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upstart writes:

Manufacturers could be forced to include repair instructions:

In yet another sign the right-to-repair movement is gaining ground in the United States, manufacturers could be forced to provide fix-it guides and maintenance instructions with certain products.

The FTC this week said it's seeking public comments on this proposed rule change.

Those proposals also include a shakeup of those yellow energy-usage labels equipment makers must attach to certain products: a wider range of goods would need to carry the stickers, and the information on them may have to be posted online too, seeing as fewer of us are going out shopping and seeing appliances in stores – if the proposals are approved.

Updated Energy Star labeling is all well and good, but it's not as big as the possibility that manufacturers could be forced to include repair information, something many have been loathe to do.

FTC chairwoman Lina Khan last week said [PDF] research by the regulator demonstrated that US companies use a variety of tricks to prevent folks from repairing their own products. By doing so, manufacturers "raise costs for consumers, stifle innovation, close off business opportunit[ies] for independent repair shops, create unnecessary electronic waste, delay timely repairs, and undermine resiliency," Khan said.

Much of the proposed changes focus on the energy-usage labels, which the FTC is considering adding to clothes dryers, air purifiers, "miscellaneous refrigerator products," a broader range of light bulbs, home ice makers, humidifiers, "miscellaneous gas products," cooking tops, and electric spas.

That focus makes it a bit less clear which products would be affected by the repair instruction requirements. In a press release about the proposals, the FTC mentioned its 2021 Nixing the Fix report that homed in on the struggles people potentially face repairing their own vehicles and mobile devices.

Despite that, the FTC told us these latest repair instruction proposals so far only apply to appliances and equipment covered by the yellow energy label regulations.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Korean auto giant Hyundai investigating child labor in its U.S. supply chain:

Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS), Korea's top automaker, is investigating child labor violations in its U.S. supply chain and plans to "sever ties" with Hyundai suppliers in Alabama found to have relied on underage workers, the company's global chief operating officer Jose Munoz told Reuters on Wednesday.

A Reuters investigative report in July documented children, including a 12-year-old, working at a Hyundai-controlled metal stamping plant in rural Luverne, Alabama, called SMART Alabama, LLC.

Following the Reuters report, Alabama's state Department of Labor, in coordination with federal agencies, began investigating SMART Alabama. Authorities subsequently launched a child labor probe at another of Hyundai's regional supplier plants, Korean-operated SL Alabama, finding children as young as age 13.

In an interview before a Reuters event in Detroit on Wednesday, Munoz said Hyundai intends to "sever relations" with the two Alabama supplier plants under scrutiny for deploying underage labor "as soon as possible."

upstart writes:

Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex:

The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is often called the "father of astronomy." He's credited with discovering the Earth's precession (how it wobbles on its axis), and calculating the motions of the Sun and Moon, among other achievements. Hipparchus was also believed to be compiling a star catalog—perhaps the earliest known attempt to map the night sky to date—sometime between 162 and 127 BCE, based on references in historical texts.

Scholars have been searching for that catalog for centuries. Now, thanks to a technique called multispectral imaging, they have found what seems to be the first known Greek remnants of Hipparchus' star catalog. It was hidden beneath Christian texts on medieval parchment, according to a new paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

Multispectral imaging is a method that takes visible images in blue, green, and red and combines them with an infrared image and an X-ray image of an object. This can reveal minute hints of pigment, as well as hidden drawings or writings underneath various layers of paint or ink. For instance, researchers have previously used the technique to reveal hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously believed to be blank. And last year, Swiss scientists used multispectral imaging to reconstruct photographic plates created by French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who pioneered color photography and snagged the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts. The method corrected for distortions of color that occurred as a result of Lippmann's technique.

The current paper arose from research into the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a palimpsest that originated at Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It consists of 11 individual manuscripts, with Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament and Greek text of the New Testament, among other content. Those texts have been dated to the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, respectively. The codex was kept at Westminster College in Cambridge until 2010, when Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, purchased it from Sotheby's. It's now part of the Green Collection on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, although a few folios are stored elsewhere.

A mysterious unnamed contributor writes:

U of Iowa has started testing an autonomous vehicle under rural conditions--long routes, roads with no lane markings, snow/ice, and eventually gravel roads as well (in a later phase). This link includes a summary of their work during the first year of the project, https://autonomoustuff.com/velocity-magazine/velocity-2022/on-the-rural-road-to-autonomy The study was, "initiated by the University of Iowa's National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) transportation safety research center and funded by a $7 million USD grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT)..."

In true big-Federal-budget style, they have commissioned and built a test vehicle into a Ford Transit 350HD with every known (to me) autonomous sensor and buzz-word technology:

The Customized Research & Development Platform includes:

        PACMod by-wire kit
        AStuff Spectra rugged GPU computing edge AI platform
        AStuff Spectra 2 rugged dual-GPU computing edge AI platform
        Multiple Continental ARS 408-21 RADARs
        Hexagon | NovAtel PwrPak7D-E2 with dual VEXXIS GNSS-502 antennas
        Mobileye Camera Development Kit (includes lane modelling, lane type, obstacle detection, obstacle classification, pedestrian detection, application warnings, traffic sign recognition)
        Multiple Velodyne Puck and Velodyne Puck Hi-res LiDAR sensors
        Cohda Wireless MK5 OBU communication solution for receiving smart infrastructure vehicle-to-everything (V2X) data
        Multiple Leopard imaging cameras for traffic light detection
        Stand-alone data logger for redundant data acquisition

The technology stack, including power distribution, high-speed ethernet switches, two computers (one for LiDAR and RADAR perception processing and classification, one for the autonomy system), data loggers and the communication system, sits in the cowl panel of the vehicle. The sensors are positioned per Figure 1.

Once AutonomouStuff delivered the equipped vehicle, the UI team added more sensors to monitor the weather and for the physiological assessments. UI and AutonomouStuff completed the initial development and testing of the ADS Transit vehicle in early 2021.

upstart writes:

Mars rover Curiosity reaches sulfate-rich Mount Sharp:

NASA's long-serving Curiosity Mars rover has finally reached an objective it has been ambling toward since landing on the red planet a decade ago: the "sulfate-bearing unit" of Mount Sharp.

The region was first spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying the Gale Crater region of Mars since 2006. NASA flagged the area for investigation because of a high concentration of salty minerals that suggests it was once covered in water.

"Soon after arriving, the rover discovered a diverse array of rock types and signs of past water," NASA said. Among the signs were "popcorn-textured nodules" and minerals including magnesium sulfate (epsom salts), calcium sulfate (gypsum), and sodium chloride (table salt).

[...] Curiosity has had its sights set on Mount Sharp since landing on Mars in 2012. The three-mile (5km) mountain has appeared in Curiosity's photos from the Martian surface for years, and in 2020 NASA began highlighting the rover's journey up the mountain to the sulfate site.

[...] "The sand ridges were gorgeous," Elena Amador-French said. "You see perfect little rover tracks on them. And the cliffs were beautiful – we got really close to the walls."

NASA hopes that its research in the sulfate-rich unit will provide additional clues as to how Mars dried up and turned into the barren wasteland we now believe it to be. Curiosity found evidence earlier this year that methane-producing life may have existed on Mars, and in the meantime simulations of Mars' environment may have provided a hypothesis that Curiosity can at least contribute to solving.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://kauainownews.com/2022/10/18/kauaʻi-mayor-signs-proactive-law-that-regulates-development-in-areas-prone-to-sea-level-rise/

Mayor Derek S. K. Kawakami signed into law a proactive bill that amends construction design standards to incorporate expected sea level rise impacts – making Kaua'i one of the first counties in the nation to enact development regulations based on scientific modeling projections.

[...] Kaua'i is no stranger to the impacts of climate change, as we've seen in the floods of 2018 and the recent historic south swell and king tides in July which resulted in significant infrastructure damage," Maor Kawakami said. "This new ordinance ensures that the inevitable effects of coastal erosion and flooding are determining factors in the future growth and development of our island."

[...] The ordinance requires the lowest floor of all new residential construction, and substantial residential construction improvements, to be elevated two feet above the highest sea level rise flood elevation. It also requires all new non-residential construction, and substantial non-residential improvements, to be elevated at least one foot above the highest sea level rise flood elevation.

[...] Fletcher said the United Nations' latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports say with high confidence that sea level rise will persist for "centuries to millennia" due to ongoing warming of the oceans and melting of the ice sheets.

"There is nothing we can do to stop sea level rise," Fletcher said "This measure will minimize the threat to public health and safety, promote resilient planning and design and minimize the expenditure of public money for costly flood control projects necessitated by accelerating sea level rise. Kaua'i is providing an example for coastal communities around the nation of the next right step in building community resiliency to climate change impacts."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

GitHub Copilot may steer Microsoft into a copyright lawsuit:

GitHub Copilot – a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet – has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim.

On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work – pulled from the training data – to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided.

That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code.

Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns.

upstart writes:

Meta grudgingly agrees to sell Giphy after admitting defeat in UK battle:

Considering that Meta bought WhatsApp and Instagram without issue, it may come as a surprise that Meta's purchase of Giphy will be blocked. But that's the situation, as the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has now ordered Meta to sell Giphy.

The decision comes two years after the merger came under the increasingly intense scrutiny of UK regulators. Fighting every step of the way, Meta has since said in a statement to Reuters that although it's "disappointed" in the decision, it will "accept today's ruling as the final word on the matter."

Among the reasons why Meta must sell Giphy are the CMA's concerns that Meta and Giphy dominate the GIF marketplace and that Meta could cut off competitors from accessing Giphy content. Meta could also possibly change its terms and charge its competitors exorbitantly for access. This, the CMA feared, threatened to increase Facebook's already dominant presence in the social media marketplace by pushing users to prefer the platform where they can access the best GIFs. The regulator noted that 73 percent of the time UK residents spend on social media is on Facebook.

Also at issue was Giphy's prior place in the display advertising market at the time of Meta's (then Facebook's) $400 million acquisition. The CMA seemed to suggest that Meta's acquisition could have been driven by an urge to shut down a budding Giphy display advertising business that could have diversified display ad choices for UK businesses. (Meta told Ars that it believes there is no evidence to suggest this.) In a press release, the CMA said that Meta already controls half of UK display advertising.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Billions in funding could kick-start the US battery materials industry:

Both public and private funding for battery manufacturing in the US have exploded, sped by the passage earlier this year of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives for electric vehicles. Under the requirements in the new electric-vehicle tax credits, battery components must be sourced and made in the US or its free-trade partners. But much of the investment in battery manufacturing so far has been focused on later stages in the supply chain, especially factories that make battery cells for electric vehicles.

The new spending is an attempt to build out the earlier parts of the supply chain so the materials that go into a battery can also be made or sourced domestically. Making battery precursors in the US could help drive down costs for new technologies and ensure a steady supply of batteries, as well as establishing new companies and creating jobs.

The funding is a step toward "building the foundation of a domestic battery industry," Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins, said in an email.

Multibillion-dollar manufacturing plants for battery cells and EVs are popping up all over the country. But earlier parts of the supply chain are still largely based in Asia, especially China, which makes up the vast majority of global capacity for mineral processing and electrode manufacturing.

This funding announcement reflects an attempt by the US to catch up, especially for processing the minerals used to make batteries. Four of the projects that received funding are companies working to extract and process lithium, a key metal for lithium-ion batteries. The supply of lithium may need to increase by 20 times between now and 2050 to meet demand. Lithium production represents "one of the vulnerable pieces of the supply chain," Nahm says.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An international team of researchers has conducted a long-term experiment aboard the International Space Station to test the effect of space radiation on mouse embryonic stem cells. Their findings will contribute to helping scientists better assess the safety and risks related to space radiation for future human space flights.

In their study, the team performed a direct quantitative measurement of the biological effect of space radiation by launching frozen mouse embryonic stem cells from the ground to the International Space Station, exposing them to space radiation for over four years, and quantifying the biological effect by examining chromosome aberrations. Their experiment results show, for the first time, that the actual biological effect of space radiation is in close agreement with earlier predictions based on the physical measurement of space radiation.

Ordinary people are now able to travel in space, and the possibility of long-term manned flights to deep space, such as to the moon and Mars, is increasing. Yet space radiation remains a limiting factor for manned exploration. Scientists have been conducting intensive studies to measure physical doses of space radiation to better understand its effect on the human body.

However, since most of the studies until now were conducted on the ground, not in space, the results suffered from uncertainties, given that space radiation consists of many kinds of particles with different energies, and astronauts are continuously irradiated with low-dose rates. The actual space environment cannot be precisely reproduced on the ground.

The team prepared about 1,500 cryotubes containing highly radio-sensitized mouse embryonic stem cells and sent them to space. Their study was complex in its scope, with seven years of work before launch, four years of work after launch, and five years for analysis. "It was difficult to prepare the experiment and to interpret the results, but we successfully obtained quantitative results related to space radiation, meeting our original objective," said Professor Morita.

upstart writes:

Why do mosquitos attack some folks and ignore others? Science has an answer:

Scientific American:

The researchers analyzed the subjects' scent profiles to see what might account for this vast difference. They found a pattern: the most attractive subjects tended to produce greater levels of carboxylic acids from their skin while the least attractive subjects produced much less.

Carboxylic acids are commonplace organic compounds. Humans produce them in our sebum, which is the oily layer that coats our skin; there, the acids help to keep our skin moisturized and protected, Vosshall says. Humans release carboxylic acids at much higher levels than most animals, De Obaldia adds, though the amount varies from person to person. The new study had too few participants to say what personal characteristics make someone more likely to produce high levels of carboxylic acids—and there's no easy way to test your own skin's carboxylic acid levels outside of the laboratory, Vosshall says. (She muses, however, that sending people skin swabs in the mail could make for an interesting citizen science project in the future.)

But we do know that skin maintains a relatively constant level of carboxylic acids over time. This, in turn, leads to a consistent odor profile. (Mosquitoes could also be attracted to skin bacteria digesting the carboxylic acids we produce, Vosshall suggests.) When Vosshall and De Obaldia ran their tournament multiple times several months apart, they found that people's attractiveness rankings remained largely the same. Any personal factors that may have changed over those months—from what each subject ate to the kind of soap they used—didn't seem to make a difference.

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Original Submission

hubie writes:

Given a choice, captive bears mimic mixed diets of their wild peers:

Bears are not cats or dogs, and feeding them like they are likely shortens their lives.

A new study in Scientific Reports on the diets of giant pandas and sloth bears adds more evidence that bears are omnivores like humans and need a lot less protein than they are typically fed in zoos.

"Bears are not carnivores in the strictest sense like a cat where they consume a high-protein diet," said lead author Charles Robbins, a Washington State University wildlife biology professor. "In zoos forever, whether it's polar bears, brown bears or sloth bears, the recommendation has been to feed them as if they are high-protein carnivores. When you do that, you kill them slowly."

Journal Reference:
Robbins, C.T., Christian, A.L., Vineyard, T.G. et al. Ursids evolved early and continuously to be low-protein macronutrient omnivores [open]. Sci Rep 12, 15251 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19742-z

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new study from Uppsala University shows that using a weighted blanket at bedtime increases melatonin in young adults:

Previous research has shown that weighted blankets may ease insomnia in humans. However, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Hence, researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden experimented with 26 young men and women to examine if the bedtime use of a weighted blanket increases the production of sleep-promoting and anti-stress hormones like melatonin and oxytocin. In addition, they investigated whether the bedtime use of a weighted blanket (12 percent of participants' body weight) reduced the activity of stress systems in the body. [...]

"Using a weighted blanket increased melatonin concentrations in saliva by about 30 percent. However, no differences in oxytocin, cortisol, and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system were observed between the weighted and light blanket conditions," says Elisa Meth, first author and Ph.D. student at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences at Uppsala University.

Journal Reference:
Elisa M. S. Meth, Luiz Eduardo Mateus Brandão, Lieve T. van Egmond, et al., A weighted blanket increases pre-sleep salivary concentrations of melatonin in young, healthy adults [open], J Sleep Res, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/jsr.13743

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Russia finds 40% of its Chinese chip imports are defective:

As reported by The Register, pro-Putin newspaper Kommersant writes that the percentage of defective imported chips into Russia before the war was just 2%, which isn't very good considering how many components are found in today's electronic items. Now, almost eight months after the country invaded Ukraine, it stands at 40%.

Russia blames these failure rates on the pandemic impacting the supply chain and sanctions forcing it to import chips from the Chinese gray market, an area that not only comes with the threat of faulty products but is also unreliable and slow.

Many businesses have quit Russia as a result of the import restrictions, and those that are left must deal with sanction-skirting Chinese companies for semiconductors. Given that some of these duds were likely intended for military hardware supporting the war in Ukraine, one wonders if Russia and China's "friendship without limits" extends to imports of non-borked chips.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How the World Will Know If Russia Is Preparing to Launch a Nuke:

This week, NATO is conducting its regular, long-planned nuclear strike exercise known as "Steadfast Noon" to practice deploying fighter jets used to carry nuclear weapons. And Russia is expected to conduct its own nuclear drills sometime this month—as it typically does—in reaction to NATO's exercises.  While these rehearsals don't involve actual bombs, they come at a fraught moment, given Russian president Vladimir Putin's recent suggestion that the Kremlin could deploy nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine.

Officials from the United States and the United Kingdom have emphasized that they do not see indications that Russia is actively preparing to launch a nuclear strike. And the signals the global community has to draw on in monitoring the Russian nuclear weapons program, while not infallible, are robust. That means the world would likely know if a nuclear attack were imminent.

"We take any nuclear weapons or nuclear saber-rattling very seriously here," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters earlier this month. But, she added, "we have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture, nor do we have any indication that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons."

Similarly, Jeremy Fleming, director of the UK's GCHQ intelligence agency, said last week, "I would hope that we will see indicators if they started to go down that path." He added that there would be a "good chance" of detecting Russian preparations.