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hubie writes:

Researchers from Osaka University find that infants can make moral judgments on behalf of others:

For millennia, philosophers have pondered the question of whether humans are inherently good. But now, researchers from Japan have found that young infants can make and act on moral judgments, shedding light on the origin of morality.

[...] Punishment of antisocial behavior is found in only humans, and is universal across cultures. However, the development of moral behavior is not well understood. Further, it can be very difficult to examine decision-making and agency in infants, which the researchers at Osaka University aimed to address.

"Morality is an important but mysterious part of what makes us human," says lead author of the study Yasuhiro Kanakogi. "We wanted to know whether third-party punishment of antisocial others is present at a very young age, because this would help to signal whether morality is learned."

To tackle this problem, the researchers developed a new research paradigm. First, they familiarized infants with a computer system in which animations were displayed on a screen. The infants could control the actions on the screen using a gaze-tracking system such that looking at an object for a sufficient period of time led to the destruction of the object. The researchers then showed a video in which one geometric agent appeared to "hurt" another geometric agent, and watched whether the infants "punished" the antisocial geometric agent by gazing at it.

"The results were surprising," says Kanakogi. "We found that preverbal infants chose to punish the antisocial aggressor by increasing their gaze towards the aggressor."

Accompanying video.

Journal Reference:
Kanakogi, Y., Miyazaki, M., Takahashi, H. et al. Third-party punishment by preverbal infants. Nat Hum Behav (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01354-2

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looorg writes:

http://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

The Floppotron has been upgraded to version 3.0. It's a very amusing project that has been going on for many years now.

The machine evolved into a relatively large system with multiple custom circuit boards and 3D-printed parts. While making the new Floppotron, one of the main priorities (if not the main) was finishing it in reasonable time. It's still a hobby project made after hours and not something commercial or mass produced, so you will find some nice solution as well as some janky, quick-and-dirty ones – and that's the beauty of hobby projects. Let's get a little more technical. To explain how the system works, I'll go through the overview first and then will get into details of each individual block. Here's a simplified schematic of the machine.

To make the old computer hardware play, we need a set of electronic controllers mentioned before but also a proper music (musical sequence) to play. A melody is encoded as a sequence of MIDI events, the same format as all digital synthesizers use. MIDI does not carry any actual audio data, but just short events, like pressing a piano key or twisting a control knob – you can think of it as a digital form of sheet music. Those events are send from the computer to the gateway using USB to MIDI adapter. The gateway is a custom nRF52 microcontroller based device which sits between the PC with MIDI adapter and the network of „instrument" controllers. It receives MIDI data and converts that data to RS-485-based internal protocol which can encapsulate MIDI and some extra stuff. The gateway, protocol and reasoning is described in further section. Those messages are picked by controllers which will turn the digital information into a sound by driving the electric motors or moving the hard disk heads. The controller consists of a common MCU board with Nordic nRF52832 chip and a driver boards specific to the „instrument", like floppy drive string, flatbed scanner or a hard drive. If you're wandering why there is a Bluetooth-enabled chip – I'll explain it too, but let's talk about how the sound is created first. [...]

https://www.youtube.com/user/sh4dowww90/videos

We know that most people have seen the earlier versions but wait until you see version 3 - including smoke effects! But my personal favourite remains Bohemian Rhapsody - oh those dial tones!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Europe cracks down on data cap exemptions in update to net neutrality rules:

European telecom regulator BEREC has updated its net neutrality guidelines to include a strict ban on zero-rating practices that exempt specific apps or categories of apps from data caps imposed by Internet service providers.

The document published Tuesday provides guidance to national regulatory authorities on their "obligations to closely monitor and ensure compliance with the rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of Internet access services and related end-users' rights." BEREC stands for Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications.

"Despite intense lobbying from big carriers and giant platforms, BEREC voted to clearly ban zero-rating offers that benefit select apps or categories of apps by exempting them from people's monthly data caps," Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote. "The ban applies whether the app pays to be included or not, closing a loophole in the draft guidelines."

[...] The new BEREC guidelines came in response to a September 2021 Court of Justice ruling that "zero tariff" options that distinguish between types of Internet traffic "on the basis of commercial considerations" violate Europe's Open Internet rules requiring "equal treatment of traffic, without discrimination or interference."

In the new guidelines, BEREC said it "considers any differentiated pricing practices which are not application-agnostic to be inadmissible for IAS [Internet access service] offers, such as applying a zero price to ISPs' own applications or CAPs [content, applications, and services] subsidizing their own data." Additionally, a "price-differentiated offer where all applications are blocked (or slowed down) once the data cap is reached except for the application(s) for which zero price or a different price than all other traffic is applied would infringe" European rules, BEREC said. The rules apply to both mobile and fixed Internet service.

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China Launches 'Fujian,' its Most Advanced Aircraft Carrier

upstart writes:

China launches 'Fujian,' its most advanced aircraft carrier:

China launched its largest and most advanced aircraft carrier on Friday at a shipyard in Shanghai, in what state media called a "short but festive ceremony."

The 80,000-ton Fujian, named for the southern coastal province opposite Taiwan, is the first of China's three carriers to be fully designed and built domestically. Unlike China's Liaoning and Shandong carriers, which use ski-jump ramps, Fujian will launch planes using electromagnetic catapults, the technology used on current U.S. carriers.

"Although it will be years before the [carrier] enters military service and achieves initial operating capability, its launch will be a seminal moment in China's ongoing modernization efforts and a symbol of the country's growing military might," said analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, in an article earlier this month.

China Launches Third Aircraft Carrier: State Media - Times of India

upstart writes:

China launches third aircraft carrier: State media - Times of India:

[...] However, it will take years before it reaches operational capacity, as the Ministry of Defence has not announced a date for entry into service. "Sailing and mooring tests will be carried out as planned after the ship is launched," CCTV reported. China has two other aircraft carriers in service. The Liaoning was commissioned in 2012, and the Shandong entering service in 2019.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Inspired by palm trees, scientists develop hurricane-resilient wind turbines:

Wind technology is growing—literally. Today's offshore wind turbines can tower more than 490 feet above ground, their spinning blades churning out up to 8 megawatts (MW) each—about enough to power 4000 homes in the U.S.

But with their increasing size comes challenges. Off the east coast, where offshore turbines are located in the U.S., increasingly powerful Atlantic hurricanes pose risks to the structures themselves and to the future of wind energy. To make those turbines more hurricane-resilient, a team of CU Boulder researchers are taking a cue from nature and turning the turbine around.

"We are very much bio-inspired by palm trees, which can survive these hurricane conditions," said Lucy Pao, Palmer Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering.

Traditional upwind turbines face the incoming wind, and to avoid being blown into the tower, their blades must be sufficiently stiff. It requires a lot of material to build these relatively thick and massive blades, which drives up their cost. Turbine blades on downwind rotors, however, face away from the wind, so there's less risk of them hitting the tower when the winds pick up. This means they can be lighter and more flexible, which requires less material and therefore less money to make. These downwind blades can also then bend instead of break in the face of strong winds—much like palm trees.

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