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upstart writes:

Alzheimer's discovery reveals "Achilles' heel" of synapse degeneration:

Scientists believe one of the key culprits behind the cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer's are amyloid beta proteins that clump together and disrupt the brain's synaptic connections, but how they carry out such degeneration has remained unclear. A new study has shone compelling new light on this phenomenon, with the authors demonstrating how these toxic agents take aim at the "Achilles' heel" of synapses, and better yet, how they might just be stopped.

[...] Neurobiologists at the University of California (UC) San Diego focused on a major type of synapse called glutamatergic synapses. During brain development, these synapses are pieced together by a powerful signaling pathway called the planar cell polarity (PCP) pathway, which includes signaling components called Celsr3 and Vangl2. These work in harmony to stabilize and disassemble synapses, respectively, to keep their numbers at a healthy level.

[...] The researchers then turned their attention to another key component of the PCP pathway called Ryk, which functions much like Vangl2 in mediating synapse disassembly. Using special antibodies, the scientists blocked the function of Ryk and found that this too prevented the degeneration of synapses by the amyloid beta proteins. In mouse models of Alzheimer's, both knocking out the gene for Ryk and administering the Ryk-blocking antibody protected the synapses and preserved cognitive function.

"As amyloid beta pathology and synapse loss usually occurs in early stages of Alzheimer's disease, even before cognitive decline can be detected, early intervention, such as restoring the rebalance of the PCP pathway, will likely be beneficial for Alzheimer's patients," says Zou.

The Ryk antibody also proved effective at quelling some of the signs of neuroinflammation seen in Alzheimer's, though the exact mechanisms behind this are unclear. In any case, the scientists believe these results indicate the PCP could prove a valuable target in efforts to protect synapse loss in Alzheimer's disease, and potentially other conditions.

Also at: UC San Diego

Journal Reference:
Bo Feng, Andiara E. Freitas, Lilach Gorodetski, et al. Planar cell polarity signaling components are a direct target of β-amyloid–associated degeneration of glutamatergic synapses [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh2307)

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upstart writes:

NASA's Perseverance to attempt second Mars soil scoop, hoping rocks don't 'crumble':

NASA's Perseverance rover will drive to a new location in the coming weeks to drill for its first Mars soil sample, scientists say, weeks after the robot's first attempt resulted in an empty sample tube.

[...] Now the rover, a science lab on wheels that landed on Mars in February, will drive to a new location called Citadelle for a second shot at picking up its first rock sample. This time, to make sure a sample is actually collected, engineers will wait for images of the sample tube to come back before it gets processed and stowed inside the rover’s belly.

“We were just super excited that the hardware worked from beginning to end without any faults. And then there was that surprise — ‘No sample? What do you mean no sample?’,” Louise Jandura, the Chief Engineer for Sampling & Caching on NASA’s Perseverance team, says of the first attempt on August 5th. “So quickly, after that sunk in, we started to do the investigation.”

The rock that Perseverance’s sampling drill bit dug into wasn’t as sturdy as scientists thought it’d be. What was supposed to be a fairly solid rock core turned out to be a crumbly powder that slipped out of the rover’s sampling tube. After finding the sample tube was empty, mission staff used the rover’s cameras to analyze remnants of the hole that Perseverance drilled. They figured the mound of dust around the hole and some material at the bottom of the hole were what slipped out.

“The rock simply wasn’t our kind of rock,” Jennifer Trosper, Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Although we had successfully acquired over 100 cores in a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved in quite this manner.”

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upstart writes:

Rain fell at the normally snowy summit of Greenland for the first time on record:

Temperatures at the Greenland summit over the weekend rose above freezing for the third time in less than a decade. The warm air fueled an extreme rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall in Washington, DC, nearly 250,000 times.

It was the heaviest rainfall on the ice sheet since record keeping began in 1950, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the amount of ice mass lost on Sunday was seven times higher than normal for this time of year.

The New York Times adds It Rained at the Summit of Greenland. That's Never Happened Before:

Something extraordinary happened last Saturday at the frigid high point of the Greenland ice sheet, two miles in the sky and more than 500 miles above the Arctic Circle: It rained for the first time.

The rain at a research station — not just a few drops or a drizzle but a stream for several hours, as temperatures rose slightly above freezing — is yet another troubling sign of a changing Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on the planet.

"It's incredible, because it does write a new chapter in the book of Greenland," said Marco Tedesco, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "This is really new."

At the station, which is called Summit and is occupied year-round under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, there is no record of rain since observations began in the 1980s. And computer simulations show no evidence going back even further, said Thomas Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia.

upstart writes:

Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%:

The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles.

Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further.

The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles.

On Thursday, German firm Volkswagen, which cut output earlier in the year, told Reuters: "We currently expect supply of chips in the third quarter to be very volatile and tight.

"We can't rule out further changes to production."

Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage.

[...] New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago.

upstart writes:

AMD Launches The Infinity Hub As Its Newest Open-Source Portal:

AMD Infinity Hub is [...] focused on high performance computing (HPC) with AMD Instinct accelerators. Infinity Hub is also more about porting existing software to the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) for enjoying Instinct support rather than developing new and original HPC software.

The AMD Infinity Hub in its initial form lays out instructions on how to obtain/use ROCm-enabled versions of AMBER, Chroma, CP2K, GROMACS, NAMD, OpenMM, PyTorch, SPECFEM3D, and TensorFlow.

Some of these upstream open-source projects already have ROCm support available and in those cases the Infinity Hub is just outlining ROCm support caveats and other details to help users. While ROCm can work on select consumer Radeon GPUs too, the Infinity Hub is just focused on the support around their Instinct accelerators.

AMD is striving for the Infinity Hub to be a resource to make it easier to deploy HPC workloads on their GPUs/accelerators, simplify deployments, and stay up to date with new resources.

[...] The Infinity Hub can be viewed on AMD.com.;

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upstart writes:

Babylonian Tablet Trigonometry:

Contrary to what generations of pupils have learned in high school geometry, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras did not come up with this foundational theorem [(a² + b² = c²)] first. The proof lies in an ancient artifact that dates back to the Old Babylonian (OB) period: 1900 to 1600 B.C.

In 1894, Father Jean-Vincent Scheil excavated a clay tablet at an archaeological expedition at Sippar, southwest of Baghdad. "But its significance was not understood at the time," Daniel Mansfield—lead author of the new research and a mathematician at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia—writes in The Conversation.

The tablet, known as Si.427, is "the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period, which is a plan used by surveyors to define land boundaries," according to Mansfield. On the front of the artifact is an inscription showing a diagram of a field. The surveyors drew a series of perpendicular lines, using Pythagorean triples to create precise right angles so that the fields' boundaries were as square as possible.

There's evidence of triangles drawn around the periphery of the field documented on the tablet, but if that's not enough proof, consider the back of the clay tablet. On it, cuneiform text describes the opposite side, including details about the sizes of the fields.

[...] Surveyors used Pythagorean triples to measure fields and draw accurate maps, but some numbers that make up Pythagorean triples aren't regular, and don't make sense to try to scale up to fit any field. Plimpton 322 lists a bunch of Pythagorean triples and notes which of their three values is regular, helping ancient Babylonian surveyors to quickly "do the math," so to speak.

Journal Reference:
Mansfield, Daniel F.. Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles [open], Foundations of Science (DOI: 10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0)

Original Submission

Elon Musk Reveals Plans to Unleash a Humanoid Tesla Bot

upstart writes:

Elon Musk reveals plans to unleash a humanoid Tesla Bot:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk ended a deeply technical AI Day event [(3h3m21s)] with a head-turning announcement: a humanoid robot.

After a dancing human dressed as a robot moved off stage at Thursday's invitation-only event in Palo Alto, California, Musk introduced Tesla Bot. It will be based on Tesla's Autopilot system and is essentially a humanoid form of the car. Musk considers the electric vehicles "fully sentient robots on wheels." So might as well make it a human-like bot!

The bot looks like a human with two arms (and two hands with five fingers) and two legs. It'll stand at 5 feet 8 inches and weigh 125 pounds. It can only run 5 mph, which Musk assured was slow enough for most people to escape if something goes wrong: "If you can run faster than that it’ll be fine."

Most importantly, Musk said it would be friendly ("of course") and operate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks as it "navigates a world built for humans."

Musk repeated that the humanoid would have a screen on its head and eight cameras, like on Tesla cars that can drive with assistance from Autopilot. "It's all the same tools we see in the car," he said.

Elon Musk Reveals Tesla Bot, a Humanoid Robot Utilizing Tesla's Vehicle AI

upstart writes:

The story continues at c|net:

Elon Musk reveals Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot utilizing Tesla's vehicle AI:

Three slides detailed the robot's proposed specifications and Musk made sure he pointed out you could both outrun the Tesla Bot and "overpower" it. He has, in the past, rallied against the use of robots as weapons and warned of the risks AI might pose -- once calling it the "biggest risk we face as a civilization." I guess if they're your incredibly slow, easy-to-overpower robots, the dangers are reduced.

One particular slide said they would eliminate "dangerous, repititive, boring tasks" and Musk provided an example suggesting the robot could be told to "go to the store and get ... the following groceries."

A prototype would likely be ready next year, he said.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Google Has Been Paying Wireless Carriers Billions To Not Develop Competing App Stores:

To be clear, wireless carrier app stores have always kind of sucked. Verizon's efforts to create its own app store were shut down in 2012, after underwhelming consumers for years. At the time, the narrative was that Verizon just didn't find it worth the trouble in the face of Google domination and innovation. And while that's still largely true (wireless carriers are utterly unfamiliar with competition and therefore historically suck at innovation and adaptation), it turns out there was another reason.

Namely, that Google was paying Verizon and other major wireless companies a big chunk of money to not compete with the Android marketplace. And they were paying smartphone manufacturers to ship devices without competing app stores installed. Both nuggets were buried in a freshly unredacted copy of Epic's antitrust complaint (pdf) against Google, first spotted by Jeremy Owens:

Man, I love when the redactions come off and there are fascinating numbers underneath.

This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service. pic.twitter.com/Vx6p1YBU6S

This agreement to start paying wireless carriers 20-25% of app sales was occurring right around the time that Google brass was visibly starting to wimp out on consumer-centric issues like net neutrality. That involved working closely with Verizon to push the FCC toward flimsy, loophole-filled, "compromise" 2010 net neutrality rules that excluded wireless entirely. Verizon proceeded to then successfully sue the FCC to have those repealed anyway, leading to better rules in 2015 that were also dismantled a few years, later, albeit thanks to lobbying, not the courtroom.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

UCLA-led study could clarify how microbes can exacerbate cognitive decline:

In the experiment, which was conducted with mice, researchers found that gut microbes can exacerbate the effects of cognitive impairment because of how they affect the hippocampus, the region of the brain that is critical for memory and learning. They found that the concentration of one group of bacteria called Bilophila increased dramatically in the gut microbiota of mice that were fed a ketogenic diet — high in fat, and low in carbohydrates — and were intermittently deprived of oxygen, creating a condition called hypoxia.

The scientists also found that a ketogenic diet, hypoxia and treatment with a species of Bilophila called Bilophila wadsworthia impaired the hippocampus, leading to reduced cognitive ability in mice.

The researchers gave several mice a ketogenic diet and others a standard diet. Then, all of the mice received reduced levels of oxygen for five consecutive days and then were given four days to recover. Depriving the animals of some oxygen was a way for the scientists to cause cognitive impairment, in order to mimic the cognitive impairment in humans that can be caused by neurological diseases or aging.

Next, the scientists observed their ability to navigate a maze. When trying to find their way out of a maze, mice on the ketogenic diet made an average of 30% more errors than mice given the standard diet. (The range of difference between the two groups was 25% to 75%.)

DannyB writes:

Windows 11 Is Making It Absurdly Difficult to Change Browsers
In a page ripped right out of the '90s, Microsoft reminds us that it's still engaging in the browser wars.

[....] there have been plenty of chances to dive into the OS to see what's next from Microsoft. And there's evidence of the same old story. Namely, Microsoft wants to make it hard for you to use a browser that isn't Edge.

The Verge reports on how convoluted the new process is to change the default browser in Windows 11. Like in Windows 10, you'll get a prompt when you click on a web link asking you to choose an app. But unless you specifically tell the system that you'd like to switch browsers, it will assume you're okay with Microsoft Edge as the default.

[....] It gets worse: if you don't remember on the initial pop-up, you'll have to dig into the settings to change the default app for every specific file type. This can get tedious! It means you'll have to tell Windows which app should open an HTM, HTML, PDF, SVG, and XHTML file—and that's only a sampling of the file types that a browser can open. Additional screenshots show Windows 11 still nags the user to try Microsoft Edge when switching browsers.

From the same people who brought us IE 6, the bane of web developers everywhere, now comes Edge — the browser with the swirl toilet flushing icon.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Milestone #1:
First off, please join me in congratulating janrinok in posting his 5,400th story! I can attest that it represents a tremendous commitment of time and effort, all freely given to the community. Thanks JR!

Milestone #2:
Secondly, we are a few days away from our team reaching 2.8 billion points towards Folding at Home. Official Team Stats and a more informative summary. As I write this, our team is currently ranked #392 in the world. Please be aware we are up against teams such as AWS, Google, Apple, Facebook, SAP, IBM, Dell, Oracle... you get the idea. Our top contributor is Runaway1956 who has been contributing about 2.5 million points per day. Barring any surprises, he is on track to reach 1 billion points by month's end. Way to go!

Moderation:
Lastly, I need to call the community's attention to some problems with moderations.

For the most part, things have been working out well! Considering the diverse viewpoints — and strong feelings about them — I'd say things are working amazingly well. There are some, however, who are prolific, vocal, strong-willed, and are trying to push their own agenda. They are likely to be unhappy with these changes. Until notified otherwise, feel free to moderate complaints about moderation as "-1 Offtopic" and just move on.

Effective Immediately:
For the benefit of the community who have been acting in good faith all along, staff will commence issuing moderation bans on accounts that have been acting unfairly. Each ban will have been discussed among staff and no unilateral action will be taken. If you receive a ban, it's because a majority of staff are in agreement that unfair moderations have been performed and needed to be dealt with.

upstart writes:

'Green steel': Swedish company ships first batch made without using coal:

The world's first customer delivery of "green steel" produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green free steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU's plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Japan developing AI, satellite system to track foreign ships in its waters:

Japan is developing a maritime surveillance system that will use artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced satellite technologies to identify and track foreign ships operating suspiciously close to its waters or that intrude into its territory.

The government is earmarking an initial 450 million yen (US$4.1 million) for the project under the third supplementary budget for fiscal 2020, with technology companies being invited to submit proposals for the system.

An analyst said Tokyo is finding it difficult to keep track of the vessels illegally entering its vast ocean territories.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

No preloading. No promises what's next.

Samsung says it will stop loading its $1,000 smartphones with ads:

Samsung says it will cut down on the ads it shows on its smartphones. The announcement was first reported by Korean news agency Yonhap and was later confirmed by Samsung in a statement to The Verge. The official line from the industry giant is "Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps, including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme." The company added, "The update will be ready by later this year."

Samsung ships Android on all its smartphones, but it changes the experience with a "One UI" skin and includes several Samsung-developed packed-in apps. Many of these apps—like Bixby, Samsung Health, and Weather—contain big banner ads, sometimes right at the top of the app, where you would normally expect to find an app logo or navigation information. The worst offenders are notification ads—a Samsung app will spawn a notification to entice you to buy a new gadget or install a new app.

[...] A "later this year" launch date would mean that the first new ad-free Samsung phone will be the Galaxy S22.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

S. Korea develops technique to recycle discarded solar panels into high-performance solar cells:

Researchers have developed a non-destructive technique to recycle discarded solar panels to create high-performance solar cells. The technique will become crucial in a few decades when solar panels that are currently being used are discarded after their operational life of about 20 years.

A solar panel is a photovoltaic module made of materials such as glass, aluminum, silicon and copper. It uses sunlight as a source of energy to generate direct current electricity. A solar cell is a black mirror-like electrical device that is the key component of a solar panel. Techniques have been researched to maximize the efficiency of recycling solar panels.

The state-run Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) said in a statement on August 19 that a technique developed by its research team led by Lee Jin-seok enables the recycling of solar panels. The institute said the new technique can recycle both undamaged and damaged panels to achieve up to 100 percent retrieval rate of glass components. About 80 percent of other materials can be retrieved and recycled into high-performance solar cells.

Original Submission