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upstart writes:

Perseverance Mars rover makes surprising discoveries:

Scientists with NASA's Perseverance Mars rover mission have discovered that the bedrock their six-wheeled explorer has been driving on since landing in February likely formed from red-hot magma. The discovery has implications for understanding and accurately dating critical events in the history of Jezero Crater—as well as the rest of the planet.

[...] These and other findings were presented today during a news briefing at the American Geophysical Union fall science meeting in New Orleans.

Even before Perseverance touched down on Mars, the mission's science team had wondered about the origin of the rocks in the area. Were they sedimentary—the compressed accumulation of mineral particles possibly carried to the location by an ancient river system? Or where they igneous, possibly born in lava flows rising to the surface from a now long-extinct Martian volcano?

"I was beginning to despair we would never find the answer," said Perseverance Project Scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena. "But then our PIXL instrument got a good look at the abraded patch of a rock from the area nicknamed "South Séítah," and it all became clear: The crystals within the rock provided the smoking gun."

takyon writes:

ExoMars discovers hidden water in Mars' Grand Canyon

The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has spotted significant amounts of water at the heart of Mars' dramatic canyon system, Valles Marineris.

The water, which is hidden beneath Mars' surface, was found by the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)'s FREND instrument, which is mapping the hydrogen – a measure of water content – in the uppermost metre of Mars' soil.

While water is known to exist on Mars, most is found in the planet's cold polar regions as ice. Water ice is not found exposed at the surface near the equator, as temperatures here are not cold enough for exposed water ice to be stable.

[...] "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water."

The water-rich area is about the size of the Netherlands and overlaps with the deep valleys of Candor Chaos, part of the canyon system considered promising in our hunt for water on Mars.

The evidence for unusually high hydrogen abundances in the central part of Valles Marineris on Mars
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103521004528
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114805

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Startup Showcases 7 bits-per-cell Flash Storage with 10 Year Retention

Floadia Corp., a Series C startup from Japan, issued a press release this week to state that it has developed st­­orage technology capable of seven bits-per-cell (7bpc). Still in the prototype stage, this 7bpc flash chip, likely in a WORM [(Write Once Read Many)] scenario, has an effective 10-year retention time for the data at 150C. The company says that a standard modern memory cell with this level of control would only be able to [retain] the data for around 100 seconds, and so the secret in the design is to do with a new type of flash cell they have developed.

The SONOS cell uses a distributed charge trap design relying on a Silicon-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon layout, and the company points to an effective silicon nitride film in the middle where the charges are trapped to allow for high retention. In simple voltage program and erase cycles, the company showcases 100k+ cycles with a very low voltage drift. The oxide-nitride-oxide layers rely on SiO2 and Si3N4, the latter of which is claimed to be easy to manufacture. This allows a non-volatile SONOS cell to be used in NV-SRAM or embedded designs, such as microcontrollers.

It's actually that last point which means we're a long time from seeing this in modern NAND flash. Floadia is currently partnering with companies like Toshiba to implement the SONOS cell in a variety of microcontrollers, rather than large NAND flash deployments, at the 40nm process node as embedded flash IP with compute-in-memory properties. Those aren't at 7 bits-per-cell yet, to the effect that the company is promoting that two cells can store up to 8-bits of network weights for machine learning inference – when we get to 8 bits-per-cell, then it might be more applicable. The 10-year retention of the cell data is where it gets interesting, as embedded platforms will use algorithms with fixed weights over the lifetime of the product, except for the rare update perhaps. Even with increased longevity, Floadia doesn't go into detail regarding cyclability at 7bpc at this time.

Press release.

Related: Is Octa-Level Cell (OLC) NAND Possible? We May Find Out This Year

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Size doesn't matter: Rock composition determines how deadly a meteorite impact is: The minerology of the rocks that a meteorite hits, rather than the size of the impact, determines how deadly an impact it will have:

A multidisciplinary research team from the University of Liverpool and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables, Tenerife with expertise in palaeontology, asteroid stratigraphy, mineralogy, cloud microphysics and climate modelling, sought to explore why some meteorites have caused mass extinctions, for example the K/Pg Chixulclub impact that killed off dinosaurs, yet many which are larger in size have not.

They analysed 44 impacts over the past 600 million years using a new method: assessing the mineral content of the dust ejected into the atmosphere upon impact.

Their findings, published in the Journal of the Geological Society of London, reveal that meteorites that hit rocks rich in potassium feldspar (a common and rather benign mineral) always correspond with a mass extinction episode, irrespective of size.

Potassium feldspar is non-toxic. However, it is a powerful ice-nucleating mineral aerosol that strongly affects cloud dynamics, which makes them let through more solar radiation. This in turn warms up the planet and changes the climate. The atmosphere also becomes more sensitive to warming from greenhouse gas emissions, such as large volcanic eruptions.

[...] "Using this new method for assessing the mineral content of the meteorite ejecta blankets, we show that every time a meteorite, big or small, hits rocks rich in potassium feldspar it correlates with a mass extinction event.

Journal Reference:
M.J. Pankhurst, C.J. Stevenson, B.C. Coldwell. Meteorites that produce K-feldspar-rich ejecta blankets correspond to mass extinctions. Journal of the Geological Society, 2021; jgs2021-055 DOI: 10.1144/jgs2021-055

Original Submission

oaklandwatch writes:

It's a newspaper puzzle that's like Sudoku, except it's impossible...  They call it "The Challenger" puzzle — but when the newspaper leaves out a crucial instruction, you can end up searching forever for a unique solution which doesn't exist!

"If you're thinking 'This could be a 9 or an 8....' — you're right!" complains Lou Cabron.  "Everyone's a winner today! Just start scribbling in numbers! And you'd be a fool to try to keep narrowing them down by, say, using your math and logic skills.  A fool like me..."   (A fool who once solved a Sudoku puzzle entirely in his head.)  But two hours of frustration later — and one night of bad dreams — he's stumbled onto the web page of Dr. Robert J. Lopez, an emeritus math professor in Indiana, who's calculated that in fact Challenge puzzles can have up to 190 solutions... and in fact, there's more than one solution for more than 97 of them!

At the end of the day, it becomes an appreciation for the local newspaper, and the puzzles they run next to the funnies.  But with a friendly reminder "that they ought to honor and respect that love — by always providing the complete instructions."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SK Hynix to Manufacture 48 GiB and 96 GiB DDR5 Modules

Today SK Hynix is announcing the sampling of its next generation DDR5 memory. The headline is the commercialization of a new 24 gigabit die, offering 50% more capacity than the leading 16 gigabit dies currently used on high-capacity DDR5. Along with reportedly reducing power consumption by 25% by using SK Hynix's latest 1a nm process node and EUV technology, what fascinates me most is that we're going to get, for the first time in the PC space (to my knowledge), memory modules that are no longer powers of two.

For PC-based DDR memory, all the way back from DDR1 and prior, memory modules have been configured as a power of two in terms of storage. Whether that's 16 MiB to 256 MiB to 2 GiB to 32 GiB, I'm fairly certain that all of the memory modules that I've ever handled have been powers of two. The new announcement from SK Hynix showcases that the new 24 gigabit dies will allow the company to build DDR5 modules in capacities of 48 GiB and 96 GiB.

To be clear, the DDR5 official specification actually allows for capacities that are not direct powers of two. If we look to other types of memory, powers of two have been thrown out the window for a while, such as in smartphones. However PCs and Servers, as least the traditional ones, have followed the power of two mantra. One of the changes in memory design that is now driving regular modules to non-power of two capacities is that it is getting harder and harder to scale DRAM capacities. The time it takes to figure out the complexity of the technology to get a 2x improvement every time is too long, and memory vendors will start taking those intermediate steps to get product to market.

These are for server RDIMMs, at least for now.

Press release.

Related: SK Hynix Begins Production of 18 GB LPDDR5 Memory... for Smartphones
Samsung Developing 24Gb DDR5 ICs: 768GB DDR5 Modules Possible

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/atari-2600

In late 1975, sales of devices that made it possible for consumers to play Pong on home television sets were booming. At Atari Inc., which had first introduced Pong as an arcade game and had manufactured one of the most popular home versions of Pong, engineers began looking for the next arcade game to put in consumer hands, anticipating that people would grow tired of two paddles and a ball.

They saw Jet Fighter and Tank, but instead of designing a custom chip for each game, as was done for Pong, they planned a system that would play both games, four-player Pong if anyone was interested, and possibly a few other, as yet unknown games. The system was to be based on a microprocessor.

In a few months, Atari's designers in Grass Valley, Calif., had made a working prototype, and over the next year, designers from Grass Valley and from Sunnyvale, Calif., refined what was to be the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). It was released in 1977, and six years later ranks as one of the most successful microprocessor-based products ever built, with over 12 million sold at about $140 apiece[*].

[*] That would be about $640 in 2021.

How many soylentils had [have?] a 2600 (or similar) system?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel:

A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.

For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.

Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement.

[...] Inertial confinement fusion involves creating something like a tiny star. It starts with a capsule of fuel, consisting of deuterium and tritium – heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This fuel capsule is placed in a hollow gold chamber about the size of a pencil eraser called a hohlraum.

Then, 192 high-powered laser beams are blasted at the hohlraum, where they are converted into X-rays. These X-rays implode the fuel capsule, heating and compressing it to conditions comparable to those in the center of a star – temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit) and pressures greater than 100 billion Earth atmospheres – turning the fuel capsule into a tiny blob of plasma.

upstart writes:

Book Publishers Sue Maryland Over Law That Would Require Them To Offer 'Reasonable' Prices On Ebooks To Libraries:

For years now, we've been highlighting how book publishers are at war with libraries, and see ebooks and ebook pricing as a key lever in that war. With regular books, a library can just buy the book and lend it out and do what they want with it. But not ebooks. Because of a broken copyright law, publishers retain excess control over ebooks, and they lord that over libraries, arbitrarily raising prices to ridiculous levels, limiting how many times they can lend it out before they have to "repurchase" the ebook, and generally making it as difficult as possible for libraries to actually be able to offer ebooks.

This is because of a broken copyright system that gives publishers way more control over ebooks than traditional hardcopy books. And book publishers have spent the past decade abusing that power. In an ideal world, Congress would get its act together and fix copyright law and properly add first sale rights for digital goods like ebooks. But, without that, some states are trying to step in and fix things, including Maryland, which earlier this year passed a law that would require publishers to sell ebooks to libraries at "reasonable" rates.

With the law set to go into effect next year, helping more Maryland residents get access to ebooks in the midst of a still ongoing pandemic, the book publishers have continued their Grinch-like ways, and sued to block the law. The complaint says that this is an attempt by state law to route around federal copyright law, and since the 1976 Copyright Act, state copyright laws are pre-empted by federal law.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Kronos ransomware attack may cause weeks of HR solutions downtime:

Workforce management solutions provider Kronos has suffered a ransomware attack that will likely disrupt many of their cloud-based solutions for weeks.

[...] "As we previously communicated, late on Saturday, December 11, 2021, we became aware of unusual activity impacting UKG [(Ultimate Kronos Group)] solutions using Kronos Private Cloud," disclosed Bob Hughes, Executive Vice President for UKG.

"We took immediate action to investigate and mitigate the issue, and have determined that this is a ransomware incident affecting the Kronos Private Cloud—the portion of our business where UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling Solutions are deployed."

UKG solutions that are not using the Kronos Private Cloud are unaffected, including UKG Pro, UKG Ready, and UKG Dimensions.

[...] While not much else is known about the attack, this disruption of services comes at a terrible time for customers getting ready for holiday vacations, bonus payments, and a limited workforce.

An affected customer has told BleepingComputer that they will now have to go back to using spreadsheets and paper and pencil to cut checks and monitor timekeeping for the time being.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"The Google Earth of Biology" – Visually Stunning Tree of All Known Life Unveiled Online:

The OneZoom explorer – available at onezoom.org – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in to any species and explore its relationships with others, in a seamless visualisation on a single web page. The explorer also includes images of over 85,000 species, plus, where known, their vulnerability to extinction.

OneZoom was developed by Imperial College London biodiversity researcher Dr. James Rosindell and University of Oxford evolutionary biologist Dr. Yan Wong. In a paper published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Drs Wong and Rosindell present the result of over ten years of work, gradually creating what they regard as "the Google Earth of biology."

upstart writes:

What is a NFT - Non fungible token?. And if that doesn't help try this for a less headache-inducing explanation.

'Bored Ape' NFT worth $284,495 accidentally sells for just $2,844:

A distracted trader accidentally sold a non-fungible token (NFT) for a hundredth of its market price.

NFTs are the latest cryptocurrency phenomenon to go mainstream. In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 pieces of digital NFT art living on the ethereum (eth) blockchain. On Saturday, the owner of such a piece of art accidentally sold his NFT for a fraction of what it was worth.

Max, who goes by the username maxnaut, said the mistake happened after "a lapse of concentration" when he accidentally listed the NFT for 0.75 eth ($2,844) instead of 75 eth ($284,495).

[...] Virtual art has been created, and talked about, for years. But now, thanks to endorsement from celebrities as diverse as Elon Musk, Lindsay Lohan and Steve Aoki, online buzz in art and cryptocurrency circles, and, perhaps most importantly, blockchain technology, it has not only entered the mainstream -- it is generating huge sums of money for digital artists and online collectors.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Personality Traits Predict Performance Differently Across Different Jobs:

"Although past studies made statements about the effects of personality traits on job performance in general, the specifics of these relationships really depend on the job," said Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. "More interesting findings exist when we take a deeper look at performance within the different jobs."

Wilmot and Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, combined multiple meta-analyses of the five big personality traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and neuroticism — and examined their effect on job performance. Meta-analysis is a process used to systematically merge multiple independent findings using statistical methods to calculate an overall effect.

The researchers indexed these personality trait relationships across nine major occupational groups — clerical, customer service, healthcare, law enforcement, management, military, professional, sales, and skilled/semiskilled. They accounted for job complexity and what occupational experts rate as the relevance of these personality traits to job requirements.

Overall, Wilmot and Ones found that relationships between personality traits and performance varied greatly across the nine major occupational groups. The main source of these differences pertained to occupational complexity.

upstart writes:

When the brain switches from hearing to listening:

It is intuitively clear to us that there is a difference between passive hearing and active listening. [...] Neuroscientists Professor Tania Rinaldi Barkat and Dr. Gioia De Franceschi from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel have provided an accurate account of what happens in this process in the journal Cell Reports.

For their study, the researchers examined the activity of neurons in four different areas in the brains of mice known to be involved in increasingly complex sound processing. During the experiment, the animals were either passively hearing the sounds played to them, or actively listening to them to receive a reward for detecting the sounds.

[...] It was shown that the majority of neurons changed their activity when switching between hearing and listening. "But this doesn't mean that all neurons behaved the same way," explains De Franceschi. "We actually found ten distinct and specific types of activity change."

While most of the neurons showed a change that was probably related to varying levels of attention, some of them also showed patterns of activity that were related to the arousal level of the mice, their movement, the availability of a reward, or a combination of these factors.

[...] "At the beginning of our study, we suspected that these were the areas particularly affected by attention to sounds," said Barkat. "Surprisingly, however, this wasn't the case." Attention also alters activity in brain areas previously thought to perform only basic forms of sound processing.

Journal Reference:
Gioia De Franceschi, Tania Rinaldi Barkat. Task-induced modulations of neuronal activity along the auditory pathway. Cell Reports, 2021; 37 (11): 110115 (DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.110115)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Debilitating human parasite transmitted via dogs eating fish:

Guinea worm disease is usually caught by drinking water containing water fleas that carry the parasite larvae.

The worms mate and grow inside the body, and after 10-14 months the one-metre-long [~40 inch] adult worm emerges, usually from the arms or legs, to shed its larvae back into water.

[...] Eradication programmes have cut human cases of Guinea worm from millions a year in the 1980s to just 27 in 2020.

[...] Targeted surveillance showed that in 2020, 93% of Guinea worms detected worldwide were in dogs in Chad, in central Africa.

Research by the University of Exeter, published today in Current Biology, has revealed a new pathway for transmission – by dogs eating fish that carry the parasite larvae. This means dogs maintain the parasite's life-cycle and humans can still catch the disease.

[The researchers] tracked hundreds of dogs with satellite tags to analyse movements, and revealed dog diets throughout the year using forensic stable isotope analysis of dog whiskers.

Much of the fish eaten by the dogs – usually guts or smaller fish – was discarded by humans fishing on the river and its lagoons.

Professor Robbie McDonald, of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, who led the study said: "Dogs are now the key impediment to eradicating this dreadful human disease.

Journal Reference:
Cecily E.D. Goodwin, Monique Léchenne, Jared K. Wilson-Aggarwal, et al. Seasonal fishery facilitates a novel transmission pathway in an emerging animal reservoir of Guinea worm. Current Biology, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.11.050

Original Submission