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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Results from the largest prospective study of its kind indicate that in the initial days and weeks after experiencing trauma, individuals facing potentially threatening situations who had less activity in their hippocampus -- a brain structure critical for forming memories of situations that are dangerous and that are safe -- developed more severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.

This association between reduced hippocampal activity and risk of PTSD was particularly strong in individuals who had greater involuntary defensive reactions to being startled.

This research, published in the JNeurosci, suggests that individuals with greater defensive reactions to potentially threatening events might have a harder time learning whether an event is dangerous or safe. They also are more likely to experience severe forms of PTSD, which include symptoms such as always being on guard for danger, self-destructive behavior like drinking too much or driving too fast, trouble sleeping and concentrating, irritability, angry outbursts, and nightmares.

"These findings are important both to identify specific brain responses associated with vulnerability to develop PTSD, and to identify potential treatments focused on memory processes for these individuals to prevent or treat PTSD," said senior author Vishnu Murty, PhD, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University.

upstart writes:

Saudi Planning Skyscraper That's 75 Miles Wide:

[...] the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told engineers and designers he wanted his next architectural project to be as grand as the Egyptian pyramids.

According to the WSJ, the plans would make it the world's largest structure. The skyscraper would be a set of two parallel buildings, each 1,600 feet tall, and spanning 75 miles of terrain. Prince Salman is calling it the "Mirror Line" and wants it to house about five million people. It could cost as much as a trillion dollars and looks like a long, golden paradise in the photos shown below.

[...] The WSJ said Salman is, essentially, hoping to create an architectural feat designers have long dreamed of — a linear city. In concept, the Mirror Line is set to include nearly everything its residents could ever dream of needing, like a stadium, yacht club and renewable sources of energy and food.

In reality, though, it kind of sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. What happens when Salman's weird isolated city runs out of food during internal supply chain shortages, or when another pandemic rips though millions of people trapped in tight, close quarters between two buildings?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In 2018, Google moved its in-house Linux desktop from the Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the Debian-based gLinux. Why? Because, as Google explained, Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) two-year release "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS."

That was a pain. Add in the time-consuming need to fully customize engineers' PCs, and Google decided that it cost too much. Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there was only one year left until we had to go through the same process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs with requests for help for corner cases."

So, when Google had enough of that, it moved to Debian Linux (though not just vanilla Debian). The company created a rolling Debian distribution: GLinux Rolling Debian Testing (Rodete).  The idea is that users and developers are best served by giving them the latest updates and patches as they're created and deemed ready for production. Such distros include Arch Linux, Debian Testing, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

For Google, the immediate goal was to get off the two-year upgrade cycle. As the move to Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) has shown, these incremental changes work well. They're also easier to control and rollback if something goes wrong.

To make all this work without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Google created a new workflow system, Sieve.  Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken. Next, each group is tested separately with a full system installation, boot, and local test suite run. The package builds complete within minutes, but testing can take up to an hour.

[...] release Sieve's code so we can all start producing rolling Linux desktop releases. How about it, Google? What do you say?

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Senate passes massive package to boost U.S. computer chip production

[....] The 64-33 vote represents a rare bipartisan victory a little more than three months before the crucial November midterms; 17 Republicans joined all Democrats in voting yes. The package, known as "CHIPS-plus," now heads to the House, which is expected to pass it by the end of the week and send it to President Joe Biden for his signature.

[....] The centerpiece of the package is more than $50 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research.

Supporters on Capitol Hill, as well as key members of Biden's Cabinet, have argued that making microchips at home — rather than relying on chipmakers in China, Taiwan and elsewhere — is critical to U.S. national security, especially when it comes to chips used for weapons and military equipment.

[...] The final chips bill is a slimmed-down version of a much broader China competitiveness package that House and Senate lawmakers had been negotiating. Earlier, the Senate passed its bill, known as USICA, while the House passed its own version, the America COMPETES Act. But lawmakers couldn't resolve their differences, and leading Democrats decided to switch their strategy and scale back the legislation.

The package also includes tens of billions more in authorizations for science and research programs, as well as for regional technology hubs around the country.

If passed, will this be well spent? Will the US actually be globally competitive in chip manufacture?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Cities have an important role in making progress on sustainability and climate change issues. And for them to achieve this, urban residents need to be involved in achieving set goals. This means that cities need to provide opportunities and guidance to their residents to help them make progress.

While national targets—like Canada's goal to reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions to 110 megatons in 2030 from 191 megatons in 2019—are important, they do not mean much to a city resident or an organization.

It can be difficult to determine how to address large and complex national issues. These need to be translated from theoretical commitments into measurable goals to create a sense of commitment and urgency. For example, Canadian emission targets need to be broken down into actionable objectives at the city level, which would make it more meaningful to its residents, who can then make small contributions that amount to significant outcomes for the city and beyond.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are recognized as strategically important for sustainability. They cannot be achieved without commitment at every scale, from individuals to different levels of government.

Public and private organizations in cities can set the stage to engage everyone to contribute to shared goals. The SDGs may seem large and difficult to achieve, but they can be localized and broken down into achievable pieces.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new study shows that nickel oxide superconductors, which conduct electricity with no loss at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors do, contain a type of quantum matter called charge density waves, or CDWs, that can accompany superconductivity.

The presence of CDWs shows that these recently discovered materials, also known as nickelates, are capable of forming correlated states -- "electron soups" that can host a variety of quantum phases, including superconductivity, researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reported in Nature Physics today.

"Unlike in any other superconductor we know about, CDWs appear even before we dope the material by replacing some atoms with others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around," said Wei-Sheng Lee, a SLAC lead scientist and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) who led the study.

"This makes the nickelates a very interesting new system -- a new playground for studying unconventional superconductors."

upstart writes:

Findings are from a new global study 'OA in physics: researcher perspectives' commissioned by leading learned society physics publishers :

A new global study from AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society (APS),IOP Publishing (IOPP) and Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA)indicates that the majority of early career researchers (ECRs) [Researchers with 1–5 years of experience] want to publish open access (OA) but they need grants from funding agencies to do so.

[...] 67% of ECRs say that making their work openly available is important to them. Yet, 70% have been prevented from publishing OA because they have not been able to access the necessary monies from funding agencies to cover the cost. When asked why ECRs favour OA publishing, agreeing with its principles and benefitting from a wider readership were cited as the top two reasons.

Daniel Keirs, head of journal strategy at IOP Publishing said: "The OA views of the next generation of physicists are important as they are the harbingers of change when it comes to scholarly communications. What we see from this study is that ECRs believe that OA is the future, and they want to be able to reap the benefits of unrestricted access to research. Good progress has been made, but the transition to full OA must neither put researchers at a disadvantage nor disregard the costs necessary to produce, protect and preserve the quality and integrity of scholarly articles and the scientific record."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Biden administration on Monday said the government will plant more than one billion trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodlands in the U.S. West, as officials struggle to counter the increasing toll on the nation's forests from wildfires, insects and other manifestations of climate change.

Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government's capacity to plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.

The U.S. Agriculture Department said it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation's forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.

[...] To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle, the agency's director of forest management.

[...] But challenges to the Forest Service's goal remain, from finding enough seeds to hiring enough workers to plant them, Fargione said.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

The New York Times is reporting [archive link] on a new study charting historical human milk use and the mutations that allow (some) adult humans to digest lactose.

The study [abstract], published on 27 July 2022 in the journal Nature utilizes archaeological and genetic evidence to characterize milk use among (pre-)historic humans. From the NYT article:

In many ways, humans are weird mammals. And our relationship with milk is especially weird.

In every mammalian species, females produce milk to feed their young. The nursing babies digest the milk with the help of an enzyme called lactase, which cuts milk sugar into easily absorbed fragments. When the young mammals are weaned, they stop making lactase. After all, why waste energy making an enzyme you no longer need?

But it is common for our species to keep consuming milk into adulthood. What's more, about one-third of people carry genetic mutations that allow them to produce lactase throughout their lives, making it easier to digest milk.[...]

But a new study of ancient human DNA and milk-drenched pottery shards suggests that the traditional story does not hold up. "Something was not quite right with the received wisdom," said Richard Evershed, a biogeochemist at the University of Bristol in England, and an author of the study.

Dr. Evershed and his colleagues found that Europeans were consuming milk without lactase for thousands of years, despite the misery from gas and cramping it might have caused. The scientists argue that the lactase mutation only became important to survival when Europeans began enduring epidemics and famines: During those periods, their poor health would have exacerbated gastric distress, leading to life-threatening diarrhea.

I, for one, welcome our (not so) new dairy overlords. MMMM...dairy!

Journal Reference:
Evershed, R.P., Davey Smith, G., Roffet-Salque, M. et al. Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe. Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05010-7

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth:

Earth's geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.

A comprehensive new survey of our planet's minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It's a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth's complex geological history—and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

[...] Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That's almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral "species" in the classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which focuses strictly on a mineral's crystalline structure and chemical makeup.

[...] Take, for example, pyrite crystals (commonly known as fool's gold). "Pyrite forms in 21 fundamentally different ways," Hazen said. Some pyrite crystals form when chloride-rich iron deposits heat up deep underground over millions of years. Others form in cold ocean sediments as a byproduct of bacteria that break down organic matter on the seafloor. Still others are associated with volcanic activity, groundwater seepage, or coal mines.

"Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it's changed through time," said Hazen.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Upgrading to more efficient cellular radio towers could save enough electricity to power cities such as Phoenix, New Orleans or Seattle, according to a new study produced by US research firm J. Gold Associates.

Annually, US cell sites use a total of almost 21 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power. That’s the equivalent of the average power used by almost two million households.

“Cellular services have become a critical infrastructure component of modern life. It’s hard to imagine not being able to communicate on the go with our mobile devices, or increasingly through a wireless home gateway enabling Internet services to both residential and business customers,” the report said. “But not often discussed is the burden that the numerous cell sites places on the electricity supplies required to keep them powered and the costs associated with the power supplied.”

Each 10% reduction in total cell site power results in enough electricity saved to power the equivalent of 195,000 households. And a 40% reduction provides enough electricity to power the equivalent of almost 782,000 households, according to the study, “US Cell Sites- a Sustainability Analysis."

By upgrading both the radio hardware and the management software, each cell site could save as much as 40% of its electricity needs, the report states.

AnonTechie writes:

The Conversation

Russia is building a new ground-based laser facility for interfering with satellites orbiting overhead, according to a recent report in The Space Review. The basic idea would be to dazzle the optical sensors of other nations' spy satellites by flooding them with laser light.

Laser technology has evolved to the point where this type of anti-satellite defense is plausible, though there is limited evidence of any nation successfully testing such a laser.

If the Russian government is able to build the laser, it would be capable of shielding a large part of the country from the view of satellites with optical sensors. The technology also sets the stage for the more ominous possibility of laser weapons that can permanently disable satellites.

[...] The reputed new Russian laser facility is called Kalina. It is intended to dazzle, and therefore temporarily blind, the optical sensors of satellites that are collecting intelligence overhead. As with the U.S. LAIRCM, dazzling involves saturating the sensors with enough light to prevent them from functioning. Achieving this goal requires accurately delivering a sufficient amount of light into the satellite sensor. This is no easy feat given the very large distances involved and the fact that the laser beam must first pass through the Earth's atmosphere.

[...] In addition, space-based lasers could be used to target any satellite by aiming lasers at propellant tanks and power systems, which, if damaged, would completely disable the spacecraft.

As technology advances continue, the use of laser weapons in space becomes more likely. The question then becomes: What are the consequences?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Does the sun rotate?:

The sun's permanent position in the sky, plus the fact that Earth and the other planets revolve around it, may give the impression that it is static and does not move or rotate.

Yet we have been aware that the sun rotates since the 17th century. Like the majority of the solar system's planets, this rotation is counter-clockwise, but as well as being significantly slower than Earth's rotation, the sun's rotation is much more complex.

The discovery that the sun rotates dates back to the time of Galileo Galilei, according to The British Library (opens in new tab). Along with several of his contemporary earlier astronomers, Galileo had observed dark spots of the sun that we now call sunspots and understand to be important parts of the solar cycle.

Galileo noticed something else too. He found these dark spots appeared to move, vanishing and returning as he observed the sun with his telescope.

In 1612, the early scientist wrote: "It is also manifest that their rotation is about the sun... to me, it seems more probable that the movement is of the solar globe than of its surroundings," according to the book 'Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo'.

AnonTechie writes:

Memory and data storage producer Micron have begun production and shipment of the world's first 232-layer NAND in Singapore, which marks the first time a NAND manufacturer has surpassed 200 layers. This opens the door for the world's first 200TB SSDs. For comparison, even the flashiest personal computers usually stop at 2TB of storage, and the current largest SSD in the world is Nimbus Data's 100TB ExaDrive.

Prior to the innovation, the company's NAND topped out at 176-layers. The new NAND is also 50% faster than Micron's 176-layer offering, at a top speed of 2.4 gigabytes per second, while featuring 100% higher write bandwidth and 75% higher read bandwidth. The company also says that the 232-layer NAND has 1 terabyte per die, the highest areal density in the industry, and has heightened capacity and energy efficiency over previous Micron NANDs.

[...] Micron says that the new NAND is in production at the company's Singapore factory, and will ship to customers in "component form." But in case you think this means you're going to upgrade your gaming PC's capacity by about 100 fold, think again. That 100TB SSD we mentioned earlier currently costs $40,000, and a 200TB one is going to be more expensive.

GIZMODO

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Aircraft are indispensable in the modern age for transporting people, delivering goods, and performing military operations, but the petroleum-based fuels that power them are in short supply. Scientists have now discovered a way to generate an alternative jet fuel by harvesting an unusual carbon molecule produced by the metabolic process of bacteria that are commonly found in soil. The research, by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was published recently in the journal Joule.

[...] Keasling wanted to recreate a molecule called Jawsamycin, which is named after the movie “Jaws” because of its bite-like indentations. It is generated by the common bacteria streptomyces, an organism that Cruz-Morales had worked with in the past.

“The recipe already exists in nature,” says Cruz-Morales. The jagged molecule is produced by native metabolism of the bacteria as they munch away on glucose. “As they eat sugar or amino acids, they break them down and convert them into building blocks for carbon-to-carbon bonds,” he says. “You make fat in your body in the same way, with the same chemistry, but this bacterial process has some very interesting twists.”