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upstart writes:

Linux Foundation launches new organization to maintain TLA+:

The LinuxFoundation, the nonprofit tech consortium that manages various open source efforts, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language. AWS, Oracle and Microsoft are among the inaugural members.

What is the TLA+ programming language, you ask? It's a formal "spec" language developed by computer scientist and mathematician Leslie Lamport. Best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, Lamport — now a scientist at Microsoft Research — created TLA+ to design, model, document and verify software programs — particularly those of the concurrent and distributed variety.

[...] "TLA+ is unique in that it's intended for specifying a system, rather than for implementing software," a Linux Foundation spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. "Based on mathematical concepts, notably set theory and temporal logic, TLA+ allows for the expression of a system's desired correctness properties in a formal and rigorous manner."

TLA+ includes a model checker and theorem prover to verify if a system's specification satisfies its desired properties. The goal is to assist developers with reasoning about systems above the code level, uncovering and preventing design flaws (hopefully) before they evolve into bugs during the later stages of software engineering.

hubie writes:

Next-generation silicon chips based on spintronics could improve global cybersecurity:

Imagine a movie about a rogue employee who breaches security in a company that implants chips inside half of the world's computers. They embed a Trojan in systems around the globe and hold the world to ransom.

This is not unimaginable, says Rajat Kumar, a Ph.D. student in Yehia Massoud's lab at KAUST. "A single company currently supplies more than half of the world's chips, and nearly all of the most advanced chips," he confirms.

Massoud's group researches emerging technology that could make chips more secure. A recent project reports multifunctional logic gates that offer users a range of hardware security advantages. These include better control over their devices, tamper protection, watermarking and fingerprinting, and layout camouflage.

"Even if a semiconductor foundry is highly trustworthy, an untrusted entity in the supply chain could tamper with chips," Massoud says.

[...] As a secure alternative, Kumar and colleagues explored polymorphic gates made from nanoscale structures consisting of an oxide layer sandwiched between two ferromagnetic layers. These structures, known as a magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ), are easily switchable by reversing the relative orientation of magnetic spins of the ferromagnetic layers. This spin-based control makes MTJs examples of spintronic devices.

Kumar and colleagues thought the switchable properties of MTJs meant that they could be used to create polymorphic gates, whose configuration users could check and reconfigure, overwriting any nefarious settings. They showed that MTJs function as polymorphic gates in a way that prevents tampering and intellectual property piracy due to their symmetry at both circuit and layout level symmetry, obscuring their layout and making them hard to reverse engineer.

Journal Reference:
Kumar, R., Divyanshu, D,. Khan, et al., Y. Polymorphic hybrid CMOS-MTJ logic gates for hardware security applications. Electronics, 12, 902 (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12040902

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The fungi can regrow, potentially fixing tears in items one day made from the alternative leather:

Imagine if a ripped leather jacket could repair itself instead of needing to be replaced.

This could one day be a reality, if the jacket is fashioned from fungus, researchers report April 11 in Advanced Functional Materials. The team made a self-healing leather from mushrooms' threadlike structures called mycelium, building on past iterations of the material to allow it to fix itself.

Mycelium leather is already an emerging product, but it's produced in a way that extinguishes fungal growth. Elise Elsacker and colleagues speculated that if the production conditions were tweaked, the mycelium could retain its ability to regrow if damaged.

That novel approach could offer inspiration to other researchers trying to get into the mycelium leather market, says Valeria La Saponara, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis.

Elsacker, a bioengineer now at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and her colleagues first grew mycelium in a soup rich in proteins, carbohydrates and other nutrients. A skin formed on the surface of the liquid, which the scientists scooped off, cleaned and dried to make a thin, somewhat fragile leather material. They used temperatures and chemicals mild enough to form the leather but leave parts of the fungus functional. Left dormant were chlamydospores, little nodules on the mycelium that can spring back to life and grow more mycelium when conditions are prime.

After punching holes in the leather, the researchers doused the area in the same broth used to grow it to revive the chlamydospores. The mycelium eventually regrew over the punctures. Once healed, the hole-punched areas were just as strong as undamaged areas — however, the repairs were visible from one side of the leather.

Journal Reference:
DOI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202301875

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Watch ispace attempt to land on the moon for the first time:

After five long months journeying through space, ispace's Hakuto-R lander is ready to greet the lunar surface.The Japanese company is expecting to land Hakuto-R at 12:40 PM EST today. If successful, this first mission will no doubt be a huge boon for ispace's ambitious plans to send two subsequent landers to the moon in 2024 and 2025. It would also make them the first private company to land on the moon, and the first spacecraft from Japan to do so. (China, the United States, and the USSR have been the only nations to reach the lunar surface.)This first mission, appropriately named Mission 1, kicked off last December when a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the lander into space. Since then, the lander has performed a number of maneuvers to stay on track in its path to the moon. At its farthest point, Hakuto-R traveled as much as 1.4 million kilometers from Earth.

The livestream will kick-off one hour prior to landing at 11:40 EST.

Link to stream.

Original Submission

Christopher Gray writes:

If I understand it correctly, researchers made a vaccine that targets the proteins common to all flu viruses instead of the part that changes every year. They tested it on 52 people and found it safe and effective.

A Widge, et al. An Influenza Hemagglutinin Stem Nanoparticle 1 Vaccine Induces Cross
Group 1 Neutralizing Antibodies in Healthy Adults. Science Translational Medicine https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ade4790

S Andrews, et al. An Influenza H1 Hemagglutinin Stem-Only Immunogen Elicits a Broadly Cross-Reactive B Cell Response in Humans. Science Translational Medicine https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ade4976

Universal Influenza Candidate Vaccine Performs Well in Phase 1 Trial NIAID Now https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/vrc-uni-flu-vax

Scientists at NIAID's Vaccine Research Center (VRC) report in two new studies that an experimental influenza vaccine, designed to elicit immunity against a broad range of influenza viruses, performed well in a small trial of volunteers. In fact, the vaccine has advanced to a second trial led by scientists at Duke University through NIAID's Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs).

In a phase 1 clinical trial of 52 volunteers, the vaccine developed by the VRC – known as H1ssF (influenza H1 hemagglutinin stabilized stem ferritin nanoparticle vaccine) – was safe, well-tolerated, and induced broad antibody responses that target the hemagglutinin stem. The two new studies assessing the nanoparticle vaccine published April 19 in Science Translational Medicine.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux 6.3 debuts after 'nice, controlled release cycle':

Linux 6.3 has arrived after a push that project boss Linus Torvalds characterized as "a nice, controlled release cycle" that required the seven release candidates he prefers and was supported by helpful developer behavior.

"It happens," he added, but also didn't rule out "something nasty couldn't have been lurking all these weeks." Torvalds therefore urged real-world testing to make sure this release really is ready for prime-time consumption.

Holidays and travel are often the cause of delays to kernel releases. Easter didn't slow development this time around.

Version 6.3 won't be a long term support (LTS) release – the last of those was Linux 6.1, and every fifth or sixth release gets LTS status. So while many users will be pleased to see it, 6.3 almost certainly won't be a cut of the kernel that demands adoption or attention.

Which is not to say it doesn't include some interesting goodies.

Among the additions are better support for multi-actuator hard disk drives. Conventional hard disks have one actuator driving a single set of read/write heads. Multi-actuator disks add a second set of heads, which speeds things up nicely. Hyperscale cloud operators are the first big buyers of multi-actuator disks, but they're slowly going mainstream. Now Linux is better able to handle them.

China's Loongson makes RISC-V processors and is working hard and fast to make them an enterprise contender. Linux 6.3 will help that a little by supporting Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization on the company's silicon. This has been around on other architectures for ages – security is helped by having the kernel load into different areas of memory each time it boots, instead of using the same locations and giving attackers a known target.

Microsoft coders contributed updates that add nested hypervisor support for Redmond's own Hyper-V hypervisor.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Both tend to judge the co-occurrence of two events as more probable than one event alone:

Animals, like humans, appear to be troubled by a Linda problem.

The famous "Linda problem" was designed by psychologists to illustrate how people fall prey to what is known as the conjunction fallacy: the incorrect reasoning that if two events sometimes occur in conjunction, they are more likely to occur together than either event is to occur alone.

[...] In the 1980s, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tvesrky showed that in a variety of scenarios, humans tend to believe, irrationally, that the intersection of two events is more probable than a single event. They asked participants to answer a question based on the following scenario.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

The great majority of participants chose No. 2, although logically it is less probable than Linda being a bank teller alone. After all, No. 1 would not preclude Linda from also being an active feminist, but given the description of Linda, No. 2 may be easier for respondents to imagine.

The Linda problem and numerous similar studies seem to indicate that humans estimate the likelihood of an event using mental shortcuts, assessing how similar the event is to a model they already have in their minds. [...]

upstart writes:

The move came as its parent company, BuzzFeed Inc., seeks further cost cuts:

BuzzFeed News is shutting down.

In an email to staff shared with NBC News, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said the move was part of a 15% workforce reduction across a number of teams.

"While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we've determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization," he wrote.

Peretti said he had "overinvest[ed] in BuzzFeed News "because I love their work and mission so much."

"This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn't provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media," he wrote.

He added that he had failed to "hold the company to higher standards for profitability" to give it a buffer for downturns.

Moving forward, BuzzFeed will have a lone news brand, HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020 and which Peretti said "is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience."

[...] BuzzFeed News launched in earnest at the outset of 2012 after it named longtime New York City political reporter Ben Smith as its editor-in-chief. In 2021, the news organization won a Pulitzer Prize for a series exposing China's mass detention of Muslims. That same year, it was also named a Pulitzer finalist — the second time it had received the honor.

Later that year, BuzzFeed Inc. became a publicly traded company amid a global frenzy of reverse mergers, many of which have since lost significant value. In BuzzFeed's case, it never traded above its initial public offering price of about $10.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Autonomous cars confused by San Francisco's fog:

Driving in thick fog is a big enough challenge for humans, but it turns out self-driving cars find it pretty tricky, too.

Overwhelmed by dense fog in San Francisco early on Tuesday morning, five of Waymo's fully driverless vehicles suddenly parked by the side of a residential street in what appeared to be a precautionary measure, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Another of its cars apparently came to halt in the middle of the street, the news outlet said.

Other vehicles were unable to pass as "baffled motorists flashed headlights and tried to maneuver around the jam," the Chronicle said.

The traffic problems persisted until the fog cleared and the autonomous cars were able to resume their journeys.

Original Submission

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.