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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Navy's experimental drone ship passes through Panama Canal:

May 20 (UPI) -- Nomad, an experimental unmanned surface vehicle, passed through the Panama Canal en route to its new home port in California, the Navy confirmed.

USNI News reported that ship spotters had found evidence of the vessel's passage through the Panama Canal using data from MarineTraffic.com, and that a Navy official had confirmed the transit.

The Navy did not provide comment on the transit, but web cameras at the Miraflores locks on the canal showed that Nomad -- a retrofitted offshore patrol vessel -- was heading toward the Pacific as of Tuesday night.

Ship spotters said the Nomad was underway in the Gulf Coast and traveled as far away as Norfolk, Va., for testing.

The real ghost guns!

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210514134119.htm

Climate change is exacerbating problems like habitat loss and temperatures swings that have already pushed many animal species to the brink. But can scientists predict which animals will be able to adapt and survive? Using genome sequencing, researchers show that some fish, like the threespine stickleback, can adapt very rapidly to extreme seasonal changes. Their findings could help scientists forecast the evolutionary future of these populations.

Journal Reference:

Alan Garcia‐Elfring, Antoine Paccard, Timothy J. Thurman, Ben A. Wasserman, Eric P. Palkovacs, Andrew P. Hendry, Rowan D. H. Barrett. Using seasonal genomic changes to understand historical adaptation to new environments: Parallel selection on stickleback in highly‐variable estuaries. Molecular Ecology, 2021; 30 (9): 2054 DOI: 10.1111/mec.15879

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Lopsided Galaxy NGC 2276:

The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.

What's going on?

In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance.

This sort of "tug of war" between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other's gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.

In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Flying has never been a safe or precise art. Even when it is not on Mars! Latest from the Ingenuity saga, from NASA it's own self.

On the 91st Martian day, or sol, of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its sixth flight. The flight was designed to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west. Ingenuity was commanded to climb to an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters) before translating 492 feet (150 meters) to the southwest at a ground speed of 9 mph (4 meters per second). At that point, it was to translate 49 feet (15 meters) to the south while taking images toward the west, then fly another 164 feet (50 meters) northeast and land.

Telemetry from Flight Six shows that the first 150-meter leg of the flight went off without a hitch. But toward the end of that leg, something happened: Ingenuity began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern. This behavior persisted throughout the rest of the flight. Prior to landing safely, onboard sensors indicated the rotorcraft encountered roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption.

[...] Approximately 54 seconds into the flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images being delivered by the navigation camera. This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps. From this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken. The resulting inconsistencies significantly degraded the information used to fly the helicopter, leading to estimates being constantly "corrected" to account for phantom errors. Large oscillations ensued.

Large oscillations are better than small ones, if the truth be told. Godspeed, Ingenuity!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements:

[...] Lawmakers are working on legislation to call off the lottery immediately. They're also trying to head off any plans for "vaccine passports." And last month, they introduced a sweeping antivaccination bill that would essentially demolish public health and vaccination requirements in the state—and not just requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, requirements for any vaccine.

[...] State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) blasted the bill, telling The Columbus Dispatch, "Not only would it prevent schools, businesses and communities from putting safety measures in pace related to COVID, it will impact the health of our children... This bill applies to all vaccines—polio, measles, meningitis, etc. If it becomes law we will see worsening measles outbreaks, meningitis in the dorms, and children once again suffering from polio."

[...] "At its core, this proposal would destroy our current public health framework that prevents outbreaks of potentially lethal diseases, threatens the stability of our economy as it recovers from a devastating pandemic and jeopardizes the way we live, learn, work and celebrate life," the letter said.

[...] "HB 248 would put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses," spokesperson Dan Williamson said. "This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis."

Also: Ohio GOP lawmakers, citing 'need to protect' from vaccines, seek to expand exemptions, nix COVID passports

Original Submission

Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

Up to now, people have been discouraged from getting antibody tests to measure what their COVID vaccination did. The reasoning behind that advice is that since nobody knew what a given level meant in actionable terms, it was not useful information.

That just changed.

Nature has published the results of research into the relationship between antibody levels post-vaccination and vaccine efficacy, with plenty of different vaccines.

An easy-to-read overview is at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01372-6

The full paper, with the methodology and conclusions, is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 (It looks like careful work but it's over my head in places.)

The bottom line is that they found a clear correlation and protection levels keep going up as antibody levels go up, though there's some diminishing returns at the very top end where the mRNA vaccines are.

The cool part is they figured out what antibody level would give you the 50% protection that we would have been willing to accept from a vaccine. The mRNA vaccines leave you with an order of magnitude more. That's quite a comforting safety factor against variants and gradual decline.

Journal References:
1.) Smriti Mallapaty. Scientists zero in on long-sought marker of COVID-vaccine efficacy, (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-01372-6)
2.) David S. Khoury, Deborah Cromer, Arnold Reynaldi, et al. Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection [open], Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01377-8)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Mars Helicopter Suffered Glitch During Flight, Forced Emergency Landing:

During its sixth flight across the desolate Martian surface earlier this month, NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter experienced a bit of a software glitch.

The tiny four pound rotorcraft "began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern" according to an official update, just after covering just over 500 feet.

The event forced it to make an emergency landing some 16 feet away from the intended touchdown site.

[...] Ingenuity is capable of adjusting control inputs 500 times per second thanks to a sophisticated inertial measurement unit (IMU) that can track its accelerations and rotation rates.

In addition to this IMU, Ingenuity uses its navigation camera to see where it is going and where it currently is. Unfortunately, 54 seconds into its sixth flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images taken by this navigation camera, as Grip explained.

"This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps," Grip wrote in the update. That means the helicopter was "operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken."

Also at c|net

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Asahi Linux Dev Reveals 'M1RACLES' Flaw in Apple M1, Pokes Fun at Similar Flaws

Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he's gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public.

Martin's executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: "A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon 'M1' chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. [...] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision." (Emphasis his.)

He also noted that this was the result of an intentional decision on Apple's part. "Basically, Apple decided to break the ARM spec by removing a mandatory feature, because they figured they'd never need to use that feature for macOS," he explained. "And then it turned out that removing that feature made it much harder for existing OSes to mitigate this vulnerability." The company would have to make a change on the silicon level with its followup to the M1 to mitigate this flaw.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof.:

The hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system.

And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in South Korea and Japan showed that the hydra periodically drops into a rest state that meets the essential criteria for sleep.

On the face of it, that might seem improbable. For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep's connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people's daily experience attest to human sleep's connection to the brain.

But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged. Researchers have noticed that molecules produced by muscles and some other tissues outside the nervous system can regulate sleep. Sleep affects metabolism pervasively in the body, suggesting that its influence is not exclusively neurological. And a body of work that's been growing quietly but consistently for decades has shown that simple organisms with less and less brain spend significant time doing something that looks a lot like sleep. Sometimes their behavior has been pigeonholed as only "sleeplike," but as more details are uncovered, it has become less and less clear why that distinction is necessary.

It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep's original role, buried billions of years back in life's history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.

takyon writes:

Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up To 14 GB/s

Today Marvell is announcing the first NVMe SSD controllers to support PCIe 5.0, and a new branding strategy for Marvell's storage controllers. The new SSD controllers are the first under the umbrella of Marvell's Bravera brand, which will also encompass HDD controllers and other storage accelerator products. The Bravera SC5 family of PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers will consist of two controller models: the 8-channel MV-SS1331 and the 16-channel MV-SS1333.

These new SSD controllers roughly double the performance available from PCIe 4.0 SSDs, meaning sequential read throughput hits 14 GB/s and random read performance of around 2M IOPS. To reach this level of performance while staying within the power and thermal limits of common enterprise SSD form factors, Marvell has had to improve power efficiency by 40% over their previous generation SSD controllers. That goes beyond the improvement that can be gained simply from smaller fab process nodes, so Marvell has had to significantly alter the architecture of their controllers. The Bravera SC5 controllers still include a mix of Arm cores (Cortex-R8, Cortex-M7 and a Cortex-M3), but now includes much more fixed-function hardware to handle the basic tasks of the controller with high throughput and consistently low latency.

Top-of-the-line PCIe 4.0 controllers from Phison and Silicon Motion are capable of 7.4 GB/s of sequential reads.

Related: Marvell Looking to Integrate Machine Learning Engines Onto SSD Controllers
Marvell Announces ThunderX3, an ARM Server CPU With 96 Cores, 384 Threads
Marvell ThunderX3 ARM Server CPU Will Have Up to 60 Cores Per Die, with 96-Core Dual-Die Option
Silicon Motion Launches PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Controllers

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ex-official who revealed UFO project accuses Pentagon of 'disinformation' campaign

The former Pentagon official who went public about reports of UFOs has filed a complaint with the agency's inspector general claiming a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out — including accusing a top official of threatening to tell people he was "crazy," according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Lue Elizondo, a career counterintelligence specialist who was assigned in 2008 to work for a Pentagon program that investigated reports of "unmanned aerial phenomena," filed the 64-page complaint to the independent watchdog on May 3 and has met several times with investigators, according to his legal team.

The claim that the government is trying to discredit him comes weeks before the director of national intelligence and the Pentagon are expected to deliver an unclassified report to Congress about UFOs and the government's strategy for investigating such encounters. The report is expected to include a detailed accounting of the agencies, personnel and surveillance systems that gather and analyze the data.

"What he is saying is there are certain individuals in the Defense Department who in fact were attacking him and lying about him publicly, using the color of authority of their offices to disparage him and discredit him and were interfering in his ability to seek and obtain gainful employment out in the world," said Daniel Sheehan, Elizondo's attorney. "And also threatening his security clearance."

Pentagon UFO videos.

Previously:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO
The US Navy is Drafting New Rules to Report UFO Sightings
US Navy Spokesman Acknowledges UFO Videos
The Pentagon Releases Official Footage of UFOs. No, Seriously!
The Pentagon Has Continued to Investigate UFOs Under Renamed Program
You Can Now Easily Download All CIA UFO Documents to Date

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Giant tortoise thought extinct 100 years ago is living in Galapagos, Ecuador says:

The Galapagos National Park is preparing an expedition to search for more of the giant tortoises in an attempt to save the species.

The turtle was found two years ago on Fernandina Island, one of the youngest and most pristine in the archipelago, during a joint expedition between the Galapagos National Park and the Galapagos Conservancy.

Scientists from Yale University then identified it as the Chelonoidis phantasticus species, which had been considered extinct more than a century ago.

"Yale University revealed the results of genetic studies and the respective DNA comparison that was made with a specimen extracted in 1906," the Galapagos Park said in a statement.

Previously: Ecuador Releases 201 Tortoises on Galápagos Island of Santa Fe.

Also see the Wikipedia entry on Lonesome George.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Vulnerability in VMware product has severity rating of 9.8 out of 10:

Data centers around the world have a new concern to contend with—a remote code vulnerability in a widely used VMware product.

The security flaw, which VMware disclosed and patched on Tuesday, resides in the vCenter Server, a tool used for managing virtualization in large data centers. vCenter Server is used to administer VMware's vSphere and ESXi host products, which by some rankings are the first and second most popular virtualization solutions on the market. Enlyft, a site that provides business intelligence, shows that more than 43,000 organizations use vSphere.

[...] "The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a remote code execution vulnerability due to lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN Health Check plug-in, which is enabled by default in vCenter Server," Tuesday's advisory stated. "VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Critical severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 9.8... A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Court orders Royal Dutch Shell to cut net emissions by 45%:

A Dutch court has ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by net 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels in a landmark case brought by climate activist groups.

[...] The Hague District Court ruled that the Anglo-Dutch energy giant has a duty of care to reduce emissions and that its current reduction plans were not concrete enough.

The decision could set a precedent for similar cases against polluting multinationals around the world. Activists gathered outside the courtroom erupted into cheers as the decision was read out loud.

"The climate won today," said Roger Cox, a lawyer for the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, which was one of the organizations behind the case.

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Tired of Boring CAPTCHAs, This Developer Created a Doom-Themed One:

Not all CAPTCHA tests need to be boring. A web developer in Spain has decided to create one revolving around the classic PC game Doom.

The developer, Miquel Camps Orteza, uploaded his creation to his GitHub page. To prove you're a human, and not a bot, the test asks you to shoot four "imps" from Doom using a handgun.

What ensues is a simple, but fun mini-game. There are no moving sprites; the monsters and background are rendered in static 2D images. Nevertheless, the CAPTCHA test is loaded with the game's music and gunshot sound effects to help recreate the feel of playing the original Doom.

If you gun down all four imps in the time allotted, you'll pass the test. If not, play again.  Try it below. (Note: The music is loud, but it will stop once you solve the puzzle.)

[...] "My CAPTCHA about Doom only validates from user-side (client). There is no backend to a server to validate the user request," he added. "For [someone] who can code, they can see how easy it is to validate the CAPTCHA."

[...] Anyone can also freely incorporate his Doom-themed CAPTCHA test into a website form.

Original Submission