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upstart writes:

Russia's Elbrus-8SV CPU goes retro gaming:

Russia doesn't have many homegrown processors — the Elbrus and Baikal are probably the two most popular chips in the country. While they may not be among the best CPUs, their importance has grown now that major chipmakers AMD and Intel halted processor sales to the country. They're also apparently capable of gaming, as we can see from a series of gaming benchmarks from a Russian YouTuber. They even used Russia's own domestic operating system for the tests.

The Elbrus-8SV, a product of TSMC's 28nm process node, comes with eight cores at 1.5 GHz. Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) developed the Elbrus-8SV to be the successor to the original Elbrus-8S, which had eight cores at 1.3 GHz. As a result, the Elbrus-8SV arrives with double the performance of the Elbrus-8S. The Elbrus-8SV offers 576 GFLOPs of single precision and 288 GFLOPs of double precision. In addition, the octa-core processor rocks 16 MB of L3 cache shared between each core, contributing to 2 MB per core.

By default, the Elbrus-8SV supports up to four channels of DDR4-2400 ECC memory with a memory throughput of 68.3 GBps. It's a significant upgrade over the Elbrus-8S that embraced DDR3-1600 memory. The Elbrus-8SV's attributes may not sound impressive, but there aren't many options in the Russian market.

YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play (opens in new tab) put the Elbrus-8SV through its paces in some childhood classic titles, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer paired the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory and an aging Radeon RX 580. The test system was on Russia's domestic Elbrus OS 7.1 operating system, based on Linux 5.4.

upstart writes:

U.S. Sanctions Against China Could Hurt Own Domestic Industry: SIA:

While the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) — the organization that represents 99% of chip companies in America — understands how important national security is, it believes that curbs against potentially hostile nations could hurt the U.S. semiconductor industry as a whole.

After the U.S. government imposed strict sanctions against Chinese chip and supercomputer sectors, various semiconductor companies lost some $240 billion of stock value nearly overnight. Among those who suffered are various companies, including developers of electronics design automation (EDA) tools, chip designers, wafer fab equipment (WFE) producers, and chipmakers themselves. Without money from Chinese clients, the U.S. semiconductor industry will certainly live and prosper, but with them, it would develop quicker, SIA notes.

"U.S. semiconductor companies are dependent on a "virtuous cycle" of innovation that includes large investments into research and development and access to global markets," a press release by SIA reads. "Historically, U.S. semiconductor companies have consistently invested about one-fifth of their revenues in research and development, among the highest shares of any industry."

So it's been awhile since I last wrote, and I'm a bit overdue for a status update. So, let me give you all the short version on what's been going on.

First, I've been doing a lot of backend work to drastically reduce the size of the SoylentNews bill month to month. We had a lot of infrastructure that was either unnecessary, or have gotten so many free tier upgrades that they were being vastly underutilized. Along the way, I've given a lot of fine tuning to bits, although I won't say its been problem free, since we went a few weeks without working sidebars. I'm truly sorry for the delays in getting up and running. My personal life chose to become very exciting in December, and I'm still dealing with the fallout of that entire mess. As such, what I had planned went a bit pear-shaped, and I went unexpectedly radio silent. ...

More past the break ...

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Australian authorities on Wednesday found a radioactive capsule that was lost in the vast Outback after nearly a week-long search along a 1,400 km (870-mile) stretch of highway. The capsule was taken to a secure facility in Perth. The radioactive capsule was part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore feed from Rio Tinto's Gudai-Darri mine in the state's remote Kimberley region. The silver capsule, 6 mm in diameter and 8 mm long, contains Caesium-137 which emits radiation equal to 10 X-rays per hour.

[...] Officials from Western Australia's emergency response department, defence authorities, radiation specialists and others have been combing the a stretch of highway for the tiny capsule that was lost in transit more than two weeks ago.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Nepenthes are tropical pitcher plants which are known for trapping and digesting not only insects but even small mammals and amphibians. In some environments and microclimates where prey is scarce, several species have recently been found to double their nitrogen intake not from trapping visiting animals but by trapping their excrement as they feed on nectar provided by the traps.

"A handful of Nepenthes species have evolved away from carnivory towards a diet of animal scats," says Alastair Robinson, a botanist from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in Australia.

"We found that nitrogen capture is more than two times greater in species that capture mammal droppings than in other Nepenthes."

The team looked at six species and four hybrids of Nepenthes in Malaysian Borneo, analyzing tissue samples to look at the amount of nitrogen and carbon that had been captured from outside the plants.

This Species of Carnivorous Plant Evolved Into a Toilet And Is Now Winning at Life. Science Alert.

The collection of mammal faeces clearly represents a highly effective strategy for heterotrophic nitrogen gain in Nepenthes. Species with adaptations for capturing mammal excreta occur exclusively at high elevation (i.e. are typically summit-occurring) where previous studies suggest invertebrate prey are less abundant and less frequently captured. As such, we propose this strategy may maximize nutritional return by specializing towards ensuring the collection and retention of few but higher-value N sources in environments where invertebrate prey may be scarce.

Capture of mammal excreta by Nepenthes is an effective heterotrophic nutrition strategy. Annals of Botany

Previously:
(2021) Venus Flytraps Produce Magnetic Fields When They Eat
(2020) How Venus Flytraps Snap
(2019) Little Swamp of Horrors? Researchers Find Salamander-Eating Plants in Ontario, Canada

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Unused bandwidth in neurons can be tapped to control extra limbs:

What could you do with an extra limb? Consider a surgeon performing a delicate operation, one that needs her expertise and steady hands—all three of them. As her two biological hands manipulate surgical instruments, a third robotic limb that's attached to her torso plays a supporting role. Or picture a construction worker who is thankful for his extra robotic hand as it braces the heavy beam he's fastening into place with his other two hands. Imagine wearing an exoskeleton that would let you handle multiple objects simultaneously, like Spiderman's Dr. Octopus. Or contemplate the out-there music a composer could write for a pianist who has 12 fingers to spread across the keyboard.

Such scenarios may seem like science fiction, but recent progress in robotics and neuroscience makes extra robotic limbs conceivable with today's technology. Our research groups at Imperial College London and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, together with partners in the European project NIMA, are now working to figure out whether such augmentation can be realized in practice to extend human abilities. The main questions we're tackling involve both neuroscience and neurotechnology: Is the human brain capable of controlling additional body parts as effectively as it controls biological parts? And if so, what neural signals can be used for this control?

[...] Two practical questions stand out: Can we achieve neural control of extra robotic limbs concurrently with natural movement, and can the system work without the user's exclusive concentration? If the answer to either of these questions is no, we won't have a practical technology, but we'll still have an interesting new tool for research into the neuroscience of motor control. If the answer to both questions is yes, we may be ready to enter a new era of human augmentation. For now, our (biological) fingers are crossed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Contractors are calling on labor officials to intervene:

YouTube Music contractors in the Austin area who voted to unionize are accusing their employers of abusing return-to-office policies to stifle labor organizers. The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging that YouTube parent Alphabet and staffing firm Cognizant are using an abrupt return-to-office move, due in February, to punish remote workers, many of whom are reportedly pro-union. Some also live outside Austin. Managers have also been sending work to other offices to "chill" union organization efforts in Austin, according to the complaint, while a supervisor purportedly made implicit anti-union threats.

While the workers are contracted, they claim Alphabet and Cognizant represent a "joint employer." If so, Alphabet would be responsible for working conditions and have to negotiate if the Austin-area team votes in favor of a union.

[...] The row comes as Alphabet is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide in the wake of rough economic conditions and dropping profits. While that figure only covers direct employees, it reflects pressure to slash employment costs. That, in turn, may set up conflicts with pro-union workers seeking better pay and benefits.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/the-flight-tracker-that-powered-elonjet-has-taken-a-left-turn/

A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious.

ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking "billionaires and baddies." But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.
[...]
ADS-B Exchange may have seen its revenue shoot up, but Stanford says recouping a significant investment—he says Jetnet's opening offers was seven figures, but that he estimates the final deal went down for around $20 million—could take a decade. A quicker route to profit would be to raise prices, make some data available only to paying subscribers, and to charge plane owners to hide information about their aircraft. These are all tactics that have made FlightAware and FlightRadar24 successful.

"FlightRadar, FlightAware win. Elon wins," Stanford says. "All these guys who were out to get us win."

Related:
Big Twitter Roll-up: Blue Checkmarks, Banning Critics, and the Mysterious John Mastodon

Original Submission

TomTheFighter writes:

The DailyBeast is not a site I'd normally go ( tend to be a little more on the Conservative side if you will ) but an interesting story is an interesting story, how could I not share it?

Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are 'Illusions':

A concept called "quantum entanglement" suggests the fabric of the universe is more interconnected than we think.
And it also suggests we have the wrong idea about reality.

This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?

Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google's quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

But why is entanglement related to space and time?"

There is some really deep stuff there, really quite something.

The propeller on my beenie cap doesn't spin fast enough to elaborate in a more intelligent fashion, I recommend just reading it for yourself.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

UChicago research offers first concrete explanation for difference, and show it is getting even stormier over time:

For centuries, sailors who had been all over the world knew where the most fearsome storms of all lay in wait: the Southern Hemisphere. "The waves ran mountain-high and threatened to overwhelm [the ship] at every roll," wrote one passenger on an 1849 voyage rounding the tip of South America.

Many years later, scientists poring over satellite data could finally put numbers behind sailors' intuition: The Southern Hemisphere is indeed stormier than the Northern, by about 24%, in fact. But no one knew why.

A new study led by University of Chicago climate scientist Tiffany Shaw lays out the first concrete explanation for this phenomenon. Shaw and her colleagues found two major culprits: ocean circulation and the large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere.

The study also found that this storminess asymmetry has increased since the beginning of the satellite era in the 1980s. The increase was shown to be qualitatively consistent with climate change forecasts from physics-based models.

[...] Looking over past decades of observations, they found that the storminess asymmetry has increased over the satellite era beginning in the 1980s. That is, the Southern Hemisphere is getting even stormier, whereas the change on average in the Northern Hemisphere has been negligible.

[...] It may be surprising that such a deceptively simple question—why one hemisphere is stormier than another—went unanswered for so long, but Shaw explained that the field of weather and climate physics is relatively young compared to many other fields.

But having a deep understanding of the physical mechanisms behind the climate and its response to human-caused changes, such as those laid out in this study, are crucial for predicting and understanding what will happen as climate change accelerates.

Journal Reference:
Tiffany A. Shaw, Osamu Miyawaki, and Aaron Donohoe, Stormier Southern Hemisphere induced by topography and ocean circulation, PNAS, 119, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123512119

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study: When employees don't have to commute, they work:

When employees are allowed to work remotely, they most often use the time they would have spent commuting to the office working.

On average, employees save 72 minutes in commute time every day when they're allowed to work from home rather than in the office, according to the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA) study performed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

"That's a large time savings, especially when multiplied by hundreds of millions of workers around the world," the study said. "These results suggest that much of the time savings flow back to employers, and that children and other caregiving recipients also benefit."

On average, those who work from home devote 40% of their commute time savings to primary and secondary job tasks, 34% to leisure, and 11% to caregiving.

[...] The data was collected from a survey of about 19,000 to 35,000 employees based on two survey periods. The G-SWA survey took place in 15 countries in late July and early August 2021 and in an overlapping set of 25 countries in late January and early February 2022. The workers surveyed were 20 to 59 years of age, and all had finished primary school. In addition to basic questions on demographics and labor market outcomes, the survey asked about current and planned work-from-home levels, commute time, and more.

Other recent studies have arrived at similar conclusions.

upstart writes:

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU security crusade:

Opinion: The European Union has a commendable love for the safety of its citizens. Armed with the keys to a market of 300 million of the world's richest consumers, the EU has merely to scent danger to bravely regulate. Food, consumer goods, financial markets and data processing: if it can bite the punter, the EU has a legal muzzle to hand.

[...] The EU has now turned its attention to cybersecurity and more especially the lack thereof. It's certainly dangerous enough to merit attention. A proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) making its way through Brussels says that for "products with digital elements" to be allowed on the EU market, manufacturers have to demonstrate they follow best practice in four areas. These are improving the security of a product through the whole life cycle, following a coherent cybersecurity framework to measure compliance, demonstrate transparency about cybersecurity efforts, and lastly to make sure customers can use products securely.

Which sounds fair enough, considering some of the horrors visited upon us in the past – and today. Cheap "smart" electronics running out-of-date Android that nobody's patched since Noah? Phones studded with "I bring you the best wishes of the People's Liberation Army" mystery-meat bloatware? Big name, big ticket office software that keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons? Who could argue with bringing these into line?

There are just two questions that need to be answered: will the proposed regulations do the job they set out to do, and what effect will they have on the market? Here, it's not so much the devil in the details as the entire population of all seven layers of Dante's Inferno.

MSG probed over use of facial recognition to eject lawyers from show venues

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/msg-probed-over-use-of-facial-recognition-to-eject-lawyers-from-show-venues/

The operator of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall is being probed by New York's attorney general over the company's use of facial recognition technology to identify and exclude lawyers from events. AG Letitia James' office said the policy may violate civil rights laws.
[...]
In December, attorney Kelly Conlon was denied entry into Radio City Music Hall in New York when she accompanied her daughter's Girl Scout troop to a Rockettes show. Conlon wasn't personally involved in any lawsuits against MSG but is a lawyer for a firm that "has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment," NBC New York reported.

upstart writes:

A Tiny but Deadly Radioactive Capsule Has Gone Missing in Australia:

The western end of Australia is dominated by a sweltering desert of ochre-colored soil and hearty shrubs, but there's something new hiding in the outback: a radioactive capsule. Australian officials are frantically searching for the object, which was being transported between two mines when it went missing. They're warning people in the region to steer clear of the object if they see it, as even brief exposure can be dangerous.

The capsule is tiny, just 6 x 8 mm in size. Inside the ceramic enclosure is a sample of cesium-137, a highly radioactive isotope that is used in mining equipment. Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) says the capsule was being moved from a mine near the town of Newman to one near Perth earlier this month. However, the capsule never made it, suggesting it fell off the truck somewhere on road.

Despite being so small, the capsule has a big radioactive footprint, according to DFES. The cesium-137 inside emits about 2 millisieverts per hour, which is the same dose as 10 medical X-rays or an entire year of normal background radiation at sea level. Officials say that holding the container even for a short time could cause radiation burns and increase the risk of severe illness.

[...] A similar radioactive capsule was lost in a Ukrainian quarry in the late 1970s. Authorities there gave up after a week of searching and went back to business as usual. The capsule eventually ended up in concrete that was used to construct an apartment building in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. From 1980 to 1989, the cesium-137 poisoned the residents of apartment 85. In all, four people died of leukemia, and 17 more received heavy doses of radiation before the object was found.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX said it loaded more than 10 million pounds of fuel onto the vehicle:

SpaceX on Tuesday confirmed that it fully fueled its Starship launch system during a critical test on Monday and is now preparing to take the next step toward launch.

The company shared images and video of its fully fueled Starship upper stage and Super Heavy first stage in South Texas. The shiny, stainless steel vehicles appeared frosty as they were loaded with super-cold liquid oxygen and methane propellants.

During this "wet-dress rehearsal" test, SpaceX said it loaded more than 10 million pounds (about 4.6 million kg) of propellant onboard the vehicle, which, when fully stacked, stands 120 meters tall. Essentially then, over the course of a little more than an hour, the company filled a skinny, 30-story skyscraper with combustible liquid propellants—and nothing blew up.

[...] Nevertheless, it is clear that SpaceX is making excellent progress toward the much-anticipated liftoff of Starship, which will be the heaviest, tallest, most capable, and most powerful rocket to ever take off from Earth.

Original Submission