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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Google's antitrust case won't go to trial until Sept. 2023:

The U.S. government's attempt to prove Google has been using its dominance of online search to stifle competition and innovation at the expense of consumers and advertisers won't go to trial for nearly three years.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Friday set a tentative trial date of Sept. 12, 2023 for the landmark case that the Justice Department filed two months ago.

"This dispels the notion that we would go to trial quickly," said Mehta during a conference call with government and Google lawyers to go over the ground rules for exchanging confidential documents and deposing top Google executives.

He estimated that once the trial begins it will last about 5 1/2 weeks in his Washington, D.C., courtroom.

[...] With the trial still years away, Google will conceivably become an even more imposing force before the federal government and the attorneys general in dozens of states get their day in court. Another antitrust case filed Thursday is seeking to preempt Google's dominance in other still-emerging fields of technology such as voice-activated devices in the home and internet-connected cars. That case is likely to be combined with the Justice Department's.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

What's the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?:

In early 2020, ornithologist Noah Strycker found himself walking amongst several thousand chinstrap penguins on Elephant Island, a remote blip of snow-covered rock just off the Antarctic Peninsula. He was there to carry out a census of the island's penguin colony, which hadn't been properly surveyed since 1970. "I'll never forget the sight, sound, and...smell," joked Strycker, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York, as well as a professional bird watcher, and author.

The survey that he and his colleagues eventually produced revealed that chinstrap penguin numbers are in decline. But despite this, this species actually forms the biggest colony of penguins on Earth - gathering in the millions in some Antarctic locations. But counting these animals doesn't daunt Strycker, who has actually developed something of a hobby for this task.

It started a few years ago when he found himself pondering how many starlings were contained in the magical murmurations that these birds form, and which swell and undulate across the evening sky in many parts of the world. "They are quite beautiful. It almost looks like smoke," Strycker told Live Science. "And it just gets you wondering, how many of them are there?" The answer, he discovered, was that there are roughly 1 million in the average murmuration, all soaring and swooping in unison. That discovery spurred Strycker on to answer an even more ambitious question: beyond birds, what's the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?

Answering this question takes us to some very interesting places — back into the past, up into the sky, down into the ocean and sweeping across desert plains. It offers magnificent proof of the abundance of animal life on Earth, but it also points to humanity's role in reducing — and, unexpectedly, increasing it too.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Swiss say Uber Eats must register as postal service provider:

Switzerland's postal supervisory authority, PostCom, announced Thursday that the U.S.-based company's Swiss affiliate needs to register as a postal service provider by the end of January, though it can contest the decision.

Following a nearly year-long assessment, PostCom found that at least part of Uber Eats' business falls under postal legislation. Food packages in essence meet the criteria for postal service, and "the nature of the contents isn't relevant when it comes to the properties of a package," PostCom said in a statement.

[...] Previously, Uber Switzerland challenged the obligation to subject itself to Swiss postal law, arguing that it was not in contractual relationship with restaurants for which the deliveries were made, PostCom said.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion - SpaceNews:

The largest U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin announced Dec. 20 it has inked a deal to acquire rocket engine manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion.

James Taiclet, Lockheed Martin's president and CEO, said the acquisition gives the company a larger footprint in space and hypersonic technology.

He said Aerojet Rocketdyne's propulsion systems already are key components of Lockheed Martin's supply chain across several business areas.

"The proposed acquisition adds substantial expertise in propulsion to Lockheed Martin's portfolio," the company said in a news release.

[...] The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2021. It is subject to regulatory approvals and has yet to be approved by Aerojet Rocketdyne's stockholders.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

GitHub removes its annoying cookie banners:

Cookie banners are one of the most annoying parts of browsing the web, forcing you to click accept or deny on multiple sites. Microsoft-owned GitHub is starting to address this aggravation by removing cookie banners from its site this week. "At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution," explains GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. "After a brief search, we found one: just don't use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really."

GitHub, which operates independently from Microsoft, has now removed all nonessential cookies, meaning the site doesn't send any information to third-party analytics services. This is a change that's turned into a commitment, so GitHub will only ever use cookies that are required and none to track, display ads, or send information elsewhere.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New catalytic process turns plastic bags into adhesives:

While many cities and eight states have banned single-use plastics, bags and other polyethylene packaging still clog landfills and pollute rivers and oceans.

One major problem with recycling polyethylene, which makes up one-third of all plastic production worldwide, is economic: Recycled bags end up in low-value products, such as decks and construction material, providing little incentive to reuse the waste.

A new chemical process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, converts polyethylene plastic into a strong and more valuable adhesive and could change that calculus.

"The vision is that you would take a plastic bag that is of no value, and instead of throwing it away, where it ends up in a landfill, you would turn it into something of high value," said John Hartwig, the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley and leader of the research team. "You couldn't take all of this recycled plastic—hundreds of billions of pounds of polyethylene are produced each year—and turn it into a material with adhesive properties, but if you take some fraction of that and turn it into something that is of high value, that can change the economics of turning the rest of it into something that is of lower value."

Journal Reference:
Liye Chen, Katerina G. Malollari. Selective, Catalytic Oxidations of C–H Bonds in Polyethylenes Produce Functional Materials with Enhanced Adhesion, Chem (DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2020.11.020)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

U.S. investigating 5 allergic reactions to Pfizer coronavirus vaccine - National:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating around five allergic reactions that happened after people were administered Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE's COVID-19 vaccine in the United States this week, a top FDA official said late on Friday.

Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at a press conference that the allergic reactions had been reported in more than one state, including in Alaska.

Marks also said that a chemical called polyethylene glycol (PEG) that is an ingredient in the Pfizer vaccine — as well as the Moderna Inc vaccine authorized on Friday — "could be the culprit" causing the reactions.

Marks said that allergic reactions to PEG could be somewhat more common than previously understood.

The cases in Alaska were similar to two cases reported last week in Britain.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Wearing someone else's face: Hyper-realistic masks to go on sale in Japan:

A year into the coronavirus epidemic, a Japanese retailer has come up with a new take on the theme of facial camouflage - a hyper-realistic mask that models a stranger's features in three dimensions.

Shuhei Okawara's masks won't protect you or others against the virus. But they will lend you the exact appearance of an unidentified Japanese adult whose features have been printed onto them.

"Mask shops in Venice probably do not buy or sell faces. But that is something that's likely to happen in fantasy stories," Okawara told Reuters.

"I thought it would be fun to actually do that."

The masks will go on sale early next year for 98,000 yen ($950) apiece at his Tokyo shop, Kamenya Omote, whose products are popular as accessories for parties and theatrical performance.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Plants can be larks or night owls just like us:

The research shows a single letter change in their DNA code can potentially decide whether a plant is a lark or a night owl. The findings may help farmers and crop breeders to select plants with clocks that are best suited to their location, helping to boost yield and even the ability to withstand climate change.

[...] Researchers at the Earlham Institute and John Innes Centre in Norwich wanted to better understand how much circadian variation exists naturally, with the ultimate goal of breeding crops that are more resilient to local changes in the environment -- a pressing threat with climate change.

[...] Dr Hannah Rees, a postdoctoral researcher at the Earlham Institute and author of the paper, said: "A plant's overall health is heavily influenced by how closely its circadian clock is synchronised to the length of each day and the passing of seasons. An accurate body clock can give it an edge over competitors, predators and pathogens.

"We were interested to see how plant circadian clocks would be affected in Sweden; a country that experiences extreme variations in daylight hours and climate. Understanding the genetics behind body clock variation and adaptation could help us breed more climate-resilient crops in other regions."

[...] "Our findings highlight some interesting genes that might present targets for crop breeders, and provide a platform for future research. Our delayed fluorescence imaging system can be used on any green photosynthetic material, making it applicable to a wide range of plants. The next step will be to apply these findings to key agricultural crops, including brassicas and wheat."

The results of the study have been published in the journal Plant, Cell and Environment.

Emphasis from original retained.

Journal Reference:
Hannah Rees, Ryan Joynson, James K.M. Brown, et al. Naturally occurring circadian rhythm variation associated with clock gene loci in Swedish Arabidopsis accessions, Plant, Cell & Environment (DOI: 10.1111/pce.13941)

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Snotnose writes:

After giving a gentle introduction to how computers work at the hardware level, this article gives an interesting thought on the future of computing and how RISC-V fits into it.

By now it is pretty clear that Apple's M1 chip is a big deal. And the implications for the rest of the industry is gradually becoming clearer. In this story I want to talk about a connection to RISC-V microprocessors which may not be obvious to most readers.

Let me me give you some background first: Why Is Apple's M1 Chip So Fast?

In that story I talked about two factors driving M1 performance. One was the use of massive number of decoders and Out-of-Order Execution (OoOE). Don't worry it that sounds like technological gobbledegook to you.

This story will be all about the other part: Heterogenous computing. Apple is aggressively pursued a strategy of adding specialized hardware units, I will refer to as coprocessors throughout this article:

Related:
Why is Apple's M1 Chip So Fast?

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takyon writes:

Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri

It's never aliens, until it is. Today, news leaked in the British newspaper The Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nevertheless a cosmic stone's throw away at just 4.2 light-years. Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)—a so-called "technosignature." Now, speaking to Scientific American, the scientists behind the discovery caution there is still much work to be done, but admit the interest is justified. "It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it," says Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley.

Most curiously, it occupies a very narrow band of the radio spectrum: 982 megahertz, specifically, which is a region typically bereft of transmissions from human-made satellites and spacecraft. "We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency" such as this one, Siemion says. Perhaps, he says, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But "for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."

The detection was made by a $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen, led by Siemion and funded by tech billionaire Yuri Milner under the umbrella of Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives.

Haim Eshed was right.

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acid andy writes:

Human Made Materials Now Outweigh Earth's Entire Biomass

While the natural world continues to shrink, the 'anthropogenic mass' – the mass of all human-made materials created since the Industrial revolution, including houses, cars, roads, and aeroplanes – has grown. Indeed, the number of so-called technospecies has far surpassed the estimated 9 million biological species on the planet, according to a new groundbreaking study published on 10 December in the journal Nature.

[...] The new findings support recent calls to recognise a new epoch called the Anthropocene to account for the profound impacts of human activity on the Earth.

[...] At the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3 per cent of the world's total biomass but in 2020, has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass. Moreover, this dramatic increase in human constructions has been accompanied by significant losses in biomass. Humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants since the first agricultural revolution, the authors say.

Journal Reference:
Emily Elhacham, Liad Ben-Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5)

Where do we go from here?

See also: CNN and xkcd.

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cosurgi writes:

CERN announces new open data policy in support of open science:

Geneva, 11 December 2020. The four main LHC collaborations (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) have unanimously endorsed a new open data policy for scientific experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was presented to the CERN Council today. The policy commits to publicly releasing so-called level 3 scientific data, the type required to make scientific studies, collected by the LHC experiments. Data will start to be released approximately five years after collection, and the aim is for the full dataset to be publicly available by the close of the experiment concerned. The policy addresses the growing movement of open science, which aims to make scientific research more reproducible, accessible, and collaborative.

The level 3 data released can contribute to scientific research in particle physics, as well as research in the field of scientific computing, for example to improve reconstruction or analysis methods based on machine learning techniques, an approach that requires rich data sets for training and validation.

[...] In practice, scientific datasets will be released through the CERN Open Data Portal, which already hosts a comprehensive set of data related to the LHC and other experiments. Data will be available using FAIR standards, a set of data guidelines that ensure the data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Deadly centipede 'king' rules over a poison hellscape cave:

A venomous centipede is the top predator in a pitch-black poison cave that hasn't seen daylight in more than 5.5 million years.

Located in Romania, Movile Cave is over 65 feet (20 meters) below the surface, and its warm, moist air is low in oxygen and thick with toxic gasses, which feed chemosynthetic bacteria. Yet despite these seemingly hellish conditions, the cave hosts a diverse community of spiders, scorpions and other arthropods, along with snails, earthworms and cave leeches.

Now, scientists have added a newfound species to the list: a centipede that they named Cryptops speleorex, "which can be translated to the 'king of the cave,'" researchers said in a statement.

[...] The "king" measures no more than 2 inches (52 millimeters) long, but it is the largest of the cave's predatory arthropods "by far," ruling its domain with deadly bites, the researchers reported in a new study, published online Dec. 16 in the journal ZooKeys.

Since Movile Cave's discovery in 1986, few people have explored its dangerous depths. The air is high in hydrogen sulfide, methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, and oxygen is in short supply, with levels in some parts of the cavern as low as 7% (the average oxygen level aboveground is typically about 21%). Though the air temperature is a relatively comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius), relative humidity is 100% and air circulation is close to zero, the scientists wrote.

Entering the cave is fraught with danger, leading explorers down a long, narrow shaft and through winding limestone tunnels that finally open into a main cavern with a lake, the BBC reported in 2015.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

For over the past year there has been work on the new "Maple Tree" data structure led by Oracle for the Linux kernel and this week marked the patches being sent out in "request for comments" (RFC) form with the aim still on helping the kernel performance.

Maple Tree amounts to a data structure that works well on modern CPUs and in an RCU-safe[*]manner for storing index ranges that map to a single pointer. Oracle's Liam Howlett sums up the Maple Tree data structure as "an RCU-safe range based B-tree designed to use modern processor cache efficiently. There are a number of places in the kernel that a non-overlapping range-based tree would be beneficial, especially one with a simple interface. The first user that is covered in this patch set is the vm_area_struct rbtree in the mm_struct with the long term goal of reducing the contention of the mmap_sem. The tree has a branching factor of 10 for non-leaf nodes and 16 for leaf nodes. With the increased branching factor, it is significantly short[er] than the rbtree so it has fewer cache misses."

This code is still a work-in-progress with some known regressions and not yet supporting 32-bit or MMU-less kernel builds. But even as it stands now there are scaling benchmarks where the Maple Tree usage can help by 1~17% or in the malloc1-threads micro-benchmark where it can help the performance by 29~71%.

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Maple-Tree-Linux-RFC

[*] RCU: Read-Copy-Update.

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