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upstart writes:

These fish work together by the hundreds of thousands to make waves:

"At first we didn't quite understand what the fish were actually doing," said David Bierbach (@CollectiveBRL), co-first author along with Carolina Doran and Juliane Lukas, also at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence. "Once we realized that these are waves, we were wondering what their function might be."

[...] They decided to investigate the anti-predator benefits of the animals' wave action. Their studies confirmed that the fish engaged in surface waves that were highly conspicuous, repetitive, and rhythmic. Experimentally induced fish waves also doubled the time birds waited until their next attack to substantially reduce their attack frequency.

For one of their bird predators, capture probability, too, decreased with wave number. Birds also switched perches in response to wave displays more often than in control treatments, suggesting that they'd decided to direct their attacks elsewhere.

Taken together, the findings support an anti-predator function of fish waves. The findings are the first to show that a collective behavior is causally responsible for reducing an animal's predation risk. As such, the researchers say that this discovery has important implications for the study of collective behavior in animals more broadly.

[...] It's clear that the fish's waving reduces birds' chances of carrying out a successful attack on sulphur mollies. What's not yet clear is exactly why that is. Do the birds get confused? Do the waves tell them they've been noticed and are less likely to succeed in capturing their prey as a result?

Journal Reference:
Carolina Doran, David Bierbach, Juliane Lukas,et al. Fish waves as emergent collective antipredator behavior. Current Biology, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.11.068

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"Doomsday Glacier" Threat: Rapid Retreat of Antarctica's Riskiest Glacier:

Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier, is retreating rapidly as a warming ocean slowly erases its ice from below, leading to faster flow, more fracturing, and a threat of collapse, according to an international team of scientists. The glacier is the size of Florida or Britain and currently contributes four percent of annual global sea level rise. If it does collapse, global sea levels would rise by several feet—putting millions of people living in coastal cities in danger zones for extreme flooding.

"Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world," said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). "It's doubled its outflow speed within the last 30 years, and the glacier in its entirety holds enough water to raise sea level by over two feet. And it could lead to even more sea-level rise, up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it."

Scambos is the U.S. lead coordinator for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC): a team of nearly 100 scientists funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.K. Natural Environment Research Council dedicated to studying the vulnerable glacier. The five-year collaboration is aimed at collecting instrument data throughout the glacier and the adjacent ocean, and modeling ice flow and the future of the ice sheet. Their work has revealed major changes in the ice, the surrounding water, and the area where it floats off the bedrock below.

takyon writes:

Russian-Made Elbrus CPUs Fail Trials, 'A Completely Unacceptable Platform'

SberTech, a technology arm of Sber, Russia's biggest bank, has evaluated the Russian-made MCST Elbrus-8C processors in multiple workloads, but the results were utterly disappointing and the processors failed the test. The testers cited "Insufficient memory, slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all" as key reasons for the failure. However, there is hope, according to SberTech engineers.

[...] "The Elbrus-8C server is very weak compared to Intel Xeon 'Cascade Lake'," said Anton Zhbankov, a representative for SberTech, said at the Elbrus Partner Day conference (via ServerNews.ru) earlier this month. "Insufficient memory [256MB], slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all."

[...] In fact, SberTech's evaluation was the first in-depth testing of the Elbrus-8C platform in a banking application. The evaluators compared dual- and quad-socket Elbrus-8C machines (16 - 32 cores per box) to a dual-processor server based on Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 processor that the company currently uses. SberTech could not test the more powerful Elbrus-8CB as it is still not available despite being formally introduced.

[...] "One of the surprising things about the Elbrus-8C server was that it is a real product," said Zhbankov. "It was a real server that we were given. [...] It is an actual product that has its disadvantages, loads of disadvantages, but we can work with them."

[...] [While] SberTech's engineers expected the Elbrus-8C machine to perform much worse and be orders of magnitude slower than Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 machine from 2019, even a two to three times performance difference is significant enough for commercial companies not to deploy a platform since it makes no financial sense. "At the moment, Sberbank says no, we cannot deploy Elbrus machines into our ecosystem, but we are pleasantly surprised that it works at all," said Zhbankov.

The complaints were only partly about the CPU's relatively low performance, with problems concerning the build quality of the server(s) being highlighted.

1.3 GHz 8-core, 8-thread CPU does not beat 20-core, 40-thread Xeon. Surprise?

Previously: Programming Guide for Russia's "28nm" Elbrus-8CB CPU Published

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Stress Ball Morphogenesis: Humble Lizards Offer Surprising Approach to Engineering Artificial Lungs:

A new study from Princeton University shows how the brown anole lizard solves one of nature's most complex problems — breathing — with ultimate simplicity. Whereas human lungs develop over months and years into baroque tree-like structures, the anole lung develops in just a few days into crude lobes covered with bulbous protuberances. These gourd-like structures, while far less refined, allow the lizard to exchange oxygen for waste gases just as human lungs do. And because they grow quickly by leveraging simple mechanical processes, anole lungs provide new inspiration for engineers designing advanced biotechnologies.

"Our group is really interested in understanding lung development for engineering purposes," said Celeste Nelson, the Wilke Family Professor in Bioengineering and the study's principal investigator. "If we understand how lungs build themselves, then perhaps we can take advantage of the mechanisms mother nature uses to regenerate or engineer tissues."

While avian and mammalian lungs develop great complexity through endless branching and complicated biochemical signaling, the brown anole lung forms its relatively modest complexity through a mechanical process the authors likened to a mesh stress ball — the common toy found in desk drawers and DIY videos. The study, published on December 22, 2021, in the journal Science Advances, is the first ever to look at the development of a reptile lung, according to the researchers.

mrpg writes:

https://hakaimagazine.com/news/the-future-is-full-of-zombie-garbage/

In the early 2010s, garbage started falling out of the sand dunes in Lingreville, France. Beset by chronic coastal erosion, a long-forgotten landfill was spewing its rotten trove into the ocean. In 2016, a powerful storm dug into the site. The next year, cleanup crews stripped 14,000 cubic meters of sand mixed with waste—including asbestos—from the site. Now, researchers are warning that coastal communities around the world are set to face the same fate, with destabilized landfills on the verge of releasing large amounts of waste into the ocean.

Humans have been throwing everything from hazardous industrial waste to domestic rubbish into landfills for decades. Landfills were originally seen as eternal dumping grounds that could hold waste forever. It didn't take long for environmental concerns to arise, and today legislation often dictates what can and can't be chucked into a landfill. But the vast majority of landfills predate such rules. And with sea level rise causing more extreme erosion, flooding, and storm surges, we are on the verge of being reunited with much of this refuse.

upstart writes:

Intel apologizes to China for shunning slave-labor region Xinjiang:

Intel has joined a growing number of large western tech firms who have had to backtrack on their moves pertaining to China's internal policies, which are criticized internationally for violating human rights.

But when the US chipmaker seemed to try to take a stance on the Xinjiang region and labor conditions there calling on its suppliers not to source components or rely on the local workforce, the company quickly issued an apology.

In the apology, posted in Chinese on the giant WeChat platform, Intel said its original letter – effectively calling its partners to boycott Xinjiang-based supply-chain and labor – was motivated solely by Intel's desire to comply with US laws when it came to doing business in China.

It was in no way meant to express a position on the matter – (i.e., support western claims that Chinese authorities are resorting to forced labor in the troubled region), it said.

"For causing trouble to our esteemed Chinese customers, partners and the general public, we express our sincere apologies," Intel's apology reads.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The cells in the body can be thought of as tiny archery targets, each vulnerable to the deadly arrow of cancer. The more cells a given animal has and the longer it lives, the greater its odds of accumulating harmful cell mutations that can eventually lead to cancer. Or at least, this is what intuition suggests.

Nevertheless, many very large animals bearing huge cell populations, including elephants and whales, not only survive to old age, but have remarkably low rates of cancer. This biological enigma bears the name Peto’s paradox. In short, the paradox says that species size and longevity should be proportional to cancer incidence, yet the real-world data across species suggest this association does not hold.

In a new study appearing in the journal Nature, Carlo Maley, a researcher with the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society at Arizona State University, along with international colleagues, explore recent implications of Peto’s paradox and highlight what science is learning about cancer across the tree of life.

The researchers analyze the largest cross-species database of its kind—a pool of adult mammalian life from zoo records that includes 110,148 individuals spanning 191 species.

upstart writes:

No more annual flu shot? New target for universal influenza vaccine:

"It's always very exciting to discover a new site of vulnerability on a virus because it paves the way for rational vaccine design," says co-senior author Andrew Ward, PhD, professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. "It also demonstrates that despite all the years and effort of influenza vaccine research there are still new things to discover."

"By identifying sites of vulnerability to antibodies that are shared by large numbers of variant influenza strains we can design vaccines that are less affected by viral mutations," says study co-senior author Patrick Wilson, MD, who was previously at the University of Chicago and recently recruited to Weill Cornell Medicine as a professor of pediatrics and a scientist in the institution's Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Health. "The anchor antibodies we describe bind to such a site. The antibodies themselves can also be developed as drugs with broad therapeutic applications."

In a typical year, influenza affects more than 20 million people in the United States and leads to more than 20,000 deaths. Vaccines against influenza typically coax the immune system to generate antibodies that recognize the head of hemagglutinin (HA), a protein that extends outward from the surface of the flu virus. The head is the most accessible regions of HA, making it a good target for the immune system; unfortunately, it is also one of the most variable. From year to year, the head of HA often mutates, necessitating new vaccines.

fliptop writes:

MIT engineers have produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery. The rechargeable battery can be woven and washed, and could provide power for fiber-based electronic devices and sensors:

The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts.

In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths.

[...] The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.

[...] The fact that they were able to make a 140-meter fiber battery shows that "there's no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length," [MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev] says. A demonstration device using the new fiber battery incorporated a "Li-Fi" communications system — one in which pulses of light are used to transmit data, and included a microphone, pre-amp, transistor, and diodes to establish an optical data link between two woven fabric devices.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New study challenges popular explanation for London's infamous "Wobbly Bridge":

London's Millennium Bridge is notorious for its "wobble" when it first opened in June 2000, as thousands of pedestrians streamed across. Londoners nicknamed it "Wobbly Bridge." The accepted explanation has been that the swaying was due to a weird synchronicity between the bridge's lateral (sideways) sway and pedestrians' gaits—an example of emergent collective phenomena.

But that explanation turns out to be a bit more complicated, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Communications. "This [old] explanation was so popular, it has been part of the scientific zeitgeist," said co-author Igor Belykh, a mathematician at Georgia State University. "Our work shows that very tiny vibrations from each person walking can get amplified significantly." People adjust their footsteps to keep their balance in response to the wobble, which only makes things worse. Eventually the bridge becomes unstable.

[...] But that original explanation was incomplete. "The initial impulse a lot of researchers had when looking at this problem was that it was about collective behavior," Varun Joshi, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Michigan, told Ars. "This was based on the presence of multiple pedestrians and the apparent synchronization between them, as observed in videos. However, data collected from actual bridges showed a lack of synchronization in many cases. This led to a lot of experimental work studying individual human response to shaken treadmills, looking for a 'negative damping effect' from individuals. The hope was that the scaled effect of negative damping (even without any adaptation to the presence of other people) would explain the phenomenon."

upstart writes:

Earth's first giant:

While dinosaurs ruled the land, ichthyosaurs and other aquatic reptiles (that were emphatically not dinosaurs) ruled the waves, reaching similarly gargantuan sizes and species diversity. Evolving fins and hydrodynamic body-shapes seen in both fish and whales, ichthyosaurs swam the ancient oceans for nearly the entirety of the Age of Dinosaurs.

"Ichthyosaurs derive from an as yet unknown group of land-living reptiles and were air-breathing themselves," says lead author Dr. Martin Sander, paleontologist at the University of Bonn and Research Associate with the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM). "From the first skeleton discoveries in southern England and Germany over 250 years ago, these 'fish-saurians' were among the first large fossil reptiles known to science, long before the dinosaurs, and they have captured the popular imagination ever since."

Excavated from a rock unit called the Fossil Hill Member in the Augusta Mountains of Nevada, the well-preserved skull, along with part of the backbone, shoulder, and forefin, date back to the Middle Triassic (247.2-237 million years ago), representing the earliest case of an ichthyosaur reaching epic proportions. As big as a large sperm whale at more than 17 meters (55.78 feet) long, the newly named Cymbospondylus youngorum is the largest animal yet discovered from that time period, on land or in the sea. In fact, it was the first giant creature to ever inhabit the Earth that we know of.

"The importance of the find was not immediately apparent," notes Dr. Sander, "because only a few vertebrae were exposed on the side of the canyon. However, the anatomy of the vertebrae suggested that the front end of the animal might still be hidden in the rocks. Then, one cold September day in 2011, the crew needed a warm-up and tested this suggestion by excavation, finding the skull, forelimbs, and chest region."

The new name for the species, C. youngorum, honors a happy coincidence, the sponsoring of the fieldwork by Great Basin Brewery of Reno, owned and operated by Tom and Bonda Young, the inventors of the locally famous Icky beer which features an ichthyosaur on its label.

Journal Reference:
P. Martin Sander, Eva Maria Griebeler, Nicole Klein, Jorge Velez Juarbe, Tanja Wintrich, Liam J. Revell, Lars Schmitz. Early giant reveals faster evolution of large body size in ichthyosaurs than in cetaceans, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abf5787)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists demonstrate a novel rocket for deep-space exploration:

The growing interest in deep-space exploration has sparked the need for powerful long-lived rocket systems to drive spacecraft through the cosmos. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have now developed a tiny modified version of a plasma-based propulsion system called a Hall thruster that both increases the lifetime of the rocket and produces high power.

[...] The new device helps overcome the problem for wall-less Hall thrusters that allows the plasma propellant to shoot from the rocket at wide angles, contributing little to the rocket's thrust. "In short, wall-less Hall thrusters while promising have an unfocused plume because of the lack of channel walls," Simmonds said. "So we needed to figure out a way to focus the plume to increase the thrust and efficiency and make it a better overall thruster for spacecraft."

[...] These developments increased the density of the thrust by shaping more of it in a reduced volume, a key goal for Hall thrusters. An added benefit of the segmented electrode has been the reduction of plasma instabilities called breathing mode oscillations, "where the amount of plasma increases and decreases periodically as the ionization rate changes with time" Simmonds said. Surprisingly, he added, the segmented electrode caused these oscillations to go away. "Segmented electrodes are very useful for Hall thrusters for these reasons," he said.

The new high-thrust-density rocket can be especially beneficial for tiny cubic satellites, or CubeSats. Masaaki Yamada, Simmonds' co-doctoral adviser who heads the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) that studies the process behind solar flares, Northern lights and other space phenomena, proposed the use of a wall-less segmented electrode system to power a CubeSat. Simmonds and his team of undergraduate students working under the guidance of Prof. Daniel Marlow, the Evans Crawford 1911 Professor of Physics at Princeton, took up that proposal to develop a CubeSat and such a rocket -- a project that was halted near completion by the COVID-19 pandemic and that could be resumed in the future.

Journal Reference:
J. Simmonds, Y. Raitses. Mitigation of breathing oscillations and focusing of the plume in a segmented electrode wall-less Hall thruster, Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/5.0070307)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Dogs notice when computer animations violate laws of physics:

A pair of researchers at the Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna has found that dogs notice when objects in the world do not conform to the laws of physics. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Christoph Völter and Ludwig Huber describe experiments they conducted with pet dogs looking at objects depicted on a computer screen.

Prior research has shown that human babies and adult chimpanzees tend to notice if something they are looking at appears to violate the laws of physics—things dropping upwards, instead of down, for example. In this new effort, the researchers have found the same is true for pet dogs.

Journal Reference:
Christoph J. Völter and Ludwig Huber, Dogs' looking times and pupil dilation response reveal expectations about contact causality, Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0465)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While using a stencil should make solder paste application onto PCBs a simple affair, there are a number of “gotchas” that make it more art than science. Luckily, there are tools you can build, like this 3D-printed vacuum-assist stencil jig, that take a little of the finesse out of the process.

[...] In use, the PCB is placed on the center fixed platform, while the stencil sits atop it. Suction pulls the stencil firmly down onto the PCB and holds it there while the solder paste is applied. Releasing the suction causes the outer section of the platform to spring up vertically, resulting in nice, neat solder-covered pads. [Marius] demonstrates the box in the video below, and shows a number of adapters that would make it work with different sized PCBs.

Link to 5m28s YouTube video.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43636/toyota-reviewing-key-fob-remote-start-subscription-plan-after-massive-blowback

Earlier this month, we broke a story about Toyota locking its key fob remote start function behind a monthly subscription. If owners of certain models aren't actively enrolled in a larger Toyota connected services plan, the proximity remote start function on the fob—that is, when you press the lock button three times to start the car while outside of it—will not work even though it sends the signal directly to the car. Obviously, this sent people into a frenzy whether they own a Toyota or not, because it was seen as a dark harbinger of the perils of fully-connected cars. Automakers now have the ability to nickel and dime people to death by charging ongoing subscription fees for functions that used to be a one-and-done purchase, and it looked like Toyota was hopping on the bandwagon.

At the time, Toyota declined to give us a detailed answer on why it chose to take a feature that doesn't need an internet connection to function and moved it behind a paywall. Today, we've got answers. Toyota now claims it never intended to market the key fob remote start as a real feature, and it also says the subscription requirement was an inadvertent result of a relatively small technical decision related to the way its new vehicles are architectured. Finally, Toyota has heard the outrage over the last week—a spokesperson told us the company was caught off guard by the blowback—and its executive team is currently examining whether it's possible to reverse course and drop the subscription requirement for key fob remote start.

Previously: Toyota Owners Have to Pay $8/Month to Keep Using their Key Fob for Remote Start

Original Submission