SoylentNews

upstart writes:

How pearls achieve nanoscale precision:

In research that could inform future high-performance nanomaterials, a University of Michigan-led team has uncovered for the first time how mollusks build ultradurable structures with a level of symmetry that outstrips everything else in the natural world, with the exception of individual atoms.

[...] Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that a pearl's symmetry becomes more and more precise as it builds, answering centuries-old questions about how the disorder at its center becomes a sort of perfection.

Layers of nacre, the iridescent and extremely durable organic-inorganic composite that also makes up the shells of oysters and other mollusks, build on a shard of aragonite that surrounds an organic center. The layers, which make up more than 90% of a pearl's volume, become progressively thinner and more closely matched as they build outward from the center.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that mollusks maintain the symmetry of their pearls by adjusting the thickness of each layer of nacre. If one layer is thicker, the next tends to be thinner, and vice versa. The pearl pictured in the study contains 2,615 finely matched layers of nacre, deposited over 548 days.

Journal Reference:
Jiseok Gim, Alden Koch, Laura M. Otter, et al. The mesoscale order of nacreous pearls [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2107477118)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Raspberry Pi 4 2GB gets a price hike to $45, 1GB version coming back for $35

We've been used to getting better hardware for cheaper or in the case of Raspberry Pi model B boards a stable $35 price tag since 2021 with gradual improvements to the hardware. Many companies already had to hike prices for their board due to supply constraints, and Raspberry Pi Trading has become the latest victim of the increase in components with the Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM going back to its original $45 price tag, and the re-introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 1GB for $35. We are told this is temporary, and once everything settles the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB should sell for $35 as was the case since last year. This is the very first price hike in Raspberry Pi (short) history.

[...] Eben Upton explains the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, and Compute Module 4 will not be as badly impacted as earlier products based on a 40nm manufacturing process. That means they'll have to make some tough choices notably prioritizing Compute Module 3, Compute Module 3+, and Raspberry Pi 3B, at the cost of the Raspberry Pi 3B+ which will fall at the back of the queue mostly to cater to the needs of industrial customers. People still using Raspberry Pi 3B+ in their design are recommended to switch to Raspberry Pi 4 with 1GB RAM.

Also at The Register.

Previously: 2 GB Model of Raspberry Pi 4 Gets Permanent Price Cut to $35

Original Submission

upstart writes:

“Largest Meat-Eating Predatory Dinosaur” of Triassic Period, Actually a Timid Vegetarian:

Fossil footprints found in an Australian coal mine around 50 years ago have long been thought to be that of a large ‘raptor-like’ predatory dinosaur, but scientists have in fact discovered they were instead left by a timid long-necked herbivore.

University of Queensland paleontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio recently led an international team to re-analyze the footprints, dated to the latter part of the Triassic Period, around 220 million-year-ago.

“For years it’s been believed that these tracks were made by a massive theropod predator that was part of the dinosaur family Eubrontes, with legs over two meters tall,” Dr. Romilio said.

“This idea caused a sensation decades ago because no other meat-eating dinosaur in the world approached that size during the Triassic period.”

However, findings made by a team of international researchers, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology, in fact shows the tracks were instead made by a dinosaur known as a Prosauropod – a vegetarian dinosaur that was smaller, with legs about 1.4 meters tall and a body length of six meters.

Journal Reference:
Anthony Romilio, Hendrik Klein, Andréas Jannel, et al. Saurischian dinosaur tracks from the Upper Triassic of southern Queensland: possible evidence for Australia’s earliest sauropodomorph trackmaker, Historical Biology (DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2021.1984447)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ocean Cleanup Device Shows It Can Remove Plastic From the Pacific:

It's been nearly a decade since Boyan Slat announced at age 18 that he had a plan to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

Slat, now 27, is a Dutch inventor and the founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

That goal has often seemed unattainable. The Ocean Cleanup launched its first attempt at a plastic-catching device in 2018, but the prototype broke in the water. A newer model, released in 2019, did a better job of collecting plastic, but the organization estimated that it would need hundreds of those devices to clean the world's oceans.

Scientists and engineers began to question whether the group could deliver on the tens of millions of dollars it had acquired in funding.

But over the summer, the organization pinned its hopes on a new device, which it nicknamed Jenny. The installation is essentially an artificial floating coastline that catches plastic in its fold like a giant arm, then funnels the garbage into a woven funnel-shaped net. Two vessels tow it through the water at about 1.5 knots (slower than normal walking speed), and the ocean current pushes floating garbage toward the giant net.

In early August, the team launched Jenny in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a trash-filled vortex between Hawaii and California. The garbage patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, encompassing more than 1.8 trillion pieces, according to the Ocean Cleanup's estimates.

Last week, Jenny faced its final test as the organization sought to determine whether it could bring large amounts of plastic to shore without breaking or malfunctioning. The Ocean Cleanup said the device hauled 9,000 kilograms, or nearly 20,000 pounds, of trash out of the Pacific Ocean — proof that the garbage patch could eventually be cleaned up.

"Holy mother of god," Slat tweeted that afternoon, adding, "It all worked!!!"

Original Submission

upstart writes:

CDC panel recommends boosters for many Americans:

People who received either Moderna's or Pfizer's vaccine should get a COVID-19 vaccine booster at least six months after their second shot if they're age 65 or older or living in a long-term care facility, if they're an adult at risk of severe COVID-19 because of a medical condition, or if they're an adult at risk because of their work or setting. The committee didn't recommend a particular booster.

Every person age 18 and older who received Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine should also get a COVID-19 vaccine booster at least two months after their shot, the panel voted. The committee didn't recommend a particular booster. For both groups, the vote was a 15-0 "yes."

Before the recommendation becomes official CDC guidance, the committee's vote will need to be approved by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Once it's accepted, there will be additional clinical considerations and guidance for individuals to decide if they need a booster, or which vaccine they should receive. Then the booster campaign will be officially rolled out for millions more people who qualify.

On Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized booster doses of Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, and it also authorized the use of mixing COVID-19 shots as booster doses, meaning an eligible adult can get a different COVID-19 vaccine as a booster, as long as they qualify based on what shot they originally received.

upstart writes:

Elephants are rapidly evolving without tusks to escape ivory poachers, study finds - ABC News:

While the evolution of animals is often thought of as something that takes millions of years, it can also happen much faster.

A new study, published today in Science, provides powerful evidence that human activities are driving rapid evolution of animals.

A population of African bush elephants in Mozambique was found to have adapted to poaching by losing their tusks over a matter of decades.

And while losing tusks might have helped the elephants survive, there's concern this will also come at a cost.

[...] When the researchers analysed blood taken from tusked and tuskless female elephants, they found evidence two gene mutations were responsible for the lack of tusks.

[...] But one of the genes called AMELX is in a region on the X chromosome that the study found differed greatly between tusked and tuskless elephants.

upstart writes:

from the TMIAHM dept.

Mining the moon's water will require a massive infrastructure investment, but should we?:

Since the 1994 discovery of water ice on the moon by the Clementine spacecraft, excitement has reigned at the prospect of a return to the moon. This followed two decades of the doldrums after the end of Apollo, a malaise that was symptomatic of an underlying lack of incentive to return.

That water changed everything. The water ice deposits are located at the poles of the moon hidden in the depths of craters that are forever devoid of sunlight.

Since then, not least due to the International Space Station, we have developed advanced techniques that allow us to recycle water and oxygen with high efficiency. This makes the value of supplying local water for human consumption more tenuous, but if the human population on the Moon grows so will demand. So, what to do with the water on the moon?

There are two commonly proposed answers: energy storage using fuel cells and fuel and oxidizer for propulsion. The first is easily dispensed with: fuel cells recycle their hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis when they are recharged, with very little leakage.

The second—currently the primary raison d'être for mining water on the moon—is more complex but no more compelling. It is worth noting that SpaceX uses a methane/oxygen mix in its rockets, so they would not require the hydrogen propellant.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Trump’s Brand New TRUTH App May Violate Terms Of Open Source Code It’s Built On

On Wednesday night, after Trump revealed the TRUTH social app, Twitter users began to note that the network appeared to be based on an open-source social networking software called Mastodon, which allows people to modify the underlying code so long as they abide by its license.

But the Trump network appears to have taken the publicly available code for the website while violating the terms that make it free to use.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told TPM in an email that TRUTH appeared to violate the terms of use that the software sets forth: making the source code available, and having a copy of the general product license available to users.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Top FCC Official Calls For Ban of DJI Drones, Citing National Security Risk:

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has called for the addition of DJI drones to the FCC Covered List, which could prevent the company from selling its products in the United States.

In a letter published to the FCC official website, Carr accuses the Shenzhen-based drone company of collecting “vast amounts” of sensitive data and effectively calls the drones Chinese surveillance.

[...] Carr says that one former Pentagon official has even said that the government agency knew — written as a statement of fact — that much of that information was being sent back to China from DJI drones.

“DJI’s collection of vast troves of sensitive data is especially troubling given that China’s National Intelligence Law grants the Chinese government the power to compel DJI to assist it in espionage activities,” Carr says.

DJI was placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List last year, [...] Its placement there made it so that American companies could not export parts to DJI. Companies on the [list] would theoretically find it harder to sell products in the United States, but DJI does not appear to have suffered this problem.

Carr says that many of the concerns he has are linked to DJI’s widespread use by various state and local public safety and law enforcement agencies. There are also reports that the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI also use DJI drones, which Carr says makes it even more important that a full review of DJI is conducted to address potential national security threats.

He's not wrong, but speaking as an ex-employer of a US based drone development company in 2010-2012, I believe this problem could have been significantly mitigated by encouraging domestic development instead of stifling it back then.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

WHO honours Henrietta Lacks, whose cells changed medicine:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has honoured Henrietta Lacks, recognising the world-changing legacy of a Black woman whose cancer cells have provided the basis for life-changing medical breakthroughs but were taken without her knowledge or consent.

Researchers took tissues from Lacks’s body when she sought treatment for cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the 1950s, establishing the so-called HeLa cells that became the first ‘immortal line’ of human cells to divide indefinitely in a laboratory.

In recognising Henrietta Lacks, the WHO said it wanted to address a “historic wrong”, noting the global scientific community once hid her ethnicity and her real story.

“WHO acknowledges the importance of reckoning with past scientific injustices, and advancing racial equity in health and science,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “It’s also an opportunity to recognise women – particularly women of colour – who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of just 31 in October 1951 and her eldest son, 87-year-old Lawrence Lacks, received the award from the WHO at its headquarters in Geneva. He was accompanied by several of her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other family members.

Henrietta Lacks' story is a fascinating one, the intermixing of the medical and the social, and more. I first learnt about it from the 1997 BBC documentary Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis (my favourite documentary maker). I know Oprah was behind a dramatisation too a few years ago.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China's FAST telescope could detect self-replicating alien probes:

One of the most challenging questions to answer when confronting the Fermi paradox is why exponentially scaling technologies haven't taken over the universe by now. Commonly known as von Neumann probes, the idea of a self-replicating swarm of extraterrestrial robots has been a staple of science fiction for decades. But so far, there has never been any evidence of their existence outside the realm of fiction. That might be because we haven't spent a lot of time looking for them—and that could potentially change with the new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST). According to some recent calculations, the massive new observational platform might be able to detect swarms of von Neumann probes relatively far away from the sun.

Those calculations, carried out by Dr. Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia, showed that von Neuman probe swarms for highly advanced civilizations could be visible in the radio spectral band that is the focal point of FAST. To help in the search, Dr. Osmanov used two frameworks to bound the potential solution. The first was the idea of Kardashev civilizations, while the other is estimates of the thermal and electromagnetic emissions profiles of any such swarm.

The Kardashev scale is a well-understood concept in science speculation—it focuses on a civilization's overall energy use, with different milestones (Type I, Type II, or Type III) correlating with the utilization of the entire energy output of a planet, a star, and a galaxy respectively. Currently, human civilization is thought to be around a .75 on the Kardashev scale.

upstart writes:

FDA authorizes Moderna, Johnson & Johnson booster shots for many Americans:

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday amended its emergency use authorizations for Moderna's and Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccines, allowing the use of a booster shot for some Americans.

The FDA now allows for a single booster dose of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine to be administered to individuals at least six months after their initial two shots for those who are 65 years and older, those who are 18 to 64 years old at high risk of contracting a severe case of COVID-19, and those ages 18 to 64 "with frequent institutional or occupational exposure" to the coronavirus, the administration said in a statement.

A single booster dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be administered at least two months after individuals 18 and older receive the initial COVID-19 vaccine.

The FDA also greenlit the option for eligible people to "mix and match" vaccines when getting their booster, meaning someone who got one kind of vaccine for the initial dose could get a booster shot of a different vaccine.

Also at AP, NYT, and NPR.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The New York Times has written about study results published recently in Nature which show rather precisely when Vikings had been living in what is now Canada, specifically at L’Anse aux Meadows.

But in results published Wednesday in Nature, scientists presented what they think are new answers to this mystery. By analyzing the imprint of a rare solar storm in tree rings from wood found at the Canadian site, scientists have decisively pinned down when Norse explorers were in Newfoundland: the year A.D. 1021, or exactly 1,000 years ago.

The date was calculated from a combination of dendrochronology and astrophysics.

Journal Reference:
Margot Kuitems, Birgitta L. Wallace, Charles Lindsay, et al. Evidence for European presence in the Americas in ad 1021 [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03972-8)

Previously:
(2020) Archaeologists in Norway Find Rare Viking Ship Burial Using Only Radar
(2020) Melting Ice Reveals an Ancient, Once-Thriving Trade Route
(2018) 8-Year-Old Girl Pulls Ancient Sword From Lake, is Our Ruler Now
(2016) Vikings, Crystal 'Sunstones,' and the Discovery of America
(2015) 1,200-year-old Viking Sword Discovered by Hiker
(2014) The Vikings' Navigational Mystery: Calcite

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Senate directs NASA to choose another company to build a lunar lander:

The United States Senate's largest committee wants NASA to choose a second company to build its new moon lander.

[...] After much legal back-and-forth following NASA's original decision, the Senate Appropriations Committee is directing NASA to now choose a second company to develop a crewed lunar lander, according to SpaceNews. However, this direction came with only a small funding increase.

NASA's original decision to grant this contract to build and develop a lunar lander, or Human Landing System (HLS), to only SpaceX was met with staunch protest from the other two companies in the running at the time: Blue Origin and Dynetics.

[...] But it seems that Blue Origin may get its wish after all.

The appropriators, in the report, state that NASA's HLS program is not underfunded, despite the agency's previous claims to the contrary. As shown in the report, the bill includes $24.83 billion for NASA, which is just slightly more than the $24.8 billion that NASA requested, and a $100 million increase in funding for HLS.

"NASA's rhetoric of blaming Congress and this Committee for the lack of resources needed to support two HLS teams rings hollow," the report states.

Three companies [at minimum] fighting over, and two companies being awarded contracts for the same sized pot of money should accelerate development. Somehow.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Nine UK schools start scanning children’s faces to take their lunch money:

Several schools in Scotland are set to start using facial recognition software to allow pupils to pay for their lunches.

The system, installed in nine sites in North Ayrshire, scans the faces of pupils at the tills in order to save time during the busy lunch hour.

It checks them off against a register of faces stored on the school’s servers and replaces software that used fingerprint scanners.

The company that installed the systems claim they are more Covid-secure and help speed up the queue, with each transaction now taking just five seconds, The Financial Times reported.

David Swanston, the managing director of CRB Cunninghams, the company that installed the systems, told the FT: ‘In a secondary school you have around about a 25 minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast throughput at the point of sale.’

But privacy campaigners claim it further normalises the technology which is often used without the consent of those being tracked.

[...] North Ayreshire council claims the majority of parents have given consent for the system because they recognise that it makes the process easier.

Original Submission