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upstart writes:

Modern technology is helping researchers make new discoveries using old data:

Data science technologies available to today's researchers play a key role in shaping our understanding of the solar system. It not only uncovers new findings from the latest data, it also allows researchers to glean new information from previously collected data. Thanks to this tech, researchers reviewing decades-old data from NASA's Voyager 2 probe have uncovered exciting secrets locked below the surface of Uranus' moons.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft was launched in 1977 to study our solar system's outer planets and beyond. In 1986, the probe became the first of its kind to visit Uranus, returning never before seen images and data about the ice giant during its five-and-a-half-hour fly-by on the way to Neptune. During the trip, the probe discovered and provided data about 10 new moons orbiting the planet, two new rings (in addition to nine previously known rings), and information about Uranus' tilted, off-axis magnetic field.

Despite the data being more than 37 years old, researchers analyzing it using modern modeling techniques have made significant discoveries on four of Uranus' largest moons. Based on the new findings, four of the planet's 27 moons (Titania, Oberon, Ariel, and Umbriel) appear to have an ocean layer between their cores and the icy surface that covers them.

The study incorporated the original data gathered during Voyager 2's fly-bys with more recent data from ground-based stations and other NASA spacecraft, including Galileo, Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons. The augmented Voyager 2 data models allowed researchers to determine that the moons may generate enough internal heat to maintain a liquid ocean, possibly even some with habitable temperatures.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A race to reserve usernames is kicking off on Discord:

Starting in the next couple of weeks, millions of Discord users will be forced to say goodbye to their old four-digit-appended names. Discord is requiring everyone to take up a new common platform-wide handle. For Discord, it's a move toward mainstream social network conventions. For some users, though, it's a change to the basics of what Discord is — a shift that's as much about culture as technology.

Discord has historically handled usernames with a numeric suffix system. Instead of requiring a completely unique handle, it allowed duplicate names by adding a four-digit code known as a "discriminator" — think TheVerge#1234. But earlier this week, it announced it was changing course and moving toward unique identifiers that resemble Twitter-style "@" handles.

Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy acknowledged the change would be "tough" for some people, but he said the discriminators had proven too confusing. He noted that over 40 percent of users don't know their discriminator number, which leads to "almost half" of all friend requests failing to connect people to the right person, largely due to mistyped numbers.

Over on Reddit, Vishnevskiy argued that the new handles wouldn't even show up in the interface that often since Discord will allow users to set a separate display name that's not unique. Carrying more than 500 downvotes on some Reddit replies, he called the original system a "halfway measure" and rejected ideas like just adding more numbers to the end of a handle. "This was not a change that we decided to do lightly and have been talking about doing for many years, trying to avoid it if we could," he posted.

During the change, Discord users will have to navigate a process that's fraught with uncertainty and cutthroat competition. Users will need to wait for an in-app prompt for when it's their turn to select a new username, which will eventually roll out to all users over the course of "several months." The company will assign priority to users based on their Discord registration dates, so people who have had their name "for quite a while" will have a better chance to get a desired name.

quietus writes:

"Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes." -- Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase.

Ninety-two (92) percent of Kenya's electricity comes from renewable resources. About 50 percent of all that is covered by the 5 geothermal power stations at Olkaria, near Hell's Gate National Park.That park is just a tiny part of the thousands of miles long East African Rift System, where the Indian, Arabian and African continental plates meet.

The big advantage of geothermal power is that it produces a steady base load of electricity -- currently 5GW at Olkaria, with an estimated total 10GW potential.

That has aroused the interest of the German government, co-investors and providers of technical expertise for the project. The potential for geothermal power in Germany, through deep (miles deep) drilling is estimated at a quarter of the country's heating needs: before 2030, at least 100 geothermal power projects should be in place.

Geothermal energy projects, however, are capital intensive -- the Olkaria project actually started getting steam in the 90s, mainly supported by the Japanese government and the United Nations Development Programme; Germany has been coinvesting for the last 20 years, alongside with the European Investment Bank. Besides, utility-scale solar and onshore wind is hovering at around $35 per MWh, while geothermal currently is slotted around $70 per MWh.

However, solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy: if you want to buy reliability, nuclear or coal- and gas-fired plants are your comparison. In an April 2023 comparison, investment bank Lazard comes to an estimated cost, unsubsidized, between $68 and $166 per MWh for coal, $141 and $221 for nuclear, and $61 to $102 per MWh for geothermal energy. Only gas-combined-cycle power generation could potentially be cheaper ($39 to $101 per MWh), for providing base load (see page 2 in the pdf).

upstart writes:

Introducing OURphone—an open-source DIY smartphone made with our favorite SBC:

It's easy to build your own desktop PC but, if you want a phone, you usually have to settle for a sealed box that's made by one of a handful of large corporations. Maker Evan Robison wants to change all that as he posted instructions for an open-source, Raspberry Pi-powered called OURPhone with the acronym OURS standing for Open-source, Upgradable, Repairable Smartphone.

According to Robinson, the idea was to create a smartphone alternative for people looking to control their privacy. He also wanted to make a smartphone that could be easily modified and repaired, so an open-source solution was the perfect fit. The OURphone project has quite a few specs that you'll find on many smartphones including 4G LTE internet support, GPS support, Bluetooth and WiFi capability, as well as basic phone operations like the ability to call, text and save contacts in an address book.

However, instead of running on Android or iOS, the phone uses Raspberry Pi OS, the Linux-based native operating system for Raspberry Pis. This means that you have very fine control over what software you run on it, but the UI (as pictured) is not particularly touch or phone friendly. You can find all of the code used in the project (as well as detailed instructions) at GitHub.

In his build guide, Robinson is using a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but there's no reason you couldn't upgrade it to a Pi 4. It's accompanied by a 4G HAT with GSM and GPS antennas. It has a Waveshare touchscreen for video output and user input. A camera can be attached but it isn't necessary for the build. A pair of headphones with a built-in microphone is used for call support. To keep the unit mobile, it operates off of a couple of 18650 batteries.

The housing, [m]ade out of 3mm MDF board, is a bit bulky but necessary to contain all of the hardware. It's laser cut with port access made available all around the edges.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The decades-old Sullivan's conjecture, about the best way to minimize the surface area of a bubble cluster, was thought to be out of reach for three bubbles and up:

[T]o understanding the shape of bubble clusters, mathematicians have been playing catch-up to our physical intuitions for millennia. Soap bubble clusters in nature often seem to immediately snap into the lowest-energy state, the one that minimizes the total surface area of their walls (including the walls between bubbles). But checking whether soap bubbles are getting this task right—or just predicting what large bubble clusters should look like—is one of the hardest problems in geometry. It took mathematicians until the late 19th century to prove that the sphere is the best single bubble, even though the Greek mathematician Zenodorus had asserted this more than 2,000 years earlier.

The bubble problem is simple enough to state: You start with a list of numbers for the volumes, and then ask how to separately enclose those volumes of air using the least surface area. But to solve this problem, mathematicians must consider a wide range of different possible shapes for the bubble walls. And if the assignment is to enclose, say, five volumes, we don't even have the luxury of limiting our attention to clusters of five bubbles—perhaps the best way to minimize surface area involves splitting one of the volumes across multiple bubbles.

Even in the simpler setting of the two-dimensional plane (where you're trying to enclose a collection of areas while minimizing the perimeter), no one knows the best way to enclose, say, nine or 10 areas. As the number of bubbles grows, "quickly, you can't really even get any plausible conjecture," said Emanuel Milman of the Technion in Haifa, Israel.

hubie writes:

Monkeys are Smarter Than We Thought:

A paradigm-shifting study published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that, just like humans, monkeys are capable of complex deliberation and careful decision-making. The study is first to show that monkeys can think deeply about a problem and consider combinations of factors such as costs, consequences and constraints. In doing so, monkeys find optimal outcomes rather than impulsively reaching for the first available option.

"Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation," said senior author William Stauffer, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "Our work shows that monkeys have a rich mental state that renders them capable of intelligent thinking. It's a new paradigm for studying the neurophysiological basis for deliberative thought."

[...] Several decades ago, Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., revolutionized the field of behavioral economics with Prospect Theory. In his book, "Thinking Fast and Slow," he postulated that humans employ two distinct systems of thinking — one nearly instantaneous that happens automatically, and the other much slower, conscious, logical reasoning that requires more mental effort.

Kahneman dubbed the first, effortless, type of thinking as 'fast' and the second as 'slow.' Slow, effortful thinking enables us to write music, develop scientific hypothesis and balance our checkbooks.

As it turns out, the slow thinking of humans is not unique.

Journal Reference:
Hong, T., Stauffer, W.R. Computational complexity drives sustained deliberation. Nat Neurosci 26, 850–857 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01307-6

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A coalition of more than 50 European consumer and digitals rights groups, smaller ISPs and broadcasters are urging EU policymakers and Member States to reject a controversial network fee proposal being lobbied for by major telcos in the region:

They suggest any move to legislative for a mechanism that funnels direct payments to telecom incumbents would have "immediate and wide-ranging" negative consequences for European businesses and consumer interest — arguing it would hit consumer costs and choice by damaging the diversity and quality of products and services available online, as well as harming competition.

"The risks of introducing network fees are many but ultimately the biggest threats would be to consumer rights, costs, and freedom of choice," they warn. "Users of the internet and mobile networks are the key players in the debate, not content providers. Consumers access content (and thus drive internet traffic and take-up), so the fee would effectively be a fee on consumer behaviour and choice."

[...] Major European telcos, meanwhile, want regional lawmakers to let them extract a network fee from Big Tech platforms whose popular services they claim are responsible for generating the most traffic across their fixed and mobile networks — spinning the ask to double dip (given consumers already paid them for connectivity) as getting tech giants like Meta and Netflix to contribute what they dub a "fair share" towards funding network infrastructure costs.

While the likes of Meta have pushed back that such a fee would actually be arbitrary and unfair.

Thing is, the European Commission, which is responsible for drafting EU legislative proposals, has been sounding suspiciously sympathetic to Big Telco's lobbying.

upstart writes:

Run your whole system from your GPU:

WTF?! Now you can bypass your hard drive and store your whole operating system in your VRAM (should you want to). Well-known Windows modder NTDEV has demonstrated how, and it's surprisingly painless.

Step one is to create a RAM drive in your GPU's memory. A VRAM drive, if you will. There's an open-source tool that can do it for you called GpuRamDrive. It only takes a couple clicks but the tool was abandoned before it reached stability, so you might need to try it a few times.

Step two is to use your pick of tools to create a virtual machine. NTDEV used Windows' baked-in Hyper-V manager, which is a simple yet powerful tool for spawning virtual machines available to Windows 10 and 11 Pro, Education, and Enterprise users. You'll need to change just a couple of defaults in Hyper-V, and you can pick those out in NTDEV's video.

If you have an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX or a GPU with more than 20 GB of VRAM then you should be able to squeeze a vanilla Windows 11 installation onto the VRAM drive you created. If you didn't drop a grand on a new GPU this past year, you'll have to use an alternate operating system with less demanding storage requirements. NTDEV uses Tiny11, a stripped-down version of Windows 11 that he created.

[...] I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to run Windows 11 on their VRAM. And yet, it's astonishingly practical: quick to set up and seemingly as fast and stable as a regular virtual machine. Why not, then, I suppose?

A YouTube video showing it running

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A sneak peek at Earth's eventual fate:

Roughly 5 billion years from now, our Sun will end, not with a bang but with a whimper. That's when it finally burns through all the fuel in its core and puffs outward into a red giant, swallowing all the inner planets of our Solar System in the process, including Earth. But no star has ever been caught in the act of gulping down a planet this way—until now. Astronomers have spotted a white-hot flash from a distant star in our Milky Way galaxy and concluded that it came from the final stage of this process, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Yes, it's a literal "Death Star," announced on the eve of Star Wars Day (May 4).

[...] This process only occurs a few times a year in the Milky Way. Astronomers have observed the early stages of the process (planets so close to their host stars that they will inevitably be engulfed when those stars expand) along with the aftermath of this stellar evolution (when the stars have puffed up and seem to have peculiar properties, such as their rotational speed or chemical composition). But scientists have never witnessed the actual devouring. That's what makes this discovery so exciting, according to co-author Kishalay De, an MIT postdoc: This is the first direct evidence of a crucial stage of stellar evolution.

[...] De was poring over data from the Zwicky Transit Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California about three years ago, hunting for the telltale brightening (by a factor of a few thousand times over the course of a week) that marks a nova. Such explosions occur when a white dwarf steals matter from a companion star. De spotted a star brightening by a factor of a few hundred times over the course of a couple of weeks. He quickly checked out observations of the same star taken by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. But the spectrum revealed that the composition and temperature of the gas surrounding this star was nothing like a nova. "This source appeared to be surrounded by a bunch of cold gas," De said. "We were seeing signs of molecules that can only exist at cold temperatures."

upstart writes:

Boring Company Gets Approval to Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network:

Las Vegas city officials have approved The Boring Company's request to expand its planned network of underground tunnels. The Las Vegas Loop will now feature a total of 69 stations and 65 miles, or 104 kilometers, of tunnels.

The Boring Company tweeted the news yesterday evening, following a meeting with the Clarke County Zoning Commission yesterday morning. The Las Vegas Loop was set to feature a combined 34 miles, or 55 kilometers, of tunnels and had stations that predominantly ran along the Las Vegas Strip. The Boring Company then asked in March to expand the Las Vegas loop, with the newly approved expansion adding 18 new stations and about 25 miles, 40 kilometers, of additional tunnels, according to a tweet from the county's official account yesterday.

[...] "This is a 100% developer funded project that will reduce traffic trips from our surface street public roadways, it will provide folks another easy and convenient alternative to get around, and as part of our revenue sharing agreement with the Boring Company, they will end up paying the City for use of our right of way," Las Vegas Executive Director of Infrastructure Mike Janssen told Gizmodo in an email. "So, I am excited to see the project continue to grow."

Attorney Stephanie Allen, representing the Boring Company, told county commissioners at yesterday's meeting that the Las Vegas loop currently has 2.2 miles constructed with 5 operational stops—four at the Las Vegas Convention Center and one at Resorts World. Allen further told commissioners that 1 million passengers have ridden through the network so far, with peak ridership in one day reaching over 32,000.

"The more opportunities we have on this map, the more opportunities for success with this system," Allen said during the meeting.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meta's ad business slapped with interim measures in France over suspected antitrust abuse:

More regulatory woes for Meta: France's competition watchdog has announced interim measures on the adtech giant — saying it suspects it of abusing a dominant position in the French market for ads on social media and across the broader (non-search-related) online ads market.

It's ordering Meta to suspend application of the current criteria it imposes for granting ad verification partnerships; and giving it two months to define and publish new rules for accessing and maintaining viewability and brand safety partnerships which the Authority specifies must be "objective, transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate".

Meta must also have a transparent access procedure for the partnerships that is not based on an invitation it sends, the order also stipulates.

The antitrust intervention follows a complaint by Adloox, a French ad verification platform that sells anti-ad-fraud and brand safety services. It complained to the Autorité de la Concurrence about Meta's conduct between 2016 and 2022, accusing the company of denying it the same kind of access to its ecosystem that some of its competitors have been granted, harming its ability to provide its services.

Adloox claims Meta discriminatorily denied it access to the aforementioned viewability and brand safety partnerships — despite providing such access to other companies in similar circumstances.

It also accuses Meta of abusing a dominant position by imposing unfair access conditions by providing only partial access to its ecosystem. And its complaint asked the Autorité to impose interim measures intended to force Meta to provide the sought for access.

upstart writes:

As big as a football field and heavier than 200 elephants, de-orbiting the International Space Station represents a monumental challenge:

[...] Drift into the wrong part of the Pacific Ocean in eight years, and you might be in for a shock. Tearing through the sky will be some 400 tonnes (880,000lbs) of metal, set aglow by its re-entry through the atmosphere. This raging inferno will crash into the ocean, across an area maybe thousands of kilometres in length, signalling the end of one of humanity's greatest projects – the International Space Station (ISS).

The ISS has been orbiting the Earth since construction on it began in 1998. It has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 countries since its first crew arrived in November 2000. "The space station has been a huge success," says Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency (Esa), one of the more than a dozen partners in the programme. It has been a boon for international collaboration, not least between the US and Russia, who partnered shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. "It is really one of the big international victories," says Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's former head of science.

But much of its hardware is decades old, which could eventually see the station become dangerous or even uncontrollable in orbit – a fate that befell the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station in 1985, requiring two cosmonauts to revive the tumbling station. "We really don't want to go through that again," says Cathy Lewis, a space historian from the National Air and Space Museum in the US.

To prevent such a catastrophe in space from happening once more, the space station will be deorbited in 2031, bringing it through the atmosphere to safely splash down in the Pacific Ocean. This will be the largest re-entry in history and, in March, Nasa asked Congress for funding to start development of a "space tug" that might be needed to perform the task – a spacecraft that can push the station back into the atmosphere. Kathy Leuders, head of Nasa's human spaceflight programme, later revealed it was estimated the tug vehicle would cost just shy of $1bn (£800m).

upstart writes:

New process significantly speeds up 2D transistor production:

A recent MIT paper proposes a new method to "grow" 2D transistors on top of wafers, potentially speeding the production of ultrathin computing materials. The study claims to solve the heating and assembly problems of other methods, possibly opening new avenues for semiconductors.

Manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC continually find ways to make ever-smaller transistors to guarantee ongoing increases in processing power each year. TSMC and Samsung have started 3nm semiconductor production as Intel looks forward to counting transistor size in Angstroms, while talk has also shifted to "2D materials" that are only a few atoms thick.

[...] One problem with building the 2D material molybdenum disulfide is heat. Growing some of its components requires temperatures over 550 degrees Celsius, but silicon wafer circuits start decaying beyond 400. Normally, manufacturers graft the 2D material onto the wafer after its production, often leading to imperfections.

The researchers instead grew the material directly onto the wafer with a new kind of kiln that separates part of the cooking process. A high-temperature zone processes the sulfur, after which it flows into the lower-temperature region where the molybdenum and the wafer are kept below 400C. The system leads to more uniform surfaces and faster production.

While the prior method could take an entire day to grow a layer, the new technique can grow a layer in under an hour. The improvement could enable growth across larger surfaces, and the researchers plan to explore stacking layers.

Journal Reference:
Zhu, J., Park, JH., Vitale, S.A. et al. Low-thermal-budget synthesis of monolayer molybdenum disulfide for silicon back-end-of-line integration on a 200 mm platform. Nat. Nanotechnol. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01375-6

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Entertainer Ed Sheeran has been found not guilty of infringing on four chords used in both his song and in Marvin Gaye's hit, "Let's Get It On". The same four-chord sequence is used in a lot of songs and at a key point in the trial a musicologist testified that the same four-chord sequence has been used in popular songs many times prior to Gaye's 1973 hit. The trial took place in Manhattan in New York and the jury took only three hours to reach a unanimous decision. The two songs featured at the trial also have very different lyrics and melodies as well as different use of the common four chords. While the decision does not form a legal precedent, it is likely to affect similar cases in the future.

During her closing argument, Farkas said the case never should have been brought and that Sheeran was "unjustly accused" of copying from "Let's Get It On."

"We all benefit from artists being free to create and to build on what came before them," Farkas said, warning the jury that a verdict against Sheeran would mean "creativity will be stifled for fear of being sued."

--ABC

Also

"I am just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy," he added. "I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake."

--New York Times

hubie writes:

Researchers show the positive impacts of musical activities to counteract brain ageing:

Normal ageing is associated with progressive cognitive decline. But can we train our brain to delay this process? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), HES-SO Geneva and EPFL has discovered that practicing and listening to music can alter cognitive decline in healthy seniors by stimulating the production of grey matter. To achieve these results, the researchers followed over 100 retired people who had never practiced music before. They were enrolled in piano and music awareness training for six months. These results open new prospects for the support of healthy ageing. They are reported in NeuroImage: Reports.

Throughout our lives, our brain remodels itself. Brain morphology and connections change according to the environment and the experiences, for instance when we learn new skills or overcome the consequences of a stroke. However, as we age, this ''brain plasticity'' decreases. The brain also loses grey matter, where our precious neurons are located. This is known as ''brain atrophy''.

Gradually, a cognitive decline appears. Working memory, at the core of many cognitive processes, is one of the cognitive functions suffering the most. Working memory is defined as the process in which we briefly retain and manipulate information in order to achieve a goal, such as remembering a telephone number long enough to write it down or translating a sentence from a foreign language.

[...] The participants were randomly assigned to two groups, regardless of their motivation to play an instrument. The second group had active listening lessons, which focused on instrument recognition and analysis of musical properties in a wide range of musical styles. The classes lasted one hour. Participants in both groups were required to do homework for half an hour a day.