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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes the following story:

Tiny water fleas could play a pivotal role in removing persistent chemical pollutants from wastewater—making it safe to use in factories, farms and homes, a new study reveals.

Rapid urbanization, population growth, unsustainable food production and climate change have put unprecedented pressure on water resources, culminating in a global water crisis. The sustainable management and reuse of water resources is paramount for ensuring societal, economic, and environmental well-being.

Persistent chemical pollutants, originating from domestic and industrial processes, escape conventional wastewater treatment and prevent its safe reuse. When wastewater effluent is released into rivers, it eventually finds its way into reservoirs, irrigation systems, and aquifer recharges. These chemical pollutants then enter the human food chain and water supply, detrimentally impacting the health of approximately 92 million individuals annually.

Scientists and engineers have discovered a method to harness Daphnia to provide a scalable low-cost, low-carbon way of removing pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and industrial chemicals from wastewater. This approach avoids the toxic byproducts typically associated with current technologies.

The researchers have developed technology that allows them to retrofit populations of water fleas into wastewater treatment plants. What makes their technology unique is the selection of strains based on their chemical tolerance which the researchers 'resurrect' from past environments.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/11/reverse-engineering-classic-mk4116-16.html

Back in the late 1970s, the most popular memory chip was Mostek's MK4116, holding a whopping (for the time) 16 kilobits. It provided storage for computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80, ZX Spectrum, Commodore PET, IBM PC, and Xerox Alto as well as video games such as Defender and Missile Command. To see how the chip is implemented I opened one up and reverse-engineered it. I expected the circuitry to be similar to other chips of the era, using standard NMOS gates, but it was much more complex than I expected, built from low-power dynamic logic. The MK4116 also used advanced manufacturing processes to fit 16,384 high-density memory cells on the chip.

[...] In dynamic RAM, each bit is stored in a capacitor with the bit's value, 0 or 1, represented by the voltage on the capacitor.3 The advantage of dynamic RAM is that each memory cell is very small, so a lot of data can be stored on one chip.4 The downside of dynamic RAM is that the charge on a capacitor leaks away after a few milliseconds. To avoid losing data, dynamic RAM must be constantly refreshed: bits are read from the capacitors, amplified, and then written back to the capacitors. For the MK4116, all the data must be refreshed every two milliseconds.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/diabetes-implant-oxygen-islet-cells/

Daily insulin injections are painful and inconvenient, which is why scientists are developing implants that treat diabetes without any need for needles. A new one looks particularly promising, as it produces oxygen to feed onboard islet cells.

[...] One alternative to those injections involves implanting islet cells that have either been harvested from a cadaver or derived from stem cells. While doing so does work in many cases, patients have to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives in order to keep those cells from being rejected.

Scientists have tried encapsulating islet cells in tiny flexible implants that shield the cells from the host's immune system, yet still allow insulin produced by those cells to diffuse into the bloodstream. These implants also prevent life-sustaining oxygen from reaching the cells, however, which means those cells won't last long.

Some implants have addressed that shortcoming by incorporating either a preloaded oxygen chamber or chemical reagents which produce oxygen. Both the oxygen and the reagents run out over time, though, so the implants will have to be replaced or refilled.

Seeking a longer-term alternative, a team from MIT and Boston Children's Hospital recently developed the new device.

It's packed with hundreds of thousands of islet cells, along with a proton-exchange membrane that splits water vapor (which occurs naturally in the body) into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen harmlessly diffuses, while the oxygen goes into a storage chamber in the implant. A thin, permeable membrane in that chamber then allows the oxygen to flow through to the chamber containing the islet cells.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Americans don't talk much about peace. But it turns out they care about it a lot—they just don't talk about it the way people who have experienced war or civil conflict do.

When public opinion polls in the U.S. ask people about peace, it's either in the context of religion or world peace.

Instead of using the word peace, Americans are more likely to say that they care deeply about safety and security and issues like terrorism, crime, illegal drugs and immigration.

But they still care about the same things people in places that have faced war are focused on.

Peace is hard to define. In the dictionary, it's equated with tranquility or the absence of war. We see it as broader. Peace is the ability for people to live in harmony with themselves and with each other. In practice, however, that can mean many different things to different people.

In Colombia, for example, many communities told us they felt at peace when they had the infrastructure necessary to supply basic needs, like clean water, or when they could actively participate in regular social gatherings. In Bosnia, residents highlighted the ability to use public spaces, including rebuilt ruins from the war, as well as the presence of more day-to-day amenities like streetlights and parking.

But until a recent project in Oakland, California, we weren't thinking about our work in America as also being about peace.

Since 2021, we've been working with six community organizations in Oakland to understand how people define and experience safety and well-being in their everyday lives. As it turns out, these concepts helped us get at how Americans, who have not experienced war like the people in other regions we've worked with, might also understand peace.

looorg writes:

https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/

Neuralink are looking for a few test subjects that have either ALS or are quadriplegics to test their wireless brain human interface. A device that will control a computer keyboard with only the users mind. Also they want to test out how good their robot is at surgery but that is perhaps less appealing.

The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) – a groundbreaking investigational medical device trial for our fully-implantable, wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) – aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.

During the study, the R1 Robot will be used to surgically place the N1 Implant's ultra-fine and flexible threads in a region of the brain that controls movement intention. Once in place, the N1 Implant is cosmetically invisible and is intended to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention. The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/online-child-safety-law-blocked-after-calif-argued-face-scans-not-that-invasive/

A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.

Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act—protecting children when they are online—clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."

"Specifically," Freeman said, "the age estimation and privacy provisions thus appear likely to impede the 'availability and use' of information and accordingly to regulate speech," and "the steps a business would need to take to sufficiently estimate the age of child users would likely prevent both children and adults from accessing certain content."

[...] Regulators' attempts to age-gate the Internet have drawn criticism, and courts have repeatedly found that these laws likely run afoul of the First Amendment. But perhaps more troubling, here, Freeman found that CAADCA not only risked restricting speech, but also did not appear to address or mitigate the harms to children identified by the state. Even worse, after California argued that businesses gathering information from children by requiring face scans or other biometric data to estimate user ages was "minimally invasive," Freeman concluded that enforcing the law could cause more harm than good. "Such measures would appear to counter the State's interest in increasing privacy protections for children," Freeman wrote, explaining:

"CAADCA's age estimation provision appears not only unlikely to materially alleviate the harm of insufficient data and privacy protections for children, but actually likely to exacerbate the problem by inducing covered businesses to require consumers, including children, to divulge additional personal information."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft AI team accidentally leaks 38TB of private company data:

AI researchers at Microsoft have made a huge mistake.

According to a new report from cloud security company Wiz, the Microsoft AI research team accidentally leaked 38TB of the company's private data.

38 terabytes. That's a lot of data.

The exposed data included full backups of two employees' computers. These backups contained sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys, and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from more than 350 Microsoft employees.

We found a public AI repo on GitHub, exposing over 38TB of private files – including personal computer backups of @Microsoft employees 👨‍💻

So, how did this happen? The report explains that Microsoft's AI team uploaded a bucket of training data containing open-source code and AI models for image recognition. Users who came across the Github repository were provided with a link from Azure, Microsoft's cloud storage service, in order to download the models.

One problem: The link that was provided by Microsoft's AI team gave visitors complete access to the entire Azure storage account. And not only could visitors view everything in the account, they could upload, overwrite, or delete files as well.

[martyb ed. update: My first hard disk drive was a Seagare ST-231. It could store so much data that I had to partition it into two "devices" under Microsoft DOS 3.2: 32MB and 8MB. It was so large that I thought that nobody would be able to use all that disk space! Over time, newest drives has had: 80MB, 200MB, and 1TB. My current PC has a 2TB drive... and that is relatively "small" by today's standards. Microsoft lost 38TB?!]

How large were your drives over time?

Original Submission

Alex "Sandy" Pentland[1] is somewhere near the top of the AI pantheon these days, here's his most recent talk, "Engineering Ecosystems with AI", given online on Friday 15 Sept., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m8EsEmZPYQ at the MIT Mobility Forum. In the intro it is mentioned that this was a dry run for Pentland's upcoming keynote to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. From the YT summary,

This talk covers how our society is having difficulties engineering heterogeneous systems of people and technologies; for instance, our systems for dealing with pandemics, climate change, inequality, or financial stress have been less than completely successful, in significant part because of unanticipated human behaviors.

He discusses recent work on models of panics, cascades and other highly nonlinear, long tailed phenomena--using aggregated census data--as an example of how AI and big data can be socially useful.

Then he takes the data further, showing that when people move between communities (both locally and internationally with migration) is when progress really happens. AI may have a similar "melting pot" effect, helping mid-level workers/earners (which he defines) in closing some of the performance/creativity/earnings gap to high-level workers. In particular, AI developed on restricted and well defined training sets may not get the headlines of ChatGPT, but will be very useful in many fields.

Near the end he quotes Xi Jinping of China to make it clear how big this social change is going to be (paraphrased):

Xi is the largest representative, loudest voice for Marxism and he recently said, 'data is a new primary means of production along with capital and labor'. And if you think about that, what he's saying is that classic Marxism is done. It's now not a battle between capital and labor. It's a battle between data, capital and labor and that sort of gives you a sense of the magnitude of this problem.

If you look at what society did with capital and labor, it took a century or more, for instance, to form labor unions to pressure companies, to establish principles to get laws enacted. ... And it's not a fixed thing, it's not like you can do it once and it's done. It evolves over time. So currently we're in a new evolutionary phase of labor and a new evolutionary phase of capital. The problem with data is that we don't have *any* institutions, we don't have *any* norms for it. It's new, so we're back in the robber baron era of capital, we're back in the early industrial age where kids were working 14 hour days. That's where we are with data. Just face it! What we have to do is develop the right institutions to be able to deal with this now-critical element of society.

I don't watch many videos, but this one was well worth the time. His actual talk is about 25 minutes, the rest of the hour is intro and many questions/discussions at the end.

[1]Here's Pentland's short CV, https://www.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/overview/

Original Submission

"aristarchus" writes:

Osiris-Rex: Nasa awaits fiery return of asteroid Bennu samples

A seven-year mission to study what has been described as the most dangerous rock in the Solar System is about to reach its dramatic conclusion.

The Osiris-Rex spacecraft is bringing home the "soil" samples it grabbed from the surface of asteroid Bennu.

These dusty materials will be dropped off by the Nasa probe as it sweeps past the Earth on Sunday.

They'll be tucked inside a capsule to protect them from a fiery descent to the US State of Utah.

Scientists expect the samples' chemistry to reveal new information about the formation of the planets 4.5 billion years ago, and possibly even to give insights into how life got started on our world.

Touchdown on desert land belonging to the Department of Defense is expected at 08:55 local time (Utah) (14:55 UTC; 15:55 BST).

When: NASA will start its live coverage at 10 a.m. EST on Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023. The agency expects the capsule to parachute down to the desert at around 10:55 a.m. EST.

How: You can watch online at:

- the agency's website via https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

or NASA TV's YouTube channel

[Updated at 09:28 UTC with links to video feeds. JR]

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/yelp-names-and-shames-businesses-paying-for-5-star-reviews/

Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index [replaced bad link in original article] documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a 5-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.

Engadget dubbed Yelp's new index a "wall of shame," suggesting that the information may be used by federal agencies who have spent the past few years cracking down on paid fake reviews. This year, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on "the use of deceptive reviews and testimonials," with penalties up to $50,000 for businesses "caught buying, selling or manipulating online reviews," Engadget reported.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

TSMC Reportedly Mulls Advanced Chip Packaging Facility in Arizona

TSMC is in talks with Arizona officials to build its chip packaging facility in the state, Katie Hobbs, governor of Arizona, said in Taipei after visiting the world's No.1 foundry's headquarters, reports Bloomberg. If the plan comes to fruition, then TSMC's will have a vertically integrated chip production chain in the USA for the first time ever.

TSMC has built Fab 21 in Arizona and is currently installing production tools there. The company is also building up the second phase of the fab and has approved plans to invest $40 billion in these two production facilities. But the company apparently does not want to stop there and is discussing the possibility of building an advanced packaging fab in the state, too, as this will help it to assemble complex system-in-packages for its clients from the U.S. on American soil.

Previously: Apple Chips Made In The US Still Require Assembly In Taiwan, Report Suggests

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/eu-game-devs-ask-regulators-to-look-at-unitys-anti-competitive-bundling/

In the wake of Unity's sudden fee structure change announcement last week, a European trade group representing thousands of game developers is calling on governments to "update their regulatory framework" to curb what they see as a "looming market failure" caused by "potentially anti-competitive market behavior."

In an open letter published last week, the European Games Developer Federation goes through a lot of the now-familiar arguments for why Unity's decision to charge up to $0.20 per game install will be bad for the industry. The federation of 23 national game developer trade associations argues that the new fee structure will make it "much harder for [small and midsize developers] to build reliable business plans" by "significantly increas[ing] the game development costs for most game developers relying on [Unity's] services."

[...] Beyond simply being bad for the industry, though, the EGDF argues that "Unity's move might be anti-competitive" in a way that demands government action. The group takes a special exception to Unity's history of bundling its game engine with services like analytics, in-game chat, ad networks and mediation tools, user acquisition tools, and more. That kind of bundling creates "a significant vendor lock risk for game developers using Unity services," which "also makes it difficult for many game middleware developers to compete against Unity."

Previously:

• Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues
• Developer Dis-Unity

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/archaeologists-find-500-year-old-board-game-carved-in-ruins-of-polish-castle/

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time. At least that's one possible scenario for the existence of a game board recently discovered by archaeologists in the castle ruins; it's also possible the board could have been carved by children or by servants after the castle was completed, or it may have been meant as a symbolic message.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was simply replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

This latest discovery isn't quite as old as that in terms of the actual carved board, but the game could be just as ancient. According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it's a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Original Submission

Signal Preps its Encryption Engine for the Quantum Doomsday Inevitability

upstart writes:

Signal preps its encryption engine for the quantum doomsday inevitability:

The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that's never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today.

The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users. It's the engine that provides end-to-end encryption, meaning messages encrypted with the apps can be decrypted only by the recipients and no one else, including the platforms enabling the service. Until now, the Signal Protocol encrypted messages and voice calls with X3DH, a specification based on a form of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman.

Often abbreviated as ECDH, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is a protocol unto its own. It combines two main building blocks. The first involves the use of elliptic curves to form asymmetric key pairs, each of which is unique to each user. One key in the pair is public and available to anyone to use for encrypting messages sent to the person who owns it. The corresponding private key is closely guarded by the user. It allows the user to decrypt the messages. Cryptography relying on a public-private key pair is often known as asymmetric encryption.

The security of asymmetric encryption is based on mathematical one-way functions. Also known as trapdoor functions, these problems are easy to compute in one direction and substantially harder to compute in reverse. In elliptic curve cryptography, this one-way function is based on the Discrete Logarithm problem in mathematics. The key parameters are based on specific points in an elliptic curve, which is defined as the field of integers modulo prime P.

When someone knows the starting point (A) in the above image showing an elliptic curve and the number of hops required to get to the endpoint (E), it's easy to know where (E) is. But when all someone knows is the starting and end points, it's next to impossible to deduce how many hops are required.

As explained in an Ars article from 2013:

Let's imagine this curve as the setting for a bizarre game of billiards. Take any two points on the curve and draw a line through them; the line will intersect the curve at exactly one more place. In this game of billiards, you take a ball at point A and shoot it toward point B. When it hits the curve, the ball bounces either straight up (if it's below the x-axis) or straight down (if it's above the x-axis) to the other side of the curve.

We can call this billiards move on two points "dot." Any two points on a curve can be dotted together to get a new point.

A dot B = C

We can also string moves together to "dot" a point with itself over and over.

A dot A = B

A dot B = C

A dot C = D

...

It turns out that if you have two points, an initial point "dotted" with itself n times to arrive at a final point, finding out n when you only know the final point and the first point is hard. To continue our bizarro billiards metaphor, imagine that one person plays our game alone in a room for a random period of time. It is easy for him to hit the ball over and over following the rules described above. If someone walks into the room later and sees where the ball has ended up, even if they know all the rules of the game and where the ball started, they cannot determine the number of times the ball was struck to get there without running through the whole game again until the ball gets to the same point. Easy to do, hard to undo. This is the basis for a very good trapdoor function.

Well, that's all clear then.....

sweettea writes:

The All Systems Go! conference happened last week in Berlin, devoted to systemd / container / image-building topics. Several cool talks focused on immutable distributions: their usages and virtues, particularly NixOS. NixOS is the foremost immutable, reproducable, and atomically upgradable Linux distribution, and a powerful building block for building easily deployable services.

Andreas Herrmann, the first Bazel community expert, talked about the value of a reproducible build of your software and the merits of using an immutable distribution like Nix to make your builds better. Xe Iaso's talk on writing your own NixOS modules for your own build dependencies to ensure your software is reproducable. Lots more talks, but mostly systemd-related: check out the list of talks and the recordings!

All Systems Go 2023 will feature Lennart Poettering talking about Unified Kernel Images along with talks on encrypted Btrfs sub-volumes, Linux security, BPF filtering, soft reboots, Linux and TPMs, systemd-repart, mkosi, and Microsoft talking about their image-based Linux deployments on Azure, among other topics.

Related: The Future of Linux: Exploring Immutable Distributions

Original Submission