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New iodine-based plasma thruster tested in orbit

Freeman and AnonTechie write:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/new-iodine-based-plasma-thruster-tested-in-orbit/

Most people are probably familiar with iodine through its role as a disinfectant. But if you stayed awake through high school chemistry, then you may have seen a demonstration where powdered iodine was heated. Because its melting and boiling points are very close together at atmospheric pressures, iodine will readily form a purple gas when heated. At lower pressures, it'll go directly from solid to gas, a process called sublimation.

That, as it turns out, could make it the perfect fuel for a form of highly efficient spacecraft propulsion hardware called ion thrusters. While it has been considered a promising candidate for a while, a commercial company called ThrustMe is now reporting that it has demonstrated an iodine-powered ion thruster in space for the first time.

[...] The big downside is that it's corrosive, which forced ThrustMe to use ceramics for most of the material that it would come into contact with.

Journal Reference:
Dmytro Rafalskyi, Javier Martínez Martínez, Lui Habl, et al. In-orbit demonstration of an iodine electric propulsion system [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04015-y)

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takyon writes:

The shareholder fight that forced Apple's hand on repair rights

Wednesday morning, Apple announced that the company will soon make parts and repair manuals available to the general public, reversing years of restrictive repair policies. The new policy represents a seismic shift for a company that has fought independent repair for years by restricting access to parts, manuals, and diagnostic tools, designing products that are difficult to fix, and lobbying against laws that would enshrine the right to repair.

But Apple didn't change its policy out of the goodness of its heart. The announcement follows months of growing pressure from repair activists and regulators — and its timing seems deliberate, considering a shareholder resolution environmental advocates filed with the company in September asking Apple to re-evaluate its stance on independent repair. Wednesday is a key deadline in the fight over the resolution, with advocates poised to bring the issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve.

Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy told The Verge that the program "has been in development for well over a year," describing it as "the next step in increasing customer access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals." Leahy declined to say whether the timing of the announcement was influenced by shareholder pressure.

Apple makes parts and manuals available to all (15m35s Louis Rossmann video)

See also: Apple makes a concession to 'right to repair' movement, will let you repair your own iPhone
Opinion: Another Apple PR fail as company waits until forced to act over Right to Repair
Apple gives in on right-to-repair
Apple Folds to Right to Repair Movement – Will Allow Customers to Perform iPhone, Mac Repairs From 2022

Previously: Apple Sued an Independent iPhone Repair Shop Owner and Lost
Apple Exports Independent Repair Provider Program to Europe and Canada
Apple, Microsoft, and Google Team Up to Block Right to Repair Laws
Apple and John Deere Shareholder Resolutions Demand They Explain Their Bad Repair Policies
Leaked Apple Training Videos Show How it Undermines Third-Party Repair

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The latest offering of FPGAs may have just been announced.

The ForgeFPGA devices will provide dramatic cost savings versus other alternatives, including non-FPGA designs. By providing a high level of integration, they reduce overall board and system costs. Their projected price in volume of well under US$ 0.50, opens up applications that previously couldn't use FPGAs due to cost constraints, including high-volume consumer and IoT applications.

The ForgeFPGA Family will serve applications that require less than 5,000 gates of logic, with initial device sizes of 1K and 2K Look Up Tables (LUTs). Standby power of less than 20 microamps is projected for the first devices, about half the power of competing devices. Users will be able to download the development software at no cost and with no license fees. The software offers two development modes to accommodate both new and experienced FPGA developers: a "macrocell mode" that uses a schematic capture-based development flow, and an "HDL" mode that provides a familiar Verilog environment for FPGA veterans.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I think this was posted before, but worth repeating since it will come about this Friday.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/17/1056205732/lunar-eclipse-moon-friday-morning-how-to-see

The lunar eclipse will be visible in North America, as well as parts of South America, Polynesia, eastern Australia and northeastern Asia, according to NASA.

Previous Story: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/11/12/1343245

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Apple Must be Stopped' and Google is 'Crazy' Says Tim Sweeney

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has decided to take shots at Apple and Google once again and has said that "Apple must be stopped." Sweeney said this in an app conference in South Korea. He's also said that Google was "crazy" about how they handled app purchases.

[...] According to a report from Bloomberg, Sweeney referenced this failure in remarks that he shared in a conference.

[...] "Apple locks a billion users into one store and payment processor," Sweeney said at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in South Korea, home to the world's first law requiring mobile platforms to give users a choice of payment handlers. "Now Apple complies with oppressive foreign laws, which surveil users and deprive them of political rights. But Apple is ignoring laws passed by Korea's democracy. Apple must be stopped."

[...] Google also earned a strong rebuke from Sweeney, who criticized its approach of charging fees on payments it doesn't process as "crazy." Praising Korea for leading the fight against anti-competitive practices with its recent legislation, the Epic Games founder said "I'm very proud to stand up against these monopolies with you. I'm proud to stand with you and say I'm a Korean."

Previously: Apple Can No Longer Force Developers to Use In-App Purchasing, Judge Rules
Apple Turns Post-Lawsuit Tables on Epic, Will Block Fortnite on iOS
Judge Denies Apple's Request to Delay App Store Changes in Epic Games Case

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/nuclear-radiation-used-to-transmit-digital-data-wirelessly

"Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.

Radio waves and mobile phone signals relies on electromagnetic radiation for communication but in a new development, engineers from Lancaster University in the UK, working with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, transferred digitally encoded information using "fast neutrons" instead.

The researchers measured the spontaneous emission of fast neutrons from californium-252, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors. Modulated emissions were measured using a detector and recorded on a laptop.

Several examples of information, i.e., a word, the alphabet and a random number selected blindly, were encoded serially into the modulation of the neutron field and the output decoded on a laptop which recovered the encoded information on screen. A double-blind test was performed in which a number derived from a random number generator was encoded without prior knowledge of those uploading it, and then transmitted and decoded.

All transmission tests attempted proved to be 100% successful.

Professor Malcolm Joyce of Lancaster University said: "We demonstrate the potential of fast neutron radiation as a medium for wireless communications for applications where conventional electromagnetic transmission is either not feasible or is inherently limited."

Journal Reference:
Malcolm J. Joyce, Michael D. Aspinall, Mackenzie Clark, Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment ; 1021: 165946 (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2021.165946)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Open-sourcing of protein-structure software is already paying off:

It is now relatively trivial to determine the order of amino acids in a protein. Figuring out how that order translates to a complicated three-dimensional structure that performs a specific function, however, is extremely challenging. But after decades of slow progress, Google's DeepMind AI group announced that it has made tremendous strides toward solving the problem. In July, the system, called AlphaFold, was made open source. At the same time, a group of academic researchers released its own protein-folding software, called RoseTTAFold, built in part using ideas derived from DeepMind's work.

How effective are these tools? Even if they aren't as good as some of the statistics suggested, it's clear they're far better than anything we've ever had. So how will scientists use them?

We got a partial answer this week, as a large research collaboration set the software loose on a related problem: how these individual three-dimensional structures come together to form the large, multi-protein complexes that perform some of the most important functions in biology.

Many individual proteins work just fine on their own, but some aspects of biology require the careful coordination of multiple chemical changes performed as a series of ordered, sequential steps. And for those processes, it's often easiest for the proteins that need to coordinate to be part of a single complex. For example, the complex that makes copies of our chromosomes typically consists of more than a dozen proteins. Photosystem I, part of plants' photosynthetic process, is similar in scale. The ribosome, which translates the information in messenger RNAs into the amino acid sequence of proteins, can require over 75 proteins in some species.

hubie writes:

From a recent Science Reports paper:

Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In this work, we perform hate speech detection on a corpus of more than one million comments on YouTube videos through a machine learning model, trained and fine-tuned on a large set of hand-annotated data.

Our analysis shows that there is no evidence of the presence of "pure haters", meant as active users posting exclusively hateful comments. Moreover, coherently with the echo chamber hypothesis, we find that users skewed towards one of the two categories of video channels (questionable, reliable) are more prone to use inappropriate, violent, or hateful language within their opponents' community.

Interestingly, users loyal to reliable sources use on average a more toxic language than their counterpart. Finally, we find that the overall toxicity of the discussion increases with its length, measured both in terms of the number of comments and time. Our results show that, coherently with Godwin's law, online debates tend to degenerate towards increasingly toxic exchanges of views.

Journal Reference:
M. Cinelli, A. Pelicon, I. Mozetič, et al. Dynamics of online hate and misinformation. [open] Sci Rep 11, 22083 (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01487-w

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mathematicians derive the formulas for boundary layer turbulence 100 years after the phenomenon was first formulated:

Now an international team of mathematicians, led by UC Santa Barbara professor Björn Birnir and the University of Oslo professor Luiza Angheluta, has published a complete description of boundary layer turbulence. The paper appears in Physical Review Research, and synthesizes decades of work on the topic. The theory unites empirical observations with the Navier-Stokes equation -- the mathematical foundation of fluid dynamics -- into a mathematical formula.

This phenomenon was first described around 1920 by Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán and German physicist Ludwig Prandtl, two luminaries in fluid dynamics. "They were honing in on what's called boundary layer turbulence," said Birnir, director of the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science. This is turbulence caused when a flow interacts with a boundary, such as the fluid's surface, a pipe wall, the surface of the Earth and so forth.

Prandtl figured out experimentally that he could divide the boundary layer into four distinct regions based on proximity to the boundary. The viscous layer forms right next to the boundary, where turbulence is damped by the thickness of the flow. Next comes a transitional buffer region, followed by the inertial region, where turbulence is most fully developed. Finally, there is the wake, where the boundary layer flow is least affected by the boundary, according to a formula by von Kármán.

The fluid flows quicker farther from the boundary, but its velocity changes in a very specific manner. Its average velocity increases in the viscous and buffer layers and then transitions to a logarithmic function in the inertial layer. This "log law," found by Prandtl and von Kármán, has perplexed researchers, who worked to understand where it came from and how to describe it.

The flow's variation -- or deviation from the mean velocity -- also displayed peculiar behavior across the boundary layer. Researchers sought to understand these two variables and derive formulas that could describe them.

Journal Reference:
Björn Birnir, Luiza Angheluta, John Kaminsky, et al. Spectral link of the generalized Townsend-Perry constants in turbulent boundary layers [open], Physical Review Research (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.043054)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hospitals are at a high risk of cyberattacks, but patients don't realize it:

Information technology experts are worried about increasing rates of ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations. Most patients, though, don't know they're happening, according to a new survey.

Southern Ohio Medical Center, a not-for-profit hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio, canceled appointments for today and is diverting ambulances after it was hit by a cyberattack on Thursday. It's part of a series of escalating attacks on healthcare organizations in the past two years — a trend that could have serious consequences for patient care.

But while information technology experts are well aware that the risk of cyberattacks that compromise patient data and shut down computer systems is on the rise, patients don't seem to be, according to a new report by cybersecurity company Armis. In fact, over 60 percent of people in the general public surveyed in the new report said they hadn't heard of any cyberattacks in healthcare in the past two years.

That's despite a doubling of cyberattacks on healthcare institutions in 2020, high-profile incidents like the attack on hospital chain Universal Health Services, and a major threat from groups using the ransomware Ryuk. The magnitude of attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic shocked experts, who said that ransomware gangs were targeting hospitals more aggressively than they had before. Unlike attacks on banks or schools, which are also common, these attacks have the potential to directly injure people.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Human Lineage Discovered In Indonesian Cave - Asian Scientist Magazine:

In Wallacea, a group of mainly Indonesian islands, researchers have discovered a previously unknown human lineage, analyzing the DNA of a fossilized female. The findings, published in Nature, help shed light on the history of Southeast Asian populations.

More than 50,000 years ago, humans already had a very mobile way of life. Instead of settling in a permanent location, archeological evidence point to mass migrations from Eurasia through Southeast Asia toward the Australian continent. Cave art found in Sulawesi, for example, show that ancestral humans traveled through Wallacea.

However, very little is actually known about the evolutionary history of humans in Wallacea, with few fossils retrieved from the area. Ancient DNA is also easily degraded in tropical climates, presenting another hurdle in building up a database of ancestral human genomes found in Southeast Asia.

But in an exciting discovery, an international team of researchers—hailing from Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Germany and Australia—uncovered a female skeleton in the Leang Panninge limestone cave in Sulawesi. This hunter-gatherer likely lived before the dawn of the Neolithic period, the last stage of the Stone Age, and was buried over 7,000 years ago.

By retrieving and analyzing DNA from a part of the skull, the researchers then found that the forager belonged to a group more closely related to modern-day Near Oceanians than East Asian populations. Strikingly, the Leang Panninge genome did not quite match known lineages, whether ancient or present-day groups.

Journal Reference:
Carlhoff, Selina, Duli, Akin, Nägele, Kathrin, et al. Genome of a middle Holocene hunter-gatherer from Wallacea [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03823-6)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study Shows Immune Cells Against Covid-19 Stay High in Number Six Months After Vaccination:

"Previous research has suggested that humoral immune response — where the immune system circulates virus-neutralizing antibodies — can drop off at six months after vaccination, whereas our study indicates that cellular immunity — where the immune system directly attacks infected cells — remains strong," says study senior author Joel Blankson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "The persistence of these vaccine-elicited T cells, along with the fact that they're active against the delta variant, has important implications for guiding COVID vaccine development and determining the need for COVID boosters in the future."

To reach these findings, Blankson and his colleagues obtained blood from 15 study participants (10 men and five women) at three times: prior to vaccination, between seven and 14 days after their second Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine dose, and six months after vaccination. The median age of the participants was 41 and none had evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.

[...] In their study, Blankson and colleagues found that the number of helper T cells recognizing SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins was extremely low prior to vaccination — with a median of 2.7 spot-forming units (SFUs, the level of which is a measure of T cell frequency) per million peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs, identified as any blood cell with a round nucleus, including lymphocytes). Between 7 and 14 days after vaccination, the T cell frequency rose to a median of 237 SFUs per million PBMCs. At six months after vaccination, the level dropped slightly to a median of 122 SFUs per million PBMCs — a T cell frequency still significantly higher than before vaccination.

acid andy writes:

The Guardian newspaper reports that Doctors are seeing young adults developing tics and seizures that usually start in childhood, with some people linking it to social media use.

[Michelle] Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair. Like Meg, she is now a TikTok influencer, using her platform to raise awareness of FND [(Functional Neurological Disorder]. "Knowing that I am going through the same crap as other people out there makes me feel better," Wacek says. "Without all these platforms, I would be quite isolated."

This month, Wacek's Facebook groups and online communities lit up. The source: a Wall Street Journal report about the rise in young women developing sudden-onset tics that doctors thought could be linked to TikTok. The article prompted a swift backlash from many in the Tourette's and FND community. "I read the article and thought it was a load of crap," says Wacek. "TikTok is not giving people Tourette's." The fact that she followed Meg before developing tics herself, says Wacek, is a "coincidence".

[...] In August, Brain published a paper with the incendiary headline: "Stop that! It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness". In it, clinicians from Hannover Medical School in Germany speculated that a mass sociogenic illness (MSI) that resembled Tourette's but was not Tourette's, was spreading among German teenagers. A sociogenic illness, explains researcher Dr Kirsten Müller-Vahl, "is when people who are in close contact develop similar symptoms, but without any underlying cause".

upstart writes:

Using mechanical tools improves our language skills:

Our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences is one of the most difficult language skills to acquire. In 2019, research had revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study, by researchers from Inserm, CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon and Université Lumière Lyon in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and—vice-versa—syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools. These findings could be applied clinically to support the rehabilitation of patients having lost some of their language skills. This study is published in November 2021 in the journal Science.

[...] Research suggests that brain areas, which control certain linguistic functions, such as the processing of word meanings, are also involved in controlling fine motor skills. However, brain imaging had not provided evidence of such links between language and the use of tools. Paleo-neurobiology has also shown that the brain regions associated with language had increased in our ancestors during periods of technological boom, when the use of tools became more widespread.

When considering this data, research teams couldn't help wondering: what if the use of certain tools, which involves complex movements, relies on the same brain resources as those mobilized in complex linguistic functions such as syntax?

[...] They discovered for the first time that the handling of the tool and the syntax exercises produced brain activations in common areas, with the same spatial distribution, in a region called the "basal ganglia."

Given that these two skill types use the same brain resources, is it possible to train one in order to improve the other? Does motor training with the mechanical tongs improve the understanding of complex phrases? In the second part of their study, the scientists looked at these issues and showed that this is indeed the case.

Journal Reference:
Tool use and language share syntactic processes and neural patterns in the basal ganglia, Simon Thibault, et. al., Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abe0874)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

It is fairly common these days when visiting a doctor's office or entering a port of entry to have one's forehead scanned by a Non-Contact Infrared Thermometer (NCIT) to check for fever (temperature greater than 38 °C). The measurements are typically very quick and easy to make. NCITs are not as accurate as contact thermometers, so it is important to know whether convenience is being traded for accuracy.

NCITs measure forehead temperature by detecting infrared radiant energy. Since the temperature of the forehead skin is lower than the core body temperature, the device manufacturers use propriety algorithms to correct for this. Depending upon the device, it might also factor in the ambient measurement conditions such as the room temperature and skin emissivity. These devices may give erroneous results from not only issues with the hardware or algorithms, but also in how they are used (pointed too far away or at the wrong angle), or the local conditions of the forehead skin (local heating or cooling from sweat or moisture). FDA approved devices conform to voluntary standards that specify they should be within ± 0.3 °C of a laboratory source.

FDA researchers measured oral temperatures from more than 1000 subjects using a clinical-grade reference thermometer and compared that to measurements made at the center of the forehead using six different models of NCITs. Although it is expected that the variability in a clinical setting would be larger than in the lab, they saw that the error can range from − 3 to + 2 °C in extreme cases, with the majority of the errors ranging from − 2 to + 1 °C.

Overall, our results indicate that some NCIT devices may not be consistently accurate enough to be used as a stand-alone temperature measurement tool to determine if the temperature exceeds a specific threshold (e.g., 38 °C) in an adult population. Model-to-model variability and individual model accuracy in the displayed temperature are a major source of concern. Users should be aware of the consequences of false negatives and false positives when using NCITs as a screening tool.

Journal Reference:
Sullivan, S.J.L., Rinaldi, J.E., Hariharan, P. et al. Clinical evaluation of non-contact infrared thermometers. Sci Rep 11, 22079 (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-99300-1

Original Submission