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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NSA spying exposed by Snowden was illegal and not very useful, court says:

The National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone metadata from telecom providers was illegal, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The court also found that the phone-metadata collection exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was not necessary for the arrests of terror suspects in a case that the US government cited in defending the necessity of the surveillance program.

The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the 2013 convictions of "four members of the Somali diaspora for sending, or conspiring to send, $10,900 to Somalia to support a foreign terrorist organization." But the Somalis' challenge of the NSA spying program yielded some significant findings. In part, the ineffectiveness of the phone-metadata collection helped ensure that the convictions would be upheld because the illegally collected metadata evidence wasn't significant enough to taint evidence that was legally collected by the government. The government got what it needed from a wiretap of defendant Basaaly Saeed Moalin's phone, not from the mass collection of metadata.

The court's three-judge panel unanimously "held that the metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization in 50 U.S.C. § 1861, which required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records, and that the program therefore violated that section of FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," the ruling said.

The judges also wrote that "the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants." But the judges didn't make a ruling on the potential Fourth Amendment violation because it wasn't necessary to decide the case. While "the Fourth Amendment requires notice to a criminal defendant" when prosecutors want to use evidence from surveillance at trial, the judges "did not decide whether the government failed to prove any required notice in this case because the lack of such notice did not prejudice the defendants," the ruling said.

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The weird physics of levitating liquids and upside-down buoyancy [2 Marge!]

c0lo writes:

Nature video for the doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2643-8.

Vibration overcomes gravity on a levitating fluid

Counter-intuitive phenomena that arise in fluids under the action of vibration have attracted considerable research interest since the 1950s. For example, in a vibrating volume of fluid, gas bubbles can sink and heavy particles can rise. Moreover, a layer of fluid can be levitated above a layer of air by shaking the system vertically at a relatively high frequency (of the order of 100 hertz or more). Writing in Nature, Apffel et al. report another remarkable phenomenon associated with a vibrating, levitated layer of fluid: objects can float upside down on the lower interface of the fluid, as if gravity were inverted (Fig. 1). These phenomena have strong potential for practical use, for example in systems that involve gas bubbles suspended in fluids (such as bubble column reactors used for gas–liquid reactions), and for the segregation and transport of material inclusions in fluids (as used in mineral processing and waste-water treatment).

The extraordinary behaviours of vibrating fluids are just a small fraction of the surprising phenomena that arise as a result of high-frequency vibrations more generally. Probably the most well-documented examples are the Stephenson–Kapitza pendulum, in which a rigid pendulum balances upside down from a vibrating point of suspension, and the Chelomei pendulum, in which a washer that can slide along a rod seems to 'float' when the rod is vibrated vertically.

Kapitza pendulum - the downwards hanging equilibrium position becomes unstable
Chelomei's pendulum explained - a rod with a sliding disc, the ensemble being vibrated vertically.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Congrats to the wannabe APK noobtard for advancing the site's codebase despite me having extremely limited time to play. I added three lines of code and now Spam modded comments (and comment trees) auto-collapse and you can still moderate a comment as Spam even if it's already at the minimum score. Honestly, the folks using any other downmod on obvious Spam annoy me more than the noobtard does but that annoyance at least is now history. Changes are to hot code only, I'll put them in the repo as part of my next pull request.

Suck it, noob. --TMB

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

These Students Figured Out Their Tests Were Graded By Ai — And The Easy Way To Cheat:

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test — it was his real grade.

[...] At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers.

Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question.

[...] Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test.

Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, but the company's online help center suggests this may be by design. According to the website, answers to certain questions receive 0% if they include no keywords, and 100% if they include at least one. Other questions earn a certain percentage based on the number of keywords included.

[...] Edgenuity offers over 300 online classes for middle and high school students[...].

Of course, short-answer questions aren't the only factor that impacts Edgenuity grades — Lazare's classes require other formats, including multiple-choice questions and single-word inputs. A developer familiar with the platform estimated that short answers make up less than five percent of Edgenuity's course content, and many of the eight students The Verge spoke to for this story confirmed that such tasks were a minority of their work. Still, the tactic has certainly impacted Lazare's class performance — he's now getting 100s on every assignment.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Apple mistakenly approved a widely-used malware to run on Macs – TechCrunch:

Apple has some of the strictest rules to prevent malicious software from landing in its app store, even if on occasion a bad app slips through the net. But last year Apple took its toughest approach yet by requiring developers to submit their apps for security checks in order to run on millions of Macs unhindered.

The process, which Apple calls "notarization," scans an app for security issues and malicious content. If approved, the Mac's in-built security screening software, Gatekeeper, allows the app to run. Apps that don't pass the security sniff test are denied, and are blocked from running.

But security researchers say they have found the first Mac malware inadvertently notarized by Apple.

[...] [Patrick Wardle] confirmed that Apple had approved code used by the popular Shlayer malware, which security firm Kaspersky said is the “most common threat” that Macs faced in 2019. Shlayer is a kind of adware that intercepts encrypted web traffic — even from HTTPS-enabled sites — and replaces websites and search results with its own ads, making fraudulent ad money for the operators.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Navy CIO: 'Malicious Cyber Actors' Attacking Military Telework Infrastructure - USNI News:

Adversaries are taking on the Navy's shift to remote work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the service's chief information officer.

Speaking at the Department of the Navy's Gold Coast Small Business Procurement event today, Navy CIO Aaron Weis said the service saw a jump in malicious activity as employees began teleworking to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

"We've seen a number of potential exploits by malicious cyber actors. Kind of the easiest stuff and because everyone is super responsive and working from home – lots of phishing activity. And Especially early on, if it said COVID-19 in the subject line, you were going to open it," Weis said.

"And really then that's the front door and then getting somebody to click on an attachment or whatnot that you can get into somebody's face with a COVID-themed message," he continued. "The other is – there was an uptick in the registration of domain names that contain COVID, COVID-19, along with DOD specific variants of that, as the services rushed to push out tracking, tracing capability services, etc, for use in this teleworking environment."

Weis did not provide details as to where the attacks originated. In addition to phishing and using registered domain names, Weis said the Navy also saw an increase in "spoofing" activities, with attackers sending messages looking like they were from "trustworthy sources." Weis praised U.S. Cyber Command, Marine Corps Cyberspace Command and U.S. Fleet Cyber Command for swiftly responding to the attempts.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Federal court rules geofence warrants are unconstitutional:

In another round of increasingly rare good news in the realm of privacy, individual rights and freedom, two separate US federal judges have found geofence warrants to be unconstitutional.

Geofence warrants have been around for some time now. Essentially, it's a new investigative technique wherein law enforcement, rather than surveilling a suspect to discover if they had been at the scene of a crime, they work backwards by identifying everyone that's been at a particular location and surveilling them until they discover which one of them is a possible suspect.

[...] US courts have recently begun accepting that our smartphones hold so much data about us that they should be protected by the fourth amendment, as an extension of our homes.

Three separate unsealed opinions from two federal magistrate judges have come to the same conclusion: that these warrants lack the probable cause and particularity requirements of the fourth amendment.

[...] It's disturbing to think of just how many Americans' constitutional rights would have been violated if the warrant was granted. Even more disturbing is other such warrants possibly getting granted regularly, aside from what information Google willingly hands over to governments.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Orange peels used to extract valuable metals from spent batteries:

Just because a lithium-ion battery no longer holds a charge doesn't mean it no longer holds any value. It still contains useful metals, which can now be reclaimed via a more eco-friendly technique – the key ingredient is orange peel waste.

[...] With that limitation in mind, scientists at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University tried using orange peels instead of the usual acids and hydrogen peroxide. More specifically, they utilized oven-dried orange peels that had been ground into a powder, combined with citric acid obtained from citrus fruit.

Doing so, the researchers were able to extract about 90 percent of the lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese from spent lithium-ion batteries. This level of efficiency is roughly what had been achieved previously. Importantly, though, when using the orange peels, the residue was found to be non-toxic.

[...] The researchers used the reclaimed metals in new lithium-ion batteries, that have a charge capacity similar to that of commercially available models. Further testing is now being conducted, to see if the new batteries last for a comparable number of charge/discharge cycles.

A paper on the research, which is being co-led by Prof. Madhavi Srinivasan, was recently published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Journal Reference:
Zhuoran Wu, Tanto Soh, Jun Jie Chan, Shize Meng, Daniel Meyer, Madhavi Srinivasan, and Chor Yong Tay. Repurposing of Fruit Peel Waste as a Green Reductant for Recycling of Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries . Environmental Science & Technology 2020 54 (15), 9681-9692 DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c02873

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Facebook pilot links user profiles with online news subscriptions:

It works like this: When Facebook identifies that a user subscribes to a participating publisher, it will invite the user to link their subscription account. Once the accounts are connected, if the user clicks on a paywalled link via Facebook, they won't have to sign-in to access the content. Users who link their Facebook and news accounts will also see more stories from those publishers in Facebook News.

Facebook is testing the feature with a handful of publishers, ranging from The Atlantic to the Winnipeg Free Press, and early test results are promising. In June, subscribers who linked their Facebook accounts made 111 percent more article clicks compared to those who didn't link their accounts, Facebook said in a blog post.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Meet GW190521—a black-hole merger for the record books:

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has picked up a gravitational wave signal from another black-hole merger—and it's one for the record books.

The merger is the most massive and most distant yet detected by the collaboration, its signal traveling across the Universe for a billion years before reaching Earth. The merger also produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a "bang" than the usual "chirp." And the new black hole resulting from the merger is the rarest of all in terms of its intermediate mass (about 150 times as heavy as our Sun), making this the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole.

[...] Details of this latest discovery, dubbed GW190521, appeared today in two concurrent papers published in Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters. The former details the discovery of the gravitational wave signal, while the latter discusses the signal's physical properties and its astrophysical implications.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

When Asthma in Jail Becomes a Death Sentence:

Growing up, Matt Santana and Savion Hall were inseparable. The two met in middle school while hanging out with mutual friends in Midland, a West Texas oil town. After realizing they lived on the same block, Hall, a year younger than Santana, started sleeping over so they could play video games late into the night. As they got older, Hall and Santana remained dear friends, often turning to each other for help. Santana, who suffers from anxiety, says Hall sometimes spent hours by his side helping calm him down. "He would stay with me until I felt better, whether it was just driving around, listening to music or talking," he says. When Hall had asthma attacks, Santana would make sure he got his breathing treatments, which included inhalers and nebulizers, sometimes taking him to the hospital three or four times a month. The two looked out for each other. "It was special having a friend like that since childhood," Santana says. "I was hoping we would grow old together."

Then Hall was arrested and taken to the Midland County jail last summer. Court records show that he was accused of failing to wear a GPS monitor and testing positive for amphetamines—violations of the probation agreement he'd signed with the local district attorney's office to resolve a drug possession charge earlier that year. Nearly three weeks after Hall entered lockup for the alleged probation violations, jail doctors shipped him to a local hospital due to breathing problems and low oxygen levels, according to a report filed with the Texas Attorney General's office.

Friends say Hall's asthma attacks were frequent and severe enough that they learned to recognize the wheezing and heaving as signs that he needed immediate treatment. But by the time Hall arrived at the hospital from the jail, his condition had deteriorated to the point that medical staff had to resuscitate him. Santana, who saw Hall in the hospital, says his friend showed little brain activity and suffered back-to-back seizures before his family decided to take him off life support eight days later, on July 19, 2019. He was 30 years old. (Hall's family declined to comment for this story.)

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

A Molecule in Honeybee Venom Destroys Breast Cancer Cells in The Lab, Study Shows:

The study focussed(sic) on certain subtypes of breast cancer, including triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which is an extremely aggressive condition with limited treatment options.

TNBC accounts for up to 15 percent of all breast cancers. In many cases, its cells produce more of a molecule called EGFR than seen in normal cells. Previous attempts to develop treatments that specifically target this molecule have not worked, because they would also negatively affect healthy cells.

[...] Bees actually use melittin - the molecule that makes up half of their venom and makes their stings really hecking painful - to fight off their own pathogens. The insects produce this peptide not just in their venom, but in other tissues too, where it's expressed in response to infections.

[...] "The venom was extremely potent," said medical researcher Ciara Duffy from The Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research. "We found that melittin can completely destroy cancer cell membranes within 60 minutes."

[Ed. note: per community request, this story is in addition to our regular story cadence. It is provided so that those who are interested will have an opportunity to plan ahead to watch the launch. Launch is scheduled for 12h45m from when this story goes "live". --martyb]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

SpaceX targets another Starlink launch Thursday to continue record pace:

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 8:46am EDT (12:46 UTC) Thursday from Kennedy Space Center while carrying a payload of 60 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. This will be the 12th launch of a large batch of Starlink satellites, although the first 60 satellites launched in May 2019 were, to some extent, a test bed for future iterations. After this mission, the company will have placed more than 700 of its satellites into orbit to provide broadband service.

[...] With a total of 15 missions through August, SpaceX is on a mathematical pace for 22 or 23 total launches this year. That would exceed the company's previous record of 21 launches in the year 2018, when SpaceX flew out much of a commercial backlog it had accrued during the mid-2010s. However, given the number of planned launches for the rest of the year, it seems plausible SpaceX will launch 25 or more rockets in 2020.

The march toward a record-setting pace in 2020 continues Thursday morning, when the weather conditions are forecast to be good, with an 80 percent chance of "go" conditions.

Live stream usually starts about 15-20 minutes before scheduled launch. YouTube link.

Separately, here are details from SpaceFlight Now's launch schedule:

Date: Sept. 3
Mission: Falcon 9 • Starlink 11
Launch time: 1246 GMT (8:46 a.m. EDT)
Launch site: LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida
Description: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the 12th batch of approximately 60 satellites for SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, a mission designated Starlink 11

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

US Hails New Milestone in Development of Hypersonic Weapons:

In the US drive to acquire an operational hypersonic weapon, after the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) programme was canceled in February due to budget issues, Lockheed Martin had been pushing ahead with the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), with its first captive-carry test held in June 2019.

The US Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have completed successful captive-carry tests of two hypersonic weapon variants designed by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, the organizations announced in a press release on 1 September.

A captive-carry flight test is when missiles remained attached to a test aircraft for the duration of the flight. The method offers an opportunity to accumulate data about how the design, as well as the aircraft carrying it, will perform subsequent free-flight tests.

[...] Both companies, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, have designed the scramjet-powered hypersonic missiles as part of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program run by the Air Force and DARPA, writes Defense News.

"Completing the captive carry series of tests demonstrates both HAWC designs are ready for free flight," said Andrew Knoedler, DARPA's HAWC program manager, making no mention of the location of the tests or the aircraft used.

The success of the recent tests put the US Air Force one step closer to achieving a long-cherished goal of fielding a hypersonic cruise missile.

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Phoenix666 writes:

China working to double nuclear warheads:

China is expected to at least double the number of its nuclear warheads over the next 10 years - from an estimated figure in the low 200s it has now - and is nearing the ability to launch nuclear attacks by land, air and sea, a capacity known as a triad, the Pentagon has revealed.

The annual report to Congress on China's military marks the first time it has put a number to China's nuclear warheads. The Federation of American Scientists has estimated that China has about 320.

The Pentagon said the growth projection was based on factors including Beijing having enough material to double its nuclear weapons stockpile without new fissile material production.

Begun, the Second Nuclear Arms Race has?

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