SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Long-Lasting Disinfectant Protects Against Viruses for Up to 7 Days – Promises To Help Fight Pandemics:

UCF researchers have developed a nanoparticle-based disinfectant that can continuously kill viruses on a surface for up to seven days – a discovery that could be a powerful weapon against COVID-19 and other emerging pathogenic viruses.

The findings, by a multidisciplinary team of the university's virus and engineering experts and the leader of an Orlando technology firm, were published this week in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

Christina Drake '07PhD, founder of Kismet Technologies, was inspired to develop the disinfectant after making a trip to the grocery store in the early days of the pandemic. There she saw a worker spraying disinfectant on a refrigerator handle, then wiping off the spray immediately.

"Initially my thought was to develop a fast-acting disinfectant," she says, "but we spoke to consumers, such as doctors and dentists, to find out what they really wanted from a disinfectant. What mattered the most to them was something long-lasting that would continue to disinfect high-touch areas like doorhandles and floors long after application."

upstart writes:

Rocket 'terminated' in fiery explosion over Pacific Ocean:

A privately designed, unmanned rocket built to carry satellites was destroyed in an explosive fireball after suffering an "anomaly" off the California coast during its first attempt at reaching Earth's orbit.

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket was "terminated" over the Pacific Ocean shortly after its 6:59 p.m. Thursday liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, according to a base statement. Video from the San Luis Obispo Tribune showed the explosion.

Firefly said an "anomaly" occurred during the first-stage ascent that "resulted in the loss of the vehicle" about two minutes, 30 seconds into the flight. Vandenberg said a team of investigators will try to determine what caused the failure.

The rocket was carrying a payload called DREAM, or the Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission. It consisted of items from schools and other institutions, including small satellites and several demonstration spacecraft.

"While we did not meet all of our mission objectives, we did achieve a number of them: successful first stage ignition, liftoff of the pad, progression to supersonic speed, and we obtained a substantial amount of flight data," Firefly said in a statement. The information will be applied to future missions.

[...] Standing 95 feet (26 meters) high, the two-stage Alpha is designed to carry up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload into low orbit. The company wants to be capable of launching Alphas twice a month. Launches would have a starting price of $15 million, according to Firefly.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Making Methane from CO2: Carbon Capture Grows More Affordable:

RICHLAND, Wash.—In their ongoing effort to make carbon capture more affordable, researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a method to convert captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane, the primary component of natural gas.

By streamlining a longstanding process in which CO2 is converted to methane, the researchers' new method reduces the materials needed to run the reaction, the energy needed to fuel it and, ultimately, the selling price of the gas.

A key chemical player known as EEMPA makes the process possible. EEMPA is a PNNL-developed solvent that snatches CO2 from power plant flue gas, binding the greenhouse gas so it can be converted into useful chemicals.

Earlier this year, PNNL researchers revealed that using EEMPA in power plants could slash the price of carbon capture to 19 percent lower than standard industry costs—the lowest documented price of carbon capture. Now, in a study published Friday, August 21 in the journal ChemSusChem, the team reveals a new incentive—in cheaper natural gas—to further drive down costs.

When compared to the conventional method of methane conversion, the new process requires an initial investment that costs 32 percent less. Operation and maintenance costs are 35 percent cheaper, bringing the selling price of synthetic natural gas down by 12 percent.

Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

We already had safety data from samples of tens of thousands in the Phase 3 trials. What's new here is the size, and one of the increased risks is one I had not heard of before.

Israel somehow found a control group of more than 884,000 unvaccinated people. They matched them to a comparable sample of vaccinated people the same size, and asked the right question, which is does a bad thing happen more often for vaccinated people or is it just what you'd expect statistically?

"Vaccination was most strongly associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 3.24; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.55 to 12.44; risk difference, 2.7 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 1.0 to 4.6), lymphadenopathy (risk ratio, 2.43; 95% CI, 2.05 to 2.78; risk difference, 78.4 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 64.1 to 89.3), appendicitis (risk ratio, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.01; risk difference, 5.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 0.3 to 9.9), and herpes zoster infection (risk ratio, 1.43; 95% CI, 1.20 to 1.73; risk difference, 15.8 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 8.2 to 24.2)."

Those are the risk ratios. With herpes zoster flareups happening at a 160 per million rate, maybe 'per million' isn't the best way to think about it and we could call it 0.16 per thousand. That's the one I hadn't known about.

The word "neuropathy" doesn't appear when I search the paper, so maybe they've ruled it out as an effect. I know this is a real issue for someone in our Soylent community. But if they didn't include people with existing neuropathy, it sheds no light.

They also include data on the side effects of a COVID infection. Eep. To avoid that I'll raise my chance of appendicitis 40%.

Journal Reference:
Noam Barda, Noa Dagan, Yatir Ben-Shlomo, et al. Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting [open], New England Journal of Medicine (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2110475)

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

From tom's HARDWARE: Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V 'High Performance' Programmers

Apple is in the process of switching its PCs to Arm-based SoCs, but the company might not be putting all its eggs into one basket, as it is also exploring the emerging open-source RISC-V architecture. This week the company posted a job alert for RISC-V high-performance programmer(s).

Apple is currently looking for experienced programmers with detailed knowledge of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and Arm's Neon vector ISA for its Vector and Numerics Group (VaNG) within its Core Operating Systems group. Apple's VaNG is responsible for developing and improving various embedded subsystems running on iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

Known for its secrecy, Apple's listing doesn't disclose exactly what it plans to do with RISC-V, but the job description indicates that the programmer will have to work with machine learning, computational vision, and natural language processing. Among other things, low-level high-performance programming experience is required. Furthermore, the job description also indicates that Apple is already working with RISC-V.

"You will work in a SW and HW cross functional team which is implementing innovative RISC-V solutions and state of the art routines," the description reads [emphasis added]. "This is to support the necessary computation for such things as machine learning, vision algorithms, signal and video processing. [....]

Does RISC-V offer Apple any technical flexibility that their ARM license does not?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A brief overview of IBM's new 7 nm Telum mainframe CPU:

From the perspective of a traditional x86 computing enthusiast—or professional—mainframes are strange, archaic beasts. They're physically enormous, power-hungry, and expensive by comparison to more traditional data-center gear, generally offering less compute per rack at a higher cost.

This raises the question, "Why keep using mainframes, then?" Once you hand-wave the cynical answers that boil down to "because that's how we've always done it," the practical answers largely come down to reliability and consistency. As AnandTech's Ian Cutress points out in a speculative piece focused on the Telum's redesigned cache, "downtime of these [IBM Z] systems is measured in milliseconds per year." (If true, that's at least seven nines.)

IBM's own announcement of the Telum hints at just how different mainframe and commodity computing's priorities are. It casually describes Telum's memory interface as "capable of tolerating complete channel or DIMM failures, and designed to transparently recover data without impact to response time."

When you pull a DIMM from a live, running x86 server, that server does not "transparently recover data"—it simply crashes.

Telum is designed to be something of a one-chip-to-rule-them-all for mainframes, replacing a much more heterogeneous setup in earlier IBM mainframes.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Internet shutdowns by governments have 'proliferated at a truly alarming pace':

The number of government-led internet shutdowns has exploded over the last decade as states seek to stifle dissent and protest by limiting citizens' access to the web.

Nearly 850 intentional shutdowns have been recorded over the past 10 years by nonprofit Access Now's Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), and although the group acknowledges that data on incidents before 2016 is "patchy," some 768 of these shutdowns took place in the last five years. There were 213 shutdowns in 2019 alone, with this figure ticking down to 155 in 2020 as the world adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic (which delayed elections and led to lockdowns that kept populations at home more often). And already in the first five months of 2021 there have been 50 shutdowns across 21 countries.

"Since we began tracking government-initiated internet shutdowns, their use has proliferated at a truly alarming pace," Access Now's Felicia Anthonio, campaigner and #KeepItOn lead, said in a new report on the issue in The Current, a publication of Google's internet thinktank Jigsaw. "As governments across the globe learn this authoritarian tactic from each other, it has moved from the fringes to become a common method many authorities use to stifle opposition, quash free speech and muzzle expression."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Arm China appears to be fully independent of Arm

A recent Semianalysis article by Dylan Patel goes further claiming Arm China is now an independent company from Arm. [This is refuted - see below. --JR] It all started when SoftBank formed a joint venture where Arm Limited and the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors with the venture having the exclusive right to distribute Arm's IP within China. They lost control of the company that way, but it was probably due to regulations as this type of law is common in Asia, and for instance, CNX Software Limited is a Hong Kong company instead of a Thai company, as foreigners can own 49% of a company, except for some expensive and time-consuming options.

The joint venture recently gave a presentation to the where they had plans to rebrand, develop their own IP, and operate independently from Arm. This is easy to see why once we learn the rest of the story... With the "power of the seal", Allen Wu ousted executives that were loyal to Arm and kept them out of the building with hired security. Arm stopped providing IP to Arm China, and Cortex-A77 core is the latest Arm IP available to Arm China. Neoverse, Armv9, Cortex-A78, and all other recent IP have not been shared with the Chinese entity.

Labor Day:
In observance of Labor Day (a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday in September) I am hereby inviting the SoylentNews editorial staff to enjoy a three-day weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Stories will be scheduled and released on a weekend-story-spacing schedule. The holiday marks the unofficial end of summer and it often marked by parades, sales, cookouts, and the like.

These volunteers give selflessly of their spare time to try and make sure we keep the stories coming. Please join me in thanking them for their generous sacrifice of spare time and experience to keep those stories coming!

Tor:
(short for The Onion Router) is in the process of rolling out an updated protocol. ThIs update is NOT compatible with prior versions. SoylentNews has had support from the early days of the site (thanks to NCommander, IIRC). As nobody on staff has experience in this area, our support will cease at any time - the TOR site is saying October. It was laudable at the time. Unfortunately, its more recent use seems to have been primarily by spammers. As such, we could lose access to Tor at anytime as our network "neighbors" either upgrade or find themselves no longer "adjacent" to back-level versions like ours is. You can still access this site using TOR with our normal URL.

Sock Mods
We have been methodically identifying and shutting down sockpuppet accounts. These are NOT allowed. Attempts to bypass the will of the community by controlling multiple accounts is forbidden. One user, one account. Do NOT use another account (or accounts) to upmod one-or-more accounts that you control. If you do not like getting downmods, take a look at the comments you post. Sure, occasionally, someone might mis-moderate a comment by accident (heck, *I* have done it!) In our experience, such errors are generally rare and are frequently followed at some point by others, offsetting moderations.

Freeman writes:

Too much of a good thing: Mourning the slow death of the retail game store:

When I was a kid, buying video games was an incredibly stressful process. In the late '80s, I was too young to buy magazines to find out what games deserved my hard-earned pocket-money. So, in an experience all too familiar to many millennial gamers, I used my (poor) intuition to look at the box art to decide what to bring home.

[...] At the time, a console title cost something in the realm of $100 in today's dollars (or over €85-95), which made each game purchase an investment requiring long consideration and thoughtful planning. At that price, every game needed to last weeks, if not months, to justify the investment. Most games achieved this with the good old "Nintendo-hard" philosophy: Brutal challenges make a relative dearth of original content last longer.

upstart writes:

New food freezing concept improves quality, increases safety and cuts energy use:

"A complete change over to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads," said ARS research food technologist Cristina Bilbao-Sainz. She is with the Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit, part of ARS's Western Regional Research Center (WRRC) in Albany.

"These savings could be achieved without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure, if food manufacturers adopt this concept," Bilbao-Sainz added.

The new freezing method, called isochoric freezing, works by storing foods in a sealed, rigid container -- typically made of hard plastic or metal -- completely filled with a liquid such as water. Unlike conventional freezing in which the food is exposed to the air and freezes solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F, isochoric freezing preserves food without turning it to solid ice.

As long as the food stays immersed in the liquid portion, it is protected from ice crystallization, which is the main threat to food quality.

[...] Another benefit of isochoric freezing is that it also kills microbial contaminants during processing.

Journal Reference:
Analysis of global energy savings in the frozen food industry made possible by transitioning from conventional isobaric freezing to isochoric freezing, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111621)

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

From ScienceNews:

For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star. In turn, that object gobbled the star's core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.

[...] Piecing the data together, Dong and his colleagues think this is what happened: Long ago, a binary pair of stars were born orbiting each other; one died in a spectacular supernova and became either a neutron star or a black hole. As gravity brought the two objects closer together, the dead star actually entered the outer layers of its larger stellar sibling.

The compact object spiraled inside the still-living star for hundreds of years, eventually making its way down to and then eating its partner's core. During this time, the larger star shed huge amounts of gas and dust, forming a shell of material around the duo.

In the living star's center, gravitational forces and complex magnetic interactions from the dead star's munching launched enormous jets of energy — picked up as an X-ray flash in 2014 — as well as causing the larger star to explode. Debris from the detonation smashed with colossal speed into the surrounding shell of material, generating the optical and radio light.

While theorists have previously envisioned such a scenario, dubbed a merger-triggered core collapse supernova, this appears to represent the first direct observation of this phenomenon, Dong says.

Journal Referencess:
1) D. Dong et al. A transient radio source consistent with a merger-triggered core collapse supernova. Science. Vol. 373, September 3, 2021, p. 1125. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg6037
2) N. Ivanova, S. Justham, X. Chen, et al. Common envelope evolution: where we stand and... [open], The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review (DOI: 10.1007/s00159-013-0059-2)

Original Submission

t-3 writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-scandalous-history-of-the-last-rotor-cipher-machine

If you've never heard of the HX-63 until just now, don't feel bad. Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it. Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early 1950s, the first chief cryptologist of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). After reading a 1957 Hagelin patent (more on that later), Friedman realized that the HX-63, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7, then considered unbreakable. During the Cold War, the NSA built thousands of KL-7s, which were used by every U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence agency from 1952 to 1968.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX-63 had about 10⁶⁰⁰ possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,000-bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a 128- or a 256-bit key.

Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. At the NSA, Friedman's job was to ensure that the U.S. government had access to the sensitive, encrypted communications of all governments and threats worldwide. But traffic encrypted by the HX-63 would be unbreakable.

upstart writes:

The fungal mind: on the evidence for mushroom intelligence:

Mushrooms and other kinds of fungi are often associated with witchcraft and are the subjects of longstanding superstitions. Witches dance inside fairy rings of mushrooms according to German folklore, while a French fable warns that anyone foolish enough to step inside these 'sorcerer's rings' will be cursed by enormous toads with bulging eyes. These impressions come from the poisonous and psychoactive peculiarities of some species, as well as the overnight appearance of toadstool ring-formations.

Given the magical reputation of the fungi, claiming that they might be conscious is dangerous territory for a credentialled scientist. But in recent years, a body of remarkable experiments have shown that fungi operate as individuals, engage in decision-making, are capable of learning, and possess short-term memory. These findings highlight the spectacular sensitivity of such 'simple' organisms, and situate the human version of the mind within a spectrum of consciousness that might well span the entire natural world.

DannyB writes:

AI computers can't patent their own inventions — yet — a US judge rules

Should an artificially intelligent machine be able to patent its own inventions? For a US federal judge, the larger implications of that question were irrelevant. In April 2020, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that only "natural persons" could be credited as the inventor of a patent, and a US court decided Thursday that yes, that's what the law technically says (via Bloomberg).

Not every country agrees with that direction. South Africa and Australia decided to go the other direction, granting one patent and reinstating a second patent application filed by AI researcher Steven Thaler, whose AI system DABUS reportedly came up with a flashing light and a new type of food container. Thaler is the one who sued the US in this case as well — he's part of a group called The Artificial Inventor Project that's lobbying for AI recognition around the globe.

On a patent application doesn't the inventor have to swear they invented it? [602.01 Naming the Inventor]

Original Submission