SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Scientists detected light emitted when a special type of thorium nucleus decayed:

Hickory dickory dock, this nucleus could make a great clock.

A special variety of the element thorium hosts an atomic nucleus that could be used to keep time, scientists say. In a first, researchers have measured a type of decay of this thorium nucleus that releases a single particle of light. The measurement of the energy released in the decay is seven times as precise as estimates based on different types of decays, researchers report in the May 25 Nature. The improved energy measurement could galvanize work toward the first nuclear clock, which would follow in the footsteps of atomic timepieces.

"We have already amazing atomic clocks which run very precisely," says nuclear physicist Sandro Kraemer of KU Leuven in Belgium. Those atomic clocks are based on the physics of the electrons that surround an atom (SN: 10/5/17). A nuclear clock would be based on the atom's nucleus. Some scientists believe nuclear clocks could be even more precise than atomic clocks, which are already such powerful tools that they're used in everything from GPS satellites to experiments that test whether fundamental laws of physics hold true (SN: 6/4/21).

The well-established technology of atomic clocks is based on how an atom's electrons jump into a higher energy state. It takes a specific frequency of light, with just the right amount of energy, to initiate the jump. The oscillation of that light acts like the ticking of a clock. A nuclear clock would be based on similar energy jumps made by a nucleus.

Most atomic nuclei have energy levels too far apart to allow scientists to set the jump off with a laser — a necessity for building a clock. But a particular variety, or isotope, of thorium called thorium-229 has two energy levels unusually close together — about 8 electron volts. Still, no one has been able to initiate the jump with a laser, because the size of that energy gap wasn't precisely known until now.

upstart writes:

No vintage cameras were harmed in the making of this project:

When it comes to historical re-enactments, one thing you don't want to do is break immersion. That's where TankArchives' latest Raspberry Pi project comes into play. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero , he's turned a vintage 1940s Argust [sic] A camera digital thanks to a Raspberry Pi High Quality camera module. Best of all, the original camera was not damaged during the creation of the project. Using this Pi-powered digital camera, TankArchives can capture images while retaining the appropriate look and feel of the era.

The camera used in this project, the Argust A, isn't a terribly expensive antique to acquire. TankArchives explains that you can find a working model for around $50. That said, it's still a historical relic and being a re-enactment fan, it's no surprise TankArchives wanted to preserve it as much as possible.

[...] The software used to capture images was created using a mixture of Python 3 and libcamera2. Picamera2 can also be used and provides a Pythonic means to interact with the camera. According to TankArchives, capturing images is somewhat slow and the unit takes a minute or so to completely boot. Taking a photo requires a couple of seconds to fully capture.

If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project or just get a closer look at how it goes together, check out the original thread shared to Reddit by TankArchives.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Comet C/2023 A3 Could Be the Next Great Comet:

Earlier this year, shortly after the excitement of comet C/2022 E3, astronomers found another icy visitor grazing through their images. This comet, C/2023 A3 ( Tsuchinan-Atlas), was discovered independently by ATLAS in South Africa and Tsuchinsan Observatory in China - and given their namesake. But will this one be the great naked-eye comet of the decade we've been waiting for?

[...] Currently , C/2023 A3 is very faint as it flies outside Jupiter's orbit, but the fun will peak next year when it skims closely past the Earth and the Sun. Its perigee, or closest approach to Earth, will occur on October 13 placing the comet less than 0.5 Earth-Sun distances (AU) from our planet. Perihelion will occur shortly before, on September 24 , 2024.

Interestingly, both of these points in the comet's orbit will position it between the Earth and Sun. This "forward scattering event" may bolster the comet's brightness. In this case, sunlight coming from behind the comet, according to our perspective on Earth , is scattered off of dust particles in the comet's coma towards our eyes . As a result, the comet could appear brighter than we would expect, but there is a caveat – its sandwiching between the Earth and the Sun means the best viewing will occur during the evening or morning instead of the darkness of night.

All in all, it is still too soon for us to know precisely what C/2023 A3 will do. Astronomers are still unsure of the comet's size, which could determine whether it breaks apart during an outburst of sublimation or stays intact. The type of ices and their distribution in the comet's nucleus can also affect how its brightness will change. However, with the help of Unistellar Citizen Astronomers, these unknowns aren't keeping SETI scientists from trying to predict how C/2023 A3 will act.

[...] As long as it survives its trip around the Sun, comet C/2023 A3 is bound to ignite a spark in the new generations on our planet. Even Graykowski's conservative estimates, shown in yellow, place the peak brightness at -0.1, which is still brighter than all but a handful of stars in the sky.

[...] As C/2023 A3 journeys closer to our corner of the solar system, researchers and citizen scientists will continue to gather data and watch it intently. Through the diligent efforts of astronomers and the power of the SETI Institute/Unistellar Network, we have obtained valuable glimpses into the early stages of this comet's trek across the solar system to inform us about its future. Stay tuned for 2024!

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Woodpecker helps managers promote new life in burned forests:

"Gigantic, severe fires are becoming the new norm in California due to drought, longer burn seasons and dense forests. But birds do really well in landscapes that are 'pyrodiverse' – areas where fire results in uneven patches burned at high, medium, and low severity," Stillman said.

Black-backed woodpeckers love pyrodiversity. They prefer to build their nest cavities in newly burned areas after high severity fires. But they also like to be adjacent to areas that burned at low intensity, where their young can hide from predators among living trees that still provide cover. Because of the species' unique habitat associations, they are sensitive to the removal of trees after fire, and forest managers use information on the woodpecker to guide their post-fire planning.

After a wildfire, forest managers face difficult decisions about how best to protect and restore the burned areas while balancing the needs of people and wildlife. Sometimes there isn't time to survey wildlife in burned areas, making it hard to choose where to invest in wildlife conservation. To address this need, the researchers developed an online tool to predict the potential abundance of black-backed woodpeckers after fire. Incorporating new information on the value of pyrodiversity made the underlying models more accurate.

"The tool we've created uses data from 11 years of surveys to predict where woodpeckers could be found in the greatest numbers using data available within months after a fire burns," Stillman said. "The birds move in to take advantage of a boom in juicy beetle larvae in the burned trees."

[...] "A burned forest is a unique, incredible and complicated ecosystem that bursts with new life," Stillman said. "At first you think everything is dead. The ground is ash. The trees are black. But as you start walking around, you find that the place is alive. It's not dead, just changed."

Journal Reference:
Andrew N. Stillman, Robert L. Wilkerson, Danielle R. Kaschube, et al., Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study, Ecol. App., 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2853

Original Submission

SoylentNews PBC had a proper business meeting on Friday, to discuss events since the shutdown notice was posted.

This meeting was attended by myself, Matt Angel, and kolie. I was on the phone for about two hours, combined with multiple follow ups in DMs.

Let's get the good news out first.

SN PBC has agreed to continue operations for SoylentNews.

We also had a very long extended discussion on what the future may look like and some points brought up by staff or members of the community were discussed.

Let's cover all the major points below.

upstart writes:

Amazon workers walk out to protest return to office mandates and the company's climate impact:

Two employee groups at Amazon have joined together to stage a corporate walk out today, uniting to protest the company's return-to-office policy and to raise concerns about Amazon's climate impact.

Standing in front of Amazon's Seattle Headquarters, the group streamed the event live on Twitter — featuring speakers for both groups advocating for their united cause. Some speakers vented their frustrations with the company's policy to have workers return to the office for at least three days a week, telling stories about how the remote work kicked off by the COVID pandemic bought them precious hours at home with their family and saved them from hours of daily commute time. Another speaker married this idea to the company's climate goals, highlighting how remote work allowed more families to become one-car households. This dovetails into some of the groups' complaints that Amazon is failing to meet its own goals in its climate pledge of reaching zero emissions by 2040.

[...] "We continue to push hard on getting to net carbon zero by 2040, and we have over 400 companies who've joined us in our Climate Pledge. While we all would like to get there tomorrow, for companies like ours who consume a lot of power, and have very substantial transportation, packaging, and physical building assets, it'll take time to accomplish. We remain on track to get to 100% renewable energy by 2025, and will continue investing substantially, inventing and collaborating both internally and externally to reach our goal.

[...] Amazon also estimated that about 300 of the 65,000 corporate and tech employees in the Puget Sound HQ participated in the walkout; it doesn't look like the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice account has yet provided their own estimate for how many people participated.

---

Original Submission

RunningWithWind writes:

https://www.bluesnews.com/

Imagine firing up your brand-new Intel 486DX and waiting those several minutes to show Windows, Open American Online and connect to go to your favorite site about Quake – Blue's News. One of the oldest and still operated Gaming Websites in the world, it is using crowd sourcing for it's articles and editors similar to SoylentNews to share what is happening in the gaming community. Passing it's 25 year anniversary recently, Blue's News continues to give the latest on Diablo to Science related news. Congrats Blue's News!

[Editor's Comment: There are certainly some news items that we haven't covered that will be of interest to our community. But I am never sure - how big IS our gaming community? Hands up please... JR]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Can ET Detect Us?

What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers from Mauritius and Manchester University has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth. Ramiro Saide, currently an intern at the SETI Institute's Hat Creek Radio Observatory and M.Phils. student at the University of Mauritius, generated models displaying the radio power that these civilizations would receive as the Earth rotates and the towers rise and set. Saide believes that unless an alien civilization is much more advanced than ours, they would have difficulty detecting the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, the team suggests that some technical civilizations are likely to have much more sensitive receiving systems than we do, and the detectability of our mobile systems will increase substantially as we move to much more powerful broadband systems.

[...] The team is eager to extend their research to include other contributors to the Earth's radio leakage signature. The next step is to include powerful civilian and military radars, new digital broadcast systems, Wi-Fi networks, individual mobile handsets and the swarm of satellite constellations now being launched into low Earth orbit, such as Elon Musk's Starlink system. According to Garrett, "Current estimates suggest we will have more than one hundred thousand satellites in low Earth orbit and beyond before the end of the decade. The Earth is already anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum; if the trend continues, we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilization with the right technology."

arXiv Reference:
Ramiro C. Saide, Michael A. Garrett, Nalini. Heeralall-Issur, Simulation of the Earth's radio leakage from mobile towers as seen from selected nearby stellar systems, arXiv:2304.13779

Original Submission

RunningWithWind writes:

https://www.callapple.org/software/apple-ii-desktop-1-3-alpha-7-released/

Joshua Bell has been quietly working on updating the Apple II Desktop and with the most recent release this month there 18 updates to the GUI. Polishing an OS from long ago shows how much people love retro computing and how it still has a place in people's lives.

[...] He has also announce[d] that there may be a potential Beta of the program next week sometime but for now the Alpha 7 release is available for free download from the Apple II Desktop Github page at:
https://github.com/a2stuff/a2d/releases/tag/v1.3-alpha7

The entire source for the program as well as releases in a variety of languages and localizations are available for download from the page as well as several different storage formats. Documentation for the Apple II Desktop and accessories is available at:
https://www.a2desktop.com/docs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Leaf and spine networks aren't the only way to make a connection with nature:

On Call Welcome once again, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tales of tortuous tech support traumas and triumphs.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Leif" who, back in the day, was given quite a challenge: a vendor's European office expanded into an adjacent office building, but the move would take months – and the network in both buildings needed to be connected throughout, and keep working within the buildings they served.

[...] Leif and his fellow techies therefore hatched a plan. The buildings were so close together – with trees between the two facilities – surely it would not be hard to just throw an ethernet cable from one to the other?

While this solution was crude, and risky, two factors made it seem feasible: spring was imminent, and green Ethernet cable was available. Leif and his colleagues thought they could string the cable through the trees, and nature would take its course to provide camouflage.

Their rickety fix would therefore do the job and nobody outside IT would ever notice.

[...] And the plan worked. Long before the leaves fell later in the year, the office move was complete, and the camouflaged cable was coiled and stowed without anyone being the wiser about trees having made the migration possible.

Does anyone have any stories to share of employing inelegant stealthy solutions to get the job done?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

JWST Scans an Ultra-Hot Jupiter's Atmosphere:

When astronomers discovered WASP-18b in 2009, they uncovered one of the most unusual planets ever found. It's ten times as massive as Jupiter is, it's tidally locked to its Sun-like star, and it completes an orbit in less than one Earth day, about 23 hours.

Now astronomers have pointed the JWST and its powerful NIRSS instrument at the ultra-Hot Jupiter and mapped its extraordinary atmosphere.

Ever since its discovery, astronomers have been keenly interested in WASP-18b. For one thing, it's massive. At ten times more massive than Jupiter, the planet is nearing brown dwarf territory. It's also extremely hot, with its dayside temperature exceeding 2750 C (4900 F.) Not only that, but it's likely to spiral to its doom and collide with its star sometime in the next one million years.

For these reasons and more, astronomers are practically obsessed with it. They've made extensive efforts to map the exoplanet's atmosphere and uncover its details with the Hubble and the Spitzer. But those space telescopes, as powerful as they are, were unable to collect data detailed enough to reveal the atmosphere's properties conclusively.

Now that the JWST is in full swing, it was inevitable that someone's request to point it at WASP-18b would be granted. Who in the Astronomocracy would say no?

[...] The researchers trained Webb's NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) on the planet during a secondary eclipse. This is when the planet passes behind its star and emerges on the other side. The instrument measures the light from the star and the planet, then during the eclipse, they deduct the star's light, giving a measurement of the planet's spectrum. The NIRISS' power gave the researchers a detailed map of the planet's atmosphere.

upstart writes:

Woman walking on California beach finds ancient mastodon tooth:

A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon.

Jennifer Schuh found the foot-long (.30-meter) tooth sticking out of the sand on Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California's central coast.

[...] Schuh wasn't sure what she had found. So she snapped some photos and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.

The answer came from Wayne Thompson, paleontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.

Thompson determined that the object was a worn molar from an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephant-like species.

"This is an extremely important find," Thompson wrote, and he urged Schuh to call him.

But when they went back to the beach, the tooth was gone.

[...] On Tuesday, Jim Smith of nearby Aptos called the museum.

"I was so excited to get that call," said Liz Broughton, the museum's visitor experience manager. "Jim told us that he had stumbled upon it during one of his regular jogs along the beach, but wasn't sure of what he had found until he saw a picture of the tooth on the news."

[...] The age of the tooth isn't clear. A museum blog says mastodons generally roamed California from about 5 million to 10,000 years ago.

"We can safely say this specimen would be less than 1 million years old, which is relatively 'new' by fossil standards," Broughton said in an email.

[...] "We are thrilled about this exciting discovery and the implications it holds for our understanding of ancient life in our region," museum Executive Director Felicia B. Van Stolk said in a statement.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

We need better data! If only everyone could carry a high-quality camera and apps to share pics...

Video Experts leading NASA's study on unidentified anomalous phenomena – what we now call UFOs – have studied 800 unclassified events recorded over 27 years, and found that only two to five percent of cases are truly unexplainable.

The panel, formed last year, is made up of 16 people ranging from scientists and biz execs to federal employees and a former astronaut. They've been studying reports of UFO sightings over the past seven months.

In the panel's first public hearing, held on Wednesday, David Spergel, a retired astrophysics professor of Princeton University, called for the need to collect better data to study and understand UAP.

"Right now there's a very limited number of high quality observations and data curation of UAP," he said in his opening remarks.

[...] NASA defines UAP as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective." Although people, generally speaking, look at weird stuff in the sky and wonder, however briefly, if it's evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the US government is more interested in whether these sightings are of foreign hardware that poses a threat to national security.

[...] "The defense and intelligence agency data on UAP are often classified primarily because of how the data is collected," he said, "not because what's in the data. The camera on an F-35 took a picture of a bird: it's classified. Spy satellite takes an image of a balloon, as we've had in the news some balloons recently, that's classified, and that's because of a desire to not reveal our technical capabilities to other nations."

upstart writes:

This RomCom is no laughing matter:

A change in the deployment of the RomCom malware strain has illustrated the blurring distinction between cyberattacks motivated by money and those fueled by geopolitics, in this case Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, according to Trend Micro analysts.

The infosec vendor pointed out that RomCom's operators, threat group Void Rabisu, also has links to the notorious Cuba ransomware, and therefore assessed it was assumed to be a financially driven criminal organization.

But in a report published this week, the researchers wrote that Void Rabisu used RomCom against the Ukraine government and military as well as water, energy, and financial entities in the country.

Outside of Ukraine, targets included a local government group helping Ukrainian refugees, a defense company in Europe, IT service providers in the US and the EU, and a bank in South America. There also were campaigns against people attending various events including the Masters of Digital and Munich Security conferences.

The usage pattern seems to have started shifting last autumn.

One campaign inside of Ukraine used a fraudulent version of the Ukrainian army's DELTA situational awareness website to lure victims into downloading RomCom through improperly patched browsers.

"Normally, this kind of brazen attack would be thought to be the work of a nation state-sponsored actor, but in this case, the indicators clearly pointed towards Void Rabisu, and some of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used were typically associated with cybercrime," Trend's researchers wrote.

JoeMerchant writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-aperiodic-tile-hat-true-chiral.html

Mathematicians from Yorkshire University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Waterloo and the University of Arkansas have one-upped themselves by finding a close relative of "the hat," a unique geometric shape that does not repeat itself when tiled, that is a true chiral aperiodic monotile

[...] Just three months ago, the same four mathematicians announced what has come to be known in the field as the "einstein" shape—a single shape that could be used for aperiodic tiling all by itself. They called it "the hat."

[...] But others in the field pointed out that the shape described by the team was not, technically, a single aperiodic tile—it and its mirror image are two unique tiles and both are needed to create the shape described by the team. Apparently agreeing with the assessment of their colleagues, the four mathematicians took another look at their shape and found that by slightly modifying it, the need for its mirror would no longer exist and it indeed represented the true einstein shape

More information:David Smith et al, A chiral aperiodic monotile, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.17743

Journal information: arXiv

Recently: Mathematicians Have Finally Discovered an Elusive 'Einstein' Tile

One wonders if they have developed special search tools to look for these shapes, or if they just sit around over beers sketching on napkins?

Original Submission