SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Magneto X "levitates" the tool head on magnetic linear motors:

Resin printer company Peopoly created quite a buzz with the unveiling of a prototype beltless FDM 3D printer, the Magneto X, at the East Coast RepRap Festival. The new printer is a desk top machine with a huge 400 x 300 x 300 mm build volume and print speeds up to 800mm/s. It borrows a design feature seen on CNC machines: magnetic linear motors. Normally, 3D printers move their components with rotating stepper motors attached to gears and pulleys. The linear motor can be thought of as a flat, unrolled motor with the "rotor" attached to the moving component – the tool head – and the stator forming a track along one axis.

Dubbed the "MagXY" system, the tool head seems to levitate across the gantry without obvious means. It has a top print speed of 800 mm/s with a max acceleration of 22,000 mm/s², which would make it faster than modern Core XY printers from Bambu Lab.

[...] Peopoly is known for high end, large scale, liquid resin 3D printers and the Magneto X will be it's first plastic pushing printer. The printer will likewise be a premium machine with a price tag starting at $1999, currently on sale for $1399 during the pre-order phase. The optional enclosure will cost $79 more. Printers are expected to begin shipping in late November.

[...] Peopoly is leaning hard into the Open Source community. Not only have they become backers of Klipper firmware, they are also using – and supporting – Open Source OcraSlicer. The Magneto X's nozzles are compatible with the popular E3D's V6 volcano which suggests the machine will be open to modification by users. Peopoly also states its machine can be used without joining a cloud-based system and promises customer data will not be collected.

The 3D printer will have a load cell sensor for precise auto leveling and four independent Z-axis stepper motors for dynamic adjustments. The hotend is rated to 300 degrees Celsius, and with an available enclosure will be able to print engineering grade materials. Prints will be monitored with an included camera which can also take time lapses.

Damn that's fast!

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Fear of being exploited is stagnating our progress in science:

Science is a collaborative effort. What we know today would have never been, had it not been generations of scientists reusing and building on the work of their predecessors.

However, in modern times, academia has become increasingly competitive and indeed rather hostile to the individual researchers. This is especially true for early-career researchers yet to secure tenure and build a name in their fields. Nowadays, scholars are left to compete with each other for citations of their published work, awards and funding.

So, understandably, many scientists have grown unwilling to cooperate and help their peers by sharing their work. They would "hide" their raw data, despite having taken years-long efforts to collect it. They would also conceal experiments that have failed or proved insignificant. All these practices would then result in different teams wasting precious time in running the same useless studies, rather than making further progress and contributing to the world's knowledge.

[...] According to their findings, a specific personality trait called "victim sensitivity" predicted knowledge hiding in science. Researchers with this personality trait are characterized by a latent fear of being exploited by others, and thus, are more suspicious about their colleagues.

[...] The good news, point out the authors of the study, is that—among the participants—the intention to hide knowledge was rather low.

However, the authors warn about a potential bias. It is likely that researchers who volunteered to take part in these studies were more cooperative to begin with. Additionally, it might be that in the context of self-reporting, the participants tried to present themselves as more likable.

"We may need to change the stereotypical way we think about ourselves as researchers, in order to build trust and create a sharing environment among scientists," concludes the research team. "Identifying as a researcher should include being cooperative, other-oriented, and trustworthy: a social identity that stands for knowledge sharing—not knowledge hiding."

Journal Reference:
Marlene Sophie Altenmüller et al, Among us: Fear of exploitation, suspiciousness, and social identity predict knowledge hiding among researchers, Social Psychological Bulletin (2023). DOI: 10.32872/spb.10011

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/4chan-pushing-bing-dall-e-as-quick-methods-to-spread-racist-images/

Despite leading AI companies' attempts to block users from turning AI image generators into engines of racist content, many 4chan users are still turning to these tools to "quickly flood the Internet with racist garbage," 404 Media reported.

404 Media uncovered one 4chan thread where users recommended various AI tools, including Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, but specifically linked to Bing AI's text-to-image generator (which is powered by DALL-E 3) as a "quick method." After finding the right tool—which could also be a more old-school photo-editing tool like Photoshop—users are instructed to add incendiary captions and share the images on social media to create a blitz of racist images online.
[...]
Perhaps because Bing AI's tool has seemingly been deemed the quickest method, it has potentially become the most popular tool in the thread. 404 Media concluded that—"judging by the images' default square format, the uniform 1024 x 1024 resolution"—"most of the images in the thread appear to be generated with Bing," then spread on social media platforms, including Telegram, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.

It's unclear what steps that makers of the AI image generators seemingly favored by 4chan users have taken to block methods 404 Media said were used to circumvent filters.
[...]
Microsoft's spokesperson told Ars that the "Bing Image Creator is a tool designed to help inspire people's creativity. As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in unintended ways. We are investigating these reports and will take action as needed in accordance with our content policy, which prohibits the creation of harmful content.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The annual Draconid meteor shower peaks this weekend, and viewing conditions are favorable this year.:

The Draconid meteor shower will be active from Oct. 6 to Oct. 10, with the peak happening around Sunday (Oct. 8) or Monday (Oct. 9). This year, the moon will be less than 20% illuminated, offering fairly dark skies for skywatchers hoping to catch sight of a few of these meteors streaking through the sky.

To see this shower, first locate the Draco constellation, from where the Draconids appear to originate (hence their name). From North America, look high to the northwest after sunset. If you can locate Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, Draco will be about 30 degrees above it, or three widths of your fist at arm's length. Otherwise, a stargazing app could help you locate it. Find a spot away from as much light as possible, set up a comfortable chair and allow your eyes time to adjust. With a little luck, you just might catch a few of these "falling stars."

The Draconids are caused by pieces of rock and ice trailing away from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. As it makes its way through our solar system, the comet leaves this debris behind it. When our planet passes through these "comet crumbs," bits of them burn up in Earth's atmosphere, creating the streaks of light we call a meteor shower.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"It's really spectacular to have all that material there":

Last month, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully dropped off incredibly rare samples it collected from the asteroid Bennu, tens of millions of miles away, which could provide tantalizing glimpses into the earliest stages of our solar system.

[...] Scientists soon cracked open the canister to find an abundance of material — and that's not even counting the still-sealed chamber of the spacecraft's TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head, which holds most of the treasure.

In fact, there are so many "dark particles" coating the canister's interior that it's slowing down the curation process, according to a NASA statement.

[...] The spacecraft rendezvoused with the 1,600-foot asteroid back in 2020. It slowly approached Bennu with its TAGSAM stretched out in front of it, briefly making contact and sending dust and small rocks flying.

It took OSIRIS-REx years to finally make it back to the Earth's orbit. After successfully dropping off its loot, it's now on its way to a different asteroid called Apophis, a journey that will take roughly 5.5 years.

Scientists are now performing a preliminary analysis of initial samples taken from outside of the TAGSAM head, scanning them with an electron microscope, X-ray, and infrared instruments.

They're hoping to find out if the samples contain any organic-rich particles or hydrated minerals, which could offer us clues about Bennu's origins.

Also at MIT Technology Review, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://searchengineland.com/youtubes-crackdown-on-ad-blockers-intensifies-432213

YouTube appears to be ramping up its efforts to crackdown on ad blocks

The platform has reportedly been sending users with ad blockers enabled more aggressive prompts, warning them to either "Allow YouTube ads" or subscribe to YouTube Premium. The notification appears in place of videos or as a pop-up when playing videos on fullscreen.

If the viewer fails to comply, the platform threatens to block video playback after three plays. Why we care. This is promising news for advertisers in terms of extending your ad's reach. However, it's important to consider that pushing ads onto people who have no interest may not yield great results, as they're less likely to convert into customers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

AI chip startup Tenstorrent announced on Monday that it will use Samsung's foundry to manufacture its next generation of products, with both partners alluding to potential future RISC-V collaborations.

"Samsung Foundry's commitment to advancing semiconductor technology aligns with our vision for advancing RISC-V and AI and makes them an ideal partner to bring our AI chiplets to market," beamed Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller.

Samsung's head of US Foundry business echoed those sentiments: "Samsung's advanced silicon manufacturing nodes will accelerate Tenstorrent's innovations in RISC-V and AI for datacenter and automotive solutions."

Tenstorrent hopes to become an alternative to Nvidia for AI hardware. It builds some of its products – such as its 2023 standalone ML computer, Black Hole – on RISC-V CPU cores. Sixteen of them, to be exact.

In June, Samsung announced it was an official member of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem, which develops code to run on open processor architecture.

The current deal for next-gen products, however, has the Korean megalith manufacturing Tenstorrent's Quasar chiplet using Samsung's SF4X process and 4nm architecture.

[...] "We leave the decision to them where the chips get made," said [Tenstorrent vice president of strategy and corporate communications Bob] Grim. The veep noted that his current customers – LG Electronics and Hyundai – are both in Korea.

Samsung is a licensee of Arm processor designs – a rival to RISC-V. Working with Tenstorrent gives Samsung potential exposure to the open processor design that could help it to win more fabrication work from other RISC-V players.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

X.Org Hit By New Security Vulnerabilities - Two Date Back To 1988 With X11R2:

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

Made public today was CVE-2023-43785 as an out-of-bounds memory access within the libX11 code that has been around since 1996. A second libX11 flaw is stack exhaustion from infinite recursion within the PutSubImage() function of libX11... This vulnerability has been around since X11R2 in February of 1988.

A third libX11 vulnerability made public today is an integer overflow within XCreateImage() that leads to a heap overflow... That too has been around since X11R2 in 1988.

Two libXpm vulnerabilities were also disclosed today related to out-of-bounds reads and both of those date back to 1998.

Due to these issues coming to light, libX11 1.8.7 and libXpm 3.5.17 were released today with the necessary security fixes. More details on these latest X.Org security vulnerabilities via today's X.Org security advisory.;

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sandra Rivera is off as executive veep of Intel's Datacenter and AI group, and will instead be CEO of the x86 giant's now-soon-to-be-spun-off FPGA business.

On a call with investors late Tuesday, Intel boss Pat Gelsinger discussed the chipmaker's decision to hive off its Platform Solutions Group (PSG), arguing the move ought to provide the unit the autonomy it needs to compete more aggressively in the FPGA market.

"We haven't been managing it as well as we could have," Gelsinger said of PSG on the call. "We also see that we have the opportunity to execute more effectively in the lower margin, mid and low-end areas of the business."

For those who don't recall, Intel bought its way into the FPGA market in 2015 with the $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera. Since then we've seen a flurry of FPGAs from Intel for a variety of applications, particularly as of late. So far this year, the Xeon processor goliath has rolled out 11 products, including an update to its Agilex programmable array portfolio that we took a look at last month.

And also for those who don't know, FPGAs – or Field Programmable Gate Arrays – are chips packed with circuitry that can be configured as needed to perform specific tasks at relatively high speed in hardware. You can program FPGAs to handle stuff like glue logic, peripheral control, data processing on the line, and many more things. They are quite useful in solving application-specific problems, especially when they ship with accelerators and CPU cores already on the die.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-prehistoric-cosmic-airburst-advent-agriculture.html

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.

That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.

"In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers," said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara . The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. "The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes," he noted. "This is what the evidence clearly shows."
...
In the 12,800-year-old layers corresponding to the shift between hunting and gathering and agriculture, the record at Abu Hureyra shows evidence of massive burning. The evidence includes a carbon-rich "black mat" layer with high concentrations of platinum, nanodiamonds and tiny metallic spherules that could only have been formed under extremely high temperatures—higher than any that could have been produced by man's technology at the time.

The airburst flattened trees and straw huts, splashing meltglass onto cereals and grains, as well as on the early buildings, tools and animal bones found in the mound—and most likely on people, too.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Humans are increasingly settling in areas highly exposed to dangerous flooding, a study warned Wednesday, with China helping drive the rise in risky urban expansion into exposed areas.

The research, led by a World Bank economist, warns that settlement growth in flood zones has vastly outpaced growth in safe areas since 1985.

"In a time when human settlements should be adapting to climate change, many countries are actually rapidly increasing their exposure to floods," author Jun Rentschler told AFP.

The study analyzed 30 years of satellite imagery tracking the expansion of human settlement globally, along with flood maps.

[...] East Asia and the Pacific region are among the most exposed, driven particularly by urban expansion in China, as well as Vietnam and Bangladesh.

"In Vietnam, where almost one-third of the coastline is now built up, the safest and most productive locations are increasingly occupied," the authors wrote.

"Thus, new developments are disproportionately forced onto hazardous land and previously avoided areas, such as riverbeds or floodplains."

The analysis does not incorporate potential increases in flood risks caused by climate change, deforestation or changes to features such as riverbeds.

But Rentschler said there was little evidence flood zones were expanding at a rate similar to human settlement in known risk areas, suggesting settlement patterns remain the key factor for policymakers to address.

[...] Rentschler argues understanding the settlement trend should be the first step in shifting urbanization policies.

"This is where you want to start: before reducing risks, countries need to stop increasing it," he said.

"Local authorities can actually do much more to protect people and prevent future climate change impacts."

Journal Reference:
Rentschler, J., Avner, P., Marconcini, M. et al. Global evidence of rapid urban growth in flood zones since 1985. Nature 622, 87–92 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06468-9

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last week the internet was abuzz with talk that Singapore's commercial Changi airport was no longer going to require passports for clearance at immigration. Although it is true the paper documentation will be replaced by biometric measures, it's not quite time to pack the document away.

The news came through as Singapore passed its Immigration Amendment Bill which, among other things, enables the use of end-to-end biometric clearance at airports and checkpoints, beginning in the first half of 2024.

"Singapore will be one of the first few countries in the world to introduce automated, passport-free immigration clearance," said minister for communications and information Josephine Teo in a wrap-up speech for the bill. Teo did concede that Dubai had such clearance for select enrolled travelers, but there was no assurance of other countries planning similar actions.

And therein lies one of the most important reasons passports will not yet go away.

[...] What travelers will see is an expansion of a program already taking form. Changi airport currently uses facial recognition software and automated clearance for some parts of immigration.

The plan is to expand to universal coverage, which Teo called one of the keys to the successful implementation of the New Clearance Concept (NCC).

"This requires a willingness to phase out traditional methods of identifying and authenticating travelers. The alternative of running two systems in parallel is not only costly but also cumbersome," said Teo.

fliptop writes:

Some gas station owners are falling victim to a sophisticated scam. Scammers are using cellphone's Bluetooth option to hack the pump - and get it for free:

Paying at the pump is for chumps - when you can get gas for free - and illegal, but it didn't stop a Detroit man from stealing almost 800 gallons of gas at the Shell at Eight Mile and Wyoming.

[...] And when the clerks inside try to stop it - they can't.

"Every time we push Pump Three stop, it wasn't doing anything," [station owner Mo] said. "We have to shut off the whole pumps - we have emergency stops."

[...] But it's not just one guy, and this maneuver is not new, just re-surfacing.

Like at a Speedway station Downriver – in Riverview this month. In that case, they used a bait-and-switch. One guy distracted the clerk with a Cash App problem inside, while the other hacked the pump.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Set your watches! Scientists have set the clock ticking for the development of a new generation of timepieces with accuracy of up to 1 second in 300 billion years or about 22 times the age of the universe.

Researchers working at European XFEL X-ray have examined the potential of scandium as the basis for nuclear clocks, long seen as the next step forward in accuracy over the current generation of atomic clocks.

Most atomic clocks rely on oscillators such as caesium, which can oscillate at very reliable frequencies when excited by microwave radiation. For example, the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology's NIST-F2 clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years.

But scientists have held the ambition of going one step further by using the oscillation of the atomic nucleus – rather than the electron shell – to create the next level in timekeeping.

[...] Ralf Röhlsberger, researcher at Germany's Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, was part of the team. He said the level of accuracy possible from a nuclear clock using scandium could be equivalent to one second in 300 billion years, according to a statement.

In other words, if your watch loses a second a year, it will be 9,512 years slow by the time a nuclear clock based on scandium is a second out.

Journal Reference:
Shvyd'ko, Y., Röhlsberger, R., Kocharovskaya, O. et al. Resonant X-ray excitation of the nuclear clock isomer 45Sc [open]. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06491-w

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/09/covid-anti-viral-drug-is-actively-helping-sars-cov-2-mutate-and-evolve/

With every new infection, the pandemic coronavirus gets new chances to mutate and adapt, creating opportunities for the virus to evolve new variants that are better at dodging our immune systems and making us sicker.

Anti-viral drugs, such as Paxlovid and remdesivir, aim to halt this incessant evolution in individual patients—shortening illnesses, snuffing out opportunities for mutation, and reducing transmission. But one antiviral appears to be backfiring—allowing SARS-CoV-2 more opportunities to mutate.

According to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature, the anti-viral drug dubbed molnupiravir is linked to specific SARS-CoV-2 mutation signatures that happened to spring up in 2022 when the drug was introduced.
[...]
Beyond simply finding molnupiravir-linked mutations, the researchers noted concerning features of them. The researchers found evidence that some of the molnupiravir-linked mutations were under positive selection—that is, they increased in frequency, suggesting that they were advantageous to the virus in some way. They also noted that some viruses with molnupiravir-linked mutations were passed on from person to person in clusters, which suggested onward transmission of these drug-induced mutations.
[...]
When molnupiravir was authorized in the US, there was concern about its potential to cause mutations in people's DNA, rather than the virus. For this reason, it is not recommended for use in pregnant people. But the new data gives birth to more concern about mutations. And this risk is coupled with lackluster efficacy data. In a final data analysis for the Food and Drug Administration, molnupiravir's maker, Merck, combined two sets of trial data to come up with an estimate of just 30 percent efficacy at preventing hospitalization and death.
[...]
FDA advisers summarized the data at the time as "not overwhelmingly good" and "modest at best." They voted in favor of authorizing the drug in a narrow 13 to 10 vote. The drug has never gained a foothold in Europe. Earlier this year, the European Medicines Agency refused to issue marketing authorization for molnupiravir. Upon the EMA's rejection, Merck said it was confident of the drug's role in fighting COVID-19 and that it would appeal the decision. In addition to the US, molnupiravir is approved for use in over two dozen countries, including Australia, China, Japan, and the UK, though use of the drug has been scaled back in many places.

Journal Reference:
Sanderson, T., Hisner, R., Donovan-Banfield, I. et al. A molnupiravir-associated mutational signature in global SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06649-6

Original Submission