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upstart writes:

Monkeys routinely consume fruit containing alcohol, shedding light on our own taste for booze: Study supports 'drunken monkey' hypothesis: humans inherited love of alcohol from primate ancestors:

The study was led by primatologist Christina Campbell of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and her graduate student Victoria Weaver, who collected fruit eaten and discarded by black-handed spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in Panama. They found that the alcohol concentration in the fruit was typically between 1% and 2% by volume, a by-product of natural fermentation by yeasts that eat sugar in ripening fruit.

Moreover, the researchers collected urine from these free-ranging monkeys and found that the urine contained secondary metabolites of alcohol. This result shows that the animals were actually utilizing the alcohol for energy -- it wasn't just passing through their bodies.

"For the first time, we have been able to show, without a shadow of a doubt, that wild primates, with no human interference, consume fruit-containing ethanol," said Campbell, a CUSN professor of anthropology who obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology from Berkeley in 2000. "This is just one study, and more need to be done, but it looks like there may be some truth to that 'drunken monkey' hypothesis -- that the proclivity of humans to consume alcohol stems from a deep-rooted affinity of frugivorous (fruit-eating) primates for naturally-occurring ethanol within ripe fruit."

Dudley laid out evidence for his idea eight years ago in the book, The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. Measurements showed that some fruits known to be eaten by primates have a naturally high alcohol content of up to 7%. But at the time, he did not have data showing that monkeys or apes preferentially sought out and ate fermented fruits, or that they digested the alcohol in the fruit.

upstart writes:

Pimoroni Announces Servo 2040 Servo Motor Controller:

Although it's slightly weird-looking, we're fairly sure that the image above is not an April Fool prank. UK-based seller of useful things Pimoroni has taken to Twitter to announce the Servo 2040, an 18-channel servo controller "for making things with lots of moving parts".

Servo 2040, as you might expect, is a standalone servo controller making use of the RP2040 microcontroller chip seen in the Raspberry Pi Pico. There are enough pre-soldered pin headers to connect up to 18 servos, current monitoring functionality to keep an eye on power consumption, and six addressable LEDs for visual feedback. You also get pin headers for up to six analog sensors for checking that you're not applying too much pressure to your test subject's head.

[...] Measuring just 62mm x 42mm x 12mm, the Servo 2040 is available now from the Pimoroni website, shipping worldwide. You can also purchase servos, including some that are Lego-compatible to your order, as well as batteries and cables, from the same site.

As a constructor myself, I often use servos to provide controllable movement in my various projects. Usually I rarely use more than half a dozen or so and more commonly only 2 or 3 so I do not see a personal need for a board capable of controlling 18! But I am sure that some constructors will.

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upstart writes:

The Biggest Deal In Gaming Is Under Fire From U.S. Senators:

Four U.S. senators have torpedoed Microsoft's $69 billion deal for Activision. They believe that the consolidation of the high-tech industry and corporate culture of gender misconduct at Activision could expand by the transaction. Democrat senators think that the planned takeover could undermine employees' calls for accountability over alleged gender and sexual harassment at the game developer.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D), Bernie Sanders (I), Cory Booker (D), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D) are distraught with the fact that Robert Kotick, chief exec of Activision, will remain at the helm of the game company until closing in 2023. With the same head, the culture of misconduct will not go away, they assume. Another point they are concerned about is the consolidation of the high-tech industry in general and its impact on the workforce. Given their concerns, they wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to block the deal.

"We are deeply concerned about consolidation in the tech industry and its impact on workers," the letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal reads. "This lack of accountability, despite shareholders, employees, and the public calling for Kotick to be held responsible for the culture he created, would be an unacceptable result of the proposed Microsoft acquisition."

[...] The senators demand that FTC oppose the deal if it finds that it can worsen the negotiating position between workers and companies (in this case, Microsoft represents both entities).

Previously:
Microsoft Set to Purchase Activision Blizzard in $68.7 Billion Deal

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upstart writes:

Europe's Biggest Lithium Mine Is Caught in a Political Maelstrom:

Only red-roofed houses interrupt the vast carpet of fields that surround the village of Gornje Nedeljice, in western Serbia. To resident Marijana Petković, this is the most beautiful place in the world. She's not against Europe's green transition, the plan to make the bloc's economy climate neutral by 2050. But she is among those who believe Serbia's fertile Jadar Valley—where locals grow raspberries and keep bees—is being asked to make huge sacrifices to enable other countries to build electric cars.

Around 300 meters away from Petković's house, according to the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto, there is enough lithium to create 1 million EV batteries, and the company wants to spend $2.4 billion to build Europe's biggest lithium mine here. But Petković and other locals oppose the project, arguing it will cause irreparable damage to the environment. When asked about that claim, a spokesperson for Rio Tinto told WIRED that throughout the project, the company has "recognized that Jadar will need to be developed to the highest environmental standards." Petković is not convinced. "I want the western countries to have the green transition and to live like people in Jadar," she says. "But that doesn't mean that we need to destroy our nature."

Officially, the Jadar mine is not happening. After months of protests against the project, the government conceded, and in January it was canceled. "As far as Project Jadar is concerned, this is an end," Serbian prime minister Ana Brnabić said on January 20, after Rio Tinto's lithium exploration licenses were revoked.

fleg writes:

From the Guardian...

The architect Christopher Alexander, who has died aged 85, saw buildings and cities as living frameworks for human beings. Through designing, building, teaching and writing, he sought "to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building and planning".

[...] A housing project in the barrios of Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1969 began with his team living for five weeks with different families on site, observing the details of daily life, to develop what he called a "pattern language" of 67 principles that formed the basis for the design.

[...] His approach provided the basis of an architecture bestseller, A Pattern Language (1977). Each of 253 "patterns", with its own number, describes a helpful relationship between parts of the environment, and consists of a title – such as Public Outdoor Room, South Facing Outdoors or Windows Overlooking Life – explanatory text, diagrams and photographs. The patterns are linked to each other in a network structure, which gave the book an appeal to the software developers among its general readership.

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upstart writes:

TSMC Will Reportedly Move Equipment Into Arizona's Fab21 in Q1 2023:

TSMC will start moving equipment into its new US plant by Q1 next year, says a report published by Taiwan's Commercial Times. The financial newspaper cites unnamed industry sources, so please take this information with a pinch of salt. As a reminder, the facility under construction in Arizona will be dubbed Fab21 and will be used for producing TSMC's 5nm process family for its many clients.

The fab TSMC is constructing in Arizona will be outputting chips at 5nm, 5nm Enhanced, and 4nm – what TSMC refers to as its N5, N5P and N4 processes. The world's largest contract chipmaker will have this US-based facility up and running by Q1 2024 pushing out 20,000 wafers per month.

Remember, TSMC will continue to develop its cutting-edge leading fabs in Taiwan. However, it is something of a safety net for it to expand overseas, to places like the US and Japan. Of course, this safety net might be useful with the geopolitical risk facing Taiwan.

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owl writes:

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1648829114

The Vizio TV that you bought with hard-earned cash has a new feature; Jump Ads. Vizio will first identify what is on your screen and then place interactive banner ads over live TV programs.

LG and Samsung have both redesigned their Smart TV platform to more prominently display ads and highlight content from partners, much like Android TV. Meanwhile, owners of Roku TVs have complained about banner ads on live TV.

Vizio is no stranger to Smart TV ads and the company is now taking it a step further with so-called Jump Ads.

- "Jump Ads represent yet another step in VIZIO's ongoing mission to unify the smart TV experience with features that benefit viewers, content providers and advertisers," said Adam Bergman, VP of sales, Vizio Ads.

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upstart writes:

CRISPR and HIV: New technique in human blood unveils potential paths toward cure: Key to possible HIV cure may lie in mechanisms behind how it replicates:

The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.

Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins -- and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2 -- hijack the body's cells to replicate and spread across systems?

A cross-disciplinary team at Northwestern sought to answer that very question.

In the team's new study, published today (April 1) in the journal Nature Communications, scientists used a new CRISPR gene-editing approach to identify human genes that were important for HIV infection in the blood, finding 86 genes that may play a role in the way HIV replicates and causes disease, including over 40 that have never been looked at in the context of HIV infection.

[...] In the study, T cells -- the major cell type targeted by HIV -- were isolated from donated human blood, and hundreds of genes were knocked out using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The "knock-out" cells were then infected with HIV and analyzed. Cells that lost a gene important for viral replication showed decreased infection, while cells that lost an antiviral factor showed an increase in infection.

From there, the team validated the identified factors by selectively knocking them out in new donors, where they found a nearly even break of newly discovered pathways and well-researched ones.

Journal Reference:
Hiatt, Joseph, Hultquist, Judd F., McGregor, Michael J., et al. A functional map of HIV-host interactions in primary human T cells [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29346-w)

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upstart writes:

NASA's big rocket faces its last test before launching:

After two weeks of preparatory work on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, NASA is ready to put its large new rocket and its complex plumbing system to the test. This will be the final major rehearsal before the space agency declares that, after 11 long years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs, the Space Launch System is finally ready to fly.

The "wet dress rehearsal" is slated to begin at 5 pm ET (21:00 UTC) on Friday, when the launch control teams will arrive on console at the Launch Control Center. At that point, engineers and technicians will begin to power up the Orion spacecraft and the rocket itself. But the real action will not take place until Sunday.

At around 6 am ET, a team from NASA and the launch vehicle's contractors will enter a "launch day" countdown; shortly thereafter, they will start to fuel the rocket's core stage with liquid oxygen. The loading of liquid hydrogen will begin about an hour later. NASA has posted a tentative schedule with key milestones on its website.

After a series of holds, NASA plans to resume its countdown toward launch at 2:30 pm ET on Sunday and continue until about T-10 seconds, with the test ending before igniting the rocket's four main engines, which once powered NASA's space shuttle. If all goes well, the test will wrap up by around 5 pm on Sunday.

[...] So will all go well? During a call with reporters on Tuesday, senior NASA officials seemed fairly confident that the wet dress test would go off smoothly. However, they acknowledged that this is the first time the entire rocket and spacecraft will be handled and fueled in concert with its ground systems and the extensive software to manage it all. So yes, they acknowledged, things could go wrong.

About a week after the test is complete, NASA officials said they expect to be able to set a launch date for the Artemis 1 mission, which will fly an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon. Presently, this test flight will happen no earlier than June.

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owl writes:

https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/31/internet-kids.html

I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet. Surely, we have seen a generation that we call "digital natives" grow up with the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on. And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering...

Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial

With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are "usability" and "user experience design". Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

But it seems that some things don't change...

Question: Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children.

Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn't want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away.

If we could start again, what design changes would you make for the 'new' internet and how would you want it to be used?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chaos theory provides hints for controlling the weather:

While weather predictions have reached levels of high accuracy thanks to methods such as supercomputer-based simulations and data assimilation, where observational data is incorporated into simulations, scientists have long hoped to be able to control the weather. Research in this area has intensified due to climate change, which has led to more extreme weather events such as torrential rain and storms.

There are methods at present for weather modification, but they have had limited success. Seeding the atmosphere to induce rain has been demonstrated, but it is only possible when the atmosphere is already in a state where it might rain. Geoengineering projects have been envisioned, but have not been carried out due to concerns about what unpredicted long-term effects they might have.

As a promising approach, researchers from the RIKEN team have looked to chaos theory to create realistic possibilities for mitigating weather events such as torrential rain. Specifically, they have focused on a phenomenon known as a butterfly attractor, proposed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorentz, one of the founders of modern chaos theory. Essentially, this refers to a system that can adopt one of two orbits that look like the wings of a butterfly, but can change the orbits randomly based on small fluctuations in the system.

Journal Reference:
Miyoshi, Takemasa, Sun, Qiwen. Control simulation experiment with Lorenz's butterfly attractor [open], Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-29-133-2022)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers used a decommissioned satellite to broadcast hacker TV:

Independent researchers and the United States military have become increasingly focused on orbiting satellites' potential security vulnerabilities in recent years. These devices, which are built primarily with durability, reliability, and longevity in mind, were largely never intended to be ultra-secure. But at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, DC, on Friday, embedded device security researcher Karl Koscher raised questions about a different phase of a satellite's life cycle: What happens when an old satellite is being decommissioned and transitioning to a "graveyard orbit"?

Koscher and his colleagues received permission last year to access and broadcast from a Canadian satellite known as Anik F1R, launched to support Canadian broadcasters in 2005 and designed for 15 years of use. The satellite's coverage extends below the US southern border and out to Hawaii and the easternmost part of Russia. The satellite will move to its graveyard orbit soon, and nearly all other services that use it have already migrated to a new satellite. But while the researchers could still talk to the satellite using special access to an uplink license and transponder slot lease, Koscher had the opportunity to take over and broadcast to the Northern Hemisphere.

"My favorite thing was actually seeing it work!" Koscher tells WIRED. "It's kind of unreal to go from making a video stream to having it broadcast across all of North America."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

EU draft law adds security checks to all crypto transactions:

The European Parliament has taken the first steps for new legislation against money-laundering that covers cryptocurrency transactions, which are an important part of illicit activities today.

Members of the European Parliament from the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) have agreed on adopting (with 93 votes in favor, 14 against, and 14 abstentions) draft legislation for more transparent crypto asset transactions.

"Under the new requirements agreed by MEPs, all transfers of crypto-assets will have to include information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary, information that is to be made available to the competent authorities," reads the Parliament's announcement.

The new rules will cover transactions from private-held cryptocurrency wallets without considering transaction thresholds, which erases any limits for anonymous transactions - previous proposal allowed up to €1000 to be transferred without giving any details about the sender and the recipient.

The reasoning behind this is that transaction thresholds make no sense for regulating cryptocurrency assets because they can be easily circumvented due to their virtual nature. Simply put, it would be practically viable for money launderers to perform numerous transactions under the set threshold.

"Illicit flows in crypto-assets move largely undetected across Europe and the world, which makes them an ideal instrument for ensuring anonymity," commented Ernest Urtasun of the Greens Party.

"As illustrated by all the recent money-laundering scandals, from the Panama Papers to the Pandora Papers, criminals thrive where rules allowing for confidentiality allow for secrecy and anonymity. With this proposal for a regulation, the EU will close this loophole."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The new message is really cool, but we need to have a serious discussion about whether we should be trying to contact extraterrestrials.

An international team of scientists has formulated an updated, binary-coded message that could eventually be transmitted to aliens in our galaxy. It's jam-packed with details, including the chemical makeup of humans, a map of Earth, and even our precise location in the Milky Way. What could possibly go wrong?

The Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG) message, as it's called, is an update to the Arecibo message of 1974. Indeed, it's been nearly 50 years since science popularizer Carl Sagan and SETI pioneer Frank Drake crafted their famous message to extraterrestrials, so an update makes a lot of sense, given the many advancements in digital technology since that time. A paper describing the new message was recently uploaded to the arXiv, and it's currently awaiting peer review.

Gizmodo

[Also Covered By]: VICE, ScienceDaily

Should we broadcast such messages or not ? What do you think ?

Journal Reference:
Jonathan H. Jiang, Hanjie Li, Matthew Chong, et al. A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects, Galaxies (DOI: 10.3390/galaxies10020055)

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://courieronsunday.com/news/asia-news/a-new-city-built-upon-data-takes-shape-in-south-korea/

Samsung Smart-village in Korea gathering all the data to, what I can only assume, the perfect happy orwellian village/city of the future. All hooked up for friendly data gathering/harvesting on and of the ideal citizens.

[...] Unmanned Solution, a company of 35 employees founded in 2008, is providing cleaning robots for the village, and the South Korean start-up Superbin, with 89 employees, provides garbage disposal services and recycling technology.

K-Water is the major player in this development as it is using its latest technology to not only transform the wetlands (making them developable by bringing in tons of sand and sinking concrete poles), but also to use the water in the Nakdong River for hydropower, drinking water and other uses. The hydropower will energize everything from homes to streetlights to sprinkler systems in the planned public areas.

With extensive data being compiled for help in health care planning, concerns about privacy and the sharing of personal information with governments and businesses have been muted so far.

"I haven't heard of any complaints so far from residents, but I know that all around the world people can be defiant about giving out their personal information," Mr. Min said. Nevertheless, he said, "a committee is drafting privacy guidelines and all of the info is encrypted."

Original Submission