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janrinok writes:

A new way to make stretchy wiring uses ultrasound and microscopic spheres of liquid metal

Zapping liquid metal droplets with ultrasound offers a new way to make wiring for stretchy, bendy electronics.

The technique, described in the Nov. 11 Science, adds a new approach to the toolbox for researchers developing circuitry for medical sensors that attach to the skin, wearable electronics and other applications where rigid circuit electronics are less than ideal.

The researchers began by drawing on sheets of stretchy plastic with lines of microscopic droplets made of an alloy of gallium and indium. The metal alloy is liquid at temperatures above about 16° Celsius.

Though the liquid metal is electrically conductive, the droplets quickly oxidize. That process covers each of them with a thin insulating layer. The layers carry static charges that push the drops apart, making them useless for connecting the LEDs, microchips and other components in electronic circuitry.

By hitting the microspheres with high-frequency sound waves, the researchers caused the microscopic balls to shed even smaller, nanoscopic balls of liquid metal. The tiny spheres bridge the gaps between the larger ones, and that close contact allows electrons to tunnel through the oxide layers so that the droplets can carry electricity.

When the plastic that the drops are printed on is stretched or bent, the larger balls of metal can deform, while the smaller ones act like rigid particles that shift around to maintain contact.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Covid lockdowns prompted a surge of new cyclists. But the trend has faltered in places that didn't build bike-friendly infrastructure.

In 18 years working in bicycles, Eric Bjorling had never seen anything like April 2020. With no end to the pandemic in sight, people were desperate for things to do. "They had time on their hands, they had kids, they needed to physically go outside and do something," says Bjorling, head of brand marketing at Trek Bicycles, one of the largest bike manufacturers in the world.

So began the pandemic bicycle boom. US bike sales more than doubled in 2020 compared to the year before, according to research firm NPD Group, reaching $5.4 billion. Bike mechanics got overloaded as people dragged neglected bikes out of garages and basements. And local governments responded to and then fueled the shift, by adapting urban environments with unprecedented speed, restricting car traffic on some streets and building temporary bike lanes on others. "During the pandemic, many things were possible, policy-wise, that before we didn't think possible, especially at that pace," says Ralph Buehler, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech.

Almost three years later, the legacy of the bike boom, and the accompanying changes to urban infrastructure, is murky. In many places, it has been hard to lastingly convert residents to cycling, especially for the sort of trips that might otherwise be taken by car: to work, to school, or to the grocery store. Bike sales have slowed from their frantic pandemic-era high: NPD Group data shows the value of sales dropped 11 percent this year compared to 2021, though they're still well above 2019 levels.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://mashable.com/article/space-solar-system-white-dwarf-discovery

Some 90 light-years away, the researchers spotted an over 10 billion-year old white dwarf star — meaning the remaining hot core of a dead star similar to the sun — that's surrounded by a graveyard of broken apart chunks of planets, called planetesimals. The faint star has pulled in debris from these objects. But this solar system is unlike anything around us. It teems with elements like lithium and potassium. Crucially, no planets in our solar system have such a composition.

[...] As noted above, this solar system is old. That means the white dwarf (called WDJ2147-4035) and its surrounding solar system formed, and died, before the sun and Earth were even born. In fact, the chunks of former planets around WDJ2147-4035 are the oldest planetesimals that have ever been found in our galaxy around a white dwarf, Elms noted.

They discovered this white dwarf, and another one of a similar age, using an observatory in space called Gaia. [...] In WDJ2147-4035, they found chemicals like lithium, potassium and sodium had accreted — or got pulled in by gravity and amassed around — the ancient star. White dwarfs are made of hydrogen or helium, so the rocky remains of planets were responsible for supplying the other unique elements, the researchers concluded (by running simulations of this solar system's evolution).

Interestingly, the other white dwarf (WDJ1922+0233) they discovered was significantly different than the mysterious one. It's more familiar. They determined this star had pulled in planetary debris that's similar to Earth's rocky crust. So although one solar system remains an anomaly, the other one shows that Earth isn't so unique in the cosmos: There are other solar systems out there somewhat like it.

mrpg writes:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/canaanite-comb-lice-israel-alphabet

Engraved into the side of a nearly 4,000-year-old ivory comb is a simple wish: Get these lice out of my hair.

This faint inscription, written in the early language of the ancient Canaanites, represents the earliest known instance of a complete sentence written using a phonetic alphabet, says archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The writing system of the Canaanites, who lived in a region in the eastern Mediterranean called the Levant until around 2,000 years ago, later served as a major basis for many modern alphabets. That makes the comb "the most important object I've ever found during an excavation," says Garfinkel. The research was published November 9 in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

[...] The comb was the unearthed in 2016 among the ruins of the ancient city of Lachish in present-day Israel. Years later, when the comb was sent to a lab to search for traces of lice, someone noticed faint symbols etched on the side. A closer look revealed that the symbols spelled out the sentence, "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard," Garfinkel and colleagues report November 9 in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

[...] The plea against lice is "so human," says Garfinkel, who notes that other writings from the time tend to center around royal accomplishments or religion. It also appears that the comb was able to fulfill its purpose, at least somewhat. Between the teeth, the researchers found the ancient remains of a louse.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The iPhone maker knows a lot about what a user does on their phone

Over the past couple of years, Apple has centered its focus on user privacy. The iPhone maker has sparred with other Big Tech companies, most notably Facebook-owner Meta, about the issue. Apple's efforts to protect users' data has cost platforms like Facebook billions of dollars in revenue.

[...] App developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry from the software company Mysk recently found that iOS sends "every tap you make" to Apple from inside one of the company's own apps. According to the developers, attempts to turn this data collection off, such as selecting the Settings option "disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether" did not affect the data from being sent.

The data being collected is quite detailed, too. As Gizmodo points out, a user looking at the App Store app on their iPhone would have their search data, what they tapped on, and how long they were checking out an app all sent to Apple in real-time. Using Apple's Stocks app? Apple will receive a list of the user's watched stocks, any articles they read in-app, and the names of any stocks they searched for. The timestamps for which a user viewed stock information will be sent over too. Some of Apple's apps even collect detailed information about the user's iPhone such as the model, screen resolution, and keyboard language.

[...] A class action lawsuit was filed on Thursday claiming that Apple's actions violate the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The lawsuit doesn't focus so much on the fact that Apple is collecting this data. The suit hones in on Apple's settings, such as "Allow Apps to Request to Track" and "Share Analytics," that give users the perception that they can disable such tracking.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Apple, or any tech company, collects user data. However, as the team at Mysk discovered, Apple is collecting this data regardless of a user's settings where they are given the option to turn data collection off, possibly giving them a false sense of privacy.

Original Submission

acid andy writes:

Researchers for the Human Brain Project have trained a large-scale computer model of the mouse primary visual cortex to accurately solve five visual tasks.

[A] study by Human Brain Project (HBP) researchers from the Graz University of Technology (Austria) showed how a large data-based model can reproduce a number of the brain's visual processing capabilities in a versatile and accurate way. The results were published in the journal Science Advances.

With the help of the PCP Pilot Systems at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, developed in a collaboration between the HBP and the software company Nvidia, the team analysed a biologically detailed large-scale model of the mouse primary visual cortex that can solve multiple visual processing tasks. This model provides the largest integration of anatomical detail and neurophysiological data currently available for the visual cortex area V1, which is the first cortical region to receive and process visual information.

The model is built with a different architecture than those of deep neural networks used in current AI, and the researchers found out that it has interesting advantages regarding learning speed and visual processing performance over models that are commonly used for visual processing in AI.

The model was able to solve all five visual tasks presented by the team with high accuracy. For instance, these tasks involved classifying images of hand-written numbers or detecting visual changes in a long sequence of images. Strikingly, the virtual model achieved the same high performance as the brain even when the researchers subjected the model to noise in the images and in the network that it had not encountered during training.

Original Publication: Chen Guozhang, Franz Scherr & Wolfgang Maass (2022). A data-based large-scale model for primary visual cortex enables brain-like robust and versatile visual processing. Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq7592

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Want to fire up the dance floor? Play low-frequency bass:

Researchers studying how different aspects of music influence the body turned a live electronic music concert into a lab study. By introducing levels of bass over speakers that were too low to hear and monitoring the crowd's movements, scientists found that people danced 11.8 per cent more when the very low frequency bass was present.

[...] "Music is a biological curiosity–it doesn't reproduce us, it doesn't feed us, and it doesn't shelter us, so why do humans like it and why do they like to move to it?"

[...] For this study, Cameron and colleagues recruited participants attending a LIVELab concert for electronic musical duo Orphx. The concertgoers were equipped with motion-sensing headbands to monitor their dance moves. Additionally, they were asked to fill out survey forms before and after the event. These forms were used to ensure the sound was undetectable, measure concert enjoyment, and examine how the music felt physically.

Throughout the 45-minute concert, the researchers manipulated the very-low bass-playing speakers, turning them on and off every two minutes. They found the amount of movement was 12 per cent greater when the speakers were on.

[...] "Very low frequencies may also affect vestibular sensitivity, adding to people's experience of movement. Nailing down the brain mechanisms involved will require looking the effects of low frequencies on the vestibular, tactile, and auditory pathways," says Cameron.

Journal Reference:
Daniel J. Cameron, Dobromir Dotov, Erica Flaten, et al., Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert [open], Curr Bio, 32, 21, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.035

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2022/11/the-unusual-bootstrap-drivers-inside.html

The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and server computing today. I've been reverse-engineering its circuitry by studying its silicon die. One of the most unusual circuits I found is a "bootstrap driver", a way to boost internal signals to improve performance.

This circuit consists of just three NMOS transistors, amplifying an input signal to produce an output signal, but it doesn't resemble typical NMOS logic circuits and puzzled me for a long time. Eventually, I stumbled across an explanation: the "bootstrap driver" uses the transistor's capacitance to boost its voltage. It produces control pulses with higher current and higher voltage than otherwise possible, increasing performance. In this blog post, I'll attempt to explain how the tricky bootstrap driver circuit works.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

A spacecraft no bigger than a microwave oven will become the first CubeSat to orbit the Moon:

At precisely 7:18 p.m. EST on Sunday, November 13, 2022 NASA's pathfinding Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) will begin a special kind of orbit of the Moon that NASA believes requires no fuel.

[...] It's been a difficult journey for the tiny spacecraft since its launch from New Zealand atop a RocketLab Electron rocket on June 28, 2022.

Propelled towards the Moon at 24,500 mph/39,500 km/h, it began spinning in early September after valve issues and was put into safe mode. However, the spacecraft is now stable.

It's up there to pave the way for NASA's planned a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit with a habitat module and a port for docking NASA's Orion spacecraft—due to launch for the first time on the Artemis I test flight this week.

[...] CAPSTONE will explore a near-rectilinear halo orbit that will see it reach an altitude of 958,000 miles from Earth—more than three times the distance between Earth and the Moon—before being pulled back towards it.

An elongated elliptical oval-shaped orbit at a precise balance point between the gravities of Earth and the Moon, the strange orbit will bring CAPSTONE within 1,000 miles of one lunar pole on its near pass and 43,500 miles from the other pole at its peak every seven days.

Brief NASA pre-launch video about the CAPSTONE mission

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Beer hops compounds could help protect against Alzheimer's disease:

Beer is one of the oldest and most popular beverages in the world, with some people loving and others hating the distinct, bitter taste of the hops used to flavor its many varieties. But an especially "hoppy" brew might have unique health benefits. Recent research published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience reports that chemicals extracted from hop flowers can, in lab dishes, inhibit the clumping of amyloid beta proteins, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD).

AD is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease, often marked by memory loss and personality changes in older adults. [...] Accordingly, preventative strategies and therapeutics that can intervene before symptoms appear are of increasing interest.

One of these strategies involves "nutraceuticals," or foods that have some type of medicinal or nutritional function. The hop flowers used to flavor beers have been explored as one of these potential nutraceuticals, with previous studies suggesting that the plant could interfere with the accumulation of amyloid beta proteins associated with AD. So, Cristina Airoldi, Alessandro Palmioli and colleagues wanted to investigate which chemical compounds in hops had this effect.

[...] In tests, they found that the extracts had antioxidant properties and could prevent amyloid beta proteins from clumping in human nerve cells. The most successful extract was from the Tettnang hop, found in many types of lagers and lighter ales. [...] The researchers say that although this work may not justify drinking more bitter brews, it shows that hop compounds could serve as the basis for nutraceuticals that combat the development of AD.

Journal Reference:
Alessandro Palmioli, Valeria Mazzoni, Ada De Luigi, et al., Alzheimer's Disease Prevention through Natural Compounds: Cell-Free, In Vitro, and In Vivo Dissection of Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Multitarget Activity, ACS Chem. Neurosci. 2022 DOI: 10.1021/acschemneuro.2c00444

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Smelling in VR environment possible with new gaming technology:

In the past, computer games have focused mostly on what we can see – moving images on screens. Other senses have not been present. But an interdisciplinary research group at Stockholm University and Malmö University has now constructed a scent machine that can be controlled by a gaming computer. In the game, the participant moves in a virtual wine cellar, picking up virtual wine glasses containing different types of wine, guessing the aromas. The small scent machine is attached to the VR system's controller, and when the player lifts the glass, it releases a scent.

"The possibility to move on from a passive to a more active sense of smell in the game world paves the way for the development of completely new smell-based game mechanics based on the players' movements and judgments," says Simon Niedenthal, interaction and game researcher at Malmö University.

The olfactometer consists of four different valves each connected to a channel. In the middle there is a fan sucking the air into a tube. With the help of the computer, the player can control the four channels so that they open to different degrees and provide different mixtures of scent. Scent blends that can mimic the complexity of a real wine glass. The game has different levels of difficulty with increasing levels of complexity.

[...] All code, blueprints and instructions for the machine are openly available online, as is code for the virtual wine tasting game. The research group, Sensory Cognitive Interaction Laboratory, which is located at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, now hopes that scented computer games can become useful for other purposes.

janrinok writes:

The hacking group Microsoft ID'd is among the world's most cutthroat and skilled

Microsoft on Thursday fingered Russia's military intelligence arm as the likely culprit behind ransomware attacks last month that targeted Polish and Ukrainian transportation and logistics organizations.

If the assessment by members of the Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is correct, it could be cause for concern for the US government and its European counterparts. Poland is a member of NATO and a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its bid to stave off an unprovoked Russian invasion. The hacking group the software company linked to the cyberattacks—known as Sandworm in wider research circles and Iridium in Redmond, Washington—is one of the world's most talented and destructive and is widely believed to be backed by Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

Sandworm has been definitively linked to the NotPetya wiper attacks of 2017, a global outbreak that a White House assessment said caused $10 billion in damages, making it the most costly hack in history. Sandworm has also been definitively tied to hacks on Ukraine's power grid that caused widespread outages during the coldest months of 2016 and again in 2017.

Last month, Microsoft said that Poland and Ukraine transportation and logistics organizations had been the target of cyberattacks that used never-before-seen ransomware that announced itself as Prestige. The threat actors, Microsoft said, had already gained control over the victim networks. Then in a single hour on October 11, the hackers deployed Prestige across all its victims.

Once in place, the ransomware traversed all files on the infected computer's system and encrypted the contents of files that ended in .txt, .png, gpg, and more than 200 other extensions. Prestige then appended the extension .enc to the existing extension of the file. Microsoft attributed the attack to an unknown threat group it dubbed DEV-0960.

On Thursday, Microsoft updated the report to say that based on forensic artifacts and overlaps in victimology, tradecraft, capabilities, and infrastructure, researchers determined DEV-0960 was very likely Iridium.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Apple's recent privacy changes leveled the digital advertising field

In April, 2021, Apple dropped a nuclear bomb on the world of online advertising. The company rolled out a new iPhone privacy setting called App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, that shows you, an iPhone user, a popup asking if you want to "Allow this app to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?" You have two options: "Ask app not to track" and "Allow." The vast majority of people pick the former, which blocks apps from collecting certain data. Behind the scenes, the change caused a radical shift in the tech landscape. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said that one setting alone cost the company an estimated $10 billion. Its stock value has plunged 70% this year. But ATT had another side effect, one that got far less attention than Meta's troubles. Apple's iPhone privacy setting gave TikTok a significant leg up in its fight for social media dominance.

"As Meta struggled to maintain performance, TikTok presented a buyer's market for advertisers where demand was low and supply was high," said John Donahue, co-founder of programmatic ad consulting firm Up & to the Right, who's worked with major advertisers like Coca-Cola, Hershey's, and Linksys. "Timing is everything in life, and TikTok couldn't have timed it better."

ATT kneecapped the Facebook ad targeting systems, motivating advertisers to look for new places to spend their money. Even though ATT hurt TikTok in the same ways, the short-form app was in the perfect position to offer an alternative to Meta: its popularity was exploding, its newness meant ad prices were low, and it had designed novel advertising models built for the new privacy world order.

The privacy setting "showcased the risk of having the majority of your eggs in a single basket," Donahue said.

TikTok just lowered its expected ad revenue for the year, but its projected to grow 155%, up $6.01 billion from 2021, according to Insider Intelligence. Meanwhile, Insider predicts that Meta's worldwide ad revenue will drop for the first time ever, down 2% from 2021, a $2.25 billion dip. It would be absurd to give ATT all or even most of the credit for those numbers; the recession played a big role in Meta's losses, as did the company's own long shot bet on virtual reality and "the metaverse." Likewise, Tiktok's gains have a lot to do with cultural shifts. But there's no question that TikTok snatched up advertising dollars that might otherwise have gone to Facebook and Instagram, and Apple's Privacy setting had a lot to do with that.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

How many bees can you fit in an X-ray machine? That's not a joke:

Researchers at CU Boulder have, for the first time, used X-ray computed tomography (also known as a CT scan) to peer inside swarms of honeybees.

The scans provide a deeper look at these humble insects: Bees, the group discovered, don't clump together in a random group. Instead, they seem to form dome-shaped structures following surprisingly sophisticated mathematical rules, or what researchers call a "scaling law." The results could one day help engineers design more resilient buildings, or even swarms of tiny robots that behave a lot like insects, said study senior author Orit Peleg.

"I'm trained in physics, and these laws aren't obvious to me," said Peleg, assistant professor in the BioFrontiers Institute and Department of Computer Science at CU Boulder. "But bees somehow know how to arrange themselves in order to maintain their mechanical stability."

[...] Based on the researchers' calculations, a bee swarm works a bit like a cheerleading pyramid. More bees cluster around the base of the swarm, then thin out the farther up they get. Bees also seem to arrange themselves so that no one layer has to carry more than its fair share of weight. In mathematical terms, the structure follows a scaling law in which each layer supports a weight that equals roughly its own weight to the one-and-a-half power.

takyon writes:

Tesla open-sources its connector to take on CCS with 'half the size twice the power' North American Charging Standard

In a surprise move, Tesla opened its proprietary charging port and connector schematics for all EV makers and charging networks to employ at will. The open-sourced design and specification documents call the heretofore custom connector the North American Charging Standard as Tesla argues it is 'half the size, twice as powerful' in comparison with CCS.

[...] Its connector supports up to 1 MW DC output "in one slim package," continues Tesla, and the combination with the port on its vehicles will from now on be called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) in an apparent move to slow the proliferation of the CCS one that other EVs use.

The open-sourcing of Tesla's unique charging system may also have something to do with the government's requirements for CCS-compatible Superchargers on a planned nationwide network that will be built with billions in federal subsidies. According to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act under which said billions are about to be disbursed, "electric vehicle charging infrastructure installed using funds provided under this title shall provide, at a minimum... non-proprietary charging connectors that meet applicable industry safety standards... and open access to payment methods that are available to all members of the public..."

Original Submission