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canopic jug writes:

While fastidiously avoiding use of the F-word [i.e. freedom], the European Commission has published a very long report on the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy. Open hardware is also covered.

This study analyses the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Hardware (OSH) on the European economy. It was commissioned by the European Commission's DG CONNECT.

It is estimated that companies located in the EU invested around €1 billion in OSS in 2018, which resulted in an impact on the European economy of between €65 and €95 billion. The analysis estimates a cost-benefit ratio of above 1:4 and predicts that an increase of 10% of OSS contributions would annually generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% GDP as well as more than 600 additional ICT start-ups in the EU. Case studies reveal that by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, the public sector could reduce the total cost of ownership, avoid vendor lock-in and thus increase its digital autonomy. The study also contains an analysis of existing public policy actions in Europe and around the world.

Back in 2006, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh prepared a similar report for UNU-MERIT, Study on the effect on the development of the information society of European public bodies making their own software available as open source, in The Netherlands.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale:

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil species belonging to an extinct animal group in half-a-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. The findings were announced on September 8, 2021, in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Named Titanokorys gainesi, this new species is remarkable for its size. With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.

"The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found," says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM's Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.

Evolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a meter in length. Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. Within this group, some species also possessed large, conspicuous head carapaces, with Titanokorys being one of the largest ever known.

Journal Reference:
J.-B. Caron, J. Moysiuk. A giant nektobenthic radiodont from the Burgess Shale and the significance of hurdiid carapace diversity, Royal Society Open Science (DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210664)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists reveal how tabby cats get their distinctive stripes:

As any cat owner can tell you, cats don't give up their secrets easily. But a new study, published Tuesday in the science journal Nature Communications, delves into a long-held kitty mystery: How exactly does a tabby cat's genes make those striking stripe patterns in its fur?

"Tabby" isn't a breed; it's a distinct fur pattern common among cats. Tabby cats often have what looks like a letter "M" on their foreheads, plus bold stripes of varying design in their fur. The tabbys have made their mark on pop culture, too. Morris the 9Lives cat food mascot is an orange tabby, as are cartoon cats Garfield and Heathcliff.

In the new study, conducted by scientists affiliated with Alabama's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and the Stanford University School of Medicine, 200 litters of nonviable embryos were examined, delving into the mystery of how patterns emerge in a developing cat.

[...] It all may seem like more than you wanted to know about your favorite feline, but the study notes that "understanding the basis of the animal color pattern is a question of longstanding interest for developmental and evolutionary biology."

Journal Reference:
Kaelin, Christopher B., McGowan, Kelly A., Barsh, Gregory S.. Developmental genetics of color pattern establishment in cats [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25348-2)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you have devices out in the field, you probably want to connect with them. There was a time when that was hard to do, requiring telephone wires or specialized radio gear. Now cellular data is prevalent, but even cellular isn’t everywhere. If you have the cash, you can pay a number of satellite companies to carry your data, but that’s generally pricey and has its own challenges.

The age of satellite constellations is changing that. Of course everyone by now has heard of Starlink which is offering satellite internet via numerous satellites that are much smaller than traditional telecom satellites. But they’re not the only came[sic] in town.

A company called Swarm has put up a constellation of 1/4U cube satellites in low orbits. They offer a ground station that uses an omni antenna and a subscription access program for small amounts of data. They sent us a unit to review, and while I haven’t used the system in a real project yet, the kit was pretty impressive.

The Swarm “tile” is a tiny radio that can talk bi-directionally with small satellites in low Earth orbit. The little unit is made to mount on a PCB, can control its power consumption, and talks to your system via a standard 3.3V UART connection. It does, however, require a small antenna and maybe even a smaller antenna for its GPS module. Small, in this case, is about a mid-size handy talkie antenna. There is a half-wave antenna that doesn’t need a ground plane and a shorter antenna that does need a ground plane.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. These were "a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks [...] against the United States of America on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001."

Of the 2,977 people who died, 2,605 were U.S. citizens and 372 non-U.S. citizens (excluding the 19 perpetrators). More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks, including the United Kingdom (67 deaths), the Dominican Republic (47 deaths), India (41 deaths), Greece (39 deaths), South Korea (28 deaths), Canada (24 deaths), Japan (24 deaths), Colombia (18 deaths), Jamaica (16 deaths), Philippines (16 deaths), Mexico (15 deaths), Trinidad and Tobago (14 deaths), Ecuador (13 deaths), Australia (11 deaths), Germany (11 deaths), Italy (10 deaths), Bangladesh (6 deaths), Ireland (6 deaths), Pakistan (6 deaths), and Poland (6 deaths).

It was a tragedy not only for America, but for the world.

Freeman writes:

Our flexible processors can now use bendable RAM:

A few months ago, we brought news of a bendable CPU, termed Plastic ARM, that was built of amorphous silicon on a flexible substrate. The use cases for something like this are extremely low-powered devices that can be embedded in clothing or slapped on the surface of irregular objects, allowing them to have a small amount of autonomous computing. But to meet the low power requirements, a minimalist processor is not enough—all the components have to sip power as well. And that makes for a poor fit for traditional RAM technology, which needs power to maintain the state of the memory.

But a group from Stanford now has that covered. The researchers have built a form of flexible phase-change memory, which is closer in speed to normal RAM than flash memory but requires no power to maintain its state. And, while their work was initially focused on getting something that's flexible to work, the principles they uncovered during their work should apply to phase-change memory in general.

[...] A lot of flexible electronics are built on polymer substrates rather than rigid materials like silicon. In addition to being flexible, most polymers are insulators—they don't conduct electricity or heat very well. And that turned out to be critical to boosting the efficiency of the phase-change memory.

The gist of the new device is that the phase-change hardware is surrounded by materials that don't conduct heat well. This helps trap the heat required to partially melt the device where it's needed, which means that you don't have to generate as much heat in the first place. And that in turn means that you need to put less power in to reset the device.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

BBC: International Space Station: Smoke triggers alert on board

Alarms were triggered on board the International Space Station after the crew reported smoke and the smell of burning plastic.

The incident centred on the Russian-built Zvezda module which provides living quarters, Russian media report.

The ageing space station has suffered a number of failures over the years and a Russian official recently warned of outdated hardware and failing systems.

These include air leaks, misfiring engines and cracks.

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said later that all systems were back to normal.

Reuters: Smoke detected in Russian module on space station - Roscosmos

Roscosmos said a smoke detector and an alarm were set off on the Zvezda service module, which provides living quarters for crew members on the ISS, when batteries were being recharged overnight.

RIA, citing audio communications broadcast by the U.S. space agency NASA, reported that Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky had seen and smelled smoke and that French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said the smell of burnt plastic or electronics had spread from the Russian segment to the U.S. section.

You know the saying about where there's smoke, there's ... um ... something you might want to look into.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.