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upstart writes:

The country is the seventh nation capable of launching practical satellites:

South Korea successfully launched and put its homegrown space rocket into orbit Tuesday, becoming the seventh nation capable of launching practical satellites using a self-developed propulsion system.

"The Nuri rocket launch was a success," Lee Sang-ryul, director of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute told the press after the launch. "After the launch, Nuri's flight process proceeded according to the planned flight sequence."

KARI set off its 200-ton homegrown space rocket from the Naro Space Center in the Southern coastal village of Goheung. The launch was delayed from the original test date last Thursday due to weather conditions and a technical glitch.

Loaded with a 162.5-kilogram (358-pound) performance-verification satellite -- as well as four cube satellites for academic research and a 1.3-ton dummy satellite -- Nuri reached its target orbit of 700 kilometers (435 miles) above the Earth. All three stages of its engine were combusted according to plan, separating the mounted satellites at the arranged moment.

[...] "The Nuri spacecraft is fired up by not just one engine but a clustering of four 75-ton grade liquid engines. This gives potential to build larger projectiles with more engines in the future," Cho said.

[...] "We have set the stage for us to travel to space whenever we'd like, without having to rent a launchpad or a projectile from another country," Minister of Science and ICT Lee Jong Ho said. "The South Korean government plans to enhance the technical reliability of the Nuri rocket through four additional launches until 2027."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new study shows that yeast, an abundant waste product from breweries, can filter out even trace amounts of lead:

Inactive yeast could be effective as an inexpensive, abundant, and simple material for removing lead contamination from drinking water supplies, according to a new analysis by scientists at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). The study shows that this approach can be efficient and economical, even down to part-per-billion levels of contamination. Serious damage to human health is known to occur even at these low levels.

The method is incredibly efficient. In fact, the research team has calculated that waste yeast discarded from a single brewery in Boston would enough to treat the city's entire water supply. Such a fully sustainable system would not only purify the water but also divert what would otherwise be a waste stream needing disposal.

[...] "We don't just need to minimize the existence of lead; we need to eliminate it in drinking water," says Stathatou. "And the fact is that the conventional treatment processes are not doing this effectively when the initial concentrations they have to remove are low, in the parts-per-billion scale and below. They either fail to completely remove these trace amounts, or in order to do so they consume a lot of energy and they produce toxic byproducts."

[...] Because the yeast cells used in the process are inactive and desiccated, they require no particular care, unlike other processes that rely on living biomass to perform such functions which require nutrients and sunlight to keep the materials active. What's more, yeast is abundantly available already, as a waste product from beer brewing and from various other fermentation-based industrial processes.

upstart writes:

More AMD GPUs are selling under MSRP in Europe as mining tanks:

GPU mining is becoming less profitable with every passing month, and with a bit of luck, Ethereum's transition to a proof of stake consensus will render the activity useless for profit-seekers. Retail stocks are also improving and next-gen graphics cards are set to launch in the coming months, so prices for current-gen hardware are under the pressure to drop to more sane levels.

For the past 18 months, Ethereum miners spent a whopping $15 billion to scoop up graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, leaving gamers at the mercy of scalpers and second-hand sellers for almost any model from the past two generations of graphics hardware.

Add to that a storm of logistical problems, factory lockdowns, and component and material shortages, and you get GPUs that are only now approaching the retail prices they should have had at launch.

According to a report from 3DCenter, prices in some parts of Europe are finally touching MSRP levels. In the case of AMD cards, prices for models like the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6700 XT, and RX 6600 XT, as well as refreshed models like the 6750 XT and 6650 XT can now be found between seven and 16 percent below MSRP.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The world's biggest surveillance company you've never heard of:

For example, the research found 55,455 Hikvision networks in London. "From my experience of just walking around London, it would probably be several times over that. They're in almost every supermarket," says Samuel Woodhams, a researcher at Top10VPN who carried out the study.

The prevalence of Hikvision cameras overseas has caused anxieties around national security, even though it hasn't been proved that the company transfers its overseas data back to China. In 2019, the US passed a bill banning Hikvision from holding any contracts with the federal government.

What really made Hikvision infamous on the global stage was its involvement in China's oppressive policies in Xinjiang against Muslim minorities, mostly Uyghurs. Numerous surveillance cameras, many equipped with advanced facial recognition, have been installed both inside and outside the detention camps in Xinjiang to aid the government's control over the region. And Hikvision has been a big part of this activity. The company was found to have received at least $275 million in government contracts to build surveillance in the region and has developed AI cameras that can detect physical features of Uyghur ethnicity.

Presented with questions about Xinjiang by MIT Technology Review, Hikvision responded with a statement that did not address them directly but said the company "has and will continue to strictly comply with applicable laws and regulations in the countries where we operate, following internationally accepted business ethics and business standards."

Adding Hikvision to the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals List) would do more than ratchet up tensions between the US and China—it would open up a new front in international sanctions, one in which tech companies increasingly find themselves embroiled in geopolitical power struggles.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

When the world of nanotechnology and microbreweries meet: Researchers succeed in synthesizing carbon quantum dots from brewery wastes:

Often considered as "artificial atoms," quantum dots are used in the transmission of light. With a range of interesting physicochemical properties, this type of nanotechnology has been successfully used as a sensor in biomedicine or as LEDs in next generation displays. But there is a drawback. Current quantum dots are produced with heavy and toxic metals like cadmium. Carbon is an interesting alternative, both for its biocompatibility and its accessibility.

The choice of brewery waste as a source material came from Daniele Benetti, a postdoctoral fellow at INRS, and Aurel Thibaut Nkeumaleu, the master's student at ÉTS who conducted the work. [...]

"The use of spent grain highlights both an eco-responsible approach to waste management and an alternative raw material for the synthesis of carbon quantum dots, from a circular economy perspective," says Professor Rosei.

The advantage of using brewery waste as a source of carbon quantum dots is that it is naturally enriched with nitrogen and phosphorus. This avoids the need for pure chemicals.

"This research was a lot of fun, lighting up what we can do with the beer by-products," says Claudiane Ouellet-Plamondon, Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Multifunctional Construction Materials at ÉTS. "Moreover, ÉTS is located on the site of the former Dow brewery, one of the main breweries in Quebec until the 1960s. So there is a historical and heritage link to this work."

[...] The next steps will be to characterize these carbon quantum dots from brewery waste, beyond proof of concept. The research team is convinced that this nanotechnology has the potential to become sophisticated detection sensors for various aqueous solutions, even in living cells.

Journal Reference:
Aurel Thibaut Nkeumaleu, Daniele Benetti, Imane Haddadou, et al. Brewery spent grain derived carbon dots for metal sensing [open], RSC Advances (DOI: 10.1039/D2RA00048B)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA, SpaceX to test satellite crash-prevention strategies - SpaceNews:

Swarms of autonomously maneuvering satellites promise to make space operations far more efficient. But they also pose collision risks.

Through the Starling mission, NASA and SpaceX will begin testing strategies for preventing autonomous satellites from crashing into each other. NASA originally planned to send the Starling mission into an orbital altitude of 555 kilometers. Because SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites operate in that orbit, the space agency's Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) group advised Starling mission managers to send the four Starling cubesats 10 kilometers higher.

"Realizing that these two constellations are close to each other gave us an opportunity to look at how we will deal with space traffic management in the future, when there are even more spacecraft in low Earth orbit," said Howard Cannon, NASA Starling project manager at the NASA Ames Research Center. "How can we avoid collisions given the number of spacecraft that will be up there?"

After Starling completes a six-month series of experiments to demonstrate swarm communications, navigation and autonomy, CARA, Starling and Starlink will test collision-avoidance strategies.

The spacecraft will report their positions to the ground systems. "Then, conjunction-analysis software on the ground will automatically say, 'Hey, you're going to run into each other if you don't do something,'" Cannon said. The warning will be sent to the satellites, which will plan maneuvers. Before carrying out the maneuvers, though, the satellites will seek approval from the ground systems.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Poliovirus may be spreading in London; virus detected in sewage for months:

A vaccine-derived version of poliovirus has repeatedly surfaced in London sewage over the past several months, suggesting there may be a cryptic or hidden spread among some unvaccinated people, UK health officials announced Wednesday. No polio cases have been reported so far, nor any identified cases of paralysis. But sewage sampling in one London treatment plant has repeatedly detected closely related vaccine-derived polioviruses between February and May. This suggests "it is likely there has been some spread between closely-linked individuals in North and East London and that they are now shedding the type 2 poliovirus strain in their feces," the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

Though the current situation raises alarm, the agency notes that it's otherwise common to see a small number of vaccine-like polioviruses pop up in sewage from time to time, usually from people who have recently been vaccinated out of the country. This is because many countries use oral polio vaccines that include weakened (attenuated) polioviruses, which can still replicate in the intestines and thus be present in stool. They can also spread to others via poor hygiene and sanitation (i.e., unwashed hands and food or water contaminated by sewage), which can become concerning amid poor vaccination rates.

upstart writes:

Privacy-focused Brave Search grew by 5,000% in a year:

Brave Search, the browser developer's privacy-centric Internet search engine, is celebrating its first anniversary after surpassing 2.5 billion queries and seeing almost 5,000% growth in a year.

To celebrate this success, Brave Software announced that Brave Search is finally exiting its beta phase and will become the default search engine for all users of the Brave browser.

Additionally, a new search results curation feature called "Goggles" will be released in beta and made available to those who wish to test it.

[...] Brave says that independence has remained at the epicenter of the company's focus, with Brave Search users receiving 92% of their queries directly from Brave's independent search index rather than through Bing and Google indexes.

"Search engines that depend too much or exclusively on Big Tech are subject to censorship, biases, and editorial decisions," explains Brave in the blog post.

"Brave Search is committed to openness in search. It does not manipulate its algorithm to bias, filter, or down-rank results (unless it's compelled by law to do so)."

upstart writes:

This capability could unlock new possibilities in medicine:

Artificial intelligence has altered the practise of science by enabling researchers to examine the vast volumes of data generated by current scientific instruments. Using deep learning, it can learn from the data itself and can locate a needle in a million haystacks of information. AI is advancing the development of gene searching, medicine, medication design, and chemical compound synthesis.

To extract information from fresh data, deep learning employs algorithms, often neural networks trained on massive volumes of data. With its step-by-step instructions, it is considerably different from traditional computing. It instead learns from data. Deep learning is far less transparent than conventional computer programming, leaving vital concerns unanswered: what has the system learnt and what does it know?

[...] For fifty years, computer scientists have unsuccessfully attempted to solve the protein-folding issue. Then in 2016, DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, launched its AlphaFold programme. It utilised the protein databank, which contains the empirically determined structures of over 150,000 proteins, as its training set.

In fewer than five years, AlphaFold had solved the protein-folding issue, or at least the most important aspect of it: identifying the protein structure from its amino acid sequence. AlphaFold can not explain how proteins may fold so rapidly and precisely. It was a tremendous victory for AI since not only did it earn a great deal of scientific reputation, but it was also a major scientific breakthrough that may touch everyone's life.

hubie writes:

The stellar structures are thought to be created when galaxies collide with hot gas in a process that could be likened to doing a belly flop in a swimming pool:

University of Arizona astronomers have identified five examples of a new class of stellar system. They're not quite galaxies and only exist in isolation.

The new stellar systems contain only young, blue stars, which are distributed in an irregular pattern and seem to exist in surprising isolation from any potential parent galaxy.

The stellar systems – which astronomers say appear through a telescope as "blue blobs" and are about the size of tiny dwarf galaxies – are located within the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. The five systems are separated from any potential parent galaxies by over 300,000 light years in some cases, making it challenging to identify their origins.

[...] "We observed that most of the systems lack atomic gas, but that doesn't mean there isn't molecular gas," Jones said. "In fact, there must be some molecular gas because they are still forming stars. The existence of mostly young stars and little gas signals that these systems must have lost their gas recently."

[...] The fact that the new stellar systems are abundant in metals hints at how they might have formed.

"To astronomers, metals are any element heavier than helium," Jones said. "This tells us that these stellar systems formed from gas that was stripped from a big galaxy, because how metals are built up is by many repeated episodes of star formation, and you only really get that in a big galaxy."

There are two main ways gas can be stripped from a galaxy. The first is tidal stripping, which occurs when two big galaxies pass by each other and gravitationally tear away gas and stars.

The other is what's known as ram pressure stripping.

"This is like if you belly flop into a swimming pool," Jones said. "When a galaxy belly flops into a cluster that is full of hot gas, then its gas gets forced out behind it. That's the mechanism that we think we're seeing here to create these objects."

The team prefers the ram pressure stripping explanation because in order for the blue blobs to have become as isolated as they are, they must have been moving very quickly, and the speed of tidal stripping is low compared to ram pressure stripping.

Journal Reference:
Michael G. Jones, David J. Sand, Michele Bellazzini et al., Young, blue, and isolated stellar systems in the Virgo Cluster. II. A new class of stellar system, arXiv:2205.01695 [astro-ph.GA]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study shows electric vehicles could be charged on the go via peer-to-peer system

Every day, Americans see more battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) on the road. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market for electric vehicles in the U.S. is expected to grow from $28.24 billion in 2021 to $137.43 billion in 2028. [...]

However, one drawback has made some consumers wary of purchasing a BEV — limited range. Unlike those plentiful gas stations, charging stations for EVs still can be few and far in between, and recharging a BEV's lithium-ion battery might take hours, making EVs impractical for some long-range road trips.

Now, a researcher at the University of Kansas School of Engineering has co-written a study in Scientific Reports proposing a peer-to-peer system for BEVs to share charge among each other while driving down the road by being matched-up with a cloud-based control system.

[...] A cloud-based system would match the two BEVs in the same vicinity, likely along major interstates. Like bicyclists in a Peloton, the two matched cars could travel close together, sharing charge en route with no need to stop for hours at a charging station. The cars would drive at the same locked speed while charging cables would link the vehicles automatically.

[...] "We'd have a complete cloud-based framework that analyzes the charging state of all participating vehicles in the network, and based on that the cloud tells you, 'Hey, you can actually pair up with this car which is nearby and share charge,'" Hoque said. "All of this has to be controlled by cloud infrastructure, which has algorithms to efficiently charge all the different BEVs."

[...] Hoque said the initial setup of a peer-to-peer charging infrastructure likely would require support from a major manufacturer of BEVs but then could expand organically.

"People who have electric vehicles will have this incentive of selling charge and earning extra money — these two things will work in parallel to grow this idea," he said.

Journal Reference:
Prabuddha Chakraborty, Robert Parker, Tamzidul Hoque, et al. Addressing the range anxiety of battery electric vehicles with charging en route [open]. Sci Rep 12, 5588 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-08942-2

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists unveil bionic robo-fish to remove microplastics from seas:

Scientists have designed a tiny robot-fish that is programmed to remove microplastics from seas and oceans by swimming around and adsorbing them on its soft, flexible, self-healing body.

Microplastics are the billions of tiny plastic particles which fragment from the bigger plastic things used every day such as water bottles, car tyres and synthetic T-shirts. They are one of the 21st century's biggest environmental problems because once they are dispersed into the environment through the breakdown of larger plastics they are very hard to get rid of, making their way into drinking water, produce, and food, harming the environment and animal and human health.

[...] The robo-fish is just 13mm long, and thanks to a light laser system in its tail, swims and flaps around at almost 30mm a second, similar to the speed at which plankton drift around in moving water.

The researchers created the robot from materials inspired by elements that thrive in the sea: mother-of-pearl, also known as nacre, which is the interior covering of clam shells. The team created a material similar to nacre by layering various microscopic sheets of molecules according to nacre's specific chemical gradient.

This made them a robo-fish that is stretchy, flexible to twist, and even able to pull up to 5kg in weight, according to the study. Most importantly, the bionic fish can adsorb nearby free-floating bits of microplastics because the organic dyes, antibiotics, and heavy metals in the microplastics have strong chemical bonds and electrostatic interactions with the fish's materials. That makes them cling on to its surface, so the fish can collect and remove microplastics from the water. "After the robot collects the microplastics in the water, the researchers can further analyse the composition and physiological toxicity of the microplastics," said Wang.

takyon writes:

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 Source Code Published

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it.

This temporal upscaling solution for game engines is now available under an MIT license. AMD self-describes FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 as, "FSR 2 uses cutting-edge temporal algorithms to reconstruct fine geometric and texture detail, producing anti-aliased output from aliased input. FSR 2 technology has been developed from the ground up, and is the result of years of research from AMD. It has been designed to provide higher image quality compared to FSR 1, our original open source spatial upscaling solution launched in June 2021."

FSR 2 on GitHub.

Previously:
AMD at Computex 2021: 5000G APUs, 6000M Mobile GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution, and 3D Chiplets
Testing Shows AMD's FSR 2.0 Can Even Help Lowly Intel Integrated GPUs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US Supreme Court rejects Bayer's bid to end Roundup lawsuits:

The US Supreme Court has rejected Bayer's bid to dismiss legal claims by customers who say its weedkiller causes cancer, as the German company seeks to avoid potentially billions of dollars in damages.

The justices turned away a Bayer appeal's on Tuesday and left in place a lower court decision that upheld $25m in damages awarded to California resident Edwin Hardeman, a user of its product Roundup, who blamed his cancer on the pharmaceutical and chemical giant's glyphosate-based weedkillers.

The Supreme Court's ruling dealt a blow to Bayer as the company manoeuvres to limit its legal liability in thousands of cases. The justices have a second Bayer petition pending on a related issue that they could act upon in the coming weeks.

Roundup-related lawsuits have dogged Bayer since it acquired the brand as part of its $63bn purchase of agricultural seeds and pesticides maker Monsanto in 2018.

[...] The lawsuits against Bayer have said the company should have warned customers of the alleged cancer risk.

[...] Bayer plans to replace glyphosate in weedkillers for the US residential market of non-professional gardeners with other active ingredients.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chandra Press Room :: NASA's Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-ray Speed Trap :: 15 June 2022:

NASA's Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-ray Speed Trap

A young pulsar is blazing through the Milky Way at a speed of over a million miles per hour. This stellar speedster, witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, is one of the fastest objects of its kind ever seen. This result teaches astronomers more about how some of the bigger stars end their lives.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that are formed when some massive stars run out of fuel, collapse, and explode. This pulsar is racing through the remains of the supernova explosion that created it, called G292.0+1.8, located about 20,000 light-years from Earth.

"We directly saw motion of the pulsar in X-rays, something we could only do with Chandra's very sharp vision," said Xi Long of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who led the study. "Because it is so distant, we had to measure the equivalent of the width of a quarter about 15 miles away to see this motion."

To make this discovery, the researchers compared Chandra images of G292.0+1.8 taken in 2006 and 2016. From the change in position of the pulsar over the 10-year span, they calculated it is moving at least 1.4 million miles per hour from the center of the supernova remnant to the lower left. This speed is about 30% higher than a previous estimate of the pulsar's speed that was based on an indirect method, by measuring how far the pulsar is from the center of the explosion.