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upstart writes:

Using a rail gun:

The wild concept was put forward by a group of astrophysicists in a study published Wednesday in PLOS Climate. Benjamin Bromley, Sameer Khan, and Scott Kenyon theorized that a solar shield could be created to deflect the sun's rays from Earth.

Coal and sea salt were considered as materials that could be used in the shield, helping to dim the sun by as much as 2%, or around six days of sunlight per year, thereby lowering the Earth's temperature. But lunar dust turned out to be the ideal candidate as it is just the right size and composition for efficiently scattering sunlight away from our planet, said Bromley.

Another advantage of moon dust is that it would take much less energy to launch it from the lunar surface compared to earth-based launches, though it would still require an estimated 22 billion pounds of dust to be mined and loaded into a ballistic device such as a rail gun and fired. This would need to be performed regularly to maintain the shield as the dust would slowly disperse. An abrupt halt in the cooling of the earth could caused "termination shock," in which the planet rapidly heats up, writes The Guardian.

[...] The proposal isn't the first time someone has suggested using a physical object in space to address global warming. A 1,250-mile glass shield, trillions of spacecraft sporting umbrella-like shields, blasting dust off an asteroid, a raft of thin-film silicon bubbles, and space mirrors are some of the other space-based suggestions. There was also the space shield in the magnificently awful Highlander 2.

[...] "Nothing should distract us from reducing greenhouse gas emissions here on Earth," said Bromley. "Our strategy may just be a moonshot, but we should explore all possibilities, in case we need more time to do the work here at home."

Journal Reference:
Bromley BC, Khan SH, Kenyon SJ (2023) Dust as a solar shield. PLOS Clim 2(2): e0000133. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000133

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2023/02/silicon-reverse-engineering-intel-8086.html

Status flags are a key part of most processors, indicating if an arithmetic result is negative, zero, or has a carry, for instance. In this post, I take a close look at the flag circuitry in the Intel 8086 processor (1978), the chip that launched the PC revolution.1 Looking at the silicon die of the 8086 reveals how its flags are implemented. The 8086's flag circuitry is surprisingly complicated, full of corner cases and special handling. Moreover, I found an undocumented zero register that is used by the microcode.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new lithium-air battery design promises unprecedented energy densityA potentially transformative technology for electrifying transportation:

A new paper published in Science describes the chemistry behind a novel lithium-air battery, an innovative design which could potentially provide way more energy density than traditional li-ion battery technology. It could serve as a real breakthrough for the battery market and a possible revolution for transportation and heavy-duty vehicles such as airplanes, trains and even submarines.

The new battery can sustain more than 1,000 recharge cycles with just a small five percent drop in energy efficiency and zero impact on coulombic efficiency. This means that all the initial battery material was still active, with no irreversible side reactions during the charge/recharge cycles.

The design conceived by researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology uses a solid electrolyte based on a ceramic-polyethylene oxide composite, which is safer and more efficient compared to liquid electrolytes. Ceramic and polymer materials used as solid electrolytes have their own downsides when used separately but when combined, they can provide both the high ionic conductivity of ceramic and the high stability of the polymer.

The composite electrolyte was able to work at room temperature, a first for lithium-air batteries. According to Mohammad Asadi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Illinois Tech, the solid-state electrolyte "contributes around 75 percent of the total energy density." There is still room for further improvement and by minimizing the thickness without compromising performance, the new design could achieve a "very, very high" energy density.

The lithium-air battery could potentially store one kilowatt-hour per kilogram or higher, which is four times greater than current lithium-ion technology. A lithium-air battery based on lithium oxide (Li2O) formation, the Science article says, can theoretically deliver an energy density that is "comparable to that of gasoline."

(DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abq1347)

I think it was takyon who said, a few years ago now: ".... announcements of new batteries with promises of increased power and capacity are made almost daily. Let me know when they arrive in the marketplace ....". Perhaps this one will be different. [JR]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

In the latest lay off round hit to tech, Yahoo has announced they will be releasing around 1,600 workers, including half their Business unit, with 1,000 of the cuts coming by the end of the week:

The layoffs are part of a broader effort by the company to streamline operations in Yahoo's advertising unit. The Yahoo for Business segment's strategy had "struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack," according to a Yahoo spokesperson.

"Given the new focus of the new Yahoo Advertising group, we will reduce the workforce of the former Yahoo for Business division by nearly 50% by the end of 2023," a Yahoo spokesperson told CNBC.

Yahoo said the company would shift efforts to its 30-year partnership with Taboola, a digital advertising company, to satisfy ad services.

Those losing their jobs will be provided severance packages.

Related:

• Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
• Amazon to Slash More Than 18,000 Jobs in Escalation of Cuts
• Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US, EU looking to form 'critical minerals club':

The US and Europe could be moving towards another area of cooperation, this time over critical minerals needed for electric vehicles and other technologies, with the creation of a de facto free-trade status for such resources.

Representatives from France and Germany have met with key US officials during a visit to Washington, and reports say a proposal was floated of a "critical minerals club" to include America and Europe, amid concerns that the US Inflation Reduction Act could penalize non-US companies developing green technologies.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence chief operating officer Andrew Miller told us efforts to nationalize or regionalize supply chains are a priority for all western economies today. He said: "The sustainable transition to clear energy is a target that will only be achievable with more diverse supply chains.

The Inflation Reduction Act aims to give a boost to US industry and bring down inflation by investing in domestic energy production, especially clean energy. But it has sparked fears that it will disadvantage European companies developing green technology. For example, it requires that a certain amount of components or critical minerals for electric vehicles be sourced in the US or from countries that have a free trade agreement with it, which does not currently include Europe.

canopic jug writes:

The Atlantic Council has published a policy report entitled "Avoiding the success trap: Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure". It addresses the idea of Open Source Software (OSS) as essential infrastructure. OSS differs from physical infrastructure yet supports critical functions, provides dependable services, offers subtle and often unseen service delivery, and functions through decentralized control.

This report aims to develop tangible example policies for the United States and European Union to support OSS as infrastructure and point policymakers toward existing policy vehicles that government can readily modify and adopt to better support and engage with the OSS ecosystem. The report does not seek to make definitive statements about what open source is or is not through these analogies. Rather the goal is to capture a snapshot of its most essential features and most consequential participants. Any of the analogies can be extended far past usefulness, and policymakers should approach each keeping in mind the essential truth that, while all models are wrong, some (including, we believe, these) are useful, nonetheless. Before diving into the analogies though, this report looks to discuss the open-source ecosystem as it is, highlighting key principles and addressing common misconceptions.

[...] None of this report reflects a belief that OSS is inherently insecure, but rather that it is uniquely central to modern digital systems and that relationships with the OSS community are necessarily, and substantively, different than those government has grown accustomed to with industry and industry within itself. Sustainable use emphasizes the user responsibility for much of the risk associated with software use, including OSS, and addresses OSS-specific features of development and contribution possibly only with open-source code. Addressing systemic risk is an important step for policy efforts to support the security and sustainability of OSS projects with an accurate picture of the considerable interdependency between code bases. Finally, governments must step up to support OSS as the infrastructure that it is. These resources should come alongside expanded private sector support and can manifest in targeted formats as well as a more general support model, the OSS Trust. OSS is infrastructure, and the provision of support for it as such will permit more rapid adoption and considerable innovation in even critical domains of economic and government activity.

So it seems that the establishment continues to turn its jaundiced eye towards software development.

Previously:
(2023) Opinion: FOSS Could be an Unintended Victim of EU Security Crusade
(2022) Honoring Peter Eckersley, Who Made the Internet a Safer Place for Everyone
(2022) Open Source Community Sets Out Path to Secure Software

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Used or new, does not matter:

As the U.S. government is gearing up to put even stricter constraints on the Chinese semiconductor sector, China-based chipmakers are accelerating their purchases of wafer fab equipment (WFE) to ensure the continuous operation of their fabs. However, Chinese companies prefer to keep these transactions under the radar as some violate U.S. sanctions, reports DigiTimes.

Companies like SMIC, HuaHong, Nexchip, and Silan Microelectronics are buying everything they can, including second-hand tools, according to the story that cites anonymous industrial sources. Some of the WFE they procure cannot be shipped to China as this would violate the U.S.-imposed sanctions, which is precisely the reason why parties prefer to keep such purchases low profile.

Interestingly, even Huawei — which is under severe sanctions by the U.S. government and legally cannot procure anything containing advanced U.S. technology without permission — is stepping up purchasing wafer fab tools. Perhaps, as it is prepping to build a fab with SMIC, it wants to get as many tools as possible.

Previously: U.S. Sanctions Against China Could Hurt Own Domestic Industry: Semiconductor Industry Association

Related:

• Netherlands Refuses to Summarily Agree to US Export Restrictions on China Over Silicon Chips
• Huawei Patents EUV Lithography Tools Used to Make <10nm Chips

Original Submission

upstart writes:

GitHub built a new code-focused search engine in Rust because popular text search engines couldn't scale enough:

The Rust programming language continues to grow in popularity and now developer platform GitHub has used it to build its new code-focused search engine, Blackbird.

Instead of perusing forums for answers, GitHub wants users to use its search engine, which is currently in beta.

[...] "At first glance, building a search engine from scratch seems like a questionable decision. Why would you do that? Aren't there plenty of existing, open source solutions out there already? Why build something new?" writes GitHub's Timothy Clem.

His short answer is that GitHub hasn't found success using general text search products to power code search.

"The user experience is poor, indexing is slow, and it's expensive to host. There are some newer, code-specific open source projects out there, but they definitely don't work at GitHub's scale," he writes.

[...] The Rust-written custom search engine, Blackbird, is more efficient and gives GitHub "substantial storage savings via deduplication and guarantees a uniform load distribution across shards", according to Pavel Avgustinov, VP of software engineering at GitHub.

He argues GitHub's scale means it can't use a Unix 'grep' (global regular expression print) for search. In effect, it would be too slow when considering the possibility of processing hundred of terabytes of code in memory. Queries would take too long.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There has never been a better time to get a job in climate tech:

Nations and corporations are setting ambitious carbon goals. The U.S. government is enacting plans unleashing billions of dollars to address climate change. Many investors remain bullish on climate tech startups. Job prospects in the space are relatively rosy while traditional tech giants layoff thousands.

Climate career opportunities include everything from installing solar panels and electric vehicle charging devices to innovating cutting-edge climate tech hardware and software.

At first it seemed like a niche sector for new jobs, said Yin Lu, partner with MCJ Collective. But now "it's literally everywhere," she said.

New evidence keeps emerging on job growth in the sector, and there are even warnings about shortages of both blue- and white-collar climate workers. On the installation and manufacturing side, U.S. clean energy companies have announced more than 100,000 new jobs since the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Globally, the current 6 million jobs in clean energy manufacturing could more than double to 14 million by 2030, according to a new report from IEA, an intergovernmental nonprofit.

fliptop writes:

The new AIs draw from human-generated content, while pushing it away:

With the massive growth of ChatGPT making headlines every day, Google and Microsoft have responded by showing off AI chatbots built into their search engines. It's self-evident that AI is the future. But the future of what?

[...] Built on information from human authors, both companies' [(Microsoft's "New Bing" and Google's Bard)] AI engines are being positioned as alternatives to the articles they learned from. The end result could be a more closed web with less free information and fewer experts to offer you good advice.

[...] A lot of critics will justifiably be concerned about possible factual inaccuracies in chatbot results, but we can likely assume that, as the technology improves, it will get better at weeding out mistakes. The larger issue is that the bots are giving you advice that seems to come from nowhere – though it was obviously compiled by grabbing content from human writers whom Bard is not even crediting.

[...] I'll admit another bias. I'm a professional writer, and chatbots like those shown by Google and Bing are an existential threat to anyone who gets paid for their words. Most websites rely heavily on search as a source of traffic and, without those eyeballs, the business model of many publishers is broken. No traffic means no ads, no ecommerce clicks, no revenue and no jobs.

Eventually, some publishers could be forced out of business. Others could retreat behind paywalls and still others could block Google and Bing from indexing their content. AI bots would run out of quality sources to scrape, making their advice less reliable. And readers would either have to pay more for quality content or settle for fewer voices.

Related: 90% of Online Content Could be 'Generated by AI by 2025,' Expert Says

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Alphabet stock price drops after Google Bard launch blunder:

About 10 percent of Alphabet's market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft's next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.

In a promotional video to show off Bard, a web search assistant to compete against Microsoft's ChatGPT-enhanced Bing, the software answered a science question incorrectly, sending Alphabet's share price down amid an overall lackluster launch by the Chocolate Factory.

Microsoft's integration of OpenAI's super-hyped language models into the Bing search engine and Edge web browser has ignited an arms race. Microsoft wants to eat into Google's web search monopoly by offering a better search engine that uses OpenAI's ChatGPT to answer queries in a conversational way with natural language rather than simple lists of links to relevant webpages.

The idea being that the bot is trained on fresh snapshots of the web, and netizens' web search requests are answered automatically by the bot with summaries of info scraped from the internet.

The Chocolate Factory is not about to give up any of its territory without a fight, though it stumbled at the first hurdle with its launch of ChatGPT rival Bard on Wednesday.

upstart writes:

Starlink can be used for military comms, but controlling drones is prohibited:

The close relationship between SpaceX and Ukraine could be strained after the company limited the country's ability to use the Starlink satellite service for offensive military purposes. The move follows reports that Ukraine has been using Starlink to control drones.

SpaceX has supplied over 25,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine and maintained them since the war began, helping keep the nation's critical infrastructure and its citizens online as Russia continues its assault.

But Ukraine is said to have been utilizing Starlink in its offensive push against the Russian military, including using it to target enemies with drones, a violation of SpaceX policies.

Speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday (via Reuters), SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink was never meant to be weaponized.

"However, Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement," she said, referring to reports that Starlink had been used to control Ukraine's drones. "There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that [controlling the drones]," she said, "There are things that we can do, and have done."

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Scientists are trying to understand the impact this huge prominence will have on Earth:

The Sun has always fascinated astronomers. And now, a new development has baffled scientists. A huge part of the Sun broke off of its surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its North Pole. Though scientists are trying to analyse how this occurred, the video of the development has stunned the space community. The remarkable phenomenon was caught by NASA's James Webb telescope and shared on Twitter by Dr Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster, last week. The Sun keeps emitting solar flares (called prominence) that sometimes affect communications on Earth, hence scientists are more concerned about the latest development.

"Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. Implications for understanding the Sun's atmospheric dynamics above 55 degrees here cannot be overstated!" Dr Skov said in a tweet last week.

According to NASA, the prominence is a large bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface. There have been several such instances in the past but this one has stumped the scientific community.

[...] Space scientists are now analyzing the strange event to gather more details about it and present a clearer picture.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An AI 'Engineer' Has Now Designed 100 Chips:

[...] AI firm Synopsys has announced that its DSO.ai tool has successfully aided in the design of 100 chips, and it expects that upward trend to continue.

Companies like STMicroelectronics and SK Hynix have turned to Synopsys to accelerate semiconductor designs in an increasingly competitive environment. The past few years have seen demand for new chips increase while materials and costs have rocketed upward. Therefore, companies are looking for ways to get more done with less, and that's what tools like DSO.ai are all about.

The tool can search design spaces, telling its human masters how best to arrange components to optimize power, performance, and area, or PPA as it's often called. Among those 100 AI-assisted chip designs, companies have seen up to a 25% drop in power requirements and a 3x productivity increase for engineers. SK Hynix says a recent DSO.ai project resulted in a 15% cell area reduction and a 5% die shrink.

[...] With all the AI innovations of late, it is starting to feel like a sea change in how we create things. OpenAI's ChatGPT, now embedded in Microsoft's products, can write stories, create computer code, and answer search queries in natural language. Meanwhile, OpenAI's Dall-e can win art competitions with AI-generated art. AI also plays a larger role in gaming, with many titles supporting AI upsampling technologies like DLSS.

Original Submission

US NIST Unveils Winning Encryption Algorithm for IoT Data Protection

fliptop writes:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that ASCON is the winning bid for the "lightweight cryptography" program to find the best algorithm to protect small IoT (Internet of Things) devices with limited hardware resources:

Small IoT devices are becoming increasingly popular and omnipresent, used in wearable tech, "smart home" applications, etc. However, they are still used to store and handle sensitive personal information, such as health data, financial details, and more.

That said, implementing a standard for encrypting data is crucial in securing people's data. However, the weak chips inside these devices call for an algorithm that can deliver robust encryption at very little computational power.

"The world is moving toward using small devices for lots of tasks ranging from sensing to identification to machine control, and because these small devices have limited resources, they need security that has a compact implementation," stated Kerry McKay, a computer scientist at NIST.

[...] ASCON was eventually picked as the winner for being flexible, encompassing seven families, energy efficient, speedy on weak hardware, and having low overhead for short messages.

NIST also considered that the algorithm had withstood the test of time, having been developed in 2014 by a team of cryptographers from Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Research, and Radboud University, and winning the CAESAR cryptographic competition's "lightweight encryption" category in 2019.

More info at the algorithm's Website and the technical paper submitted to NIST in May 2021.

Related:

• NIST Drafts Revised Guidelines for Digital Identification in Federal Systems
• NIST Calls Time on SHA-1, Sets 2030 Deadline

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2