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takyon writes:

Water on Mars May Be Trapped in the Planet's Crust, Not Lost to Space

Mars had water—until it didn't. Scientists thinks that about four billion years ago, the planet had substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface, enough to form rivers, lakes, seas, and even oceans—and perhaps also to support life. But something happened in the following billion years, triggering the loss of this water from the surface until all that was left was the cold, dry wasteland of a world that we see today. Why and how that happened remains somewhat of a mystery. "We don't exactly know why the water levels decreased and Mars became arid," says Eva Scheller of the California Institute of Technology.

In recent years, results from NASA's Mars-orbiting MAVEN spacecraft suggested the driver of this water depletion may have been atmospheric loss. Long ago, for reasons unknown, Mars lost its strong magnetic field, exposing the planet to atmosphere-eroding outbursts from the sun. As a result, much of Mars's air escaped to space, presumably carrying away most of the planet's water with it. But in a new paper published this week in the journal Science, Scheller and her colleagues argue this process alone cannot explain Mars's modern-day aridity. Instead they say that a substantial amount of the planet's water—between 30 and 99 percent—retreated into the crust [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7717] [DX], where it remains today, in a process known as crustal hydration.

Also at NYT, Reuters, National Geographic, and Yahoo News.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

World's first dinosaur preserved sitting on nest of eggs with fossilized babies:

The fossil in question is that of an oviraptorosaur, a group of bird-like theropod dinosaurs that thrived during the Cretaceous Period, the third and final time period of the Mesozoic Era (commonly known as the 'Age of Dinosaurs') that extended from 145 to 66 million years ago. The new specimen was recovered from uppermost Cretaceous-aged rocks, some 70 million years old, in Ganzhou City in southern China's Jiangxi Province.

"Dinosaurs preserved on their nests are rare, and so are fossil embryos. This is the first time a non-avian dinosaur has been found, sitting on a nest of eggs that preserve embryos, in a single spectacular specimen," explains Dr. Shundong Bi.

The fossil consists of an incomplete skeleton of a large, presumably adult oviraptorid crouched in a bird-like brooding posture over a clutch of at least 24 eggs. At least seven of these eggs preserve bones or partial skeletons of unhatched oviraptorid embryos inside. The late stage of development of the embryos and the close proximity of the adult to the eggs strongly suggests that the latter died in the act of incubating its nest, like its modern bird cousins, rather than laying its eggs or simply guarding its nest crocodile-style, as has sometimes been proposed for the few other oviraptorid skeletons that have been found atop nests.

Journal Reference:
Bi, S., Amiot, R., de Fabrègues, C.P. et al. An oviraptorid preserved atop an embryo-bearing egg clutch sheds light on the reproductive biology of non-avialan theropod dinosaurs, (DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2020.12.018)

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looorg writes:

Cleaning up space junk with magnets in space!

Prototype mission. It might run into a bit of an issue since a lot of satellites (if not all) tend to be made of things that are not magnetic -- future solution is apparently to attach a magnetic plate to your satellites so this janitor (or recycling-) satellite can attract them and clean them up.

They really missed out tho -- they should just have named it Roger Wilco

Satellite that can clean up space junk with a magnet about to launch:

A satellite is about to demonstrate a new way of capturing space junk with magnets for the first time. With the frequency of space launches dramatically increasing in recent years, the potential for a disastrous collision above Earth is continually growing. Now, Japanese orbital clean-up company Astroscale is testing a potential solution.

The firm’s End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration mission is scheduled to lift off on 20 March aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. It consists of two spacecraft: a small “client” satellite and a larger “servicer” satellite, or “chaser”. The smaller satellite is equipped with a magnetic plate which allows the chaser to dock with it.

The two stacked spacecraft will perform three tests once in orbit, each of which will involve the servicer satellite releasing and then recapturing the client satellite. The first test will be the simplest, with the client satellite drifting a short distance away and then being recaptured. In the second test, the servicer satellite will set the client satellite tumbling before catching up with it and matching its motion to grab it.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

One company wants to sell the feds location data from every car on Earth:

There is a strange sort of symmetry in the world of personal data this week: one new report has identified a company that wants to sell the US government granular car location data from basically every vehicle in the world, while a group of privacy advocates is suing another company for providing customer data to the feds.

A surveillance contractor called Ulysses can "remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real-time basis," Vice Motherboard reports.

Ulysses obtains vehicle telematics data from embedded sensors and communications sensors that can transmit information such as seatbelt status, engine temperature, and current vehicle location back to automakers or other parties.

"Among the thousands of other data points, vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real-time basis while the vehicle is operating," the company wrote in a sales pitch document obtained by Vice. As roughly 100 million new cars are manufactured worldwide each year that are "increasingly connected to the manufacturer, other vehicles, infrastructure, and their owners, it becomes apparent that telematics will revolutionize intelligence," the document adds. Ulysses claims it can currently access more than 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month, and it estimates that by 2025, 100 percent of new cars will be connected and transmitting gigabytes of collectible data per hour.

Meanwhile...

[...] A coalition of privacy advocates in California is now suing Thomson Reuters, which operates CLEAR, alleging that it violates state privacy law by collecting and sharing personal information without individuals' consent.

"When we look at the ways that these data brokers are remaking our country, the Fourth Amendment concerns are terrifying," Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn, who is participating in the suit, told the Post. "But the way that they're allowing companies to track millions without the most basic consent is deeply alarming as well."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Victoria University of Wellington accidentally nukes files on all desktop PCs:

[On March 12th], IT staff at the Victoria University of Wellington started a maintenance procedure aimed at reclaiming space on the university network—in theory, by removing the profiles of students who no longer attend the university. The real impact, unfortunately, was much larger—affecting students, faculty, and staff across the university.

The New Zealand university's student newspaper reported the issue pretty thoroughly this Wednesday, although from a non-IT perspective. It sounds like an over-zealous Active Directory policy went out of bounds—the university's Digital Solutions department (what most places would refer to as Information Technology, or IT) declared that files stored on the university network drives, or on Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage, were "fully protected."

A grad student reported that not "only files on the desktop were gone" but "my whole computer had been reset, too," which would be consistent with an AD operation removing her user profile from the machine entirely—in such a case, a user would be able to log in to the PC, but into a completely "clean" profile that looked factory new.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Unicode: On Building The One Character Set To Rule Them All:

Most readers will have at least some passing familiarity with the terms 'Unicode' and 'UTF-8', but what is really behind them? At their core they refer to character encoding schemes, also known as character sets. This is a concept which dates back to far beyond the era of electronic computers, to the dawn of the optical telegraph and its predecessors. As far back as the 18th century there was a need to transmit information rapidly across large distances, which was accomplished using so-called telegraph codes. These encoded information using optical, electrical and other means.

During the hundreds of years since the invention of the first telegraph code, there was no real effort to establish international standardization of such encoding schemes, with even the first decades of the era of teleprinters and home computers bringing little change there. Even as EBCDIC (IBM's 8-bit character encoding demonstrated in the punch card above) and finally ASCII made some headway, the need to encode a growing collection of different characters without having to spend ridiculous amounts of storage on this was held back by elegant solutions.

Development of Unicode began during the late 1980s, when the increasing exchange of digital information across the world made the need for a singular encoding system more urgent than before. These days Unicode allows us to not only use a single encoding scheme for everything from basic English text to Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and even Mayan, but also small pictographs called 'emoji', from Japanese 'e' (絵) and 'moji' (文字), literally 'picture word'.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Over-valued fossil fuel assets creating trillion-dollar bubble about to burst:

A major new report has warned that conventional energy assets including coal, gas, nuclear and hydro power plants have been consistently and "severely" over-valued, creating a massive bubble that could exceed $US1 trillion by 2030.

The report is the latest from Rethinx, an independent think-tank that was co-founded by Stanford University futurist Tony Seba, who is regarded as one of few global analysts to correctly forecast the plunging cost of solar over the last decade.

According to the new report, co-authored by Rethinx research fellow Adam Dorr, analysts and the broader market are still getting energy valuation badly wrong, not just on the falling costs of solar, wind and batteries, or "SWB," but on the true value, or levelised cost of energy, of conventional energy assets.

"Since 2010, conventional LCOE[*] analyses have consistently overestimated future cash flows from coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro power assets by ignoring the impacts of SWB disruption and assuming a high and constant capacity factor," the report says.

Where the analysts are going wrong, according to Seba and co, is in their assumptions that conventional energy plants will be able to successfully sell the same quantity of electricity each year from today through to 2040 and beyond.

AnonTechie writes:

IBM Built an AI Capable of Holding Its Own Against Humans in a Debate:

Over the past few years, AI has gone from a niche topic to an exploding field. AI can improve audio and video quality, animate still images of long-dead people, and identify you from an analprint. One thing it hasn't been able to do? Argue effectively within the context of a formal debate.

To overcome this problem, IBM created Project Debater, an AI development program focused on exactly what it sounds like. Many AI projects, especially those focusing on gaming, have a clear winner and a loser based on the evaluation of numerical criteria, such as pieces captured, lives lost, or the ratio between kills and deaths. Effectively debating a human requires a vastly different skill set.

A recent paper in Nature [PDF] describes the results of a 2019 test between Project Debater and globally recognized debate champion Harish Natarajan. The AI and individual debated whether preschool should be subsidized. Each side was given 15 minutes for prep time without additional internet access, which Project Debater used to sort through its own internal database of content. Both sides gave a four-minute speech, followed by a two-minute closing statement.

[...] The question of who wins a debate will always be subjective, and humans still clearly outperform IBM's Project Debater. For now, we're still a long way from Commander Data — but we've come a long way from Eliza, too.

I think the real test of such debating machines would be their ability to debate politicians.

Journal Reference:
Noam Slonim, Yonatan Bilu, Carlos Alzate, et al. An autonomous debating system, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03215-w)

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers Have Figured Out a Way to Stop People From Sharing Misinformation:

A new study in Nature suggests that shifting reader attention online can help combat the spread of inaccurate information. The study, published on March 17, 2021, found that while people prefer to share accurate information, it is difficult to convince the average social media user to seek it out before sharing. Adding a roadblock in the form of a request to rate information accuracy can actually change the quality of information they share online.

"These findings indicate that people often share misinformation because their attention is focused on factors other than accuracy—and therefore they fail to implement a strongly held preference for accurate sharing," write the authors, suggesting that people usually want to do good but often fail in the heat of the moment. "Our results challenge the popular claim that people value partisanship over accuracy and provide evidence for scalable attention-based interventions that social media platforms could easily implement to counter misinformation online"

[...] In other words, many users don't share fake news because they want to but because they don't think about what they're sharing before they press the button. Slowing down the process by asking users whether or now[sic] they actually trust a headline or news source means they are far more likely to think twice before sharing misinformation.

What do you think? Will this stop people from sharing fake news?

Journal Reference:
Gordon Pennycook, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, et al. Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Cricut Backs Down, Will Now Give Existing Registered Users Unlimited Use of Their Cutting Machines:

After facing several days of backlash from users over a planned update that would severely limit the use of their cutting machines without a paid subscription, Cricut has changed its mind.

In a statement released today, Circut promised existing users unlimited lifetime use of their machines. The policy extends to anyone else who decides to buy one of the machines throughout 2021.

Cricut said:

One of our core values is community — we're listening, and we took your feedback to heart. The foundation of our Cricut community is one of integrity, respect, and trust. It is clear that, in this instance, we did not understand the full impact of our recent decision on our current members and their machines. We apologize.

Here's how we'll move forward.

We will continue to allow an unlimited number of personal image and pattern uploads for members with a Cricut account registered and activated with a cutting machine before December 31, 2021. This benefit will continue for the lifetime of your use of these machines.

Cricut issued a further update and backed down even further:

So, we've made the decision to reverse our previously shared plans. Right now, every member can upload an unlimited number of images and patterns to Design Space for free, and we have no intention to change this policy. This is true whether you're a current Cricut member or are thinking about joining the Cricut family before or after December 31, 2021.

If you're wondering what this is all about:

Cricut Now Wants Users to Pay Extra for Unlimited Use of the Cutting Machines They Already Own

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Photographer Spends 12 Years, 1250 Hours, Exposing Photo of Milky Way:

Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released a Milky Way photo that took him nearly 12 years to create. The 1.7-gigapixel image has a cumulative exposure time of 1,250 hours.

Metsavainio began shooting for the project back in 2009. For the next 12 years, he focused on different areas and objects in the Milky Way, shooting stitched mosaics of them as individual artworks. To complete the ultra-high-resolution view of the Milky Way as a whole, Metsavainio then set out to fill in the gaps that weren't covered by his original artworks.

"I think this is a first image ever showing the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels (H-a, S-II, and O-III)," Metsavainio tells PetaPixel.

The photo is 100,000 pixels wide and comprises 234 individual panels stitched together.

[...] You can find more of Metsavainio's work on his website and Facebook.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Seems Google is going to start mass-producing Googlers, but not in the traditional fashion.

Inside Google's $240 Plan to Disrupt the College Degree:

This morning, Google is announcing the next steps in its plan to disrupt the world of education, including the launch of new certificate programs that are designed to help people bridge any skills gap and get qualifications in high-paying, high-growth job fields--with one noteworthy feature:

No college degree necessary.

The new tools could be a game changer for a growing number of people who consider the current educational system broken, or for the millions of Americans who are currently unemployed, much due to fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The pandemic has led to a truly horrible year," Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells Inc. in an interview. "But it has also created profound shifts along the journey to digital transformation in ways no one could have imagined."

The plan includes:

• The release of three new Google Career Certificates on Coursera in project management, data analytics, and user experience (UX) design
• A new Associate Android Developer Certification course
• Over 100,000 need-based scholarships
• Partnerships with more than 130 employers working with Google to hire graduates of its certificate program
• A new Google Search feature that makes it easier for people to find jobs for their education level, including no degree and no experience

Most enrollees will finish in six months or less, putting the cost at about $240 for U.S. students. Some may need only three months, cutting that cost in half. Google is offering 100,000 need-based scholarships in the U.S.

Not sure if this is like Burger U (McDonald's), or Trump University, or MSCE (Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert). But, Big Tech proves once again, it don't need no Badgers, nor Liberal Arts, or AI Ethicists.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Back in November 2020, the NATO Stratgic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia published an analysis of the coordinated online harassment of Finnish government ministers. The conclusion is that the attacks and astroturfing are largely free from automated activity, aka bots. The report includes statistics, lots of analysis, and several illustrative graphs. The main topics triggering the online abuse were the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, immigration, EU relations, and social policies. Finland is not a NATO member but the lessons learned from studying the coordinated harrassment can be generalized to the alliance.

This report is informed by the findings of three recent Finnish studies, one of which investigated the extent and effects of online hate speech against politicians while the other two studied the use of bots to influence political discourse during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary eleections. The first study released by the research branch of the Finnish govenment in Novemeber 2019, found that a third of municipal decision-makers and nearly half of all membes of Finnish Parliament have been subjected to hate speech online.

[...] As social media platforms continue to grow in political importance, so does their use as a means for engaging with and criticising individual government officials with little or no consequences. An additional aim of our study was to determine the role, if any, bot accounts play in disseminating abusive messages, and whether such bot activity displayed characteristics of coordination. Based on previous Finnish studies analysing the impact of bots during election periods, we hypothesised that we would observe low levels of automation and coordination. Our findings confirmed this theory; our algorithm attributed less than 3% of abusive messages to bot-like accounts. However, the more significant finding was that over half of abusive messages were sent by anonymous accounts. Anonymity erases accountability online. This can have the effect of emboldening users to voice their dissatisfaction with ministers through unfiltered, abusive messages. It is possible for people to operate many anonymous accounts. However, our data do not show clear patterns indicating single users sending abusive messaging from multiple fake accounts. The unfortunate conclusion is that much of the offensive, sexually explicit, expletive-filled abuse targeting government officials is written and published by individuals.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Elon Musk wants to send a Starship to orbit as soon as July:

SpaceX is targeting July to take its next big step on the path toward Mars. That's when Elon Musk says he hopes to launch a Starship prototype that includes the "full stack" of the main spacecraft riding atop the company's new Super Heavy rocket booster.

Stripped-down Starship prototypes with three Raptor engines have made a series of three high-altitude flights over the past four months. All these flights have ended in dramatic explosions and none have yet taken a Starship beyond Earth's atmosphere.

A full-stack flight would likely be the first attempt at sending a Starship prototype to orbit. On Tuesday, Musk confirmed a timeline, first reported by NASASpaceflight.com, that has SpaceX targeting a first full-stack flight by July.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The bald truth: Altered cell divisions cause hair thinning:

The basis for new hair growth is the proper function of hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs). HFSCs undergo cyclic symmetric and asymmetric cell divisions (SCDs and ACDs). SCDs generate two identical cells that go on to have the same fate, while ACDs generate a differentiating cell and a self-renewing stem cell. The combination ensures that the stem cell population continues to exist, yet how those contribute to the loss of HFSC function due to aging is not yet completely understood.

"For proper tissue function, symmetric and asymmetric cell divisions have to be in balance," says corresponding author of the study Emi Nishimura. "Once stem cells preferentially undergo one of either or, worse yet, deviate from the typical process of either type of cell division, the organ suffers. In this study, we wanted to understand how stem cell division plays into hair grows during aging."

[...] But why does the mode of cell division change so drastically during aging? To answer this question, the researchers focused on hemidesmosomes, a class of protein that connect the cells to the extracellular matrix (ECM; proteins surrounding cells). Cell-ECM have long been known to confer polarity to cells, i.e., that the cells can sense their localization within a given space through the action of specific proteins. The researchers found that during aging both hemidesmosomal and cell polarity proteins become destabilized, resulting in the generation of aberrantly differentiating cells during division of HFSCs. As a result, HFSCs become exhausted and lost (leading to hair thinning and hair loss) over time.

Journal Reference:
Hiroyuki Matsumura, Nan Liu, Daisuke Nanba, et al. Distinct types of stem cell divisions determine organ regeneration and aging in hair follicles, Nature Aging (DOI: 10.1038/s43587-021-00033-7)

Original Submission