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martyb writes:

Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet:

First image from surface. (Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers). Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).

Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Perseverance rover mission marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth.

“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. “The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet in the 2030s.”

About the size of a car, the 2,263-pound (1,026-kilogram) robotic geologist and astrobiologist will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of Mars’ Jezero Crater. While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the region’s geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.

Image Gallery: Perseverance Rover.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

SDK Bug Lets Attackers Spy on User's Video Calls Across Dating, Healthcare Apps:

A vulnerability in an SDK that allows users to make video calls in apps like eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, MeetMe and Skout allows threat actors to spy on private calls without the user knowing.

Researchers discovered the flaw, CVE-2020-25605, in a video-calling SDK from a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company called Agora while doing a security audit last year of personal robot called "temi," which uses the toolkit.

Agora provides developer tools and building blocks for providing real-time engagement in apps, and documentation and code repositories for its SDKs are available online. Healthcare apps such as Talkspace, Practo and Dr. First's Backline, among various others, also use the SDK for their call technology.

[...] Due to its shared use in a number of popular apps, the flaw has the potential to affect "millions–potentially billions–of users," reported Douglas McKee, principal engineer and senior security researcher at McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR), on Wednesday.

McKee said he did not find evidence of the bug is being exploited in the wild.

The flaw makes it easy for third parties to access details about setting up video calls from within the SDK across various apps due to their unencrypted, cleartext transmission. This paves the way for remote attackers to "obtain access to audio and video of any ongoing Agora video call through observation of cleartext network traffic," according to the vulnerability's CVE description.

Researchers reported this research to Agora.io on April 20, 2020. The flaw remained unpatched for about eight months until Dec. 17, 2020 when the company released a new SDK, version 3.2.1, "which mitigated the vulnerability and eliminated the corresponding threat to users," McKee said.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Plastic recycling results in rare metals being found in children's toys and food packaging:

Some of the planet's rarest metals—used in the manufacture of smartphones and other electrical equipment—are increasingly being found in everyday consumer plastics, according to new research.

Scientists from the University of Plymouth and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tested a range of new and used products including children's toys, office equipment and cosmetic containers.

Through a number of detailed assessments, they examined levels of rare earth elements (REEs) but also quantities of bromine and antimony, used as flame retardants in electrical equipment and a sign of the presence of recycled electronic plastic.

The results showed one or more REEs were found in 24 of the 31 products tested, including items where unregulated recycling is prohibited such as single-use food packaging.

They were most commonly observed in samples containing bromine and antimony at levels insufficient to effect flame retardancy, but also found in plastics where those chemicals weren't present.

Having also been found in beached marine plastics, the study's authors have suggested there is evidence that REEs are ubiquitous and pervasive contaminants of both contemporary and historical consumer and environmental plastics.

The study, published in Science of the Total Environment, is the first to systematically investigate the full suite of REEs in a broad range of consumer plastics.

Journal Reference:
Andrew Turner, John W. Scott, Lee A. Green, Rare earth elements in plastics, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 774, 20 June 2021, 145405. (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145405)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

An anniversary for great justice: Remembering "All Your Base" 20 years later:

As the Internet began crystallizing into its modern form—one that now arguably buttresses society as we know it—its anthropology of common language and references matured at a strange rate. But between the simple initialisms that emerged by the '90s (ROFL!) and the modern world's ecosystem of easily shared multimedia, a patchwork connection of users and sites had to figure out how to establish a base of shared references.

In some ways, the Internet as we know it really began on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago today, when a three-word phrase blew up: "All Your Base."

On that day, a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com, one of the Internet's earliest and longest-lasting dumping grounds of Flash multimedia content, and went on to become one of the most beloved Internet videos of the 21st century. Though Flash support has since been scrapped across the entire Web-browsing ecosystem, Newgrounds continues to host the original video in a safe Flash emulator, if you'd like to see it as originally built instead of flipping through dozens of YouTube rips.

In an online world where users were previously drawn to the likes of the Hamster Dance, exactly how the heck did this absurdity become one of the Internet's first bona fide memes?

A dub(?) of the intro sequence is available on overclocked.org as a .mov file.

YouTube video which starts with actual scenes and then runs wild with the meme. (Has a catchy, techno soundtrack, too!)

Obligatory: xkcd.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Facebook said Wednesday that it'll restrict users from viewing or sharing Australian news, because of a proposed law in the country that would require the social network to pay news publishers for content.

Called the News Media Bargaining Code, the legislation also affects Google, which surfaces news articles in search results. News outlets have struggled to compete with tech firms for advertising dollars and argue they should be compensated for articles shown on online platforms such as Facebook and Google. Facebook's move comes after Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. signed a landmark deal with Google so the media outlet gets paid for news content.

Facebook said the business benefits of displaying news on its platform are "minimal," noting that news makes up less than 4% of the content people see in their News Feed. The social network, which has been combating misinformation, has also been reducing the amount of political content users see on Facebook.

The new restrictions appear to already be in place. Users who visit an Australian news outlet's Facebook Page no longer see any articles displayed.

also at cnet.com and ABC News

Facebook Blog

Related:
Google inks deals, while Facebook blocks content in Australia media dustup
Australia news media 'large and small' discuss Google deals

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Mutation in SARS-CoV-2 spike protein renders virus up to eight times more infectious:

A mutation in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2—one of several genetic mutations in the concerning variants that have emerged in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil—makes the virus up to eight times more infectious in human cells than the initial virus that originated in China, according to research published in the journal eLife.

The study, led by researchers at New York University, the New York Genome Center, and Mount Sinai, corroborates findings that the D614G mutation makes SARS-CoV-2 more transmissible.

"In the months since we initially conducted this study, the importance of the D614G mutation has grown: the mutation has reached near universal prevalence and is included in all current variants of concern," said Neville Sanjana, assistant professor of biology at NYU, assistant professor of neuroscience and physiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Core Faculty Member at the New York Genome Center. "Confirming that the mutation leads to more transmissibility may help explain, in part, why the virus has spread so rapidly over the past year."

[The researchers] found that the D614G variant increased transduction, or transmissibility, of the virus up to eight-fold as compared to the original virus. The researchers also found that the spike protein mutation made the virus more resistant to being cleaved or split by other proteins. This provides a possible mechanism for the variant's increased ability to infect cells, as the hardier variant resulted in a greater proportion of intact spike protein per virus.

"With our experimental setup we are able to quickly and specifically assess the contribution of G614 and other mutations to the increased spread of SARS-CoV-2," said Tristan Jordan, a postdoctoral scholar in the tenOever Lab at Mount Sinai and co-first author of the study.

Journal Reference:
Zharko Daniloski, Tristan X Jordan, Juliana K Ilmain, et al. The Spike D614G mutation increases SARS-CoV-2 infection of multiple human cell types, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.65365)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The use of "invisible" tracking tech in emails is now "endemic", according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC's request.

Hey's review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users' personal accounts contained a "spy pixel", even after excluding for spam.

Its makers said that many of the largest brands used email pixels, with the exception of the "big tech" firms.

Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic.

And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.

Emails pixels can be used to log:

• if and when an email is opened
• how many times it is opened
• what device or devices are involved
• the user's rough physical location, deduced from their internet protocol (IP) address - in some cases making it possible to see the street the recipient is on

This information can then be used to determine the impact of a specific email campaign, as well as to feed into more detailed customer profiles.

Hey's co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says they amount to a "grotesque invasion of privacy".

Original Submission

[2021-02-18 21:02:56 UTC; UPDATE: Landing successful! Picture received from the surface!]

7 Minutes to Mars: NASA's Perseverance Rover Attempts Most Dangerous Landing Yet

Eratosthenes writes:

Video at NASA on YouTube on the Perseverance landing.

Helicopter!!

NASA's Perseverance Rover Prepares for Mars Landing

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA's Perseverance rover prepares for Mars landing:

If NASA successfully lands its fifth rover on Mars on Thursday, it will have delivered the Red Planet's first microphones, its first aircraft, more cameras than ever before and a life-detecting duo known as SHERLOC and WATSON.

The Perseverance rover will also hopefully complete the initial step in an estimated 10-year effort to return samples of Martian rock back to Earth-bound researchers.

The rover carries a drill that can collect around 40 core samples, some 30 of which will be returned to Earth in the 2031 timeframe — though that plan could change.

With luck, however, scientists won't have to wait a decade for evidence of early Martian life.

Perseverance has a laser spectrometer on board that will be able to examine rocks using different wavelengths of energy.

Attached to the end of Perseverance's robotic arm, SHERLOC will scan rocks with deep-ultraviolet light to classify the organic materials, minerals and chemicals on their surfaces. The acronym stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.

WATSON, the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering, will also take microscopic images of the rocks.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Unlocking the mystery behind skeletal aging:

Researchers from the UCLA School of Dentistry have identified the role a critical enzyme plays in skeletal aging and bone loss, putting them one step closer to understanding the complex biological mechanisms that lead to osteoporosis, the bone disease that afflicts some 200 million people worldwide.

The findings from their study in mice, published online today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, could hold an important key to developing more effective treatments for osteoporosis and improving the lives of an aging population, they say.

Cells in the bone marrow known as mesenchymal stem cells serve as the building blocks of the body's skeletal tissues, but whether these stem cells ultimately develop into bone or fat tissues is controlled in part by what are known as epigenetic factors — molecules that regulate genes, silencing some and activating others.

[...] In one important scenario, the scientists examined stem cell senescence, or deterioration and exhaustion — the natural process by which mesenchymal stem cells stop rejuvenating or creating more of themselves over time. The team unexpectedly found that senescence, which leads to natural skeletal aging, was characterized by a loss of KDM4B.

takyon writes:

Samsung's New HBM2 Memory Thinks for Itself: 1.2 TFLOPS of Embedded Processing Power

Today, Samsung announced that its new HBM2-based memory has an integrated AI processor that can push out (up to) 1.2 TFLOPS of embedded computing power, allowing the memory chip itself to perform operations that are usually reserved for CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, or FPGAs.

The new HBM-PIM (processing-in-memory) chips inject an AI engine inside each memory bank, thus offloading processing operations to the HBM itself. The new class of memory is designed to alleviate the burden of moving data between memory and processors, which is often more expensive in terms of power consumption and time than the actual compute operations.

[...] As with most in-memory processing techniques, we expect this tech will press the boundaries of the memory chips' cooling limitations, especially given that HBM chips are typically deployed in stacks that aren't exactly conducive to easy cooling. Samsung's presentation did not cover how HBM-PIM addresses those challenges.

HBM: High Bandwidth Memory.
ASIC: Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
FPGA: Field-Programmable Gate Array.

Original Submission

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