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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:103

posted by FatPhil on Friday November 19 2021, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the expect-alien-probing-in-TN dept.

NASA tracked wild 'earthgrazer' meteor fireball for 186 miles through the air:

Some meteors are fancier than others. Lucky skywatchers in the southeastern US were treated to a fantastic fireball on Tuesday night. Data from NASA shows it was quite a whopper, traveling 186 miles (300 kilometers) through the air.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama tweeted images of the fireball as captured by NASA meteor cameras. A map shows the trajectory stretched across Georgia and into Alabama before ending above the town of Lutts, Tennessee.

NASA Meteor Watch, a group that brings together the work of meteor experts and amateur meteor watchers, gave an update on the fireball on Facebook on Wednesday. "Last night's fireball over Georgia and Alabama was what we call an earthgrazer, in which the meteor's trajectory is so shallow it just skims across the upper atmosphere for a long distance."

The group described the event as "a rare meteor for those fortunate enough to see it." A video from a meteor camera at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, shows part of the fireball's path.

We're currently in a good fireball-watching season as the Taurid meteor shower is underway. The Taurids are caused by dust and debris from an ancient comet. When those little bits hit the atmosphere, they can burn up into bright "shooting stars."


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Friday November 19 2021, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-last-windii dept.

Microsoft is no longer bringing x64 emulation to Windows 10 on ARM

Last December, Microsoft announced that it would bring x64 emulation to Windows 10 on ARM, a feature missing from the fledgling OS. Windows 10 on ARM already supported x86 emulation but making sure you have a 32-bit installer is not ideal. Initially, Microsoft brought x64 emulation to the Windows Insider Program, although you need a preview version of the Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver for some ARM machines that supported Windows 10 ARM.

Since then, Microsoft has released Windows 11, including an ARM version. For some reason, the company has now decided to quietly drop any intentions of integrating x64 emulation within Windows 10 on ARM. Inexplicably, it only confirmed this change in a Windows Blogs post where most people would miss it.

Windows Insider blog. Also at The Verge.

Previously: Microsoft Document Details Windows 10 on ARM Limitations


Original Submission

posted by FatPhil on Friday November 19 2021, @05:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the when-burnouts-end-in-lithium-fires dept.

But there are many other electric vehicle (EV) racing events popping-up across the country that are showcasing and championing important advances in EV technology.

Formula E has been around for years, but a flood of newer EV racing events have lately zoomed into view.

Others include the Extreme E race series, which launched earlier this year. In it, electric sports utility vehicles (SUVs) compete in a series of off-road events. And in 2022, SuperCharge will bring EV racing to city streets around the world.

Battery life, safety, and weight are three dimensions that EV racers are focused on to give them a competitive edge.

But mostly battery life -- Ed. (yeah, yeah, that belongs in the comments - shut up!).

Anyway, plenty of variants available - including 2-wheeled ones. That might be what powers your sit-on lawnmower in a few years.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday November 19 2021, @02:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-a-stab-at-a-cure? dept.

Paralysed mice walk again after a single injection

A new therapy, developed by researchers in the USA, has successfully reversed paralysis and repaired severe spinal cord injuries in mice. The animals regained the ability to walk only four weeks after a single injection of the treatment.

"Our research aims to find a therapy that can prevent individuals from becoming paralysed after major trauma or disease," said Prof Samuel I Stupp of Northwestern University, who led the study. "For decades, this has remained a major challenge for scientists because our body's central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, does not have any significant capacity to repair itself after injury or after the onset of a degenerative disease."

When the therapy is injected, the liquid immediately forms a network of nanofibres matching the structure around the spinal cord. The difficulty then is in communicating with the body's cells.

[...] "The key innovation in our research, which has never been done before, is to control the collective motion of more than 100,000 molecules within our nanofibres," he said. "By making the molecules move, 'dance' or even leap temporarily out of these structures, known as supramolecular polymers, they are able to connect more effectively with [cellular] receptors."

Also at ScienceAlert.

Journal Reference:
Z. Álvarez, A. N. Kolberg-Edelbrock, I. R. Sasselli, et al. Bioactive scaffolds with enhanced supramolecular motion promote recovery from spinal cord injury, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3602)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 19 2021, @12:06PM   Printer-friendly

Developing Telecoms reveals the biggest data center in UAE.:

Etisalat Group, a leading telecom group in emerging markets, and AI and cloud computing company Group 42 have announced plans to merge their data centre businesses.

A total of twelve data centres will be combined in the new joint venture business operating under the name Khazna Data Centres, creating the UAE's largest data centre provider. Khazna is an existing data centre company with a three-facility portfolio, which will now expand significantly.

The combined business will be the largest data centre provider in the UAE, with around 300MW of capacity, according to the Data Centre Developments website.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 19 2021, @09:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-get-any-darker dept.

Black holes slamming into the moon could end the dark-matter debate:

Circa 14 billion years ago, when the universe's clock began to tick, space was still a tight, blazing hot, frenzied packet of cosmic stuff. Stars were yet to shine, planets hadn't been born, and jittery particles of every shape and size were zipping around at random. It was chaos.

But somewhere amid the lawlessness, in between spirals of stardust, a few minuscule, unstable and hyper-dense pockets of flaming matter might have collapsed. And if they did, scientists believe they would've dotted the early universe with clusters of black holes even smaller than atoms.

Don't let these petite spheres of doom fool you. A black hole half the size of a golf ball would have a mass equivalent to Earth's. Even microscopic black holes, with masses comparable to asteroids, would've unceasingly sucked in and destroyed everything along their path.

Slowly, as the universe progressed, swarms of them would have seen planetary systems rise and fall, and billions of years ago there's a fair chance they'd have even whizzed through our corner of the cosmos. Eventually, these mini black holes would've sailed away from each other. But if they did exist, experts think they'd still be roaming in and around the galaxies right this second.

They are, scientists believe, our newest lead on dark matter -- perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe. Dark matter quests that hope to unveil the strange, invisible particle or force that somehow binds the cosmos together often reach a wall. Solving the puzzle requires, well, actually... finding dark matter.

So to ensure this innovative hypothesis isn't a dead end, we'd need to locate unseen, miniature versions of black holes. But how? We have enough trouble finding supermassive, visible ones with high-tech equipment tailored to the search.

That's where the moon comes in. "There's this funny estimate that you can do," says Matt Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University and one of the theorists behind the research published in March. Caplan contends that if dark matter can indeed be explained by these tiny black holes, then at some point, they would have punctured the moon.

Yes, you read that correctly: The moon might've been bombarded by atomic-sized black holes. Taking it a step further, the wounds they inflicted should still be up there; if these mini-abysses are proven to exist, dark matter may no longer be an everlasting enigma.

[...] Though finding a submass black hole would be the holy grail for her work, she says finding implications of a potential dark matter black hole would suffice, too. That could be the consequences of dark cooling processes.

"What's interesting about this," she says, "is if you continue not to find something, it's a complementary way to constrain the nature of dark matter."

Essentially, it's a process of elimination.

But even if we can never find it, and it's not atomic-sized black holes slamming into the moon, dark matter's purpose will live on until the end of the universe. Until then, the cosmos will continue to tick along its linear timeline.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 19 2021, @06:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-don't-say! dept.

Perceptual links between sound and shape may unlock origins of spoken words:

Language scientists have discovered that this effect exists independently of the language that a person speaks or the writing system that they use, and it could be a clue to the origins of spoken words.

The research breakthrough came from exploring the 'bouba/kiki effect', where the majority of people, mostly Westerners in previous studies, intuitively match the shape on the left to the neologism 'bouba' and the form on the right to 'kiki'.

An international research team has conducted the largest cross-cultural test of the effect, surveying 917 speakers of 25 different languages representing nine language families and ten writing systems -- discovering that the effect occurs in societies around the world.

Publishing their findings in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the team, led by experts from the University of Birmingham and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, says that such iconic vocalisations may form a global basis for the creation of new words.

Co-author Dr Marcus Perlman, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, commented: "Our findings suggest that most people around the world exhibit the bouba/kiki effect, including people who speak various languages, and regardless of the writing system they use."

"Our ancestors could have used links between speech sounds and visual properties to create some of the first spoken words -- and today, many thousands of years later, the perceived roundness of the English word 'balloon' may not be just a coincidence, after all."

Journal Reference:
Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, et al. The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0390)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 19 2021, @03:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the unsubscirbe dept.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-end-of-click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel-one-of-the-news-industrys-favorite-retention-tactics-is-illegal-ftc-says/

Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from "an annoyance" and "ridiculous" to "shady" and "oppressive."

Publishers tend to think of this as "retention." A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe.

The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently made it clear that it sees the practice as 1) one of several "dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscriptions" and 2) straight-up illegal. The FTC vowed to ramp up enforcement on companies that fail to provide an "easy and simple" cancellation process, including an option that's "at least as easy" as the one to subscribe.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 19 2021, @01:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the no,-not-that-kind-of-germy-nation dept.

OSU study yields a first in fossil research: Seeds sprouting from an amber-encased pine cone:

In a paper published in Historical Biology, George Poinar Jr. of the Oregon State College of Science describes a pine cone, approximately 40 million years old, encased in Baltic amber from which several embryonic stems are emerging.

"Crucial to the development of all plants, seed germination typically occurs in the ground after a seed has fallen," said Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past. "We tend to associate viviparity – embryonic development while still inside the parent – with animals and forget that it does sometimes occur in plants."

Most typically, by far, those occurrences involve angiosperms, Poinar said. Angiosperms, which directly or indirectly provide most of the food people eat, have flowers and produce seeds enclosed in fruit.

"Seed germination in fruits is fairly common in plants that lack seed dormancy, like tomatoes, peppers and grapefruit, and it happens for a variety of reasons," he said. "But it's rare in gymnosperms."

Gymnosperms such as conifers produce "naked," or non-enclosed, seeds. Precocious germination in pine cones is so rare that only one naturally occurring example of this condition, from 1965, has been described in the scientific literature, Poinar said.

"That's part of what makes this discovery so intriguing, even beyond that it's the first fossil record of plant viviparity involving seed germination," he said. "I find it fascinating that the seeds in this small pine cone could start to germinate inside the cone and the sprouts could grow out so far before they perished in the resin."

Journal Reference:
George Poinar Jr. Precocious germination of a pine cone in Eocene Baltic amber, Historical Biology (DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2021.2001808)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @10:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the ouch-it-burns dept.

New iodine-based plasma thruster tested in orbit

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)


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @07:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-how-long-and-how-well? dept.

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

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @04:47PM   Printer-friendly

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

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the mooning dept.

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

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @11:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the ecosystem-warriors dept.

'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

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 18 2021, @08:35AM   Printer-friendly

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