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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny objects has led to technological leaps that weren’t possible before they came along, like the vibration motors in cell phones, or the tiny speakers in earbuds and hearing aids. And that’s not to mention the motors in electric vehicles and the generators in wind turbines, along with countless medical, military, and scientific uses.

These advances come at a cost, though, as the rare earth elements needed to make them are getting harder to come by. It’s not that rare earth elements like neodymium are all that rare geologically; rather, deposits are unevenly distributed, making it easy for the metals to become pawns in a neverending geopolitical chess game. What’s more, extracting them from their ores is a tricky business in an era of increased sensitivity to environmental considerations.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to make a magnet, and it may soon be possible to build permanent magnets as strong as neodymium magnets, but without any rare earth metals. In fact, the only thing needed to make them is iron and nitrogen, plus an understanding of crystal structure and some engineering ingenuity.

upstart writes:

France is working on a program to let people lease EVs for €100 per month:

France is preparing to launch a new electric vehicle subsidy program that would give people the ability to lease an EV for €100 ($100) per month. Budget Minister Gabriel Attal announced the plan over the weekend on the country's LCI news channel, reports Bloomberg. "We know that for many French [EVs] remain very expensive," he said, adding that the government was working to figure out how quickly it could implement the measure.

For context, France is significantly behind on that front compared to countries like Norway. Last year, battery-electric and hybrid vehicles made up nearly two-thirds of all new car sales within the Nordic country. Much of what's driving adoption there is a subsidy scheme that allows car buyers to avoid taxes that are found on internal combustion engine cars.

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hubie writes:

Novel music intervention sparks emotional connection between patients and caregivers:

People with dementia often lose their ability to communicate verbally with loved ones in later stages of the disease. But a Northwestern Medicine study, in collaboration with Institute for Therapy through the Arts (ITA), shows how that gap can be bridged with a new music intervention.

In the intervention — developed at ITA and called "Musical Bridges to Memory" — a live ensemble plays music from a patient's youth such as songs from the musicals "Oklahoma" or "The Sound of Music." This creates an emotional connection between a patient and their caregiver by allowing them to interact with the music together via singing, dancing and playing simple instruments, the study authors said.

The program also enhanced patients' social engagement and reduced neuropsychiatric symptoms such as agitation, anxiety and depression in both patients and caregivers.

[...] Music memories often remain in the brain even as language and other memories disappear in dementia, Bonakdarpour said. This is because regions of the brain that are involved in musical memory and processing (e.g., the cerebellum) are not as affected by Alzheimer's or dementia until much later in the disease course. Thus, patients can retain the ability to dance and sing long after their ability to talk has diminished.

Before the intervention, some individuals would not communicate much with their partners. However, during the intervention, they started to play, sing and dance together, which was a significant change for the family. These changes generalized to their behavior outside the sessions as well.

"As the program progressed, caregivers invited multiple family members," said Jeffrey Wolfe, a neurologic music therapist-fellow at ITA and leader of the Musical Bridges to Memory program. "It became a normalizing experience for the whole family. All could relate to their loved one despite their degree of dementia."

This brings to my mind Lady Gaga's description of Tony Bennett's last concert where he was well into Alzheimer's, but once he was on stage in front of a band and people, he recognized her, sang his songs, and was his old self. The human brain is a strange and interesting piece of hardware.

Journal Reference:
Rhiana Schafer, Aimee Karstens, Emma Hospelhorn, et al. Musical Bridges to Memory A Pilot Dyadic Music Intervention to Improve Social Engagement in Dementia, Alz Dis Assoc Dis, 2022. DOI: 10.1097/WAD.0000000000000525

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MostCynical writes:

'RUTAN FIELD' is now listed on aeronautical charts

Mojave Airport has been renamed in honour of Burt Rutan:

[...] At the first 2022 Mojave Air and Space Port board meeting on Jan. 18, directors voted unanimously to approve a resolution officially changing the name of the airport by adding the Rutan name. During discussions at the meeting, it was said that introduction of the new name will be done gradually. General Manager/CEO Todd Lindner said, "The plan is to start with the items most visible to the public, such as the monument signs at the entrances of the airport."

According to the staff report, "Adding the Rutan name to the facility would recognize aerospace designer Burt Rutan and record-setting brother Dick. Their aviation achievements have played a key role in the evolution of the aerospace industry and the success of the Mojave Air and Space Port organization.

"Many thanks to Lindner for working with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to accomplish the mission of putting 'Rutan Field' on the Aeronautical Chart with the Mojave Air and Space Port name."

[...] Rutan's last design to fly was the Rutan SkiGull, an all-terrain float plane designed to be able to fly from California to Hawaii and land and take off on rough water, assisted by two electric motors.

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upstart writes:

Why is newborn baby skin-to-skin contact with dads and non-birthing parents important? What the science says:

Soon after a baby is born, it's getting more common these days for the father or non-birthing parent to be encouraged to put the newborn directly on their chest. This skin-to-skin contact is often termed "kangaroo care," as it mimics the way kangaroos provide warmth and security to babies.

Mothers have been encouraged to give kangaroo care for decades now and many do so instinctively after giving birth; it has been shown to help mum and baby connect and with breastfeeding.

So what does the evidence say about kangaroo care for other parents?

A growing body of research shows kangaroo care brings benefits for both baby and parent.

One study that measured cortisol (a stress hormone) levels and blood pressure in new fathers found: "Fathers who held their baby in skin-to-skin contact for the first time showed a significant reduction in physiological stress responses."

upstart writes:

When will the space agency get another shot? They're still figuring that out:

NASA will not slingshot a spacecraft around the moon this week following two previous called-off launch attempts, officials confirmed at a news conference Saturday evening.

That means the team will likely haul the gigantic, 322-foot Space Launch System rocket back to its hangar, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and perhaps take another shot at the moon in October. The U.S. space agency is bumping up against a launch blackout period and can't conflict with a SpaceX flight carrying astronauts to the International Space Station in a few weeks.

[...] Mission leaders are weighing various options and will announce next steps in about a week. Engineers and technicians may perform some work at the platform before the rocket leaves the launchpad.

Launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson canceled the second launch attempt a little after 11 a.m. on Saturday, after the team discovered a large fuel leak that engineers couldn't stop. The liquid hydrogen seeping out was two or three times the permissible level, Sarafin said. When high concentrations of hydrogen are mixed in the air, there is a high risk for flammability.

"It was pretty clear that we weren't going to be able to work our way through it like we did on Monday, in terms of managing the leak," he said.

NASA is still investigating the cause of the leak. One possibility the team will look into is whether an accidental overpressurization of the fuel line earlier in the morning could have been the culprit.

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hubie writes:

Good with faces? New research suggests that your ability might be more akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle than taking a photograph:

Psychologists at UNSW Sydney have challenged the prevailing view that people with exceptional face recognition abilities rely on processing faces holistically.

Instead, they argue, people who are great at learning and remembering new faces – also known as super recognisers – can divide new faces into parts, before storing them in the brain as composite images.

"It's been a long-held belief that to remember a face well you need to have a global impression of the face, basically by looking at the centre and seeing the face as a whole," said study lead author, Dr James Dunn.

"But our research shows that super-recognisers are still able to recognise faces better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This suggests that they can piece together an overall impression from smaller chunks, rather than from a holistic impression taken in a single glance."

[...] But according to Dr Dunn, the results don't mean that super-recognisers are necessarily doing anything differently than the rest of us.

"It seems that super-recognisers are not processing faces in a qualitatively different way from everyone else," Dr Dunn said. "They are doing similar things to normal people, but they are doing some important things more and this leads to better accuracy."

[...] The researchers said their experiment changes the way we think about why some people are better than others at committing a face to memory.

"We think one of the things they're doing uniquely is exploring the face more to find information that is useful for remembering or recognising a person later. So when super-recognisers learn a face, it is more like putting together pieces in a jigsaw puzzle than taking a single snapshot of the whole face."

If you want to find out whether you are a "super-recognizer," they have a test you can take (won't work on mobile screens).

Journal Reference:
James Daniel Dunn Victor Perrone de Lima Varela Victoria Ida Nicholls, et al., Face information sampling in super-recognizers, 2022. PsyArXiv preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/z2k4a

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upstart writes:

New Coating Keeps Surfaces Germ-Free for Months at a Time - ExtremeTech:

Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed a durable coating that continuously kills both viruses and bacteria. It's clear and can be brushed or sprayed onto a variety of surfaces. Though made with hospitals, airports, and other high-traffic areas in mind, the coating could be used to eliminate germs on touch screens, personal computer keyboards, and even cutting boards.

[...] Lab tests proved the coating capable of killing SARS-CoV-2 (the virus associated with COVID-19), E. coli, MRSA, and a number of other common pathogens. The coating continued to kill 99.9 percent of viruses and bacteria for six months (the length of the experiment), during which test surfaces were given a bit of a beating: Raw chicken was placed on the coated cutting board while the coated keyboard and smartphone were repeatedly touched. The scientists even compared coated surfaces with uncoated surfaces that had been cleaned with a Clorox wipe, exposed to UV light for 12 hours, and kept in a freezing environment for 25 hours. There were fewer germs on the coated surface than on the one that underwent an obsessive level of cleaning.

If you're wondering how such an aggressive substance can possibly be safe for those who touch it, there's more good news: the antimicrobials that lend the coating its germ-killing capabilities are derived from tea tree oil and cinnamon oil, two nature-derived substances that have long been used for cleaning purposes. The antimicrobials themselves are "generally regarded as safe" by the FDA and can even sometimes be found in food. To function as a coating, the antimicrobials are added to polyurethane, another safe and commonly-used substance. Though the oils in the coating begin to evaporate after about six months, all it takes is a quick swipe with more oil to make the coating effective again.

Journal Reference:
Dhyani et al., Surfaces with instant and persistent antimicrobial efficacy against bacteria and SARS-CoV-2, Matter (2022), 10.1016/j.matt.2022.08.018

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists studying mice from the Andes Mountains in Patagonia noticed something they couldn't explain: the mice from the western side of the mountains were bigger than the ones from the east, but DNA said that they were all from the same species. The researchers examined the skulls of 450 mice from the southern tip of South America, and found that existing biological laws didn't explain the size differences. Instead, in a new paper in the Journal of Biogeography, the scientists put forth a new hypothesis: the mice on the western slopes were bigger because that side of the mountain range gets more rain, which means there's more plentiful food for the mice to eat.

[...] De la Sancha and his colleagues realized this might be related to what biologists call the "resource rule." "This rule suggests that where there are more resources, individuals from the same species tend to be larger than where there are fewer resources," says de la Sancha. "For instance, some deer mice that are found in deserts and other habitats tend to be smaller in drier portions of their habitats. Another hypothesis suggests that some animals tend to be smaller in mountains versus adjacent plains in North America. Our study found a mixed result of these rules."

The sizes of mice seemed to be following the resource rule, but the question still remained: why were there more resources on the western slopes of the southern Andes than on the eastern slopes? De la Sancha had a "Eureka!" moment while teaching a class of undergraduates at Chicago State University.

"Believe it or not, when I was teaching ecology, one of the things that I was teaching about was the rain shadow effect," says de la Sancha.

upstart writes:

Google Launches New Open Source Bug Bounty to Tackle Supply Chain Attacks:

Google on Monday introduced a new bug bounty program for its open source projects, offering payouts anywhere from $100 to $31,337 (a reference to eleet or leet) to secure the ecosystem from supply chain attacks.

Called the Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program (OSS VRP), the offering is one of the first open source-specific vulnerability programs.

With the tech giant the maintainer of major projects such as Angular, Bazel, Golang, Protocol Buffers, and Fuchsia, the program aims to reward vulnerability discoveries that could otherwise have a significant impact on the larger open source landscape.

Other projects managed by Google and hosted on public repositories such as GitHub as well as the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects are also eligible.

[...] Beefing up open source components, especially third-party libraries that act as the building block of many a software, has emerged a top priority in the wake of steady escalation in supply chain attacks targeting Maven, NPM, PyPI, and RubyGems.

[...] "Last year saw a 650% year-over-year increase in attacks targeting the open source supply chain, including headliner incidents like Codecov and the Log4j vulnerability that showed the destructive potential of a single open source vulnerability," Google's Francis Perron and Krzysztof Kotowicz said.

[...] Earlier this May, the internet behemoth announced the creation of a new "Open Source Maintenance Crew" to focus on bolstering the security of critical open source projects.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/pixel-art-comes-to-life-fan-upgrades-classic-ms-dos-games-with-ai/

Last night, a Reddit user by the name of frigis9 posted a series of six images that feature detailed graphical upgrades to classic MS-DOS computer games such as Commander Keen 6 and The Secret of Monkey Island. The most interesting part is how they did it: by using an image synthesis technique called "img2img" (image to image), which takes an input image, applies a written text prompt, and generates a similar output image as a result. It's a feature of the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model released last week.

[...] Art quality in image synthesis currently requires much trial and error with prompts and cherry-picking to achieve the kinds of results frigis9 posted—likely hours of work. But with some incremental advances in image synthesis techniques and GPU power, we could imagine an emulator upgrading vintage game graphics in real time within a few years.

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upstart writes:

Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year:

A company called Subsea Cloud is planning to have a commercially available undersea datacenter operating off the coast of the US before the end of 2022, with other deployments planned for the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

Subsea, which says it has already deployed its technology with "a friendly government faction," plans to put its first commercial pod into the water before the end of this year near Port Angeles, Washington.

The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.

However, according to Subsea founder Maxie Reynolds, it can also deploy 1MW of capacity for as much as 90 percent less cost than it takes to get 1MW up and running at a land-based facility.

[...] But what happens if something goes wrong, or a customer wants to replace their servers? According to Subsea, customers can schedule periodic maintenance, including server replacement, and the company says that would take 4-16 hours for a team to get to the site, bring up the required pod(s), and replace any equipment.

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DeathMonkey writes:

OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay

Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.

This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.

[...] "When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society," said Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP. "The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Quasars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), extremely luminous galactic cores where gas and dust falling into a supermassive black hole emit electromagnetic radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The gas and dust become luminous as a result of the extreme gravitational and frictional forces exerted on them as they fall into the black hole.

Quasars are some of the most luminous objects in the known Universe, typically emitting thousands of times more light than the entire Milky Way. They are distinguished from other AGNs by their tremendous luminosity, and their enormous distances from Earth. As the speed of light is finite, objects observed from Earth are seen as they were when the light we see left them. The nearest quasars to Earth are still several hundred million light-years away, which means that they are observed now as they were several hundred million years ago. The absence of quasars closer to Earth does not mean that there were never quasars in our region of the Universe, but instead means that quasars existed when the universe was younger. The study of quasars provides fascinating insights into the evolution of the Universe.

[...] Hubble has also imaged quasar ghosts — ethereal green objects which mark the graves of these objects that flickered to life and then faded. These unusual structures orbit their host galaxies and glow in a bright and eerie green hue, and offer insights into the pasts of these galaxies.

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hubie writes:

Sharing on Social Media Makes Us Overconfident in Our Knowledge:

Sharing news articles with friends and followers on social media can prompt people to think they know more about the articles' topics than they actually do, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Social media sharers believe that they are knowledgeable about the content they share, even if they have not read it or have only glanced at a headline. Sharing can create this rise in confidence because by putting information online, sharers publicly commit to an expert identity. Doing so shapes their sense of self, helping them to feel just as knowledgeable as their post makes them seem.

This is especially true when sharing with close friends, according to a new paper from Susan M. Broniarczyk, professor of marketing, and Adrian Ward, assistant professor of marketing, at UT's McCombs School of Business.

[...] The research also suggests there's merit to social media companies that have piloted ways to encourage people to read articles before sharing.

"If people feel more knowledgeable on a topic, they also feel they maybe don't need to read or learn additional information on that topic," Broniarczyk said. "This miscalibrated sense of knowledge can be hard to correct."

For more details about this research, read the McCombs Big Ideas feature story and watch the video explaining Broniarczyk and Ward's work.

Journal Reference:
Adrian F. Ward, Jianqing (Frank) Zheng, Susan M. Broniarczyk, I share, therefore I know? Sharing online content - even without reading it - inflates subjective knowledge, J Con Psych, 2022. DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1321

Original Submission