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upstart writes:

Researchers working on plan to neutralise reach of network developed by billionaire Elon Musk:

Researchers say China plans to build a huge satellite network in near-Earth orbit to provide internet services to users around the world — and to stifle Elon Musk's Starlink.

The project has the code name "GW", according to a team led by associate professor Xu Can with the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Space Engineering University in Beijing. But what these letters stand for is unclear.

The GW constellation will include 12,992 satellites owned by the newly established China Satellite Network Group Co, Xu and his colleagues said in a paper about anti-Starlink measures published in the Chinese journal Command Control and Simulation on Feb 15.

[...] Xu's team said the GW satellite constellation was likely to be deployed quickly, "before the completion of Starlink". This would "ensure that our country has a place in low orbit and prevent the Starlink constellation from excessively pre-empting low-orbit resources", they wrote.

The Chinese satellites could also be placed in "orbits where the Starlink constellation has not yet reached", the researchers said, adding that they would "gain opportunities and advantages at other orbital altitudes, and even suppress Starlink".

quietus writes:

It looks like ChatGPT learns from the questions you pose it.

That, at least, is the conclusion one could draw from a couple of enterprise bans of the tool.

The first one out of the gate was Amazon. Amazon's analysis of ChatGPT's results appeared to show confidential information. As a company lawyer put it,

"... your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT, and we wouldn't want its output to include or resemble our confidential information (and I've already seen instances where its output closely matches existing material)."

The second big announcement came from JPMorgan, the world's largest bank. Last week they followed in Amazon's steps, without giving explanation apart from this being normal procedure for third-party tools. That explanation smells a bit dubious, unless the use of Google or any other public search engine is forbidden there too.

That was on February 22. Two days later, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and other Wall Street banks followed suit.

Maybe, as people have the impression of chatting with a real person, they tend to share more gossip and secret info too?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study finds helping others reduces focus on your own symptoms:

People suffering from symptoms of depression or anxiety may help heal themselves by doing good deeds for others, new research shows.

The study found that performing acts of kindness led to improvements not seen in two other therapeutic techniques used to treat depression or anxiety.

Most importantly, the acts of kindness technique was the only intervention tested that helped people feel more connected to others, said study co-author David Cregg, who led the work as part of his PhD dissertation in psychology at The Ohio State University.

[...] "We often think that people with depression have enough to deal with, so we don't want to burden them by asking them to help others. But these results run counter to that," she said.

"Doing nice things for people and focusing on the needs of others may actually help people with depression and anxiety feel better about themselves."

[...] After an introductory session, the participants were split into three groups. Two of the groups were assigned to techniques often used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression: planning social activities or cognitive reappraisal.

[...] Members of the third group were instructed to perform three acts of kindness a day for two days out of the week. Acts of kindness were defined as "big or small acts that benefit others or make others happy, typically at some cost to you in terms of time or resources."

Some of the acts of kindness that participants later said they did included baking cookies for friends, offering to give a friend a ride, and leaving sticky notes for roommates with words of encouragement.

upstart writes:

Waymo is starting driverless taxi tests in Los Angeles:

Late last year, Waymo secured a Driverless Pilot permit from the state of California, bringing the alphabet-owned brand one step closer to launching its autonomous taxi service in the state. Now, Waymo is already expanding its service area, announcing plans to begin testing driverless cars in Los Angeles. The company tells Engadget that the test will mark the first time that fully autonomous cars will roam the streets of LA, and that thanks to successful tests in San Francisco, its been able to roll out autonomous drivers in new cities with "little-to-no on-board engineering work."

That doesn't mean the company is ready to launch its Waymo One taxi service in California, however. The LA test will likely follow the same course as Waymo's fleet in San Francisco: a limited number of vehicles only available to riders in the Waymo Research Trusted Tester program. Waymo didn't have any details to share regarding when the full driverless taxi service will be available to customers in Los Angeles, but it probably hinges on the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issuing the firm a Driverless Deployment permit. Until it can clear that final legal hurdle, Waymo's paid taxi service will remain exclusive to Phoenix AZ. So far, GM's Cruise robotaxi service is the only company permitted to charge for driverless rides in the state, so long as those rides take place during daylight hours.

[...] Waymo didn't give any specific dates for when the test will begin, but noted that its 5th-generation Jaguar I-Pace cars will start rider-only testing in Santa Monica, and only outside of rush-hour. Then, the program will expand in accordance with Waymo's safety framework before eventually launching to consumers. Oh, and in case you were worried that the cars might make LA traffic even worse, the company promises that its continuously updating its self-driving software to avoid stalling traffic, as one stopped Waymo vehicle recently did in San Francisco.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Samsung commits $230B for five new chip plants in South Korea:

Samsung Electronics said today that it plans to invest approximately $230 billion (300 trillion won) to build five new memory and foundry fabs in South Korea — a big move in line with the government's ambitious aim to set up a mega semiconductor hub in Yongin, on the outskirts of Seoul. The investments will be made through 2042.

The country's move indicates that it is shoring up the domestic semiconductor production line to secure the supply chain as other countries, including the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and China, are scrambling to ramp up their domestic chip manufacturing to offset risks to global supply chain disruption due to rising tensions between the U.S. and China.

"It is expected that we would invest about 300 trillion KRW ($230 billion) in the chip-making cluster through 2042," a spokesperson at Samsung said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. Although the government, in a statement, spoke of plans for five plants, the Samsung spokesperson declined to comment on the number of plants Samsung will set up in the semiconductor cluster as well as other details.

[...] Samsung already operates a foundry chip facility in Austin, Texas, and it has recently announced additional investment plans for the U.S.: $17 billion earmarked to build a manufacturing facility in Taylor, Texas. In addition, it is also considering investing $200 billion to set up a further 11 chip plants in Texas.

South Korea boosts its AI chip industry with $642M amid ChatGPT frenzy

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Scientists have decoded the physical process that takes place in the mouth when chocolate is eaten, as it changes from a solid into a smooth emulsion that many people find totally irresistible:

By analysing each of the steps, the interdisciplinary research team from the School of Food Science and Nutrition and the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds hope it will lead to the development of a new generation of luxury chocolate that will have the same feel and texture but will be healthier to consume.

During the moments it is in the mouth, the chocolate sensation arises from the way the chocolate is lubricated, either from ingredients in the chocolate itself or from saliva or a combination of the two.

Fat plays a key function almost immediately when a piece of chocolate is in contact with the tongue. After that, solid cocoa particles are released and they become important in terms of the tactile sensation, so fat deeper inside the chocolate plays a rather limited role and could be reduced without having an impact on the feel or sensation of chocolate.

[...] "If a chocolate has 5% fat or 50% fat it will still form droplets in the mouth and that gives you the chocolate sensation. However, it is the location of the fat in the make-up of the chocolate which matters in each stage of lubrication, and that has been rarely researched.

"We are showing that the fat layer needs to be on the outer layer of the chocolate, this matters the most, followed by effective coating of the cocoa particles by fat, these help to make chocolate feel so good."

[...] "Our research opens the possibility that manufacturers can intelligently design dark chocolate to reduce the overall fat content.

upstart writes:

MIT AR Headset Uses RF Signals to Reveal Hidden Objects:

The headset, called X-AR, relies on radio frequency (RF) signals to operate. RF signals are wireless electromagnetic signals most often used for communication, like in walkie-talkies, mobile phones, and your favorite radio station. Their ability to pass through solid material makes for an ideal locator—provided the hidden object possesses an RFID tag.

RFID tags reflect RF signals emitted by an RF antenna. As these reflections occur, MIT's AR headset captures them and turns them into a virtual transparent sphere. The sphere tells the user where an item is, regardless of whether it's sitting in a cardboard box, around a corner, or under a pile of other objects. Once the user picks up the item, the AR headset verifies that they've picked up the right thing.

MIT associate professor Fadel Adib, who directs a wireless and sensor technologies group, led a team of research assistants and postdoc students in creating the headset. The team started with a Microsoft Hololens AR headset with an RF antenna. Then they programmed the antenna to use synthetic aperture radar (SAR). This technique enabled the antenna to measure the distance between itself and RFID-tagged objects. This technique proved highly effective thanks to humans' free range of motion: Frequent movement provided the SAR antenna with multiple measurements, facilitating more accurate localization.

[...] As one can imagine, this isn't just useful for a lighthearted game of hide-and-seek. Warehouse, retail, and factory workers could use the technology to quickly and easily find the necessary equipment, rather than opening and digging through bin after bin. There's also a chance emergency services could also use it for search-and-rescue missions, but anything they'd hope to find under snow or rubble would have to contain an RFID tag.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA and SpaceX target new Crew-6 launch date:

After NASA and SpaceX scrubbed the launch of Crew-6 just a couple of minutes before lift-off early on Monday morning, officials have announced they're now targeting Thursday for the next launch effort.

The team called off Monday's launch attempt at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida when it suddenly encountered an issue in the ground systems affecting the loading of the ignition fluids for the Falcon 9 rocket that will carry the astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) inside the Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule.

They're now aiming to launch the crew at 12:34 a.m. ET on Thursday, March 2 (9:34 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1).

Traveling aboard the Crew Dragon as part of Crew-6 will be NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

[...] Much of their time will be spent performing carefully designed science experiments, among them a fascinating effort that will involve gathering samples of bacteria and fungi from surfaces on the outside of the space station.

The experiment will investigate whether any microbes exist around parts of the station such as its life support system vents, and try to determine how easily they can survive and whether they can spread. This should help planners of future crewed missions into deep space better understand the potential dangers of the human contamination of environments.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

iPhone 15 to require certified accessories for full access to USB-C:

According to a rumor, Apple is resuming the Made For iPhone program despite moving from Lightning to USB-C on iPhone 15.

Apple requires third-party accessory makers to pay a fee to get certified access to select parts and technologies like the Lightning connector. This system is called the Made For iPhone program, and it was thought to be going away thanks to USB-C, but a repeated rumor says otherwise.

According to leaker ShrimpApplePro on Twitter, Apple will be requiring MFi certification for products connecting to the iPhone 15. This has been confirmed by the leaker's source, stating that Foxconn is in mass production of accessories like EarPods and cables with the certification.

The leaker does offer a bright side to the matter — some third-party MFi products are cheaper than Apple's official ones.

In the replies, Shrimp states that Apple will limit data and charging speed for cables connected to iPhone without the MFi certification. It seems this will be allowed, as Apple will be cooperating with the EU mandate to move to USB-C, just providing an obstacle to users.

While this might appear to be a consumer-hostile move from Apple, there are reasons the company might want a certification process. Obviously, Apple stands to make some money from charging for the certified parts and technology, but consumers will also have more confidence in buying products they know are guaranteed to work seamlessly with the iPhone.

Despite all of the praise USB-C gets for its universal connector, there are a lot of problems with it too. It is nearly impossible to tell what capabilities a cable might have just by looking at it, which could potentially damage a product if connected in an unexpected way.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Telecom companies have long resisted letting scientific sensors piggyback on their subsea cables—until now:

The residents of Vanuatu, a clutch of islands in the South Pacific, are no strangers to flooding. The ocean floor around them is frequently shaken by tsunami-triggering earthquakes.

Some advance warning could give residents enough time to get to higher ground before tsunamis strike, saving lives. But the world's 65 active deep-ocean buoys, which are designed to detect the waves, are too sparsely distributed to provide that type of warning for Vanuatu.

The Joint Task Force for Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) Subsea Cables, a United Nations initiative, aims to solve that problem by equipping new commercial undersea telecom cables with simple sensors that measure pressure, acceleration, and temperature. The sensors could be added to the fiber-optic cables' signal repeaters—the watertight cylinders full of equipment that are used to amplify signals every 50 kilometers or so. With cables providing for the sensors' power and data transfer needs, scientists could collect information about the seafloor at an unprecedented scale—and pass on data about potential tsunamis far faster than is currently possible.

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.