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owl writes:

http://lulabs.net/machining/ss-cube/

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the aluminum cube, so after thinking about the design for a while, I decided to make another one out of stainless steel. Just for fun, I thought I would make all the pieces using only manual machines. How hard could it be?

As it turns out, it was quite a bit of type 2 fun. It sure was slow and repetitive work, but I'm pleased with the result. I was motivated to think about ways to be more efficient, like machining multiple pieces at once and using looser tolerances where allowable. The slow pace also allowed me to consider details of the design while making parts. I have never been a fan of taking things slowly, but this could be a good argument for it.

[...] The final result is one incredibly heavy solid stainless Rubik's cube. Although it may be neat to look at, it weighs a massive three pounds (~1.4 kg) and is very tiring to manipulate. Solving this is more a test of the wrists than of the mind!

Between the relief grooves, the contours under the face centers, and the closer tolerances, this cube is much neater and smoother than the aluminum one. All the corner and edge pieces fit snugly without significant play. That does mean the faces must be better aligned to turn, but nobody would try speed cubing with this anyway.

Are any of our community into this kind of heavy metal construction at home? If you are, please tell us about it.

Original Submission

Microplastics Found in Human Blood for First Time

upstart writes:

Microplastics found in human blood for first time:

Microplastic pollution has been detected in human blood for the first time, with scientists finding the tiny particles in almost 80% of the people tested.

The discovery shows the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

[...] The scientists analysed blood samples from 22 anonymous donors, all healthy adults and found plastic particles in 17. Half the samples contained PET plastic, which is commonly used in drinks bottles, while a third contained polystyrene, used for packaging food and other products. A quarter of the blood samples contained polyethylene, from which plastic carrier bags are made.

"Our study is the first indication that we have polymer particles in our blood – ​it's a breakthrough result," said Prof Dick Vethaak, an ecotoxicologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "But we have to extend the research and increase the sample sizes, the number of polymers assessed, etc." Further studies by a number of groups are already under way, he said.

Europe Agrees New Law to Curb Big Tech Dominance

upstart writes:

Europe agrees new law to curb Big Tech dominance:

European lawmakers have agreed on new rules which they hope will curb the dominance of Big Tech companies.

Under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), giants such as Google and Apple will be forced to open up their services and platforms to other businesses.

[...] The announcement is the biggest regulatory move yet from the EU to act against what it defines as "anti-trust" or anti-competitive behaviour from mainly US technology businesses.

"The agreement ushers in a new era of tech regulation worldwide," said German MEP Andreas Schwab, who led the negotiations for the European Parliament.

[...] The targets of the law include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, the App Store, Google Play and many other services belonging to large tech firms.

The EU wants to give users more choice over how people send messages. The new rules would require that technology make their messaging services interoperable with smaller competitors.

However, Apple said it was "concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users".

Meanwhile, Google said: "While we support many of the DMA's ambitions around consumer choice and interoperability, we're worried that some of these rules could reduce innovation and the choice available to Europeans."

The law will only affect companies with a value of more than €75bn (£63bn), annual sales of €7.5bn and at least 45 million monthly users.

upstart writes:

Bacteria-shredding insect wings inspire new antibacterial packaging:

Inspired by the bacteria-killing wings of insects like cicadas, scientists have developed a natural antibacterial texture for use on food packaging to improve shelf life and reduce waste. The lab-made nanotexture from an Australian-Japanese team of scientists kills up to 70% of bacteria and retains its effectiveness when transferred to plastic.

More than 30% of food produced for human consumption becomes waste, with entire shipments rejected if bacterial growth is detected. The research sets the scene for significantly reducing waste, particularly in meat and dairy exports, as well as extending the shelf life and improving the quality, safety and integrity of packaged food on an industrial scale.

Distinguished Professor Elena Ivanova of RMIT University said the research team had successfully applied a natural phenomenon to a synthetic material—plastic. "Eliminating bacterial contamination is a huge step in extending the shelf life of food," she said.

"We knew the wings of cicadas and dragonflies were highly-efficient bacteria killers and could help inspire a solution, but replicating nature is always a challenge. We have now created a nanotexturing that mimics the bacteria-destroying effect of insect wings and retains its antibacterial power when printed on plastic. This is a big step towards a natural, non-chemical, antibacterial packaging solution for the food and manufacturing industry."

The research, published in ACS Applied Nano Materials, is a collaboration between RMIT, Tokyo Metropolitan University and Mitsubishi Chemical's The KAITEKI Institute. In 2015, Australia exported $US 3.1 billion of food and agricultural exports to Japan, making it the 5th largest exporter of such products to the country.

Journal Reference:
Denver P. Linklater, Soichiro Saita, Takaaki Murata, et al. Nanopillar Polymer Films as Antibacterial Packaging Materials, ACS Applied Nano Materials (DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.1c04251)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Half of Americans accept all cookies despite the security risk:

Although cookies have become a normal and necessary part of using the internet, new research from NordVPN has revealed that half of American users 'accept all cookies' on every website they visit.

[...] While most cookies are safe and used by companies to offer more personalization on their sites, some can be used to track you without your consent. At the same time, cookies can even be spied upon or used to fake the identity of a user so that an attacker can gain access to their online accounts.

Digital privacy expert at NordVPN, Daniel Markuson provided further insight on the dangers posed by cookies in a press release, saying:

"People need to be aware that cookies follow you online. Even if you hide your IP address with a VPN, cookies can track what you do online and form a partial ID of who you are. Moreover, third parties can sell your cookies. Some sites earn revenue by serving third-party cookies. These aren't functional – their purpose is to turn a profit from your data. Also, cookies are a vulnerability. With the wrong browser settings or when visiting the wrong website, cookies can introduce security vulnerabilities to your browsing experience,"

[...] Cookies have long been an important part of the internet but that could soon change as Google has been working on its Privacy Sandbox with the aim of replacing cookies for good. Until then though, you should continue to think twice before accepting all cookies on every site you visit.

Original Submission

NASA Astronaut Moon Lander Plans Expand Beyond SpaceX Starship

upstart writes:

NASA Astronaut Moon Lander Plans Expand Beyond SpaceX Starship:

As NASA makes strides to return humans to the lunar surface under Artemis, the agency announced plans Wednesday to create additional opportunities for commercial companies to develop an astronaut Moon lander.

Under this new approach, NASA is asking American companies to propose lander concepts capable of ferrying astronauts between lunar orbit and the lunar surface for missions beyond Artemis III, which will land the first astronauts on the Moon in more than 50 years.

Built and operated according to NASA's long-term requirements at the Moon, new landers will have the capability to dock to a lunar orbiting space station known as Gateway, increase crew capacity, and transport more science and technology to the surface.

"Under Artemis, NASA will carry out a series of groundbreaking missions on and around the Moon to prepare for the next giant leap for humanity: a crewed mission to Mars," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "Competition is critical to our success on the lunar surface and beyond, ensuring we have the capability to carry out a cadence of missions over the next decade. Thank you to the Biden Administration and Congress for their support of this new astronaut lander opportunity, which will ultimately strengthen and increase flexibility for Artemis."

upstart writes:

Social engineering attacks to dominate Web3, the metaverse:

Researchers predict that a surge in social engineering attacks will dominate web3 and the metaverse.

Web3 is the term coined for what could become the next face of the internet. The web has shifted from pages containing content to the growth of social media, and now, the concept of a decentralized internet is being discussed under the Web3 banner.

Part of this transformation could include the 'metaverse' -- a 3D environment and virtual world for facilitating social connections, whether personal or for work. Your ID in the metaverse may also end up linked to cryptocurrency wallets, Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and various smart contracts.

As technology vendors work on these concepts, cybersecurity researchers from Cisco Talos have offered their perspective on the potential threats Web3, and the metaverse will face.

upstart writes:

How access to satellite images shifts the view of war:

Media coverage of the war in Ukraine, which started almost a month ago, has included, arguably to an unprecedented extent, content shared via social media. This has included satellite photos that document troop movements and shocking damage to cities.

In recent days, pictures snapped by satellites in orbit have captured images which appear to show destroyed Russian helicopters, extensive damage to a shopping centre and residential districts in Mariupol, and a civilian tanker vessel on fire in the Black Sea.

Privately-owned companies that launch and operate their own satellites - such as Planet and Maxar - have distributed many satellite images of the conflict zone.

The proliferation of these images means members of the public and military analysts alike can try to gauge the situation on the ground in Ukraine and the progress of Russia's invading armed forces from thousands of miles away.

[...] So, what's changed? While government and intelligence agency satellites gather classified, secret information, commercial firms have long been able to sell their own, unclassified, imagery. And now, this material is being made easily accessible online.

upstart writes:

Brain implants allow fully paralysed man to communicate:

A fully paralysed man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can now communicate with his family after receiving microchip implants in his brain.

It is the first time a completely locked-in person – someone who is conscious and cognitively able but fully paralysed – was able to communicate in full sentences, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications this week.

"People have really doubted whether this was even feasible," Mariska Vansteensel, a researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht who was not involved in the study, told Science.org.

The unidentified German man, 36, was diagnosed with ALS, a rare progressive nervous system disease that leads to the loss of muscle control, in 2015.

upstart writes:

New pumpkin shaped nucleus radiates protons with record setting rate:

The new isotope was found among the products of fusion of ⁵⁸Ni beam particles and ⁹⁶Ru target atoms, and it was identified in the detector setup of the MARA separator. ¹⁴⁹Lu was found to decay into ¹⁴⁸Yb via spontaneous proton emission, which is a rare nuclear decay mode. Decay properties of ¹⁴⁹Lu were measured to be exceptional; It has the highest decay energy and the shortest directly measured half-life of any ground-state proton emitter known to date.

Observation of the swift decay was made possible by modern digital signal handling that allows "traces" to be recorded, see attached figure for a few examples. Additionally, it was found via comparison to theoretical calculations that it is the most oblate deformed ("pumpkin shaped") proton emitter.

This is the first instance when the models of proton emission are tested against such a strong oblate deformation. These observations will help to develop the theory of proton emission as well as the atomic mass models for the most exotic isotopes, both models are needed to understand the origin of the elements. The results of this study have been published as the Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review Letters.

Journal Reference:
K. Auranen et al., Nanosecond-Scale Proton Emission from Strongly Oblate-Deformed Lu149., Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.112501)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Humans have given wild animals their diseases nearly 100 times, researchers find:

In a study published March 22 in Ecology Letters, the authors describe nearly one hundred different cases where diseases have undergone "spillback" from humans back into wild animals, much like how SARS-CoV-2 has been able to spread in mink farms, zoo lions and tigers, and wild white-tailed deer.

"There has understandably been an enormous amount of interest in human-to-wild animal pathogen transmission in light of the pandemic," says Gregory Albery, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University and the study's senior author. "To help guide conversations and policy surrounding spillback of our pathogens in the future, we went digging through the literature to see how the process has manifested in the past."

In their new study, Albery and colleagues found that almost half of the incidents identified occurred in captive settings like zoos, where veterinarians keep a close eye on animals' health and are more likely to notice when a virus makes the jump. Additionally, more than half of cases they found were human-to-primate transmission, an unsurprising result both because pathogens find it easier to jump between closely-related hosts, and because wild populations of endangered great apes are so carefully monitored.

[...] Disease spillback has recently attracted substantial attention due to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wild white-tailed deer in the United States and Canada. Some data suggest that deer have given the virus back to humans in at least one case, and many scientists have expressed broader concerns that new animal reservoirs might give the virus extra chances to evolve new variants.

Journal Reference:
Just a moment..., (DOI: 10.1111/ele.14003)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tiny, cheap solution for quantum-secure encryption - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis:

It's fairly reasonable to assume that an encrypted email can't be seen by prying eyes. That's because in order to break through most of the encryption systems we use on a day-to-day basis, unless you are the intended recipient, you'd need the answer to a mathematical problem that's nearly impossible for a computer to solve in a reasonable amount of time.

Nearly impossible for modern-day computers, at least.

"If quantum computing becomes a reality, however, some of those problems are not hard anymore," said Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor and vice dean for research and graduate education in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering.

[...] Chakrabartty's lab at Washington University in St. Louis proposes a security system that is not only resistant to quantum attacks, but is also inexpensive, more convenient, and scalable without the need for fancy new equipment.

[...] The new protocol for Symmetric Key Distribution, which Chakrabartty and Mustafizur Rahman, a PhD student in Chakrabartty's lab and first author on the research paper, refer to as SPoTKD, doesn't require lasers or satellites or miles of new cable. It relies on tiny microchips embedded with even tinier clocks that run without batteries.

Journal Reference:
Shantanu Chakrabartty, et. al.,SPoTKD: A Protocol for Symmetric Key Distribution Over Public Channels Using Self-Powered Timekeeping Devices, (DOI: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9730879)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours:

It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.

All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

The paper had us at The Verge a little shook, too. So, to figure out how worried we should be, The Verge spoke with Fabio Urbina, lead author of the paper. He's also a senior scientist at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company that focuses on finding drug treatments for rare diseases.

Journal Reference:
Urbina, Fabio, Lentzos, Filippa, Invernizzi, Cédric, et al. Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery, Nature Machine Intelligence (DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux Mint Announces Latest Debian Based OS:

Linux Mint has announced the latest release of its Debian based operating system Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), codename "Elsie" is based upon the latest Debian "Bullseye" release and is an alternative to the mainstream Ubuntu based Linux Mint.

LMDE, or Linux Mint Debian Edition, is a backup version of Mint designed to preserve the work put into, and user experience of, Linux Mint should Ubuntu ever disappear to the great software graveyard in the sky. As Ubuntu is itself built on Debian architecture, to the uninitiated the difference is hard to discern. But under the hood there are notable software changes inline with the source operating system's philosophy. Following a successful beta release at the end of February, the time has come for a full version.

LMDE 5, codenamed Elsie, is made using the same Debian 11 Bullseye that Raspberry Pi OS made such a difficult upgrade to last year (as more recently and successfully did Peppermint OS). This, however, seems to be a much more fortunate project than Raspberry Pi's, displaying the same Cinnamon desktop as the Ubuntu-based version of Mint, but with none of the Snap containerised software packages used by Canonical's operating system. Instead, it uses the Flatpak application manager, along with a native Firefox app straight from Mozilla. Being a Debian based OS, Linux Mint also comes with the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) to manage software installation.

The system requirements are modest, with just 2GB of RAM (4GB for a 'comfortable experience') and 20GB of disk space required. A screen resolution of 1024 x 768 is recommended, but on coarser displays there's a workaround involving Alt+dragging windows to get them on the screen.

Original Submission

Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died

NPC-131072 and canopic jugwrite:

From The Verge

Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed. His obituary page notes that "even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man."

Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.