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hubie writes:

Junk food advertising restrictions prevent almost 100,000 obesity cases and is expected to save the NHS £200m:

The new study, from the University of Sheffield and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), revealed the TfL advertising policy restricting the advertisement of foods high in calories from sugar and fat or high in salt, has led to consumers cutting down on less healthy products.

Researchers estimate the policy, which has been in place since 2019, has directly led to 94,867 fewer cases of obesity than expected (a 4.8 per cent decrease), 2,857 fewer cases of diabetes, and 1,915 fewer cases of cardiovascular disease.

In addition to health benefits for individuals, the analysis found the current advertising policy would save the NHS £218 million over the lifetime of the current population.

[...] Dr Chloe Thomas, First Author of the study from the University of Sheffield's School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR), said: "We all know how persuasive and powerful advertising can be in influencing what we buy - especially the food we eat. Our study has shown what an important tool advertising restrictions can be in order to help people lead healthier lives without costing them more money.

"We hope that demonstrating the policy's significant benefits in preventing obesity and the diseases exacerbated by obesity, will lead to it being rolled out on a national scale, something that could save lives and NHS money."

The findings reveal the policy has had the biggest health impacts on people from deprived areas in terms of preventing health conditions, therefore reducing the level of health inequality in London. Despite people on middle incomes cutting more calories, the policy has had a bigger impact on the most deprived areas as people from those areas tend to be less healthy overall.

Journal Reference:
Thomas, C., Breeze, P., Cummins, S. et al. The health, cost and equity impacts of restrictions on the advertisement of high fat, salt and sugar products across the transport for London network: a health economic modelling study. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act 19, 93 (2022). 10.1186/s12966-022-01331-y

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A paradigm shift away from the 3D mathematical description developed by Schrödinger and others to describe how we see color could yield more vibrant computer displays, TVs, printed materials, textiles and more:

A new study corrects an important error in the 3D mathematical space developed by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger and others and used by scientists and industry for more than 100 years to describe how your eye distinguishes one color from another. The research has the potential to boost scientific data visualizations, improve TVs and recalibrate the textile and paint industries.

"The assumed shape of color space requires a paradigm shift," said Roxana Bujack, a computer scientist with a background in mathematics who creates scientific visualizations at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bujack is lead author of the paper by a Los Alamos team in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on the mathematics of color perception. "Our research shows that the current mathematical model of how the eye perceives color differences is incorrect. That model was suggested by Bernhard Riemann and developed by Hermann von Helmholtz and Erwin Schrödinger — all giants in mathematics and physics — and proving one of them wrong is pretty much the dream of a scientist."

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/

Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home Internet provider because he couldn't get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money.

When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes including his own with his ISP, Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC. Mauch now has about 70 customers and will extend his network to nearly 600 more properties with money from the American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, he told Ars in a phone interview in mid-July.

The US government allocated Washtenaw County $71 million for a variety of infrastructure projects, and the county devoted a portion to broadband. The county conducted a broadband study before the pandemic to identify unserved locations, Mauch said. When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said.

[...] Mauch's network currently has about 14 miles of fiber, and he'll build another 38 miles to complete the government-funded project, he said. In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."

Previously:
Jared Mauch Didn't Have Good Broadband—So He Built His Own Fiber ISP

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study finds saturation in images is key to marketing menu items:

An appealing photo of a pizza or other menu item can help a restaurant increase sales – especially if the right filter is used, a new study suggests.

Photos high in color saturation make food look fresher and tastier to viewers, which increases their willingness to order the menu items, researchers found.

Color saturation refers to the intensity of the color in the image – the vividness and richness of the reds and greens and blues.

But how well color saturation works to make food appealing depends on the visual distance of the food in the photo – and even on whether consumers plan to dine alone or with others.

[...] "On Instagram, it means using the 'X-Pro II' filter on your food photos rather than the 'Earlybird' filter," Liu said. "It is not difficult and doesn't cost a dime, so it is an easy win for restaurant marketers."

[...] The food in the more highly saturated photos looked fresher and tastier to participants, and that led them to be more likely to purchase the food, results showed.

But color saturation had a stronger effect when the food appeared more distant in the photos, Liu said.

"When the food is shown close up, it is already easy for the viewers to imagine how fresh and tasty the food would be," she said. "Color saturation is not as necessary."

[...] "Restaurants have to post pictures of their food on social media and online ordering platforms," she said.

"They should be paying as much attention, or maybe more, to the photos they post as they do to the text. Color saturation is one key element they need to focus on."

Journal Reference:
Stephanie Q. Liu, Laurie Luorong Wu, Xi Yu, and Huiling Huang, Marketing online food images via color saturation: A sensory imagery perspective, J Bus Res, 151, 2002. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.06.061

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Northrop Grumman picks Firefly to replace Russian engines on Antares rocket:

Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket is about to get an all-American upgrade with the help of Firefly Aerospace.

The two U.S. space companies announced Monday (Aug. 8) they are working together to build a new first stage for Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket while also developing a brand-new medium-lift booster for future launches. The partnership means Northrop Grumman will replace the current Antares rocket, which is built in Ukraine and powered by Russian engines, with a more powerful version (called the Antares 330) that can carry heavier payloads.

The move removes Northrop Grumman's dependency on Ukraine and Russia for critical components of the Antares rocket, which the company uses to fly Cygnus cargo ship missions to the International Space Station for NASA.

"Through our collaboration, we will first develop a fully domestic version of our Antares rocket, the Antares 330, for Cygnus space station commercial resupply services, followed by an entirely new medium class launch vehicle," Scott Lehr, Northrop Grumman's vice president and general manager, launch and missile defense systems, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

Related: Northrop Grumman's Cygnus boosts International Space Station's

Not THAT Firefly!

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

For many years my computer purchasing regime has been simple: Pick up a refurbished Dell laptop that's selling off-lease for under $500, install Mint Linux, and just use it til it turns to dust. Right now I'm driving a Latitude E7450. It's served me well, but I can see the end approaching.

I've been doing some shopping, and wow, have prices climbed. Suddenly the discount for used gear (from a retailer that I trust) makes less sense. So it appears likely that I'll be shopping for new laptop, something equivalent to the Latitude. I don't do gaming, and mostly use it for writing and surfing, so don't need extravagant specs or features.

The question though is what I should expect when stick my Mint USB into a new laptop these days, and what sorts of hoops I may need to jump to get it installed. I gather that Microsoft has managed to add "features" to "protect" users from my kind of behaviour.

Second question: would installing Linux on an Apple be easier?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fifty years of monitoring suggested that baboon hybrids manage just fine, but new DNA evidence reveals that some of their borrowed genes came at a cost:

New genetic analyses of wild baboons in southern Kenya reveals that most of them carry traces of hybridization in their DNA. As a result of interbreeding, about a third of their genetic makeup consists of genes from another, closely-related species.

The study took place in a region near Kenya's Amboseli National Park, where yellow baboons occasionally meet and intermix with their anubis baboon neighbors that live to the northwest.

[...] By all accounts, the offspring of these unions manage just fine. Fifty years of observations turned up no obvious signs that hybrids fare any worse than their counterparts. Some even fare better than expected: baboons that carry more anubis DNA in their genome mature faster and form stronger social bonds, and males are more successful at winning mates.

But new genetic findings published Aug. 5 in the journal Science suggest that appearances can be deceiving.

Even modern humans carry around a mix of genes from now-extinct relatives. As much as 2% to 5% of the DNA in our genomes points to past hybridization with the Neanderthals and Denisovans, ancient hominins our ancestors encountered and mated with as they migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia. Those liaisons left a genetic legacy that still lingers today, affecting our risk of depression, blood clots, even tobacco addiction or complications from COVID-19.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/phishers-breach-twilio-and-target-cloudflare-using-workers-home-numbers/

At least two security-sensitive companies—Twilio and Cloudflare—were targeted in a phishing attack by an advanced threat actor who had possession of home phone numbers of not just employees but employees' family members as well.

In the case of Twilio, a San Francisco-based provider of two-factor authentication and communication services, the unknown hackers succeeded in phishing the credentials of an undisclosed number of employees and, from there, gained unauthorized access to the company's internal systems, the company said. The threat actor then used that access to data in an undisclosed number of customer accounts.

Two days after Twilio's disclosure, content delivery network Cloudflare, also headquartered in San Francisco, revealed it had also been targeted in a similar manner. Cloudflare said that three of its employees fell for the phishing scam, but that the company's use of hardware-based MFA keys prevented the would-be intruders from accessing its internal network.

In both cases, the attackers somehow obtained the home and work phone numbers of both employees and, in some cases, their family members. The attackers then sent text messages that were disguised to appear as official company communications. The messages made false claims such as a change in an employee's schedule, or the password they used to log in to their work account had changed. Once an employee entered credentials into the fake site, it initiated the download of a phishing payload that, when clicked, installed remote desktop software from AnyDesk.

The threat actor carried out its attack with almost surgical precision. When the attacks on Cloudflare, at least 76 employees received a message in the first minute. The messages came from a variety of phone numbers belonging to T-Mobile. The domain used in the attack had been registered only 40 minutes prior, thwarting the domain protection Cloudflare uses to ferret out impostor sites.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ISRO, has attributed the problem to a sensor issue and vowed to come back 'soon with SSLV-D2':

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) maiden's small satellite launch vehicle (SSLV), carrying earth observation satellite EOS-02 and co-passenger students satellite AzaadiSAT, didn't go as planned on Sunday.

The mission went awry as the SSLV-D1 placed the satellites in an elliptical orbit instead of a circular one, rendering them "no longer usable", as ISRO later said in a statement.

In its statement, ISRO said, "SSLV-D1 placed the satellites into 356 km x 76 km elliptical orbit instead of 356 km circular orbit. Satellites are no longer usable. Issue is reasonably identified. Failure of a logic to identify a sensor failure and go for a salvage action caused the deviation."

[...] The mission by the space agency was aimed at garnering a larger pie in the small launch vehicles market, as it could place the satellites into Low Earth Orbit.

As per a report published in The Wire, the problem appeared to be the SSLV's terminal stage, called the velocity trimming module (VTM). According to the launch profile, the VTM was supposed to have burnt for 20 seconds at 653 seconds after launch. However, it burnt for only 0.1 seconds, denying the rocket of the requisite altitude boost.

[...] According to the ISRO, "failure of logic to identify a sensor failure and go for salvage action caused the deviation. A committee would analyse and recommend. With the implementation of the recommendations, ISRO will come back soon with SSLV-D2".

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The candidate is so far away that it might even break our models of the early universe, but there's a catch:

Astronomers armed with early data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are hunting galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist based at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), and his colleagues have been particularly good at uncovering these cosmic relics.

[...] In a pre-print paper, released on Aug. 5 and yet to undergo peer review, Naidu and colleagues have detailed another distant galaxy candidate, from one of JWST's early release science programs, known as CEERS-1749. It's an extremely bright galaxy that, if confirmed, would have existed just 220 million years after the Big Bang -- and it could also rewrite our understanding of the cosmos.

But there's a huge catch.

CEERS-1749 could be one of the most distant galaxies we've ever seen or it could be lurking much closer to home. Essentially, the data seems to indicate two possible places for the galaxy to be -- and we won't know which one is correct without observing it a lot more. That's earned it the title of "Schrodinger's galaxy candidate" in the paper submitted to pre-print repository, arXiv, on Aug. 4.

So, how can a galaxy like Schrodinger (the name we're running with because it's way more fun than CEERS-1749) seem to be in two different places? It's all about redshift.

upstart writes:

Arrival pauses work on its electric bus and car projects:

Anglo-American EV startup Arrival is putting its groundbreaking bus and car projects on ice as it struggles to manage its cash reserves. The Financial Times reports that the company, which said it would lay off a third of its staff last month, would now focus on completing its delivery van. Arrival said that it had anything up to 20,000 orders with UPS for the vehicle, and is expecting to get the first models out of the door later this year. That will hopefully reduce the pressure on the company's bottom line, and boost its share price, which has fallen 90 percent since it went public via a SPAC last year.

[...] The biggest tragedy from all of this is that Arrival's focus on revolutionizing public buses was a genuinely different approach from most EV makers. Buses are a fixture in pretty much every city, and while it's always better for the environment to use one over a car, making them even cleaner was a great plan. That the public project has been iced in favor of the fleet of logistics vans is not surprising, but it's certainly not a great sign for the future of public transport.

upstart writes:

Possible outcomes run the gamut from "more delays" to outright cancellation:

Almost a year ago, Intel made a big announcement about its push into the dedicated graphics business. Intel Arc would be the brand name for a new batch of gaming GPUs, pushing far beyond the company's previous efforts and competing directly with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs.

Arc is the culmination of years of work, going back to at least 2017, when Intel poached AMD GPU architect Raja Koduri to run its own graphics division. And while Intel would be trying to break into an established and fiercely competitive market, it would benefit from the experience and gigantic install base that the company had cultivated with its integrated GPUs.

[...] The first Arc GPUs were initially targeted for early 2022, and Intel managed to announce a pair of low-end 300-series laptop GPUs at the tail end of March. To date, the number of those laptops that is actually available for purchase is relatively small, and no one in the US has been able to buy anything else. A desktop version of the 1080p-focused Arc A380 has appeared in China, though, and a few publications have managed to import and test it.

[...] Arc's performance is also worst when playing older games that don't support the DirectX12 or Vulkan APIs, pointing to one huge issue that Intel has openly acknowledged: The company is struggling with its GPU drivers.

upstart writes:

Please Don't Normalize Copyright As A Tool For Censorship:

Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. [...]

That said, it's one thing to recognize that copyright is a tool for censorship and another altogether to normalize and embrace that fact.

Over the last few months, we've had a few stories about cops blasting copyright-covered music in an effort to block people filming them from being able to upload the videos online. The steps to getting here are not hard to figure out. The legacy copyright industry spent a couple decades screaming about copyright infringement online, and demanding that internet services wave a magic wand and stop it. And, eventually, a variety of automated copyright filters sprung up to try to get Hollywood to just stop whining all the time.

When cops are doing it, it's clearly problematic, because as multiple courts have noted, you have a constitutional right to film police. So the use by police to try to get these videos taken down are a nefariously clever attempt to using copyright law to stifle the public's rights.

But that doesn't mean it's okay when private citizens do it. Even if in pursuit of a good cause. Just as it's not right when people abuse the DMCA to take down content being used for harassment and abuse, it's not right to try to use copyright to block people from being able to film you.

[...] Which seems more likely? Congress fixing broken copyright law? Or Congress and lots of others getting excited about new ways to exploit this "feature" of copyright law to their own benefit. It's the latter and no one seriously thinks the former is going to happen.

Copyright law is used for censorship all the time. It's good at that. That doesn't mean we should embrace it or support it. And it definitely does not mean we should be normalizing that kind of abuse.

Original Submission

liar writes:

https://www.rawstory.com/a-new-australian-supercomputer-has-already-delivered-a-stunning-supernova-remnant-pic/

Within 24 hours of accessing the first stage of Australia's newest supercomputing system, researchers have processed a series of radio telescope observations, including a highly detailed image of a supernova remnant.The very high data rates and the enormous data volumes from new-generation radio telescopes such as ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder) need highly capable software running on supercomputers. This is where the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre comes into play, with a newly launched supercomputer called Setonix – named after Western Australia's favorite animal, the quokka (Setonix brachyurus).

The very high data rates and the enormous data volumes from new-generation radio telescopes such as ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder) need highly capable software running on supercomputers. This is where the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre comes into play, with a newly launched supercomputer called Setonix – named after Western Australia's favorite animal, the quokka (Setonix brachyurus).

ASKAP, which consists of 36 dish antennas that work together as one telescope, is operated by Australia's national science agency CSIRO; the observational data it gathers are transferred via high-speed optical fibers to the Pawsey Centre for processing and converting into science-ready images.

[...] An exciting outcome of this exercise has been a fantastic image of a cosmic object known as a supernova remnant, G261.9+5.5.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Russian weapons recovered in Ukraine contained more than 450 foreign-made components, think-tank says:

More than 450 foreign-made components have been found in Russian weapons recovered in Ukraine, evidence that Moscow acquired critical technology from companies in the United States, Europe and Asia in the years before the invasion, according to a new report.

Since the start of the war five months ago, the Ukrainian military has captured or recovered from the battlefield intact or partially damaged Russian weapons. When disassembled, 27 of these weapons systems, ranging from cruise missiles to air defence, were found to rely predominantly on Western components, according to research by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think-tank.

[...] About two-thirds of the components were manufactured by US-based companies, RUSI found, based on the weapons recovered from Ukraine. Products manufactured by the US-based Analog Devices and Texas Instruments accounted for nearly one-quarter of all the Western components in the weapons.

[...] In one case, a Russian 9M727 cruise missile – one of the country’s most advanced weapons that can manoeuvre at low altitude to evade radar and can strike targets hundreds of kilometres away – contained 31 foreign components.

[...] In response to questions about how their chips ended up in Russian weapons, the companies said they comply with trade sanctions and have stopped selling components to Russia.

[...] Russia is currently working to find new routes to secure access to Western microchips, according to RUSI. Many components are sold through distributors operating in Asia, such as Hong Kong, which acts as a gateway for electronics making their way to the Russian military or companies acting on its behalf, RUSI found.

With the way the global economy is set up, is export control on these kinds of chips enforceable in practice?

Original Submission