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upstart writes:

Computer hardware giant GIGABYTE hit by RansomEXX ransomware:

Taiwanese motherboard maker Gigabyte has been hit by the RansomEXX ransomware gang, who threaten to publish 112GB of stolen data unless a ransom is paid.

Gigabyte is best known for its motherboards, but also manufactures other computer components and hardware, such as graphics cards, data center servers, laptops, and monitors.

The attack occurred late Tuesday night into Wednesday and forced the company to shut down systems in Taiwan. The incident also affected multiple websites of the company, including its support site and portions of the Taiwanese website

[...] Customers have also reported issues accessing support documents or receiving updated information about RMAs, which is likely due to the ransomware attack.

According to the Chinese news site United Daily News, Gigabyte confirmed they suffered a cyberattack that affected a small number of servers.

After detecting the abnormal activity on their network, they had shut down their IT systems and notified law enforcement.

[...] While Gigabyte has not officially stated what ransomware operation performed the attack, BleepingComputer has learned it was conducted by the RansomEXX gang.

Also at Mashable.

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TheMightyChickadee writes:

Booster stacked! Story at Techcrunch, and everywhere else.

SpaceX has achieved another major milestone in its Starship fully reusable launch system: It stacked the Starship spacecraft itself on top of a prototype of its Super Heavy booster, which itself is loaded up with a full complement of 29 Raptor rocket engines, and the Starship on top has six itself. The stacked spacecraft now represents the tallest assembled rocket ever developed in history.

This stacking, which happened at SpaceX's development site in south Texas, is a significant development because it's the first time the two elements of the full Starship system have been united as one. This is the configuration that will be used for launching the next Starship prototype on its test mission that will hopefully achieve orbit.

Taken together, the massive combined launch system reaches nearly 400 feet [122 meters] tall (around 390 feet [118 meters], to be more precise), and combined with the orbital launch stand on which it rests, the whole thing is about 475 feet [147 meters] high, which is taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza[*].

The stacking itself is impressive, but don't expect it to last: The likely next step is for the two halves of the launch system to be separated again, with both undergoing more work, analysis and testing ahead of a reassembly in preparation for the actual eventual orbital launch test.

[*] Great Pyramid of Giza on Wikipedia.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

[Ed. note: too late, but all is not lost. Here is a 10m28s YouTube video of the stacking and unstacking of "Ship 20" onto "Booster 4" as well as its return trip over Highway 4 from the launch site to the High Bay on the build site! NB: You'll probably want to fast-forward through the first minute or so.]

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takyon writes:

Intel: Upcoming US Fab Will Be a Small City, to Cost $60 to $120 Billion

Intel has revealed some additional details about its upcoming brand-new fab complex in the U.S. Patrick Gelsinger, chief executive of Intel, said that the new fab campus will cost between $60 billion and $120 billion, will include multiple modules capable of processing wafers using Intel's advanced process technologies, and chip packaging facilities. In addition, the company aims to build it adjacent to a university to simplify the hiring of new personnel.

As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel is set to decide on the exact location of its next major semiconductor manufacturing hub in the U.S by the end of this year. The fab will include between six and eight modules that will produce chips using the company's leading-edge fabrication processes, will be able to package chips using Intel's proprietary techniques like EMIB and Foveros, and will also run a dedicated power plant, Pat Gelsinger said in an interview with the Washington Post.

Each semiconductor fabrication module will cost between $10 billion and $15 billion, so Intel's investments into the hub over the next decade could be as 'low' as $60 billion and could top $120 billion.

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upstart writes:

The US Navy's New Solar Aircraft Will Fly For 90 Days Without Landing:

The US Navy is working on an uncrewed aircraft called Skydweller that is capable of staying in the air for 90 days without needing to land thanks to large strips of solar panels on both of its wings, a report by New Scientist explains.

The company behind the aircraft, Skydweller Aero, is a U.S.-Spanish aerospace firm developing the technology to enable the U.S. Navy to keep a constant watchful eye over the areas surrounding its ships.

In order to stay airborne for so long, the 236-foot wingspan aircraft houses 2,900 square feet (269.4188 meters) of photovoltaic cells, allowing it to generate up to 2 kilowatts of power. Skydweller Aero also plans to fit its aircraft with hydrogen fuel cells as a backup in case the solar energy harvesting plane goes through a prolonged spell of bad weather.

The Skydweller is a new iteration on the Solar Impulse 2, a crewed solar aircraft that traversed the globe in 2015 and 2016. Skydweller Aero founders John Parkes and Robert Miller purchased the intellectual property and machinery of the Swiss Solar Impulse project before setting out to make their own aircraft.

Previous coverage.

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upstart writes:

2 out of 3 Americans say they would take a pay cut to work remotely full time:

Americans are desperate to continue working remotely well beyond the pandemic.

To work from home full-time, they’d be willing to make some serious sacrifices, according to a recent survey from insurance company Breeze. The survey included 1,000 American adults who were either employed at a job – or looking for one – that could be performed completely remotely.

Of the respondents, 65% said they’d be willing to take a 5% pay cut in order to have the option to work remotely full-time. Some remained unfazed with the prospect of an even larger pay cut, with one in seven saying they’d give up 25% of their salaries to be able to work from home forever.

The surveyed Americans also said they’d be willing to clock more time at work if they could do it from home.

Fifty-three percent of them said they’d put in an extra 10 hours every week at the office if the office was their home. Nearly half of them said they’d concede 25% of their paid time off in exchange for a full-time remote work option. One in seven said they’d give up all of their PTO for remote work.

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upstart writes:

‘Master Faces’ That Can Bypass Over 40% Of Facial ID Authentication Systems:

Researchers from Israel have developed a neural network capable of generating ‘master’ faces – facial images that are each capable of impersonating multiple IDs. The work suggests that it’s possible to generate such ‘master keys’ for more than 40% of the population using only 9 faces synthesized by the StyleGAN Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), via three leading face recognition systems.

The paper is a collaboration between the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the school of Electrical Engineering, both at Tel Aviv.

Testing the system, the researchers found that a single generated face could unlock 20% of all identities in the University of Massachusetts’ Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) open source database, a common repository used for development and testing of facial ID systems, and the benchmark database for the Israeli system.

upstart writes:

Researchers discover fresh water in the Mediterranean Sea:

"Our discovery is based on an oceanographic expedition we conducted in 2018," explains Dr. Amir Haroon, from GEOMAR, lead author of the study. "We used geophysical methods, called reflection seismics, combined with novel electromagnetic techniques to detect these deposits," Haroon continues. "Our data suggest that the groundwater occurs as an isolated body in limestone formations three kilometres from the coast," the scientist explains.

[...] The water body was probably formed there during the last ice age 20,000 years ago, when the sea level was lower than today.

Journal Reference:
Amir Haroon, Aaron Micallef, Marion Jegen, et al. Electrical Resistivity Anomalies Offshore a Carbonate Coastline: Evidence for Freshened Groundwater? [open], Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2020GL091909)

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Anti-aristarchus writes:

Geological analysis explains durability of Stonehenge megaliths:

Aug 4 (Reuters) - The first comprehensive scientific analysis of Stonehenge's imposing megaliths has revealed some of the traits that made them an exemplary building material for the famed monument in southern England including their stout resistance to weathering.

Researchers on Wednesday described a battery of examinations that provided a glimpse inside one of Stonehenge's 52 sandstone megaliths, known as sarsens, gaining insight into its geology and chemistry.

They studied a core sample extracted from one of the sarsens, called Stone 58, during 1950s conservation work. It was kept in the United States for decades before being returned to Britain for research in 2018.

The sarsens are made of stone called silcrete that formed gradually within a few yards (meters) of the ground surface as a result of groundwater washing through buried sediment.

The examination clarified Stone 58's internal structure. It showed that the silcrete is comprised of mainly sand-sized quartz grains cemented tightly together by an interlocking mosaic of quartz crystals. Quartz is extremely durable and does not easily crumble or erode even when exposed to eons of wind and weather.

"This explains the stone's resistance to weathering and why it made an ideal material for monument-building," said University of Brighton geomorphologist David Nash, who led the study published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Also at Phys.org

Journal Refrence:
David J. Nash, et al. Petrological and geochemical characterisation of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254760)

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upstart writes:

‘It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization:

Just over 10 years ago, a small group of Indigenous Guatemalan farmers visited Beata Tsosie-Peña’s stucco home in northern New Mexico. In the arid heat, the visitors, mostly Maya Achì women from the forested Guatemalan town of Rabinal, showed Tsosie-Peña how to plant the offering they had brought with them: amaranth seeds.

Back then, Tsosie-Peña had just recently [be]come interested in environmental justice amid frustration at the ecological challenges facing her native Santa Clara Pueblo – an Indigenous North American community just outside the New Mexico town of Española, which is downwind from the nuclear facilities that built the atomic bomb. Tsosie-Peña had begun studying permaculture and other Indigenous agricultural techniques. Today, she coordinates the environmental health and justice program at Tewa Women United, where she maintains a hillside public garden that’s home to the descendants of those first amaranth seeds she was given more than a decade ago.

They are now six-foot-tall perennials with flowering red plumes and chard-like leaves. But during that first visit in 2009, the plants were just pinhead-size seeds. Tsosie-Peña and her guests spent the day planting, winnowing, cooking and eating them – toasting the seeds in a skillet to be served over milk or mixed into honey – and talking about their shared histories: how colonization had separated them from their traditional foods and how they were reclaiming their relationship with the land.

Since the 1970s, amaranth has become a billion-dollar food – and cosmetic – product. Health conscious shoppers embracing ancient grains will find it in growing numbers of grocery stores in the US, or in snack bars across Mexico, and, increasingly, in Europe and the Asia Pacific. As a complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a highly nutritious source of manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, iron and antioxidants that may improve brain function and reduce inflammation.

“This is a plant that could feed the world,” said Tsosie-Peña.

---

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upstart writes:

Fast-Growing Mini-Forests Spring up in Europe to Aid Climate:

Tiny, dense forests are springing up around Europe as part of a movement aimed at restoring biodiversity and fighting the climate crisis.

Often sited in schoolyards or alongside roads, the forests can be as small as a tennis court. They are based on the work of the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who has planted more than 1,000 such forests in Japan, Malaysia and elsewhere.

Advocates for the method say the miniature forests grow 10 times faster and become 30 times denser and 100 times more biodiverse than those planted by conventional methods. This result is achieved by planting saplings close together, three per square metre, using native varieties adapted to local conditions. A wide variety of species – ideally 30 or more – are planted to recreate the layers of a natural forest.

Scientists say such ecosystems are key to meeting climate goals, estimating that natural forests can store 40 times more carbon than single-species plantations. The Miyawaki forests are designed to regenerate land in far less time than the 70-plus years it takes a forest to recover on its own.

takyon writes:

2 Red Objects Were Found in the Asteroid Belt. They Shouldn't Be There.

Scientists led by Sunao Hasegawa from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Monday that two objects spotted in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter appear to have originated beyond Neptune. The discoveries could one day provide direct evidence of the chaos that existed in the early solar system.

[...] [203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia] orbit at about 2.7 and 2.6 times the Earth-sun distance, well within the asteroid belt. 203 Pompeja, at about 70 miles across, appears to be structurally intact, whereas 269 Justitia, only 35 miles or so, is likely a fragment of a previous collision. Both have stable circular orbits, meaning they must have settled into this space long ago.

Both also have an unusual color. Objects in the inner solar system tend to reflect more blue light because they are devoid of organic material — things like carbon and methane — whereas objects in the outer solar system are redder because they have a lot of organics, perhaps the building blocks of life on Earth.

"In order to have these organics, you need to initially have a lot of ice at the surface," said Michaël Marsset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author on the paper. "So they must have formed in a very cold environment. Then the solar irradiation of the ice creates those complex organics."

These two rocks, as it turns out, are extremely red — more red than anything else seen in the asteroid belt. While tentative hints of other red asteroids have been found, these two appear to be special.

Also at Universe Today.

Journal Reference:
Sunao Hasegawa, Michaël Marsset, Francesca E. DeMeo, et al. Discovery of Two TNO-like Bodies in the Asteroid Belt - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac0f05)

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upstart writes:

28,000-year-old cave lion cub found in perfect condition:

A study published in the journal Quaternary details the discovery of two mummified baby cave lions in the Siberian Arctic by local mammoth tusk collectors in 2017 and 2018. The extinct cave lions were widely spread throughout eastern Siberia in the late Pleistocene period and were a bigger relative of the African lions that live today.

Researchers initially thought the two cubs, believed to be 1 or 2 months old when they died, were siblings as they were discovered just dozens of feet from one another. But the new study found they differ in age by around 15,000 years.

One female cub nicknamed "Sparta" dates back about 28,000 years ago while "Boris," a male,  is more than 43,000 years old, according to radiocarbon dating.

Journal Reference:
Gennady G. Boeskorov, Valery V. Plotnikov, Albert V. Protopopov, et al. The Preliminary Analysis of Cave Lion Cubs Panthera spelaea (Goldfuss, 1810) from the Permafrost of Siberia, Quaternary (DOI: 10.3390/quat4030024)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Leaked Document Says Google Fired Dozens of Employees for Data Misuse:

Google fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to the company's tools or data, with some workers potentially facing allegations of accessing Google user or employee data, according to an internal Google document obtained by Motherboard.

The document provides concrete figures on an often delicate part of a tech giant's operations: investigations into how the company's own employees leverage their positions to steal, leak, or abuse data they may have access to. Insider abuse is a problem across the tech industry. Motherboard previously uncovered instances at Facebook, Snapchat, and MySpace, with employees in some cases using their access to stalk or otherwise spy on users.

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web:

In 1989 the world's largest physics laboratory, CERN, was a hive of ideas and information stored on multiple incompatible computers. Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a unifying structure for linking information across different computers, and wrote a proposal in March 1989 called "Information Management: A Proposal". By 1991 this vision of universal connectivity had become the World Wide Web.

To celebrate 30 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee's proposal and to kick-start a series of celebrations worldwide, CERN hosted a 30th Anniversary event in the morning of 12 March 2019 in partnership with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and with the World Wide Web Foundation.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Peloton treadmill owners will be able to run again without a subscription:

After a spate of accidents on its Tread+ treadmill, Peloton temporarily moved the basic running mode of Tread+ behind a paywall so non-authorized users couldn't gain access. Now, all users will be able to use the "Just Run" feature without a subscription [...]

[...] after several reports of injuries and one death. The company subsequently released a software update that required a passcode to use the basic running mode, but the feature was only available to subscribers.

[...] The Tread Lock feature locks the device if you haven't used the treadmill in 45 seconds and aren't in a class. You then need to input a four-digit code before it can be used again.

[...] While the update was inconvenient for non-subscribers who purchased the $4,000+ devices, Peloton did make it possible to do basic running without paying.

Putting the primary function of an expensive product behind a paywall is a way to prevent accidents.

Original Submission