SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo_:

Yuan Longping, Plant Scientist Who Helped Curb Famine, Dies at 90:

SHANGHAI — Yuan Longping, a Chinese plant scientist whose breakthroughs in developing high-yield hybrid strains of rice helped to alleviate famine and poverty across much of Asia and Africa, died on Saturday in Changsha, China. He was 90.

The cause was multiple organ failure, China's main state-run newspaper, People's Daily, reported. An earlier report from an official news service in Hunan Province, of which Changsha is the capital, said Mr. Yuan had been increasingly unwell since a fall in March during a visit to a rice-breeding research site.

Mr. Yuan's research made him a national hero and a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit in China. His death triggered messages of grief across the country, where Mr. Yuan — slight, elfin-featured and wizened in old age — was a celebrity. Hundreds left flowers at the funeral home where his body was being kept.

Mr. Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation, said Jauhar Ali, the senior scientist for hybrid rice breeding at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines. Those discoveries, in the early 1970s — together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the '50s and '60s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist — helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.

Mr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, died in 2009. Mr. Yuan's research arguably had effects at least as broad, since rice is the main grain for half the world's population and wheat for a third.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Exposure to a chemical found in the weed killer Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides is significantly associated with preterm births, according to a new University of Michigan study.

The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that the presence of the chemical in women's urine in late pregnancy was linked to an increased risk for premature birth, while the association was inconsistent or null earlier in the pregnancy.

"Since most people are exposed to some level of glyphosate and may not even know it, if our results reflect true associations, then the public health implications could be enormous," said senior author John Meeker, professor of environmental health sciences and senior associate dean for research at the U-M School of Public Health.

[...] The researchers decided to measure glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA)—one of the primary degradation products of the herbicide—by testing urine, since the chemicals are not metabolized by mammals. They tested the urine of 247 pregnant women at the first and third study visit of their pregnancy, at 16-20 weeks and 24-28 weeks.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RunawayXXXX:

How to see the 'Super Flower Blood Moon,' 1st lunar eclipse of this decade:

This week's full moon will be the second supermoon of the season, appearing brighter and larger than usual. According to the Farmer's Almanac, the "Flower Blood Moon" will be roughly 222,000 miles away from the Earth early Wednesday morning.

May's full moon is known as the "Flower Moon," and because a total lunar eclipse -- also known as a "blood moon" as it gives the moon a reddish hue -- is also set to happen at the same time, it's being called the "Super Flower Blood Moon."

The moon will be at its brightest and largest at 4:14 a.m. PT (11:14 UTC), according to astronomers.

People who live in western North America, western South America, eastern Asia, and Oceania, will have the best view of the "Flower Blood Moon," according to astronomers.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-compound-commonly-candles-grid-scale-energy.html

A compound used widely in candles offers promise for a much more modern energy challenge—storing massive amounts of energy to be fed into the electric grid as the need arises.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have shown that low-cost organic compounds hold promise for storing grid energy. Common fluorenone, a bright yellow powder, was at first a reluctant participant, but with enough chemical persuasion has proven to be a potent partner for energy storage in flow battery systems, large systems that store energy for the grid.

Development of such storage is critical. When the grid goes offline due to severe weather, for instance, the large batteries under development would kick in, boosting grid resilience and minimizing disruption. The batteries can also be used to store renewable energy from wind and solar, for use when the winds are quiet or the sun's not shining.

Freeman writes:

China will likely ban all bitcoin mining soon

Bitcoin took investors on another rollercoaster ride over the weekend after a top regulator in China announced a crackdown on mining, a new tack in the country's ongoing fight against the cryptocurrency.

The government will "crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society," said the statement, which was issued by the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council, the country's cabinet equivalent. The committee is chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, who acts as President Xi Jinping's top representative on economic and financial matters.

"The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining," Li Yi, chief research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. "When all mining activities are banned in China, it will be a turning point for the fate of bitcoin, as a large chunk of its processing power is taken out of the picture."

Also at Notebookcheck.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form.

Libreboot 20210522 allows more Intel GM45 / X3X era hardware to work with this fully open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware. New boards supported by this Libreboot release include the Acer G43T-AM3, Lenovo ThinkPad R500, Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and Intel G43T-AM3. Yeah, it's quite hard in 2021 to get excited about Socket 775 motherboards or 45nm Penryn laptops. Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.

Previously: Replace your Proprietary BIOS with Libreboot
AMD to Consider Coreboot/Libreboot Support
Libreboot Applies to Rejoin GNU

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Ken Shirriff has carefully disassembled an ATX PC power supply and blogged about his findings.

Have you ever wondered what's inside your computer's power supply? The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (120 or 240 volts AC) into stable power at the DC voltages that the computer requires. The power supply must be compact and low-cost while transforming the power efficiently and safely. To achieve these goals, power supplies use a variety of techniques and are more complex inside than you might expect. In this blog post, I tear down a PC power supply and explain how it works.1

The power supply I examined, like most modern power supplies uses a design known as a "switching power supply." Switching power supplies are now very cheap, but this wasn't always the case. In the 1950s, switching power supplies were complex and expensive, used in aerospace and satellite applications that needed small, lightweight power supplies. By the early 1970s, though, new high-voltage transistors and other technology improvements made switching power supplies much cheaper and they became widely used in computers. Now, you can buy a phone charger for a few dollars that contains a switching power supply.

He goes through the input filtering, rectification, isolation boundary, splitting of DC, and other aspects including the standby mode circuits. He has written before about various power supplies and chargers before, including a historical overview in IEEE Spectrum.

Previously:
Ken Shirriff Unfolds A Nuclear Missile Guidance Computer With Impressive Memory
How "Special Register Groups" Invaded Computer Dictionaries for Decades
Mature Mainframe Prints Mandlebrot Fractal in 12 Minutes.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

Tesla is found guilty of throttling charging speed, asked to pay $16,000 to thousands of owners - Electrek:

In court in Norway, Tesla was found guilty of throttling charging speed and battery capacity through a software update.

Unless it appeals, Tesla is going to have to pay $16,000 to each of the thousands of owners affected in the country. The fine could be even more significant as other similar legal efforts are on the way in other countries.

Back in 2019, Electrek reported on several reports from Tesla owners about seeing significant drops in range from 12 to 30 miles following a software update.

[...] On top of the range loss, the DC fast-charging rate at Supercharger stations has also been reduced. Affected owners are seeing much slower charging sessions.

When Electrek reported on the issue, Tesla told us that the goal of the update is to "protect the battery and improve battery longevity," and it resulted in a range loss for only "a small percentage of owners."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Crypto payments above $10,000 would be reported to IRS under Treasury plan

The Biden administration wants businesses to report cryptocurrency transactions with values of at least $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service.

"Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion," the US Treasury Department said in its proposal for implementing the tax compliance initiatives in President Biden's American Families Plan. The larger Biden plan still needs approval from Congress.

The Treasury document said that crypto reporting is one part of "the President's tax compliance initiatives that seek to close the 'tax gap'—the difference between taxes owed to the government and actually paid." The proposal calls for a $4.5 billion investment in IT to implement a new information-reporting regime that would help close that gap, which was nearly $600 billion in 2019.

US law already "requires that trades and businesses report cash payments of more than $10,000 to the federal government," the IRS website notes. This information "assists law enforcement in its anti-money laundering efforts" and "provide[s] authorities with an audit trail to investigate possible tax evasion, drug dealing, terrorist financing and other criminal activities," the IRS says. The Treasury Department said it would apply that same threshold to crypto transactions under the proposed new reporting system

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

A zombie-fire outbreak may be growing in the north:

Each winter, as snow blankets Alaska and northern Canada, the wildfires of the summer extinguish, and calm prevails—at least on the surface. Beneath all that white serenity, some of those fires actually continue smoldering underground, chewing through carbon-rich peat, biding their time. When spring arrives and the chilly landscape defrosts, these "overwintering" fires pop up from below—that's why scientists call them zombie fires.

Now, a new analysis in the journal Nature quantifies their extent for the first time, and shows what conditions are most likely to make the fires reanimate. Using satellite data and reports from the ground, researchers developed an algorithm that could detect where over a decade's worth of fires—dozens in total—burned in Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories, snowed over, and ignited again in the spring. Basically, they correlated burn scars with nearby areas where a new fire ignited later on.

[...] Northern soils are loaded with peat, dead vegetation that's essentially concentrated carbon. When a wildfire burns across an Arctic landscape, it also burns vertically through this soil. Long after the surface fire has exhausted the plant fuel, the peat fire continues to smolder under the dirt, moving deeper down and also marching laterally. In their analysis, Scholten and her colleagues found this is most likely to happen following hotter summers, because that makes vegetation drier, thus igniting more catastrophically. "The more severe it burns, the deeper it can burn into that soil," says VU Amsterdam Earth systems scientist Sander Veraverbeke, co-author on the new paper. "And the deeper it burns, the higher the chances that that fire will hibernate." Even when autumn rain falls or the surface freezes in the winter, water isn't able to penetrate the soil enough to entirely extinguish it.

Then spring arrives and the ice retreats. These hot spots can flare up, seeking more vegetation to burn at the edges of the original burn scar. "Basically, right after the snow melts, we already have dry fuel available," says Scholten.

Journal Reference:
Rebecca C. Scholten, Randi Jandt, Eric A. Miller, et al. Overwintering fires in boreal forests, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03437-y)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Announcing the Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT compliant with 802.3at (aka PoE+) and 802.3af standards and support for up to 25.5 Watts input.

It will replace the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT introduced in 2018 which was limited to 802.3af standard with a maximum of 15.4 Watts input and will become available around mid-June for $20 plus taxes and shipping.

HAT = Hardware Attached on Top.

Here is a competing Waveshare PoE HAT for Raspberry Pi 3B+/4B.

Also at CNX Software.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Huawei confirms a June 2, 2021 launch for HarmonyOS

Huawei has set a date for the launch of its first-party operating system, HarmonyOS, in its native China. The software may have originally been intended to replace Android on its smartphones, but may also ship with other new products such as the MatePad Pro 2 and Watch 3, which are also now expected to debut on the same day.

Huawei's HiSilicon Develops First RISC-V Design to Overcome Arm Restrictions

In a bid to overcome US restrictions on its Arm designs, Huawei's HiSilicon has turned to the open-source RISC-V architecture and has even released its first RISC-V board for Harmony OS developers. Due to being blacklisted by the U.S. government, Huawei and its chip division HiSilicon do not have access to development and production technologies designed in America. The restrictions include many Arm processor architectures, including those used in various microcontrollers that Huawei uses widely.

[...] The Hi3861 is aimed mostly at the IoT market, whereas HiSilicon's development efforts were historically aimed at high-margin smartphones, tablets, PCs, and embedded systems. But Huawei needs computing platforms to use for its other devices, so the HiSilicon Hi3861 is just what the doctor ordered at this time.

Huawei Expected to Develop a 3nm Kirin SoC but Release May Happen in 2022, Suggests Latest Trademark

takyon writes:

Potential organic salt detection from Curiosity yields further evidence for past organics on Mars

While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover's Gale Crater location.

What's more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them.

[...] While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes.

Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars' surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.

Also at SciTechDaily.

Pyrolysis of Oxalate, Acetate, and Perchlorate Mixtures and the Implications for Organic Salts on Mars (open, DOI: 10.1029/2020JE006803) (DX)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Incredible Microscope Sees Atoms at Record Resolution:

In 2018, Cornell researchers built a high-powered detector that, in combination with an algorithm-driven process called ptychography, set a world record by tripling the resolution of a state-of-the-art electron microscope.

As successful as it was, that approach had a weakness. It only worked with ultrathin samples that were a few atoms thick. Anything thicker would cause the electrons to scatter in ways that could not be disentangled.

Now a team, again led by David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, has bested its own record by a factor of two with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that incorporates even more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms.

[...] Ptychography works by scanning overlapping scattering patterns from a material sample and looking for changes in the overlapping region.

"We're chasing speckle patterns that look a lot like those laser-pointer patterns that cats are equally fascinated by," Muller said. "By seeing how the pattern changes, we are able to compute the shape of the object that caused the pattern."

The detector is slightly defocused, blurring the beam, in order to capture the widest range of data possible. This data is then reconstructed via complex algorithms, resulting in an ultraprecise image with picometer (one-trillionth of a meter) precision.

"With these new algorithms, we're now able to correct for all the blurring of our microscope to the point that the largest blurring factor we have left is the fact that the atoms themselves are wobbling, because that's what happens to atoms at finite temperature," Muller said. "When we talk about temperature, what we're actually measuring is the average speed of how much the atoms are jiggling."

Journal Reference:
Zhen Chen, Yi Jiang, Yu-Tsun Shao, et al. Electron ptychography achieves atomic-resolution limits set by lattice vibrations [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abg2533)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Washington State Removes All Barriers to Municipal Broadband:

Yesterday, following weeks of anticipation, State Gov. Jay Islee signed the Public Broadband Act (H.B. 1336), removing all restrictions on public broadband in the state of Washington, according to the bill's primary sponsor, State Rep. Drew Hansen, D-23. This critical leap forward in Washington drops the number of states with laws restricting community broadband to 17.

(...) The bill grants public entities previously restricted by statute from offering retail telecommunications services the unrestricted authority to provide Internet services to end-users. This includes Public Utility Districts (PUDs) and district ports, as well as, towns, second-class cities (defined as those with populations of 1500 or more which have not adopted a city charter) and counties, currently not operating under Washington's Optional Municipal Code. (Washington's charter counties, first-class cities, and cities operating under the state's Optional Municipal Code already had the power to construct telecommunications networks and offer Internet access services to their residents, without a third-party business overseeing network management operations.)

(...) The public reaction to the passage of Washington's Public Broadband Act has been highly celebratory, with many Washingtonians promptly calling on their local governments, regional ports and PUDs, to both demand public networks and air their grievances against incumbent, monopoly Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the region.

Original Submission