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upstart writes:

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings:

In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia's Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation's Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can't be considered an inventor.

Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human.

As Beach's judgement puts it: "... in my view an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act.

"First, an inventor is an agent noun; an agent can be a person or thing that invents. Second, so to hold reflects the reality in terms of many otherwise patentable inventions where it cannot sensibly be said that a human is the inventor. Third, nothing in the Act dictates the contrary conclusion."

The Justice also worried that the Commissioner of Patents' logic in rejecting Thaler's patent submissions was faulty.

"On the Commissioner's logic, if you had a patentable invention but no human inventor, you could not apply for a patent," the judgement states. "Nothing in the Act justifies such a result."

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upstart writes:

Wild U.S. deer found with coronavirus antibodies:

White-tailed deer, a species found in every U.S. state except Alaska, appear to be contracting the coronavirus in the wild, according to the first study to search for evidence of an outbreak in wild deer.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analyzed blood samples from more than 600 deer in Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania over the past decade, and they discovered that 40 percent of the 152 wild deer tested from January through March 2021 had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Another three deer from January 2020 also had antibodies.

Their presence means that deer likely had encountered the virus and then fought it off. The animals didn't appear sick, so they probably had asymptomatic infections, the agency says. Roughly 30 million white-tailed deer live in the U.S.

"The risk of animals spreading SARS-CoV-2 to people is considered low," the USDA told National Geographic in a statement. Still, the results may suggest that "a secondary reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has been established in wildlife in the U.S." says Jüergen Richt, a veterinarian and director of the Center on Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at Kansas State University who was not involved in the USDA's work. If the virus is circulating in other species, it could continue to evolve, perhaps in ways that make it more severe or transmissible, undermining efforts to slow the pandemic.

Journal Reference:
Mitchell V. Palmer, Mathias Martins, Shollie Falkenberg, et al. Susceptibility of White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to SARS-CoV-2 [open], (DOI: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.00083-21)

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upstart writes:

Damage control: Microsoft deletes all comments under heavily criticized Windows 11 upgrade video:

Windows 11 is still one of the hottest topics in the world of technology. A few days after we reported on a new video which discusses the Windows 11 upgrade in more detail, Microsoft has now dealt with the reactions from countless upset customers.

[...] Due to the large amount of negative reactions, Microsoft has closed the comment section under the YouTube video, which included the deletion of all previously posted comments. Before they were erased, users shared speculations that Microsoft introduced the overly stringent system requirements in order to sell more new devices, from which the Redmond-based software company would benefit greatly due to the included Windows licenses. Considering that the video has garnered almost 1000 dislikes and less than 100 likes so far, it's likely that this was not Microsoft's final battle in its effort to gain control over the narrative that is revolving around the controversial Windows 11 upgrade requirements.

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upstart writes:

Every Car Made After 2027 May Have Drunk Driving Monitoring System:

Buried deep in the 2,700-page bipartisan infrastructure bill is a provision that mandates all cars manufactured from 2027 onwards be equipped with a drunk driver monitoring system, in the hopes of ending a behavior that results in about 10,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. If passed with this provision, the bill would give a firm release date to a research program the federal government and an automotive industry group have collaborated on for more than a decade.

Since 2008, an alphabet soup of acronym organizations have been working on a public-private partnership to invent a new technology that can prevent drunk driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) partnered with the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety (ACTS), an industry group representing all the major automakers, to form the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety Program, which goes by the unfortunate acronym of DADSS.

upstart writes:

Scientists launching Blob the slime mold into space:

Blob is a naturally occurring slime mold with the scientific name Physarum polycephalum. But the European Space Agency, which is sending Blob to the ISS so it can be observed in microgravity, clearly understands that calling it by its nickname makes it way likelier the mold will snag a movie deal.

"Composed of just one cell, the brainless blob is still able to move, feed, organize itself and even transmit knowledge to like-minded slime molds," says the ESA

[...] Blob is scheduled to launch to the ISS on Aug. 10 on Northrop Grumman's 16th NASA commercial resupply mission. Once it arrives, ESA astronaut and space photographer Thomas Pesquet will add water to Blob to wake it up, and then he'll take pictures of it under two scientific protocols. One will study how two Blobs respond alongside each other in an environment without food. Another will analyze Blobs when food is available (oat flakes, naturally).

Primary, middle and high school students down on Earth will conduct similar experiments, comparing their results to a time-lapse video from space to observe differences in Blob's speed, shape and growth up there and down here.

[...] The experiment will last seven days. During that time, a four-second video of Blob will automatically be recorded on a micro SD-card every 10 minutes.

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upstart writes:

Laser pincers generate antimatter by recreating neutron star conditions:

In principle, antimatter sounds simple – it’s just like regular matter, except its particles have the opposite charge. That basic difference has some major implications though: if matter and antimatter should ever meet, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy. In fact, that should have destroyed the universe billions of years ago, but obviously that didn’t happen. So how did matter come to dominate? What tipped the scales in its favor? Or, where did all the antimatter go?

[...] But now, researchers have designed a new method that could produce antimatter in smaller labs. While the team hasn’t built the device yet, simulations show that the principle is feasible.

The new device involves firing two powerful lasers at a plastic block, one from either side in a pincer motion. This block would be crisscrossed by tiny channels, just micrometers wide. As each laser strikes the target, it accelerates a cloud of electrons in the material and sends them shooting off – until they collide with the cloud of electrons coming the other way from the other laser.

That collision produces a lot of gamma rays and, because of the extremely narrow channels, the photons are more likely to also collide with each other. This in turn produces showers of matter and antimatter, specifically electrons and their antimatter equivalent, positrons. Finally, magnetic fields around the system focus the positrons into an antimatter beam, and accelerate it to an extremely high energy.

Journal Reference:
He, Yutong, Blackburn, Thomas G., Toncian, Toma, et al. Dominance of γ-γ electron-positron pair creation in a plasma driven by high-intensity lasers [open], Communications Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00636-x)

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upstart writes:

A sand shortage? The world is running out of a crucial:

An insatiable global appetite for sand, one of the world’s most important but least appreciated commodities, is unlikely to let up anytime soon. The problem, however, is that this resource is slipping away.

Our entire society is built on sand. It is the world’s most consumed raw material after water and an essential ingredient to our everyday lives.

Sand is the primary substance used in the construction of roads, bridges, high-speed trains and even land regeneration projects. Sand, gravel and rock crushed together are melted down to make the glass used in every window, computer screen and smart phone. Even the production of silicon chips uses sand.

Yet, the world is facing a shortage — and climate scientists say it constitutes one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

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upstart writes:

Antibiotics in Early Life Could Lead to Brain Disorders:

Antibiotic exposure early in life could alter human brain development in areas responsible for cognitive and emotional functions, according to a Rutgers researcher.

The laboratory study, published in the journal iScience, suggests that penicillin changes the microbiome — the trillions of beneficial microorganisms that live in and on our bodies — as well as gene expression, which allows cells to respond to its changing environment, in key areas of the developing brain. The findings suggest reducing widespread antibiotic use or using alternatives when possible to prevent neurodevelopment problems.

Penicillin and related medicines (like ampicillin and amoxicillin) are the most widely used antibiotics in children worldwide. In the United States, the average child receives nearly three courses of antibiotics before the age of 2. Similar or greater exposure rates occur in many other countries.

Journal Reference:
Angelina Volkova, Kelly Ruggles, Anjelique Schulfer, et al. “Effects of early-life penicillin exposure on the gut microbiome and frontal cortex and amygdala gene expression” 15 July 2021 iScience (DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102797)

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/att-completes-directv-spinoff-after-6-years-of-utter-failure-and-ineptitude/

AT&T has completed its spinoff of DirecTV after six years of mismanagement in which nearly 10 million customers ditched the company's pay-TV services.

AT&T bought DirecTV for $49 billion ($67 billion including debt) in July 2015 even though DirecTV and other traditional TV services were already losing subscribers in the face of competition from online streaming. Customer losses were inevitable but DirecTV's losses under AT&T ownership went far beyond anything experienced by other major TV providers.

AT&T revealed the spinoff plan in February and announced the deal's completion yesterday. AT&T partnered with private-equity firm TPG to create a new company called DirecTV, which "will own and operate the DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-verse video services previously owned and operated by AT&T," the announcement said.

AT&T will no longer run DirecTV, perhaps allowing it to succeed under better management. But AT&T will own 70 percent of the new company's stock, with TPG owning the other 30 percent. AT&T will receive $7.1 billion in cash to help pay down its debt, which consists of $160.7 billion in long-term debt and $19.5 billion of debt maturing within one year. TPG paid $1.8 billion for its 30 percent stake.

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DannyB writes:

In heat emergency, southern Europe scrambles for resources

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A heat wave baking southeast Europe has fueled deadly wildfires in Turkey and threatened the national power grid in Greece as governments scrambled Monday to secure the resources needed to cope with the emergency.

Temperatures reached 45 C (113 F) in inland areas of Greece and nearby countries and are expected to remain high for most of the week.

Battling deadly wildfires along its coastline for a sixth day, Turkey broadened an appeal for international assistance and was promised water-dropping planes from the European Union. The fires have been blamed for the deaths of eight people in recent days.

[....] In Greece, an emergency was declared in fire-hit areas on the island of Rhodes, which is near the Turkish coast. Workers with health conditions were allowed to take time off work, while Greek coal-fired power stations slated for retirement were brought back into service to shore up the national grid, under pressure due to the widespread use of air conditioning.

Pregnant and other vulnerable workers in North Macedonia were told to stay home.

Dann Mitchell, a professor of climate science at the University of Bristol, said the heat wave in southeast Europe “is not at all unexpected, and very likely enhanced due to human-induced climate change.”

Will ICE vehicles overheat before you drive them?

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TheMightyChickadee writes:

They just keep banging them out at the LHC! Story at Gizmodo.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics. Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.

Quarks are the building blocks of all matter; they’re subatomic particles that combine to form hadrons, the group that includes the familiar protons and neutrons. (In other words, quarks are smaller than small.) Protons and neutrons are both made up of three quarks, but the newly discovered hadron particle is made of four, making it a species of tetraquark. The first tetraquark was officially discovered in 2003.

Quarks have antimatter partners—evil twins, if you will. This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.

How big is this discovery?

The findings from particle colliders advance physicists’ understanding of how fundamental particles interact. “If you really want to know somebody, you put them in extreme situations. What we’re doing with these tetraquarks and pentaquarks is we’re putting the theory in extreme situations, which aren’t the run-of-the-mill that we have observed for the last 60 years,” Marek Karliner, a particle physicist at Tel Aviv University who was not affiliated with the recent research, explained in a video call. “It turned out that this particular design of the LHCb experiment is ideal for searching for new hadrons.”

Other coverage at Phys.org, Scientific American, and Sci-news.

Announcement at European Physical Society conference on high energy physics 2021, pdf is here.

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upstart writes:

New Water Desalination Device Runs on Solar Energy and is 400% More Efficient:

An international team of researchers including engineers from Ural Federal University (UrFU) developed a new desalination technology with high-efficiency thanks to a rotating cylinder, a press release reveals.

[...] The method utilizes a cylinder that is slowly rotated by a solar-powered DC motor. The rotating hollow cylinder is housed inside a rectangular basin that acts as a solar distiller. This cylinder accelerates water evaporation in the vessel by forming a thin film of water on its outer and inner surface. The film of water is constantly renewed with each turn of the cylinder, while the water below the cylinder is heated using a solar collector.

The team tested a prototype on a rooftop in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg for several months in 2019. They found that at 0.5 rpm, the machine would allow the evaporation of a thin film of water from the surface of the cylinder.

"The performance improvement factor of the created solar distiller, compared to traditional devices, was at least 280% in the relatively hot months (June, July, and August) and at least 300% and 400% in the cooler months (September and October), at the same time, the cumulative water distillation capacity reached 12.5 l/m2 per day in summer and 3.5 l/m2 per day in winter," said Alharbawi Naseer Tawfik Alwan, a research engineer at UrFU.

Journal Reference:
Naseer T. Alwan, S. E. Shcheklein, Obed M. Ali. Evaluation of distilled water quality and production costs from a modified solar still integrated with an outdoor solar water heater [open], Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (DOI: 10.1016/j.csite.2021.101216)

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takyon writes:

Tencent and other gaming stocks tumble after China news outlet labels them 'spiritual opium' for teens

Accusations of "spiritual opium" sent shares of the China multinational technology group Tencent and other companies in the gaming industry tumbling on Tuesday amid fears a new regulatory chapter was about to begin.

The losses came after an article in the Economic Information Daily, which has links to China's state-controlled news agency, Xinhua, said the gaming industry, especially Tencent, was harming the nation's teens, according to media reports.

While the South China Morning Post subsequently reported the story has been taken down, investors were rattled by fears that yet another regulatory crackdown could be coming. That's even as the South China Morning Post pointed out the article didn't appear to represent Beijing's position on that industry, noting positive comments from an official recently.

See also: Tencent & Chinese Video Games Companies Rocked as State Media Calls Gaming "Spiritual Opium"

Also at Bloomberg and CNBC.

Related: No Cults, No Politics, No Ghouls: How China Censors the Video Game World

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dx3bydt3 writes:

In a paper published in Nature (paywalled), astronomers have, for the first time been able to discern x-ray echos that came from behind a supermassive black hole. It is the first direct observation of light bending all the way around a black hole and into our line of sight. The finding is further confirmation of general relativity, showing that the predictions hold even around extreme objects like supermassive black holes.

Coverage on Space.com, and Science Daily

A non-paywalled copy of the paper can be found here.

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takyon writes:

Intel Executive Posts Thunderbolt 5 Photo then Deletes It: 80 Gbps and PAM-3

In this image we can see a poster on the wall showcasing '80G PHY Technology', which means that Intel is working on a physical layer (PHY) for 80 Gbps connections. Off the bat this is double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, which runs at 40 Gbps.

The second line confirms that this is 'USB 80G is targeted to support the existing USB-C ecosystem', which follows along that Intel is aiming to maintain the USB-C connector but double the effective bandwidth.

The third line is actually where it gets technically interesting. 'The PHY will be based on novel PAM-3 modulation technology'.

USB4 Gen 3×2 has a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. USB4 products that support all the optional functionality can be branded as Thunderbolt 4. We can expect 80 Gbps USB5 at some point. Type C is the connector, as Type A is already deprecated for 20 Gbps and up ports.

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