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upstart writes:

Single-molecule experiments reveal force capability of artificial molecular motors:

National University of Singapore physicists have shown that a single man-made molecular motor can exhibit a force similar to naturally occurring ones that power human muscles. Their results are published in Nanoscale.

Molecular motors are a class of machines with nanoscale dimensions that are essential agents of movement in living organisms. They harness various energy sources within the body to generate mechanical motion. A key characteristic is the force generated by a single motor during its self-propelled motion. This force generation capability allows the molecular motor to deliver mechanical work and is a measure of its energy conversion efficiency, which influences its use in potential applications.

[...] The research team successfully applied their method to an autonomous DNA molecular motor (previously developed by Prof. Wang's lab). This bipedal molecular motor is able to "walk" consecutively on its own with a stride length of about 16 nm between each step, providing a maximum force output of around 2 to 3 pN. This measured force output is at a level which is near to naturally occurring molecular motors powering human muscles, indicating a reasonably efficient conversion of chemical energy to mechanical motion.

Prof. Wang said, "This study paves the way for the development of applications associated with translational artificial molecular motors which require the generation of forces. Examples include molecular robots and biomimicking artificial muscles. Separately, the single-molecule method established in this work is applicable to force measurement of many other artificial molecular motors with soft tracks."

Journal Reference:
Xinpeng Hu, Xiaodan Zhao, Iong Ying Loh, et al. Single-molecule mechanical study of an autonomous artificial translational molecular motor beyond bridge-burning design, Nanoscale (DOI: 10.1039/D1NR02296B)

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upstart writes:

China's 'space dream': A Long March to the Moon and beyond:

The return to Earth of three astronauts on Saturday after six months at China's new space station marks a landmark step in the country's space ambitions, ending its longest crewed mission ever.

The world's second-largest economy has put billions into its military-run space programme, with hopes of eventually sending humans to the Moon.

[...] Besides a space station, China is also planning to build a base on the Moon, and the country's National Space Administration said it aims to launch a crewed lunar mission by 2029.

upstart writes:

Apple store workers at Grand Central Terminal start collecting signatures to form a union:

Retail Apple employees at a New York City store in Grand Central Terminal have started collecting signatures to form a union, according to a report from The Washington Post.

The organizers, who go by Fruit Stand Workers United, announced in an update on its website that they voted to affiliate themselves with the Workers United labor union on February 21st, 2022. Workers United is the same group backing recent unionization efforts at Starbucks stores across the country.

As noted by The Post, organizers at the Grand Central location are currently handing out signature cards so employees can express interest in forming a union. If at least 30 percent of workers sign off on it, organizers can file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a union election. So far, there hasn't been an Apple store that has successfully formed a union.

"Grand Central is an extraordinary store with unique working conditions that make a union necessary to ensure our team has the best possible standards of living in what have proven to be extraordinary times," the organizers' website reads, citing inflation rates and pandemic-related store closures.

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takyon writes:

Russian Government's New Semiconductor Plan: Local 28nm by 2030

As it's being ostracized and sanctioned by much of the world for its war against Ukraine, Russia is building up plans to revive its ailing local manufacturing of semiconductors, since it cannot get chips from the usual suppliers. The country's new chip plan involves a rather massive investment over the next eight years, the goals don't exactly sound ambitious. For example, while TSMC plans to hit 2nm by 2026, Russia wants 28nm local chip manufacturing by 2030.

Russia's government has developed a preliminary version of its new microelectronics development plan that requires investments of around ₽3.19 trillion ($38.43 billion) by 2030. The money will be spent on the development of local semiconductor production technologies, domestic chip development, datacenter infrastructure, developing of local talents, and marketing of homebrew chips and solutions, reports Cnews.

On the semiconductor manufacturing side of matters, the country plans to spend ₽420 billion ($5 billion) on new fabrication technologies and their ramp-up. One of the short-term goals is to ramp up local chip production using a 90nm fabrication technology by the end of the year. A longer-term goal is to establish manufacturing using a 28nm node by 2030, something TSMC did in 2011.

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upstart writes:

Changing Vegetation a Key Driver of Global Temperatures Over Last 10,000 Years:

Alexander Thompson, a postdoctoral research associate in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, updated simulations from an important climate model to reflect the role of changing vegetation as a key driver of global temperatures over the last 10,000 years.

Thompson had long been troubled by a problem with models of Earth's atmospheric temperatures since the last ice age. Too many of these simulations showed temperatures warming consistently over time.

But climate proxy records tell a different story. Many of those sources indicate a marked peak in global temperatures that occurred between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Thompson had a hunch that the models could be overlooking the role of changes in vegetation in favor of impacts from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations or ice cover.

upstart writes:

NASA Mars Perseverance Rover: Digging Into Drill Data:

You probably think that the drill being employed on Perseverance Rover is bound to be special, but do you know just how clever it is? The problem that the drill has to balance is getting maximum life from the drill bit itself while achieving the job of collecting samples of rock and sediment.

One of the first things we look at is how difficult it was for the drill to make progress through the rock. The rover has a rotary percussive drill, which means the drill bit pushes against the rock while spinning and hammering. When we are coring or abrading, an algorithm controls the amount of force and percussion. We call this algorithm "prodapt," short for proprioceptive adaptive, because the drill adjusts its settings by sensing and assessing its own performance in real-time. The goal is to try and maintain a certain rate of progress into the rock that isn't too slow or too fast. The rate we aim for keeps our drill bits healthy and creates high-quality cores and abrasions for the scientists.

The prodapt algorithm can range from level 0 to level 20. Levels 0 through 2 have no percussion at all, which we call rotary only drilling. (We never do rotary only abrading, so these low levels are only used while coring.) Level 3 has light percussion, and the percussion and force increase all the way up to the most force and the most percussion at level 20.

If the drill senses that it is not making fast enough progress through a rock, it will increase the prodapt level. If it senses that it is making progress too quickly, it will decrease the level. One note: although hard rocks often require higher levels, the interaction between the drill and the rock is complex, so prodapt level doesn't always match up with rock strength. A rock might require high drill levels but break easily if a different type of tool was used.

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upstart writes:

New HYBRiD Technique for Making Tissue Transparent Could Speed the Study of Many Diseases:

[...] “This is a simple and universal tissue-clearing technique for studies of large body parts or even entire animals,” says study senior author Li Ye, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research.

Tissue-clearing involves the use of solvents to remove molecules that make tissue opaque (such as fat), rendering the tissue optically transparent—while keeping most proteins and structures in place. Scientists commonly use genetically encoded or antibody-linked fluorescent beacons to mark active genes or other molecules of interest in a lab animal, and tissue-clearing in principle allows these beacons to be imaged all at once across the entire animal.

[...] The new method devised by Ye and his team uses a sequential combination of organic solvents and water-based detergents, and makes use of water-based hydrogels to protect those molecules within the tissue that need to be preserved. It often does not require the pumping of solvents through the sample.

Journal Reference:
Nudell, Victoria, Wang, Yu, Pang, Zhengyuan, et al. HYBRiD: hydrogel-reinforced DISCO for clearing mammalian bodies [open], Nature Methods (DOI: 10.1038/s41592-022-01427-0)

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owl writes:

https://mark.engineer/2022/04/calculating-pi-digits-on-first-intel-microprocessor-intel-4004/

One day I thought about the performance gap between the first Intel processor and modern machines. Of course, we can try to do some estimations empirically – we know clock rate and how the pipeline is organized and what features intel 4004 CPU has (but it would not be standard FLOPS, because there was no embedded support for float numbers yet). But there are few details: architecture bit width (only 4 bits in comparison with modern 64 bits!), very limited instruction set (it's missing even basic logical operators like AND or XOR) and peripheral limitations (ROM/RAM accesses).

So I decided to research the subject in practice. After some thinking, I chose π number calculation as a benchmark. After all, even ENIAC did that (in 1949) and achieved a new record for the amount of calculated digits.

Usually, we chose hardware, based on our goals. But in that case, we need to choose an algorithm, based on restrictions that come with intel 4004. So what do we have?

CPU is very basic and its instruction set has very few ALU operations – addition/subtraction of 4-bit operands, inversion (NOT operator), rotation left/right. And ... that's all, folks. No multiplications, division or any other logical operators.

Original Submission

zafiro17 writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/04/16/apple_m2_chips/

Apple is seemingly testing four next-generation M2 processors on software developed by third-party app makers in at least nine Mac models that are likely to be upcoming laptops and desktops.

Two years ago, the iGiant debuted its homegrown Arm-compatible M1 processor to power computers and iPads; the shift marked a departure from using x86 Intel silicon for its PCs. Instead of purchasing off-the-shelf processors, Apple – which was already designing its own mobile system-on-chips – wanted a custom design for its macOS products.

Now it appears the M1's successor, the M2, is edging closer to launch, judging from developer logs leaked to Bloomberg that signal there is "widespread internal testing" of the chip family at Apple.

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zafiro17 writes:

It's 2022 and most of us are glued to one internet device or another for 23 hours of the day. So where does your attention go? Software, for this discussion, can mean: apps installed on your laptop/desktop, operating systems, desktop environments/windowing applications, web software/software as a service, apps on a smartphone, etc. - broadly defined.

Use this as an opportunity to spread some love for software that you find helpful, useful, efficient, or rewarding.

Keep the conversation going.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Remoticon 2021 // Rob Weinstein Builds An HP-35 From The Patent Up:

Fifty years ago, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35. It was quite the engineering feat, since equivalent machines of the day were bulky desktop affairs, if not rack-mounted. [Rob Weinstein] has long been a fan of HP calculators, and used an HP-41C for many years until it wore out. Since then he gradually developed a curiosity about these old calculators and what made them tick. The more he read, the more engrossed he became. [Rob] eventually decided to embark on a three year long reverse-engineer journey that culminated a recreation of the original design on a protoboard that operates exactly like the original from 1972 (although not quite pocket-sized). In this presentation he walks us through the history of the calculator design and his efforts in understanding and eventually replicating it using modern FPGAs.

He started with the original HP patent and began to build tinyFPGA models. One part of the patent was treated as a black box, but he was able to reverse engineer what it does based upon the parts that interacted with it. He made a brief video demonstrating his recreation side-by-side with an actual HP-35.

Rob Weinstein's Remoticon 2021 presentation can be found on YouTube.

upstart writes:

SUSE's New Linux Release Isn't for Your Desktop - FOSS Force:

While it's not going to be of much use to those running Linux on a desktop or laptop, minified versions of Linux like SUSE's SLE Micro are becoming essential in the enterprise, both for DevOps teams working in containerized environments and for IoT devices running at the edge.

Yesterday SUSE released a new version in one of its lines of SUSE Linux Enterprise operating systems — SUSE Linux Enterprise-Micro 5.2

Don't worry, this doesn't mean that if you're using SUSE to run your desktop you'll need to upgrade, even if you're using SUSE to run a server or two. This one's for DevOps teams who use SLE Micro as part of their container infrastructure or in edge deployments, or for manufacturers who embed it in their internet of things devices.

[...] With enterprises' ever increasing use of containers and IoT, all of the server-focused Linux distributions offer minified versions of their distribution. Canonical, for example, has Ubuntu Core, which has the distinction of supporting Snaps for installing sandboxed software, an addition that could be especially useful for IoT and for enterprise edge deployments.

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zafiro17 writes:

South Korea the big winner in a year of supply struggles and continued shortages

Despite (and perhaps because) of ongoing shortages, the semiconductor industry posted $595 billion in revenue in 2021, an increase of 26.3 percent over 2020.

The numbers, from Gartner, also make plain the effects of US sanctions against China, whose market share fell, and which did not have a single manufacturer present in the top 10 list (sorted by total 2021 revenue).

The biggest news of the report was Samsung overtaking Intel in the top spot, albeit barely: Samsung's chip biz grew 28 percent from 2020 to 2021, while Intel lost 0.3 percent over the same period. Now Samsung sits atop the list with $73.2 billion in revenue and a 12.3 percent market share, while Intel nips at its heels with $72.5 billion in revenue and a 12.2 percent share of the spoils. It's a lead, but one that could easily evaporate by the end of 2022.

Other things to note from the report are that this profit is occurring despite the chip shortage, which appears that it will continue longer than expected, China has been feeling the squeeze as the result of US sanctions on Huawei and other companies, and that South Korea was the fastest growing country by market share.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/its-still-stupidly-ridiculously-difficult-to-buy-a-dumb-tv/

Historically, "smart" TVs aren't always particularly smart. They've routinely been shown to have lax security and privacy standards. They also routinely feature embedded OS systems that don't age well, aren't always well designed, don't perform particularly well over time, are slathered with ads, and are usually worse than most third-party game streaming devices or video game consoles.

Yet when if you go shopping for "dumb" televisions — as in just a high quality display with a bunch of HDMI ports and not much else, you're usually going to be out of luck. There are options, but guides on this front will usually shovel you toward computer monitors (too pricey at large sizes), or business-class displays (ditto).

[...] Of course it's challenging because TV manufacturers now make more money collecting and monetizing your personal data than they do selling the actual hardware. Last year Vizio noted it made $38.4 million in one quarter just from tracking and monetizing consumer viewing and usage data. It made $48.2 million on hardware (which also includes soundbars, and other products) in that same period.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Driverless car appears to flee the scene after being pulled over by cops:

A video showing a driverless car being stopped by the police and then attempting to drive away went viral over the weekend. San Francisco police stopped one of Cruise's autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs, likely because the car's headlights were not on despite it being night. In the video, first posted to Instagram on April 2, an officer can be heard saying, "There's nobody in it."

But a few seconds later, after the officer walks back to his police car, the autonomous vehicle—perhaps deciding that the traffic stop was over—tries to drive away before pulling over to a stop a few hundred feet away.

Cruise says that the car wasn't trying to make a run for it. The vehicle first yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to a safe spot for the actual traffic stop, the company says. One of the police officers contacted Cruise to inform it of the situation, and the driverless car did not receive a ticket. Cruise says it has fixed whatever caused the car to drive without its headlights at night.

Original Submission