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takyon writes:

Ray-Ban Stories: These are Facebook's first mass-market smart glasses

As previously rumored, Facebook has partnered with EssilorLuxottica to produce Ray-Ban Stories, one of the first potentially viable attempts at mass-market smart glasses. They are similar in some ways to early iterations of Snapchat Spectacles but with a more stylish aesthetic that looks right in line with other Ray-Ban glasses.

The glasses have two front-facing cameras, each at 5 megapixels. Users can take a photo either with a touch gesture or with a "Hey Facebook" voice command. So people in the room can tell that pictures or video are being taken, a white LED on the front of the frames will light up. Videos can be as long as 30 seconds.

[...] The Ray-Ban Stories are equipped with a Snapdragon processor, but they don't have displays in the lenses. So these are by no means augmented reality (AR) glasses.

Also at Wccftech.

Related: Snapchat Takes a Second Shot at Wearable Camera "Spectacles"

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-best-vga-dos-games-period

Every major computing platform has, in terms of gaming, something special about it. The color palettes, the sound hardware, the storage mechanisms, the available keyboards and joysticks... they all lend flavor to the games developed for each system.

The sound of a Commodore 64. The funky colors of a ZX Spectrum. The pure black and white of the early Macintoshes. All wonderful in their own ways.

But DOS gaming... it might just be the most amazing of all. Especially the period of time from the early 1990s through to about the mid-1990s. VGA graphics. Sound Blaster audio. Lots and lots of 3.5" floppies (with the occasional CD-ROM).

And the games... Oh, my. So many games. Bajillions of them. While there were a lot of stinkers (counting them is as futile as counting the grains of sand on the beaches of the world), the great ones were truly spectacular.

Nay. Life changing.

What follows are what I consider to be the 10 best DOS games that capture that "VGA plus Sound Blaster" aesthetic. These are presented in chronological order... purely because ranking them any other way made my brain explode.

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owl writes:

Paid influencers must label posts as ads, German court rules:

BERLIN, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Social media influencers who receive money from companies to promote products must clearly label such posts as advertisements, a top German court ruled on Thursday.

If the influencers are not paid, they can show products without the advertising label, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in the cases of three influencers on Facebook's (FB.O) social media site Instagram.

Influencers with thousands of followers can earn large fees from companies to promotes a product on Instagram.

Original Submission

thorfinn writes:

The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize Winners:

(Heavily elided — see source for journal references, authors, ceremony participants, and more.--Ed.)

BIOLOGY PRIZE - variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication.

ECOLOGY PRIZE - genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE - chemically analysing the air inside movie theatres, to test whether the odours produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience is watching.

ECONOMICS PRIZE - the obesity of a country's politicians may be a good indicator of that country's corruption.

MEDICINE PRIZE - sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing.

PEACE PRIZE - humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.

PHYSICS PRIZE - why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.

KINETICS PRIZE - why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.

ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE - A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines.

TRANSPORTATION PRIZE - for determining by experiment whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside-down.

The entire 1h30m presentation is available on YouTube.

Original Submission

LabRat writes:

First Came A Quake In Mexico, Then Strange Blue Lights. People Feared The Apocalypse:

Mexicans are sharing spectacular videos of bursts of blue lights seen streaking across the skies as a strong earthquake rocked the country's Pacific coast city of Acapulco on Wednesday.

The 7.0 magnitude quake struck some 11 miles northeast of the resort city in the southwestern state of Guerrero. At least one person was killed, buildings were damaged and rockslides littered a major highway, but the temblor didn't cause widespread damage. It did rattle nerves though.

The earthquake could be felt some 200 miles away in Mexico City and lasted nearly a minute. Residents fled into the streets as buildings swayed, sidewalks undulated and the blue lights burst brilliantly in the sky.

[...] Rutgers University physicist Troy Shinbrot says not to worry — the blue lights are not a sign of the world coming to an end. [...] In an interview with NPR, he said the phenomenon of so-called earthquake lights has been recorded historically and occurs fairly regularly.

Some scientists believe the eruption of light, or luminosity, is caused by the friction of rock near Earth's crust, which releases energy into the atmosphere. The flash of light is produced near the planet's surface.

Shinbrot has tried to re-create the phenomenon in his lab and says he has measured voltage changes similar to what happens when Earth's crust slips in an earthquake.

[...] There's disagreement about what actually causes the flashes. The U.S. Geological Survey makes that clear on its website, stating, "Geophysicists differ on the extent to which they think that individual reports of unusual lighting near the time and epicenter of an earthquake actually represent EQL."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

With COVID out of control, Biden unveils hefty vaccine mandates:

President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a sweeping six-pronged plan to try to regain control over the COVID-19 pandemic, which is wildly raging once again in the US.

[...] The main focus of the president's "Path out of the Pandemic" plan is on reducing the number of unvaccinated people in the country. As such, the plan's most prominent elements are hefty vaccination requirements for millions of federal employees, health care workers, school employees, and even employees of private businesses.

Biden signed an executive order Thursday requiring COVID-19 vaccines for millions of federal workers plus millions more federal contractors. The new vaccine mandate eliminates a previous option that allowed federal workers to undergo regular testing in lieu of vaccination.

In addition to mandating vaccines for federal workers, Biden will also require vaccination for over 17 million health care workers who work at facilities that receive federal funding. The administration had previously required vaccination for all staff of federally funded nursing homes. The new requirements will extend vaccine mandates to hospitals, dialysis facilities, ambulatory surgical settings, and home health agencies—most facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.

upstart writes:

The Screens in Cars Are Becoming a Problem:

You're driving and you're bored. Tired of staring at the road, your eyes drift toward the polished touchscreen to the right of your steering wheel—what the auto industry calls your "infotainment" system. First you scroll through its menus to select a pump-me-up playlist; then you use its mapping tool to reroute toward a nearby Starbucks.

Sounds like a typical driving experience these days. Sure, you temporarily looked away from the road while tapping through the infotainment system, but that's no big deal. Right?

Well, it could be. You might have been distracted for as long as 40 seconds while changing your destination, according to an analysis by the AAA Foundation—long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph. As for choosing playlists, one study found that drivers selecting music with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto had slower reaction times than those who were high from smoking pot.

"Today's infotainment systems can be as distracting—if not more so—than personal electronic devices," says Jennifer Homendy, the newly confirmed chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. The federal government blames distraction for around 10 percent of the 38,680 annual traffic fatalities in the United States, but that's almost certainly an underestimate, since people aren't inclined to admit they were fiddling with a phone or a navigation system prior to a crash.

upstart writes:

Walking with coffee is a little-understood feat of physics: Understanding the physics behind natural processes provides new applications for soft robotics, manufacturing automation:

The coffee, a thermally agitated fluid contained in a cup, has internal degrees of freedom that interact with the cup which, in turn, interacts with the human carrier.

"While humans possess a natural, or gifted, ability to interact with complex objects, our understanding of those interactions -- especially at a quantitative level, is next to zero," said ASU Professor Ying-Cheng Lai, an Arizona State University electrical engineering professor. "We have no conscious ability to analyze the influences of external factors, like noise or climate, on our interactions."

Yet, understanding these external factors is a fundamental issue in applied fields such as soft robotics.

"For example, in design of smart prosthetics, it is becoming increasingly important to build in natural modes of flexibility that mimic the natural motion of human limbs," said Brent Wallace, a former undergraduate student of Lai's and now a doctoral student in ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. "Such improvements make the prosthetic feel more comfortable and natural to the user."

According to Lai, it is conceivable that, in the not-too-distant future, robots will be deployed in various applications of complex object handing or control which require the kind of coordination and movement control that humans do quite well.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Inspired by extremely strong spider silk, researchers at NTNU have developed a new material that defies previously seen trade-offs between toughness and stiffness.

The material is a type of polymer known as an elastomer because it has a rubber-like elasticity. The newly developed elastomer features molecules that have eight hydrogen bonds in one repeat unit, and it is these bonds that help to evenly distribute stress put on the material and make it so durable.

"The eight hydrogen bonds are the origin of the extraordinary mechanical properties," says Zhiliang Zhang, professor of mechanics and materials at NTNU's Department of Structural Engineering. The material was developed at NTNU NanoLab and partially funded by the Research Council of Norway.

The idea to introduce a higher than usual number of hydrogen bonds came from nature. "Spider silk contains the same kind of structure," says Yizhi Zhuo, who developed the new material as part of his Ph.D. and postdoc work. "We knew it could result in very special properties."

Scientists have previously noted that spider silk—specifically dragline silk, which provides the spokes and outer rim of a spider's web—is both exceptionally stiff and tough.

Stiffness and toughness are distinct properties in engineering, and are often in opposition. Stiff materials can withstand a lot of stress before deforming, whereas tough materials can absorb a lot of energy before they break.

Original Submission

owl writes:

The World's Biggest Plant to Suck Carbon Dioxide From the Sky Is Up and Running:

The world's biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant is set to come online in Iceland on Wednesday. The moment is an important one in developing new technologies to help suck carbon dioxide out of the air—but raises a whole host of questions on the future of how we're going to put those technologies to use.

The Orca plant, located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of the capital of Reykjavík, uses large industrial vacuums to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The plant's owners and operators, a Swiss startup called Climeworks, said that the plant can remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, powered by hydrothermal energy. Climeworks has partnered with a carbon storage company to take that carbon dioxide and store it deep underground, where it turns into stone (whoa) after about two years.

Unlike other carbon capture technologies that prevent carbon dioxide from being released from dirty technologies in the first place—which are generally attached to fossil fuel facilities—DAC plants like Orca present the possibility of removing some of the damage we've already done. In theory, we could dot the earth with plants like Orca, resulting in what are known as "negative emissions." These types of technology aren't ready for primetime at scale yet, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said we need them to help meet the target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) outlined in the Paris Agreement (in addition to cutting emissions in the first place of course).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hot pack or cold pack: Which one to reach for when you're injured or in pain:

When you injure yourself, you may reach for a hot or a cold pack. Which option is better depends on the nature of your pain, what caused it and how long you've had it.

[...] Cold therapy should be used for injuries that result in swelling and inflammation such as joint sprains, muscle strains or bruises. The objective is to slow blood flow to the area and prevent the effects of the injury. Gel packs that can be kept in the freezer, coolant sprays or even a bag of frozen veggies will do the job.

It is important to avoid holding ice in direct contact with the skin for long periods as this can cause skin damage. It is best to wrap ice in a cloth and then apply it.

Cold therapy is most effective in the immediate or acute phase of pain when swelling and inflammation first kicks off. Typically, the treatment should be applied for about 20 minutes and can be reapplied every two hours for a few days. After that, the injury should be well into the healing phase and the swelling and inflammation will subside.

[...] Heat therapy is not recommended for acute management of sprains, strains or contusions as this promotes blood flow and can increase swelling and pain.

Heat therapy can help chronic conditions such as recurring joint pain, neck or back pain.

upstart writes:

AT&T COW drones restoring phone service cut by Ida's extreme weather:

In their effort to reconnect southeastern communities cut off by Hurricane Ida, telecom companies are taking to the skies with flying COWs[*]. Far from heifers, however, those cell-on-wings units are ultra-buffed, extreme weather-resistant drones that provide phone service to isolated people with the outside world.

Telecom giant AT&T says it deployed its most recent generation of COWs to areas of the southeast whose electricity and communications connections have been cut off by Ida. Though tethered to a multi-purpose cable attached to ground equipment, the specialized drone can hover at 300 feet in extreme weather conditions, providing LTE phone coverage over an area of 40 miles. AT&T's COWs can withstand wind of up to 50 mph, and operate almost indefinitely.

The aerial communication relay stations were developed by AT&T's Network Disaster Recovery Team, which has already produced several generations of the craft. The first version was rolled out nearly a half decade ago, with upgrades following from there.

The COW vehicles, which process dozens of gigabytes of data and thousands of texts and calls as they fly, were first deployed to in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria 2017. The following year, they operated 200 feet above Mexico Beach, Florida in severe weather to provide LTE coverage to residents, first responders, and surrounding counties deprived of phone service. Continued improvements have led to the current version, which operates at altitudes 500% higher than terrestrial COW masts, broadening the reach of service they provide.

[*] COW: Cellular On Wings.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

The James Webb telescope has a bona fide launch date:

The telescope is ready. So is the rocket. It's time.

NASA announced in August that the James Webb Space Telescope had passed its final ground-based tests and was being prepared for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Now, the oft-delayed $10 billion telescope has an official launch date: December 18, 2021.

The date was announced on Wednesday by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the launch provider, Arianespace. The space telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launch delayed to December:

NASA's long-awaited and high-powered James Webb Space Telescope won't begin observations this year after NASA and its counterpart the European Space Agency (ESA) announced another launch delay.

[...] "We now know the day that thousands of people have been working towards for many years, and that millions around the world are looking forward to," Günther Hasinger, ESA's director of science, said in an agency statement. "Webb and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle are ready, thanks to the excellent work across all mission partners. We are looking forward to seeing the final preparations for launch at Europe's Spaceport."

[...] Once the James Webb Space Telescope launches, the spacecraft will spend about a month traveling the 930,000 miles (1.5 kilometers) out to its destination, the second Lagrange point (L2)[*]. Here, the observatory can enjoy a relatively stable "parking spot" orbit on the opposite side of Earth from the sun. The location is crucial for the telescope, which must remain well shielded from the heat that would interfere with the infrared capabilities on the observatory.

The telescope's instruments won't turn on until two or three months after launch, and typical science won't begin until about six months after launch, according to ESA.

[*] Wikipedia entry on Lagrange points and the specific entry on L2.

Hopefully all will go well with the launch and deployment.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

XPoint capacity to surpass DRAM by 2030

We have just learned about a report by Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis called Emerging Memories Take Off, courtesy of Tom Coughlin. The report looks at 3D XPoint, MRAM, ReRAM and other emerging memory technologies and says their revenues could grow to $44 billion by 2031. That's because they will displace some server DRAM, and also NOR flash and SRAM — either as standalone chips or as embedded memory within ASICs and microcontrollers.

The emerging memory market is set to grow substantially with 3D XPoint revenues reaching $20 billion-plus by 2031, and standalone MRAM and STT-RAM reaching $1.7 billion in revenues by then. The report predicts that the bulk of embedded NOR and SRAM in SoCs will be replaced by embedded ReRAM and MRAM.

A chart shows XPoint capacity ships crossing the 100,000PB level in 2028 and so surpassing DRAM, whose capacity growth is slowing slightly. The chart shows XPoint capacity shipped being 1000PB this year. That number will grow 100x to 100,000PB in 2028.

Related: Micron Abandons 3D XPoint, Puts Fab Up for Sale
Micron Sells 3D XPoint Fab to Texas Instruments, Not Intel

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An international team of researchers has developed a way to create non-radiating sources of electromagnetism. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their technique and how well it worked when they tested a model based on their ideas.

For many years, physicists have grappled with the idea of "meta-atoms," macroscopic objects that have alternating current that prevents the emission of electromagnetic energy. In 1957, Yakov Zel'dovich came up with the idea of anapole states, where parity violations in electric current would produce electric moments with no poles. Since that time, some astrophysicists have suggested that such states could explain how dark matter remains hidden.

[...] Due to constraints in their lab, the team was forced to create a device based on microwaves rather than radio frequencies—they placed an 18-mm antenna inside of a 6.4-mm disk and put them into an anechoic chamber. They used another antenna to measure emissions from the device after it was turned on. They found the device able to support total suppression of far-field radiation. The researchers suggest their device could pave the way toward the development of new kinds of wireless power transfer devices.

Journal Reference:
Esmaeel Zanganeh, Andrey Evlyukhin, Andrey Miroshnichenko, et al. Anapole Meta-Atoms: Nonradiating Electric and Magnetic Sources, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.096804)

Original Submission