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upstart writes:

Ukraine may move its top-secret data and servers abroad:

Fears that Russia could steal top-secret government documents has caused Ukrainian authorities to explore potentially moving its data and servers to another country, reported Reuters. While the original plan is still to protect the country's IT infrastructure, moving the most sensitive data to another location is a viable Plan B, Victor Zhora— the deputy chief of Ukraine's information protection arm—told the news service.

Ukraine has already faced a litany of aggressive cyberattacks from the neighboring nation, including last month's penetration of its military and energy networks. Russia also attempted to interfere with Ukraine's 2014 presidential election and regularly launches attacks on Ukraine's power grid, leading to outages that last for days.

upstart writes:

Using nature's structures in wooden buildings:

Concern about climate change has focused significant attention on the buildings sector, in particular on the extraction and processing of construction materials. The concrete and steel industries together are responsible for as much as 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, wood provides a natural form of carbon sequestration, so there's a move to use timber instead. Indeed, some countries are calling for public buildings to be made at least partly from timber, and large-scale timber buildings have been appearing around the world.

Observing those trends, Caitlin Mueller, an associate professor of architecture and of civil and environmental engineering in the Building Technology Program at MIT, sees an opportunity for further sustainability gains. As the timber industry seeks to produce wooden replacements for traditional concrete and steel elements, the focus is on harvesting the straight sections of trees. Irregular sections such as knots and forks are turned into pellets and burned, or ground up to make garden mulch, which will decompose within a few years; both approaches release the carbon trapped in the wood to the atmosphere.

For the past four years, Mueller and her Digital Structures research group have been developing a strategy for "upcycling" those waste materials by using them in construction—not as cladding or finishes aimed at improving appearance, but as structural components. "The greatest value you can give to a material is to give it a load-bearing role in a structure," she says. But when builders use virgin materials, those structural components are the most emissions-intensive parts of buildings due to their large volume of high-strength materials. Using upcycled materials in place of those high-carbon systems is therefore especially impactful in reducing emissions.

upstart writes:

The Fliegerfaust Roars Back To Life After 77 Years:

For those that like watching home-made weapons and explosions - take a look at this Hackaday story and, in particular, watch the video!

As their prospects for victory in the Second World War became increasingly grim, the Germans developed a wide array of outlandish "Wonder Weapons" that they hoped would help turn the tide of the war. While these Wunderwaffe obviously weren't enough to secure victory against the Allies, many of them represented the absolute state-of-the-art in weapons development, and in several cases ended up being important technological milestones. Others faded away into obscurity, sometimes with little more then anecdotal evidence to prove they ever even existed.

[...] Building the launcher was relatively straightforward, as it's little more than nine tubes bundled together with a handle and a simplistic electric igniter. The trick is in the 20 mm (0.78 inch) rockets themselves, which are spin stabilized by the exhaust gasses exiting the four angled holes on the rear. With no fins or active guidance the path of each rocket is somewhat unpredictable, but this was known to be true of the original as well.

Watch YouTube video

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upstart writes:

Scientists Discover Ants Can Be Trained to "Sniff Out" Cancer:

You've probably heard about dogs that have been trained to smell cancer in humans. But what about ants doing the same job? A team of scientists has found that ants can use their keen sense of smell to detect cancerous cells.

The team used Formica fusca ants, also known as silky ants, and trained them through a reward system. "After a few minutes of training, these insects, which use smell for daily tasks, were able to differentiate healthy human cells from cancerous human cells," the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a statement Wednesday.

Journal Reference:
Baptiste Piqueret, Brigitte Bourachot, Chloé Leroy, et al. Ants detect cancer cells through volatile organic compounds, [open] (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.103959)

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upstart writes:

California can once again set its own emissions rules, EPA says:

California can now set its own emission standards under the Clean Air Act, the EPA announced today. The decision puts an end to a feud that began when automakers pushed the Trump administration to revisit fuel efficiency rules, which eventually led the former president to revoke California's waiver to declare its own standards in 2019. California is known for pushing stricter emissions requirements than the federal government, standards which have also been adopted by 16 other states and Washington, D.C.

"Today we proudly reaffirm California's longstanding authority to lead in addressing pollution from cars and trucks," EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. "Our partnership with states to confront the climate crisis has never been more important. With today's action, we reinstate an approach that for years has helped advance clean technologies and cut air pollution for people not just in California, but for the U.S. as a whole."

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upstart writes:

Italy slaps facial recognition firm Clearview AI with €20 million fine:

Italy's data privacy watchdog said it will fine the controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI for breaching EU law. An investigation by Garante, Italy's data protection authority, found that the company's database of 10 billion images of faces includes those of Italians and residents in Italy. The New York City-based firm is being fined €20 million, and will also have to delete any facial biometrics it holds of Italian nationals.

This isn't the first time that the beleaguered facial recognition tech company is facing legal consequences. The UK data protection authority last November fined the company £17 million after finding its practices—which include collecting selfies of people without their consent from security camera footage or mugshots—violate the nation's data protection laws. The company has also been banned in Sweden, France and Australia.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dell opts out of Microsoft's Pluton security for Windows

This doesn't align with our approach, PC giant tells us

Yet another top-tier PC maker seemingly isn't interested right now in Microsoft's vision of hardware-level security for Windows 11 systems.

Dell won't include Microsoft's Pluton technology in most of its commercial PCs, telling The Register: "Pluton does not align with Dell's approach to hardware security and our most secure commercial PC requirements."

Microsoft launched to much fanfare its Pluton security layer for PCs in 2020 after developing it with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Pluton effectively bakes a co-processor in silicon that securely stores encryption keys, credentials, and other sensitive information. The idea being that this data is kept close to the CPU cores, within the same processor package, thwarting attempts extract the secret info by, say, snooping an external bus.

It also allows Microsoft to define a base level of security features in the chips that Windows runs on. For instance, Pluton provides a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a technology required by Windows 11."

Lenovo had previously told The Register its Intel-powered ThinkPads "will not support Microsoft Pluton at launch."

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Freeman writes:

Biden considers digital dollar—here’s how it could differ from regular money:

President Joe Biden today issued an executive order that could lead to the US creating a digital currency.

"My Administration places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]," the executive order said. "These efforts should include assessments of possible benefits and risks for consumers, investors, and businesses; financial stability and systemic risk; payment systems; national security; the ability to exercise human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and the actions required to launch a United States CBDC if doing so is deemed to be in the national interest."

Biden also ordered government agencies to develop policies for managing cryptocurrencies that already exist. "The rise in digital assets creates an opportunity to reinforce American leadership in the global financial system and at the technological frontier, but also has substantial implications for consumer protection, financial stability, national security, and climate risk," the White House said. Biden's order "encourages regulators to ensure sufficient oversight and safeguard against any systemic financial risks posed by digital assets."

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upstart writes:

Spotting accelerator-produced neutrinos in a cosmic haystack:

Physicists have developed new tools to help tone down the cosmic "noise" when searching for signs of particles called neutrinos in detectors located near Earth's surface. This method combines data-sifting techniques with image reconstruction methods similar to the computerized tomography (CT) scans used in medicine. It makes the signals of neutrinos produced by a particle accelerator stand out against the "web" of tracks produced by cosmic rays. These cosmic travelers are 20,000 times more numerous than neutrino interactions in the detector. Filtering out the many tracks from cosmic rays should improve experiments on the Earth's surface that are seeking to understand the behavior of the subatomic neutrinos.

Neutrino detectors at Earth's surface need to pick out the signals of elusive neutrino interactions from the background "noise" of cosmic rays. MicroBooNE detects tracks produced when charged particles from neutrino interactions ionize argon atoms in the detector. Three planes of wires in the MicroBooNE experiment are sensitive to electrons in the ionization trails. Each plane captures an image of the track in two dimensions. Computers assemble the 2D images into 3D tracks—similar to the way computed tomography (CT) scanners reconstruct 3D images of internal organs from 2D "slice-like" snapshots of the human body. At MicroBooNE, the shape of the track tells scientists which flavor of neutrino triggered the interaction. To weed out thousands of tracks produced by cosmic rays, scientists first match the track signals with flashes of light also produced in neutrino interactions. The team developed algorithms to help compare the timing and light patterns for each photomultiplier tube in the detector with the locations of all of the particles' tracks. No match means it's not a neutrino event. They also developed methods to eliminate tracks that completely traverse the detector and spot tracks that originate in the detector, rather than outside, completing the job of zeroing in on the neutrino events.

upstart writes:

Is Dark Energy Just an Illusion? Neutron Stars Will Tell Us:

For about 100 years now, general relativity has been very successful at describing gravity on a variety of regimes, passing all experimental tests on Earth and the solar system. However, to explain cosmological observations such as the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe, we need to introduce dark components, such as dark matter and dark energy, which still remain a mystery.

Enrico Barausse, astrophysicist at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) and principal investigator of the ERC grant GRAMS (GRavity from Astrophysical to Microscopic Scales) questions whether dark energy is real or, instead, it may be interpreted as a breakdown of our understanding of gravity. “The existence of dark energy could be just an illusion,” he says, “the accelerated expansion of the Universe might be caused by some yet unknown modifications of general relativity, a sort of ‘dark gravity’.”

The merger of neutron stars offers a unique situation to test this hypothesis because gravity around them is pushed to the extreme. “Neutron stars are the densest stars that exist, typically only 10 kilometers in radius, but with a mass between one or two times the mass of our Sun,” explains the scientist. “This makes gravity and the spacetime around them extreme, allowing for abundant production of gravitational waves when two of them collide. We can use the data acquired during such events to study the workings of gravity and test Einstein’s theory in a new window.”

owl submitted this interesting story:

Ken Shirriff writes Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard

How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combined a solderless breadboard with some supporting circuitry: power supplies, a waveform generator, a pulse generator, switches, and lights. CuriousMarc found one of these breadboards on eBay, but the function generator didn't work, so we set out to repair it.

I figured that the waveform and pulse generators would be simple circuits, but they turn out to be implemented with a board crammed full of components, including over 40 transistors. I reverse-engineered the circuitry and found some interesting circuits inside, including op-amps implemented from discrete transistors. This complexity probably explains the shockingly high price of this breadboard: $1300 in 1969 (equivalent to $10,000 in current dollars).

The article continues is Ken's usual meticulously-detailed fashion with images and schematics of what he found.

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upstart writes:

Shackleton's lost shipwreck discovered off Antarctica:

One of the world's most storied shipwrecks, Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, has been discovered off the coast of Antarctica more than a century after its sinking, explorers announced Wednesday.

Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 meters (9,869 feet) in the Weddell Sea, about six kilometers (four miles) from where it was slowly crushed by pack ice in 1915.

"We are overwhelmed by our good fortune in having located and captured images of Endurance," said Mensun Bound, the expedition's director of exploration.

[...] As part of Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition between 1914 and 1917, Endurance was meant to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, but it fell victim to the tumultuous Weddell Sea.

Just east of the Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula, it became ensnared in sea-ice for over 10 months before being crushed and sinking.

[...] The voyage became legendary due to the miraculous escape Shackleton and his crew made on foot and in boats.

The crew managed to escape by camping on the sea ice until it ruptured.

Freeman writes:

Valve does what FromSoftware don’t, thanks to Steam Deck’s precaching update:

While Elden Ring's recent launch has been a massive critical and commercial success, it continues developer FromSoftware's streak of leaving players in a technical lurch. Even on the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles or the highest-end PCs, Elden Ring still manages to turn in a somewhat unsteady performance for various reasons.

In the case of one unoptimized aspect of the game's PC version, someone outside FromSoftware has swooped in to save the day. Usually, this kind of PC gaming story comes thanks to enterprising modders from the gaming community at large. In Elden Ring's case, however, the fix comes courtesy of an unlikely source: Valve, the massive company that runs the Steam storefront.

Freeman writes:

The secret US mission to bolster Ukraine’s cyber defenses ahead of Russia’s invasion:

Months before the Russian invasion, a team of Americans fanned out across Ukraine looking for a very specific kind of threat.

Some were soldiers, with the US Army’s Cyber Command. Others were civilian contractors and some employees of American companies that help defend critical infrastructure from the kind of cyber attacks that Russian agencies had inflicted upon Ukraine for years.

The US had been helping Ukraine bolster its cyber defenses for years, ever since an infamous 2015 attack on its power grid left part of Kyiv without electricity for hours.

But this surge of US personnel in October and November was different: it was in preparation of impending war. People familiar with the operation described an urgency in the hunt for hidden malware, the kind which Russia could have planted, then left dormant in preparation to launch a devastating cyber attack alongside a more conventional ground invasion.

Experts warn that Russia may yet unleash a devastating online attack on Ukrainian infrastructure of the sort that has long been expected by western officials. But years of work, paired with the past two months of targeted bolstering, may explain why Ukrainian networks have held up so far.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A man who got the 1st pig heart transplant has died after 2 months

The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking experiment, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced Wednesday.

David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Doctors didn't give an exact cause of death, saying only that his condition had begun deteriorating several days earlier.

[...] Prior attempts at such transplants — or xenotransplantation — have failed largely because patients' bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. This time, the Maryland surgeons used a heart from a gene-edited pig: Scientists had modified the animal to remove pig genes that trigger the hyper-fast rejection and add human genes to help the body accept the organ.

At first the pig heart was functioning, and the Maryland hospital issued periodic updates that Bennett seemed to be slowly recovering. Last month, the hospital released video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed while working with his physical therapist.

Bennett survived significantly longer with the gene-edited pig heart than one of the last milestones in xenotransplantation — when Baby Fae, a dying California infant, lived 21 days with a baboon's heart in 1984.

[...] One next question is whether scientists have learned enough from Bennett's experience and some other recent experiments with gene-edited pig organs to persuade the FDA to allow a clinical trial — possibly with an organ such as a kidney that isn't immediately fatal if it fails.

Previously: Surgeons Smash Records With Pig-to-Primate Organ Transplants
Surgeons Successfully Transplant Genetically Modified Pig Heart Into Human Patient

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