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upstart writes:

Elon Musk Suggests That Piracy is Appealing Once Again:

There is little doubt that for many people, streaming services have become the standard for watching movies and TV-shows.

Subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ even converted some hardcore pirates, as they were seen as more convenient alternatives.

There is a problem though. The whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many 'Netflixes.' Paying for a handful of streaming subscriptions and navigating from service to service for an evening of entertainment is not the best experience.

Research has shown that the fragmented streaming landscape keeps piracy relevant, instead of making it disappear.

A few hours ago Elon Musk added his two cents on the streaming service jungle. [...] The tweet doesn't come with any further context but it's clear that the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is not entirely happy with the paid streaming ecosystem in its current form. Whether he uses The Pirate Bay himself is another question though.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sacklers Raise Their Offer to Settle Opioid Lawsuits by More Than $1 Billion:

Members of the billionaire Sackler family have sweetened their cash offer to settle thousands of opioid-related lawsuits against them and their company, Purdue Pharma, offering up to $6 billion, an increase of more than $1 billion from an earlier offer, according to a mediator's report filed Friday afternoon in bankruptcy court.

But the deal is not done. The Sacklers have not budged from the line they drew in the sand at the outset of the case. In exchange for their billions, they are continuing to demand an end to all civil claims against them related to Purdue and opioids, and that future such claims be prohibited.

Legal experts and the public have criticized efforts by the Sackler family to seek personal protection from liability. It is a shield typically granted to companies seeking bankruptcy restructuring, as Purdue is, but rarely extended to owners who do not file for personal bankruptcy. Eight states and the District of Columbia refused to sign on to an earlier proposal because of the Sackler liability shields.

The mediator, Judge Shelley Chapman, a federal bankruptcy judge, said in her report that a "supermajority" of those states had now agreed to the new offer. But holdouts remain and the deal is not yet done.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Three-drug combination prolongs survival in men with metastatic, hormone-sensitive prostate cancer:

Standard treatment for patients with metastatic, hormone-sensitive prostate cancer includes the addition of either the chemotherapy drug docetaxel or an androgen-receptor pathway inhibitor to androgen-deprivation therapy, with the latter two treatments acting to lower the effects of androgen hormones, such as testosterone. Clinical trials that have combined all three treatments have generated conflicting results. To provide clarity, investigators designed the large, international ARASENS Trial and randomly assigned 1,306 patients with metastatic, hormone-sensitive prostate cancer in a 1:1 ratio to receive the oral androgen-receptor inhibitor darolutamide or placebo, both in combination with androgen-deprivation therapy and docetaxel.

Survival rates in the two groups were compared after 533 patients had died. Patients were followed for a median of approximately 3.5 years, and those who received darolutamide had a 32.5% lower risk of dying during that time than patients not taking darolutamide.

Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Smith, Maha Hussain, Fred Saad, et al. Darolutamide and Survival in Metastatic, Hormone-Sensitive Prostate Cancer, New England Journal of Medicine (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2119115)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla's radar-less cars investigated by NHTSA after complaints spike:

Tesla is facing a new headache this week. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into a "phantom braking" problem after receiving hundreds of complaints from owners of recent Models 3 and Y. In total, the NHTSA says that about 416,000 cars are affected.

In May 2021, Tesla decided to remove the forward-looking radar sensor from the Model 3 and Model Y EVs. This sensor was used by some of the cars' advanced driver-assistance systems, like adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, and automatic emergency braking.

Instead, new Teslas built for the North American market rely entirely on cameras. At the time of the removal, Tesla noted that the change meant the cars' forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking functions were no longer rated by the NHTSA but that the company expected that rating to happen "in the coming weeks."

[...] But the problem of phantom braking is not limited to the controversial FSD mode. In early February, The Washington Post reported on a growing number of complaints made to the NHTSA by Tesla owners, who told the agency about situations in which their cars slammed on the brakes at inappropriate times (for example, when driving at highway speed), mistakenly believing an obstacle was ahead.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers combine piezoelectric thin film and metasurfaces to create lens with tunable focus: Compact, inexpensive tunable lenses could be useful for portable medical diagnostics, miniature cameras and more:

"This type of low-power, ultra-compact varifocal lens could be used in a wide range of sensor and imaging technologies where system size, weight and cost are important," said research project leader Christopher Dirdal from SINTEF Smart Sensors and Microsystems in Norway. "In addition, introducing precision tunability to metasurfaces opens up completely new ways to manipulate light."

Dirdal and colleagues describe the new technology in the Optica Publishing Group journal Optics Letters. To change focal length, a voltage is applied over lead zirconate titanate (PZT) membranes causing them to deform. This, in turn, shifts the distance between two metasurface lenses.

"Our novel approach offers a large displacement between the metasurface lenses at high speed and using low voltages," said Dirdal. "Compared to state-of-the-art devices, we demonstrated twice the out-of-plane displacement at a quarter of the voltage."

upstart writes:

16-year-old Indian chess sensation Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa stuns world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen:

16-year-old Indian chess sensation Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa stuns world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen

Praggnanandhaa, nicknamed Pragg, belied his age and his experience as he remained cool and collected, while Carlsen appeared to make mistakes to present opportunities to the Indian youngster.

And although the five-time world champion fought to get back into the game, Pragg didn't give him an opening, eventually holding on for a famous victory in the rapid chess tournament.

When it became apparent a win was certain, the achievement appeared to dawn on Pragg, as he covered his mouth with his hand in shock.

It was Pragg's first victory over Carlsen, and he became the youngest player to beat Carlsen since the superstar became World Champion in 2013.

The cherry on top - Pragg was playing black!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

With eyes on reuse, Relativity plans rapid transition to Terran R engines:

Relativity Space intends to use the small Aeon 1 engine it is developing to power its first rocket for only a few flights. Instead, the company plans to quickly perform a "block upgrade" for the Terran 1 rocket, which will serve as a bridge to the much larger, more capable Terran R rocket.

"We've always envisioned Terran 1 being a development platform," said Tim Ellis, the co-founder and chief executive of Relativity Space, in an interview with Ars.

The California-based company, which seeks to 3D-print the majority of its rocket parts, is continuing to work toward the first launch of Terran 1 this year. Powered by nine Aeon 1 rocket engines, this small rocket has a lift capacity of 1.25 metric tons to low Earth orbit. This first Terran 1 mission will not carry any customer payloads in order to focus on the rocket itself and is called "Good Luck, Have Fun." The name is a reference to what players say to one another before a video game begins, Ellis said.

The second flight of Terran 1 will carry a "Venture Class Launch Services" small satellite payload for NASA, awarded by the space agency in 2020 to support US-based small launch companies. The third Terran 1 mission also has a customer, but Relativity has not yet disclosed it.

Following these three demonstration flights, Relativity plans to upgrade the Terran 1 rocket by moving from a nine-engine configuration to just a single Aeon-R engine. This engine, nine of which will eventually power the reusable Terran R rocket, is projected to have about 300,000 pounds of thrust, or more than 10 times that of the Aeon-1 engine. This upgrade will provide Relativity with a more capable small launch vehicle, for less cost, with commonality on the Terran R rocket, Ellis said. It also satisfies the company's goal of reducing part counts. For example, instead of nine engines and 18 turbopumps, the upgraded Terran 1 would use one engine and two turbopumps.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Unearthed photos show John Glenn's orbit of Earth on 60th anniversary:

Sunday marks 60 years since NASA astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.

On Feb. 20, 1962, the "Mercury Seven" member set out on the agency's three-orbit Mercury-Atlas 6 mission aboard the spacecraft he named Friendship 7.

New images released to Fox News show the mission – and Glenn – in remarkable detail.

The pictures, created by "Apollo Remastered" author Andy Saunders, were made using source footage provided by Stephen Slater, who headed up the archive research and production for "Apollo 11."

Saunders, who has previously shared remastered images of the Apollo 15 moon landing, regularly posts new images on Twitter and Instagram.

To produce each new image, Saunders told Fox News he stacked hundreds of frames of the film on top of each other in several areas of the film — "averaging out" the image noise — and "stitched" the frames together, with each image containing more than 1,000 image samples. The output was then constructed using digital processing techniques.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

COVID-19 infection detected in breath tests:

Traces of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can be detected in microscopically small fluid droplets exhaled during a very short time span. This is the finding of a new study from the University of Gothenburg. The measurement was carried out primarily with an advanced research instrument developed by the publishing research team.

The findings have now been published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses. The measurements were made with the research instrument Particles in Exhaled Air (PExA), developed at Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy, and with a smaller handheld instrument called the Breath Explor (BE).

Infection spread with exhaled air is well known, but now the researchers show that a few breaths are sufficient for detecting traces of viruses in microscopically small fluid droplets (i.e. particles) exhaled from small airways, at least early in the course of COVID-19.

"We show that aerosol particles with the ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus can be found early in the course of COVID-19. The particles we can detect are very small-less than five micrometers in diameter-and we have here managed to capture particles with RNA virus in just a few breaths," said Emilia Viklund, a doctoral student in occupational and environmental medicine and lead author of the study.

Yes, we are aware; comment counts do not appear to be updating when viewing the main page.

We apparently have a resource availability issue. As far as I can tell, the counts are being updated correctly. (Yay!)

The problem seems to exist in a layer in which I lack expertise. The assistance of site admins has been requested.

UPDATE 20:23 23-02-2022

The problem has now been resolved. Many thanks to mechanicjay for fixing it again. As of yet we do not know the cause of the local mysql query node failure on one of our servers. However, as some of you have already deduced, there are many background tasks that are managed by the scheduler including updating comment counts, issuing moderation points, updating the journal index on the front page etc. The scheduler couldn't access the database and therefore couldn't do any of the tasks that we expect it to do.

In addition to expressing our gratitude to mechanicjay I would also like to say thanks to all in our community for your patience and good-humour in this rather protracted fix.

upstart writes:

Centuries-old capture documents now online:

Centuries-old documents related to the capture of ships by the British are accessible online from today, for the use of international researchers. The "Prize Papers"  Project of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Göttingen is, as a first stage, making available online via the website www.prizepapers.de documents from court processes linked to approximately 1,500 ship captures between 1793 and 1815. The act of capturing ships, as so-called prize, was once a common practice during the conduct of war by legitimate means. Since 2018, the research project has had as its long-term objectives the cataloguing and digitisation of the "Prize Papers" in their entirety, which were originally drawn up for or during court processes related to ship captures by the English or British between 1652 and 1817. This project, which is situated at the University of Oldenburg, as well as at The National Archives, UK (TNA), is being funded by the Academies Programme of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities which in turn is, in equal parts, financed by the Federal Government of Germany and the state of Lower Saxony. The project co-operates closely with the German Historical Institute London, as well as the VZG, the Head Office of the Common Library Network in Göttingen (VZG) in Göttingen, who provide their IT expertise.

upstart writes:

Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices - ABC News:

When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds.

Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us.

As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker.

upstart writes:

EU Challenges China Over Telecom Patents:

The European Union has filed suit against China to protect companies' telecom technology patents, according to a report.

The European Commission alleged that companies from the EU's member countries were being discouraged from protecting certain patents in foreign courts. The legal challenges allege Chinese courts have been threatening these companies with heavy fines if they persist, as Reuters reported. In one case, the fines were 130,000 euros (more than $147,000) per day.

The EU says that since August 2020, Chinese courts have been handing European companies' "anti-suit injunctions" to prevent them from going to non-Chinese courts to legally protect the companies' patents, and threatening fines if they do.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Well-functioning fat may be the key to fewer old-age ailments:

How well does your fat function? It isn't a question that one gets asked very often. Nonetheless, research in recent years suggests that the function of our fat tissue, or adipose tissue, is central to why our bodies decay with age, and strongly linked to human diseases like diabetes 2, cancer as obesity often develop and fat cells undergo functional changes as we get older. Thus, overall health is not just influenced by the amount of fat we bear, but about how well our fat tissue functions.

[...] Gudiksen and a group of colleagues looked at the role of age and physical training in maintaining fat tissue function. Specifically, they studied mitochondria, the tiny power plants within fat cells. Mitochondria convert calories from food to supply cells with energy. To maintain the life processes within cells, they need to function optimally.

upstart writes:

Fear Not: Intel Says the Chip Technology That'll Power Your PC in 2025 Is Going Great:

Intel on Thursday showed a silicon wafer studded with chips built with a manufacturing process that's set to arrive in 2025, a signal intended to reassure customers that the company's years of chip manufacturing difficulties are behind it.

"We remain on or ahead of schedule against the timelines that we laid out," Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said of the company's plan to improve manufacturing processes. He showed off a gleaming wafer of memory chips built with the company's upcoming Intel 18A process, which overhauls the transistors at the heart of chip circuitry and the way power is delivered to them.