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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Futuristic sleeping pods for homeless people installed in German city:

Windproof and waterproof sleep pods have been installed in the streets of a German city in order to house the homeless.

The wood and steel cabins, which can fit up to two people, protect against the cold, wind, and humidity. They also guarantee fresh air circulation.

[...] The capsules are also equipped with solar panels, and are connected to a radio network, allowing occupants to communicate without dependency of mobile networks.

The creators of the “Ulmer Nest” have stated that it is made with those who cannot access usual homeless shelters in mind, either due to psychological factors or because they have a pet, for example.

They also note that there was a delay in installation due to the pandemic, but that they were able to install the pods in time for “the coldest nights”.

The article features a photo of one of the pods, which resemble pentagonal prisms in shape.

The project has a web site that defaults to German, but also has an English translation of most parts of the site.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The lead up to [the] UFC 257 Poirier v McGregor was notable for the UFC's threats to target an illegal streamer, warning that his house was being watched, his phone was tapped, and police were standing by. While that guy reportedly backed down, many others didn't - which is fortunate since ESPN+ went down under the load, forcing legitimate buyers (including UFC fighters) to request pirate streams.

[...] With huge numbers of fans bombarding ESPN on Twitter complaining that they couldn't access the event, the broadcaster said that it was doing the best it could to restore service. However, after shelling out $70.00 the desperation mounted for many fans as the anxiety of missing the action took its toll.

In a now-deleted Tweet, UFC middleweight Ian Heinisch wrote: "Okay I am done send me illegal streams!" a sentiment that was shared by thousands of other individuals including those who already paid and those who never intended to.

[...] [The] post mortem will be a difficult one for [UFC president] Dana White. After being ridiculed in some corners for his anti-piracy rhetoric, it seems fairly likely that some fans will have decided to take the legal option for once, a golden opportunity to shine if ever there was one.

Instead, they will have watched their pirating counterparts receive superior service at what would've been less than a tenth of the price, which is just about the worst possible outcome on the night. Add that to the fact that McGregor lost, and you have a UFC 257 that White won't look back on with the fondest of memories.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-streamers-save-ufc-257-after-espn-collapses-under-the-load-210124/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scanners applied in research use not just one antenna that emits and receives the signal, but several of them, which can cause severe burns to inner tissues and organs. Thus, researchers are forced to power scanners with less voltage, which negatively affects the quality of their studies. Now, [ITMO University] physicists, together with their colleagues from the M-Cube consortium, have created the first ever leaky-wave antennas for MRI scanners. The device can conduct body organ diagnostics without risks for patient health while also raising the quality of images acquired in research scanners.

[...] "Our idea is that we have many small antennas connected in series with a wave propagating through them. Each element emits a portion of the power, so that together they form the total radiation. Thanks to the method of leaky waves (which are non-resonant), it is possible to reduce the heating and make the scanning safe for patients," explains Georgiy Solomakha, a Ph.D. student at ITMO's Faculty of Physics and Engineering and main author of the paper.

wikipedia article for MRI

Journal Reference:
G. Solomakha, J. T. Svejda, C. van Leeuwen, et al. A self-matched leaky-wave antenna for ultrahigh-field magnetic resonance imaging with low specific absorption rate [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20708-w)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Autonomous Vehicle International reports on new work from UCSD: University researchers develop improved radar imaging system:

Engineers at the University of California San Diego say they have developed a way to improve the imaging capability of existing radar sensors, so that they accurately predict the shape and size of objects in a scene.

"It's a lidar-like[*] radar," explained Dinesh Bharadia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "It's an inexpensive approach to achieving bad weather perception in self-driving cars. Fusing lidar and radar can also be done with our techniques, but radars are cheap. This way, we don't need to use expensive lidars."

The system consists of two radar sensors placed on the hood of a vehicle and spaced an average car's width apart (1.5m). Having two radar sensors arranged this way is key — they give the system a wider field of view and provide more detail than a single radar sensor.

During test drives on clear days and nights, its developers claim the system performed as well as a lidar sensor at determining the dimensions of cars moving in traffic. Its performance did not change in tests simulating foggy weather. The team 'hid' another vehicle using a fog machine and say the system accurately predicted its 3D geometry. The lidar sensor to all practical purposes failed this test.

[*] Wikipedia entries on RADAR and on LIDAR.

More details in the article including a brief description of the work required to fuse the two radar images--which they claim hasn't been done before (at least not for the consumer market). One of the big improvements was in rejecting random noise normally present in a radar echo. Another comment is that fusing the radar data with normal camera data (really cheap) could be a good match. The link also includes a short video of the system being tested in fog.

Maybe Elon was right after all (he rejected Lidar in his Autonomous press conference)?

Got Lidar stock? Maybe time to unload...

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for requerdanos:

They can capture more carbon than they emit. So why aren't wooden buildings mainstream?:

Four storeys high and made almost entirely of wood, the ZEB Lab building in Trondheim, Norway, had, even before it existed, sucked as much carbon from the atmosphere as it would probably produce in construction. Now, thanks to its arboreal origins, as well as to the sleek expanse of solar panels on its roof and to other energy efficiency measures, it is a carbon-negative building. In other words, from birth to demise, it will have drawn down more carbon than it emitted.

There are various ways to store excess carbon dioxide. "One way is to have it hidden in buildings," says Tero Hasu, a project manager at Kouvola Innovation, a municipally owned development company of the City of Kouvola in Finland. The ZEB (zero emission building) Lab achieves this by using wood for almost everything—from beams to pillars and staircases. Concrete is to be found only in the foundations and the ground floor.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center could open enterprise users to remote attack and takeover.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-1257[*], exists in the web-based management interface of the Cisco DNA Center, which is a centralized network-management and orchestration platform for Cisco DNA. It carries a CVSS vulnerability-severity score of 7.1, making it high-severity.

[...] The web-based management interface used for accessing and using the Cisco DNA Center has insufficient CSRF protections in software versions prior to 2.1.1.0. The patch issued today addresses the problem.

[...] This vulnerability is fixed in Cisco DNA Center Software releases 2.1.1.0, 2.1.2.0, 2.1.2.3 and 2.1.2.4, and later. Cisco credited Benoit Malaboeuf and Dylan Garnaud from Orange for reporting the bug.  vulnerability.[sic]

[...] The most serious flaw (CVE-2021-1144[**]) afflicted Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX), a software solution that is utilized by retailers to provide business insights or on-site customer experience analytics. The solution uses the Cisco wireless infrastructure to collect a treasure trove of data from the retailer’s Wi-Fi network, including real-time customer-location tracking. The high-severity issue (8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability-severity scale) could allow an authenticated attacker to impersonate any user on the system.

[*] CVE-2021-1257
[**] CVE-2021-1144

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

SARS-CoV-2 needs cholesterol to invade cells and form mega cells:

People taking cholesterol-lowering drugs may fare better than others if they catch the novel coronavirus. A new study hints at why: the virus relies on the fatty molecule to get past the cell's protective membrane.

To cause COVID-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus must force its way into people's cells—and it needs an accomplice. Cholesterol, the waxy compound better known for clogging arteries, helps the virus open cells up and slip inside, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Clifford Brangwynne's lab reports.

Without cholesterol, the virus cannot sneak past a cell's protective barrier and cause infection, the team writes in a preprint posted to bioRxiv.org on December 14, 2020. The work, which recreated the early stage of infection in lab-grown cells, has not yet undergone the scientific vetting process of peer review.

"Cholesterol is an integral part of the membranes that surround cells and some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. It makes sense that it should be so important for infection," says Brangwynne, a biophysical engineer at Princeton University.

The finding might underlie the better health outcomes seen in COVID-19 patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins, he adds. Although scientists haven't yet established the mechanism responsible, this study and another published last fall suggest the drugs prevent SARS-CoV-2 from getting into cells by denying it cholesterol.

[...] Brangwynne says it's not clear yet whether or not syncytia play a major role in the progression of COVID-19. But, his team writes, the discovery of cholesterol's contribution could help scientists fight the disease. "Our findings underscore the potential utility of statins and other [similar] treatments."

Journal Reference:
David W. Sanders, Chanelle C. Jumper, Paul J. Ackerman, et al. SARS-CoV-2 Requires Cholesterol for Viral Entry and Pathological Syncytia Formation [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.14.422737)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Laser beams can be used to change the properties of materials in an extremely precise way. This principle is already widely used in technologies such as rewritable DVDs. However, the underlying processes generally take place at such unimaginably fast speeds and at such a small scale that they have so far eluded direct observation. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have now managed to film, for the first time, the laser transformation of a crystal structure with nanometre resolution and in slow motion in an electron microscope. The results have been published in the journal Science.

[...] In their experiments, the researchers induced this phase transition with short laser pulses and recorded a film of the charge-density wave reaction. "What we observe is the rapid formation and growth of tiny regions where the material was switched to the next phase," explains first author Thomas Danz from Göttingen University. "The ultrafast transmission electron microscope developed in Göttingen offers the highest time resolution for such imaging in the world today." The special feature of the experiment lies in a newly developed imaging technique, which is particularly sensitive to the specific changes observed in this phase transition. The Göttingen physicists use it to take images that are composed exclusively of electrons that have been scattered by the crystal's waviness.

Journal Reference:
Thomas Danz, Till Domröse, Claus Ropers. Ultrafast nanoimaging of the order parameter in a structural phase transition [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd2774)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After analyzing the techniques current being used in higher education, [researchers] are calling for a pragmatic and evidence-based approach instead.

Professor Phil Newton, director of learning and teaching at of Swansea University Medical School, said, "Higher education is how we train those who carry out important professional roles in our society. There are now more than 200 million students in HE worldwide and this number is likely to double again over the next decade.

"Given the size, impact, importance and cost of HE, it would be reasonable to assume that policies and practices employed are the best available, based upon rigorous evidence. However, this does not appear to be the case."

[...] Prof Newton added "There is an abundance of academic literature on higher education, stretching back decades. We owe it to all involved in education to ensure that this can best inform innovation and improvement, in a way that allows for professional judgment and a consideration of context.

"This could be achieved by adopting principles of pragmatic, evidence-based higher education."

The researchers' recommendations include, among other things, skills-based development for faculty, cost/benefit analysis of effective approaches, and, of course, "increased funding" to look into the matter further.

Journal Reference:
Newton, Philip M., Da Silva, Ana, Berry, Sam. The Case for Pragmatic Evidence-Based Higher Education: A Useful Way Forward?, Frontiers in Education (DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2020.583157)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Newly discovered giant galaxies dwarf the Milky Way:

Our universe may be filled with unseen giants. Astronomers have discovered two giant radio galaxies, which are some of the largest-known objects in the universe. This revelation suggests that the enormous galaxies may be more common than previously believed.

[...] Giant radio galaxies [are] rare and have jets [that flow perpendicularly to the galaxy's disk] that exceed 22 times the size of our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, which is also fairly common, and looks like it sounds: a spiral-shaped galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure made of stars.

Now, astronomers have found two giant radio galaxies in a rather small patch of sky.

"We found these giant radio galaxies in a region of sky which is only about 4 times the area of the full Moon," said Jacinta Delhaize, lead study author and research fellow at the University of Cape Town, in a statement. "Based on our current knowledge of the density of giant radio galaxies in the sky, the probability of finding two of them in this region is less than 0.0003 per cent. This means that giant radio galaxies are probably far more common than we thought!"

Journal Reference:
Delhaize, J, Heywood, I, Prescott, M, et al. MIGHTEE: are giant radio galaxies more common than we thought?, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa3837)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for requerdanos:

EU Power Sector 2020 - Ember:

Landmark moment as EU renewables overtake fossil fuels

Climate neutrality by 2050 means renewables growth will further accelerate

Ember and Agora Energiewende’s fifth annual report tracking Europe’s electricity transition was published on 25th January 2021. It revealed that renewables overtook fossil fuels to become the EU’s main source of electricity for the first time in 2020.

[...] Renewables rose to generate 38% of Europe’s electricity in 2020 (compared to 34.6% in 2019), for the first time overtaking fossil-fired generation, which fell to 37%. This is an important milestone in Europe’s Clean Energy Transition. At a country level, Germany and Spain (and separately the UK) also achieved this milestone for the first time. The transition from coal to clean is, however, still too slow for reaching 55% greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050.

[...] Wind generation rose 9% in 2020 and solar generation rose 15%. Together they generated a fifth of Europe’s electricity in 2020. Since 2015, wind and solar have supplied all of Europe’s growth in renewables, as bioenergy growth has stalled, and hydro generation remains unchanged.

Renewables rise is still too slow – wind and solar generation growth must nearly triple to reach Europe’s 2030 green deal targets: from 38 TWh per year average growth in 2010-2020 to 100 TWh per year average growth between 2020-2030. It is encouraging that wind and solar increased by 51 terawatt-hours in 2020, well above the 2010-2020 average, despite facing some impact from Covid-19. The IEA forecast record wind and solar capacity growth in 2021. Still, EU countries need to step up their 2030 commitments considerably. At the moment, national energy and climate plans only add up to about 72 TWh new wind and solar per year, not the 100 TWh/year that are needed.

Initial Patches Posted for Bringing up Linux Kernel on Apple Silicon M1 Hardware

takyon writes:

Initial Patches Posted For Bringing Up The Linux Kernel On Apple Silicon M1 Hardware

It was over the weekend that Corellium began posting their work of Linux booting on the Apple M1. It's now to the extent they can get Ubuntu's Raspberry Pi ARMv8 desktop image booting on Apple M1 hardware to a GUI albeit without any hardware acceleration. The Apple M1 graphics support will remain the big elephant in the room given the big challenges involved in bringing up an entirely new OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack and needing to carry out all of that reverse engineering first under macOS.

Apple M1 Open-Source GPU Bring-Up Sees An Early Triangle

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.

Alyssa Rosenzweig of Panfrost fame has been working to reverse engineer the Apple M1 graphics as part of the Asahi Linux effort with developer Marcan.

This week the milestone was reached of drawing a triangle using the open-source code. It's an important first milestone but important to keep in mind that this isn't an initial driver triangle but rather hand-written vertex and fragment shaders with machine code for the M1 GPU. Those hand-written shaders are submitted to the hardware via the existing macOS IOKit kernel driver. If not clear enough, this was done on macOS and not the early Linux state as well.

Previously: Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
Linus Torvalds Doubts Linux will Get Ported to Apple M1 Hardware
ARM-Based Mac Pro Could Have 32+ Cores

Apple Pulls the Plug on User-Found Method to Sideload iOS Apps on M1 Mac

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Department of Defense, confirmed in a memo that it purchases "commercially available" smartphone location data to gather information that would otherwise require use of a search warrant.

The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," the agency wrote in a memo (PDF) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), first obtained by the New York Times.

The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. "When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in his opinion. "The retrospective quality of the data here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable."

[...] The DIA explains in the memo that it simply does not think the Carpenter ruling applies to it. "DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes," the agency wrote. "DIA's acquisition, use, and storage of commercial geolocation data is governed" not by these civilian law enforcement rules but by the DoD's own "Attorney General-approved data handling requirements."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A proposal to replace the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico with a new facility suggests it could be used for tracking space objects as well as for scientific research.

Plans for a potential replacement of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo, whose observing platform collapsed Dec. 1, are still in their early phases. One proposal, developed by observatory staff and submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a recent white paper, calls for replacing the giant dish with an array of up to 1,000 small dishes, each nine meters across, on a platform spanning the current dish.

“As we move into the future, we feel that phased arrays are probably the right way to go, rather than continue to focus on large single-dish elements,” said Francisco Cordova, director of Arecibo Observatory, during a presentation at a Jan. 21 meeting of a committee supporting the ongoing planetary science decadal survey by the National Academies.

The concept in the white paper would double the sensitivity of the single-dish radio telescope and increase sky coverage by 250% compared to the fixed dish, as well as incorporate a new radar system. “From our perspective as the operator, we feel that the 305-meter was really an invaluable tool,” he said. “But, any future visions of the site really need to be centered around the development of a next-generation instrument.”

That new concept, Cordova said, could serve applications beyond astronomy and planetary science. One of the potential applications he listed on a slide in his presentation was space situational awareness (SSA).

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

Microsoft patents chatbot technology to revive dead loved ones:

Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.

The patent describes creating a bot based on the "images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages", and more personal information.

"The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc", it goes on to say.

"The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot," Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

Original Submission