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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.

[...] The figures have been published today (Monday, 25 January) by a research team which is the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.

The team, led by the University of Leeds, found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons per year by 2017.

Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.

[...] Lead author Dr. Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling , said: "Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.

[...] The increase in ice loss has been triggered by warming of the atmosphere and oceans, which have warmed by 0.26°C and 0.12°C per decade since the 1980, respectively. The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.

[...] Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the southern hemisphere.

Journal Reference:
Slater, Thomas, Lawrence, Isobel R., Otosaka, Inès N., et al. Review article: Earth's ice imbalance [open], The Cryosphere (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Amazon Alexa Starts Proactively Making Decisions for You:

Amazon's Alexa knows that actions speak louder than words, which is why it can automatically complete tasks without you having to ask.

Hunches rolled out last year, reminding users to lock the front door or turn off the basement light if Alexa senses you forgot. A recent update, however, lets customers choose to have the virtual assistant proactively control compatible devices, instinctively starting the robot vacuum or adjusting the thermostat when it deems necessary.

"Customers can choose to have Alexa proactively act on Hunches without needing to ask," Amazon says. "That means customers have fewer things to think about at home, so they can spend their time on more meaningful things."

[...] The function—currently available in English in the US—improves with use; regularly ask about the daily weather forecast, and Alexa could one day automatically offer advice about an umbrella or sunscreen.

More about Alexa Hunches at Amazon:

Hunches is an optional Alexa feature that alerts you when one of your connected smart home devices isn't in its usual state. Alexa can offer a hunch after you say certain utterances, such as "Set alarm" or "Good night."

[...] If Alexa detects that a connected smart home device isn't in a state you prefer, Alexa lets you know and offers to fix it. For example, if you say "Good night" and you've forgotten to turn off a light, Alexa alerts you and offers to turn it off.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

US has 'moral imperative' to develop AI weapons, says panel:

The US should not agree to ban the use or development of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI) software, a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress.

The panel, led by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, on Tuesday concluded two days of public discussion about how the world’s biggest military power should consider AI for national security and technological advancement.

Its vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said autonomous weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification.

“It is a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis,” he said.

[...] Mary Wareham, coordinator of the eight-year Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said the commission’s “focus on the need to compete with similar investments made by China and Russia … only serves to encourage arms races.”

More Info:

• The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Draft Report
• Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.

[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/26/whats-the-deal-with-chromium-on-linux-google-at-odds-with-package-maintainers/

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Eratosthenes writes:

CNET says:

SpaceX and its Crew Dragon spacecraft have been a bright spot in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which returned astronaut launches to US soil in 2020. Boeing, the other Commercial Crew provider, still has some work to do before it carries a NASA crew to the International Space Station.

On Monday, NASA announced a new target date of March 25 to launch the second uncrewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner. Last fall, NASA had been aiming for March 29, so the new date pushes up the target by a few days. The mission is called Orbital Flight Test-2, or OFT-2.

Developing spacecraft is challenging, and hurdles and delays are a normal part of the process.

The first major CST-100 Starliner flight test in late 2019 didn't go as planned. The spacecraft failed to reach the ISS, but it did return to Earth safely. An investigation turned up software defects and a communications link problem. Boeing vowed to conduct a second orbital flight test to prove the spacecraft's safety before it carries humans on board.

Previously:
Boeing and NASA Target December for Second Try at Uncrewed Orbital Demonstration Flight

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The $50 Ham: A Cheap Antenna For The HF Bands:

So far in the $50 Ham series, I've concentrated mainly on the VHF and UHF bands. The reason for this has to do mainly with FCC rules, which largely restrict Technician-level licensees to those bands. But there's a financial component to it, too; high-frequency (HF) band privileges come both at the price of learning enough about radio to pass the General license test, as well as the need for gear that can be orders of magnitude more expensive than a $30 handy-talkie radio.

But while HF gear can be expensive, not everything needed to get on the air has to be so. And since it's often the antenna that makes or breaks an amateur radio operator's ability to make contacts, we'll look at a simple but versatile antenna design that can be adapted to support everything from a big, powerful base station to portable QRP (low-power) activations in the field: the end-fed half-wave antenna.

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takyon writes:

SpaceX adds laser links to Starlink satellites to serve Earth's polar areas

SpaceX has begun launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in polar regions. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday, these satellites "have laser links between the satellites, so no ground stations are needed over the poles."

The laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites just launched into polar orbits. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560km.

"All sats launched next year will have laser links," Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that the laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. For now, SpaceX is only including laser links on polar satellites. "Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9," Musk wrote.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: SpaceX Successfully Launches Most Single-Mission Satellites Ever: 143 [Updates: 2]

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

Robotics company plans to flood pandemic-battered economy with androids to ‘keep people safe’:

Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics[*], makers of the viral sensation humanoid robot Sophia, have announced plans to mass-produce robots by the end of 2021 for use in multiple sectors in the pandemic economy.

The company will ramp up production of four models, including Sophia, and its new ‘Grace’ robot which will be sold for use in the healthcare sector.

“The world of Covid-19 is going to need more and more automation to keep people safe,” founder and chief executive David Hanson claimed.

Hanson foresees a robotic renaissance, not just in healthcare but in the retail and airline sectors as well, an outcome which would improve his company’s bottom line but imperil an already battered global workforce which took an unprecedented beating in 2020.

“Sophia and Hanson robots are unique by being so human-like,” he added. “That can be so useful during these times where people are terribly lonely and socially isolated.”

The CEO said his company had set a goal of selling “thousands” of units but declined to go into more detail.

[*] Hanson Robotics at Wikipedia.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station:

Two are grandfathers, the other has three young children. All three are extremely wealthy, with the means to pay the $55 million ticket price for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. They are the first would-be spaceflight crew comprised entirely of private citizens in a mission to the station.

Sometime early next year, if all goes according to plan, the trio — Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot — will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for what is scheduled to be an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.

Accompanying them will be Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that is coordinating their trip to space. López-Alegría is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission’s commander.

[...] Pathy and Connor traveled to Cape Canaveral last year to witness SpaceX’s first launch of astronauts. It was the first time either of them had been to a rocket launch, and both said they were awestruck.

“You feel that sound in your chest,” Pathy said. “And for me, especially, I’m thinking that was going to be me in a few months. It was a really exciting and intense experience.”

Axiom Space at Wikipedia.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mozilla Announces "Open Web Docs" Following Last Year's Layoffs

Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.

Following those unfortunate layoffs last summer, they exposed all of the Mozilla Developer Network documentation to GitHub. Now they are announcing the Open Web Docs organization.

"Open Web Docs (OWD) is an open collective, created in collaboration between several key MDN partner organizations to ensure the long-term health of open web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. It will do this by collecting funding to finance writing staff and helping manage the communities and processes that will deliver on present and future documentation needs," was written on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
A Pretty Dire Assessment of Mozilla
Firefox 83 Released; Mozilla Kicks Rusty "Servo" Web Engine to the Linux Foundation

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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.

Original Submission

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)

Original Submission

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.