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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The availability of cheap and powerful RC motors and electronics has made it possible for almost anyone to build an RC flying machine. Software is usually the bigger challenge, which has led to the development of open-source packages like BetaFlight and Ardupilot. These packages are very powerful, but not easy to modify if you have unconventional requirements. [Nichola Rehm] faced this challenge while doing his master’s degree, so he created dRehmFlight, a customizable flight controller for VTOL aircraft.

[Nichalo] has repeatedly demonstrated the capabilities of dRehmFlight with several unique aircraft, like the belly flopping RC Starship we covered a while ago, a VTOL quad rotor biplane, VTOL F35, and the cyclocopter seen in the header image. dRehmFlight might not have the racing drone performance of BetaFlight, or advanced autopilot features of Ardupilot, but it’s perfect for getting unconventional aircraft off the ground.

dRehmFlight on GitHub.

dRehmFlight is a simple, bare-bones flight controller intended for all types of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles from simple multirotors to more complex transitioning vehicles. This flight controller software and hardware package was developed with people in mind who may not be particularly fluent in object-oriented programming. The goal is to have an easy to understand flow of discrete operations that allows anyone with basic knowledge of coding in C/Arduino to peer into the code, make the changes they need for their specific application, and quickly have something flying. It is assumed that anyone using this code has previous experience building and flying model aircraft and is familiar with basic RC technology and terminology. The Teensy 4.0 board used for dRehmFlight is an extremely powerful microcontroller that allows for understandable code to run at very high speeds: perfect for a hobby-level flight controller.

The Teensy 4.0 microcontroller.

[Ed Note - I work with the Teensy 4.x for digital signal processing in some amateur radio projects. It's fast and a joy to use. I'm not surprised to find a Teensy 4.x at the heart of this project. - Fnord]

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

The ever-growing demand for efficient magnetic data processing calls for novel means to manipulate the magnetic state and manipulating the exchange interaction would be the most efficient and ultimately fastest way to control magnetism.

To achieve this result, the researchers used the fastest and the strongest stimulus available: ultrashort laser pulse excitation. They used light to optically stimulate specific atomic vibrations of the magnet's crystal lattice which extensively disturbed and distorted the structure of the material.

The results of this study are published in the prestigious journal Nature Materials by the international team from Lancaster, Delft, Nijmegen, Liege and Kiev.

[...] This all occurs within an unprecedentedly short time of less than a few picoseconds (millionth of a millionth of a second). This time is not only orders of magnitude shorter than the recording time in modern computer hard drives, but also exactly matches the fundamental limit for the magnetization switching.

Dr. Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University explains: "It has long been thought that the control of magnetism by atomic vibrations is restricted to acoustic excitations (sound waves) and cannot be faster than nanoseconds. We have reduced the magnetic switching time by 1000 times that is a major milestone in itself."

Dr. Dmytro Afanasiev from the Technical University of Delft adds: "We believe that our findings will stimulate further research into exploring and understanding the exact mechanisms governing the ultrafast lattice control of the magnetic state."

Journal Reference:
D. Afanasiev, J. R. Hortensius, B. A. Ivanov, et al. Ultrafast control of magnetic interactions via light-driven phonons, Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-00922-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Star employees get most of the credit - and blame:

Working with a "star" employee – someone who demonstrates exceptional performance and enjoys broad visibility relative to industry peers – offers both risks and rewards, according to new research from the ILR School.

In collaborations, stars tend to get more than their share of the credit when things go well -- and more of the blame when projects don't succeed, according to "Shadows and Shields: Stars Limit Their Collaborators' Exposure to Attributions of Both Credit and Blame," published Dec. 10, 2020, by Personnel Psychology.

"We look at what happens when you collaborate with a star in terms of whose getting credit when that collaboration is successful," said Rebecca Kehoe, associate professor of human resource studies. "What we find, and this is consistent with research on the Matthew effect and other work, is that if you collaborate with a star and that collaboration is successful, the star does get more of that credit and you benefit less than if you were working with somebody that wasn't a star. The silver lining here though is that if you collaborate with a star and that collaboration is not successful, the star takes the heat."

[...] Results showed that collaborating with a star reduces the credit -- and gains in professional status -- that non-stars experience in the context of collaborative success. On the other hand, collaborating with a star not only mitigates -- but may actually outweigh -- the professional status loss associated with collaborative failure.

[...] "I think what this points to, both for low-performing employees and for managers," she said, "is the importance of being very mindful of what is the gain that you're hoping to achieve from a collaboration with a star."

Journal Reference:
Rebecca R. Kehoe, F. Scott Bentley. Shadows and shields: Stars limit their collaborators' exposure to attributions of both credit and blame, Personnel Psychology (DOI: 10.1111/peps.12436)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new theory that could explain how unconventional superconductivity arises in a diverse set of compounds might never have happened if physicists Qimiao Si and Emilian Nica had chosen a different name for their 2017 model of orbital-selective superconductivity.

In a study published last month in npj Quantum Materials, Si of Rice University and Nica of Arizona State University argue that unconventional superconductivity in some iron-based and heavy-fermion materials arises from a general phenomenon called “multiorbital singlet pairing.”

[...] Si and Nica proposed the idea of selective pairing within atomic orbitals in 2017 to explain unconventional superconductivity in alkaline iron selenides. The following year, they applied the orbital-selective model to the heavy fermion material in which unconventional superconductivity was first demonstrated in 1979.

They considered naming the model after a related mathematical expression made famous by quantum pioneer Wolfgang Pauli, but opted to call it d+d. The name refers to mathematical wave functions that describe quantum states.

KritonK writes:

SigLA is an interdisciplinary project blending linguistics and computer science and aiming at developing a systematic, exhaustive and user friendly open access database of all inscriptions known to date written in the Linear A script of Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1800-1450 BCE), to date still undeciphered. Such a research tool is currently missing, and is highly desirable inasmuch as essential in order to carry out statistical and palæographic analyses within the epigraphic corpus, currently available in print form only. In fact, one of the hindrances to decipherment prospects is the current impossibility to carry out any meaningful linguistic statistical analysis and palæographic sign comparison covering the whole corpus of Linear A inscriptions due to the limited resources available. This is especially true with respect to research tools, as all material is only available in (cumbersome) print form. Collecting the Linear A inscriptions in a unified database is of paramount importance to be able to answer sophisticated palæographical and linguistic questions about the Linear A script as well as the language (Minoan) it encodes, which will help us reconstruct the socio-historical context of the Minoan civilisation.

(Summary taken from the accompanying paper.)

[N.B. follows below. - Fnord]

From "About SigLA":

SigLA is an interactive database of inscriptions written in the (still undeciphered) Linear A script of Bronze Age Greece. SigLA aim at developing a systematic, exhaustive and user-friendly open access database of all Linear A inscriptions. Such a research tool is currently missing, and is essential in order to carry out statistical and palæographic analyses within the epigraphic corpus, only available in print form at the moment.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

iOS 14.5 wants to keep your internet use well away from Google:

Apple continues to ramp up its privacy policies, after revealing that it will re-route Safari traffic through its own servers to limit how much information Google can collect when its Safe Browsing service is employed. The change will be implemented from iOS 14.5 onwards.

Previously, Apple used Google's Safe Browsing database to safeguard Safari users from malicious websites, checking URLs against suspected phishing or malware sites and issuing a warning when a match was found. However, this means that Google can collect information about a user's IP address without their permission (although the technology firm is never able to see what specific websites are being visited).

Apple will now proxy its Safari traffic via its own servers to ensure that even less user information gets seen by Google. Maciej Stachowiak, Apple's head of WebKit engineering confirmed that the change was made in order to "limit the risk of information leak".

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Dr. Fauci wins $1 million Dan David prize for 'defending science':

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, won one of the three Dan David Prizes, Israeli awards that each grant $1 million ( £720,440, AU$1.29 million) to recipients. The international awards are given in the categories Past, Present and Future, with Fauci winning the Present award, given for "achievements that shape and enrich society today."

[...] "The Dan David Prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms," the official website for the award says. "It aims to promote scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our lives and our knowledge of the world."

Fauci was praised for "courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition during the challenging COVID crisis.

"In addition to traditional vaccine methods, he and his team recognized the value of novel vaccine approaches, such as mRNA vaccines, and quickly moved them into clinical development," the Dan David Foundation said on its site. "Several of these vaccines have gained approval and are now being widely distributed to inoculate millions of people worldwide against the coronavirus."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A tiny crystal device could boost gravitational wave detectors to reveal the birth cries of black holes:

In 2017, astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. Gravitational wave detectors picked up the ripples in spacetime caused by two neutron stars colliding to form the black hole, and other telescopes then observed the resulting explosion.

But the real nitty-gritty of how the black hole formed, the movements of matter in the instants before it was sealed away inside the black hole's event horizon, went unobserved. That's because the gravitational waves thrown off in these final moments had such a high frequency that our current detectors can't pick them up.

If you could observe ordinary matter as it turns into a black hole, you would be seeing something similar to the Big Bang played backwards. The scientists who design gravitational wave detectors have been hard at work to figure out how improve our detectors to make it possible.

Today our team is publishing a paper that shows how this can be done. Our proposal could make detectors 40 times more sensitive to the high frequencies we need, allowing astronomers to listen to matter as it forms a black hole.

[...] Five years ago physicists realised you could solve the problem of insufficient sensitivity at high frequency with devices that combine phonons with photons. They showed that devices in which energy is carried in quantum packets that share the properties of both phonons and photons can have quite remarkable properties.

These devices would involve a radical change to a familiar concept called "resonant amplification". Resonant amplification is what you do when you push a playground swing: if you push at the right time, all your small pushes create big swinging.

martyb writes:

On Monday February 17 2014, at 02:06AM SoylentNews announced itself to the world!

(That's exactly seven years ago from the time this story posts.) Does it seem possible? I know it certainly amazes me.

A lot can happen in a year. Here are some items of note. As always, if you are not interested in this kind of stuff, ignore this post — a new story will be along shortly. Otherwise, this story continues below the fold.

1. Random Statistics
2. Site News
3. Staff Activity
4. Folding@Home

NB: An earlier version of this story containing much more detail seems to have jumped into a bit bucket. Please forgive any errors that crept into this quick reincarnation attempt!

Random Statistics:

Over the past year, activity on the site comes to:

We previously had a great number of posts on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is still with us, but vaccines are starting to be rolled out. Sadly, variants of the coronavirus have appeared, and some appear to be more contagious than the earlier strains. We had let up on our coverage of late, because trying to merge 20-30 story submissions was extremely demanding of time and energy — yet with decreasing amounts of discussion.

In spite of the hit that COVID-19 had on the community, we had a successful fundraiser last year. When we have official results, we will get them to you.

takyon writes:

Pine64 unveils Quartz64 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3566 SoC

We may just have written about Geniatech RK3566/RK3568 development board, but as expected, Pine64 has now unveiled more details about Quartz64 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3566 SoC.

As we'll see below, the design is very similar to RK3399 based RockPro64, but the new model adds a native SATA 3.0 port, an integrated battery charging circuitry, an ePD port for e-Ink displays, and supports more memory with up to 8GB LPDDR4 RAM.

[...] It's nice to have SATA, but as I understand it, the board relies on one of the multi-PHY Interfaces from RK3566 processor with SATA and USB 3.0 being multiplexed, meaning you can use SATA 3.0 if you don't use USB 3.0, and use USB 3.0 if you don't use SATA.

Pine64 is also working on a ~$15 RISC-V single board computer, using the XuanTie C906.

Pine64 Blog - February Update: Show and Tell.

Related: How PINE64 is Creating a Device-Design Community to Compete with Raspberry Pi

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A Falcon 9 loaded with Starlink satellites prepares for launch.

After successfully sending another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit Monday night from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, SpaceX appears to have missed the landing of its Falcon 9 first stage booster for the first time in a year.

On the livestream of the mission, a flash is seen just to the side of the droneship at the moment the booster should be landing, although no rocket ever enters the frame.

SpaceX has not yet confirmed the fate of the Falcon 9, but it seems very likely it crashed in the ocean. In the process, it appears to have spared three seagulls that were hanging out on the landing pad and may never understand how close they came to being barbecued.

The Falcon 9 itself had a pretty good life, completing six launches successfully, but only five landings in its career.

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

Science Mag says:

For planetary scientists, it was the boldest claim in a generation: an unseen extra planet, as much as 10 times the mass of Earth, lurking on the Solar System's frontier, beyond Neptune. But the claim looks increasingly shaky, after a team of astronomers reported last week that the orbits of a handful of distant lumps of rock are not bunched together by the gravity of "Planet Nine," as its proponents believe, but only seem clustered because that's where telescopes happened to be looking.

Planet Nine supporters aren't backing down yet but one skeptic not involved with the new work says she is "very happy" to see it. The study has carried out "a more uniform analysis" than done previously of the far-off rocky bodies known as known as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina, who has tried and failed to simulate the clustered orbits in computer models with an extra planet.

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology made headlines worldwide in 2016 with their prediction for a distant Planet Nine. They based their conclusion on a study of six TNOs, each smaller than Pluto, in extremely elongated and tilted orbits around the Sun. The orbits of these "extreme" TNOs were bunched together, Brown and Batygin said, because Planet Nine's gravity had nudged them there over billions of years. Several more extreme TNOs discovered since then seemed to cluster as well. "I would argue that the relevant [Planet 9] dataset is in pretty good shape," Batygin says.

But then, the evil selection bias crept in.

In Violation of Einstein, Black Holes Might Have 'Hair'

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

what-color-is-the-virtual-hair-of-black-holes

In Violation of Einstein, Black Holes Might Have 'Hair':

Identical twins have nothing on black holes. Twins may grow from the same genetic blueprints, but they can differ in a thousand ways — from temperament to hairstyle. Black holes, according to Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, can have just three characteristics — mass, spin and charge. If those values are the same for any two black holes, it is impossible to discern one twin from the other. Black holes, they say, have no hair.

"In classical general relativity, they would be exactly identical," said Paul Chesler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. "You can't tell the difference."

Yet scientists have begun to wonder if the "no-hair theorem" is strictly true. In 2012, a mathematician named Stefanos Aretakis — then at the University of Cambridge and now at the University of Toronto — suggested that some black holes might have instabilities on their event horizons. These instabilities would effectively give some regions of a black hole's horizon a stronger gravitational pull than others. That would make otherwise identical black holes distinguishable.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Scientists prove that deepfake detectors can be duped:

Universities, organizations and tech giants, such as Microsoft and Facebook, have been working on tools that can detect deepfakes in an effort to prevent their use for the spread of malicious media and misinformation. Deepfake detectors, however, can still be duped, a group of computer scientists from UC San Diego has warned. The team showed how detection tools can be fooled by inserting inputs called "adversarial examples" into every video frame at the WACV 2021 computer vision conference that took place online in January.

[...] The UC San Diego scientists found that by creating adversarial examples of the face and inserting them into every video frame, they were able to fool "state-of-the-art deepfake detectors." Further, the technique they developed works even for compressed videos and even if they had no complete access to the detector model. A bad actor coming up with the same technique could then create deepfakes that can evade even the best detection tools.

So, how can developers create detectors that can't be duped? The scientists recommend using adversary training, wherein an adaptive adversary keeps generating deepfakes that can bypass the detector while it's being trained, so that the detector can continue to improve in spotting inauthentic images.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Zero-days under active exploit are keeping Windows users busy:

It's [was] the second Tuesday of February, and that means Microsoft and other software makers are releasing dozens of updates to fix security vulnerabilities. Topping off this month's list are two zero-days under active exploit and critical networking flaws that allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code or shut down computers.

The most important patch fixes a code-execution flaw in Adobe Reader, which despite its long-in-the-tooth status remains widely used for viewing and working with PDF documents. CVE-2021-21017, as the critical vulnerability is tracked, stems from a heap-based buffer overflow. After being tipped off by an anonymous source, Adobe warned that the flaw has been actively exploited in limited attacks that target Reader users running Windows.

Adobe didn't provide additional details about the vulnerability or the in-the-wild attacks exploiting it. Typically, hackers use specially crafted documents sent by email or published online to trigger the vulnerability and execute code that installs malware on the device running the application. Adobe's use of the word "limited" likely means that the hackers are narrowly focusing their attacks on a small number of high-value targets.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has issued a fix for a vulnerability in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 that's also under active attack. The flaw, indexed as CVE-2021-1732, allows attackers to run their malicious code with elevated system rights.

[...] In all, Microsoft patched 56 vulnerabilities across multiple products including Windows, Office, and SharePoint. Microsoft rated 11 of the vulnerabilities as critical. As usual, affected users should install patches as soon as practical. Those who can't patch immediately should refer to workarounds listed in the advisories.

Original Submission