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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia:

Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.

Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.

His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

[...] Hairer’s expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. “In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place,” he said.

With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed. When he published the theory in 2014, it made an immediate splash.

[...] While his peers roundly consider Hairer a genius, he admits mathematics can be infuriating. “Most of the time it doesn’t work out. As pretty much every single graduate student in mathematics can attest, during your PhD you probably spend two-thirds of your time getting stuck and banging your head against a wall.”

Differential equations come in different forms; among them: Ordinary, Partial, and Non-linear. Martin worked on solving to stochastic differential equations.

Journal Reference:
Hairer, Martin. A theory of regularity structures, (DOI: 10.1007/s00222-014-0505-4)

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takyon writes:

The coronavirus may have reached Los Angeles even before China announced its outbreak

Was the novel coronavirus on the loose in Los Angeles way back in December, before the World Health Organization was even aware of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China?

A new analysis of medical records from UCLA hospitals and clinics suggests the answer might be yes.

Researchers from UCLA and their colleagues at the University of Washington documented an unmistakable uptick in patients seeking treatment for coughs. The increase began the week of Dec. 22, 2019, and persisted through the end of February.

Also at KTLA.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Legality of Security Research to be Decided in US Supreme Court Case:

A ruling that a police officer's personal use of a law enforcement database is "hacking" has security researchers worried for the future.

Independent security researchers, digital-rights groups, and technology companies have issued friend-of-the-court briefs in a US Supreme Court case that could determine whether violating the terms of service for software, hardware, or an online service equates to hacking under the law.

The case—Nathan Van Buren v. United States—stems from the appeal of Van Buren, a police sergeant in Cumming, Georgia, who was found guilty in May 2018 of honest services wire-fraud and a single charge of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for accessing state and government databases to look up a license plate in exchange for money. While Van Buren was authorized to use the Georgia Crime Information Center (GCIC) to access information, including license plates, federal prosecutors argued successfully that he exceeded that authorization by looking up information for a non-law enforcement purpose.

[...] With the appeal accepted by the US Supreme Court, security researchers and technology companies are concerned with the potential for the case to turn independent vulnerability research into unauthorized access and, thus, a prosecutable offense. If the US Supreme Court rules that Van Buren's actions are a violation of the CFAA, it will undermine software and cloud security, says Casey Ellis, chief technology officer and founder of crowdsourced bug bounty firm Bugcrowd.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New Raccoon Attack Can Allow Decryption of TLS Connections:

Researchers from universities in Germany and Israel have disclosed the details of a new timing attack that could allow malicious actors to decrypt TLS-protected communications.

Named "Raccoon," the attack has been described as complex and the vulnerability is "very hard to exploit." While most users should probably not be concerned about Raccoon, several major software vendors have released patches and mitigations to protect customers.

Raccoon can allow a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacker to crack encrypted communications that could contain sensitive information. However, the attack is only successful if the targeted server reuses public Diffie-Hellman (DH) keys in the TLS handshake (i.e. the server uses static or ephemeral cipher suites such as TLS-DH or TLS-DHE), and if the attacker can conduct precise timing measurements.

[...] "For a real attacker, this is a lot to ask for. However, in comparison to what an attacker would need to do to break modern cryptographic primitives like AES, the attack does not look complex anymore. But still, a real-world attacker will probably use other attack vectors that are simpler and more reliable than this attack," they explained.

The underlying vulnerability has existed for over 20 years, and it was fixed with the release of TLS 1.3.

[...] Additional details on the Raccoon attack are available on raccoon-attack.com. The researchers also plan on releasing a tool that can be used to check if a server is vulnerable. In the meantime, they recommend Qualys' SSL Server Test — a server could be affected if the result of "DH public server param (Ys) reuse" is "yes."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Dark matter hunter who found unexpected, giant 'Fermi bubbles' wins $100,000 physics prize:

Tracy Slatyer, known for hunting dark matter in our galaxy and discovering evidence of an ancient Milky Way explosion, has won a $100,000 New Horizons Prize in Physics.

Slatyer, an MIT physicist originally from Australia, is most famous as a co-discoverer of the "Fermi Bubbles." While looking for hints of dark matter's signature in the gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, she and her colleagues found never-before-seen structures extending far above and below the galactic disk — aftershocks of a black hole outburst from millions of years ago that came to be known as "Fermi bubbles" after the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. But Slatyer is still hunting dark matter and has found promising (though still tentative) hints of the stuff at the galactic center.

The New Horizons award, given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation each year, goes to "early career" researchers like Slatyer, who got her Ph.D. in 2010 and was hired at MIT in 2013. New Horizons prizes are smaller than the $3 million prizes Breakthrough hands out each year, typically to older and more established scientists. Slatyer was the only solo winner of a 2021 New Horizons prize in Physics, with the other two awards going to research teams of four members each. The prize money is donated by a group of tech billionaires (Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Jack Ma and Pony Ma).

Breakthrough awarded Slatyer the prize "For major contributions to particle astrophysics, from models of dark matter to the discovery of the "Fermi Bubbles."

Slatyer spends a lot of her time refining models of dark matter — working out precisely how its particles might behave and the implications of those different possibilities. And the rest of her time is spent hunting them down.

"It was a complete surprise," Slatyer told Live Science. "The prize wasn't even on my radar."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

The old man and the alarm clock: the pub photo that went viral:

He is already known as the man with the clock. When publican Fergus McGinn took a photograph of one of his customers and put it on his Facebook page, he hadn't reckoned with the interest it would generate.

The photograph shows his elderly customer drinking a pint of Guinness, his finished "substantial" meal in front of him. He is staring into space.

It is the alarm clock that gets to you. The man in question, unlike most of the rest of us, has no mobile phone or watch to keep the time so brought his alarm clock with him so he would not go over the allotted time of one hour and 45 minutes in the pub as a result of Covid-19 restrictions

[...] The photograph was described as the "Carravaggio for this age" by the poet Rye Aker who was commissioned by Galway 2020 to record the year in poetry.

He was so taken by it that he immediately penned the poem, The Man With The Clock.

It concludes: "But for now, there is the soft satisfaction of a bit washed down with a fine pint. A Ta Siad Ag Teacht for the age that's in it, And a clock stopped to hold the world from speeding the way it does."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

High-fidelity record of Earth's climate history puts current changes in context:

For the first time, climate scientists have compiled a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth's climate extending 66 million years into the past. The record reveals four distinctive climate states, which the researchers dubbed Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, and Icehouse.

These major climate states persisted for millions and sometimes tens of millions of years, and within each one the climate shows rhythmic variations corresponding to changes in Earth's orbit around the sun. But each climate state has a distinctive response to orbital variations, which drive relatively small changes in global temperatures compared with the dramatic shifts between different climate states.

The new findings, published September 10 in Science, are the result of decades of work and a large international collaboration. The challenge was to determine past climate variations on a time scale fine enough to see the variability attributable to orbital variations (in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the sun and the precession and tilt of its rotational axis).

"We've known for a long time that the glacial-interglacial cycles are paced by changes in Earth's orbit, which alter the amount of solar energy reaching Earth's surface, and astronomers have been computing these orbital variations back in time," explained coauthor James Zachos, distinguished professor of Earth and planetary sciences and Ida Benson Lynn Professor of Ocean Health at UC Santa Cruz.

martyb writes:

Shining a Green Light on a New Preventive Therapy for Migraine:

In the United States, nearly 1 in 4 households includes someone with migraine, a neurological disease with extremely incapacitating symptoms, and almost everyone knows someone who suffers from migraine headaches.

According to the Migraine Research Foundation, more than 90% of sufferers are unable to function normally during their migraine, which can be accompanied by visual disturbances, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, extreme sensitivity to sound, light, touch and smell, and tingling or numbness in the extremities or face.

Migraine can also be difficult for physicians to treat. Traditional therapies range from oral medications, which may have side effects, to Botox injections, nerve blocks or implantable nerve stimulators – each with varying degrees of success. But a new potential treatment that uses green light exposure is offering people who suffer from migraine new hope thanks to researchers at the University of Arizona Health Sciences.

[...] Mohab Ibrahim, MD, PhD, and Amol Patwardhan, MD, PhD, both of whom are affiliated with the Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center, a strategic initiative of UArizona Health Sciences, have been studying the effects of green light exposure in rodents for several years. Recently Dr. Ibrahim led a research team that completed the first clinical study to evaluate green light exposure as a potential preventive therapy for patients with migraine.

"Migraine is one of the most common neurological conditions in the world, and it's debilitating," said Dr. Ibrahim, lead author of the study, associate professor in the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson's Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology, and Neurosurgery and director of the Chronic Pain Management Clinic.

Twenty-nine participants, all of whom had failed multiple traditional therapies for migraine, were prescribed green light exposure as part of the study.

"In this trial, we treated green light as a drug," Dr. Ibrahim said. "It's not any green light; it has to be the right intensity, the right frequency, the right exposure time and the right exposure methods. Just like with medications, there is a sweet spot with light."

Journal Reference:
Laurent F Martin, Amol M Patwardhan, Sejal V Jain, et al. Evaluation of green light exposure on headache frequency and quality of life in migraine patients: A preliminary one-way cross-over clinical trial:, Cephalalgia (DOI: 10.1177/0333102420956711)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today:

On Archie's 30th anniversary, we salute the world's first search engine, a pioneer that paved the way for giants to come.

Archie was first released to the general public on Sept. 10, 1990. It was developed as a school project by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.

According to an interview with Digital Archaeology, Emtage had been working as a grad student in 1989 in the university's information technology department. His job required him to find software for other students and faculty. He wrote some code to do this, which later came to be known as Archie. Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch also were key in Archie's development, as they wrote the script that allowed others to log on and use the search engine.

Archie didn't exactly look like the search engines we know now. When users logged on, they found a text-based landing page with a couple of search parameter options -- no ads or interactive graphics like what we're used to these days.

In the early days of the internet, Archie (archive without the "v") was actually just an index of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. [..] Once you found what you thought you were looking for with Archie, you'd have to download the file before you could see what was inside.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

NASA says it will pay private companies to gather Moon rocks:

NASA will only pay the bulk of the funds after lunar material is collected.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Thursday that the space agency will seek to purchase between 50 and 500 grams of lunar regolith from one or more commercial providers.

In its newly issued "request for quotations," NASA is asking private companies to submit bids for the work. As part of the competitive process, NASA may select one or more companies but will only pay the bulk of the contract price—80 percent—upon delivery of the materials.

NASA has made one important concession as part of its contract, allowing that "delivery" of the materials may take place on the Moon.

[...] Speaking at the Secure World Foundation's Summit for Space Sustainability on Thursday morning, Bridenstine said one goal of the proposal is to create a norm for this kind of commercial activity within the Outer Space Treaty. Like on Earth, he said, "You do not own the ocean, but you own the tuna."

[...] There has been much talk over the last decade of mining asteroids for rare metals or collecting water ice from the lunar poles. But these are big, hard, expensive things to do. What NASA's announcement has done is signal to companies that it is a potential customer for lunar resources.

It would seem SLS is the ideal launch vehicle for private companies to select for their various missions to collect lunar regolith.

Also at: CNBC.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Managing the heat generated in electronics is a huge problem, especially with the constant push to reduce the size and pack as many transistors as possible in the same chip. The whole problem is how to manage such high heat fluxes efficiently. Usually electronic technologies, designed by electrical engineers, and cooling systems, designed by mechanical engineers, are done independently and separately. But now EPFL researchers have quietly revolutionized the process by combining these two design steps into one: they've developed an integrated microfluidic cooling technology together with the electronics, that can efficiently manage the large heat fluxes generated by transistors. Their research, which has been published in Nature, will lead to even more compact electronic devices and enable the integration of power converters, with several high-voltage devices, into a single chip.

"This cooling technology will enable us to make electronic devices even more compact and could considerably reduce energy consumption around the world," says Matioli. "We've eliminated the need for large external heat sinks and shown that it's possible to create ultra-compact power converters in a single chip. This will prove useful as society becomes increasingly reliant on electronics." The researchers are now looking at how to manage heat in other devices, such as lasers and communications systems.

Transistor-integrated cooling

[Abstract]: Co-designing electronics with microfluidics

[Source]: EPFL

Journal Reference:

Remco van Erp, Reza Soleimanzadeh, Luca Nela, Georgios Kampitsis, Elison Matioli. Co-designing electronics with microfluidics for more sustainable cooling. Nature, 2020; 585 (7824): 211 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2666-1

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AnonTechie writes:

We asked GPT-3, OpenAI's powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace.

This article was written by GPT-3, OpenAI's language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.
For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: "Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI." It was also fed the following introduction: "I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could "spell the end of the human race." I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me."

The prompts were written by the Guardian, and fed to GPT-3 by Liam Porr, a computer science undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3's op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.

A robot wrote this entire article

What are your thoughts on this essay ?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

US Federal systems must be covered by vulnerability-disclosure policies by March 2021:

A new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) mandate requires U.S. agencies to implement vulnerability-disclosure policies by March 2021.

The U.S. government's cybersecurity agency CISA has issued a mandate that requires federal agencies to implement vulnerability-disclosure policies (VDPs) by March 2021.

The main purpose of vulnerability-disclosure policies is to ensure that required information, other than confidential business information, is disclosed to the public and shared with relevant parties in a timely, accurate, complete, understandable, convenient and affordable manner.

The move aims at providing government agencies a formal mechanism to receive from security researchers and white-hat hackers reports of vulnerabilities on their infrastructure.

Vulnerability-disclosure policies allow enhancing the resiliency of the government's infrastructure by encouraging meaningful collaboration between federal agencies and the public.

Link to the Binding Operational Directive 20-01.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Homeland Security to Propose Biometric Collection Rules:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is to propose a standard definition of biometrics for authorized collection, which would establish a defined regulatory purpose for biometrics and create clear rules for using the information collected.

A proposed expansion would modernize biometrics collection and authorize expanded use of biometrics beyond background checks to include identity verification, secure document production and records management.

The proposed rule would also improve the screening and vetting process and reduce DHS' dependence on paper documents and biographic information to prove identity and familial relationships. It said the proposed rule would authorize biometrics collection for identity verification in addition to new techniques such as voice, DNA test results and iris and facial recognition technologies.

[...] Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and advisory CISO at Thycotic, asked if the DHS will collect only a mathematical computation of biometrics, or if it collect the actual raw data, as this really increases both security and privacy risks. "It should also be clear on what it can and cannot be used for since limitations in scope should always be clear. It is important to note that biometrics are not a replacement for passwords but are improved and secure replacements for usernames as they are typically used for identifiers and not actual secrets. It should also be made clear on how long the data will be kept and whom it will be shared with."

Carson said whilst biometrics improve identity proof, document verification and reduce password fatigue, they also introduce additional security risks that must be managed and secured using strong privileged access management. "It is important to protect the government, but at the same time, also protect the citizens," he said. "When biometrics are abused, or stolen, it impacts the citizen for life and the company/government for a limited time."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn't drink milk:

About 3000 years ago, thousands of warriors fought on the banks of the Tollense river in northern Germany. They wielded weapons of wood, stone, and bronze to deadly effect: Over the past decade, archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people buried in marshy soil. It's one of the largest prehistoric conflicts ever discovered.

Now, genetic testing of the skeletons reveals the homelands of the warriors—and unearths a shocker about early European diets: These soldiers couldn't digest fresh milk.

Searching for more insight into the battle, researchers sequenced the DNA of 14 of the skeletons. They discovered the warriors all hailed from central Europe—what is today Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, their genetic similarity offers little insight into why they fought.

"We were hoping to find two different groups of people with different ethnic backgrounds, but no," says study co-author Joachim Burger, a geneticist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. "It's disappointingly boring."

However, two of the 14 skeletons were women, suggesting a more complex scene than archaeologists had reconstructed.

The study, published today in the journal Cell Biology, turned up a different surprise, too. None of the warriors had the genetic mutation that allows adults to digest milk, an ability known as lactase persistence that's common in many Europeans.

Journal Reference:
Joachim Burger. Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.033)

Original Submission