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upstart writes:

Can't find your keys? You need a chickadee brain: Scientists identify a link between spatial memory and genes in a bird:

"We all use spatial memory to navigate our environment," says lead author Carrie Branch at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Without memory there's no learning and an organism would have to start from scratch for every task. So, it really is life and death for these birds to be able to remember where they stashed their food. We've been able to show that natural selection is shaping their ability to remember locations."

If natural selection (survival of the fittest) is shaping chickadee memory, certain criteria have to be met. There has to be variation in the trait: some chickadees are indeed better than others at re-finding their stores. There has to be a fitness advantage: birds that perform better on a spatial memory task are more likely to survive and produce offspring. Importantly, variation in the trait must have a genetic basis.

"Environment does still matter a lot in terms of shaping behavior, but our work here suggests that genes may create the brain structures, and then experience and learning can build on top of that," Branch explains.

upstart writes:

NASA's stalwart Mars helicopter is back and better than ever:

Nearly seven months have passed since NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made its first groundbreaking flight on Mars. Since that initial tentative hovering above the surface of Mars, Ingenuity has flown a progression of longer, more significant, and scientifically important flights. It has flown as far as 625 meters in a single flight, as high as 12 meters, and for a duration of as long as 169.5 seconds.

But in September the small flying vehicle faced a growing threat from a thinning atmosphere due to seasonal variation. NASA's Perseverance mission had landed in Jezero Crater, in the northern hemisphere of Mars, during the planet's late winter in February. But since then summer has come on, and the density of Mars' atmosphere has fallen from about 1.5 percent that of Earth's atmosphere to 1.0 percent. For a helicopter already pushing the limits of flying in a thin atmosphere, this represented a significant decline. NASA engineers devised a plan to compensate by increasing the rotation rate of Ingenuity's blades from a little more than 2,500 rpm to about 2,800 rpm. An initial flight test at a higher rotation rate, in September, raised concerns after Ingenuity failed to take off. Was this the end for a helicopter that had already survived far longer than its design life?

No, it was not. After engineers diagnosed a problem with the helicopter's small flight control motors and implemented a solution, Ingenuity was ready to try again. On October 24, Ingenuity executed a short flight at 2,700 rpm, rising about 5 meters and moving a horizontal distance of about 2 meters. This successful test gave engineers more confidence in trying a longer flight in Mars' thinner atmosphere at a higher rpm. That happened this week, when Ingenuity completed its 15th overall flight on Mars, flying 128.8 seconds and about 400 meters across the surface of Mars. This flight proves that Ingenuity is capable of flying on Mars even in the thinnest atmosphere and sets the stage for future low-density-atmosphere scouting missions to check out scientifically interesting areas.

Original Submission

Judge Denies Apple's Request for a Stay After Epic Trial

upstart writes:

Judge denies Apple's request for a stay after Epic trial:

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied Apple's request for a stay of the injunction ordering it to let app developers link to non-Apple payment options. The company has 90 days from the verdict to comply.

As part of the Epic v Apple case that went to court this year, Apple was found to be in violation of California's Unfair Competition Law. A permanent injunction declared that, "Apple Inc. [...] are hereby permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from (i) including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app."

"It's going to take months to figure out the engineering, economic, business, and other issues," said Apple's attorney Mark Perry when requesting a stay on the order. "It is exceedingly complicated. There have to be guardrails and guidelines to protect children, to protect developers, to protect consumers, to protect Apple. And they have to be written into guidelines that can be explained and enforced and applied."

Epic's attorney Gary Bornstein suggested this was purely a delaying tactic. "Apple does nothing unless it is forced to do it," he said.

Judge Denies Apple's Request to Delay App Store Changes in Epic Games Case

upstart writes:

Judge denies Apple's request to delay App Store changes in Epic games case:

Judge Rogers seems to side with Epic's interpretation of Apple's request, writing in the ruling today:

"In short, Apple's motion is based on a selective reading of this Court's findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction, namely incipient antitrust conduct including supercompetitive commission rates resulting in extraordinarily high operating margins and which have not been correlated to the value of its intellectual property. This incipient antitrust conduct is the result, in part, of the antisteering policies which Apple has enforced to harm competition. As a consequence, the motion is fundamentally flawed. Further, even if additional time was warranted to comply with the limited injunction, Apple did not request additional time other than ten days to appeal this ruling. Thus, the Court does not consider the option of additional time, other than the requested ten days."

See also: Judge orders Apple to allow external payment options for App Store by December 9th, denying stay:

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Freeman writes:

Google sends anti-regulation propaganda to small businesses using Google Maps:

Google is quietly enlisting the help of small businesses to help protect the nearly $2 trillion company from antitrust regulations. In response to Congressional bills like the "Ending Platform Monopolies Act," which would ban platform owners from favoring their own services over the competition, Google is telling small business owners that these bills would hurt their ability to find customers online and that they should contact their congressperson about the issue.

We've seen Google do political action before, usually in the form of headline-grabbing blog posts from CEO Sundar Pichai defending the latest product-bundling scheme. The strategy here seems new, though; rather than writing a public blog post, Google is quietly targeting users who have registered business listings on Google Maps. These users report receiving unsolicited emails and an "action item" in the Google Business Profile UI that both link to Google's new anti-antitrust site.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Anxiety effectively treated with exercise:

The study, now published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, is based on 286 patients with anxiety syndrome, recruited from primary care services in Gothenburg and the northern part of Halland County. Half of the patients had lived with anxiety for at least ten years. Their average age was 39 years, and 70 percent were women.

Through drawing of lots, participants were assigned to group exercise sessions, either moderate or strenuous, for 12 weeks. The results show that their anxiety symptoms were significantly alleviated even when the anxiety was a chronic condition, compared with a control group who received advice on physical activity according to public health recommendations.

Most individuals in the treatment groups went from a baseline level of moderate to high anxiety to a low anxiety level after the 12-week program. For those who exercised at relatively low intensity, the chance of improvement in terms of anxiety symptoms rose by a factor of 3.62. The corresponding factor for those who exercised at higher intensity was 4.88. Participants had no knowledge of the physical training or counseling people outside their own group were receiving.

"There was a significant intensity trend for improvement -- that is, the more intensely they exercised, the more their anxiety symptoms improved," states Malin Henriksson, doctoral student at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, specialist in general medicine in the Halland Region, and the study's first author.

Previous studies of physical exercise in depression have shown clear symptom improvements. However, a clear picture of how people with anxiety are affected by exercise has been lacking up to now. The present study is described as one of the largest to date.

DannyB writes:

Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged:

Tuvalu is looking at legal ways to keep its ownership of its maritime zones and recognition as a state even if the Pacific island nation is completely submerged due to climate change, its foreign minister said on Tuesday.

"We're actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged," the minister, Simon Kofe, told Reuters in an interview.

[...] Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level. Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.

[...] When asked what Tuvalu's people think about the rising sea levels, Kofe said some of the older generation say they are happy to go down with the land, while others are leaving.

This is an interesting situation to ponder. A nation loses it's island to climate change. What if one day sea levels were to fall. Could the descendants of the island nation reclaim their land and nation? Or would the US decide to annex it for the good of all humanity?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Robinhood Trading Platform Data Breach Hits 7M Customers:

The cyberattacker attempted to extort the company after socially engineering a customer service employee to gain access to email addresses and more.

Investor trading app company Robinhood Markets has confirmed a data breach that affects the personal information of about 7 million customers – roughly a third of its user base. A cyberattacker made off with emails and more, which could lead to follow-on attacks for Robinhood customers.

The trading platform, which found itself in the middle of the infamous GameStop stock price run-up in January, acknowledged that the breach was a result of a system compromise that occurred on Nov. 3. The company said that the adversary was able to target an employee to gain access to sensitive company systems. After that, the perpetrator attempted to extort the company, demanding payment in return for not releasing the stolen data.

"The unauthorized party socially engineered a customer-support employee by phone and obtained access to certain customer support systems," Robinhood said Monday in a statement. It added, "After we contained the intrusion, the unauthorized party demanded an extortion payment. We promptly informed law enforcement and are continuing to investigate the incident with the help of Mandiant, a leading outside security firm."

For 5 million of the victims, the cybercrook made off with email addresses. For 2 million of them, the attacker also absconded with full names. Meanwhile, names, birth dates and ZIP codes were stolen for 310 people, and "more extensive account details" were heisted for 10 more, the company said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:

Do not fall for the “hype” - anti-drone technology is very much a joke currently.

I’ve done a walk through on why RF jammers are at best more of a last resort than crossing your fingers when you do not have advanced intel.

First of a lot of drones when they loose control go into a “short path flight” back towards what they think is their “start point”. It takes no great brains to realise that if you change the real start point co-ordinates for the attack point co-ordinates you know where the drone is going to try and land at…

Secondly you can only jam a frequency successfully in two ways,

1, Know the actual frequency
2, Put kilowatts of power up.

Radio receivers work on “energy in a bandwidth” to control RC aircraft back in the 1970’s you could use as little as 1kHz bandwidth at the upper end of the HF band. That technology still works today.

Now if you need to jam from 1MHz to more than 6GHz to jam you would effectively need more than 6,000,000,000/1,000, more than 6 million times the power at the drone mid point with respect to the operator who could without much difficulty push 100watts into an antenna that makes it directional and more like 1kW is being used.

upstart writes:

Multiple BusyBox Security Bugs Threaten Embedded Linux Devices:

Researchers have discovered 14 critical vulnerabilities in a popular program used in embedded Linux applications, all of which allow for denial of service (DoS) and 10 that also enable remote code execution (RCE), they said.

One of the flaws also could allow devices to leak info, according to researchers from JFrog Security and Claroty Research, in a report shared with Threatpost on Tuesday.

The two firms teamed up to take a deeper dive into BusyBox, a software suite used by many of the world's leading operational technology (OT) and internet of things (IoT) devices—such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and remote terminal units (RTUs). Shachar Menashe, senior director security research for JFrog, partnered with Vera Mens, Uri Katz, Tal Keren and Sharon Brizinov of Claroty Research on the report.

Touted as a "Swiss Army Knife" of embedded Linux, BusyBox is comprised of useful Unix utilities called applets that are packaged as a single executable. The program includes a full-fledged shell, a DHCP client/server, and small utilities such as cp, ls, grep and others.

The discovery of the flaws are significant because of the proliferation of BusyBox not just for the embedded Linux world, but also for numerous Linux applications outside of devices, Menashe said in an email to Threatpost.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Once mighty conglomerate GE to split into three units:

General Electric Co. will split into three separate companies, breaking up the once-mighty conglomerate into standalone businesses focused on health care, power and aviation. The shares surged.

The health unit will be spun off in early 2023, according to a statement Tuesday. GE will combine its renewable energy, power equipment and digital businesses into a separate unit that will then be spun off in early 2024. The remaining company will consist of GE Aviation, the company's engine-manufacturing operation.

The move ends years of speculation about the future of GE, long one of the most admired U.S. companies but one that's struggled since the global financial crisis more than a decade ago. Since then it's been retrenching from its once sprawling conglomerate structure, including the sale of the bulk of the GE Capital finance arm.

[...] With operational improvements to boost cash flow and profit margins, GE is on target to have reduced its debt burden by more than $75 billion over three years by the end of 2021, the company said. There are opportunities for further progress, it said in an investor presentation.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung Announces LPDDR5X DRAM for Smartphones; 1.3x Faster Than LPDDR5 With Speeds up to 8.5Gbps

Samsung today officially announced LPDDR5X DRAM chips for smartphones and other applications. Compared to the LPDDR5 standard, the new chips bring increased speeds, and it will be no surprise that we will see them in action in several 2022 flagship handsets.

[...] In contrast to LPDDR5's 6.4Gbps maximum bandwidth, LPDDR5X can achieve 1.3-times the performance with processing speeds that go up to 8.5Gbps. Samsung has used its 14nm technology to mass produce the next-generation DRAM chips, and it will be advantageous for portable devices too because the new standard is 20 percent more energy-efficient than LPDDR5.

The press release says that 16Gb LPDDR5X chips will enable 64 GB memory packages, "accommodating increasing demand for higher-capacity mobile DRAM worldwide." In other words, Samsung is planning to put 32 dies in a single package, and eventually stick 64 gigabytes of memory in smartphones (or tablets, or laptops). Recently, Samsung has been making 16 GB packages with only 12 or 8 dies:

The 16Gb LPDDR5 can build a 16GB package with only eight chips, whereas its 1y-based predecessor requires 12 chips (eight 12Gb chips and four 8Gb chips) to provide the same capacity.

Also at AnandTech.

Previously: SK Hynix Announces 8 GB LPDDR4x DRAM Package for Mobile Devices
Samsung Announces LPDDR5 DRAM Prototype Before Specification is Finalized
Samsung Announces Mass Production of 16 GB LPDDR5 DRAM Packages
SK Hynix Begins Production of 18 GB LPDDR5 Memory... for Smartphones

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bedtime linked with heart health:

Going to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00 pm is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease compared to earlier or later bedtimes, according to a study published today in European Heart Journal – Digital Health, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1

"The body has a 24-hour internal clock, called circadian rhythm, that helps regulate physical and mental functioning," said study author Dr. David Plans of the University of Exeter, UK. "While we cannot conclude causation from our study, the results suggest that early or late bedtimes may be more likely to disrupt the body clock, with adverse consequences for cardiovascular health."

While numerous analyses have investigated the link between sleep duration and cardiovascular disease, the relationship between sleep timing and heart disease is underexplored. This study examined the association between objectively measured, rather than self-reported, sleep onset in a large sample of adults.

DannyB writes:

Ferocious 'penis worms' were the hermit crabs of the ancient seas:

[...] Technically known as priapulids — named for Priapus, the well-endowed Greek god of male genitals — penis worms, as they're commonly known, are a division of marine worms that have survived in the world's oceans for 500 million years. Their modern descendants live largely unseen in muddy burrows deep underwater, occasionally freaking out fishermen with their floppy, phallus-shaped bodies. But fossils dating back to the early Cambrian show that penis worms were once a scourge of the ancient seas, widely distributed around the world and in possession of extendible, fang-lined mouths that could make a snack out of the poor marine creature that crossed them.

But, fearsome as they were, penis worms themselves were not without fear. In a new study published Nov. 7 in the journal Current Biology, researchers discovered four priapulid fossils that were nestled into the cone-shaped shells of hyoliths, a long-extinct group of marine animals.

[...] In each shell, the worm's bottom sits squished into the bottom of the cone, while the worm's head and mouth dangle out over the side — sort of like a melting swirl of soft-serve ice cream. According to the researchers, the fossil region contained dozens of other empty shells, but no other free-living priapulids, suggesting the connection between the two was no mere accident. Furthermore, each worm fit snugly in its sheath, suggesting the creatures chose their shells for permanent protection from Cambrian predators, rather than as temporary refuge.

Penis worms were the hermit crabs of their time:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The 2020 Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics has recommended a new series of three Great Observatories — or space-based telescopes — as a top national priority for the future of space astrophysics.

The Lynx X-Ray Observatory is included as part of this vision. Dozens of scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian teamed with colleagues around the world to define the observatory’s scientific objectives, conceptualize its design and work on key technologies.

Known as the Decadal Survey, the report evaluates astrophysics and astronomy programs and prioritizes them for the next decade of transformative science. Findings from the survey are submitted as recommendations to NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy to guide funding requests and allocations for astrophysics over the next 10 years.

[...] “Lynx will reveal invisible drivers of the cosmos,” says Grant Tremblay an astronomer at the CfA and member of the Lynx concept study team. “It will act as an indispensable force-multiplier for a triad of Observatories that will be greater together than they ever could be apart.”

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD has announced its "Milan-X" Epyc CPUs, which reuse the same Zen 3 chiplets found in "Milan" Epyc CPUs with up to 64 cores, but with triple the L3 cache using stacked "3D V-Cache" technology designed in partnership with TSMC. This means that some Epyc CPUs will go from having 256 MiB of L3 cache to a whopping 768 MiB (804 MiB of cache when including L1 and L2 cache). 2-socket servers using Milan-X can have over 1.5 gigabytes of L3 cache. The huge amount of additional cache results in average performance gains in "targeted workloads" of around 50% according to AMD. Microsoft found an 80% improvement in some workloads (e.g. computational fluid dynamics) due to the increase in effective memory bandwidth.

AMD's next-generation of Instinct high-performance computing GPUs will use a multi-chip module (MCM) design, essentially chiplets for GPUs. The Instinct MI250X includes two "CDNA 2" dies for a total of 220 compute units, compared to 120 compute units for the previous MI100 monolithic GPU. Performance is roughly doubled (FP32 Vector/Matrix, FP16 Matrix, INT8 Matrix), quadrupled (FP64 Vector), or octupled (FP64 Matrix). VRAM has been quadrupled to 128 GB of High Bandwidth Memory. Power consumption of the world's first MCM GPU will be high, as it has a 560 Watt TDP.

The Frontier exascale supercomputer will use both Epyc CPUs and Instinct MI200 GPUs.

AMD officially confirmed that upcoming Zen 4 "Genoa" Epyc CPUs made on a TSMC "5nm" node will have up to 96 cores. AMD also announced "Bergamo", a 128-core "Zen 4c" Epyc variant, with the 'c' indicating "cloud-optimized". This is a denser, more power-efficient version of Zen 4 with a smaller cache. According to a recent leak, Zen 4c chiplets will have 16 cores instead of 8, will retain hyperthreading, and will be used in future Zen 5 Ryzen desktop CPUs as AMD's answer to Intel's Alder Lake heterogeneous ("big.LITTLE") x86 microarchitecture.

Also at Tom's Hardware (Milan-X).

Previously: AMD Reveals 'Instinct' for Machine Intelligence
AMD Launches "Milan" Epyc Server CPUs, with Zen 3 and up to 64 Cores
AMD at Computex 2021: 5000G APUs, 6000M Mobile GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution, and 3D Chiplets
AMD Unveils New Ryzen V-Cache Details at HotChips 33
AMD Aims to Increase Energy Efficiency of Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI Accelerators 30x by 2025

Original Submission