SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Only ambitious climate protection measures can still save a third of the tundra:

The climate crisis can especially be felt in the Arctic: in the High North, the average air temperature has risen by more than two degrees Celsius over the past 50 years – far more than anywhere else. And this trend will only continue. [...]

"For the Arctic Ocean and the sea ice, the current and future warming will have serious consequences," says Prof Ulrike Herzschuh, Head of the Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems Division at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). "But the environment on land will also change drastically. The broad expanses of tundra in Siberia and North America will be massively reduced, as the treeline, which is already slowly changing, rapidly advances northward in the near future. In the worst-case scenario, there will be virtually no tundra left by the middle of the millennium." [...]

The tundra is home to a unique community of plants, roughly five percent of which are endemic, i.e., can only be found in the Arctic. Typical species include the mountain avens, Arctic poppy and prostrate shrubs like willows and birches, all of which have adapted to the harsh local conditions: brief summers and long, arduous winters. It also offers a home for rare species like reindeer, lemmings and insects like the Arctic bumblebee.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Japan has successfully tested a system that could provide a constant, steady form of renewable energy:

For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity. The giant machine resembles an airplane, with two counter-rotating turbine fans in place of jets, and a central 'fuselage' housing a buoyancy adjustment system. Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet).

[...] The advantage of ocean currents is their stability. They flow with little fluctuation in speed and direction, giving them a capacity factor — a measure of how often the system is generating — of 50-70%, compared with around 29% for onshore wind and 15% for solar

[...] Still, the Japanese company has a long way to go. Compared with onshore facilities, it's much more complicated to install a system underwater. "Unlike Europe, which has a long history of the North Sea Oil exploration, Japan has had little experience with offshore construction," said Takagi. There are major engineering challenges to build a system robust enough to withstand the hostile conditions of a deep ocean current and to reduce maintenance costs.

"Japan isn't blessed with a lot of alternative energy sources," he said. "People may say that this is just a dream, but we need to try everything to achieve zero carbon."

If it's endless and free, it has no value? /s

For a lot more technical detail and pictures, see this IHI Corporation white paper: Power Generation Using the Kuroshio Current

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The question is more important than you think:

When should I fit exercise within my daily schedule? For most, the answer depends on our family's schedule and working hours, and perhaps on whether we're 'larks' or 'night owls'. But over the past decade, researchers have found that much more hangs on this question than these constraints. That's because recent findings suggest that the effectiveness of exercise depends on the time of day (Exercise Time Of Day, ETOD).

Now, a randomized controlled trial not only confirms convincingly that ETOD affects the effectiveness of exercise, but also shows that these effects differ between types of exercise, and between women and men. The results are published in Frontiers in Physiology.

The authors recruited 30 women and 26 men to participate. All were between 25 and 55 years old, healthy, highly active, nonsmokers, and with normal weight. [...]

Importantly, female and male participants had been independently randomized beforehand to either of two regimes: exclusively training in the morning (60min between 06:30 and 08:30), or in the evening (between 18:00 and 20:00). Those assigned to morning exercise breakfasted after exercise, and ate three further meals at four-hour intervals. Those assigned to evening exercise ate three meals at four-hour intervals before training, plus another afterwards.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/loot-box-laws-block-diablo-immortal-launch-in-some-european-countries/

Blizzard's upcoming open beta launch of Diablo Immortal later this week will be skipping the Netherlands and Belgium, thanks to regulations in those countries that consider games with randomized loot boxes to be illegal gambling.

"Diablo Immortal will not be available in Belgium or the Netherlands, and will not appear on Battle.net or the Belgian and Netherlands App or Google Play Stores," an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Eurogamer over the weekend. "This is related to the current operating environment for games in those countries. Accordingly, pre-registrations for the game are not accessible in those markets."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The researchers successfully increased the level of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the main psychoactive component in cannabis, by close to 17%, and the level of CBG (cannabigerol), often referred to as the mother of all cannabinoids, by close to 25%. Further, Vainstein and his team were able to increase the ratio of terpenes, which are responsible for maximizing the euphoric effects of cannabis, by 20–30%.

The stated goal of their study was to find a way to intervene in the biochemical pathways in the cannabis plant in order to increase or decrease the production of active substances. The researchers accomplished this by manipulating a plant-based virus, that had first been neutralized so that it could not harm the plant, and then manipulating it to express the genes that influence the production of active substances in the cannabis plant.

See also: Metabolic 'fingerprint' predicts impairment from medical cannabis

Perhaps the research can lead to a new class of drugs as an alternative to opioid-based pain management.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/gop-senators-want-to-ban-chinas-digital-currency-from-us-apps-and-app-stores/

Three Republican senators are proposing a law to prohibit app stores from carrying apps that accept payments using China's digital currency. The "Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act" would prohibit app stores in the US from carrying or supporting any app "that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY," also known as the digital yuan or digital renminbi.

The app stores would also be prohibited from supporting or enabling digital yuan transactions. The bill defines an app store broadly as "a publicly available website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device."
[...]
The digital yuan is in the early stages of rollout. Akram Keram, an expert on China at the National Endowment for Democracy, wrote last year that the digital currency would give the Chinese Communist Party "direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists, for example."
[...]
The US could eventually issue a digital dollar. In March, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that said his administration "places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]."

While Americans have long used the dollar in digital form, a digital dollar would differ in fundamental ways. The Federal Reserve explains that a Central Bank Digital Currency "is generally defined as a digital liability of a central bank that is widely available to the general public." By contrast, the current types of central bank money in the US are "physical currency issued by the Federal Reserve and digital balances held by commercial banks at the Federal Reserve."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

SciTechDaily:

Scientists have discovered a new effect in two-dimensional conductive systems that promises improved performance of terahertz detectors.

A recent physics discovery in two-dimensional conductive systems enables a new type of terahertz detector. Terahertz frequencies, which lie between microwave and infrared on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, could enable faster, safer, and more effective imaging technologies, as well as much higher speed wireless telecommunications. A lack of effective real-world devices has hampered these developments, but this new breakthrough brings us one step closer to these advanced technologies.

[...] If the lack of usable devices were solved, terahertz radiation could have many useful applications in security, materials science, communications, and medicine. For example, terahertz waves allow the imaging of cancerous tissue that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. They can be employed in new generations of safe and fast airport scanners that make it possible to distinguish medicines from illegal drugs and explosives, and they could be used to enable even faster wireless communications beyond the state-of-the-art.

So, what is the recent discovery about? "We were developing a new type of terahertz detector," says Dr. Wladislaw Michailow, Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, "but when measuring its performance, it turned out that it showed a much stronger signal than should be theoretically expected. So we came up with a new explanation."

This explanation, as the scientists say, lies in the way how light interacts with matter. At high frequencies, matter absorbs light in the form of single particles – photons. This interpretation, first proposed by Einstein, formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and was able to explain the photoelectric effect. This quantum photoexcitation is how light is detected by cameras in our smartphones; it is also what generates electricity from light in solar cells.

Disclaimer: use of terahertz medical scanners may produce the smell of sizzling bacon.

Journal Reference:
"An in-plane photoelectric effect in two-dimensional electron systems for terahertz detection" by Wladislaw Michailow, Peter Spencer, Nikita W. Almond, Stephen J. Kindness, Robert Wallis, Thomas A. Mitchell, Riccardo Degl'Innocenti, Sergey A. Mikhailov, Harvey E. Beere and David A. Ritchie, 15 April 2022, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8398/)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reveals next-generation Starlink satellite details

Speaking in an onsite interview and Starbase tour with YouTuber Tim Dodd (The Everyday Astronaut), Musk – largely unprovoked – revealed that SpaceX has already built at least one functional Starlink Gen2/V2.0 satellite prototype and shipped it to the South Texas Starship factory, where it is currently being stored. More importantly, Musk also provided the first direct specifications for the next-generation spacecraft, stating that each Starlink V2.0 satellite will weigh about 1.25 tons (~2750 lb), measure about seven meters (~23 ft) long, and be almost an order of magnitude more capable than the "Starlink 1" satellites they'll ultimately supersede.

[...] Starlink V1.0 and V1.5 satellites weigh around 260 and 310 kilograms, respectively, meaning that Starlink V2.0 satellites will be about a bit more than four times heavier than V1.5 and a bit less than five times heavier than V1.0.

Musk also revealed that V2.0 satellites will be "almost an order of magnitude more capable than Starlink 1." He refused to call that capability bandwidth or throughput, the traditional method of describing a communication satellite's total performance, but Starlink V1.0 satellites are believed to have a total bandwidth of 18 gigabits per second (18 Gbps). As of today, it's unknown if Starlink V1.5 – a significant upgrade – also added more bandwidth, nor if Musk was referring to that latest Starlink V1.x iteration. But even if he was comparing V2.0 with the earliest V1.0 satellites, it's possible that each Starlink V2.0 satellite could add around 140-160 Gbps to the 30,000-satellite constellation.

Both the standard and extended payload fairings (pp. 40-41) for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have a diameter of 5.2 meters.

Also at ZDNet.

Original Submission

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