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upstart writes:

The ships full of gas waiting off Europe's coast:

The huge tankers are waiting. Off the coasts of Spain, Portugal, the UK and other European nations lie dozens of giant ships packed full of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Cooled to roughly -160C for transportation, the fossil fuel is in very high demand. Yet the ships remain at sea with their prized cargo.

After invading Ukraine in February, Russia curtailed gas supplies to Europe, sparking an energy crisis that sent the price of gas soaring. That led to fears of energy shortages and eye-watering bills for consumers.

[...] So why are ships loaded with LNG just hanging around Europe, exactly? The answer, as you might have guessed, is a little complicated.

Someone else who has watched the accumulation of vessels is Fraser Carson, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. This month, he counted 268 LNG ships on the water worldwide - noticeably above the one-year average of 241. Of those currently at sea, 51 are in the vicinity of Europe.

He explains that European nations plunged into a gas-buying spree over the summer that aimed to fill onshore storage tanks with gas. This was to ensure that heaps of fuel would be available to cover energy needs this winter.

The original target was to fill storage facilities to 80% of their total capacity by 1 November. That target has been met, and exceeded, far ahead of schedule. The latest data suggests storage is now at nearly 95% in total.

hubie writes:

The Great Salt Lake is getting saltier, creating a serious threat to the ecosystems and the economies that depend on it:

Starved for freshwater, the Great Salt Lake is getting saltier. The lake is losing sources of freshwater input to agriculture, urban growth and drought, and the drawdown is causing salt concentrations to spike beyond even the tolerance of brine shrimp and brine flies, according to Wayne Wurtsbaugh from Watershed Sciences in the Quinney College of Natural Resources.

Deciphering the ecological and economic consequences of this change is complex and unprecedented, and experts are closely observing another stressed saline lake for clues on what to expect next — Lake Urmia in Iran. This "sister lake" offers obvious, and troubling, parallels to the fate of the Great Salt Lake, according to new research from Wurtsbaugh and Somayeh Sima from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran.

[...] The Great Salt Lake and Lake Urmia in Iran were once remarkably similar in size, depth, salinity and geographic setting. High rates of urban growth there also fueled demand for irrigated agriculture and human uses, putting extreme stress on the ecosystem. Compared to the Great Salt Lake, the fate of Lake Urmia is on fast-forward.

Over just 20 years, diversions caused Urmia's salinity to jump from 190 grams of salt per liter of water to over 350 grams, Sima said. (For comparison, ocean water has a salinity of around 35 grams per liter.) The decline in Lake Urmia's ecosystem has been precipitous and easy to recognize. It has lost nearly all of its brine shrimp. How long brine shrimp can endure in increasingly salty water in the Great Salt Lake is a question researchers are eager to understand, especially for the south arm where salt concentrations are high, but still sustaining some shrimp.

[...] Lake Urmia has already lost most of its ecological and cultural function — but the Great Salt Lake has not yet crossed that precipice, say the authors. The ongoing crises at Great Salt Lake and Lake Urmia are not unique: Around the globe, other saline lakes are facing a similar crisis and are entirely desiccated or quickly losing water, Wurtsbaugh said. But communities are noticing, which gives him hope. Making any progress will require considerable sacrifice from the water users if the lakes are to be sustained, Wurtsbaugh said.

Journal Reference:
Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh and Somayeh Sima. Contrasting Management and Fates of Two Sister Lakes: Great Salt Lake (USA) and Lake Urmia (Iran), MDPI, 2022. DOI: 10.3390/w14193005

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Condensers promise to accelerate Java programs:

Project Leyden, an ambitious effort to improve startup time, performance, and footprint of Java programs, is set to offer condensers. A condenser is code that runs between compile time and run time and transforms the original program into a new, faster, and potentially smaller program.

In an online paper published October 13, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle, said a program's startup and warmup times and footprint could be improved by temporarily shifting some of its computation to a point either later in run time or backward to a point earlier than run time. Performance could further be boosted by constraining some computation related to Java's dynamic features, such as class loading, class redefinition, and reflection, thus enabling better code analysis and even more optimization.

Project Leyden will implement these shifting, constraining, and optimizating transformations as condensers, Reinhold said. Also, new language features will be investigated to allow developers to shift computation themselves, enabling further condensation. However, the Java Platform Specification will need to evolve to support these transformations. The JDK's tools and formats for code artifacts such as JAR files will also need to be extended to support condensers.

The condensation model offers developers greater flexibility, Reinhold said. Developers can choose which condensers to apply and in so doing choose whether and how to accept constraints that limit Java's natural dynamism. The condensation model also gives Java implementations considerable freedom. As long as a condenser preserves program meaning and does not impose constraints except those accepted by the developer, an implementation will have wide latitude for optimizing the result.

Original Submission

Mykl writes:

A consortium of companies, including the big hitters Google, Apple and Microsoft, are making another attempt to kill off the password. This time it's through a system known as Passkeys.

Passkeys work almost identically to the FIDO authenticators that allow us to use our phones, laptops, computers, and Yubico or Feitian security keys for multi-factor authentication. Just like the FIDO authenticators stored on these MFA devices, passkeys are invisible and integrate with Face ID, Windows Hello, or other biometric readers offered by device makers. There's no way to retrieve the cryptographic secrets stored in the authenticators short of physically dismantling the device or subjecting it to a jailbreak or rooting attack.

Ars Review Editor Ron Amadeo summed things up well last week when he wrote: "Passkeys just trade WebAuthn cryptographic keys with the website directly. There's no need for a human to tell a password manager to generate, store, and recall a secret—that will all happen automatically, with way better secrets than what the old text box supported, and with uniqueness enforced."

Given the nature of having the OS manage your credentials with other sites (without ever actually sending your biometric data, PIN or similar data), it becomes possible to share the same credentials across all logged in devices (think, iPhone, iPad, Mac all serviced by iCloud). Phishing sites would no longer be able to steal and re-use credentials.

It certainly sounds promising, though obviously a great deal of trust is given to the OS. What are other Soylentils' thoughts?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Postgres is eating relational:

Even as NoSQL databases keep booming, the relational party is very far from over. But among the relational crowd, one database keeps growing in popularity at the expense of its more established peers. Yes, I'm talking about PostgreSQL. The real question isn't why developers like PostgreSQL. There are plenty of reasons. No, the real question is why developers like it so much right now.

The PostgreSQL renaissance is several years old now, something I've written about repeatedly. The reasons for its popularity? There are several, as consultant Tanel Poder neatly summarizes:

1. Rich set of features 2. Extremely extensible (extensions, hooks) 3. Open source 4. 'Permissive' open source license

[...] At any rate, no one questions how good PostgreSQL is nor the part it plays in the industry trend that favors general-purpose databases. This isn't exactly news. What is news is the rush to modernize—and PostgreSQL's role in it.

[...] So even if another database model might actually be better for their use case, the "easy button" is to go PostgreSQL. As ex-AWS engineer Dave Cuthbert notes, "Far more apps are using relational [databases] because it was the only hammer they had."

OK, so the guy likes Postgresql. But what relational database do you or your company use, and why was the choice made? Has it lived up to its promises, or have you found that some things don't quite work as well as they might? What would you recommend today?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Marine coral shares many chemical and physical properties with bone, which makes it a potential substitute that could 'revolutionise' orthopaedic procedures:

Researchers at University of Galway have teamed up with local start-up Zoan BioMed to test the potential of coral to treat people with bone injuries.

Marine coral, composed of minerals and salts from surrounding water, shares many chemical and physical properties with bone. This may make it an excellent potential bone substitute or 'scaffold'.

Zoan BioMed grows tropical coral from its facility in Galway. Researchers from the university will work with the start-up to design a novel way of tracking and measuring the formation of bone in a lab.

The researchers said coral scaffolds have the potential to treat bone injuries and other issues, such as damage from tumour removal.

[...] "Critical to evaluating the potential of a new scaffold as it enters the market is the evaluation of its compatibility with human cells and its bone-forming potential."

Dr Cynthia Coleman is a cellular manufacturing and therapy expert at University of Galway and a long-time collaborator with Zoan BioMed. Coleman said the technology is "incredibly exciting" as it will allow researchers to measure cell changes as they move through different stages of bone formation.

"This method will help us understand the process by which individual cells become bone tissue and give us the tools to support collaborating academics and industrial partners as they develop technology to support bone formation in the clinic," Coleman added.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Glasgow's SWG3 will now be powered by dancer's body heat:

This renewable energy system runs via heat flowing through pipes that are charged as a thermal battery before being emitted back into the venue.

[...] It's claimed by SWG3 owners that the venue can completely disconnect from gas boilers, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.

The BODYHEAT system, produced by renewable energy company TownRock Energy, was first introduced to the venue as a trial during the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year at an estimated cost of £600,000.

"To put in perspective, if we were to go down a more conventional route with typical air conditioning, then your costs would probably be about 10% of that - so £60,000," Managing Director Andrew Fleming-Brown told the BBC.

Fleming-Brown also has said: "As well as being a huge step towards our goal of becoming net zero and will hopefully influence others from our industry and beyond to follow suit, working together to tackle climate change."

[...] "You know they don't want to be kind of beaten at cool clubbing technology." He adds: "They've seen what we've done in Glasgow and really want it in Berlin."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Invasive Species Leave Behind Their Friends, Hindering Colonization

For invasive species leaving their home, they leave not only their predators but also the species that helped them thrive.

Arriving to a new range or location, invasive species lose not only their enemies but also their friends—those relationships that benefit colonization.

[...] "In this paper, we show that many introduced species leave not only their enemies but also their friends behind," says Prof. Angela Moles. "This might help to explain why so many invasions fail in their early stages—about 60% of introduced species fail to establish."

This is the first meta-study to quantitatively examine the "Missed Mutualist Hypothesis," the notion that invasive species leave behind their native mutualists—species whose relationships provide a net benefit to survival and reproduction. The Missed Mutualist Hypothesis is the overlooked parallel to the better tested and understood Enemy Release Hypothesis, which describes the advantage afforded to invasive species when they lose their native predators.

[...] By appreciating the Missed Mutualist Hypothesis, we can consider the species-species interactions of introduced populations, recognizing not only lost enemies but missed mutualists and thereby bolstering our biosecurity policy.

"For instance, the spread of introduced pines can be limited by a lack of fungi in the soil," says Prof. Moles. "Yet addition of fungi to help pine plantations grow is almost totally unmonitored worldwide.

More information: Angela T. Moles et al, Advancing the missed mutualist hypothesis, the under-appreciated twin of the enemy release hypothesis, Biology Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0220

Original Submission

hubie writes:

UC Riverside psychologists' experiments explain which choice rules daily life:

Will you read this news release now or decide to read it later? "Precrastination," defined as the tendency to expend extra effort to get things done as soon as possible, could explain what you will do.

We have all probably precrastinated, that is, completed tasks right away, even if that meant putting in more work. An unresolved question about precrastination is: Do we rush to get things done because we want to simply act as quickly as possible and worry about decision making later, or do we want to get decision making over and done with, so we needn't have to worry about it subsequently?

A team of psychologists at the University of California, Riverside, may have an answer: Given a choice, we opt for the latter because we want to have our minds clear.

[...] "Precrastination is widespread," Rosenbaum said. "When you answer emails too quickly, when you submit papers before they have been polished, you are precrastinating. But why do we rush? What's the hurry? If there are scarce resources, it's wise to grab low-hanging fruit, but in other cases, rushing has another less clear basis.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Single-use plastics have saved many lives by improving sanitation in health care. However, the sheer quantity of plastic waste—which can take from tens to hundreds of years to decompose—is a global pollution scourge. But now, in a study recently published in ACS Nano, researchers from The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research (SANKEN) at Osaka University and collaborating partners have developed exceptionally versatile hydrogels and moldings that might replace conventional plastics.

The global scale of plastic waste urgently requires solutions and is being addressed from diverse perspectives. For example, in August 2022, National Geographic published a feature on recycling and repurposing plastic waste. Nevertheless, "the only long-term solution is to develop inexpensive, high-performance, plastic-like alternatives that don't persist in the environment," says Takaaki Kasuga, lead and senior author. "This is an active area of research, but the proposed alternatives to date haven't met society's needs."

Various techniques are currently available for molding nanofibers into a controlled orientation; i.e., to exhibit anisotropy. However, a simple technique that enables one to mold cellulose nanofibers from the nano- to macroscopic scale, on multiple spatial axes, has long been unavailable. To meet this need, Kasuga and coworkers used electrophoretic deposition to fabricate anisotropic cellulose-nanofiber-based hydrogels and moldings.

upstart writes:

French Government Hits Clearview With The Maximum Fine For GDPR Violations:

Clearview hasn't won many friends since its inception. Scraping the web of any relevant content to compile a few billion records for facial recognition matches is no way to run a respectable business, and Clearview has been anything but respectable.

[...] Clearview's run in the US has been slightly more successful that its endeavors outside our borders. Thanks to a lack of strong privacy laws, not much can be done about Clearview's scrape-and-sell tactics. But outside of the US, Clearview is finding it almost impossible to engage in shady business as usual.

A few countries have explicitly uninvited Clearview. The UK, after first threatening a $23 million fine for privacy law violations, finally settled on a $9.4 million fine that came with an order to delete all data pertaining to UK residents. The Italian government had the same problems with Clearview and its web scraping, ordering it to pay a $21 million fine for GDPR violations.

The same conclusion has been reached in France, adding to Clearview's European tab. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, French regulators have hit Clearview with the maximum possible fine for GDPR violations.

"Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice," the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction [emphasis its].

"The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of 20 million euros, according to article 83 of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On November 15, 2021, Russia launched a Nudol missile at one of its aging satellites in low-Earth orbit. As intended, the missile struck the Cosmos 1408 satellite at an altitude of 480 km, breaking it into more than 1,000 fragments.

In the immediate aftermath of this test—which Russia carried out to demonstrate to other space powers its anti-satellite capabilities—American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station scrambled into spacecraft in case an emergency departure was needed. They remained in these shelters for about six hours before getting an all clear to return to normal activities.

Following international condemnation for this test, Russian officials claimed that Americans and other officials had overreacted. "The United States knows for certain that the emerging fragments at the time of the test and in terms of the orbit’s parameters did not and will not pose any threat to orbital stations, satellites and space activity," the Defense Ministry of Russia said at the time.

However, in the year since then, there have been a number of close calls resulting from near collisions with an estimated 1,500 trackable pieces of debris from the satellite's destruction. In January, for example, a piece of debris came within just 14 meters of a Chinese science satellite.

The International Space Station has also had to maneuver out of the way of potential impacts on several occasions. It had to do so again on Monday evening, NASA said. To put "an extra measure of distance" between the station and the predicted track of debris from Cosmos 1408, thrusters fired for more than five minutes.

Ironically, the thrusters were those of a Russian Progress vehicle, docked to the station in part to give the laboratory propulsive capability to maintain its orbit and just for such maneuvers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Marine archaeologists in Sweden say they have found the sister vessel of a famed 17th century warship that sank on its maiden voyage and is now on display in a popular Stockholm museum.

The wreck of the royal warship Vasa was raised in 1961, remarkably well preserved, after more than 300 years underwater in the Stockholm harbor. Visitors can admire its intricate wooden carvings at the Vasa Museum, one of Stockholm's top tourist attractions.

Its sister warship, Applet (Apple), was built around the same time as the Vasa on the orders of Swedish King Gustav II Adolf.

Unlike the Vasa, which keeled over and sank just minutes after leaving port in 1628, the sister ship was launched without incident the following year and remained in active service for three decades. It was sunk in 1659 to become part of an underwater barrier mean to protect the Swedish capital from enemy fleets.

upstart writes:

TSMC Reportedly Halts Shipments to China's GPU Specialist, Biren:

Bloomberg reports that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has suspended shipments of products it makes for China-based Biren, which designs processors aimed at artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. TSMC's lawyers reportedly told the top contract chipmaker to suspend shipments while they are assessing the new limitations.

The U.S. has imposed pretty strict curbs and sanctions of China's supercomputer and AI industries. Specifically, new chips cannot enable machines with the performance of over 100 FP64 PetaFLOPS, or over 200 FP32 PetaFLOPS within 41,600 cubic feet (1178 cubic meters). Furthermore, the machine cannot have a throughput of more than 600 GB/s.

[...] Based on performance numbers published by Biren, its compute GPUs can barely compete with Nvidia's in HPC applications that require 64-bit precision for floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). What is more important is that Biren's software for AI and HPC is reportedly years and generations behind that of Nvidia. So whether or not Biren is a competitor to Nvidia as of today, restrictions or not, is still unclear.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A genetic variant that boosts Crohn's disease risk may have helped people survive bubonic plague :

Researchers used DNA collected from centuries-old remains to discern the fingerprints that bubonic plague during the Black Death left on Europeans' immune systems. This devastating wave of disease tended to spare those who possessed a variant of a gene known as ERAP2, causing it to become more common, researchers report October 19 in Nature. That variant is already known to scientists for slightly increasing the odds of developing Crohn's disease, in which errant inflammation harms the digestive system.

The results show "how these studies on ancient DNA can help actually understand diseases even now," says Mihai Netea, an infectious diseases specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, who was not involved with the study. "And the trade-off is also very clear."

Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague once killed 60 percent of those infected. [...]

By sparing individuals whose immune systems bear certain traits, pathogens such as Y. pestis have shaped the evolution of the human immune system. Studies are teasing out the ways the massive winnowing of the plague altered Europeans' immune-related genetics.