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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The natural world possesses its own intrinsic electrical grid composed of a global web of tiny bacteria-generated nanowires in the soil and oceans that "breathe" by exhaling excess electrons.

In a new study, Yale University researchers discovered that light is a surprising ally in fostering this electronic activity within biofilm bacteria. Exposing bacteria-produced nanowires to light, they found, yielded an up to a 100-fold increase in electrical conductivity.

[...] Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by "breathing minerals," like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.

When bacteria were exposed to light, the increase in electrical current surprised researchers because most of the bacteria tested exist deep in the soil, far from the reach of light. Previous studies had shown that when exposed to light nanowire-producing bacteria grew faster.

[...] "It is a completely different form of photosynthesis," Malvankar said. "Here, light is accelerating breathing by bacteria due to rapid electron transfer between nanowires."

Malvankar's lab is exploring how this insight into bacterial electrical conductivity could be used to spur growth in optoelectronics—a subfield of photonics that studies devices and systems that find and control light—and capture methane, a greenhouse gas known to be a significant contributor to global climate change.

Journal Reference:
Neu, J., Shipps, C.C., Guberman-Pfeffer, M.J. et al. Microbial biofilms as living photoconductors due to ultrafast electron transfer in cytochrome OmcS nanowires. Nat Commun 13, 5150 (2022). 10.1038/s41467-022-32659-5

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A joint U.S.-French Earth science mission is ready to be delivered to California for a launch now scheduled for early December, a slight delay caused in part because of transportation issues.

Thales Alenia Space, the prime contractor for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft, said Sept. 6 it is making final preparations to ship the two-ton spacecraft from its factory in Cannes, France, to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. There, it will be integrated with a SpaceX Falcon 9 for a launch no earlier than Dec. 5.

SWOT, a joint mission of NASA and the French space agency CNES, with participation from the Canadian Space Agency and U.K. Space Agency, will carry out observations for oceanography and hydrology using a synthetic aperture radar, altimeter and other instruments. Scientists plan to use SWOT to conduct a global survey of the Earth’s water, including measuring changes in lakes and rivers as well as ocean currents.

[...] “We had a slight issue with the transport of it,” said Kathleen Boggs, acting associate director for flight programs in NASA’s Earth science division, at an Aug. 2 advisory committee meeting. “It was supposed to come back on a Ukrainian Antonov aircraft that was provided by CNES.”

Those aircraft, though, have largely been grounded because of sanctions and other issues linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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upstart writes:

FCC Does The Bare Minimum: Asks Wireless Carriers To Be Honest About Location Data:

It took fifteen years filled with constant scandal, but the FCC finally recently announced that it would be "cracking down on" wireless carrier abuse of consumer location data, thanks to pressure from our new post-Roe reality. This "crackdown" involves politely asking the nation's top wireless carriers to disclose what kind of location data they were collecting, and who they've been sharing and selling it to.

Wireless carriers have now shared their responses with the FCC, all of which have been posted to the agency's website:

[...] So basically the FCC is asking an industry with a history of lying about this stuff to be transparent about what they're collecting and selling, and if they're very clearly breaking fairly flimsy agency rules, they might face penalties. Someday. If those enforcements can survive an agency that's been intentionally vote gridlocked by the telecom industry.

[...] While there are some wireless carriers who claim to never collect or sell user location data, others (notably Verizon and AT&T) utilize familiar legalese to suggest the collection and sale of this data is tightly controlled, anonymous, and secure, despite the fact that, again, fifteen years of scandals have shown that's very much never been the case.

upstart writes:

Ireland fines Instagram a record $400 Million over children's data:

[...] Ireland's data privacy regulator has agreed to levy a record fine of 405 million euros ($402 million) against social network Instagram following an investigation into its handling of children's data, a spokesperson for the watchdog said.

Instagram plans to appeal against the fine, a spokesperson for parent Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) said in an emailed statement.

The investigation, which started in 2020, focused on child users between the ages of 13 and 17 who were allowed to operate business accounts, which facilitated the publication of the user's phone number and/or email address.

"We adopted our final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of 405 million euro," said the spokesperson for Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), the lead regulator of Instagram's parent company Meta Platforms Inc (META.O).

Full details of the decision will be published next week, he said.

Instagram updated its settings over a year ago and has since released new features to keep teens safe and their information private, the Meta spokesperson said.

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hubie writes:

A projected shortage of sulfuric acid could stifle green technology advancement and threaten global food security:

The study, published in the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) journal The Geographical Journal, highlights that global demand for sulfuric acid is set to rise significantly from '246 to 400 million tonnes' by 2040 - a result of more intensive agriculture and the world moving away from fossil fuels.

[...] A vital part of modern manufacturing, sulfuric acid is required for the production of phosphorus fertilisers that help feed the world, and for extracting rare metals from ores essential to the rapidly required green economy transition, like cobalt and nickel used in high-performance Li-ion batteries.

Currently, over 80% of the global sulfur supply is in the form of sulfur waste from the desulfurisation of crude oil and natural gas that reduces the sulfur dioxide gas emissions that cause acid rain. However, decarbonisation of the global economy to deal with climate change will significantly reduce the production of fossil fuels - and subsequently the supply of sulfur.

[...] "What we're predicting is that as supplies of this cheap, plentiful, and easily accessible form of sulfur dry up, demand may be met by a massive increase in direct mining of elemental sulfur. This, by contrast, will be dirty, toxic, destructive, and expensive.

[...] The authors also explore several ways that demand for sulfur could be reduced as part of the transition to post-fossil fuel economies, including recycling phosphorus in wastewater for the fertiliser industry, by increasing the recycling of lithium batteries, or by using lower energy capacity/weight ratio batteries, as these require less sulfur for their production.

[...] However, they conclude that by recognising the sulfur crisis now, national and international policies can be developed to manage future demand, increase resource recycling, and develop alternative cheap supplies that have minimal environmental and social impact.

Journal Reference:
Mark Maslin, Livia Van Heerde, Simon Day. Sulfur: A potential resource crisis that could stifle green technology and threaten food security as the world decarbonises [open], Geogr J, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12475

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act into law in early August to help boost the US chip manufacturing industry amid a global microchip shortage.

As part of a plan to restore the US semiconductor industry and protect national security interests, the CHIPS Act prohibits US tech companies that receive federal funding from building new, advanced factories in China for at least 10 years.

"Companies who receive CHIP funds can't build leading-edge or advanced technology facilities in China for a period of 10 years," Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a press briefing Tuesday. "Companies who receive the money can only expand their mature node factories in China to serve the Chinese market."

One of the main objectives of the CHIPS Act is to "establish and expand domestic production of leading-edge semiconductors in the United States" to help reduce reliance on foreign producers like China, Raimondo said. "The United States consumes more than 25% of the world's leading-edge chips and produces zero of those chips."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA’s DART spacecraft is due to collide with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system in September 2022.

From this distance—about 20 million miles away from DART—the Didymos system is still very faint, and navigation camera experts were uncertain whether DRACO would be able to spot the asteroid yet. However, once the 243 images DRACO took during this observation sequence were combined, the team was able to enhance it to reveal Didymos and pinpoint its location.

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos is a composite of 243 images taken by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) aboard DART on July 27, 2022. Credit: NASA JPL DART Navigation Team

“This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques,” said Elena Adams. She is the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The quality of the image is similar to what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously.”

“[...] Seeing the DRACO images of Didymos for the first time, we can iron out the best settings for DRACO and fine-tune the software,” said Julie Bellerose, the DART navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “In September, we’ll refine where DART is aiming by getting a more precise determination of Didymos’ location.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you were just looking at his LinkedIn page, you’d certainly think Mai Linzheng was a top-notch engineer. With a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua, China’s top university, and a master’s degree in semiconductor manufacturing from UCLA, Mai began his career at Intel and KBR, a space tech company, before ending up at SpaceX in 2013. Having spent the past eight years and nine months working in the human race to space, he’s now a senior technician.

[...] Upon closer inspection, there are plenty of red flags: Despite having been in the US for 18 years, Mai has written all his job titles, degrees, and company locations in Chinese. His bachelor's degree is in business management, even though his alma mater, Tsinghua, only offers that degree to student athletes, and Mai was not one. Besides, the man in his profile photo looks younger than Mai’s stated age. The image, as it turns out, was stolen from Korean influencer Yang In-mo's Instagram. In fact, none of the information on this page is true.

[...] Scammers “are always thinking about different ways to victimize people, victimize companies,” Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento field offices, told CNBC in June. “And they spend their time doing their homework, defining their goals and their strategies, and their tools and tactics that they use.” He called the work of these criminals a “significant threat.” 

upstart writes:

The EU publishes draft regulations on smartphone spare parts and battery life, including requiring that manufacturers supply 15+ parts for at least five years:

Smartphone manufacturers supplying the EU will face stringent requirements to provide spare parts and ensure longer battery life, according to draft proposals published by Brussels on Wednesday.

The European Commission said that at least 15 different component parts should be made available for at least five years from the date of a smartphone's introduction to the market and that batteries should survive at least 500 full charges without deteriorating to below 83 per cent of their capacity.

[...] The draft regulations, which also cover tablets and standard mobile phones, suggest that if hardware is made more repairable and recyclable it would cut the energy consumption involved in its production and use by a third.

"Devices are often replaced prematurely by users and are, at the end of their useful life, not sufficiently reused or recycled, leading to a waste of resources," the document said.

[...] Smartphone makers argue that requiring more parts to be available simply increases the consumption of plastic.

Digital Europe, which represents the tech industry, said: "A potential overproduction, subsequent warehousing and destruction of spare parts will naturally result in wasted resources, reduced material efficiency and negative economic value ultimately resulting in higher costs for the consumer."

[...] "It will be a burden for the lesser brands and I'm sure we'll start to see limitations of smartphone models they will offer in the EU market," he said. "The net effect may very well be to make smartphones less affordable or wipe out the ultra-low cost category altogether."

Draft regulation

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upstart writes:

Honoring Peter Eckersley, Who Made the Internet a Safer Place for Everyone:

With deep sadness, EFF mourns the loss of our friend, the technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley. Peter worked at EFF for a dozen years and was EFF's Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. Peter was a tremendous force in making the internet a safer place. He was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and passed away suddenly on Friday.

The impact of Peter's work on encrypting the web cannot be overstated. The fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous that it's nearly invisible is thanks to the work Peter began. [...]

While encrypting the web would have been enough, Peter played a central role in many groundbreaking projects to create free, open source tools that protect the privacy of users' internet experience by encrypting communications between web servers and users. Peter's work at EFF included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, Switzerland, Certbot, Privacy Badger, and the SSL Observatory.

His most ambitious project was probably Let's Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority, which entered public beta in 2015. [...]

By 2017 it had issued 100 million certificates; by 2021, about 90% of all web page visits use HTTPS. As of today it has issued over a billion certificates to over 280 million websites.

[...] Peter left EFF in 2018 to focus on studying and calling attention to the malicious use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He founded AI Objectives Institute, a collaboration between major technology companies, civil society, and academia, to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The long-awaited Ethereum Merge is happening next week, and it's one of the most important days in cryptocurrency history. Arcane as it sounds, the Merge matters whether or not you're a blockchain believer or a crypto critic. If it's successful, the process will lower ethereum's massive electricity requirements by over 99%.

That is of huge consequence. Skeptics of cryptocurrency typically argue that coins like bitcoin and ether are useless, and that they consume enormous amounts of electricity. The first point is polarizing and subjective, but the second is unequivocally true. In an era when more people than ever view climate change mitigation as society's highest priority, the carbon emissions of bitcoin and ethereum are too conspicuous to ignore. 

In the Merge, ethereum will adopt a system known as proof of stake, which has been planned since 2014, before the blockchain's creation. Because of its technical complexity, and the increasingly large amount of money at risk, it has been delayed multiple times. The Merge is part of what in the past was called "ether 2.0," a series of upgrades that reshape the blockchain's foundations.

"We've been working on proof of stake for about seven years now," ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin said at the Eth Shanghai conference in March, "but finally all of that work is coming together." 

The Ethereum Merge is scheduled to occur between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15. [...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-C-Language-Manual

GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual.

Stallman announced today the release of the GNU C Language Introduction & Reference Manual for covering the GNU extensions to the C programming language.

The manual is written as Texi files and is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, v1.3+.

• This manual explains the C language for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on the GNU/Linux system and other systems. We refer to this dialect as GNU C. If you already know C, you can use this as a reference manual.
• If you understand basic concepts of programming but know nothing about C, you can read this manual sequentially from the beginning to learn the C language.
• If you are a beginner to programming, we recommend you first learn a language with automatic garbage collection and no explicit pointers, rather than starting with C. Good choices include Lisp, Scheme, Python and Java. C's explicit pointers mean that programmers must be careful to avoid certain kinds of errors.

Original Submission

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61585886

Buckingham Palace has announced that Queen Elizabeth II has died.

hubie writes:

Projects funded by the National Institutes of Health increasingly employ subjective and promotional language in describing research:

The language used in grant applications is becoming increasingly hyperbolic, a study published last week (August 25) in JAMA Network Open finds. The study found that 130 research-hyping adjectives were used at a 1,378 percent higher frequency on average in funded application abstracts from 2020 than in those from 1985. "The findings in this study should serve to sensitize applicants, reviewers, and funding agencies to the increasing prevalence of subjective, promotional language in funding applications," the authors write.

The team, comprised of two linguists and a biomedical researcher, began by using software to annotate the parts of speech in more than 900,000 abstracts in the National Institutes for Health (NIH) archive of funded projects. They then compared the frequency of adjectives between projects funded in 1985 and those funded in 2020, looking specifically for what they considered hype: "hyperbolic and/or subjective language that may be used to glamorize, promote, or exaggerate aspects of research," according to the paper. While there was no statistically significant difference in the overall prevalence of adjectives between those two years, 1,888 of the descriptors exhibited marked shifts in frequency, 139 of which the researchers deemed to be hype.

Of those 139, 130 were used more often in 2020 than in 1985—including words like "transformative" and "impactful," which increased in frequency by 8,190 percent and 6,465 percent, respectively. The word "sustainable" was more than 25,000 percent more common in the more recent set of abstracts, and some hype adjectives were not seen at all in 1985, such as "renowned," "incredible," "groundbreaking," and "stellar." Meanwhile, the hype adjectives "major," "important," "detailed," and "ultimate" showed some of the largest decreases in frequency.

[...] After all, the words themselves "don't actually really say much," coauthor and linguist Neil Millar of the University of Tsukuba in Japan tells STAT. And other studies have found increases in hype in published research, press releases, and science journalism.

Journal Reference:
Neil Millar; Bojan Batalo; Brian Budgell; Trends in the Use of Promotional Language (Hype) in Abstracts of Successful National Institutes of Health Grant Applications, 1985-2020 [open], JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(8):e2228676. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.28676

Original Submission

upstart writes:

G7 countries beat UK in global broadband speed test again:

For the second year in a row, the UK is second worst in the G7 league of industrial nations for broadband speed, only faster than Italy, according to a report published today.

Beating the UK's 72.06Mbps mean download speed globally was Japan in ninth place overall (with an average of 122.33Mbps); France (10th with 120.01Mbps); the United States (in 11th place with 119.01Mbps); Canada (17th, with 106.80Mbps) and Germany, which was 33rd in the rankings (with an average of 72.95Mbps).

As for Italy, which languishes in 56th place with an average download speed of 46.77Mbps, according to Eurostat's 2022 Digital Economy and Society Index, more than half of the country's population still lacks basic digital skills and an FTTH Council Europe study in September 2021 said Italy's full-fiber household penetration would hit 10 percent by the end of last year. However, Rome is attempting to remedy this, and in 2021 set out an Italian Strategy for Ultra Broadband called Plan Italy 1 Giga, with an allocation of €3.8 billion and the aim of providing 1Gbps in download and 200Mbps upload speeds, covering 8.5 million households by 2026. In June this year, the country's €6 billion telecoms incumbent, Telecom Italia, signed an MoU to spin off its fiber network assets and merge them with state-backed rival Open Fiber, seemingly with the aim of creating a single fiber network operator in Italy. Shareholders, bondholders, and regulators have yet to approve the deal.

At 72.06Mbps, the UK average puts it in 19th place out of 28 states in Western Europe, or tenth slowest. Average speeds in the UK are roughly 73 percent of the Western European average (99.00Mbps) – which is an improvement on last year's results.

Commenting on the worldwide rankings, Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Cable.co.uk, said: "The fastest average speeds in the world are no longer accelerating away from the rest of the field, since FTTP/pure fibre saturation is hitting its current limits in many of the fastest locations."

Howdle added: "In all cases, those countries ranking highest are those with a strong focus on pure fiber (FTTP) networks, with those countries dawdling too much on FTTC and ADSL solutions slipping further down year on year."

I live in France but in a rural area. These speeds might be good for major cities but there is little chance of fibre being available to anyone around here for at least another 2 years.

Original Submission