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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Everybody’s coming for Google, but Google is doing just fine, according to parent company Alphabet’s third quarter earnings on Tuesday.

While Google has been dealing with fierce competition on all sides and is investing a lot into infusing AI into as many products as it can, its ads business, the company’s bread and butter, is still humming along. The Search business earned $44 billion, an 11 percent jump year over year. 

The big question coming up is how Google’s focus on AI will impact that core business. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience [SGE] is still only available on an opt-in basis, so we don’t yet know how much it’ll impact the company’s ad business.

Google is already moving to head off that problem. On Google’s earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company would be experimenting with new formats native to the way SGE works — the company has already shown off some ideas — so perhaps we’ll start to see some of those formats debut in the coming weeks and months. Later in the call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler added that “it’s extremely important to us that in this new experience, advertisers still have the opportunity to reach potential customers along their search journeys.”

As the company rolls out SGE, “we are making sure the product works well, and we’re generating value for our ecosystem and that ads transition well,” Pichai said.

Infusing AI in search is a long-term play for Google. Pichai said he sees an opportunity to “evolve search and Assistant over the next decade ahead.” Last quarter, he declared that over time, SGE will “just be how search works,” and given the comments about ads on Tuesday’s call, it seems the company is starting to think seriously about how to make its AI-powered search into more of a business.

[...] There’s also a shadow over Google due to the Department of Justice’s huge antitrust trial against the company, which kicked off in September.

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hubie writes:

UCalgary-led study, published in the medical journal Pediatrics, can reduce parental fears:

The angst parents feel when their children sustain injuries is surely one of the universal conditions of parenthood. That anxiety is heightened greatly when those injuries involve concussions. But a new study led out of the University of Calgary, published July 17 in the medical journal Pediatrics, may set worried parental minds slightly at ease.

The findings — taken from emergency room visits in children's hospitals in Canada and the United States — show that IQ and intelligence is not affected in a clinically meaningful way by paediatric concussions.

[...] "Obviously there's been a lot of concern about the effects of concussion on children, and one of the biggest questions has been whether or not it affects a child's overall intellectual functioning," says Dr. Keith Yeates, PhD, a professor in UCalgary's Department of Psychology and senior author of the Pediatrics paper. Yeates is a renowned expert on the outcomes of childhood brain disorders, including concussion and traumatic brain injuries.

"The data on this has been mixed and opinions have varied within the medical community," says Yeates. "It's hard to collect big enough samples to confirm a negative finding. The absence of a difference in IQ after concussion is harder to prove than the presence of a difference."

[...] "Understandably, there's been a lot of fear among parents when dealing with their children's concussions," Ware says. "These new findings provide really good news, and we need to get the message to parents."

upstart writes:

First module of new space station to be launched in 2027:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station following a meeting regarding the development of the country's space industry. Moscow mouthpiece TASS reported the move, and lurking within the grandstanding about space station ambitions was an admission of how much Russia's human spaceflight program still depends on the International Space Station (ISS).

Roscosmos boss Yuri Borisov said the funds have been allocated and the green light given to start work on the project. This is convenient because the prospects for Russian human spaceflight will start to look bleak once the ISS hurtles back to Earth around 2030. According to TASS, Borisov said that ensuring the continuity of Russia's program was a "pressing task" and he added that there was a genuine risk of a situation where "the ISS is no longer there, and the Russian station is not yet there."

Considering the lengthy delays associated with space programs, the timelines are ambitious. The first component – the scientific and energy module – is supposedly planned for late 2027 and will be followed by others between 2028 and 2030.

The plan calls for the first crew to be launched six months after the first module launch.

[...] According to the timelines reported by TASS, Russia intends to construct, test, and launch the first element of its space station in four years. Hopefully, with a puncture repair kit on board.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers at Stockholm University have unveiled the hidden intricacies of how sperm go from passive bystanders to dynamic swimmers. This transformation is a pivotal step in the journey to fertilization, and it hinges on the activation of a unique ion transporter. Their research has been published in Nature.

Imagine sperm as tiny adventurers on a quest to reach the ultimate treasure, the egg. They don't have a map, but they make use of something even more extraordinary: chemo-attractants. These are chemical signals released by the egg that act as siren call, directing and activating the sperm. When these signals bind to receptors on the sperm's surface, it triggers a series of events, starting their movement towards the egg. And in this intricate scenario, one key player is a protein known as "SLC9C1."

It's exclusively found in sperm cells, and it is usually not active. However, when the chemo-attractants interact with the sperm's surface, everything changes.

[...] The activation of SLC9C1 is driven by a change in voltage that occurs when chemo-attractants attach to the sperm. To accomplish this, SLC9C1 uses a unique feature called a voltage-sensing domain (VSD). Typically, VSD domains are associated with voltage-gated ion channels. But in the case of SLC9C1, it's something truly exceptional in the realm of transporters.

Researchers, led by David Drew, have unveiled the secrets behind SLC9C1's inner workings and provides the first example of voltage-sensing domain activation of a transporter and its connection via an unusually long voltage-sensing (S4) helix.

[...] "Transporters work very differently than channels and, as such, the VSD is coupled to the sperm protein in a way that we have just never seen before, or even imagined. Its exciting to see how nature has done this and perhaps, in the future, we can learn from this to make synthetic proteins that can be turned-on by voltage or develop novel male contraceptives that work by blocking this protein," David Drew notes.

Journal Reference:
Yeo, H., Mehta, V., Gulati, A. et al. Structure and electromechanical coupling of a voltage-gated Na+/H+ exchanger. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06518-2

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U.S. Govt Mulls Blocking China's Access To Cloud GPUs

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One less loophole.

Although the U.S. government has restricted sales of advanced AI and HPC GPUs to Chinese entities, it did not block access of Chinese companies to such processors in the cloud. As a result, Chinese firms can continue to train large language models or do other performance-demanding tasks using services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. But the American government is considering patching this hole, reports Nikkei. There is a catch, though: the U.S. cannot block access to cloud services not in the U.S.

The United States is evaluating the imposition of restrictions to hinder China’s access to U.S.-based cloud computing services, a move driven by concerns over Beijing’s use of artificial intelligence in military operations, said Alan Estevez, U.S. under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. If the decision is made, it will come as part of a broader initiative to regulate technological resources that could facilitate advancements in military AI applications by China.

[...] The enhanced regulatory measures symbolize a concerted U.S. effort to mitigate the risk associated with the potential utilization of American technological resources in promoting Chinese military innovations, specifically in AI. There is a significant catch that almost nullifies the effort. The U.S. government does not seem to be able to block access of Chinese entities to cloud services provided by non-American companies. There are prominent cloud services in Europe and the Middle East, so Chinese companies will start using them instead of AWS or Azure.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As the utility of AI systems has grown dramatically, so has their energy demand. Training new systems is extremely energy intensive, as it generally requires massive data sets and lots of processor time. Executing a trained system tends to be much less involved—smartphones can easily manage it in some cases. But, because you execute them so many times, that energy use also tends to add up.

Fortunately, there are lots of ideas on how to bring the latter energy use back down. IBM and Intel have experimented with processors designed to mimic the behavior of actual neurons. IBM has also tested executing neural network calculations in phase change memory to avoid making repeated trips to RAM.

Now, IBM is back with yet another approach, one that's a bit of "none of the above." The company's new NorthPole processor has taken some of the ideas behind all of these approaches and merged them with a very stripped-down approach to running calculations to create a highly power-efficient chip that can efficiently execute inference-based neural networks. For things like image classification or audio transcription, the chip can be up to 35 times more efficient than relying on a GPU.

It's worth clarifying a few things early here. First, NorthPole does nothing to help the energy demand in training a neural network; it's purely designed for execution. Second, it is not a general AI processor; it's specifically designed for inference-focused neural networks. As noted above, inferences include things like figuring out the contents of an image or audio clip so they have a large range of uses, but this chip won't do you any good if your needs include running a large language model.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/iphone-privacy-feature-hiding-wi-fi-macs-has-failed-to-work-for-3-years/

Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network. On Wednesday, the world learned that the feature has never worked as advertised. Despite promises that this never-changing address would be hidden and replaced with a private one that was unique to each SSID, Apple devices have continued to display the real one, which in turn got broadcast to every other connected device on the network.
[...]
In 2020, Apple released iOS 14 with a feature that, by default, hid Wi-Fi MACs when devices connected to a network. Instead, the device displayed what Apple called a "private Wi-Fi address" that was different for each SSID. Over time, Apple has enhanced the feature, for instance, by allowing users to assign a new private Wi-Fi address for a given SSID.

On Wednesday, Apple released iOS 17.1. Among the various fixes was a patch for a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-42846, which prevented the privacy feature from working. Tommy Mysk, one of the two security researchers Apple credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability (Talal Haj Bakry was the other), told Ars that he tested all recent iOS releases and found the flaw dates back to version 14, released in September 2020.

"From the get-go, this feature was useless because of this bug," he said. "We couldn't stop the devices from sending these discovery requests, even with a VPN. Even in the Lockdown Mode."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA is considering alternative ways to bring back samples from Mars after its budget and schedule for the sample return mission was deemed unrealistic in a recent report by an independent review board.

[...] In late September, an independent review board issued its final report on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission (MSR). The space agency’s quest to collect samples from the Red Planet and bring them back to Earth was referred to as a “highly constrained and challenging campaign,” with “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning.”

[...] NASA has been struggling to manage the budget of its highly complex mission so that it can launch it on schedule. In fact, the report stated that there’s a “a near zero probability” that the lander and orbiter would be ready for launch in 2028. The report also suggested that the mission’s full lifecycle cost will likely range between $8 billion and $11 billion, far more than what NASA had originally planned for.

The mission received $822.3 million in the 2023 spending bill and NASA requested $949.3 million for Mars Sample Return in its budget proposal for 2024. In April, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson revealed that the Mars Sample Return mission needs an additional $250 million in the current fiscal year, plus another $250 million in 2024, in order to stay on track for launch in 2028.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

EU legislators on Tuesday voted to slash use of pesticides by half across the bloc, despite opposition from some conservative groups. But green politicians were left to regret the rejection of a proposed symbolic declaration calling for a complete ban on controversial weedkiller glyphosate.

A parliamentary commission rejected making a declaration a month before the 27 member states are due to decide on appeal whether to extend the use of glyphosate, something the WHO fears could be carcinogenic.

Earlier this month the bloc failed to agree to do so as divisions emerged and the matter will now go to an appeals committee in early November. Tuesday saw the EU's environment committee vote by a narrow majority—47 votes to 37—to set binding targets on reduced pesticide use that targets a 50-percent reduction by 2030.

The pesticides judged the most hazardous will see use pared back by two-thirds compared with 2013-2017. The committee has also banned use of pesticides in designated sensitive areas, including public parks, around schools and at Natura 2000 protection sites.

Among those voting against were the rightwing European People's Party and the far right, while farmers and agri-cooperatives are opposed to seeing the EU impose too tight a set of regulations in the sector.

[...] Austrian Green MEP Sarah Wiener, leading the campaign on the issue, said she was pleased at an outcome bringing agreement "on feasible compromises in an ideologically-charged and industry-dominated discussion." Belgian Socialist lawmaker Marie Arena said the outcome would benefit farmworkers and the environment alike as "abusive use of pesticides makes people sick," as well as decimating bee numbers.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A carbon tax based on the purpose of using goods and services would be fairer and more likely to deliver climate justice, say ecological economists:

Presently most carbon taxes are uniform across all economic sectors - and in the developed nations, their impact disproportionately affects people on lower incomes and are not extensive enough to have a "profound impact on emissions".

The researchers say a differentiated carbon tax system would be fairer as the tax would set higher rates for users of luxury goods and services, which are predominantly consumed by the better off.

Under the theoretical model described in the paper, the revenues generated from the carbon tax could be used to retrofit insulation in the homes of poorer families to reduce domestic energy consumption.

[...] "The scheme we are proposing will introduce a higher carbon tax for luxury goods, such as flying long-haul or driving a high-performance car, and a lower carbon tax for goods and services that meet basic human needs, such as providing housing, cooking and healthcare."

But the study team warn that if a luxury goods taxation scheme is to work and deliver significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, in line with those set out in the Paris Agreement, it needs to be introduced "promptly, universally and with high and rapidly rising carbon prices as compared to any policy currently in place".

[...] A fair and luxury-focused carbon taxation system is needed because technological solutions alone will not deliver the reduction in carbon emissions that are needed to keep global warming within 1.5 °C. If those solutions do come along, the researchers say the taxation system could then be suitably amended.

"It cannot remain status quo to continue environmentally damaging luxury activities unabated while awaiting a technology fix," they say.

Journal Reference:
Yannick Oswald et al., Luxury-focused carbon taxation improves fairness of climate policy [open], One Earth, Volume 6, ISSUE 7, P884-898, July 21, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.05.027

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Do you feel it? The sense that this civilization has run out of creative juice. That we've reached the cliff edge of the Enlightenment.

That big ideas are dead, killed off by the technocrats of the ruling class. If an idea is proposed that doesn't grow the economy, does it really exist as a thought?

This sense struck me hard recently reading BBC Focus, a popular science magazine. One of the articles was about a team of university researchers in California using AI to predict hit pop songs.

Professor Paul Zack said: "Streaming services can readily identify new songs that are likely to be hits for people's playlists more efficiently, making the streaming services jobs easier and delighting listeners."

There is so much of this going about. Click on any science tab at any of the big media outlets and there'll be a story about a research "breakthrough" that crushes the soul. Here's a ground-breaking study from the news today about how smiling makes you more attractive.

[...] We are being fed trivia and bullshit about delighting listeners and smiling while the ecological foundations of our world are being destroyed. What happened to the great sense of inquiry that I've read used to exist in the world? It wasn't so long ago that people would spend years writing history-changing theses articulating political, economic, and social models to cast off subjugation and injustice, secure new material conditions and propel humanity forward.

Let's call this bullshit research, the sibling of those bullshit jobs made famous by David Graeber.

[...] They questioned the current approach to academic research "in the context of the approaching climate apocalypse. What is the point of all this in the face of wildfires, superstorm, and megadrought ?"

They were too polite to say it, but the gist of their critique was: stop focusing on bullshit research. Seize the spirit of the Enlightenment. Start focusing on big, transformative ideas before we lose everything.

[Source]: OK Doomer

Do you feel the same ?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The color changes reflect significant shifts in essential marine ecosystems:

The ocean's color has changed significantly over the last 20 years, and the global trend is likely a consequence of human-induced climate change, report scientists at MIT, the National Oceanography Center in the U.K., and elsewhere.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the team writes that they have detected changes in ocean color over the past two decades that cannot be explained by natural, year-to-year variability alone. These color shifts, though subtle to the human eye, have occurred over 56 percent of the world's oceans — an expanse that is larger than the total land area on Earth.

In particular, the researchers found that tropical ocean regions near the equator have become steadily greener over time. The shift in ocean color indicates that ecosystems within the surface ocean must also be changing, as the color of the ocean is a literal reflection of the organisms and materials in its waters.

[...] "I've been running simulations that have been telling me for years that these changes in ocean color are going to happen," says study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Center for Global Change Science. "To actually see it happening for real is not surprising, but frightening. And these changes are consistent with man-induced changes to our climate."

[...] "The color of the oceans has changed," Dutkiewicz says. "And we can't say how. But we can say that changes in color reflect changes in plankton communities, that will impact everything that feeds on plankton. It will also change how much the ocean will take up carbon, because different types of plankton have different abilities to do that. So, we hope people take this seriously. It's not only models that are predicting these changes will happen. We can now see it happening, and the ocean is changing."

Journal Reference:
Cael, B.B., Bisson, K., Boss, E. et al. Global climate-change trends detected in indicators of ocean ecology. Nature 619, 551–554 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06321-z

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/1960s-style-aero-testing-with-an-old-school-mustang-restomod/

To Shelby Mustang fans, the Original Venice Crew (OVC) is the stuff of legends. This was the actual team that designed and built the original GT350s, Cobras, Daytona Coupes, and GT40s that introduced Carroll Shelby's name to the masses. Today, OVC builds modern Mustang recreations so accurate that one was approved for last year's Le Mans Classic, which celebrated 100 years of the world's most famous endurance race.

But OVC also offers updated versions of those classics, bringing to life ideas that bounced around the shop back in the day but that Shelby never built in series production. Want a 1965 GT350 with independent rear suspension? OVC can do that, after dialing in a design that Ford originally believed would be too expensive as a replacement for the first-gen Mustang's solid rear axle.

These projects don't quite fit under the "restomod" umbrella, instead falling more along the lines of the ideas that OVC founder and boss Jim Marietta remembers from his days back at 1042 Princeton Drive. Think fender flares cut by hand rather than being machined or updated fiberglass front fascias to provide additional airflow.
[...]
In the 1960s, aerodynamicists struggled with a big gap between common sense design and today's highly refined computational fluid dynamics modeling. LaViolette arrived at Willow Springs fresh off working on the aero packages for some of Shelby American's forthcoming 2024 and '25 Mustangs and told me he looked forward to seeing how the classic methods worked in comparison.

"Back in the day, it was one of those things where everybody looked at it and went, 'Why would you do that? The air comes in from the front!'" he laughed before climbing into the driver's seat. "So what we're here today to do is put wool tufts on the car and we're gonna do it old-school and we're gonna see which way the wool flows, see if it starts sucking into the scoop at the back."
[...]
"It works perfect," he says. "Works just like everybody thought it would... A lot of this is fly by the pants. 'Well, let's try this, try that. OK, how does it seal? You have to move this a little bit, shift it around, do a little bit of different seal rubber.'"

"It's what you call American engineering," he chuckles. "What nobody seems to do anymore these days."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/10/behind-the-scenes-of-unitys-rushed-out-install-fee-program/

It's been over a month now since Unity partially backtracked on its controversial proposed "pay per install" fee structure, a trust-destroying saga that seems to have contributed to the retirement of Unity CEO John Riccitiello. Now, a new report highlights some of the internal divisions over the "rushed-out" policy introduction and provides new insight into what may have been motivating the company to even attempt such a plan.

Business-focused site MobileGamer.biz cites multiple "sources from inside Unity and across the mobile games business" in reporting that Unity received some significant pushback from senior-level managers before rolling out its initial fee-restructuring plans. "Half of the people in that meeting said that this model is too complicated, it's not going to be well-received, and we should talk to people before we do this," one anonymous source told the site. "It felt very rushed. We had this meeting and were told it was happening, but we were not told a date. And then before we knew it, it was out there."

After the negative reaction to that initial plan, Unity reportedly considered a modification that would take up to 4 percent of revenue from the largest Unity publishers—slightly under the 5 percent charged by the Unreal Engine. The final policy knocked that cap down to 2.5 percent only after the extent of the backlash became clear.
[...]
Despite bringing in over $1.8 billion in revenue in the 12 months ending in June 2023, Unity was nearly a billion dollars away from profitability during that same period, thanks in large part to a wave of expensive acquisitions. The perilous financial situation was reflected in Unity's tumultuous stock price, which grew from a 2020 IPO price of $68 a share to a peak of nearly $200 a share in late 2021, only to tumble to $37 a share by the beginning of September.

Previously:
Unity CEO John Riccitiello is Retiring, Effective Immediately 20231011
Unity Dev Group Dissolves After 13 Years Over "Completely Eroded" Company Trust 20230927
Unity Makes Major Changes to Controversial Install-Fee Program 20230925
EU Game Devs Ask Regulators to Look at Unity's "Anti-Competitive" Bundling 20230923
Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues 20230918
Developer Dis-Unity 20230915

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An international team of interdisciplinary researchers has successfully created a method for better 3D modeling of complex cancers. The University of Waterloo-based team combined cutting-edge bioprinting techniques with synthetic structures or microfluidic chips. The method will help lab researchers more accurately understand heterogeneous tumors: tumors with more than one kind of cancer cell, often dispersed in unpredictable patterns.

Traditionally, medical practitioners would biopsy a patient's tumor, extract cells, and then grow them in flat petri dishes in a lab. "For 50 years, this was how biologists understood tumors," said Nafiseh Moghimi, an applied mathematics post-doctoral researcher and the lead author of the study. "But a decade ago, repeated treatment failures in human trials made scientists realize that a 2D model does not capture the real tumor structure inside the body."

The team's research addresses this problem by creating a 3D model that not only reflects the complexity of a tumor but also simulates its surrounding environment.

[...] First, the team created polymer "microfluidic chips": tiny structures etched with channels that mimic blood flow and other fluids surrounding a patient's tumor.

Next, the team grew multiple types of cancer cells and suspended these cell cultures in their own customized bioink: a cocktail of gelatin, alginate, and other nutrients designed to keep the cells cultures alive.

Finally, they used an extrusion bioprinter—a device that resembles a 3D printer but for organic material—to layer the different types of cancer cells onto the prepared microfluidic chips.

The result is a living, three-dimensional model of complex cancers that scientists can then use to test different modes of treatment, such as various chemotherapy drugs.

[...] The 3D-printed tumor models exemplify how new technology enables faster, less expensive and less painful treatments for serious conditions like late-stage breast cancer.

Journal Reference:
Moghimi, N., Hosseini, S.A., Dalan, A.B. et al. Controlled tumor heterogeneity in a co-culture system by 3D bio-printed tumor-on-chip model. Sci Rep 13, 13648 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40680-x

Original Submission