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SomeGuy writes:

The international news agency AFP reports on a violent rampage at a Taiwanese-run iPhone factory in southern India" leading to over 100 arrests. About 2,000 workers were involved in the protest, reports the Verge, citing the Indian Express newspaper.

The workers are protesting over allegations of unpaid wages and exploitation, according to AFP. "Local media reported workers saying they had not been paid for up to four months and were being forced to do extra shifts..."

Workers at the Taiwanese-run Wistron Infocomm Manufacturing near Bangalore smashed glass panels with rods and flipped cars on their side.

[...] CCTV cameras, fans and lights were torn down, while a car was set on fire, footage shared on social media showed.

[...] A local trade union leader alleged that there was "brutal exploitation" of factory workers in sweatshop conditions at the iPhone manufacturing plant.

"The state government has allowed the company to flout the basic rights," Satyanand, who uses one name, told The Hindu newspaper.

[...] Labour unrest is not uncommon in India, with workers paid poorly and given few or no social security benefits.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Hubble spots exoplanet with a wild orbit:

We all grew up thinking there were nine planets in our solar system. Pluto got demoted, leaving just eight official planets, but in recent years some scientists have begun to believe that there is indeed a ninth big planet hanging out on the edges of the solar system, beyond our limits of detection. It's a theory that is supported by observations of smaller objects in the asteroid belt past Neptune, but nobody has actually seen this lost world.

Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a distant exoplanet that has an incredibly distorted orbit around its host stars. The planet, called HD 106906, orbits a double star located 336 light-years away, and NASA says it could help astronomers explain how our own still-mythical "Planet Nine" could exist.

[...] "This system draws a potentially unique comparison with our solar system," Meiji Nguyen, lead author of a study explaining the planet's orbit, said in a statement. "It's very widely separated from its host stars on an eccentric and highly misaligned orbit, just like the prediction for Planet Nine. This begs the question of how these planets formed and evolved to end up in their current configuration." The research was published in The Astronomical Journal. It's far from a confirmation of a planet nine existing in our solar system, but it's an interesting finding that does suggest it may be possible.

Journal Reference:
Meiji M. Nguyen, Robert J. De Rosa, and Paul Kalas. First Detection of Orbital Motion for HD 106906 b: A Wide-separation Exoplanet on a Planet Nine–like Orbit - IOPscience, The Astronomical Journal (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abc012)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Atom-thin transistor uses half the voltage of common semiconductors, boosts current density:

University at Buffalo researchers are reporting a new, two-dimensional transistor made of graphene and the compound molybdenum disulfide that could help usher in a new era of computing.

As described in a paper accepted at the 2020 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, which is taking place virtually next week, the transistor requires half the voltage of current semiconductors. It also has a current density greater than similar transistors under development.

[...] The transistor is composed of a single layer of graphene and a single layer of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, which is a part of a group of compounds known as transition metals chalcogenides. The graphene and MoS2 are stacked together, and the overall thickness of the device is roughly 1 nanometer -- for comparison, a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers.

While most transistors require 60 millivolts for a decade of change in current, this new device operates at 29 millivolts.

[...] An even more important characteristic of the transistor, Li says, is its ability to handle a greater current density compared to conventional transistor technologies based on 2D or 3D channel materials. As described in the study, the transistor can handle 4 microamps per micrometer.

"The transistor illustrates the enormous potential 2D semiconductors and their ability to usher in energy-efficient nanoelectronic devices. This could ultimately lead to advancements in quantum research and development, and help extend Moore's Law," says co-lead author Fei Yao, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Design and Innovation, a joint program of SEAS and UB's College of Arts of Sciences.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Google services crashed today taking YouTube and other Google services offline with a cascading effect across the internet. Services hit include Discord and other third party online systems which depend on Google services to operate. This event has proven that having single entities such as Google and AWS as the backbone of the internet makes for a linchpin that can be pulled at any time.

I for one did not miss our Search Overlord.

[Ed. addition follows]

See also: CNET.

Things are slowly returning, but if you've been smashing your head against the wall in frustration, it helps to know it might not be entirely on your end.

From the CNET article:

According to DownDetector, the outage began around 6:25 a.m. ET (3:25 a.m. PT) and continued for over an hour. Google's own Workspace Status Dashboard showed all its services to be suffering outages. But Google Search appeared to still be working, as did Chrome. Around 7:40 a.m. ET (4:40 a.m. PT) services started coming back online.

Google's own statement shows the timings to be different, however. According to a statement from a Google spokesperson, the outage began at 3:47 a.m. PT and lasted around 45 minutes.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Robot lawyer startup DoNotPay now lets you file FOIA requests – TechCrunch:

DoNotPay, the consumer advice company that started out helping people easily challenge parking tickets, has come a long way since it launched. It's expanded to help consumers cancel memberships, claim compensation for missed flights and even sue companies for small claims. In the early days of the pandemic, the startup helped its users file for unemployment, where many state benefit sites crashed.

Now the so-called "robot lawyer" has a new trick. The startup now lets you request information from U.S. federal and state government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act.

[...] That's where DoNotPay wants to help. The new feature guides you through how to file a request for information, as well as wrangle the fee waivers and option to expedite processing — which is up to you to convince the government department why you should get the information for free and faster than regular FOIA requests. (In reality, the FOIA system is massively under-resourced, and responses can take months or years to get back.) After asking you a series of questions and what you want to request, DoNotPay generates a formal FOIA request letter using your answers and files it to the government agency on your behalf.

DoNotPay's founder and chief executive Joshua Browder said he's hoping the new feature can help consumers "beat bureaucracy."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

'Electronic amoeba' finds approximate solution to traveling salesman problem in linear time:

Many real-world application tasks such as planning and scheduling in logistics and automation are mathematically formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. Conventional digital computers, including supercomputers, are inadequate to solve these complex problems in practically permissible time as the number of candidate solutions they need to evaluate increases exponentially with the problem size -- also known as combinatorial explosion. Thus new computers called "Ising machines," including "quantum annealers," have been actively developed in recent years. These machines, however, require complicated pre-processing to convert each task to the form they can handle and have a risk of presenting illegal solutions that do not meet some constraints and requests, resulting in major obstacles to the practical applications.

These obstacles can be avoided using the newly developed "electronic amoeba," an analog computer inspired by a single-celled amoeboid organism. The amoeba is known to maximize nutrient acquisition efficiently by deforming its body. It has shown to find an approximate solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP), i.e., given a map of a certain number of cities, the problem is to find the shortest route for visiting each city exactly once and returning to the starting city. This finding inspired Professor Seiya Kasai at Hokkaido University to mimic the dynamics of the amoeba electronically using an analog circuit, as described in the journal Scientific Reports. "The amoeba core searches for a solution under the electronic environment where resistance values at intersections of crossbars represent constraints and requests of the TSP," says Kasai. Using the crossbars, the city layout can be easily altered by updating the resistance values without complicated pre-processing.

A movie introducing the operation of the electronic amoeba is available on YouTube

Journal Reference:
Kenta Saito, Masashi Aono, Seiya Kasai. Amoeba-inspired analog electronic computing system integrating resistance crossbar for solving the travelling salesman problem [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77617-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Science of sandcastles is clarified, finally:

Researchers at The University of Manchester led by Nobel Laureate Andre Geim -- who, with Kostya Novoselov, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 10 years ago this month -- have made artificial capillaries small enough for water vapour to condense inside them under normal, ambient conditions.

The Manchester study is entitled 'Capillary condensation under atomic-scale confinement' and will be published in Nature. The research provides a solution for the century-and-half-old puzzle of why capillary condensation, a fundamentally microscopic phenomenon involving a few molecular layers of water, can be described reasonably well using macroscopic equations and macroscopic characteristics of bulk water. Is it a coincidence or a hidden law of nature?

Capillary condensation, a textbook phenomenon, is omnipresent in the world around us, and such important properties as friction, adhesion, stiction, lubrication and corrosion are strongly affected by capillary condensation. This phenomenon is important in many technological processes used by microelectronics, pharmaceutical, food and other industries -- and even sandcastles could not be built by children if not for capillary condensation.

[...] "So we can relax, all those numerous condensation effects and related properties are now backed by hard evidence rather than a hunch that 'it seems to work so therefore it should be OK to use the equation'."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? We may find out soon!

Photos Capture World's Largest Iceberg As It Heads Toward South Atlantic Island:

Britain's Royal Air Force has obtained images of what is considered the largest iceberg as it veers toward the island territory of South Georgia.

Pictures of A68a were released Friday following a reconnaissance flight of the iceberg. At roughly 93 miles long and 30 miles wide, the floe is believed to be the world's largest.

[...] In a Facebook post, British officials note that because of the iceberg's massive size, it's nearly impossible to photograph it in full with the exception of satellite imagery.

The chunk of ice cleaved off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 at a reported size of roughly 2,300 square miles. Researchers have noted for some weeks now that A68a has been on a collision with the island of South Georgia.

The iceberg is roughly 130 miles off the island's coast and could run aground in shallow coastal waters.

The government there said Saturday that it's keeping a close eye on the iceberg's trajectory.

[...] Last month, the British Antarctic Survey raised the alarm on the damage the iceberg could potentially cause to wildlife if it became grounded near the island.

[...] The survey notes that a large numbers of seals, whales and penguins feed off the coast of the southern Atlantic island.

Since 2017, the European Space Agency says, A68a has floated thousands of miles across the Southern Hemisphere.

Watch a video of A68a's progress so far.

So where to watch from?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

We have a winner in the world's first quantum chess tournament:

Forget all those amusing memes of Anya Taylor-Joy's Beth Harmon from The Queen's Gambit facing off against Spock in Star Trek's infamous 3D chess. We want to see Beth take on challengers in a quantum chess tournament. The world's first such tournament was held December 9 as part of the virtual Q2B conference on quantum computing, with Amazon's Aleksander Kubica emerging victorious, New Scientist reports.

What exactly is quantum chess? It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference. "It's like you're playing in a multiverse but the different boards [in different universes] are connected to each other," said Caltech physicist Spiros Michalakis during a livestream of the tournament.

[...] You don't need to be a quantum physicist to play quantum chess, per Cantwell, although it does help to already know the rules of regular chess. In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Self-Victimhood Is A Personality Type, Researchers Find:

[...] A new paper in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences posits a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), an archetype defined by several truly toxic traits: a pathological need for recognition, a difficulty empathizing with others, feelings of moral superiority, and, importantly, a thirst for vengeance.

[...] In one of this paper's experiments, for instance, a computer split a pot of money between itself and a human participant; this person was led to believe the computer was also a human participant. Sometimes the pot was split unevenly, and the human participant was given a chance to take vengeance by reducing the computer's pot without enriching his own. Researchers discovered that participants classified as having higher TIV scores were "strongly associated with behavioral revenge" in this scenario.

TIV was also "associated with an increased experience of negative emotions, and entitlement to immoral behavior."

[...] Writing in Scientific American, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman notes that "the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma and victimization with possessing the victimhood mindset. They point out that a victimhood mindset can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization."

Kaufman continues:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RunawayXXXX:

The only total solar eclipse of 2020 is happening this week. Here's how to watch it from anywhere.:

The only total solar eclipse of the year arrives this week. On Monday, December 14, lucky skywatchers will have the chance to spot the spectacular celestial event, when the new moon fully blocks the sun, creating temporary darkness during what NASA calls "one of nature's most awe-inspiring sights."

[...] Unfortunately, this solar eclipse will only track over parts of South America, so relatively few people will be able to watch it live. However, several live streams of the event will ensure eager amateur astronomers have a chance to see the eclipse, no matter where in the world you are located.

[...] The eclipse will be visible in South America, specifically in certain regions of Chile and Argentina. According to NASA, the path will stretch from Saavedra, Chile to Salina del Eje, Argentina.

[...] For those viewing the eclipse in person, there are several safety precautions to follow. Never look directly at the sun, and make sure to wear solar eclipse glasses to protect your eyes — regular sunglasses are not sufficient.

For those located elsewhere in the world, NASA TV will live stream the eclipse from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile via telescopes at the Observatorio Docente. The show starts at 9:40 a.m. ET, with a narrated program in Spanish at 10:30 a.m. ET and the total eclipse set for 11:02 a.m. ET. Watch it here.

[...] Time and Date is also hosting a live stream, from the Villarrica volcano in Chile starting at 9:30 a.m. ET.

Original Submission

cosurgi writes:

More precision measurements are planned at LHC (Large Hadron Collider) [1]. Short extract below:

When ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) discovered the Higgs boson [2] and confirmed the validity of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, physicists were hungry for more. But the Higgs was a giant tree hiding a meadow full of well-known flowers. No exotic plants were to be found in these high-energy plains. Month after month, the Standard Model has revealed itself to be more solid than ever. Previously when higher energy at LHC was possible scientists were looking for spectacular phenomena that have now mostly been ruled out. The approach now is to carry out precision measurements.

In reality, the Standard Model is built on two quantum theories: the electroweak theory [3], which describes the electromagnetic and the weak forces, and quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong force. So, here we have the basics. One advantage of the Standard Model is that it is predictive: it predicts all possible interactions between particles with a precise probability (which physicists call the "cross section"). However, it doesn't predict the masses of the fundamental particles: these are among the parameters measured by the experiments. These masses vary greatly e.g. the heaviest top quark, is almost 90 000 times heavier than the up quark, the lightest. In total, there are 19 free parameters which determine the inner workings of the standard model (aside from the parameters relating to neutrinos). Measuring them precisely is crucial to be able to calculate the interaction cross sections and test the consistency of the Standard Model. Although the Standard Model doesn't predict their values, it ties some parameters together. "By [more precisely] measuring all of these parameters independently, we test the relationships predicted by the Standard Model and impose constraints on physics beyond the Standard Model." explains Andrew Pilkington, a physicist with the ATLAS experiment.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Bandwidth Limits at NWS (National Weather Service) Could Hobble Our Weather Apps:

The National Weather Service's data budget is hitting a ceiling, and it apparently doesn't have the money to fix the situation. Now, the agency is considering throttling users who access its essential forecast data.

In a notice dated Nov. 18, 2020, the NWS said that it is seeking public comment on a proposal to impose data limits on users who access its wide range of public web services. "As demand for data continues to grow across NCEP websites, we are proposing to put new limits into place to safeguard our web services," the memo says. "The frequency of how often these websites are accessed by the public has created limitations and infrastructure constraints."

[...] If nothing else, the data limits could cause services that rely on NWS data, like many smartphone weather apps, to be hours behind the real-time measurements they've been accustomed to accessing. Another possibility is that services switch to gathering information from competing agencies around the globe like the UK Met Office and ECMWF. But services that aggregate data from multiple agencies would be losing out. What's more, it seems that this issue would be really cheap to fix.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RunawayXXXX:

Virgin Galactic Aborts First Powered Spaceflight From New Mexico Spaceport :

On December 12th, Virgin Galactic aborted its first powered test flight of its tourist spaceplane, VSS Unity, from the company's home at Spaceport America in New Mexico. The vehicle's engine cut out after briefly igniting.

The vehicle's engine cut out early, forcing the spaceplane to glide home

This morning, Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic had to abort its first powered test flight of its spaceplane from the company's home in New Mexico, bringing the vehicle home before it could reach space. During the flight, the spaceplane's engine cut out too early and the vehicle's two pilots had to glide back down to the ground early.

The aborted engine ignition was caught live by a Twitch livestream provided by the outlet NASASpaceflight. The video showed the spaceplane, called VSS Unity, dropping away from its carrier aircraft in mid-air as planned. The vehicle then briefly ignited its main engine, according to the video, but the ignition cut out after just a moment. On a typical flight, the spaceplane's engine will stay ignited for a full minute, propelling the vehicle to the edge of space.

Zodiac killer's "340 cipher" cracked after 51 years

MadTinfoilHatter writes:

In November 1969 a 340 character long encrypted message was sent in a letter to the San Fransisco Chronicle. It appeared to have been sent by an already-infamous serial killer, popularly going by the name Zodiac killer. The cipher proved to be a very hard nut to crack, and the solution eluded cryptanalysts for over 50 years. On December 3rd three code breakers finally solved the mystery and here they tell us how.

Cryptographers Solve Zodiac Killer's "340 Cipher"

takyon writes:

Zodiac '340 Cipher' cracked by code experts 51 years after it was sent to the S.F. Chronicle

The solution to what's known as the 340 Cipher, one of the most vexing mysteries of the Zodiac Killer's murderous saga, has been found by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia and Belgium.

The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived 51 years ago. Investigators hoped the Zodiac, who killed five people in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, would reveal his name in one of his many ciphers, but there is no such name in the 340.

[...] The solution to the 340 Cipher, according to Oranchak's team:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

To see a video about cracking the code, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o [13m2s]

Oranchak's findings started leaking out on some of the many Zodiac amateur sleuth forums, such as zodiackillersite.com, over the past couple of days, causing much excitement in that widespread world of true-crime buffs.

In most ciphers, like the 408, the solution consists mainly of figuring out which letters are represented by certain symbols. In the 340 Cipher, it turned out the alignment of the words runs diagonally down the page, and occasionally they get shifted over a column.

It's a complicated bit of code creation, Oranchak said, but a basic scheme for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s.

Also at CBS News.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2