SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Samantha Cristoforetti also plans to follow a 20-minute routine in microgravity in the near future:

English-speaking yoga teachers often evoke space in their pose names, with examples including "crescent moon" and "star" positions.

Now an astronaut is getting these moves on during microgravity exercise on the International Space Station.

Expedition 67 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti recently shared a picture of herself on Twitter doing "triangle pose" in the Japanese Kibo laboratory, a popular spot for astronauts to pose for pictures and press conferences.

"You know what? I love doing yoga here on Earth, and I'm wondering, would it work up there in space?" Cristoforetti asked in a May 23 video posted on the Cosmic Kids YouTube channel.

In response, certified yoga teacher Jaime Amor played out a possible space routine for Cristoforetti in the 20-minute video, adding a Yoga in Space activity pack for youngsters looking to stretch and do resistance training along with the astronaut.

[...] Other astronauts have successfully done yoga in orbit before Cristoforetti. For example, NASA astronauts Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitson showed off some balancing poses in 2017, although Fischer joked on Twitter that these are a lot easier to hold "without gravity."

[...] Yoga has numerous health benefits including improving strength, balance and flexibility, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine ; yoga is also associated with more energy and better stress management, among other health outcomes.

Any Soylental yoga enthusiasts? Any starting tips for someone who wants to relieve anxiety, but whose hamstrings are no longer very flexible and who is more likely to want to stay on the floor once they get down there? [asking for a friend --hubie]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The decision to make the C# extension in Visual Studio Code proprietary is raising hackles, but Microsoft is still a consistent supporter of open source:

Miguel de Icaza's barrage of criticism against Microsoft comes with a lot of credibility. This is the developer who has spent much of his career building open source projects within the Microsoft ecosystem and spent years working for Microsoft on Xamarin and other projects. His primary complaint? "That Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lock down .NET." This comes after last year's Hot Reload open source dumpster fire.

For those who choose to see this as a resurrection of Microsoft's old "Linux is a cancer" trope, not so fast. On balance, Microsoft has been a consistent contributor to open source communities, at least since its public declaration of open source devotion back in 2014. It's doubtful that the company is suddenly reverting to type, closing off one of its most visible open source successes. Instead, I suspect this is one division's decision to satisfy corporate revenue targets with a well understood, if out-of-favor, licensing model.

Still think it's just Microsoft being evil? Have you ever worked at a big company?

[...] It's possible to accept de Icaza's view of the situation and still think that, on balance, Microsoft gets more decisions on open source right than wrong. This is the same Microsoft that recently funded the GNOME project, a direct (if not particularly threatening) challenge to the Windows desktop. It's a big sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, plus it contributes cash and other resources to Python, Java (!!), Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and more.

[...] One thing I've learned: A company is never as bad as it seems on the surface because ultimately it's made up of individual people making decisions. [...] It was money that influenced Microsoft's love for open source, just as with every other company, and Microsoft will follow the money in this case, too.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Artificial intelligence use is booming, but it's not the secret weapon you might imagine:

From cyber operations to disinformation, artificial intelligence extends the reach of national security threats that can target individuals and whole societies with precision, speed, and scale. As the U.S. competes to stay ahead, the intelligence community is grappling with the fits and starts of the impending revolution brought on by AI.

The U.S. intelligence community has launched initiatives to grapple with AI's implications and ethical uses, and analysts have begun to conceptualize how AI will revolutionize their discipline, yet these approaches and other practical applications of such technologies by the IC have been largely fragmented.

As experts sound the alarm that the U.S. is not prepared to defend itself against AI by its strategic rival, China, Congress has called for the IC to produce a plan for integration of such technologies into workflows to create an "AI digital ecosystem" in the 2022 Intelligence Authorization Act.

The article at Wired goes on to describe how different government agencies are using AI to find patterns in global web traffic and satellite images, but there are problems when using AI to interpret intent:

AI's comprehension might be more analogous to the comprehension of a human toddler, says Eric Curwin, chief technology officer at Pyrra Technologies, which identifies virtual threats to clients from violence to disinformation. "For example, AI can understand the basics of human language, but foundational models don't have the latent or contextual knowledge to accomplish specific tasks," Curwin says.

[...] In order to "build models that can begin to replace human intuition or cognition," Curwin explains, "researchers must first understand how to interpret behavior and translate that behavior into something AI can learn."

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously:
Is Society Ready for AI Ethical Decision-Making?
The Next Cybersecurity Crisis: Poisoned AI

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fix the Hog: Harley, Westinghouse ordered to fix warranties:

Federal regulators have accused Harley-Davidson and Westinghouse of imposing illegal warranty terms on customers and ordered them to fix their warranties and ensure that their dealers compete fairly with independent repair-makers.

The companies have imposed illegal warranty terms that voided customer warranties if they used anyone other than the companies and their authorized dealers to get parts or repairs — restricting their options and costing them more money, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday in actions against the Milwaukee motorcycle maker and MWE Investments, which makes Westinghouse-brand outdoor power generators and related equipment.

Under a proposed consent agreement with the agency, the companies will be prohibited from telling customers that their warranties will be voided if they use third-party services or parts, or that they should only use branded parts or authorized service providers.

The companies also will be required to add specific language to their warranties recognizing consumers' right to repair: "Taking your product to be serviced by a repair shop that is not affiliated with or an authorized dealer of (company name) will not void this warranty. Also, using third-party parts will not void this warranty."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It's only going to get worse.:

In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation noticed something worrying: The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before. The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet.

"In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."

Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don't survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station's controllers to perform regular "reboost" maneuvers to maintain the station's orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk. Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.

"There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."

Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting.

Appalbarry writes:

I date back to the days before HTTPS was a thing, when web sites were written in Notepad. Since then I've worked through various editors and programs including Dreamweaver, Joomla, WordPress (of course) and on-line things like Wix.com and Substack. Now we find that we have a half dozen small web sites to manage or update, in different platforms, and all which are small enough that WordPress et al are serious overkill. I've done some research and have come up with no sure solution to get us out of this mess. Here's what we need.

• Open source, hosted in our own web space. No cloud based things
• Simple interface - for a couple of dozen pages without the need for massive database backends we don't need a Joomla or WordPress. Plus a non-techy user can update stuff easily.
• Obviously has to work for desktop browsers and on the phone.
• Has to handle some media like images and present YouTube hosted videos well.
• SIMPLE Has to be SIMPLE to update and manage.

I'm needing suggestions, and even better, URLs for sites that use simple packages. Please folks, save me hundreds of hours of trial and error.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Graphical desktop system X Window turns 38:

The X window system turned 38 years old this week, and although it has more rivals than ever, it is still the go-to for a graphical desktop on Unix.

The first public release of the X window system, according to Robert W. Scheifler's announcement, was 19 June 1984.

X itself was a rewrite of an older windowing system called W, which ran on a research microkernel OS called the V-System (V→W→X, you see.) Both the V-System and the W window system seem to have now been lost, although Bryan Lunduke has an interesting history.

About the only relic that you can see today, if you're curious, is the V-System manual [PDF].

Just two years after launch, X had already reached version 10 – the oldest point release showing in the release history on the X.org Foundation web page. X11R1 was introduced in 1987, and with some modifications, that's what the world is still using today.

hubie writes:

Scientists are developing artificial photosynthesis to help make food production more energy-efficient here on Earth, and one day possibly on Mars:

Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.

The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

[...] Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn.

[...] By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.

Journal Reference:
Hann, E.C., Overa, S., Harland-Dunaway, M. et al. A hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production. Nat Food 3, 461–471 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details:

When our phones and computers run out of power, their glowing screens go dark and they die a sort of digital death. But switch them to low-power mode to conserve energy, and they cut expendable operations to keep basic processes humming along until their batteries can be recharged.

Our energy-intensive brain needs to keep its lights on too. Brain cells depend primarily on steady deliveries of the sugar glucose, which they convert to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel their information processing. When we're a little hungry, our brain usually doesn't change its energy consumption much. But given that humans and other animals have historically faced the threat of long periods of starvation, sometimes seasonally, scientists have wondered whether brains might have their own kind of low-power mode for emergencies.

Now, in a paper published in Neuron in January, neuroscientists in Nathalie Rochefort's lab at the University of Edinburgh have revealed an energy-saving strategy in the visual systems of mice. They found that when mice were deprived of sufficient food for weeks at a time — long enough for them to lose 15%-20% of their typical healthy weight — neurons in the visual cortex reduced the amount of ATP used at their synapses by a sizable 29%.

But the new mode of processing came with a cost to perception: It impaired how the mice saw details of the world. Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task.

upstart writes:

SpaceX ramps up FCC battle over broadband usage the company says poses an existential threat to Starlink:

Elon Musk's SpaceX on Tuesday ramped up a battle over broadband regulations with Dish Network and an affiliate of billionaire Michael Dell, calling for the FCC to address lingering disputes over broadband use that could interfere with its Starlink satellite internet network.

[...] In January 2021, the Federal Communications Commission issued a notice asking for comment on how to best use the 12-gigahertz band. Dish and RS Access, funded by Dell's investment firm, published studies arguing that ground-based 5G networks could share the frequency with low Earth orbit satellite networks, such as Starlink or OneWeb.

SpaceX filed its analysis of the Dish and RS Access studies on Tuesday, claiming it needed to correct what it called "some of the most egregious assumptions" in the reports, arguing Starlink users would see interference to the point of causing service outages for customers "74% of the time."

Musk's company called on the FCC "to investigate whether DISH and RS Access filed intentionally misleading reports," noting that the studies did not match findings from Dish two years earlier that called sharing usage "not viable."

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