SoylentNews

hubie writes:

The most complicated and expensive part of the supply chain is the last-mile delivery, where the costs can account for up to 28% of the total transportation cost and is projected to increase. The two main issues driving these costs will be the continual rise of e-commerce as well as rapid global urbanization, so there is a need for ways to optimize the delivery process to reduce costs. Urbanization leads to continued growth of traffic, which leads to transportation delays, higher fuel costs, and larger environmental impacts. These factors have led companies to consider deliveries by drone, but drones have limited battery capacities. Instead of looking at company delivery trucks as mobile charging stations from which to launch drones, a group of researchers considered utilizing public transportation vehicles to serve that purpose.

The idea of letting drones recharge or hitch rides on buses and trams to conserve energy was first introduced by Stanford researchers. The researchers in this work extended that idea to using multiple drones and multiple warehouses operating around the actual transportation nodes of a city (Bremen, Germany) and found that this is an attractive and viable approach that can be implemented in the real world.

Journal Reference:
Moadab, A., Farajzadeh, F. & Fatahi Valilai, O. Drone routing problem model for last-mile delivery using the public transportation capacity as moving charging stations. Sci Rep 12, 6361 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-10408-4

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The rover will collect samples and search for signs of life as it explores an ancient and now-dry river channel

After collecting eight rock-core samples from its first science campaign and completing a record-breaking, 31-Martian-day (or sol) dash across about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover arrived at the doorstep of Jezero Crater's ancient river delta April 13. Dubbed "Three Forks" by the Perseverance team (a reference to the spot where three route options to the delta merge), the location serves as the staging area for the rover's second science expedition, the "Delta Front Campaign."

"The delta at Jezero Crater promises to be a veritable geologic feast and one of the best locations on Mars to look for signs of past microscopic life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The answers are out there – and Team Perseverance is ready to find them."

The delta, a massive fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment at the western edge of Jezero Crater, formed at the convergence of a Martian river and a crater lake billions of years ago. Its exploration tops the Perseverance science team's wish list because all the fine-grained sediment deposited at its base long ago is the mission's best bet for finding the preserved remnants of ancient microbial life.

[...] "The delta is why Perseverance was sent to Jezero Crater: It has so many interesting features," said Farley. "We will look for signs of ancient life in the rocks at the base of the delta, rocks that we think were once mud on the bottom of 'Lake Jezero.' Higher up the delta, we can look at sand and rock fragments that came from upstream, perhaps from miles away. These are locations the rover will never visit. We can take advantage of an ancient Martian river that brought the planet's geological secrets to us."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft looking to add advertisements to free-to-play games:

Microsoft is creating a program that would enable companies and various advertisers to advertise in free-to-play Xbox games, according to Business Insider. Ads could appear in these games as digital-rendered billboards in car-racing games, the outlet added, citing sources close to the matter.

The company is considering creation of a private marketplace, where only select brands would be able to buy ad space and display ads in ways that don’t disrupt gameplay. The goal is to avoid an outcry from gamers.

"We are always looking for ways to improve the experience for players and developers but we don't have anything further to share," a Microsoft spokesperson told TheStreet. The spokesperson didn't dispute the report.

[...] According to Business Insider, Microsoft has no intention of taking a cut. The company plans to let developers and ad-tech companies share this advertising revenue.

In this case, why would Microsoft take such a risk of alienating certain players? One possibility is that Microsoft, which aims to buy out Activision Blizzard, wants to attract developers by offering them additional sources of income.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Variable schedules harm workers and businesses:

Variable work schedules—which employers increasingly use to maximize profits amid unpredictable market conditions—can actually undermine organizational performance, especially in crisis periods such as the pandemic, according to Cornell research.

[...] For decades, employers have altered the number and timing of employees' work hours on a daily or weekly basis in order to respond quickly to changing conditions. Chung studied the impact of this practice by integrating insights from literature on flexible staffing, turnover and organizational resilience, with data from 1,678 stores of a U.S.-based fast-food restaurant chain

"Research in the last decade has built a convincing theoretical and empirical record that workers in units with variable work schedules suffer from unstable earnings, negative mental and physical health outcomes, and work-life conflicts," wrote Chung, a student in the field of human resources.

[...] Human resources theory suggests that flexible staffing can hedge against volume and demand uncertainty, but through this study, Chung found that its value can expire if overused because variable work schedules can beget another source of uncertainty: loss of human capital due to high turnover.

[...] "The findings suggest that managers need to rethink the implication of the environmental disruption (COVID-19 in this study) with respect to the use of certain HR practices," she said. "In particular, the loss of human capital resulting from the use of flexible staffing practices may be a roadblock for firms seeking to bounce back from adversity."

Journal Reference:
Chung, H. (2022). Variable work schedules, unit-level turnover, and performance before and during the COVID-19 pandemic [open]. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(4), 515-532.
DOI: 10.1037/apl0001006

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mars scientists look to less expensive missions - SpaceNews:

The National Academies is scheduled to release the latest decadal survey for planetary sciences April 19. The report will set priorities for planetary science and astrobiology missions for 2023 through 2032.

The previous planetary science decadal survey, released in 2011, recommended as its top priority for large, or flagship, missions a rover that could cache samples for later return to Earth. NASA ultimately implemented that recommendation as Mars 2020, with the Perseverance rover currently collecting those samples.

Agency officials, speaking at a conference on low-cost Mars mission options in Pasadena, California, in late March, acknowledged it’s unlikely another flagship-class Mars mission will be the top priority of the new decadal survey. Even if it was, the expense of the ongoing Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign to return the samples Perseverance is caching makes it unlikely the agency could afford another large mission this decade.

[...] At the conference, many were pinning their hopes on smaller missions, both orbiters and landers, that could address key scientific issues. Recent studies, one by the Mars Architecture Strategy Working Group (MASWG) and another by a committee organized by Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies, concluded that low-cost Mars missions were both feasible and useful.

Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, who chaired the MASWG study, said at the conference that there was potential for missions with a total lifecycle cost of between $100 million and $300 million. “We think missions in this range have the potential to do outstanding science,” he said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Lyrid meteor shower peaks April 21-22:

One of the oldest known meteor showers is gracing the night sky next week — coinciding with the celebration of our planet, known as Earth Day. There hasn't been a meteor shower in months, and the Lyrid shower marks the end of the drought.

[...] The Lyrid meteor shower lights up the night sky every year from around April 15 to 29, as particles shed from Comet 1861 G1 Thatcher. The comet last passed through the inner solar system in 1861 — and it will not return until 2276 due to its 415-year orbit.

[...] Lyrid meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Lyra the Harp, located near the well-known star Vega, giving the shower its name.

[...] The Lyrids meteor shower is predicted to peak at 4 UTC on Friday, April 22, according to EarthSky.

Unfortunately, this year, a bright waning moon will illuminate the sky during the shower, making it more difficult to spot shooting stars.

If you look directly at the radiant — the point where the meteors appear to be coming from, which will be in the constellation Lyra — the shooting stars will be short. To see longer and more spectacular meteors, it's better to look away.

Find yourself a dark spot and remember to Keep Looking Up!.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Drone delivery could be poised to take off in the United States.

Earlier this month, Google’s sister company, Wing, began offering a drone delivery service in the Dallas suburbs of Frisco and Little Elm. Wing drones take off from “nests” in two Walgreens parking lots to deliver things like health products or ice cream to nearby customers. Wing describes it as “the first ever commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area.”

One reason for that last caveat: Walmart has been running its own drone delivery service near its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters since November. Walmart delivers a range of products to customers within a 1.5-mile radius of two Walmart stores. The service will soon expand to a third Walmart store in the same corner of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s drone efforts got some unflattering press coverage last week.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The MIT biologist Yukiko Yamashita’s research has shed light on the immortality of germline cells and the function of “junk DNA.”:

When cells divide, they usually generate two identical daughter cells. However, there are some important exceptions to this rule: When stem cells divide, they often produce one differentiated cell along with another stem cell, to maintain the pool of stem cells.

Yukiko Yamashita has spent much of her career exploring how these “asymmetrical” cell divisions occur. These processes are critically important not only for cells to develop into different types of tissue, but also for germline cells such as eggs and sperm to maintain their viability from generation to generation.

She spent her Ph.D. studying how cells make exact copies of themselves, but as a postdoc she turned her attention to exceptions to that process, which is very important because that is how one original cell can turn into so many different kinds of tissues. She focused on so-called junk DNA. These sequences make up most of the genome, but were thought to be useless because they don’t code for proteins. However, her work showed that stretches of junk DNA act like barcodes that label each chromosome to keep them bound together. Without the codes, the chromosomes scatter and leak out of the cell nucleus. Her lab also showed that these barcodes are unique to each species, and that the junk DNA of one species cannot necessarily code the chromosomes of another.

“[...] We think that might be one of the big reasons why different species become incompatible, because they don’t have the right information to bundle all of their chromosomes together into one place,” Yamashita says.

DannyB writes:

Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users' smart homes

The app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.

The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

[....] Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee.

[....] With its servers down, the Insteon app appears worthless, and users' automations and schedules have stopped working. Many of Insteon's wall switches were actual electrical switches, so the worst that will ever happen is that they become dumb switches.

Every dark internet cloud has a cat 6 lining. This isn't as bad as cloud connected pet feed fooders no longer working. Or cloud connected exercise machines not working or restricting features with new pay walls. Or Smart TVs spying on you and displaying ads during a live sporting event.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Central Valley of California makes up only 1% of U.S. farmland, but produces 40% of the nation's produce despite only receiving 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) of rainfall a year. That kind of productivity is due to massive pumping of groundwater for irrigation. After decades of pumping, parts of California are literally sinking and water is getting harder to get at (wells in the Tulare Basin have to be drilled a kilometer deep).

Groundwater in this region comes from two sources that are separated by a dense layer of clay. The water on top of the clay resides in loose soil and this water gets replenished with rainfall and snowmelt runoff. The water below the clay is the aquifer and this is not replenished. A major problem is that nobody knows where the pumped water is being pulled from, nor how much of it remains.

A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory came up with a new method to monitor changes between the two water sources.

They attacked the problem by combining data on water loss from U.S.-European Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On satellites with data on ground-level changes from a[sic] ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1 satellite. Ground-level changes in this region are often related to water loss because when ground is drained of water, it eventually slumps together and sinks into the spaces where water used to be – a process called subsidence.

[...] The researchers created a simple numerical model of these two layers of soils in the Tulare Basin. By removing the long-term subsidence trend from the ground-level-change data, they produced a dataset of only the month-to-month variations. Their model revealed that on this time scale, virtually all of the ground-level change can be explained by changes in aquifers, not in the water table.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microplastics permeate seafood across southern Australia:

Plastic rubbish is everywhere and now broken-down microplastics have been found in variable concentrations in blue mussels and water within the intertidal zone at some of southern Australia's most popular and more remote beaches.

Flinders University researchers warn that this means microplastics are now finding their way into human food supplies—including wild-caught and ocean-farmed fish and seafood sourced from the once pristine Southern Ocean and gulf waters of South Australia.

[...] Trillions of microplastic particles exist in the world's oceans, with the highest concentrations recently found in the shallow sea floor sediment off Naifaru in the Maldives (at 278 particles kg-1) and lowest reported in the surface waters of the Antarctic Southern Ocean (3.1 x 10-2 particles per m3).

For the first time, the new Flinders University study measured the presence of microplastics in South Australia's coastline, in areas important both for shipping, fishing and tourism, along with other industries and local communities.

upstart writes:

A new membrane material could make purification of gases significantly more efficient, potentially helping to reduce carbon emissions.:

Industrial processes for chemical separations, including natural gas purification and the production of oxygen and nitrogen for medical or industrial uses, are collectively responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s energy use. They also contribute a corresponding amount to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now, researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a new kind of membrane for carrying out these separation processes with roughly 1/10 the energy use and emissions.

Using membranes for separation of chemicals is known to be much more efficient than processes such as distillation or absorption, but there has always been a tradeoff between permeability — how fast gases can penetrate through the material — and selectivity — the ability to let the desired molecules pass through while blocking all others. The new family of membrane materials, based on “hydrocarbon ladder” polymers, overcomes that tradeoff, providing both high permeability and extremely good selectivity, the researchers say.

[...] The new type of polymers, developed over the last several years by the Xia lab, are referred to as ladder polymers because they are formed from double strands connected by rung-like bonds, and these linkages provide a high degree of rigidity and stability to the polymer material. [...] The sizes of the resulting pores can be tuned through the choice of the specific hydrocarbon starting compounds. “This chemistry and choice of chemical building blocks allowed us to make very rigid ladder polymers with different configurations,” Xia says.

upstart writes:

Vintage Computer Festival East Is This Weekend:

This weekend the InfoAge Science and History Museum in Wall, New Jersey will once again play host to the Vintage Computer Festival East — the annual can't-miss event for anyone who has even a passing interest in the weird and wonderful machines that paved the way for the supercomputers we now all carry around in our pockets. Ticket holders will have access to a program absolutely jam packed with workshops, talks, and exhibits that center around the dual themes of "Women in Computing" and "Computers for the Masses", plus a consignment and vendor area that almost guarantees you'll be going home a little poorer than when you got there. But hey, at least you'll have some new toys to play with.

For those that can't make the pilgrimage to the tropical wonderland that is the Jersey Shore in April, all three days of the Festival will be live-streamed to the VCF YouTube page. There's even an official Discord server where you can chat with other remote attendees.

What is Discord?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Jack Dorsey's First Tweet' NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280:

A non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first-ever tweet could sell for just under $280. The current owner of the NFT listed it for $48 million last week.

Iranian-born crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021. Last Thursday, he announced on Twitter that he wished to sell the NFT, and pledged 50% of its proceeds (which he thought would exceed $25 million) to charity. The auction closed Wednesday, with just seven total offers ranging from 0.09 ETH ($277 at current prices) to 0.0019 ETH (almost $6).

"The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it," Estavi told CoinDesk via a WhatsApp message on Wednesday.

Estavi has two days to accept the bid, or it will expire.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Green eggs and scam: Cuckoo finch's long con may be up:

For two million years African cuckoo finches have been tricking other birds into raising their young by mimicking the colour of their eggs, but new research suggests the tables may be turning in this evolutionary scam.

The cute yellow appearance of the cuckoo finch belies its nefarious nature: it smuggles its forged eggs into foreign nests, where unwitting foster parents treat them like their very own.

The cuckoo finch eggs then hatch a little earlier than the others in the nest, allowing them to grow quicker and beg more loudly for food than the host chicks—which starve to death as their confused parents prioritise the imposter.

Aiming to save their young from this grisly fate, birds like the African tawny-flanked prinia, a common victim of the ruse, have evolved ever more colourful and elaborate patterns for their eggs to avoid falling for counterfeits.

But the wily cuckoo finch has responded in kind, evolving the ability to copy a variety of egg colours and signatures of several different bird species.