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DannyB writes:

Unruly passenger incidents rising again, FAA data shows:

FAA figures released Tuesday show more disruptions on commercial flights in the past week than any week in the past two and a half months.

The FAA says there were 128 new incidents reported by flight crews, bringing this year's total to 4,626 incidents. The new number is the highest weekly figure since the FAA started releasing weekly data on July 20.

About 72% of issues in the past week were over the federal transportation mask mandate, figures show.

[...] The agency has proposed more than $1 million in fines against unruly airline passengers this year.

One $45,000 fine announced in August was against a passenger accused of throwing his luggage at another passenger and, while lying on the aisle floor, "grabbing a flight attendant by the ankles and putting his head up her skirt."

Another passenger would not wear his face mask, the FAA, said, and "acted as though his hand was a gun and made a 'pew, pew' noise as if he was shooting a fellow passenger."

[...] Pekoske said 110 TSA officers have been assaulted this year.

Lots Of Talk About A Crackdown On America’s Air Rage Epidemic—But Not Enough Action:

Among the most egregious incidents: Last December, a Delta Air Lines passenger tried to open the cockpit door mid-flight and struck a flight attendant in the face before being restrained by crew members and a fellow passenger. On an Alaska Airlines flight in March, a Colorado man who refused to wear a face mask swatted at a flight attendant, then stood up and urinated in his seat area. In May, a Southwest Airlines passenger punched out a flight attendant’s teeth after being told to keep her seat belt fastened.

[...] The threat of four- and five-figure fines has not tamped down unruly behavior on planes. “Civil penalties alone are failing to deter criminal activity by airline passengers,” [...]

[...] The airline industry, meanwhile, says this is a job for the Department of Justice. “We believe that the United States Government is well equipped to prosecute unruly and disruptive onboard behavior,” [...]

What, if anything, should be done, or could improve the situation?

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

Twitch source code, creator earnings exposed in 125GB leak:

Live video broadcasting service Twitch has been hit by a massive hack that exposed 125GB of the company's data. In a 4chan thread posted (and removed) Wednesday, an anonymous user posted a torrent file of the multi-gig data dump. The dump contains the company's source code and details of money earned by Twitch creators.

In a 4chan post seen by Ars today, an anonymous user claimed to leak 125GB of data lifted from 6,000 internal Twitch Git repositories. The forum poster mocked Amazon's acquisition of Twitch, writing, "Jeff Bezos paid $970 million for this, we're giving it away FOR FREE."

The hacker wrote that the purpose of the leak was to cause disruption and promote competition among video streaming platforms. The hacker further said that Twitch's "community is a disgusting, toxic cesspool."

Twitch source code and creator payouts part of massive leak:

Twitch appears to have been hacked, leaking source code for the company’s streaming service, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and details of creator payouts. An anonymous poster on the 4chan messaging board has released a 125GB torrent, which they claim includes the entirety of Twitch and its commit history.

The poster claims the leak is designed to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space.” The Verge is able to confirm that the leak is legitimate, and includes code that is as recent as this week. Video Games Chronicle first reported details on the leak earlier today.

Twitch has confirmed it has suffered a data breach, and the company says it’s “working with urgency to understand the extent of this.”

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Over two feet of rain fell in Italy in only half a day, something not seen in Europe before:

Extreme, climate-fueled rainfall broke records this week in a part of Italy known for its rain and an area in Oman not known for rain at all.

On Monday, a series of storms put on the parking brakes over northwestern Italy, unleashing rainfall rates never before seen in all of Europe after over 29 inches (742 mm) of rain fell in just 12 hours. In Oman, a rare tropical cyclone dumped years' worth of rainfall, bringing deadly floods to the desert landscape that rarely sees much rain in an entire year.

[...] For some context, 36 inches is roughly equivalent to the average rainfall one would expect in Seattle in a year. It would take London an average of 15 months to tally such rainfall. Dozens had to be rescued after reports of mudslides and flooding dotted the landscape, leading a bridge to collapse in the town of Quiliano, according to Milan news outlet Corriere della Sera.

[...] Less than 2 days earlier and a little over 3,000 miles to the southeast, Cyclone Shaheen made landfall in far northern Oman with winds just shy of a Category 1 hurricane.

The storm drenched the normally parched city of Al Khaburah with over 14 inches (300 mm) of rainfall in a matter of hours, according to The Times of Oman.

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upstart writes:

New type of magnetism unveiled in an iconic material:

Since the discovery of superconductivity in Sr₂RuO₄ in 1994, hundreds of studies have been published on this compound, which have suggested that Sr₂RuO₄ is a very special system with unique properties. These properties make Sr₂RuO₄ a material with great potential, for example, for the development of future technologies including superconducting spintronics and quantum electronics by virtue of its ability to carry lossless electrical currents and magnetic information simultaneously. An international research team led by scientists at the University of Konstanz has been now able to answer one of the most interesting open questions on Sr₂RuO₄: why does the superconducting state of this material exhibit some features that are typically found in materials known as ferromagnets, which are considered being antagonists to superconductors? The team has found that Sr₂RuO₄ hosts a new form of magnetism, which can coexist with superconductivity and exists independently of superconductivity as well. The results have been published in the current issue of Nature Communications.

[...] The authors also developed a theoretical model suggesting the origin of this hidden surface magnetism. "Unlike for conventional magnetic materials whose magnetic properties originate from the quantum mechanical property of an electron known as spin, a cooperative swirling motion of interacting electrons, generating circulating currents at the nanometer scale, underlies the magnetism discovered in Sr₂RuO₄" states Dr Mario Cuoco from the CNR-spin who developed the theoretical model along with Dr Maria Teresa Mercaldo and other colleagues at the University of Salerno.

[...] The new type of magnetism discovered in Sr₂RuO₄ is essential to also better understanding the other physical properties of Sr₂RuO₄ including its unconventional superconductivity. The fundamental discovery may also lead to the search for this new form of magnetism in other materials similar to Sr₂RuO₄ as well as trigger new studies to better understand how such magnetism can be manipulated and controlled for novel quantum electronics applications.

Journal Reference:
Fittipaldi, R., Hartmann, R., Mercaldo, M. T., et al. Unveiling unconventional magnetism at the surface of Sr2RuO4 [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26020-5)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Largest mobile SMS routing firm discloses five-year-long breach:

Syniverse, a service provider for most telecommunications companies, disclosed that hackers had access to its databases over the past five years and compromised login credentials belonging to hundreds of customers.

Self-described as “the world’s most connected company,” Syniverse provides text messaging routing services to over 300 mobile operators, among them Vodafone, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, America Movil, Telefonica, and China Mobile.

Syniverse is so big that it brags about having as its customers “nearly every mobile communications provider, the largest global banks, the world’s biggest tech companies.”

[...] In a filing on September 27 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) spotted by Motherboard journalist Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Syniverse disclosed that an unauthorized party accessed on several occasions databases on its network.

When the company became aware of the intrusions in May 2021, an internal investigation began to determine the extent of the hack.

“The results of the investigation revealed that the unauthorized access began in May 2016,” the company reveals in the SEC filing.

For five years, hackers maintained access to Syniverse internal databases and compromised the login data for the Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment belonging to about 235 customers.

“All EDT customers have been notified and have had their credentials reset or inactivated, even if their credentials were not impacted by the incident. All customers whose credentials were impacted have been notified of that circumstance” - Syniverse

Also at Business Insider, Security Week, and Ars Technica

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Raspberry Pi Launches New Website For Its Hardware

In a surprise move, Raspberry Pi today announced that a new website has been created to support Raspberry Pi devices, sales and documentation. This marks a change from a single website from 2011 which served both educational outreach and sales. Another change is Raspberry Pi's social media presence, with the original Raspberry Pi twitter account focusing on the hardware, and another representing the charity and educational outreach of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Raspberry Pi Trading and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have long been separate entities. Raspberry Pi Trading is responsible for the hardware engineering and sales of Raspberry Pi while Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that provides educational outreach such as learning resources and teacher outreach program "Picademy".

In two blog posts, one written by Liz Upton, executive director of communications for Raspberry Pi Trading, and another from Philip Colligan chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we learn that the division is a necessary step as the user base grows and their requirements change. The new raspberrypi.com website aims to serve those interested in the Raspberry Pi hardware and software and provides documentation and links to resellers offering official Raspberry Pi boards and accessories.

Some posts from the RaspberryPi.org blog have been transferred to the RaspberryPi.com news page. The former blog focuses on the education mission while the news page has the project ideas, magazines, product announcements, and other news.

Raspberry Pi looks to set up African retail channel to make buying a mini computer there as easy as Pi

Raspberry Pi said yesterday it would be pushing to get its miniature computers into more shops across Africa, admitting that its presence on the continent was limited to a single approved reseller with commercial ops in a few countries in southern Africa.

Writing on the company blog, Ken Okolo said he had been recently appointed to focus on building a network of resellers and partnerships across industry and the education sector in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Uganda.

Previously Raspberry Pi was available through a South African reseller with "some commercial operations" in nearby countries, but the rest of the continent was vastly underserved, relying on e-commerce sites like Amazon and [Alibaba], and their high shipping rates, to dispatch the product from other parts of the globe.

According to Okolo, this burden "undermines [the] goal of ensuring affordability and availability across the continent."

Previously: Raspberry Pi Attracts $45m After Lockdowns Fuel Demand for PCs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Large scale solar parks cool surrounding land:

The team of scientists, from Lancaster University, Ludong University in China, and the University of California Davis in the USA focused on two large-scale solar parks located in arid locations -- the 300 MW Stateline solar park in California USA, and the 850 MW Longyangxia solar park in China.

The researchers used land surface temperature data derived from Landsat satellite images, an approach not previously applied to solar parks. This enabled the study team to compare the land surface temperatures around solar parks before and after the solar parks were constructed. The satellite data was supplemented by on the ground temperature measurements around Stateline solar park.

They found that the parks produced 'cool islands' extending around 700 metres from the solar park boundaries. The temperature of surrounding land surface was reduced by up to 2.3 ℃ at 100 metres away from the solar park, with the cooling effects reducing exponentially to 700 metres.

This new discovery is important as it shows the solar park could impact ecological processes, including productivity, decomposition, and ultimately the carbon balance, in the surrounding landscape. The scale of effect will depend on the location and could be positive, negative or inconsequential.

[...] The new findings therefore highlight the need for greater consideration to be given to where solar parks are built around the world, as well as their design, to minimise any negative impacts and boost positive effects.

Journal Reference:
Li Guoqing, Rebecca R Hernandez, George Alan Blackburn, et al. Ground-mounted photovoltaic solar parks promote land surface cool islands in arid ecosystems Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition [Open] (DOI: 10.1016/j.rset.2021.100008)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chronic Pain Treatment Should Include Psychological Interventions:

"There are several effective nonmedical treatments for chronic pain, and psychological treatments emerge among the strongest of these," said Mary Driscoll, a researcher at Yale University and first author on the issue's main article. "People who engage in psychological treatments can expect to experience meaningful reductions in pain itself as well as improvements in physical functioning and emotional well-being."

[...] Research has shown that psychological factors can play a role in the onset, severity, and duration of chronic pain. For those reasons, several psychological interventions have been shown to be effective in treating chronic pain.

In the article, Driscoll and her colleagues describe the interventions that have been most widely studied by the pain community, including:

upstart writes:

By End Of 2021, Google Plans To Auto-Enroll 150 Million Users In Two-Step Verification And Require 2 Million Youtube Creators To Turn It On | Zdnet:

In honor of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Google said it wanted to make sure their products are secure "by default."

Google announced on Tuesday that it will be auto-enrolling 150 million of their users in two-step verification by the end of 2021. The platform will also force two million YouTube creators to turn on two-step verification by the end of the year as well.

In a blog post, Google Chrome product Manager AbdelKarim Mardini and Google account security and safety director Guemmy Kim said the best way to keep users safe is to turn on security protections by default.

"For years, Google has been at the forefront of innovation in two-step verification (2SV), one of the most reliable ways to prevent unauthorized access to accounts and networks. 2SV is strongest when it combines both 'something you know' (like a password) and 'something you have' (like your phone or a security key)," the two explained.

upstart writes:

Tiny rare fossil found in 16 million-year-old amber is 'once-in-a-generation' find:

Hiding in plain sight, the third-ever tardigrade[*] fossil on record has been found suspended within a piece of 16-million-year-old Dominican amber.

The find includes a newly named species, Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus, as a relative of the modern living family of tardigrades known as Isohypsibioidea. It's the first tardigrade fossil from the Cenozoic, our current geological era that began 66 million years ago.

The study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

[*] Tardigrade:

Tardigrades (/ˈtɑːrdɪɡreɪd/), known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals.

They have been found everywhere in Earth's biosphere, from mountaintops to the deep sea and mud volcanoes, and from tropical rainforests to the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions—such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation—that would quickly kill most other known forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.

Also at Phys.org and C|Net.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes:

Why do all the other animals have tails, but not me? [...] The loss of tails has long been thought to have played a key role in bipedalism in humans.

This curiosity-based question was addressed by using bioinformatics tools to look at differences between the genomes of humans (and the other apes, which all lack tails) and monkeys (which all have tails, like most other mammals).

Bo Xia, a Ph.D. candidate studying this problem in the labs of Jef Boeke and Itai Yanai, looked at sequence alignments of all genes known to be involved in tail development and discovered a movable piece of DNA called a retrotransposon inserted in the TBXT gene, which is a developmental regulator crucial for tail development. The reason it had not been spotted before was due its placement in noncoding (intron) DNA, where most people would not look for mutations.

Having a tail would likely make it difficult to sit down. What practical applications would there be if we did have a tail?

Journal Reference:
Bo Xia, Weimin Zhang, Aleksandra Wudzinska, et al. The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2021.09.14.460388)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

COVID-19: Without masks, two metres distancing is not enough:

To prevent the spread of COVID-19 indoors, the two metres physical distancing guideline is not enough without masks, according to researchers from Quebec, Illinois, and Texas. However, wearing a mask indoors can reduce the contamination range of airborne particles by about 67 percent.

“Mask mandates and good ventilation are critically important to curb the spread of more contagious strains of COVID-19, especially during the flu season and winter months as more people socialize indoors,” says Saad Akhtar, a former doctoral student under the supervision of Professor Agus Sasmito at McGill University.

While most public health guidelines recommend physical distancing of two metres for people from different households, the researchers say distancing alone is not enough to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In a study published in Building and Environment, the researchers found that when people are unmasked, more than 70 percent of airborne particles pass the two metres threshold within the 30 seconds. By contrast, less than 1 percent of particles cross the two-metre mark if masks are worn.

Coughing is one of the main sources of spread of airborne viruses from symptomatic individuals.

Journal Reference:
Jayaveera Muthusamy, Syed Haq, Saad Akhtar, et al. Implication of coughing dynamics on safe social distancing in an indoor environment—A numerical perspective Building and Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2021.108280)

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6652659/Teenager-jailed-buying-PlayStation-4-8-WEIGHING-paying-6lb-food.html

A French teenager has been jailed after buying a PlayStation 4 for under £8 by weighing it as if the games console was a huge bag of fruit.

The 19-year-old man, named in the French media as Adel, picked the device off the shelf and took it to the fruit section and weighed it.

He then put a sticker with the heavily reduced price tag on the expensive console and went to the checkout.

Adel paid £7.86 (€9) for the 6lb bag of 'fruit' at a self-checkout at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France, last September.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Simple method for converting carbon dioxide into useful compounds:

Researchers in Japan have found an energy-efficient way to convert the chief greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into useful chemicals. Using the method, CO2 is transformed into structures called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), suggesting a new and simpler route to dispose of the greenhouse gas to help tackle global warming.

The research was carried out by scientists at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Kyoto University, and colleagues, and the results are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Taking the CO2 released from fossil fuel combustion and converting the gas into valuable chemicals and materials is a promising approach to protect the environment. But because CO2 is a very inert and stable molecule, it is difficult to get it to react using conventional conversion processes,” says Satoshi Horike, a chemist at iCeMS who led the study. “Our work demonstrates an easier approach that can be run at a much lower temperature and pressure. This should make reactions that use CO2 easier to produce and more popular.”

upstart writes:

NASA likely to move some astronauts off Starliner due to extended delays:

NASA will not make an official announcement for weeks or months, but two sources say the space agency is moving several astronauts from Boeing's Starliner spacecraft onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle for upcoming missions to the International Space Station.

The assignments are not final—they have yet to go through the formal approval process of the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, which includes all international partners—but sources say NASA's rookie astronauts who have not yet flown to space will move off the Boeing vehicle due to its ongoing delays.

The most likely scenario is that Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, and Jeannette Epps will now fly on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, targeted for launch no earlier than August 2022 on a Falcon 9 rocket. They are likely to be joined by an international partner astronaut, probably Japan's Koichi Wakata, for the mission.

These represent substantial changes for NASA and its astronauts. Mann has been assigned to the Crew Flight Test for Starliner since August 2018. This is the pivotal flight that will take place after Boeing's upcoming uncrewed test flight of Starliner, Orbital Flight Test-2, or OFT-2. At the time of Mann's assignment, Cassada was assigned to the first operational flight of Starliner, a regular rotation mission to the space station called "Starliner-1." Epps was added to the Starliner-1 mission a year ago.

A NASA spokesperson, Kyle Herring, declined to confirm any information about the new assignments.

Original Submission