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upstart writes:

AIMS plays frying bacon sounds to fish in bid to save Australia's coral reefs - ABC News:

To the untrained ear, it might sound like bacon frying in a pan but, to fish, it is the alluring sound of a healthy home.

[...] The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) is in a race against climate change, with bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks threatening reefs.

In response, it has hatched a national project to find out how to make reefs more resilient by studying the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia and the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.

AIMS biologist Mark Meekan says efforts are focussed[sic] on Ningaloo where healthy reef sounds are being played underwater to attract baby fish to reefs, which could improve coral growth.

"If our ears could hear underwater, we'd realise that reefs are actually quite noisy places — lots of pops and crackles from shrimp and all sorts of things," he said.

[...] [Lead researcher] Dr Bay said the corals in the region were fast-growing but very sensitive to damage from storms and bleaching.

"Corals start life as tiny little larva and they grow, they settle onto the reef and then they grow larger, but they're very fragile in that first year of life," she said.

"What we're working with is a fragile, but very important species … we're really trying to understand how to help them live through these disturbances."

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owl writes:

How I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing code for it. I find I’m using it a lot.

Unfortunately, the fact that I can ssh into it leads to the first part of this post.

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mcgrew writes:

Captain Kir... ahem, William Shatner is riding the next Blue Origin trip to space. The Guardian says.

William Shatner will boldly go into space with Bezos’s Blue Origin – report:

"He was once Starfleet’s youngest captain, a fearless explorer leading the USS Enterprise on an intergalactic odyssey. Now the actor who famously portrayed Captain James Tiberius Kirk on Star Trek for four decades is reportedly set to boldly go on a real-life space adventure – at the age of 90.

"According to TMZ, William Shatner will blast off from Earth next month aboard a Blue Origin capsule owned by the Amazon founder Jezz[sic - ty SW!] Bezos, with the 15-minute joyride being filmed for a documentary."

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upstart writes:

Monday launch from California begins countdown to Atlas 5 retirement – Spaceflight Now:

An Atlas 5 rocket standing on a launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, set for liftoff Monday with the Landsat 9 Earth observation satellite, is one of 29 Atlas 5s remaining in ULA’s inventory. Jessica Rye, a ULA spokesperson, confirmed last month that all 29 Atlas 5s have been sold to customers for future launches.

ULA received its final shipment of RD-180 engines from Russia earlier this year. A dual-nozzle RD-180 engine, made in Russia by NPO Energomash, powers the first stage of each Atlas 5 rocket, generating around 860,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle while guzzling kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants.

The new Vulcan Centaur will be driven by twin U.S.-made BE-4 main engines from Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. ULA says the Vulcan Centaur will have more lift capability, additional mission flexibility, and will be cheaper to operate than the existing Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rocket families.

There are three Delta 4 rockets left to fly on ULA’s schedule.

The Landsat 9 mission is the latest in a series of environmental satellites developed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. The new mission is designed for a lifetime of at least five years, extending an unbroken data record of global land images that  dates back to the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972.

[...] Liftoff is timed for 11:12 a.m. PDT (2:12 p.m. EDT; 1812 GMT)[*] from Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg, a military base around 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Launch is scheduled to occur 4 hours after this story goes live.

NASA live-stream of the launch on YouTube

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upstart writes:

British petrol stations run out of fuel as motorists panic buy amid truck-driver shortage - ABC News:

Thousands of British petrol stations ran dry on Sunday (local time), as motorists scrambled to fill up amid a supply disruption due to a nationwide shortage of truck drivers.

[...] BP said nearly a third of its British petrol stations had run out of the two main grades of fuel.

"With the intense demand seen over the past two days, we estimate that around 30 per cent of sites in this network do not currently have either of the main grades of fuel," BP, which operates 1,200 sites in Britain, said in statement.

Lines of vehicles formed at petrol stations for a third day running as motorists waited, some for hours, to fill up with fuel after oil firms reported a lack of drivers was causing transport problems.

Some operators had to ration supplies and others closed petrol stations altogether.

The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said about two-thirds of its members were reporting that they had sold out their fuel, with the rest "partly dry and running out soon".

upstart writes:

Calls for cull as scavenging wild boars trot across Italy and into Rome - ABC News:

Rome has been invaded by Gauls, Visigoths and Vandals over the centuries, but the Eternal City is now grappling with a rampaging force of an entirely different sort: rubbish-seeking wild boars.

[...] Families of wild boars have become a daily sight in Rome, as groups of up to 30 beasts emerge from the city's parks to trot down traffic-clogged streets in search of food.

[...] There are over 2 million wild boars in Italy, according to agriculture body Coldiretti.

In the Lazio region, surrounding Rome, there are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 in city parks.

A few hundred of them regularly leave the trees and greenery for urban asphalt and rubbish bins.

[...] Lazio parks manager Maurizio Giubbiotti said the region needed to increase the boar cull from 700 over two years to at least 1,000 annually to control the situation.

[...] Wild boars can weigh up to 100 kilograms, posing a not-insignificant threat to the elderly and young children.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

Chatham House's Climate Change Risk Asessment 2021:

If emissions follow the trajectory set by current NDCs, there is a less than five per cent chance of keeping temperatures well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and less than one per cent chance of reaching the 1.5°C target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

[...] Unless NDCs are dramatically increased, and policy and delivery mechanisms are commensurately revised, many of the impacts described in this research paper are likely to be locked in by 2040 and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what nations can adapt to.

[...] If emissions do not come down drastically before 2030, then by 2040 some 3.9 billion people are likely to experience major heatwaves, 12 times more than the historic average. By the 2030s, 400 million people globally each year are likely to be exposed to temperatures exceeding the workability threshold. Also by the 2030s, the number of people on the planet exposed to heat stress exceeding the survivability threshold is likely to surpass 10 million a year.

To meet global demand, agriculture will need to produce almost 50 per cent more food by 2050. However, yields could decline by 30 per cent in the absence of dramatic emissions reductions. By 2040, the average proportion of global cropland affected by severe drought will likely rise to 32 per cent a year, more than three times the historic average.

Download the full report (pdf).

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takyon writes:

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

Splashy headlines have long overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and economics. Now, extensive new research suggests the industry may be on a billion-dollar crash course with reality.

[...] [In March], the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.

In the press push that followed, GFI claimed victory. "New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030," it trumpeted, suggesting that a new era of cheap, accessible cultured protein is rapidly approaching. The finding is critical for GFI and its allies. If private, philanthropic, and public sector investors are going to put money into cell-cultured meat, costs need to come down quickly. Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.

upstart writes:

Three iOS 0-days revealed by researcher frustrated with Apple's bug bounty:

Yesterday, a security researcher who goes by illusionofchaos dropped public notice of three zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS mobile operating system. The vulnerability disclosures are mixed in with the researcher's frustration with Apple's Security Bounty program, which illusionofchaos says chose to cover up an earlier-reported bug without giving them credit.

[...] illusionofchaos says that they've reported four iOS security vulnerabilities this year—the three zero-days they publicly disclosed yesterday plus an earlier bug that they say Apple fixed in iOS 14.7. It appears that their frustration largely comes from how Apple handled that first, now-fixed bug in analyticsd.

[...] According to illusionofchaos, they sent Apple the first detailed report of this bug on April 29. Although Apple responded the next day, it did not respond to illusionofchaos again until June 3, when it said it planned to address the issue in iOS 14.7. On July 19, Apple did indeed fix the bug with iOS 14.7, but the security content list for iOS 14.7 acknowledged neither the researcher nor the vulnerability.

Apple told illusionofchaos that its failure to disclose the vulnerability and credit them was just a "processing issue" and that proper notice would be given in "an upcoming update." The vulnerability and its resolution still were not acknowledged as of iOS 14.8 on September 13 or iOS 15.0 on September 20.

upstart writes:

Mathematician Answers Chess Problem About Attacking Queens:

If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you succeed once, can you find a second arrangement? A third? How many are there?

This challenge is over 150 years old. It is the earliest version of a mathematical question called the n-queens problem whose solution Michael Simkin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, zeroed in on in a paper posted in July. Instead of placing eight queens on a standard 8-by-8 chessboard (where there are 92 different configurations that work), the problem asks how many ways there are to place n queens on an n-by-n board. This could be 23 queens on a 23-by-23 board — or 1,000 on a 1,000-by-1,000 board, or any number of queens on a board of the corresponding size.

"It is very easy to explain to anyone," said Érika Roldán, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Technical University of Munich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

Simkin proved that for huge chessboards with a large number of queens, there are approximately (0.143n)ⁿ configurations. So, on a million-by-million board, the number of ways to arrange 1 million non-threatening queens is around 1 followed by about 5 million zeros.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New report suggests Texas' grid was 5 minutes from catastrophic failure:

The preliminary report has been put together by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in combination with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit set up by utilities to help set standards and practices that keep the grid stable. The draft itself isn't being released at this point, but the two have posted a detailed presentation that describes the report's contents. A final version will be released in November.

The outline of February's grid problems is well understood: a severe cold snap raised demand at the same time as it caused failure of many of the generating sources in the area affected. The problems struck a number of states, but only Texas' ERCOT grid suffered severe failures. The neighboring Southwest Power Pool suffered five hours when its demand exceeded its generating capacity, But, because of its tight integration into neighboring grids, it was able to call upon 13 gigawatts of generation capacity in states farther east.

[...] The largest single cause of failures during the event was frozen equipment, which ranged from individual gauges and instruments on large plants to the icing up of wind turbine blades. This accounted for 44 percent of the failures of generating equipment. Mechanical failures accounted for another 20 percent. Between the two was a failure of fuel supplies, accounting for nearly a third of the failures. And "fuel supplies" here primarily means natural gas.

[...] But a major problem was loss of power to the gas distribution and supply system. Apparently, Texas grid operators had taken no steps to identify natural gas facilities and prioritize power delivery to them when starting the rolling blackouts. "Most natural gas production and processing facilities surveyed were not identified as critical load or otherwise protected from load shedding," the report indicates.

Previously:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/02/15/2347241

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Delta Air Lines calls for carriers to share names of unruly passengers:

Delta Air Lines is calling for an industry-wide effort to keep passengers from boarding competitors' flights after being banned for disruptive behavior.

So far this year, Delta says it has submitted the names of more than 600 banned passengers to the Federal Aviation Administration, which has sought to enforce rules against interfering with flight crews. The industry has seen a surge in poor behavior and banned passengers in recent months, with the bulk of incidents related to face mask requirements.

"We've also asked other airlines to share their 'no fly' list to further protect airline employees across the industry," Delta said in a memo this week. "A list of banned customers doesn't work as well if that customer can fly with another airline."

The company did not say whether sharing of passenger lists should be through the federal government or among companies themselves, and declined to elaborate. Delta said it has more than 1,600 people on its internal no-fly list and did not clarify why it submitted fewer than that to the FAA.

"Marckalada" mentioned by 14th century Italian monk

takyon writes:

Genoan friar knew about America 150 years before Christopher Columbus

Sailors in Christopher Columbus's home town knew about North America more than a century before the explorer discovered the continent, Italian researchers have claimed.

An account by Genoan sailors of a verdant land beyond Greenland "where giants live" has been found in a history of the world written around 1340 by an Italian friar — 152 years before Columbus set foot in the Americas in 1492.

"This astonishing find is the first known report to circulate in the Mediterranean of the American continent, and if Columbus was aware of what these sailors knew it might have helped convince him make his voyage," said Paolo Chiesa, who led the research at the University of Milan.

Journal Reference:
Paolo Chiesa. Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340), Terrae Incognitae (DOI: 10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792)

A Monk in 14th-century Italy Wrote About the Americas

upstart writes:

A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas:

upstart writes:

Why EFF Flew a Plane Over Apple's Headquarters:

For the last month, civil liberties and human rights organizations, researchers, and customers have demanded that Apple cancel its plan to install photo-scanning software onto devices. This software poses an enormous danger to privacy and security. Apple has heard the message, and announced that it would delay the system while consulting with various groups about its impact.

[...] The delay may well be a diversionary tactic. Every September, Apple holds one of its big product announcement events, where Apple executives detail the new devices and features coming out. Apple likely didn’t want concerns about the phone-scanning features to steal the spotlight.

But we can’t let Apple’s disastrous phone-scanning idea fade into the background, only to be announced with minimal changes down the road. To make sure Apple is listening to our concerns, EFF turned to an old-school messaging system: aerial advertising.

During Apple’s event, a plane circled the company’s headquarters carrying an impossible-to-miss message: Apple, don’t scan our phones! The evening before Apple’s event, protestors also rallied nationwide in front of Apple stores. The company needs to hear us, and not just dismiss the serious problems with its scanning plan. A delay is not a cancellation, and the company has also been dismissive of some concerns, referring to them as “confusion” about the new features.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fossilized footprints show humans made it to North America much earlier than first thought:

North and South America were the last continents to be settled by humans, but exactly when that started is a topic that has divided archaeologists.

The commonly held view is that people arrived in North America from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge that once connected the two continents, at the end of the Ice Age around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. But more recent -- and some contested -- discoveries have suggested humans might have been in North America earlier.

Now, researchers studying fossilized human footprints in New Mexico say they have the first unequivocal evidence that humans were in North America at least 23,000 years ago.

"The peopling of the Americas is one of those things that has been for many years very contentious and a lot of archeologists hold views with almost religious zeal," said Matthew Bennett, a professor and specialist in ancient footprints at Bournemouth University and author of a study on the new findings that published in the journal Science on Thursday.

"One of the problems is that there is very few data points," he added.

Bennett and his colleagues were able to accurately date 61 footprints by radiocarbon dating layers of aquatic plant seeds that had been preserved above and below them. The prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin in White Sands National Park, were made 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, the researchers found.

Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, et al. Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum^[$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586)

Original Submission