SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Intel Kicks Off Fab Co-Investment Program with Brookfield: New Fabs to be Jointly Owned

Intel this week introduced its new Semiconductor Co-Investment Program (SCIP) under which it will build new manufacturing facilities in collaboration with investment partners – a sharp departure from the company's traditional stance of wholly owning its logic fabs. As part of its SCIP initiative, Intel has already signed a deal with Brookfield Asset Management, which will provide Intel about $15 billion to build its fab new fab in Arizona in exchange for a 49% stake in the project. Furthermore, similar co-investment models are set to be used for other fabs in the future.

[...] Under the terms of the deal, the two companies will co-invest $30 billion in the ongoing expansion of the site [in Arizona] with Intel financing 51% and Brookfield backing 49% of the total project cost. Previously Intel planned to invest $20 billion in its Fab 52 and Fab 62, but together with Brookfield the sum has increased to $30 billion. In addition to getting access to additional funding, Intel could also take advantage of Brookfield's experience in developing infrastructure assets.

By working together with Brookfield, Intel will get $15 billion in free cash flow and will be able to invest more into its new fabs without raising new debt. Also, this will allow Intel to invest more in other projects while "continuing to fund a healthy and growing dividend." Meanwhile, the $15 billion benefit is "expected to be accretive to Intel's earnings per share during the construction and ramp phase."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A recent report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than 80 percent of urine samples from children and adults in the U.S. contained the herbicide glyphosate. A study by Florida Atlantic University and Nova Southeastern University takes this research one step further and is the first to link the use of the herbicide Roundup, a widely used weed killer, to convulsions in animals.

Glyphosate, the weed killer component in Roundup, is the world's most commonly used herbicide by volume and by land-area treated. Glyphosate-resistant crops account for almost 80 percent of transgenic crop cultivated land, which has resulted in an estimated 6.1 billion kilos of glyphosate sprayed across the world from 2005 to 2014. Roundup is used at both industrial and consumer levels, and its use is projected to dramatically increase over the coming years. A major question, yet to be fully understood, is the potential impact of glyphosate on the nervous system.

[...] Results, published in Scientific Reports, showed that glyphosate and Roundup increased seizure-like behavior in soil-dwelling roundworms and provides significant evidence that glyphosate targets GABA-A receptors. These communication points are essential for locomotion and are heavily involved in regulating sleep and mood in humans. What truly sets this research apart is that it was done at significantly less levels than recommended by the EPA and those used in past studies.

"The concentration listed for best results on the Roundup Super Concentrate label is 0.98 percent glyphosate, which is about 5 tablespoons of Roundup in 1 gallon of water," said Naraine. "A significant finding from our study reveals that just 0.002 percent glyphosate, a difference of about 300 times less herbicide than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer use, had concerning effects on the nervous system."

upstart writes:

Former UK Supreme Court Judge Calls Out Online Safety Bill As Harmful By Itself:

We have discussed at great lengths the many problems of the UK's Online Safety Bill, in particular how it will be a disaster for the open internet. Unfortunately, it appears that important politicians seem to think that the Online Safety Bill will be a sort of magic wand that will make the "bad stuff" online disappear automatically (it won't).

It appears that more people — and prominent ones at that — are now speaking out against the bill. Former UK Supreme Court judge, Jonathan Sumption, has published a piece in the Spectator, the old school UK political commentary magazine that is generally seen as quite conservative. Sumption warns that the Online Harms Bill will, itself, be quite harmful.

The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but 'harmful'. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause 'harm' to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any 'physical or psychological harm'. As if that were not general enough, 'harm' also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.

This test is almost entirely subjective. Many things which are harmless to the overwhelming majority of users may be harmful to sufficiently sensitive, fearful or vulnerable minorities, or may be presented as such by manipulative pressure groups. At a time when even universities are warning adult students against exposure to material such as Chaucer with his rumbustious references to sex, or historical or literary material dealing with slavery or other forms of cruelty, the harmful propensity of any material whatever is a matter of opinion. It will vary from one internet user to the next.

upstart writes:

Top Programming Languages 2022:

Python remains on top but is closely followed by C. Indeed, the combined popularity of C and the big C-like languages—C++ and C#—would outrank Python by some margin. Java also remains popular, as does Javascript, the latter buoyed by the ever-increasing complexity of websites and in-browser tools (although it's worth noting that in some quarters, the cool thing is now deliberately stripped-down static sites built with just HTML and simple CSS).

But among these stalwarts is the rising popularity of SQL. In fact, it's at No. 1 in our Jobs ranking, which looks solely at metrics from the IEEE Job Site and CareerBuilder. Having looked through literally hundreds and hundreds of job listings in the course of compiling these rankings for you, dear reader, I can say that the strength of the SQL signal is not because there are a lot of employers looking for just SQL coders, in the way that they advertise for Java experts or C++ developers. They want a given language plus SQL. And lots of them want that "plus SQL."

It may not be the most glamorous language...but some experience with SQL is a valuable arrow to have in your quiver.

This is likely because so many applications today involve a front-end or middleware layer talking to a back-end database, often over a network to eliminate local resource constraints. Why reinvent the wheel and try to hack your own database and accompanying network interface protocol when so many SQL implementations are available? Chances are there's probably already one that fits your use case. And even when a networked back end isn't practical, embedded and single-board computers can be found with enough oomph to run a SQL database locally.

("although it's worth noting that in some quarters, the cool thing is now deliberately stripped-down static sites built with just HTML and simple CSS") - Hey, so now we are cool? [JR]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2335230-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-linked-to-changes-in-dolphin-gene-activity

Dolphins living off the coast of Louisiana during and after the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 have genetic changes that could serve as a "canary in the coal mine" for future disease, according to researchers who analysed the animals' blood samples.

"[Gene expression] is a very, very sensitive indicator that can let us know something’s going wrong long before we see illness or deaths in the population," says Jeanine Morey at GEL Laboratories in South Carolina [...].

The largest marine petroleum spill, the Deepwater Horizon disaster churned around 800 million litres of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico after an oil rig sank in April 2010. The impacts on wildlife were staggering, with fish, birds and marine animals dying in huge numbers. But the long-term consequences of the spill on wildlife are less understood, which led Morey to investigate how common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were faring.

She and her team analysed the health records and blood samples of 71 wild dolphins captured and released between 2013 and 2018. During hands-on exams, biologists assessed each animal’s physical health, including their heart and lung function, and performed ultrasounds on pregnant females. The researchers lacked data on dolphins before the spill, so they compared more than 11,000 genes of individuals living in oil-impacted Barataria Bay, Louisiana, with those from dolphins living in Sarasota Bay, Florida, which was spared from the spill. Some of the Louisiana dolphins lived through the disaster, while others were born after.

hubie writes:

A team of Université de Montréal astronomers have discovered an exoplanet that could be completely covered in water:

An international team of researchers led by Charles Cadieux, a Ph.D. student at the Université de Montréal and member of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx), has announced the discovery of TOI-1452 b, an exoplanet orbiting one of two small stars in a binary system located in the Draco constellation about 100 light-years from Earth.

The exoplanet is slightly greater in size and mass than Earth and is located at a distance from its star where its temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. The astronomers believe it could be an "ocean planet," a planet completely covered by a thick layer of water, similar to some of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons.

[...] The exoplanet TOI-1452 b is probably rocky like Earth, but its radius, mass, and density suggest a world very different from our own. Earth is essentially a very dry planet; even though we sometimes call it the Blue Planet because about 70% of its surface is covered by ocean, water actually only makes up a negligible fraction of its mass — less than 1%.

[...] "TOI-1452 b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date," said Cadieux. "Its radius and mass suggest a much lower density than what one would expect for a planet that is basically made up of metal and rock, like Earth."

[...] An exoplanet such as TOI-1452 b is a perfect candidate for further observation with the James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb for short. It is one of the few known temperate planets that exhibit characteristics consistent with an ocean planet. It is close enough to Earth that researchers can hope to study its atmosphere and test this hypothesis. And, in a stroke of good fortune, it is located in a region of the sky that the telescope can observe year round.

Journal Reference:
Charles Cadieux, René Doyon, Mykhaylo Plotnykov, et al. TOI-1452 b: SPIRou and TESS Reveal a Super-Earth in a Temperate Orbit Transiting an M4 Dwarf [open], AstronJ, 164, 2022. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac7cea

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/twitter-whistleblower-claims-musk-was-right-about-bots-ftc-reviewing-report/

The pressure on Twitter to talk publicly about how it monitors and removes spam accounts continues to mount.

Reports from CNN and The Washington Post reveal an 84-page whistleblower complaint alleging that Twitter isn't motivated to track the true number of spam accounts and hid security vulnerabilities from federal regulators.

The complaint comes from Twitter's former security chief, Peiter Zatko. Zatko is a well-known ethical hacker with the alias "Mudge." He told the Post that he "felt ethically bound" to report his serious concerns to government agencies. He alleges that he was fired for pushing disinclined Twitter executives to address major security problems—which his complaint suggests "pose a threat" to Twitter "users' personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy."

Zatko alleges that Twitter execs were more invested in covering up those vulnerabilities, including cherry-picking and misrepresenting data on spam accounts and security threats to regulators and Twitter's board members.

Previously:
Judge Orders Twitter to Give Elon Musk Former Executive's Documents
Elon Musk Pulls Deal to Buy Twitter
Twitter Reportedly Will Give Musk the Full "Firehose" of User Data
Elon Musk Accuses Twitter of Thwarting His Due Diligence, Threatens to Walk Out of Deal
Twitter Users React to Elon Musk Putting Buyout Deal 'on Hold'
Musk Buying Twitter Is Not About Freedom of Speech
After Musk's Twitter Takeover, an Open-Source Alternative is 'Exploding'
Elon Musk has just bought Twitter
Elon Musk Isn't Joining Twitter's Board of Directors After All
Elon Musk Will Join Twitter's Board of Directors

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Waste from vegetable oil manufacturing could cheaply and effectively remove toxic heavy metals from contaminated water:

Using leftovers from sunflower and peanut oil manufacturing, a team of Singaporean and Swiss researchers have created a membrane that can effectively filter heavy metal ions from contaminated water, purifying it to international safety standards in a simple, cheap, gravity-based process needing little to no electricity.

[...] When oily seed crops or oilseeds are processed into edible oils, what remains is oilseed meal; a protein-rich by-product often thrown away or fed to animals. However, the team found that proteins extracted from oilseed meal could be shaped into amyloid fibrils, which are nanometre-sized ropes of tightly-wound protein molecules.

Amyloid fibrils have an unusually strong ability to adsorb—that is, to attract and trap—heavy metals and radioactive substances, thanks to amino acid bonds that sandwich such particles while letting water through, Miserez explained.

[...] The team found around 160 g of usable protein could be extracted from a kilo of oilseed meals. To filter an Olympic-sized swimming pool of water contaminated with 400 parts per billion (ppb) of lead—40 times the safety threshold for drinking water set by the World Health Organization—would take just 16 kg of sunflower seed protein, they estimated.

"Our protein-based membranes are created through a green and sustainable process, and require little to no power to run, making them viable for use throughout the world and especially in less developed countries," said Miserez. "Our work puts heavy metal where it belongs—as a music genre and not a pollutant in drinking water."

Europe needs this quick!

Journal Reference:
Wei LongSoon, Mohammad Peydayesh, Raffaele Mezzenga, and Ali Miserezad, Plant-based amyloids from food waste for removal of heavy metals from contaminated water [open], Chemical Engineering Journal, 445, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.cej.2022.136513

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Neolithic people sprinkled the crystals over burials:

Hundreds of fragments of a rare transparent type of quartz called "rock crystal" suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England, archaeologists say.

The rock crystals were likely brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, over mountainous terrain, and the crystals appear to have been carefully broken into much smaller pieces, possibly during a community gathering to watch the working of what must have seemed like a magical material.

"You can think of it as a really special event," Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, told Live Science. "It feels like they're putting a lot of emphasis on the practice of working [the crystal] ... people would have remembered it as being distinctive and different."

Overton is the lead author of a study published in July in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that describes the discovery of more than 300 of these quartz crystal fragments at a 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England, about a mile (1.6 km) south of the monument known as Arthur's Stone. As well as being almost as transparent as water, several of the crystal fragments are prismatic, splitting white light into a visible rainbow spectrum.

liar writes:

California is expected to vote on Thursday to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

"The climate crisis is solvable if we focus on the big, bold steps necessary to stem the tide of carbon pollution," Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

The landmark move toward electric vehicles would be phased in over several years, with a target of 35 percent of new vehicles that don't emit fossil fuels being set for 2026, a target of 51 percent for 2028, 68 percent for 2030, and finally a target of 100 percent for 2035.

The California Air Resource Board will vote to implement the measure on Thursday, with board member Daniel Sperling telling CNN that he is "99.9 percent" confident that it will pass. "This is monumental," Sperling added. "This is the most important thing that CARB has done in the last 30 years. It's important not just for California, but it's important for the country and the world."

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/California-Is-Banning-the-Sale-of-Gas-Cars-17395622.php

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The big catch is that it has to be at roughly the boiling point of water to work:

There's a classic irony with new technology, that adopters are forced to limit themselves to two of the three things everyone wants: fast, cheap, and good. When the tech is batteries, adoption is even more challenging. Cheap and fast (charging) still matter, but "good" can mean different things, such as light weight, low volume, or long life span, depending on your needs. Still, the same sorts of trade-offs are involved. If you want really fast charging, you'll probably have to give up some capacity.

Those trade-offs keep research into alternate battery chemistries going despite the massive lead lithium has in terms of technology and manufacturing capabilities—there's still the hope that some other chemistry could provide a big drop in price or a big boost in some measure of performance.

[...] People have been pondering batteries based on aluminum for a while, drawn by their high theoretical capacity. While each aluminum atom is a bit heavier than lithium, aluminum atoms and ions are physically smaller, as the higher positive charge of the nucleus pulls in the electrons a bit. Plus, aluminum will readily give up as many as three electrons per atom, meaning you can shift lots of charge for each ion involved.

[...] At slow rates of discharge, the aluminum sulfur cells had a charge capacity per weight that was over three times that of lithium-ion batteries. That figure went down as the rate of charge/discharge went up, but performance remained excellent. If the cell was discharged over two hours and charged in just six minutes, it still had a charge capacity per weight that was 25 percent higher than lithium-ion batteries and retained roughly 80 percent of that capacity after 500 cycles—well beyond what you'd see with most lithium chemistries.

upstart writes:

Leaked TSMC Slide Shows N3E Yields Progressing Ahead of Plan:

What appears to be an internal TSMC slide charting the development progress of the N3E process has been shared by tech enthusiast HS Kuo (opens in new tab) on Twitter. Recently, we heard from Taiwan's business media that N3 was going to hit mass production come September, but we haven't had much information about the progress of N3E since back in March.

To quickly recap, TSMC N3E is an 'Enhanced' version of the N3 process, which was initially scheduled (opens in new tab) (PDF) for mass production a year after N3. However, the new but undated slide (please add a pinch of salt) from Mr. Kuo indicates that the development of N3E is progressing well and is even "ahead of plan."

The chart suggests N3E SRAM yields are tracking significantly above N3, starting about six months ahead of risk production. Currently, the average 256Mb SRAM yield is about 80%, it is claimed. Also impressive is that Mobile and HPC test chips yield about 80%. Lastly, yield-proven ring oscillator performance is better than 92%.

We aren't surprised by previous reports into N3E that it is progressing so well. TSMC designed N3E with an improved process window, with slightly lower transistor density, which naturally comes with the benefit of better yields. Other touted benefits of N3E are better clock speeds and lower power usage.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft details critical vulnerability in ChromeOS:

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows Oh wow, get a load of Google using strcpy() all wrong – strcpy! Haha, you'll never ever catch us doing that

Microsoft has described a severe ChromeOS security vulnerability that one of its researchers reported to Google in late April.

The bug was promptly fixed and, about a month later, merged in ChromeOS code then released on June 15, 2022 and detailed by Redmond in a report released on Friday.

Microsoft's write-up is noteworthy both for the severity (9.8 out of 10) of the bug and for flipping of the script – it has tended to be Google, particularly its Project Zero group, that calls attention to bugs in Microsoft software.

At least as far back as 2010, Google security researchers made a habit of disclosing bugs in software from Microsoft and other vendors after typically 90 days – even if a patch had not been released – in the interest of forcing companies to respond to security flaws more quickly.

upstart writes:

Victory! Federal Court Upholds First Amendment Protections for Student's Off-Campus Social Media Post:

Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried. Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the student's expulsion violated his First Amendment rights. The court's opinion affirms what we argued in an amicus brief last year.

We strongly support the Tenth Circuit's holding that schools cannot regulate how students use social media off campus, even to spread "offensive, controversial speech," unless they target members of the school community with "vulgar or abusive language."

The case arose when the student and his friends visited a thrift shop on a Friday night. There, they posted a picture on Snapchat with an offensive joke about violence against Jews. He deleted the post and shared an apology just a few hours later, but the school suspended and eventually expelled him.

[...] The Tenth Circuit held the First Amendment protected the student's speech because "it does not constitute a true threat, fighting words, or obscenity." The "post did not include weapons, specific threats, or speech directed toward the school or its students." While the post spread widely and the school principal received emails about it, the court correctly held that this did not amount to "a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption" that would allow regulation of protected speech.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

VW strikes a deal with Canada to build EV batteries in North America:

Volkswagen signed a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to "explore opportunities" to bring some of its electric vehicle battery manufacturing to the country.

The move is seen as an effort to ensure that the automaker's plug-in vehicles qualify for the US's revamped EV tax credits, which place stricter requirements on where battery and vehicle manufacturing can be done.

VW says it plans to build a "dedicated Gigafactory" somewhere in North America, and today's agreement most likely increases Canada's chances of being selected as the location.

The automaker is tasking its battery supply management company, Power Co, with spearheading the site search as well as sourcing key ingredients for EV batteries, like nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Power Co will also play a key role in cathode production in North America, VW says.

Last year, VW unveiled plans to build six battery cell production plants in Europe by 2030, including the facility in Salzgitter, Germany, and one in Skellefteå, Sweden. A third plant will be established in Valencia, Spain, and the fourth factory will be based in Eastern Europe. The plants will eventually have a production capacity of 240 gigawatt-hours a year.

Original Submission