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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Nobel Prize winner says the universe has gone through multiple Big Bangs:

When it comes to how the universe started, science holds that the universe began in what's known as the Big Bang. Many have wondered over the years what the end of the universe will be like. A 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics named Sir Roger Penrose believes that the universe goes through cycles of death and rebirth.

He believes that there have been multiple Big Bangs and that more will happen. Penrose points to black holes as holding clues to the existence of previous universes.

[...] He calls his theory, "conformal cyclic cosmology." Penrose says he discovered six "warm" sky points known as "Hawking Points" first discovered by the late Prof. Stephen Hawking. Hawking believed that black holes leak radiation and eventually will evaporate. That evaporation could take longer than the current age of the universe, according to the scientist.

Penrose believes that we can observe what he calls dead black holes left by past universes. If he's correct, it would validate some of Hawking's theories. The theory is controversial, and like many theories, it may never be proven to be true or false. If he is right, the universe we know will one day explode, and a new one will come into existence.

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DannyB writes:

Final Nail in the Coffin for Yahoo Groups Lands Dec. 15

Yahoo Groups will shut down for good on Dec. 15, a year after company parent Verizon decided to gut most of the functionality from the 20-year-old discussion board platform.

Yahoo said supporting the platform "no longer fit" with its long-term strategy, citing low use. At the same time, Yahoo is indicating it's moving away from hosting user-generated content.

"Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years," Yahoo said in a FAQ about the shutdown. "Over that same period, we've witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content."

"A disaster for the galaxy, Captain. The central brain is damaged. The memory core is burned out. The loss to the galaxy may be irretrievable." -- Spock

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

Minimally invasive procedure may free Type 2 diabetics from insulin:

A small study suggests that a new procedure that treats part of the intestine just beyond the stomach may allow people with type 2 diabetes to safely stop taking insulin.

The procedure -- which resurfaces the duodenum -- was combined with a popular kind of diabetes medication called GLP-1 receptor agonists -- such as Victoza, Trulicity, Ozempic -- and counseling on lifestyle factors, such as nutrition and physical activity.

Six months after treatments began, three-quarters of participants taking insulin no longer needed it. The amount of fat stored in their livers dropped from 8% to less than 5%.

"The duodenum harbors a broad potential for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and this combination treatment could be a game-changing approach in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome," said lead researcher Dr. Suzanne Meiring, of Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/feds-to-investigate-the-chevrolet-bolt-ev-after-three-fires/

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation of the Chevrolet Bolt EV following several reports of vehicle fires. Specifically, NHTSA says it was contacted by two owners reporting that their Bolt EVs had caught fire while parked and unattended. The agency did some digging and turned up a third instance, and on October 9 it opened a preliminary investigation into the scope, frequency, circumstances, and safety consequences of the fires.

https://www.autoblog.com/2020/10/13/chevrolet-bolt-electric-car-nhtsa-fires-investigation/

Fires were reported in 2017, 2018, and 2019 models, and the three EVs were left with a similar burn pattern on or around the rear seats. The NHTSA published a bulletin that explains the fires seemingly started in the Bolt's battery compartment and spread to the cabin; they didn't start inside the passenger compartment.

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takyon writes:

Blue Origin tests NASA landing system hardware on latest New Shepard flight

After a ten-month lull in flights following the previous test of Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard launch system, the company conducted a launch and landing of the fully reusable booster and capsule duo.

Following weather-related and technical issues during a window late in September, the flight took place from the company's West Texas facility — near Van Horn, Texas — on Tuesday morning at just after 8:35 AM CDT / 13:35 UTC.

This mission, also known as NS-13, saw 12 commercial payloads launched to the edge of space and back, including a NASA-developed sensor suite that could enable future lunar landing craft to perform safe and precise touchdowns on the surface of the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis exploration program.

Also at Teslarati.

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takyon writes:

BBC micro:bit v2 board Unveiled with Nordic nRF52833 SoC, Microphone and Speaker

The original BBC micro:bit educational board was launched in July 2015 with a Nordic nRF51822 Arm Cortex-M0 MCU @ 16 MHz providing Bluetooth LE connectivity, a few I/Os, some buttons, and a LED matrix acting as a small display.

The British company has now launched a new update with BBC micro:bit v2 with the same form factor, but equipped with a more powerful Nordic Semi nRF52833 Bluetooth 5.1 Arm Cortex-M4 MCU clocked at 64 MHz and adding a microphone and a speaker.

Micro:bit Educational Foundation announcement. Also at BBC.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The mountains of Pluto are snowcapped, but not for the same reasons as on Earth:

In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snowcapped mountains on Pluto, which are strikingly similar to mountains on Earth.

[...] An international team led by CNRS scientists1 conducted this exploration. They first determined that the "snow" on Pluto's mountains actually consists of frozen methane, with traces of this gas being present in Pluto's atmosphere, just like water vapor on Earth. To understand how the same landscape could be produced in such different conditions, they used a climate model for the dwarf planet, which revealed that due to its particular dynamics, Pluto's atmosphere is rich in gaseous methane at altitudes.

[...] it is only at the peaks of mountains [...] that the air contains enough methane for it to condense.

The homologous structures are striking.

Journal Reference:
Tanguy Bertrand, François Forget, Bernard Schmitt, et al. Equatorial mountains on Pluto are covered by methane frosts resulting from a unique atmospheric process [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18845-3)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Hurricanes, heavy rains are critical for Hawai'i's groundwater supply:

Dores and a team of scientists from SOEST and the Hawai'i Department of Health collected rainfall around the island of Oahu and analyzed the stable isotopes of rainwater, chemical signatures in the water molecules. They compared the chemical signatures in rainwater to those of groundwater to determine the source of water in the aquifers—event-based rainfall or trade wind-related rain.

"Because windward and mauka showers are so common, it is easy to assume that is the main source of our drinking water," said Dores. "Also, large rainfall events such as Kona storms[*] result in significant runoff into the oceans. However, our research found that a lot of the rain from Kona storms makes it into our groundwater aquifers and is an important source of our drinking water."

[*] Kona Storms:

Kona storms (also called Kona lows) are a type of seasonal cyclone in the Hawaiian Islands, usually formed in the winter from winds coming from the westerly "kona" (normally leeward) direction. They are mainly cold core cyclones, which places them in the extratropical cyclone rather than the subtropical cyclone category. Hawaii typically experiences two to three annually, which can affect the state for a week or more. Among their hazards are heavy rain, hailstorms, flash floods and their associated landslides, high elevation snow, high winds which result in large surf and swells, and waterspouts.

In Hawaii, the rain must fall heavily upon the plain.

[Ed Note - For those who don't know, Hawaiʻi is the largest island located in the U.S. state of Hawaii.]

Journal Reference:
Daniel Dores, Craig R. Glenn, Giuseppe Torri, et al. Implications for groundwater recharge from stable isotopic composition of precipitation in Hawai'i during the 2017–2018 La Niña, Hydrological Processes (DOI: 10.1002/hyp.13907)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Simulations reveal that rocky super-Earths with thin atmospheres are often protected by a Jupiter-like planet:

An international group of astronomers, led by Martin Schlecker of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, has found that the arrangement of rocky, gaseous and icy planets in planetary systems is apparently not random and depends on only a few initial conditions. The study, which will appear in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is based on a new simulation that tracks the evolution of planetary systems over several billion years. Planetary systems around sun-like stars, which produce in their inner regions super-Earths with low water and gas content, very often form a planet comparable to our Jupiter on an outer orbit. Such planets help to keep potentially dangerous objects away from the inner regions.

Scientists suspect that the planet Jupiter played an important role in the development of life on Earth, because its gravity often deflects potentially dangerous asteroids and comets on their orbits into the zone of rocky planets in a way that reduces the number of catastrophic collisions. This circumstance therefore repeatedly raises the question whether such a combination of planets is rather random, or whether it is a common result of the formation of planetary systems.

Jupiter-like planets deflect asteroids, comets, and other hazardous objects from planets nearer their stars.

Journal Reference:
M. Schlecker, C. Mordasini, A. Emsenhuber, et al. The New Generation Planetary Population Synthesis (NGPPS). III. Warm super-Earths and cold Jupiters: A weak occurrence correlation, but with a strong architecture-composition link [open], Astronomy & Astrophysics (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202038554)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Rainforest at biosphere 2 offers glimpse into future of the Amazon:

Tropical forests may be more resilient to predicted temperature increases under global climate change than previously thought, a study published in the journal Nature Plants suggests. The results could help make climate prediction models more accurate, according to the authors—an international team led by scientists in the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

The group studied data from the rainforest habitat at UArizona's Biosphere 2 and compared them to measurements taken at natural tropical forest sites. Due to being encased under a glass dome, the tropical forest at Biosphere 2 is possibly the hottest tropical forest in the world, with temperatures reaching up to 40 degrees Celsius[104 F], about 6 C[10 F] higher than maximum temperatures currently experienced by natural tropical forests and in the range of what scientists expect them to experience in the year 2100, absent major climate change mitigation.

At Biosphere 2, when the effects of warming and drying were separated, the authors observed that, just as in natural forests, photosynthesis declined as the air dried, but when the air was wet, the trees continued to photosynthesize steadily at ever higher temperatures, right up to a forest-roasting 38 C[100 F].

Autonomous Vehicle International, a trade magazine, is running this story today.

Waymo opens unaccompanied drives to public:

According to a statement from the company, "We'll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app (available on Google Play and the App Store). In the near term, 100% of our rides will be fully driverless. We expect our new fully driverless service to be very popular, and we're thankful to our riders for their patience as we ramp up availability to serve demand."

Are you ready for a Johnny Cab ride?
Will the good citizens of Tempe keep throwing rocks (or worse) at the Waymo cars when they wander into quiet neighborhoods?

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DeathMonkey writes:

Scientists Confirm Nevada Man Was Infected Twice With Coronavirus:

A 25-year-old was infected twice with the coronavirus earlier this year, scientists in Nevada have confirmed. It is the first confirmed case of so-called reinfection with the virus in the U.S. and the fifth confirmed reinfection case worldwide.

The cases underscore the importance of social distancing and wearing masks even if you were previously infected with the virus, and they raise questions about how the human immune system reacts to the virus.

The two infections in the Nevada patient occurred about six weeks apart, according to a case study published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet. The patient originally tested positive for the virus in April and had symptoms including a cough and nausea. He recovered and tested negative for the virus in May.

But at the end of May, he went to an urgent care center with symptoms including fever, cough and dizziness. In early June, he tested positive again and ended up in the hospital.

"The second infection was symptomatically more severe than the first," the authors of the study write. The patient survived his second bout with COVID-19.

[...] One of the biggest outstanding questions is how widespread reinfection might be. It's difficult to confirm cases in which a person is infected twice. Scientists must have the nasal swabs from both the first and second infection in order to compare the genomes of both virus samples.

Only the most advanced hospital and laboratory facilities have the equipment and personnel to do the genome sequencing and analyze the results. As a result, most cases of reinfection are likely going undetected.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Wisconsin denies Foxconn tax subsidies after contract negotiations fail:

Foxconn isn't building what it promised and failed to hire enough people

Through the many twists and turns of Foxconn's troubled Wisconsin project, one thing has long been clear: the company is not building the promised 20 million-square-foot Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in its contract with the state. Even before President Trump broke ground on the supposed factory in June 2018, Foxconn said it would instead build a far smaller factory than it had proposed.

The discrepancy between what Foxconn is doing and what it said it would do in its contract has only grown since then, and it has brought Wisconsin and the company to an impasse. Documents obtained by The Verge show that attempts to renegotiate that contract have so far failed, and today, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), which oversees the deal, rejected Foxconn's application for tax subsidies on the grounds that Foxconn had not carried out the Gen 10.5 LCD factory project described in its original contract.

WEDC also noted that even if whatever Foxconn is currently doing had been eligible under the contract, it had failed to employ the minimum number of people needed to get subsidies. Foxconn needed to employ at least 520 people at the end of 2019 to receive subsidies and claimed to have hired 550, but WEDC estimated that only 281 would qualify under the terms of the contract.

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takyon writes:

Imagination has announced new B-series GPU designs focused on automotive and high-performance computing use cases, as it has become difficult for the company to compete in the mobile GPU market:

It's almost been a year since Imagination had announced its brand-new A-series GPU IP, a release which at the time the company called its most important in 15 years. The new architecture indeed marked some significant updates to the company's GPU IP, promising major uplifts in performance and promises of great competitiveness. Since then, other than a slew of internal scandals, we've heard very little from the company – until today's announcement of the new next-generation of IP: the B-Series.

The new Imagination B-Series is an evolution of last year's A-Series GPU IP release, further iterating through microarchitectural improvements, but most importantly, scaling the architecture up to higher performance levels through a brand-new multi-GPU system, as well as the introduction of a new functional safety class of IP in the form of the BXS series.

[....] Imagination's current highest-end hardware implementation in the BXT series is the BXT 32-1024, and putting four of these together creates an MC4 GPU. In a high-performance implementation reaching up to 1.5GHz clock speeds, this configuration would offer up to 6TFLOPs of FP32 computing power. Whilst this isn't quite enough to catch up to Nvidia and AMD, it's a major leap for a third-party GPU IP provider that's been mostly active in the mobile space for the last 15 years.

[....] Beyond the addition of safety critical features on the BXS series, the automotive IP also features some specific enhancements in the microarchitecture that allows for better performance scaling for workloads that are more unique to the automotive space. One such aspect is geometry, where automotive vendors have the tendency to use absurd amounts of triangles. Imagination says they've tweaked their designs to cover these more demanding use-cases, and together with some MSAA specific optimisations they can reach up to a 60% greater performance for these automotive edge-cases, compared to the regular non-automotive IP.

Related: Imagination Technologies Group Up for Sale

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Watch Out — Microsoft Warns Android Users About A New Ransomware:

Microsoft has warned about a new strain of mobile ransomware that takes advantage of incoming call notifications and Android's Home button to lock the device behind a ransom note.

The findings concern a variant of a known Android ransomware family dubbed "MalLocker.B" which has now resurfaced with new techniques, including a novel means to deliver the ransom demand on infected devices as well as an obfuscation mechanism to evade security solutions.

The development comes amid a huge surge in ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure across sectors, with a 50% increase in the daily average of ransomware attacks in the last three months compared to the first half of the year, and cybercriminals increasingly incorporating double extortion in their playbook.

[...] "This new mobile ransomware variant is an important discovery because the malware exhibits behaviors that have not been seen before and could open doors for other malware to follow," Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said.

"It reinforces the need for comprehensive defense powered by broad visibility into attack surfaces as well as domain experts who track the threat landscape and uncover notable threats that might be hiding amidst massive threat data and signals."

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