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upstart writes:

Giant goldfish problem in US lake prompts warning to pet owners:

A city in the US state of Minnesota has urged residents not to release their unwanted pet fish into the wild after finding huge goldfish in a lake.

[...] A goldfish kept in a home aquarium typically grows to about 2in (5.1cm) in length.

But once they are established in public waters, wildlife officials say, goldfish can grow far larger and be difficult to remove - reproducing rapidly and dominating native species.

In its warning, the city of Burnsville advised pet owners to "please consider other options for finding them a new home".

Wildlife officials have been dealing with a similar problem in nearby Carver County, where 50,000 goldfish were removed from a creek in October last year.

The removal was part of a three-year plan to study and manage the species, which have caused problems across the US.

[...] Large goldfish have been found in the UK's wild waters as well. In 2010, a British teenager pulled a 5lb (2.2kg), 16in fish from a lake in Dorset.

Wikipedia entry for goldfish.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

VPN servers seized by Ukrainian authorities weren’t encrypted:

Privacy-tools-seller Windscribe said it failed to encrypt company VPN servers that were recently confiscated by authorities in Ukraine, a lapse that made it possible for the authorities to impersonate Windscribe servers and capture and decrypt traffic passing through them.

The Ontario, Canada-based company said earlier this month that two servers hosted in Ukraine were seized as part of an investigation into activity that had occurred a year earlier. The servers, which ran the OpenVPN virtual private network software, were also configured to use a setting that was deprecated in 2018 after security research revealed vulnerabilities that could allow adversaries to decrypt data.

“On the disk of those two servers was an OpenVPN server certificate and its private key,” a Windscribe representative wrote in the July 8 post. “Although we have encrypted servers in high-sensitivity regions, the servers in question were running a legacy stack and were not encrypted. We are currently enacting our plan to address this.”

[...] By failing to follow standard industry practices, Windscribe largely negated [...] security guarantees. While the company attempted to play down the impact by laying out the requirements an attacker would have to satisfy to be successful, those conditions are precisely the ones VPNs are designed to protect against.

[...] It’s not clear how many active users the service has. The company’s Android app, however, lists more than 5 million installs, an indication that the user base is likely large.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla tops $1 billion in profit, delays Semi launch:

Tesla TSLA, +2.21% said it earned $1.14 billion, or $1.02 a share, in the second quarter, compared with $104 million, or 10 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted for one-time items, the company earned $1.45 a share.

Revenue rose 98% to $11.96 billion, from $6.04 billion a year ago, which the company pinned in part on “substantial growth” in vehicle sales.

[...] The chip shortage “remains quite serious,” Chief Executive Elon Musk said in a call after the results. “The chip supply is fundamentally the governing factor on our output,” and it’s hard to say how long it will last because it’s out of Tesla’s control, he said.

Tesla has used alternative chips, but that’s not just a matter of doing a swap, as new software then has to be rewritten, Musk said.

Besides the delay of the Semi launch to 2022, Musk and Tesla executives left vague the start of production of the Cybertruck, its much-awaited pickup, at the under-construction Austin, Texas, plant, saying only it would be later this year.

Production of the vehicle was expected for early 2021, and the Tesla Semi, revealed in 2017, has been delayed by a couple of years.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

United Arab Emirates is making its own fake rain to beat 44C heat:

The United Arab Emirates, parched from heatwaves and an arid climate, is testing new technology to zap clouds with electricity to artificially create rain.

Similar forms of cloud seeding have existing for decades. But the process has typically used salt flairs and has come with concerns about the environment, expenses and effectiveness, according to the Desert Research Institute and CNN.

So the UAE is now testing a new method that has drones fly into clouds to give them an electric shock to trigger rain production, the BBC and CNN have previously reported.

The project is getting renewed interest after the UAE's National Center of Meteorology recently published a series of videos on Instagram of heavy rain in parts of the country. Water gushed past trees, and cars drove on rain-soaked roads. The videos were accompanied by radar images of clouds tagged "#cloudseeding."

The Independent reports recent rain is part of the drone cloud seeding project.

[...] Water security remains one of the UAE's "main future challenges" as the country relies on groundwater for two-thirds of its water needs, according to the National Center of Meteorology website. The arid nation faces low rainfall level, high temperatures and high evaporation rates of surface water, the center says. Paired with increased demand due to high population growth, this puts the UAE in a precarious water security situation, according to the center.

But rain enhancement may "offer a viable, cost-effective supplement to existing water supplies," especially amid diminishing water resources across the globe, the center said.

"While most of us take free water for granted, we must remember that it is a precious and finite resource," according to the center.

[...] So far, rain enhancement projects have centered on the country's mountainous north-east regions, where cumulus clouds gather in the summer, according to the National Center of Meteorology website.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Outbreak of Untreatable, Drug-Resistant Superbug Fungus Unnerves Experts in 2 US Cities:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) discovered multiple instances of Candida Auris that were resistant to all medicines in two health institutions in Texas and a long-term care facility in Washington, D.C. for the first time.

According to researchers, a deadly, difficult-to-treat fungal infection spreading through nursing homes and hospitals across the United States is becoming even more dangerous. For the first time, the fungus, Candida Auris, was utterly impervious to all existing medication in several cases.

[...] The discovery, announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday, is a concerning step in the evolution of C. Auris, a hardy yeast infection first found in Japan in 2009 and spreading rapidly throughout the globe.

During the coronavirus pandemic, federal health officials believe the disease has expanded even farther, with overburdened hospitals and nursing homes unable to keep up with the surveillance and control procedures needed to manage local outbreaks.

According to the C.D.C.'s recent study, five out of over 120 cases of C. Auris were resistant to therapy.

[...] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not name the facilities where the novel infections occurred. Still, health officials said there was no apparent link between the outbreaks in Texas at a hospital and a long-term care facility that shared patients and in Washington, D.C. at a single long-term care center. Between January and April, epidemics occurred.

According to the C.D.C., about a third of infected patients died within 30 days, although officials said it was unclear if their deaths were caused by the fungus because they were already critically ill.

Original Submission

Will Approximation Drive Post-Moore's Law HPC Gains?:

“Hardware-based improvements are going to get more and more difficult,” said Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). [...] Thompson, speaking at Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2021, likely wasn’t wrong: the proximate death of Moore’s law has been a hot topic in the HPC community for a long time.

[...] Thompson opened with a graph of computing power utilized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over time. “Since the 1950s, there has been about a one trillion-fold increase in the amount of computing power being used in these models,” he said. But there was a problem: tracking a weather forecasting metric called mean absolute error (“When you make a prediction, how far off are you on that prediction?”), Thompson pointed out that “you actually need exponentially more computing power to get that [improved] performance.” Without those exponential gains in computing power, the steady gains in accuracy would slow, as well.

Enter, of course, Moore’s law, and the flattening of CPU clock frequencies in the mid-2000s. “But then we have this division, right?” Thompson said. “We start getting into multicore chips, and we’re starting to get computing power in that very specific way, which is not as useful unless you have that amount of parallelism.” Separating out parallelism, he explained, progress had dramatically slowed. “This might worry us if we want to, say, improve weather prediction at the same speed going forward,” he said.

So in 2020, Thompson and others wrote a paper examining ways to improve performance over time in a post-Moore’s law world. The authors landed on three main categories of promise: software-level improvements; algorithmic improvements; and new hardware architectures.

takyon writes:

Intel introduces its new node naming, Enhanced Superfin is now Intel 7

Intel 10nm Enhanced SuperFin has been renamed to Intel 7. Intel revealed that this node is now in volume production and it will see 10 to 15% performance per watt improvement over 10nm SuperFin. This node will be used for Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids.

Intel 4 is what was previously known as Intel's 7nm node. The manufacturer promises a 20% performance per watt gain over Intel 7. This node will use EUV lithography. The first products to feature Intel 4 are Meteor Lake which had taped in in Q2 2021 and Granite Rapids's compute tile.

[...] Intel 20A node will provide innovations beginning the first half of 2024. The A stands for angstrom, a metric unit 0.1 of the size of a nanometer. This node will introduce a new transistors architecture known as RibbonFET and PowerVia interconnect innovation. Intel does not confirm which product will use the Intel 20A node.

Also at AnandTech and Wccftech.

Intel's First High-Profile IFS Fab Customer: Qualcomm Jumps on Board For 20A Process

Per Intel's announcement, Intel and Qualcomm are partnering up to get Qualcomm products on Intel's 20A process, one of the company's most advanced (and farthest-out) process node. The first of Intel's "Ångström" process nodes, 20A is due in 2024 and will be where Intel first implements Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors, one of the major manufacturing technology milestones on Intel's new roadmap.

Intel Teases Meteor Lake 5-125W Core CPUs With Up To 192 EU GPU, 12th Gen Alder Lake Hinted For 27th October Launch

This is the first time Intel has given a detailed look at the Meteor Lake SOC that features three separate chiplets that are connected together through Forveros technology. Intel is expected to utilize a next-generation core architecture that will power the compute die while the I/O will be located on its own SOC-LP die. The GPU die will also be separate and will be composed of up to 192 EU (96 EU for Desktops & 192 EUs for Mobility). The Meteor Lake lineup will comprise 5-125W CPUs and feature a bump pitch of 36u (microns).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Main Attraction: Scientists Create World’s Thinnest Magnet – Just One Atom Thick!

A one-atom-thin 2D magnet developed by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley could advance new applications in computing and electronics.

[...] The researchers synthesized the new 2D magnet – called a cobalt-doped van der Waals zinc-oxide magnet – from a solution of graphene oxide, zinc, and cobalt.

Just a few hours of baking in a conventional lab oven transformed the mixture into a single atomic layer of zinc-oxide with a smattering of cobalt atoms sandwiched between layers of graphene.

In a final step, the graphene is burned away, leaving behind just a single atomic layer of cobalt-doped zinc-oxide.

[...] To confirm that the resulting 2D film is just one atom thick, Yao and his team conducted scanning electron microscopy experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry to identify the material’s morphology, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging to probe the material atom by atom.

X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source characterized the 2D material’s magnetic parameters under high temperature.

Additional X-ray experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource verified the electronic and crystal structures of the synthesized 2D magnets. And at Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, the researchers employed TEM to image the 2D material’s crystal structure and chemical composition.

The researchers found that the graphene-zinc-oxide system becomes weakly magnetic with a 5-6% concentration of cobalt atoms. Increasing the concentration of cobalt atoms to about 12% results in a very strong magnet.

To their surprise, a concentration of cobalt atoms exceeding 15% shifts the 2D magnet into an exotic quantum state of “frustration,” whereby different magnetic states within the 2D system are in competition with each other.

upstart writes:

Food of the Future? 'Generator' Turns Plastic Trash Into Edible Protein:

Two U.S. scientists have won a 1 million euro ($1.18 million) prize for creating a food generator concept that turns plastics into protein.

The 2021 Future Insight Prize went to Ting Lu, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Stephen Techtmann, associate professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University, for their project. It uses microbes to degrade plastic waste and convert it into food.

The German science and technology company Merck sponsors the prize. Global plastics production totaled 368 million metric tons in 2019. The only decline in the past 60 years came because the COVID-19 pandemic choked production of goods worldwide as factories sputtered and shipping slowed down.

[...] The two scientists, who call their project a food “generator,” focused on finding an efficient, economical and versatile technology that finds a use for plastics that are at the end of their useful life and would otherwise end up in landfills or oceans.

The resulting foods “contain all the required nutrition, are nontoxic, provide health benefits and additionally allow for personalization needs,” according to Merck.

The scientists learned to exploit synthetically altered microbes, programming them genetically to convert waste into food.

Gives new meaning to the phrase you are what you eat.

Journal Reference:
Nicholas S. McCarty, Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro. Synthetic Biology Tools to Engineer Microbial Communities for Biotechnology, Trends in Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2018.11.002)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tobacco firm Philip Morris calls for ban on cigarettes within decade:

The chief executive of tobacco business Philip Morris International has called on the UK government to ban cigarettes within a decade, in a move that would outlaw its own Marlboro brand.

Jacek Olczak said the company could “see the world without cigarettes … and actually, the sooner it happens, the better it is for everyone.” Cigarettes should be treated like petrol cars, the sale of which is due to be banned from 2030, he said.

Government action would end the confusion felt by smokers, some of whom still thought the “alternatives are worse than cigarettes”, Olczak told the Sunday Telegraph. “Give them a choice of smoke-free alternatives … with the right regulation and information it can happen 10 years from now in some countries. You can solve the problem once and forever.”

Philip Morris International (PMI) recently said it wanted half its turnover to come from non-smoking products as it morphs into a “healthcare and wellness company” with executive pay tied to its new mission to “unsmoke the world” by phasing out cigarettes.

Nonetheless the company has come under fire from anti-smoking campaigners who accused it of hypocrisy after it launched a £1bn takeover bid for Vectura, a British pharmacy company that makes asthma inhalers.

Original Submission

Editor's note: this in the 50,000th story submission to SoylentNews! Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this milestone!

upstart writes:

England’s Covid unlocking is threat to world, say 1,200 scientists:

Boris Johnson’s plan to lift virtually all of England’s pandemic restrictions on Monday is a threat to the world and provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants, international experts say.

Britain’s position as a global transport hub would mean any new variant here would rapidly spread around the world, scientists and physicians warned at an emergency summit. They also expressed grave concerns about Downing Street’s plans.

Government advisers in New Zealand, Israel and Italy were among those who sounded alarm bells about the policy, while more than 1,200 scientists backed a letter to the Lancet journal warning the strategy could allow vaccine-resistant variants to develop.

[...] New coronavirus infections in the UK are at a six-month high, according to government figures, and the number of people in hospital and dying with Covid are at their highest level since March. Thursday’s data showed 3,786 people in hospital with Covid and another 63 virus-related deaths.

Downing Street, which has defended the lifting of all remaining legal restrictions on social gatherings in England on 19 July, is hoping the rapid rollout of vaccines will keep a lid on the number of people becoming seriously ill.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Moon Tricks Tesla's Full Self-Driving Feature Into Thinking It's a Yellow Light:

Tesla recently announced that any Tesla user can subscribe to Autopilot’s Full Self-Driving feature for $99 to $199 per month, but it seems the new feature still comes with its fair share of kinks. Recently a Tesla driver took to Twitter to share an entertaining little problem with the system.

It turns out that the feature mistakes the full moon for a yellow light and slows down the vehicle. It should be noted that this is an extremely yellow and quite low moon.

Hey @elonmusk you might want to have your team look into the moon tricking the autopilot system. The car thinks the moon is a yellow traffic light and wanted to keep slowing down. 🤦🏼 @Teslarati @teslaownersSV @TeslaJoy pic.twitter.com/6iPEsLAudD

— Jordan Nelson (@JordanTeslaTech) July 23, 2021

Original Submission

TheMightyChickadee writes:

With Successful 10th Flight, Ingenuity Has Now Flown More Than a Mile on Mars:

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully completed its 10th flight on Mars on Saturday, bringing its total distance flown on the Red Planet to more than one mile (roughly 1.60 kilometers) and capturing important images to help out its friend, the Perseverance rover.

In a Twitter post early Sunday, NASA confirmed that its helicopter had flown over an area called “Raised Ridges,” which is part of a fracture system that the Perseverance team finds intriguing and is considering visiting sometime in the future. Fracture systems often operate as pathways for fluid to get underground. If water did indeed flow through Raised Ridges, it would be an ideal spot to look for evidence of past Martian life, which is the rover’s primary goal, and maybe even drill a sample for further examination.

And, just a reminder:

The status update also takes the time to remind us how Ingenuity has gone above and beyond its initial goals and carried out impressive maneuvers. It has survived on Mars for 107 sols, or Martian days, which is 76 more than its original mission.

In addition, the helicopter has also managed to perform two flight software updates designed to improve its flight and color image capture abilities. Ingenuity has flown for a total of more than 14 minutes on Mars, or more than 112% above its performance in tech demos. It has also given us new views of the Red Planet, taking 43 13-megapixel color images and 809 black and white navigation images.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Paris-based Gourmey hopes ethical lab grown foie gras will overcome bans - EU Today:

The push to make foie gras, the fattened liver of a duck or goose, in a lab comes amid a push to find a sustainable, ethical alternative to meat raised for slaughter. Most foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks and geese through a tube to engorge their livers up to 10 times their normal sizes. The process can leave ducks too big to walk or breathe, according to animal activists.

[...] With growing opposition to foie gras because of animal cruelty concerns, Nicolas Morin-Forest, Gourmey’s co-founder and chief executive, said that producing the delicacy from cultivated cells was a way to preserve a centuries-old French culinary tradition.

[...] Gourmey engineers faux meat by taking cells out of a freshly laid duck egg and placing them into a cultivator. The cells are then fed with proteins, amino acids and sugar, similar to the nutrients a duck would get from a diet of oats, corn and grass. The cells are then harvested and transformed into foie gras in a process that uses significantly less land and water than traditional methods.

[...] Mr. Morin-Forest said that, on a technical level, foie gras was well suited to be grown in a lab precisely because of its delicate texture compared with other types of meat.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Although initially expecting to only sell a few thousand units, the Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million computers to date. Over time it has developed quite a fan base. Part of cultivating that base has been through a dedicated blog and help forum. The Raspberry Pi blog and forum have now turned 10 years old.

We’ve kept every single blog post we’ve ever written up on this site, starting way back in July 2011. Ten years is a long time in internet terms, so you’ll find some dead links in some earlier posts; and this website has undergone a number of total redesigns, so early stuff doesn’t tend to have the pretty thumbnail associated with it to show you what it’s all about. (Our page design didn’t use them back then.) But all the same, for the internet archeologists among you, or those interested in the beginnings of Raspberry Pi, those posts from before we even had hardware are worth flicking through.

There are two organizations involved. Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, etc. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.

Previously:
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco
(2021) Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(2020) Raspberry Pi: We're Making it Easier to Build Our Devices into Your Hardware
(2020) Raspberry Pi 400: Its Designer Reveals More About the Faster Pi 4 in the $70 PC's Keyboard

Original Submission