

Rust's core team and Mozilla are announcing plans to create a Rust foundation with the hopes of establishing this legal entity by year's end. The trademarks and related assets of Rust, Cargo, and Crates.io will belong to this foundation. Work is well underway on establishing this foundation with originally coming to the idea of possibly creating an independent Rust foundation last year, now pushed along by the recent Mozilla layoffs and the global pandemic. This should allow the Rust community more safety rather than being reliant upon a sole organization (Mozilla) and help foster growth and open up new possibilities.

Lay(off)ing the foundation for Rust's future

Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team

Related: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512

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takyon writes:

Mandatory Socialization: Facebook Accounts To be Required for Oculus Headsets

Signaling the end to any remaining degrees of separation between Facebook and its VR headset division, Oculus, today the social media company announced that it will be further integrating the two services. Coming this fall, the company will begin sunsetting stand-alone Oculus accounts as part of an effort to transition the entire Oculus ecosystem over to Facebook. This will start in October, when all new Oculus accounts and devices will have to sign up for a Facebook account, while support for existing stand-alone accounts will be retired entirely at the start of 2023.

Previously: Facebook to Buy Rift Maker Oculus VR for $2bn
Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Founder of Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey, Departs Facebook
Facebook Announces Oculus Go for $200
Facebook's Zuckerberg Wants to Get One Billion People in VR
Facebook Launches Oculus Go, a $200 Standalone VR Headset
Oculus Co-Founder Says there is No Market for VR Gaming
John Carmack Steps Down at Oculus to Pursue AI Passion Project
Facebook is Developing its Own OS to Reduce Dependence on Android

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RandomFactor writes:

According to a study published August 18th in Nature Communications, a new gene therapy approach eliminates over 90% of latent herpes simplex 1 virus (HSV-1, also known as oral herpes) in animal models.

Two-thirds of the world population under the age of 50 have HSV-1, according to the World Health Organization. The infection primarily causes cold sores and is lifelong.

In the study, the researchers used two types of genetic scissors to cut the DNA of the herpes virus. They found that when using just one pair of the scissors the virus DNA can be repaired in the infected cell. But by combining two scissors - two sets of gene-cutting proteins called meganucleases that zero in on and cut a segment of herpes DNA - the virus fell apart.

Using this approach...

researchers found a 92% reduction in the virus DNA present in the superior cervical ganglia, the nerve tissue where the virus lies dormant. The reductions remained for at least a month after the treatment and is enough the researchers say to keep the virus from reactivating.

The researchers are also pursuing using this approach to target herpes simplex 2 (genital herpes), although they indicate clinical trials are at least three years out.

Journal Reference:
Martine Aubert, Daniel E. Strongin, Pavitra Roychoudhury, et al. Gene editing and elimination of latent herpes simplex virus in vivo [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17936-5)

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takyon writes:

Alibaba Reports Their XT910 RISC-V Core To Be Faster Than An Arm Cortex-A73

A few weeks back Alibaba announced the "XT910" as the fastest RISC-V processor featuring 16 cores and clock speeds up to 2.5GHz while being manufactured on a 12nm node. This by far beats most RISC-V hardware currently available and now at this week's Hot Chips conference the Chinese company is reporting that the XT910 is faster than an Arm Cortex-A73.

Alibaba confirmed the XT910 as a TSMC 12nm FinFET design with clock speeds between 2.0GHz and 2.5GHz for this RISC-V 64-bit processor supporting the RISC-V 0.7.1 Vector Extension.

Benchmarks posted by Alibaba's T-Head organization put the XT910 faster than an Arm Cortex-A73 found within the Kirin 970 SoC in areas across automotive, consumer, networking, and telecom spaces.

Cortex-A73 (launched in 2016) reportedly has less floating point IPC than its Cortex-A72 predecessor (found in the Raspberry Pi 4B). ARM's latest performance-oriented cores are the Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1.

Previously: Alibaba Announces a 16-Core RISC-V CPU

Related: ARM Cortex A73 Unveiled
ARM Cortex-A75, Cortex-A55, and Mali-G72 Announced
ARM Announces Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1

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Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica:

Granted, it was a small sample size, but those results were encouraging enough to convince Jordan to conduct a more ambitious study over the last four years. His team worked with local farmers in the Okavango delta region, painting the cattle in 14 herds (a total of 2,061 animals). They used acrylic paint (black and white or yellow), applied with foam stencils in the shapes of the inner and outer "eye." The colors were chosen "because of their highly contrasting and aposematic^* features, common in natural anti-predator signaling settings," the authors wrote.

Roughly one-third of the cattle in each herd got the eye patterns, one-third got simple cross-marks, and one-third weren't painted at all. The results confirmed Jordan's preliminary findings. Cattle with the painted eyes on their rumps were significantly more likely to survive than those cattle that had crosses painted on their butts and those that weren't painted at all. But the authors were surprised to find that even the painted crosses offered some survival advantage over the unpainted cattle. Over the course of the four-year study, 15 (out of 835) unpainted and four (out of 543) cross-painted cattle were killed by lions; none of the 683 cattle with painted eyes were killed.

The tactic will likely fail to deter the cattle's main predator...

[* Aposematic: conspicuous coloration or markings of an animal serving to warn off predators.]

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takyon writes:

342 Transistors for Every Person In the World: Cerebras 2nd Gen Wafer Scale Engine Teased

One of the highlights of Hot Chips from 2019 was the startup Cerebras showcasing its product – a large 'wafer-scale' AI chip that was literally the size of a wafer. The chip itself was rectangular, but it was cut from a single wafer, and contained 400,000 cores, 1.2 trillion transistors, 46225 mm2 of silicon, and was built on TSMC's 16 nm process.

[...] Obviously when doing wafer scale, you can't just add more die area, so the only way is to optimize die area per core and take advantage of smaller process nodes. That means for TSMC 7nm, there are now 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors. Cerebras has had to develop new technologies to deal with multi-reticle designs, but they succeeded with the first gen, and transferred the learnings to the new chip. We're expecting more details about this new product later this year.

Previously: Cerebras "Wafer Scale Engine" Has 1.2 Trillion Transistors, 400,000 Cores
Cerebras Systems' Wafer Scale Engine Deployed at Argonne National Labs

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

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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