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An Anonymous Coward writes:

An Australian company is trialing glow in the dark road markings to improve road safety. The trial is a part of a $4 million government program installing new innovative treatments across regional Victoria. Describing it as a "photo-luminescent delineation treatment" the government hoped it would provide drivers with a stronger visual signal to follow in low light.

The 'smarter path' line markings use the natural science of photoluminescence – similar to the process used in glow-in-the-dark childrens' stickers, toys or watches.

When it's dark, the coating emits light it has absorbed and stored through the day, so that the lines and pavement markings can be better seen.

[...] Mr Emanuelli said while overcast days may affect the light's longevity, they usually last "most of the night" after sunny days.

It only took 40 years to get TRON in real life. How soon can we expect the T1000?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wizards of the Coast files lawsuit to stop publication of tabletop game, alleging trademark violation and 'reprehensible content':

Renton, Wash.-based gaming company Wizards of the Coast filed a preliminary injunction in Seattle last week that seeks to prevent the release of a Wisconsin company's upcoming tabletop game, citing conflicts over both intellectual property rights and allegedly "racist and transphobic content."

Wizards of the Coast, owned by conglomerate Hasbro, is the current publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, the audience for which has been growing steadily over the course of the last several years.

The company's injunction, filed on Sept. 8 in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, aims to stop the publication of Star Frontiers: New Genesis, a tabletop space opera role-playing game that's currently under development at TSR LLC, headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wisc.

TSR LLC (a.k.a. "TSR3.5" or "NuTSR") is the latest company to lay claim to the name and legacy of the defunct TSR Inc., which is best known for publishing the original version of Dungeons & Dragons in 1973 and was acquired by Wizards in 1997.

TSR LLC was founded in June 2021 by Ernie Gygax, son of late D&D creator Gary Gygax; Stephen Dinehart; and Justin LaNasa, the owner and operator of the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva. The Museum is located on the site of the first office that Gary Gygax opened for TSR Inc. in 1976.

takyon writes:

GeForce GPUs are 80% of EVGA's revenue—but it's cutting ties with Nvidia anyway

Graphics card manufacturer EVGA has made a name for itself manufacturing and selling Nvidia's GeForce GPUs for two decades, including some of the more attractively priced options on the market. But according to the YouTubers at Gamers Nexus, analyst Jon Peddie, and an EVGA forum post, EVGA is officially terminating its relationship with Nvidia and will not be manufacturing cards based on the company's RTX 4000-series GPUs.

EVGA's graphics cards have exclusively used Nvidia GPUs since its founding in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales represent 80 percent of EVGA's revenue, making this a momentous and arguably company-endangering change. But EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus that the decision was about "principle" rather than financials—Han complained about a lack of communication from Nvidia about new products, including information about pricing and availability.

Nvidia's pricing strategy was apparently another sore point for EVGA. Nvidia's first-party Founders Edition cards could often undercut the pricing of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to either lower prices or lose sales as a result.

Nvidia may not be entirely at fault here—the wider dynamics of the GPU market are also tough to navigate. As Peddie also points out, even as GPU costs have gone up, profit margins for the board partners that manufacture Nvidia GPUs have gone down. Modern high-end GPUs have massively higher power, cooling, and PCI Express signaling requirements than cards from just a few years ago, making them more expensive to design and manufacture, and reporting about the RTX 4000 series indicates that that trend is only going to continue.

EVGA also makes power supplies, motherboards, keyboards, mice, etc.

Also at Tom's Hardware, The Verge, and Notebookcheck.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

No one can really agree on what makes each of us laugh, so designing an artificial intelligence (AI) system with a sense of humor is enormously challenging:

Since at least the time of inquiring minds like Plato, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over the question, "What's so funny?" The Greeks attributed the source of humor to feeling superior at the expense of others. German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed humor was a way to release pent-up energy. US comedian Robin Williams tapped his anger at the absurd to make people laugh.

It seems no one can really agree on the question of "What's so funny?" So imagine trying to teach a robot how to laugh. But that's exactly what a team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan are trying to do by designing an AI that takes its cues through a shared laughter system. The scientists describe their innovative approach to building a funny bone for the Japanese android 'Erica' in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

[...] In the shared-laughter model, a human initially laughs and the AI system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. This approach required designing three subsystems – one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh, and a third to choose the type of appropriate laughter.

[...] The type of laughter is also important, because in some cases a polite chuckle may be more appropriate than a loud snort of laughter. The experiment was limited to social versus mirthful laughs.

There are still plenty of other laughing styles to model and train Erica on before she is ready to hit the stand-up circuit. "There are many other laughing functions and types which need to be considered, and this is not an easy task. We haven't even attempted to model unshared laughs even though they are the most common," Inoue noted.

Of course, laughter is just one aspect of having a natural human-like conversation with a robot.

"Robots should actually have a distinct character, and we think that they can show this through their conversational behaviors, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style," Inoue added. "We do not think this is an easy problem at all, and it may well take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend."

Journal Reference:
Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala and Tatsuya Kawahara, Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue [open], Front. Robot. AI, 2022. DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2022.933261

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Talk with your hands? You might think with them too!:

How do we understand words? Scientists don't fully understand what happens when a word pops into your brain. A research group led by Professor Shogo Makioka at the Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, wanted to test the idea of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition proposes that people understand the words for objects through how they interact with them, so the researchers devised a test to observe semantic processing of words when the ways that the participants could interact with objects were limited.

Words are expressed in relation to other words; a "cup," for example, can be a "container, made of glass, used for drinking." However, you can only use a cup if you understand that to drink from a cup of water, you hold it in your hand and bring it to your mouth, or that if you drop the cup, it will smash on the floor. Without understanding this, it would be difficult to create a robot that can handle a real cup. In artificial intelligence research, these issues are known as symbol grounding problems, which map symbols onto the real world.

[...] "It was very difficult to establish a method for measuring and analyzing brain activity. The first author, Ms. Sae Onishi, worked persistently to come up with a task, in a way that we were able to measure brain activity with sufficient accuracy," Professor Makioka explained.

upstart writes:

Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter dodge questions on social media and national security:

Executives from four of the biggest social media companies testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, defending their platforms and their respective safety, privacy and moderation failures in recent years.

Congress managed to drag in a relatively fresh set of product-focused executives this time around, including TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, who testified for the first time before lawmakers, and longtime Meta executive Chris Cox. The hearing was convened to explore social media's impact on national security broadly and touched on topics ranging from domestic extremism and misinformation to CSAM and China.

Committee Chair Sen. Gary Peters pressed each company to disclose the number of employees they have working full-time on trust and safety and each company in turn refused to answer — even though they received the question prior to the hearing. Twitter General Manager of Consumer and Revenue Jay Sullivan chipped in the only numerical response, noting that the company has 2,200 people working on trust and safety "across Twitter," though it wasn't clear if those employees also did other kinds of work.

It's no secret that social media moderation is patchy, reactive and uneven, largely because these companies refuse to invest more deeply in the teams that protect people on their platforms. "We've been trying to get this information for a long time," Peters said. "This is why we get so frustrated."

upstart writes:

Team led by Japanese researchers reveals best way to put crying baby to sleep:

The evidence-based soothing strategy was derived from experiments carried out in Japan and Italy, which were analyzed and published in the journal Current Biology on Tuesday.

[Senior author Kumi] Kuroda and colleagues wanted to explore this further in humans, and to compare the effect against other comforting behaviors such as rocking in one spot.

They recruited 21 mother-baby pairs aged 0-7 months, and tested them under four conditions: carrying while moving, held still by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot.

Crying decreased and heart rates slowed within 30 seconds when infants were transported. There was a similar effect when they were rocked, but not when held motionless.

[...] This suggested that, contrary to assumptions, maternal holding was insufficient to calm a child, and the transport response was an important factor.

Next, they looked at the impact of carrying infants for five minutes, finding that the activity put 46 percent of them to sleep, and an additional 18 percent fell asleep in the minute after.

This showed that not only did carrying stop crying, it also promoted sleep.

But there was a wrinkle: when infants were put to bed, more than one-third became alert within 20 seconds.

hubie writes:

The well-tempered tweet: Least hate tweets at 15-18 °C (59-65°F) across the USA:

Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12-21 degrees Celsius (54-70 °F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behaviour across the USA, a new study finds. Analysing billions of tweets posted on the social media platform Twitter in the USA, researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found hate speech increasing across climate zones, income groups and belief systems for temperatures too hot or too cold. This indicates limits to adaptation to extreme temperatures, and sheds light on a yet underestimated societal impact of climate change: conflict in the digital sphere with implications for both societal cohesion and mental health.

[...] Across the USA, the authors found low levels of hate tweets in a 'feel-good window' of 12-21°C (54-70 °F); the minimum of hate tweets is reached for temperatures between 15 and 18°C (59-65°F) . Temperatures hotter and colder are linked to increases in hate tweets. The precise feel-good temperature window varies a little across climate zones, depending on what temperatures are common. Temperatures above 30°C, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit, are however consistently linked to strong increases in online hate across all climate zones and socioeconomic differences such as income, religious beliefs or political preferences.

Journal Reference:
Annika Stechemesser, Anders Levermann, Leonie Wenz. Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from four billion tweets [open]. (2022) The Lancet Planetary Health. DOI: 10.1016/PIIS2542-5196(22)00173-5

Original Submission

MostCynical writes:

Science News and the Guardian are reporting a story from Nature

Five patients are now in remission after a successful trial of a treatment for Lupus using CAR T cell therapy.

That treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, seems to have reset the patients' immune systems, sending their autoimmune disease into remission, researchers report September 15 in Nature Medicine. It's not yet clear how long the relief will last or whether the therapy will work for all patients.

Even so, the results could be "revolutionary," says immunologist Linrong Lu of the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

CAR-T cell therapy has been used for various types of cancer, but it's still in testing for autoimmune diseases

In the new study, all five participants went into remission without needing additional drugs beyond the genetically engineered CAR-T cells. The target of those engineered cells — immune cells key for fighting off infections — returned a few months after being wiped out. Some of those cells are primed to attack viruses and bacteria but not the study participants' healthy cells.

Journal References:
1.) Andreas Mackensen, Fabian Müller, Dimitrios Mougiakakos, et al. Anti-CD19 CAR T cell therapy for refractory systemic lupus erythematosus Nature Medicine. Published online September 15, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-022-02017-5.

2.) Dimitrios Mougiakakos, Gerhard Krönke, Simon Völkl, et al. CD19-targeted CAR T cells in refractory systemic lupus erythematosus. New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 385, August 5, 2021, p. 567. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2107725.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Settlement sees HP compensating some customers in Europe with $1.35 million fund:

HP continues to pay for abruptly blocking third-party ink from its printers. The company has agreed to pay compensation to additional customers impacted by HPs use of DRM to prevent third-party ink and toner from working in its printers. The settlement pertaining to customers in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal comes after the company already agreed to a settlement in the US and was fined in Italy.

HP printer owners were annoyed, to say the least, in 2016 when HP introduced Dynamic Security, a firmware update that prevented ink and toner cartridges lacking an HP chip from working in HP printers. Customers who already owned these printers suddenly faced error messages preventing them from printing with cartridges that were fully functioning before. At the time, HP claimed that the move was about helping customers avoid counterfeit and subpar ink and protecting HP's IP. However, it largely felt like a business tactic aimed at protecting one of HP's biggest profit drivers at the time, which was tied to a declining industry.

[...] Euroconsumers noted that while it alleged that "consumers were not properly informed that Dynamic Security would cause printers to reject certain non-HP replacement ink cartridges," the settlement isn't "an acknowledgment of any fault or wrongdoing by HP nor as an acknowledgment by Euroconsumers of the groundlessness of its claims."

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