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owl writes:

Home Alone is now a $250 Lego set, and it might be the most impressive fan-inspired model yet:

Some of the most amazing Lego sets of the past decade have been dreamt up by fans — and this week, the Danish toy brick company revealed its largest Lego Ideas set yet. It's Kevin McCallister's iconic house from Home Alone, and it's a 3,955-piece marvel filled with movie moments, hidden references, and a number of Kevin's booby traps.

Kevin can slide down the stairs on his sled, land a clothes iron on Marv's face, zipline down to his treehouse, break the shelves that release Buzz's tarantula, drop a paint can, and more. Lego even recreated the scary basement furnace with its opening jaws, with a light-up brick so it can glow, and there's a gear you can turn to spin the train set and turntable that Kevin disguised as people (to make it look like someone was "home").

The whole build opens up like a dollhouse, including a full attic playspace you access by flipping up the roof, and each floor can lift off if you'd rather interact from the top down. As The Brothers Brick point out in their review, it's got a few never-before-seen bricks, too: the door with the pet flap is new here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists made a wooden knife that's three times sharper than steel blades:

The gold standard for knives is usually steel or ceramics, but in a new study, appearing in the journal Matter on Oct. 20, material scientists describe their latest creation: A "hardened wood knife" around three times sharper than a stainless steel dinner knife. It can "easily" cut through a medium-well done steak, according to Teng Li, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland and first author on the paper, and can be used and reused many times.

[...] Li's team developed a two-step method for hardening the wood in their knives that increased the blade's hardness 23-fold. This was achieved by ensuring the wood retained a higher level of cellulose.

Typically, wood contains only about 50% cellulose, which provides some structural integrity, and weaker molecules make up the rest. Li's two-step process was able to remove these weaker components but retain the cellulose. Coating the wood in mineral oil helps protect its sharpness during use and washing.

[...] They discovered the two-step process the used(sic) prevented defects from creeping in. "The strength of a piece of material is very sensitive to the size and density of defects, like voids, channels, or pits," he said in a statement.

The team didn't stop at hardened wooden knives, either. They also developed wooden nails, showing they were as sharp as conventional steel nails.

Also at ScienceDaily

Journal Reference:
Bo Chen. Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic, Matter [open] (DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2021.09.020)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset:

Oculus may have officially discontinued its low-end Oculus Go headset last year, but the company has one more "official" update to help future-proof the hardware. On Thursday, Oculus released an unlocked build of the Oculus Go operating system, allowing for "full root access" on more than 2 million existing units.

Oculus CTO (and former id Software co-founder) John Carmack announced his plans for this update last month, saying it was something he had "been pushing on for years." In part, the unlocking is an attempt to guarantee that Go hardware will continue to be fully functional well into the future, allowing for "a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now [to] be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down," Carmack wrote.

Before that, though, the update will allow tinkerers to "repurpose the hardware for more things today," as Carmack puts it.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/bluetooth_tracking_device/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Vice

Japanese police on Monday arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos, in the first criminal case in the country involving the exploitative use of the powerful technology.

Masayuki Nakamoto, who runs his own website in the southern prefecture of Hyogo, lifted images of porn stars from Japanese adult videos and doctored them with the same method used to create realistic face swaps in deepfake videos.

But instead of changing faces, Nakamoto used machine learning software to reconstruct the blurred parts of the video based on a large set of uncensored nudes and sold the content online. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Nakamoto reportedly made about 11 million yen ($96,000) by selling over 10,000 manipulated videos, though he was arrested specifically for selling 10 fake photos at about 2,300 yen ($20) each.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

White House further postpones disclosure of JFK assassination documents, citing Covid

The White House announced late Friday that it would further postpone the release of more documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, pointing to the "significant impact" of the Covid-19 pandemic.

President Joe Biden issued a memo that said the national archivist recommended he "'direct two public releases of the information that has ultimately 'been determined to be appropriate for release to the public.'" The first will be an "interim release" later this year, with a second, "more comprehensive release in late 2022," the memo said.

The memo said that the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down the process of reviewing whether redactions continue to meet the "statutory standard."

Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on the Temporary Certification Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

"upstart" writes:

Seamless wayfinding by a deafblind adult on an urban college campus: A case study:

Portland State University researchers Martin Swobodzinski and Amy Parker, with student co-authors Julie Wright, Kyrsten Hansen and Becky Morton, have published a new article in Frontiers in Education: "Seamless Wayfinding by a Deafblind Adult on an Urban College Campus: A Case Study on Wayfinding Performance, Information Preferences, and Technology Requirements."

The article reports on an empirical evaluation of the experience, performance, and perception of a deafblind adult participant in an experimental case study on pedestrian travel in an urban environment. The case study assessed the degree of seamlessness of the wayfinding experience pertaining to routes that traverse both indoor and outdoor spaces under different modalities of technology-aided pedestrian travel. Specifically, an adult deafblind pedestrian traveler completed three indoor/outdoor routes on an urban college campus using three supplemental wayfinding support tools: a mobile application, written directions, and a tactile map.

Results indicate that wayfinding performance and confidence differed considerably between the three wayfinding support tools. The tactile map afforded the most successful wayfinding and highest confidence. Wayfinding performance and confidence were lowest for the mobile application modality.

Journal Reference:
Martin Swobodzinski, Amy T. Parker, Julie D. Wright, et al. Seamless Wayfinding by a Deafblind Adult on an Urban College Campus: A Case Study on Wayfinding Performance, Information Preferences, and Technology Requirements, Frontiers in Education (DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2021.723098)

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Dutch forensic lab says it has decoded Tesla's driving data.

A Dutch government forensic lab claims to have decrypted the data generated and stored in the cars made by Tesla. While doing so uncovered a lot more information than they expected, one would assume Tesla logged a lot more information than previously claimed (no surprise there for anyone).

It was already known that Tesla cars store data from accidents, but the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) said it had discovered far more data than investigators had previously been aware of.

The NFI said the decrypted data showed Tesla vehicles store information about the operation of its driver assistance system, known as Autopilot. The vehicles also record speed, accelerator pedal position, steering wheel angle and brake usage, and depending on how the vehicle is used, that data can be stored for over a year.

Tesla has no comment. Perhaps a future patch will soon change the entire system again, so all that driver/car data once again is out of reach.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

We're closing the gap with Arm and x86, claims SiFive: New RISC-V CPU core for PCs, servers, mobile incoming

SiFive reckons its fastest RISC-V processor core yet is closing the gap on being a mainstream computing alternative to x86 and Arm.

The yet-unnamed high-performance design is within reach of Intel's Rocket Lake family, introduced in March, and Arm's Cortex-A78 design, announced last year, in terms of single-core performance, James Prior, senior director of product marketing and communications at SiFive, told The Register.

San Francisco-based SiFive didn't provide specific comparative benchmarks, so you'll have to take their word for it, if you so choose.

[...] SiFive's latest design, which is set to be teased today, will be christened with a formal name at the RISC-V Summit in December.

The CPU core is said to be about 50 per cent faster than its predecessor, the P550, which was introduced in June. We note that the L3 cache memory capacity has been quadrupled, from the 4MB in the P550 to 16MB in the new design. Up to 16 of these new cores can be clustered versus the maximum of four for the P550. The latest design can also run up to 3.5GHz compared to 2.4GHz for the P550.

Intel's Attempt to Acquire SiFive for $2 Billion Fell Apart, Report Claims

While Intel was interested to acquire RISC-V processor developer SiFive and SiFive is considering its strategic options, the companies could not agree neither on financial terms nor on how SiFive technologies could be used at Intel reports Bloomberg. The latter company is still considering both an initial public offering (IPO) as well as a takeover by a larger player.

Previously: SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX Motherboard for RISC-V PCs
Intel May Attempt to Acquire SiFive for $2 Billion
Intel Will License SiFive's New P550 RISC-V Core

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers call for armchair astronomers to help find unknown hidden worlds:

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have joined partners around the world in launching a new online initiative, calling for volunteers to come forward and help to search for extrasolar planets.

The online citizen project, Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search (NGTS), is enlisting the help of the public to examine five years' worth of digital footage showing some of the brightest stars in the sky.

The footage was captured by twelve NGTS robotic telescopes based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile—they make high precision measurements, sensitive enough to detect the signatures of exoplanets.

[...] "Computers are searching through the NGTS observations looking for the telltale repeated dips in starlight due to planet transits. The automated algorithms produce lots and lots of possible candidate transit events that need to be reviewed by the NGTS team to confirm whether they are real or not.

"Most of things spotted by the computers are not due to exoplanets, but a small handful of these candidates are new bona fide planet discoveries."

While the NGTS team reviews the most interesting objects identified by computers, humans are still better at picking out the signals of transiting planets—and the team thinks there may still be planets lurking in the data that the computers missed.

There is no application process to join the Planet Hunters NGTS project. Anyone with a web browser can dive right into the data and start searching for these possible hidden worlds and helping to check the best candidate planets identified on the website.

Original Submission

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.