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owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/tesla-recalls-53822-cars-because-they-wont-stop-at-stop-signs/

Tesla's controversial hands-free driver-assistance system is the subject of yet another safety recall. In November, the automaker had to recall nearly 12,000 cars after a software update affected some of the cars' forward-looking safety systems. Now, Tesla wants to recall 53,822 cars to remove a "rolling stop" feature that flouts traffic laws.

The issue affects Models 3, Y, S, and X running firmware 2020.40.4.10 or newer and participating in the "full self-driving" beta program. This software allows selectable moods for the car's driving style—chill, average, and assertive. And it's the last of those that's the problem.

In assertive mode, if a Tesla approaches a four-way stop intersection at less than 5.6 mph (9 km/h) and it detects no other road users or pedestrians near the intersection, it will carry on traveling at that speed instead of coming to a complete stop at the stop sign.

Tesla first released the rolling stop function in October 2020. But in January of this year, it met with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration twice, deciding to issue the recall suspending the law-breaking feature the day after the second meeting.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Earth has a second known 'Trojan asteroid' that shares its orbit

A recently found space rock is schlepping along with Earth around the sun. This "Trojan asteroid" is only the second one discovered that belongs to our planet. And it's probably a visitor.

Trojan asteroids, which are also found accompanying Mars, Jupiter and Neptune, hang out in two locations near a planet where the gravitational pulls of that planet and the sun balance each other (SN: 10/15/21). Because of this balancing act, these locations are stable spots in space. In 2010, astronomers discovered the first known Earth Trojan — called 2010 TK7 — orbiting within one of these two regions, known as L4, tens of millions of kilometers from Earth and leading our planet around the sun (SN: 8/2/11).

Now, researchers have found another one. Dubbed 2020 XL5, this roughly 1-kilometer-wide asteroid is also at L4, astronomer Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Barcelona and colleagues report February 1 in Nature Communications.

2020 XL₅. 2010 TK₇. Earth trojan.

Journal Reference:
T. Santana-Ros, M. Micheli, L. Faggioli, et al. Orbital stability analysis and photometric characterization of the second Earth Trojan asteroid 2020 XL5 [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-27988-4)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

FCC aims to stop broadband bill shock, reviving plan nixed by Ajit Pai:

The Federal Communications Commission is moving ahead with plans to require broadband "nutrition labels" that include details on the actual price of Internet service and information about data caps and performance.

The consumer labels that home Internet and mobile broadband providers would have to provide at the point of sale will be similar to those adopted by the FCC in 2016. The labels and related rules requiring greater transparency were eliminated under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, but the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act approved by Congress in November 2021 requires the FCC to issue new rules mandating the display of the consumer labels.

Today's 4-0 FCC vote approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks public comment on the plan. There's generally at least a few months between an NPRM and a commission vote to issue final rules. The deadline for initial comments will be 30 days after the NPRM is published in the Federal Register, and reply comments will be due 45 days after Federal Register publication. The docket where comments will be filed can be found here.

[...] "Today's FCC vote is a welcome step forward and a win for consumers," Joshua Stager, deputy director for broadband and competition policy at New America's Open Technology Institute, said today. ISPs are "notorious for keeping customers in the dark" with "hidden fees, surprise bills, and dense contracts," he said.

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upstart writes:

Hubble Space Telescope Revisits a Galactic Oddball:

The dwarf galaxy NGC 1705 is featured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This diminutive galaxy lies in the southern constellation Pictor, and is approximately 17 million light-years from Earth. NGC 1705 is a cosmic oddball — it is small, irregularly shaped, and has recently undergone a spate of star formation known as a starburst.

Despite these eccentricities, NGC 1705 and other dwarf irregular galaxies like it can provide valuable insights into the overall evolution of galaxies. Dwarf irregular galaxies tend to contain few elements other than hydrogen or helium, and are considered to be similar to the earliest galaxies that populated the Universe.

[...] By observing a specific wavelength of light known as H-alpha with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, astronomers aimed to discover thousands of emission nebulae — regions created when hot, young stars bathe the clouds of gas surrounding them in ultraviolet light, causing them to glow.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US bans telecom giant China Unicom over spying concerns:

China Unicom has become the latest Chinese telecoms giant to be banned from the US over "significant" national security and espionage concerns.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it had voted unanimously to revoke authorisation for the company's American unit to operate in the US.

The firm must stop providing telecoms services in America within 60 days.

The announcement comes after larger rival China Telecom had its licence to operate in the US revoked in October.

FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said: "There has been mounting evidence - and with it, a growing concern - that Chinese state-owned carriers pose a real threat to the security of our telecommunications networks."

China Unicom told the BBC its American unit "has a good record of complying with relevant US laws and regulations and providing telecommunication services and solutions as a reliable partner of its customers in the past two decades".

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Simulations Reveal Fundamental Insights on Janus Particles:

Named for a Roman god, Janus particles refer to nanoparticles that possess surfaces with two or more distinct physical chemical properties.

The special nanoparticles were introduced to the scientific community by 1991 Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who pointed out that "objects with two sides of different wettability have the unique advantage of densely self-assembling at liquid-liquid interfaces," and consequentially, generating new colloidal structures.

The resulting chemical asymmetry led to the discovery of new and unusual molecular properties, making Janus particles relevant to a wide range of applications, from biomedicine to water-repellent textiles to fabrication of membranes with tunable properties.

[...] Focusing on a cluster of spherical particles used to create a rigid body of Janus rods, the simulations shed light on the dynamic behavior of the nanoparticles, with varying surface coatings and sizes, at a water-oil interface. The work reveals a strong influence of their shape on their orientation at the interface as well as on their mobility.

"As a result, these varying individual responses modify the interfacial tension of the entire system, which impacts rheology and, thus, processing schemes," said co-author Giovanniantonio Natale.

Journal Reference:
Mohammad T. Hossain, Ian D. Gates, Giovanniantonio Natale. Dynamics of Brownian Janus rods at a liquid–liquid interface, Physics of Fluids (DOI: 10.1063/5.0076148)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'The New York Times' buys Wordle

The New York Times has acquired Wordle, a simple word guessing game, for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures, the newspaper announced Monday.

The game, created by Josh Wardle, will initially continue to be free to play.

Wordle, which was released in October 2021, is a daily word puzzle that has soared in popularity, amassing millions of daily players within months.

To play the game, players have six tries to guess a five-letter word. Many users choose to share their results — a grid of green, yellow and black boxes — on social media.

Also at CNN.

See also: The New York Times Buys Wordle
The Sudden Rise of Wordle
Wordle buyout by New York Times draws backlash from fans

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meta stablecoin project Diem confirms shut down and $200m asset sale:

The Diem Association has read the writing on the wall and called it quits, confirming on Monday it will sell off its Diem Payment Network assets.

It explained that the decision was made after it "became clear" that federal regulators would not allow the project to move ahead.

In making the announcement, the association said it will sell those assets to Silvergate, a crypto-focused bank it was working with last year to launch a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, for $200 million.

upstart writes:

Sony bolsters PlayStation, buying Destiny game maker Bungie for $3.6 billion:

Sony has reached a deal to buy Halo creator and Destiny maker Bungie, marking an escalation of efforts for the biggest game makers to expand their lineup with some of the most popular franchises in the industry.

The agreement, confirmed Monday by both companies after an earlier Bloomberg report, brings one of the most well respected game makers in the industry under Sony's control. Bungie, which makes the online game Destiny, is also known for creating the early gaming hit Halo, which is now owned by Microsoft.

"Bungie has created two of gaming's most iconic franchises, Halo and Destiny, and has deep expertise in bringing incredible immersive experiences at great scale to the community through games that evolve and develop over time, and has a hugely impressive road map for future content," Jim Ryan, head of Sony's PlayStation division, said in a blog post Monday.

Sony didn't say how much it paid for the game maker, but Bloomberg reported the price to be $3.6 billion. The move comes after two other large game industry acquisitions this month, when Microsoft announced plans to buy Call of Duty and World of Warcraft maker Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, and Take-Two Interactive said it planned to buy FarmVille developer Zynga for $12.7 billion.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Imagine Regrowing Lost Limbs – It's a Step Closer With New Treatment That Helped Frogs Regenerate Amputated Legs:

A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs – taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts, too.

Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or traumatic injury, they often feel that they've lost a part of who they are, even experiencing a grief akin to losing a loved one. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike salamanders or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool, adult human tissues generally do not regenerate – limb loss is permanent and irreversible.

While there have been significant advances in prosthetic and bionic technologies to replace lost limbs, they cannot yet restore a sense of touch, minimize the sensation of phantom pains or match the capabilities of natural limbs. Without reconstructing the limb itself, a person won't be able to feel the touch of a loved one or the warmth of the sun.

[...] Our recent study in the journal Science Advances showed that just 24 hours of a treatment we designed is enough to regenerate fully functional and touch-sensitive limbs in frogs.

upstart writes:

Seagate starts shipping enormous 22TB hard drives to "some customers":

Whereas NVMe SSDs tend to focus on getting faster, good old spinning hard drives are intent on getting larger. Tom's Hardware reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced on a recent earnings call that it is shipping huge 22TB hard drives to some of its customers. The company uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its biggest drives.

The highest-capacity drives most people can currently buy top out at 20TB; the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and they both generally retail for over $600. In its NAS drives, Seagate uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which provides better random read and write speeds than SMR disks but at a lower density—this is fine for archival storage but not so much for servers where multiple users are regularly accessing and modifying data.

[...] But as of early 2021, Seagate said it was aiming for 30TB drives by 2023, 50TB drives in 2026, and 100TB drives by 2030.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The PC is back again. But for how long?:

In the last few years, PC sales have been in gradual decline for the obvious reason that, with the advent of smartphones and tablets, the one-size-fits-all approach offered by the PC didn't seem so relevant anymore - particularly for consumers.

That changed with the pandemic as many people rapidly realised that while tablets and smartphones are useful for watching video or sending a few messages, they are a lot less useful for long hours of working or learning.

Until we come up with something better, that old combination of screen and keyboard is just better for creative tasks than a screen alone. As a result, the PC has seen the biggest growth in a decade, with PC sales up 14% to 350 million this year.

Part of that was organisations buying notebooks to replace the desktop PCs locked away in offices they could not access, and part of its was families buying devices to keep them entertained and educated during lockdown.

hubie writes:

Heavy metals contaminate ground and surface waters from a variety of sources such as industrial effluent or fertilizers or pesticide applications. Cadmium and lead are the most common and toxic metals found in aqueous environments. They are persistent, they migrate, they accumulate in biological tissues, and they are carcinogenic. Removing these metals effectively and cheaply has been a big environmental challenge. There are a number of approaches to remove them including reverse osmosis, ion-exchange, chemical precipitation, coagulation, electrochemical treatment, and physical adsorption. Of these, adsorption is seen as very promising due to it being cost-effective, widely available, and easy to implement. There are a wide variety of adsorbent materials from the mundane (activated carbon, diatomaceous earth, polymers, etc.) to the exotic (carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide), but biochar has shown to be very efficient and cost-effective.

upstart writes:

The US plans to reduce roadway deaths with smarter road design:

Statistics help tell stories, and one often touted by technologists and engineers and police officers and even the federal government told a tale. The statistic: 94 percent of US traffic crashes are the result of human error. The number felt right. It also appealed to a very American idea: that individuals are in charge of their own destinies. Rather than place the burden of road safety on systems—the way roads are built, the way cars are designed, the way streets are governed—it placed it on the driver, or the walker, or the cyclist.

The statistic was based on a misunderstanding of a 2015 report from the US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is in charge of US road safety. The report studied crashes between 2005 and 2007 and determined that the driver was the "critical reason" behind the vast majority of crashes. But a driver's actions were typically the last in a long chain of events. The driver's fiddly movement of the wheel, in other words, was the final thing to go wrong—a process that started with, perhaps, the surveying of the highway, or the road design laid out on the desk of an engineer, or the policy crafted by lobbyists decades ago that made it impossible for anyone to get across town without a car.

Earlier this month, after pleas from researchers, advocates, and another Biden administration official, the US DOT nixed that 94 percent statistic from its website. And on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg began to tell a very different story about US road deaths. "Human fallibility should not lead to human fatalities," he said during a press conference in Washington, DC. His goal, he said, is zero road deaths.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Over at ACM.org, Robin K. Hill writes Cryptocurs Don't Asportate [*]:

Cryptocurrency cannot be stolen—by definition. We don't need to ask whether crypto is a commodity or a credit vehicle, nor whether the exchange or the client owns the funds [Anderson]. We need only look at the principle behind the arrangement. Most bank accounts have an owner, a vessel (the account), some contents (the money), and some means of access (an account identifier or accountholder's personal identity). AND there is some authority that manages these elements (the bank). Cryptocurrency conflates the vessel and the contents, while rejecting the authority. I claim that cryptocurrency also absorbs the owner into the acess, leaving only two things, the access and the contents.

Note that the term "decentralized finance" might be more precise here, but "crypto" is the coin of the realm, so to speak. We digress to note that cryptocurrency promoters explicitly omit the element of authority, claiming its absence as a feature, not a bug. Yet this doctrine has already, and ironically, been contravened. The government(!) of El Salvador has declared that Bitcoin is legal tender and must be accepted as payment; the IMF (an even broader authority!) urges retraction [IMF]. A long-standing request to the local government for permission to excavate the tip (landfill) in Newport (Wales) has ben rejected by that Council [BBC]. Law enforcement can indeed handle this as a crime [HamiltonPolice]. In all of these situations, a crypto holder has invoked authority to thwart the anarchy of decentralized finance.