SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus_:

Chang'e-5 ascender docks with orbital module in lunar orbit:

The ascender of China's Chang'e-5 probe successfully rendezvoused and docked with the orbiter-returner combination in lunar orbit at 5:42 a.m. BJT on Sunday, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) has announced.

This is the first time Chinese spacecraft have carried out a rendezvous and docking in a lunar orbit.

The samples collected on the moon weighing roughly 2 kilograms have been transferred from the ascender to the returner, said the CNSA.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Asteroid capsule 'found' in Australian desert

A recovery team in Australia has found a space capsule carrying the first large quantities of rock from an asteroid.

The capsule, containing material from a space rock called Ryugu, parachuted down near Woomera in South Australia.

The samples were originally collected by a Japanese spacecraft called Hayabusa-2, which spent more than a year investigating the object.

The container detached from Hayabusa-2, later entering the Earth's atmosphere.

The official Hayabusa-2 Twitter account reported that the capsule and its parachute had been found at 19:47 GMT.

Also at CNET.

Previously: Hayabusa2 Approaches Asteroid Ryugu
Hayabusa2 Reaches Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Hayabusa2 Deploys MINERVA Landers to Asteroid Ryugu
Japan's Hopping Rovers Capture Amazing Views of Asteroid Ryugu
Short-Lived MASCOT Lander Reaches Asteroid Ryugu
Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Faces Difficulties in Landing and Collecting a Sample from an Asteroid
Hayabusa2 "Lands" on Asteroid Ryugu

Original Submission   Alternate Submission

takyon writes:

China conducting biological tests to create super soldiers, US spy chief says

China has conducted testing on its army in the hope of creating biologically enhanced soldiers, according to the top intelligence official in the US.

John Ratcliffe, who has served as Donald Trump's director of national intelligence since May, made the claims in a newspaper editorial, where he warned that China "poses the greatest threat to America today".

[...] "US intelligence shows that China has even conducted human testing on members of the People's Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities," Ratcliffe wrote. "There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing's pursuit of power."

Also at The Wall Street Journal (archive), BioSpace and Interesting Engineering:

In a report published last year in Jamestown, the authors Elsa Kania and Wilson VornDick offer insight into China's interest in gene editing.

"While the potential leveraging of CRISPR to increase human capabilities on the future battlefield remains only a hypothetical possibility at the present, there are indications that Chinese military researchers are starting to explore its potential," state the scholars, Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese defense technology at the Center for a New American Security, and Wilson VornDick, a consultant on China matters and former Navy officer.

See also: State Dept. terminates five exchange programs with China, calling them 'propaganda'

Original Submission

An Anonymous User wrote in with a story submission; it became this story.

After analyzing 15 billion passwords, these are the most common phrases people use:

[...] the CyberNews Investigation team was interested in what kind of patterns everyday people were using in creating their own passwords. We collected data from publicly leaked data breaches, including the Breach Compilation, Collection #1-5, and other databases. We then anonymized the data and detached the passwords so that we could look at that data in isolation.

In total, we were able to analyze 15,212,645,925 passwords, of which 2,217,015,490 were unique. We discovered some interesting things about the way that people create passwords: their favorite sports teams, cities, food and even curse words. We could even deduce the probable age of the person by looking at which year they use in their password.

As the data came in various forms, we filtered the results to only include terms that we could make sense of, and from which we could gather some insights.

[...] Of course, at this point this conversation has all become moot: the best passwords are the ones that you don't need to remember at all. For this reason, we normally strongly recommend that people use password managers. These easy-to-use tools will create very complex passwords for you that you don't even have to remember.

They mostly come as browser extensions that will create or fill in your usernames and passwords for you. The only thing you need to remember is one master password to use the password managers.

Now, if you noticed that your own personal passwords have similar patterns to the ones we analyzed, and that these passwords can be considered rather simple, we recommend you visit our Data Leak Checker to see if your email address and other personal data has been exposed in a data breach.

The CyberNews Data Leak Checker currently has the largest database of known breached accounts, with more than 15 billion compromised accounts. So, chances are that if your account has been leaked, we'll probably have a record of it.

(Emphasis from original retained here.)

Another useful site for checking if an email address has been compromised is: https://haveibeenpwned.com/.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Baby's first breath triggers life-saving changes in the brain:

A team of researchers led by UVA's Yingtang Shi, MD; Patrice Guyenet, PhD; and Douglas A. Bayliss, PhD, have discovered a signaling system within the brainstem that activates almost immediately at birth to support early breathing. That first gasp that every parent cherishes appears to trigger this support system.

[...] Bayliss and his colleagues at UVA, working with researchers at the University of Alberta and Harvard University, found that a specific gene is turned on immediately at birth in a cluster of neurons that regulate breathing selectively in mice. This gene produces a peptide neurotransmitter -- a chain of amino acids that relays information between neurons. This transmitter, called PACAP, starts to be released by these neurons just as the baby emerges into the world.

[...] PACAP is the first signaling molecule shown to be massively and specifically turned on at birth by the breathing network, and it has been linked genetically to SIDS in babies. The causes of SIDS likely are complex, and there may be other important factors to discover, the researchers note.

Journal Reference:
Yingtang Shi, Daniel S. Stornetta, Robert J. Reklow, et al. A brainstem peptide system activated at birth protects postnatal breathing [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2991-4)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Psychology research shows 'water cooler talk' can have big benefits: A newly described behavior shows how small talk brings balance to collaborative conversations:

Whether in the workplace or our personal lives, most people have a strong preference for balanced conversations, where each person is able to “get their two cents in.” In fact, new research published in Language and Speech shows that people take corrective action to ensure a two-way flow of conversation when situational factors, like defined roles for working together on a task, create an imbalance in how each person is able to contribute.

This corrective behavior had never before been identified or described. The researchers at UC Santa Cruz who discovered it are calling it "reciprocity in conversation." And in settings where people are working together on a task, it's actually associated with higher levels of task enjoyment. This could have fascinating implications for employee morale in work settings, but there's a catch. In order for conversation reciprocity to take place, the people collaborating on a task must make time to incorporate small talk into their work.

[...] "An average workday now is getting the team together into a virtual meeting, where there's a very clear goal and task," Guydish said. "You're not talking to coworkers at their desk or in the hall. Everything is structured, and everything is essentially a task nowadays. So this research highlights the importance of perhaps trying to institute moments throughout the day with unstructured chat time."

It's in those moments that reciprocity works its magic. Typically, when peers are working together on a task that requires one to direct the other, it creates a natural imbalance in the conversation, where the person in the leadership role ends up doing most of the talking. But if the participants also have unstructured time available, the person leading the task-based conversation can use the opportunity to pull back on their contributions, essentially yielding air time during small talk to the other participant.

That's reciprocity. It helps balance the scales of the overall interaction. And the closer participants get to achieving balance, the higher their levels of enjoyment will be related to the task at hand.

Journal Reference:
Andrew J. Guydish, J. Trevor D’Arcey, Jean E. Fox Tree. Reciprocity in Conversation [$], Language and Speech (DOI: 10.1177/0023830920972742)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Lidar startup goes public, makes founder a billionaire:

Luminar founder Austin Russell has become one of the youngest self-made billionaires after the lidar maker debuted on public markets on Thursday. Russell, 25, was just 17 when he founded Luminar in 2012. Shares of Luminar rose above $30 a share on Friday, a massive 43 percent gain for the day on top of big gains on Thursday.

Luminar has emerged as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing lidar industry.  Carmakers are expected to begin offering lidar as an advanced option for their vehicles in the next few years to enable better driver-assistance technology. Right now, lidar companies are vying to win contracts to supply these sensors.

Luminar had a major win in May when it signed a deal with Volvo to supply lidar sensors for vehicles starting in 2022. It was one of the first such deals in the industry.

More recently, Luminar struck a deal to supply lidar sensors to Mobileye, the Intel subsidiary that supplies many of the camera-based driver assistance systems in today's cars. Luminar is supplying sensors for Mobileye's self-driving prototypes, not production vehicles, so it wasn't a huge deal on its own. But if Mobileye winds up building its next-generation technology around Luminar's lidar—far from a sure thing—it could lead to a lot of Luminar lidar sales in the future.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Onion-Location
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/onion-location/

Onion-Location is an easy way to advertise an onion site to the users. You can either configure a web server to show an Onion-Location Header or add an HTML meta attribute in the website.

For the header to be valid the following conditions need to be fulfilled:

• The Onion-Location value must be a valid URL with http: or https: protocol and a .onion hostname.
• The webpage defining the Onion-Location header must be served over HTTPS.
• The webpage defining the Onion-Location header must not be an onion site.

In this page, the commands to manage the web server are based Debian-like operating systems and may differ from other systems. Check your web server and operating system documentation.

[...] The identical behaviour of Onion-Location includes the option of defining it as a HTML http-equiv attribute. This may be used by websites that prefer (or need) to define an Onion-Location by modifying the served HTML content instead of adding a new HTTP header. The Onion-Location header would be equivalent to a .onion" /> added in the HTML head element of the webpage. Replace with the onion service that you want to redirect.
More information

Read the Onion-Location spec.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

China announces expansion to weather modification program, artificial rain to cover area bigger than size of India - ABC News:

China has revealed plans over the next five years to expand its experimental weather modification program, to cover an area greater than the size of India with artificial rainfall.

[...] China's State Council says breakthroughs in research and new technologies means the country will have a "developed weather modification system" by 2025.

[...] "China will have a developed weather modification system by 2025, with breakthroughs in fundamental research [and development] in key technologies, steady improvements in modernisation and refined services, distinct enhancement in comprehensive prevention against safety risks," the statement said.

The State Council said weather modification will "intensify" in areas of mitigating drought, hail, fires and high temperatures, while also assisting agricultural production and preserving ecologically protected areas.

[...] Cloud seeding — specifically, glaciogenic cloud seeding — is where tiny drops of super-cooled water that are not growing efficiently enough to become raindrops are converted into ice by adding silver iodide.

This then helps the super-cooled water grow into snowflakes or raindrops ready to fall from the sky. The process only works if conditions are just right.

[...] The $19 million Tianhe Project — which translates into Sky River — is the world's largest artificial rain experiment, which aims to divert excess water vapour above the Yangtze river basin towards drier parts of the country, according to local media.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers discover life in deep ocean sediments at or above water's boiling point:

"Water boils on the (Earth's) surface at 100 degrees Celsius, and we found organisms living in sediments at 120 degrees Celsius," said URI Professor of Oceanography Arthur Spivack, who led the geochemistry efforts of the 2016 expedition organized by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Germany's MARUM–Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. The study was carried out as part of the work of Expedition 370 of the International Ocean Discovery Program.

[...] While this is exciting news on its own, Spivack said the research could point to the possibility of life in harsh environments on other planets.

According to the study, sediments that lie deep below the ocean floor are harsh habitats. Temperature and pressure steadily increase with depth, while the energy supply becomes increasingly scarce. It has only been known for about 30 years that, in spite of these conditions, microorganisms do inhabit the seabed at depths of several kilometers. The deep biosphere is still not well understood, and this brings up fundamental questions: Where are the limits of life, and what factors determine them?

[...] Like the search for life in outer space, determining the limits of life on the Earth is fraught with great technological challenges, the research study says.

"Surprisingly, the microbial population density collapsed at a temperature of only about 45 degrees," says co-chief scientist Fumio Inagaki of JAMSTEC. "It is fascinating – in the high-temperature ocean floor, there are broad depth intervals that are almost lifeless. But then we were able to detect cells and microbial activity again in deeper, even hotter zones – up to a temperature of 120 degrees."

Journal Reference:
Verena B. Heuer, Fumio Inagaki, Yuki Morono, et al. Temperature limits to deep subseafloor life in the Nankai Trough subduction zone [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd7934)

Original Submission

Tokolosh writes:

Blogger Daniel Lange takes a look at the Linux Foundation's 2020 annual report, and concludes that it was produced with Adobe, which is not available on Linux. Further sleuthing by a commentator reveals that the original was created on Microsoft Word. Stock images used for illustration mostly show Apple MacBooks. This is what you get for a $148 million annual budget.

No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The same vision for all primates: The world's smallest primate reveals the incredible preservation of our visual system through millions of years of evolution:

For more than a century, the visual system of primates has been intensely studied. These studies uncovered that unlike other mammals such as rodents, visual information is processed by small dedicated computing units located in the visual cortex. "As the different primate species cover a wide range of sizes, we were led to wonder whether this basic computing unit scales with body or brain size. Is it simplified or miniaturized, for example, in the world's smallest primate, the gray mouse lemur," asks Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine?

[...] To answer this question, the visual system of the mouse lemur was studied using an optical brain imaging technique. Geometrical shapes representing lines of various orientations were presented to the lemurs and the activity of the neurons responding to the visual stimuli was imaged. The repetition of such measurements gradually allowed them to determine the size of the minimal units processing form information. "We expected to see a unit of tiny size, proportional to the small size of the lemur, but our data revealed that they measure more than half a millimeter in diameter," says Daniel Huber.

In collaboration with the Max Planck Researchers, Huber compared hundreds of these units imaged in the tiny mouse lemur brain with the data obtained for the visual circuits of other, much larger primate species. The team made a surprising discovery: not only was the basic processing unit almost identical in size in the 60-gram mouse lemur, as in larger monkeys such as macaques weighing about seven kilograms, or even larger primates such as us humans.

They also found that the way the units are arranged across the brain was totally indistinguishable, following the same rules with mathematical precision. The researchers also found that the number of nerve cells per visual unit was almost identical in all primates studied so far.

Journal Reference:
Chun Lum Andy Ho, Robert Zimmermann. et. al.,Orientation Preference Maps in Microcebus murinus Reveal Size-Invariant Design Principles in Primate Visual Cortex, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.027)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Chinese Robotaxi Firm AutoX Starts Operation In Shenzen With No Human Driver:

Most self-driving car companies move to test vehicles put putting them into taxi service, to learn what it's like to carry passengers, but they always start by having a human safety driver on board who, ideally, never touches the wheel, though at first they need to intervene from time to time.

As progress is made, an important milestone is to have the confidence (and legal permission) to operate for actual passengers without the safety driver. On Dec 2, AutoX, a Chinese robocar developer, announced that their vehicles are now providing taxi rides in Shenzen to a group of staff and VIP guests.

Google DriveVideo - AutoX Puts Fully Driverless RoboTaxis on the Roads in China.mp4

The start of such operations presumes that the existing tests have shown an excellent safety record, good enough that the company is willing to take the necessary risk and liability of no-driver operation. Previously, Waymo was the only pioneer to do this, having begun in 2018. Since then it has expanded operations and temporarily is making all rides passenger-only due to Covid-19. AutoX is deploying its entire fleet of 25 cars passenger-only, and did not disclose what set of roads the vehicles operate on. (Waymo operates in the fairly easy region around Chandler, Arizona.)

[...] While AutoX indicated the vehicles do not have remote monitors or operators, the vehicles will come to a stop if they come to a confusing situation, and a remote operator can then give high level guidance on how to proceed.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends:

Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically "free" relative to those that are "partially free" or "not free."

Specifically, the fraction of Tor users globally accessing hidden sites is 6.7, a relatively small proportion. Those users, however, aren't evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes rated "not free" by this scoring from an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was just 4.8 percent. In "free" countries, the proportion jumped to 7.8 percent.

[...] The researchers—from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Cyber Espion in Portsmouth, United Kingdom—acknowledged that the estimates aren't perfect, In part, that's because the estimates are based on the unprovable assumption that the overwhelming majority of Dark Web sites provide illicit content or services.

The paper, however, argues that the findings can be useful for policymakers who are trying to gauge the benefits of Tor relative to the harms it creates. The researchers view the results through the lenses of the 2015 paper titled The Dark Web Dilemma: Tor, Anonymity and Online Policing and On Liberty, the essay published by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859.

The Tor Project points out in an email, presumably to ArsTrchnica, that the findings are flawed because they assume every .onion address is used for illicit purposes. Many sites offer a .onion address as an alternative way of reaching their content, including SoylentNews.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo_:

Divers discover Nazi WW2 enigma machine in Baltic Sea:

BERLIN (Reuters) - German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.

Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.

"I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," said Huber.

[...] The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF aiming to find abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be given to the archaeology museum in Schleswig.

Original Submission