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upstart writes:

The Janus asteroid probes will remain on Earth:

Two small spacecraft should have now been cruising through the Solar System, on their way to study unexplored asteroids, but after several years of development and nearly $50 million in expenditures, NASA announced Tuesday the probes will remain locked inside a Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado.

That's because the mission, called Janus, was supposed to launch last year as a piggyback payload on the same rocket with NASA's much larger Psyche spacecraft, which will fly to a 140-mile-wide (225-kilometer) metal-rich asteroid—also named Psyche—for more than two years of close-up observations. Problems with software testing on the Psyche spacecraft prompted NASA managers to delay the launch by more than a year.

An independent review board set up to analyze the reasons for the Psyche launch delay identified issues with the spacecraft's software and weaknesses in the plan to test the software before Psyche's launch. Digging deeper, the review panel determined that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Psyche mission, was encumbered by staffing and workforce problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psyche is now back on track for liftoff in October on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, but Janus won't be aboard.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/report-linux-desktops-hit-3-global-market-share-but-are-declining-in-us

According to one measurement by one firm, Linux reached 3.07 percent market share of global desktop operating systems in June 2023. It's a notable first for the more than 30-year-old operating system, though other numbers in Statcounter's chart open it up to many more interpretations. It's either the year of the Linux desktop or a notable asterisk—your call.

As Statcounter explains, its numbers come from tracking code installed on more than 1.5 million websites across the globe, capturing roughly 5 billion page views per month. Statcounter says it does not collate, weigh, or otherwise adjust its data aside from correcting for bots and Google Chrome's prerendering. Laptops are included in "desktop" because there is no easy way to separate them. And they're subject to revision for up to 45 days after publication.
[...]
Because we couldn't help ourselves, we asked GPT-4 to graph out when, assuming a similar growth pattern from 1991 to 2023, Linux would reach 100 percent desktop market share. GPT-4 told us that, assuming linear growth, "which is a significant simplification and not likely accurate for the real world," it could see the existing 0.096 percent-per-year growth rate average reaching 100 percent in the year 3033.

It's worth noting that two other prompts resulted in answers of "January 2121" and "2002." The Year of the Linux Desktop is in the past; it's in the future; it's at 3% or 7.2% or neither; it's global or local; it's impossible and inevitable. It never stops being fascinating [to nerds].

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A New Bill Would Force Tech Companies to Report Their Users for Drugs:

The Cooper Davis Act would force tech companies to report suspected drug activity to the government. Experts say it would be a disaster for digital privacy.

Internet drug sales have skyrocketed in recent years, allowing powerful narcotics to be peddled to American teenagers and adolescents. It's a trend that's led to an epidemic of overdoses and left countless young people dead. Now, a bill scheduled for a congressional vote seeks to tackle the problem, but it comes with a major catch. Critics worry that the legislative effort to crack down on the drug trade could convert large parts of the internet into a federal spying apparatus.

The Cooper Davis Act [...] has been under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee for weeks. Named after a 16-year-old Kansas boy who died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago, the bipartisan bill, which the committee is scheduled to vote on Thursday, has spurred intense debate. Proponents say it could help address a spiraling public health crisis; critics, meanwhile, see it as a gateway to broad and indiscriminate internet surveillance.

Gizmodo spoke with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—two organizations involved in the policy discussions surrounding the bill. Both groups expressed concern over the impact the proposed law could have on internet privacy. "There are some very real problems with this bill—both in how it's written and how it's conceptualized," said India McKinney, an analyst with the EFF.

Critics argue that, at its worst, the bill would effectively "deputize" internet platforms as informants for the DEA, creating an unwieldy surveillance apparatus that may have unintended consequences down the line.

upstart writes:

Intel has exited several side businesses as it tries to stop losing money:

Since 2012, Intel has designed and sold its own lineup of mini PCs. The Next Unit of Computing series (NUC—rhymes with yuck) always most closely resembled Mac mini-like desktops, but over the years, it grew to encompass compact workstations and gaming systems as well as mini servers with multiple Ethernet ports.

But Intel is apparently throwing in the towel on the NUC, according to a statement given to The Verge earlier today.

[...] The NUC was an effort to bring the speed, size, and low power usage of an ultrabook into the desktop realm, replacing boxy, ugly office desktops with something you could hold in the palm of your hand. NUC-style mini PCs didn't take over the desktop market in the same way that ultrabooks came to dominate the laptop market, but the NUC is still survived by a large ecosystem of similarly tiny PCs, many of which are ultimately cheaper and easier to buy than most NUCs were. Models include but are not limited to Dell's Optiplex Micro, Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny, HP's ProDesk and EliteDesk Mini systems, Gigabyte's Brix systems, a number of models from PC motherboard-makers like Asus and ASRock, and Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio.

The end of the NUC is due at least in part to Intel's recent financial struggles—the company has had a few rough quarters since the end of the pandemic-era PC boom, losing billions of dollars as its consumer, workstation, and server businesses all falter. The company has already instituted layoffs and cut executive pay in response, and it announced plans to sell its pre-built server business in April.

Although Intel is still investing in a few product lines that aren't processors—the company has said it's still committed to its nascent GPU business—CEO Pat Gelsinger is betting the company's future on his "IDM 2.0" strategy, in which Intel offers its chip manufacturing facilities to third-party chip designers. This will put Intel in competition with the likes of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), Samsung, and GlobalFoundries.

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AnonTechie writes:

Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called "impossible early galaxy problem."

"Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated," says author Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.

For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of our universe by measuring the time elapsed since the Big Bang and by studying the oldest stars based on the redshift of light coming from distant galaxies. In 2021, thanks to new techniques and advances in technology, the age of our universe was thus estimated at 13.797 billion years using the Lambda-CDM concordance model.

However, many scientists have been puzzled by the existence of stars like the Methuselah that appear to be older than the estimated age of our universe and by the discovery of early galaxies in an advanced state of evolution made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies, existing a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang, appear to have a level of maturity and mass typically associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. Furthermore, they're surprisingly small in size, adding another layer of mystery to the equation.

Reinventing cosmology

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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

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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.

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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