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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

U.S. Army gets one step closer to laser gun system:

Last week, the Assistant Secretary of the Army – Acquisition, Logistics & Technology has announced that the U.S. Army is one step closer to delivering laser weapons to Soldiers with the recent arrival of two Stryker vehicles in Huntsville, Ala.

[The] Assistant Secretary Facebook account made the post regarding Directed Energy Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) with a 50 kW-class laser integrated onto a Stryker platform. The government-industry team is integrating directed energy capabilities onto the platforms, in preparation for the  Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office DE-MSHORAD combat shoot-off next year, according to the message.

“DE-MSHORAD will protect Divisions and Brigade Combat Teams from unmanned aerial systems, rotary-wing aircraft, and rocket, artillery and mortar threats,” the message added.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Senator asks DHS if foreign-controlled browser extensions threaten the US:

A US senator is calling on the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm to assess the threat posed by browser extensions made in countries known to conduct espionage against the US.

“I am concerned that the use by millions of Americans of foreign-controlled browser extensions could threaten US national security,” Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, wrote in a letter to Christopher Krebs, director of the DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “I am concerned that these browser extensions could enable foreign governments to conduct surveillance of Americans.”

Also known as plugins and add-ons, extensions give browsers functionality not otherwise available. Ad blockers, language translators, HTTPS enforcers, grammar checkers, and cursor enhancers are just a few examples of legitimate extensions that can be downloaded either from browser-operated repositories or third-party websites.

Unfortunately, there’s a darker side to extensions. Their pervasiveness and their opaqueness make them a perfect vessel for stashing software that logs sites users visit, steals passwords they enter, and acts as a backdoor that funnels data between users and attacker-controlled servers.

Extensions: A short, sordid history

One of the more extreme examples of this type of malice came last year when Chrome and Firefox extensions were caught logging the browsing history of more than 4 million users and selling it online. People often think that long, complicated Web URLs prevent outsiders from being able to access medical or accounting data, but the systematic collection, dubbed DataSpii, proved the assumption wrong.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow0495:

After breach, Twitter hires a new cybersecurity chief – TechCrunch:

Following a high-profile breach in July, Twitter has hired Rinki Sethi as its new chief information security officer.

Sethi most recently served as chief information security officer at cloud data management company Rubrik, and previously worked in cybersecurity roles at IBM, Palo Alto Networks and Intuit.

In the new role at Twitter overseeing the company’s information security practices and policies, Sethi will report to platform lead Nick Tornow, according to her tweet announcing the job move.

[...] Twitter had left the role of chief information security officer vacant since the departure of its previous security chief, Mike Convertino, who left in December to join cyber resilience firm Arceo.

Previously:
Hackers Tell the Story of the Twitter Attack
Twitter Revamping Its API for 3rd-Party Apps
Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates-Bitcoin Scam Hits Twitter in Coordinated Blitz

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Study: Neanderthal genes may be liability for COVID-19 patients:

Researchers Hugo Zeberg and Svante Paabo determined that the genes belong to a group, or haplotype, which likely came from Neanderthals. The haplotype is found in about 16% of the population in Europe and half the population in South Asia, while in Africa and East Asia it is non-existent.

[...] The genes are one of several risk factors for COVID-19, including age, sex and pre-existing conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart problems.

Zeberg and Paabo, who work at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, noted that the prevalence of the particular Neanderthal gene group is highest in people from Bangladesh, where 63% are estimated to carry a copy of the haplotype.

They cited studies from the U.K. showing that people of Bangladeshi descent have about two times higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than the general population.

Recently:
Women with Neandertal Gene Variant are More Fertile, Have Fewer Miscarriages
Neanderthal Diet Included Seafood
Neanderthals Shared Genetic Similarities With Woolly Mammoths
Study Suggests Multiple Instances of Inter-Breeding Between Neanderthal and Early Humans
Mating With Neanderthals Reintroduced "Lost" DNA Into Modern Humans

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

The Global Semiconductor Market: China Deploys Sun Tzu to Prevail in the Chip War - Global Research:

Let's cut to the chase: with or without a sanction juggernaut,China simply won't be expelled from the global semiconductor market.

The real amount of chip supply Huawei has in stock for their smart phone business may remain an open question.

But the most important point is that in the next few years – remember Made in China 2025 remains in effect – the Chinese will be manufacturing the necessary equipment to produce 5 nm chips of equivalent or even better quality than what's coming from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Conversations with IT experts from Russia, ASEAN and Huawei reveal the basic contours of the road map ahead.

They explain that what could be described as a limitation of quantum physics is preventing a steady move from 5nm to 3nm chips. This means that the next breakthroughs may come from other semiconductor materials and techniques. So China, in this aspect, is practically at the same level of research as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Additionally, there is no knowledge gap – or a communication problem – between Chinese and Taiwanese engineers. And the predominant modus operandi remains the revolving door.

China's breakthroughs involve a crucial switch from silicon to carbon. Chinese research is totally invested in it, and is nearly ready to transpose their lab work into industrial production.

In parallel, the Chinese are updating the US-privileged photo-lithography procedure to get nanometer chips to a new, non-photo lithography procedure capable of producing smaller and cheaper chips.

As much as Chinese companies, moving forward, will be buying every possible stage of chip manufacturing business in sight, whatever the cost, this will proceed in parallel to top US semiconductor firms like Qualcomm going no holds barred to skirt sanctions and continue to supply chips to Huawei. That's already the case with Intel and AMD.

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takyon writes:

The Subtle Effects of Blood Circulation Can Be Used to Detect Deep Fakes

This work, done by two researchers at Binghamton University (Umur Aybars Ciftci and Lijun Yin) and one at Intel (Ilke Demir), was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning this past July. In an article titled, "FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals," [DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2020.3009287] [DX] the authors describe software they created that takes advantage of the fact that real videos of people contain physiological signals that are not visible to the eye.

In particular, video of a person's face contains subtle shifts in color that result from pulses in blood circulation. You might imagine that these changes would be too minute to detect merely from a video, but viewing videos that have been enhanced to exaggerate these color shifts will quickly disabuse you of that notion. This phenomenon forms the basis of a technique called photoplethysmography, or PPG for short, which can be used, for example, to monitor newborns without having to attach anything to a their very sensitive skin.

Deep fakes don't lack such circulation-induced shifts in color, but they don't recreate them with high fidelity. The researchers at SUNY and Intel found that "biological signals are not coherently preserved in different synthetic facial parts" and that "synthetic content does not contain frames with stable PPG." Translation: Deep fakes can't convincingly mimic how your pulse shows up in your face.

The inconsistencies in PPG signals found in deep fakes provided these researchers with the basis for a deep-learning system of their own, dubbed FakeCatcher, which can categorize videos of a person's face as either real or fake with greater than 90 percent accuracy. And these same three researchers followed this study with another demonstrating that this approach can be applied not only to revealing that a video is fake, but also to show what software was used to create it.

That newer work, posted to the arXiv pre-print server on 26 August, was titled, "How Do the Hearts of Deep Fakes Beat? Deep Fake Source Detection via Interpreting Residuals with Biological Signals." In it, the researchers showed they that can distinguish with greater than 90 percent accuracy whether the video was real, or which of four different deep-fake generators (DeepFakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap or NeuralTex) was used to create a bogus video.

6 months later: Deep Fakes Get the Blood Pumping.

Related:
Deep Fakes Advance to Only Needing a Single Two Dimensional Photograph
MIT Team Creates Deepfake of President Nixon Reading "Moon Disaster" Apollo 11 Contingency Speech
Microsoft Announces a Deepfake Detector Tool

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Freeman writes:

SpaceX Starlink brings Internet to emergency responders in wildfire areas:

SpaceX Starlink is providing Internet access to Washington state emergency responders in areas ravaged by wildfires. The group has deployed seven Starlink user terminals (i.e. satellite dishes) since it began using the service in early August, as CNBC reported yesterday:

        "I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable" as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department's IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday.

Previously:
SpaceX Seeks FCC Broadband Funds, Must Prove It Can Deliver Sub-100ms Latency
SpaceX Starlink Speeds Revealed as Beta Users Get Downloads of 11 to 60Mbps

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takyon writes:

Toyota Research Demonstrates Ceiling-Mounted Home Robot

[Toyota Research Institute (TRI)] has been focusing heavily on home robots, which is reflective of the long-term nature of what TRI is trying to do, because home robots are both the place where we'll need robots the most at the same time as they're the place where it's going to be hardest to deploy them. The unpredictable nature of homes, and the fact that homes tend to have squishy fragile people in them, are robot-unfriendly characteristics, but as the population continues to age (an increasingly acute problem in Japan), homes offer an enormous amount of potential for helping us maintain our independence.

Today, Toyota is showing off some of the research that it's been working on recently, in the form of a virtual reality presentation in lieu of an in-person press event. For journalists, TRI pre-loaded the recording onto a VR headset, which was FedEx'ed to my house. You can watch the entire 40-minute presentation in 360 video on YouTube (or in VR if you have a headset of your own), but if you don't watch the whole thing, you should at least check out the full-on GLaDOS (with arms) that TRI thinks belongs in your home.

Freeman writes:

Nikola’s deal with GM was supposed to close today—it didn’t:

When Nikola and GM announced a partnership on September 8, GM said it expected the deal to close by September 30. Now September 30 has arrived, and the deal hasn't closed. Media reports indicate that the deal is unlikely to close today.

A GM spokesman confirmed the delay in an email to Ars. "Our transaction with Nikola has not closed. We are continuing our discussions with Nikola and will provide further updates when appropriate."

[...] September 30 isn't a hard deadline. According to Nikola's regulatory filing about the deal, the transaction can be terminated by either party if it hasn't closed by December 3. So talks between the companies could drag on for another two months.

Previously:
Nikola Founder Bought Truck Designs From Third Party

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers develop dual-wavelength ocean lidar for ocean detection:

Ocean water column information profiles are essential for ocean research. Currently, water column profiles are typically obtained by ocean lidar instruments, including spaceborne, airborne and shipborne lidar.

[...} A research team from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOFM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a novel airborne dual-wavelength ocean lidar (DWOL) equipped with a 53-nm and 486-nm lasers that can operate simultaneously. The study was published in Remote Sensing.

This instrument was designed to compare the performance of 486 and 532 nm lasers in a single detection area and to provide a reference for future spaceborne oceanic lidar (SBOL) design.

The researchers optimized the laser wavelengths of the DWOL system to make it compatible with coastal water and open ocean water. The vertical profiles of returning signals from a depth of approximately 100 m were obtained with the newly designed 486 nm channel.

Blue wavelengths penetrate ocean water better.

Journal Reference:
Li, Kaipeng; He, Yan; Ma, Jian; et al. A Dual-Wavelength Ocean Lidar for Vertical Profiling of Oceanic Backscatter and Attenuation, Remote Sensing (DOI: 10.3390/rs12172844)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Green shoots: Rooftop farming takes off in Singapore:

On the rooftop of a Singapore shopping mall, a sprawling patch of eggplants, rosemary, bananas and papayas stand in colourful contrast to the grey skyscrapers of the city-state's business district.

[...] In the past few years, however, the city of 5.7 million has seen food plots sprouting on more and more rooftops.

Authorities last year said they were aiming to source 30 percent of the population's "nutritional needs" locally by 2030, and want to increase production of fish and eggs as well as vegetables.

With coronavirus increasing fears about supply-chain disruption, the government has accelerated its efforts, announcing the rooftops of nine car parks would become urban farms and releasing Sg$30 million ($22 million) to boost local food production.

Urban farming has been a novelty over the past decade; will it become commonplace, a standard feature of urban living and design?

Previously:
World's Biggest Rooftop Greenhouse Opens in Montreal

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

No bones about it: Wild gorillas don't develop osteoporosis like their human cousins:

In a study of gorilla skeletons collected in the wild, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and their international collaborators report that aging female gorillas do not experience the accelerated bone loss associated with the bone-weakening condition called osteoporosis, as their human counterparts often do. The findings, they say, could offer clues as to how humans evolved with age-related diseases.

[Christopher Ruff, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine] and his colleagues were able to analyze the bones of 34 wild mountain gorillas—16 females and 17 males, ages 11 to 43 years. This spans the full adult range of the species. Using a specialized CT scanner brought to Rwanda, the researchers examined the leg, arm and spine bones from each animal (including the femur, tibia, radius, ulna, humerus and lumbar vertebrae), taking measurements of bone density and geometry.

[...] The researchers found some features of skeletal aging among the gorillas that are similar to those observed in humans, including a general widening of the diameter of long bones and thinning of the bone wall. However, the gorilla bones did not show any of the accelerated bone mineral loss associated with age-related osteoporosis in human skeletons. In humans, women tend to lose bone mineral density more than men. However, in the mountain gorillas, there was no significant difference in bone density or overall strength between older males and females.

These differences, Ruff says, may be explained by the fact that gorillas continue to have offspring throughout their lives, maintaining hormonal levels that help protect them from bone loss. Higher activity levels also may help grow and then maintain stronger bones.

Journal Reference:
Skeletal ageing in Virunga mountain gorillas, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0606)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Tea bud "robots" used to kill and clear bacteria:

When harmful bacteria colonize the surface of items such as medical implants, they form slimy antibiotic-resistant coatings known as biofilms. Scientists have devised a new way of removing such films, and it involves magnetically steering augmented tea plant buds.

In their natural form, buds from the Camellia sinensis tea plant are not only inexpensive and biodegradable, they're also porous. They additionally contain compounds called polyphenols, which are known to kill bacteria.

[...] Named T-Budbots, the modified tea bud particles were finally placed in bacterial biofilms grown in glass dishes. Utilizing a magnet, the scientists were able to steer the particles through those films. As the T-Budbots moved along, they penetrated the coatings, killing the bacteria, and clearing the biofilms away.

The researchers hope the technique can combat antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Journal Reference:
Tamanna Bhuyan, Anitha T. Simon, Surjendu Maity, et al. Magnetotactic T-Budbots to Kill-n-Clean Biofilms, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c08444)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://news.err.ee/1140442/head-of-ms-estonia-investigation-estonia-sank-on-collision-with-submarine:

Considering that the tear is below the water line and considering noone has ever mentioned that another ship could have sunk with Estonia and none of the survivors have said they saw a ship close to Estonia - the most likely cause is Estonia collided with a submarine.

That means there should be a damaged submarine somewhere?

Yes, it means there should be a damaged submarine somewhere. But I will specify a bit. If one says a collision with a submarine, the first thought is the submarine ran into Estonia from its side. It might not have been so simple. It was more likely a intrusion. That Estonia and a submarine went in the same direction. And we can not rule out that Estonia might have hit the submarine, grazed the submarine. The question is what was a submarine doing on Estonia's route.

[...] The ferry Estonia sank on the night of September 28, 1994, sailing from Tallinn to Stockholm. The sinking of Estonia is the largest maritime disaster in peacetime in the Baltic Sea, killing 852 people from 17 countries.

MS Estonia

Local ed's (FP) update, also from ERR (our state news service): Swedish authorities considering MS Estonia investigation.

Additional coverage at euronews, BBC, and The Guardian.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Mars Express finds more subsurface ponds of liquid water on Mars:

ESA's Mars Express orbiter has found evidence of more liquid water beneath the ice cap in the south polar region of Mars. Based on data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) radar instrument, researchers found three new subsurface ponds, with the largest measuring 20 x 30 km (12 x 19 mi).

In 2018, the Mars Express team discovered that the Martian ice caps are not ice throughout, but actually have large, subsurface lakes of liquid water. Using the MARSIS instrument to probe beneath the southern polar cap from May 2012 and December 2015, the orbiter mapped out a lake 20 km (12.4 mi) wide under 1.5 km (0.9 mi) of solid ice. Now, more ponds are being revealed at the same depth by a reanalysis of the same data.

The ponds could serve as habitat for extremophiles.

Also at: Gizmodo and NASA.

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