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New Water Treatment Technology Could Fix Mars Soil and Earth Soil:

UC Riverside engineers have developed a catalyst to remove a dangerous chemical from water on Earth that could also make Martian soil safer for agriculture and help produce oxygen for human Mars explorers.

Perchlorate, a negative ion consisting of one chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms, occurs naturally in some soils on Earth, and is especially abundant in Martian soil. As a powerful oxidizer, perchlorate is also manufactured and used in solid rocket fuel, fireworks, munitions, airbag initiators for vehicles, matches and signal flares. It is a byproduct in some disinfectants and herbicides.

Because of its ubiquity in both soil and industrial goods, perchlorate is a common water contaminant that causes certain thyroid disorders. Perchlorate bioaccumulates in plant tissues and a large amount of perchlorate found in Martian soil could make food grown there unsafe to eat, limiting the potential for human settlements on Mars. Perchlorate in Martian dust could also be hazardous to explorers. Current methods of removing perchlorate from water require either harsh conditions or a multistep enzymatic process to lower the oxidation state of the chlorine element into the harmless chloride ion.

Journal Reference:
Changxu Ren, Peng Yang, Jiaonan Sun, et al. A Bioinspired Molybdenum Catalyst for Aqueous Perchlorate Reduction, Journal of the American Chemical Society (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c00595)

Original Submission

Despite all the sterling work put in by malware writers, scammers and whatnot to teach people not to trust computers, people still need to learn that reading or finding something on a computer doesn't automatically make it true. And this also applies to people whose job is find stuff on computers.

Digital forensics experts prone to bias, study shows (The Guardian)

Ian Walden, a professor of information and communications law at Queen Mary, University of London, said there was a tendency to believe the machine. "This study shows that we need to be careful about electronic evidence," Walden said. "Not only should we not always trust the machine, we can't always trust the person that interprets the machine."

[...] The study, [upcoming] , found that the examiners who had been led to believe the suspect might be innocent documented the fewest traces of evidence in the files, while those who knew of a potential motive identified the most traces.

With caching by the browser, hidden and invisible text on web pages, data retrieved by malware and probably many more ways, how can you show the user was even aware of something "suspicious" found on their computer. Even a small disk or SSD is far too big for one person to be able to know all the data on it.

Journal Reference:
Nina Sunde, Itiel E. Drorb. A hierarchy of expert performance (HEP) applied to digital forensics: Reliability and biasability in digital forensics decision making [open], Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation (DOI: 10.1016/j.fsidi.2021.301175)

Original Submission

Eratosthenes wrote in with a submission which inspired this story.

As science advances, does Ockham’s Razor still apply?:

William of Ockham is the medieval philosopher who gave us what is perhaps the world's only metaphysical knife. Raised by Franciscan friars and educated at Oxford in the late 13th century, he focused his energies on what can only be described as esoterica, topics spanning theology and politics. In service of this occupation, he clashed with Pope John XXII and was excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

Ockham's exploration of the philosophical concept of nominalism and his preference for parsimony in logical arguments gave rise to the concept of Ockham's Razor (sometimes spelled "Occam"). Stated plainly, the Razor asserts that if two models equally explain a scenario, the simpler of the two is more likely.

[...] In his book "The Demon-Haunted World," the late Carl Sagan introduces a thought experiment of a dragon in his garage. When Sagan convinces someone to come look at the dragon, the visitor opens the garage door and finds nothing there. Sagan then counters that "she's an invisible dragon," and, naturally, cannot be seen.

Here's the AMD RDNA 2-powered Navi 23 GPU From 2021 Tesla Model S

upstart writes:

Here's the AMD RDNA 2-powered Navi 23 GPU from 2021 Tesla Model S:

Tesla announced its refreshed 2021 Model S electric vehicle teasing that it had 10 TFLOPs of compute performance, but now we know it is a custom AMD RDNA 2-based Navi 23 GPU and its GPU block diagram.

The AMD Navi 23 GPU should be used inside of the 2021 Tesla Model S for its entertainment and navigation systems, with GDDR6 memory (Samsung 16Gb chips) with 8GB in total. The Navi 23 GPU has 10 TFLOPs of performance, which is virtually identical to that of the Sony PlayStation 5 console and its semi-custom AMD chip.

Navi 23 has 32 Compute Units (2048 Stream Processors) with GPU clocks of at least 2.44GHz, while the 8GB of GDDR6 finds itself on a 128-bit memory bus -- making the memory bus of Tesla's new 2021 infotainment system similar to Microsoft's slower Xbox Series S console.

takyon writes:

Update: Google Used a New AI to Design Its Next AI Chip

Update, 9 June 2021: Google reports this week in the journal Nature that its next generation AI chip, succeeding the TPU version 4, was designed in part using an AI that researchers described to IEEE Spectrum last year. They've made some improvements since Spectrum last spoke to them. The AI now needs fewer than six hours to generate chip floorplans that match or beat human-produced designs at power consumption, performance, and area. Expert humans typically need months of iteration to do this task.

Original blog post from 23 March 2020 follows:

There's been a lot of intense and well-funded work developing chips that are specially designed to perform AI algorithms faster and more efficiently. The trouble is that it takes years to design a chip, and the universe of machine learning algorithms moves a lot faster than that. Ideally you want a chip that's optimized to do today's AI, not the AI of two to five years ago. Google's solution: have an AI design the AI chip.

"We believe that it is AI itself that will provide the means to shorten the chip design cycle, creating a symbiotic relationship between hardware and AI, with each fueling advances in the other," they write in a paper describing the work that posted today to Arxiv.

"We have already seen that there are algorithms or neural network architectures that... don't perform as well on existing generations of accelerators, because the accelerators were designed like two years ago, and back then these neural nets didn't exist," says Azalia Mirhoseini, a senior research scientist at Google. "If we reduce the design cycle, we can bridge the gap."

Journal References:
1.) Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mustafa Yazgan, et al. A graph placement methodology for fast chip design, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03544-w)
2.) Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini. Placement Optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08445)

Related: Google Reveals Homegrown "TPU" For Machine Learning
Google Pulls Back the Covers on Its First Machine Learning Chip
Hundred Petaflop Machine Learning Supercomputers Now Available on Google Cloud
Google Replaced Millions of Intel Xeons with its Own "Argos" Video Transcoding Units

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Roller Skating, Wile E. Coyote-Style | Hackaday:

Today's tidbit is that just anybody (including [Ian Charnas]) can exchange money for jet engines, no questions asked. Scary, huh? So once [Ian] secured the cutest little engine, he took a poll regarding possible uses for it. Jetpack rollerskating won, that's obvious enough. So let's get into those details.

In order to run the thing and test the thrust a bit before strapping it on his back, [Ian] went about this the smart way and welded together a sliding stand. And he didn't use just any old Jansport backpack, he welded together a frame and roll cage for the engine and attached it to a full-body harness. There's also a heat shield to keep his backside from catching fire.

Read the linked story and then watch the well-crafted (and funny) video in YouTube where he documents parts procurement (including getting hold of jet fuel), the build process, safety precautions, and actual test runs. Not only did he give it a try, but also obtained help from roller derby aficionados who we able to double his top speed!

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD patents a task transition method between BIG and LITTLE processors

The next decade will no longer be dictated by the number of cores, but rather the processor's fabrication node, packaging method, and power efficiency. A big role will also be played by heterogeneous architectures.

Later this year Intel will launch its 12th Gen Core Alder Lake processors for desktop and mobile systems. This is not the first architecture to implement Intel's Hybrid Technology (the first was Lakefield). This is a marketing term for high-efficiency (small) and high-performance (big) core implementation. Most tech users should be more familiar with the term big.LITTLE, which is actually an old name for ARM's heterogeneous computing architecture, now replaced by DynamIQ.

While heterogeneous CPUs have been used in mobile devices for years, this technology isn't exactly a domain of modern desktop PCs, where power efficiency is not exactly the biggest concern. The next-generation Windows operating system is rumored to feature a new task scheduling method for such heterogeneous computing, which might just align with Intel's Alder Lake launch.

While AMD has not really confirmed it is working on such [a] processor design, the leaks have brought us a new codename 'Strix Point', which is associated with [a] Zen5 based APU, supposedly also featuring smaller cores known as Zen4D. The latter is a codename of the smaller core.

Just two days ago, an AMD patent on 'task transition between heterogeneous processors' has been published. This patent was originally filed in December 2019, which suggests AMD has clearly been working on this technology for a long time. The patent covers the most important engineering problem of heterogeneous computing, which is how to schedule or transition tasks between different types of cores.

upstart writes:

Nikkei Asia:

Andy Wang, an IT engineer at a Shanghai-based gaming company, occasionally felt a pang of guilt about his job.

Most of his hours were spent on a piece of surveillance software called DiSanZhiYan, or "Third Eye." The system was installed on the laptop of every colleague at his company to track their screens in real time, recording their chats, their browsing activity and every document edit they made.

Working from their floor in a downtown high-rise, the startup's hundreds of employees were constantly, uncomfortably aware of being under Third Eye's intent gaze.

The software would also automatically flag "suspicious behavior" such as visiting job-search sites or video streaming platforms. "Efficiency" reports would be generated weekly, summarizing their time spent by website and application.

"Bosses would check the reports regularly," Wang said. Farther down the line, that could skew workers' prospects for promotions and pay rises. They could also be used as evidence when the company looked to fire certain people, he added.

Even Wang himself was not exempt. High-definition surveillance cameras were installed around the floor, including in his office, and a receptionist would check the footage every day to monitor how long each employee spent on their lunch break, he said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA Selects New Science Investigations for Future Moon Deliveries:

As NASA continues plans for multiple commercial deliveries to the Moon’s surface per year, the agency has selected three new scientific investigation payload suites to advance understanding of Earth’s nearest neighbor. Two of the payload suites will land on the far side of the Moon, a first for NASA. All three investigations will receive rides to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative, part of the agency’s Artemis approach.

[...] Lunar Vertex, one of the three selections, is a joint lander and rover payload suite slated for delivery to Reiner Gamma – one of the most distinctive and enigmatic natural features on the Moon, known as a lunar swirl. Scientists don’t fully understand what lunar swirls are or how they form, but they know they are closely related to anomalies associated with the Moon’s magnetic field. The Lunar Vertex rover will make detailed surface measurements of the Moon’s magnetic field using an onboard magnetometer.

[...] NASA also has selected two separate payload suites for delivery in tandem to Schrödinger basin, which is a large impact crater on the far side of the Moon near the lunar South Pole. The Farside Seismic Suite (FSS), one of the two payloads to be delivered to Schrödinger basin, will carry two seismometers: the vertical Very Broadband seismometer and the Short Period sensor. NASA measured seismic activity on the near side of the Moon as part of the Apollo program, but FSS will return the agency’s first seismic data from the far side of the Moon—a potential future destination for Artemis astronauts.

[...] The Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite (LITMS), the other payload headed to Schrödinger basin, is a suite of two instruments: the Lunar Instrumentation for Thermal Exploration with Rapidity pneumatic drill and the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder. This payload suite will investigate the heat flow and electrical conductivity of the lunar interior in Schrödinger basin, giving an in-depth look at the Moon’s internal mechanical and heat flow.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How far back are your first memories? You may have been younger than you think:

A new study from a Newfoundland researcher suggests that our earliest memories could be from as far back as 2.5 years of age.

Dr. Carole Peterson, a psychology professor at Memorial University's Faculty of Science, reviewed decades of data from interviews conducted at her laboratory over the last two decades. She published her findings in in the journal Memory last month.

[...] She found that the average age of the earliest memory is around 2.5 years old, challenging the previous notion that our earliest memories start at age 3.5.

[...] In previous studies, Peterson and her colleagues interviewed children and young adults about their earliest memories and compared their answers with interviews with their parents. As the children aged and years had passed, the researchers found that the children would give a later age were when discussing memories, often from before they were four years old.

Journal Reference:
Carole Peterson. What is your earliest memory? It depends [open], Memory (DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2021.1918174)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How This Supercomputer Will Use A.I. to Map Dark Energy:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the new Perlmutter supercomputer, recently installed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, California, will begin working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey project this summer. The project aims to learn more about dark energy, a hypothesized type of energy that accounts for a whopping 68% of the universe. To do this, the DESI instrument at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona will observe the night sky with 5,000 spectroscopic "eyes" which will record the light from 35 million galaxies.

To analyze all of that data, researchers will use the Perlmutter supercomputer. Named after Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, the computer is a significant upgrade over the lab's previous supercomputer, Cori, and is predicted to reach 100 petaFLOPS of processing power.

[...] DESI is expected to begin its five-year survey later this year.

It will be interesting to see how far along the installation is when the new Top500 supercomputer list comes out in a couple weeks.

Original Submission

[2021-06-14 02:24:41 UTC; update 2: We made a decision to accept Linode's offer of moving up our migration of fluorine. It appears the migration has completed successfully. YAY!]

[2021-06-14 00:25:32 UTC; update 1: hydrogen appears to have successfully migrated. We had a brief 503 on the site until I bounced varnish. The site seems to be fine, now.--Bytram]

martyb writes:

Prologue:
First off please accept my sincere wish for a happy Father's Day to all our dads in the community! (It is celebrated next Sunday in 90 countries.)

Also, I am happy to report a surge in participation on the site over the past month. I've seen increases in story submissions, subscriptions[*], and participation (comments, moderations, etc.) Community++

[*] NB: I was successful in crediting users for their subscriptions on the site after the server crash. Unfortunately, that failed to account for the dollar amount of their subscriptions in our tracking database table which is used to source our progress against our funding goal. I have a plan for getting those updates in place, but want to run it past other members of staff to make sure everything is accounted for before making any changes.

Read on for the rest of the site's news, or just wait and a new story will be out before too long.

takyon writes:

The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete

When the human genome was first deemed "complete" in 2000, the news was met with great international fanfare. The two rival groups vying to finish the genome first—one a large government-led consortium, the other an underdog private company—agreed to declare joint success. They shook hands at the White House. Bill Clinton presided. Tony Blair beamed in from London. "We are standing at an extraordinary moment in scientific history," one prominent scientist declared when those genomes were published. "It's as though we have climbed to the top of the Himalayas."

But actually, the human genome was not complete. Neither group had reached the real summit. As even the contemporary coverage acknowledged, that version was more of a rough draft, riddled with long stretches where the DNA sequence was still fuzzy or missing. The private company soon pivoted and ended its human-genome project, though scientists with the public consortium soldiered on. In 2003, with less glitz but still plenty of headlines, the human genome was declared complete once again.

But actually, the human genome was still not complete. Even the revised draft was missing about 8 percent of the genome. These were the hardest-to-sequence regions, full of repeating letters that were simply impossible to read with the technology at the time.

Finally, this May, a separate group of scientists quietly posted a preprint online describing what can be deemed the first truly complete human genome—a readout of all 3.055 billion letters across 23 human chromosomes. The group, led by relatively young researchers, came together on Slack from around the world to finish the task abandoned 20 years ago. There was no splashy White House announcement this time, no talk of summiting the Himalayas; the paper itself is still under review for official publication in a journal. But the lack of pomp belies what an achievement this is: To complete the human genome, these scientists had to figure out how to map its most mysterious and neglected repeating regions, which may now finally get their scientific due.

Telomere-to-telomere consortium
CHM13 T2T v1.1 (NCBI)

See also: A complete human genome sequence is close: how scientists filled in the gaps
Researchers claim they have sequenced the entirety of the human genome — including the missing parts
The Entire Human Genome Finally Sequenced! Here's What This Means (11m21s video)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Human Brain Is More Like A Testicle Than Any Other Organ:

Hailed as the most complex and exquisite structure in the universe, the human brain is generally considered to be without equal, yet new research suggests it may have finally met its match in the form of the lowly testicle. According to a study published today in the journal Royal Society Open Biology, our brains have a striking number of genes and proteins in common with the male gonads, and are in fact more akin to a goolie than any other organ in the body.

In spite of its many talents, the brain has long been suspected of maintaining a hidden bond with the testicle, with previous research revealing links between intelligence and semen quality. Yet the extent of the kinship between these two wrinkly blobs has never been fully understood.

To shine some light on the issue, the study authors compared the proteomes of 33 different tissue types, including the brain, testis, heart, ovaries, liver, prostate, cervix, and kidneys. Their results indicated that the brain is made up of 14,315 different proteins while the testis consists of 15,687, with the two tissues sharing an incredible 13,442 proteins in common.

[...] And in case you’re wondering, this also applies to the brains of women, which are just as ball-like as those of men.

Journal Reference:
Bárbara Matos, Stephen J. Publicover, Luis Filipe C. Castro, et al. Brain and testis: more alike than previously thought?, Open Biology (DOI: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsob.200322)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sold! Bidder pays $28m for spare seat on space flight with Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has sold the spare seat of the company's 20 July New Shepard space rocket blast-off for $28m, the company announced on Saturday.

With 20 active bidders starting at $4.8m during the 10-minute auction, bids escalated in the final three minutes of the sale. Initially, some 7,600 people registered to bid from 159 countries, the company said. The winner, whose identity has not been announced, will join the Amazon founder Bezos and his brother Mark on the flight.

The 11-minute, automated flight – the company's 16th but first carrying humans – will lift off from Van Horn, Texas. The capsule will carry as many as six passengers, though the company has not yet revealed who else will be onboard.

[...] The company has said the auction price will be donated to Blue Origin's foundation, Club for the Future, whose stated mission "is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) and to help invent the future of life in space".

Also at The Verge and BBC.

Previously: Jeff Bezos' Vision for Space: One Trillion Population in the Solar System
Jeff Bezos Will Fly on Blue Origin's First Human Spaceflight

Related: Branson May Make a Last-Ditch Effort to Beat Bezos Into Space

Original Submission