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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Scientists sent a satellite to space to test Einstein's weak-equivalence principle with extreme precision:

In 1916, Albert Einstein dared to declare that Isaac Newton was wrong. No, he said, gravity is not a mysterious force emanating from Earth. 

[...] And while the genius mathematician referred to this perplexing notion as his theory of general relativity, a title that stuck, his peers called it "totally impractical and absurd," a title that didn't. Against all odds, Einstein's mind-numbing idea has yet to falter. Its premises remain true on both the smallest of scales and the incomprehensibly large. Experts have attempted to poke holes in them again, and again and again, but general relativity always prevails. 

And on Wednesday, thanks to an ambitious satellite experiment, scientists announced that, yet again, general relativity has proven itself to be a fundamental truth of our universe. The team conducted what it calls the "most precise test" of one of general relativity's key aspects, named the weak-equivalence principle, with a mission dubbed Microscope. 

[...] The weak-equivalence principle is a weird one.

It pretty much says all objects in a gravitational field must fall in the same way when no other force is acting on them -- I'm talking external interference like wind, a person kicking the object, another object bumping into it, you get the idea. 

[...] The Microscope project sent a satellite into Earth's orbit that contained two objects: a platinum alloy and titanium alloy. "The selection was based on technology considerations," Rodrigues said, such as whether the materials were easy and feasible to make in a lab. 

upstart writes:

The method, which works in conjunction with a deep-learning AI, identifies materials by their texture:

A new x-ray technique that works alongside a deep-learning algorithm to detect explosives in luggage could eventually catch potentially deadly tumors in humans.

[...] While standard x-ray machines hit objects with a uniform field of x-rays, the team scanned the bags using a custom-built machine containing masks—sheets of metal with holes punched into them, which separate the beams into an array of smaller beamlets.

As the beamlets passed through the bag and its contents, they were scattered at angles as small as a microradian (around one 20,000th as big as a degree).The scattering was analyzed by AI trained to recognize the texture of specific materials from a particular pattern of angle changes.

The AI is exceptionally good at picking up these materials even when they're hidden inside other objects, says lead author Sandro Olivo, from the UCL Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. "Even if we hide a small quantity of explosive somewhere, because there will be a little bit of texture in the middle of many other things, the algorithm will find it."

upstart writes:

systemd's mkosi-initrd Talked Up As Better Alternative To Current Initrd Handling--Phoronix:

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project.

The mkosi-initrd approach paired with systemd system extensions is a fundamental shift from expecting initrd images to be built locally on user systems to something that can be done by distribution vendors with their build system. This can allow for better QA, embracing various modern security features, and more manageable initrd assets. Zbigniew summed up his LPC 2022 talk as:

Distributions ship signed kernels, but initrds are generally built locally. Each machine gets a "unique" initrd, which means they cannot be signed by the distro, the QA process is hard, and development of features for the initrd duplicates work done elsewhere.

Systemd has gained "system extensions" (sysexts, runtime additions to the root file system), and "credentials" (secure storage of secrets bound to a TPM). Together, those features can be used to provide signed initrds built by the distro, like the kernel. Sysexts and credentials provide a mechanism for local extensibility: kernel-commandline configuration, secrets for authentication during emergency logins, additional functionality to be included in the initrd, e.g. an sshd server, other tweaks and customizations.

Mkosi-initrd is a project to build such initrds directly from distribution rpms (with support for dm-verity, signatures, sysexts). We think that such an approach will be more maintainable than the current approaches using dracut/mkinitcpio/mkinitramfs. (It also assumes we use systemd to the full extent in the initrd.)

See the talk or go look at the PDF slides.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How an enormous project attempted to map the sky without computers:

Recently, the European Space Agency released the third installment of data from the Gaia satellite, a public catalog that provides the positions and velocities of over a billion stars. This is our most recent attempt to answer some of the most long-standing questions in astronomy: How are stars (and nebulae) spread out across the sky? How many of them are there, how far away are they, and how bright are they? Do they change in position or brightness? Are there new classes of objects that are unknown to science?

For centuries, astronomers have tried to answer these questions, and that work has been laborious and time-consuming. It wasn't always easy to record what you could see in your telescope lens—if you were lucky enough to have a telescope at all.

Now imagine the emergence of a new technique that, for its time, offered some of the benefits of the technology that enabled the Gaia catalogs. It could automatically and impartially record what you see, and anyone could use it.

That technique was photography.

This article tells the story of how photography changed astronomy and how hundreds of astronomers formed the first international scientific collaboration to create the Carte du Ciel (literally, "Map of the Sky"), a complete photographic survey of the sky. That collaboration resulted in a century-long struggle to process thousands of photographic plates taken over decades, with the positions of millions of stars measured by hand to make the largest catalog of the night sky.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Arduino IDE:

The new major release of the Arduino IDE is faster and even more powerful. In addition to a more modern editor and a more responsive interface it features autocompletion, code navigation, and even a live debugger. The Arduino IDE 2.0 features a new sidebar, making the most commonly used tools more accessible.

Tutorials and guides for the Arduino IDE 2.0 can be found here.

If you haven't already given the new IDE 2.0 a try, here are just a few of the key features...

• Autocomplete during sketch editing

• Dark Mode

• Never lose a sketch keeping them safely at Arduino Cloud

• Serial Plotter

• In-app updates

There is lots more information in the quoted link. [JR] If you are an Arduino user, or any other single board computer, what do you use them for? Care to share some of your stories?

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

TechCrunch is publishing what appears to be an adaptation of a company PR release from a company called Solar Foods.

Solar Foods is growing bacteria to be used as a protein source which can replace traditional sources like meat, fish and soybeans, thus reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture/food production.

From the TechCrunch hagiographic take:

Fermentation has a long, rich history in food production, from beer and wine to yogurt and cheese, leavened bread and coffee, miso and tempeh, sauerkraut and kimchi, to name just a few of the tasty things we can consume thanks to a chemical process thought to date back to the Neolithic period.
[...]
The industrial biotech startup is working on bringing a novel protein to market — one it says will offer a nutritious, sustainable alternative to animal-derived proteins. The product, a single-cell protein it's branding Solein, is essentially an edible bacteria; a single-cell microbe grown using gas fermentation. Or, put another way, they're harvesting edible calories from hydrogen-oxyidizing microbes.
[...]
The production of Solein requires just a handful of 'ingredients': Air, water and energy (electricity) — which means there's no need for vast tracts of agricultural land to be given out to making this future foodstuff. It could be produced in factories located in remote areas or inside cities and urban centers.

Nor indeed are other foods needed to feed it to create an adequate yield, as is the case with rearing livestock for human consumption.

I guess if it's cheap enough, it's not a bad idea. Much less waste than this site's namesake I'd reckon.

What say you, Soylentils? Is a bacteria-based burger in your future? Should there be?

Original Submission

Everyone Cares About Splatoon 3 More Than You Think

upstart writes:

Everyone Cares About Splatoon 3 More Than You Think:

Splatoon 3 hasn't just climbed to the top of the charts, it's absolutely demolishing them, at least in Japan. Nintendo announced the latest sequel in its party shooter series has already sold over 3 million copies in just three days there, making Splatoon 3's launch bigger than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Sword and Shield, and any other Switch game you can think of.

"[D]omestic sales of the Splatoon 3 game for the Nintendo Switch system have surpassed 3.45 million units in the first three days since its launch on September 9, 2022," Nintendo wrote in a press release today. To put that number in perspective, it's more than the combined launch sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokémon Legends: Arceus in Japan.

We don't have U.S. sales numbers for the game yet, but initial indications point to Splatoon 3 being one of the biggest Switch games ever. And it's not because it's some massive evolution of the series either. I played it a fair bit over the weekend, and in many ways it feels like the sort of iterative improvement you'd expect for an online shooter, taking the lessons learned from Splatoon 2 and making a more refined and robust sequel.

Splatoon 3's First Splatfest is Set for Sept. 23

upstart writes:

Splatoon 3's First Splatfest Is Set for Sept. 23:

The first Splatoon 3 Splatfest event is happening next weekend, Nintendo announced during its September Nintendo Direct presentation.

The competition kicks off at 5 p.m. PT on Sept. 23 and runs for 48 hours, concluding at 5 p.m. PT on Sept. 25. This time around, the game asks what you'd rather take with you to a deserted island: gear, grub or fun?

This marks the first Splatfest since Splatoon 3 launched earlier this month, but Nintendo held a prelaunch demo Splatfest back in August. That event asked players to choose between rock, paper and scissors, with Team Rock ultimately emerging victorious.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Climate change may make pandemics like COVID-19 much more common:

The likelihood of an extreme epidemic, or one similar to COVID-19, will increase threefold in the coming decades, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers used data from epidemics from the past 400 years, specifically death rates, length of previous epidemics and the rate of new infectious diseases. Their calculation is a sophisticated prediction based on known risks and can be a useful guide for policy makers and public health officials.

They also found that the probability of a person experiencing a pandemic like COVID-19 in one's lifetime is around 38%. The researchers said this could double in years to come.

[...] Zoonotic diseases are caused by germs that spread between animals and people. Animals can carry viruses and bacteria that humans can encounter directly, through contact, or indirectly, through things like soil or water supply, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"As you make that interface between humans and the natural world smaller, we just come in more contact with those things and climate enhances the ability for viruses to infect us more easily," said Pan. He said our risk for any zoonotic or emerging viral infections is going to rise over time.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/MGLRU-LPC-2022

Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year.

MGLRU benchmarks continue to look very promising across a wide variety of workloads and a diverse spectrum of hardware. From Chrome OS and Android up through desktops/workstations and even servers, MGLRU is able to often deliver better performance due to being less taxing than the existing page reclamation code that has also been acknowledged as often making poor eviction choices.

Jesse Barnes‎ and Rom Lemarchand, both of Google, presented yesterday at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 (LPC2022) on the latest MGLRU happenings. They reiterated the expectation that MGLRU should make it to mainline with Linux 6.1, there are numerous kernel downstreams and backports already using the code in production, and benchmarks continue to look promising.

[...] As for the MGLRU prospects for Linux 6.1, Andrew Morton commented that he'd like to move the MGLRU patches to his "mm-stable" branch later this week. Though he has expressed some concern over the level of code review and that code commenting could be improved upon. He's hoping though that things will get pushed along. We'll see when the Linux 6.1 merge window opens up in October if MGLRU is ready for mainline.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New Research Exposes the Pervasive Practice of Fake Online Product Reviews:

Can you really trust that online product review before you make a purchase decision? New research has found that the practice of faking online product reviews may be more pervasive than you think.

According to researchers, a wide array of product marketers actually purchases fake online reviews through an online marketplace found through social media. As a result, marketers receive many reviews and high-average ratings on e-commerce sites that include Amazon, Walmart and Wayfair, among others.

[...] Here's how it works: Sellers post in private online groups to promote their products. They then pay customers to purchase certain products and leave positive reviews. These social media groups exist for a number of online retailers.

[...] To conduct their research, the study authors built a sample of approximately 1,500 products that were observed soliciting fake reviews over a nine-month period. The researchers found that the types of products involved represented many categories. They then tracked the outcomes of these products before and after the buying of fake reviews, and were able to document how the platform, in this case Amazon, regulates fake reviews.

"For the products in our research observed buying fake reviews, roughly half of their reviews were eventually deleted, but the deletions occurred with an average lag of over 100 days, allowing sellers to benefit from the short-term boost in ratings, reviews and sales," says Proserpio. "Almost none of the sellers purchasing fake reviews were well-known brands. This is consistent with other research that has shown online reviews are more effective and more critical to smaller, lesser-known brands."

Journal Reference:
Sherry He, Brett Hollenbeck, Davide Proserpio, The Market for Fake Reviews, Market Sci, 2022. DOI: 10.1287/mksc.2022.1353

Original Submission

upstart writes:

EU upholds Google's 4.1B euro fine for bundling search with Android:

Google has lost its latest battle with European Union regulators. This morning, the EU General Court upheld Google's record fine for bundling Google Search and Chrome with Android. The initial ruling was reached in July 2018 with a 4.34 billion euro fine attached, and while that number has been knocked down to 4.125 billion euro ($4.13 billion), it's still the EU's biggest fine ever.

The EU takes issue with the way Google licenses Android and associated Google apps like the Play Store to manufacturers. The Play Store and Google Play Services are needed to build a competitive smartphone, but getting them from Google requires signing a number of contracts that the EU says stifles competition.

The Commission zeroed in on three unlawful restrictions. First, Google bundles Google Chrome and Search with Android. The company requires Android manufacturers to sign a "Mobile Application Distribution Agreement" (MADA) contract, which says that manufacturers that want to include one Google product must include a large collection of them and make Google the default. There are even requirements for where icons and widgets should be placed.

The second unlawful restriction is the contract's "anti-fragmentation agreement," which says that anyone who creates a fork of Android, even as a separate product or under a different brand, will have their company's Google app license instantly revoked. The third issue concerns Google's revenue-sharing agreements, which give manufacturers adhering to all these rules a share of the Google search and Google ad revenue that a customer generates.

The EU Commission found that "the objective of all those restrictions was to protect and strengthen Google's dominant position in relation to general search services and, therefore, the revenue obtained by Google through search advertisements."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Major volcanic events linked to the slowing of tectonic plates:

In the past history of Earth there have been times when magma from the molten mantle has flowed out into, or over, the solid crust of the planet. In the cases where these major volcanic events have led to excessive accumulations of lava, the resulting formations have been termed Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs). Some LIPs have an aerial extent of a few million km2 and involve volumes of igneous rock totaling up to a million km3. Such phenomena clearly had major impacts on the geology, structure and natural environments where they occurred.

[...] In the new study, led by scientists in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, chemical data was obtained from ancient mudstone deposits in Wales by drilling a borehole down to a depth of 1.5 km. Analysis of the chemical markers enabled the researchers to link two key events that occurred around 183 million years ago, during the Toarcian stage at the end of the Early Jurassic Period.

The team discovered that this time period coincides directly with the occurrence of the major volcanic activity that gave rise to the Karoo and Ferrar LIP's which covered parts of what are today southern Africa and Antarctica with lava. This time was also characterized by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, by some of the most severe climatic and environmental changes ever, and by the Pliensbachian–Toarcian extinction event that affected the world's fauna and flora.

hubie writes:

Local food outlets received significantly more attention as a result of the pandemic, but one should not expect the elevated interest to continue:

The COVID‐19 pandemic affected American households in countless ways, but according to researchers, some of the most tangible shifts are taking place in the food system.

A combination of supply chain issues, tighter budgets, concern about shopping in public spaces, and increases in at-home preparation has led to a greater interest in sourcing food locally, but the question remains how long that interest will last. A team of researchers from Penn State's Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education conducted a study to find out.

[...] "During the pandemic, food consumption changed and so did the sourcing of that food," said Martina Vecchi, assistant professor of agricultural economics at Penn State and lead author on the study. "A lot of people started exploring different ways of purchasing food and we wanted to understand the determining factors in their decisions."

[...] "We thought of those as the two mechanisms that could influence the willingness to buy this type of product: anxiety and sense of community," Vecchi said. "We assumed that as people got more anxious because of the pandemic, they would buy more local food because they thought it was safer. We also thought it might strengthen their sense of community and would therefore reflect a higher willingness to pay for local food."

The results show a trend in the opposite direction. As anxiety increased, sense of community decreased. Vecchi explains that the rise in local food sales during the pandemic may simply be a byproduct of supply chain issues and fears about supermarkets, not a reflection of permanent changes in consumer behavior.

"It doesn't appear that their actual willingness to invest in local food was higher," Vecchi said. "Sure, they were paying for local food, just because they felt that was the safest option, but it's not that their actual willingness to pay for it was higher."

[...] "My advice to policymakers and farmers is to try and deal with consumers' anxiety and their sense of community first," Vecchi said. "We have to solve for that if we want to sustain a vibrant local food economy."

Good luck trying to manage anxiety in our world of social media news.

Journal Reference:
Martina Vecchi, Edward C. Jaenicke, Claudia Schmidt, Local food in times of crisis: The impact of COVID-19 and two reinforcing primes [open], Agribusiness, 2022. DOI: 10.1002/agr.21754

Original Submission

upstart writes:

DART slams into Dimorphos: online, live observation of the impact - 26 Sept. 2022. - The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0:

Next 26 Sept. 2022, after a 10-month long journey, the Nasa's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft will reach the climax of its mission. It will impact on Dimorphos, the satellite of asteroid (65803) Didymos, to test its deflection by kinetic impactor. We will show you the target asteroid live, to hopefully spot any brightness increase after the collision!

The NASA's DART probe, impacting on its target asteroid Dimorphos, will be the first test ever of a planetary defence mission. The idea is to use the same technique in the future, just in case an asteroid will be found on a route of collision with the Earth. Testing this before the real need is vital.

As always, the Virtual Telescope Project wanted to bring to you such a unique opportunity: spying in real-time the target asteroid around the impact time, to hopefully record and see together any brightness increase due to collision. We spotted DART soon after it was launched in Nov. 2021, now we wanted to show you its final fate. Unfortunately, asteroid (65803) Didymos is currently too South in the sky to be seen from Italy, where are telescopes are installed.

Original Submission

Florida-Sized 'Doomsday Glacier' in Antarctica May Slip Into the Ocean More Quickly

upstart writes:

Florida-Sized 'Doomsday Glacier' In Antarctica May Slip Into The Ocean More Quickly:

When measured across geological timescales that span eons, it's fair to say the massive Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is in the midst of a collapse. Now new data drawn from the seafloor suggests that it could retreat even faster than previously thought, leading to dramatic impacts on global sea levels.

If the entirety of the Florida-sized ice sheet and some surrounding ice were to slide into the ocean, it could raise sea levels by three to ten feet spelling potential devastation for a number of coastal communities worldwide.

For context, we've seen less than a foot of sea level rise over the past three decades, and that's been enough to increase flooding in a number of places. The worst case scenario were we to lose the Thwaites would redraw coastline maps around the world.

'Doomsday Glacier' is Teetering Even Closer to Disaster Than Scientists Thought

upstart writes:

Researchers say the icy mass is "holding on by its fingernails":

Underwater robots that peered under Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier," saw that its doom may come sooner than expected with an extreme spike in ice loss. A detailed map of the seafloor surrounding the icy behemoth has revealed that the glacier underwent periods of rapid retreat within the last few centuries, which could be triggered again through melt driven by climate change.

[...] The Thwaites Glacier extends well below the ocean's surface and is held in place by jagged points on the seafloor that slow the glacier's slide into the water. Sections of seafloor that grab hold of a glacier's underbelly are known as "grounding points," and play a key role in how quickly a glacier can retreat.

In the new study, an international team of researchers used an underwater robot to map out one of Thwaites' past grounding points: a protruding seafloor ridge known as "the bump," which is around 2,133 feet (650 m) below the surface. The resulting map revealed that at some point during the last two centuries, when the bump was propping up Thwaites Glacier, the glacier's ice mass retreated more than twice as fast as it does now.