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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/spacex-gets-886-million-from-fcc-to-subsidize-starlink-i

SpaceX has been awarded $885.51 million by the Federal Communications Commission to provide Starlink broadband to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. The satellite provider was one of the biggest winners in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, the results of which were released today. Funding is distributed over 10 years, so SpaceX's haul will amount to a little over $88.5 million per year.

Charter Communications, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, did even better. Charter is set to receive $1.22 billion over 10 years to bring service to 1.06 million homes and businesses in 24 states.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Scientists Say They've Identified The Best Place For Life to Have Existed on Mars:

The surface of Mars, by every measurement we've taken, is currently an inhospitable wasteland. Only dust devils roam its arid surface; the only water is permanent ice. Yet evidence that water once flowed and pooled on the planet's surface keeps mounting.

[...] New research has found an answer: geothermal heat could have risen from deep inside the planet - in which case, the best place for life to thrive would have been deep underground.

"Even if greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor are pumped into the early Martian atmosphere in computer simulations, climate models still struggle to support a long-term warm and wet Mars," said planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

"I and my co-authors propose that the faint young Sun paradox may be reconciled, at least partly, if Mars had high geothermal heat in its past."

The faint young Sun paradox is the contradiction between the presence of liquid water in the early Solar System, and the faintness of the Sun. According to our understanding of stellar evolution, in the billion or so years after its formation 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun's heat and light would only have been about 70 percent of its current output.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Hidden structure found in essential metabolic machinery:

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that's essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015 — subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes — is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

"This is, without a doubt, the most unexpected thing our lab has ever discovered," said study co-author Bonnie Bartel, Wright's Ph.D. adviser and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "This requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes."

Peroxisomes are compartments where cells turn fatty molecules into energy and useful materials, like the myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. In humans, peroxisome dysfunction has been linked to severe metabolic disorders, and peroxisomes may have wider significance for neurodegeneration, obesity, cancer and age-related disorders.

[...] The peroxisomes he was viewing were up to 100 times larger. Scientists aren't certain why peroxisomes get so large in Arabidopsis seedlings, but they do know that germinating Arabidopsis seeds get all of their energy from stored fat, until the seedling leaves can start producing energy from photosynthesis. During germination, they are sustained by countless tiny droplets of oil, and their peroxisomes must work overtime to process the oil. When they do, they grow several times larger than normal.

"Bright fluorescent proteins, in combination with much bigger peroxisomes in Arabidopsis, made it extremely apparent, and much easier, to see this," Wright said.

But peroxisomes are also highly conserved, from plants to yeast to humans, and Bartel said there are hints that these structures may be general features of peroxisomes.

"Peroxisomes are a basic organelle that has been with eukaryotes for a very long time, and there have been observations across eukaryotes, often in particular mutants, where the peroxisomes are either bigger or less packed with proteins, and thus easier to visualize," she said. But people didn't necessarily pay attention to those observations because the enlarged peroxisomes resulted from known mutations.

Journal Reference:
Zachary J. Wright, Bonnie Bartel. Peroxisomes form intralumenal vesicles with roles in fatty acid catabolism and protein compartmentalization in Arabidopsis [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20099-y)

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canopic jug writes:

[Ed note: this is a quite old story, but might lead to interesting discussion. What kind of simulators have you operated and how well did the prepare you for the real-life activity? Which ones were successful? Which ones were not?]

Back in 2013, TopGear brought in simulation champion Greger Huttu from Vaasa, Finland to drive a real racing car to investigate how well simulator skills transfer to physical racing. In a nutshell the answer is quite well, aside from the motion sickness.

After one installation lap to check everything's working, he starts his first flyer. All eyes turn to the final corner, a swooping downhill-right with a vicious wall on the outside, ready to collect understeery mishaps. Here comes Greger. The engine revs high and hard and his downshifts sound perfectly matched. Then he comes into sight and, to the sound of many sucked teeth, absolutely bloody nails it through the bend, throttle balanced, car planted. His only hiccup is a late upshift, that has the rotary engine blatting off its limiter. "Time to crank up the revs," says Alan. "He's quick."

The telemetry confirms it. His braking points are spot on. He's firm and precise on the throttle. And in the fastest corner, he's entering at 100mph compared to an experienced driver's 110 - a sign of absolute confidence and natural feel for grip. Remember, this is a guy who has never sat in a racing car in his life - he's only referencing thousands of virtual laps. Then, on lap four, he pops in a 1:24.8, just three seconds off a solid time around here. He reckons the car feels more grippy than it does online, but that's probably down to set-up and baking-hot tarmac. It's a weirdly familiar experience, he says, like déjà vu... with added sweat.

The air temperature is 34 degrees; in the cockpit, it's probably closer to 45. It's just too extreme for the increasingly sickly looking bloke from the Arctic. Then there's the g-forces. Road Atlanta is a bucking, weaving, undulating place, where your tummy floats over crests, then smashes into your intestines through compressions. This is another first for Greger. He's never been on a rollercoaster, or even in a fast road car. In fact, the quickest he's ever been was on the flight over here, which also happened to be his first plane ride. Which would explain why, as he hurtles down the back straight at 100mph, he throws up, right inside his helmet. When he rolls into the pits, little flecks of sick roll down his visor and his overalls are soggy around the neck.

For the most part, he handled the car quite well.

Previously:
(2020) Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine
(2020) Pacman Turns 40 Years Old
(2016) Aircraft Are Now So Automated Pilots Have Forgotten How to Fly
(2014) Video-Game Vehicle Crashes Get Real

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takyon writes:

Vendors Finally Pair Ryzen CPUs and High-End GPUs In Laptops

AMD's Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) processors may be mobile powerhouses, but for reasons unknown, laptop vendors were reluctant to pair the Zen 2 chips with high-end graphics cards. Ryzen 5000 (Cezanne), on the other hand, appears to have won over manufacturers as there are already retailer postings of upcoming laptops (via Tum_Apisak) with options that span up to a GeForce RTX 3080.

[...] The Ryzen 9 5900HX broke its cover recently, but the Zen 3 chip's secret remains to be unraveled. It's plausible that the Ryzen 9 5900HX is just a faster variant of its H-series counterpart or that AMD may have finally unlocked the multiplier for enthusiasts to overclock the processor, like what Intel allows with its HK-series SKUs.

[...] No one has any idea of when AMD will release Ryzen 5000, but the sudden appearance of benchmark submissions and retailer listings point to an imminent launch. CES 2020 is coming up, and AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech. It would be the ideal venue to announce the mobile Zen 3 chips since the desktop counterparts are already out.

"Cezanne" is the Zen 3 version of AMD's Zen 2 "Renoir" 4000-series APUs. "Lucienne" will consist of Zen 2 APUs (a Renoir refresh) confusingly given the same 5000-series naming as Cezanne.

One of the common theories behind a lack of high-end GPU options has been that AMD's Renoir limits a discrete mobile GPU to a PCIe 3.0 x8 connection (instead of x16), which can be a slight bottleneck for higher end mobile GPUs. Others believe it's just due to OEMs cheaping out on AMD systems.

Upcoming mobile GPUs (like the mobile RTX 3080 mentioned) could bring up to 16 GB of VRAM to laptops.

See also: AMD Radeon RX 6000M RDNA 2 Mobility GPUs Based on Navi 22, Navi 23, Navi 24 SKUs Further Detailed – Die Sizes, TGPs, Clock Limits

Related: AMD Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APU Runs Crysis Without Any Cooling Solution
AMD Succeeds in its 25x20 Goal: 2020 "Renoir" Over 31 Times More Efficient than 2014 "Kaveri" Chips
AMD Launches Ryzen 4000G Desktop APUs: OEM-Only at First

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Meet the new generation of puzzle-makers bringing mystery to your door:

A few weeks ago, my husband and I broke into a museum.

Well, we didn't break in, exactly. We had keys, so it was more like, you know, a little light trespassing. The keys came from some guy in a hooded cloak standing around outside, but they worked, and the cops never showed up. So, long story short: there's an artifact sitting in our living room currently, and we're trying to figure out what to do with it.

The artifact, alas, exists only digitally (for now, at least). And both the keys and the museum were made entirely of paper. My husband and I both wore cozy pajama pants for the break-in slightly unauthorized entry, which took place on our coffee table while I sipped a glass of red wine.

If all this sounds terribly confusing, know that we were playing a game made by the Curious Correspondence Club, a subscription box filled with mysteries instead of with snacks. It was one of a litany of at-home mystery boxes we've played through in the past two years, a stack of adventures each positioned somewhere between an escape room, a puzzle, and an alternate reality game. So it's not unusual that our home remains full of ancient, furled maps and long-lost artifacts pointing the way to solve mysteries of the ages... none of which existed till, roughly speaking, last Thursday.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

How do archaeologists know where to dig?:

National Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. And some of us do work at these famous places.

But archaeologists like us want to learn about how people from the past lived all over the planet. We rely on left-behind artifacts to help fill out that picture. We need to excavate in places where there's evidence of human activity—those clues from the past aren't always as obvious as a giant pyramid, though.

[...] The simplest and oldest identification method is a pedestrian survey: looking for evidence of human activity, either on unstructured strolls or when walking in a grid. Unless the evidence is crystal clear—like those broken pots—such surveys usually need a trained eye to read the clues.

[...] In recent years, archaeologists have begun to use new methods to find archaeological sites that had previously been overlooked. These techniques, broadly referred to as remote sensing, allow us to peer through dense forests without clearing them, digitally removing jungle growth and centuries of soil to reveal long-lost structures hidden beneath. High-resolution scans using lasers or 3-D photographs can even detect subtle undulations of ground surfaces that are not visible to the human eye.

[...] Increasingly, archaeologists find sites by searching satellite imagery, including Google Earth. For instance, during a recent drought in England, the remains of ancient features began to appear across the landscape and were visible from above.

Remote sensing can also focus on smaller areas. Geophysical techniques are commonly used before excavating to scan the ground where researchers know archaeological remains are buried. These nondestructive methods help pick out buried anomalies from surrounding soils by distinguishing their density, magnetic properties or conduction of electrical currents.

The shape and alignment of these features can often provide clues about what they are. For instance, the dense walls of a building will show up as distinct from the surrounding soil.

Original Submission

Several Soylentils, including aristarchus_, Runaway1956, c0lo, and an Anonymous Coward have submitted news about the departure of AI ethicist Timnit Gebru from Google.

Timnit claims that she was fired while Google claims that she made certain demands and that, if they were not met, she would resign at a later date. Google accepted that resignation and made the date effective immediately.

Timnit Gebru's actual paper may explain why Google ejected her:

A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models.

[...] Gebru and her team submitted their paper, titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" for a research conference. She said in a series of tweets on Wednesday that following an internal review, she was asked to retract the paper or remove Google employees' names from it. She says she asked Google for conditions for taking her name off the paper, and if they couldn't meet the conditions they could "work on a last date." Gebru says she then received an email from Google informing her they were "accepting her resignation effective immediately."

The head of Google AI, Jeff Dean, wrote in an email to employees that the paper "didn't meet our bar for publication." He wrote that one of Gebru's conditions for continuing to work at Google was for the company to tell her who had reviewed the paper and their specific feedback, which it declined to do. "Timnit wrote that if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google," Dean wrote.

[...] Gebru told Wired in an interview published Thursday that she felt she was being censored. "You're not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and don't point out problems," she said. "That's antithetical to what it means to be that kind of researcher."

Additional coverage at:
One of Google's leading AI researchers says she's been fired in retaliation for an email to other employees
Google Scientist's Abrupt Exit Exposes Rift in Prominent AI Unit
Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I.
The controversy behind a star Google AI researcher's departure
Google fires prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru
The withering email that got an ethical AI researcher fired at Google
More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru
A Prominent AI Ethics Researcher Says Google Fired Her

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Supreme Court will finally rule on controversial US hacking law:

The Supreme Court on Monday considered how broadly to interpret the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking statute.

Here's how I described the case back in September:

The case arose after a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren was caught taking a bribe to look up confidential information in a police database. The man paying the bribe had met a woman at a strip club and wanted to confirm that she was not an undercover cop before pursuing a sexual—and presumably commercial—relationship with her.

Unfortunately for Van Buren, the other man was working with the FBI, which arrested Van Buren and charged him with a violation of the CFAA. The CFAA prohibits gaining unauthorized access to a computer system—in other words, hacking—but also prohibits "exceeding authorized access" to obtain data. Prosecutors argued that Van Buren "exceeded authorized access" when he looked up information about the woman from the strip club.

But lawyers for Van Buren disputed that. They argued that his police login credentials authorized him to access any data in the database. Offering confidential information in exchange for a bribe may have been contrary to department policy and state law, they argued, but it didn't "exceed authorized access" as far as the CFAA goes.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges:

Google violated US labor laws by spying on workers who were organizing employee protests, then firing two of them, according to a complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) today.

The complaint names two employees, Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, both of whom were fired by the company in late 2019 in connection with employee activism. Berland was organizing against Google's decision to work with IRI Consultants, a firm widely known for its anti-union efforts, when he was let go for reviewing other employees' calendars. Now, the NLRB has found Google's policy against employees looking at certain coworkers' calendars is unlawful.

Several other employees were fired in the wake of the protests, but the NLRB found that only the terminations of Berland and Spiers violated labor laws.

"Google's hiring of IRI is an unambiguous declaration that management will no longer tolerate worker organizing," Berland said in a statement. "Management and their union busting cronies wanted to send that message, and the NLRB is now sending their own message: worker organizing is protected by law."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Physicists capture the sound of a "perfect" fluid:

For some, the sound of a "perfect flow" might be the gentle lapping of a forest brook or perhaps the tinkling of water poured from a pitcher. For physicists, a perfect flow is more specific, referring to a fluid that flows with the smallest amount of friction, or viscosity, allowed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Such perfectly fluid behavior is rare in nature, but it is thought to occur in the cores of neutron stars and in the soupy plasma of the early universe.

Now MIT physicists have created a perfect fluid in the laboratory, and listened to how sound waves travel through it. The recording is a product of a glissando of sound waves that the team sent through a carefully controlled gas of elementary particles known as fermions. The pitches that can be heard are the particular frequencies at which the gas resonates like a plucked string.

The researchers analyzed thousands of sound waves traveling through this gas, to measure its "sound diffusion," or how quickly sound dissipates in the gas, which is related directly to a material's viscosity, or internal friction.

Surprisingly, they found that the fluid's sound diffusion was so low as to be described by a "quantum" amount of friction, given by a constant of nature known as Planck's constant, and the mass of the individual fermions in the fluid.

This fundamental value confirmed that the strongly interacting fermion gas behaves as a perfect fluid, and is universal in nature. The results, published today in the journal Science, demonstrate the first time that scientists have been able to measure sound diffusion in a perfect fluid.

Scientists can now use the fluid as a model of other, more complicated perfect flows, to estimate the viscosity of the plasma in the early universe, as well as the quantum friction within neutron stars — properties that would otherwise be impossible to calculate. Scientists might even be able to approximately predict the sounds they make.

"It's quite difficult to listen to a neutron star," says Martin Zwierlein, the Thomas A. Franck Professor of Physics at MIT. "But now you could mimic it in a lab using atoms, shake that atomic soup and listen to it, and know how a neutron star would sound."

Journal Reference:
Parth B. Patel, Zhenjie Yan, Biswaroop Mukherjee, et al. Universal sound diffusion in a strongly interacting Fermi gas [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz5756)

Original Submission

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