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takyon writes:

Google threatens to remove its search engine from Australia if new law goes into effect

Google is threatening to pull its search engine from an entire country — Australia — if a proposed law goes into effect that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content.

"If this version of the Code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia," Google Australia and New Zealand VP Mel Silva told Australia's Senate Economics Legislation Committee today.

"We have had to conclude after looking at the legislation in detail we do not see a way, with the financial and operational risks, that we could continue to offer a service in Australia," she added, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

The company, which has been lobbying against Australia's plan for months, claims the country is trying to make it pay to show links and snippets to news stories in Google Search, not just for news articles featured in places like Google News, saying it "would set an untenable precedent for our business, and the digital economy" and that it's "not compatible with how search engines work."

Also at TechRadar and CNN.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Bugs in Signal, Facebook, Google chat apps let attackers spy on users:

Vulnerabilities found in multiple video conferencing mobile applications allowed attackers to listen to users' surroundings without permission before the person on the other end picked up the calls.

The logic bugs were found by Google Project Zero security researcher Natalie Silvanovich in the Signal, Google Duo, Facebook Messenger, JioChat, and Mocha messaging apps and are now all fixed.

However, before being patched, they made it possible to force targeted devices to transmit audio to the attackers' devices without the need of gaining code execution.

"I investigated the signalling state machines of seven video conferencing applications and found five vulnerabilities that could allow a caller device to force a callee device to transmit audio or video data," Silvanovich explained.

[...] "The majority of calling state machines I investigated had logic vulnerabilities that allowed audio or video content to be transmitted from the callee to the caller without the callee’s consent," Silvanovich added.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Google parent Alphabet to shut down Loon, its internet-beaming balloon project:

Google parent company Alphabet said Thursday that it's shutting down Loon, a project aimed at beaming down internet connectivity from balloons floating in the stratosphere.

The project was born out of X, Alphabet's self-described moonshot factory for experimental projects, which has also developed the company's driverless car and delivery drone services. Alphabet, however, deemed Loon's business model unsustainable and said it couldn't get costs low enough to continue operation.

"The road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped," Astro Teller, who leads X, said in a blog post. "So we've made the difficult decision to close down Loon."

Loon, which debuted in 2013, was spun out of the X division three years ago. The project was meant to serve rural parts of the world that don't have robust broadband infrastructure, serving as flying cellular towers.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

2020 Tied for Warmest Year on Record, NASA Analysis Shows:

Continuing the planet's long-term warming trend, the year's globally averaged temperature was 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1.02 degrees Celsius) warmer than the baseline 1951-1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. 2020 edged out 2016 by a very small amount, within the margin of error of the analysis, making the years effectively tied for the warmest year on record.

"The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend," said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. "Whether one year is a record or not is not really that important – the important things are long-term trends. With these trends, and as the human impact on the climate increases, we have to expect that records will continue to be broken."

[...] A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that 2020 was the second-warmest year in their record, behind 2016. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis, but have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Unlike NASA, NOAA also does not infer temperatures in polar regions lacking observations, which accounts for much of the difference between NASA and NOAA records.

Like all scientific data, these temperature findings contain a small amount of uncertainty – in this case, mainly due to changes in weather station locations and temperature measurement methods over time. The GISS temperature analysis (GISTEMP) is accurate to within 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit with a 95 percent confidence level for the most recent period.

Stacking Sheets of Tissue Builds Better Lab-Grown Meat

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Stacking sheets of tissue builds better lab-grown meat:

The idea of creating meat by cultivating animal cells rather than from the animal itself is an attractive proposition. Regarded as having a lower environmental impact than raising livestock, cultivated or lab-grown meat also avoids the ethical concerns that many people have about eating meat.

However, cultivating meat isn't like growing mushrooms. Meat is essentially muscle organs, which are a complex assembly of various tissues that have been exercised through the animal's lifetime to produce the right texture, consistency, and taste. In addition, it's not just a matter of what cells are present in the meat, but the ratio and distribution as well. This is why anyone who has eaten a well-marbled beef steak with a high fat content and then a very lean bison steak will certainly be able to tell the difference.

While some food engineers have been able to create cultured meat that resembles minced beef, minute steaks, and chicken nuggets, a greater level of control is needed to give cultured meat the full taste and feel of conventional meat. To put it another way, there needs to be much more control over producing the meat to required specifications.

[...] The method is derived from one that was originally developed to grow tissues for human transplants and involves producing sheets of cells in a nutrient medium, which are then concentrated in paper-thin layers on growth plates. These sheets are then peeled off and stacked or folded together, bonding to one another before the cells die.

As a result, the sheets can not only be stacked up as much as desired to create slabs of meat, but the percentage of fat and degree of marbling can be made to order in much the same way as the fat content of milk is controlled. In addition, the sheets can be cultivated in days and assembled in hours.

Journal Reference:
Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, P. Ravi Selvaganapathy. Engineering Murine Adipocytes and Skeletal Muscle Cells in Meat-like Constructs Using Self-Assembled Layer-by-Layer Biofabrication: A Platform for Development of Cultivated Meat, Cells Tissues Organs (DOI: 10.1159/000511764)

Lab-Grown Plant Tissue Could Ease the Environmental Toll of Logging and Agriculture

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Could lab-grown plant tissue ease the environmental toll of logging and agriculture?:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Study: Children much more likely to spread COVID-19 to others:

While children are less susceptible to illness with the new coronavirus, they are nearly 60% more likely than adults over 60 to infect other family members when they are sick, a new study shows.

The findings show the need to conduct COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy studies in children, according to co-senior study author Yang Yang, an associate professor of biostatistics and member of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida.

"We also need to take into account the potential high infectivity of children when we plan school reopenings and what prevention measures we need to take during active school sessions," Yang said in a university news release.

The researchers analyzed data from more than 27,000 households in Wuhan, China, that had confirmed cases of COVID-19 between Dec. 2, 2019, and April 18, 2020, a peak period of COVID-19 disease transmission in the city that was the first epicenter of the pandemic.

[...] The higher infectivity of children in this study may be due to close contact with parents and other relatives caring for them, according to the authors of the study.

[...] The study also found that infants younger than 1 were significantly more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than children between the ages of 2 and 5. This may be due to a combination of their still-developing immune systems and their close contact with adults.

"It's unlikely there will be a vaccine for infants against COVID-19 in the near future, so we need to protect their caregivers," said study co-author Ira Longini.

[...] The findings were published this week in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

No-brainer: kids... spread ALL communicable diseases!

Press Release:
UF study sheds light on the roles of children and asymptomatic infections in COVID-19 household transmission

Journal Reference:
Fang Li, Yuan-Yuan Li. Household transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and risk factors for susceptibility and infectivity in Wuhan: a retrospective observational study, The Lancet Infectious Diseases (DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30981-6)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Massive new dinosaur might be the largest creature to ever roam Earth:

The remains of the unnamed dinosaur were first discovered in 2012 in Neuquén Province of northwest Patagonia, but have still not been fully excavated.

[...] "Given the measurements of the new skeleton, it looks likely that this is a contender for one of the largest, if not the largest, sauropods that have ever been found," Paul Barrett, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

[...] "The place of the finding is very hard to access, so the logistics is pretty complicated," lead study author Alejandro Otero, a paleontologist at La Plata Museum in Argentina, told Live Science. "But we expect to return there after the pandemic situation."

The remains themselves date to about 98 million years ago, meaning the creature lived during the Cretaceous period.

[...] Right now, the researchers can't say how large the new titanosaur was, given that the long limb bones used to make such estimates, such as the humerus and femur, have not yet been excavated. However, analyses of the bones that have been found — including 24 vertebrae of the tail and parts of the pelvic and pectoral girdle — show that it was most likely the largest of the titanosaurs.

[...] "It is a huge dinosaur, but we expect to find much more of the skeleton in future field trips, so we'll have the possibility to address with confidence how big it really was," Otero said.

Journal Reference:
Alejandro Otero, José L. Carballido, Leonardo Salgado et al. Report of a giant titanosaur sauropod from the Upper Cretaceous of Neuquén Province, Argentina, Cretaceous Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104754)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

A 'super-puff' planet like no other:

The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers at Université de Montréal have found.

This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student Caroline Piaulet of UdeM's Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) suggests that gas-giant planets form a lot more easily than previously believed.

Piaulet is part of the groundbreaking research team of UdeM astrophysics professor Björn Benneke that in 2019 announced the first detection of water on an exoplanet located in its star's habitable zone.

Published today in the Astronomical Journal with colleagues in Canada, the U.S., Germany and Japan, the new analysis of WASP-107b's internal structure "has big implications," said Benneke.

"This work addresses the very foundations of how giant planets can form and grow," he said. "It provides concrete proof that massive accretion of a gas envelope can be triggered for cores that are much less massive than previously thought."

WASP-107b was first detected in 2017 around WASP-107, a star about 212 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation. The planet is very close to its star -- over 16 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun. As big as Jupiter but 10 times lighter, WASP-107b is one of the least dense exoplanets known: a type that astrophysicists have dubbed "super-puff" or "cotton-candy" planets.

[...] "Exoplanets like WASP-107b that have no analogue in our Solar System allow us to better understand the mechanisms of planet formation in general and the resulting variety of exoplanets," [Piaulet] said. "It motivates us to study them in great detail."

WASP-107b

Journal Reference:
Caroline Piaulet, Björn Benneke, et al. WASP-107b's Density Is Even Lower: A Case Study for the Physics of Planetary Gas Envelope Accretion and Orbital Migration - IOPscience, The Astronomical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/abcd3c)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Breakthrough study finds age-related cognitive decline may be reversible:

A breakthrough study from a team of neurologists at Stanford University claims to have discovered one way immune cells become dysfunctional as we age, leading to the inflammatory hyperdrive that plays a role in most age-related disease from cancer to cognitive decline. Preliminary study suggests this immune dysfunction can be reversed, pointing to compelling future anti-aging therapies.

[...] The specific focus of the new study, published in the journal Nature, was a hormone called prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Levels of this particular hormone have previously been found to rise with aging. PGE2 is also known to promote inflammatory activity in immune cells.

[...] Katrin Andreasson, senior author on the new study, calls this age-induced inflammatory mechanism, "a double-whammy – a positive feedback loop."

[...] "Our study suggests that cognitive aging is not a static or irrevocable condition but can be reversed by reprogramming myeloid glucose metabolism to restore youthful immune functions," the researchers conclude in the new study.

Also at: Stanford.edu

Journal Reference:
Paras S. Minhas, Amira Latif-Hernandez, Melanie R. McReynolds, et al. Restoring metabolism of myeloid cells reverses cognitive decline in ageing, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03160-0)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Raspberry Pi Foundation's first microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico is now on sale at $4. Raspberry Pi is normally associated with single board microcomputers. This microcontroller uses the RP2040 dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ chip. The board has support for C, C++, and microPython.

We had three principal design goals for RP2040: high performance, particularly for integer workloads; flexible I/O, to allow us to talk to almost any external device; and of course, low cost, to eliminate barriers to entry. We ended up with an incredibly powerful little chip, cramming all this into a 7 × 7 mm QFN-56 package containing just two square millimetres of 40 nm silicon. RP2040 has:

• Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
• 264KB (remember kilobytes?[*]) of on-chip RAM
• Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
• DMA controller
• Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
• 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
• 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
• 16 × PWM channels
• 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
• 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
• USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming

And this isn't just a powerful chip: it's designed to help you bring every last drop of that power to bear. With six independent banks of RAM, and a fully connected switch at the heart of its bus fabric, you can easily arrange for the cores and DMA engines to run in parallel without contention.

[*] By comparison, the Apple II computer (introduced in June 1977) had: 4-48 KiB of RAM, a 6502 processor (running at 1 MHz), and an Introductory price of US$1,298 (equivalent to $5,476 in 2019).

Additional coverage:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

This Bot Turns Reddit Comments Into Ace Attorney Debates:

Drama is no stranger to Reddit, as many of you all might know. And while more than a few have snickered or giggled at Reddit arguments that have exploded or taken strange twists and turns, there's now a new way to check out what's happening in the comments.

Micah Price, a software engineer from Cape Town, South Africa, on Sunday unveiled a genius bot that turns Reddit arguments into scenes from Ace Attorney, the Capcom series in which attorney Phoenix Wright fights to get his clients off the hook using his investigative and courtroom skills, Mashable reported. The video arguments come with the dramatic music and the famous "Objection!" catchphrase. The results are entertaining, hilarious, and honestly sometimes don't make sense. There are, of course, some that do elicit an appalled, "Oh God," when you see what people are arguing about.

In an interview with Mashable, Price said that he got the idea from other meme-based videos of the game on YouTube.

"The dramatic music is great," Price told the outlet, "especially for the melodramatic debates on Reddit."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Chinese scientists develop gene therapy which could delay ageing:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Scientists in Beijing have developed a new gene therapy which can reverse some of the effects of ageing in mice and extend their lifespans, findings which may one day contribute to similar treatment for humans.

The method, detailed in a paper in the Science Translational Medicine journal earlier this month, involves inactivating a gene called kat7 which the scientists found to be a key contributor to cellular ageing.

The specific therapy they used and the results were a world first, said co-supervisor of the project Professor Qu Jing, 40, a specialist in ageing and regenerative medicine from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"These mice show after 6-8 months overall improved appearance and grip strength and most importantly they have extended lifespan for about 25%," Qu said.

[...] Qu said she hopes to be able to test the method on primates next, but it would require a lot of funding and much more research first.

"In the end, we hope that we can find a way to delay ageing even by a very minor percentage...in the future."

Journal Reference:
Wei Wang, Yuxuan Zheng, Shuhui Sun, et al. A genome-wide CRISPR-based screen identifies KAT7 as a driver of cellular senescence [$], Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abd2655)

Original Submission

MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for TheMightyBuzzard.

The Origin Of Cut, Copy, And Paste:

I'm always fascinated that someone designed just about everything you use, no matter how trivial it is. The keyboard you type on, the light switch you turn on, even the faucet handle. They don't just spontaneously grow on trees, so some human being had to build it and probably had at least a hazy design in mind when they started it.

Some things are so ubiquitous that it is hard to remember that someone had to dream them up to begin with. A friend of mine asked me the other day why we use Control+X and Control+V to manipulate the clipboard almost universally. Control+C for copy makes sense, of course, but it is still odd that it is virtually universal in an industry where everyone likes to reinvent the wheel. I wasn't sure of the answer but figured it had to do with some of the user interface standards from IBM or Sun. Turns out, it is much older than that.

[NB: This story is much more than a dry history of physically cutting and pasting together documents.--martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AI-Powered Text From This Program Could Fool the Government:

Idaho proposed changing its Medicaid program. The state needed approval from the federal government, which solicited public feedback via Medicaid.gov.

Roughly 1,000 comments arrived. But half came not from concerned citizens or even internet trolls. They were generated by artificial intelligence. And a study found that people could not distinguish the real comments from the fake ones.

The project was the work of Max Weiss, a tech-savvy medical student at Harvard, but it received little attention at the time. Now, with AI language systems advancing rapidly, some say the government, and internet companies, need to rethink how they solicit and screen feedback to guard against deepfake text manipulation and other AI-powered interference.

"The ease with which a bot can generate and submit relevant text that impersonates human speech on government websites is surprising and really important to know," says Latanya Sweeney, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School who advised Weiss on how to run the experiment ethically.

Sweeney says the problems extend well beyond government services, but it is imperative that public agencies find a solution. "AI can drown speech from real humans," she says. "Government websites have to change."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

FAA approves first commercial drone flights with no on-site pilots:

Farms and other agricultural operations in certain rural areas in the US can now use robotic drones to take images of or gather data on their crops. The FAA has approved Massachusetts-based American Robotics' request to be able to deploy automated drones without human pilots and spotters on site. As The Wall Street Journal notes, commercial drone flights typically require the physical presence of licensed pilots making them a costly undertaking. AR's machine eliminates the need for on-site personnel, though each automated flight will still need to be overseen by a remote human pilot.

According to the relevant documents (via The Verge) the FAA has uploaded on its website, the pilot "who is not co-located with the aircraft" will have to conduct pre-flight safety checks to ensure the drone is in working condition. American Robotics' drones are 20—pound machines powered by its Scout System technology, which uses predetermined paths. Scout also has a Detect-and-Avoid feature that allows the unmanned aircraft system to maintain a safe distance from other aircraft, birds and obstacles. When it's not in the air, the UAS can stay inside a weatherproof base station for charging, data processing/analysis and data transmission

Original Submission