SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Major crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital files for bankruptcy and fires 25% of workforce as crypto implosion spreads:

The news for cryptocurrencies keeps getting worse as Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a major cryptocurrency hedge fund, plunges into bankruptcy and fires 25% of its workforce.

Rumors that the embattled fund was in trouble started gaining steam early last month, and it was hit hard by the collapse of the Terra crypto and other issues. A court order in the British Virgin Islands ordered their liquidation after they defaulted on a loan worth $660 million to crypto brokerage Voyager Digital.

[...] 3AC is one of the most prominent cryptocurrency hedge funds, focusing on investments in digital assets, and it is known for bullish views on bitcoin and highly leveraged bets. It was founded by Kyle Davies and Zhu Su, who is now trying to sell the $35 million mansion he bought in December.

The collapse of Three Arrows Capital has sent shockwaves throughout the crypto lending market, with countless firms now racking up significant losses as a result of their exposure to the fund.

[...] The conditions have led experts to conclude the crypto space is dealing with its first wide-scale credit crisis. IntoTheBlock Head of Research Lucas Outumoro wrote: "Institutions led by their risky practices thrived during the bull market, but were exposed as prices crashed and took down the rest of the crypto space with them. Ultimately, as an industry, crypto ended up learning the same lessons from traditional finance from its first debt crisis." Are you jumping in when it bottoms out?

Having a need for a $660M loan is surprising in itself, but more surprising to me is having another crypto fund step up and loaning them that much and putting their own business at risk. Is this the start of a major collapse, or just a "market correction," as the economists like to say?

See previously: Crypto Hedge Fund Three Arrows Capital Plunges Into Liquidation

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DannyB writes:

NASA Loses Contact With Just-Launched Spacecraft Headed Toward Moon

NASA has encountered "communication issues" and is attempting to "re-establish contact" with its Moon-bound CAPSTONE satellite, which successfully broke free of Earth's orbit on Monday after launching atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.

Though more info is needed, it's a serious problem that could jeopardize the entire mission.

[ . . . . ] Fortunately, not all is lost. The CAPSTONE team has "good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network," according to the update, meaning that scientists will at least know where to look in their attempts to regain communication with the spacecraft.

The spacecraft also has the ability to delay its "trajectory correction maneuver" towards the Moon according to NASA, buying the team "several days" of time.

NASA loses contact with moon-bound CAPSTONE spacecraft

Flight controllers have lost contact with a small pathfinder spacecraft launched last week to test an unusual lunar orbit planned for NASA's Artemis moon program, the agency said Tuesday. Engineers are troubleshooting and attempting to re-establish communications.

Launched last Tuesday from New Zealand atop a Rocketlab Electron rocket, the CAPSTONE spacecraft relied on a compact-but-sophisticated upper stage for thruster firings to repeatedly "pump up" the high point of an increasingly elliptical orbit to the point where it could break free of Earth's gravity and head for the moon.

Those maneuvers went well and CAPSTONE was released from Rocketlab's Photon upper stage early Monday to fly on its own. NASA confirmed successful solar array deployment and an initial communications session. But a second session apparently was cut short for some reason and flight controllers lost contact.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/forget-smart-glasses-this-smart-contact-lens-prototype-has-a-new-vision-for-ar/

Since 2015, a California-based company called Mojo Vision has been developing smart contact lenses. Like smart glasses, the idea is to put helpful AR graphics in front of your eyes to help accomplish daily tasks. Now, a functioning prototype brings us closer to seeing a final product.

In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an "on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens." In an interview with CNET, he said he's been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

[...] At the heart of the lens is an Arm M0 processor and a Micro LED display with 14,000 pixels per inch. It's just 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) in diameter with a 1.8-micron pixel pitch. Perkins claimed it's the "smallest and densest display ever created for dynamic content."

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chr writes:

Finnish researchers installed first working 'sand battery' that can store energy as heat for months. See article in BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

In short:

1. Use excess/cheap electricity to heat up sand.
2. Store the hot sand and thus the energy for later use. Article says it can be done for up to several months.
3. Later use the warm sand as a heat source for district heating, i.e. heat up water that's transported to e.g. residences.

The BBC article is light on technical details: The installation in Kankaanpää in Finland uses about a 100 tonnes of sand heated to 500 deg C.

Their company is called Polar Night Energy: https://polarnightenergy.fi/ Extracting information from there; the unit in Kankaanpää has 100 kW heating power and 8 MWh capacity.

Didn't see details of cost. Seems like it could scale well in principle. However, IIRC, construction sand might become a scarce resource in the future, so I hope their solution works with other types of "sand".

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upstart writes:

8,000 kilometers per second: Star with the shortest orbital period around black hole discovered:

Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8,000 kilometers per second. S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole—a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU corresponds to 149,597,870 kilometers. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

[...] By means of continuously refining methods of analysis, together with observations covering almost twenty years, the scientist now identified without a doubt a star that travels around the central supermassive black hole in just four years. A total of five telescopes observed the star, with four of these five being combined into one large telescope to allow even more accurate and detailed observations. "For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes," said Peissker.

Journal Reference:
Florian Peißker, Andreas Eckart, Michal Zajaček, and Silke Britzen. Observation of S4716—a Star with a 4 yr Orbit around Sgr A* - IOPscience, [open access] The Astrophysical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac752f)

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hubie writes:

By identifying clouds in data collected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the public can increase scientists' understanding of the Red Planet's atmosphere:

NASA scientists hope to solve a fundamental mystery about Mars' atmosphere, and you can help. They've organized a project called Cloudspotting on Mars that invites the public to identify Martian clouds using the citizen science platform Zooniverse. The information may help researchers figure out why the planet's atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth's even though ample evidence suggests the planet used to have a much thicker atmosphere.

The air pressure is so low that liquid water simply vaporizes from the planet's surface into the atmosphere. But billions of years ago, lakes and rivers covered Mars, suggesting the atmosphere must have been thicker then.

[...] "We want to learn what triggers the formation of clouds – especially water ice clouds, which could teach us how high water vapor gets in the atmosphere – and during which seasons," said Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

That's where Cloudspotting on Mars comes in. The project revolves around a 16-year record of data from the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the Red Planet since 2006. The spacecraft's Mars Climate Sounder instrument studies the atmosphere in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. In measurements taken by the instrument as MRO orbits Mars, clouds appear as arches. The team needs help sifting through that data on Zooniverse, marking the arches so that the scientists can more efficiently study where in the atmosphere they occur.

[...] While scientists have experimented with algorithms to identify the arches in Mars Climate Sounder data, it's much easier for humans to spot them by eye. But Kleinboehl said the Cloudspotting project may also help train better algorithms that could do this work in the future. In addition, the project includes occasional webinars in which participants can hear from scientists about how the data will be used.

Cloudspotting on Mars is the first planetary science project to be funded by NASA's Citizen Science Seed Funding program. The project is conducted in collaboration with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. For more NASA citizen science opportunities, go to science.nasa.gov/citizenscience.

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upstart writes:

Never-before-seen crystals found in perfectly preserved meteorite dust:

On Feb. 15, 2013, an asteroid measuring 59 feet (18 meters) across and weighing 12,125 tons (11,000 metric tons) entered Earth's atmosphere at around 41,600 mph (66,950 km/h). Fortunately, the meteor exploded around 14.5 miles (23.3 kilometers) above the city of Chelyabinsk in southern Russia, showering the surrounding area in tiny meteorites and avoiding a colossal single collision with the surface. Experts at the time described the event as a major wake-up call to the dangers asteroids pose to the planet.

The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was the largest of its kind to occur in Earth's atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event. It exploded with a force 30 times greater than the atomic bomb that rocked Hiroshima, according to NASA. Video footage of the event showed the space rock burning up in a flash of light that was briefly brighter than the sun, before creating a powerful sonic boom that broke glass, damaged buildings and injured around 1,200 people in the city below, previously reported on Space.com.

[...] The researchers stumbled upon the new types of crystal while they were examining specks of the dust under a standard microscope. One of these tiny structures, which was only just big enough to see under the microscope, was fortuitously in focus right at the center of one of the slides when one team member peered through the eyepiece. If it had been anywhere else the team would likely have missed it, according to Sci-News (opens in new tab).

[...] The new crystals came in two distinct shapes; quasi-spherical, or "almost spherical," shells and hexagonal rods, both of which were "unique morphological peculiarities," the researchers wrote in the study.

Further analysis using X-rays revealed that the crystals were made of layers of graphite — a form of carbon made from overlapping sheets of atoms, commonly used in pencils — surrounding a central nanocluster at the heart of the crystal. The researchers propose that the most likely candidates for these nanoclusters are buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane (C18H12), a molecule made from carbon and hydrogen.

Journal Reference:
Taskaev, Sergey, Skokov, Konstantin, Khovaylo, Vladimir, et al. Exotic carbon microcrystals in meteoritic dust of the Chelyabinsk superbolide: experimental investigations and theoretical scenarios of their formation, The European Physical Journal Plus (DOI: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02768-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

California sets nation's toughest plastics reduction rules:

Companies selling shampoo, food and other products wrapped in plastic have a decade to cut down on their use of the polluting material if they want their wares on California store shelves.

Major legislation passed and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday aims to significantly reduce single-use plastic packaging in the state and drastically boost recycling rates for what remains. It sets the nation's most stringent requirements for the use of plastic packaging, with lawmakers saying they hope it sets a precedent for other states to follow.

[...] Under the bill, plastic producers would have to reduce plastics in single-use products 10% by 2027, increasing to 25% by 2032. That reduction in plastic packaging can be met through a combination of reducing package sizing, switching to a different material or making the product easily reusable or refillable. Also by 2032, plastic would have to be recycled at a rate of 65%, a massive jump from today's rates. It wouldn't apply to plastic beverage bottles, which have their own recycling rules.

Efforts to limit plastic packaging have failed in the Legislature for years, but the threat of a similar ballot measure going before voters in November prompted business groups to come to the negotiating table. The measure's three main backers withdrew it from the ballot after the bill passed, though they expressed concern the plastics industry will try to weaken the requirements.

looorg writes:

Lockbit ransomware gang creates first malicious bug bounty program:

Today, the Lockbit ransomware gang announced the launch of Lockbit 3.0, a new ransomware-as-a-service offering and a bug bounty program.

According to Lockbit's leak site, as part of the bug bounty program, the cyber gang will pay all security researchers, ethical and unethical hackers "to provide Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on high-profile individuals and web exploits in exchange for remuneration ranging from $1,000 to $1 million."

[...] "A key focus of the bug bounty program are defensive measures: preventing security researchers and law enforcement from finding bugs in its leak sites or ransomware, identifying ways that members including the affiliate program boss could be doxed, as well as funding bugs within the messaging software used by the group for internal communications and the Tor network itself," Narang said.

The writing on the wall is that Lockbit's adversarial approach is about to get much more sophisticated. "Anyone that still doubts cybercriminal gangs have reached a level of maturity that rivals the organizations they target, may need to reassess," said Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber.

[...] "This should have every enterprise looking at the security of their internal supply chain, including who and what has access to their code, and any secrets in it. Unethical bounty programs like this turn passwords and keys in code into gold for everybody who has access to your code," said Casey Bisson, head of product and developer enablement at BluBracket.

upstart writes:

Perseverance Mars rover wind sensor damaged by pebbles, but still operational:

The Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet in February 2021 carrying, among other instruments, a weather station dubbed Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). That instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among several other sensors that provide weather metrics such as humidity, radiation and air temperature.

Pebbles carried aloft by strong Red Planet gusts recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still keep track of wind at its landing area in Jezero Crater, albeit with decreased sensitivity, José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA, told Space.com.

"Right now, the sensor is diminished in its capabilities, but it still provides speed and direction magnitudes," Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, wrote in an e-mail. "The whole team is now re-tuning the retrieval procedure to get more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings."

The two approximately ruler-sized wind sensors on Perseverance are encircled by six individual detectors that aim to give accurate readings from any direction, according to materials from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which manages the rover.

[...] Like all instruments on Perseverance, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. "But of course, there is a limit to everything."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Amazon Cancels Or Delays Plans For At Least 16 Warehouses This Year:

After spending billions doubling the size of its fulfillment network during the pandemic, Amazon finds itself in a perilous position.

In the first quarter of 2022, the e-commerce giant reported a $3.8 billion net loss after raking in an $8.1 billion profit in Q1 2021. That includes $6 billion in added costs — the bulk of which can be traced back to that same fulfillment network.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company chose to expand its warehouse network based on "the high end of a very volatile demand outlook." So far this year, though, it has shut down or delayed plans for at least 16 scheduled facilities.

"We currently have some excess capacity in the network that we need to grow into," Olsavsky told investors on Amazon's Q1 2022 earnings call. "So, we've brought down our build expectations. Note again that many of the build decisions were made 18 to 24 months ago, so there are limitations on what we can adjust midyear."

[...] If you're wondering how that's possible, consider Amazon's unmatched turnover rate. A New York Times investigation uncovered that even before the pandemic, it was as high as 150%. That means there are more employees leaving Amazon warehouses each year than there are being hired.

[Ed's Comment: AC Friendly withdrawn. You can blame you-know-who for the spamming]

hubie writes:

Machine learning goes with the flow [pdf press release]:

An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm trained to listen to patients pass urine is able to identify abnormal flows and could be a useful and cost-effective means of monitoring and managing urology patients at home

The deep learning tool, Audioflow, performed almost as well as a specialist machine used in clinics, and achieves similar results to urology residents in assessing urinary flow. The current study focuses on sound created by urine in a soundproof environment, but the ambition is to create an app so patients can monitor themselves at home.

Uroflowmetry is an important tool for the assessment of patients with symptoms, but patients have to urinate into a machine during outpatient visits. They are asked to urinate into a funnel connected to the uroflowmeter which records information about flow. During the COVID-19 pandemic access to clinics has been restricted, and even where patients can attend, the test can take a long time with queues to use a single machine.

[...] "Our AI can outperform some non-experts and comes close to senior consultants," he continues. "But the real benefit is having the equivalent of a consultant in the bathroom with you, every time you go. We are now working towards the algorithm being able to work when there is background noise in the normal home environment and this will make the true difference for patients."

Audioflow will now be rolled out as a smartphone app via primary care physicians so it can be tested in the real world and learn from different datasets in different noise environments.

Soon you'll be able to get critiques from Alexa as you go to the bathroom.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning instructions, but leaves up the lethal tips:

"Fractal wood burning" refers to using hacked microwave power supplies to char Lichtenberg figures into wood. It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have been killed following instructions contained in viral videos. Ann Reardon recently posted a thorough debunking of the method, which quickly became popular in its own right—a timely and essential remedy to a lethal problem that social media companies are under no obligation to deal with themselves.

But YouTube has removed Reardon's video, claiming it is harmful and dangerous—while leaving up fractal wood burning videos demonstrating methods that have killed, at latest count, 34 people in America.

The presumed "explanation" is that YouTube's moderation is automated, and that this removal was likely triggered by keywords or abusive flagging by the viral (and often outright sinister) "crafts" channels that Reardon's video implicitly criticizes. But that's not what YouTube says in its takedown notification, and you can still get served these completely lethal instructions with obvious search terms there.

[...] Reardon simply reposted her well-researched debunking again with an explanation: "your life is more important than my channel".

[Ed's Comment: AC Friendly withdrawn. You can blame you-know-who for the spamming]

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From Software Freedom Conservancy

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site.

SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.

GitHub has, in the last ten years, risen to dominate FOSS development. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS. GitHub profits from those proprietary products (sometimes from customers who use it for problematic activities).

Specifically, GitHub profits primarily from those who wish to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development. Yet, GitHub comes out again and again seeming like a good actor — because they point to their largess in providing services to so many FOSS endeavors. But we've learned from the many gratis offerings in Big Tech: if you aren't the customer, you're the product. The FOSS development methodology is GitHub's product, which they've proprietarized and repackaged with our active (if often unwitting) help.

hubie writes:

Board game developed by scientists is winning plaudits for inspiring students to consider STEM careers:

A team of scientists and a games specialist have designed 'Diamond: The Game', a board game developed to give secondary school students a chance to explore a broad range of STEM scientific careers and subjects. This is achieved through first-hand experience of the different aspects of working in scientific research and life as a scientist and shows how research at a facility like Diamond underpins successful science. [...]

Dr Mark Basham and Dr Claire Murray from the UK's national synchrotron Diamond Light Source and Dr Matthew Dunstan from the University of Cambridge created the game for 2-5 players. It lasts between 20-30 minutes and is for ages 10 and up. It puts students directly in the role of a researcher at Diamond, visiting different beamlines (laboratories) to make progress in a diverse range of scientific projects in Physics, Chemistry, Cultural Heritage, and more.

[...] The game was developed in line with Diamond's Public Engagement programme which actively promotes careers in STEM to secondary level students who can visit the facility and see their scientific curricula in action. The target for the game was to therefore create an engagement option for schools that were not able to visit the facility. This became even more important with the advent of the pandemic. The team say that the potential for a resource like this to function in both formal and informal settings make it a valuable tool in multiple learning environments, especially as there is evidence children as early as seven make career limiting decisions.

This paper showcases a gaming approach which could be adapted by educators, educational professionals, or subject enthusiasts to cover any desired topic of study ie. not limited to STEM subjects and could be transferred to the broader curriculum. Diamond – The Game reflects the interdisciplinary nature of science undertaken at a facility like the Diamond synchrotron and how it underpins work on everything from fragments of Rembrandt's painting of Homer, COVID-19 drug screening, to the degradation of the Mary Rose Tudor warship and much more.

If you want to grab a few friends and play the home version, they released a Print and Play version in 2020.

Journal Reference:
Murray et al. Diamond: The Game – a board game for secondary school students promoting scientific careers and experiences. Research for All, 6(1): 14. DOI: 10.14324/RFA.06.1.14

[Ed's Comment: AC Friendly withdrawn. You can blame you-know-who for the spamming]

Original Submission