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upstart writes:

Easy aluminum nanoparticles for rapid, efficient hydrogen generation from water:

For years, researchers have tried to find efficient and cost-effective ways to use aluminum's reactivity to generate clean hydrogen fuel. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that an easily produced composite of gallium and aluminum creates aluminum nanoparticles that react rapidly with water at room temperature to yield large amounts of hydrogen. The gallium was easily recovered for reuse after the reaction, which yields 90% of the hydrogen that could theoretically be produced from reaction of all the aluminum in the composite.

"We don't need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I've never seen anything like it," said UCSC Chemistry Professor Scott Oliver.

Oliver and Bakthan Singaram, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are corresponding authors of a paper on the new findings, published February 14 in Applied Nano Materials.

The reaction of aluminum and gallium with water has been known since the 1970s, and videos of it are easy to find online. It works because gallium, a liquid at just above room temperature, removes the passive aluminum oxide coating, allowing direct contact of aluminum with water. The new study, however, includes several innovations and novel findings that could lead to practical applications.

[...] Previous studies had mostly used aluminum-rich mixtures of aluminum and gallium, or in some cases more complex alloys. But Singaram's lab found that hydrogen production increased with a gallium-rich composite. In fact, the rate of hydrogen production was so unexpectedly high the researchers thought there must be something fundamentally different about this gallium-rich alloy.

Journal Reference:
Gabriella Amberchan, Isai Lopez, Beatriz Ehlke, et al. Aluminum Nanoparticles from a Ga–Al Composite for Water Splitting and Hydrogen Generation, ACS Applied Nano Materials (DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.1c04331)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Multiple vulnerabilities found in Snap-confine function on Linux systems:

Qualys' security researchers have discovered several vulnerabilities affecting Canonical's Snap software packaging and deployment system.

In a blog post, Qualys director of vulnerability and threat research, Bharat Jogi, explained that they found multiple vulnerabilities in the snap-confine function on Linux operating systems, "the most important of which can be exploited to escalate privilege to gain root privileges." Jogi added that Snap was developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel.

"The packages called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap-confine is a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications," Jogi said, noting that the main issue was CVE-2021-44731.

"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host. Qualys security researchers have been able to independently verify the vulnerability, develop an exploit, and obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu."

upstart writes:

Innovation is slowing down—and Big Tech is to blame:

[...] This greater industry dominance by top firms is accompanied by a corresponding decline in the risk that they will be disrupted, a prospect that has obsessed corporate managers ever since Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma came out in 1997. At the time Christensen wrote his book, disruption was on the rise. But since about 2000—when top firms started their investment spree in proprietary systems—this trend has declined sharply. In a given industry, the chance that a high-ranking firm (as measured by sales) will drop out of one of the top four spots within four years has fallen from over 20% to around 10%. Here, too, investments by dominant firms in their internal systems largely account for the change. While some new technologies disrupt entire industries—think of what the internet did to newspapers or DVDs—others are now suppressing the disruption of dominant firms.

How does this happen, and why does it apparently affect so much of the economy? It is because these business systems address a major shortcoming of modern capitalism. Beginning in the late 19th century, innovative firms found that they could often achieve dramatic cost savings by producing at a large scale. The shift dramatically reduced consumer prices, but there was a trade-off: in order for companies to achieve those large volumes, products and services needed to be standardized. Henry Ford famously declared that car buyers could have "any color so long as it is black." Retail chains achieved their efficiencies by providing a limited set of products to their thousands of stores. Finance companies offered standard mortgages and loans. As a result, products had limited feature sets; stores had limited selection and were slow to respond to changing demand; and many consumers could not get credit or obtained it only on terms that were costly and not suited for their needs.

upstart writes:

Want to be a developer? These are the coding skills that can get you hired:

Technology recruiters say they are struggling to find experienced full-stack engineers to meet the growing demand for web app development in a candidate-driven tech jobs market.

Developer recruitment platform CodinGame and online technical assessment platform CoderPad surveyed 4,000 tech recruiters to identify the most in-demand tech roles, technical skills, programming languages and frameworks in 2022.

Over 10,000 developers were also polled to identify whether their skillsets and professional aspirations were aligned with the needs of employers.

The top three skills recruiters are looking to hire for this year are web development, DevOps and AI/machine learning, the survey found.

More than a third of tech recruiters (36%) polled said that they were struggling to find experienced full-stack engineers in a competitive hiring market, while 35% of recruiters said there was strong demand for back-end engineers.

upstart writes:

Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History:

Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today's smartphones easily outperform desktop computers of the past, machines which themselves were thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths that ushered in the age of digital computing. The technology has developed so rapidly that an individual who's now making their living developing iPhone applications could very well have started their career working with stacks of punch cards.

With things moving so quickly, it can be difficult to determine what's worth holding onto from a historical perspective. Will last year's Chromebook one day be a museum piece? What about those old Lotus 1-2-3 floppies you've got in the garage? Deciding what artifacts are worth preserving in such a fast moving field is just one of the challenges faced by Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. Dag stopped by [...] to talk about the role of the CHM and other institutions like it in storing and protecting computing history for future generations.

[...] In addition to the hardware itself, the CHM also maintains a collection of ephemera that serves to capture some of the institutional memory of the era. Notebooks from the R&D labs of Fairchild Semiconductor, or handwritten documents from Intel luminary Andrew Grove bring a human touch to a collection of big iron and beige boxes.

[...] Quoting the the words of early Digital Equipment Corporation engineer Gordon Bell, Dag says these computers are "beautiful sculptures" that "reflect the times of their creation" in a way that can't easily be replicated. They represent not just the technological state-of-the-art but also the cultural milieu in which they were developed, with each and every design decision taking into account a wide array of variables ranging from contemporary aesthetics to material availability.

Some, in the Hackaday comments to this story, said "Why people obsess over keeping technology from the past I will never understand. It's old, its useless, just pitch it and lets move on. Keeping crap like this is like trying to preserve a fart. Its useless & pointless." Personally I disagree with this view, but what do you think of the idea of preserving items of technology as historical reminders of what once was? What items would you suggest should be kept?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Paradox of the Lizard Tail, Solved:

When choosing between life and limb, many animals willingly sacrifice the limb.

[...] But lizards may be the best-known users of autotomy. To evade predators, many lizards ditch their still-wiggling tails. This behavior confounds the predator, buying the rest of the lizard time to scurry away. While there are drawbacks to losing a tail — they come in handy for maneuvering, impressing mates and storing fat — it beats being eaten. Many lizards are even capable of regenerating lost tails.

[...] Yong-Ak Song, a biomechanical engineer at New York University Abu Dhabi, calls this the "paradox of the tail": It must be simultaneously adherent and detachable. "It has to detach its tail quickly in order to survive," Dr. Song said of the lizard. "But at the same time, it cannot lose its tail too easily."

Recently, Dr. Song and his colleagues sought to solve the paradox by examining several freshly amputated tails. They did not want for test subjects — according to Dr. Song, the N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi campus is crawling with geckos. Using tiny loops attached to fishing rods, they rounded up several lizards from three species: two types of geckos and a desert lizard known as Schmidt's fringe-toed lizard.

[...] Back at the lab, they pulled the lizards' tails with their fingers, coaxing them into acts of autotomy. They filmed the resulting process at 3,000 frames per second using a high-speed camera. (The lizards were soon returned to where they were first found.) Then the scientists stuck the squirming tails under an electron microscope.

upstart writes:

World funds own destruction with $1.8 tn subsidies: study:

The world must slash $1.8 trillion in annual subsidies that destroy the environment, according to a study Thursday from business groups including one founded by tycoon Richard Branson.

[...] The vast subsidies, totalling two percent of global GDP, fund the "global destruction of nature" and governments worldwide must act, the two organisations added in a statement.

The study "finds the fossil fuel, agriculture and water industries receive more than 80 percent of all environmentally harmful subsidies per year", the organisations concluded.

And they called upon governments to "redirect, repurpose or eliminate" those subsidies by 2030 to help "finance a net zero global economy".

[...] "Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity," said Christiana Figueres, head of The B Team's climate working group.

"At least $1.8 trillion is funding the destruction of nature and changing our climate, while creating huge risks for the very businesses who are receiving the subsidies."

She added that "harmful subsidies must be redirected towards protecting the climate and nature, rather than financing our own extinction".

Here's a high-level list of the top three and what they support:

• $640 billion: fossil fuels (climate change, air and water pollution, etc.)
• $520 billion: agriculture (soil erosion; water pollution, etc.)
• $350 billion: water industry (water pollution; risk to ocean and aterway ecosystems)

Original Submission

owl writes:

Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline:

A French dad faces jail time and a hefty fine after using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online and taking the rest of a nearby town down with them.

Starting at midnight and until 3 AM every day of the week, the French town of Messanges found that their cellular and Internet service were no longer working.

After a mobile carrier reported the issue to the Agence nationale des fréquences (ANFR), a public agency responsible for managing the radioelectric spectrum in France, it was determined that a signal jammer was being used to block radio frequencies in the town.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The surprising structural reason your kitchen sponge is disgusting:

In a series of experiments, the scientists show how various microbial species can affect one another's population dynamics depending on factors of their structural environment such as complexity and size. Some bacteria thrive in a diverse community while others prefer a solitary existence. And a physical environment that allows both kinds to live their best lives leads to the strongest levels of biodiversity.

Soil provides this sort of optimal mixed-housing environment, and so does your kitchen sponge.

[...] The results, You says, create a framework for researchers working with diverse bacterial communities to begin testing what structural environments might work best for their pursuits. They also point toward why a kitchen sponge is such a useful habitat for microbes. It mimics the different degrees of separation found in healthy soil, providing different layers of separation combined with different sizes of communal spaces.

[...] To prove this point, the researchers also ran their experiment with a strip of regular household sponge. The results showed that it's an even better incubator of microbial diversity than any of the laboratory equipment they tested.

"As it turns out, a sponge is a very simple way to implement multilevel portioning to enhance the overall microbial community," You said. "Maybe that's why it's a really dirty thing -- the structure of a sponge just makes a perfect home for microbes."

Journal Reference:
Wu, Feilun, Ha, Yuanchi, Weiss, Andrea, et al. Modulation of microbial community dynamics by spatial partitioning, Nature Chemical Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s41589-021-00961-w)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Apple-1 Registry, currently maintained by Achim Baqué, has used handwriting analysis to solve the mystery of who hand wrote serial numbers on the first Apple-I motherboards. Photos of many boards and several actual boards were examined. One reason for the investigation not happening earlier is that the investigation required writing samples. Achim goes through that and other aspects of the investigation. After two forensic handwriting analyses, the result was clear.

Not on every Apple-1 computer is a serial number!

Some (not all!) Apple-1 of the 1^st batch have a handwritten number on the back which is obviously a serial number. None of the 2^nd batch (also called 'NTI' Apple-1) have a serial number. List of all known serial numbers on the back of some 1^st batch Apple-1.

There were many theories surrounding this number. Only Apple-1 computers sold by the Byte Shop seems to have this number. But nobody remembers where the number really comes from. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Paul Terrell, the board manufacturer etc. all say that they didn't put the number on the mainboard. For a factory it would be very unusual to write a serial number [using a] magic marker on a pcb. Usually it was printed on the board or a label was used.

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

[...] Two forensic examinations in the USA using original Apple-1s have shown that Steve Jobs actually wrote the serial number on the first Apple-1. Another legacy of Steve Jobs.

The Apple-1 Registry is an online museum of the first model of Apple. Only 200 were made and fewer survived. Only 29 are known to have such serial numbers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You'll need a Microsoft account to set up future versions of Windows 11 Pro:

Now that Windows 11's first major post-release update has been issued, Microsoft has started testing a huge collection of new features, UI changes, and redesigned apps in the latest Windows Insider preview for Dev channel users. By and large, the changes are significant and useful—there's an overhauled Task Manager, folders for pinned apps in the Start menu, the renewed ability to drag items into the Taskbar (as you could in Windows 10), improvements to the Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, new touchscreen gestures, and a long list of other fixes and enhancements.

But tucked away toward the bottom of the changelog is one unwelcome addition: like the Home edition of Windows 11, the Pro version will now require an Internet connection and a Microsoft account during setup. In the current version of Windows 11, you could still create a local user account during setup by not connecting your PC to the Internet—something that also worked in the Home version of Windows 10 but was removed in 11. That workaround will no longer be available in either edition going forward, barring a change in Microsoft's plans.

While most devices do require a sign-in to fully enable app stores, cloud storage, and cross-device sharing and syncing, Windows 11 will soon stand alone as the only major consumer OS that requires account sign-in to enable even basic functionality.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

James Webb Space Telescope Locked Onto Guide Star for High Accuracy Mirror Alignment:

After starting the mirror alignment with Webb's first detection of starlight in the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the telescope team is hard at work on the next steps for commissioning the telescope. To make more progress, the team needs to use another instrument, the Fine Guidance Sensor, to lock onto a guide star and keep the telescope pointed to high accuracy. We have asked René Doyon and Nathalie Ouellette of the Université de Montréal to explain how Webb uses its Canadian instrument in this process.

"After being powered on January 28, 2022, and undergoing successful aliveness and functional tests, Webb's Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) has now successfully performed its very first guiding operation! Together with the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), the FGS is one of Canada's contributions to the mission.

"To ensure Webb stays locked on its celestial targets, the FGS measures the exact position of a guide star in its field of view 16 times per second and sends adjustments to the telescope's fine steering mirror about three times per second. In addition to its speed, the FGS also needs to be incredibly precise. The degree of precision with which it can detect changes in the pointing to a celestial object is the equivalent of a person in New York City being able to see the eye motion of someone blinking at the Canadian border 500 kilometers (311 miles) away!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Discovery of key protein in malaria parasite opens door to novel treatment:

An international team has discovered a protein that plays a key biological role in a parasite that causes malaria. Deactivating this protein reduces in vitro growth of Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoa behind the most virulent form of the disease, by more than 75%. The team, led by Professor Dave Richard of Université Laval, recently published details of the discovery in the scientific journal mBio.

"This breakthrough could lead to the development of a treatment that targets a function of the parasite that no malaria drug has yet exploited," said Richard, professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and researcher at CHU de Québec-Université Laval Research Centre.

Plasmodium falciparum is transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. After infecting the host's liver it circulates in the blood, hiding inside red blood cells and thereby avoiding attacks from the immune system. The parasite's main food source is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen from the red blood cells to the rest of the body. The parasite digests the hemoglobin in structures called digestive vacuoles.

"The protein we discovered, PfPX1, is involved in transporting hemoglobin to these digestive vacuoles," said Professor Richard. "When we deactivate PfPX1, we deprive the parasite of its main source of amino acids. This has an impact on its growth and survival."

Journal Reference:
A Phosphoinositide-Binding Protein Acts in the Trafficking Pathway of Hemoglobin in the Malaria Parasite Plasmodium falciparum, mBio (DOI: 10.1128/mbio.03239-21)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Three major browsers are about to hit version 100. Will websites cope?

This February Google put out Chrome 98, closely followed by Mozilla releasing Firefox 97. Soon both will hit version 100.

The memory of the web industry is short. This has happened before: when Opera reached version 10 in 2009, it caused problems, and just three years later, Firefox 10 faced similar issues.

And it will happen again. Google is planning to release Chrome 100 at the beginning of April, and Firefox 100 should follow in May.

Google anticipates that there will be some issues, so ever since Chrome 96 it has offered a facility to force the version number to 100: just go to chrome://flags and set #force-major-version-to-100.

Also at XDA Developers.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Corn ethanol no better—and probably worse—than burning gasoline, study says:

For over a decade, the US has blended ethanol with gasoline in an attempt to reduce the overall carbon pollution produced by fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks. But a new study says that the practice may not be achieving its goals. In fact, burning ethanol made from corn—the major source in the US—may be worse for the climate than just burning gasoline alone.

Corn drove demand for land and fertilizer far higher than previous assessments had estimated. Together, the additional land and fertilizer drove up ethanol's carbon footprint to the point where the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from seed to tank—were higher than that of gasoline. Some researchers predicted [*] this might happen, but the new paper provides a comprehensive and retrospective look at the real-world results of the policy.

Proponents have long argued that corn-based ethanol bolsters farm incomes while providing a domestic source of renewable liquid fuel, while critics have said that its status as a carbon-reducing gasoline additive relies on questionable accounting. Based on the new study, both sides may be right.

Journal Reference:
Mark Z. Jacobson. Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, Energy & Environmental Science (DOI: 10.1039/B809990C)

Original Submission