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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Dealing with dust: A back-to-the-moon dilemma - SpaceNews:

The next chapter in the U.S. human exploration of the moon, the Artemis Project, will dispatch crews there for extended periods of time, building upon Apollo's heritage. Between 1969 and the end of 1972, a dozen astronauts kicked up the powdery regolith, the topside dirt of the moon. But there's one flash back message from the Apollo moonwalkers worth heeding: the place is a Disneyland of dust.

[...] "I think dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon. I think that we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems except dust," said mission commander Eugene Cernan. "One of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive friction-like action to everything it gets on," said lunar module pilot and geologist, Harrison Schmitt.

Study groups and technologists are assessing ways to lessen the negative impact of lunar dust on the astronauts, their equipment, and surface operations.

NASA Report:
Daniel Winterhalter, et al. Lunar Dust and Its Impact on Human Exploration: A NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Workshop, NASA Technical Reports Server (Link: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205008219)

Original Submission

[Update 1; 2020-12-27 16:05:32 UTC: Added my conversation with TMB. Scroll down to view. Minor rewording of original story. --martyb]
[Update 2; 2020-12-27 19:38:48 UTC: TMB started investigation and added a short update below. --Bytram]

aristarchus writes:

Not an actual sub. If this had been an actual sub, there would be something here. But just noticing that the list of recent journal entries is gone from the front page?

Thanks for that, aristarchus!

We've got a problem:
Where did the "Most Recent Journal Entries" slashbox go?

I don't know what happened. And, of course, TheMightyBuzzard is on vacation for the week.

No code changes have been made recently. Hmmm.

Way back when, I had read Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms+Data Structures = Programs. Well, if it's not code, then maybe it's data? It's a longshot, but worth a look.

I looked in the DB. Found the most recent journal entry. Looked like a Cut-and-Paste of some computer-generated HTML wrapping some marketing blurb written in Portuguese. Not only were there inappropriate HTML tags, they were saddled down with a plethora of attributes. For more fun, ladle in a heaping helping of UNICODE characters.

Still doubtful, but seemed the most likely culprit given the timing. I updated that journal entry manually in the DB to replace journal.article text with something benign.

No Joy. :(

FWIW, I also "bounced" the servers (varnishd on hydrogen and fluorine). Still no luck.

Current Workaround:
Use the site's search function to list the most recent journal entries:

https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=&author=&sort=2&op=journals

Besides, I had nothing else to do first thing on a Sunday morning, right?

[Update #2]:

I don't have the patience to fix db transaction timeouts on someone else's chicklet-keyboard-having Windows laptop. It can wait until I get home on the 2nd. --TMB

[Update #1]:

(See below the fold.)

Booga1 writes:

Eurogamer reports: A month after launch, Assassin's Creed Valhalla starts selling XP boosts

Assassin's Creed Valhalla launched in November with a shop selling cosmetic extras for real money, but to the surprise of many, the XP boost packs sold in Assassin's Creed Odyssey were conspicuously absent. Not to worry, everyone: the controversial microtransactions have now arrived.

[...] The XP boost was controversial in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, not only because players felt microtransactions didn't belong in a full-price single-player title, but due to Odyssey's slow levelling process and level gates. This led some fans to claim the grind was there to deliberately encourage players to buy boost packs.

[...] Of course, given this microtransaction was available in Odyssey at launch, players have noted it seems a little dubious that Ubisoft waited a month after release and reviews to introduce the packs to Valhalla.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut

A trip of 500 km on one charge. A recharge from zero to full in 10 minutes. All with minimal safety concerns. The solid-state battery being introduced by Toyota promises to be a game changer not just for electric vehicles but for an entire industry.

The technology is a potential cure-all for the drawbacks facing electric vehicles that run on conventional lithium-ion batteries, including the relatively short distance traveled on a single charge as well as charging times. Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world's largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year.

[...] Solid-state batteries are expected to become a viable alternative to lithium-ion batteries that use aqueous electrolyte solutions. The innovation would lower the risk of fires, and multiply energy density, which measures the energy a battery can deliver compared to its weight.

It would take roughly 10 minutes to charge an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery, cutting the recharging time by two-thirds.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

The family with no fingerprints:

Apu Sarker was showing his open palm to me on a video call from his home in Bangladesh. Nothing seemed unusual at first, but as I looked closer I could see the smooth surfaces of his fingertips.

Apu, who is 22, lives with his family in a village in the northern district of Natore. He was working as a medical assistant until recently. His father and his grandfather were farmers.

The men in Apu's family appear to share a genetic mutation so rare it is thought to affect only a small handful of families in the world: they have no fingerprints.

[...] over the decades, the tiny grooves that swirl around our fingertips - known properly as dermatoglyphs - have become the world's most collected biometric data. We use them for everything from passing through airports to voting and opening our smartphones.

[...] The rare condition likely afflicting the Sarker family is called Adermatoglyphia. It first became widely known in 2007 when Peter Itin, a Swiss dermatologist, was contacted by a woman in the country in her late twenties who was having trouble entering the US. Her face matched the photograph on her passport, but customs officers were not able to record any fingerprints. Because she didn't have any.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:

More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren't using it:

When the University of Texas system teamed up with the Census Bureau to show how much money graduates earn, broken down by major and campus, the idea was to help future students make good choices.

College is, after all, a huge investment, with costs consumers often criticize and toward which many have to borrow. If they knew that one major results in higher salaries than others — or that graduates from one university earn more than those with the exact same degree from another — wouldn't they make the higher-paying choice?

Two years after the groundbreaking collaboration began, however, students haven't seemed to alter course, said David Troutman, the system's associate vice chancellor, who oversees the project.

[...] He and other advocates stress that they want students to continue following their passions. But they also want them to be aware that earnings vary widely among graduates, even when they have identical majors, from different universities and colleges, affecting not only their quality of life but their ability to repay their student loans.

That's a principal reason more and more information about job opportunities and salaries is being made available to students and their families, most recently by the federal government, which this month expanded a feature of its College Scorecard website showing the earnings payoffs of 37,459 majors at 4,434 colleges and universities.

canopic jug writes:

Software developer Bert Hubert explores reverse engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate being rolled out. Pfizer claims to have used mRNA to encode instructions for producing the distinctive outer layer of protein coating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine.

Now, these words may be somewhat jarring - the vaccine is a liquid that gets injected in your arm. How can we talk about source code?

[...] The BNT162b mRNA vaccine [has] digital code at its heart. It is 4284 characters long, so it would fit in a bunch of tweets. At the very beginning of the vaccine production process, someone uploaded this code to a DNA printer (yes), which then converted the bytes on disk to actual DNA molecules.

What follows is a reasonably accessible explanation of what the vaccine does, and how it does it, step-by-step.

Hubert also has a much older blog post on DNA sequencing.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:

A Photograph With an Eight-Year Exposure Was Taken With a Beer Can:

A week after the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony, a Master's student at the University of Hertfordshire placed a film-lined beer can on the side of a campus observatory and seemingly at some point forgot about it. Eight years later, in September 2020, there was a picture on the inside of the can with one of the longest exposure photographs ever taken.

Regina Valkenborgh was experimenting with pinhole camera techniques when she created this project, according to a University of Hertfordshire statement. She decided to build a simple, makeshift camera using a can to capture the rising and setting of the sun for an indeterminate length of time. It ended up sitting there for eight years—according to the university, 2,953 arced trails of the star were captured on the film inside of the can. This is believed to be the longest-exposure photograph taken.

"To me the most exciting thing is that this rudimentary way of photographing in this technology-driven era still has value," Valkenborgh said in an email to Motherboard. "Yet in all its simplicity it has the capability of 'capturing' a photograph way beyond the slowest shutter speed you can set on any digital camera. The images are also totally unique, the light photons travel through the actual pinhole and touch the paper inside the can. You can compare it with your footprint in the sand as opposed to drawing a foot with a stick. The foot actually touched the sand and likewise the sun's rays actually touched the paper."

Officially titled "Days in the Sun", the image documents the sun's path in the Northern Hemisphere's sky. The highest arches coincide with the Summer Solstice (i.e. the longest day of the year), and as time goes on, the lowest ones indicate the Winter Solstice (the shortest day). Breaks in the light trails indicate cloudy days and saturated spots imply sunny ones.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Exclusive: Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes 'next level' battery technology - sources

(Reuters) - Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The iPhone maker’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019.

Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple’s plans are not public. Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.

Central to Apple’s strategy is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range, according to a third person who has seen Apple’s battery design.

Apple declined to comment on its plans or future products.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Putting on the pressure improves glass for fiber optics:

Rapid, accurate communication worldwide is possible via fiber optic cables, but as good as they are, they are not perfect. Now, researchers from Penn State and AGC Inc. in Japan suggest that the silica glass used for these cables would have less signal loss if it were manufactured under high pressure.

"Signal loss means that we have to use amplifiers every 80 to 100 kilometers (50 to 62 miles)," said John C. Mauro, professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. "After that distance, the signal wouldn't be detected properly. Across continents or across oceans that becomes a big deal."

[...] Mauro and his team used molecular simulations to investigate the effects of pressure when making optical fibers. They reported their results in npj Computational Materials. The simulations showed that using pressure quenching of the glass, the Rayleigh scattering loss could be reduced by more than 50%.

[...] Mauro's work is a molecular simulation, but Madoka Ono of AGC Inc.'s Materials Integration Laboratories, who is an associate professor in the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University in Japan, tested bulk pieces of silica glass and found that the results matched the simulation.

Journal Reference:
Yongjian Yang, Osamu Homma, Shingo Urata, et al. Topological pruning enables ultra-low Rayleigh scattering in pressure-quenched silica glass [open], npj Computational Materials (DOI: 10.1038/s41524-020-00408-1)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MediaTek leapfrogs Qualcomm as the world's largest smartphone chipset vendor thanks to huge growth in India and Latin America

In Q3 2019 the two companies held 26% (MediaTek) and 31% (Qualcomm) market share; in Q3 2020 these figures had changed to 31% for MediaTek and 29% for Qualcomm. There is a three-way tie for third position, with HiSilicon, Samsung, and Apple all snatching 12% of the share, leaving Unisoc with 4%.

The surge for MediaTek's chipsets is attributed to numerous factors: The Dimensity range has been adopted by big-name smartphone vendors like Xiaomi (Redmi), Realme, and OPPO, and the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 series SoCs have been especially praised for their performances. Also, Huawei's trade issues have helped MediaTek increase its share, and sales of affordable (US$100-US$250) smartphones featuring its chipsets have grown significantly in markets such as India and Latin America.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The ACLU Is Suing For Info On The FBI's Encryption Breaking Capabilities:

The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Tuesday that it plans to sue for information related to the FBI's shadowy and relatively new ability to break into encrypted devices at will.

The lawsuit will reportedly seek to target information related to the FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) and its apparent acquisition of software that would allow the government to unlock and decrypt information that is otherwise securely stored on cell phones.

[...] The problem, however, is that the FBI's refusal to acknowledge whether the records exist or not is particularly implausible in light of how much information on the agency's attempts to access encrypted devices is already publicly available. The ACLU has now appealed to a federal court in an attempt to compel the DOJ and FBI to turn over all relevant documents on the EDAU and its technological capabilities. In the blog post, the ACLU wrote that the FBI's chilling refusal to provide information isn't just shutting the door on the investigation — "they've shut the door, closed the windows, drawn the shades, and refused to acknowledge whether the house that we're looking at even exists."

Original Submission

[2020-12-25 22:18:22 UTC -- Corrected typo (with thanks to maxwell demon) --martyb]
[2020-12-25 21:32:03 UTC -- Updated with staff info and reformatted the story. --martyb]

martyb writes:

First, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept our best wishes for a happy (and safe and healthy) holiday!

Next, here are a few quick items of note that bear calling to your attention.

Please join me in welcoming requerdanos to the editorial staff at SoylentNews! He has already jumped in with both feet and had stories appear on the main page. Welcome aboard requerdanos!

Of note, as well, takyon has not only posted 1364 stories to the site, and he has submitted just shy of 6,100 stories (as I write this it stands at 6,097 submissions... there's more(!) how about posting over 20,000 comments! Thank you SO much!

I always feel reluctant to mention anyone specifically as running this site is a team effort. I sense there are some staff who prefer to work in the background and shun the limelight. We appreciate their efforts nonetheless! Recall the early days when site crashes were a request frequent occurrence. We've come a long way from then and I count it a privilege to have worked with such knowledgeable folk who have been so generous with their time and energy!

Lastly a huge thank-you to those who responded so generously to our end-of-the-year fundraiser! As of this writing, we have had 21 subscriptions totaling $567.40 since our request went out a couple weeks ago.

In this second half of the year (July 1 through December 31) we have raised $1908.15 from 85 subscriptions towards our $3,500.00 goal. THANK-YOU!

We realize it's been a tough year for everyone; take care of your friends, family, and community first. But, if you do have the means, we'd really appreciate your subscribing and helping us to keep things going for you and our community! Please see this comment to our previous story for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe.

Why subscribe? Why not? Besides, you'll get all the benefits listed on the "SoylentNews - Why Subscribe?".

NB: If you'd prefer, you can subscribe anonymously. There's an option to make a gift subscription, as well. For any questions or difficulty, please reach out on IRC, send an email to admin@soylentnews.org, or just post a comment to this story.

Thank you!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Police Seize VPN Service Beloved by Cyber-criminals:

A virtual private network (VPN) used by some of the world's leading cyber-criminals has been shut down in an international law enforcement action led by German police.

The Safe-Inet service was deactivated yesterday as part of Operation Nova, a coordinated effort that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation and European law enforcement agencies acting through Europol.

Servers used by the service were taken down, and its infrastructure was seized in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Visitors to the Safe-Inet webpage are now greeted by a domain seizure notice.

Safe-Inet was active for eleven years prior to yesterday's action, describing itself as an international team of "experienced technical specialists who understand how important anonymity on the network is for our clients."

[...] "This VPN service was sold at a high price to the criminal underworld as one of the best tools available to avoid law enforcement interception, offering up to 5 layers of anonymous VPN connections," said a spokesperson for Europol.

Original Submission

Tesla Allowed to Clear Part of Forest Near Berlin for New Factory, Reports Say

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Tesla Allowed to Clear Part of Forest Near Berlin for New Factory, Reports Say:

The Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court has ruled that Tesla can clear a part of a forest near Berlin to build a new manufacturing site there, Reuters reported. The ruling prohibited clear-cutting the forest in peripheral areas of the site, but stressed that the same ban for the rest of the area "could not be justified".

The court turned down a complaint from the Gruene Liga Brandenburg group, stating that local authorities didn't violate laws when they allowed work on the factory to start.

Hibernating Lizards are Blocking Tesla's Plan for a Berlin Gigafactory

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Hibernating lizards are blocking Tesla's plan for a Berlin Gigafactory:

Tesla has run into yet another snag while it tries to construct its Gigafactory near Berlin, Germany.

On Friday, a German court rule that Tesla cannot raze as much of the nearby forest as it'd planned to, according to Business Insider. The reason? The forest is home to a protected species of sand lizard that's already hunkered down for its winter hibernation. In the face of yet another ecological delay, it seems increasingly likely that Tesla will have to revisit its planned completion date of July 2021.

Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2