SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Perovskite-modified LEDs reveal rot in spoiled food before it is visible:

A team of researchers has developed new LEDs which emit light simultaneously in two different wavelength ranges, for a simpler and more comprehensive way to monitor the freshness of fruit and vegetables. As the team write in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, modifying the LEDs with perovskite materials causes them to emit in both the near-infrared range and the visible range, a significant development in the contact-free monitoring of food.

Perovskite crystals are able to capture and convert light. Being simple to produce and highly efficient, perovskites are already used in solar cells but are also being intensively researched for suitability in other technologies. Angshuman Nag and his team at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Pune, India, are now proposing a perovskite application in LED technology that could simplify the quality control of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Without light converters, LEDs would emit light in rather narrow light bands. To cover the whole range of white light produced by the sun, the diodes in "phosphor-converted" (pc) LEDs are coated with luminescent substances. Nag and his team have used a double emission coating with the purpose to produce pc-LEDs that emit both white ("normal") light and also a strong band in the near-infrared range (NIR).

To make the dual-emission pc-LED, they applied a double perovskite doped with bismuth and chromium. Part of the bismuth component emits warm white light and another part transfers energy to the chromium component, de-exciting it and causing an additional emission in the NIR range, the researchers found out.

NIR is already used in the food industry to examine freshness in fruit and vegetables. Nag and Ph.D. student Sajid Saikia, first author of the paper, explain their idea. "Food contains water, which absorbs the broad near-infrared emission at around 1,000 nm. The more water that is present [due to rotting], the greater the absorption of near-infrared radiation, yielding darker contrast in an image taken under near-infrared radiation. This easy, non-invasive imaging process can estimate the water content in different parts of food, assessing its freshness."

Using these modified pc-LEDs to examine apples or strawberries, the team observed dark spots that were not visible in standard camera images. Illuminating the food with both white and NIR light revealed normal coloring that could be seen by the naked eye, as well as those parts which were starting to rot, but not yet visibly so.

Journal Reference:
Sajid Saikia et al, Broad Dual Emission by Codoping Cr³⁺ (d → d) and Bi³⁺ (s → p) in Cs₂Ag_0.6Na_0.4InCl₆ Double Perovskite, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2023). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202307689

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Research reveals people schedule their binge watching and will pay with money or time to binge shows:

If viewers sometimes feel guilty about binge-watching television programing, they really shouldn't. Though its name implies impulsive behavior, binge-watching TV is a common activity planned out by viewers, suggests new research from the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management and School of Global Policy and Strategy.

The study, in collaboration with the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and Fox School of Business at Temple University, reveals that viewers prefer to binge-watch certain types of programming over others. They're also more likely to pay to watch shows consecutively and/or wait to be able to consume more than one episode at a time.

"We find that the notion of a show being so interesting that it just sucks people in and they can't pull away is not the whole story," said study coauthor Uma Karmarkar, assistant professor of marketing and innovation at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management and School of Global Policy and Strategy. "Binge-watching can have a negative connotation, like binge eating or binge drinking. It is generally seen as impulsive, maybe problematic, but certainly very indulgent. However, media consumption is more complex. Binge-watching is not always about a failure of self-control; it can also be a thoughtful preference and planned behavior."

The paper that is forthcoming in "The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied" finds that people tend to plan to binge shows they perceive to be more sequential and connected—those that have an overarching narrative. [...]

However, the authors do find that no matter how bingeable a show is, viewers are much less likely to plan to watch multiple episodes if the streaming service or channel features commercials.

[...] But the differences in plans to binge independent and sequential media were also replicated in how people approach streaming media in the form of online education courses. A separate experiment revealed that people are more likely to plan to binge a Coursera class if it is perceived to be more sequential. Taking this one step further, the authors analyzed real-world data from the Coursera platform and found that these plans to binge-learn accurately predicted viewing behavior in enrolled students.

Original Submission

Halibut writes:

While “hacking” is often used to mean criminal intrusion into computer systems, some, including Bruce Schneier, use a more general definition that includes any kind of creative (mis-)use of something. While this kind of mindset is often talked about in tech circles, it is not restricted to it. The governor of the US state of Wisconsin found a creative use of an apparently-flexible line-item veto power to change the following text:

For the limit for the 2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year, add $325 to the result under par.

into:

For the limit for … 2023–…24…25…, add $325 to the result under par.

This essentially changes the time frame of the adjustment from 2 years (2023–2025) to 402 years (2023&ndash2425). Bruce Schneier points out that this is not the first time Wisconsin's line-item veto has been used to change a timeframe, and refers to it as: “Definitely a hack. This is not what anyone thinks about when they imagine using a line-item veto.”

[Ed Note: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_veto ]

Original Submission

fab23 writes:

Shortening the Let's Encrypt Chain of Trust

When Let's Encrypt first launched, we needed to ensure that our certificates were widely trusted. To that end, we arranged to have our intermediate certificates cross-signed by IdenTrust's DST Root CA X3. This meant that all certificates issued by those intermediates would be trusted, even while our own ISRG Root X1 wasn't yet. During subsequent years, our Root X1 became widely trusted on its own.

Come late 2021, our cross-signed intermediates and DST Root CA X3 itself were expiring. And while all up-to-date browsers at that time trusted our root, over a third of Android devices were still running old versions of the OS which would suddenly stop trusting websites using our certificates. That breakage would have been too widespread, so we arranged for a new cross-sign – this time directly onto our root rather than our intermediates – which would outlive DST Root CA X3 itself. This stopgap allowed those old Android devices to continue trusting our certificates for three more years.

On September 30th, 2024, that cross-sign too will expire.

In the last three years, the percentage of Android devices which trust our ISRG Root X1 has risen from 66% to 93.9%. That percentage will increase further over the next year, especially as Android releases version 14, which has the ability to update its trust store without a full OS update. In addition, dropping the cross-sign will reduce the number of certificate bytes sent in a TLS handshake by over 40%. Finally, it will significantly reduce our operating costs, allowing us to focus our funding on continuing to improve your privacy and security.

For these reasons, we will not be getting a new cross-sign to extend compatibility any further.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The images shed light on how electrons form superconducting pairs that glide through materials without friction:

When your laptop or smartphone heats up, it's due to energy that's lost in translation. The same goes for power lines that transmit electricity between cities. In fact, around 10 percent of the generated energy is lost in the transmission of electricity. That's because the electrons that carry electric charge do so as free agents, bumping and grazing against other electrons as they move collectively through power cords and transmission lines. All this jostling generates friction, and, ultimately, heat.

But when electrons pair up, they can rise above the fray and glide through a material without friction. This "superconducting" behavior occurs in a range of materials, though at ultracold temperatures. If these materials can be made to superconduct closer to room temperature, they could pave the way for zero-loss devices, such as heat-free laptops and phones, and ultraefficient power lines. But first, scientists will have to understand how electrons pair up in the first place.

[...] "Fermion pairing is at the basis of superconductivity and many phenomena in nuclear physics," says study author Martin Zwierlein, the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics at MIT. "But no one had seen this pairing in situ. So it was just breathtaking to then finally see these images onscreen, faithfully."

[...] To directly observe electrons pair up is an impossible task. They are simply too small and too fast to capture with existing imaging techniques. To understand their behavior, physicists like Zwierlein have looked to analogous systems of atoms. Both electrons and certain atoms, despite their difference in size, are similar in that they are fermions — particles that exhibit a property known as "half-integer spin." When fermions of opposite spin interact, they can pair up, as electrons do in superconductors, and as certain atoms do in a cloud of gas.

upstart writes:

Robots will finish a dismantling process that has taken decades:

All of the the world's governments will, at least officially, be out of the chemical weapons business. The US Army tells The New York Times it should finish destroying the world's last declared chemical weapons stockpile as soon as tomorrow, July 7th. The US and most other nations agreed to completely eliminate their arsenals within 10 years after the Chemical Weapons Convention took effect in 1997, but the sheer size of the American collection (many of the warheads are several decades old) and the complexity of safe disposal left the country running late.

The current method relies on robots that puncture, drain and wash the chemical-laden artillery shells and rockets, which are then baked to render them harmless. The drained gas is diluted in hot water and neutralized either with bacteria (for mustard gas) or caustic soda (for nerve agents). The remaining liquid is then incinerated. Teams use X-rays to check for leaks before destruction starts, and they remotely monitor robots to minimize contact with hazardous material.

[...] The US last used chemical weapons in World War I, but kept producing them for decades as a deterrent. Attention to the program first spiked in 1968, when strange sheep deaths led to revelations that the Army was storing chemical weapons across the US and even testing them in the open.

This measure will only wipe out confirmed stockpiles. Russia has been accused of secretly making nerve gas despite insisting that it destroyed its last chemical weapons in 2017. Pro-government Syrian military forces and ISIS extremists used the weapons throughout much of the 2010s. This won't stop hostile countries and terrorists from using the toxins.

Even so, this is a major milestone. In addition to wiping out an entire category of weapons of mass destruction, it represents another step toward reduced lethality in war. Drones reduce the exposure for their operators (though not the targets), and experts like AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton envision an era when robots fight each other. While humanity would ideally end war altogether, efforts like these at least reduce the casualties.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Japan schedules August launch for 'Moon Sniper' lander:

Japan's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has named August 26 as its intended launch date for a lunar lander it hopes will improve humanity's ability to touch down on other worlds – as well as an astronomical observation that might help us understand how they form.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is also known as the "Moon Sniper" thanks to its use of technologies that JAXA claims "make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land." If JAXA can pull that off, it believes "it will become possible to land on planets even more resource scarce than the Moon."

The sobriquet "sniper" has been applied because the craft is equipped with high-resolution cameras and an image processing algorithm. As it swings into lunar orbit, it will be able to recognize craters and measure its position, then decide on an optimal spot to land. JAXA expects it to touch down within 100 meters of its preferred target.

That accuracy is important, because it means future missions can send instruments to specific locations, instead of having to design missions around the places where landing will be easiest. As the guy said – we do this not because it's easy, but because it's hard.

Original Submission

Halibut writes:

Quoting The Washington Post:

If you're printing something on actual paper, there's a good chance it's important, like a tax form or a job contract.

But popular printing products and services won't promise not to read it. In fact, they won't even promise not to share it with outside marketing firms.

The spread of digital file-sharing — along with obnoxious business practices by printing manufacturers — has pushed many U.S. households to give up at-home printers and rely on nearby printing services instead. At the same time, major printer manufacturers have adopted mobile apps and cloud-based storage, creating new opportunities to collect personal data from customers. Whether you're walking to the corner store or sending your files to the cloud, it's tough to figure out whether you're printing in private.

The article then gives a quick rundown of various printing services and their apparent verbal-vs-actual commitments to privacy.

Also seen on Bruce Schneier's blog.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The laws of physics were likely different in the deep past:

The laws of physics must have been different at the start of the universe than they are now, according to a mind-bending study conducted by University of Florida astronomers, which provides clues to why stars, planets and life itself managed to form in the universe.

After analyzing the distribution of a whopping million, trillion groups of galaxies, the scientists discovered that physical laws once preferred one set of shapes over their mirror images. It's as if the universe itself used to favor right-handed things instead of left-handed things, or vice versa.

The findings, made possible in part by UF's supercomputer HiPerGator, chip away at explaining perhaps the biggest question in cosmology: Why does anything exist? That's because some kind of handedness at the earliest moments of creation is necessary to explain why the universe is made of matter, the stuff that makes everything we see. The results also help confirm a central tenet of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

[...] Their study was designed to look for violation of a concept known as "parity symmetry" in physics, which refers to mirror-image reflections akin to left- or right-handedness. Many things in physics can be said to have a handedness, like the spin of an electron. The laws of physics today don't usually care if this spin is left or right handed, though. That equal, or symmetric, application of the laws of physics regardless of handedness is referred to as parity symmetry.

The only problem is that parity symmetry must have been broken at some point. Some ancient parity violation – some kind of preference for right-handed or left-handed stuff in the distant past – is required to explain how the universe created more matter than antimatter. If parity symmetry held during the Big Bang, equal portions of matter and antimatter would have combined, annihilated one another, and left the universe completely empty.

Journal Reference:
Cahn, Robert N., Zachary Slepian, and Jiamin Hou, Test for Cosmological Parity Violation Using the 3D Distribution of Galaxies, Phys. Rev. Lett, 130, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.201002

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Put simply, science is good for us:

[...] How are we supposed to judge the value of large scientific projects? With traditional projects the cost-benefit analysis is rather straightforward. We sink in a bunch of time and money into a project, and we judge the success of those projects based on how much money they make or how many benefits they provide to society.

But by their very nature large scientific projects don't return any money on the investment. And they don't have any immediate impact on society. So are they really worth it?

[...] The first benefit that large scientific projects have is that they provide a training ground for highly skilled workers. The vast majority of the people working in large collaborations are temporary researchers, hired right out of grad school for a limited period of time to accomplish the goals of the collaboration. Once the project is over those people move on to other things, and since there are essentially no jobs in academia most of those people go into industry.

[...] Secondly, many corporations are involved in the process of assisting scientific goals. They may make instruments or optics or specialized sensors, for example. Those industries get paid to do their work and they develop new technological solutions that can then be applied to other problems or spun off into their own revenue generating products.

When it comes to satisfaction, we are all ultimately human. Part of what makes us human is our innate curiosity about the world around us. Science satisfies that curiosity in an enormous way. Science makes the results of its research available for public consumption. What we learn in science is available and open to all. We enjoy the fruits of scientific labor the same way we enjoy the work of artists and musicians. It is something that touches all of us and impacts all of us.

Journal Reference:
Avner Offer and Ofer Lahav, The Social Value of Dark Energy arXiv:2305.17982

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study shows how accounting practices distort economic reality:

Accounting standards don't properly reflect the difference between losses driven by investments and actual business performance shortfalls, according to new University at Buffalo School of Management research.

Forthcoming in the Review of Accounting Studies, the study found that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) mask the true value of companies by marking investments in intangibles like technology, brands and human capital as losses.

"Even as the economy boomed in 2019 following a decade of growth, about half of all public companies reported losses because accounting rules force them to report losses despite initial success," says Feng Gu, Ph.D., chair and professor of accounting and law in the UB School of Management. "This is just another indication of how broken accounting is. We need to treat intangible investments as real economic assets."

[...] "GAAP losers are less likely to decline, more likely to reverse their losses, and even have better future stock performance than real losers or profitable firms," says Gu. "This is an alarming consequence for a group of highly dynamic and innovative firms that are the driving force behind the growing intangible revolution in our economy."

Journal Reference:
Gu, Feng, Lev, Baruch, Zhu, Chenqi. All Losses Are Not Alike: Real versus Accounting-Driven Reported Losses, (DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3847359)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/openais-most-powerful-chatbot-api-rolls-out-for-all-paying-customers/

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that all paying API customers now have access to the GPT-4 API. It also introduced updates to chat-based models, announced a shift from the Completions API to the Chat Completions API, and outlined plans for deprecation of older models.

Generally considered its most powerful API product, the GPT-4 API first launched in March but has been under closed testing until now.
[...]
OpenAI also announced that "based on the stability and readiness of these models for production-scale use," it is also making APIs for Whisper, DALL-E, and GPT-3.5 Turbo "generally available." And the company expects to continue fine-tuning the models throughout the year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers discover safe, easy, and affordable way to store and retrieve hydrogen:

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) in Japan have discovered a compound that uses a chemical reaction to store ammonia, potentially offering a safer and easier way to store this important chemical.

This discovery, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on July 10, makes it possible not only to safely and conveniently store ammonia, but also the important hydrogen is [sic] carries. This finding should help lead the way to a decarbonized society with a practical hydrogen economy.

For society to make the switch from carbon-based to hydrogen-based energy, we need a safe way to store and transport hydrogen, which by itself is highly combustible. One way to do this is to store it as part of another molecule and extract it as needed. Ammonia, chemically written as NH₃, makes a good hydrogen carrier because three hydrogen atoms are packed into each molecule, with almost 20% of ammonia being hydrogen by weight.

The problem, however, is that ammonia is a highly corrosive gas, making it difficult to store and use. Currently, ammonia is generally stored by liquefying it at temperatures well below freezing in pressure-resistant containers. Porous compounds can also store ammonia at room temperature and pressure, but storage capacity is low, and the ammonia cannot always be retrieved easily.

The new study reports the discovery of a perovskite, a material with a distinctive repetitive crystal structure, which can easily store ammonia and also allows easy and complete retrieval at relatively low temperatures.

The research team led by Masuki Kawamoto at RIKEN CEMS focused on the perovskite ethylammonium lead iodide (EAPbI₃), chemically written as CH₃CH₂NH₃PbI₃. They found that its one-dimensional columnar structure undergoes a chemical reaction with ammonia at room temperature and pressure, and dynamically transforms into a two-dimensional layered structure called lead iodide hydroxide, or Pb(OH)I.

Journal Reference:
Jyorthana Rajappa Muralidhar, Krishnachary Salikolimi, Kiyohiro Adachi, et al., Chemical Storage of Ammonia through Dynamic Structural Transformation of a Hybrid Perovskite Compound, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2023. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c04181

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/book-authors-sue-openai-and-meta-over-text-used-to-train-ai/

On Friday, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed US federal class-action lawsuits on behalf of Sarah Silverman and other authors against OpenAI and Meta, accusing the companies of illegally using copyrighted material to train AI language models such as ChatGPT and LLaMA.

Other authors represented include Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, and an earlier class-action lawsuit filed by the same firm on June 28 included authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad. Each lawsuit alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition laws, and negligence.

[...] Authors claim that by utilizing "flagrantly illegal" data sets, OpenAI allegedly infringed copyrights of Silverman's book The Bedwetter, Golden's Ararat, and Kadrey's Sandman Slime. And Meta allegedly infringed copyrights of the same three books, as well as "several" other titles from Golden and Kadrey.

[...] Authors are already upset that companies seem to be unfairly profiting off their copyrighted materials, and the Meta lawsuit noted that any unfair profits currently gained could further balloon, as "Meta plans to make the next version of LLaMA commercially available." In addition to other damages, the authors are asking for restitution of alleged profits lost.

"Much of the material in the training datasets used by OpenAI and Meta comes from copyrighted works—including books written by plain­tiffs—that were copied by OpenAI and Meta without consent, without credit, and without compensation," Saveri and Butterick wrote in their press release.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China curbs exports of key computer chip materials:

The Chinese government is tightening controls over exports of two key materials used to make computer chips.

From next month, special licenses will be needed to export gallium and germanium from China, which is the world's biggest producer of the metals.

It comes in response to Washington's efforts to curb Chinese access to some advanced microprocessors.

[...] On Monday, China's Ministry of Commerce said the restrictions were needed to "safeguard national security and interests".

[...] Semiconductors, which power everything from mobile phones to military hardware, are at the centre of a bitter dispute between the world's two largest economies.

[...] "I think we gain and China gains from trade and investment that is as open as possible, and it would be disastrous for us to attempt to decouple from China," [said US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen] during an appearance before Congress last month.