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upstart writes:

Free trade not quite as dead, 'but it's in danger' says Morris Chang:

Globalization is over, at least for the chip industry, and this will mean higher chip prices, according to semiconductor contract manufacturer giant TSMC. Despite this, the company's founder said he supports US actions to slow the development of China's chip technology.

The Taiwanese chip company is caught up in the ongoing semiconductor battle between the superpowers, where the US is trying to prevent China from getting access to cutting edge technology that might be used by its burgeoning military. At least, that is the reason given.

At an event hosted by Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine in Taipei, retired TSMC founder Morris Chang said that efforts to contain China were leading to a split in the global supply chain that would likely increase prices and could have an effect on chip availability.

"There's no question in my mind that, in the chip sector, globalization is dead. Free trade is not quite that dead, but it's in danger," Chang said.

[...] It has already been noted that US efforts to isolate China are leading to an undoing of the distributed global supply chain infrastructure that has built up over the past few decades.

Richard Gordon, practice vice president for semiconductors and electronics at Gartner, told us earlier this year the outcome may be a world divided into China-centric and US-Europe-centric networks of supply chains and a greater self-reliance within those blocks.

Meanwhile, TSMC is also discussing subsidies with officials for the German state of Saxony about a new fabrication plant the chip giant is aiming to build there, despite publicly stating in December that it had no plans to site any facilities in Europe.

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upstart writes:

Intel's new HEDT CPU leaves behind Skylake-X in terms of power consumption:

Intel's recently introduced Xeon W9-3495X processor packs 56 cores begging you to overclock them, as the CPU also features an unlocked multiplier. When cooled down using liquid nitrogen, the 56-core processor can indeed be pushed to a formidable 5.50 GHz frequency, but at such high clocks it alone consumes almost 1,900 watts, more than beefy high-end gaming PCs, reports HardwareLuxx.

Elmor, a professional overclocker who collaborates with Asus, recently tried to push a Xeon W9-3495X 'Sapphire Rapids-SP' CPU on an Asus Pro WS W790E Sage SE motherboard to its limits with liquid nitrogen cooling. When frozen to -92.8 degrees Celsius/-135 degrees Fahrenheit, the CPU can work at 5.50 GHz and hit 132,220 points in Cinebench R23, which is just a little bit lower than the absolute record of 132,484 points set by another heavily overclocked Xeon W9-3495X. But the result comes at a cost.

The heavily overclocked Intel Xeon W9-3495X processor not only demonstrates phenomenal performance in Cinebench R23, but it also sets record in terms of power consumption. The CPU draws as much as 1,881W power when operating at 5.50 GHz and requires two 1,600W PSUs to feed it.

[...] Without any doubts, hitting 5.50 GHz with a 56-core Xeon W9-3495X processor cooled down using liquid nitrogen is a monumental achievement. Yet, it remains to be seen what makers of boutique factory-overclocked extreme workstations manage to squeeze out of this CPU with a production-grade cooling system and guaranteed long-term stability.

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upstart writes:

Sony wants to help low-vision users enjoy photography by shining lasers in their eyes:

Giant frickin' laser beams get all the buzz and sci-fi love, but it's our little laser bros that are putting in the work: taking measurements, entertaining our cats, and now, in the case of a Sony camera, helping people with vision problems see clearly through an electronic viewfinder and take pictures.

Sony is working with fellow Japanese company QD Laser to release the HX99 RNV Retina Projection Camera kit, a compact camera with an add-on retinal laser housing for projecting the camera's focused live view image into the user's eye. The low-power laser projection is designed to effectively bypass the focusing of the eye, helping users with visual impairments like shortsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism see a clear image.

It uses Sony's existing DSC-HX99 compact camera, which is a somewhat middling model from 2018 with an 18-megapixel sensor and equivalent zoom lens of 24-720mm (30x magnification), combined with QD Laser's Retissa Neoviewer projector. According to QD Laser's specs, the Retissa Neoviewer uses an RGB semiconductor laser to display an image with an equivalent of 720p resolution and 8-bit color depth. This beamed image has an approximate 60-degree horizontal field of view with 60Hz refresh, and the housing's battery has an estimated four hours of battery life. Tragically, it charges via Micro USB instead of USB-C.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/03/20-years-later-second-life-is-launching-on-mobile/

Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time—and now it's coming to mobile for the first time.

In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form.

In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year.

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upstart writes:

Simple robots wander NYC asking for trash and recycling, and it's adorable:

My favorite approach to human-robot interaction is minimalism. I've met a lot of robots, and some of the ones that have most effectively captured my heart are those that express themselves through their fundamental simplicity and purity of purpose. What's great about simple, purpose-driven robots is that they encourage humans to project needs and wants and personality onto them, letting us do a lot of the human-robot-interaction (HRI) heavy lifting.

In terms of simple, purpose-driven robots, you can't do much better than a robotic trash barrel (or bin or can or what have you). And in a paper presented at HRI 2023 this week, researchers from Cornell explored what happened when random strangers interacted with a pair of autonomous trash barrels in NYC, with intermittently delightful results.

What's especially cool about this, is how much HRI takes place around these robots that have essentially no explicit HRI features, since they're literally just trash barrels on wheels. They don't even have googly eyes! However, as the video notes, they're controlled remotely by humans, so a lot of the movement-based expression they demonstrate likely comes from a human source—whether or not that's intentional. [...]

upstart writes:

Chances its Arm that maker community is looking for a fresh SBC:

Asus has unveiled a RISC-V model in its range of Tinker Board single board computer (SBC) systems, which up until now have all been Arm-based. However, it seems users should not expect too much in the way of performance from this first device.

The Tinker Board has been around since 2017 as Asus' answer to the Raspberry Pi, even keeping the same form factor and GPIO pinout in some models. Like the Pi, they have been based on various Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) hardware.

Announced this week, the Tinker V is powered by a 64-bit RISC-V chip and aimed at embedded and IoT applications, but like other Tinker Boards and the Raspberry PI, is likely to find its way into the hands of makers and enthusiasts as well.

According to Asus, Tinker V "provides impressive power, comprehensive functionality and rich connectivity, making it the perfect choice for a diverse range of industrial IoT applications".

However, it is based on a 1GHz Renesas RZ/Five chip, which has just a single CPU core, the AX45MP designed by Andes Technology, whereas most rival products sport multiple processor cores.

upstart writes:

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the higher rate in 2020 and 2021:

An increasing number of U.S. women are dying during pregnancy or soon after giving birth, according to the latest data on the maternal mortality rate.

In 2021, there were 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 23.8 per 100,000 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019, the National Center for Health Statistics reports March 16. The U.S. rate greatly exceeds those of other high-income countries. The total number of U.S. maternal deaths rose from 861 in 2020 to 1,205 in 2021.

There remains a wide disparity in the maternal mortality rate for Black women, at 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with white women, at 26.6 per 100,000. Many social determinants of health underlie this gap, including differences in the quality of care that Black women receive before, during and after pregnancy.

The NCHS report doesn't discuss the reasons behind the increase for 2021. But COVID-19 contributed to a quarter of maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in October. The pandemic also contributed to the mortality disparity between Black and white women, the GAO found, worsening existing structural inequities that lead to such issues as barriers to getting health care (SN: 4/10/20).

The U.S. maternal mortality rate has risen overall since 2018. The highest rate is among non-Hispanic Black women compared with Hispanic women and non-Hispanic white women.

The maternal deaths captured by the NCHS report are those that occur during pregnancy or within 42 days of the end of the pregnancy, "from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management." These causes include hemorrhaging, infections and high blood pressure disorders such as eclampsia.

The report excludes deaths after 42 days and up to the first year after birth. But 30 percent of pregnancy-related deaths occur during this period, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in September, from an analysis of the years 2017 to 2019.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

For genetics, use scientifically relevant descriptions, not outdated social ideas:

With the advent of genomic studies, it's become ever more clear that humanity's genetic history is one of churn. Populations migrated, intermingled, and fragmented wherever they went, leaving us with a tangled genetic legacy that we often struggle to understand. The environment—in the form of disease, diet, and technology—also played a critical role in shaping populations.

But this understanding is frequently at odds with the popular understanding, which often views genetics as a determinative factor and, far too often, interprets genetics in terms of race. Worse still, even though race cannot be defined or quantified scientifically, popular thinking creeps back into scientific thought, shaping the sort of research we do and how we interpret the results.

Those are some of the conclusions of a new report produced by the National Academies of Science. Done at the request of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the report calls for scientists and the agencies that fund them to stop thinking of genetics in terms of race, and instead to focus on things that can be determined scientifically.

The report is long overdue. Genetics data has revealed that the popular understanding of race, developed during a time when white supremacy was widely accepted, simply doesn't make any sense. In the popular view, for instance, "Black" represents a single, homogenous group. But genomic data makes clear that populations in Sub-Saharan Africa are the most genetically diverse on Earth.

And, like everywhere else, populations in this region haven't stayed static. While some groups remained isolated from each other, the vast Bantu expansion touched most of the continent. Along the coast of East Africa, the history of interchange with Mideastern traders can be detected in many groups. There's also a tendency to treat African Americans as being equivalent to African, when the former population carries the legacy of genetic mixing with European populations—often not by choice.

Similar things are true for every population we have looked at, no matter where on the globe they reside. Treating any of these populations as a monolithic, uniform group—as a race, in other words—makes no scientific sense.

upstart writes:

A bruising, failed 16-month FCC nomination has left President Joe Biden with little time to staff up the agency before 2024:

Shortly after coming into office, President Joe Biden moved to restore net neutrality. He signed a sweeping executive order to promote competition, calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to bring back the Obama-era internet rules rolled back by the Trump administration.

But close to two years later, the FCC remains deadlocked with only four of its five commissioner slots filled — and Biden may be running out of time.

Biden's pick for a new FCC commissioner was Gigi Sohn, a former FCC official and public interest advocate. Sohn would have secured a long-awaited Democratic majority at the agency. After she was nominated in October 2021, however, a well-funded opposition organized a brutal opposition campaign against her. The culture-war campaign called Sohn an "extremist" and a "censor" because of past tweets criticizing Fox News and former President Donald Trump, largely ignoring her decades-long professional record. After more than 16 months and three separate confirmation hearings, Sohn withdrew her nomination earlier this month, citing the "unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks" by broadband and cable lobbyists and their friends.

It's unlikely Biden will pick someone as critical of cable companies again — but Republicans could try to thwart even a centrist candidate

Now, the White House has been forced to start over, prolonging a vacancy that continues to obstruct the administration's broadband agenda. The White House hasn't announced a new nominee or when they're hoping to confirm someone, but it's unlikely that Biden would pick someone as critical of cable companies as Sohn. Republicans and "dark money" groups have already proved that they're willing to spend millions to block progressive nominees. With so little time left in Biden's first term, stakeholders may even try to thwart a more moderate nominee, especially if there's an opportunity to continue the stalemate past the 2024 election.

guest reader writes:

Getting To Zettascale Without Needing Multiple Nuclear Power Plants:

There's no resting on your laurels in the HPC world, no time to sit back and bask in a hard-won accomplishment that was years in the making. The ticker tape has only now been swept up in the wake of the long-awaited celebration last year of finally reaching the exascale computing level, with the Frontier supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Labs breaking that barrier.

With that in the rear-view mirror, attention is turning to the next challenge: Zettascale computing, some 1,000 times faster than what Frontier is running. In the heady months after his heralded 2021 return to Intel as CEO, Pat Gelsinger made headlines by saying the giant chip maker was looking at 2027 to reach zettascale.

Lisa Su, the chief executive officer who has led the remarkable turnaround at Intel's chief rival AMD, took the stage at ISSCC 2023 to talk about zettascale computing, laying out a much more conservative – some would say reasonable – timeline.

Looking at supercomputer performance trends over the past two-plus decades and the ongoing innovation in computing – think advanced package technologies, CPUs and GPUs, chiplet architectures, the pace of AI adoption, among others – Su calculated that the industry could reach the zettabyte scale within the next 10 years or so.

fliptop writes:

The U.S. government database provided access to a treasure trove of sensitive data. "I can request information on anyone in the U.S.," one of the alleged hackers wrote:

Two men, one of whom previously presented themselves as an independent security researcher to Motherboard, allegedly went on a wide spanning hacking spree that included breaking into a federal U.S. law enforcement database; using a compromised Bangladeshi police officer's email to fraudulently requesting user data from a social media company; and even trying to buy services from a facial recognition company which doesn't sell products to the wider public.

[...] Sagar Steven Singh, 19, was arrested in Rhode Island on Tuesday; Nicholas Ceraolo, 25, remains at large with his location listed as Queens, New York, a press release from the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York says. "Singh and Ceraolo unlawfully used a police officer's stolen password to access a restricted database maintained by a federal law enforcement agency that contains (among other data) detailed, nonpublic records of narcotics and currency seizures, as well as law enforcement intelligence reports," it states.

[...] That pursuit of personal information is what allegedly drew Singh and Ceraolo to breaking into various law enforcement accounts. In one case, the pair allegedly used a police officer's credentials to access a web portal maintained by a U.S. federal law enforcement agency.

Also at Dnyuz.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Aztec farming calendar accurately tracked seasons, leap years:

Without clocks or modern tools, ancient Mexicans watched the sun to maintain a farming calendar that precisely tracked seasons and even adjusted for leap years.

Before the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico's agricultural system fed a population that was extraordinarily large for the time. Whereas Seville, the largest urban center in Spain, had a population of fewer than 50,000, the Basin, now known as Mexico City, was home to as many as 3 million people.

To feed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons required advanced understanding of when seasonal variations in weather would arrive. Planting too early, or too late, could have proved disastrous. The failure of any calendar to adjust for leap-year fluctuations could also have led to crop failure.

Though colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, it was not previously understood how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such accuracy. New UC Riverside research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how they did it. They used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, keeping track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

"We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun," said Exequiel Ezcurra, distinguished UCR professor of ecology who led the research.

To find that spot, the researchers studied Mexica manuscripts. These ancient texts referred to Mount Tlaloc, which lies east of the Basin. The research team explored the high mountains around the Basin and a temple at the mountain's summit. Using astronomical computer models, they confirmed that a long causeway structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on Feb. 24, the first day of the Aztec new year.

Journal Reference:
Exequiel Ezcurra, Paula Ezcurra, and Ben Meissner, Ancient inhabitants of the Basin of Mexico kept an accurate agricultural calendar using sunrise observatories and mountain alignments [open], PNAS, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215615119

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/chinese-search-giant-launches-ai-chatbot-with-prerecorded-demo/

Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China's answer to ChatGPT.

The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products.

But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of whether Baidu's chatbot could compete with ChatGPT.
[...]
"We can only explore by ourselves. Training ChatGPT took OpenAI more than a year, and it took them another year to tune GPT-4," said one Baidu employee. "It means we're two years behind."

Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Original Submission

upstart writes:

The hypothesis could help in the search for other Earthlike worlds:

The leading explanation for the origin of the moon proposes that a Mars-sized planet, dubbed Theia, struck the nascent Earth, ejecting a cloud of debris into space that later coalesced into a satellite (SN: 3/2/18). New computer simulations suggest that purported remains of Theia deep inside the planet could have also triggered the onset of subduction, a hallmark of modern plate tectonics, geodynamicist Qian Yuan of Caltech reported March 13 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

[...] Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the initiation of subduction, a tectonic process in which one plate slides under another (SN: 5/2/22; SN: 6/5/19; SN: 1/2/18). Yuan and his colleagues chose to focus on two continent-sized blobs of material in Earth's lower mantle known as large low-shear velocity provinces (SN: 5/12/16). These are regions through which seismic waves are known to move anomalously slow. Researchers had previously proposed these regions could have formed from old, subducted plates. But in 2021, Yuan and colleagues alternatively proposed that the mysterious masses could be the dense, sunken remnants of Theia.

[...] While the simulations suggest the large low-shear velocity provinces could have had a hand in starting subduction, it's not yet clear whether these masses came from Theia. "The features ... are a fairly recent discovery," says geodynamicist Laurent Montési of the University of Maryland in College Park. "They're very fascinating structures, with a very unknown origin." As such, he says, it's too early to say that Theia triggered plate tectonics.

"It's provoking. This material down there is something special," Montési says of the large low-shear velocity provinces. "But whether it has to be originally extraterrestrial, I don't think the case is made."

Journal Reference:
Q. Yuan. A giant impact origin for the first subduction on Earth. Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 13, 2023.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tiny data center makes for a comfortable swim:

A data center about the size of a washing machine is being used to heat a public swimming pool in England.

Data centers' servers generate heat as they operate, and interest is growing in finding ways to harness it to cut energy costs and offset carbon emissions.

In this latest example, the computing technology has been placed inside a white box and surrounded by oil, which captures the heat before being pumped into a heat exchanger, according to a BBC report.

The setup is effective enough to heat a council-run swimming pool in Exmouth, about 150 miles west of London, to about 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for about 60% of the time, saving the operator thousands of dollars. And with energy costs rising sharply in the U.K., and councils looking for ways to save money, an initiative like this could be the difference between the pool staying open and closing down.

Behind the idea is U.K.-based tech startup Deep Green. In exchange for hosting its kit, Deep Green installs free digital boilers at pools and pays for the energy that they use. Meanwhile, tech firms pay Deep Green to use its computing power for various artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.

Related:
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    Microsoft's Underwater Server Experiment Resurfaces After Two Years
    Heating Homes and Businesses with "Data Furnaces"

Original Submission