SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Three small regions unexpectedly connect to a network known for planning and pain perception:

The classical view of how the human brain controls voluntary movement might not tell the whole story.

That map of the primary motor cortex — the motor homunculus — shows how this brain region is divided into sections assigned to each body part that can be controlled voluntarily (SN: 6/16/15). It puts your toes next to your ankle, and your neck next to your thumb. The space each part takes up on the cortex is also proportional to how much control one has over that part. Each finger, for example, takes up more space than a whole thigh.

A new map reveals that in addition to having regions devoted to specific body parts, three newfound areas control integrative, whole-body actions. And representations of where specific body parts fall on this map are organized differently than previously thought, researchers report April 19 in Nature.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Babies tumble about with more than 200 previously unknown viral families within their intestines:

Viruses are usually associated with illness. But our bodies are full of both bacteria and viruses that constantly proliferate and interact with each other in our gastrointestinal tract. While we have known for decades that gut bacteria in young children are vital to protect them from chronic diseases later on in life, our knowledge about the many viruses found there is minimal.

A few years back, this gave University of Copenhagen professor Dennis Sandris Nielsen the idea to delve more deeply into this question. As a result, a team of researchers from COPSAC (Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood) and the Department of Food Science at UCPH, among others, spent five years studying and mapping the diaper contents of 647 healthy Danish one-year-olds.

"We found an exceptional number of unknown viruses in the faeces of these babies. Not just thousands of new virus species – but to our surprise, the viruses represented more than 200 families of yet to be described viruses. This means that, from early on in life, healthy children are tumbling about with an extreme diversity of gut viruses, which probably have a major impact on whether they develop various diseases later on in life," says Professor Dennis Sandris Nielsen of the Department of Food Science, senior author of the research paper about the study, now published in Nature Microbiology.

The researchers found and mapped a total of 10,000 viral species in the children's faeces – a number ten times larger than the number of bacterial species in the same children. These viral species are distributed across 248 different viral families, of which only 16 were previously known. The researchers named the remaining 232 unknown viral families after the children whose diapers made the study possible. As a result, new viral families include names like Sylvesterviridae, Rigmorviridae and Tristanviridae.

upstart writes:

Perhaps not all booms are bad:

About four minutes after SpaceX's gargantuan rocket lifted from its Texas launch pad, it burst into a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico, never reaching space.

Though SpaceX hasn't shared many details yet about what happened during Starship's maiden voyage, one fact is known: It was intentionally ordered to explode.

Rockets are destroyed in the air when people's lives could be even remotely at risk of falling debris. In the days since the uncrewed test, no injuries or major property damage appear to have been reported.

When the rocket launched at 9:33 a.m. ET April 20, 2023, some of the rocket's 33 booster engines had either burned out or failed to light from the start. As Starship ascended, cameras caught views of the flames underneath it, appearing to show some of the engines had cut out.

In a statement released after the incident, SpaceX said Starship climbed to about 26 miles over the ocean before beginning to lose altitude and tumble. Then, self-destruct commands were sent to the booster and ship, which hadn't separated as planned, the company said.

upstart writes:

Likely a motherboard BIOS issue:

High-performance microprocessors tend to get hot and, when overclocked without proper cooling or throttling, can literally burn out When an old CPU does so in an old PC because of dust and a worn out fan, there is nothing surprising about it. But when a new CPU breaks on a shiny new motherboard, that's surprising. This is what happened to an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, one of the best CPUs, which belonged to a Reddit user. And, according to other users, he's not alone.

"The CPU pad is physically bulging," wrote Speedrookie, the owner of the burned-out processor. "I imagine there was just too much heat on the contacts causing the pad to expand. Not that the CPU has an internal component which exploded."

At least when it comes to AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D-series processors, it appears that this is by far not an isolated case. There are reports from other Reddit users who had the same experience with their Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs on motherboards from Asus and MSI.

Famous overclocker der8auer also had an issue with an AMD Ryzen 7000X3D chip burning out during some early overclocking tests a few weeks ago. As you can see in his video, he says "I did not expect this to happen so quickly and especially right out of the BIOS."

There are about a million of reasons why a modern processor can burn out. Defective sockets or a motherboards [sic] are likely causes and insufficient cooling can cause a similar result. A BIOS version that tends to automatically overclock CPUs too much could be a yet another reason for a processor failure. In fact, as noticed by HXL (@9550pro), Asus has just withdrew old BIOSes for many of its AMD X670-based motherboards, but for some of them old BIOSes are still available.

[...] Again, given that the information is insufficient to say the least, we cannot make any conclusions at this point. We'll reach out to our contacts at AMD and the motherboard vendors to see if they are aware of any issues. For now, we recommend that those with AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D processors keep a close eye on their CPU temps, use adequate cooling and keep their BIOSes up-to-date.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A recent experiment tested the mass-based boundaries between the quantum and classical realms:

Picture a cat. I'm assuming you're imagining a live one. It doesn't matter. You're wrong either way—but you're also right. This is the premise of Erwin Schrödinger's 1935 thought experiment to describe quantum states, and now, researchers have managed to create a fat (which is to say, massive) Schrödinger cat, testing the limits of the quantum world and where it gives way to classical physics.

Schrödinger's experiment is thus: A cat is in a box with a poison that is released from its container if an atom of a radioactive substance, also in the box, decays. Because it is impossible to know whether or not the substance will decay in a given timeframe, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and some objective truth is determined. [...]

In the same way, particles in quantum states (qubits, if they're being used as bits in a quantum computer) are in a quantum superposition (which is to say, both "alive" and "dead") until they're measured, at which point the superposition breaks down. Unlike ordinary computer bits that hold a value of either 0 or 1, qubits can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously.

Now, researchers made a Schrödinger's cat that's much heavier than those previously created, testing the muddy waters where the world of quantum mechanics gives way to the classical physics of the familiar macroscopic world. Their research is published this week in the journal Science.

In the place of the hypothetical cat was a small crystal, put in a superposition of two oscillation states. The oscillation states (up or down) are equivalent to alive or dead in Schrödinger's thought experiment. A superconducting circuit, effectively a qubit, was used to represent the atom. The team coupled electric-field creating material to the circuit, allowing its superposition to transfer over to the crystal. Capiche?

"By putting the two oscillation states of the crystal in a superposition, we have effectively created a Schrödinger cat weighing 16 micrograms," said Yiwen Chu, a physicist at ETH Zurich and the study's lead author, in a university release.

upstart writes:

The lineage had not been seen in the area for over two years:

[...] SARS-CoV-2 infections in mink aren't particularly noteworthy or concerning on their own; it's well established that mink are susceptible to the virus. The realization early in the pandemic resulted in extensive culls in Denmark and the Netherlands during 2020 and led to intensive monitoring and regulation of remaining mink herds in many places, including Poland.

But the recent cases in Polish mink, reported this week in the journal Eurosurveillance, are unusual. While previous mink outbreaks have linked to infected farmworkers and local circulation of the virus—indicating human-to-mink spread—none of the farm workers or families in the recently affected farms tested positive for the virus. In fact, health investigators found that the infected mink carried a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that has not been seen in humans in the region in more than two years (B.1.1.307).

The finding suggests that humans were not responsible for infecting the mink—at least not directly. Rather, it suggests that another unknown species may have been stealthily harboring and spreading the otherwise bygone strain for some time and managed to carry it onto the mink farms.

The suggestion raises more concern over viral "spillback." The term relates to the more recognized "spillover," when a virus jumps from a host population—a reservoir—to a new population, such as humans. SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have originated in a reservoir of horseshoe bats before it reached humans. Since then, it is clear that it can also infect a broad range of animals, including rodents, cats, dogs, white-tail deer, non-human primates, as well as ferrets and mink. Researchers fear that the virus could spill back to an animal population that could become a new reservoir from which the virus could periodically move back to humans.

upstart writes:

Red Alert: ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names:

ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published "Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET", which is now open for public comment.

Either by design, or unintentionally, they've proposed allowing any government in the world to cancel, redirect, or transfer to their control applicable domain names! This is an outrageous and dangerous proposal that must be stopped. While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal.

The offending text can be found buried in an Appendix of the proposed new registry agreement. Using the "redline" version of the proposed agreement (which is useful for quickly seeing what has changed compared with the current agreement), the critical changes can be found in Section 2.7 of Appendix 8, on pages 147-148. [...]

It would allow Verisign, via the new text in 2.7(b)(ii)(5), to:

" deny, cancel, redirect or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, as it deems necessary, in its unlimited and sole discretion" [the language at the beginning of 2.7(b)(ii), emphasis added]

upstart writes:

The U.S. space agency is supplying two instruments for a Japanese spacecraft tasked with collecting samples from Phobos:

JAXA is getting ready to visit Mars's two moons, but Japan's space agency is no longer going alone.

This week, NASA signed a memorandum of understanding with JAXA to join its upcoming mission to the two Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, which is scheduled to launch in 2024. NASA has assembled a team of scientists and prepared two instruments to board JAXA's spacecraft to Mars, the space agency announced on Tuesday.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission will not only visit the two mysterious moons that whirl around Mars, it will also land on the cratered surface of Phobos to snag a sample from the largest of the two moons.

It's an ambitious plan as no spacecraft has successfully ventured to the Martian moons before, let alone land on one. JAXA, however, has some experience in returning samples from cosmic bodies. The Japanese space agency's Hayabusa spacecraft retrieved samples from asteroid Itokawa's surface in 2010, while Hayabusa2 returned samples from a different asteroid named Ryugu in 2020.

[...] The main purpose of the mission is to analyze the origins of the Martian moons and determine whether they are in fact captured asteroids in the Mars system or fragments that coalesced together following a huge impact on the Red Planet. The mission could help scientists better understand how terrestrial planets like Mars form and learn more about the history of the planet.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Our precious planet seen from deep space:

NASA's exploration robots have rumbled around Mars, swooped around Saturn, and flown well beyond the planets, into interstellar space.

But the space agency's engineers often direct their machines to peer back at the vivid blue dot in the distance.

"During almost every mission we turn around and take a picture back home," NASA's former chief historian, Bill Barry, told Mashable. "There seems to be an irresistible tendency to look back at home."

Indeed, in the cosmic images below you'll glimpse some of the farthest-away views of our humble, ocean-blanketed world ever captured by humanity. When we view other objects, worlds, stars, or even galaxies, we often see just dots. But to most of the cosmos, we're just a dot in the vast ether, too.

The article has nice images of the Earth and Moon taken by OSIRIS-REx, Earth as seen from the surface of Mars, a video flyby of the Earth and Moon by the Juno spacecraft, and a beautiful shot of Earth looking back with Saturnian rings in the view by Cassini, all reminding us of Carl Sagan's famous Pale Blue Dot where he observed:

To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

MacLife and Maximum PC April issues will be their last physical versions:

Magazines are so retro: If you are anything like me, you probably remember the days when you subscribed to multiple computing magazines. I still have fond memories of typing out the computer programs in the back pages of some publications; I even submitted a few of my own.

When high-speed internet came along, many computing publications began producing digital versions of their magazines online. Those with subscriptions still got their physical copies, but the online component was a nice perk for when readers could not just pick up a magazine and start reading, like at work.

Before long, most computing magazines had online versions and, at some point, started ditching paper. It was easier and cheaper to publish one copy that all subscribers could access online rather than printing hundreds of thousands of physical versions.

[...] The demise of print media in the computing industry was inevitable. By the 2000s, many prominent magazines had shut down their printing arms and switched to digital only. Byte stopped printing in 1998. Windows Magazine crashed in 2002, and the succinctly titled PC Magazine (now PCMag) published its last issue in 2009. Computer Gaming World went entirely out of business with its November 2006 issue.

[...] Print advertising also played a big part in the decline of computer publications. Once advertisers realized replicating ads on web pages was cheap and easy, they gradually pulled out of print computer magazines. Many physical magazine branches shut down for that reason alone. If the pub didn't have the clout of names like PC Magazine, Maximum PC, or PC World, it had no chance of competing against the internet for ad space. Even the almanac-like Computer Shopper plunged from nearly 360,000 readers in 1996 to about 55,000 in 2014.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

For millennia, humans have been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos:

Unlike ancient philosophers imagining the universe's origins, modern cosmologists use quantitative tools to gain insights into its evolution and structure. Modern cosmology dates back to the early 20th century, with the development of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Now, researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration have submitted a set of papers to The Astrophysical Journal featuring a groundbreaking new map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the sky, extending deep into the cosmos, that confirms Einstein's theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the 14-billion-year life span of the universe.

The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang.

"It's a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it," said Suzanne Staggs, director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. "The famous blue and yellow CMB image [from 2003] is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since."

[...] "We have mapped the invisible dark matter distribution across the sky, and it is just as our theories predict," said co-author Blake Sherwin, a 2013 Ph.D. alumnus of Princeton and a professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a large group of ACT researchers. "This is stunning evidence that we understand the story of how structure in our universe formed over billions of years, from just after the Big Bang to today.'

upstart writes:

Governments also have no theory on how nefarious groups might behave using the tech:

The proliferation of AI in weapon systems among non-state actors such as terrorist groups or mercenaries would be virtually impossible to stop, according to a hearing before UK Parliament.

The House of Lords' AI in Weapon Systems Committee yesterday heard how the software nature of AI models that may be used in a military context made them difficult to contain and keep out of nefarious hands.

When we talk about non-state actors that conjures images of violent extremist organizations, but it should include large multinational corporations, which are very much at the forefront of developing this technology

Speaking to the committee, James Black, assistant director of defense and security research group RAND Europe, said: "A lot of stuff is very much going to be difficult to control from a non-proliferation perspective, due to its inherent software-based nature. A lot of our export controls and non-proliferation regimes that exist are very much focused on old-school traditional hardware: it's missiles, it's engines, it's nuclear materials."

An added uncertainty was that there was no established "war game" theory of how hostile non-state actors might behave using AI-based weapons.

upstart writes:

The encrypted email service has more features than ever and surpassed 100 million users worldwide:

Encrypted email company Proton has announced one of the biggest new additions to its growing suite of privacy-focused apps: Proton Pass, an end-to-end encrypted password manager.

[...] To get a better perspective on Proton's recent changes and its ambitions for the future, Gizmodo sat down with Proton's CEO, Andy Yen, to discuss what the company's been up to and where it's headed in the future. Proton Pass is the most consequential new feature that Proton has released in quite some time. Currently available only as a limited beta, Pass can only be accessed by Lifetime and Visionary Proton users, and even then on an invite-only basis. That said, the company says that a general launch of the app will happen "later this year," meaning it should soon be available to all users.

"A password manager has been one of the most common requests from the Proton community ever since we first launched Proton Mail," Yen wrote in a company blog post. "Proton Pass is not just another password manager. It's perhaps the first one built by a dedicated encryption and privacy company, leading to tangible differences in security."

[...] Speaking with Gizmodo, Proton's Yen said that the growth of consumer interest in privacy services over the past several years has generated more competition in his industry but it has also helped drive business to Proton.

"Back when we started, end-to-end encryption, abbreviated E2EE, was something that spies or crazy people were using—it was barely something most people had heard about," Yen tells me. That changed in the intervening years—as an ever-compounding slew of privacy scandals drew attention to the dangers of surveillance capitalism and government spying. Today, the average consumer is much more well versed in services like E2EE, said Yen.

canopic jug writes:

Theologian Dr Corey Stephan has documented his exploration of installing OpenBSD on an old ThinkPad X270. He has posted his rather thorough personal notes which cover the intial setup, such as power management, performance tweaks, Wi-Fi configuration, audio and video, tracking -current, and getting software from the ports tree. He also goes into a bit of his favored tools and workflow.

It is hard not to cherish the partnership of a slightly older ThinkPad and OpenBSD. The ThinkPad X270 and OpenBSD are both minimalist, robust, and customizable. Specifically, the ThinkPad is minimalist with regard to features, robust with regard to physical durability, and customizable with regard to hardware repairability and replaceability. OpenBSD is minimalist with regard to code, robust with regard to security, and customizable with regard to every aspect of the system. Further, since a healthy number of OpenBSD's developers long have used ThinkPads (to the point that I have read some jokes come out of members of their ranks like 'I may use any kind of laptop that I may like, as long as it is a ThinkPad'), the operating system works brilliantly on the laptop — both with their stock settings.

Overall, installing and configuring OpenBSD -current on the ThinkPad X270 was the simplest minimalist installation of any operating system on any hardware that I ever have done, even simpler than Debian GNU/Linux or my beloved FreeBSD (and much simpler than a proprietary, dysfunctional operating system Windows or MacOS). Was the total setup process easier than, say, that of a GNU/Linux distribution that uses the Calamares installer and comes preconfigured with a huge array of GNU/Linux drivers? Well, no, it was not, but that is not the point. OpenBSD is secure, nimble, and customizable in an elegantly simple way that interoperates smoothly with this small ThinkPad for my mobile academic research and writing. Even in this topsy-turvy era in which other popular desktop operating systems are have many design choices for form over function, OpenBSD comes as a serious, professional product that is ready to let me focus on my work.

Previously:
(2021) Recent and Not So Recent Changes in OpenBSD That Make Life Better
(2020) Using OpenBSD Routing Tables to Segment the Home Network for Privacy
(2018) OpenBSD Chief De Raadt Says No Easy Fix For New Intel CPU Bug
and many others.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have created a sturdy, lightweight material made from sugar and wood-derived powders that disintegrates on-demand:

Sturdy, degradable materials made from plants and other non-petroleum sources have come a long way in recent years. For example, cornstarch-based packing peanuts disappear simply by dousing them in water, and some utensils are based on polymers synthesized from plant sugars. But those packing peanuts can't be used to protect anything wet, and plant-derived polymers still take a long time to break down. One potential alternative is a new type of rigid material designed from isomalt, which is a sugar alcohol rather than a polymer. With isomalt, bakers can create breathtaking, but brittle, structures for desserts, and then dissolve them away quickly in water. So, Scott Phillips and colleagues wanted to boost the sturdiness of isomalt with natural additives to create a robust material that degrades on-demand.

The researchers heated isomalt to a liquid-like state and mixed in either cellulose, cellulose and sawdust, or wood flour to produce three different materials. Then, using commercial plastics manufacturing equipment, the materials were extruded into small pellets and molded into various objects, including balls, a dodecahedron, a chess piece and flower-shaped saucers. All of the tested additives doubled the strength of isomalt, creating materials that were harder than plastics, including poly(ethylene terephthalate) (known as PET) and poly(vinyl chloride) (known as PVC), but were still lightweight. In experiments, samples dissolved in water within minutes. And saucers made of the material, and coated with a food grade shellac and cellulose acetate, withstood being immersed in water for up to seven days. However, once the saucers were broken and the coating cracked, they rapidly disintegrated in water. The team also repeatedly crushed, dissolved and recycled both coated and uncoated objects into new ones that were still as strong as the original items.

The researchers say that the material could be used for food-service items and temporary décor, and then crushed and sprayed with water to fall apart. But even if such items were simply tossed into the trash or somehow got into the environment, the slightest crack in the coating would start their collapse into sugars and the plant-based additives, which the researchers say might be good for soil.

There is also a video version of this press release

Original Submission