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liar writes:

NASA's Mars helicopter 'phones home' after no contact for 63 days. https://nordot.app/1047625013294923986?c=592622757532812385

Washington (AFP) - Long time, no speak: NASA has re-established contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars Helicopter after more than two months of radio silence, the space agency said Friday

[...] Ingenuity's 52nd flight launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended to the surface following its two minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) hop...

The loss of communications was expected, because a hill stood between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which acts as a relay between the drone and Earth.

"Ingenuity is designed to take care of itself when communication gaps like this occur, but we all still had a sense of relief finally hearing back."

Data so far indicates that the heli is in good shape. If further health checks also come back normal, Ingenuity will be all set for its next flight, westward toward a rocky outcrop the Perseverance team is interested in exploring.

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hubie writes:

First of its kind study quantifies mental and physical health value of urban parks:

A new framework developed by University of Waterloo researchers demonstrates the significant economic health savings and benefits from urban park investments.

In the first case study of its kind in Canada, researchers looked at Peterborough's new Quaker Foods City Square park, which cost taxpayers $6.4 million, and have estimated the economic value of physical and mental health benefits that could come from it at more than $4 million per year. The framework considers the health savings associated with improved mental health and better air quality, the avoided economic burden of physical inactivity and higher life satisfaction.

The study demonstrates the value of developing and enhancing urban parks as a strategy to improve population health and well-being, and as a means of cost savings to the medical system.

"Investments in urban parks are among the soundest financial decisions a community can make," said Jeffrey Wilson, professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development. "When you consider the population health benefits, the value of lessening climate-related impacts and the role of parks to support economic development, we see how parks provide a large payback."

Journal Reference:
Wilson, Jeffrey, and Xiao Xiao. 2023. "The Economic Value of Health Benefits Associated with Urban Park Investment" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 20, no. 6: 4815. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20064815

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upstart writes:

Drone deployed to fight mosquitoes in Southern California:

A drone flies over a peaceful Southern California marsh and unleashes a rain of larvae-killing bacterial spore pellets. Its target: a surging population of mosquitoes that can spread diseases to humans.

The drone is the latest technology deployed by the Orange County Mosquito and Vector Control District to attack mosquito development in marshes, large ponds and parks.

[...] Common methods of applying anti-mosquito treatments involve use of backpack sprayers, trucks, airplanes and helicopters. The drone allows more precise treatments and avoids the need to trample through sensitive lands, according to the district.

[...] The drone is flown higher than all nesting birds and allows access to places that can't be reached by a person with a backpack sprayer or trucks, Nguyen said.

Nguyen said the drone is able to treat 1 acre (0.4 hectares) of land in under two minutes, a task that would take more than an hour of hiking by a worker with a backpack.

[...] The anti-mosquito treatment is not harmful to other wildlife.

"The mosquito larvae are filter feeders, so they feed on the bacteria," Savage said. "It enters their gut and it's a growth regulator. So essentially—if you guys have seen the movie 'Alien'—it blows their stomach out."

[...] So far this year, West Nile has not been detected in the Orange County district but Nguyen is nowhere near declaring victory over the pests.

"It's more of a battle," he said. "You're not going to win the war against mosquitoes, but you can gain some ground. And with advancements in technology, we're gaining ground."

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upstart writes:

Virgin Galactic's First Commercial Spaceflight Is A Success - SlashGear:

Virgin Galactic, the private space tourism company, announced today that it has completed its first ever commercial space flight without a hitch. This mission, titled "Galactic 01," was crewed by six people total, including members of the Italian Air Force and National Research Council of Italy.

[...] In August, Virgin Galactic plans on launching the "Galactic 02" mission, and thereafter begin monthly flights.

The VSS Unity reached speeds of Mach 2.88 and an apogee (greatest distance of an orbiting object) of 52.9 miles. This successful flight comes after test flights resumed last month, nearly two years after no successful space missions were conducted. Virgin Galactic sets itself apart from more conventional space missions that utilize large multi-stage rockets like the ones used by NASA, and other private space companies like SpaceX.

[...] If you want to take part in a Virgin Galactic space mission, you can sign up, and it will set you back a cool $450,000.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/06/its-summer-and-that-means-disturbing-swim-advisories-heres-our-top-5/

It's summer, and that means health organizations will be periodically showering Americans with reminders of how public swimming venues are actually nightmarish cesspits teeming with microbes that can burn your eyes, ravage your intestines, and eat your brains.

In attempts to communicate some pretty basic health advice—like, don't pee or poop in a public pool and try to avoid gulping toxic algae from lakes—health organizations create a mesmerizing fountain of hilarious, graphic, disturbing, clumsy, and sometimes perplexing advisories.

Given this wellspring of vomitus summer fun, here are our picks for the top five public health advisories bobbing in the waters this summer.
[...]
3. The dipstick test

If swimming pools suddenly seem too confining and ill-equipped to handle the loaded loads we're plunging, maybe a swim in a nice, big, natural lake sounds nice this summer? Think again.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services wants to ensure you don't swim in any toxin-toting blooms of blue-green algae. In helpful, picture-based tips, the department advises against swimming in water that looks like green pea soup or green latex paint—in case any of those options seemed enticing. Dead fish and "floating scum, globs, or mats" are also (apparently not obvious) signs to stay away.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/steam-mods-reportedly-blocking-games-that-use-ai-generated-artwork/

Valve has reportedly become the latest company to react to the uncertain legal landscape surrounding AI-generated artwork by simply barring its use in submitted materials. An anonymous developer going by the Reddit handle potterharry97 reports having a Steam game page submission rejected for the use of "art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties."

Potterharry97 originally posted about the rejection in a May post on the now-private GameDev subreddit (partially archived here, Google Cache here). In that post, potterharry97 admitted that "a large portion of the assets have some AI involvement in its creation" through the use of Stable Diffusion. In a follow-up post this month on the AIGameDev subreddit, potterharry97 wrote that the initial submission was intended as an early placeholder version, "with 2-3 assets/sprites that were admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands."
[...]
These days, the use of AI-generated art can sometimes be easier to catch, as was the case with potterharry97's Stable Diffusion sprites and their telltale hands. But that might get tougher as improvements in generative synthesis models make AI art more and more indistinguishable from art created by a human.

As potterharry97 put it in his initial Reddit post, "Even if I redo everything from scratch, how can I definitively prove if something was or wasn't AI generated?"

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DeathMonkey writes:

Women hunt in vast majority of foraging societies, upending old stereotypes

For decades anthropologists have witnessed forager women—those who live in societies that both hunt and gather—around the world skillfully slay prey: In the 1980s, Agta women of the Philippines drew bows and arrows as tall as themselves and aimed at wild pigs and deer, and Matses Amazonians struck paca rodents with machetes. Observations from the 1990s described Aka great-grandmothers and girls as young as age 5 trapping duiker and porcupine in central Africa.

A study published today in PLOS ONE has united these reports for a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters. Reviewing accounts penned by scholars who study culture, known as ethnographers, as well as those by observers between the late 1800s and today, the researchers found that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.

These data flatly reject a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history.

Worldwide survey kills the myth of 'Man the Hunter'

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/youtube-scammer-who-stole-millions-in-song-royalties-sentenced-to-5-years

A YouTube scammer conspiring to run what Billboard described as possibly the largest music royalty scam in history, Jose Teran was recently sentenced by the US government to 70 months in prison.

He was hit with a "significant sentence," US attorney for the District of Arizona, Gary Restaino, wrote in the sentencing memo, because of the "greed and the great lengths" that Teran's scam went over the course of five years to fraudulently claim rights to 50,000 songs. Ultimately, the scam routed $23 million in royalty proceeds away from mostly Latin artists and into the bank accounts of Teran and his co-conspirators.

Teran, the sentencing memo said, "obtained more than $6 million in personal profits" and continued pocketing $190,000 in stolen royalties—which he hid from officials—even after he was indicted for the fraud. Partly because of this, Teran is considered a "high-risk to re-offend," Restaino wrote.
[...]
Artists attempted to bring a class-action lawsuit against YouTube to gain access to systems to monitor their royalties and stop royalty theft, but that case was dismissed earlier this month before going to trial.

Teran could attempt to run the scam or something like it again, Restaino wrote. The US government considers Teran at high risk to re-offend, partly because just 12 days after being summoned for his indictment, he promptly created a new bank account to stash additional stolen payments sent from AdRev.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Elusive neutrinos reveal a portrait of our galaxy unlike any before:

From visible starlight to radio waves, the Milky Way galaxy has long been observed through the various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation it emits. Scientists have now revealed a uniquely different image of our galaxy by determining the galactic origin of thousands of neutrinos — invisible "ghost particles" which exist in great quantities but normally pass straight through Earth undetected. The neutrino-based image of the Milky Way is the first of its kind: a galactic portrait made with particles of matter rather than electromagnetic energy.

The breakthrough was achieved by a collaboration of researchers using the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported IceCube Neutrino Observatory at NSF's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The immense observatory detects the subtle signs of high-energy neutrinos from space by using thousands of networked sensors buried deep within a cubic kilometer of clear, pristine ice. The results were revealed at an event at Drexel University and published in the journal Science.

[...] "As is so often the case, significant breakthroughs in science are enabled by advances in technology," says Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Physics Division. "The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before. As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

"What's intriguing is that, unlike the case for light of any wavelength, in neutrinos, the universe outshines the nearby sources in our own galaxy," says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator at IceCube.

[...] Over many decades, scientists have revealed countless astronomical discoveries by expanding the methods used to observe the universe. Once-revolutionary advances such as radio astronomy and infrared astronomy have been joined by a new class of observational techniques using phenomena such as gravitational waves and now, neutrinos. Kurahashi Neilson says that the neutrino-based image of the Milky Way is yet another step in that lineage of discovery. She predicts neutrino astronomy will be honed like the methods that preceded it, until it too can reveal previously unknown aspects of the universe.

"This is why we do what we do," she says. "To see something nobody has ever seen, and to understand things we haven't understood."

Here is a link to an animated GIF showing the neutrino image oscillating in and out of a visible light image of the galaxy.

Journal Reference:
IceCube Collaboration, Observation of high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane, Science, 380, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adc9818

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The discovery hints that auroras on all planets except Neptune have a common explanation:

Mercury's auroras are perfectly in character. While temperate Earth gets heavenly light shows over its poles, hellish Mercury gets invisible ribbons of X-ray radiation that cling to its sun-blasted surface.

But as alien as they may appear, Mercury's X-ray auroras have a lot in common with Earth's polar lights, and with auroras throughout the solar system.

Scientists have now directly shown that fluctuations in Mercury's magnetic field can fling electrons toward the planet, where they eventually rain down and cause auroras of X-ray light. This process, called electron precipitation, now appears to be practically universal in the solar system: It causes auroras on every planet with a global magnetic field except Neptune, researchers report July 18 in Nature Communications. Even Mars, which has only localized magnetic fields, has auroras caused by raining electrons (SN: 3/19/15).

[...] Buffeted by the solar wind, the sun-facing side of a planet's magnetic field gets squished while the night side is swept out into a long "magnetotail" that extends behind the planet. Eventually, the magnetotail stretches so much that its formerly mostly-parallel magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, sending some field lines flying off behind the planet and others back toward it.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-prepares-the-big-one-a-major-lawsuit-targeting-amazons-core-business/

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a major antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of "leverag[ing] its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don't," Bloomberg reported today. Bloomberg described the forthcoming lawsuit as "the big one," following several earlier lawsuits filed by the FTC under Chair Lina Khan.

"In the coming weeks, the agency plans to file a far-reaching antitrust suit focused on Amazon's core online marketplace, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and three people familiar with the case," the report said.
[...]
Third-party sellers can rely on Amazon for warehousing, shipping, and other services through the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) system, but it takes a big cut out of their revenue. A recent Marketplace Pulse study based on profit and loss statements from a sample of sellers found that "Amazon is pocketing more than 50 percent of sellers' revenue—up from 40 percent five years ago," because "Amazon has increased fulfillment fees and made spending on advertising unavoidable."
[...]
The FTC's current investigation began two years before Khan became chair. "Amazon received the initial investigation notice in June 2019, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The first lithography tools were fairly simple, but the technologies that produce today's chips are among humankind's most complex inventions:

When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn't be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created—disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It's thanks to advances in these areas that we can fabricate the chips on which all the 1s and 0s of the digital world reside. Without them, modern computing would have been impossible.

Semiconductor lithography, the manufacturing process responsible for producing computer chips, has 70-year-old roots. Its origin story is as simple as today's process is complex: the technology got its start in the mid-1950s, when a physicist named Jay Lathrop turned the lens in his microscope upside down.

Lathrop, who died last year at age 95, is scarcely remembered today. But the lithography process he and his lab partner patented in 1957 transformed the world. Steady improvement in lithographic methods has produced ever-smaller circuitry and previously unimaginable quantities of computing power, transforming entire industries and our daily lives.

[...] Lathrop named the process photolithography—printing with light—and he and Nall filed for a patent. They delivered a paper on the topic at the annual International Electron Devices Meeting in 1957, and the Army awarded him a $25,000 prize for the invention. Lathrop bought his family a new station wagon with the money.

[...] But the approach wasn't practical as chip features got still smaller. By the late 1970s, scanners began to be replaced with steppers, machines that moved light in discrete steps across a wafer. The challenge with a stepper was to move the light with micron-scale precision, so that each flash was perfectly aligned with the chip. GCA, a Boston-based firm that had its origins in spy balloons, devised the first stepper tool, reportedly on the advice of Texas Instruments executive Morris Chang—later the founder of TSMC, which is today the world's largest chipmaker.

[...] The decline of America's lithography industry coincided with a dramatic leap forward in the field's technological complexity. Visible light—which has a wavelength of several hundred nanometers—was by the 1980s too broad a brush with which to paint the smallest transistors. So the industry shifted to using new chemicals like krypton fluoride and argon fluoride to create deep ultraviolet light, with wavelengths as low as 193 nanometers. By the early 2000s, after this ultraviolet light itself proved too blunt a tool, lithography machines were created that could shoot light through water, creating a sharper angle of refraction and thereby allowing more precision. Then, after this "immersion" lithography proved insufficient for the finest features on a chip, lithographers began using multi-patterning, applying multiple layers of lithography on top of one another to produce yet more precise patterns on silicon.

upstart writes:

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now:

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field."

Consciousness is everything that a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says.

Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically."

[...] At the time Koch proposed the bet, certain technological advancements made him optimistic about solving the mystery sooner rather than later. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity, was taking laboratories by storm. And optogenetics — which allowed scientists to stimulate specific sets of neurons in the brains of animals such as nonhuman primates — had come on the scene. Koch was a young assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at the time. "I was very taken by all these techniques," he says. "I thought: 25 years from now? No problem."

hubie writes:

Nature can curb smartphone use, but go beyond your local park and find some wild nature:

While a visit to the great outdoors is a common prescription for reducing screen use, a pioneering new study finds that time outdoors doesn't always reduce smartphone screen time.

The new research, which tracked the smartphone activity of 700 study participants for two years, reveals that participants' smartphone activity actually increased during visits to city parks and other urban green spaces.

With smartphone use rising worldwide, the study identifies a powerful way to reduce screen time: participants who visited nature reserves or forests saw significant declines in screen time over the first three hours, compared to visits to urban locations for the same amount of time.

[...] "Green time, or time outdoors, has long been recommended as a way to restore our attention from the demands of daily life, yet before our study, little was known about whether nature provides a way for people to disconnect from the mobile devices that now follow us into the great outdoors," said lead author Kelton Minor at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University. "While past research suggested that short trips to city parks might provide a digital detox, we saw texting and phone calls actually go up. It was really the longer visits to wilder areas, like forests or nature preserves, that helped people get off their screens and wrest back their attention from their smartphones."

[...] Discussing their findings, the researchers theorize that urban greenspace may instead be useful in enhancing remote social ties—hence the increase in texts and phone calls in urban parks—but may interrupt the individual's opportunity to utilize the attention-restoring properties of nature.

Journal Reference:
Minor, K., Glavind, K. L., Schwartz, A. J., et al. (2023). Nature Exposure is Associated With Reduced Smartphone Use. Environment and Behavior, 55(3), 103–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231167165

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A user submitted a recent Daring Fireball Post discussing Masnick's Impossibility Theorum: Content Moderation at Scale is Impossible to do Well:

While many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that's misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can't do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there's a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I'd like to propose Masnick's Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone. While I'm not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow's, I'll just note a few points on why the argument I'm making is inevitably true.

Ed. Note: Masnick discusses factors such as user discontent with moderation, the subjective nature of moderation, and moderation problems at scale. It's well-known that Soylent-style community moderation is best-in class, but what about corporate-imposed moderation of millions of posts per day, as Masnick discusses? Any solutions?

Original Submission