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quietus writes:

European airplane maker Airbus and a 50/50 joint partnership between General Electric (GE) and Safran Aircraft Engines are going to equip an A380 superjumbo with a hydrogen engine, by 2026. The plan is to go the cryogenic route with hydrogen: using its liquid form at -253°C (-425°F), and burning it directly in a GE Passport turbofan.

The modified A380 will keep its 4 conventional turbines, with an additional fifth being the hydrogen-powered one.

The number of technical challenges are large. Under the plans, 400kg of liquid hydrogen will be stored in four tanks at minus 253 degrees Celsius. A new cryogenic distribution system will need to be developed. The hydrogen will also need to be converted into a gas before it is burnt. The gas burns at a much higher temperature than conventional jet fuel, so special cooling and coating materials will also need to be developed.

The modified GE Passport jet engine needs a complete overhaul of its combustor, fuel system and controls system to make them compatible with liquid hydrogen fuel. The group picked the Passport because of its size, advanced turbomachinery and ability to operate at the appropriate pressures and temperatures for the flight platform. As the liquid hydrogen needs to be vaporized into gas to be used as fuel, certain parts of the engine could see temperature differences of some 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

upstart writes:

China suggests it doesn't own the rocket debris poised to collide with the Moon:

Don't expect China to readily accept blame for the rocket debris expected to collide with the Moon on March 4th. SpaceNews and The Verge report Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin denied that the debris came from the 2014 Chang'e-5 T1 Moon mission. The upper stage of that rocket burned up "completely" in Earth's atmosphere, Wang said. He maintained that China's aerospace efforts were always in line with international laws, and that the country was determined to protect the "long-term sustainability" of outer space.

[...] The dispute over the debris' origins also reflects the difficulty of tracking space debris. While there are more advanced sensors for spotting debris in Earth orbit, deep space monitoring simply hasn't been a priority. The impending collision might change that focus, particularly with Moon missions like NASA's Artemis program on the horizon.

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takyon writes:

Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians

A massive leak from one of the world's biggest private banks, Credit Suisse, has exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes.

Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland's best-known financial institutions.

The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds. The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data.

We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world.

They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela's state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.

One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.

The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. "I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral," the whistleblower source said in a statement. "The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders."

See also: The Credit Suisse leaks expose an industry that has got away with too much for too long

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upstart writes:

China Says Rover Discovered Glass Spheres on the Dark Side of the Moon:

China's Yutu-2 rover just won't stop making — or at least claiming – weird discoveries on the Moon. Case in point, Chinese space authorities now say it's found several mysterious glass spheres found on the far side of the lunar surface.

The team behind the discovery published a paper about the findings in the journal Science Bulletin, in which they describe the objects as "translucent glass globules."

The spheres are roughly a centimeter in diameter, they say, and were spotted in images taken by the panorama camera on the Yutu-2 rover on the dark side of the Moon.

[...] Though the globules seem plausible, it's worth noting that Yutu-2 has been the source of some sketchy claims during its tenure on the Moon. Remember that "moon cube" that turned out to be a boring rock? Or that "gel" that turned out to be, uh, another rock?

Journal Reference:
Zhiyong Xiao, Pan Yan, Bo Wu, et al. Translucent glass globules on the Moon, Science Bulletin (DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2021.11.004)

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takyon writes:

Linux Developers Discuss Deprecating & Removing ReiserFS

Besides no discussion in years over possibly upstreaming Reiser4 nor have any been brought up about eventually trying to mainline Reiser5, it looks like the original and feature-rich for its original time ReiserFS file-system could be on its way out of the Linux kernel in 2022.

ReiserFS was introduced 21 years ago as the Linux kernel's first journaling file-system to be mainlined and offered innovative features for its time among early open-source file-systems. For a time ReiserFS was used by default on SUSE Linux and during the Namesys times was continuing to see active feature development. But since lead ReiserFS developer Hans Reiser was convicted of murdering his wife a decade and a half ago, there hasn't been much work on ReiserFS (or Reiser4) besides notably the work of former Namesys developer Edward Shishkin. While Shishkin has been pushing forward with Reiser4/Reiser5 out-of-tree, ReiserFS has basically been left to code rot with diminishing user interest and no company seeming to want to get involved with it given its connection to Hans Reiser. Plus these days EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs are all better choices and even OpenZFS.

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upstart writes:

EV coach drives from California to Seattle and back using public chargers:

An electric coach just completed a 1,700-mile (2,743-km) trip from Newark, California, to Seattle and back. The journey was a demonstration of battery-electric transport and was organized by the coach operator MTRWestern and ABC Companies, the US importer for Van Hool coaches.

What makes this trip noteworthy [...] is that it relied on public fast chargers. The coach averaged 280 miles (450 km) between charging stops, with some stretches of over 300 miles (482 km).

The coach averaged 55 mph (88.5 km/h) on its trip and used 3.4 MWh of electricity. Half a mile per kWh sounds like pretty bad efficiency if you're used to thinking about (comparatively) tiny passenger EVs, but with 660 kWh onboard, the CX45E has more than enough lithium to stave off range anxiety. A comparable trip by diesel coach would consume 262 gallons of the fuel, according to ABC.

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Live: Updating.

Reuters: Russian forces launch invasion of Ukraine with strikes on defence

MOSCOW/KYIV, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Russian forces fired missiles at several cities in Ukraine and landed troops on its coast on Thursday, officials and media said, after President Vladimir Putin authorised what he called a special military operation in the east.

Shortly after Putin spoke in a televised address on Russian state TV, explosions could be heard in the pre-dawn quiet of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

Gunfire rattled near the capital's main airport, the Interfax news agency said, and sirens were heard over the city.

WSJ: The Latest News on the Russia-Ukraine Crisis: Live Updates

Russian troops and tanks pushed into Ukraine and airstrikes hit the country's capital and more than a dozen other cities early Thursday after President Vladimir Putin said he ordered a military operation to "demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine" and bring its leaders to trial.

Ukrainian officials said an initial wave of strikes targeted military installations, airfields and government facilities across the country. Ukraine's border service said its troops came under attack all along the country's frontiers with Russia and Belarus as well as Crimea. Heavy shelling targeted the city of Mariupol on the Azov sea. Air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv after 7 a.m. and the city's airport came under attack. Ukraine's military said it shot down five Russian warplanes and one helicopter. Russia denied any of its aircraft were hit.

mhajicek writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-online-privacy-inequality.html

As information and communications technology (ICT) systems proliferate, it has become essential for the privacy of users to be considered and safeguarded. While there are many existing ways to protect users' digital privacy, such as network security measures, cryptography and access control strategies, these methods are not implemented equally in all countries worldwide.

"Our team has been researching digital privacy since 2016," Mohammad Abu Alsheikh, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "This recent work was inspired by the inequality we noticed in the digital privacy protection provided to users based on their geographical location."

[...] The analyses conducted by this team of researchers yielded very interesting results, which emphasize the extent to which digital privacy has recently led to significant inequality. Most notably, they found that young users (15- to 32-year-olds) were more concerned about their digital privacy than older ones (33-year-olds and older adults).

upstart writes:

Inside "Project Tinman": Peloton's plan to conceal rust in its exercise bikes:

[...] In September last year, staff at Peloton warehouses, which receive high-end bikes originally manufactured in Taiwan, noticed that paint was flaking off some of the exercise machines.

The cause was a build-up of rust on "non-visible parts" of the bike—the inner frame of the seat and handlebars—and did not affect the product's integrity, Peloton recently told the Financial Times.

Instead of returning the bikes to the manufacturer, executives hatched a plan, dubbed internally as "Project Tinman," to conceal the corrosion and sent the machines to customers who had paid between $1,495 and $2,495 to purchase them.

The project was first revealed in FT Magazine last week, but eight current and former Peloton employees across four US states have provided further details on the operation.

They described the plan as a nationwide effort to avoid yet another costly recall just months after the company's most tragic episode—the death of a child due to the design of its treadmill.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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!

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