SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New 'Swiss Army knife' cleans up water pollution:

Phosphate pollution in rivers, lakes and other waterways has reached dangerous levels, causing algae blooms that starve fish and aquatic plants of oxygen. Meanwhile, farmers worldwide are coming to terms with a dwindling reserve of phosphate fertilizers that feed half the world's food supply.

Inspired by Chicago's many nearby bodies of water, a Northwestern University-led team has developed a way to repeatedly remove and reuse phosphate from polluted waters. The researchers liken the development to a "Swiss Army knife" for pollution remediation as they tailor their membrane to absorb and later release other pollutants.

[...] Phosphorus underpins both the world's food system and all life on earth. Every living organism on the planet requires it: phosphorous is in cell membranes, the scaffolding of DNA and in our skeleton. Though other key elements like oxygen and nitrogen can be found in the atmosphere, phosphorous has no analog. The small fraction of usable phosphorous comes from the Earth's crust, which takes thousands or even millions of years to weather away. And our mines are running out.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

New 'superfood' for bees may be able to help detoxify hives contaminated with pesticides:

TORONTO -- To bee or not to bee? Researchers have synthesized a particle as small as pollen, which, when fed to bees, may be able to help them to detoxify hives damaged by pesticides in order to protect the insects.

"This is a low-cost, scalable solution which we hope will be a first step to address the insecticide toxicity issue and contribute to the protection of managed pollinators," Minglin Ma, an associate professor at Cornell University and senior author of the research, said in a press release.

[...] The wax and pollen in around 98 per cent of commercial bee hives in the U.S. have been contaminated by various pesticides, according to the release, and pesticides cause beekeepers to lose around a third of their hives annually.

[...] "We have a solution whereby beekeepers can feed their bees our microparticle products in pollen patties or in a sugar syrup, and it allows them to detoxify the hive of any pesticides that they might find," James Webb said in the release. Webb is a co-author of the paper and CEO of Beemmunity, a new company hoping to use this technology to assist commercial beekeepers.

The new microparticles are formulated to battle specific pesticides known as organophosphate-based insecticides, which make up a third of the market, according to the release.

Journal Reference:
Jing Chen, James Webb, Kaavian Shariati, et al. Pollen-inspired enzymatic microparticles to reduce organophosphate toxicity in managed pollinators, Nature Food (DOI: 10.1038/s43016-021-00282-0)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

QUIC is Now RFC 9000:

QUIC is a new latency-reducing, reliable, and secure internet transport protocol that is slated to replace TCP, the most commonly used transport today.

[...] The IETF just published QUIC as RFC 9000, supported by RFC 9001, RFC 9002, and RFC 8999. That means QUIC version 1 is officially formalized, and QUIC deployments will now move away from using temporary draft versions to the newly minted version 1. (HTTP/3, the version of HTTP that runs on QUIC, is following closely behind, and should be published soon.)

QUIC Version 1 is Live on Cloudflare:

The killer feature of QUIC, however, is that it is deployable in reality. We are excited to announce that QUIC version 1, RFC 9000, is available to all Cloudflare customers. We started with a limited beta in 2018, we made it general availability in 2019, and we've been tracking new document revisions every step of the way. In that time we've seen User-Agents like browsers join us in this merry march and prove that this thing works on the Internet.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A Driverless Truck Got a Shipment Cross-Country 10 Hours Faster Than a Human Driver:

Last month TuSimple, a transportation company focused on self-driving technology for heavy-duty trucks, shipped a truckload of watermelons from Arizona to Oklahoma using the truck's autonomous system for over 80 percent of the journey. The starting point was Nogales, at Arizon's southern end right on the border with Mexico. A human driver took the wheel for the first 60 miles or so, from Nogales to Tucson—but from there the truck went on auto-pilot, and not just for a little while. It drove itself all the way to Dallas, 950 miles to the east (there was a human safety driver on board the whole time, but not controlling the truck).

[...] From Dallas, the human driver took over again and drove the final 200 miles to a distribution center in Oklahoma City. From there, the watermelons were inspected—nothing to see here, they were in better shape than they would've been with a human driving the whole time—then distributed to stores all over the state.

Fnord666 writes:

It looks like the launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope has slipped again. It was slated to launch this coming Halloween but now it will be at mid-November at the earliest.

According to Ars Technica:

Last summer, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) set an October 31, 2021, launch date for the $10 billion telescope. The instrument, which is the largest science observatory ever placed into space, will launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana. Now, however, three considerations have pushed the launch into November or possibly early December.

[...] The launch campaign, which begins when the telescope arrives in French Guiana, requires 55 days. Asked whether this means that Webb will not launch until mid-November at the earliest, Zurbuchen said this assessment was correct.

Engadget added:

A delay of a few weeks is not much, considering the initial launch timeframe was around 2007. Still, there are reasons for optimism. Pushing back the launch by weeks rather than months or years is an indication that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter for the successor to Hubble.

Previously:

1. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Passes Crucial Launch-Simulation Tests
2. NASA's Webb to Examine Objects in the Graveyard of the Solar System
3. NASA Ominously Chooses Halloween 2021 to Launch Long-Delayed Space Telescope
4. James Webb Space Telescope Will "Absolutely" Not Launch in March
5. New Exoplanet Life Detection Method for James Webb Telescope

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Meat Producer JBS Says Expects Most Plants Working Wednesday:

A ransomware attack on the world's largest meat processing company disrupted production around the world just weeks after a similar incident shut down a U.S. oil pipeline.

Brazil's JBS SA, however, said late Tuesday that it had made "significant progress" in dealing with the cyberattack and expected the "vast majority" of its plants to be operating on Wednesday.

"Our systems are coming back online and we are not sparing any resources to fight this threat," Andre Nogueira, the CEO of JBS USA said in a statement.

[...] JBS is the second-largest producer of beef, pork and chicken in the U.S. If it were to shut down for even one day, the U.S. would lose almost a quarter of its beef-processing capacity, or the equivalent of 20,000 beef cows, according to Trey Malone, an assistant professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

JBS said the cyberattack affected servers supporting its operations in North America and Australia. The company said it notified authorities and engaged third-party experts to resolve the problem as soon as possible. Backup servers weren't affected.

Malone said the disruption could further raise meat prices ahead of summer barbecues. Even before the attack, U.S. meat prices were rising due to coronavirus shutdowns, bad weather and high plant absenteeism. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said it expects beef prices to climb 1% to 2% this year, poultry as much as 1.5% and pork between by from 2% and 3%.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Amazon Faced 75,000 Arbitration Demands. Now It Says: Fine, Sue Us:

Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don't allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

Now, [Amazon.com] Inc. is bucking that trend. With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company's Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission.

The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs' lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies.

Amazon's decision to drop its arbitration requirement is the starkest example yet of how companies are responding to plaintiffs' lawyers pushing the arbitration system to its limits.

Previously:
'Scared to Death' by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1

Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.

[...] The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they have shipped over 600k Raspberry Pi Pico boards this year and orders for another 700k. More creators and other businesses meanwhile have been seeking to build out their own wares using the RP2040 chip, which has now led the group to offering the chip for $1 USD in single-unit sales. By this autumn they expect "serious volume" of the RP2040 chips for those looking to build out their own wares with this tasty silicon.

Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1

Also at CNX Software. Alasdair Allan says:

Today's announcement is for single unit quantity only. We're still figuring out what reel-scale pricing will look like in the autumn, but we expect it to be significantly lower than that.

Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Employees are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working from Home:

The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who've embraced remote work as the new normal.

A six-minute meeting drove Portia Twidt to quit her job.

She'd taken the position as a research compliance specialist in February, enticed by promises of remote work. Then came the prodding to go into the office. Meeting invites piled up.

The final straw came a few weeks ago: the request for an in-person gathering, scheduled for all of 360 seconds. Twidt got dressed, dropped her two kids at daycare, drove to the office, had the brief chat and decided she was done.

"I had just had it," said Twidt, 33, who lives in Marietta, Georgia.

With the coronavirus pandemic receding for every vaccine that reaches an arm, the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who've embraced remote work as the new normal.

takyon writes:

GCC 9.4 Compiler Released With 190+ Bug Fixes

GCC 9.4 is now available with this wide range of "fixes for regressions and serious bugs". No new features are provided by GCC 9.4 but for anything new you'll want to move up to the current GCC 11 series for the latest processor support, shiny new C/C++ features, and other improvements.

GCC 12 is the next feature release in development for debut next year.

GCC To No Longer Require Copyright Assignment To The Free Software Foundation

GCC has long required copyright assignment to the FSF for any patches and that's been an issue for some. Especially these days with the FSF coming under fire and even some talking of possible forks to the GNU Compiler Collection or being able to move this open-source compiler further away from the FSF, the steering committee decided to no longer require the controversial copyright assignment.

That copyright assignment (and the GPLv2 to GPLv3 change) blocked Apple from contributing to GCC a decade ago. The copyright assignment has also blocked other contributions to GCC in the past by other organizations.

GCC will continue to be developed under the GPLv3 but no longer require the FSF copyright assignment. Instead, contributors can use the Developer Certificate of Origin with a Signed-off-by tag in their Git messages.

Update to GCC copyright assignment policy

[*] (Because there's bound to be at least one person wondering) GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection:

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

The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, and D, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++,...). GCC was originally written as the compiler for the GNU operating system. The GNU system was developed to be 100% free software, free in the sense that it respects the user's freedom.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

The US military is starting to get really interested in Starship:

As part of last week's federal budget rollout, a process during which the White House proposes funding levels for fiscal year 2022, the US Air Force released its "justification book" to compare its current request to past budget data. The 462-page book contains a lot of information about how the Air Force spends its approximately $200 billion budget.

For those tracking the development of SpaceX's ambitious Starship vehicle, there is an interesting tidbit tucked away on page 305, under the heading of "Rocket Cargo" (see .pdf). The Air Force plans to invest $47.9 million into this project in the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1.

"The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity," the document states.

Starship, more than just an expensive ride. Quick military equipment delivery en route.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

30-year stellar survey cracks mysteries of galaxy's giant planets:

Current and former astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have wrapped up a massive collaborative study that set out to determine if most solar systems in the universe are similar to our own. With the help of W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, the 30-year planetary census sought to find where giant planets tend to reside relative to their host stars.

In our solar system, the giant planets—Jupiter and Saturn—are found in the chilly outer regions, while smaller planets tend to orbit closer to the Sun. Earth lives in an intermediate tropical zone well-suited to life, at a distance of 1 AU (astronomical unit) from the Sun. Jupiter is about 5 AU from the Sun, and Saturn is at 9 AU. An AU, the distance from the Earth to our Sun, is about 93 million miles.

"Dynamically speaking, Jupiter and Saturn are the VIPs—Very Important Planets—of the solar system," said IfA Parrent Postdoctoral Fellow Lauren Weiss. "They are thought to have shaped the assembly of the terrestrial planets, potentially stunting the growth of Mars and slingshotting water-bearing comets toward Earth."

martyb writes:

Escape From Oblivion: Innovative Experiment Shows How the Brain Reboots After Deep Anesthesia:

Millions of surgical procedures performed each year would not be possible without the aid of general anesthesia, the miraculous medical ability to turn off consciousness in a reversible and controllable way.

Researchers are using this powerful tool to better understand how the brain reconstitutes consciousness and cognition after disruptions caused by sleep, medical procedures requiring anesthesia, and neurological dysfunctions such as coma.

[...] In the study, 30 healthy adults were anesthetized for three hours. Their brain activity was measured with EEG and their sleep-wake activity was measured before and after the experiment. Each participant was given cognitive tests—designed to measure reaction speed, memory, and other functions—before receiving anesthesia, right after the return of consciousness, and then every 30 minutes thereafter.

[...] After the anesthetic was discontinued and participants regained consciousness, cognitive testing began. A second control group of study participants, who did not receive general anesthesia and stayed awake, also completed tests over the same time period.

Analyzing EEG and test performance, the researchers found that recovery of consciousness and cognition is a process that unfolds over time, not all at once. To the investigators' surprise, one of the brain functions that came online first was abstract problem solving, controlled by the prefrontal cortex, whereas other functions such as reaction time and attention took longer to recover.

The EEG readings revealed that the frontal regions of the brain were especially active around the time of recovery. Importantly, within three hours of being deeply anesthetized for a prolonged period of time, participants were able to recover cognitive function to approximately the same level as the group that stayed awake during that time. Furthermore, their sleep schedule in the days after the experiment did not appear to be affected.

Journal Reference:
George A Mashour, Ben JA Palanca, Mathias Basner, et al. Recovery of consciousness and cognition after general anesthesia in humans, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.59525)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD's Ryzen 5000G APUs now have a release date for the DIY market: August 5th. The 8-core Ryzen 7 5700G has a suggested price of $359, while the 6-core Ryzen 5 5600G will be $259.

AMD announced the Radeon RX 6800M, 6700M, and 6600M discrete GPUs for laptops, promising better performance, efficiency, and battery-constrained performance. The Radeon RX 6800M is a 40 compute unit design (equivalent to the Radeon RX 6700 XT on desktop) with 12 GB of VRAM.

AMD biggest announcements were the introduction of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and the demonstration of a 3D chiplet design. FSR uses a spatial scaling algorithm to upscale game graphics for higher frame rates at a given resolution. The algorithm competes with Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), but will be released as open source and work with some older AMD GPUs, integrated graphics, as well as competing products from Nvidia and Intel (it was shown running on an Nvidia GTX 1060).

AMD CEO Lisa Su also showed off a modified, delidded Ryzen 9 5900X CPU prototype, with "3D V-Cache technology". It was identical to the standard 5900X with the exception of through-silicon via (TSV) stacked L3 cache. This allowed the 5900X prototype to have 192 MB of total L3 cache instead of 64 MB (96 MB per 8-core chiplet). AMD claims it can run games with an average of +15% performance (simply due to the larger cache size), and some version of this will appear in products that are starting production at the end of 2021.

Related: TSMC "5nm", "3nm", Stacked Silicon, and More

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Antibody from cold can neutralize COVID-19 and could lead to vaccine against all coronaviruses:

Both the common cold and SARS-CoV-2 fall under a family known as coronaviruses, which cause upper-respiratory tract illnesses.

However, it was believed that antibodies that react to ordinary coronaviruses didn't work against the virus that leads to COVID.

But in blood samples of COVID survivors, researchers found high levels of immune cells generated during the common cold that 'remember' diseases and are called back into action if the threat returns.

The team, from the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California, says the findings could help scientists develop a vaccine or antibody treatment that protects against all coronaviruses.

The team found the antibody is produced by a type of immune system cell known as a memory B cell.

Memory B cells lock onto the surface of invading pathogens and mark them for destruction by other immune cells.

They also can circulate in the bloodstream for years – even decades – and the immune system can call up on them if there is another infection.

[...] Results showed that levels of memory B cell antibodies were higher in blood samples of people who had been infected with COVID-19 than those who never had been.

Journal Reference:
Ge Song, Wan-ting He, Sean Callaghan, et al. Cross-reactive serum and memory B-cell responses to spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 and endemic coronavirus infection [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23074-3)

Original Submission