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upstart writes:

‘They said we were eccentrics’: the UK team developing clean aviation fuel:

“Anyone passing would have wondered why these people were staring at a pipe and whooping and laughing,” says Bobby Sethi, associate professor of gas turbine combustion at Cranfield University. “But we were almost certainly the only people in the world right then burning anything without producing CO2.”

[...] “We were able to demonstrate successful ignition and safe combustion of pure hydrogen and air at high temperature and pressure – producing no carbon emissions,” he says. Even if, he adds, the passing layperson would have only seen a pipe and some steam.

[...] Sethi recalls the scepticism of even five years ago, when he was pursuing funding for the hydrogen research project, known as Enable H2: “They said we were eccentrics. Now they’re queueing up to be on our advisory board.”

There are broadly three strands of work that the aviation industry is frantically investigating for an environmentally acceptable future. One is to create greener fuels for the large aircraft currently in service. A second is electric flight, which appears feasible for smaller aircraft and short-haul hops. And a third is hydrogen.

Two projects pioneered at Cranfield are using hydrogen in the form of fuel cells to power electric motors and propel planes: ZeroAvia flew a six-seater from here last September, and hopes to scale up the technology for commercial short-haul flights in the coming decades. Another, Project Fresson, is planning to use fuel cells for a green, short-hop passenger service around the Orkney islands as soon as 2023.

But the ambitions for direct combustion of hydrogen are on a bigger scale; whether a radically different plane and propulsion system could replace the modern, paraffin-fuelled passenger jet. Which is where Sethi’s research comes in.

Nothing yet in the sheds looks anything like a plane. The rig here is a unique facility, Sethi says, assembled to show that hydrogen can be clean, safe and efficient for aviation, and produce data showing the optimum temperature and pressure to minimise other harmful emissions such as nitrogen oxides or NOx, a family of highly poisonous gases.

Not the only scientists looking for controlled ignition of hydrogen. What's described still seems a long way away from something that produces thrust, which is the ultimate need. However, technology usually advances in small steps, and that's fine as long as there's an ultimately reachable goal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Drone Delivery Is Live Today, And It's 90% Cheaper Than Car-Based Services:

Amazon may be failing to deliver on its promises of drone delivery programs. But a home-grown Irish company is running live autonomous drone delivery right now in Galway, Ireland, has licenses to take it across the European Union, and is poised to — at the right moment — take its tech and knowhow across the Atlantic.

To Canada, at least.

Regulation in the U.S. is too far behind the times.

"We're delivering coffees," Manna CEO Bobby Healy told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. "We're delivering burgers and fries. We're delivering ice cream, broccoli, melon, you name it, we're delivering it. And it arrives perfect, you know, piping hot coffee, foam intact, little design on top of the foam still intact."

Manna is doing 2,000 to 3,000 flights a day using fully autonomous suitcase-sized drones that fly at 50 miles an hour — that's 80 km/hour in Ireland — at an altitude of 150 to 200 feet. Near your home, it'll scan the area with lidar and radar to find a safe spot, descend, drop off your delivery, and whiz back for its next pick-up.

upstart writes:

Hoo’s there? Citizen scientists needed to identify Australian owl calls:

Data from 263,000 hours of continuous recording of sounds of the night from throughout Australia will be available to citizen scientists to listen to and identify the calls of five native owls, and other wildlife, during ABC’s Science Week interactive project, Hoot Detective, from August 14 to 22.

The data made available will contain night-time environmental sounds selected by artificial intelligence as having ‘sounds of interest’ for citizen scientists. They will then identify sounds in the audio clip from a short list of, for example, owls, frogs, or crickets.

QUT [Queensland University of Technology] Australian Acoustic Observatory director Professor Paul Roe, from QUT School of Computer Science, said it was vital to engage the community in conservation of our native wildlife.

[...] “We’ve become quite disconnected from our natural environment, and we know that connection with the natural environment is beneficial to our health and wellbeing,” Professor Roe said.

“In terms of citizen science, we have plenty of data from the observatory, far too much for any one person to listen to or to analyse, which is why we need the help of citizen scientists.”

“We also need help to refine and hone our automatic call recognisers, for this we need test data for training hence the need for annotated data sets and citizen scientists can help with this. “

The five feathered creatures of the night whose calls might be identified are the powerful owl, the barking owl, the boobook owl, the barn owl and the masked owl.

JoeMerchant writes:

Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life:

Biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have "blinded us to additional general principles of life".

To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.

Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.

[...] Kempes and Krakauer call for researchers to consider, first, the full space of materials in which life could be possible; second, the constraints that limit the universe of possible life; and, third, the optimization processes that drive adaptation. In general, the framework considers life as adaptive information and adopts the analogy of computation to capture the processes central to life.

Several significant possibilities emerge when we consider life within the new framework. First, life originates multiple times — some apparent adaptations are actually “a new form of life, not just an adaptation,” explains Krakauer — and it takes a far broader range of forms than conventional definitions allow.

Culture, computation, and forests are all forms of life in this frame. As Kempes explains, “human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms.”

So, next can we get a definition of sentient life which deserves the rights afforded to (most) h. sapiens today?

Journal Reference:
Kempes, Christopher P., Krakauer, David C.. The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life [open], Journal of Molecular Evolution (DOI: 10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The hacker who stole and gave back $600M has been offered a job and reward from the company he stole from:

In yet another bizarre twist to this story, Poly Network announced today in a Medium post that it has maintained daily contact with the hacker referred to as Mr White Hat. Poly Network claims that the hacker shared his concerns about "Poly Network’s security and overall development strategy" in the post.

Poly Network then offered Mr. White Hat a job as Chief Security Advisor of Poly Network. It's not uncommon for hackers to make living testing out the digital defense of large companies for a fee. The idea is: Who better to run your security than the person who robbed you?

#PolyNetwork has no intention of holding #mrwhitehat legally responsible and cordially invites him to be our Chief Security Advisor. $500,000 bounty is on the way. Whatever #mrwhitehat chooses to do with the bounty in the end, we have no objections. https://t.co/4IaZvyWRGz href="https://twitter.com/PolyNetwork2/status/1427574236483231749">August 17, 2021

[...] And if you're still keeping count, as of Friday, $340M was returned along with $238M to a multi-signature wallet with a remainder of $33M that's currently waiting to be unfrozen. Poly Network also took this moment to turn lemons into lemonade and announce the launch of a bug bounty program. Discovering vulnerabilities on their platform can score you up to $100,000.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Counter-spinning turbine design draws double the energy from ocean waves:

One of the more common approaches to harnessing wave energy is known as a point absorber buoy, which consists of a flotation device on the surface that is tethered to the seabed. As the buoy moves up and down with the passing waves, it drives an energy converter mechanism built onto the tether partway below the surface. This might be a geared drivetrain that uses the linear motion to spin a flywheel and generate power, as seen in some experimental designs.

The RMIT scientists used the point absorber buoy as a jumping off point for their novel generator, which they say addresses a couple of problems with conventional designs. To efficiently harvest energy, point absorber buoys typically need to use sensors, actuators and other electronics to precisely synchronize themselves with the incoming waves, but this leaves them open to maintenance and reliability issues.

In what they call a world-first design, the scientists eschewed all these synchronization sensors and electronics and went with a passive approach that has the device float up and down naturally with the swell. Two turbine wheels that are stacked close together down below rotate in opposite directions, and combine to amplify the energy being relayed to the generator.

takyon writes:

Apple's Double Agent

For more than a year, an active member of a community that traded in illicitly obtained internal Apple documents and devices was also acting as an informant for the company.

On Twitter and in Discord channels for the loosely defined Apple "internal" community that trades leaked information and stolen prototypes, he advertised leaked apps, manuals, and stolen devices for sale. But unbeknownst to other members in the community, he shared with Apple personal information of people who sold stolen iPhone prototypes from China, Apple employees who leaked information online, journalists who had relationships with leakers and sellers, and anything that he thought the company would find interesting and worth investigating.

​​Andrey Shumeyko, also known as YRH04E and JVHResearch online, decided to share his story because he felt that Apple took advantage of him and should have compensated him for providing the company this information.

Also at Wccftech.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Boston Dynamics releases video of Atlas robot doing parkour:

In the video[#1], two Atlas robots navigate jumps and steps of varying heights, vaulting over and running along a balance beam before ending the routine with two backflips a piece.

It's more than most humans can do, but the team at Boston Dynamics explain that the robots aren't intelligently navigating an unfamiliar course. They've been programmed and trained to complete it.

"It's not the robot just magically deciding to do parkour," chief technology officer Aaron Saunders said.

"It's kind of a choreographed routine, much like a skateboard video, or a parkour video, where it's an athlete that's practised these moves.

[...] The behind-the-scenes peek[#2] at how the often viral videos are made shows the stumbles and fumbles that often result when making a 175cm, 75kg robot do parkour.

[...] While the routines are rehearsed and pre-programmed, Atlas has become more capable at assessing its own environment and its movements now are much more based on perception than in previous videos, Boston Dynamics said.

Videos on YouTube #1 (1m6s) and #2 (5m50s).

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Thwaites Glacier: Significant Geothermal Heat Beneath the Ice Stream

Researchers map the geothermal heat flow in West Antarctica; a new potential weak spot in the ice sheet’s stability is identified.

Ice losses from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica are currently responsible for roughly four percent of the global sea-level rise. This figure could increase, since virtually no other ice stream in the Antarctic is changing as dramatically as the massive Thwaites Glacier. Until recently, experts attributed these changes to climate change and the fact that the glacier rests on the seafloor in many places, and as such comes into contact with warm water masses. But there is also a third, and until now, one of the most difficult to constrain, influencing factors. In a new study, German and British researchers have shown that there is a conspicuously large amount of heat from Earth’s interior beneath the ice, which has likely affected the sliding behaviour of the ice masses for millions of years. This substantial geothermal heat flow, in turn, is due to the fact that the glacier lies in a tectonic trench, where the Earth’s crust is significantly thinner than it is e.g. in neighbouring East Antarctica.

Anti-aristarchus writes:

The Mars Ingenuity copter has completed its twelfth flight. Story from Ars Technica.

NASA's tiny Mars helicopter, which has a fuselage about the size of a small toaster, has successfully flown above the planet for the 12th time.

Nearly half a year after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, the Ingenuity helicopter is still going strong on the surface of the planet. The small flyer has done so well that it has been separated from Perseverance for some time as it scouts ahead on the red planet.

Ingenuity completed its latest flight on Monday, ascending to 10 meters and flying 450 meters across Mars to investigate what scientists call the "South Séítah" region of Mars. The helicopter was aloft for a total of 169 seconds during Monday's flight. In its dozen flights, Ingenuity has now covered 2.67 km, which is farther than Perseverance has rolled during nearly six months.

For Monday's flight, Ingenuity flew out over this intriguing region to scout its boulders and other geological features to help mission scientists determine whether they warrant further scrutiny by Perseverance. After slowing over this area of interest to take photographs, Ingenuity then flew back to its takeoff point. The flight involved significant risk because Ingenuity's terrain navigation system was designed to fly across nearly flat terrain. Rocky terrain could induce errors in pitch and roll during flight.

Yes, little rotor-craft, flying on the edge! And actually doing useful reconnaissance.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Grew Stem Cell 'Mini Brains'. Then, The Brains Sort-of Developed Eyes:

Mini brains grown in a lab from stem cells have spontaneously developed rudimentary eye structures, scientists report in a fascinating new paper.

On tiny, human-derived brain organoids grown in dishes, two bilaterally symmetrical optic cups were seen to grow, mirroring the development of eye structures in human embryos. This incredible result will help us to better understand the process of eye differentiation and development, as well as eye diseases.

"Our work highlights the remarkable ability of brain organoids to generate primitive sensory structures that are light sensitive and harbor cell types similar to those found in the body," said neuroscientist Jay Gopalakrishnan of University Hospital Düsseldorf in Germany.

"These organoids can help to study brain-eye interactions during embryo development, model congenital retinal disorders, and generate patient-specific retinal cell types for personalized drug testing and transplantation therapies."

Brain organoids are not true brains, as you might be thinking of them. They are small, three-dimensional structures grown from induced pluripotent stem cells - cells harvested from adult humans and reverse engineered into stem cells, that have the potential to grow into many different types of tissue.

Journal Reference:

Elke Gabriel, Walid Albanna, Giovanni Pasquini, Anand Ramani, Natasa Josipovic, Aruljothi Mariappan, Friedrich Schinzel, Celeste M. Karch, Guobin Bao, Marco Gottardo, Ata Alp Suren, Jürgen Hescheler, Kerstin Nagel-Wolfrum, Veronica Persico, Silvio O. Rizzoli, Janine Altmüller, Maria Giovanna Riparbelli, Giuliano Callaini, Olivier Goureau, Argyris Papantonis, Volker Busskamp, Toni Schneider, Jay Gopalakrishnan. Human brain organoids assemble functionally integrated bilateral optic vesicles. Cell Stem Cell, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2021.07.010

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Space collision: Chinese satellite got whacked by hunk of Russian rocket in March:

In March, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron (18SPCS) reported the breakup of Yunhai 1-02, a Chinese military satellite that launched in September 2019. It was unclear at the time whether the spacecraft had suffered some sort of failure — an explosion in its propulsion system, perhaps — or if it had collided with something in orbit.

We now know that the latter explanation is correct, thanks to some sleuthing by astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who's based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On Saturday (Aug. 14), McDowell spotted an update in the Space-Track.org catalog, which the 18SPCS makes available to registered users. The update included "a note for object 48078, 1996-051Q: 'Collided with satellite.' This is a new kind of comment entry — haven't seen such a comment for any other satellites before," McDowell tweeted on Saturday.

He dove into the tracking data to learn more. McDowell found that Object 48078 is a small piece of space junk — likely a piece of debris between 4 inches and 20 inches wide (10 to 50 centimeters) — from the Zenit-2 rocket that launched Russia's Tselina-2 spy satellite in September 1996. Eight pieces of debris originating from that rocket have been tracked over the years, he said, but Object 48078 has just a single set of orbital data, which was collected in March of this year.

"I conclude that they probably only spotted it in the data after it collided with something, and that's why there's only one set of orbital data. So the collision probably happened shortly after the epoch of the orbit. What did it hit?" McDowell wrote in another Saturday tweet.

upstart writes:

German chemists identified over 7,700 different chemical formulas in beers:

People have been brewing beer for millennia, and the basic chemistry of fermentation is well understood. But thanks to advanced analytical techniques, scientists continue to learn more about the many different chemical compounds that contribute to the flavor and aroma of different kinds of beer. The latest such analysis comes courtesy of a team of German scientists who analyzed over 400 commercial beers from 40 countries. The scientists identified at least 7,700 different chemical formulas and tens of thousands of unique molecules, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry. And they did it with a new approach that can analyze a sample in just 10 minutes.

[...] As I've written previously, all beer contains hops, a key flavoring agent that also imparts useful antimicrobial properties. To make beer, brewers mash and steep grain in hot water, which converts all that starch into sugars. This is traditionally the stage when hops are added to the liquid extract (wort) and boiled. That turns some of the resins (alpha acids) in the hops into iso-alpha acids, producing beer's hint of bitterness. Yeast is then added to trigger fermentation, turning the sugars into alcohol. Some craft brewers prefer dry-hopping—hops are added during or after the fermentation stage, after the wort has cooled. They do this as a way to enhance the hoppy flavors without getting excessive bitterness, since there is no isomerization of the alpha acids.

[...] For their analysis, [Philippe] Schmitt-Kopplin et al. subjected 400 samples of beer—purchased from local grocery stores—brewed from all over the world (the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia) to two complementary mass spectrometry techniques. They used the first method to determine the beers' chemical diversity and to predict chemical formulas for the metabolite ions in those beers. They used the second technique to figure out the exact molecular structure in a subsample of 100 beers. They were also able to reconstruct a full metabolic network of the complex reactions taking place during the brewing process.

upstart writes:

US safety regulator opens investigation into Tesla Autopilot following crashes with parked emergency vehicles – TechCrunch:

U.S. auto regulators have opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla's Autopilot advanced driver assistance system, citing 11 incidents in which vehicles crashed into parked first responder vehicles while the system was engaged.

The Tesla vehicles involved in the collisions were confirmed to have either have had engaged Autopilot or a feature called Traffic Aware Cruise Control, according to investigation documents posted on the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration's [(NHTSA)] website. Most of the incidents took place after dark and occurred despite "scene control measures," such as emergency vehicle lights, road cones and an illuminated arrow board signaling drivers to change lanes.

"The investigation will assess the technologies and methods used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver's engagement with the dynamic driving task during Autopilot operation," the document says.

The investigation covers around 765,000 Tesla vehicles that span all currently available models: Tesla Model Y, Model X, Model S and Model 3. The 11 incidents or fires resulted in 17 injuries and one fatality. They occurred between January 2018 and July 2021.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Swiping left on magnetic stripes:

The shift away from the magnetic stripe points to both consumers changing habits for payments and the development of newer technologies. Today’s chip cards are powered by microprocessors that are much more capable and secure, and many are also embedded with tiny antennae that enable contactless transactions. Biometric cards, which combine fingerprints with chips to verify a cardholder’s identity, offer another layer of security.

Based on the decline in payments powered by magnetic stripes after chip-based payments took hold, newly-issued Mastercard credit and debit cards will not be required to have a stripe starting in 2024 in most markets. By 2033, no Mastercard credit and debit cards will have magnetic stripes, which leaves a long runway for the remaining partners who still rely on the technology to phase in chip card processing.

[...] More than half of Americans prefer using a chip card payment at a terminal over any other payment method, with security being the driving factor, according to a December survey for Mastercard by the Phoenix Consumer Monitor. That was followed by contactless payments — with a card or a digital wallet. Only 11% said they preferred to swipe, and that drops to 9% when looking at cardholders with experience using contactless payments.

And in a July study by Phoenix, 81% of American cardholders surveyed reported they would be comfortable with a card that does not have the magnetic stripe, and 92% would increase or keep usage of their cards the same if the magnetic stripe was no longer on the card.

Original Submission