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takyon writes:

3D Printing Industry ICON partners with NASA to develop 3D printed Moon infrastructure in 'Project Olympus'

Texas-based construction company ICON has gained a NASA contract to develop a 3D printed off-world construction system for the Moon.

Project Olympus will see ICON partner with architecture firms BIG and SEArch+ to design robust lunar structures that can be built using materials available on the Moon's surface. As part of the program, ICON has also created a new division, dedicated to developing and demonstrating prototype elements for a full-scale space-based 3D printing system.

Through the project, NASA aims to develop a more sustainable presence on the Moon, and in doing so, allow humanity to become a permanently spacefaring civilization.

See also: 3D-printed houses completed for Austin's homeless population

Related: NASA Announces the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge For Moon and Mars Bases
Startup Can 3D Print Small Homes in 12-24 Hours, for Up to $10,000 Each

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Watch a meteroid bounce off the Earth's atmosphere:

Last week, a small meteoroid stopped by for a quick visit into our atmosphere before bouncing back off into the cosmos.

Earthgrazing meteoroids, as they're called, are already pretty rare, according to Universe Today, showing up just a few times per year. But even more uncommon: This one was caught on tape — and as more meteoroid-spotting cameras are set up around the world, videos like this might grow more common.

(1/2) An earthgrazer above N Germany and the Netherlands was observed by 8 #globalmeteornetwork cameras on Sept 22, 03:53:35 UTC. It entered the atmosphere at 34.1 km/s, reached the lowest altitude of ~91 km and bounced back into space!@westernuScience@IMOmeteors@amsmeteorspic.twitter.com/5EgRivdcsu

— Denis Vida (@meteordoc) September 22, 2020

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow639:

Quantum entanglement realized between distant large objects:

A team of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have succeeded in entangling two very different quantum objects. The result has several potential applications in ultra-precise sensing and quantum communication and is now published in Nature Physics.

[...] Researchers succeeded in making entanglement between a mechanical oscillator—a vibrating dielectric membrane—and a cloud of atoms, each acting as a tiny magnet, or what physicists call "spin." These very different entities were possible to entangle by connecting them with photons, particles of light. Atoms can be useful in processing quantum information and the membrane—or mechanical quantum systems in general—can be useful for storage of quantum information.

Professor Eugene Polzik, who led the effort, states that: "With this new technique, we are on route to pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of entanglement. The bigger the objects, the further apart they are, the more disparate they are, the more interesting entanglement becomes from both fundamental and applied perspectives. With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible."

Journal Reference:
Rodrigo A. Thomas, Michał Parniak, Christoffer Østfeldt, et al. Entanglement between distant macroscopic mechanical and spin systems, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-1031-5)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Parrots removed from British wildlife park after swearing at visitors:

Five parrots have been removed from public view at a British wildlife park after they started swearing at customers.

The foul-mouthed birds were split up after they launched a number of different expletives at visitors and staff just days after being donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England.

"It just went ballistic, they were all swearing," the venue's chief executive Steve Nichols told CNN Travel on Tuesday. "We were a little concerned about the children."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

H&M fined more than $40 million for spying on employees:

A German privacy watchdog said Thursday that it is fining clothing retailer H&M 35.3 million euros ($41 million) after the company was found to have spied on some of its employees in Germany.

Hamburg's data protection commissioner said in a statement that the Swedish company collected private information about employees at a customer service center in Nuremberg, "ranging from rather harmless details to family issues and religious beliefs."

The information was recorded on a network drive accessible to up to 50 managers and "used, among other things, to obtain a detailed profile of employees for measures and decisions regarding their employment."

[...] H&M said in a statement that the practices in Nuremberg didn't correspond to company guidelines but that it nevertheless took full responsibility and had apologized unreservedly to the employees. The company said it would examine the fine issued.

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RandomFactor writes:

A team of physicists at the University of Arkansas has published an article on harvesting energy from the brownian motion in a single atom thick layer of graphene.

"An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors," said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.

The findings, published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms—ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting.

The idea of harvesting energy from graphene is controversial because it refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms, known as Brownian motion, cannot do work. Thibado's team found that at room temperature the thermal motion of graphene does in fact induce an alternating current (AC) in a circuit, an achievement thought to be impossible.

This is done in a circuit with no temperature differential.

According to Thibado "If millions of these tiny circuits could be built on a 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter chip, they could serve as a low-power battery replacement."

Journal Reference:
P. M. Thibado, P. Kumar, Surendra Singh, et al. Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene, Physical Review E (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.042101)

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AnonTechie writes:

The Secretive Networks Used to Move Money Offshore:

Researchers at USC Viterbi have uncovered a highly unusual network pattern within the Panama Papers, showing how fortunes can be easily hidden in secretive offshore shell corporations, and how these remain difficult to trace and take down.

In 2016, the world's largest ever data leak dubbed The Panama Papers exposed a scandal, uncovering a vast global network of people—including celebrities and world leaders, who used offshore tax havens, anonymous transactions through intermediaries and shell corporations to hide their wealth, grow their fortunes and avoid taxes.

Researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering have now conducted a deep analysis of the entities and their interrelationships that were originally revealed in the 11.5 million files leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The academic researchers have made some discoveries about how this network and transactions operate, uncovering uniquely fragmented network behavior, vastly different from more traditional social or organizational networks, demonstrating why these systems of transactions and associations are so robust and difficult to infiltrate or take down. The work has been published in Applied Network Science.

Journal Reference:
Mayank Kejriwal, Akarsh Dang. Structural studies of the global networks exposed in the Panama papers [open], Applied Network Science (DOI: 10.1007/s41109-020-00313-y)

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

E-scooters should be legalised on roads but riding on pavements should be prohibited, the Transport Committee of MPs has said.

Currently, privately-owned e-scooters are banned to use in the UK anywhere except on private land.

The committee argues the vehicles, which usually travel 9-15mph, could offer a green alternative to the car.

Official trials of rented e-scooters have already been announced in some places in England.

What does it mean when a government voices concern about climate change but bans non-fossil fuel burning transportation?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

A group of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory has discovered a way to convert a common byproduct of the paper manufacturing process into valuable chemical precursors for making nylon. The process is much more environmentally friendly in terms of the solvent(s) used and the energy inputs than other methods and provides a useful alternative to burning waste products of pulping.

Kraft (from the German meaning strength) lignin is a major waste product of the paper industry, amounting to about 50 million tons annually. This waste lignin is typically burned for heat, however, that process also releases carbon dioxide into the environment.

Ames Laboratory researchers discovered that treating this lignin with aqueous sodium hydroxide at reasonable temperatures (200 °C) produces guaiacol. Guaiacol can then be converted into nylon precursors under even milder conditions using suitable catalysts—creating a new, viable two-step process for producing important chemicals from lignin.

One process's waste is another's gold?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Why Walmart Plus thinks it can challenge Amazon:

Walmart is one of the very few companies that could hope to challenge Amazon, which has a 15-year headstart and boasts over 150 million members worldwide. As the biggest retailer in the world, Walmart has the resources, finances and logistics infrastructure to build out a viable Prime rival.

It's got a very long way to go. Walmart Plus, which costs $98 a year, offers shipping as fast as same-day for orders over $35. It also offers a fuel discount and a "Scan & Go" feature that lets in-store shoppers scan and pay for items using their phones, so they can avoid the checkout line. Amazon Prime, costing $119 annually, offers one-day shipping even for orders under $10, the Prime Now rapid-delivery service, Prime Video and Prime Music streaming services.

Are Walmart's physical stores an asset or a hindrance in its quest to unseat Amazon Prime?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Corals have a secret weapon against a warming climate:

Rising ocean temperatures are killing coral reefs, but researchers discovered corals have a secret buried in their genes that just might help them fight off seasonal changes in temperature.

[...] This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and part of a bigger initiative aimed at understanding the effects of hurricanes on coral reefs, catapulted Rodriguez-Casariego to further research the adaptation responses of corals. For 17 months, he collected more than 200 Staghorn coral samples with former CREST undergraduate student Ivanna Ortiz Rivera and former CREST postdoctoral researcher Alex Mercado-Molina.

Together, they studied the corals across all four seasons. What they found was eye-opening. Depending on the season, corals modified the activity of their DNA in order to adapt to changes in temperature and other conditions. These epigenetic changes do not involve a change in DNA itself but can affect how genes are expressed.

Corals are able to modify how their DNA behaves according to environmental conditions.

Journal Reference:
Javier A. Rodríguez-Casariego, Alex E. Mercado-Molina, Daniel Garcia-Souto, et al. Genome-Wide DNA Methylation Analysis Reveals a Conserved Epigenetic Response to Seasonal Environmental Variation in the Staghorn Coral Acropora cervicornis, Frontiers in Marine Science (DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2020.560424)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today Senate Republicans held a hearing titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." It was the second such hearing to be held in Congress in the past six months — in September, House Republicans put on a similar show, lambasting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

[...] To the extent that these hearings have any basis in actual events, as Hirono notes, they tend to involve isolated cases in which some conservative-leaning person or organization is temporarily suspended from a service, or does not appear in search results, or is not being promoted sufficiently by a site's recommendation features. And while unintentional bias often is baked into algorithms, as this recent study of Facebook's ad products suggests, no research has ever suggested that Republicans have been disadvantaged on social media platforms.

In fact, as I often like to point out, Fox News typically gets more engagement on Facebook than any other publisher. Still, that's just one data point. How do partisan pages fare across the social network?

A study today published by Media Matters for America attempts to answer that question. Over 37 weeks, the authors measured engagement — likes, comments, and shares — across left- and right-leaning pages. What did they find?

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/11/18305407/social-network-conservative-bias-twitter-facebook-ted-cruz

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

US military eyes nuclear thermal rocket for missions in Earth-moon space:

The U.S. military aims to get a nuclear thermal rocket up and running, to boost its ability to monitor the goings-on in Earth-moon space.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just awarded a $14 million task order to Gryphon Technologies, a company in Washington, D.C., that provides engineering and technical solutions to national security organizations.

The money will support DARPA's Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, whose main goal is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system in Earth orbit.

[...] NTP systems use fission reactors to heat propellants such as hydrogen to extreme temperatures, then eject the gas through nozzles to create thrust. This tech boasts a thrust-to-weight ratio about 10,000 times higher than that of electric propulsion systems and a specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, two to five times that of traditional chemical rockets, DARPA officials wrote in a description of the DRACO program.

Such improvements in propulsion technology are needed for "maintaining space domain awareness in cislunar space — the volume of space between the Earth and the moon," the DRACO description reads.

Nuclear thermal rocket on Wikipedia.

Also at Futurism.

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JoeMerchant writes:

Bold new claims from an "open Fusion" development team. They claim a compact design utilizing newly available high temperature superconductors will combine to allow them to demonstrate 10:1 energy returns from fusion reactions within the next four to five years, add 10 more years to build a practical electrical generation station around it. Stories have been all over the popular press for days now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-reactor.html

https://news.mit.edu/2020/physics-fusion-studies-0929

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant.

Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable.

[...] "The MIT group is pursuing a very compelling approach to fusion energy." says Chris Hegna, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not connected to this work. "They realized the emergence of high-temperature superconducting technology enables a high magnetic field approach to producing net energy gain from a magnetic confinement system. This work is a potential game-changer for the international fusion program​."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-26/nuclear-fusion-project-backed-by-investors-to-enter-next-phase

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

Tech giants are ignoring questions over the legality of their EU-US data transfers:

A survey of responses from more than 30 companies to questions about how they're approaching EU-US data transfers in the wake of a landmark ruling (aka Schrems II) by Europe's top court in July, which struck down the flagship Privacy Shield over US surveillance overreach, suggests most are doing the equivalent of burying their head in the sand and hoping the legal nightmare goes away.

European privacy rights group, noyb, has done most of the groundwork here — rounding up in this 45-page report responses (some in English, others in German) from EU entities of 33 companies to a set of questions about personal data transfers.

It sums up the answers to the questions about companies' legal basis for transferring EU citizens' data over the pond post-Schrems II as "astonishing" or AWOL — given some failed to send a response at all.

Tech companies polled on the issue run the alphabetic gamut from Apple to Zoom. While Airbnb, Netflix and WhatsApp are among the companies that noyb says failed to respond about their EU-US data transfers.

Responses provided by companies that did respond appear to raise many more questions than they answer — with lots of question-dodging 'boilerplate responses' in evidence and/or pointing to existing privacy policies in the hope that will make the questioner go away (hi Facebook!) .

"Overall, we were astonished by how many companies were unable to provide little more than a boilerplate answer. It seems that most of the industry still does not have a plan as to how to move forward," noyb adds.

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