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upstart writes:

SpaceX launches three rockets in 36 hours:

SpaceX launched three missions in just over 36 hours, including two from Florida's Space Coast with most recent a two-stage Falcon 9 early Sunday.

The third rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:27 a.m. carrying a communications satellite for Louisiana-based Globalstar.

Earlier, the company founded by billionaire Elon Musk launched 53 Starlink internet satellites at 12:09 p.m. Friday Eastern time from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and then sent into space a radar satellite for the German military from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 7:19 a.m. Saturday Pacific.

Sunday morning's launch was Space X's 26th this year and ninth for this particular Falcon 9 first stage.

Ten minutes after liftoff, the first stage went back to Earth, landiing vertically on the SpaceX droneship "Just Read The Instructions" in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

Globalstar did give details about the launch of its spare satellite before liftoff, and SpaceX also didn't mention the payload.

In the other flight from Florida, the Falcon 9's first stage landed on the "A Shortfall of Gravitas" droneship.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

If you're trying to scale back on impulse purchases, then you may want to hold off on drinking that coffee:

An international study led by the University of South Florida (USF) found that caffeine impacts what you buy and how much you spend when shopping.

The research team ran three experiments in retail stores – an industry that's increasingly been adding coffee bars near their entrances. In their study published in the Journal of Marketing, they found that shoppers who drank a cup of complimentary caffeinated coffee prior to roaming the stores spent about 50% more money and bought nearly 30% more items than shoppers who drank decaf or water.

"Caffeine, as a powerful stimulant, releases dopamine in the brain, which excites the mind and the body. This leads to a higher energetic state, which in turn enhances impulsivity and decreases self-control," said lead author Dipayan Biswas, the Frank Harvey Endowed Professor of Marketing at USF. "As a result, caffeine intake leads to shopping impulsivity in terms of higher number of items purchased and greater spending."

[...] Researchers found that caffeine also impacted what types of items they bought. Those who drank caffeinated coffee bought more non-essential items than the other shoppers, such as scented candles and fragrances. However, there was a minimal difference between the two groups when it came to utilitarian purchases, such as kitchen utensils and storage baskets.

[...] "While moderate amounts of caffeine intake can have positive health benefits, there can be unintended consequences of being caffeinated while shopping. That is, consumers trying to control impulsive spending should avoid consuming caffeinated beverages before shopping," Biswas said.

Journal Reference:
Dipayan Biswas, Patrick Hartmann, Martin Eisend, et al., EXPRESS: Caffeine's Effects on Consumer Spending, Journal of Marketing, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/00222429221109247

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The growing field of sensory urbanism is changing the way we assess neighborhoods and projects:

When David Howes thinks of his home city of Montreal, he thinks of the harmonious tones of carillon bells and the smell of bagels being cooked over wood fires. But when he stopped in at his local tourism office to ask where they recommend that visitors go to smell, taste, and listen to the city, he just received blank stares.

"They only know about things to see, not about the city's other sensory attractions, its soundmarks and smellmarks," says Howes, the author of the forthcoming book The Sensory Studies Manifesto and director of Concordia University's Centre for Sensory Studies, a hub for the growing field often referred to as "sensory urbanism."

Around the world, researchers like Howes are investigating how nonvisual information defines the character of a city and affects its livability. Using methods ranging from low-tech sound walks and smell maps to data scraping, wearables, and virtual reality, they're fighting what they see as a limiting visual bias in urban planning.

[...] The best way to determine how people react to different sensory environments is a subject of some debate within the field. Howes and his colleagues are taking a more ethnographic approach, using observation and interviews to develop a set of best practices for good sensory design in public spaces. Other researchers are going more high-tech, using wearables to track biometric data like heart-rate variability as a proxy for emotional responses to different sensory experiences. The EU-funded GoGreenRoutes project is looking to that approach as it studies how nature can be integrated into urban spaces in a way that improves both human and environmental health.

upstart writes in with two stories on a recent DDoS attack:

Hackers just launched the largest HTTPS DDoS attack in history:

The largest ​​HTTPS distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history materialized last week, Cloudflare has confirmed.

As reported by Bleeping Computer, the company revealed that it recorded a 26 million requests per second distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

It should be stressed that this is an HTTPS-based DDoS attempt as opposed to the more traditional, standard DDoS attacks. In any case, the intended target was a Cloudflare client utilizing the service's Free plan.

[...] Interestingly, ​​whoever was behind the attack managed to concentrate all its firepower with a botnet of 5,067 devices, which is a relatively small number considering the scale of the assault. Every single device was capable of delivering around 5,200 requests per second (rps) at its peak.

[...] Specifically, the botnet that was put to work in the unprecedented 26 million rps DDoS attack managed to deliver over an astronomical 212 million HTTPS requests within a period of just 30 seconds. This was achieved due to requests stemming from more than 1,500 networks located in 121 countries around the globe.

Tsunami of junk traffic that broke DDoS records delivered by tiniest of botnets:

The DDoS delivered 26 million HTTPS requests per second, breaking the previous record of 15.3 million requests for that protocol set only seven weeks ago, Cloudflare Product Manager ​​Omer Yoachimik reported. Unlike more common DDoS payloads such as HTTP, SYN, or SYN-ACK packets, malicious HTTPS requests require considerably more computing resources for the attacker to deliver and for the defender or victim to absorb.

[Cloudflare Product Manager ​​Omer] Yoachimik wrote:

The 26M rps DDoS attack originated from a small but powerful botnet of 5,067 devices. On average, each node generated approximately 5,200 rps at peak. To contrast the size of this botnet, we've been tracking another much larger but less powerful botnet of over 730,000 devices. The latter, larger botnet wasn't able to generate more than one million requests per second, i.e. roughly 1.3 requests per second on average per device. Putting it plainly, this botnet was, on average, 4,000 times stronger due to its use of virtual machines and servers.

[...] The Cloudflare product manager said that his company automatically detected and mitigated the attack against the customer, which was using Cloudflare's free service.

See also:
    Cloudflare Just Mitigated One of the Most Powerful DDoS Attacks Ever
    Microsoft Azure Customer Hit by Largest 3.47 Tbps DDoS Attack
    Microsoft Azure Fends Off Huge DDoS Attack

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

DannyB writes:

Why do cats lick and chew catnip? Researchers find an answer

Anyone who has seen a cat experience catnip knows that it makes them go a bit wild—they rub in it, roll on it, chew it, and lick it aggressively. It is widely accepted that this plant, and its Asian counterpart, silvervine, have intoxicative properties, but this might not be the only reason that cats rub on and chew the plants so enthusiastically. Researchers in Japan have found that when cats damage catnip, much higher amounts of strong insect repellents are released, indicating that the cats' behavior protects them from pests. This study appears in the journal iScience on June 14.

Catnip and silvervine leaves contain the compounds nepetalactol and nepetalactone, iridoids that protect the plants from pests. To see how cats' behavior was affecting the chemicals released by the plants, Miyazaki worked with chemists at Nagoya University. "We found that physical damage of silvervine by cats promoted the immediate emission of total iridoids, which was 10-fold higher than from intact leaves," says Miyazaki.

Embedded Video in article

[....] To test if the felines were reacting to these compounds specifically, the cats were given dishes with pure nepetalactone and nepetalactol. "Cats show the same response to iridoid cocktails and natural plants except for chewing," says Miyazaki. They lick the chemicals on the plastic dish and rub against and roll over on the dish."

"When iridoid cocktails were applied on the bottom of dishes that were then covered by a punctured plastic cover, cats still exhibited licking and chewing even though they couldn't contact the chemicals directly," says Miyazaki. "This means that licking and chewing is an instinctive behavior elicited by olfactory stimulation of iridoids."

A form of catnip for Chinese bears would cause pandamoanium.

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

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.