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upstart writes:

SpaceX could attempt three Falcon 9 rocket launches in next two days:

The first liftoff is set for Monday, when a rocket topped with an Italian surveillance satellite is currently scheduled to leave Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:11 p.m. PT (6:11 p.m. ET). Then, a Starlink launch is on tap Tuesday from adjacent Kennedy Space Center, followed by mission for the National Reconnaissance Office from California Wednesday.

[...] Things weren't supposed to line up this way. Monday's launch was originally planned for last week, but got pushed back a few days by poor weather. A Sunday evening attempt then got scrubbed at the literal last minute due to a cruise ship in the  launch exclusion zone.

[...] The Starlink launch has also been pushed back a few times and was set to happen Monday, but Sunday's scrub appears to have postponed it again to Tuesday.

[...] Whenever the next mission does get off the ground it will be the fourth of 2022 for SpaceX. All three flights will be livestreamed starting about 10 minutes before launch. Check back for updates as the situation evolves.

Launches are generally live-streamed on YouTube and other sites on-line.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

BT data centres will give London Underground 4G a welcome boost:

BT [*] has secured a multi-million-pound contract with BAI Communications [**] to deliver data centre services that will help power 4G and Wi-Fi services across the entire London Underground [***].

BAI has a 20-year concession from Transport for London (TfL) to build and operate a neutral host network available to all four major mobile operators, with the first stations coming online as soon as 2022.

BT's data centres will play a critical role in delivering the neutral host network and operators will be able to collocate their equipment in these facilities. BT itself has already signed up through EE, while BAI has also signed up Three and Vodafone as customers.

[..] The London Underground has long been the UK's most high profile 'mobile not spot' with previous attempts to bring mobile connectivity to the capital's subterranean railway network all ending in failure.

Under the terms of its 20-year concession, BAI has joined as a long-term investor, and there are no upfront costs for TfL. All revenues generated by the authority reinvested back into London's transport system.

[*] BT was formerly known as British Telecom.
[**] BAI Communications on Wikipedia.
[***] Colloquially known as The Tube.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

GNOME Network: Worldwide Coordinated Search for Dark Matter:

An international team of researchers with key participation from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) has published for the first time comprehensive data on the search for dark matter using a worldwide network of optical magnetometers. According to the scientists, dark matter fields should produce a characteristic signal pattern that can be detected by correlated measurements at multiple stations of the GNOME network. Analysis of data from a one-month continuous GNOME operation has not yet yielded a corresponding indication. However, the measurement allows to formulate constraints on the characteristics of dark matter, as the researchers report in the prestigious journal Nature Physics.

GNOME stands for Global Network of Optical Magnetometers for Exotic Physics Searches. Behind it are magnetometers distributed around the world in Germany, Serbia, Poland, Israel, South Korea, China, Australia, and the United States. With GNOME, the researchers particularly want to advance the search for dark matter – one of the most exciting challenges of fundamental physics in the 21st century. After all, it has long been known that many puzzling astronomical observations, such as the rotation speed of stars in galaxies or the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation, can best be explained by dark matter.

upstart writes:

Researchers use GPU fingerprinting to track users online:

A team of researchers from French, Israeli, and Australian universities has explored the possibility of using people's GPUs to create unique fingerprints and use them for persistent web tracking.

The results of their large-scale experiment involving 2,550 devices with 1,605 distinct CPU configurations show that their technique, named 'DrawnApart,' can boost the median tracking duration to 67% compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

This is a severe problem for user privacy, which is currently protected by laws that focus on acquiring consent to activate website cookies.

These laws have led unscrupulous websites to collect other potential fingerprinting elements such as the hardware configuration, OS, timezones, screen resolution, language, fonts, etc.

upstart writes:

Mega Iceberg – One of the Largest on Record – Released 150 Billion Tons of Freshwater Near Island:

In July 2017, a giant iceberg, named A-68, snapped off Antarctica's Larsen-C ice shelf and began an epic journey across the Southern Ocean. Three and a half years later, the main part of iceberg, A-68A, drifted worryingly close to South Georgia. Concerns were that the berg would run aground in the shallow waters offshore. This would not only cause damage to the seafloor ecosystem but also make it difficult for island wildlife, such as penguins, to make their way to the sea to feed.

[...] For the first two years of its life, A-68A stayed in the cold waters of the Weddell Sea close to its parent ice shelf. Here, it experienced little in the way of melting. However, once the berg began its northward journey across the Drake Passage, it traveled through increasingly warm waters and began to melt.

[...] Tommaso Parrinello, ESA's CryoSat Mission Manager, said, "Our ability to study every move of the iceberg in such detail is thanks to advances in satellite techniques and the use of a variety of measurements. Imaging satellites record the shape of the iceberg and data from altimetry missions like CryoSat add another important dimension as they measure the height of surfaces – which is essential for calculating changes in volume."

The new study reveals that A-68A collided only briefly with the sea floor and broke apart shortly afterward, making it less of a risk in terms of blockage. By the time it reached the shallow waters around South Georgia, the iceberg's keel had reduced to 141 meters below the ocean surface, shallow enough to just avoid the seabed which is around 150 meters deep.

[Ed note: I've provided a brief list of alternative sources for streaming free music and podcasts at the end of this story. Please help out your fellow Soylentils by mentioning your favorite Soundcloud alternative in the comments. --martyb]

upstart writes:

Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in ditching Spotify over COVID misinformation:

Joni Mitchell has turned up the volume on demands for music and podcast streamer Spotify to address misinformation on its platform. Joining protests by a group of medical professionals and by rocker Neil Young, the iconic singer-songwriter says she plans to pull her work off Spotify over false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

"I've decided to remove all my music from Spotify," Mitchell said Friday in a brief post on her website. "Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue."

l...] Young sparked a #DeleteSpotify movement earlier this week when he yanked his catalog off the service and cited a letter by more than 250 doctors, nurses, scientists and educators who criticized Spotify and its most popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, for spreading vaccine misinformation.

In her post, Mitchell, the artist behind songs like Big Yellow Taxi, Help Me and A Case of You, included a link to that same letter. It calls out an episode of Rogan's podcast that featured virologist and vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone, points to a critical post about Malone on fact-checking site PolitiFact, and urges Spotify to establish a policy on misinformation.

Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in having her music pulled off Spotify:

hendrikboom writes:

The universe may have learned its own physical laws.

We present an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own physical laws. It does so by exploring a landscape of possible laws, which we express as a certain class of matrix models. We discover maps that put each of these matrix models in correspondence with both a gauge/gravity theory and a mathematical model of a learning machine, such as a deep recurrent, cyclic neural network. This establishes a correspondence between each solution of the physical theory and a run of a neural network. This correspondence is not an equivalence, partly because gauge theories emerge from N→∞ limits of the matrix models, whereas the same limits of the neural networks used here are not well-defined. We discuss in detail what it means to say that learning takes place in autodidactic systems, where there is no supervision. We propose that if the neural network model can be said to learn without supervision, the same can be said for the corresponding physical theory. We consider other protocols for autodidactic physical systems, such as optimization of graph variety, subset-replication using self-attention and look-ahead, geometrogenesis guided by reinforcement learning, structural learning using renormalization group techniques, and extensions. These protocols together provide a number of directions in which to explore the origin of physical laws based on putting machine learning architectures in correspondence with physical theories.

from The Autodidactic Universe by Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, and Dave Wecker.

abstract

full paper

This sounds like the kind of thing that would be rife with crackpottery, but I've looked it over enough that I can't say "it's not even false". It's not talking about whether we learned the laws of physics by trial and error (we did, that's the scientific method), but whether that's how the universe itself invented them. The authors see mathematical similarity in some formulations of laws of physics with some versions of artificial-intelligence learning algorithms. They explain this in some detail.

Definitely ground for further investigation, despite the catchy title.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA "Oceans Melting Greenland" Mission Complete – Six Years of Mapping Unknown Terrain:

The most important thing to remember about NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland mission, which ended Dec. 31, 2021, may be its name: OMG proved that ocean water is melting Greenland's glaciers at least as much as warm air is melting them from above. Because ice loss from Greenland's ice sheet currently contributes more to the global rise of the oceans than any other single source, this finding has revolutionized scientists' understanding of the pace of sea level rise in the coming decades.

These new, unique measurements have clarified the likely progress of future ice loss in a place where glaciers are melting six or seven times faster today than they were only 25 years ago. If all of Greenland's ice sheet were to melt, global sea levels would rise by about 24 feet (7.4 meters).

But that's just the tip of the iceberg in the story of this small plane- and boat-based mission. In six years of operations, OMG made the first scientific measurements along many miles of the most remote coastline in the Northern Hemisphere. The mission performed the most complete survey of the seafloor around Greenland's coastline, including dozens of previously uncharted fjords (cliff-lined inlets clogged with icebergs from disintegrating glaciers), and measured how the ocean temperature changed from place to place, year to year, and top to bottom. To get this unique dataset, mission planes logged enough air miles around and over Greenland to circle the globe more than 13 times.

takyon writes:

Lenovo invests nearly US$50 million into its chip-design ambitions

A new company called Dingdao Zhixin has been registered as a business entity in Shanghai, China as of January 26, 2022. According to its new listings, it will concern itself with PC hardware, software and some retail equipment - not to mention the sale and design of integrated circuits.

The establishment of a new firm in this sector would be interesting enough, and gets even more so in the wake of reports that this company is in fact wholly owned by Lenovo China. Therefore, this subsidiary might be an early sign that this OEM has ambitions of matching other companies like Apple with its M-series of in-house processors.

Also at WRAL TechWire (Lenovo is headquartered in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina).

Original Submission

owl writes:

Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable:

Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro. But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to capture the low-level data from a floppy disk: my Saleae Logic 8 logic analyzer.

Side note: While I can only highly recommend the Saleae analyzers for their features and easy-to-use software, the things described here can also be done with other logic analyzers – including those available for less than 10 € from your favorite Chinese online store – and using, for example, the free Sigrok software.

Contrary to more modern mass storage devices such as ATA hard drives or USB sticks, the interface to a floppy drive is much more low-level. E.g., you can ask a modern hard drive to read sector 1337 and it will return you the bytes stored in that sector. In contrast, as soon as it is selected for reading and the disk is rotating, a floppy drive will simply give you a pulse each time the magnetic flux changes, i.e. whenever the magnetic field changes orientation. It is important to know that the magnetic field orientation does not directly represent the individual bits that are stored on the disk. Instead, an encoding scheme is always used. The details of the encoding differ between systems – which is why you cannot read an Amiga disk in an Atari ST, for example. Regardless of the implementation, the encoding always needs to take care of several things: 1. Encode the data bits, obviously. 2. Clock recovery. This is essential because different drives may rotate at slightly different speeds and the floppy disk controller thus needs to determine the actual data rate. 3. Marking the start of a sector. This is often achieved by flux patterns that do not occur in regular data.

Raise your hand if you remember storing data on a floppy disk. Or was that on a floppy disc?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Microsoft: Windows needs at least 8 hours online to update reliably:

Microsoft says that Windows devices need to be online for at least eight hours to get the latest updates and have them correctly installed after they're released through Windows Update.

The amount of time devices running Windows are powered on and connected to Windows Update is tracked by Microsoft as 'Update Connectivity.'

This measurement correlates the systems' lack of enough connected time with why they're not up to date while also making it easier to understand why some devices are unlikely to get recently released updates successfully.

According to David Guyer, a Microsoft Program Manager for Windows Updates in MEM, Windows devices need at least 8 hours online to get the latest updates and successfully install them.

"One of the most impactful things we explored was how much time a device needs to be powered on and connected to Windows Update to be able to successfully install quality and feature updates," said Guyer.

"What we found is that devices that don't meet a certain amount of connected time are very unlikely to successfully update. Specifically, data shows that devices need a minimum of two continuous connected hours, and six total connected hours after an update is released to reliably update.

"This allows for a successful download and background installations that are able to restart or resume once a device is active and connected."

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

Surgical robot performs world-first autonomous laparoscopic procedure:

Known as the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), the robotic-arm-equipped device was designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

[...] In the more recent experiments, an improved and more autonomous version of STAR successfully performed the procedure laparoscopically – this means that only small incisions were required for the entry and exit of the surgical tools. What's more, the robot did so four times (on four pigs), producing "significantly better results than humans performing the same procedure."

Intestinal anastomosis is said to be a particularly tricky operation, as it requires multiple sutures to be made in soft tissue with a consistently high rate of precision. If any of the sutures are misplaced, intestinal leakage may occur, which can have very serious consequences for the patient.

Among the new features on this version of STAR are specialized suturing tools, better imaging systems (which include a 3D endoscope) and perhaps most notably, an autonomous control system. The latter adapts the surgical plan in real time, based on the often unpredictable movements of the soft intestinal tissue.

Journal Reference:
H. Saeidi, J. D. Opfermann, M. Kam, et al. Autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis, Science Robotics (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abj2908)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Intel fails to get Spectre, Meltdown chip flaw class-action super-suit tossed out:

Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers.

On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders.

The Register broke the Meltdown story on January 2, 2018, as Intel and those who confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities were preparing to disclose them. The following day, Google's Project Zero published details of Meltdown and its cousin Spectre, revealing that efforts to make CPU cores faster using speculative execution have opened them up to side-channel attacks that can read memory that should be out of reach and leak confidential information.

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

What wintering squirrels can teach astronauts: The unique way that ground squirrels burn almost no energy when they hibernate – with no loss of muscle mass – has implications for space travel:

Now, in research published in Science, an Université de Montréal biologist has figured out why, and his findings could have implications for, of all things, the future of space travel . By studying a variety called the 13-lined ground squirrel that is common in North America, Matthew Regan has confirmed a theory known as "urea nitrogen salvage" dating back to the 1980s.

The theory posits that hibernators harness a metabolic trick of their gut microbes to recycle the nitrogen present in urea, a waste compound that is usually excreted as urine, and use it to build new tissue proteins.

How could this discovery be of use in space? Theoretically, Regan posits, by helping astronauts minimize their own muscle-loss problems caused by microgravity-induced suppression of protein synthesis and which they now try to reduce by intensively exercising.

If a way could be found to augment the astronauts' muscle protein synthesis processes using urea nitrogen salvage, they could be able to achieve better muscle health during long voyages into deep space in spacecraft too small for the usual exercise equipment, the argument goes.

"Because we know which muscle proteins are suppressed during spaceflight, we can compare these proteins with those that are enhanced by urea nitrogen salvage during hibernation," said Regan, who carried out this research while a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Journal Reference:
Matthew D. Regan, Edna Chiang, Yunxi Liu , et al. Nitrogen recycling via gut symbionts increases in ground squirrels over the hibernation season, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abh2950)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Surveys with repetitive questions yield bad data, study finds:

The study found that people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. Marketers, policymakers, and researchers who rely on long surveys to predict consumer or voter behavior will have more accurate data if they craft surveys designed to elicit reliable, original answers, the researchers suggest.

"We wanted to know, is gathering more data in surveys always better, or could asking too many questions lead to respondents providing less useful responses as they adapt to the survey," said first author Ye Li, a UC Riverside assistant professor of management. "Could this paradoxically lead to asking more questions but getting worse results?"

[...] In one of the studies, respondents were asked about their preferences for varying configurations of laptops. They were the sort of questions marketers use to determine if customers are willing to sacrifice a bit of screen size in return for increased storage capacity, for example.

"When you're asked questions over and over about laptop configurations that vary only slightly, the first two or three times you look at them carefully but after that maybe you just look at one attribute, such as how long the battery lasts. We use shortcuts. Using shortcuts gives you less information if you ask for too much information," said Li.