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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-solar-storms-locally-current-instrument.html

A new study shows that there is greater local variation in the impact of solar storms on Earth than previously estimated. Researchers show that the effects can vary widely even over distances as small as 100 kilometers. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Local changes in the magnetic environment have so far remained largely unexplored due to the sparse magnetometer array in the main observing area. Today, solar storms, or geomagnetic storms, are recorded on average by magnetometers spaced about 400 km apart.

Solar storm effects are caused by fast solar wind streams, which cause large electric currents to flow through the ionosphere of the Earth's auroral region, but the behavior of these currents during storms is still not fully understood. Solar storms also appear as auroras.

Researchers from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and the Ionospheric Physics Group at the University of Oulu, Finland studied the local magnetic field perturbations in the auroral region during space storms using historical data.

The new study looked at data from a strong solar storm in December 1977 from all 32 stations of the then Scandinavian Magnetometer Array (SMA) network in the Nordic countries, which is denser than the current network, and largely unexplored.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/features/2023/11/the-ars-guide-to-time-travel-in-the-movies/

Since antiquity, humans have envisioned various means of time travel into the future or the past. The concept has since become a staple of modern science fiction. In particular, the number of films that make use of time travel has increased significantly over the decades, while the real-world science has evolved right alongside them, moving from simple Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to quantum mechanics and the notion of a multiverse or more exotic alternatives like string theory.
[...]
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, we selected films that represented many diverse approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then evaluated each one—grading on a curve—with regard to its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final combined score determining a film's spot on the overall ranking. For the "science" part of our scoring system, we specifically took three factors into account. First and foremost, does the time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel somewhat realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in narratively interesting ways? So a movie like Looper, which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard, gets points for weaving time paradoxes thoroughly into the fabric of the story.

[Sampling: More Entertaining and Less Scientific (Back to the Future), Less Entertaining and More Scientific (The Time Machine), Less Entertaining and Less Scientific (Timecop), More Entertaining and More Scientific (12 Monkeys)]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

TSMC chairman Mark Liu believes Nvidia will become the largest semiconductor firm by the end of the year (via Trendforce). Speaking at a lecture held by the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce, Liu discussed the future of TSMC in an AI-focused world and stated that Nvidia would develop into the world's largest semiconductor company thanks to AI.

[...] As for Nvidia's rivals, the company made more revenue than Intel, Samsung, and even TSMC, the company that produces the vast majority of Nvidia's chips. Nvidia also beat them all in profit, especially Intel, which lost $8 million, and Samsung, which saw $2.86 billion wiped out due to factors like the NAND flash crisis. That's presumably why Liu believes Nvidia will be the largest of its peers by the end of the year.

However, there are some caveats to Liu's claims. Although Nvidia did beat out its immediate rivals and made the most money in Q3, that might only have been possible since Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are in a slump. All three companies were doing significantly better in revenue before the start of the year, and they all have posted at least one quarter with more than $20 billion in revenue since 2021. If this turns out to be a temporary dip rather than a permanent development, Nvidia would need to make even more money to keep up.

[...] Liu also noted that fabless chip designers like Nvidia, AMD, and Google are expected to grow by 10% in the next five years, while projections for Intel and Samsung (the only chip designers to own their fabs) are at just 4% in the same time frame. Both companies have declined for a year or so, with Intel taking great measures to reform its business. TSMC, of course, stands as a major beneficiary if these projections prove accurate, as most fabless companies who want to make cutting-edge processors go to TSMC.

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owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23978042/popular-science-digital-magazine-discontinued

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. In a statement to The Verge, Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to "evolve" beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021.

PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/researchers-beat-windows-hello-fingerprint-sensors-with-raspberry-pi-and-linux/

Since Windows 10 introduced Windows Hello back in 2015, most Windows laptops and tablets have shipped with some kind of biometric authentication device installed. Sometimes that means a face- or iris-scanning infrared webcam; sometimes it means a fingerprint sensor mounted on the power button or elsewhere on the device.

While these authentication methods are convenient, they aren't totally immune to security exploits. In 2021, researchers were able to fool some Windows Hello IR webcams with infrared images of users' faces. And last week, researchers at Blackwing Intelligence published an extensive document showing how they had managed to work around some of the most popular fingerprint sensors used in Windows PCs.
[...]
Blackwing's post on the vulnerability is also a good overview of exactly how fingerprint sensors in a modern PC work.

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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community, welcome to observe and participate, is invited to the meeting.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The CEO of Australian telco Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, has resigned after deciding it was in the best interests of her former employer.

Bayer Rosmarin's resignation follows a November 8 outage that saw around ten million Australians unable to connect to any Optus services for fourteen hours.

Optus hid its explanation of the outage in an FAQ at the bottom of this page, where the incident is described as follows:

At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a software upgrade. These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.

It was later revealed that the source of the routing information was Singtel, the Singapore-based telco that owns Optus. The Optus network connects to Singtel internet exchanges in North America and Asia.

Optus later blamed the incident on default settings in its Cisco routers, which couldn't cope with the volume of changes sent by Singtel as they exceeded safety limits. Optus's submission explaining the outage is, however, silent on or why its network accepted such changes without testing their impact on its kit – a common and sensible approach to operating mission-critical infrastructure.

[...] The danger Optus's outage posed, and the mass inconvenience, earned Bayer Rosmarin an appearance before a parliamentary committee.

[...] Yet Bayer Rosmarin did not do well in her appearance regarding the outage, revealing that the nation's second-largest telco's disaster recovery regime did not envisage a total network outage. Another admission was that the former CEO's personal DR strategy had evolved to see her carry SIM cards for Australia's two rival mobile networks.

[...] Left unanswered is how Singtel poisoned the network in the first place, amid an undercurrent of concern that a foreign carrier – even one from a friend like Singapore – had deep enough access to an Australian network to bring it down.

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owl writes:

https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2019/02/22/the-history-behind-aspirin-81/

Patients often come into clinics on a grocery list of medications. Common prescriptions include lisinopril 20 mg, amlodipine 2.5 mg, metformin 500 mg, and aspirin 81 mg. One dosage stands out from the others. While most medications come in dosages of round numbers or common decimals, low-dose aspirin has a standard dose of 81 mg.

Why is aspirin available at a dose of 81 milligrams? The answer is historical in nature and is rooted in a medieval and now defunct system of measurement called the apothecary system of weights and measures. The full explanation of aspirin 81 requires some background information on the apothecary system and is best explained in comparison to the more familiar metric system.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-soot-pollution-coal-fired-power-deadly.html

Burning coal to generate electricity is on the way out in the United States, but the nation's long dependence on the fossil fuel took a devastating toll.

A new study determined for the first time that soot pollution from coal-fired power plants is more dangerous than soot from other sources. During the past two decades, the researchers found, coal plant soot contributed to the deaths of at least 460,000 Americans, including 25% of all deaths among Medicare recipients before 2009.

Only Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio recorded more deaths associated with coal plant pollution than the 25,000 deaths in Illinois during the period studied.

An interactive map accompanying the study, published in the journal Science, reveals glimmers of hope amid the grim statistics.

Deaths attributed to coal plant soot have declined dramatically in recent years as utilities closed scores of their dirtiest plants and cleaned up others—changes prompted by more stringent federal clean air regulations, competition from less expensive gas-fired power plants and legal pressure from environmental groups.

"The fact that they estimated more than 40,000 deaths a year two decades ago and the number is now down to 1,600 a year is a pretty remarkable success story," said Jonathan Levy, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University, who wasn't involved in the study.

Soot, also known as particulate matter, is a byproduct of incomplete combustion and can be formed by chemical reactions between sulfur dioxide emitted by fossil fuel power plants and other compounds in the atmosphere. The type of soot that most concerns public health researchers—PM2.5—is so tiny that thousands of the fine particles could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.

Breathing even small amounts can inflame the lungs and trigger asthma attacks. Previous studies have linked soot exposure with heart attacks and premature death.

Journal Reference:
Lucas Henneman et al, Mortality risk from United States coal electricity generation, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adf4915

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Simple ballpoint pen can write custom LEDs:

Researchers working with Chuan Wang, an associate professor of electrical and systems engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, have developed ink pens that allow individuals to handwrite flexible, stretchable optoelectronic devices on everyday materials including paper, textiles, rubber, plastics and 3D objects.

In a paper published Aug. 7 in Nature Photonics, the team reports their simple and versatile fabrication approach to allow anyone to make a custom light-emitting diode (LED) or photodetector without the need for any specialized training or bulky equipment. The new handheld fabrication technology builds on earlier work by Wang and first author Junyi Zhao, a doctoral candidate in Wang's lab, in which they demonstrated a novel way to fabricate stretchable LEDs with an inkjet printer.

"Handwriting custom devices was a clear next step after the printer," Wang said. "We had the inks already, so it was a natural transition to take the technology we had already developed and modify it to work in regular ballpoint pens where it could be cheap and accessible to all."

Journal Reference:
Zhao, J., Lo, LW., Yu, Z. et al. Handwriting of perovskite optoelectronic devices on diverse substrates. Nat. Photon. 17, 964–971 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01266-1

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SomeGuy writes:

SFGate reports: As a major dust storm hit, the Google Maps app helpfully offered Nevada drivers on Interstate 15 an alternate route... into the middle of nowhere.

"Every car we were driving with was heading that direction..." Shelby Easler says in a follow-up TikTok video, "so we assumed this was going somewhere..."

Instead of a handy "alternate route," Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers "far off the major highway and into Nevada's fierce deserts on an off-roading trail." Easler's car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby's viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. "The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around," Easler said.

The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, "We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn't even make it," Easler says in the second video. "Which is kind of why our car broke down."

They told SFGate that ultimately "We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix."

They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because "With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An estimated 50,000 shipwrecks can be found around the UK's coastline and have been acting as a hidden refuge for fish, corals and other marine species in areas still open to destructive bottom towed fishing, a new study has shown.

Many of these wrecks have been lying on the seabed for well over a century, and have served as a deterrent to fishers who use bottom towed trawling to secure their catches.

As a result, while many areas of the seabed have been damaged significantly in areas of heavy fishing pressure, the seabed in and around shipwrecks remains largely unblemished.

[...] Jenny Hickman, the study's lead author, completed the research as part of her MSc Marine Conservation program at the University of Plymouth.

She said, "The industrial use of bottom towed fishing gear has been commonplace since the 1800s, and has significantly altered marine communities and ecosystem services. Outside of legal protection, only areas inaccessible to trawlers are offered any protection, which is why shipwreck sites are rarely subject to trawling pressure. As many have been in situ for more than 100 years, they offer a baseline of ecological potential when trawling pressure is reduced or removed."

[...] Joe Richards, Scotland Project Manager for Blue Marine Foundation and one of the study's co-authors, said, "It has long been thought that shipwrecks could be playing an important role in providing sanctuary for marine species to utilize. It is brilliant to see this proven in this study. The research provides and insight into what might be possible if bottom towed fishing activity is reduced. This feeds into our wider understanding of shipwrecks' potential to contribute to ecosystem recovery and enhancement, given the sheer number found on the seabed."

[...] Researchers say the latest study demonstrates the importance of factoring wreck sites into future conservation plans, but also the benefits of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) status.

Journal Reference:
Jenny Hickman, Joe Richards, Adam Rees, Emma V. Sheehan, Shipwrecks act as de facto Marine Protected Areas in areas of heavy fishing pressure [open], Marine Ecology, First published: 22 November 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/maec.12782

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A Florida judge, Reid Scott, has ruled that there's "reasonable evidence" to conclude that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk knew of defects in Autopilot systems and failed to fix them. Testimony from Tesla engineers and internal documents showed that Musk was "intimately involved" in Tesla's Autopilot program and "acutely aware" of a sometimes-fatal defect—where Autopilot repeatedly fails to detect cross traffic, Scott wrote.

"Knowing that the Autopilot system had previously failed, had limitations" and, according to one Tesla Autopilot systems engineer, "had not been modified, Tesla still permitted the 'Autopilot' system to be engaged on roads that encountered areas of cross traffic," Scott wrote.

Because a jury could perhaps consider that a "conscious disregard or indifference to the life" of Tesla drivers, Scott granted a motion to seek punitive damages to Kim Banner, whose husband Jeremy was killed in 2019 when his "Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had turned onto the road, shearing off the Tesla's roof," Reuters reported. Autopilot allegedly failed to warn Jeremy or respond in any way that could have avoided the collision, like braking or steering the vehicle out of danger, Banner's complaint said.

[...] Scott noted that Tesla's marketing of Autopilot is "important" in this case, pointing to a 2016 video that's still on Tesla's website, where Tesla claimed "the car is driving itself." The video, Scott wrote, shows the car navigating scenarios "not dissimilar" to the cross-traffic encounter with a truck that killed Banner's husband.

"Absent from this video is any indication that the video is aspirational or that this technology doesn’t currently exist in the market," Scott wrote.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The transaction would represent the most expensive sale of a privately owned software company in history, and was flagged as a concern by 16 member states of the European Union in February, such is the lack of credible alternatives to Adobe on the market.

The EC leaned in for an in-depth investigation of the merger in August, and late on Friday evening - in the Euro time zone - it delivered the damning preliminary verdict in a Statement of Objections.

"As a result of this in-depth investigation, the commission reached the preliminary conclusion that the transaction may significantly reduce competition in the global markets," the EC said.

[...] By erasing Figma as a competitive hurdle, Adobe would also tighten its grip on the supply of vector and raster editing tools, the EC added.

"Figma already exerts a significant constraining influence on Adobe's vector editing tool, Adobe Illustrator, as well as on Adobe's raster editing tool, Photoshop. Moreover, absent the transaction, Figma is significantly likely to enter these markets and grow into an effective competitive force," it said.

[...] Adobe had wanted to get the deal done by the close of this calendar year but that is now definitely not going to be the case, with the case files to be publicly updated in February.

In October, Adobe told us of the CMA investigation: "We remain confident in the merits of the case as Figma's product design is an adjacency to Adobe's core creative products and Adobe has no meaningful plans to compete in the product design space.”

[...] “The combination of Adobe and Figma will deliver significant value to customers by making product design more accessible and efficient, reimagining creative capabilities on the web and creating new categories of creativity and productivity.

"We remain confident in the merits of our case, as Figma’s product design is an adjacency to Adobe’s core creative products and Adobe has no meaningful plans to compete in the product design space. We will continue to engage constructively with the European Commission to address their concerns and are confident we can address them.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One summer morning, Le Thi Hong Mai's home collapsed into a river in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, where shoreline erosion caused by sand mining and hydropower dams threatens hundreds of thousands of people.

Sand—needed to produce concrete—is the world's second most exploited natural resource after water, and its use has tripled in the last two decades, according to the UN environment program.

Vietnam's "rice bowl" delta region, where the Mekong empties into the South China Sea, is predicted to run out of sand in just over a decade.

But losses to the riverbed are already devastating lives and harming the local economy.

[...] Over the past two decades, hydropower dams upstream on the Mekong have restricted the flow of sand to the delta.

And sand mining to feed Vietnam's construction boom is also fast depleting resources, according to a major WWF report published earlier this year.

[...] According to Vietnam's ministry of transport, the Delta region needs 54 million cubic meters of sand for six major national highways before 2025.

The river system can provide less than half, the ministry says.

[...] Vietnam banned exports of sand in all forms in 2017.

But given high domestic demand, the amount dredged still exceeds what comes downstream, Mekong expert Nguyen Huu Thien explained.

At the current extraction rate of 35-55 million cubic meters a year, there will be no more sand by 2035, according to the WWF-led study.

"These are the last grains of sand we are dredging," Thien warned.

[...] Half the delta could be gone by the end of the century, Thein warned.

"After that, the delta will disappear altogether and we will have to redraw our map and rewrite our geography books."

Original Submission