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Phoenix666 writes:

SpaceNews:

A Long March 5B rocket has arrived at Wenchang spaceport as China gears up to send its second space station module into orbit.

The components of the third Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket arrived at Wenchang May 29, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced (Chinese).

[...] The mission aims to send the roughly 22-ton Wentian experiment module into orbit to join Tianhe, the similarly-sized core module for the Tiangong space station which launched in April 2021.

The 17.9-meter-long Wentian ("Quest for the Heavens") module will dock with the forward port of Tianhe, which is currently in a 387 by 386-kilometer orbit inclined by 41.5 degrees.

The Tianhe space station could be expanded to six modules.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Hennepin Healthcare investigators study game to help people quit smoking:

Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute is testing an innovative way to help people quit smoking – by letting them bet on themselves and win real money. It's part of a new game called QuitBet and it's being funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant administered by researchers at Hennepin Healthcare.

Players commit to quit smoking over four weeks and bet $30 on themselves, which goes into the pot. Players then receive a free breath testing device to track their progress every day. At the end, all the players who have managed to quit win back their bet plus a profit as they split the pot with the other winners. Winners typically double their money while quitting smoking.

Developed by digital-health company WayBetter, QuitBet is an example of the "serious games" movement where games are employed to improve health. [...]

"Quitting smoking is hard, but who said it also has to be solitary and frustrating?" said Rosen. "Why not mix in some fun, friendly competition and the thrill of winning money? It's a powerful new way to think about the problem. We're finding that it really helps people get through those tough first few weeks."

The game lasts four weeks. Is that long enough to be off nicotine to prevent relapses and considered yourself to have quit? I've seen late night TV commercials for weight loss that sounds like works on this model. Do you think this could be widely effective, or is the fact that there is a weight loss company presumably making money on people who lose their bets evidence that the approach doesn't work for most?

If you want to join the study, visit https://Quit.bet.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Who may benefit from climate change? Rattlesnakes, study suggests:

Animals around the world have been feeling the negative effects of climate change, but there's one slithering creature that may be benefiting from it: rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes can be found in every state in the continental U.S., according to Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, but they are commonly found in the southwest. One of the most widely known snakes in the world, rattlesnakes are relatively reserved reptiles that avoid human confrontation, but when threatened, they often will curl into striking position and begin to rattle their signature tail before they give a venomous bite.

[...] If temperatures continue to warm, Crowell said that could mean hibernation ends earlier in the spring for rattlesnakes, and they could still be active late in the fall heading into winter.

"Basically just more time to grow and do rattlesnake things," she said.

[...] Luckily, Crowell said not to panic; more rattlesnake activity won't mean "a giant boom of millions of more rattlesnakes." Instead, they might just be noticed more often and won't drastically increase the annual number of bites.

Journal Reference:
Hayley L. Crowell, Katherine C. King, James M. Whelan, et al. Thermal ecology and baseline energetic requirements of a large-bodied ectotherm suggest resilience to climate change, Ecol Evol., 2022. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.7649

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists made a Möbius strip out of a tiny carbon nanobelt:

From cylindrical nanotubes to the hollow spheres known as buckyballs, carbon is famous for forming tiny, complex nanostructures (SN: 8/15/19). Now, scientists have added a new geometry to the list: a twisted strip called a Möbius carbon nanobelt.

In 2017, researchers created carbon nanobelts, thin loops of carbon that are like tiny slices of a carbon nanotube. That feat suggested it might be possible to create a nanobelt with a twist, a Möbius carbon nanobelt. To make the itsy-bitsy twisty carbon, some of the same researchers stitched together individual smaller molecules using a series of 14 chemical reactions, chemist Yasutomo Segawa of the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan, and colleagues report May 19 in Nature Synthesis.

While carbon nanotubes can be used to make new types of computer chips and added to textiles to create fabric with unusual properties, scientists don't yet know of any practical applications for the twisty nanobelts (SN: 8/28/19; SN: 2/8/19). But, Segawa says, the work improves scientists' ability to make tiny carbon structures, especially complicated ones.

Journal Reference:
Yasutomo Segawa et al., Synthesis of a Möbius carbon nanobelt, Nat. Synth (2022). DOI: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00075-8

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Last week, Google Street View turned 15:

Fifteen years ago, Street View began as a far-fetched idea from Google co-founder Larry Page to build a 360-degree map of the entire world. Fast forward to today: There are now over 220 billion Street View images from over 100 countries and territories — a new milestone — allowing people to fully experience what it's like to be in these places right from their phone or computer. And Street View doesn't just help you virtually explore, it's also critical to our mapping efforts — letting you see the most up-to-date information about the world, while laying the foundation for a more immersive, intuitive map.

While that's all worth celebrating, we aren't stopping there. Today, we're unveiling Street View's newest camera, giving you more ways to explore historical imagery, and taking a closer look at how Street View is powering the future of Google Maps.

Admittedly, the piece reads more like an ad for their new camera, but there's no denying the tool has its place in modern society. Here's a fun idea, ask any Millennial or Gen Z if they know how to read a map.

Also at XDA, DailyMail, and a decent discussion at YCombinator Hacker News. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

[Ed.: there were a lot of interesting things that people found in the early days before Google has to start blurring faces and license plates --hubie]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian website is now available to Tor users as an "onion service", at the address:

https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion

The Tor network helps conceal its users' locations, which makes tracking their internet activity much more difficult. Tor also makes it harder for internet service providers to identify what their users are accessing. This means users can bypass censorship in parts of the world where access to independent news might be difficult or if certain websites and services are banned.

Guardian readers have always been able to access https://www.theguardian.com using tools such as Tor Browser. These browsers route their communications over the Tor network – thereby concealing the reader's location. But the browsers' communications have to exit the Tor network for the final leg of the journey in order to get to the site on the normal world wide web.

The introduction of a Guardian onion service means that the entire communication pathway between a reader and the Guardian takes place within the Tor network, thereby avoiding potential risks with the "hop" between the Tor network and the world wide web service. An example of such a risk could be that the "exit node" – the gateway between the normal web and the Tor network – could contain malicious software or be located somewhere that is subject to censorship.

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2022/may/30/guardian-launches-tor-onion-service

Two other large news sites of note also have .onion addresses:

BBC: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/
NYTimes: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why the search for a privacy-preserving data sharing mechanism is failing:

From banking to communication our modern, daily lives are driven by data with ongoing concerns over privacy. Now, a new EPFL paper published in Nature Computational Science argues that many promises made around privacy-preserving mechanisms will never be fulfilled and that we need to accept these inherent limits and not chase the impossible.

Data-driven innovation in the form of personalized medicine, better public services or, for example, greener and more efficient industrial production promises to bring enormous benefits for people and our planet and widespread access to data is considered essential to drive this future. Yet, aggressive data collection and analysis practices raise the alarm over societal values and fundamental rights.

As a result, how to widen access to data while safeguarding the confidentiality of sensitive, personal information has become one of the most prevalent challenges in unleashing the potential of data-driven technologies and a new paper from EPFL's Security and Privacy Engineering Lab (SPRING) in the School of Comupter and Communication Sciences argues that the promise that any data use is solvable under both good utility and privacy is akin to chasing rainbows.

Head of the SPRING Lab and co-author of the paper, Assistant Professor Carmela Troncoso, says that there are two traditional approaches to preserving privacy, "There is the path of using privacy preserving cryptography, processing the data in a decrypted domain and getting a result. But the limitation is the need to design very targeted algorithms and not just undertake generic computations."

The problem with this type of privacy-preserving technology, the paper argues, is that they don't solve one of the key problems most relevant to practitioners: how to share high-quality individual-level data in a manner that preserves privacy but allows analysts to extract a dataset's full value in a highly flexible manner.

DannyB writes:

Phys.org
How electric fish were able to evolve electric organs

Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study in Science Advances explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs. The finding might also help scientists pinpoint the genetic mutations behind some human diseases.

Evolution took advantage of a quirk of fish genetics to develop electric organs. All fish have duplicate versions of the same gene that produces tiny muscle motors, called sodium channels. To evolve electric organs, electric fish turned off one duplicate of the sodium channel gene in muscles and turned it on in other cells. The tiny motors that typically make muscles contract were repurposed to generate electric signals, and voila! A new organ with some astonishing capabilities was born.

[....] researchers from UT Austin and Michigan State University describe discovering a short section of this sodium channel gene—about 20 letters long—that controls whether the gene is expressed in any given cell. They confirmed that in electric fish, this control region is either altered or entirely missing. And that's why one of the two sodium channel genes is turned off in the muscles of electric fish.

[....] "This control region is in most vertebrates, including humans," Zakon said. "So, the next step in terms of human health would be to examine this region in databases of human genes to see how much variation there is in normal people and whether some deletions or mutations in this region could lead to a lowered expression of sodium channels, which might result in disease."

[....] Zakon said the sodium channel gene had to be turned off in muscle before an electric organ could evolve.

"If they turned on the gene in both muscle and the electric organ, then all the new stuff that was happening to the sodium channels in the electric organ would also be occurring in the muscle," Zakon said. "So, it was important to isolate the expression of the gene to the electric organ, where it could evolve without harming muscle."

[....] "If you rewound the tape of life and hit play, would it play back the same way or would it find new ways forward? Would evolution work the same way over and over again?" said Gallant, who breeds the electric fish from South America that were used in part of the study.

It is shocking that electric organs are not only for musicians.

More information: Sarah LaPotin et al, Divergent cis-regulatory evolution underlies the convergent loss of sodium channel expression in electric fish, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2970 or www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2970

Journal information: Science Advances

Original Submission

owl brings us an interesting bit of space history for your weekend enjoyment:

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-launched-needles-space/

In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from this, many in the Western world weren't too keen on the state of the situation given that were to someone, say, the Soviet Union, cut those cables before launching an attack, international communications with overseas forces and foreign allies would have to rely on the mood of said ionosphere.

[...] Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Labs, the project was initially called "Project Needles" by Professor Walter E. Morrow in 1958 when he first dreamed up the idea. It was later re-named "West Ford", presumably after Westford, Massachusetts, a nearby town. The idea was to place potentially even billions of tiny (1.78 centimeters 0.7 inches long and microscopically thin) copper antennae or dipoles in a medium Earth orbit to be used for communication signals at 8 Ghz.

The first set of well over a hundred million needles was launched on Oct. 21, 1961, but unfortunately this test failed when the needles didn't disperse as planned.

On a second attempt in May 9, 1963, a batch of 350 million needles was placed on the back of an Air Force satellite and sent into orbit. Once dispersed, properly this time, the needles spread to form a sparsely concentrated belt with approximately 50 dipoles per cubic mile.

[...] early results of the experiment were extremely promising, with communication established using the needle array from California to Massachusetts [...]

An interesting and entertaining read about that Wild West era of the Space Age and how events like this eventually brought us the first Outer Space Treaty.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/the-mystery-of-chinas-sudden-warnings-about-us-hackers/

For the best part of a decade, US officials and cybersecurity companies have been naming and shaming hackers they believe work for the Chinese government. These hackers have stolen terabytes of data from companies like pharmaceutical and video game firms, compromised servers, stripped security protections, and highjacked hacking tools, according to security experts. And as China's alleged hacking has grown more brazen, individual Chinese hackers face indictments. However, things may be changing.

Since the start of 2022, China's Foreign Ministry and the country's cybersecurity firms have increasingly been calling out alleged US cyberespionage. Until now, these allegations have been a rarity. But the disclosures come with a catch: They appear to rely on years-old technical details, which are already publicly known and don't contain fresh information. The move may be a strategic change for China as the nation tussles to cement its position as a tech superpower.

"These are useful materials for China's tit-for-tat propaganda campaigns when they faced US accusation and indictment of China's cyberespionage activities," says Che Chang, a cyber threat analyst at the Taiwan-based cybersecurity firm TeamT5.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

SpaceNews.com: NASA selects Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace for spacesuit contracts

NASA awarded contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to provide spacesuits for International Space Station spacewalks and Artemis moonwalks, although neither the agency nor the winning companies offered many technical or financial details.

NASA announced June 1 it selected the two companies for Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contracts to support the development of new spacesuits as well as purchasing spacesuit services. The companies will own the suits they develop and will effectively rent them to NASA for space station and Artemis missions, while also being able to offer the suits to other customers.

The goal, NASA officials said at a briefing about the awards, is to have lunar spacesuits ready for the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2025. NASA will also conduct an "orderly transition" from existing, decades-old suits on the ISS to the new suits around the same time.

[....] the companies provided few technical details about their suit designs, and NASA did not even have illustrations of the winning designs to show, electing instead to release an illustration of two moonwalking astronauts wearing suits not necessarily associated with either company.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

For decades, paleobotanist David Greenwood has collected fossil plants from Australia—some so well preserved it's hard to believe they're millions of years old. [...]

The fossils date back 55 to 40 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch. At that time, the world was much warmer and wetter, and these hothouse conditions meant there were palms at the North and South Pole and predominantly arid landmasses like Australia were lush and green. [...]

To sustain a lush green landscape, the continent required a steady supply of precipitation. Warmth means more evaporation, and more rainfall was available to move into Australia's continental interior. Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time, 1500 to 2000 parts per million, also contributed to the lushness via a process called carbon fertilization. Reichgelt explains that with the sheer abundance of CO2, plants were basically stuffing their faces.

"Southern Australia seems to have been largely forested, with primary productivity similar to seasonal forests, not unlike those here in New England today," Reichgelt says. "In the Northern Hemisphere summer today, there is a big change in the carbon cycle, because lots of carbon dioxide gets drawn down due to primary productivity in the enormous expanse of forests that exists in a large belt around 40 to 60 degrees north. In the Southern Hemisphere, no such landmass exists at those same latitudes today. But Australia during the Eocene occupied 40 degrees to 60 degrees south. And as a result, there would be a highly productive large landmass during the Southern Hemisphere summer, drawing down carbon, more so than what Australia is doing today since it is largely arid."

DannyB writes:

From Tom's Hardware:

Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) said they would invest €400 million (around $426 million) in a laboratory that will develop RISC-V-based processors that could be used to build zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not focus solely on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers but also on processor uses for artificial intelligence applications and autonomous vehicles.

The research laboratory will presumably be set up in Barcelona, Spain, and will receive €400 million from Intel and the Spanish Government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research laboratory is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that could be used for a wide range of applications, including AI accelerators, autonomous vehicles, and high-performance computing.

The creation of the joint laboratory does not automatically mean that Intel will use RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year, Intel tried to buy SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and is among the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a non-profit organization supporting the ISA.

[....] throughout its history, Intel invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64/Itanium in the 1990s and the 2000s). Eventually, those architectures were dropped, but technologies developed for them found their way into x86 offerings.

I would observe that a simple well designed instruction set could require less silicon. Possibly more cores per chip using same fabrication technology. Or more speculative execution branch prediction using up some of that silicon. I would mention compiler back ends, but that is a subject best not discussed in public.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

What's in a name?

Maverick was first used as a baby name after a television show called "Maverick" aired in the 1950s, but its popularity rose meteorically in 1986 with the release of the movie "Top Gun." Today, it is even used for baby girls.

[...] So, what's in a name—or, at least, what's in a baby name trend? University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Mitchell Newberry has found that the more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. Same goes for popular dog breeds: Dalmatians today are a tenth as popular as they were in the 1990s.

Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

[...] Newberry used the Social Security Administration baby name database, itself born in 1935, to examine frequency dependence in first names in the United States. He found that when a name is most rare—1 in 10,000 births—it tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most common—more than 1 in 100 births—its popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

Ometecuhtli writes:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-06-01/worlds-largest-plant-seagrass-meadow-shark-bay-giant-clone/101112726

"[...] But researchers have today revealed there's a plant about 4,500 years old and measuring 180 kilometres across living right under our noses in Western Australia.

Genetic testing has revealed that what was once thought to be part of a giant seagrass meadow in the shallow waters of Shark Bay, near Carnarvon, was actually a single massive clone of Posidonia australis seagrass

[...] "We were a bit suspicious because the plants around there don't act like normal seagrass," Dr Breed said. "They don't flower as much, don't seed as much, so these signs of reproductive activity were a little bit unremarkable."

But when they took samples from 10 meadows throughout the Shark Bay area, they never expected nine of them to return a genetic match.

Instead, they were planning to use their research to inform which plants to use for restoration of the meadows, to help with their resilience against threats like bleaching...

[...] Being a clone probably helps to explain why this single plant has been so successful.

[...] Polyploidy in this case has occurred because at some stage, a Posidonia plant has hybridised with another related species.

Original Submission