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c0lo writes:

Long Covid alarm as 21% report symptoms after five weeks

A fifth of people still have coronavirus symptoms five weeks after being infected, with half of them continuing to experience problems for at least 12 weeks, official data suggests, as concerns grow about the scale and impact of "long Covid".

Previous estimates suggested 14.5% of people in the UK had symptoms for at least four weeks, with 2.2% likely to have symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more. But new figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest ongoing symptoms could be more common than previously thought.

The latest data for England, based on the Covid infection survey, which randomly samples households for coronavirus, reveals 21% of almost 8,200 participants who were followed up after testing positive still had symptoms five weeks after infection, with 9.9% reporting symptoms 12 weeks after infection.

Long COVID guidelines need to reflect lived experience - DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32705-7

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Over-Engineered Bottle Opener Takes The Drudgery Out Of Drinking:

Some projects take but a single glance for you to know what inspired them in the first place. For this over-engineered robotic bottle opener, the obvious influence was a combination of abundant free time and beer. Plenty of beer.

Of course there are many ways to pop the top on a tall cold one, depending on the occasion. [Matt McCoy] and his cohorts selected the "high-impulse" method, which when not performed by a robot is often accomplished by resting the edge of the cap on a countertop and slapping the bottle down with the palm of one's hand. This magnificently pointless machine does the same thing, except with style.

What's your most memorable beverage-opening story?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Firefox continues cracking down on tracking with cache partitioning:

Firefox version 85 will be released in January 2021, and one of its features is increased user privacy via improvements in client-side storage (cache) partitioning. This has been widely and incorrectly reported elsewhere as network partitioning, likely due to confusion around the privacy.partition.network_state flag in Firefox, which allows advanced users to enable or disable cache partitioning as desired.

What is cache partitioning—and why might I want it?

In a nutshell, cache partitioning is the process of keeping separate cache pools for separate websites, based on the site requesting the resources loaded, rather than simply on the site providing the resources.

[...] For a more detailed discussion of client-side storage partitioning, see the W3C Privacy Community Group's work item on the topic, at https://github.com/privacycg/storage-partitioning.

What's the downside to cache partitioning?

There are some Web resources which are legitimately used near-universally across thousands or millions of sites—for example, embedded fonts being delivered from fonts.google.com. With a globally scoped cache, site1.com might embed a copy of the Roboto font from fonts.google.com, and when site2.com through site999.com embed the same font, it can be delivered from the browser cache.

Although this will be the broadest userdata cache partitioning scheme in production once launched, Mozilla is playing catch-up in deploying one at all. Apple began partitioning Safari's browser cache in 2013 and has continued to partition it further since, and Google partitioned Chrome's HTTP cache beginning with Chrome 86, released in early October.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

NASA says it will fly a Canadian to the Moon:

NASA just struck a historic deal with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) that will entail, for the first time in history, a non-US astronaut orbiting the Moon.

The agreement says that the CSA will help NASA with its upcoming Artemis Moon missions in exchange for a seat on some of the flights, according to Space.com. Not only is the CSA's support good news for the Artemis missions specifically, but it's a major international development in the future of crewed space exploration.

[...] "This will make Canada only the second country after the U.S. to have an astronaut in deep space... and send the first Canadian around the Moon," Navdeep Bains, Canada's government minister of innovation, science and industry said at a Wednesday press conference, according to Space.com.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Linux 5.11 Drops AMD Zen Voltage/Current Reporting Over Lack Of Documentation - Phoronix:

Earlier in 2020 this long-standing AMD hwmon temperature driver added support for core/SoC current and voltage reporting with Zen processors based on the work by the community and some best assumptions around the appropriate registers. But now that support is being dropped for lack of accuracy in some configurations and the possibility it might even damage the hardware.

Last week was the main hwmon pull request for the Linux 5.11 cycle while sent in today was a secondary update with the sole change being the removal of this k10temp current/voltage reporting.

The support is being removed as it "turns out that [it] was not worth the trouble."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Scientists say there was a huge, mysterious object in the early solar system:

After studying one of the fragments of an asteroid that exploded over Sudan, a team of scientists arrived at a provocative conclusion.

The researchers suggest that at least one giant space rock, the size of a dwarf planet, orbited the Sun during the earliest days of our solar system. Inside of the tiny asteroid splinter allocated to the study, they found an unusual crystal structure that couldn't have formed inside a typical asteroid, according to the research the team published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[...] The rare hydrated crystals, called amphiboles, are formed after extremely-lengthy exposures to heat and pressure — more so than could be provided by a typical meteorite. That suggests, according to the study, that the rock broke off of something on the scale of the dwarf planet Ceres.

[...] "Our surprising result suggests the existence of a large, water-rich parent body," she added in a separate statement.

[...] The international team of scientists assumes that whatever giant object formed the crystals is long gone, perhaps explaining why fragments of it have now crashed into Earth.

Journal Reference:
V. E. Hamilton, C. A. Goodrich, A. H. Treiman, et al. Meteoritic evidence for a Ceres-sized water-rich carbonaceous chondrite parent asteroid, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01274-z)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Army long-range cannon gets direct hit on target 43 miles away:

WASHINGTON — The Army's Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system under development hit a target 43 miles away — or 70 kilometers — on the nose at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, Dec. 19, using an Excalibur extended-range guided artillery shell, according to the general who is overseeing the service's Long-Range Precision Fires modernization.

[...] The Army is racing to extend artillery ranges on the battlefield to take away advantages of high-end adversaries like Russia. The ERCA cannon, when fielded, should be able to fire and take out targets from a position out of the range of enemy systems.

[...] In this test, the Army took three shots. The first shot came up short due to very high head winds at a high altitude and the second shot had a hardware failure, but the third shot proved that the service is getting closer to dialing in on the right balance between propellant, projectile design and other factors that play into achieving greater distances, Rafferty said.

[...] Each munition fired during Saturday's event had slight design differences to address how best to design and prepare the round to absorb the high-pressure and force of being fired at 1,000 meters per second from a gun tube of ERCA's caliber, Rafferty said.

No sharks with frickin lasers.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New Blue Whales Discovered After Scientists Hear Unknown Song:

In a study published in the journal Endangered Species Research last week, scientists analyzed underwater recordings from the Arabian Sea, extending from the coast of Oman as far south as Madagascar. The team of researchers came across an unfamiliar kind of whale song that had never before been documented in 2017, sparking an international effort to discover the new singer.

[...] As the group analyzed the novel tune, it became clear that it was sung by a previously undiscovered population of blue whales in the western Indian Ocean. As they continued to amass data, they found that the new population likely spends most of its time in the northwestern Indian Ocean.

The exciting discovery is a glimmer of hope for blue whales, which have been pushed to the brink of extinction and are currently listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In the 1800s and into the 1900s, the commercial whaling industry nearly wiped them out. Thanks to environmental protections, blue whale populations have been increasing around the world in the past half-century, but the species still faces global threats, chiefly due to habitat loss from climate-induced changes to ocean temperature and pH levels, as well as marine pollution. Ships also put the largest creatures on Earth at risk of being struck or getting tangled in fishing lines.

Journal Reference:
Salvatore Cerchio, Andrew Willson, Emmanuelle C. Leroy, et al. A new blue whale song-type described for the Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean; Endang Species Res. Vol. 43: 495–515, 2020 https://doi.org/10.3354/esr01096

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The COVID-19 Stimulus Bill Would Make Illegal Streaming a Felony:

Providing relief via direct assistance and loans to struggling individuals and businesses hit hard by COVID-19 has been a priority for federal lawmakers this past month. But a gigantic spending bill has also become the opportunity to smuggle in some other line items, including those of special interest to the entertainment community.

Perhaps most surprising, according to the text [PDF link] of the bill (a combination of COVID relief and annual government spending), illegal streaming for commercial profit could become a felony.

It's been less than two weeks since Sen. Thom Tillis released his proposal to increase the penalties for those who would dare stream unlicensed works.... [I]t's had very little time to circulate before evidently becoming part of the spending package. If passed, illegal streaming of works including movies and music tracks could carry a penalty of up to 10 years in jail.

[...] On Monday night, lawmakers voted in favor of the package.

The provision was not entirely without opposition, as TechCrunch notes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Free news sites step up pleas for consumers to disable adblocking software:

If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.

"Please support journalism by allowing ads," one of the pop-up messages reads.

In the message, there is a large link that will disable the adblocker extension in your browser. There is a smaller link that will allow you to proceed to the site while continuing to block ads.

Dominic Chorafakis, with the cybersecurity consulting firm Akouto, says adblocking extensions aren't exactly new, but it's possible browsers have strengthened them in recent updates.

"Sites that rely on ad revenue, of course, don't like this at all, and there is quite a bit of effort being put in from their side to detect when a visitor has adblocking in place and either ask them politely to disable adblocking or outright prevent them from viewing their content unless they disable it," Chorafakis told ConsumerAffairs.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russia's space chief is hopping mad over most recent US restrictions

On Monday the US Commerce Department released a list of Chinese and Russian companies that it says have military ties. The list designates 58 Chinese and 43 Russian companies as "military end users" and requires exporters to obtain a license before selling them products. Such licenses are unlikely to be issued.

[...] The list includes several space companies in China and Russia, including the Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara, Russia. This company develops and manufactures the Soyuz rockets that have carried Russian and US astronauts to the International Space Station for the last decade after the US space shuttle retired.

The inclusion of the Soyuz manufacturer drew a swift rebuke from Dmitry Rogozin, the leader of Russia's space corporation, Roscosmos, on Tuesday. In his heated statement, Rogozin said the restrictions were "illegal," and he characterized them as "stupid."

"This Samara enterprise manufactures the legendary Soyuz-2 launch vehicles, with the help of which the Soyuz MS spacecraft has been taking American astronauts to the ISS for 10 years already," he said. "Now, it turns out that our American colleagues have their 'trampoline working' again, and the first thing they did is spit into the Samara well. Isn't it too early, colleagues, in case your 'trampoline' breaks again suddenly and you will have to satisfy your passion for space from our well again?"

Earlier, Rogozin had demonstrated yet again that SpaceX is on his mind:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Major Computing Breakthrough: Copenhagen Researchers Can Now Achieve “Quantum Advantage”:

“We now possess the tool that makes it possible to build a quantum simulator that can outperform a classical computer. This is a major breakthrough and the first step into uncharted territory in the world of quantum physics,” asserts Professor Peter Lodahl, Director of the Center for Hybrid Quantum Networks (Hy-Q).

[...] While the researchers have yet to conduct an actual ‘quantum advantage’ experiment, their article in Science Advances proves that their chip produces a quantum mechanical resource that can be used to reach ‘quantum advantage’ with already demonstrated technology.

To achieve this state demands that one can control about 50 quantum bits, “qubits” — quantum physics’ equivalent of the binary bits of zeros and ones used in our classical computers — in a comprehensive experimental set-up that is well beyond the university’s own financial means.

[...] Various schools exist in the world of qubit development for quantum computers, depending upon which “quantum building blocks” one starts with: atoms, electrons, or photons. Each platform has pros and cons, and it remains difficult to predict, which technology will triumph.

The primary advantage of light-based quantum computers is that technology is already available for scaling up to many qubits because of the availability of advanced photonic chips, which have been developed for the telecom industry. A major challenge to generating photon qubits has been to do so with sufficiently high quality. This is precisely where the Copenhagen researchers achieved their breakthrough.

The main block in performing an actual experiment is funding; they need about 10 million Euro.

Journal Reference:
Ravitej Uppu, Freja T. Pedersen, Ying Wang, et al. Scalable integrated single-photon source [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc8268)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Diamonds are not just for jewelry anymore:

When it comes to the semiconductor industry, silicon has reigned as king in the electronics field, but it is coming to the end of its physical limits.

To more effectively power the electrical grid, locomotives and even electric cars, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are turning to diamond as an ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor.

[...] "We said to ourselves 'let's take this pure high quality CVD [(chemical vapor deposition)] diamond and irradiate it to see if we can tailor the carrier lifetime,'" [LLNL physicist Paulius] Grivackas said. "Eventually, we nailed down the understanding of which irradiation defect is responsible for carrier lifetimes and how does the defect behave under annealing at technologically relevant temperatures."

Photoconductive diamond switches produced this way can be used, for example, in the power grid to control current and voltage surges, which can fry out the equipment. Current silicon switches are big and bulky, but the diamond-based ones can accomplish the same thing with a device that could fit on the tip of a finger, Grivickas said.

Journal Reference:
P. Grivickas, P. Ščajev, N. Kazuchits, et al. Carrier recombination and diffusion in high-purity diamond after electron irradiation and annealing, Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/5.0028363)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New SUPERNOVA backdoor found in SolarWinds cyberattack analysis:

While analyzing artifacts from the SolarWinds Orion supply-chain attack, security researchers discovered another backdoor that is likely from a second threat actor.

Named SUPERNOVA, the malware is a webshell planted in the code of the Orion network and applications monitoring platform and enabled adversaries to run arbitrary code on machines running the trojanized version of the software.

The webshell is a trojanized variant of a legitimate .NET library (app_web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll) present in the Orion software from SolarWinds, modified in a way that would allow it to evade automated defense mechanisms.

Orion software uses the DLL to expose an HTTP API, allowing the host to respond to other subsystems when querying for a specific GIF image.

[...] The malicious code contains only one method, DynamicRun, which compiles on the fly the parameters into a .NET assembly in memory, thus leaving no artifacts on the disk of a compromised device.

This way, the attacker can send arbitrary code to the infected device and run it in the context of the user, who most of the times has high privileges and visibility on the network.

[...] The researcher adds that taking a valid .NET program as a parameter and in-memory code execution makes SUPERNOVA a rare encounter as it eliminates the need for additional network callbacks besides the initial C2 request.

Original Submission

An anonymous user writes:

Exploring the potential of near-sensor and in-sensor computing systems:

As the number of devices connected to the internet continues to increase, so does the amount of redundant data transfer between different sensory terminals and computing units. Computing approaches that intervene in the vicinity of or inside sensory networks could help to process this growing amount of data more efficiently, decreasing power consumption and potentially reducing the transfer of redundant data between sensing and processing units.

Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have recently carried out a study outlining the concept of near-sensor and in-sensor computing. These are two computing approaches that enable the partial transfer of computation tasks to sensory terminals, which could reduce power consumption and increase the performance of algorithms.

"The number of sensory nodes on the Internet of Things continues to increase rapidly," Yang Chai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "By 2032, the number of sensors will be up to 45 trillion, and the generated information from sensory nodes is equivalent to 10²⁰ bit/second. It is thus becoming necessary to shift part of the computation tasks from cloud computing centers to edge devices in order to reduce energy consumption and time delay, saving communication bandwidth and enhancing data security and privacy."

[...] So far, the work by Chai and his colleagues primarily focused on vision sensors. However, near-sensor and in-sensor computing approaches could also integrate other types of sensors, such as those that detect acoustic, pressure, stain, chemical or even biological signals.

Journal References:
1.) Feichi Zhou, Yang Chai. Near-sensor and in-sensor computing, Nature Electronics (DOI: 10.1038/s41928-020-00501-9)
2). Feichi Zhou, Zheng Zhou, Jiewei Chen, et al. Optoelectronic resistive random access memory for neuromorphic vision sensors, Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0501-3)
3.) Yang Chai. In-sensor computing for machine vision, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-00592-6)

Original Submission