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upstart writes:

Researchers design cheap plastic processor that could usher in the age of truly ubiquitous electronics:

If you've been following statistics about the Internet of Things (IoT), which is growing by billions of devices every year, the numbers are pretty mind-boggling. But the truth is that expensive silicon chips are actually holding this rampant growth back.

But now researchers have designed a new plastic processor, which they estimate will be able to be mass-produced for less than a penny. That's right — the new Flexicore chips could kick-start a world in which everything — from bandages to bananas — could have a chip, according to a report by IEEE Spectrum.

The chip designs we currently use — even for the most basic microcontrollers — are too complex to be mass-produced in plastic: You surely won't see a plastic processor on our list of best CPUs for gaming. [...]

To address the peculiarities of plastic chip design, the University of Illinois team built the new Flexicore processor design from scratch. Because yields dive when processor gate count rise, they decided to make a minimal design that reduced the gate count and used 4-bit and 8-bit logic instead of 16-bit or 32-bit alternatives. [...]

A sample 4-bit FlexiCore processor is 5.6mm square and contains 2,104 semiconductor devices, similar to a classic Intel 4004 CPU. [...]

With this sub-penny plastic processor, and the move of flexible electronics from niche to mainstream, we may be seeing the dawn of truly ubiquitous electronics. The above research is going to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, so we should learn more about it and further development plans soon.

We speed headlong into our (dystopian?) IoT future.

See also: The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bats are one of the most misunderstood mammals:

By turns admired and reviled, bats are one of the most mysterious mammals alive. Their nocturnal habits and unique adaptations mean that bat biology still holds many secrets. It is possible that bats may hold the key to understanding diabetes.

When the pandemic started in 2020 and speculation began that a notorious zoonotic "spillover" appeared to have triggered it all, one specific animal was identified almost immediately as a threat to humans—the bat. People feared and, in some cases, even killed them in a futile attempt to stop the virus from spreading.

[...] The BABE project analyzes how bats and other predators help keep the world green. And with over 1,450 species and making up 20% of the mammals on our planet, bats constitute one of the most diverse and geographically dispersed species. As such, they play a valuable role in the global ecosystem by pollinating crops and maintaining plant diversity.

[...] What we do know is that bats are great at gobbling up insects and other arthropods. Sivault and her team look at what and how much the individual species eat. For now, findings have indicated the difference in the strength of arthropod control by bats along different latitudes.

upstart writes:

Fastest-growing black hole of past 9 billion years discovered in bright constellation of Centaurus - ABC News:

Now, an international team of researchers say they have discovered a supermassive black hole that gobbles up the equivalent of one Earth every second.

By looking at other luminous objects that are billions of years old, the team confirmed the newly discovered behemoth was the brightest and fastest-growing supermassive black hole of the past 9 billion years (that we know of).

Located in the bright constellation of Centaurus, this luminous cosmic beast is more than 500 times larger than the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.

[...] The team stumbled across the unusual object while they were hunting for close pairs of binary stars — the stars that orbit around the same centre of mass—in the Milky Way.

[...] Supermassive black holes — which have a mass of millions or billions of Suns — are the engines that drive some of the brightest objects in the sky: quasars.

From Earth, these luminous objects look a bit like stars, but their light actually comes from the ring of gas, dust and stars swirling around the black hole, known as an accretion disk.

As this material gets sucked into the gaping mouth of the black hole by its intense gravitational pull, it gets super hot and emits bright light.

CrypticNerd writes:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/06/08/4g-antenna-suspected-of-disturbing-herd-of-cows-in-haute-loire-to-be-shut-down_5986020_114.html

[...] "I can see from my tractor that they are all skin and bones. It's enough to make you cry." On the other side of the small road that winds along his property, a short distance from the town of Mazeyrat-d'Allier, in the Haute-Loire department, Frédéric Salgues can spot what he considers to be the cause of his cows' problems, less than 300 meters away: a cell phone tower commissioned by Orange on June 28, 2021.

[...] On May 23, the administrative court of Clermont-Ferrand ordered the 4G antenna's cessation of operation for a period of two months.

This measure, unprecedented in France, should become effective within three months. The objective is to carry out an expert assessment in order to "establish a potential causal link between the behavior of the cattle and this antenna." The administrative court highlights "a significant drop in the quality and quantity of milk produced, a serious disruption in the behavior of the herd and its voluntary denutrition and abnormally high deaths.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Protecting Against Browser-Language Fingerprinting:

Brave has further strengthened its fingerprinting protections by preventing users from being identified based on preferred browser language. Starting with version 1.39, Brave randomizes how your browser informs sites of what language(s) you've set as default, and what fonts you have installed on your system. This expands Brave's existing fingerprinting protections, already the strongest of any popular browser.

When you visit a website, your browser needs to tell that site your default language(s). This helps the site present content in a language you can understand. Browsers do this both explicitly (for example, with the Accept-Language header, and the navigator.language and navigator.languages Web APIs) and implicitly (for example with the fonts you have installed on your system).

However, as with so much online, features meant to improve your experience often just expose you to more risk. In this case, trackers can use your language preferences (both implicit and explicit) to fingerprint you, identifying you across sites and browsing sessions.

Brave's unique "farbling" features already provide the best fingerprinting protections of any popular browser. These add small amounts of randomization into identifying browser features—enough to confuse and defeat trackers, but not so much that they break sites. With this latest release, Brave has expanded "farbling" protections to language preferences, too.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] As broadband connectivity becomes more and more integral to daily work and schooling habits, few ISPs are meeting our expectations. If we start to see increased competition, that might change.

Your industry may have a perception problem when it gets lower customer satisfaction ratings than the US Postal Service or even gas stations. But that's where internet service providers are now, with the recent release of the American Customer Satisfaction Index's Telecommunications Study for 2021-2022. 

Among more than 45 different industries surveyed (including such wide-ranging trades as food manufacturing, life insurance, airlines, hotels, hospitals and social media), ISPs came in dead last for customer satisfaction, with a 64 rating on a zero to 100 scale. That's two points behind the next lowest industry (subscription TV services at 66) and a 1.5% loss over the previous year's performance.

Internet service providers bring up the rear in the latest ACSI list of customer satisfaction by industry.

[...] One other standout from the report is newcomer T-Mobile Home Internet, which hit the market in 2021 and debuted at second on the list with a score of 71. That bodes well for the fixed wireless option, which uses its 5G and 4G LTE networks to connect homes to the internet and aims to be a disruptor to traditional broadband providers (the tagline on its site is "Free yourself from internet BS"). If these scores are any indication, it and other newcomers might have a shot at success.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Europe's First Exascale Supercomputer to Unlock a Quintillion Ops:

Europe's push towards HPC (High-Performance Computing) relevancy is an ongoing effort laid out in the European Union's (EU) EuroHPC Joint Unit initiative (opens in new tab). As part of this program, the old continent has already deployed its first pre-exascale system, LUMI, which integrates the latest technology from AMD in a quantum-ready system that also boasts an awe-inspiring carbon-negative design. But LUMI is a stepping stone towards the real goal: post-exascale computing. As covered by Computerbase (opens in new tab), that honor is for the stratospheric-defiant JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) supercomputer.

JUPITER will be installed in Jülich's Supercomputing Centre in Germany, with the EU setting aside a whopping €500 million (~$522 million) for infrastructure, hardware, and installation costs alone. The system, expected to be operational sometime beyond the 2024 timeframe, will be the continent's first to surpass the trillion operations per second threshold.

Unlike LUMI, JUPITER will be leveraged towards the fields of climate modeling, materials engineering, biological simulations, and sustainable energy production research while leveraging the latest AI acceleration. Unfortunately, these are all computed and memory-demanding workloads, which justify the installation's high price.

[...] One of the most impressive elements regarding JUPITER's announcement is its power consumption. While the world's top supercomputer, Frontier, reaches an average of 19 MW in power consumption, JUPITER is claimed to average out at just 15 MW - cutting 22% in power requirements within a couple of years of hardware development. And it's an almost 50% power consumption reduction compared to the former world champion in the supercomputing field, Japan's Arm-based Fugaku. Installed in 2020, its average power consumption is around 29 MW while offering "only" 537.21 PFlop/s in peak performance - half that of JUPITER. That's equivalent to a doubling in power efficiency in half a decade - an essential metric regarding environmental sustainability if we've ever seen one.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains in what is now Kyrgyzstan, tombstones in the Kara-Djigach cemetery with Syriac inscriptions showed that the village's death rate skyrocketed over a two-year period. [...]

Ten of the gravestones from those two years had longer inscriptions memorializing the persons and their cause of death—pestilence. This made [Phil] Slavin wonder whether the site might help settle a long debate about the origins of the Black Death pandemic that arrived in Europe around 1347 CE. [...]

The results of their analysis, published today (June 15) in Nature, implicate an ancient strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis as the likely source of the Black Death pandemic, which Spyrou says killed half of Europe’s population in the decade after it arrived in the Black Sea region. The research also puts the village’s outbreak near the epicenter of a phylogenetic diversification, called a polytomy, where the bacterium’s lineage split into four new branches. “So it’s really like the big bang . . . of plague that we have there; the strain that gave rise to the majority of strains that are circulating in the world today,” Krause said in the briefing. Although it was already known that Y. pestis underwent an explosive radiation, the timing of it has been debated.

upstart writes:

The propellant leak and ensuing investigation has resulted in a one-month delay to the CRS-25 cargo mission:

A SpaceX cargo mission to the International Space Station has been pushed back to no earlier than July 11 after teams discovered elevated vapor levels of propellant. [...]

Following additional inspections and testing of the Dragon spacecraft, the investigators managed to identify the source of the leak as being a faulty Draco thruster valve inlet joint, which controls the flow of propellant. [...]

This marks the second delay for the cargo resupply mission, the first delay being announced on June 6. The first delay happened after ground teams detected elevated vapor readings of mono-methyl hydrazine while loading the propellant, forcing them to stand down from the launch attempt. [...]

The NASA and SpaceX partnership continues to be a strong one. The space agency recently bought five additional Crew Dragon flights to the ISS after NASA's other commercial partner, Boeing, failed to deliver its own crew vehicle on schedule. The recent glitch with Crew Dragon, it's fair to say, likely won't have much of a bearing on this fruitful working relationship.

Previously: NASA and SpaceX Stand Down on Dragon Launch to Study Hydrazine Issue

Original Submission

upstart writes:

TSMC's Arizona Fab Construction Emerges at Breakneck Speed:

TSMC's construction on its latest semiconductor fabrication facility in Arizona is progressing at breakneck speeds. Thanks to the photographic reporting skills of Matt Schrader on Twitter, we can now witness the incredible construction rate for what will soon become one of the most advanced silicon fabrication facilities across the world.

The construction grounds literally went from tumbleweeds to factory shells in under six months, spelling a good pace for the factory's expected spin-up in early 2024. That's what a cool $10 to $12 billion can do, as you can see when you expand the below tweet.

TSMC's Arizona fab, christened Fab21, will occupy at least 1,100 acres of land in Phoenix, Arizona, and will churn out tens of thousands of semiconductor wafers in the 5 nm class for the Taiwanese company's customers around the world (initial output is expected at 20K wafers, just short of the 25K TSMC considers for its GigaFab nomenclature). This includes chips fabricated in the N5, N5P, and even N4 processes.

N5 and N5P have been tapped by both AMD and Apple, powering AMD's already-announced Zen 4 CPUs and chiplet-based RDNA3 GPUs (which are sure to make it into our Best Picks for graphics cards), as well as Apple's evolution of its original Apple Silicon, the M2 SoC (System-on-Chip).

[...] The Arizona fab is of strategic importance for TSMC's bid to increase its 5 nm output beyond the 25% already planned for 2022. Intel has also become a customer of the Taiwanese manufacturer — Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently visited Taiwan in a bid to secure additional capacity for the company's silicon designs.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Activist group called for Happy's release from New York zoo, calling her cognitively complex and autonomous:

New York's top court has ruled that Happy, an elephant residing at the Bronx Zoo since the 1970s, cannot legally be considered a person in a closely watched case that tested the boundaries of applying human rights to animals.

[...] The state court of appeals ruled on Tuesday 5-2, with a decision written by Chief Judge Janet DiFiore echoing that point. "While no one disputes that elephants are intelligent beings deserving of proper care and compassion", a writ of habeas corpus was intended to protect the liberty of human beings and did not apply to a nonhuman animal like Happy, said DiFiore.

[...] Extending that right to Happy to challenge her confinement at a zoo "would have an enormous destabilizing impact on modern society". And granting legal personhood in a case like this would affect how humans interact with animals, according to the majority decision.

"Indeed, followed to its logical conclusion, such a determination would call into question the very premises underlying pet ownership, the use of service animals, and the enlistment of animals in other forms of work," read the decision.

[...] Two judges, Rowan Wilson and Jenny Rivera, wrote separate, sharply worded dissents saying the fact that Happy is an animal does not prevent her from having legal rights. Rivera wrote that Happy was being held in "an environment that is unnatural to her and that does not allow her to live her life".

"Her captivity is inherently unjust and inhumane. It is an affront to a civilized society, and every day she remains a captive – a spectacle for humans – we, too, are diminished," Rivera wrote.

Next time they should try a writ of Mammuthus.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A toxic chemical used in hair products for black women fuels breast cancer, study finds:

Haircare and beauty products marketed to black women often contain a class of hormone-disrupting chemicals called parabens. According to a new study, those chemicals are not only linked to increased breast cancer risk, they uniquely fuel the spread of cancer cells in black women, compared to white women.

Parabens are a group of chemicals that keep mold and bacteria from growing on beauty products, thus prolonging their shelf lives. But, in humans, parabens can mimic the hormone estrogen, possibly fueling dangerous cell growth, according to research.

The study, which will be presented today at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in Atlanta, analysed the effect parabens had on breast cancer cells from both black women and white women. Researchers found parabens increased the growth of black breast cancer cell lines, but did not effect white breast cancer cell lines at the same dose.

Parabens also increased the expression of genes linked to breast cancer in both black and white women.

"Black women are more likely to buy and use hair products with these types of chemicals, but we do not have a lot of data about how parabens may increase breast cancer risk in black women," Lindsey S. Treviño, the study's lead researcher, said in a press release. "This is because black women have not been picked to take part in most research studies looking at this link. Also, studies to test this link have only used breast cancer cell lines from white women."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Astronomers may have discovered the first free-floating black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a technique called gravitational microlensing:

If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing.

The team, led by graduate student Casey Lam and Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, estimates that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Because astronomers think that the leftover remnant of a dead star must be heavier than 2.2 solar masses in order to collapse to a black hole, the UC Berkeley researchers caution that the object could be a neutron star instead of a black hole. Neutron stars are also dense, highly compact objects, but their gravity is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents further collapse to a black hole.

[...] "This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing," Lu said. "With microlensing, we're able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can't be seen any other way."

[...] Notably, a competing team from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore analyzed the same microlensing event and claims that the mass of the compact object is closer to 7.1 solar masses and indisputably a black hole. A paper describing the analysis by the STScI team, led by Kailash Sahu, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Explanatory animated video

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Double-layered catalyst generates more hydrogen:

Recently published as a supplementary cover of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, this study was conducted by a POSTECH research team led by Professor In Su Lee, Research Professor Soumen Dutta, and Dr. Yu-Rim Hong (of the Department of Chemistry) in collaboration with Professor Si-Young Choi (Department of Materials Science and Engineering) and Professor Jeong Woo Han (Department of Chemical Engineering).

Platinum combines well with hydrogen and is often regarded as the best catalyst for hydrogen generation. However, because the water decomposition ability of platinum is poor, research has been conducted to improve this ability by combining platinum with iron and nickel hydroxide.

Professor In Su Lee team has already synthesized a sandwich-type hybrid material in which two-dimensional (2D) NiFe hydroxide nanoplates are sandwiched between porous 2D platinum nanoplates. This material was prepared via an inventive way of growing a platinum layer of ~1 nm on the surface of NiFe hydroxide with a thickness of several nanometers (nm; 1 nm = 1 billionth of a meter).

In this study, a method for synthesizing the platinum layer by separate thinning was used. This was done to overcome the limitation of the uneven growth of platinum layer on the NiFe hydroxide surface. The researchers ensured that both the upper and lower crystal planes of platinum grew as a flat surface in a confined 2D nanospace to react more effectively with iron and nickel hydroxide. In this catalyst, a complementary effect occurs between NiFe hydroxide and platinum, which are closely attached at a wide interface.

Journal Reference:
Yu-Rim Hong, Soumen Dutta, Sun Woo Jang, et al. Crystal Facet-Manipulated 2D Pt Nanodendrites to Achieve an Intimate Heterointerface for Hydrogen Evolution Reactions. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022; 144 (20): 9033
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c01589

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft ends Internet Explorer support in Windows 10 tomorrow:

Internet Explorer is bowing out just short of its 27th birthday. As revealed last May, Microsoft will no longer support the Internet Explorer 11 desktop app for Windows 10's usual Semi Annual Channel as of June 15th. You'll still receive IE11 support if you're using Windows Server 2022 or an earlier OS release with a long-term service extension, but this marks the effective end of software updates for most people. Windows 11 doesn't include an IE desktop app.

The Edge browser's IE Mode will still receive support through 2029 or later, so you won't be stuck if you just need compatibility with the older web engine. Microsoft won't be subtle in pushing you toward its newer browser, however. The company will "progressively" redirect users from IE to Edge in the next few months, and will permanently disable the old software through a Windows update.

Is anyone going to miss it?

Original Submission