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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:44 | Votes:96

posted by janrinok on Friday November 26 2021, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the underused-nexus! dept.

Ars Technica has a series-recap-thing going on for "The Wheel of Time" series on Amazon: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/two-book-readers-recap-the-first-three-episodes-of-amazons-the-wheel-of-time/

In the event that you dislike people ruining great books for stupid political agendas, perhaps you should steer clear of this review of Amazon's TV Series.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

#1 The way magic works in the Wheel of Time (WoT) is crucial to the plot of the entire series. This is ignored entirely in the first three episodes. Which makes me think, they're going to be doing even more stupid things.
#2 Being inclusive and trying to say, but the girls should also be included as possible main plot "Dragon Reborn" hype is stupid. Egwene goes from village girl to badass quite well on her own in the books, thank you very much.
#3 Lan in the first few episodes sucks. In the books, he can take a few dozen trollocs on his own. Whereas in the first few episodes, Moiraine is barely able to take down a nice grouped up bunch? That is stupid beyond words. (We will gloss over the deliberate destruction of the town's property, because apparently it's easier to throw bricks.)
#4 Mat is a thief and his parents are evil, essentially. His Mom is a drunk, apparently driven to it by his Dad who is shown as unfaithful and essentially a deadbeat.
#5 There is a lot of sexing going on. This is a long ways away from Perrin and his lady falling down the stairs on top of each other and being embarassed.
#6 Where is Elyas?

This is no faithful adaptation from the books. In the event that you happened to like "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", but were put off by "The Silver Chair", because they turned Peter into a whiny brat... you will be even more put off by the random stupid changes they made in this book. Rand wasn't always a brooding semi-sociopath and Mat is a lot more honorable than portrayed by these first few episodes.

[...] Probably the most annoying things to me are the twisting of characters and plot to make them more "woke". Like, if they'd added a scene in Lord of the Rings where someone asks, if Frodo and Samwise are gay. You know, because they are traveling together, so you must be gay. What kind of stupid?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 26 2021, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the femurs-for-Algernon dept.

A Stunning 3D Map of Blood Vessels and Cells in a Mouse Skull Could Help Scientists Make New Bones:

"We need to see what's happening inside the skull, including the relative locations of blood vessels and cells and how their organization changes during injury and over time," says Warren Grayson, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Craniofacial and Orthopaedic Tissue Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His lab focuses on developing biomaterials and transplanting stem cells into the skull to re-create missing bone tissue.

Other scientists have provided maps of small portions of blood vessels and stem cells in the mouse skull. "However, a larger picture of the skull gives us a better understanding of the entire vasculature and distribution of different stem cell types," says Alexandra Rindone, graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine and first author of the paper.

The new map, published Oct. 28 in Nature Communications, is a 3D view of the top of a mouse skull -- its cranial bone, or calvaria -- which is made up of four connected skull bones.

To create the map, which includes hundreds of thousands of cells, the Johns Hopkins researchers used four key techniques to pinpoint vessels and cells.

First, they used immunofluorescence to tag molecules on the surface of a variety of blood vessels and stem cells with a fluorescent, or glowing, chemical.

Then, the scientists use a chemical compound that helps light penetrate the skull without scattering -- a method called optical tissue clearing. "It makes the skull appear like glass," says Rindone.

Video of 3D map of mouse skull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGNdBcHNo7E

Journal Reference:
Alexandra N. Rindone, Xiaonan Liu, Stephanie Farhat, et al. Quantitative 3D imaging of the cranial microvascular environment at single-cell resolution [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26455-w)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 26 2021, @11:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-long-enough-for-a-good-sleep dept.

One year on this giant, blistering hot planet is just 16 hours long:

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of  light years from Earth. These extrasolar planets are a veritable menagerie, from rocky super-Earths and miniature Neptunes to colossal gas giants.

Among the more confounding planets discovered to date are "hot Jupiters" —  massive balls of gas that are about the size of our own Jovian planet but that zing around their stars in less than 10 days, in contrast to Jupiter's plodding, 12-year orbit. Scientists have discovered about 400 hot Jupiters to date. But exactly how these weighty whirlers came to be remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in planetary science.

Now, astronomers have discovered one of the most extreme ultrahot Jupiters  — a gas giant that is about five times Jupiter's mass and blitzes around its star in just 16 hours. The planet's orbit is the shortest of any known gas giant to date.

Due to its extremely tight orbit and proximity to its star, the planet's day side is estimated to be at around 3,500 Kelvin, or close to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit — about as hot as a small star. This makes the planet, designated TOI-2109b, the second hottest detected so far.

Judging from its properties, astronomers believe that TOI-2109b is in the process of "orbital decay," or spiraling into its star, like bathwater circling the drain. Its extremely short orbit is predicted to cause the planet to spiral toward its star faster than other hot Jupiters.

The discovery, which was made initially by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led mission, presents a unique opportunity for astronomers to study how planets behave as they are drawn in and swallowed by their star.

"In one or two years, if we are lucky, we may be able to detect how the planet moves closer to its star," says Ian Wong, lead author of the discovery, who was a postdoc at MIT during the study and has since moved to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "In our lifetime we will not see the planet fall into its star. But give it another 10 million years, and this planet might not be there."

Journal Reference:
Ian Wong, Avi Shporer, George Zhou, et al. TOI-2109: An Ultrahot Gas Giant on a 16 hr Orbit - IOPscience, The Astronomical Journal [open] (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac26bd)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 26 2021, @06:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the beats'-bad-business-barriers-beaten-back-by-big-beatdown dept.

Italy fines Amazon, Apple $230M over reseller collusion – TechCrunch:

Amazon and Apple have been hit with almost $230 million (€203M) in total fines by Italy’s antitrust authority — following an investigation into reselling of Apple and (Apple-owned) Beats kit on Amazon’s Italian ecommerce marketplace.

The authority says the alleged collusion decreased the level of discounts available to consumers buying Apple and Beats products on the Amazon Italy marketplace.

It has also ordered the tech giants to end the restrictions on resellers.

The AGCM announced the sanction today, saying its probe identified a restrictive agreement between the pair to block some “legitimate” resellers of Beats products on Amazon.it.

The fine breaks down into €134.5M (~$151M) for Amazon — and €68.7M (~$77.3M) for Apple.

The agreement in question was signed between the pair back in October 2018.

Per the AGCM’s press release, it found the agreement contained a number of contractual clauses which prohibited official and unofficial resellers of Apple and Beats products from using Amazon.it — with the restriction limiting the sale of Apple and Beats products on Amazon.it to Amazon itself and a number of resellers the authority says were “chosen individually and in a discriminatory way” — in violation of Art. 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday November 26 2021, @02:03AM   Printer-friendly

Samsung Officially Announces $17 Billion Advanced Semiconductor Site in Texas – Facility to Span More Than 5 Million Square Meters

After multiple reports and of course, surveying various locations in the U.S., Samsung has officially announced that Taylor, Texas[*], is the location of the Korean giant's $17 billion advanced chip manufacturing facility. The company states that the new hub will boost production of various semiconductor solutions that will be found in next-generation solutions, including smartphones.

[...] The Korean tech behemoth says that groundbreaking will begin in the first half of 2022, with operations expected to start in the second half of 2024. Unfortunately, this timeline means that this chip manufacturing hub will not be one of the locations where Samsung will mass produce its 3nm wafers, as a previous report states that mass production of this advanced process will commence in the first half of 2022.

[*] Taylor, Texas on Wikipedia.

Texas To Get Multiple New Fabs as Samsung and TI to Spend $47 Billion on New Facilities

After a year of searching for the right place of its new U.S. fab, Samsung this week announced that it would build a fab near Taylor, Texas. The company will invest $17 billion in the new semiconductor fabrication plant and will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives from local and state authorities. Separately, Texas authorities have announced that Texas Instruments intend to spend $30 billion on new fabs in the state, as well.

[...] The Governor of Texas recently announced the Texas Instruments was planning to build several new 300-mm fabs near Sherman[**]. In total, TI intends to build as many as four wafer fabrication facilities in the region over coming decades and the cumulative investments are expected to total $30 billion as fabs will be eventually upgraded.

Texas Instruments itself [has] yet have to formally announce its investments plans, but the announcement by the governor Greg Abbot indicates that the principal decisions have been made and now TI needs to finalize the details.

[**] Sherman, Texas on Wikipedia.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday November 25 2021, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-of-these-do-you-recognize? dept.

Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s:

If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.

YouTube has a 17m00s video by IBM demonstrating many of these in use.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday November 25 2021, @04:32PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-secret-history-of-atapi/

The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press releases touting the advantages of the new technology, articles describing the whys and wherefores, but… nope. There is nothing.

In 1993, CD-ROM drives used either SCSI or one of several proprietary interfaces, the major amongst those being Matsushita/Panasonic, Mitsumi, Philips, and Sony. In 1995, the proprietary interfaces were effectively gone and most new CD-ROM drives used the ATAPI interface. Something clearly happened in 1994, but exactly what, when, and how—that’s something of a mystery.

[Ed. note: As one who was around when this happened, I found it to be a detailed and fascinating read! Unfortunately, it was years later when I could afford my first CD-ROM. Who else here has experience from those early days? --martyb]


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 25 2021, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the Pew!-Pew!-Pew! dept.

Ultrashort-pulse lasers kill bacterial superbugs, spores:

Life-threatening bacteria are becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics, making the search for alternatives to antibiotics an increasingly urgent challenge. For certain applications, one alternative may be a special type of laser.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that lasers that emit ultrashort pulses of light can kill multidrug-resistant bacteria and hardy bacterial spores. The findings, available online in the Journal of Biophotonics, open up the possibility of using such lasers to destroy bacteria that are hard to kill by other means. The researchers previously have shown that such lasers don't damage human cells, making it possible to envision using the lasers to sterilize wounds or disinfect blood products.

"The ultrashort-pulse laser technology uniquely inactivates pathogens while preserving human proteins and cells," said first author Shaw-Wei (David) Tsen, MD, PhD, an instructor of radiology at Washington University's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR). "Imagine if, prior to closing a surgical wound, we could scan a laser beam across the site and further reduce the chances of infection. I can see this technology being used soon to disinfect biological products in vitro, and even to treat bloodstream infections in the future by putting patients on dialysis and passing the blood through a laser treatment device."

Tsen and senior author Samuel Achilefu, PhD, the Michel M. Ter-Pogossian Professor of Radiology and director of MIR's Biophotonics Research Center, have been exploring the germicidal properties of ultrashort-pulse lasers for years. They have shown that such lasers can inactivate viruses and ordinary bacteria without harming human cells. In the new study, conducted in collaboration with Shelley Haydel, PhD, a professor of microbiology at Arizona State University, they extended their exploration to antibiotic-resistant bacteria and bacterial spores.

The researchers trained their lasers on multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which causes infections of the skin, lungs and other organs, and extended spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli (E. coli), which cause urinary tract infections, diarrhea and wound infections. Apart from their shared ability to make people miserable, MRSA and E. coli are very different types of bacteria, representing two distant branches of the bacterial kingdom. The researchers also looked at spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which causes food poisoning and food spoilage. Bacillus spores can withstand boiling and cooking.

In all cases, the lasers killed more than 99.9% of the target organisms, reducing their numbers by more than 1,000 times.

Journal Reference:
Shaw-Wei D. Tsen, John Popovich, Megan Hodges, et al. Inactivation of multidrug‐resistant bacteria and bacterial spores and generation of high‐potency bacterial vaccines using ultrashort pulsed lasers, Journal of Biophotonics (DOI: 10.1002/jbio.202100207)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 25 2021, @07:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the CoCs dept.

https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671

The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately. This resignation is done in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.

As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to. To leave under these circumstances deeply pains us, and we apologize to all of those that we have let down. In recognition that we are out of options from the perspective of Rust Governance, we feel as though we have no course remaining to us but to step down and make this statement.

In so doing, we would offer a few suggestions to the community writ large:

  • We suggest that Rust Team Members come to a consensus on a process for oversight over the Core Team. Currently, they are answerable only to themselves, which is a property unique to them in contrast to all other Rust teams.

  • In the interest of not perpetuating unaccountability, we recommend that the replacement for the Mod Team be made by Rust Team Members not on the Core Team.
  • We suggest that the future Mod Team, with advice from Rust Team Members, proactively decide how best to handle and discover unhealthy conflict among Rust Team Members. We suggest that the Mod Team work with the Foundation in obtaining resources for professional mediation.

Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 25 2021, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly

Chemotherapy may affect muscle cells at lower doses than previously thought: The cancer therapy may also affect the protein building process, not just cause muscles to degrade:

According to the researchers, it was previously known that chemotherapy drugs can affect the mitochondria within cells, which can cause the loss of muscle tissue via a process called oxidative stress.

In their new study, the researchers studied three different chemotherapy drugs in cultured muscle cells at levels too low to trigger oxidative stress. They found that the muscle cells were still affected by the lower levels of drugs -- this time by interfering with the process that builds muscle, called protein synthesis.

Gustavo Nader, associate professor of kinesiology, said that while the findings need to be confirmed in humans, they could have implications for cancer treatment in the future.

"Eventually, it may be that the implementation of cancer treatments should consider that even at low doses that do not cause oxidative stress, some chemotherapy drugs may still promote the loss of muscle tissue," Nader said. "The tumor is already making you weak, it's contributing to the loss of muscle mass, and the chemo drugs are helping the tumor to accomplish that."

Additionally, Nader said the results -- recently published in the American Journal of Physiology -- Cell Physiology -- also have the potential to change how health care professionals think about the ways chemotherapy affects the body.

"For a long time, people thought the problem with chemo and muscle loss was an issue with degrading the proteins that already existed in the muscle," Nader said. "So, a lot of research and treatments in the past had the goal of preventing protein degradation. But our study points to there also being a problem with protein synthesis, or the building of new muscle proteins, as well."

Nader said that in addition to having implications for chemotherapy treatment, the findings could also ultimately change the way health care professionals think about other, pharmaceutical cancer treatments and programs.

Journal Reference:
Bin Guo, Devasier Bennet, Daniel J. Belcher, et al. Chemotherapy agents reduce protein synthesis and ribosomal capacity in myotubes independent of oxidative stress, American Journal of Physiology-Cell Physiology (DOI: 10.1152/ajpcell.00116.2021)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday November 25 2021, @01:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the Gobble!-Gobble!-Gobble! dept.

On behalf of all the staff I wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving!

I am grateful for all the support the community has shown us since we started SoylentNews.org on February 12, 2014. Has it really been that long? Back then, the internet was dominated by HTTP; it would take some time (years?) until we transitioned to Gandhi and then Let's Encrypt!

I have been active on the site since we started. Why? It was the spirit of gratitude I saw here to be free from having "corporate overlords"; how people pitched in trying to help. They were looking not at what they could get but rather what they could give! That spirit lives on to this day. Where? I see it in the people who submit stories and journal articles. I see it when people post (and moderate) comments. And lets not forget those who subscribe to the site which pays bills (hosting fees and accounting expenses, primarily). We are all volunteers here; nobody has ever been paid anything for their work here!

I'm taking this opportunity to thank all the editors who perform the seemingly thankless task of selecting, reviewing, editing, and posting stories to the site. I hereby invite them to enjoy the long holiday weekend.

We will be on a holiday/weekend story schedule from the start of Thursday through the end of Sunday (UTC). Enjoy the well-deserved break! Thank You!

Another story will be along presently; this story is in addition to our normal schedule. --martyb/Bytram

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 24 2021, @11:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the bloat dept.

Flatpak Is Not the Future:

Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn't always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux desktop.

This is finally changing. The stability of the Linux desktop has dramatically improved in recent years. Core library developers are finally seeing the benefits of maintaining compatibility. Despite this, many developers are not interested in depending on a stable base of libraries for binary software. Instead, they have decided to ignore and override almost all libraries pre-installed on the user's system.

The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system's runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this.

Flatpak calls itself "the future of application distribution". I am not a fan. I'm going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I'll try to avoid addressing "fixable" problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.

Suppose you want to make a simple calculator app. How big should the download be?

At the time of this writing, the latest KCalc AppImage (if you can even figure out how to download it) is 152 MB. For a calculator.

This is uncompetitive with Windows on its face. If I ship an app for Windows I don't have to include the entire Win32 or .NET runtimes with my app. I just use what's already on the user's system.

Other solutions like Flatpak or Steam download the runtime separately. Your app metadata specifies what runtime it wants to use and a service downloads it and runs your app against it.

So how big are these runtimes? On a fresh machine, install KCalc from Flathub. You're looking at a nearly 900 MB download to get your first runtime. For a calculator.

[...] Snap and Flatpak in their current incarnations have been around for at least five years. AppImage, Steam and Docker have been around even longer. None of the above is new. The problems with alternate runtimes were known from the very beginning, yet little progress has been made in fixing them. I don't believe these are growing pains of a new technology. These are fundamental problems that are mostly not fixable.

All of these technologies are essentially building an entire OS on top of another OS just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility. In doing so, they create far more problems than they solve. Problems of compatibility are best solved by the OS, the real one, not some containerized bastardization on top. We need to make apps that run natively, that use the system libraries as much as possible. We need to drastically simplify everything if we have any hope of attracting proprietary software to Linux.

The full article is a very interesting read.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the ZOMBEES! dept.

When bees get a taste for dead things: Meat-eating 'vulture bees' sport acidic guts:

A little-known species of tropical bee has evolved an extra tooth for biting flesh and a gut that more closely resembles that of vultures rather than other bees.

Typically, bees don't eat meat. However, a species of stingless bee in the tropics has evolved the ability to do so, presumably due to intense competition for nectar.

"These are the only bees in the world that have evolved to use food sources not produced by plants, which is a pretty remarkable change in dietary habits," said UC Riverside entomologist Doug Yanega.

Honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees have guts that are colonized by the same five core microbes. "Unlike humans, whose guts change with every meal, most bee species have retained these same bacteria over roughly 80 million years of evolution," said Jessica Maccaro, a UCR entomology doctoral student.

Given their radical change in food choice, a team of UCR scientists wondered whether the vulture bees' gut bacteria differed from those of a typical vegetarian bee. They differed quite dramatically, according to a study the team published today in the American Society of Microbiologists' journal mBio.

Journal Reference:
Laura L. Figueroa, Jessica J. Maccaro, Erin Krichilsky, et al. Why Did the Bee Eat the Chicken? Symbiont Gain, Loss, and Retention in the Vulture Bee Microbiome, mBio [open] (DOI: 10.1128/mBio.02317-21)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-it-enforceable-outside-the-USA? dept.

Apple sues company known for hacking iPhones on behalf of governments

Apple on Tuesday sued NSO Group, an Israeli firm that sells software to government agencies and law enforcement that enables them to hack iPhones and read the data on them, including messages and other communications:

Earlier this year, Amnesty International said it discovered recent-model iPhones belonging to journalists and human rights lawyers that had been infected with NSO Group malware called Pegasus.

Apple is seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using Apple software, services, or devices. It's also seeking damages over $75,000.

[...] NSO Group software permits "attacks, including from sovereign governments that pay hundreds of millions of dollars to target and attack a tiny fraction of users with information of particular interest to NSO's customers," Apple said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, saying that it is not "ordinary consumer malware."

Also at The Guardian.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Andromeda-Strain dept.

Space Biosecurity: Scientists Warn that Alien Organisms on Earth May Become a Reality Stranger than Fiction:

Scientists warn, without good biosecurity measures 'alien organisms' on Earth may become a reality stranger than fiction.

Published in international journal BioSciences, a team of scientists, including Dr. Phill Cassey, Head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Adelaide, are calling for greater recognition of the biosecurity risks ahead of the space industry.

"In addition to government-led space missions, the arrival of private companies such as SpaceX has meant there are now more players in space exploration than ever before," said Associate Professor Cassey.

"We need to take action now to mitigate those risks."

Space biosecurity concerns itself with both the transfer of organisms from Earth to space (forward contamination) and vice-versa (backward contamination). While the research points out that at present the risk of alien organisms surviving the journey is low, it's not impossible.

Dr. Cassey said: "Risks that have low probability of occurrence, but have the potential for extreme consequences, are at the heart of biosecurity management. Because when things go wrong, they go really wrong."

Journal Reference:
Anthony Ricciardi, Phillip Cassey, Stefan Leuko, et al. Planetary Biosecurity: Applying Invasion Science to Prevent Biological Contamination from Space Travel, BioScience (DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biab115)


Original Submission