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AnonTechie writes:

This paper is from 2017, however, I found it interesting and thought our community would also find this worthy of discussion ...

Have you ever wondered if there is a correlation between a computer's energy consumption and the choice of programming languages? Well, a group Portuguese university researchers did and set out to quantify it. Their 2017 research paper entitled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages / How Do Energy, Time, and Memory Relate? may have escaped your attention, as it did ours.

The team used a collection of ten standard algorithms from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game project (formerly known as The Great Computer Language Shootout) as the basis for their evaluations.

Last year they updated the functional language results, and all the setups, benchmarks, and collected data can be found here. Check out the paper for more details. Have your choice of programming language ever been influenced by energy consumption?

hackaday.com

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

In the early morning hours of June 24, 2021, half of the 12-story Surfside Florida luxury condominium, Champlain Towers South, came crashing to the ground, killing 98 occupants.

In a recent public update, the NIST detailed the lengthy work needed to uncover the causes of this collapse.

This includes building design, construction, modification, and deterioration analysis, evidence preservation, remote sensing analysis using data collected with tools such as LIDAR during recovery, material tests on recovered evidence, a geotechnical analysis of the surrounding soil and geologic conditions, as well as detailed structural and failure analysis using computer modeling.

Additionally, they will interview people with historic knowledge of construction in south Florida, and continue to accept information from the public that could shed additional light on this tragedy.

Although answers from NIST's investigation will not be forthcoming for a number of years, many individuals unrelated to the NIST have combed through publicly available information to find possible causes.

While precise triggers leading to the collapse may never be known, most public evidence, as this video demonstrates, points to two key factors: Badly neglected and deteriorated pool deck concrete slab that lead to a pool deck collapse, and resulting damage to three key building support columns that lead to the building collapse minutes later.

A timeline based on public witness accounts, details the dramatic events of that morning.

In an interesting twist, this USA Today article digs deep in to possible drug related money laundering and corruption surrounding the building's construction.

AP News reports a lawsuit that was just filed alleges previous construction next door contributed to the collapse.

Most of the media has focused on the lack of "answers" from the NIST and other organizations. Youtuber Jeff Ostroff has compiled an informative explanation of who NIST is, why the NIST is investigating, and why this takes so long.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the US in one year, a record:

During a one-year period from April 2020 to April 2021, more than 100,000 people died from a drug overdose in the US, according to provisional data from the National Vital Statistics System, a government network for sharing public-health data. The number is a record for the US and means about 274 people died each day.

In December 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounded the alarm on an increase in overdose deaths -- more than 93,000 in 2020. Factors compounding the existing overdose epidemic may include the financial and emotional burdens of the coronavirus pandemic, along with COVID-era problems in getting health care and mental health services.

Fatal overdoses continue to be driven by opioids, particularly the extremely potent fentanyl. Overdose deaths involving fentanyl or other synthetic opioids increased 12-fold from 2013 to 2019, the CDC reported.

Fentanyl, which is legal if it's prescribed to treat severe pain, is up to 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, the CDC says. Nonprescription fentanyl is illegal, which means it doesn't undergo any testing or safety regulations. Heroin, cocaine and other drugs are often laced with fentanyl, so people who overdose on fentanyl may not even know they consumed it or may have underestimated how much fentanyl was in the other drug.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency says that without laboratory testing, there's no way to know the amount of fentanyl in a pill or drug. Test strips people can use to check whether a drug contains fentanyl can be found at some public health clinics, including syringe services programs. But they don't reveal the amount of fentanyl in the drug; they only show its presence.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientist advances prospect of regeneration in humans:

Without macrophages, which are part of the immune system, regeneration did not take place. Instead of regenerating a limb, the axolotl formed a scar at the site of the injury, which acted as a barrier to regeneration, just as it would in a mammal such as a mouse or human. In terms of regenerative capability, Godwin had turned the salamander into a mammal. In a follow-up 2017 study, he found the same to be true in heart tissue.

Now, in a study that builds on his earlier research, Godwin has identified the origin of pro-regenerative macrophages in the axolotl as the liver. By providing science with a place to look for pro-regenerative macrophages in humans -- the liver, rather than the bone marrow, which is the source of most human macrophages -- the finding paves the way for regenerative medicine therapies in humans.

Although the prospect of regrowing a human limb may be unrealistic in the short term due to a limb's complexity, regenerative medicine therapies could potentially be employed in the shorter term in the treatment of the many diseases in which scarring plays a pathological role, including heart, lung and kidney disease, as well as in the treatment of scarring itself -- for instance, in the case of burn victims.

"In our earlier research, we found that scar-free healing hinges on a single cell type, the macrophage," Godwin said. "This finding means we have a way in. If axolotls can regenerate by having a single cell type as their guardian, then maybe we can achieve scar-free healing in humans by populating our bodies with an equivalent guardian cell type, which would open up the opportunity for regeneration."

The paper on Godwin's research, entitled "Identification of the Adult Hematopoietic Liver As the Primary Reservoir for the Recruitment of Pro-regenerative Macrophages Required for Salamander Limb Regeneration," was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

upstart writes:

NASA's Perseverance captures challenging flight by Mars helicopter:

Ingenuity is currently prepping for its 16th flight, scheduled to take place no earlier than Saturday, Nov. 20, but the 160.5-second Flight 13 stands out as one of Ingenuity's most complicated. It involved flying into varied terrain within the "Séítah" geological feature and taking images of an outcrop from multiple angles for the rover team. Acquired from an altitude of 26 feet (8 meters), the images complement those collected during Flight 12, providing valuable insight for Perseverance scientists and rover drivers.

Captured by the rover's two-camera Mastcam-Z, one video clip of Flight 13 shows a majority of the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft's flight profile. The other provides a closeup of takeoff and landing, which was acquired as part of a science observation intended to measure the dust plumes generated by the helicopter.

"The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips," said Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "Even at 300 meters [328 yards] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z's 'right eye." And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the 'left eye," it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring."

During takeoff, Ingenuity kicks up a small plume of dust that the right camera, or "eye," captures moving to the right of the helicopter during ascent. After its initial climb to planned maximum altitude of 26 feet (8 meters), the helicopter performs a small pirouette to line up its color camera for scouting. Then Ingenuity pitches over, allowing the rotors' thrust to begin moving it horizontally through the thin Martian air before moving offscreen. Later, the rotorcraft returns and lands in the vicinity of where it took off. The team targeted a different landing spot—about 39 feet (12 meters) from takeoff—to avoid a ripple of sand it landed on at the completion of Flight 12.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

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

takyon writes:

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

Phoenix666 brings us this EV-themed story from the BBC:

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

takyon writes:

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

upstart writes:

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

upstart writes:

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.

upstart writes:

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

owl writes:

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

upstart writes:

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

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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