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looorg writes:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2218380120
https://liu.se/en/news-item/varldens-forsta-tratransistor

Researchers at Linköping University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed the world's first transistor made of wood. Their study, published in the journal PNAS, paves the way for further development of wood-based electronics and control of electronic plants.

We've come up with an unprecedented principle. Yes, the wood transistor is slow and bulky, but it does work, and has huge development potential," says Isak Engquist, senior associate professor at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics

In previous trials, transistors made of wood have been able to regulate ion transport only. And when the ions run out, the transistor stops functioning. The transistor developed by the Linköping researchers, however, can function continuously and regulate electricity flow without deteriorating.

The researchers used balsa wood to create their transistor, as the technology involved requires a grainless wood that is evenly structured throughout. They removed the lignin, leaving only long cellulose fibres with channels where the lignin had been.

These channels were then filled with a conductive plastic, or polymer, called PEDOT:PSS, resulting in an electrically conductive wood material.

The researchers used this to build the wood transistor and could show that it is able to regulate electric current and provide continuous function at a selected output level. It could also switch the power on and off, albeit with a certain delay – switching it off took about a second; on, about five seconds.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Selfies and Other Third-Person Photos Help Us Capture the Meaning of Moments:

Imagine you are eating your dream meal and want to commemorate the moment: Should you snap a picture of the food by itself or take a selfie with your partner while you eat? New research suggests that people use first-person photography, taking a photo of the scene from one's own perspective, when they want to document a physical experience, but opt for third-person photos, depicting themselves in the scene (like selfies), to capture the deeper meaning of events.

Previous research has focused on how the photo-taker wants to present themselves to others. The current research, published today in Social Psychological and Personality Science, also considers people who are taking photos for themselves to look back on.

"Not only do we find that most people take both types of photos in different situations, but that people also differ across situations in whether their goal for taking a photo is to capture the physical experience of the moment or the bigger meaning of the moment in their life," says lead author Zachary Niese, of the University of Tübingen.

[...] "Taking and posting pictures is a part of everyday life for many people. While there is sometimes derision about photo-taking practices in popular culture, personal photos have the potential to help people reconnect to their past experiences and build their self-narratives," says Dr. Niese.

[...] "People's photo-taking practices have the potential to serve a more fundamental human motive to develop and understand our sense of self, both in terms of the experiences in our life as well as their bigger meaning," says Dr. Niese.

Journal Reference:
Niese, Z. A., Libby, L. K., & Eibach, R. P. (2023). Picturing Your Life: The Role of Imagery Perspective in Personal Photos [open]. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506231163012

Original Submission

upstart writes:

World's encyclopedia warns draft law could boot it offline in UK:

Wikipedia won't be age-gating its services no matter what final form the UK's Online Safety Bill takes, two senior folks from nonprofit steward the Wikimedia Foundation said this morning.

The bill, for those who need a reminder, styles itself as world-leading legislation which aims to make the UK "the safest place in the world to be online" and has come under fire not only for its calls for age verification but also for wording that implies breaking encryptiion, asking providers to make content available for perusal by law enforcement, either before encryption or somehow, magically, during.

The new legislation asks that platforms control risks for underage visitors, prompting the foundation to come out to say it won't age-restrict its entries.

In a statement to national UK broadcaster the BBC this morning, Rebecca MacKinnon, vice president of Global Advocacy at Wikimedia, said that to perform such verification would "violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors."

Wikimedia UK chief Lucy Crompton-Reid told the Beeb it was "definitely possible that one of the most visited websites in the world - and a vital source of freely accessible knowledge and information for millions of people - won't be accessible to UK readers (let alone UK-based contributors)."

SunTzuWarmaster writes:

Hospital and university clinics have historically helped people post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias using virtual reality to immerse them in simulations that help them reckon with the problem. It was the foundation of a US Army program called BraveMind ( https://medvr.ict.usc.edu/projects/bravemind.html ). It is a virtual version of the longstanding technique called exposure therapy, in which people confront memories or fears, such as fear of flying or confined spaces - done actively with a therapist. However, a limited number of virtual-reality scenarios are available, and many patients must go to a specialized clinic for such care. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, they covered that researchers are aiming to make immersive VR-based therapy more personal and bring it into people's homes.

Full Story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/confronting-your-fears-in-virtual-reality-therapy-1b4200d

The future of this technology will certainly almost certainly involve home care, large language models, and generative content scaled to the users' appropriate level...

Related: Inmates are Using VR to Learn Real-world Skills

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meta says about 10% of its global ad revenue at risk from EU data flows order:

Meta's earning call yesterday was upbeat on better than expected revenue for the quarter. However buried in its disclosures to investors is a stark warning on looming regulatory risk it's facing in Europe — where a decision is expected in a matter of weeks (by May 12) that could see the tech giant ordered to suspend its transatlantic data flows.

"We expect the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) to issue a decision in May in its previously disclosed inquiry relating to transatlantic data transfers of Facebook EU/EEA user data, including a suspension order for such transfers and a fine," Meta's CFO wrote in its Q1 2023 report.

We've covered the (very) long-running saga — which hinges on a clash between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights — most recently here and here. So regular TechCrunch readers will already know that a key development Meta is hoping will save its bacon in Europe is the adoption of a new high level data transfer pact which aims to resolve the legal uncertainty around EU data exports.

[...] In its earnings report, Meta tells investors it's hopeful the new EU-US data framework will arrive soon enough to be implemented before the deadline for a suspension of its EU transfers — meaning, were these stars to align, it could reboot its claim to have an authorized mechanism for its EU transfers and flick the suspension order away — however the company also warns it "cannot exclude the possibility" that adoption won't happen soon enough to prevent such an order.

[...] During a call with investors, the social networking giant was asked about the potential impact on revenues if it is forced to suspend EU-US data flows on regulatory order. Responding, CFO Susan Li began by reiterating its hope that the new high level framework will save its bacon. However, if this sought for escape hatch fails to open in time, she warned investors Meta is facing a hit of around a tenth of its worldwide ad revenue — saying "roughly 10%" of this comes from ads delivered to Facebook users in EU countries.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The space agency is hoping that future astronauts can use this technology for longterm habitation on the Moon:

In a groundbreaking step towards establishing a human presence on the Moon, NASA extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil in a "dirty" chamber with similar conditions to the Moon's environment.

During a recent test at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, scientists were able to produce oxygen from the soil in a vacuum environment for the first time, the space agency announced on Tuesday.

Soil on the Moon contains compounds that could potentially be used to produce oxygen with the help of radiation from the Sun. In order to test that out, a team of scientists from NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) created fine-grained soil to simulate the material covering the Moon's surface.

Using a high-powered laser that simulated heat from a solar energy concentrator (which is similar to a magnifying lens), the team then melted the lunar soil simulant, NASA explained. After the soil was heated, the scientists detected carbon monoxide using the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo), a device that was designed to help scientists look for water on the Moon.

[...] The process of heating the soil and extracting the oxygen took place inside a carbothermal reactor, a device that uses high temperatures to produce carbon monoxide or dioxide on Earth to create items like solar panels and steel, according to NASA. The test was the first time the reactor was used inside the Moon-like chamber, providing possible proof that it can in fact operate in the lunar environment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Snapdragon giant and others insist alleged data gathering is overblown:

Analysis Cellphones using Qualcomm chipsets may transmit data sometimes classified as personal information, specifically IP addresses, back to Qualcomm. But where such transmission is occurring, it's not secret and it has been going on for years.

That doesn't mean, however, there's no privacy risk in Qualcomm-based phones or in devices with rival chip sets for individuals like journalists or human rights advocates with sophisticated adversaries. Such scenarios, however, are unusual and not much of a worry for most mobile phone users.

Recently, hardware security firm Nitrokey published an advisory claiming that "smartphones with Qualcomm chips secretly send personal data to Qualcomm" and do so "without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution."

[...] "Qualcomm's proprietary firmware is not only downloading some files to our phone to help establish the GPS location faster, but also uploads our personal data, such as the devices' unique ID, our country code (Germany in this case), our cellphone operator code (allowing identification of country and mobile operator), our operating system and version and a list of software on the device," as Nitrokey put it, arguing this supplied metadata amounts to a unique per-person signature that harms privacy and occurs even when GPS is turned off.

A Qualcomm spokesperson disputed the research. "The article is riddled with inaccuracies and appears to be motivated by the author's desire to sell his product," a company spokesperson told The Register in an email. "Qualcomm only collects personal information when permitted by applicable law."

[...] Martijn Braam, a core developer for Alpine-Linux-based postmarketOS, has published a similarly scathing dismissal of the research as empty marketing. He noted the Qualcomm-initiated HTTP communication does not contain any private data. "It's just downloading a GPS almanac from Qualcomm for A-GPS [assisted GPS]," he observed.

fliptop writes:

Dropbox announced Thursday it has laid off 500 employees, approximately 16% of its workforce, with company leaders seeing emerging challenges to its business model:

CEO Drew Houston announced the changes in a blog post on the company's website.

"First and foremost, I want to recognize the impact this decision has on Dropboxers who are affected and their families, and I take full ownership of this decision and the path that led us here," Houston wrote.

[...] "While our business is profitable, our growth has been slowing," Houston said. "Part of this is due to the natural maturation of our existing businesses, but more recently, headwinds from the economic downturn have put pressure on our customers and, in turn, on our business. As a result, some investments that used to deliver positive returns are no longer sustainable."

The company also said advances in AI will affect the company's future.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Want Better Kimchi? Make It Like the Ancients Did:

Fermented foods like kimchi have been an integral part of Korean cuisine for thousands of years. Since ancient times, Korean chefs have used onggi — traditional handmade clay jars — to ferment kimchi. Today, most kimchi is made through mass fermentation in glass, steel, or plastic containers, but it has long been claimed that the highest quality kimchi is fermented in onggi.

Kimchi purists now have scientific validation, thanks to recent research from David Hu, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, and Soohwan Kim, a second-year Ph.D. student in Hu's lab.

In a combined experimental and theoretical study, Hu and Kim measured carbon dioxide levels in onggi during kimchi fermentation and developed a mathematical model to show how the gas was generated and moved through the onggi's porous walls. By bringing the study of fluid mechanics to bear on an ancient technology, their research highlights the work of artisans and provides the missing link for how the traditional earthenware allows for high quality kimchi.

[...] "We wanted to find the 'secret sauce' for how onggi make kimchi taste so good," Hu said. "So, we measured how the gases evolved while kimchi fermented inside the onggi — something no one had done before."

The porous structure of these earthenware vessels mimics the loose soil where lactic acid bacteria — known for their healthy probiotic nature — are found. While previous studies have shown that kimchi fermented in onggi has more lactic acid bacteria, no one knew exactly how the phenomenon is connected to the unique material properties of the container.

upstart writes:

Hopes it might wake during the Martian solstice, but not with much confidence:

China has finally confirmed that its Zhurong Mars rover is inoperable, and may never again roll across the red planet.

The rover's chief designer, Zhang Rongqiao said in an interview with Chinese state media on Tuesday that a pile-up of dust had likely affected the vehicle's ability to generate power. He did not speculate whether this represents a final end for Zhurong.

Zhang said if dust accumulation exceeds 40 percent, the rover is designed to go into a dormant state.

It has been pointed out that active cleaning measures could revive the rover when the summer solstice arrives in July.

The six-wheeled explorer was thought to have failed since at least December 2022 when it didn't wake from the sleep mode it entered in May. Zhurong's slumber was intended to preserve power as winter arrived and the sun's rays on its solar panels weakened.

Hypotheses circulated in early January that the solar panels became coated in dust kicked up by winter storms, preventing the rover from collecting energy.

In late February, images released by NASA revealed the vehicle had been parked for months.

fliptop writes:

Months before OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google engineer and AI ethicist Blake Lemoine went viral after going on record with The Washington Post to claim that LaMDA, Google's powerful large language model (LLM), had come to life, an act that cost him his job.

Now that the dust has settled, Futurism has published an interview with Lemoine to talk about the state of the AI industry, what Google might still have in the vault, and whether society is actually ready for what AI may bring.

Which begs the question, if AI is sentient, what kind of mind does it have?

What kinds of new minds are being released into our world? The response to ChatGPT, and to the other chatbots that have followed in its wake, has often suggested that they are powerful, sophisticated, imaginative, and possibly even dangerous. But is that really true? If we treat these new artificial-intelligence tools as mysterious black boxes, it's impossible to say. Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually works—from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring—can we understand what we're dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void, and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, is writing back?

[...] The idea that programs like ChatGPT might represent a recognizable form of intelligence is further undermined by the details of their architecture. Consciousness depends on a brain's ability to maintain a constantly updated conception of itself as a distinct entity interacting with a model of the external world. The layers of neural networks that make up systems like ChatGPT, however, are static: once they're trained, they never change. ChatGPT maintains no persistent state, no model of its surroundings that it modifies with new information, no memory of past conversations. It just cranks out words one at a time, in response to whatever input it's provided, applying the exact same rules for each mechanistic act of grammatical production—regardless of whether that word is part of a description of VCR repair or a joke in a sitcom script.

upstart writes:

The National Academies call for the US to be smart about new reactor designs:

"The race against climate change is both a marathon and a sprint," declares a new report from the US National Academies of Science. While we need to start decarbonizing immediately with the tech we have now—the sprint—the process will go on for decades, during which technology that's still in development could potentially play a critical role.

The technology at issue in the report is a new generation of nuclear reactors based on different technology; they're smaller and easier to build, and they could potentially use different coolants. The next generation of designs is working to avoid the delays and cost overruns that are crippling attempts to build additional reactors both here and overseas. But their performance in the real world will remain an unknown until next decade at the earliest, placing them squarely in the "marathon" portion of the race.

The new report focuses on what the US should do to ensure that the new generation of designs has a chance to be evaluated on its merits.

Most of the next generation of nuclear power designs fall into the category of what are termed small modular reactors (SMRs). These designs have two emphases: They are modular and could potentially be mass-produced, and they focus on inherent safety. Combined, these factors will theoretically allow for rapid and cheap production of reactors and a far lower footprint for the supporting power plant where the reactors are installed.

upstart writes:

Performing the famous double-slit experiment near a black hole will never work:

Don't try to do a quantum experiment near a black hole — its mere presence ruins all quantum states in its vicinity, researchers say.

The finding comes from a thought experiment that pits the rules of quantum mechanics and black holes against each other, physicists reported April 17 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Any quantum experiment done near a black hole could set up a paradox, the researchers find, in which the black hole reveals information about its interior — something physics says is forbidden. The way around the paradox, the team reports, is if the black hole simply destroys any quantum states that come close.

That destruction could have implications for future theories of quantum gravity. These sought-after theories aim to unite quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing subatomic particles, and general relativity, which describes how mass moves on cosmic scales.

"The idea is to use properties of the [theories] that you understand, which [are] quantum mechanics and gravity, to probe aspects of the fundamental theory," which is quantum gravity, says theoretical physicist Gautam Satishchandran of Princeton University.

Here's how Satishchandran, along with theoretical physicists Daine Danielson and Robert Wald, both of the University of Chicago, did just that.

First the team imagined a person, call her Alice, performing the famous double-slit experiment in a lab orbiting a black hole (SN: 11/5/10). In this classic example of quantum physics, a scientist sends a particle, like an electron or a photon, toward a pair of slits in a solid barrier. If no one observes the particle's progress, an interference pattern typical of waves appears on a screen on the other side of the barrier, as if the particle went through both slits at once (SN: 5/3/19). But if someone, or some device, measures the particle's path, it will register as having gone through one slit or the other. The particle's quantum state of apparently being in two places at once collapses.

canopic jug writes:

FedScoop has pointed out that industry vendors have until June 26 to comment on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) draft attestation form for government software providers. The draft Secure Software Self-Attestation Common Form was published Thursday and the window for feedback is 60 days so comments will be accepted through June 26, 2023.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday published a draft attestation form for software providers working with federal government agencies.

The agency launched a 60-day request for comment period, during which industry is able to submit feedback on the document.

This stems from Executive Order 14028 and the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) M-22-18, Enhancing the Security of the Software Supply Chain through Secure Software Development Practices. The CISA has requested that interested parties (that's you FOSS projects) review the Secure Software Development Attestation Common Form, and submit feedback.

Redmond and its minions are already on this. Will the FSF, OSI, EFF, SFLC, SFC, and the others step up and be heard?

Original Submission

Many countries are celebrating a public holiday on 1 May. In view of this, the weekend/holiday posting rate (5 stories/day) will continue through the holiday, with the usual story posting rate restarting on Tuesday. I realise that for the USA this is NOT a holiday, but we will probably celebrate your own Labor Day with you later on this year.

For those who are enjoying the holiday, I hope that you have a pleasant and relaxing time!