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upstart writes:

Prehistoric Climate Change Repeatedly Channelled Human Migrations Across Arabia:

New research shows that over the last 400,000 years, multiple pulses of increased rainfall transformed the generally arid Arabian Peninsula into a hospitable route for human population movements across Southwest Asia

International and Saudi researchers have discovered archaeological sites in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia associated with the remains of ancient lakes formed when periods of increased rainfall transformed the region into grassland. The researchers found that early humans spread into the region during each 'Green Arabia' phase, each bringing a different kind of material culture. The new research establishes northern Arabia as a crucial migration route and a crossroads for early humans.

Recent research in Arabia – a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and many other Saudi and international researchers – has begun to document the incredibly rich prehistory of Saudi Arabia, the largest country in Southwest Asia. Previous research in the region has focused on the coastal and woodland margins, while human prehistory in the vast interior areas remained poorly understood.

The new findings, including the oldest dated evidence for humans in Arabia at 400,000 years ago, are described as a "breakthrough in Arabian archaeology" by Dr Huw Groucutt, lead author of the study and head of the 'Extreme Events' Max Planck Society Research Group in Jena, Germany, based at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

Journal Reference:
Groucutt, Huw S., White, Tom S., Scerri, Eleanor M. L., et al. Multiple hominin dispersals into Southwest Asia over the past 400,000 years [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03863-y)

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upstart writes:

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it used the trademarked word 'zeta':

On Tuesday, Tariq Rashid, a UK-based data scientist and author, tried to create a t-shirt design using on-demand print shop Spring to celebrate the Riemann zeta function, which is widely known among mathematicians and technical types.

"I thought I'd create a t-shirt of the function as it looks cool and is pretty famous," Rashid told The Register. "The Clay Math Institute has a $100m prize for solving the Riemann Hypothesis."

Rashid uploaded his design to Spring, formerly known as Teespring, so that it could be printed to order by netizens. The biz had other ideas. It removed Rashid's design from its store listings because his item included the trademarked word "zeta" in its blurb.

When Rashid emailed Spring to object that zeta is a common mathematical term, the company's legal team replied: "We completely understand your concerns about our keyword block. As you are aware, Zeta is a letter of the Greek Alphabet. The Greek alphabet is currently protected legally by the Affinity Client Services. Due to this ownership and the takedowns we have received, we must police our platform for content using 'Zeta.'"

The legal eagles later said it had reviewed Rashid's content and "placed it back into active status because it does not violate current ownership." That said, that particular listing was not made publicly available again as we'll explain later.

Affinity Consultants, based in Carlsbad, California, for more than two decades has been coordinating trademark licensing oversight for various Greek-lettered organizations – fraternities and sororities – that use combinations of Greek letters to identify themselves. [...]

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FAA Grounds SpaceShipTwo After Problem on July Flight - SpaceNews

upstart writes:

FAA grounds SpaceShipTwo after problem on July flight - SpaceNews:

LOMPOC, Calif. — The Federal Aviation Administration will not allow Virgin Galactic to resume flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane until it completes an investigation into a problem on the vehicle's previous flight in July.

In a Sept. 2 statement, the FAA said it is overseeing a Virgin Galactic mishap investigation into the July 11 flight of SpaceShipTwo, called "Unity 22" by the company, which appeared to go as planned but in fact suffered a problem that caused it to stray from its restricted airspace.

"Virgin Galactic may not return the SpaceShipTwo vehicle to flight until the FAA approves the final mishap investigation report or determines the issues related to the mishap do not affect public safety," the agency stated.

The statement came a day after the publication of an article by The New Yorker that revealed that the two SpaceShipTwo pilots ignored an "entry glide cone warning" during the July 11 flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The flight took them and four others on board, including Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, to the edge of space and back with no indication at the time of any problems.

DannyB writes:

On Mars, NASA's Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For

After a perplexing failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, was able to successfully collect a sample of rock on Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images to Earth so that mission managers could be sure they had not come up empty again. The rock was there.

Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for the rover, enthused on Twitter on Thursday morning, describing it as “one beautifully perfect cored sample.”

Now that is one beautifully perfect cored sample, if I do say so myself! Be patient, little sample, your journey is about to begin. #SamplingMarshttps://t.co/jOtNGKjeAe

— Adam Steltzner (@steltzner) September 2, 2021

[...] Late in the day on Thursday, NASA said in a news release that the mission team remained confident the rock was still in the collection tube, hidden in shadows. It would be surprising if the shaking could have caused the rock to jump up and out of the tube. But NASA said the rover would take more pictures when the lighting was better before sealing the tube and putting it away in its belly.

BBC: Perseverance: Nasa's Mars rover makes second drill sample bid

The rover is tasked with gathering more than two dozen cores over the next year or so that will be fetched home by a joint US and European effort later this decade.

[....] The deep, 45km-wide depression, some 20 degrees north of the planet's equator, looks to have held a lake billions of years ago.

Because of this, scientists think Jezero's sediments may hold traces of ancient microbial life - assuming biology ever took hold on Mars.

Now scientists have to wait and see which happens first: return of rock samples to Earth, or SLS launch.

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

DentalSlim weight-loss device literally locks your mouth shut:

UK and University of Otago researchers have presented a "world-first weight loss device," which attaches to the teeth and prevents patients from opening their mouths wider than 2 mm using "magnetic devices and custom-manufactured locking bolts."

The researchers say this medieval-sounding machine, which is fixed to the first molars with orthodontic cement by a dentist, doesn't restrict breathing or speech, but holds people to a liquid diet.

In a study published in the British Dental Journal, seven healthy, obese participants wore the devices for 14 days. They were given a commercially-available liquid diet to follow, giving them 1,200 kcal of energy per day. The mean weight loss over this period was 6.36 kg (14 lb).

[Insert obvious joke about politicians needing this here.]

Journal Reference:
Paul A. Brunton, Jithendra Ratnayake, H. Jonathan Bodansky, et al. An intraoral device for weight loss: initial clinical findings [open], British Dental Journal (DOI: 10.1038/s41415-021-3081-1)

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LabRat writes:

From WSJ [original, paywalled], Vice [quoted below], and others:

McFlurry machines are complicated pieces of equipment designed so that only certified technicians employed by the Taylor, the manufacturer, can service them. When one breaks, even if it's a simple fix, the McDonald's franchise has to call in a special repair person to fix it. A company called Kytch invented a device that lets franchise owners do basic repairs and diagnostics without calling in the expensive repair person. According to Motherboard's reporting, some techs and McDonald's franchises know how to bypass safety features to get the machine operational.

Kytch busted Taylor's monopoly on repairing the ice cream machines and, according to Kytch, Taylor retaliated by stealing its devices and reverse engineering them. Kytch won a legal victory in early August when a judge awarded it a temporary restraining order against Taylor and ordered the ice cream machine manufacturer to return ill-gotten Kytch devices.

The McDonald's ice cream machine problem is a right to repair issue. Franchises pay for a McFlurry machine and then have to keep paying Taylor to keep it running. It's an issue that mirrors Apple charging exorbitant amounts [for] basic iPhone repairs or John Deere forcing farmers to use their authorized dealers to get a repair.

In July, Joe Biden signed an executive order that detailed his administration's plans to make it easier for everyone to repair their own stuff. Later that month, the FTC formally adopted a right-to-repair platform and promised to investigate companies for possible violations of antitrust and anti-competition laws. According to the FTC letter viewed by The Wall Street [Journal], it appears that looking into what's going on with the ice cream machines is part of that push.

Related:
This app tells you if your local McDonald's ice cream machine is down
Is Your Local McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Broken? Check the McBroken App
McBroken

Previously:
Bot Orders $18,752 of McSundaes Every 30 Minutes to Find If Machines are Working

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Chip world veterans gather to design customizable, chiplet-based RISC-V server chips

A Silicon Valley startup is stepping out of stealth mode today, publicly vowing to supply high-performance data-center-class RISC-V processors.

Ventana Micro Systems said since its founding in 2018 it has secured $53m in funding in series A and B rounds, the latter of which totaled $38m and was led by Marvell founders Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai.

It is hoped the first samples of its 64-bit RISC-V processors will be shared with customers in the second half of next year, and ship in volume in the first half of 2023. It's worth remembering that big biz rarely significantly commits to using someone's silicon until it reaches second generation; the first generation is mostly for evaluation of the platform, which is where Ventana is at right now.

The processors, CEO and cofounder Balaji Baktha explained to us, will use a chiplet approach, as seen with AMD and lately Intel. That is to say, each chip will contain a number of discrete dies – some with CPU cores, some with custom acceleration, and others with IO and memory interfaces – interconnected within a single package.

[...] Ventana's compute dies each feature 16 RISC-V cores. Baktha said these out-of-order, four-wide superscalar cores should outperform RV64 rivals and at least match Arm's Neoverse data-center-class CPUs.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Western Digital introduces new non-SMR 20TB HDDs with onboard NAND:

At Western Digital's HDD Reimagine Event yesterday, the company introduced its newest hard drive architecture—a hybrid spinning rust/NAND flash design it calls OptiNAND. But as WD President of Technology and Strategy Dr. Siva Sivaram told Ars in an interview, OptiNAND bears almost no resemblance to the much-maligned hybrid SSHD drives first introduced in 2011 and 2012.

Instead of promising SSD-like speeds via caching of customer data, OptiNAND offers increased areal density by removing firmware-accessible metadata from the disk itself and storing it on NAND instead.

The most tangible milestone achieved by Western Digital's newly announced architecture is a nine-platter, 20TB drive that does not require Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) techniques. The new disk uses a subset of Western Digital's EAMR technology, which has been rebranded ePMR—presumably to emphasize that it's not SMR, which has severe performance and usability implications for many common workloads.

[...] The 20TB OptiNAND disks are currently in the early stages of production, with samples shipping to select Western Digital enterprise customers only. However, the technology is expected to serve as "the foundation for future designs and innovations" across Western Digital's entire rotational storage product line, with market-specific products becoming available later this year.

See also:

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/western-digital-unveils-optinand-architecture-for-hdds
• https://www.anandtech.com/show/16920/western-digital-reimagines-hdd-flash-integration-with-optinand

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scotland to trial a four-day week:

Scotland is to trial a four-day week, but without a loss of pay. A report out today includes some ideas for how it could be done, drawing on experience in Iceland and New Zealand.

Reduced hours don't have to be taken weekly, and they could be targeted at particular groups, such as parents.

However, this is not a one-trick policy that delivers the necessary boost to productivity that is necessary to pay for it. Improving employees' sense of wellbeing, and therefore their output, requires the remaining 80% of hours to be well-managed.

[...] The four-day week, for instance. It sounds great, if you're one of those getting a three-day weekend. A new report, out today, has some survey evidence to back that up. A wholly unsurprising 80% think they'd prefer a four-day week. The same proportion, and probably the same people, say it would improve their wellbeing

For employers? It's maybe not so attractive.

Freeman writes:

Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can’t compete, SpaceX says:

Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday.

"Amazon's track record amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind," SpaceX told the FCC in its filing. Approving Amazon's request would hurt consumers by denying them "access to faster-moving competition," SpaceX said.

Amazon last week urged the FCC to reject an update to SpaceX's Starlink plan [...]

Previously:
Blue Origin Employees Are Jumping Ship
Judges Reject Viasat's Plea to Stop SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Launches

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cloudflare says Intel is not inside its next-gen servers – Ice Lake melted its energy budget:

Cloudflare has revealed that it was unable to put Intel inside its new home-brew servers, because they just used too much energy.

A Tuesday post by platform operations engineer Chris Howells reveals that Cloudflare has been working on designs for an eleventh-generation server since mid-2020.

"We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server – that's enormous."

Fatally enormous – Cloudflare's evaluation saw it adopt AMD's 64-core Epyc 7713 for the servers it deploys to over 200 edge locations around the world.

Power savings also influenced a decision to go from three disks to two in the new design. A pair of 1.92TB Samsung drives replaced the three of the Korean giant's 960GB units found in previous designs. The net gain was a terabyte of capacity, and six fewer watts of power consumption.

[...] "We investigated higher-speed Ethernet, but we do not currently see this as beneficial," Howells wrote. That's not a brickbat for fast Ethernet, but a decision made possible by Cloudflare's highly distributed architecture that removes the need for higher speeds and the higher cost of faster kit.

See also:

• https://hothardware.com/news/cloudflare-dumps-intel-amd-epyc-gen-x-servers
• https://www.techzine.eu/news/cloud/64718/cloudflare-chooses-amd-to-power-its-new-generation-of-servers/

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

From An Accidental Discovery Hints at a Hidden Population of Cosmic Objects:

Brown dwarfs aren't quite stars and aren't quite planets, and a new study suggests there might be more of them lurking in our galaxy than scientists previously thought.

A new study offers a tantalizing explanation for how a peculiar cosmic object called WISEA J153429.75-104303.3 – nicknamed "The Accident" – came to be. The Accident is a brown dwarf. Though they form like stars, these objects don't have enough mass to kickstart nuclear fusion, the process that causes stars to shine. And while brown dwarfs sometimes defy characterization, astronomers have a good grasp on their general characteristics.

Or they did, until they found this one.

The Accident got its name after being discovered by sheer luck. It slipped past normal searches because it doesn't resemble any of the just over 2,000 brown dwarfs that have been found in our galaxy so far.

As brown dwarfs age, they cool off, and their brightness in different wavelengths of light changes. It's not unlike how some metals, when heated, go from bright white to deep red as they cool. The Accident confused scientists because it was faint in some key wavelengths, suggesting it was very cold (and old), but bright in others, indicating a higher temperature.

Freeman writes:

Tesla must tell NHTSA how Autopilot sees emergency vehicles:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system continues apace. The Associated Press reports that on Tuesday, the NHTSA sent Tesla a letter requesting further information following 12 incidents of Autopilot-enabled Teslas crashing into emergency vehicles parked by the side of the road. In total, 17 people have been injured, and one has died.

[...] The investigation covers 765,000 Tesla Models S, X, 3, and Y built between 2014 and 2021.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/nsa_quantum_computing_faq/

America's National Security Agency has published an FAQ about quantum cryptography, saying it does not know "when or even if" a quantum computer will ever exist to "exploit" public-key cryptography.

In the document, titled Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography FAQ, the NSA said it "has to produce requirements today for systems that will be used for many decades in the future." With that in mind, the agency came up with some predictions [PDF] for the near future of quantum computing and their impact on encryption.

Is the NSA worried about the threat posed by a "cryptographically relevant quantum computer" (CRQC)? Apparently not too much.

What the super-surveillance agency seems to be saying is that it's not a given that a CRQC capable of breaking today's public-key algorithms will ever emerge, though it wouldn't be a bad idea to consider coming up with new techniques that could defeat a future CRQC, should one be built.

It's almost like the NSA is dropping a not-so-subtle hint, though why it would is debatable. If it has a CRQC, or is on the path to one, it might want to warn allies, vendors, and citizens to think about using quantum-resistant technologies in case bad people develop a CRQC too. But why would the spies tip their hand, so? It's all very curious.

What do the experts here think... is this a red herring or is there some substance to this ?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Parliamentary Committee to government: Ban VPN services in India

Terming Virtual Private Network (VPN) services as a threat to counter cyber threats and other nefarious activities, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs reportedly wants the Indian government to ban VPN services in the country. As per a report by MediaNama, the committee explained that the reason why VPN services should be banned in India is because VPN apps and tools are easily available online and these allow "criminals to remain anonymous online."

[...] According to the report by MediaNama, the committee recommended permanently blocking VPN services in the country with "the help of internet service providers" across India. "The Committee notes with anxiety the technological challenge posed by VPN services and Dark Web, that can bypass cyber security walls and allow criminals to remain anonymous online. As of date, VPN can easily be downloaded, as many websites are providing such facilities and advertising them. The Committee, therefore, recommends that the Ministry of Home Affairs should coordinate with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to identify and permanently block such VPNs with the help of internet service providers."

Also at Notebookcheck.

Related: Messaging App Signal Not in Compliance With New Rules in India

Original Submission