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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Indian services giant advised [PDF] investors of the deal on September 14th, describing it as “a Memorandum of Understanding with a global company to provide enhanced digital experiences, along with modernization and business operations services, leveraging Infosys platforms & AI solutions” with a total client target spend of $1.5 billion over 15 years.

That announcement included the caveat that Infosys and the unnamed company would have to conclude a Master Agreement to seal the deal.

A December 23rd filing revealed that didn’t happen.

“The global company has now elected to terminate the Memorandum of Understanding and the parties will not be pursuing the Master Agreement,” the statement revealed.

Infosys’s annual revenue topped $18 billion last year, so losing this deal won’t cause massive pain.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Research found little ones typically begin to distinguish fantasy from reality during preschool years:

[...] Research found little ones typically begin to distinguish fantasy from reality during preschool years

'I cried for hours': the moments people realised truth about Father Christmas

From empty glasses of sherry on the mantelpiece to sooty footprints leading to the bedroom door, evidence of Santa's existence is clearly irrefutable. Yet most children will begin to question it at some point – and many parents anticipate this moment with dread. Now psychologists have identified the average age when Santa scepticism creeps in, and which children are at greatest risk of harbouring negative feelings when it does.

While most adults have fallen for the myth that Santa doesn't exist, many children still believe – even if the idea of a single individual visiting the homes of billions of children in a single night is at odds with their wider reasoning skills.

Dr Candice Mills, a psychologist at the University of Texas in Dallas, US, and a Santa sceptic, said: "Children typically begin to distinguish fantasy from reality during the preschool years, but their belief in the existence of a singular magical Santa Claus often continues into middle childhood."

Mills became interested in this issue when she became a parent and "got immersed in the world of promoting Santa Claus" herself. "I felt a bit of tension about it, because on one hand we often encourage our children to be scientific thinkers and to not deceive others, yet with the Santa story, sometimes there's some stretching of the truth that goes along with it.

"I was worried about coming across to my children as lying, because I knew I had felt upset about being lied to about [Santa]."

upstart writes:

Chinese engineers claimed to have created a "revolutionary" dual-mode rotating detonating and straight-line oblique detonation engine setup:

Chinese engineers claimed to have created a "revolutionary" dual-mode rotating detonating and straight-line oblique detonation engine setup.

Referred to as "revolutionary," the new air-breathing engine should carry an aircraft to 18.6-mile (30 km) altitudes and travel around Mach 16. If true, at this velocity, intercontinental flights should take only hours and consume far less fuel when compared to conventional jet engines.

Designed by Zhang Yining and his team at the Beijing Power Machinery Institute (in conjunction with the People's Liberation Army's 93160 Unit), little is known about the engine beyond a blueprint published in the peer-reviewed journal Chinese Journal of Propulsion Technology in December SCMP reports. The engine operates in two modes, with the first being a sub-Mach 7 mode, which works as a continuous rotating detonation engine (RDE). Air from outside mixes with fuel and gets ignited, which leads to the creation of a shock wave.

This shock wave propagates in an annular chamber. During rotation, the shock wave ignites more fuel, resulting in a powerful and continuous thrust for the aircraft. China, the United States, and other nations like Japan are currently working on their own RDE concepts with NASA, and contractors like GE recently tested prototype engines on the ground. China has also reported breakthroughs in RDE technology recently with its own ground tests and even a drone variant.

In the second mode, when the aircraft travels above Mach 7, the shock wave stops rotating and focuses on a circular platform at the engine's rear. This helps maintain the thrust through a nearly straight-line oblique detonation format. As the researchers describe in the paper, fuel auto-detonates as it reaches the rear platform due to the high speed of incoming air. The engine relies on detonation as its primary driving force throughout its operation.

upstart writes:

Regulators said its quality is nearly identical to what is traditionally used in planes:

Firefly Green Fuels, a UK-based company, has developed a new form of jet fuel that is entirely fossil-free and made from human waste. The company worked with experts at Cranfield University to confirm that the fuel they developed had a 90 percent lower carbon footprint than what is used in aviation today, according to the BBC. Tests by independent regulators validated that what Firefly Green Fuels has developed is nearly identical to standard A1 jet fuel.

In 2021, the company received a £2 million grant from the Department of Transport to continue developing its sustainable aviation fuel. Although it's not yet available commercially, the company says it is on track to bringing its fuel to the global market and it will have its first commercial plant operating within 5 years. The company has already inked a partnership with the budget airline Wizz Air — the name of the company and the source of its potential combustibles could scarcely be a more perfect pairing — to supply it with fuel starting in 2028.

It currently sources its waste from water companies in the UK and takes the refined sewage through a process called hydrothermal liquefaction, which converts the liquid waste into a sludge or crude oil. Solid by-products can also be made into crop fertilizer. The company claims that the carbon intensity of the whole process — which measures how much carbon is needed to produce energy — is 7.97 grams of carbon dioxide per megajoule (gCO²e/MJ). Comparatively, the ICCT says carbon intensity recorded for jet fuel ranges from 85 to 95 gCO²e/MJ.

[...] The achievement of carbon neutrality in our airspaces has been a longtime goal for regulators and leaders in Europe and the US. While EVs have made headway in the car industry, it might be a while before we see battery powered commercial jets. So in the meantime, solutions for creating more environmentally-friendly jet fuel are welcome.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes could be the future of protective helmets:

Researchers have developed a new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes that, when used as a helmet liner, absorbed the kinetic energy caused by an impact almost 30 times better than liners currently used in US military helmets. The foam could prevent or significantly reduce the likelihood of concussion in military personnel and sportspeople.

Among sportspeople and military vets, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the major causes of permanent disability and death. Injury statistics show that the majority of TBIs, of which concussion is a subtype, are associated with oblique impacts, which subject the brain to a combination of linear and rotational kinetic energy forces and cause shearing of the delicate brain tissue.

[...] For the current study, Thevamaran built upon his previous research into vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) foams – carefully arranged layers of carbon cylinders one atom thick – and their exceptional shock-absorbing capabilities. Current helmets attempt to reduce rotational motion by allowing a sliding motion between the wearer's head and the helmet during impact. However, the researchers say this movement doesn't dissipate energy in shear and can jam when severely compressed following a blow. Instead, their novel foam doesn't rely on sliding layers.

VACNT foam sidesteps this shortcoming via its unique deformation mechanism. Under compression, the VACNTs undergo collective sequentially progressive buckling, from increased compliance at low shear strain levels to a stiffening response at high strain levels. The formed compression buckles unfold completely, enabling the VACNT foam to accommodate large shear strains before returning to a near initial state when the load is removed.

The researchers found that at 25% precompression, the foam exhibited almost 30 times higher energy dissipation in shear – up to 50% shear strain – than polyurethane-based elastomeric foams of similar density.

[...] The researchers had previously demonstrated the VACNT foam's outstanding thermal conductivity and diffusivity, which would enable a helmet liner made out of the foam to remain cool in hot environments. Beyond its use in helmets, VACNT foam could be used in electronic packaging and systems to prevent shocks and keep electronics cool.

The study was published in the journal Experimental Mechanics.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Original Submission

From the Staff of SoylentNews.Org, may we wish every member of our community a very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

In a little over 1 month's time we will have been active as a site for 10 years. Hopefully by then we will also have created the new site and will be looking at another 10 years or more ahead of us. That still requires some more work from everyone as it is the community who will be deciding how the site is run, what the new policies will be, what subjects are discussed and how we grow our community in the future. The entire Board will consist of volunteers elected from the community by the community.

But for now let us all look forward to the new year and celebrate together!

upstart writes:

The honeyguide recognizes calls made by different human groups:

With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we've lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.

The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.

Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call.

[...] How did this interspecies communication evolve? Other African cultures besides the Hadza and Yao have their own calls to summon a honeyguide. Why do the types of calls differ? The researchers do not think these calls came about randomly.

hubie writes:

You're Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk:

Tesla cars are shoddily built pieces of shit liable to fall apart and malfunction in dangerous ways at inopportune moments. No, this is not a blog from 2012! It is also not a blog from 2015 or 2018 or 2022. It is not even a blog from two weeks ago about Tesla's self-driving systems killing people all over the place. It is a blog from today, Dec. 21, 2023.

On Wednesday, Reuters published a big, thorough investigative story documenting a pattern of major parts failures on low-mileage Tesla vehicles—and Tesla's organized years-long effort to obscure the pattern and offload its costs onto drivers, so as to sustain the illusion that it is a profitable company making cars that are not piece-of-shit death traps. By "major parts failures," I should specify here that we are not talking about, like, a faulty turn signal, or an unreliable trunk latch. We are talking about stuff like a whole-ass wheel falling off of your Model 3 while it travels at highway speeds, or the suspension collapsing while you make a left turn, causing the body of the car to crunch down onto the road, or an axle half-shaft fucking snapping while you accelerate, or the power steering suddenly failing while you are zooming along at 60 miles per hour.

We are talking, in short, about engineering failures—failures that anyone would find alarming if they encountered them in a soap box derby racer made out of literally a soap box—happening, abruptly and without warning, to Tesla cars that are for all practical purposes brand new. Moreover, they're happening to lots of them, because of manufacture and assembly problems the company knew about, and hid, and lied about, and blamed on the poor suckers who bought its crappy cars.

hubie writes:

'Our licenses aren't working anymore,' says free software pioneer:

Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement.

"I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."

Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.

"First of all, our licenses aren't working anymore," he said. "We've had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That's RHEL."

RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM's ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.

upstart writes:

Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions:

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria's Secret.

Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.

Aitana is a "virtual influencer" created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.

Their emergence has led to worry from human influencers their income is being cannibalized and under threat from digital rivals. That concern is shared by people in more established professions that their livelihoods are under threat from generative AI—technology that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.

But those behind the hyper-realistic AI creations argue they are merely disrupting an overinflated market.

"We were taken aback by the skyrocketing rates influencers charge nowadays. That got us thinking, 'What if we just create our own influencer?'" said Diana Núñez, co-founder of the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, which created Aitana. "The rest is history. We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though."

"It is not influencing purchase like a human influencer would, but it is driving awareness, favourability and recall for the brand," said Becky Owen, global chief marketing and innovation officer at Billion Dollar Boy, and former head of Meta's creator innovations team.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Volkswagen has ranked as the world's second-best selling automaker for three years running, trailing only Toyota with between 8.2 million and 9.3 million vehicles sold each year between 2020 and 2022. The Volkswagen group now includes 10 European brands including Porsche, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati. However, the company almost didn't survive World War II. The auto group got its start and name from Adolf Hitler in May of 1937. He wanted a "people's car" and enlisted Ferdinand Porsche to design the brand's first model. In 1938, Hitler established the city of Stadt des KdF-Wagens ("City of the KdF Wagon"), now called Wolfsburg, which was home to the Volkswagen factory there.

During the war, the factory was used to make bombs and military vehicles. When the plant was captured by Allied forces in April of 1945, nearly 8,000 forced laborers were freed. The damaged factory and city were then handed over to the British after U.S. troops withdrew following Hitler's suicide and Germany's surrender.

British Maj. Ivan Hirst took command of the factory and convinced his superiors that Vollkswagens would work well as light transport. The British Army then responded with an order of 20,000 vehicles — including 1,785 Type Is — in 1945.

The Type I was the car eventually dubbed the Beetle. It would become the most-produced model in automotive history, surpassing the Ford Model T in 1972. According to Autoweek, the Brits found the Type I obnoxious and "quite unattractive to the average motorcar buyer." They even tried to give Volkswagen away to Ford, but Ford's board chairman Ernest Breech declined, saying, "I don't think what we're being offered here is worth a damn!" 

upstart writes:

"Triangulation" infected dozens of iPhones belonging to employees of Moscow-based Kaspersky:

Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of.

"The exploit's sophistication and the feature's obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities," Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email. "Our analysis hasn't revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we're exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases. They may also have stumbled upon it through hardware reverse engineering."

[...] The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action.

With that, the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers. Although infections didn't survive a reboot, the unknown attackers kept their campaign alive simply by sending devices a new malicious iMessage text shortly after devices were restarted.

[...] The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of the heretofore-unknown hardware feature, which proved to be pivotal to the Operation Triangulation campaign. A zero-day in the feature allowed the attackers to bypass advanced hardware-based memory protections designed to safeguard device system integrity even after an attacker gained the ability to tamper with memory of the underlying kernel. On most other platforms, once attackers successfully exploit a kernel vulnerability they have full control of the compromised system.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has claimed that its upcoming 18A process node (essentially 1.8nm) could outperform TSMC's 2nm chips despite launching a year earlier. The comments contradict recent claims from the Taiwanese competitor. Gelsinger made the remarks in an interview with Barrons.

[...] Additionally, TSMC is confident that its 2nm N2 node, slated for 2025, will outperform N3P and 18A. Following the company's inaugural 3nm process pattern, Apple could get first dibs on N2 and utilize it for the iPhone 17 Pro.

Much of Gelsinger's confidence in 20A and 18A lies in their introduction of the RibbonFET architecture – the company's take on gate-all-around (GAA) transistors and backside power delivery. These technologies will become crucial for companies manufacturing 2nm chips, enabling higher logic densities and clock speeds with reduced power leakage. Meanwhile, TSMC's N3P and other upcoming 3nm nodes will continue utilizing the mature FinFET architecture until it migrates to GAA with N2 a year after Intel.

Intel and TSMC aren't the only companies preparing to build 2nm semiconductors. Samsung also wants to enter 2nm mass production in 2025, while Japanese fabricator Rapidus plans to introduce prototypes by 2025, with mass production beginning in 2027.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tests in animals show the material works like the body's own system:

People with type I diabetes have to inject themselves multiple times a day with manufactured insulin to maintain healthy levels of the hormone, as their bodies do not naturally produce enough. The injections also have to be timed in response to eating and exercise, as any consumption or use of glucose has to be managed.

Research into glucose-responsive insulin, or "smart" insulin, hopes to improve the quality of life for people with type I diabetes by developing a form of insulin that needs to be injected less frequently, while providing control of blood-glucose levels over a longer period of time.

A team at Zhejiang University, China, has recently released a study documenting an improved smart insulin system in animal models—the current work doesn't involve any human testing. Their insulin was able to regulate blood-glucose levels for a week in diabetic mice and minipigs after a single subcutaneous injection.

[...] The new smart insulin is based on a form of insulin modified with gluconic acid, which forms a complex with a polymer through chemical bonds and strong electrostatic attraction. When insulin is trapped in the polymer, its signaling function is blocked, allowing a week's worth of insulin to be given via a single injection without a risk of overdose.

Crucial to the "glucose responsive" nature of this system is the fact that the chemical structures of glucose and gluconic acid are extremely similar, meaning the two molecules bind in very similar ways. When glucose meets the insulin-polymer complex, it can displace some of the bound insulin and form its own chemical bonds to the polymer. Glucose binding also disrupts the electrostatic attraction and further promotes insulin release.

[...] This system mimics the body's natural process, in which insulin is also released in response to glucose.

[...] The study is not without its limitations. Although long-term glucose regulation was seen in the mice and minipigs examined, only a few animals were involved in the study—five mice and three minipigs. And of course, there's always the risk that the results of animal studies don't completely track over to clinical trials in humans. "We have to accept that these are animal studies, and so going across to humans is always a bit of an issue," said Bain.

Although more research is required before this smart insulin system can be tested in humans, this work is a promising step forward in the field.

Journal Reference:
Zhang, Juan, Wei, Xiangqian, Liu, Wei, et al. Week-long norm glycaemia in diabetic mice and minipigs via a subcutaneous dose of a glucose-responsive insulin complex, Nature Biomedical Engineering (DOI: 10.1038/s41551-023-01138-7)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Plasma could be wrangled to collide photons and yield matter, according to physicists who ran simulations to explore the practical applications of a world-famous equation.

The equation at work here is Einstein’s E = mc^2, which establishes a relationship between energy and mass; specifically, the equation holds that energy and mass are equivalent when the latter is multiplied by the speed of light, squared.

A team led by scientists at Osaka University and UC San Diego recently simulated the collisions of photons using lasers; their results suggest that the collisions would yield pairs of electrons and positrons. The positrons—the antiparticle of the electron—could then be accelerated by the laser’s electric field to produce a positron beam. Their results are published in Physical Review Letters.

“We feel that our proposal is experimentally feasible, and we look forward to real-world implementation,” said Alexey Arefiev, a physicist at UC San Diego and co-author of the paper, in a University of Osaka release.

The experimental set-up is possible, the release added, at laser intensities that currently exist. The researchers used simulations to test potential experimental set-ups and found a compelling one. The photon-photon collider uses the Breit-Wheeler process to produce matter, meaning it annihilates gamma-rays to produce electron-positron pairs.

[...] “This research shows a potential way to explore the mysteries of the universe in a laboratory setting,” said Vyacheslav Lukin, a program director at the National Science Foundation, which supported the recent research. “The future possibilities at today’s and tomorrow’s high-power laser facilities just became even more intriguing.”

The experiment could provide a way to peer into the universe’s composition, by bringing some far-out physics much closer to home. But for that to happen, an experiment will actually need to be built.

Journal Reference:
K. Sugimoto, Y. He, N. Iwata, et al., Positron Generation and Acceleration in a Self-Organized Photon Collider Enabled by an Ultraintense Laser Pulse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 065102 – Published 9 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.065102

Original Submission