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Older Stuff
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July 29 -
July 28- Activison Blizzard Employees Walk Out in Protest Over Sexism, Harassment (80)
- An AI-Based Lie Detector for Call Center Conversations (30)
- Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede (7)
- Apple Patches Zero-Day Vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS Under Active Attack (11)
- America's Largest Retailer Will Cover 100% of College Tuition for its Workers (121)
- Study Shows Why Beer Mats Do Not Fly in a Straight Line — University Of Bonn (14)
- Facebook Recalls 4 Million Quest 2 VR Face Liners Over "Rashes and Hives" (21)
- Eating for Hunger or Pleasure? Regulating These Feeding Behaviors Involves Different Brain Circuits (35)
- United States Sells Unique Wu-Tang Clan Album Forfeited by Martin Shkreli (28)
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July 27
Quick Links
Google And Facebook Mandate Vaccines For Employees At U.S. Offices:
Google and Facebook will require U.S. employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus before returning to the company's offices, the tech giants said on Wednesday.
In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the vaccine mandate would apply to its U.S. offices in the coming weeks and would be required eventually for other locations.
"Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead," Pichai wrote.
Shortly after Google's announcement, Facebook said it too will require anyone coming to work at its U.S. offices to be vaccinated.
"How we implement this policy will depend on local conditions and regulations. We will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and will be evaluating our approach in other regions as the situation evolves," Lori Goler, Facebook's vice president of people, wrote in a statement.
The tech giants' vaccine requirements could push other employers to follow suit.
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Russian module suddenly fires thrusters after docking with space station:
Flight controllers at NASA and Roscosmos averted a disaster on Thursday after a large Russian module docked with the International Space Station and began to "inadvertently" fire its thrusters.
The Russian "Nauka" module linked to the space station at 8:30 am CT (13:30 UTC), local time in Houston, where NASA's Mission Control is based. After that, Russian cosmonauts aboard the station began preparing to open the hatches leading to Nauka, but at 11:34 am Houston time, Nauka unexpectedly started to fire its movement thrusters.
Within minutes, the space station began to lose attitude control. This was a problem for several reasons. First of all, the station requires a certain attitude to maintain signal with geostationary satellites and talk to Mission Control on the ground. Also, solar arrays are positioned to collect power based upon this predetermined attitude.
Another concern is G forces on the station's structure. The various components of the extensive space station were assembled in microgravity and designed to operate at zero-G. So even small stresses on the vehicle can induce small cracks or other problems with the station's structure.
For all of these reasons, space station flight controllers in Houston and Moscow acted quickly after the station started to drift. Attitude control was fully lost at 11:42 am, and engines on the space station's service module were fired. This was followed by a handover to the Russian Progress vehicle attached to the station, which began to fire its thrusters. This tug-of-war offset the Nauka module thruster activity, which eventually stopped after fuel supplies were exhausted. By 12:29 pm on Thursday, attitude control was restored. It made for quite an hour on the ground and in space.
[...] By late Thursday afternoon, when NASA officials held a teleconference to brief reporters, the situation appeared to be well in hand.
Previously:
Russia's MLM Nauka Makes Triumphant Docking to ISS.
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No Antenna Could Survive Europa's Brutal, Radioactive Environment—Until Now
Ultimately, when NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I am a senior antenna engineer, began to seriously consider a Europa lander mission, we realized that the antenna was the limiting factor. The antenna needs to maintain a direct-to-Earth link across more than 550 million miles (900 million km) when Earth and Jupiter are at their point of greatest separation. The antenna must be radiation-hardened enough to survive an onslaught of ionizing particles from Jupiter, and it cannot be so heavy or so large that it would imperil the lander during takeoff and landing. One colleague, when we laid out the challenge in front of us, called it impossible. We built such an antenna anyway—and although it was designed for Europa, it is a revolutionary enough design that we're already successfully implementing it in future missions for other destinations in the solar system.
[...] I've mentioned previously that the antenna will need to transmit signals up to 900 million km. As a general rule, less efficient antennas need a larger surface area to transmit farther. But as the lander won't have an orbiter overhead with a large relay antenna, and it won't be big enough itself for a large antenna, it needs a small antenna with a transmission efficiency of 80 percent or higher—much more efficient than most space-bound antennas.
So, to reiterate the challenge: The antenna cannot be large, because then the lander will be too heavy. It cannot be inefficient for the same reason, because requiring more power would necessitate bulky power systems instead. And it needs to survive exposure to a brutal amount of radiation from Jupiter. This last point requires that the antenna must be mostly, if not entirely, made out of metal, because metals are more resistant to ionizing radiation.
The antenna we ultimately developed depends on a key innovation: The antenna is made up of circularly polarized, aluminum-only unit cells—more on this in a moment—that can each send and receive on X-band frequencies (specifically, 7.145 to 7.19 gigahertz for the uplink and 8.4 to 8.45 GHz for the downlink). The entire antenna is an array of these unit cells, 32 on a side or 1,024 in total. The antenna is 32.5 by 32.5 inches (82.5 by 82.5 centimeters), allowing it to fit on top of a modestly sized lander, and it can achieve a downlink rate to Earth of 33 kilobits per second at 80 percent efficiency.
By way of comparison, consider that the V.34bis standard (which allowed a top speed of up to 33.6 kbit/s bidirectional data transfer over phone lines) was finalized and issued in February of 1998. It was in September 1998 that the first draft of V.90 was announced and which finally enabled faster speeds. See the extensive history of modems on Wikipedia.
It bears noting that landlines presented much less of a challenge to communications than what would be experienced by the lander. Especially since light (or a radio wave) takes up to 50 minutes to get from Earth to Jupiter!
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The IBM PC spawned the basic architecture that grew into the dominant Wintel platform we know today. Once heavy, cumbersome and power thirsty, it’s a machine that you can now emulate on a single board with a cheap commodity microcontroller. That’s thanks to work from [Fabrizio Di Vittorio], who has shared a how-to on Youtube.
The full playlist is quite something to watch, showing off a huge number of old-school PC applications and games running on the platform. There’s QBASIC, FreeDOS, Windows 3.0, and yes, of course, Flight Simulator. The latter game was actually considered somewhat of a de facto standard for PC compatibility in the 1980s, so the fact that the ESP32 can run it with [Fabrizio’s] code suggests he’s done well.
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China's CATL unveils sodium-ion battery - a first for a major car battery maker:
China's CATL (300750.SZ) on Thursday became the first major automotive battery maker to unveil a sodium-ion battery, saying it planned to set up a supply chain for the new technology in 2023.
As electric vehicles become increasingly popular, demand for key battery ingredients, particularly cobalt, has spiked. That has spurred car and battery makers to seek alternatives to the current three main technologies - nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA), nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.
The sodium-ion batteries do not contain lithium, cobalt or nickel. It did not disclose cost details of the new batteries.
CATL, China's top car battery maker with a market value of almost $200 billion, also unveiled a battery pack that integrates sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries.
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from the getting-up-oily-in-the-morning-to-lose-weight dept.
Mice sweating fat raises prospect of unusual anti-obesity therapy:
The research began by studying how an immune protein called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) influences energy metabolism in mice. The initial hypothesis was that increasing the levels of TSLP in mice could lower the animals’ risk of developing diabetes.
“Initially, we did not think TSLP would have any effect on obesity itself," says the study’s principal investigator Taku Kambayashi. "What we wanted to find out was whether it could impact insulin resistance. We thought that the cytokine could correct Type 2 diabetes, without actually causing the mice to lose any weight.”
After a month of treatment designed to increase TSLP levels the mice showed significant improvements to blood glucose. But surprisingly, the animals also dropped huge volumes of visceral fat. Even more unexpectedly, the TSLP-treated mice were losing weight while consuming up to 30 percent more food than the control mice.
So what was going on? Kambayashi says the clue was in the unusually oily coats on the TSLP-treated mice.
[...] Extracting oils from the animals’ fur the researchers discovered the mice were indeed "sweating fat." The fat cells in the oils were a form of what is called sebum – a waxy substance released by glands in the skin.
Sebum secretion is generally regulated by hormones. In humans excessive hormonal activity in adolescence is known to stimulate high levels of sebum secretion leading to that infamous wave of teenage acne.
Journal Reference:
Ruth Choa, Junichiro Tohyama, Shogo Wada, et al. Thymic stromal lymphopoietin induces adipose loss through sebum hypersecretion [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd2893)
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from the desperate-situations-require-desperate-measures dept.
Australia's military will help enforce a lockdown in Sydney after the city of 6 million posted a record daily rise in COVID-19 cases on Thursday and state authorities said the outbreak was likely to get worse.
The lockdown of Australia's biggest city has increased pressure on Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is now trailing in opinion polls, and heightened concern that Australia's A$2 trillion ($1.5 trillion) economy could slide into recession.
[...] "We can only assume that things are likely to get worse before they get better given the quantity of people infectious in the community," said Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of New South Wales state, of which Sydney is the capital.
[...] With little sign that of restrictions reducing infections, Berejiklian said new curbs would be imposed on the southwestern and western areas of Sydney where the majority of COVID-19 cases are being found.
Residents there will be forced to wear masks outdoors and to stay within five km (three miles) of their homes.
With even tighter restrictions set to begin on Friday, New South Wales Police said it had asked for 300 military personnel to help enforce lockdown orders.
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The Amount of Greenland Ice That Melted on Tuesday Could Cover Florida in 2 Inches of Water
The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water:
It's the third instance of extreme melting on the continent in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s.
Greenland lost more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass on Tuesday, and 18.4 billion tons since Sunday, according to the Denmark Meteorological Institute. While this week's total ice loss is not as extreme as a similar event in 2019 — a record melt year — the area of the ice sheet that's melting is larger.
"It's a significant melt," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told CNN. "July 27th saw most of the eastern half of Greenland from the northern tip all the way to the southern tip mostly melted, which is unusual."
As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has increased rapidly. According to a recent study published in the journal Cryosphere, Earth has lost a staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet.
As Drought Cuts Hay Crop, Cattle Ranchers Face Culling Herds
As drought cuts hay crop, cattle ranchers face culling herds:
With his cattle ranch threatened by a deepening drought, Jim Stanko isn’t cheered by the coming storm signaled by the sound of thunder.
“Thunder means lightning, and lightning can cause fires,” said Stanko, who fears he’ll have to sell off half his herd of about 90 cows in Routt County outside of Steamboat Springs, Colorado if he can’t harvest enough hay to feed them.
As the drought worsens across the West and ushers in an early fire season, cattle ranchers are among those feeling the pain. Their hay yields are down, leading some to make the hard decision to sell off animals. To avoid the high cost of feed, many ranchers grow hay to nourish their herds through the winter when snow blankets the grass they normally graze.
But this year, Stanko’s hay harvest so far is even worse than it was last year. One field produced just 10 bales, down from 30 last year, amid heat waves and historically low water levels in the Yampa River, his irrigation source.
Some ranchers aren’t waiting to reduce the number of mouths they need to feed.
At the Loma Livestock auction in western Colorado, sales were bustling earlier this month even though its peak season isn’t usually until the fall when most calves are ready to be sold. Fueling the action are ranchers eager to unload cattle while prices are still strong.
[...] “If it rained four inches, there wouldn’t be a cow to sell for five months,” said George Raftopoulos, owner of the auction house.
Warming Rivers in US West Killing Fish, Imperiling Industry
Warming rivers in US West killing fish, imperiling industry:
Hundreds of thousands of young salmon are dying in Northern California’s Klamath River as low water levels brought about by drought allow a parasite to thrive, devastating a Native American tribe whose diet and traditions are tied to the fish. And wildlife officials said the Sacramento River is facing a “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon due to abnormally warm water.
A crash in one year’s class of young salmon can have lasting effects on the total population and shorten or stop the fishing season, a growing concern as climate change continues to make the West hotter and drier. That could be devastating to the commercial salmon fishing industry, which in California alone is worth $1.4 billion.
[...] Winter-run Chinook salmon are born in the Sacramento River, traverse hundreds of miles to the Pacific, where they normally spend three years before returning to their birthplace to mate and lay their eggs between April and August. Unlike the fall-run Chinook that survives almost entirely due to hatchery breeding programs, the winter run is still largely reared in the wild.
Federal fisheries officials predicted in May that more than 80% of baby salmon could die because of warmer water in the Sacramento River. Now, state wildlife officials say that number could be higher amid a rapidly depleting pool of cool water in Lake Shasta. California’s largest reservoir is filled to only about 35% capacity, federal water managers said this week.
[...] When Lake Shasta was formed in the 1940s, it blocked access to the cool mountain streams where fish traditionally spawned. To ensure their survival, the U.S. government is required to maintain river temperatures below 56 degrees Fahrenheit (13 Celsius) in spawning habitat because salmon eggs generally can’t withstand anything warmer.
The warm water is starting to affect older fish, too. Scientists have seen some adult fish dying before they can lay their eggs.
[...] Hudson, the fisherman, said he used to spend days at sea when the salmon season was longer and could catch 100 fish per day.
This year, he said he was lucky to catch 80 to sell at the market.
“Retiring would be the smart thing to do, but I can’t bring myself to do it because these fish have been so good to us for all these years.
'Trying to Survive': Wells Dry Up Amid Oregon Water Woes
'Trying to survive': Wells dry up amid Oregon water woes:
Judy and Jim Shanks know the exact date their home’s well went dry — June 24.
Since then, their life has been an endless cycle of imposing on relatives for showers and laundry, hauling water to feed a small herd of cattle and desperately waiting for a local well-drilling company to make it to their name on a monthslong wait list.
The couple’s well is among potentially hundreds that have dried up in recent weeks in an area near the Oregon-California border suffering through a historic drought, leaving homes with no running water just a few months after the federal government shut off irrigation to hundreds of the region’s farmers for the first time ever.
Officials have formal reports of 117 empty wells but suspect more than 300 have gone dry in the past few weeks as the consequences of the Klamath River basin’s water scarcity extend far beyond farmers’ fields.
Worried homeowners face waits of six months or more to get new, deeper wells dug because of the surging demand, with no guarantee that those wells, too, won’t ultimately go dry.
[...] While much of the West is experiencing exceptional drought conditions, the toll on everyday life is particularly stark in this region filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields and normally teeming wetlands.
This summer’s already critical water shortages have been amplified by a mandate to preserve water levels for two species of endangered suckerfish in a key lake that’s also the primary source of irrigation water for 200,000 acres (80,900 hectares) of farmland.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3 Original Submission #4
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The Porsche dynasty is taking on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in space
Porsche SE, the family holding company that controls Volkswagen Group, is the latest big investor to bet on space's crucial role in developing future technologies.
The company, controlled by the related Porsche and Piëch families that turned Volkswagen into a global powerhouse, on Wednesday unveiled an investment into Germany's Isar Aerospace, a space startup attempting to rival Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX with rocket production and satellite launch services.
While Blue Origin and SpaceX are backed by billionaires and already racing ahead with manned space missions, Isar Aerospace believes it can compete in the growing market for launching small satellites into Earth's orbit. It's planning its first test flight for next year.
[....] "The funding will allow Isar Aerospace to further invest in its launch, testing, and manufacturing infrastructure for its largely automated rocket production and commercial operations," Isar Aerospace said in a statement on Wednesday.
[....] Commercial demand for the launch of small satellites is expected to grow significantly in the coming years, as companies in traditional and emerging industries come to rely more heavily on satellite technology to run software applications.
[....] Although a relatively small deal for Porsche SE, it's a notable move for a business that's invested overwhelmingly in automotive businesses and is the latest example of the space race taking hold between private companies and their billionaire backers.
Will space become the next gold rush?
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MLM Nauka makes triumphant docking to ISS - NASASpaceFlight.com:
Russia’s Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) Nauka, meaning “science,” has defied the odds to successfully dock to the ISS after a long and arduous journey dating back over 20 years and a problematic propulsion system after launch which had threatened the success of the mission.
The docking was not without issue, with Russian cosmonauts noting that Nauka wasn’t on the correct course less than an hour before docking; however, a retro burn quickly corrected the issue. After also troubleshooting an issue with the TORU manual docking system, which was used for the final seconds of the module’s approach, Nauka successfully docked to the Zvezda service module’s nadir port at 09:29 EDT / 13:29 UTC, marking the first major expansion to the Russian segment for over 20 years.
Immediately after a successful orbit insertion of 190 x 350.1 km, issues with the module’s communications and propulsion systems were noted. Initial troubleshooting was complicated by limited communications during brief periods when the module came within range of Russian ground stations.
The communications issues were resolved in initial orbits; however, the propulsion system issue was more troublesome and believed to be related to a part of the module’s fuel supply being rendered unusable due to gases becoming mixed with the fuel for the main engine.
Reports indicated that pressure in the main engine’s propulsion tanks had risen to unacceptable levels due to an earlier-than-planned equalization of pressure between the tanks. Thus, use of the smaller engines would be needed to relieve tank pressure to a point where the main engine could be used.
[...] That, coupled with continuous limited communications, resulted in several of the initially-planned orbit raising burns being cancelled and then later conducted using the module’s secondary engines.
These replanned first burns were enough to prevent Nauka from reentering the atmosphere within a few days, as was the fear given the low perigee insertion of 190 km. With those first burns, Russian controllers were able to stabilize Nauka, get the main engine working, and keep the module on track for a 29 July arrival at the Station as originally planned.
Also at: phys.org, www.nytimes.com, and AP News.
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from the watch-upstart-the-robot-post-about-robots dept.
Watch Cassie the bipedal robot run a 5K:
Cassie, a bipedal robot that's all legs, has successfully run five kilometers on a single charge, all without having a tether. The machine serves as the basis for Agility Robotics' delivery robot Digit, as TechCrunch notes, though you may also remember it for "blindly" navigating a set of stairs. Oregon State University engineers were able to train Cassie in a simulator to enable it to go up and down a flight of stairs without the use of cameras or LIDAR. Now, engineers from the same team were able to train Cassie to run using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm.
According to the team, Cassie teaching itself using the technique gave it the capability to stay upright without a tether by shifting its balance while running. The robot had to learn to make infinite subtle adjustments to be able to accomplish the feat.
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from the some-plants-are-much-bigger-(and-dirtier)-than-others dept.
5% of Earth's Power Plants Create 73% of the Energy Sector's Emissions:
A group of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder analyzed 2018 data from 29,000 fossil fuel power plants in 221 countries and located the top emitters in the world.
They mapped plants by their carbon dioxide emissions and identified the top 10 "worst-of-the-worst" power plants, which are clustered around Europe, East Asia, and India.
The world's "super-emitters" have a few qualities in common: They are all coal-powered, they are primarily located in the global north and they all operate inefficiently for the amount of energy they generate. Focusing policy responses on mitigating the handful of the worst offenders would go a long way to curbing the climate crisis, the authors find.
[...] Emissions from electricity generation would fall by 17 to 49 percent if these plants were updated for efficiency, offset by carbon capture, or shut off entirely.
Switching from coal and oil to natural gas would be a start, the authors say. Grant notes that he and his fellow researchers "also embrace renewables," but are also wary that "some countries are not yet ready or willing to adopt that strategy." Though widely cited by the industry as a "bridge fuel," many environmentalists are now ditching the notion that natural gas is a clean alternative to other fossil fuels. Many believe shutting off fossil fuel power plants and switching to renewables is the only way to curb emissions enough to meet the International Panel on Climate Change's 1.5-degree warming restriction recommendation to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Journal Reference:
Don Grant, David Zelinka, and Stefania Mitova. Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hyper-polluting power plants - IOPscience, Environmental Research Letters (DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1)
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There are many different alternative video platforms out there but the quality varies greatly. Reclaim the Net writes about the TubeShift browser extension that helps you rescue videos censored by YouTube. From the article:
TubeShift makes it easy to find censored YouTube videos on Odysee, Rumble, BitChute and more. It also simplifies the process of staying up to date with creators on alternative platforms. When YouTube censors videos, it also scrubs the video title and the name of the channel that uploaded the video from the page. All that remains is white space and a notice stating: "This video has been removed for violating YouTube's terms of service." This means that if all you have is a link to a YouTube video that was censored before you had a chance to watch it, you can't search for the video title or the creator on alternative platforms.
[...] The open-source TubeShift browser extension fixes this problem by finding alternative versions of censored YouTube videos and making links to these alternative videos available to you with a single click. In addition to helping you find censored videos, TubeShift also finds alternative versions of non-censored videos across a variety of platforms. So if you're watching a video on YouTube, TubeShift will let you know if the video's also available on BitChute, Odysee, and the other platforms it supports.
[...] While TubeShift is great for finding alternative versions of YouTube videos, you can also use it to find alternatives while browsing the other supported sites. For example, if you're on Odysee and want to see if the creator also uploads to Rumble, TubeShift will let you know with a single click. Currently, TubeShift supports five video-sharing platforms – BitChute, Odysee, Rumble, YouTube, and Dailymotion. It also plans to add support for the free speech video sharing platform Gab TV after it makes a planned change to its website.
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Tale can be found at Science Magazine.
PARIS—Five public research institutions in France have imposed a 3-month moratorium on the study of prions—a class of misfolding, infectious proteins that cause fatal brain diseases—after a retired lab worker who handled prions in the past was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the most common prion disease in humans. An investigation is underway to find out whether the patient, who worked at a lab run by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), contracted the disease on the job.
If so, it would be the second such case in France in the past few years. In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named Émilie Jaumain died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs.
The aim of the moratorium, which affects nine labs, is to "study the possibility of a link with the [new patient's] former professional activity and if necessary to adapt the preventative measures in force in research laboratories," according to a joint press release issued by the five institutions yesterday.
Prion and Creutzfeldt–Jakob_disease entries on Wikipedia.
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California and Five Other States Ban... Gaming Computers?
"Six states, led by California's fulltime climate alarmists, this week enacted a ban on the sales of high-end gaming computers.
Niche Gamer reports that Dell is already following the 2017 law that just went into effect. According to the gamer-focused site, Dell has "pulled the sale of seven of its eight Alienware gaming desktops" from California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
Trying to order one of the banned machines will alert buyers, "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled."
The offending component would seem to be the power-hungry NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card, but it's no problem to order the card separately and install it yourself. I tried ordering one from Amazon without any hassle.
Gamers, you might have guessed, aren't happy."
Also at PC Gamer and The Register.
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