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On my linux machines, I run a virus scanner . . .

  • regularly
  • when I remember to enable it
  • only when I want to manually check files
  • only on my work computers
  • never
  • I don't have any linux machines, you insensitive clod!

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:3 | Votes:43

posted by martyb on Friday December 24 2021, @10:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the bumnles-bounce! dept.

[2021-12-24 23:01:40 UTC UPDATE] Yay! mechanicjay heard my plea, and responded! "slash died and left a stale pid behind. Cleaned it up, started slash, all good now." Thank-you! Thank-you! Thank-you! Original post follows.


It has been brought to my attention that the story comment counts have not been updating.

I'm seeing the same symptoms that I did on 2021-12-19 when this last happened. So, I tried to restart things armed with this new information. The system insisted on ignoring my efforts. :(

I've requested help from other, more-knowledgeable staff rather than following the time-honored tradition of not asking for help until everyone else has has a chance to gum up the works!

Summary: New stories ARE going out on schedule. Further, comment AND moderations ARE being accepted (and tallied) as expected. In short, it seems that everything *else* is working as expected (whew!). I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while things get sorted out. --martyb/Bytram

P.S. I can assure you that eggnog had no part in the current situation!

posted by janrinok on Friday December 24 2021, @03:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the eying-lower-cost-eyes dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

GEOST, a small company based in Tucson, Arizona, won two U.S. Space Force contracts worth $38 million to develop an optical sensor payload that could be hosted on government or commercial satellites to scan the geostationary belt more than 22,000 miles above Earth.

The contracts awarded to the company — $6 million in November 2020 and $32 million in December 2021 — include the design and development of the sensor, ground infrastructure, technical support and integration with the host platform and launch vehicle. But the actual payload is less than $10 million, a key price point that the Space Force believes would make it possible to deploy these in large numbers, said GEOST vice president and general manager Joshua Hartman.

Hartman said the company’s payload will be ready to launch in 2023. The Space Force has not yet identified a host satellite but the whole idea behind this program is to build sensors that could go on almost any U.S. or allied government, or commercial satellite to provide space domain awareness.

The Space Force wants to proliferate these sensors across geostationary orbit, so the $10 million target price is key to make that a reality, said Hartman. 

The Space Systems Command in an Oct. 21 solicitation said the Space Force is considering buying a large number of “space domain awareness sensors to augment current and planned systems.” Multiple sensors would be needed to get “frequent revisits of significant portions of the GEO belt.”


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday December 24 2021, @10:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-good-sound-investment dept.

Yes, ANOTHER wonderful item that will "improve" your digital sound!

$2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles From Cash:

Ever wondered if you needed an ethernet switch that has built-in power conditioning for the sake of better audio fidelity? You probably haven't, but Synergistic Research has. The company developed a wild ethernet switch that is designed to smooth out electric signals inside the switch in order to gain higher audio quality from audio streaming services, but the price point is dubious, to say the least.

The Ethernet Switch UEF costs a substantial $2,595, which will make it appealing to only the most diehard of audiophiles.

[...] The unit is equipped with Active EM Cell technology which claims to close the gap between digital audio quality and good old-fashioned analog tapes and LPs. To "further improve audio quality," the switch is constructed from a solid billet of aluminum and uses carbon fiber to eliminate chassis vibrations from making their way into the switch (which the company claims could interfere with the digital signal). There's even an optional SR Ground Block that serves as a ground for the switch.

It is important to understand that a bit value zero or one with low distortion conveys better quality information than a zero or one that is somewhat distorted but completely readable.

Previously:
Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday December 24 2021, @05:45AM   Printer-friendly

Semiconductors reach the quantum world:

Our current electronic infrastructure is based primarily on semiconductors. This class of materials emerged around the middle of the 20th century and has been improving ever since. Currently, the most important challenges in semiconductor electronics include further improvements that would increase the bandwidth of data transmission, energy efficiency and information security. Exploiting quantum effects is likely to be a breakthrough.

Quantum effects that can occur in superconducting materials are particularly worthy of consideration. Superconductors are materials in which the electrical resistance disappears when they are cooled below a certain temperature. The fact that quantum effects in superconductors can be utilised has already been demonstrated in first quantum computers.

To find possible successors for today's semiconductor electronics, some researchers -- including a group at Cornell University -- are investigating so-called heterojunctions, i.e. structures made of two different types of materials. More specifically, they are looking at layered systems of superconducting and semiconducting materials. "It has been known for some time that you have to select materials with very similar crystal structures for this, so that there is no tension in the crystal lattice at the contact surface," explains John Wright, who produced the heterojunctions for the new study at Cornell University.

Two suitable materials in this respect are the superconductor niobium nitride (NbN) and the semiconductor gallium nitride (GaN). The latter already plays an important role in semiconductor electronics and is therefore well researched. Until now, however, it was unclear exactly how the electrons behave at the contact interface of these two materials -- and whether it is possible that the electrons from the semiconductor interfere with the superconductivity and thus obliterate the quantum effects.

"When I came across the research of the group at Cornell, I knew: here at PSI we can find the answer to this fundamental question with our spectroscopic methods at the ADRESS beamline," explains Vladimir Strocov, researcher at the Synchrotron Light Source SLS at PSI.

This is how the two groups came to collaborate. In their experiments, they eventually found that the electrons in both materials "keep to themselves." No unwanted interaction that could potentially spoil the quantum effects takes place.

Journal Reference:
Momentum-resolved electronic structure and band offsets in an epitaxial NbN/GaN superconductor/semiconductor heterojunction, Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi5833)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday December 24 2021, @01:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the fun-for-the-holler-daze dept.

Lisp in Conway's Game of Life

Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life.

[...] The Lisp interpreter, written in C, is compiled to an assembly language for a CPU architecture implemented in the Game of Life, which is a modification of the computer used in the Quest For Tetris (QFT) project. The compilation is done using an extended version of ELVM (the Esoteric Language Virtual Machine). The Game of Life backend for ELVM was implemented by myself.

Generating a short enough Lisp interpreter assembly code and a Game of Life pattern that runs in a reasonable amount of time required a lot of effort.

Having an infinite size Game of Life grid [...] reduces the chances that any pattern will wrap around to the other side of the grid.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 23 2021, @10:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the successive-refinements-add-up dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It isn’t an uncommon science fiction trope for our hero to be in a situation where there is no technology. Maybe she’s back in the past or on a faraway planet. The Professor from Gilligan’s Island comes to mind, too. I’d bet the average Hacakday reader could do pretty well in that kind of situation, but there’s one thing that’s often overlooked: materials. Sure, you can build a radio. But can you make wire? Or metal plates for a capacitor? Or a speaker? We tend to overlook how many abstractions we use when we build. Even turning trees into lumber isn’t a totally obvious process.

People are by their very nature always looking for ways to use the things around them. Even 300,000 years ago, people would find rocks and use them as tools. It wasn’t long before they found that some rocks could shape other rocks to form useful shapes like axes. But the age of engineered materials is much younger. Whether clay, metal, glass, or more obviously plastics, these materials are significantly more useful than rocks tied to sticks, but making them in the first place is an engineering story all on its own.

The first steps were using wood from trees, including bark and unusual wood like cork, and other plant materials. They used mud, too, and mudworking evolved into ceramics about 26,000 years ago. Pottery was high science in its day. The Corded Ware culture, who spread across Europe around 5,000 years ago, created pottery that  they would decorate with rope while it was still wet. When fired, the rope would burn away and leave its imprint in the finished piece. Bone was another early structural element. People today sometimes mimic prehistoric pottery techniques, like the stone-age tech video below. [link]

When the first people stumbled into copper in its elemental form, around 7,500 years ago, people started to shape it into useful implements. About 500 years later, there is evidence people learned to melt copper to help with the shaping process. It would be another 1,000 years before craftsmen started melting copper and casting it. Copper is soft on its own, but by experimentation or accident someone figured out that adding arsenic to copper would make bronze, which was much harder. Even a half percent of arsenic can make a bronze that is 10% harder and stronger than elemental copper. Bump that two percent and the results are even better.  Later bronze formulae would employ tin in place of the arsenic, but tin would have to wait for more advanced metallurgy. It took over, though, not because it is much better from a metallurgy standpoint, but smelting and casting arsenic is bad for your health.

[Editor's Note: The full story goes on to explain how and why we made various materials through history and nowadays too.]


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 23 2021, @07:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-so-sweet! dept.

For some Greenlanders, eating sugar is healthy:

"Adult Greenlanders with the genetic variation have lower BMI, weight, fat percentage, cholesterol levels and are generally significantly healthier. They have less belly fat and might find it easier to get a six pack. It is amazing and surprising that a genetic variation has such a profoundly beneficial effect," says University of Copenhagen biology professor Anders Albrechtsen.

Along with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, the University of Southern Denmark and a number of research institutions and public agencies in Greenland, Professor Albrechtsen analysed data from 6,551 adult Greenlanders and conducted experiments on mice.

The results demonstrate that carriers of the genetic variation have what is known as sucrase-isomaltase deficiency, meaning that they have a peculiar way of metabolizing sugar in the intestine. Simply put, they do not absorb ordinary sugar in the bloodstream the way people without the genetic variation do. Instead, sugar heads directly into their intestine.

"Here, gut bacteria convert the sugar into a short-chain fatty acid called acetate, which in previous studies has been shown to reduce appetite, increase metabolism and boost the immune system. That is most likely the mechanism happening here," explains Mette K. Andersen, an assistant professor at the Center for Metabolism Research at the University of Copenhagen and first author of the study.

The reason for this widespread genetic variation among Greenlanders is due to a diet that has stood out from that of the rest of the world for millennia.

[...] While the variation has clear health benefits for adult Greenlanders, it is problematic for their children.

"Younger carriers of the variation experience negative consequences due to their different type of sugar absorption. For them, consuming sugar causes diarrhea, abdominal pain and bloating. Our guess is that as they age, their gut bacteria gradually get used to sugar and learn how to convert it into energy," explains Torben Hansen, a doctor and professor at the University of Copenhagen's Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research.

Journal Reference:
Mette K. Andersen, Line Skotte, Emil Jørsboe,et al. Loss of sucrase-isomaltase function increases acetate levels and improves metabolic health in Greenlandic cohorts. Gastroenterology, 2021; DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2021.12.236


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 23 2021, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-crap! dept.

People with IBD have more microplastics in their feces:

The prevalence of IBD [(Inflammatory bowel disease)], which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is rising globally. [...] Microplastics can cause intestinal inflammation, gut microbiome disturbances and other problems in animal models, so Faming Zhang, Yan Zhang and colleagues wondered if they could also contribute to IBD. As a first step toward finding out, the researchers wanted to compare the levels of microplastics in feces from healthy subjects and people with different severities of IBD.

[...] The microplastics had similar shapes (mostly sheets and fibers) in the two groups, but the IBD feces had more small (less than 50 µm) particles. The two most common types of plastic in both groups were polyethylene terephthalate (PET; used in bottles and food containers) and polyamide (PA; found in food packaging and textiles). People with more severe IBD symptoms tended to have higher levels of fecal microplastics. Through a questionnaire, the researchers found that people in both groups who drank bottled water, ate takeaway food and were often exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces. These results suggest that people with IBD may be exposed to more microplastics in their gastrointestinal tract. However, it's still unclear whether this exposure could cause or contribute to IBD, or whether people with IBD accumulate more fecal microplastics as a result of their disease, the researcher say.

Journal Reference:
Zehua Yan, Yafei Liu, Ting Zhang, et al. Analysis of Microplastics in Human Feces Reveals a Correlation between Fecal Microplastics and Inflammatory Bowel Disease Status, Environmental Science & Technology (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.1c03924)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday December 23 2021, @01:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-vibrations-♩♫♩ dept.

The Matterhorn appears as an immovable, massive mountain that has towered over the landscape near Zermatt for thousands of years. A study now shows that this impression is wrong. An international research team has proven that the Matterhorn is instead constantly in motion, swaying gently back and forth about once every two seconds. This subtle vibration with normally imperceptible amplitudes is stimulated by seismic energy in the Earth originating from the world's oceans, earthquakes, as well as human activity.

Every object vibrates at certain frequencies when excited, like a tuning fork or the strings of a guitar. These so-called natural frequencies depend primarily on the geometry of the object and its material properties. The phenomenon is also observed in bridges, high-rise buildings, and now even mountains.

[...] For the study, the scientists installed several seismometers on the Matterhorn, including one directly on the summit at 4,470 meters above sea level and another in the Solvay bivouac, an emergency shelter on the northeast ridge, better known as Hörnligrat. Another measuring station at the foot of the mountain served as a reference. Extensive past experience from Jan Beutel (ETH Zurich / University of Innsbruck) and Samuel Weber installing equipment for measuring rock movements in high mountains made deployment of the measurement network possible. The data are automatically transmitted to the Swiss Seismological Service.

The seismometers recorded all movements of the mountain at high resolution, from which the team could derive the frequency and direction of resonance. The measurements show that the Matterhorn oscillates roughly in a north-south direction at a frequency of 0.42 Hertz, and in an east-west direction at a second, similar frequency (see animation). In turn, by speeding up these ambient vibration measurements 80 times, the team was able to make the vibration landscape of the Matterhorn audible to the human ear, translating the resonant frequencies into audible tones.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday December 23 2021, @11:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the Bingo-was-almost-it's-name-o dept.

Steve Ballmer's "parting gift" as Microsoft CEO: Trying to name Cortana "Bingo":

Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant is clearly winding down—the feature is still available in the desktop versions of Windows, but it's no longer included in a default install of Windows 11, and the mobile app was discontinued back in March.

But the future once looked bright for the chipper virtual assistant, according to former Microsoft Product Manager Sandeep Paruchuri [...]

The Cortana feature was only officially called "Cortana" after the codename leaked during development—another early suggestion was "Alyx," and then-CEO Steve Ballmer tried to name it "Bingo" as a "parting gift" before handing the reins to current CEO Satya Nadella. (Ballmer had "poor product taste," says Paruchuri, in what we in the tech biz call "an understatement.") Cortana's developers were inspired by Siri but wanted their voice assistant to be more proactive, making suggestions based on context and user data rather than merely responding to direct input. The team also wanted Cortana to have more of a personality than Siri or Google Now, which was helped along by Cortana's Halo voice actor, Jen Taylor.

Paruchuri ultimately blames a loss of focus and "dilution" for Cortana's decline.

Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday December 23 2021, @08:25AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Tesla's infotainment screen has offered video games for years, but in late 2020, the company enabled them while driving.

The probe covers around 580,000 Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y EVs with this Passenger Play function. Tesla had previously added various video games to its center touchscreen but only made them playable when the vehicle was in Park. The ability to play games while on the move reportedly changed sometime in December, 2020, but it's unclear why the change was made.

Passenger Play does include a so-called "lawyer screen" with an interstitial warning that states "playing while the car is in motion is only for passengers." The screen requires a confirmation press to have access to the games, but the on-screen button can be pressed by passenger or driver.

The probe comes in the wake of a Dec. 8 story in the New York Times that investigated the concern. NHTSA reportedly engaged Tesla as soon as the following day.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 23 2021, @05:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Yes-we-have-no-(sick)-bananas dept.

New grafting technique could combat the disease threatening Cavendish bananas:

Scientists have found a novel way to combine two species of grass-like plant including banana, rice and wheat, using embryonic tissue from their seeds. The technique allows beneficial characteristics, such as disease resistance or stress tolerance, to be added to the plants.

Grafting is the technique of joining the shoot of one plant with the root of another, so they continue to grow together as one. Until now it was thought impossible to graft grass-like plants in the group known as monocotyledons because they lack a specific tissue type, called the vascular cambium, in their stem.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that root and shoot tissues taken from the seeds of monocotyledonous grasses—representing their earliest embryonic stages—fuse efficiently. Their results are published today in the journal Nature.

An estimated 60,000 plants are monocotyledons; many are crops that are cultivated at enormous scale, for example rice, wheat and barley.

The finding has implications for the control of serious soil-borne pathogens including Panama Disease, or 'Tropical Race 4', which has been destroying banana plantations for over 30 years. A recent acceleration in the spread of this disease has prompted fears of global banana shortages.

"We've achieved something that everyone said was impossible. Grafting embryonic tissue holds real potential across a range of grass-like species. We found that even distantly related species, separated by deep evolutionary time, are graft compatible," said Professor Julian Hibberd in the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Sciences, senior author of the report.

The technique allows monocotyledons of the same species, and of two different species, to be grafted effectively. Grafting genetically different root and shoot tissues can result in a plant with new traits—ranging from dwarf shoots, to pest and disease resistance.

The scientists found that the technique was effective in a range of monocotyledonous crop plants including pineapple, banana, onion, tequila agave and date palm. This was confirmed through various tests, including the injection of fluorescent dye into the plant roots—from where it was seen to move up the plant and across the graft junction.

Journal Reference:
Gregory Reeves, Anoop Tripathi, Pallavi Singh, et al. Monocotyledonous plants graft at the embryonic root–shoot interface, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04247-y)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 23 2021, @02:45AM   Printer-friendly

Critical Apache HTTPD Server Bugs Could Lead to RCE, DoS:

Don't duck at the latest mention of Apache: Two critical bugs in its HTTP web server – HTTPD – need to be patched pronto, lest they lead to attackers triggering denial of service (DoS) or bypassing your security policies.

Apache, the open-source software foundation behind the Log4J logging library that's been making for so many Log4Shell headlines, on Monday put out an update to fix the two bugs in HTTPD, which is a web server that's right up there with Log4j in its ubiquity.

Both vulnerabilities are found in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.51 and earlier.

[...] In a Tuesday writeup of the two CVEs, Sophos principal security researcher Paul Ducklin said that the two bugs could leave servers at risk of some serious hurt.

"These bugs might not be exposed in your configuration, because they are part of optional run-time modules that you might not actually be using," Ducklin noted. "But if you are using these modules, whether you realize it or not, you could be at risk of server crashes, data leakage or even remote code execution."

On Monday, Apache published these details for the two CVEs in its changelog:

  • CVE-2021-44790: Possible buffer overflow when parsing a carefully crafted request in the mod_lua multipart parser of Apache HTTP Server 2.4.51 and earlier. Apache said that its HTTPD team hasn't seen an exploit, but "it might be possible to craft one."
  • CVE-2021-44224: Possible NULL dereference or Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) in forward proxy configurations, likewise in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.51 and earlier.

On Tuesday, CERT-FR sent out an alert about the issue.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 22 2021, @11:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the Jumpin'-Jack-Flash? dept.

From the oilfield to the lab: How a special microbe turns oil into gases:

Microorganisms can convert oil into natural gas, i.e. methane. Until recently, it was thought that this conversion was only possible through the cooperation of different organisms. In 2019, Rafael Laso-Pérez and Gunter Wegener from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology suggested that a special archaeon can do this all by itself, as indicated by their genome analyses. Now, in collaboration with a team from China, the researchers have succeeded in cultivating this microbe in the laboratory. This enabled them to describe exactly how the microbe achieves the transformation. They also discovered that it prefers to eat rather bulky chunks of food.

Underground oil deposits on land and in the sea are home to microorganisms that use the oil as a source of energy and food, converting it into methane. Until recently, it was thought that this conversion was only possible in a complicated teamwork between different organisms: certain bacteria and usually two archaeal partners. Now the researchers have managed to cultivate an archaeon called Methanoliparia from a settling tank of an oil production facility that handles this complex reaction all by itself.

[...] This archaeon breaks down oil into methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). "Methanoliparia is a kind of hybrid creature that combines the properties of an oil degrader with those of a methanogen, i.e. a methane producer," explains study author Gunter Wegener from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the MARUM—Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

Now that the researchers have succeeded in cultivating these microorganisms in the laboratory, they were able to investigate the underlying processes in detail. They discovered that its genetic make-up gives Methanoliparia unique capabilities. "In its genes it carries the blueprints for enzymes that can activate and decompose various hydrocarbons. In addition, it also has the complete gear kit of a methane producer," says Wegener.

Journal Reference:
Zhuo Zhou, Cui-jing Zhang, Peng-fei Liu, et al. Non-syntrophic methanogenic hydrocarbon degradation by an archaeal species, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04235-2)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 22 2021, @09:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the uncle-SARS-drone-delivery dept.

Series of preclinical studies supports the Army's pan-coronavirus vaccine development strategy:

A series of recently published preclinical study results show that the Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle (SpFN) COVID-19 vaccine developed by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) not only elicits a potent immune response but may also provide broad protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern as well as other coronaviruses.

Scientists in WRAIR's Emerging Infectious Diseases Branch (EIDB) developed the SpFN nanoparticle vaccine, based on a ferritin platform, as part of a forward-thinking "pan-SARS" strategy that aims to address the current pandemic and acts as a first line of defense against variants of concern and similar viruses that could emerge in the future.

[...] SpFN entered Phase 1 human trials in April 2021. Early analyses, expected to conclude this month, will provide insights into whether SpFN's potency and breadth, as demonstrated in preclinical trials, will carry over into humans. The data will also allow researchers to compare SpFN's immune profile to that of other COVID-19 vaccines already authorized for emergency use.

Journal Reference:
M. Gordon Joyce, Hannah A. D. King, Ines Elakhal-Naouar, et al. A SARS-CoV-2 ferritin nanoparticle vaccine elicits protective immune responses in nonhuman primates, Science Translational Medicine (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abi5735


Original Submission