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upstart writes:

The global interpreter lock is both a key component of the Python runtime and a major obstacle to multithreading:

Powerful, flexible, and programmer-friendly, Python is widely used for everything from web development to machine learning. By the two most-cited measures, Python has even surpassed the likes of Java and C to become the most popular programming language of all. After years of soaring popularity, Python might well seem unstoppable.

But Python faces at least one big obstacle to its future growth as a programming language. It's called the GIL, the global interpreter lock, and Python developers have been trying to remove it from the default implementation of Python for decades now.

Although the GIL serves a critical purpose, namely ensuring thread safety, it also creates a serious bottleneck for multithreaded programs. In short, the GIL prevents Python from taking full advantage of multiprocessor systems. For Python to be a first-class language for concurrent programming, many believe the GIL has to go.

[...] Strictly speaking, the global interpreter lock isn't part of Python in the abstract. It's a component of the most commonly used Python implementation, CPython, which is maintained by the Python Software Foundation.

[...] What makes the GIL such a problem? For one, it prevents true multithreading in the CPython interpreter. That makes a whole class of code accelerations—optimizations that are readily available in other programming languages—far harder to implement in Python.

upstart writes:

Pregnancy quickly reorganizes the brain to respond to infants:

Pregnancy shrinks parts of the brain. That sounds bad. Throw in the forgetfulness and fogginess, or "momnesia," that many moms report, and what's left is the notion that for the brain, the transition to motherhood is a net loss.

[...] But that's just not true, Pawluski says. The perception that the maternal brain is dysfunctional has gone on long enough: It's time to "start giving the maternal brain the credit it deserves," Pawluski and her colleagues write February 6 in in JAMA Neurology.

Pregnancy does kick-start structural changes in the brain, including a loss of gray matter. But the loss isn't automatically a bad thing — reductions can reflect a fine-tuning process that makes the brain more efficient (SN: 3/18/22).

During the transition to motherhood, the brain reorganizes its connections, strengthening those that are useful and letting go of those that aren't, Pawluski says. This reorganization prepares the brain "to learn rapidly to keep a baby alive," she says.

[...] Giving the maternal brain its due for its incredible adaptations does not mean that caregiving is a skill exclusive to those who give birth. While hormones trigger brain modifications during pregnancy, nonbirthing parents' brains change with the experience of having a newborn. After the birth of their first child, new fathers' brains showed a reduction in gray matter, but childless men's brains didn't, researchers reported in Cerebral Cortex in 2022.

Changing misperceptions about the brain during the transition to motherhood "comes back to acknowledging the importance of caregiving," Pawluski says, by all parents. "The ability for your brain to actually learn to keep a baby alive is a big deal."

Journal Reference:
Clare McCormack; Bridget L. Callaghan; Jodi L. Pawluski. It's Time to Rebrand "Mommy Brain", JAMA Neuro (DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.5180)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Small bore holes could provide an alternative to centralized waste repositories:

There's one thing every planned permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel has in common: They're all underground mines.

Like any mine, a mined repository for nuclear waste is a complex feat of engineering. It must be excavated by blasting or a boring machine, it must keep the tunnels stable using rock supports, and it must have ventilation, seals, and pumps to handle groundwater and make it safe for people and machinery. Unlike a mine, however, a repository must also transport and entomb canisters of radioactive waste, and it must be engineered to exacting standards that ensure the tunnels will keep the canisters safe for many millennia.

There is an alternative idea that dispenses with most of those downsides: disposal in deep boreholes. But can they be both feasible and safe?

[...] The US Department of Energy was planning to drill a vertical borehole 4 to 5 kilometers (2.5 to 3 miles) to gain experience with the process, but the project was canceled in 2017. This borehole would have been about 10 times deeper than a mined repository, but such depths are not unusual for oil and gas boreholes.

Governments aren't the only ones interested in the approach. Deep Isolation, a company founded in 2016 and headquartered in California, aims to offer nuclear waste disposal in deep boreholes as a commercial service anywhere in the world. "Depending on your geology, we can design a borehole for it," said John Midgley, a geologist with Deep Isolation. The company's designs could be anything from deep vertical boreholes to shallower J-shaped holes with horizontal disposal sections. Again, the oil and gas industry has gotten there first, drilling around 160,000 boreholes with horizontal sections in the USA alone.

"There are lots of oil and gas wells that deep, so the problem is going to be how hard the rocks are and how often your drill bits wear out, things like that, but in general... I don't think [depth] presents any additional problems," said Sherilyn Williams-Stroud of the University of Illinois, an expert on geological disposal of nuclear waste and CO2.

upstart writes:

There's always a catch if you blame it on trawlers:

Both the Taiwanese island and the Vietnam outages have symbolic significance beyond the costs and inconvenience. Vietnam is profiting from technology companies wanting to diversify from reliance on China's manufacturing base, while Taiwan focuses China's increasingly militant ire for merely existing. As for Shetland, it may be a remote sheep poo repository, but it's also a key part of NATO's watch on Russian adventurism. It is home to RAF Saxa Vord, the UK's northernmost radar station, one that watches the key entrance to the North Atlantic between the UK and Iceland.

Is it plausible that some or all of the submarine cable breaks are deliberate attempts to unsettle rivals to Russia and China? It seems prime conspiracy theory territory, especially as the main victims of the Shetland break were crofters denied Netflix and shops unable to process contactless payments for whisky. Where's the evidence?

There are very good reasons that what is known isn't published. The unique vulnerability of the submarine cable network to sabotage and subterfuge was noted in 2020 by a confidential NATO report on US-Europe fiber connectivity. It was not good news: all of the cables are privately owned, so there was no cohesive security. Quite the opposite, as the precise locations of the cables, which carry 97 percent of US-Europe data, are public, and both Russia and China have been developing capabilities to disrupt underwater infrastructure.

NATO also said at the time that it was building capabilities to monitor and protect submarine cables, but at this point the politics of peacetime antagonism kicked in. It's hard to monitor the many thousand kilometers of fiber for physical attack, or to distinguish between an accidental snagging by a trawler from a deliberate state action, but these are skills that were finely honed in the Cold War and have not atrophied. Back then, the US deployed a huge undersea acoustic monitoring system called SOSUS to track Soviet submarines. It worked very well, and as the threat's still there it's fair to say that its replacement, augmented by intensive satellite and other electronic surveillance, is much better.

upstart writes:

The Morning After: Scientists confirm a fifth layer inside the Earth's core:

[...] A team at Australian National University (ANU) has found evidence of a new" fifth layer to the planet, an iron-nickel alloy ball in the inner core. The scientists found the hidden core by studying seismic waves that travel up to five times across the Earth's diameter – previous studies only looked at single bounces. The earthquake waves probed places near the center at angles that suggested a different crystalline structure deep inside.

The ANU researchers also believe the innermost inner core hints at a major event in Earth's past that had a "significant" impact on the planet's heart. As researchers told The Washington Post, it could also help explain the formation of the Earth's magnetic field. The field plays a major role in supporting life as it shields the Earth from harmful radiation and keeps water from drifting into space.

Bouncing Seismic Waves Reveal Secrets of the Planet's Inner Core

upstart writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/earths-structure-has-a-fifth-layer-bouncing-seismic-waves-reveal-secrets-of-the-planets-inner-core/

Data captured from seismic waves caused by earthquakes has shed new light on the deepest parts of Earth's inner core, according to seismologists from The Australian National University (ANU).

By measuring the different speeds at which these waves penetrate and pass through the Earth's inner core, the researchers believe they've documented evidence of a distinct layer inside Earth known as the innermost inner core – a solid "metallic ball" that sits within the center of the inner core.

upstart writes:

"Nowadays we are a business technology company":

Finish [sic] telecoms giant Nokia has announced that the company is rebranding and, for the first time in almost six decades, changing its logo. The move is part of a strategy to disassociate Nokia from smartphones, which it hasn't made in around ten years.

On the eve of Barcelona's Mobile World Congress, Nokia announced a new corporate logo that is made up of five different shapes to form the company's name. The famous blue-colored lettering of old has been replaced in favor of a range of colors that change depending on the use.

Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters, "There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company."

Nokia hasn't made smartphones since the Nokia Lumia 1020 in 2013, the year before Microsoft bought its mobile phone business - and we know how that turned out. Microsoft sold its Nokia-branded feature phone business to HMD Global in 2016.

[...] Nokia hopes to increase its market share when it comes to serving wireless service providers with network equipment, something that should be easier now that Huawei is prohibited from selling its 5G networking gear to many countries. But Nokia's main focus will be selling equipment to private companies, an area that made up 8% of its revenue last year, or around 2 billion euros (roughly $2.11 billion). Lundmark said Nokia's aim is to take that figure into double digits as quickly as possible.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The computer's accuracy improved as scientists used more qubits to fix mistakes:

To shrink error rates in quantum computers, sometimes more is better. More qubits, that is.

The quantum bits, or qubits, that make up a quantum computer are prone to mistakes that could render a calculation useless if not corrected. To reduce that error rate, scientists aim to build a computer that can correct its own errors. Such a machine would combine the powers of multiple fallible qubits into one improved qubit, called a "logical qubit," that can be used to make calculations.

Scientists now have demonstrated a key milestone in quantum error correction. Scaling up the number of qubits in a logical qubit can make it less error-prone, researchers at Google report February 22 in Nature.

[...] The new advance doesn't mean researchers are ready to build a fully error-corrected quantum computer, "however, it does demonstrate that it is indeed possible, that error correction fundamentally works," physicist Julian Kelly of Google Quantum AI said in a news briefing February 21.

[...] That small improvement suggests scientists are finally tiptoeing into the regime where error correction can begin to squelch errors by scaling up. "It's a major goal to achieve," says physicist Andreas Wallraff of ETH Zurich, who was not involved with the research.

However, the result is only on the cusp of showing that error correction improves as scientists scale up. A computer simulation of the quantum computer's performance suggests that, if the logical qubit's size were increased even more, its error rate would actually get worse. Additional improvement to the original faulty qubits will be needed to enable scientists to really capitalize on the benefits of error correction.

Still, milestones in quantum computation are so difficult to achieve that they're treated like pole jumping, Wallraff says. You just aim to barely clear the bar.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The technology is already out in force in some cities, but the true debate on privacy and policies is lagging behind:

Chula Vista was the first police department to be awarded such a waiver. Now roughly 225 departments have them, and a dozen of those, including Chula Vista's, operate what are called drone-as-first-responder programs, where drones are dispatched by pilots, who are listening to live 911 calls, and often arrive first at the scenes of accidents, emergencies, and crimes, cameras in tow.

The FAA is widely expected to fully legalize BVLOS within the next few years, which would make it easier for other such programs to launch; the sheriff-elect in Las Vegas, Nevada, already announced plans to pre-position hundreds of drones citywide to respond rapidly to crimes and shootings. New technologies such as autonomous flying, where drones can fly pre-programmed routes or respond to commands without the need for human operators, aren't far away.

"This is rapidly escalating," says Matt Sloane, founder of Atlanta-based Skyfire Consulting, which helps train law enforcement agencies on the use of drones. "Police departments are steadily growing their budgets for this technology. I think we'll see autonomous deployment within two to three years."

[...] Many argue that it's happening too fast. The use of drones as surveillance tools and first responders is a fundamental shift in policing, one that is happening without a well-informed public debate around privacy regulations, tactics, and limits for this technology.

Original Submission

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-u-s-needs-a-formal-reckoning-on-the-covid-pandemic/

In better times, the U.S. has, with some humility, owned up to its failures. Commissions have investigated tragedies such as Pearl Harbor and 9 /11. Presidential blue-ribbon panels bulwarked the Social Security program in 1983 and overhauled NASA's space shuttle program after the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Three years into the COVID pandemic, more than 1.1 million people are dead, and millions more are living with long COVID. How did the nation judged most prepared for an epidemic or pandemic in 2019 suffer a death rate so much worse than peers such as Canada, Germany or Japan? These are historic failures, and with the Biden administration and Congress coming to a rare agreement that the national health emergency should now end, we need an honest examination of this tragedy and what led to it.

How can we prevent another pandemic if we will not ask what happened? We need answers for the millions and counting who have been devastated by this disease.

It's unlikely that you can prevent another pandemic. But many other countries have handled the pandemic better than the USA. Most had the same amount of warnings and info from China.

You can try to blame China, but the US is doing it wrong if it's betting and relying on other countries (especially rival countries) to protect the USA from future pandemics.

If Covid-19 had started in Italy, France, Brazil or Mexico instead of China, would the results in the USA really have been better? It sure doesn't look like many countries would have been significantly faster and better at detecting Covid-19 and preventing its spread.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The enormous glacier is in trouble:

The Thwaites Glacier, an ice formation the size of Florida, can change the world. And the latest research shows that some of its most vulnerable spots are in greater danger than previously thought.

Thwaites holds a colossal amount of ice, enough to gradually raise sea levels by over two feet(Opens in a new tab), though its collapse in a heating climate could unleash many more feet from neighboring glaciers. The Antarctic glacier has destabilized, retreating back nearly nine miles since the 1990s. If much of it progressively melts in the coming decades and centuries, large swathes of coastal cities and populated areas around the globe could become submerged, and easily thrashed by storms. For this reason, scientists are now intensely researching where Thwaites is melting, and how fast it might melt. These are monumental questions for Earth's future denizens.

[...] "Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades," Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University, told Mashable in 2021.

That's why, for better or worse, Thwaites has earned the moniker "Doomsday Glacier." But, crucially, civilization is not inherently doomed, climate scientists emphasize. We are not hapless; we have energy choices that can limit the worst consequences of climate change.

The latest 2023 research, straight from the West Antarctic source, further shows how the glacier is melting. The critical point is beneath Thwaites' ice shelf, which is the end of the glacier that reaches over the ocean. Crucially, ice shelves ground themselves to the ocean floor, acting somewhat like "a cork in a bottle" to hold back the rest of colossal glaciers from flowing unimpeded into the sea. So if the ice shelf eventually goes, so can the glacier (though this process progresses from over many decades to centuries).

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Nokia G22 has removable back and standard screws allowing battery swap in less than five minutes at home

Nokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes in partnership with iFixit.

Launched before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Saturday, the Nokia G22 has a removable back and internal design that allows components to be easily unscrewed and swapped out including the battery, screen and charging port.

Nokia phones manufacturer HMD Global will make "quick fix" repair guides and genuine parts available for five years via specialists iFixit, in addition to affordable professional repair options.

[...] HMD Global hopes to ride the wave of increasing consumer desire for longer-lasting and more repairable devices. It follows in the footsteps of pioneers such as the Dutch manufacturer Fairphone, but at more affordable prices and with far simpler processes than Apple's recent DIY repair programmes.

The Nokia G22 will cost from £149.99 shipping on 8 March with replacement parts costing £18.99 for a charging port, £22.99 for a battery and £44.99 for a screen.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists make stunning discovery, find new protein activity in telomeres:

Once thought incapable of encoding proteins due to their simple monotonous repetitions of DNA, tiny telomeres at the tips of our chromosomes seem to hold a potent biological function that's potentially relevant to our understanding of cancer and aging.

Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UNC School of Medicine researchers Taghreed Al-Turki, Ph.D., and Jack Griffith, Ph.D., made the stunning discovery that telomeres contain genetic information to produce two small proteins, one of which they found is elevated in some human cancer cells, as well as cells from patients suffering from telomere-related defects.

"Based on our research, we think simple blood tests for these proteins could provide a valuable screen for certain cancers and other human diseases," said Griffith, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. "These tests also could provide a measure of 'telomere health,' because we know telomeres shorten with age."

Telomeres contain a unique DNA sequence consisting of endless repeats of TTAGGG bases that somehow inhibit chromosomes from sticking to each other. Two decades ago, the Griffith laboratory showed that the end of a telomere's DNA loops back on itself to form a tiny circle, thus hiding the end and blocking chromosome-to-chromosome fusions. When cells divide, telomeres shorten, eventually becoming so short that the cell can no longer divide properly, leading to cell death.

[...] "Many questions remain to be answered, but our biggest priority now is developing a simple blood test for these proteins. This could inform us of our biological age and also provide warnings of issues, such as cancer or inflammation."

See also:
    Scientists Unlock Secrets of 'Immortal Jellyfish'
    Is Ageing a Disease?

Journal information: Al-Turki, Taghreed M. et al, Mammalian telomeric RNA (TERRA) can be translated to produce valine–arginine and glycine–leucine dipeptide repeat proteins, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2221529120

Original Submission

upstart writes:

European Space Agency Launches 12-Month Lunar Farming Study:

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Wednesday that it's launched a new project that will help determine the feasibility of farming on the moon. The project, "Enabling Lunar In-Situ Agriculture by Producing Fertilizer from Beneficiated Regolith," will study various ways of extracting minerals from lunar soil for hydroponic farming.

[...] Lunar topsoil, otherwise known as regolith, is nutrient-dense—but that doesn't make it a suitable substrate for produce. Regolith lacks the nitrogen compounds necessary for steady plant growth; it's also hydrophobic and compacts in the presence of water, making it difficult for seedlings to establish healthy root systems. (This is likely why the University of Florida's regolith growth experiments were underwhelming last year.)

Hydroponics bypass the need for soil. Rather than hoping plants will establish roots in regolith or other substrates, hydroponics allows those roots to grow directly into nutrient-rich water. In order to ensure the water used for lunar hydroponics is nutritious, however, Solsys and the ESA will have to create a system that extracts nutrients from regolith.

[...] "This work is essential for future long-term lunar exploration," said ESA materials and processes engineer Malgorzata Holynska. "Achieving a sustainable presence on the Moon will involve using local resources and gaining access to nutrients present in lunar regolith with the potential to help cultivate plants."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

And how Chinese companies came to dominate battery manufacturing:

Among the many factors at play, China's control of refined materials for battery cells and its advanced battery-making technologies are particularly important. So important that Western automakers who want to transition out of gas cars won't be able to do it without turning to Chinese-made batteries. That's why Ford has been planning for a long time to build a battery plant with Chinese battery giant CATL, the world's largest manufacturer of lithium batteries.

[...] But why does Ford feel it's necessary to work with CATL to make EV batteries in the first place? The simple answer is that Chinese companies have managed to make good-quality batteries in large quantities and at a low cost. It will be commercially unviable to avoid using Chinese batteries, and it will take a long time for domestic battery companies to rival the size and efficiency of CATL.

As my colleague Casey Crownhart explained last week, Ford's new plant will focus on making LFP batteries, which use iron rather than the cobalt and nickel used in the other main type of lithium battery, known as NMC. Compared with NMC batteries, which are widely used to make EVs in the US and Europe, LFP batteries cost less, have a longer life cycle, and are safer when it comes to the possibility of catching fire.

But just a few years ago, LFP batteries were considered an obsolete technology that would never rival NMC batteries in energy density. It was Chinese companies, particularly CATL, that changed this consensus through advanced research. "That's purely down to the innovation within Chinese cell makers," Max Reid, senior research analyst in EV and battery supply chain services at the global research firm Wood Mackenzie, tells me. "And that has brought Chinese EV battery [companies] to the front line, the tier-one companies."

AnonTechie writes:

The magical demos displayed the capability. Now the platform wars begin.

The chatbots did their job. They inspired awe, mockery, and even some fear. Most importantly, they drew attention. Front-page headlines, cover stories, and word of mouth caused millions to try them, leading businesses and developers to ask how they could put the technology to use.

The APIs, of course, were always the point. ChatGPT and Bing's chatbot were never the end product. They were demos meant to sell other companies on tools they could use to build their own. And it worked. Now, the war to build the leading generative AI platform is underway.

"For OpenAI, the vast majority of the money they will ever make will come from developers," Ben Parr, president of Octane AI, told me via phone Thursday. "ChatGPT is just the entry road into everything else."

[...] The APIs, amid the commotion, are what matter. They're why Microsoft was willing to release an unproven chatbot into Bing, even when it knew it was a bit crazy. And why the company didn't seem to mind when the bot's flaws exploded into public view. It was never about Bing or ChatGPT, but about the potential future they previewed. And now, given the demos' success, the race to enable that future is underway.

Big Technology

Original Submission