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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The global chip shortage will soon cause a number of new BMWs to lose their touchscreen functionality. According to a recent Bimmerfest forum post, in an effort to save silicon and have BMW maintain its current production levels, the following models will be delivered to customers without touchscreen capabilities:

"This measure is a result of the industry-wide supply chain issues which are affecting automotive manufacturing worldwide and causing limitations on the availability of some features or options," BMW told Edmunds on Thursday. BMW did not immediately respond to Roadshow's request for comment.

According to Bimmerfest, customers affected by this change will have option code 6UY on their vehicles' window stickers, listed as "deletion of touchscreen." This will result in a $500 credit on the car's MSRP.

[...] It's unclear how long these BMW models will be affected by the chip shortage or if other cars will be added to the no-touchscreen list in the future.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How space solar panels could power the Earth with 24/7 clean energy:

Solar power has been a key part of humanity's clean-energy repertoire. We spread masses of sunlight-harvesting panels on solar fields, and many people power their homes by decorating their roofs with the rectangles.

But there's a caveat to this wonderful power source. Solar panels can't collect energy at night. To work at peak efficiency, they need as much sunlight as possible. So, to maximize these sun catchers' performance, researchers are toying with a plan to send them to a place where the sun never sets: outer space.

Theoretically, if a bunch of solar panels were blasted into orbit, they'd soak up the sun even on the foggiest days and the darkest nights, storing an enormous amount of power. If that power were wirelessly beamed down to Earth, our planet could breathe in renewable clean energy, 24/7.

[...] In the early 1900s, Russian scientist-mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was steadily churning out a stream of futuristic designs envisioning human tech beyond Earth. He's responsible for conjuring things like space elevators, steerable rockets and, you guessed it, space solar power.

Since Bell Labs first invented the first concrete "solar panel" in the '50s, international scientists have been working to make  Tsiolkovsky's sci-fi fantasy a reality. They include Japanese researchers, the United States military and a team from California Institute of Technology spearheading the Space Solar Power Project.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

BrakTooth is a collection of flaws affecting commercial Bluetooth stacks on more than 1,400 chipsets used in billions of devices – including smartphones, PCs, toys, internet-of-things (IoT) devices and industrial equipment – that rely on Bluetooth Classic (BT) for communication.

On Thursday, CISA urged manufacturers, vendors and developers to patch or employ workarounds.

The PoC has been made available on the BrakTooth website on GitHub.

As the paper pointed out, all that attackers need to do to pick apart the BrakTooth bugs is an off-the-shelf ESP32 board that can be had for $14.80, (or as low as $4 for an alternative board on AliExpress), custom Link Manager Protocol (LMP) firmware, and a computer to run the PoC tool.

Researchers from the University of Singapore disclosed the initial group of 16 vulnerabilities (now up to 22), collectively dubbed BrakTooth, in a paper published in September. They found the bugs in the closed commercial BT stack used by 1,400+ embedded chip components and detailed a host of attack types they can cause: Mainly denial of service (DoS) via firmware crashes (the term “brak” is actually Norwegian for “crash”). One of the bugs can also lead to arbitrary code execution (ACE).

Since the paper was published, there have been a number of updates, as vendors have scrambled to patch or to figure out whether or not they will in fact patch, and as researchers have uncovered additional vulnerable devices.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey

The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey is a review of astronomy and astrophysics literature produced approximately every ten years by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. The report surveys the current state of the field, identifies research priorities, and makes recommendations for the coming decade. The report represents the recommendations of the research community to governmental agencies on how to prioritize scientific funding within astronomy and astrophysics. The editing committee is informed by topical panels and subcommittees, dedicated conferences, and direct community input in the form of white papers summarizing the state of the art in each subdiscipline. The most recent report, Astro2020, was released in 2021.

[...] The seventh report, released to the public at 11am ET on Thursday, November 4, 2021, recommended scientific priorities and investments for the next decade to help achieve the following primary goals: search for habitable exoplanets and extraterrestrial life, study black holes and neutron stars and study the growth and evolution of galaxies.

Astrophysics decadal survey recommends a program of flagship space telescopes

[The] report recommended NASA establish a Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program that would oversee initial studies of large "flagship" astrophysics missions as well as invest in the technologies needed to enable them.

"The survey committee expects that this process will result in decreased cost and risk and enable more frequent launches of flagship missions, even if it does require significantly more upfront investment prior to a decadal recommendation regarding implementation," the committee concluded in the 600-page report.

Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s. The 589 page report is paywalled.

Also at NPR.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Jewelers, geologists, and microscopists agree: diamonds are forever. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are using microscopic nanodiamonds to calibrate and assess the performance of high-powered microscopes. Their longevity and durability make the tiny "first-aid kits" more than up to the task.

Advanced optical microscopy systems provide high-resolution views of the structure and function of cells and molecular compounds. Developing a stable fluorescent nanodiamond phantom promises wide-reaching applicability for microscopy research and quality control alike.

"There is potential that this is going to become a standard calibration tool in fluorescence microscopy worldwide. This sample is so convenient, and so easy to use, that it is hopefully going to make a large impact," said Mantas Žurauskas, an imaging research scientist for the GlaxoSmithKline Center for Optical Molecular Imaging at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, who led the research.

The team's paper, "Fluorescent nanodiamonds for characterization of nonlinear microscopy systems," was published in Photonics Research.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Tooting Crater was named after a London suburb.

Let's deal with this name issue right away. "Tooting Crater" on Mars is a large and fairly young impact site. Mars craters expert Peter Mouginis-Mark identified the landmark and named it Tooting after his birthplace in the London suburb. It's OK to giggle about it, especially when thinking about the crater ejecting material out into space that ended up reaching Earth.

Planetary scientist Anthony Lagain of Australia's Curtin University led a study published in Nature Communications this week that traced the origin of some Martian meteorites found on Earth.

According to Curtin, 166 Martian rocks are known to have landed on our planet over the past 20 million years, but it's been tough to trace their precise origin points on Mars. It takes a lot of energy to blast a bit of Mars out into space, so the researchers looked at craters that might be responsible.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft's Surface laptop business ran a survey with YouGov in the UK and found that 66% of workers with company-owned laptops or tablets are still using the same device they had when the COVID-19 lockdowns started last March.

[...] "More than a third (35%) of employees who received new devices since the onset of COVID-19 reported a resulting increase in their productivity. Meanwhile, most employees have "made do" with the same device while working remotely," Microsoft said in a statement.

"Employees want upgrades that better suit their individual needs -- as-remote working arrangements that started as temporary measures have become the norm. Their company's IT teams, which initially purchased devices to help staff work from home during the pandemic but then shelved routine upgrades, now feel the same way."

The survey found that employees feel they are not being listened to when it comes to new devices. Half of them believe devices are provided based on job role alone – with individual requirements not considered as standard. Only one in three feel their individual needs and accessibility requirements are taken into consideration, a number that drops to 17% for frontline workers.

[...] There are several factors at play here in Microsoft's pitch to business. Companies are moving to hybrid work after a year of largely remote work, which means some sectors have stalled hardware purchases after a splurging on devices last year. And of course, Windows 11 has just arrived.

[...] Windows 11 has been out for mainstream users since October 5, but it hasn't been widely adopted yet. Windows 10 reaches end of life on October 14, 2025.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/01/world-of-warcraft-director-ion-hazzikostas-talks-the-games-future-and-current-soul-searching/

As we said in, I think, a brief blog, a forum post, this has been a process that has been ongoing as a result of an internal period of self-reflection over the last few months. These are changes that are coming from the team as a whole. In the discussions we began internally in the aftermath of the lawsuit and everything surrounding that, on many levels, trying to understand how we as the current leadership of the team could do better — better for our team, better for our community. One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players. There are things that people on our team were not proud to have in our game. These are many things that people, over the years, have pointed out in the community, but we didn't necessarily listen in the way we should have at the time.

What we did was we just set up a process internally for folks across the team, as well as sourcing some feedback from the community as a whole, to flag pieces of the game for review, whether it's old quests or specific lines. As a random example, there were a number of jokes and references made a dozen years ago about how feminine male blood elves were, mistaking male blood elves for women, just poking fun at that in a not necessarily good-spirited way. That doesn't sit right in 2021. That's the sort of thing that was reviewed by a broad group that reflects the diversity of our team today. We made decisions on whether to leave some things standing, because they're borderline, but we're not looking to reinvent everything, turn over every single stone and rewrite 17 years of WoW. It might be a little bit juvenile. It might be off-color. But this isn't something that is really making our game feel less welcoming for people, which is what we're aiming to change. Those things we left. Others were removed, others were rewritten or changed accordingly.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The U.S. Blacklists Makers of Cops' Favorite iPhone Hacking Tool:

NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm whose spyware has been peddled to authoritarian governments around the world, has been sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department. The new restrictions, which the agency announced in a press release Wednesday, will limit the degree to which American companies can provide parts or services to NSO—a decision that could seriously hobble the vendor's business.

NSO is best known for its commercial malware "Pegasus," a product that can infiltrate smartphones and silently pilfer their contents—from text messages to voice calls to photos. The company also sells a creepy "zero-click" exploit, the likes of which apparently requires no phishing and is said to take advantage of security flaws inherent in iPhones and Android devices to compromise them. In September, it was reported that some 1.65 billion Apple devices had been vulnerable to NSO's malware for a period of several months.

See also: US Cuts Off Pegasus Developer: What You Need To Know About This Spyware

Previously: Israeli Firm NSO Linked to WhatsApp Hack, Faces Lawsuit Backed by Amnesty International
Saudi Crown Prince's WhatsApp Account Reportedly Used to Hack Jeff Bezos
The Great iPwn -- Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage 'Zero-Click' Exploit
Israeli Spyware Maker Is in Spotlight Amid Reports of Wide Abuses

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Children who don't eat eggs before first birthday more likely to develop egg allergy:

Researchers with the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology say an intolerance to eggs is the second most common food allergy worldwide. Egg allergies often result in rashes, eczema, occasional vomiting, and even anaphylaxis. Being allergic to eggs can also lead to the development of asthma in older patients.

Study authors are now advising parents to start introducing their children to eggs at six months to ensure they do not develop an egg allergy. Health officials generally recommend babies eat small portions of egg when they start to have solid food. Specifically, experts recommend starting with pieces of the yolk from a hard-boiled egg.

[...] “We examined infant feeding and food allergy data from birth to 6 years, collected by 2237 parent surveys in the Infant Feeding Practices Study II conducted by the CDC and US-FDA,” says lead author Dr. Guilia Martone in a media release.

“We found that children who hadn’t had egg introduced by 12 months were more likely to have egg allergy at 6 years.”

They also advised introducing peanut products to infants when they start solid food to avoid developing peanut allergies later in life.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Drinking alcohol won't help you live longer:

Prior work had reported an increased mortality risk among non-drinkers in comparison to those who drink moderately. However, the new study finds that other factors among non-drinkers such as previous alcohol or drug problems, daily smoking habits, and overall poor health may partially explain their shorter lives.

This new work is based on a dataset of 4,038 Germans who had taken part in a standardized interview between 1996 and 1997. At that time, all subjects were between the ages of 18 and 64 years-old. Researchers also had access to baseline information on each person’s alcohol and lifestyle habits in the 12 months prior to the interview, and the team tracked mortality outcomes over the next 20 years.

[...] Just over 11 percent (447) participants had completely abstained from alcohol during the 12 months prior to the interviews. Among those non-drinkers, 405 (90.60%) were former alcohol drinkers and 322 (72.04%) exhibited at least one or more additional risk factor for higher mortality rates. Examples of such extra risk factors include a former alcohol use disorder or risky alcohol consumption patterns (35.40%), smoking every day (50%), or fair to poor self-rated health scores (10.51%).

Meanwhile, the other 125 non-drinkers who did not display any additional risk factors didn’t actually show any statistically significant differences in regards to total, cardiovascular or cancer mortality rates in comparison to low to moderate alcohol consumers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Many people are doubtful world leaders will suddenly jump into action to head off ‘catastrophic’ warming after decades of dragging feet. 

Critics of decades of inaction on global warming voiced deep scepticism as world leaders gathered in Glasgow to hammer out crucial deals to urgently reverse the intensifying climate crisis.

Many activists question whether developed countries will finally move to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and the major corporations responsible for them, and if rich nations – solely responsible for the crisis – will financially support poorer ones in the transformation away from fossil fuels.

Scientists say the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, is likely the last chance to take serious measures to prevent the most catastrophic scenarios facing the planet, as temperatures continue to rise and extreme weather events become the norm.

Bangladesh, a South Asian nation of 165 million people, is ranked the seventh-most affected country in the world by climate disasters, and spiking temperatures will only make the situation worse.

Mass migration from coastal areas to urban centres inland is already under way as rising seas envelop the low-elevation nation, with as many as 30 million people becoming “climate refugees” in the coming decades.

takyon writes:

VIA To Offload Parts of x86 Subsidiary Centaur to Intel For $125 Million

As part of their third quarter earnings release, VIA Technologies has announced this morning that the company is entering into an unusual agreement with Intel to offload parts of VIA's x86 R&D subsidiary, Centaur Technology. Under the terms of the murky deal, Intel will be paying Centaur $125 million to pick up part of the engineering staff – or, as the announcement from VIA more peculiarly puts it "recruit some of Centaur's employees to join Intel," Despite the hefty 9-digit price tag, the deal makes no mention of Centaur's business, designs, or patents, nor has an expected closing date been announced.

A subsidiary of VIA since 1999, the Austin-based Centaur is responsible for developing x86 core designs for other parts of VIA, as well as developing their own ancillary IP such as deep learning accelerators. Via Centaur, VIA Technologies is the largely aloof third member of the x86 triumvirate, joining Intel and AMD as the three x86 license holders. Centaur's designs have never seen widescale adoption to the extent that AMD or Intel's have, but the company has remained a presence in the x86 market since the 90s, spending the vast majority of that time under VIA.

Centaur's most recent development was the CNS x86 core, which the company announced in late 2019. Aimed at server-class workloads, the processor design is said to offer Haswell-like general CPU performance, which is combined with AVX-512 support (executed over 2 rounds via a 256-bit SIMD). CNS, in turn, would be combined into a product Centaur called CHA, which added fabric and I/O, as well as an integrated proprietary deep learning accelerator. The first silicon based on CHA was originally expected in the second half of 2020, but at this point we haven't heard anything (though that's not unusual for VIA).

VIA on Wikipedia.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Making Aircraft Fuel From Sunlight and Air:

Carbon-neutral fuels are crucial for making aviation and maritime transport sustainable. The plant developed in Zurich can be used to produce synthetic liquid fuels that release as much CO2 during their combustion as was previously extracted from the air for their production. CO2 and water are extracted directly from ambient air and split using solar energy. This process yields syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is then processed into kerosene, methanol, or other hydrocarbons.

[...] Analyses of the entire process show that the fuel would cost 1.20 to 2 euros per litre if it were produced on an industrial scale. Desert regions with high solar resources are particularly suitable as production sites. "Unlike with biofuels, whose potential is limited due to the scarcity of agricultural land, this technology enables us to meet global demand for jet fuel by using less than one percent of the world's arid land and would not compete with the production of food or livestock feed," explains Johan Lilliestam, a research group leader at the IASS and professor of energy policy at the University of Potsdam. If the materials used to build the production facilities, such as glass and steel, are manufactured using renewable energy and carbon-neutral methods, emissions can be further reduced to close to zero.

Journal Reference:
Remo Schäppi, David Rutz, Fabian Dähler, et al. Drop-in Fuels from Sunlight and Air, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04174-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Revolutionary identity verification technique offers robust solution to hacking:

A team of computer scientists, including Claude Crépeau of McGill University and physicist colleagues from the University of Geneva, have developed an extremely secure identity verification method based on the fundamental principle that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. The breakthrough has the potential to greatly improve the security of financial transactions and other applications requiring proof of identity online.

"Current identification schemes that use personal identification numbers (PINs) are incredibly insecure faced with a fake teller machine that stores the PINs of users," says Crépeau, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill. "Our research found and implemented a secure mechanism to prove someone's identity that cannot be replicated by the verifier of this identity."

The new method, published in Nature, is an advance on a concept known as zero-knowledge proof, whereby one party (a 'prover') can demonstrate to another (the 'verifier') that they possess a certain piece of information without actually revealing that information.