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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers have developed a unique inkjet printing method for fabricating tiny biocompatible polymer microdisk lasers for biosensing applications. The approach enables production of both the laser and sensor in a room temperature, open-air environment, potentially enabling new uses of biosensing technologies for health monitoring and disease diagnostics.

"The ability to use an inexpensive and portable commercial inkjet printer to fabricate a sensor in an ambient environment could make it possible to produce biosensors on-site as needed," said research team leader Hiroaki Yoshioka from Kyushu University in Japan. "This could help make biosensing widespread even in economically disadvantaged countries and regions, where it could be used for simple biochemical tests, including those for pathogen detection."

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optical Materials Express, the researchers describe the ability to print microdisk lasers as small as the diameter of a human hair from a specially developed polymer called FC-V-50. They also show that the microdisks can successfully be used for biosensing with the widely used biotin-avidin system.

"Our technique can be used to print on almost any substrate," said Yoshioka. "This means that it could one day be possible to print a sensor for health monitoring directly on the surface of a person's fingernail, for example."

Journal Reference:
Abdul nasir, Hiroaki Yoshioka, Nilesh vasa, et al. Fully room temperature and label free biosensing based on an ink-jet printed polymer microdisk laser [open], Optical Materials Express (DOI: 10.1364/OME.415000)

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martyb writes:

This is not expected to be ready for another couple years, but a new theme park is under development which promises numerous new attractions and rides. Rides? Yes, rides. Lots of rides! Top of list is the "Falcon's Flight". No, not a SpaceX Falcon-9, a new roller coaster. When completed, it promises to be the fastest, tallest, and longest in the world!

Record-breaking roller coaster will travel more than 155 miles per hour:

(CNN) — A roller coaster now under development in the Middle East is set to smash existing records for speed, height and track length.

Called "Falcon's Flight," the ride will be the main attraction of Six Flags Qiddiya, due to open in Saudi Arabia outside of capital Riyadh in 2023.

According to a press release issued by the Qiddiya Investment Company, which has partnered with US-headquartered Six Flags to build the park, the coaster will travel across four kilometers (about 2.5 miles) of track.

Riders will experience the thrill of diving over a vertical cliff into a 160-meter-deep valley (525 feet) thanks to the use of magnetic motor acceleration (LSM technology), and "achieve unprecedented speeds of 250-plus km/h" -- about 155 miles per hour.

"The Falcon's Flight will also be the world's tallest free-standing coaster structure, featuring a parabolic airtime hill allowing a weightlessness airtime experience," says the release.

It will take up to 20 passengers on a three-minute long ride that and[sic] offers panoramic views of Six Flags Qiddiya. If the video rendering produced by Qiddiya is an accurate depiction of what guests will experience, this one's only for true thrill seekers.

Looking closely at the rendering of a ride on Falcon's Flight, I noticed numerous changes in the orientation of the ride's track. Sure, there stretches that are purely horizontal (parallel to the ground), but others where you are riding on what appears to be the outside of a huge basketball. Especially when the track is cantilevered out over a huge cliff! (You can catch a glimpse of it above you at 0m53s-0m55s into the video. There's a much better look at it from 1m1s-1m3s.)

More info about the park and rides can be found at https://content.sixflags.com/qiddiya/qiddiya-plan/ and https://qiddiya.com/en.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The quick choice might be a choice-overload avoidance strategy:

A popular streaming service boasts a film inventory approaching 4,000 titles. When it's time to pick a movie, are you more likely to quickly make a decision or meticulously sift through the possibilities?

Psychologists refer to those who search minimally for something to arrive at an adequate choice as "satisficers." It's the "maximizers," meantime, who search exhaustively for what might be considered as the perfect option.

[...] "We might assume maximizers are having a negative experience in the moment, obsessing over the perfect choice. But it appears to be the satisficers -- and that might be why they're satisficing," says Thomas Saltsman, a psychology researcher in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author. "We found evidence that compared to maximizers, satisficers exhibited cardiovascular threat responses consistent with evaluating themselves as less capable of managing their choice in the moment."

The findings, published in the journal Psychophysiology, break with traditional wisdom. The implications are relevant not just to everyday decision making, but speak as well to how people approach significant choices, according to Mark Seery, an associate professor of psychology at UB, and one of the paper's co-authors.

"Anyone who has had the experience of maximizing and thought about the energy and stress saved by satisficing might want to rethink that position," says Seery. "There's a time and a place for satisficing, but people who do so as a defense against the agony of choice might not be prepared to make critical decisions when they have to."

Journal Reference:
Thomas L. Saltsman, Mark D. Seery, Deborah E. Ward, et al. Is satisficing really satisfying? Satisficers exhibit greater threat than maximizers during choice overload, Psychophysiology (DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13705)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Hypnotic Suggestions Can Make a Complex Task Easy by Helping Vision Fill in the Blanks:

Popular folklore and anecdotal evidence suggest that people in a hypnotic or suggestible state can experience sensory hallucinations, such as perceiving sounds and sights that are not actually there. Reliable scientific evidence of these experiences, however, has been notoriously challenging to obtain because of their subjective nature.

New research published in the journal Psychological Science provides compelling evidence that hypnotic suggestions can help highly susceptible people "see" imaginary objects, equipping them with the missing details needed to solve an otherwise challenging visual puzzle.

"Hypnosis holds intriguing effects on human behavior," said Amir Raz, a researcher at McGill University and coauthor on the paper. "The careful, systematic study of hypnotic phenomena can answer important questions about mind-body interactions and advance novel therapies in medicine, psychology, and dentistry."

[...] "Our findings support the idea that, at least in some people, suggestions can add perceptual information to sensory input," said Raz. "This observation adds meaningful weight to theoretical, clinical, and applied aspects of the brain and psychological sciences."

Journal Reference:
Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, et al. Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders a Challenging Visual Task Simple:, Psychological Science (DOI: 10.1177/0956797620954856)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Apple Reportedly Teams With Kia to Produce Apple Car:

Apple is investing about $3.6 billion in a car partnership with Kia Motors, according to a report out of South Korea.

[...] Apple will set up production with Kia and build Apple cars at the company's facility in Georgia, Korean newspaper DongA Ilbo reported, though the report did not cite sources for the information, Bloomberg reported.

The newspaper also said that the two companies could sign a deal on Feb. 17 and are planning to introduce Apple cars in 2024, with an initial target to produce 100,000 vehicles a year.

Last month, South Korean automaker Hyundai, an affiliate of Kia's, announced it was in preliminary talks with Apple on developing a self-driving car, before quickly backing away from the statement and saying it has received requests from a number of technology suitors to develop autonomous electric vehicles.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Despite the use of nonstick frying pans, foods will sometimes get stuck to a heated surface, even if oil is used. The results can be very messy and unappetizing.

Scientists at the Czech Academy of Sciences began an investigation of the fluid properties of oil on a flat surface, such as a frying pan. Their work, reported in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, shows convection may be to blame for our stuck-on food.

The experimental investigation used a nonstick pan with a surface comprised of ceramic particles. A video camera was placed above the pan as it was heated and used to measure the speed at which a dry spot formed and grew. Further experiments with a Teflon-coated pan showed the same.

"We experimentally explained why food sticks to the center of the frying pan," said author Alexander Fedorchenko. "This is caused by the formation of a dry spot in the thin sunflower oil film as a result of thermocapillary convection."

Journal Reference:
A. I. Fedorchenko, J. Hruby. On formation of dry spots in heated liquid films, Physics of Fluids (DOI: 5.0035547)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Discoveries at the Edge of the Periodic Table: First Ever Measurements of Einsteinium Reveals Unexpected Properties:

Since element 99 — einsteinium — was discovered in 1952 at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb, scientists have performed very few experiments with it because it is so hard to create and is exceptionally radioactive. A team of Berkeley Lab chemists has overcome these obstacles to report the first study characterizing some of its properties, opening the door to a better understanding of the remaining transuranic elements of the actinide series.

Published in the journal Nature, the study, "Structural and Spectroscopic Characterization of an Einsteinium Complex," was co-led by Berkeley Lab scientist Rebecca Abergel and Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Stosh Kozimor, and included scientists from the two laboratories, UC Berkeley, and Georgetown University, several of whom are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. With less than 250 nanograms of the element, the team measured the first-ever einsteinium bond distance, a basic property of an element's interactions with other atoms and molecules.

LiveScience adds:

They found that einsteinium's bond length goes against the general trend of the actinides. This is something that had been theoretically predicted in the past, but has never been experimentally proved before.

Compared with the rest of the actinide series, einsteinium also luminesces very differently when exposed to light, which [study co-author Korey] Carter describes as "an unprecedented physical phenomenon." Further experiments are needed to determine why.

The new study "lays the groundwork for being able to do chemistry on really small quantities," Carter said. "Our methods will allow others to push boundaries studying other elements in the same way."

Journal Reference:
Korey P. Carter, Katherine M. Shield, Kurt F. Smith, et al. Structural and spectroscopic characterization of an einsteinium complex, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03179-3)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Spacewalking astronauts complete a space station battery upgrade years in the making:

Two NASA astronauts completed the second in a pair of spacewalks [on Feb 1, 2021], installing a European science platform and finishing up a long series of battery replacements outside the International Space Station.

[...] spacewalk, which began at 7:56 a.m. EST (1256 GMT), was the 234th spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), in support of space station assembly, maintenance and upgrades, according to NASA. The 233rd spacewalk took place just a few days prior, on Jan. 27.

This spacewalk was conducted by NASA astronaut Victor Glover and NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins. This marked Glover's second spacewalk and Hopkin's fourth spacewalk.

"Enjoying the view," Hopkins said about the view of the Earth from space during the spacewalk.

Glover and Hopkins had a variety of tasks to tackle when they stepped out into space. [T]heir main objectives [...] included configuring a battery and adapter plate and installing three separate cameras[.]

[...] Following today's spacewalk, the Expedition 64 astronauts will conduct two additional spacewalks in the near future, according to NASA. Next, Glover and [NASA astronaut Kate] Rubins will prepare the space station's power system for the installation of new solar arrays and, in the spacewalk after that, Rubins and [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi] Noguchi will continue to upgrade space station components, according to NASA. The exact dates for those spacewalks have not yet been set.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

[...] Rather than using the traditional dots and dashes as commonly used in these technologies, the Purdue innovators encode information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area.

"The storage capacity greatly increases because it is only defined by the resolution of the sensor by which you can determine the angular positions of antennas," said Alexander Kildishev, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "We map the antenna angles into colors, and the colors are decoded."

[...]This new development not only allows for more information to be stored but also increases the readout rate.

"You can put four sensors nearby, and each sensor would read its own polarization of light," Kildishev said. "This helps increase the speed of readout of information compared to the use of a single sensor with dots and dashes."

Future applications for this technology include security tagging and cryptography. To continue developing these capabilities, the team is looking to partner with interested parties in the industry.

Journal Reference:
Maowen Song, Di Wang, Zhaxylyk A. Kudyshev, et al. Enabling Optical Steganography, Data Storage, and Encryption with Plasmonic Colors, Laser & Photonics Reviews (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202000343)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A short article and video describes the latest self driving pilot program, using a minivan with what appears to be a very full suite of multiple cameras/lidars/radars all around the vehicle:
https://www.automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com/news/vehicle-development/autox-opens-fully-driverless-robotaxi-pilot-to-chinese-public.html

The video (with charming actress) does its best to defuse any concerns about driverless cars. The ride itself presents several slightly-challenging driving situations, but all at low speeds. At one point the car moves onto a larger road...where the speed limit is 40kph (25mph) and a few other cars pass the robotaxi. It's also worth noting that the roads were all pretty new (no potholes), no attempt to go into an older city center, and nearly empty. There were some large commercial vehicles in awkward locations--but it wasn't at rush hour.

No hint about how much tailoring/special-casing was done to the local maps and driving algorithms for this pilot. Your AC submitter suggests that it might not be very easy to re-train this system for another city?

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

U.S. Cuts $231 Million Deal To Provide 15-Minute COVID-19 At-Home Tests:

The Biden administration has made a $231.8 million deal with an Australian company to boost availability of the first at-home rapid test for the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 that is available without a prescription. The test, made by Ellume, can send results to a smartphone within 15 minutes of receiving a sample.

The Food and Drug Administration gave emergency authorization to Ellume's rapid test in December, after it showed 96% accuracy in a U.S. clinical study. Those trials included both adults and children of ages 2 years and older.

[...] The test uses a relatively short nasal swab to collect a sample. The sample is put into a digital analyzer linked to a smartphone app.

[...] As part of the new contract, Ellume has committed to providing 8.5 million tests to the federal government said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

[...] the test is not yet commercially available in the U.S. or elsewhere, but that the company would "be making further announcements around [the] rollout and retail plans in the coming weeks."

[...] Because of the expected $30 cost and the need for a smartphone to receive results, this particular test is unlikely to be the game-changer several public health experts have been calling for - a test that families could use routinely at home before leaving the house, to prevent silent spread.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

These Are the Highest Resolution Photos Ever Taken of Snowflakes:

Photographer and scientist Nathan Myhrvold has developed a camera that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before.

The first chill of a winter storm is enough to send most people indoors, but not Nathan Myhrvold. The colder the weather, the better his chances are of capturing a microscopic photograph of a snowflake. Now, nearly two years in the making, Myhrvold has developed what he bills as the "highest resolution snowflake camera in the world." Recently, he released a series of images taken using his creation, a prototype that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before.

Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University and served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, leaned on his background as a scientist to create the camera. He also tapped into his experience as a photographer, most notably as the founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food innovation lab known for its high-resolution photographs of various food stuffs published into a five-volume book of photography of the same name that focuses on the art and science of cooking. Myhrvold first got the idea to photograph snowflakes 15 years ago after meeting Kenneth Libbrecht, a California Institute of Technology professor who happened to be studying the physics of snowflakes.

"In the back of my mind, I thought I'd really like to take snowflake pictures," Myhrvold says. "About two years ago, I thought it was a good time and decided to put together a state-of-the-art snowflake photography system...but it was a lot harder than I thought."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Putting the latest Starship crash into perspective:

Once again, on Tuesday afternoon, a Starship prototype soared into the clear skies above South Texas like something out of the pages of a science fiction novel. Once again, after reaching a high altitude, the spaceship leaned into a "belly flop" maneuver, making a controlled descent back toward the planet.

And then, once again, a problem within the last few seconds caused the Starship prototype to spectacularly crash near its launch platform.

Seven weeks have passed since the first full-scale Starship prototype, SN8, performed its high-altitude flight. Now, SN9 has met a similar fate. It appeared that one of the two Raptor rocket engines intended to power the final, controlled descent failed to relight (see a great, slow-motion view). As a result, when the vehicle began reorienting itself into a vertical position, it never stopped swinging. Then, BOOM!

So what are we to make of a second high-profile failure of the Starship program? Is this a program on the cusp of failure?

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Traffic noise makes mating crickets less picky:

A new study shows that the mating behaviour of crickets is significantly affected by traffic noise and other man-made sounds—a finding that could have implications for the future success of the species.

The research, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, was carried out at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), and involved studying the mating choices of female field crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus) under different acoustic conditions.

[...] In the control conditions of ambient noise, the females mounted the males much sooner and more frequently when paired with a high-quality courtship song. However, a high-quality courtship song provided no benefit in the white noise and traffic noise conditions, with the researchers finding that courtship duration and mounting frequency were not influenced by the quality or even the presence of a song.

Journal Reference:
Adam M Bent, Thomas C Ings, Sophie L Mowles, Anthropogenic noise disrupts mate choice behaviors in female Gryllus bimaculatus, Behavioral Ecology, 02 February 2021, Link, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa124

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Astronomers Found an Ancient Galaxy with a Halo of Dark Matter:

Some 163,000 light-years from the Milky Way is a much smaller, much more ancient galaxy: Tucana II, so named for the tropical bird-resembling constellation in which it sits. Sitting at the periphery of our galaxy's gravitational pull, Tucana II provides researchers with the opportunity to understand the composition of the earliest galactic structures in the universe.

Now, a team of astronomers has found evidence of an extended dark matter halo around the galaxy. Their research was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"We know [dark matter] is there because in order for galaxies to remain bound, there must be more matter than what we see visibly, from starlight," said Anirudh Chiti, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a phone call. "That led to the hypothesis of dark matter existing as an ingredient that holds galaxies together; without it, galaxies that we know, or at least of the stuff at their outskirts, would just fly apart."

Journal Reference:
Anirudh Chiti, Anna Frebel, Joshua D. Simon, et al. An extended halo around an ancient dwarf galaxy, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01285-w)

Original Submission