SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Drone flight trials in Poland bring EU-wide urban air mobility a step closer:

An initial series of test flights with drones has been launched in Poland as part of the EU-funded Uspace4UAM project. The first of these trials is now underway in Rzeszów, a city of close to 200,000 people.

The test flights are being carried out by three Uspace4UAM consortium members: Dronehub, the developer of drone-in-a-box systems for automated monitoring and data collection; drone equipment and sensor supplier Honeywell; and drone software technology company Altitude Angel. About 160 flights will be carried out in the Rzeszów area during the first phase, under 3 scenarios of autonomous drones flying for public service missions. The first scenario will involve emergency aerial monitoring of accident sites, the second will take ortho- and photogrammetric photos for public institutions, and the third will replicate the transportation of automated external defibrillators for use in life-threatening situations.

"Dronehub demos within Uspace4UAM started in November 2021, and we will end in June 2022. During this time, amongst other objectives, we will check how drones react to different and rapidly changing weather conditions," states test flight project manager Jakub Węglarz of Dronehub in a news item posted on the SESAR Joint Undertaking website. The SESAR Joint Undertaking—which is funding Uspace4UAM—is a partnership between European private and public sector institutions formed to speed up the delivery of smarter, connected, accessible and more sustainable air transport solutions through research and innovation.

upstart writes:

China's Xi'an lockdown hits some of the world's largest chipmakers:

Two of the world's biggest chipmakers are warning that Covid-19 outbreaks and stringent lockdowns in a major Chinese industrial hub are hampering their operations.

Samsung and Micron said this week that they've had to adjust operations in the northwestern city of Xi'an, which is experiencing one of China's worst community outbreaks of the coronavirus pandemic. Authorities have responded by enacting sweeping measures with an intensity and on a scale rarely seen since Wuhan, the pandemic's original epicenter.

[...] Samsung said Wednesday that it had to "temporarily adjust operations" in Xi'an.

[...] According to the Korea Economic Daily, output in the city accounts for over 40% of Samsung's total global production of NAND memory chips, a product found in smartphones, tablets and hard drives.

[...] American chipmaker Micron also said Wednesday that Xi'an's lockdown could impact the production of its DRAM memory chips, which are used in computers, as the company has had to reduce its workforce at the site.

[...] Xi'an, an ancient city in Shaanxi province, has reported 1,117 total cases in the latest outbreak. It rolled out city-wide testing and placed its 13 million residents under a strict lockdown last week, closing schools, public venues and transportation. The lockdown is China's largest since Wuhan, which sealed off 11 million people.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mexico's central bank to launch digital currency by 2024:

Mexico's central bank will have its digital currency by 2024, the Mexican government announced on social media, although the development was not confirmed by the monetary authority, known locally as Banxico. "Banxico reports that it will have its own digital currency in circulation by 2024," the Mexican government wrote late on Wednesday on its official Twitter account.

[...] But a senior central bank source, who requested anonymity, told the Reuters news agency on Thursday that the government announcement was "not official."

[...] Mexico's central bank is legally independent of the government.

[...] "The project has among its objectives the opening of accounts for the registration of a digital currency for both banked and unbanked people, thereby contributing to financial inclusion," the report added.

Several central banks worldwide are exploring the launch of digital currencies, concerned that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could weaken government control of monetary policy.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

University Loses Valuable Supercomputer Research After Backup Error Wipes 77 Terabytes of Data:

Kyoto University, a top research institute in Japan, recently lost a whole bunch of research after its supercomputer system accidentally wiped out a whopping 77 terabytes of data during what was supposed to be a routine backup procedure.

That malfunction, which occurred sometime between Dec. 14 and Dec. 16, erased approximately 34 million files belonging to 14 different research groups that had been using the school's supercomputing system. The university operates Hewlett Packard Cray computing systems and a DataDirect ExaScaler storage system—the likes of which can be utilized by research teams for various purposes.

It's unclear what kind of files were specifically deleted or what caused the actual malfunction, though the school has said that the work of at least four different groups will not be able to be restored.

Also at BleepingComputer.

Original announcement from the university.

Original Submission

Happy New Year!
As the final hours of 2021 here's wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

In light of the holiday, I am inviting the editorial staff to post stories on a weekend/holiday schedule. Thank you for all your hard work in 2021. Here's wishing for a better year to come! Enjoy!

We did it! [*]
([*] I think).

Current Status:
Thanks to a VERY generous subscription of nearly $1,000, we reached our fundraising goal for the second half of the year THANK YOU!: $4,132.81 on a goal of $3,500.00 (all amounts are estimates):

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

mysql>  SELECT  SUM(payment_net) AS Net,  100.0 * SUM(payment_net) / 3500.00  AS GoalPercent, MAX(ts), MAX(spid), NOW() FROM subscribe_payments WHERE ts > '2021-06-30' ;
+---------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+---------------------+
| Net     | GoalPercent | MAX(ts)             | MAX(spid) | NOW()               |
+---------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+---------------------+
| 4132.81 | 118.0802857 | 2021-12-30 17:36:36 |      1744 | 2021-12-30 23:45:49 |
+---------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

And for those of you interested in the details:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

mysql> SELECT spid, ts, payment_gross, payment_net, payment_type FROM subscribe_payments WHERE ts > '2021-12-29 22:06:03' AND payment_gross > 0 ORDER BY ts ;
+------+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+
| spid | ts                  | payment_gross | payment_net | payment_type |
+------+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+
| 1728 | 2021-12-29 23:16:21 |         20.00 |       18.81 | user         |
| 1729 | 2021-12-30 00:15:05 |        100.00 |       96.80 | user         |
| 1730 | 2021-12-30 01:08:02 |         20.00 |       19.12 | user         |
| 1731 | 2021-12-30 01:13:58 |         30.00 |       28.01 | user         |
| 1732 | 2021-12-30 01:45:50 |         50.00 |       48.25 | user         |
| 1733 | 2021-12-30 02:35:54 |         40.00 |       38.54 | user         |
| 1734 | 2021-12-30 03:12:48 |         20.00 |       18.81 | user         |
| 1735 | 2021-12-30 04:24:07 |        924.43 |      897.32 | user         |
| 1736 | 2021-12-30 07:05:37 |         20.00 |       18.51 | user         |
| 1737 | 2021-12-30 07:50:05 |         20.00 |       18.51 | gift         |
| 1738 | 2021-12-30 09:23:14 |         20.00 |       19.12 | gift         |
| 1739 | 2021-12-30 12:22:42 |         20.00 |       18.51 | user         |
| 1740 | 2021-12-30 12:24:24 |         20.00 |       18.81 | user         |
| 1741 | 2021-12-30 13:59:52 |         40.00 |       38.11 | user         |
| 1742 | 2021-12-30 17:33:36 |         20.00 |       19.12 | gift         |
| 1743 | 2021-12-30 17:35:13 |         20.00 |       19.12 | gift         |
| 1744 | 2021-12-30 17:36:36 |         20.00 |       19.12 | gift         |
+------+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+
17 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

That's great news! So why the equivocation?

Looking Closer:
Actually, it's more of a stepping back to look at things over the course of the entire year:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

mysql> SELECT SUM(payment_gross) AS Gross, SUM(payment_net) AS Net, ts, max(spid) AS SPID FROM subscribe_payments WHERE ts > '2020-12-31' ;
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
| Gross   | Net     | ts                  | SPID |
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
| 6916.61 | 6611.75 | 2020-12-31 21:47:25 | 1744 |
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

The fundraising goal for the first half of the year was also $3,500.00. So... (2 x $3,500.00) is $7,000.00 but we have a total of... $6,916.61?

The Crash:
And then I remembered. Early this year we had a server (fluorine) crash. We had backups (yay!), but they were borken (Boo! Hiss!). We lost over a day's worth of activity, including a number of subscriptions. I *was* able to manually reconstruct people's subscriptions (time) based on information displayed on a window I just happened to have open at the time. But that was in a table separate from what is used to generate these numbers. After 3 days' effort, I'd patched things up as well as I could. Thankfully the official numbers (on which income and taxes are calculated) are kept on a completely separate server. Whew! One that I DO NOT have access. I'd concluded that we'll just have to sort things out at the end of the year. And that time has draw nigh.

tl;dr:
We're probably all set for the year, but there is also the matter that (unknown to me) we had previously been running at a deficit for a couple years. So anything additional you can contribute will go to replenish our funding base. (NCommander and Matt_ each put up $5,000.00 of their own money that to get us started.)

upstart writes:

For mammals, eating other animals can increase cancer risk:

Cancer is a sad fact of life, as nearly 40 percent of people are diagnosed with it at some point in their lives. But humans aren't alone in this. Many different species can also develop the disease—some more often than others. By studying these species and their habits and natural defenses (or lack thereof), we can learn new ways to combat the disease.

New research that involves a comprehensive survey of cancer shows that many mammals can indeed get cancer. To gain insight into this, the team looked at records for 110,148 animals from 191 species that died in zoos. The data came from Species360, an international non-profit that collects and unifies this kind of data from zoos across the world, according to Orsolya Vincze, a research fellow at the Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary and one of the paper's authors.

Using the data gathered by the organization, the research team could "collect information on what the animals died of," she told Ars.

[...] Carnivores, however, were particularly prone to cancer. Within the dataset, more than a quarter of clouded leopards, bat-eared foxes, and red wolves died of cancer, for instance. According to Vincze, there are some hypotheses surrounding why this might be the case.

Journal Reference:
Orsolya Vincze, Fernando Colchero, Jean-Francois Lemaître, et al. Cancer risk across mammals [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04224-5)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China upset about needing to dodge SpaceX Starlink satellites:

Earlier in December, the Chinese government filed a document with the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space at the United Nations. The body helps manage the terms of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, more commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty. In the document, China alleges that it had to move its space station twice this year due to potential collisions with Starlink satellites operated by SpaceX.

The document pointedly notes that signatories of the treaty, which include the US, are responsible for the actions of any nongovernmental activities based within their borders.

The document was filed back on December 6, but it only came to light recently when Chinese Internet users became aware of it and started flaming Elon Musk, head of SpaceX.

The document starts out with an impossibly formal 110-word-long sentence that notes the Outer Space Treaty obliges its signatories to inform other nations when they discover any phenomena in space that could pose a risk to astronauts. It then indicates that China has identified such a threat: Starlink satellites.

upstart writes:

Intel to invest $7.1B in Malaysia chipmaking expansion:

Intel said it will invest 30 billion ringgit ($7.1 billion) to expand its manufacturing operation in Malaysia as chipmakers work to diversify their global supply chains that were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. semiconductor company is no stranger to Malaysia, where it built its first offshore assembly plant in Penang in 1972.

[...] the new investment will expand the operations of its Malaysian subsidiary across Penang and Kulim, creating more than 4,000 new Intel jobs and more than 5,000 local construction jobs. That's on top of 13,000 people that Intel already employs in Malaysia, roughly 10% of the company's global workforce.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why you should consider purchasing refurbished over new electronics:

[...] And there's another set of benefits to refurbished electronics these days, which I discussed with Lauren Benton, the general manager at Back Market.

"One major issue here is too much demand, and not enough supply of chips. Refurbished electronics helps alleviate supply chain woes by keeping chips in circulation longer. Back Market­­ is leading the charge against buying new these days to support and promote sustainability in tech," Benton told me.

She outlined further the benefits of buying refurbished:

First and foremost, major cost savings can be realized. Refurbished devices are usually half the price of new while still functioning like new (they can be up to 70% off the price of new).

Better quality is another factor. Benton said that when working with professional refurbishers, consumers can expect a professional review of their device. I myself can attest to this since these devices have been proven to work reliably.

"For example, at Back Market, all sellers must meet a 25-point quality charter, which ensures that the defective rate on the platform remains low — generally below 5%. For reference, the unofficial failure rate of new devices hovers at around 3% (case in point, the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 Plus, which both came out at the end of 2017, were each reported to have a 3% failure rate in Q1 of 2018)" she told me.

Have you used reconditioned hardware and, if so, what are your experiences? If you have bought used hardware (but not reconditioned) has it turned out to be a bargain or a disappointment?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms

Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world's first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is "hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080." 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

[...] The [Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE)] is a somewhat narrow engine when it comes to what exact workloads it can execute. But, as the company says, "PACE efficiently searches for solutions to several of the hardest computational math problems, including the Ising problem, and the graph Max-Cut and Min-Cut problems, illustrating the real-world potential of integrated photonics in advanced computation." In that perspective, we can classify it as an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) of sorts: it does very few things (or a single thing) very, very well.

Research Opens the Door to Fully Light-Based Quantum Computing

takyon writes:

Apple ditched Intel, and it paid off

Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year.

The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring.

It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run.

[...] In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. [...] There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mapping the musical mind: Interesting patterns of brain activity emerge during musical analysis exercises:

"In the field of neuroscience, it is well established that there are areas of the brain that deal specifically with language, and even specialized regions that correspond to different parts of language processing such as grammar or syntax," said [Professor Kuniyoshi L.] Sakai. "We wondered if training under the Suzuki method might lead to activity in such areas, not when using language, but when engaging with music. Our study reveals this is indeed the case."

For their investigation, the team enlisted 98 Japanese secondary school students classified into three groups: Group S (Suzuki) was trained from a young age in the Suzuki method, Group E (Early) was musically trained from a young age but not in the Suzuki method, and Group L (Late) was either musically trained at a later age, but not in the Suzuki method, or were not musically trained at all. All the students had their brains scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which produced dynamic 3D models of their brains' activity. During this time, they were given a musical exercise to identify errors in a piece of music played to them. The musical pieces played had errors in one of four musical conditions: pitch, tempo, stress and articulation.

[...] "One striking observation was that regardless of musical experience, the highly specific grammar center in the left brain was activated during the articulation condition. This connection between music and language might explain why everyone can enjoy music even if they are not musical themselves," said Sakai.

[In the early 1980s, when the field was very young, IBM was known to hire musicians for programming positions. I wonder how many Soylentils have music-related backgrounds? --martyb.]

Journal Reference:
Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, Yoshiaki Oshiba, Reiya Horisawa, et al. Music-Experience-Related and Musical-Error-Dependent Activations in the Brain, Cerebral Cortex (DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhab478)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A virtual reality simulator to train surgeons for skull-base procedures:

"The process of drilling requires surgeons to remove minimal amounts of bone while ensuring that important structures (such as nerves and vessels) housed within the bone are not harmed," Adnan Munawar, one of the researchers who developed the system, told TechXplore. "Therefore, skull base surgeries require high skill, absolute precision, and sub-millimeter accuracy. Achieving these surgical skills requires diligent training to ensure the safety of patients."

Currently, most resident surgeons are trained to complete skull base surgeries and other procedures on cadavers or on live people under the supervision of experienced doctors. However, realistic computer simulations and virtual environments could significantly enhance the training of surgeons, offering a cost-effective, safe and reproducible alternative to traditional training methods.

In addition to allowing surgeons to practice their skills in a safe and realistic setting, simulation tools enable the collection of valuable data that would otherwise be harder to attain. This includes optimal trajectories for surgical tools, the forces that are imparted during a procedure, or the position of cameras/endoscopes.

Journal Reference:
Adnan Munawar, Zhaoshuo Li, Punit Kunjam, et al. Virtual reality for synergistic surgical training and data generation, Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization (DOI: 10.1080/21681163.2021.1999331)

Original Submission

You guys are GREAT!

Previously:
In our last Fundraising Update we had raised $1,808.21 (net) towards our goal of $3,500.00 for the 2nd half of the year. (And five days earlier we stood at just $1,510.49).

Currently:
And where are we now? Hold onto your seat...

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

mysql>  SELECT SUM(payment_gross) AS Gross, SUM(payment_net) AS Net, ts, max(spid) AS SPID FROM subscribe_payments WHERE ts >= '2021-07-01' ;
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
| Gross   | Net     | ts                  | SPID |
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
| 2435.06 | 2307.23 | 2021-07-01 02:15:00 | 1727 |
+---------+---------+---------------------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

In that time, we had 4x $50.00 subscriptions and a $100.00 subscription (flagged by an "*" below):

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

mysql> SELECT ts, payment_gross, payment_net, method, submethod, payment_type FROM subscribe_payments WHERE ts > '2021-12-28 13:01:56' AND payment_gross > 0 ORDER BY ts ;
+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+-----------+--------------+
| ts                  | payment_gross | payment_net | method | submethod | payment_type |
+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+-----------+--------------+
| 2021-12-28 22:28:09 |         *50.00 |       47.76 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-28 22:48:32 |         20.00 |       18.81 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-28 23:33:57 |         *50.00 |       47.76 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 00:54:44 |         20.00 |       18.81 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 02:47:41 |         *50.00 |       47.01 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 03:08:48 |         20.00 |       18.51 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 04:50:49 |        *100.00 |       96.02 | paypal | NULL      | gift         |
| 2021-12-29 07:01:43 |         20.00 |       18.51 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 10:58:54 |         10.00 |        9.16 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 12:46:04 |         25.00 |       23.26 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 13:32:12 |         20.00 |       19.12 | stripe | CC        | user         |
| 2021-12-29 13:37:36 |         *50.00 |       48.25 | stripe | CC        | user         |
| 2021-12-29 14:16:35 |         20.00 |       18.81 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 14:24:29 |         40.00 |       37.51 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 21:11:32 |         12.00 |       10.91 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
| 2021-12-29 22:06:03 |         20.00 |       18.81 | paypal | NULL      | user         |
+---------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+-----------+--------------+
16 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

Yes, the larger subscriptions are attention-getting, but $220.00 of that $527.00 came from subscriptions of $20.00 or less.

Remaining:
Since I started writing this, we received two more $20.00 subscriptions! All told, we need just $1,173.96 to make our goal and only 2 days to go. Can we do it? We Can Do This... Please Subscribe!

Ahem. Got carried away there. But seriously, every bit makes a difference; please help.
--martyb

upstart writes:

RedLine malware shows why passwords shouldn't be saved in browsers:

The RedLine information-stealing malware targets popular web browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera, demonstrating why storing your passwords in browsers is a bad idea.

This malware is a commodity information-stealer that can be purchased for roughly $200 on cyber-crime forums and be deployed without requiring much knowledge or effort.

However, a new report by AhnLab ASEC warns that the convenience of using the auto-login feature on web browsers is becoming a substantial security problem affecting both organizations and individuals.

[...] Using your web browser to store your login credentials is tempting and convenient, but doing so is risky even without malware infections.

By doing so, a local or remote actor with access to your machine could steal all your passwords in a matter of minutes.

Instead, it would be best to use a dedicated password manager that stores everything in an encrypted vault and requests the master password to unlock it.

Moreover, you should configure specific rules for sensitive websites such as e-banking portals or corporate asset webpages, requiring manual credential input.

Finally, activate multi-factor authentication wherever this is available, as this additional step can save you from account take-over incidents even if your credentials have been compromised.

Original Submission