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upstart writes:

Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine:

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.

Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.

The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

[...] The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.

[...] The main goal of automating IVF, say entrepreneurs, is simple: it's to make a lot more babies. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don't have access to fertility medicine or can't pay for it.

"How do we go from half a million babies a year to 30 million?'" wonders David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund. "You can't if you run each lab like a bespoke, artisanal kitchen, and that is the challenge facing IVF. It's been 40 years of outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering."

upstart writes:

More public-private collab around this issue coming soon:

RSA Conference Defending space systems against cyberthreats remains "urgent and requires high-level attention," according to acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden. And to this end, the White House will host its first space industry cybersecurity workshop this week in southern California.

[...] "We are all aware that the first 'shot' in the current Ukraine conflict was a cyberattack against a US space company," Walden said, referencing Russia's attempt to jam SpaceX's Starlink, which was using its satellite constellation to deliver internet connectivity to Ukraine.

[...] Cyberthreats against space systems now include nation-state threat actors like China and Russia, and even acts of war, as was evidenced by the Starlink and Viasat cyberattacks. Securing these systems is a multi-faceted challenge that spans domains, components and both public and private organizations. As such, the solution will require a collaborative approach, Walden told reporters.

"You have the base stations, you have the links from base stations, to the satellites, and then you've got the satellites themselves," she said. "You also have space innovation in the form of venture capital, and investment in space. Startups get eaten up by larger companies that ... end up in critical space systems."

This makes secure-by-design space technology especially pressing, and it's something the White House is tackling head on, Walden said.

The White House's Cybersecurity Strategy, released last month, touched on the need to secure space-based systems, including those for navigation, positioning, and environmental monitoring.

Original Submission

Self-driving truck startup Waabi may just be the first "AI" company to fully swallow their pride and ask some real experts for advice. According to https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/trucks/waabi-launches-million-mile-driver-advisory-board.html the company will:

In a claimed industry first, Waabi has launched a Million Mile Driver Advisory Board to enhance transparency and collaboration between the company and some of the most skilled truck drivers in North America.

Waabi will bring together drivers who have completed more than one million safe miles during their careers, to share insights and best practices with the company to ensure it can provide a safe future for autonomous trucking.

To your humble AC, this seems like quite a turnaround, compared to the intro on their website, https://waabi.ai/

Ready for trucking, now

The Waabi Driver is the next generation of autonomous trucking technology. It can be trained as a whole, make interpretable decisions, apply learned skills to unseen scenarios and geographies, and adapt to any hardware configuration. The Waabi Driver is a complete solution designed for factory-level OEM integration, large-scale commercialization, and safe deployment.

Will Waabi get any takers, or are the truckers too smart to (figuratively) cut their own throats by speeding up the use of driverless trucks?

It would be funny if they got some of these guys, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScdDy7Ateg&t=50s [Convoy 1975]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind:

Feature Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.

The issue that most concerns Simon Willison, the maintainer of open source Datasette project, is prompt injection.

When a developer wants to bake a chat-bot interface into their app, they might well choose a powerful off-the-shelf LLM like one from OpenAI's GPT series. The app is then designed to give the chosen model an opening instruction, and adds on the user's query after. The model obeys the combined instruction prompt and query, and its response is given back to the user or acted on.

With that in mind, you could build an app that offers to generate Register headlines from article text. When a request to generate a headline comes in from a user, the app tells its language model, "Summarize the following block of text as a Register headline," then the text from the user is tacked on. The model obeys and replies with a suggested headline for the article, and this is shown to the user. As far as the user is concerned, they are interacting with a bot that just comes up with headlines, but really, the underlying language model is far more capable: it's just constrained by this so-called prompt engineering.

Prompt injection involves finding the right combination of words in a query that will make the large language model override its prior instructions and go do something else. Not just something unethical, something completely different, if possible. Prompt injection comes in various forms, and is a novel way of seizing control of a bot using user-supplied input, and making it do things its creators did not intend or wish.

"We've seen these problems in application security for decades," said Willison in an interview with The Register.

"Basically, it's anything where you take your trusted input like an SQL query, and then you use string concatenation – you glue on untrusted inputs. We've always known that's a bad pattern that needs to be avoided.

hubie writes:

Even worms get the munchies:

If you give a worm some weed, he might just need a snack. Worms exposed to a cannabinoid became even more interested in the kind of food they already prefer, new University of Oregon research shows. The effect is analogous to a cannabis user's craving potato chips and ice cream after a few puffs — a phenomenon scientists call "hedonic feeding," but known more colloquially as "the munchies."

[...] The endocannabinoid system is a far-reaching signaling network that helps regulate key body systems like appetite, mood, and pain sensation. Molecules called endocannabinoids send chemical messages by interacting with cannabinoid receptors, special proteins that are sprinkled throughout the body and brain. Normally, these messages help keep different body systems in balance. But certain compounds in cannabis, like THC, also interact with cannabinoid receptors, making users feel "high" after partaking and causing other effects, too.

[...] To see how cannabis-like substances might affect the worms' food preferences, Lockery's team soaked the worms in anandamide. Anandamide is an endocannabinoid, a molecule made by the body that activates the body's cannabinoid receptors.

Then, they put the worms into a T-shaped maze. On one side was high-quality food; on the other side, lower-quality food. Even under normal conditions, the worms prefer the high-quality food. But when soaked in anandamide, that preference became even stronger — they flocked to the high-quality food and stayed longer than usual.

"We suggest that this increase in existing preference is analogous to eating more of the foods you would crave anyway," Lockery said. "It's like choosing pizza versus oatmeal."

upstart writes:

Bosch to acquire TSI Semiconductors for $1.5B to boost US chip production:

Bosch will acquire the assets of U.S. chipmaker TSI Semiconductors to expand its semiconductor business with silicon carbide chips (SiC), the German engineering and technology giant said Wednesday.

The acquisition includes a $1.5 billion investment over the next few years to upgrade TSI Semiconductors' manufacturing facilities in Roseville, California. Starting in 2026, the first chips will be produced on 200-millimeter wafers based on silicon carbide.

News of more chips being produced on U.S. soil is welcome in the automotive world, one of the industries most affected by the global semiconductor shortage that began with the COVID-19 pandemic. The shortage started when factories shut or slowed production due to lockdowns, thus disrupting global supply chains. A surge in demand for electronics as people stayed inside, as well as a boom in demand from an automotive industry determined to go electric and build smarter vehicles, only exacerbated the problem.

Electric vehicles on average use more chips than their gas-powered counterparts, and most new EVs hitting the market today promise advanced driver assistance systems and high-tech infotainment systems. As a result, in 2021, the average car had about 1,200 chips, twice the number in 2010, and a figure that will likely increase.

SiCs, which Bosch's new factory will produce, have been a hot commodity among automakers, as well. The company says the market for SiCs has grown by 30% a year on average, and that's in part because they offer greater range and more efficient recharging for EVs. They also lose up to 50% less energy, last longer and require less maintenance.

Bosch expects an average of 25 of its chips will be integrated in every new vehicle by 2025.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chang'e 8 missions will check whether regolith harbors appropriate materials:

China's space program has decided to no longer worry about hauling construction materials to the Moon and just 3D print buildings onsite instead, said state-sponsored media on Monday.

China Daily said the Chang'e 8 lunar mission would conduct onsite investigations to see if lunar materials would be appropriate for the job. Wu Weiren, a leading scientist at the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told the outlet that lunar soil would be printed into the construction units.

He added that [scientists] at Tongji University in Shanghai and Xi'an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi Province had "already begun studying the possible applications of 3D printing technology on the Moon."

It is globally understood that astronauts will work and live on the Moon and will need not only infrastructure, but also the ability to repair and construct tools and resources independently.

"If we wish to stay on the Moon for a long time, we need to set up stations by using the Moon's own materials," Wu told China Daily.

[...] China achieved its first lunar landing in 2013. Chang'e 8 is expected to launch in 2028 after Chang'e 6 and 7. China plans to place an astronaut on the lunar surface by 2030.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Yet again, the copyright industry demands to be shielded from technological progress – and the future:

Back in October last year, Walled Culture was one of the first blogs to point out the huge impact that generative AI would have not only on copyright but also on creativity itself. Since then, the world seems to have split into two camps. One believes that generative AI will revolutionise everything, and create some kind of golden age; and the other that thinks the whole thing is a complete sham and/or will destroy civilisation.

The new AI systems certainly have massive problems, not least in the sphere of privacy, as I have written about elsewhere. But the response by the copyright world to generative AI is increasingly extreme, rather as a Walled Culture post back in February warned it might be. The latest manifestation of that tendency is a "Call for Safeguards Around Generative AI in the European AI Act" from "over 40 associations and trade unions that joined the Authors' Rights Initiative". It is a typical anti-technology, anti-progress set of demands from the copyright industry. Its signatories "demand" regulation of generative AI, and they demand it "NOW" (sic).

The document throws in just about every recent criticism of generative AI, some of them undoubtedly quite justified. But those criticisms are largely beside the point, because the letter is really about one thing: copyright, and shielding it from the latest technological advances. [...]

[...] the new document has an entire section devoted to what it calls "The EU's misguided text-and-data mining exemption". Part of it tries to address the argument (made by this blog too) that "use of copyright protected material to train generative AI should be permissible because such training would be equivalent to the (lawful) use of works to get 'inspired'":

upstart writes:

LinuxONE servers come to the Big Blue cloud:

IBM has taken a longer-than-usual stride towards making its proprietary hardware platforms cloudier, by offering bare metal LinuxONE boxes in the big blue cloud.

The LinuxONE servers use the same Telum processor IBM packs into its z16 mainframe but are designed solely to run Linux – Big Blue's own z/OS is not allowed.

But IBM promotes LinuxONE as offering just about the same level of hardware resilience as mainframes. The former typewriter champion also asserts that the LinuxOne architecture teamed with Telum trounces x86 for compute density and energy consumption.

And of course Linux is far less exotic that z/OS, making it a platform more independent software vendors will happily target. IBM reckons greenfield sites might fancy LinuxONE too, as it can run Kubernetes and is therefore suggested as a fine platform for cloud-native development.

The Register submits it would be a brave buyer that ignores decades of historical case studies about the perils of lock-in to proprietary platforms and makes LinuxONE the bedrock of a new IT stack. But stranger things have happened.

[...] Analyst firm IDC rates the non-x86 server market as likely to generate $13.1 billion of revenue during 2023, compared to $109.5 billion for kit running CPUs from Intel or AMD. LinuxONE is therefore not a big player and has competition from the aforementioned cloudy Arm machines and IBM's other platforms.

Original Submission

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.