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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb's surface in hot lava. Over the eons, that lava created the dark blotches, or maria, that give the face of the moon its familiar appearance today.

Now, new research from CU Boulder suggests that volcanoes may have left another lasting impact on the lunar surface: sheets of ice that dot the moon's poles and, in some places, could measure dozens or even hundreds of feet thick.
...
It's a potential bounty for future moon explorers who will need water to drink and process into rocket fuel, said study co-author Paul Hayne.

"It's possible that 5 or 10 meters below the surface, you have big sheets of ice," said Hayne, assistant professor in APS and LASP.

Is it better to drink the water there, or burn it?

Journal Reference:
Andrew X. Wilcoski et al, Polar Ice Accumulation from Volcanically Induced Transient Atmospheres on the Moon, The Planetary Science Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ac649c

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fliptop writes:

For years China's censors have relied on a trusted tool kit to control the country's internet. They have deleted posts, suspended accounts, blocked keywords, and arrested the most outspoken.

Now they are trying a new trick: displaying social media users' locations beneath posts:

Authorities say the location tags, which are displayed automatically, will help unearth overseas disinformation campaigns intended to destabilize China. In practice, they have offered new fuel for pitched online battles that increasingly link Chinese citizens' locations with their national loyalty. Chinese people posting from overseas, and even from provinces deemed insufficiently patriotic, are now easily targeted by nationalist influencers, whose fans harass them or report their accounts.

The tags, based on a user's Internet Protocol, or I.P., address that can reveal where a person is located, were first applied to posts that mentioned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a topic authorities said was being manipulated with foreign propaganda. Now they are being expanded to most social media content, further chilling speech on a Chinese internet dominated by censorship and isolated from the world.

The move marks a new step in a decade-long push by Chinese officials to end anonymity online and exert a more perfect control over China's digital town squares.

[...] Those who appear to be getting online from abroad, even if they're just using a virtual private network or VPN that cloaks their location in China, are treated as foreign agitators and spies. After being reported by the trolls, some accounts are deleted by the platforms for violating "community regulations."

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Phoenix666 writes:

MIT Technology Review:

Solar panels are basically synonymous with silicon. The material is used in about 95% of the panels in today's market. But silicon solar cells are limited in how much energy they can harness from the sun, and they are still relatively expensive to make.

For many, compounds called perovskites have long held promise as potentially cheaper, lighter, more efficient solar materials. But despite the excitement—and a flurry of startups to commercialize the technology—some experts caution that perovskite-based solar cells could still be nearly a decade away from having a significant commercial impact, if it ever happens.

[...] But despite the hype, there are a couple of key reasons why your next rooftop solar installation probably won't be powered by perovskites. At the top of the list: they're too fragile.

Perovskites are cheaper to make, but not nearly durable as silicon. Whoever can bridge that gap will change the world.

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upstart writes:

Nonprogrammers are building more of the world's software: A computer scientist explains 'no-code':

Traditional computer programming has a steep learning curve that requires learning a programming language, for example C/C++, Java or Python, just to build a simple application such as a calculator or Tic-tac-toe game. Programming also requires substantial debugging skills, which easily frustrates new learners. The study time, effort and experience needed often stop nonprogrammers from making software from scratch.

No-code is a way to program websites, mobile apps and games without using codes or scripts, or sets of commands. People readily learn from visual cues, which led to the development of "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) document and multimedia editors as early as the 1970s. WYSIWYG editors allow you to work in a document as it appears in finished form. The concept was extended to software development in the 1990s.

There are many no-code development platforms that allow both programmers and nonprogrammers to create software through drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces instead of traditional line-by-line coding. For example, a user can drag a label and drop it to a website. The no-code platform will show how the label looks and create the corresponding HTML code. No-code development platforms generally offer templates or modules that allow anyone to build apps.

[...] There are many current no-code website-building platforms such as Bubble, Wix, WordPress and GoogleSites that overcome the shortcomings of the early no-code website builders. Bubble allows users to design the interface by defining a workflow. A workflow is a series of actions triggered by an event. For instance, when a user clicks on the save button (the event), the current game status is saved to a file (the series of actions).

Netflix Cuts 150 US-based Jobs After Losing Subscribers

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Netflix has laid off about 150 staff, just a month after the entertainment giant said it was losing subscribers for the first time in a decade.

The redundancies, announced by the streaming service on Tuesday, will mainly affect its US office in California. They account for about 2% of its North American workforce.

Netflix said the job losses were due to the slump in the company's revenue.

The streaming service is battling an exodus of viewers this year.

Is Netflix losing subscribers to increased competition in streaming, to customers cutting costs in hard economic times, or to customer saturation and/or discontent with Netflix's library?

DannyB writes:

Tech war: China bets on open-source RISC-V for chip design to minimise potential damage from 'being cut off' by US sanctions

A growing number of Chinese chip design firms have adopted open-source RISC-V in their chip designs as an alternative to Intel's proprietary X86 and Arm's architecture, in a bid to minimise potential damage from US sanctions and to save on licensing fees.

[....] "[This] gives Chinese companies access to a global open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) ecosystem," said Stewart Randall, head of electronics and embedded software at consultancy Intralink. "So Chinese companies can have access to, and create, their own cores or chips based on it."

However, some industry experts said China's adoption of open-source RISC-V architecture would not shield them from all US sanction risks, as America still holds the trump card when it comes to electronic design automation (EDA) tools, the key software needed for chip design, as well as chip manufacturing technologies.

If you really want to create your own cores from scratch, without licensing anyone else's IP, is it truly possible to do so with RISC-V?

See Also:

Tech war: China bets on open-source RISC-V for chip design to minimise potential damage from 'being cut off' by US sanctions

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

FSR 2.0 can make Deathloop just about playable on a two-year-old laptop GPU.

There are two things to like about version 2.0 of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech, which finally began appearing in actual games late last week. The most important is that the quality of the upscaled image is dramatically better than in FSR version 1.0. The second is that FSR 2.0 is compatible with all kinds of GPUs, including not just AMD's but older GeForce GPUs that aren't compatible with Nvidia's proprietary deep learning super sampling (DLSS).

New testing from Tom's Hardware has also revealed another unlikely beneficiary: Intel's recent integrated GPUs. Using an Iris Xe laptop GPU in a Core i7-1165G7, FSR 2.0 was able to bump the average frame rates in a 720p version of Deathloop by around 16 percent, nudging it from just under 30 fps to just over 30 fps and helping to offset the low resolution with its built-in anti-aliasing. Not bad for a nearly two-year-old laptop GPU playing a demanding modern game.

[...] Game developers could choose to support FSR 2.0 over Nvidia's DLSS for the same reason: It provides good-enough results that cover a much broader range of GPU hardware from multiple manufacturers. [...]

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takyon writes:

U.S. Space Force sees future demand for surveillance beyond Earth orbit

An international race back to the moon is already underway, with the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates all at various stages of planning future lunar missions.

Growing activity in outer space beyond Earth orbit — known as xGEO or cislunar space — could turn this region into a contested domain as countries seek access to lunar resources and stake out areas of jurisdiction. As a result, the U.S. military will likely have to pay more attention to what's happening in xGEO, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force's Space Operations Command.

"We are now seeing other actors go to the moon, go to lunar orbit and we do need to be concerned and interested in what they are doing there," Whiting said May 16 at a Mitchell Institute event.

Current sensors used by the military for space domain awareness were designed to track satellites in Earth orbits, at distances of 36,000 kilometers or closer, and not for cislunar space which extends out 385,000 kilometers and has different orbital trajectories. Scientists have pointed out that most activities in cislunar space are largely unmonitored and only self-reported.

Whiting noted that keeping watch of Earth orbit alone is "a huge challenge" but nevertheless the military has to prepare to extend its surveillance capabilities.

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From Universe Today

Each of us is, as it says in Max Ehrmann's famous poem "Desiderata", a child of the universe. It speaks metaphorically about our place in the cosmos, but it turns out to be a very literal truth. Our bodies contain the stuff of stars and galaxies, and that makes us children of the cosmos. To be more precise, we are carbon-based life forms. All life on Earth is based on the element carbon-12. It turns out this stuff is a critical gateway to life. So, how did the universe come up with enough of it to make you and me and all the life on our planet? Astrophysicists and nuclear physicists think they have an answer by using a supercomputer simulation of what happens to create carbon. As it turns out, it's not very easy.

The recipe for carbon-12 requires a pressure cooker and a lot of source material. The environment inside a star or during a stellar collision or an explosion provides the pressure cooker. The ingredients inside are helium-4 atoms and a theoretically forbidden nucleus of something called beryllium-8 (8Be). Put them all together and eventually, you get carbon-12. Sounds simple, right?

Well, not exactly. There's no way to replicate this recipe in the lab to test it and prove the process. That's because you need temperatures and pressures that exist only inside stars. To understand why we can't reproduce the birth of carbon, here's a simple outline of a complex process that astrophysicists think is happening.

See also:
On the Origin of Life's Most Crucial Isotope
Researchers reveal the origin story for carbon-12, a building block for life

Journal Reference:
Otsuka, T., Abe, T., Yoshida, T. et al. α-Clustering in atomic nuclei from first principles with statistical learning and the Hoyle state character [open] Nat Commun 13, 2234 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29582-0

Original Submission

NASA, Boeing Ready for Long-Delayed, High-Stakes Starliner Test Flight

takyon writes:

NASA, Boeing ready for long-delayed, high-stakes Starliner test flight

Running years late, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule program is poised for a crucial unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station set for launch Thursday, a do-over of an abbreviated 2019 demo mission that has cost the aerospace contractor nearly $600 million.

The Starliner crew capsule is scheduled for liftoff on the Orbital Flight Test 2, or OFT-2 mission, from Cape Canaveral at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) Thursday on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

ULA, Boeing, and NASA, which oversees the Starliner commercial crew contract, gave a green light Tuesday to proceed with final launch preparations. Managers convened for a launch readiness review and gave a "go" to press on with the mission.

The review "went really well," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "It was short. It was very clean. There are really no issues that ULA, Boeing, or NASA are working for the launch coming up."

Boeing Starliner Nears Launch As ISS Astronauts Work on Space Botany and Human Research

Phoenix666 writes:

SciTechDaily:

The International Space Station (ISS) is preparing for the targeted arrival of Boeing's Starliner crew ship on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. Meanwhile, the Expedition 67 crew is continuing its ongoing life science research while maintaining orbital lab systems.

Weather forecasters anticipate a 70% likelihood of favorable weather when Boeing's OFT-2 mission is scheduled to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT (3:54 p.m. PDT) on Thursday. The Starliner spacecraft will lift off atop the Atlas-V rocket from United Launch Alliance at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Starliner will take a 24-hour automated trip to the station where it will dock to the Harmony module's forward port for five to 10 days of cargo and test operations.

The mission will be carrying materials for the station's botany experiments.

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

The lure of making a quick buck has always attracted young people to invest in risky assets. For Generation Z, it is the volatility - and the decentralised nature - of digital assets such as cryptocurrency and NFTs which appeals. But they are unregulated, meaning there is little investor protection.

"All my friends were talking about [cryptocurrency] so one day I just decided why not just jump in and see if I can make some money," says 20-year-old Paxton See Tow.

All he needed was his phone and trading thousands of dollars' worth of assets was only a click away.

The gamification of trading is cited as a key attractant for Gen Z investors. Is that good, because it draws more people into investing, or dangerous?

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-a-linear-b/

The Minoan language known as "Linear A" may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language. Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

Understanding the link between them and decoding the secrets of Linear A would allow experts to paint a much more complete picture of Minoan civilization going back as far as 1,800 BC.

Linear A, which was used by the Minoans during the Bronze Age, exists on at least 1,400 known inscriptions made on clay tablets. The language has baffled the world's top archaeologists and linguistic experts for many years.

hubie writes:

Researcher warns of risks with using alternative data in lending:

Traditional credit scoring is based on a person's demonstrated ability to take on debt and pay it off. But with the dawn of larger data pools and access to more sophisticated modeling programs, lenders and credit agencies are taking more nonfinancial factors into rating creditworthiness, particularly those without an extensive credit history. This group tends to include vulnerable populations who are often more susceptible to predatory lending practices.

The problem is the systems developing these alternative scores can be like a black box, according to University of Georgia financial regulation researcher Lindsay Sain Jones. With the pool of personal data available growing, Jones argues that it's time to take a second look at how the American credit scoring system works and is regulated.

[...] In their recent paper, Jones and her co-author argue further regulation of financial reporting entities — both large credit bureaus and new data collectors — is needed in the same way gas, electric and water providers regulated their services. They argue participation in the credit system has become as necessary as having a phone or electricity.

[...] Jones and her co-author are also concerned that much of the lifestyle-related data points lenders correlate with creditworthiness can connect to race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, a person's ZIP code or where they attended college. Successfully challenging this kind of disparate impact under the ECOA [Ed: Equal Credit Opportunity Act] is nearly impossible.

One agency pulled information on how often people pay for gas at the pump versus paying inside the store. People who paid at the pump were deemed more creditworthy.

"There are all kinds of factors that can be correlated with creditworthiness, but that doesn't mean they should be used," Jones said.

When they factor in the web sites that people visit, do you suppose SN would be an asset or liability towards creditworthiness?

[ed note: See also Black Mirror, Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive". - fnord]

Journal Reference:
Janine S. Hiller and Lindsay Sain Jones, Who's Keeping Score?: Oversight of Changing Consumer Credit Infrastructure [open], Am. Bus. Law J., 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ablj.12199

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild:

Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys in the wild.

The software comes from a basic version of the SafeZone Crypto Libraries, which were developed by a company called Inside Secure and acquired by Rambus as part of its 2019 acquisition of Verimatrix, a Rambus representative said. That version was deprecated prior to the acquisition and is distinct from a FIPS-certified version that the company now sells under the Rambus FIPS Security Toolkit brand.

Researcher Hanno Böck said that the vulnerable SafeZone library doesn't sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. (These keys can be used to secure Web traffic, shells, and other online connections.) Instead, after the SafeZone tool selects one prime number, it chooses a prime in close proximity as the second one needed to form the key.

"The problem is that both primes are too similar," Böck said in an interview. "So the difference between the two primes is really small." The SafeZone vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-26320.

Cryptographers have long known that RSA keys that are generated with primes that are too close together can be trivially broken with Fermat's factorization method. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat first described this method in 1643.

A little old but interesting nonetheless. Implementation details matter.

[ed. note. - The youtube channel ComputerPhile also has a decent video explaining the issue. - fnord]

Original Submission

maxwell demon writes:

The site Tanya Goodin tells us that Zoom might soon monitor your emotions:

Imagine being on a Zoom call and the person [at]sic the other end is getting real-time messages from an artificial intelligence (AI) that's analysing your face and indicating when you're bored, annoyed, or even lying. A creepy prospect, but one that sounds slightly far-fetched?

Well, no, this 'emotion AI' is something Zoom is considering building into their product right now, with research currently underway on how they can do that.

Human rights organizations are not happy about it:

More than 25 human and digital rights organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Fight for the Future have sent a letter to Zoom demanding the company end their plans to incorporate these emotion AI features into their software.

"This software is discriminatory, manipulative, potentially dangerous and based on assumptions that all people use the same facial expressions, voice patterns, and body language," wrote the groups in the letter sent on Wednesday to Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom.

But the technology is not restricted to Zoom:

AI-based features for assessing people's emotional states are already showing up in remote classroom platforms like Intel's 'Class' and will be mandatory in new EU vehicles from 2022 to detect driver distraction, signs of drunkenness and road rage. Like it or not these technologies are coming – many of them are here already.

So next time you are facing any camera, better control your facial expression well.

Original Submission