SoylentNews

upstart writes:

2022 is 'Soylent Green' year. Here's why you shouldn't worry.:

If you know the 1973 movie Soylent Green at all, it's likely for the arresting last line. "Soylent Green is people," lead actor Charlton Heston bellows as he is carried away on a stretcher, simultaneously becoming a meme and summing up the plot so thoroughly that there's little need to catch the rest of the film. (Soylent Green is a hot new food product in this starving overpopulated future New York; Heston's detective character discovers it is not made from plankton as the manufacturer claims.)

Less well known is the year Soylent Green is set in: 2022. That's right, we've reached the point when Hollywood told us that millions of New Yorkers would be fighting each other over protein bars made from the finest processed human. Presuming that a fad for cannibalism doesn't arrive with the next NYC fashion week, we can safely say that humanity has successfully avoided the threat of the movie's main premise. (Instead we're grappling with the threat of the Omicron variant, which itself sounds like a Charlton Heston movie.)

Does this mean Soylent Green got nothing right about our 21st century world? Not so fast. As with Blade Runner and its setting, the Los Angeles of 2019, the movie's predictive power is a mixed bag.

[...] WRONG: Soylent Green. RIGHT: Soylent. Soylent green is mint chocolate, it turns out.

[...] WRONG: Starvation. RIGHT: Ocean acidification.

[...] WRONG: Dump trucks for protesters. RIGHT: Global warming.

[...] WRONG: Mass euthanasia. RIGHT: Mass numbing.

[...] Soylent Green is available to buy or rent on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime, and YouTube TV.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

White House commits to ISS extension

The Biden administration formally supports extending operations of the International Space Station through the end of the decade, an announcement that is neither surprising nor addresses how to get all the station's partners, notably Russia, to agree on the station's future.

In a statement published on NASA's ISS blog Dec. 31, NASA said the White House agreed to extend operations of the ISS through 2030. Federal law, last revised in 2015 with the enactment of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, made it U.S. policy to operate the station through at least 2024.

[...] The White House's decision is alone not sufficient to continue ISS operations through the end of the decade. NASA said it would work with the station's partners — Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia — "to enable continuation of the groundbreaking research being conducted in this unique orbiting laboratory through the rest of this decade."

One partner has already signaled its willingness to continue the ISS. "I welcome this announcement & will submit a proposal to Member States for @esa to continue until 2030, as well," tweeted Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, shortly after NASA published its statement.

A bigger challenge, though, will be keeping Russia in the ISS partnership. Russian officials have expressed doubts about both the technical ability of the ISS to operate through the end of the decade given problems with the Russian segment of the station as well as a desire to develop a Russian national space station.

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A bicycle riser bar made from jute fibre reinforced polymer composite materials:

To meet the demand for alternative low-cost, sustainable, light weight and strong materials for two wheelers, Dr. JS Binoj from Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College India has led a multi-national team to successfully develop a novel riser bar made from jute fiber reinforcing isophthalic polymer composite material.

[...] The novelty of the composite bar involves a new and effective way of tailoring the length of the jute fibers as well as the interfacial bonding interactions between the jute fibers and the isophthalic polymer, which functioned as the matrix phase for the composite material. Conventionally, riser bar is made from aluminum (which is inexpensive); more advanced ones are made from scandium and carbon fiber reinforced composites (which are expensive). More importantly the environmental impact of these materials could be contentious. On the other hand, the new isophthalic polymer-based composite material reinforced by jute fibers revealed mechanical strength, stiffness, extensibility and toughness that are comparable to conventional materials.

Isophthalic polymer is a low-cost, durable material that is used for construction in civil engineering. With the proof-of-concept demonstrated, the team is now looking for investors and new collaborators to support further development to bring the technology readiness level from 4 to 9.

Journal Reference:
J. B. Sajina, R. Christu Paulb, J. S. Bino, et al. Impact of fiber length on mechanical, morphological and thermal analysis of chemical treated jute fiber polymer composites for sustainable applications (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crgsc.2021.100241)

Original Submission

End of the Line Finally Coming for BlackBerry Devices

upstart writes:

End of the line finally coming for BlackBerry devices:

BlackBerry, the company that once dominated smart mobile devices, recently announced that it was finally discontinuing key services that support its phones. As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including the cellular network.

It may seem difficult to imagine if you weren't using cell phones at the time, but BlackBerry once dominated the smartphone market. Its keyboard-based hardware was widely adopted in corporate settings, in part because the services it provided typically ran through BlackBerry servers, allowing for high levels of security and control. An indication of its importance is that early internal builds of Android looked like a cheap BlackBerry knockoff, rather than the cheap iPhone knockoff that was eventually released.

Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry's leadership was blindsided by the iPhone's popularity. It dismissed on-screen keyboards, and counted on its stranglehold on corporate services to maintain its market. It took over a year after the iPhone's release for the company to come out with its own touch screen phone, and its software remained an awkward mix of old and new for some time after. In the mean time, corporate users fell in love with their Apple and Android phones, and compelled their IT departments to support them.

canopic jug writes:

As the new year starts, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain reminds us that works from 1926 ascend to public domain, and become available for use by any and all in any manner they may wish. There is also a lot of recorded music starting to enter the public domain, as an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 hit the scene. Most of them music recordings are salvaged from very fragile 78 RPM platters using multiple methods.

In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. A. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works—sound recordings—will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922—estimated at some 400,000 works—will be open for legal reuse.

Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. That is something Winnie-the-Pooh would appreciate. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1926 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1926 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2022, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.

The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! As explained in a New York Times editorial:

When a work enters the public domain it means the public can afford to use it freely, to give it new currency . . . [public domain works] are an essential part of every artist’s sustenance, of every person’s sustenance.

See also, What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2022? A festive countdown which, were it not blocked by javascript, would highlight a selection of what has become available.

Previously:
(2021) Public Domain Day in the USA: Works from 1925 are Open to All!
(2020) January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day: Works From 1924 Are Open to All!
(2018) Public Domain Day is Coming
(2014) Happy Public Domain Day: Here are the Works that Copyright Extension Stole From You in 2015
and more ...

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla is recalling over 475,000 Model 3 and Model S vehicles:

Tesla is recalling over 475,000 of its vehicles because of a pair of safety issues. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 356,309 Tesla Model 3s covering model years 2017-2020 are being recalled due to problems with the rearview cameras. The 2017-2020 Model S is the other target with 119,009 of those BEVs due to a problem with the front hood latch.

[...] Owners of the affected vehicles will receive notification letters by the end of February, according to the NHTSA.

I almost hesitate to ask, but do we have any Tesla owners/drivers in our community?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Plans To Capture Co2 From Coal Plants Wasted Federal Dollars, Watchdog Says - The Verge:

The Biden administration wants to shove more money into projects that are supposed to capture CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they can escape and heat up the planet. But carbon capture technologies that the Department of Energy has already supported in the name of tackling climate change have mostly fallen flat, according to a recent report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office.

About $1.1 billion has flowed from the Department of Energy to carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects since 2009. Had they panned out, nine coal plants and industrial facilities would have been outfitted with devices that scrub most of the CO2 out of their emissions. Once captured, the CO2 can be sent via pipelines to underground storage in geologic formations.

That's not what happened. The DOE doled out $684 million to coal[sic] six coal plants, but only one of them actually got built and started operating before shuttering in 2020. Of the three separate industrial facilities that received $438 million, just two got off the ground. Without more accountability, "DOE may risk expending significant taxpayer funds on CCS demonstrations that have little likelihood of success," the GAO says.

To stop that from happening, the GAO says there ought to be more congressional oversight of DOE-funded demonstration projects. The GAO report also recommends that the DOE do a better job of choosing which projects to fund and that the DOE should establish more consistent "scopes, schedules, and budgets" for projects.

takyon writes:

Year 2021 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards.

We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it's getting really close with the first board expected in H1 2022. I promise! The company still introduced the RK3566 and RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processors with plenty of I/O for AIoT use cases. There was less to announce on Amlogic side with [the] S908X processor still being very elusive (or has it been canceled?), but we still got news of [an] Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53processor be found next year in the upcoming Khadas VIM4 single board computer. Allwinner hasn't released any really interesting [Arm] processors in the last couple of years, and 2021 was not different.

Instead, the most exciting announcement from Allwinner was their RISC-V processor namely [the] Allwinner D1 and D1s/F133, the first affordable RISC-V Linux processors found in boards such as Nezha and Lichee RV. In other RISC-V news, higher-end RISC-V cores were announced like the StarFive Dubhe (Cortex-A75 like) and SiFive Performance P650 (Cortex-A77 like) and should start to be found in new SoCs in 2022 or 2023. Espressif launched the ESP32-C3 WiFi & BLE SoC, announced the ESP32-H2 with BLE 5.2, ZIgbee and Thread connectivity, and we got announcements for a wider variety of RISC-V microcontroller or processors for televisions, the automotive market, the Smart Home with more Bluetooth LE 5.3 and Zigbee MCU, as well as artificial intelligence, and more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

CES 2022 attendees scale back plans but keep plane tickets as Lenovo, T-Mobile, Twitter and Meta back out:

IT professionals with in-person tickets for CES 2022 are holding onto plans to attend as big tech companies scrap Las Vegas appearances. T-Mobile canceled its CES 2022 keynote earlier this week and Lenovo is keeping its team at home too. Amazon, AT&T, Meta and TikTok also have decided against in-person attendance.

Individual attendees with speaking plans and networking events are keeping their plane tickets for Las Vegas for now, while keeping an eye on case rates. The Omicron variant is pushing case numbers higher than the peak of Delta cases with the US hitting 267,305 cases on Tuesday, December 28. Cases reached 165,000 on Sept. 1. Cases are up 65% in the Las Vegas area as well. The vaccination rate is 53% in that part of the country.

Intel and self-driving car company Waymo also decided to move to a virtual-only CES 2022 late last week. P&G changed its plans on Tuesday and will be hosting its CES activities in its PGLifeLab. Google, Microsoft, AMD, HP, Nvidia and Intel also have cancelled plans for in-person attendance.

Is anybody in our community planning to go?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Elon Musk rejects claims his satellites are squeezing out rivals in space:

Elon Musk has hit back at criticism that his company's Starlink satellites are hogging too much room in space, and has instead argued there could be room for "tens of billions" of spacecraft in orbits close to Earth.

"Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny," Musk said. "This is not some situation where we're effectively blocking others in any way. We've not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to."

His comments, made in an interview with the Financial Times, came in response to a claim from Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, that Musk was "making the rules" for the new commercial space economy. Speaking to the FT earlier this month, Aschbacher warned that Musk's rush to launch thousands of communications satellites would leave fewer radio frequencies and orbital slots available for everyone else.

[...] Rejecting suggestions he was "squeezing out" future satellite competitors, Musk compared the number of satellites in low Earth orbit to what he said were 2 billion cars and trucks on Earth. Each orbital "shell" around the Earth is larger than the planet's surface, he said, with an additional shell every 10 meters or so further out into space.

upstart writes:

Researchers offer future 6G network concept:

With commercial 5G rapidly deploying, researchers have begun to look at 6G. Its key technologies for mobile communication networks are expected to become available as early as 2023, with 6G networks emerging in 2030, according to Saad et al. Compared to 5G, the 6G network will increase data rates by over 100 times, to one terabyte per second or more, enabling the inclusion of edge intelligent devices and computing. To move large amounts of data to where and when it is needed, 6G networks will need to customize services to meet demands, transmit valued data, and interact with users.

To meet these requirements, the paper offers a "mailbox theory" that envisions a 6G network characterized as a:

• Distributed Intelligent Network [...]
• Proactive Interactive Network [...]
• Cognitive Information Transmission [...]

Journal Reference:
Yixue Hao, Yiming Miao, Min Chen, et al. 6G Cognitive Information Theory: A Mailbox Perspective, Big Data and Cognitive Computing BDCC (2021) [open] (DOI: 10.3390/bdcc5040056)

Original Submission

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