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upstart writes:

Biodegradable and disappearing bandages and sensors advance sustainable monitoring and healing:

Researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and the University of Sussex, Brighton, England, have created prototypes of new environmentally sustainable devices that can monitor blood pressure and heartbeat, or heal persistent afflictions such as diabetic ulcers.

The devices are also far more advanced than proof-of-concept stage; the Northwestern device, a transient bandage that uses electrotherapy to both monitor and heal diabetic wounds, is resorbed into the body. It may be ready for human trials within a year to 18 months, according to Guillermo Ameer, director of Northwestern's Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering. The bandage consists of two small molybdenum electrodes connected to a battery-free power-harvesting unit and a near-field communications module that communicates with control software in a smartphone or tablet.

In a study conducted on diabetic mice published in Science Advances, Ameer and his collaborators, including resorbable electronics pioneer John Rogers, found the device led to 30 percent faster healing than a control group using ordinary bandages.

The device works by transmitting a small current from the outer ringlike electrode, which sits around the wound site, to the inner flower-shaped electrode, which is about 120 micrometers across and sits atop the wound. (The mouse study used about 1 volt of current [sic], and Ameer said that may change in upcoming studies on larger animals.) The current stimulates healthy skin regeneration, the progress of which is measured by current differential between the electrodes. As the wound heals and dries, the current differential [sic] decreases.

Perhaps the most compelling element of the device is the inner electrode. As the wound heals, the regenerated skin grows over the electrode and completely absorbs it. The outer ring electrode and the accompanying power and communications unit are detachable from the inner electrode. Results of the mouse study showed molybdenum concentrations in the body returned to those similar to the control group's within 22 weeks.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/07/the-intel-8086-processors-registers.html

The photo shows the silicon die of the 8086 processor under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon hidden underneath. Around the outside edge, bond wires connect pads on the die to the chip's 40 external pins.

The highlighted region indicates the 8086's fifteen 16-bit registers and six bytes of instruction prefetch queue.1 Registers take up a significant portion of the die, even though they are just 36 bytes in total. Due to space limitations, early microprocessors had a relatively small number of registers; in comparison, a modern processor chip has kilobytes of registers and megabytes of cache storage.2

[...] The 8086 and other chips of that era were built from a type of transistor called NMOS. These chips consisted of a silicon substrate, which was "doped" by diffusion of arsenic or boron to form transistors. Above the silicon, polysilicon wiring created the gates of the transistors and wired components together. Finally, a metal layer on top provided more wiring. (Modern processors, in comparison, use CMOS technology, which combines NMOS and PMOS transistors, and they have many metal layers.)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Helium is way cheaper than rocket fuel, and the pictures are just as good if you get high enough:

The world's first wide-field, balloon-borne telescope has begun returning images to Earth, with scientists keen to begin months of imagery to help investigate the existence of dark matter.

The Super Pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, has returned two publicly-shared images so far: The one of the Tarantula Nebula in the header of this article, and a second of a pair of colliding galaxies known as "the Antennae."

SuperBIT's main scientific objective is to measure the properties of dark matter, a term given to the invisible-yet-mathematically-required quarter of the matter in the universe that we're unable to see or detect in any way other than its interactions with gravity.

The telescope, a collaboration between the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Durham University and NASA, lifted off from New Zealand on April 16, and was carried to an altitude of 33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles) by one of NASA's stadium-sized super pressure balloons. At that altitude, SuperBIT is floating above all but the last half-percent of the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a level of visibility that ground-based telescopes can't match.

Because it sits outside of most of the atmosphere, SuperBIT isn't limited by anything but the laws of optics, and is able to take images with resolutions as high as the Hubble Space Telescope. It's also the first balloon-borne telescope to be able to capture wide-field images.

"SuperBIT will test whether dark-matter particles can bounce off each other, by mapping the dark matter around clusters of galaxies that are colliding with neighbouring galaxy clusters," said the University of Toronto.

upstart writes:

Scientists turned a forest into a lab to figure how some species cope with repeated dry spells:

The tissues of living trees may hold the secrets of why some can recover after drought and others die. But those tissues are challenging to assess in mature forests. After all, 90-year-old trees can't travel to the lab to get an imaging scan. So most studies of the impacts of drought on plants are done in the lab and on younger trees — or by gouging cores out of mature trees.

[...] In the Kranzberg Forest outside Munich, the team outfitted stands of mature spruce and beech trees with rugged, waterproof ultrasound sensors. Some of the stands had been covered by roofs to block the summer rain, creating artificial drought conditions.

Five years of monitoring revealed that beeches (Fagus sylvatica) are more drought-resilient than spruces (Picea abies), the team reported in the December Plant Biology. Delving into the underlying mechanisms explained this difference.

Drought-stressed trees produced more ultrasound signals than trees exposed to summer rains. Those faint acoustic waves were bouncing off air bubbles called embolisms deep within the trees' vasculature. Surface tension keeps water moving through a tree's thousands of tiny vessels — evaporation from pores in leaves drives water up the trunk (SN: 9/6/22). But if there's insufficient water in the soil, this upward pull can generate embolisms that clog vessels. In the experiments, spruces pinged much more than beeches, suggesting they had far more embolisms.

That's despite the fact that beeches appear to be less conservative with their water management, at least above ground. Trees can prevent embolisms by closing the pores on their leaves, but there's a trade-off. Doing so cuts off the supply of the carbon dioxide that drives photosynthesis, which makes the carbohydrates and sugars that trees need to live and grow. In dry conditions, trees face an impossible choice "between starving and dying of thirst," Beikircher says.

hubie writes:

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines how receiving negative medical results might affect how people choose between generic and brand name drugs:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Manuel Hermosilla received a call from a family friend in Chile who had been recently diagnosed with cancer. The friend needed help tracking down Hydroxychloroquine to treat her rheumatoid arthritis—a drug in short supply given its supposed therapeutic powers to combat COVID-19.

Hermosilla found two alternatives for Hydroxychloroquine: a generic version for about $15 a month and the branded version for a hefty $330. The family friend didn't want the generic version, Hermosilla says. "Given her cancer diagnosis, she felt the generic wasn't 'safe' enough—which got me to thinking: could medical-related insecurities impact patients' brand/generic choices?"

Getting bad medical news can be alarming. It might influence us to embark on a healthier lifestyle, perhaps by exercising more or eating healthier food. Given that brand name drugs are perceived to be more effective and perhaps even safer than generics (despite many experts viewing generics as molecular replicas of brand name drugs), bad news might also affect how we choose between drugs.

This new research points to estimates suggesting substantial savings for the U.S. healthcare system— about 10% of drug expenditures, or $36 billion a year—if patients always chose a generic option when available. The researchers suggest that a broader use of generics could significantly lower expenditures without sacrificing the quality of patient care.

Journal Reference:
Hermosilla, M., & Ching, A. T. (2023). EXPRESS: Does Bad Medical News Reduce Preferences for Generic Drugs? Journal of Marketing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429231158360

Original Submission

upstart writes:

We reported this problem a couple of days ago, here:

Impacts all motherboard makers and all Ryzen 7000 chips:

Multiple reports of Ryzen processors burning out have burst onto the internet over the last few days. The damaged chips have not only bulged out and overheated to the point they have become desoldered, but they have also done significant damage to the motherboards they are installed in. We reached out to our industry contacts and learned some new information about the nature of the problem and the scope of AMD's planned fix. Our information comes from multiple sources that wish to remain anonymous, but the info from our sources aligns on all key technical details. As with all unofficial information, we should take the finer details with a grain of salt until AMD issues an official statement.

First, we're told this condition can occur with both standard Ryzen 7000 models and the new Ryzen 7000X3D chips, though the latter is far more sensitive to the condition, and the root cause could be different between the two types of chips. AMD will issue a fix soon, but the timeline is unknown. We're told that failures have occurred with all motherboard brands, including Biostar, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and ASRock.

According to our sources and seconded by an ASUS statement to Der8auer, the problem stems from SoC voltages being altered to unsafe higher levels. This can be imposed from either the pre-programmed voltages used in EXPO memory overclocking profiles or when a user manually adjusts the SoC voltages (a common practice to eke out a bit more memory overclocking headroom).

Our sources also added further details about the nature of the chip failures — in some cases, excessive SoC voltages destroy the chips' thermal sensors and thermal protection mechanisms, completely disabling its only means of detecting and protecting itself from overheating. As a result, the chip continues to operate without knowing its temperature or tripping the thermal protections.

AMD's modern chips often run at their thermal limits to squeeze out every last drop of performance within their safe thermal range — it isn't uncommon for them to run at 95C during normal operation — so they will automatically continue to draw more power until it dials back to remain within a safe temperature. In this case, the lack of temperature sensors and protection mechanisms allows the chip to receive more power beyond the recommended safe limits. This excessive power draw leads to overheating that eventually causes physical damage to the chip, like the bowing we've seen on the outside of several chip packages, or the desoldering reported by Der8auer.

NotSanguine writes:

This report from Ars Technica details an important warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

from the article:

For a sinister Shakespearian brew to conjure spirits, you're going to need to gather a variety of mystical herbs, like the scale of a dragon and the cool blood of a baboon (or maybe a spotted gecko). For eternal life, harvest a dead man's toe and a newt's saliva.

But if dry eye relief is all you seek, then the urine of a human fetus is what you'll need—just don't mention it to the Food and Drug Administration.

The regulatory agency posted a public safety notification warning people not to use eye drops with such ingredients—products more akin to hocus-pocus than modern medicine.

The eye drops are thought to contain amniotic fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds and cushions a human fetus as it incubates in a womb. Generally, amniotic fluid contains a variety of maternal and fetal excretions and secretions, but after the 10th week of gestation, it is largely fetal urine, with fetal lung secretions being another significant component.

upstart writes:

This NASA Telescope Has Discovered 329 New Exoplanets In Just Five Years - SlashGear:

One of the biggest areas of research in astronomy right now is the discovery of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. With over 5,000 exoplanets known and more being discovered every month, you might think that this field is well-established — but in fact, it's rather recent, with the study of exoplanets only really taking off in the last decade or so. A big part of the explosion of exoplanet studies has been new tools that allow scientists to discover these far-off worlds more readily than ever before.

The new generation of exoplanet-hunting tools arguably began with the launch of the (now retired) Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, which ceased operations in 2018. But the baton was picked up by subsequent instruments, like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, also known as TESS. Launched in 2018, NASA recently released some figures for TESS's achievements from its first five years in space. In this time, TESS has discovered an impressive 329 new exoplanets, as well as discovering thousands more candidate exoplanets.

[...] TESS uses an exoplanet detection method called the transit method. This is where you look at the brightness of a given star over time. If there is a planet orbiting that star when it passes between us and the star (called a transit), the star's brightness will dip very slightly. If you observe that dip in brightness at regular intervals, you can work out whether there is a planet there and how quickly it orbits that star. The amount by which the brightness dips can also help give information on things like the planet's size or orbit too.

upstart writes:

You can smash these 3D-printed cups from GaeaStar on the ground and walk away:

Imagine the horrified looks you'd get if you dropped your paper coffee cup on the ground, stepped on it and walked away. A startup based in San Francisco and Germany says you can do exactly that with its cups, guilt-free.

GaeaStar is getting ready to introduce its 3D-printed, disposable clay cups to the US, after a successful trial period at coffee shops and ice cream parlors in Berlin. Watch the video above to learn more.

The cups are made from just three ingredients: dirt, salt and a small amount of water. Founder and CEO Sanjeev Mankotia told CNET he had the idea when he was visiting family in India and his cousin was drinking chai from a terracotta cup she bought from a street vendor. "She drank the cup, and then smashed it on the ground. And I was like, 'You're throwing something away that's creating litter.' And her reaction was, "It's made out of dirt, why is this an issue?"

Those terracotta cups, or "Kuhlars" have been used in South Asia for 5,000 years. They are typically never reused.

[...] According to GaeaStar, it can print a ceramic cup using about 60% less energy than it takes to create a plastic or paper cup, for about the same price. "When you scale it up, we feel that this could be priced in parallel or comparable to the incumbent cups in the market, if not cheaper."

[...] GaeaStar's long-term goal is to put its patent-pending 3D-printers in shops around the US, where cups could be printed on-demand in about 10 seconds. Mankotia says dirt can be sourced locally to save energy. In the meantime, you'll be able to find them in select Verve Coffee shops around California this year.

Original Submission

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