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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Straight from NASA we have word of a delay in the first flight of Ingenuity on Mars.

Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed To No Earlier Than April 14 - Nasa Mars:

Based on data from the Ingenuity Mars helicopter that arrived late Friday night, NASA has chosen to reschedule the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's first experimental flight to no earlier than April 14.

During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a "watchdog" timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from 'Pre-Flight' to 'Flight' mode. The helicopter is safe and healthy and communicated its full telemetry set to Earth.

The watchdog timer oversees the command sequence and alerts the system to any potential issues. It helps the system stay safe by not proceeding if an issue is observed and worked as planned.

The helicopter team is reviewing telemetry to diagnose and understand the issue. Following that, they will reschedule the full-speed test.

NASA has a web site devoted to Ingenuity.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Natural brilliant blue food coloring wrung out of red cabbage:

For decades, concerns have been raised about the safety of synthetic food dyes, and while the evidence against them is still unclear, natural colorings are generally preferred. Most of these pigments are sourced from plants, although a few come from crushed insects. But frustratingly, not all colors are easy to find in these places.

"Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples," says Pamela Denish, an author of the new study.

[...] As you might expect, most of the anthocyanins in red cabbage are red or purple, but there are tiny amounts of blue in there too. After about a decade of trying, a team of scientists from a range of institutions and food companies has now managed to extract useful amounts of blue by converting other anthocyanins.

Doing so required exactly the right enzyme, so the team screened a library of millions of them, and used computational simulations to explore about 100 quintillion potential protein sequences. Eventually, they were able to design the perfect enzyme for the job of converting the red and purple anthocyanins into blue ones.

The end result, the team says, is a natural cyan dye equivalent to the widely used synthetic FD&C Blue No. 1.

Journal Reference:
Pamela R. Denish, Julie-Anne Fenger, Randall Powers, et al. Discovery of a natural cyan blue: A unique food-sourced anthocyanin could replace synthetic brilliant blue [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe7871)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

SpaceX COO says Starlink is just five launches away from "full global connectivity":

The day before SpaceX aced its eighth Starlink launch in three months, President and COO Gwynne Shotwell implied that the company’s constellation of satellites could achieve “full [global] connectivity” just a handful of months from now.

Speaking at Satellite 2021’s “LEO Digital Forum” on April 6th, Shotwell revealed that SpaceX hopes to cross that milestone a few months after a total of 28 operational Starlink launches have been completed. Around 25 hours after her panel appearance, SpaceX launched its 490th Starlink satellite of the year, more or less wrapping up the first quarter of 2021.

[...] SpaceX’s April 7th Starlink launch and booster landing was the 23rd successful launch of operational ‘v1.0’ satellites since they began flying in November 2019. All told, of the 1383 operational satellites launched by SpaceX in those 17 months, some 1369 are still in orbit, at least 1356 are functioning as expected, and more than 900 have reached their final orbits and are operational. Another 400 appear to be in long-term parking orbits dozens to hundreds of kilometers below their operational 550 km (~340 mi) ceiling, the purpose of which is unclear.

Once the 400-500 satellites now in low parking orbits reach whatever orbital parameters they’re waiting on, it’s unlikely to take more than two or three months for them to boost up to an operational altitude. Starlink-23 added another 60 around 250 km (155 mi).

[...] Given Shotwell’s 28-launch comment and a general idea of SpaceX’s 2021 launch cadence targets, it’s possible to extrapolate to a reasonably accurate timeline for the constellation to reach a point of “full connectivity globally” – albeit with a few caveats.

[...] In other words, barring unprecedented numbers of early satellite failures or unusually long orbit-raising periods, it’s likely that SpaceX will have enough operational satellites – around 1700 – for near-total, uninterrupted Starlink coverage of the inhabited world by the end of Q3 (September) 2021.

That works out to just less than two years from Starlink's very first launch to total world coverage. Granted, this would be the minimum coverage required. Each satellite can only support so many users at one time, so SpaceX will continue launching Starlinks for quite some time to come.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Watch a monkey equipped with Elon Musk’s Neuralink device play Pong with its brain – TechCrunch:

The last we saw of Neuralink, Musk himself was demonstrating the Link tech live[*] in August 2020, using pigs[**] to show how it was able to read signals from the brain depending on different stimuli. This new demo with Pager[***] more clearly outlines the direction that the tech is headed in terms of human applications, since, as the company shared on its blog, the same technology could be used to help patients with paralysis manipulate a cursor on a computer, for instance. That could be applied to other paradigms as well, including touch controls on an iPhone, and even typing using a virtual keyboard, according to the company.

[...] Musk separately tweeted that in fact, he expects the initial version of Neuralink’s product to be able to allow someone with paralysis that prevents standard modes of phone interaction to use one faster than people using their thumbs for input. He also added that future iterations of the product would be able to enable communication between Neuralinks in different parts of a patient’s body, transmitting between an in-brain node and neural pathways in legs, for instance, making it possible for “paraplegics to walk again.”

Videos:
[*] Watch Elon Musk's ENTIRE live Neuralink demonstration (1h12m46s)
[**] Snout Boops (1m28s)
[***] Monkey MindPong (3m29s)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

34% of WFH (work from home) workers say they'd rather quit than return to full-time office work:

A new survey of WFH (work-from-home) employees suggests that many are not yet ready to return to the office. In fact, they may never be ready.

The survey found that 34% of WFH respondents say they would rather quit than return to a full-time office job.

The survey was published by staffing firm Robert Half. It involved more than 1,000 adult employees of US companies, all of whom are currently working from home due to the pandemic.

As mentioned above, more than 1 in 3 said they would look for a new job if they had to again work in the office full time.

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DannyB writes:

Fun While It Lasted, Falcon 9 Telemetry Now Encrypted

A few weeks back we brought word that Reddit users [derekcz] and [Xerbot] had managed to receive the 2232.5 MHz telemetry downlink from a Falcon 9 upper stage and pull out some interesting plain-text strings. With further software fiddling, the vehicle's video streams were decoded, resulting in some absolutely breathtaking shots of the rocket and its payload from low Earth orbit.

Unfortunately, it looks like those heady days are now over, as [derekcz] reports the downlink from the latest Falcon 9 mission was nothing but intelligible noise.

[...] we know that SpaceX is actively pursuing more lucrative national security launch contracts for both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. For these sensitive government payloads, the normal on-screen telemetry data and space views are omitted from the company's official live streams. It seems likely the Pentagon would be very interested in finding out how civilians were able to obtain this information, and a guarantee from SpaceX that the link would be encrypted for all future flights could have helped smooth things over.

Isn't the government trying to require encryption to have back doors?

Also At:
ExtremeTech and RedOrbit, among others.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/windows-and-linux-devices-are-under-attack-by-a-new-cryptomining-worm/

A newly discovered cryptomining worm is stepping up its targeting of Windows and Linux devices with a batch of new exploits and capabilities, a researcher said.

Research company Juniper started monitoring what it's calling the Sysrv botnet in December. One of the botnet's malware components was a worm that spread from one vulnerable device to another without requiring any user action. It did this by scanning the Internet for vulnerable devices and, when found, infecting them using a list of exploits that has increased over time.

The malware also included a cryptominer that uses infected devices to create the Monero digital currency. There was a separate binary file for each component.
[...]
"Based on the binaries we have seen and the time when we have seen them, we found that the threat actor is constantly updating its exploit arsenal," Juniper researcher Paul Kimayong said in a Thursday blog post.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/the-amazon-union-drive-in-alabama-appears-headed-for-defeat/

Update: A majority of workers have voted not to form a union at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Alabama. The result of the NLRB's initial vote count was 1,798 votes against the union and 738 in favor. Hundreds of additional ballots were not counted because their authenticity was disputed. But the "no" side already has a majority of the 3,215 votes cast, making the issue moot.

Original story, April 8: A closely watched effort to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama appears to be headed for defeat. With about half the votes counted, 1,100 workers have voted against forming a union, while only 463 voted in favor.

The National Labor Relations Board is counting the 3,215 votes that were cast by workers at the Bessemer facility. The union needs to win at least half the votes in order to become the official representative of the roughly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer facility. Counting has ended for the evening and is scheduled to resume at 8:30 am Central Time on Friday.

Also at The Washington Post, c|net, and Al Jazeera.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Japanese doctors perform world's first living donor lung transplant to a Covid-19 patient:

[...] Kyoto University Hospital said the woman underwent an 11-hour operation by a 30-strong medical team on Wednesday to transplant lung tissue from her husband and son.

Covid-19 is known to cause severe lung damage in some patients, and people around the world -- including the United States -- have received lung transplants as part of their recovery from the disease.

But the Kyoto hospital said this case was the first in which lung tissue had been transplanted from living donors to a Covid-19 patient.

Dr. Hiroshi Date, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital who led the operation, said it gave hope to patients suffering from severe lung damage from Covid-19.

Original Submission

Rice, Intel Optimize AI Training for Commodity Hardware

hendrikboom writes:

Researchers claim they can get do deep learning faster and cheaper on a commodity CPU than with a GPU.

The press release actually contains links to the original papers!

“The whole industry is fixated on one kind of improvement — faster matrix multiplications,” Shrivastava said. “Everyone is looking at specialized hardware and architectures to push matrix multiplication. People are now even talking about having specialized hardware-software stacks for specific kinds of deep learning. Instead of taking an expensive algorithm and throwing the whole world of system optimization at it, I’m saying, ‘Let’s revisit the algorithm.'”

Shrivastava’s lab did that in 2019, recasting DNN training as a search problem that could be solved with hash tables. Their “sub-linear deep learning engine” (SLIDE) is specifically designed to run on commodity CPUs, and Shrivastava and collaborators from Intel showed it could outperform GPU-based training when they unveiled it at MLSys 2020.

Can we hope that this will release the GPU inventories for actual gamers?

SLIDE Algorithm for Training Deep Neural Nets Faster on CPUs than GPUs

NPC-131072 writes:

From SLIDE algorithm for training deep neural nets faster on CPUs than GPUs:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Water being pumped into Tampa Bay could cause a massive algae bloom:

Millions of gallons of water laced with fertilizer ingredients are being pumped into Florida's Tampa Bay from a leaking reservoir at an abandoned phosphate plant at Piney Point. As the water spreads into the bay, it carries phosphorus and nitrogen—nutrients that under the right conditions can fuel dangerous algae blooms that can suffocate sea grass beds and kill fish, dolphins and manatees.

It's the kind of risk no one wants to see, but officials believed the other options were worse.

About 300 homes sit downstream from the 480-million-gallon reservoir, which began leaking in late March 2021. State officials determined that pumping out the water was the only way to prevent the reservoir's walls from collapsing. They decided the safest location for all that water would be out through Port Manatee and into the bay.

Journal References:
1.) Jeff C. Ho, Anna M. Michalak, Nima Pahlevan. Widespread global increase in intense lake phytoplankton blooms since the 1980s, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1648-7)
2.) James W. Fourqurean, Carlos M. Duarte, Hilary Kennedy, et al. Seagrass ecosystems as a globally significant carbon stock, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1477)
3.) Janine Lemaire, Bénédicte Sisto, Hamilton Disston, et al. The Everglades Ecosystem: Under Protection or Under Threat?, Miranda. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-speaking world (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.2881)
4.) Brian E. Lapointe, Rachel A. Brewton, Laura W. Herren, et al. Nitrogen enrichment, altered stoichiometry, and coral reef decline at Looe Key, Florida Keys, USA: a 3-decade study, Marine Biology (DOI: 10.1007/s00227-019-3538-9)

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Eratosthenes writes:

Testing Our Fundamental Understanding of the Universe: Muon G-2 Experiment Hints at Mysterious New Physics :

What do touch screens, radiation therapy and shrink wrap have in common? They were all made possible by particle physics research. Discoveries of how the universe works at the smallest scale often lead to huge advances in technology we use every day.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, along with collaborators from 46 other institutions and seven countries, are conducting an experiment to put our current understanding of the universe to the test. The first result points to the existence of undiscovered particles or forces. This new physics could help explain long-standing scientific mysteries, and the new insight adds to a storehouse of information that scientists can tap into when modeling our universe and developing new technologies.

The experiment, Muon g-2 (pronounced Muon g minus 2), follows one that began in the ​‘90s at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which scientists measured a magnetic property of a fundamental particle called the muon.

The Brookhaven experiment yielded a result that differed from the value predicted by the Standard Model, scientists’ best description of the makeup and behavior of the universe yet. The new experiment is a recreation of Brookhaven’s, built to challenge or affirm the discrepancy with higher precision.

The Standard Model very precisely predicts the muon’s g-factor — a value that tells scientists how this particle behaves in a magnetic field. This g-factor is known to be close to the value two, and the experiments measure their deviation from two, hence the name Muon g-2.

[Update: This story appears to be a dupe of Latest Muon Measurements Hint at Cracks in the Standard Model; as there are already comments here, it will remain posted for discussion. --martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Google Now Supports Rust For Android Os Development - 9To5Google:

For the past few years, Google has been encouraging developers to write Android apps with Kotlin. The underlying OS still uses C and C++, though Google today announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust.

This is part of Google’s work to address memory safety bugs in the operating system:

We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities.

[...] Rust “provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid.” Google has been working to add this support to AOSP for the past 18 months.

Performance is equivalent to the existing languages, while increasing the effectiveness of current sandboxing and reducing the overall need for it. [...] Other improvements include data concurrency, a more expressive type system, and safer integer handling.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple to Pay $3.4 Million USD to Settle Planned Obsolescence Lawsuit

Apple has agreed to settle and pay $3.4 million to Chilean users due to a class-action lawsuit filed by iPhone users who noticed that their older devices, which include the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone SE were performing significantly worse after an iOS update in 2017. Every registered Chilean user stands to gain $50, which has to be shared if there is more than one claim per device serial number. For instance, a second-hand phone may have two people filing a lawsuit for the same phone.

Around 150,000 Chilean iPhone users sued Apple for implementing a performance throttling feature in their 2017 iOS update. In the same year, Apple released the iOS 10.2.1 update and programmed in a feature that would forcefully slow down system performance in old iPhones by reducing the CPU's clock speed. This was done to prevent the phone from spontaneously shutting off due to poor battery health in degrading iPhones, but they failed to inform the user that this change would have a detrimental effect on their iPhone's performance.

Previously: Apple iPhones Appear to Slow Down as Battery Condition Degrades: Planned Obsolescence?
Two Class Action Lawsuits Filed After Apple Admits Slowing Down iPhones
Eight Lawsuits Filed Against Apple Over iPhone Slowdowns
Apple Offers $29 Battery Replacements in Response to iPhone Slowdown Scandal

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Decentralized DNS Project Handshake Patches Inflation Bug - CoinDesk:

The team behind the decentralized Domain Name Server (DNS) project, Handshake, recently patched a bug which could have inflated the supply of HNS coins.

When it existed in Handshake's code, the bug was never exploited and no user funds or domain data were compromised, Handshake's developers write in a post.

"A flaw was discovered in the Handshake protocol that could unintentionally increase the total HNS coin supply beyond its designed limits," the post reads. "A user with a reserved name claim could have accidentally generated small amounts of extra HNS by modifying their wallet. In the worst-case scenario, a malicious miner could generate nearly unlimited extra HNS in every block. The bug was never exploited and is now fixed."

The team advises miners and node operators to update to the newest version asap.

Handshake is "An experimental peer-to-peer root naming system." The "About Handshake" section of their web page says that "Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems. "

Original Submission