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upstart writes:

Excellent Utilities: Whoogle Search - self-hosted metasearch engine:

Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don't get us wrong, we're long-standing admirers of many of Google's products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and 'free', but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google's ecosystem.

Whoogle Search is a privacy-focused search engine. It displays the same results as Google Search but without ads/sponsored content, JavaScript, cookies, or tracking.

[...] You can deploy it to PaaS hosting solutions such as Heroku, Fly.io, or Repl.it and lots of other platforms. Or you may choose to install it to a local machine on your network.

Website: github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
Developer: Ben Busby
License: MIT License

At the bottom of the github page is a short list of public instances where you can try it out.

Anyone use this or searX for web searching, and if so, what are your experiences/recommendations?

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Telescopes reveal why Neptune is more blue than Uranus

Neptune and Uranus are so similar that scientists sometimes refer to the distant, icy planets as planetary twins. But these ice giants have one big difference: their color.

New space and ground-based telescope observations have revealed what's behind this difference in tone.

[...] Astronomers used the Gemini North telescope and NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, both in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescope to create a model that could match up observations of Neptune and Uranus.

[...] The scientists determined that an excess of haze builds up in Uranus' atmosphere, which gives it a lighter appearance. This haze is thicker on Uranus than a similar atmospheric layer on Neptune, so it whitens the appearance of Uranus from our perspective.

Without this haze in either planetary atmosphere, astronomers believe both planets would be almost identically blue.

Shades of Uranus: Scientists know why the planet and Neptune are different hues of blue

[...] The study shows that embedded in the inner atmospheric planetary layers, there is even more haze than thought, rather than just icy clouds of methane and hydrogen sulfide. It is the first time a study took into account wavelengths from ultraviolet to near-infrared, rather than concentrating on a handful of light waves, authors said.

"It's also the first [study] to explain the difference in visible color between Uranus and Neptune," lead author Patrick Irwin, a planetary physics professor at Oxford University, said in a statement from the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab.

It is good to understand phenomena in the atmosphere of other planets. But why didn't they say that Neptune is more Azure than Uranus?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/qualcomm-wants-to-buy-a-stake-in-arm-alongside-its-rivals/

The US chipmaker Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm alongside its rivals and create a consortium that would maintain the UK chip designer's neutrality in the highly competitive semiconductor market.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank plans to list Arm on the New York Stock Exchange after Nvidia's $66 billion purchase collapsed earlier this year. However, the IPO has sparked concern over the future ownership of the company, given its crucial role in the global technology sector.

[...] Some UK politicians have called for the government to buy a "golden share" in Arm that would recognize the company's place as a crucial strategic asset for the nation.

But despite intense British lobbying, SoftBank is thought to be pushing ahead with a US listing, leading to questions over the future control of a company that has long been considered an impartial actor in the $500 billion global semiconductor industry. Arm strikes licensing deals with partners regardless of size or geography, which has led to its intellectual property being used in the majority of chips sold worldwide.

[...] With demand for semiconductors set to double over the next 10 years and as the world struggles to recover from a multiyear chip crunch, manufacturers of the technology found in all modern electronics will rely on Arm's designs more than ever.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

There is growing interest in extracting minerals from mining waste, with conferences held in the new area of remining in Europe and new prospecting ventures under way in Australia exploring mine waste.

The first to invest in this secondary prospecting was the Queensland government, which has funded sampling across 16 sites. Early results have found cobalt deposits rich enough to draw overseas investment.

New South Wales has recently launched a similar program, while work is under way by Geoscience Australia, the University of Queensland and RMIT to produce the first-ever atlas of mine waste in Australia.

Does mining the waste make financial sense in and of itself, or is it simply meant to assuage environmental and political concerns?

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

Hot-Blooded or Cold-Blooded? Chemical Clues Solve One of the Oldest Mysteries in Paleontology

Paleontologists have been debating for decades whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded could give us clues about how active they were and what their everyday lives were like, but previous methods to determine their warm- or cold-bloodedness — how quickly their metabolisms could turn oxygen into energy — were inconclusive. However, in a new paper published in the journal Nature, scientists are unveiling a novel method for studying dinosaurs' metabolic rates, using clues in their bones that indicated how much the individual animals breathed in their last hour of life.

"This is really exciting for us as paleontologists — the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded is one of the oldest questions in paleontology, and now we think we have a consensus, that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded," says Jasmina Wiemann, the paper's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

"The new proxy [...] allow us to directly infer metabolism in extinct organisms, something that we were only dreaming about just a few years ago. We also found different metabolic rates characterizing different groups, which was previously suggested based on other methods, but never directly tested," says Matteo Fabbri, [...] one of the study's authors.

Reference: "Fossil biomolecules reveal an avian metabolism in the ancestral dinosaur" by Jasmina Wiemann, Iris Menéndez, Jason M. Crawford, Matteo Fabbri, Jacques A. Gauthier, Pincelli M. Hull, Mark A. Norell and Derek E. G. Briggs, 25 May 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04770-6

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI systems can detect patient race, creating new opportunities to perpetuate health disparities:

Can computers figure out your race by looking at your wrist bones or lungs? Yes, according to a study published this month by the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet Digital Health. That's not the whole story, though: the bigger issue is researchers don't know how the machines do it.

The findings come after months of work by a team of experts in radiology and computer science led by Judy W. Gichoya, MD, assistant professor and director of the Healthcare Innovations and Translational Informatics Lab in Emory University School of Medicine's Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. Additional Emory researchers include Hari Trivedi, MD, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, Ananth Bhimireddy, MS, systems software engineer and computer science student Zachary Zaiman. The team also includes colleagues from Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, Indiana University-Perdue University and Arizona State, plus experts in Canada, Taiwan and Australia.

The team used large-scale medical imaging datasets from both public and private sources, datasets with thousands of chest x-rays, chest CT scans, mammograms, hand x-rays and spinal x-rays from racially diverse patient populations.

They found that standard deep learning models—computer models developed to help speed the task of reading and detecting things like fractures in bones and pneumonia in lungs—could predict with startling accuracy the self-reported race of a patient from a radiologic image, despite the image having no patient information associated with it.

pkrasimirov writes:

HARRISON: "I've got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the aeroplane."

CONTROL: "ATC: 333 Lima Delta, Roger, what's your position?"

HARRISON: "I have no idea. I can see the coast of Florida in front of me but I have no idea."

CONTROL: "Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either northbound or southbound. We're trying to locate you."

On 10 May at 10,000 feet above the ocean a Cessna 208 Caravan pilot suffers aortic dissection and collapses. The other two people on board are passengers without piloting experience -- Russ Franck, 69, and Darren Harrison, 39. The plane goes into a dive. Harrison takes control, slowly levels the aircraft, establishes radio communication and gets assistance from ground controller Robert Morgan, a seasoned Cessna flight instructor. One hour later, after what Franck describes as "a normal landing", the pilot Kenneth Allen, 64, is rushed to Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center where his life is saved for second time that day.

The story:
• May 11 https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/passenger-safely-lands-aircraft-after-pilot-incapacitated/
• May 11 https://medium.com/faa/miracle-in-the-air-air-traffic-controllers-guide-passenger-to-land-plane-safely-27362004f07c
• May 12 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61416384
• May 12 https://people.com/human-interest/air-traffic-controller-speaks-out-after-helping-passenger-land-plane/
• May 16 https://people.com/human-interest/passenger-who-landed-airplane-with-no-flying-experience-speaks-out/
• May 17 https://people.com/human-interest/pilot-has-miraculous-recovery-after-health-emergency-led-to-passenger-landing-plane/
• May 26 https://people.com/human-interest/pilot-who-had-medical-emergency-speaks-out-after-passenger-landed-plane/
--
Ever wanted to know how to fly an airplane just in case?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Fjords emit as much methane as all the deep oceans globally

The world's fjords were created when the inland ice receded, and are a relatively rare natural feature, constituting only 0.13 per cent of all the oceans on Earth. However, according to researchers from the University of Gothenburg, emissions of methane from the surface of fjords are comparable to the emissions of this gas from global deep oceans which account for 84 per cent of the global sea surface area. These results were presented in an article in the prestigious science journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters.

"It's been known for some time that many fjords have anoxic environments closest to the bottom and that methane forms in the bottom sediment. Usually, only a small portion of this gas ever reaches the atmosphere because it gets broken down as it ascends through the more oxygen-rich waters closer to the surface. But in our research, we recorded large emissions of methane when the water in the fjord was mixed during storm events, for example," says Stefano Bonaglia, researcher in marine geochemistry at the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg.

[The lead author] adds that if climate change leads to more extreme weather events, methane emissions may rise, but only up to a certain point.

"If we were to see a sharp rise in the number of heavy storm events, methane emissions would be reduced, because the anoxic environments at the bottom of fjords would disappear if the water are mixed frequently."

Journal Reference:
Stefano Bonaglia et al., High methane emissions from an anoxic fjord driven by mixing and oxygenation [open], Limnol Oceanogr, 2022. DOI: 10.5061/dryad.ksn02v75g

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists try to bring Australian 'tiger' back from extinction:

The scientist reached into an enclosure in the biosciences building at the University of Melbourne and pulled out a dunnart — a mouse-sized marsupial with huge, inky black eyes. [...]

The enclosure is part of the university's newly established Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab. A team of genetic scientists led by biosciences professor Andrew Pask is attempting to make the concept of "de-extinction" a reality. [...]

Here's the plan to bring it [thylacine, aka Tasmanian tiger] back: First, turn dunnart cells into thylacine cells using gene-editing technology. Then use the thylacine cells to create an embryo, either in a petri dish or the womb of a living animal. Implant the embryo into a female marsupial such as a quoll, and watch the quoll give birth to a thylacine baby. When the baby is old enough to leave the quoll pouch, raise it into adulthood. Repeat and establish a healthy population, with the goal of releasing thylacines into the wild.

"It is certainly feasible," said Owain Edwards, Environmental Synthetic Genomics group leader at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, who is not involved in the project. "Absolutely. What they're proposing to do, can be done. What isn't clear to anybody yet is: What exactly will result from it? Because it will never be a pure thylacine."

upstart writes:

Geology from 50 Light-Years: Webb Gets Ready to Study Rocky Worlds:

With its mirror segments beautifully aligned and its scientific instruments undergoing calibration, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is just weeks away from full operation. Soon after the first observations are revealed this summer, Webb's in-depth science will begin.

Among the investigations planned for the first year are studies of two hot exoplanets classified as "super-Earths" for their size and rocky composition: the lava-covered 55 Cancri e and the airless LHS 3844 b. Researchers will train Webb's high-precision spectrographs on these planets with a view to understanding the geologic diversity of planets across the galaxy, and the evolution of rocky planets like Earth.

55 Cancri e orbits less than 1.5 million miles from its Sun-like star (one twenty-fifth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun), completing one circuit in less than 18 hours. With surface temperatures far above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals, the day side of the planet is thought to be covered in oceans of lava.

[...] Like 55 Cancri e, LHS 3844 b orbits extremely close to its star, completing one revolution in 11 hours. However, because its star is relatively small and cool, the planet is not hot enough for the surface to be molten. Additionally, Spitzer observations indicate that the planet is very unlikely to have a substantial atmosphere.

[...] These observations of 55 Cancri e and LHS 3844 b will be conducted as part of Webb's Cycle 1 General Observers program. General Observers programs were competitively selected using a dual-anonymous review system, the same system used to allocate time on Hubble.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has exceeded 1.1 exaFLOPS (Rmax), leading the June 2022 TOP500 list as the world's fastest supercomputer and the first truly "exascale" system.

Frontier uses 9,408 64-core Epyc 7A53 CPUs and 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs. It has 4.6 petabytes each of DDR4 and High Bandwidth Memory.

Frontier also reached #2 on the June 2022 Green500 list at 52.227 gigaFLOPS/Watt, behind the smaller Frontier Test & Development System:

Previously, Frontier had been characterized as a two peak exaflops system, but its first Top500 benchmark measures some 1.686 peak exaflops. (Oak Ridge said that there remains "much higher headroom on the GPUs and the CPUs" to achieve the two peak exaflops target.) Outside of Linpack and the Top500, the system benchmarks at 6.88 exaflops of mixed-precision performance on HPL-AI. The team ran out of time and was not able to submit an HPCG benchmark.

[...] Frontier also achieved another win out of the gate: second place on the spring 2022 Green500 list, which ranks supercomputers by their flops per watt. The Oak Ridge team accomplished this by delivering those 1.102 Linpack exaflops in a 21.1-megawatt power envelope, an efficiency of 52.23 gigaflops per watt (which works out to one exaflops at 19.15 megawatts). This puts the system well within the 20-megawatt exascale power envelope target set by DARPA in 2008—a target that had been viewed with much skepticism over the ensuing 14 years. Frontier was only outpaced in efficiency by its own test and development system (Frontier TDS, aka "Crusher"), which delivered 62.68 gigaflops per watt.

#10: 30.05 petaflops (Nov. 2021) → 46.10 petaflops (June 2022)
#100: 4.79 petaflops → 5.39 petaflops
#500: 1.65 petaflops → 1.65 petaflops (both are Lenovo C1040, Xeon E5-2673v4 20C 2.3GHz systems)

Previously: New TOP500 List Released -- Fugaku Holds Top Spot, Exascale Remains Elusive; Green500 Released Too!
Top500: No Exascale, Fugaku Still Reigns, Polaris Debuts at #12

Original Submission

upstart writes:

CubeSat Set to Demonstrate NASA's Fastest Laser Link from Space:

NASA's Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) mission, carrying the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, will debut on May 25 [for a 6-month experiment] as part of SpaceX's Transporter-5 rideshare launch. TBIRD will showcase the high-data-rate capabilities of laser communications from a CubeSat in low-Earth orbit. At 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), TBIRD will downlink data at the highest optical rate ever achieved by NASA.

NASA primarily uses radio frequency to communicate with spacecraft, but with sights set on human exploration of the Moon and Mars and the development of enhanced scientific instruments, NASA needs more efficient communications systems to transmit significant amounts of data. With more data, researchers can make profound discoveries. Laser communications substantially increases data transport capabilities, offering higher data rates and more information packed into a single transmission.

upstart writes:

Gene Editing Can Change The Social Behavior of Animals in Unexpected Ways:

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique can be used to change genetic coding with great precision, and its uses include curing disease and fixing genetic faults. Now it's been used to change animal behavior – and the results are not what scientists were expecting.

CRISPR was used on a group of hamsters to knock out the Avpr1a receptor, which is acted on by the hormone vasopressin. Vasopressin is linked to social actions, such as bonding, cooperation, communication, dominance, and aggression.

Without the Avpr1a receptor, the team behind the study expected social communication and aggressive behavior to be reduced.

Instead, the opposite happened: the hamsters without the receptor showed much higher levels of social communication and aggression. Typical sex differences in aggressiveness disappeared as well, with hamsters of both sexes displaying high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Nokia CEO says 6G will be here by 2030 — but you might not access it via your smartphone

Headquartered in Finland, Nokia builds telecoms networks that enable phones and other internet-enabled devices to communicate with one another.

Asked when he thinks the world will move away from using smartphones to using smart glasses and other devices that are worn on the face, [Nokia CEO] Lundmark said it will happen before 6G arrives.

[...] "By then, definitely the smartphone as we know it today will not anymore be the most common interface," he said. "Many of these things will be built directly into our bodies."

He did not specify exactly what he was referring to but some companies, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink, are working on producing electronic devices that can be implanted into the brain and used for communication with machines and other people. On a more basic level, chips can be implanted into people's fingers and used to unlock things.

6G may be here in the next 8 years or so, but I believe the suggestion of implanted devices being commonplace is a totally unrealistic statement. We have not yet reached the stage where 'implanting things into the brain' has become a simple and low risk proposition. But even if we had, who is going to be performing these operations and at what rate? Who would pay for such medical treatment?

However, let us put these problems aside for a moment. What do you see as the future of personal communications? Let's discuss some realistic or even 'off-the'wall' ideas. What effect would such devices have on our privacy and freedoms? In Star Trek the communicator device, which appeared on our (television) screens around the mid 1960s, does not look too different from some of today's smartphones although at that time it was pure science fiction.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA-Supported Solar Sail Could Take Science to New Heights:

As NASA's exploration continues to push boundaries, a new solar sail concept selected by the agency for development toward a demonstration mission could carry science to new destinations.

The Diffractive Solar Sailing project was selected for Phase III study under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Phase III aims to strategically transition NIAC concepts with the highest potential impact for NASA, other government agencies, or commercial partners.

"As we venture farther out into the cosmos than ever before, we'll need innovative, cutting-edge technologies to drive our missions," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program helps to unlock visionary ideas – like novel solar sails – and bring them closer to reality."

Like a sailboat using wind to cross the ocean, solar sails use the pressure exerted by sunlight to propel a craft through space. Existing reflective solar sail designs are typically very large and very thin, and they are limited by the direction of the sunlight, forcing tradeoffs between power and navigation. Diffractive lightsails would use small gratings embedded in thin films to take advantage of a property of light called diffraction, which causes light to spread out when it passes through a narrow opening. This would allow the spacecraft to make more efficient use of sunlight without sacrificing maneuverability.

[...] Work under Phase III will optimize the sail material and perform ground tests in support of this conceptual solar mission. Orbits passing over the Sun's north and south poles are difficult to achieve using conventional spacecraft propulsion. Lightweight diffractive lightsails, propelled by the constant pressure of sunlight, could place a constellation of science spacecraft in orbit around the Sun's poles to advance our understanding of the Sun and improve our space weather forecasting capabilities.

Original Submission