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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Semiconductor qubits scale in two dimensions:

The heart of any computer, its central processing unit, is built using semiconductor technology, which is capable of putting billions of transistors onto a single chip. Now, researchers from the group of Menno Veldhorst at QuTech, a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO, have shown that this technology can be used to build a two-dimensional array of qubits to function as a quantum processor. Their work, a crucial milestone for scalable quantum technology, was published today in Nature.

[...] Electrons trapped in quantum dots, semiconductor structures of only a few tens of nanometres in size, have been studied for more than two decades as a platform for quantum information. Despite all promises, scaling beyond two-qubit logic has remained elusive. To break this barrier, the groups of Menno Veldhorst and Giordano Scappucci decided to take an entirely different approach and started to work with holes (i.e. missing electrons) in germanium. Using this approach, the same electrodes needed to define the qubits could also be used to control and entangle them. 'No large additional structures have to be added next to each qubit such that our qubits are almost identical to the transistors in a computer chip,' says Nico Hendrickx, graduate student in the group of Menno Veldhorst and first author of the article. 'Furthermore, we have obtained excellent control and can couple qubits at will, allowing us to program one, two, three, and four-qubit gates, promising highly compact quantum circuits.'

After successfully creating the first germanium quantum dot qubit in 2019, the number of qubits on their chips has doubled every year. 'Four qubits by no means makes a universal quantum computer, of course,' Veldhorst says. 'But by putting the qubits in a two-by-two grid we now know how to control and couple qubits along different directions.' Any realistic architecture for integrating large numbers of qubits requires them to be interconnected along two dimensions.

Journal Reference:
Nico W. Hendrickx, William I. L. Lawrie, Maximilian Russ, et al. A four-qubit germanium quantum processor, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03332-6)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board:

Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation's board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF's entire board to resign.

The open letter said:

        Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities. With his recent reinstatement to the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation, we call for the entire Board of the FSF to step down and for RMS to be removed from all leadership positions.

Previously:
Richard Stallman Rejoins Free Software Foundation Board of Directors
Richard M. Stallman Resigns
Richard Stallman Deserved to be Fired, Says Fired GNU Hurd Maintainer

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Programmer Ian Henry has written a blog post about using datalog to optimze home bar ingredients. That is to say, given what is in his bar already which cocktails can he already mix and which one new ingredient would provide the largest possible number of additional recipes?

I like cocktails. Once upon a time, I liked to go to restaurants and order cocktails. But for some reason I haven't been going to restaurants for a while, and instead I've been making cocktails at home.

But I don't want to mix the same cocktails every time. A big part of what I enjoyed about the restaurant-cocktail-ordering experience was the variety: every fancy hipster restaurant I used to frequent had its own cocktail menu – it's own unique set of drinks, full of ingredients I had never heard of.

Which is sort of a problem, for the home bartender.

See, I don't have a very comprehensive liquor collection. I've got the basics, sure, and over the course of quarantining I've acquired a few fancier ingredients. But fancy ingredients usually aren't very versatile: I bought a bottle of Amaro Nonino once to mix a Paper Plane. But it turns out I don't like really Paper Planes. So now I just have, like, 97.1% of a bottle of Amaro Nonino, and nothing to do with it.

That was not very efficient purchase. We can do better.

So I wrote a little program to tell me: given what I have in my bar right now, what should I add that will enable me to make the maximum number of new cocktails. Or in other words, what is my most efficient purchase – what is the ingredient that I am most "blocked on."

Datalog is a type of logic programming language used especially for data integration and information extraction. It consists of a database of facts and a set of rules for deriving new facts from existing ones.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New York lawmakers reach deal to legalize marijuana

New York lawmakers have reportedly reached an agreement to legalize recreational marijuana in the state.

According to Bloomberg, the state is prepared to legalize recreational marijuana use for people aged 21 and older.

The deal would reportedly include a 13 percent tax on sales and would provide licenses to dispensaries.

Nine percent of the 13 percent pot tax would go to the state, Bloomberg notes, while the remaining 4 percent would go to local governments. The New York governor's office estimates that a legal cannabis program in the state could bring in around $350 million annually, it added.

Also at CBS (2m37s video), and the New York Post.

See also: Legalizing Marijuana Is Cuomo's 2021 'Priority' For New York To Be 'Progressive Capital' Of U.S.
Why New York Legalizing Recreational Cannabis Won't Kill The Illicit Market
The Data On Legalizing Weed

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

GameStop (the stock) and GameStop (the retailer) continue to be worlds apart:

The last time GameStop announced its quarterly earnings, in early December, the stock market valued the video game retailer at about $1 billion. Following a worse-than-expected earnings report released Tuesday night, the company now has a market cap of just under $10 billion as of Wednesday morning.

Sure, that's down roughly 18 percent from Tuesday's closing price, and off roughly 44 percent from a January peak that saw the stock offering become a poster child for the retail investor-driven "meme stock" phenomenon. Still there's not much in this week's report to suggest that GameStop as a company is worth ten times as much as it was just three months ago, much less the higher valuations it briefly enjoyed in the interim.

[...] Overall, GameStop's latest earnings report shows a company still struggling to turn itself around. For the full fiscal year, the company lost $215 million on net, improving on a net loss of just over $470 million the year prior. Net sales for the year were down over 21 percent, to $5.09 billion, a decline GameStop blamed in part on its "de-densification efforts" (i.e. closing nearly 700 stores). Even taking that move into account, though, sales for comparable stores were down 9.5 percent for the year.

Previously:
GameStop Shares Rise, Fall and Rise Again in Roller-Coaster Day of Trading
The Complete Moron's Guide to GameStop's Stock Roller Coaster
Console Options Without Disc Drives Could be GameStop's Final Death Knell
GameStop Heading Towards Possible Doom
GameStop Posts Massive Loss as Pre-Owned Game Sales Plummet

Original Submission

datapharmer writes:

A 15 year old XML file created a stir in the Ruby on Rails world today as it was discovered that freedesktop.org.xml which is GPL 2 licensed was included improperly in the mimemagic project which was MIT licensed. The author accepted this notification as valid, pulled prior versions, and switched licenses but as this was a dependency of Rails it promptly got the attention of programmers worldwide that rely on the Rails gem for their applications.

Since Rails itself is MIT licensed this makes for a difficult day of sorting out licensing options for many people.

Original Submission

Rich writes:

Recent reports concerning a paper about lepton universality in beauty-quark decays are coming in. One report rather close to the source can be found at New result from the LHCb experiment challenges leading theory in physics

The core point of the research is that "beauty quarks", particles that existed around the time of the big bang, should decay evenly into mesons with electrons and mesons with muons, which is implied by the standard model. However, in recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, for 100 mesons with electrons, only 85 mesons with muons could be found.

This implies that a deviation from the standard model was found in a hands-on (for large values of hands-on) experiment. Further research might yield interesting insights in the mechanisms of the universe.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Melting Glaciers Contribute To Alaska Earthquakes:

In 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a debris avalanche into Southeast Alaska's Lituya Bay. Displacing estimated 40 million cubic yards of water in an instant, the avalanche created a wave that ran 1,700 feet up a mountainside before racing out to sea. The largest known tsunami in history was taller than the Empire State Building in New York - 1,454 feet (or 443,2 meters) tall.

[...] Researchers now think the region's widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the earthquakes and their increasing intensity.

In a recently published research article, scientists with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute found that ice loss near Glacier Bay National Park has influenced the timing and location of earthquakes with a magnitude of 5 or greater in the area during the past century.

[...] Alaska has some of the world's largest glaciers, which can be thousands of feet thick and cover hundreds of square miles. The ice's weight causes the land beneath it to sink, and, when a glacier melts, the ground springs back like a sponge.

[...] "There are two components to the uplift," said Chris Rollins, the study's lead author who conducted the research while at the Geophysical Institute. "There's what's called the 'elastic effect,' which is when the earth instantly springs back up after an ice mass is removed. Then there's the prolonged effect from the mantle flowing back upwards under the vacated space."

Journal Reference:
Chris Rollins, Jeffrey T. Freymueller, Jeanne M. Sauber. Stress Promotion of the 1958 Mw∼7.8 Fairweather Fault Earthquake and Others in Southeast Alaska by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Inter‐earthquake Stress Transfer [open], Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (DOI: 10.1029/2020JB020411)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Whether Cold Fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, U.S. Navy Researchers Reopen Case

Scientists at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division have pulled together a group of Navy, Army, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) labs to try and settle the debate. Together, the labs will conduct experiments in an effort to establish if there's really something to the cold fusion idea, if it's just odd chemical interactions, or if some other phenomenon entirely is taking place in these controversial experiments.

[...] Aside from the recent promising findings from NASA, Google published a paper in Nature in 2019 revealing that the company had spent US $10 million to research cold fusion since 2015. The company teamed up with researchers at institutions including MIT, the University of British Columbia, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The research group found no evidence of classic Pons-Fleischmann-style cold fusion, but it did find evidence of the larger umbrella category of LENRs—suggesting (as the NASA group also reported) that nuclear fusion may be possible in locally-hot sites in otherwise room temperature metals.

"We got our impetus from the Google paper appearing in Nature," says Carl Gotzmer, Indian Head's Chief Scientist. Gotzmer's duties include keeping the Navy abreast of the latest scientific developments. Gotzmer says his cold fusion/LENR interest developed after attending the International Conference on Cold Fusion in 2003. After a four-hour conversation with Fleischmann himself, and seeing presentations from across the world giving evidence of nuclear transmutations, he says he began to follow this field in earnest.

"Quite frankly, [to] other folks who have tried this over the years, it was considered a career ender," says Gotzmer. But the Indian Head team decided that, as a government lab, they had a little more freedom to pursue a controversial topic, so long as it also offered up the prospect of rewarding scientific results.

Related: It's Not Cold Fusion but It's Something

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

FCC wants to hear from Americans who've been ignored by broadband industry:

The Federal Communications Commission wants to hear from Internet users about their experiences trying to find good broadband service. The FCC announced yesterday that it is seeking "first-hand accounts on broadband availability and service quality directly from consumers" as part of a new data collection effort. People who live in areas where ISPs either haven't deployed service or have failed to upgrade old networks may be especially interested in participating.

"Far too many Americans are left behind in access to jobs, education, and healthcare if they do not have access to broadband," acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. "Collecting data from consumers who are directly affected by the lack of access to broadband will help inform the FCC's mapping efforts and future decisions about where service is needed." Rosenworcel shared those sentiments on Twitter as well:

Take note. We're going straight to consumers. https://t.co/bZzsFo46ap

— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) March 22, 2021

Anyone who wants to participate can fill out the "Share Your Broadband Experience" form at this webpage. While the FCC is trying to find unserved areas, people with broadband access can also tell the FCC about the quality of their current ISPs. "Your experience with the availability and quality of broadband services at your location will help to inform the FCC's efforts to close the digital divide," the FCC said.

If you have a specific problem and want a response from your ISP, you can also file a complaint against the ISP at the consumer complaint center that the FCC has been operating for years.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

(NB: Follow real-time graphical updates by zooming in at https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000

Grounded 'Mega Ship' Blocking Suez Canal in Both Directions:

An ultra-large containership is aground and blocking ship traffic in the Suez Canal.

AIS[*] data shows the MV Ever Given is stuck sideways towards the south end of the canal near Suez, Egypt, preventing ships from passing in either direction. Several tugs have been on scene for several hours working to dislodge the ship.

Shipping agent GAC reports that the grounding occurred at 7:40 a.m. local time on Tuesday (March 23) at kilometer 151 after the vessel suffered a black out while transiting.

It seems the Ever Given had just begun its transit of the waterway as part of a northbound convoy when the incident occurred.

“The 199,489 GT ship was fifth in the northbound convoy. None of the vessels before it were affected, but the 15 behind it were detained at anchorages waiting for the Canal to be cleared. The southbound convoy was also blocked,” GAC reported.

At 400-meters-long and a little over 20,000 TEU capacity, the Panama-registered MV Ever Given is among the largest of so-called “mega ships”, aka ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs), currently in operation.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA to offer funding for initial studies of commercial space stations - SpaceNews:

WASHINGTON — NASA is shifting direction in its effort to support development of commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, with plans to issue a series of awards for initial studies before later purchasing services.

At a March 23 industry briefing, agency officials outlined what it calls the Commercial LEO Development (CLD) program, which will start with a set of two to four funded Space Act Agreements with companies to help with the initial design of their proposed orbital facilities. A draft announcement of proposals is scheduled for release in April followed by the final version in May.

Those awards, planned for the fourth quarter of 2021 with a combined value of $300 million to $400 million, will cover work from fiscal years 2022 to 2025 to advance the design of proposed commercial space stations to at least the preliminary design review level. The studies will also help NASA understand both the potential supply of commercial LEO destinations as well as the mix of customers who would use them alongside NASA.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

TikTok wants to keep tracking iPhone users with state-backed workaround:

Some of China's biggest technology companies, including ByteDance and Tencent, are testing a tool to bypass Apple's new privacy rules and continue tracking iPhone users without their consent to serve them targeted mobile advertisements.

Apple is expected in the coming weeks to roll out changes it announced last June to iPhones that it says will give users more privacy. Until now, apps have been able to rely on Apple's IDFA system to see who clicks on ads and which apps are downloaded.

In the future, they will have to ask permission to gather tracking data, a change that is expected to deal a multibillion-dollar bombshell to the online advertising industry and has been fought by Facebook, since most users are expected to decline to be tracked.

In response, the state-backed China Advertising Association, which has 2,000 members, has launched a new way to track and identify iPhone users called CAID, which is being widely tested by tech companies and advertisers in the country.

ByteDance, the owner of the social video app TikTok, referred to CAID in an 11-page guide to app developers obtained by the Financial Times, suggesting that advertisers "can use the CAID as a substitute if the user's IDFA is unavailable."

People close to Tencent and ByteDance confirmed the companies were testing the system, but both companies declined to comment.

[...] "The big picture is that there is simply too much money at stake," [Dina Srinivasan] said. "There will always be an arms race to track consumers. Only legislation can make it stop."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA lays out plans for its first flights on Mars:

On Tuesday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hosted a press conference where it detailed the plans for the Ingenuity drone that hitched a ride to Mars attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover. The scientists and engineers behind the drone announced that they've now picked a site for what is expected to be the first powered flight on another planet. With the site settled, they're now targeting April 8 for the flight, which will be the first in a month long series of test flights to validate the technology.

[...] Håvard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot, said that the test flights required two distinct areas, both of which needed to be flat. The inner part, which he called the airfield, had to have very little material that could interfere with landings. That needed to be surrounded by a larger area, called the flight zone, that had to have enough material in it that the drone's onboard image-processing system could track individual features in order to assist with navigation.

Grip said the search for an appropriate area started within a few hours of Perseverance's landing. That's because knowing where Perseverance was helped Grip and his colleagues search satellite imagery of the surrounding area. Once the rover was operational, the drone provided higher-resolution imagery of potential sites.

In the end, things couldn't be much more convenient, as the rover landed on what will be the edge of the flight zone, which extends north from the landing site.

[...] If everything goes well with depositing Ingenuity and its systems check out, the earliest we could see a flight is in two weeks, on April 8. A month has been set aside for five flights, with extensive checkouts of the system between each. During this time, however, Perseverance won't be able to move on to its main science mission.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Scientists Detect 55 Chemicals Never Before Reported in People – 42 "Mystery Chemicals" Whose Sources Are Unknown:

The chemicals most likely come from consumer products or other industrial sources. They were found both in the blood of pregnant women, as well as their newborn children, suggesting they are traveling through the mother's placenta.

[...] "These chemicals have probably been in people for quite some time, but our technology is now helping us to identify more of them," said Tracey J. Woodruff, PhD, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.

A former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientist, Woodruff directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE) and the Environmental Research and Translation for Health (EaRTH) Center, both at UCSF.

[...] The scientific team used high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) to identify human-made chemicals in people.