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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Natural and man-made disasters have caused $3.8 trillion in crop and livestock losses over 30 years, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization said on Friday.

Floods, droughts, insect infestations, storms, disease and war have caused about $123 billion per year in lost food production between 1991 and 2021, the equivalent of five percent of total production or enough to feed up to half a billion people per year, the FAO said in a report.

This is the first time the UN body has tried to compile such an estimate, with the aim of putting into context the scale of the cost of disasters on both a global and personal scale.

"The international community is taking stock of the fact that disasters are... increasing tremendously... quadrupling since the 1970s" and are having an increasing impact on food production, the deputy head of FAO's statistics department, Piero Conforti, told AFP.

The FAO report, entitled "The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security", found that disasters are increasing in severity and frequency, from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year in the past 20 years.

[...] It identified the "systemic drivers of disaster risk" as climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflicts.

[...] The FAO further found that poorer nations suffered the highest losses due to extreme events in terms of the percentage of their agricultural output, at up to 10 percent.

upstart writes:

Discoveries at Kalambo Falls, Zambia offer insights into ancient human technology:

Recent research has revealed that nearly half a million years ago, ancient human ancestors, predating Homo sapiens, were already engaging in advanced woodworking.

The artifacts found indicate that these humans were building structures, potentially laying the foundation of platforms or parts of dwellings, much earlier than what was once believed.

A team from the University of Liverpool and Aberystwyth University excavated preserved wood at Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dating back to an impressive 476,000 years. Analyzing the stone tool cut marks on the wood, the team deduced that these early humans intentionally shaped and combined two logs, showcasing the deliberate crafting of logs to fit together. Prior to this discovery, humans were believed to only utilize wood for simpler purposes such as creating fire, crafting digging sticks, and making spears.

The preservation of this wood is in itself remarkable. Typically, wood from such ancient times deteriorates and disappears. However, at Kalambo Falls, high water levels have protected and preserved these ancient wooden structures.

These findings cast doubt on the previously held belief that Stone Age humans were strictly nomadic. The abundance of resources in the vicinity of Kalambo Falls suggests that these ancient humans could have settled, tapping into the perennial water source and the surrounding forest for sustenance, allowing them to engage in construction.

Professor Larry Barham from the University of Liverpool articulated the significance of this discovery, stating, "They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they'd never seen before, something that had never previously existed."

Journal Reference:
Barham, L., Duller, G. A. T., Candy, I., et al. Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06557-9)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Europe is subsidizing the launch of Internet satellites for Jeff Bezos:

Nearly a decade ago, the European Space Agency announced plans to develop the next generation of its Ariane rocket, the Ariane 6 booster. The goal was to bring a less costly workhorse rocket to market that could compete with the likes of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster and begin flying by 2020.

It has been well documented that development of the Ariane 6 is running years behind—the vehicle is now unlikely to fly before the middle of 2024 and subject to further delays. For example, a critical long-duration hot fire of the vehicle's Vulcain 2.1 main engine had been scheduled for "early October," but there have been no recent updates on when this key test will occur.

However, there are also increasing concerns that the Ariane 6 rocket will not meet its ambitious price targets. For years, European officials have said they would like to cut the price of launches by half with a rocket that is easier to manufacture and by flying an increased cadence of missions.

[...] However, as Ars previously reported, a 50 percent cost reduction is no longer achievable. Speaking in June at the Paris Air Show, the European Space Agency's Toni Tolker-Nielsen said the Ariane 6 is projected to come in at a higher cost per launch than first predicted. The Ariane 6's cost per flight will be about 40 percent lower than that of the now-retired Ariane 5, short of the previous goal.

[...] Since 2021, the publicly funded European Space Agency has provided a subsidy of 140 million euros annually to ArianeGroup in order to make the Ariane 6 rocket more competitive in the commercial market. That is to say, taxpayers are subsidizing the cost of building Ariane 6 rockets so that they will be more attractive to private satellite operators seeking a ride to space.

However, according to the French news report, ArianeGroup is asking for a substantial increase to this subsidy, to 350 million euros a year. If this were approved by the European Space Agency, it would blow any cost savings for the Ariane 6 rocket, compared to the Ariane 5, out of the water.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope is back to normal and will resume its mission, thanks to a software update that was required after its navigation sensors mistakenly identified solar ray signals as stars.

But shortly after its instruments were deployed and it snapped a first picture a month later, mission control discovered the telescope was failing to focus on stars. Squiggly lines and circles captured in another image revealed that Euclid was looping around and struggling to lock onto distant stars to keep it steady during its observations.

Mission control pinpointed the issue and realized the telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), which the craft uses to locate a set of landmark stars to help navigate and align its instruments on designated targets, was to blame. The optical sensors were mistakenly identifying photons, ejected by the Sun during periods of high solar activity, as stars.

The FGS analyzes light from distant sources and helps control Euclid's orientation. Since it was misinterpreting the solar rays as stars, the telescope was moving haphazardly making it difficult to focus its sight. Working together with aerospace companies Thales Alenia Space and Leonardo, ESA engineers updated its software to change the way its sensors characterize stars.

The patch was uploaded to Euclid, and the telescope is now functioning normally. Mission control will continue testing its performance for a little while longer before it officially begins to collect data. 

"The performance verification phase that was interrupted in August has now fully restarted and all the observations are carried out correctly," Giuseppe Racca, Euclid Project Manager, said before the weekend. "This phase will last until late November, but we are confident that the mission performance will prove to be outstanding and the regular scientific survey observations can start thereafter."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In August and September, threat actors unleashed the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks in Internet history by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in a key technical protocol. Unlike other high-severity zerodays in recent years—Heartbleed or log4j, for example—which caused chaos from a torrent of indiscriminate exploits, the more recent attacks, dubbed HTTP/2 Rapid Reset, were barely noticeable to all but a select few engineers.

HTTP2/Rapid Reset is a novel technique for waging DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, of an unprecedented magnitude. It wasn’t discovered until after it was already being exploited to deliver record-breaking DDoSes. One attack on a customer using the Cloudflare content delivery network peaked at 201 million requests per second, almost triple the previous record Cloudflare had seen of 71 million rps. An attack on a site using Google’s cloud infrastructure topped out at 398 million rps, more than 7.5 times bigger than the previous record Google recorded of 46 million rps.

[...] The vulnerability that HTTP/2 Rapid Reset exploits resides in HTTP/2, which went into effect in 2015 and has undergone several overhauls since then. Compared to the HTTP/1 and HTTP/1.1 protocols that predated it, HTTP/2 provided the ability for a single HTTP request to carry 100 or more “streams” that a server can receive all at once. The resulting throughput can lead to almost 100 times higher utilization of each connection, compared with the earlier HTTP protocols.

The increased efficiency wasn’t just useful for distributing video, audio, and other sorts of benign content. DDoSers began leveraging HTTP/2 to deliver attacks that were orders of magnitude larger. There are two properties in the protocol allowing for these new efficient DDoSes. Before discussing them, it’s useful to review how DDoS attacks work in general and then move on to the way HTTP protocols prior to 2.0 worked.

[...] The type of attack carried out by HTTP/2 Rapid Reset falls into a third form of DDoS known as Application Layer attacks. Rather than trying to overwhelm the incoming connection (volumetric) or exhaust the routing infrastructure (network protocol), application-level DDOSes attempt to exhaust the computing resources available in layer 7 of a target’s infrastructure. Floods to server applications for HTTP, HTTPS, and SIP voice are among the most common means for exhausting a target’s computing resources.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://gizmodo.com/neanderthals-hunted-cave-lions-skeleton-spear-1850921295

Marks on the ribcage of a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton suggest the animal was killed by Neanderthals, making it the first evidence that our nearest human cousins hunted the Ice Age predators.

A team of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists recently scrutinized the remains of four lions: the aforementioned skeleton, which was excavated in 1985 in Siegsdorf, Germany, and phalanges and sesamoid bones from three lion specimens excavated from Einhornhöle, Germany, in 2019. The former showed evidence of being punctured by a wooden-tipped spear—a known weapon of Neanderthals—and the latter three had cut marks that suggested they were butchered in a way to keep the animals' claws preserved on the fur. The team's research is published today in Scientific Reports.

"The notion that Neanderthals interacted with cave lions holds deep significance," said Gabriele Russo, a paleoanthropologist at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the study's lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. "It reveals that Neanderthals were actively engaged with their environment, which included encounters with formidable creatures like lions. These interactions encompassed not only the cultural use of lion body parts but also the ability to hunt them."

Cave lions (Panthera spelaea) are now extinct, but they inhabited most of northern Eurasia during the Pleistocene, recently enough that some preserved cave lions look like they're just sleeping. They made up a remarkable tableau of megafauna on the Ice Age steppe, alongside creatures like the woolly rhinoceros, ancient, extinct elephant species, and the woolly mammoth. And while the mammoth is a known quarry of Neanderthals, it now appears that the human group also hunted cave lions, one of the most prominent Ice Age predators.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Speaking to partners last week as part of their annual Open Innovation Platform forum in Europe, a big portion of TSMC's roadshow was dedicated to the next generation of the company's foundry technology. TSMC's 2 nm-class N2, N2P, and N2X process technologies are set to introduce multiple innovations, including nanosheet gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, backside power delivery, and super-high-performance metal-insulator-metal (SHPMIM) capacitor over the next few years. But in order to take advantage of these innovations, TSMC warns, chip designers will need to use all-new electronic design automation (EDA), simulation, and verification tools as well as IP. And while making such a big shift is never an easy task, TSMC is bringing some good news to chip designers early-on: even with N2 still a couple of years out, many of the major EDA tools, verification tools, foundation IP, and even analog IP for N2 are already available for use.

[...] Preparations for the start of N2 chip production, scheduled for sometime in the second half of 2025, began long ago. Nanosheet GAA transistors behave differently than familiar FinFETs, so EDA and other tool and IP makers had to build their products from scratch. This is where TSMC's Open Innovation Platform (OIP) demonstrated its prowess and enabled TSMC's partners to start working on their products well in advance.

By now, major EDA tools from Cadence and Synopsys as well as many tools from Ansys and Siemens EDA have been certified by TSMC, so chip developers can already use them to design chips. Also, EDA software programs from Cadence and Synopsys are ready for analog design migration. Furthermore, Cadence's EDA tools already support N2P's backside power delivery network.

With pre-built IP designs, things are taking a bit longer. TSMC's foundation libraries and IP, including standard cells, GPIO/ESD, PLL, SRAM, and ROM are ready both for mobile and high-performance computing applications. Meanwhile, some PLLs exist in pre-silicon development kits, whereas others are silicon proven. Finally, blocks such as non-volatile memory, interface IP, and even chiplet IP are not yet available - bottlenecking some chip designs - but these blocks in active development or planned for development by companies like Alphawave, Cadence, Credo, eMemory, GUC, and Synopsys, according to a TSMC slide. Ultimately, the ecosystem of tools and libraries for designing 2 nm chips is coming together, but it's not all there quite yet.

[...] Although many of the major building blocks for chips are N2-ready, a lot of work still has to be done by many companies before TSMC's 2 nm-class process technologies go into mass production. Large companies, which tend to design (or co-design) IP and development tools themselves are already working on their 2 nm chips, and should be ready with their products by the time mass production starts in 2H 2025. Other players can also fire up their design engines because 2 nm preps are well underway at TSMC and its partners.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/06/a-reagan-judge-the-first-amendment-and-the-eternal-war-against-pornography/

Using "Protect the children!" as their rallying cry, red states are enacting digital pornography restrictions. Texas's effort, H.B. 1181, requires commercial pornographic websites—and others, as we'll see shortly—to verify that their users are adults, and to display state-drafted warnings about pornography's alleged health dangers. In late August, a federal district judge blocked the law from taking effect. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit expedited Texas's appeal, and it just held oral argument. This law, or one of the others like it, seems destined for the Supreme Court.

So continues what the Washington Post, in the headline of a 1989 op-ed by the columnist Nat Henthoff, once called "the eternal war against pornography."

It's true that the First Amendment does not protect obscenity—which the Supreme Court defines as "prurient" and "patently offensive" material devoid of "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Like many past anti-porn crusaders, however, Texas's legislators blew past those confines. H.B. 1181 targets material that is obscene to minors. Because "virtually all salacious material" is "prurient, offensive, and without value" to young children, the district judge observed, H.B. 1181 covers "sex education [content] for high school seniors," "prurient R-rated movies," and much else besides. Texas's attorneys claim that the state is going after "teen bondage gangbang" films, but the law they're defending sweeps in paintings like Manet's Olympia (1863):

Incidentally, this portrait appears—along with other nudes—in a recent Supreme Court opinion.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We hear plenty of legitimate concerns regarding the new wave of generative AI, from the human jobs it could replace to its potential for creating misinformation. But one area that often gets overlooked is the sheer amount of energy these systems use. In the not-so-distant future, the technology could be consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country.

Alex de Vries, a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, authored 'The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence,' which examines the environmental impact of AI systems.

De Vries notes that the training phase for large language models is often considered the most energy-intensive, and therefore has been the focus of sustainability research in AI.

Following training, models are deployed into a production environment and begin the inference phase. In the case of ChatGPT, this involves generating live responses to user queries. Little research has gone into the inference phase, but De Vries believes there are indications that this period might contribute significantly to an AI model's life-cycle costs.

According to research firm SemiAnalysis, OpenAI required 3,617 Nvidia HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 GPUs, to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day. For comparison, an estimated 1,287 MWh was used in GPT-3's training phase, so the inference phase's energy demands were considerably higher.

Google, which reported that 60% of AI-related energy consumption from 2019 to 2021 stemmed from inference, is integrating AI features into its search engine. Back in February, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said that a single user exchange with an AI-powered search service "likely costs ten times more than a standard keyword search."

[...] "It would be advisable for developers not only to focus on optimizing AI, but also to critically consider the necessity of using AI in the first place, as it is unlikely that all applications will benefit from AI or that the benefits will always outweigh the costs," said De Vries.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The biggest acquisition in gaming history and one of the largest in the tech industry is in the books. Twenty-one months after the deal was announced, Microsoft has bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the largest acquisition in the company's history. CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer has asked Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to stay on until the end of 2023, at which point he'll be leaving the company. It's been a long road filled with plenty of twists and turns to get to this point.

[...] In an attempt to win over the UK regulator, Microsoft agreed to sell the cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard titles to Ubisoft. That means that not only should Activision Blizzard's games be on Xbox Game Pass, but they'll land on Ubisoft+ and any other game-streaming service Ubisoft decides to work with. Concerns about competition in the cloud gaming market was the CMA's reasoning for initially blocking Microsoft's takeover of Activision, but the watchdog said in September that the Ubisoft concession "opens the door to the deal being cleared." A few weeks later, the CMA has rubberstamped the merger.

Microsoft also signed 10-year agreements with Nintendo and several cloud-gaming companies to offer its titles on their platforms. Those moves led to the European Union giving the merger the green light. The bloc's competition officials reportedly didn't see anything in the amended merger agreement (with the Ubisoft plan factored in) that would prompt a fresh antitrust investigation.

[...] The FTC still plans to challenge the merger. If that effort is successful, Microsoft could be forced to divest some or all of Activision Blizzard.

upstart writes:

Early analyses reveal carbon and water in ancient asteroid parachuted down to Earth:

When the OSIRIS-REx mission touched down in Utah with a sample from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid, Bennu, scientists who opened the hatch gave an audible gasp when they saw what was inside. Now, early studies from the materials parachuted down to Earth have revealed why: The sample contains evidence of carbon and water, which "together could indicate the building blocks of life on Earth," according to a NASA press release.

[...] "The bounty of carbon-rich material and the abundant presence of water-bearing clay minerals are just the tip of the cosmic iceberg," said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta in the press release. "These discoveries, made possible through years of dedicated collaboration and cutting-edge science, propel us on a journey to understand not only our celestial neighborhood but also the potential for life's beginnings."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://crystalverse.com/pyramid-salt-crystals/

Regular salt looks like a fine white powder. Sure, it tastes good, but it's not very interesting to look at.

But what if I told you that you could transform the salt sitting in your kitchen into a work of art?

What if I told you that within a few hours, you could turn white, powdery salt into premium salt crystals shaped like pyramids, flowers and Eiffel towers?

Plus, you don't need to be good at art. You don't need to carve those pyramids yourself. Just sit beside the stove, and watch as pyramid salt crystals grow from a dish of salt water right before your eyes.

Let me show you how to do just that.

To my knowledge, it's the only such guide on the Internet.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Illusions are in the eye, not the mind:

Numerous visual illusions are caused by limits in the way our eyes and visual neurones work – rather than more complex psychological processes, new research shows.

Researchers examined illusions in which an object's surroundings affect the way we see its colour or pattern.

Scientists and philosophers have long debated whether these illusions are caused by neural processing in the eye and low-level visual centres in the brain, or involve higher-level mental processes such as context and prior knowledge.

In the new study Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, co-developed a model that suggests simple limits to neural responses – not deeper psychological processes – explain these illusions.

"Our eyes send messages to the brain by making neurones fire faster or slower," said Dr Troscianko, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"However, there's a limit to how quickly they can fire, and previous research hasn't considered how the limit might affect the ways we see colour."

[...] "This throws into the air a lot of long-held assumptions about how visual illusions work," Dr Troscianko said.

He said the findings also shed light on the popularity of high-definition televisions.

"Modern high dynamic range televisions create bright white regions that are over 10,000 times brighter than their darkest black, approaching the contrast levels of natural scenes," Dr Troscianko added.

"How our eyes and brains can handle this contrast is a puzzle because tests show that the highest contrasts we humans can see at a single spatial scale is around 200:1.

"Even more confusingly, the neurones connecting our eyes to our brains can only handle contrasts of about 10:1.

"Our model shows how neurones with such limited contrast bandwidth can combine their signals to allow us to see these enormous contrasts, but the information is 'compressed' – resulting in visual illusions.

[...] "Ultimately this shows how a system with a severely limited neural bandwidth and sensitivity can perceive contrasts larger than 10,000:1."

Journal Reference:
Jolyon Troscianko, Daniel Osorio, A model of colour appearance based on efficient coding of natural images [open], PLOS Comp Bio, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011117

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection (UDCP) is suing TikTok over allegations that the app’s “addictive nature” harms children and that TikTok deceptively obscures its relationship with ByteDance, its parent company in China. The state’s lawsuit is the latest in a long-and-growing string of bans and legal action from US-based governments and organizations to rein in TikTok’s popularity, generally on espionage fears.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox accused the company of “misleading parents that its app is safe for children” in a press release announcing the lawsuit today. He said the app “illegally baits children into addictive and unhealthy use” with features that encourage young users to scroll endlessly in order to make more advertising money.

The lawsuit alleges that TikTok violates the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act (UCSPA) by making the app addictive to children and profiting from it; misrepresenting things like the safety of its app and fairness of its policies; and claiming that it’s based in the US and not controlled from China by ByteDance.

[...] Beyond TikTok, Utah also passed a law this year requiring parents to consent before their children can use social media, in a move that’s part of a larger censorship trend in the United States.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Besides the well-known tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, recent research proposes that the tongue might also detect ammonium chloride as a basic taste:

Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda first proposed umami as a basic taste in the early 1900s, in addition to the recognized tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. It took nearly eighty years for the scientific community to officially acknowledge his proposition.

Now, scientists led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences have evidence of a sixth basic taste.

In a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, USC Dornsife neuroscientist Emily Liman and her team found that the tongue responds to ammonium chloride through the same protein receptor that signals sour taste.

"If you live in a Scandinavian country, you will be familiar with and may like this taste," says Liman, professor of biological sciences. In some northern European countries, salt licorice has been a popular candy at least since the early 20th century. The treat counts among its ingredients salmiak salt, or ammonium chloride.

Scientists have for decades recognized that the tongue responds strongly to ammonium chloride. However, despite extensive research, the specific tongue receptors that react to it remained elusive.

[...] Hydrogen ions are the key component of acids, and as foodies everywhere know, the tongue senses acid as sour. That's why lemonade (rich in citric and ascorbic acids), vinegar (acetic acid), and other acidic foods impart a zing of tartness when they hit the tongue. Hydrogen ions from these acidic substances move into taste receptor cells through the OTOP1 channel.

Because ammonium chloride can affect the concentration of acid — that is, hydrogen ions — within a cell, the team wondered if it could somehow trigger OTOP1.