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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-rice-lines-africa-virus.html

Rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV) is responsible for high crop losses in Africa, particularly among small-scale farmers. A research team has now produced rice lines that are resistant to the disease by means of genome editing.

The rice varieties, the development of which the team describes in Plant Biotechnology Journal, are a preliminary step toward being able to generate resistant locally adapted elite varieties for small-scale food producers in Africa.

RYMV is an RNA virus spread by beetles and direct leaf-to-leaf contact. In Africa, where the majority of producers farm plots of land barely one hectare in size, between ten and one hundred percent of the rice harvests are regularly lost to this virus. This makes it a life-threatening problem for the poorest farmers.

There is no effective protection against the virus. "The only real protection is to develop rice varieties that possess a resistance gene against RYMV, which would make the plant invulnerable," says Dr. Yugander Arra, lead author of the study now published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

A research team from the Institute for Molecular Physiology at HHU (headed by Professor Dr. Wolf B. Frommer) and the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France, has developed such resistant rice lines.

Three resistance genes are currently known; mutations in just one gene, RYMV1, 2, and 3, are sufficient to achieve resistance. The resistant form rymv2 occurs in poor-yielding African rice (Oryza glaberrima) varieties. RYMV2, also known as CPR5.1, encodes an essential protein from the pores of the cell nucleus.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Before the ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), humans imagined a world wherein machines would take over the most mundane and repetitive tasks. In this ideal world, things like cleaning or organizing would have been a thing of the past, and people could do less manual labor and more creative work. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening.

These days, AI is being used to fulfill the roles that many of us perceive to be particularly human activities, especially in the arts. In 2023, content behemoths like Netflix announced their plans to create increasingly more content with AI. Knowing this, it is unsurprising that AI was a core concern for performers, and the harvesting of their "digital likeness" to train them was one of the key issues raised during the SAG-AFTRA Strike in the same year.

With generative AI making several aspects of movie magic and photography obsolete, many photographers and videographers are struggling to protect their work and their livelihood. Thankfully, some of the largest camera companies are on their side. [...]

Before the age of generative AI, photographers, and videographers employed the use of watermarks to tag their work. When AI-generated content became more common, many groups called for transparency and sought to mandate watermarks which would show that these images were not created by humans.

Despite this, watermarks have never fully been able to keep bad actors at bay, even before AI, especially because of the existence of accessible technology that can easily remove them. In September 2023, a study claimed that watermarking AI content still has several issues, including how forging watermarks can lead to misattribution. Although, all hope is not lost yet.

JoeMerchant writes:

Scientists swapped out carbon for perovskite semiconductors to demonstrate the power of a future PeLED technology.

The ULTRA-LUX project, led by technology company Imec, has developed a new type of light-emitting diode (LED) – known as perovskite LEDs (PeLED) – that might one day consign OLED displays to history.

"This novel architecture of transport layers, transparent electrodes and perovskite as the semiconductor active material, can operate at electrical current densities tens of thousands of times higher (3 kA cm-2) than conventional OLEDs can,"

Sounds rough on battery life, to me.

Researchers with the ULTRA-LUX project, however, have wielded the potential of perovskite – a class of material with a specialized crystal structure – to serve as the semiconductor in LED-based displays. In doing so, they've created a display technology that can be up to 1000 times brighter than state-of-the-art OLEDs, according to research published in Nature.

This material, which is used in solar-powered cells, can withstand very high current densities, but hasn't been used in such a way as to emit light in a display. Using their architecture, Imec demonstrated the potential of PeLEDs in future displays, and the researchers now plan on building one.

[...]

It may well be a good few years, however, before we start to see displays on the market powered by this kind of display technology, given there's a fair amount of research and engineering still to be done.

Ah yes, the eternal dodge of breaking technology news...

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Unstaffed tills were supposed to revolutionise shopping. Now, both retailers and customers are bagging many self-checkout kiosks.

It's a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.

[...] Many retail companies have invested millions – if not billions – of dollars in self-checkout technology, which Andrews says was first developed during the 1980s, and started appearing in stores in the 1990s. They're not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures.

Despite the cost to install them, many retailers are reversing course on the tech. Target, for instance, is restricting the number of items self-checkout customers can purchase at one time. Walmart has removed some self-checkout kiosks in certain stores to deter theft. In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable.

[...] Some retailers cite theft as a motivator for ditching the unstaffed tills. Customers may be more willing to simply swipe merchandise when using a self-service kiosk than they are when face-to-face with a human cashier. Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average.

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. [...]

[...] Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. However, years later, they're still queueing for tills; waiting for store-staff assistance with errors or age checks; and searching high and low for the PLU code of the Walla Walla Sweet Onions they're trying to purchase.

In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice, yet 67% of consumers have had the technology fail while trying to use it.

[...] For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

Original Submission

Apple AirDrop Leaks User Data Like a Sieve. Chinese Authorities Say They're Scooping It Up.

upstart writes:

Chinese authorities are exploiting a weakness Apple has allowed to go unfixed for 5 years:

Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's illegal in that country.

[...] The scant details and the quality of Internet-based translations don't explicitly describe the technique. All the translations, however, have said it involves the use of what are known as rainbow tables to defeat the technical measures AirDrop uses to obfuscate users' phone numbers and email addresses.

[...] In 2021, researchers at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another. One of the researchers' attack methods relies on rainbow tables.

[...] Christian Weinert, one of the TU Darmstadt researchers who's now at Royal Holloway University in London, said in an email that Green is almost certainly correct.

"The attack clearly exploits the underlying issue that we pointed out in our paper and that we reported to Apple—namely the insecure use of hash functions for 'obfuscating' contact identifiers in the AirDrop protocol," he wrote. "Furthermore, the described use of rainbow tables for 'cracking' the hash values seems identical to what we described in a paper published at WiSec '21 (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/893) where we demonstrate our attacks. Note that the screenshots in the Chinese blog post indicate that the forensic lab implemented their own tooling for this and also considers email addresses in addition to phone numbers."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, the company appears to have taken a draconian turn in recent years. Then, over the summer, there was a bunch of backlash when WotC was found to have included art from one of its artists that had been partially generated using AI generative art in one of its books. After that whole fiasco, WotC publicly swore off using any art in its products that was not 100% human created.

And it’s important to note that this is a huge thing in the D&D and Magic worlds. The books, cards, and associated items that players and fans buy from these games have always been revered in part for the fantastic art that has come along with them. And the artists contributing to them have been equally celebrated.

So, when sharp-eyed observers of recent promotional art that came out for Magic pointed out it sure looked like the images around the cards showed signs of having been generated by AI, well, WotC came out with a very strong denial.

[...] But, no, it turns out that the images around the cards was in fact generated in part using AI, as admitted later on by WotC itself.

[...] But the real lesson here is that companies have to be very careful with this sort of thing. The internet has enough well-trained Sherlocks out there who are holding companies to their word, looking for anywhere where AI generated content is being snuck in to replace human-made content that, as the technology stands today, there’s a good chance any such uses will be found out. They might as well save themselves the trouble and just make sure the humans are doing the work.

What happens when some of the celebrated artists start using it too?

Original Submission

NYT reports that USA greenhouse gas emissions reduced last year. They open with a graph of U.S. electricity generation by source from 2005-2023 showing natural gas, nuclear, coal and renewable power generation. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/climate/us-carbon-emissions-2023-climate.html or https://archive.is/wNgDx

America's greenhouse gas emissions fell 1.9 percent in 2023, in large part because the burning of coal to produce electricity plummeted to its lowest level in half a century, according to estimates published on Wednesday by the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research firm.

The drop means that United States emissions have now fallen roughly 17.2 percent since 2005. There was a huge, anomalous dip in planet-warming pollution at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when large segments of the economy shut down, followed by a sharp rebound in the following two years once activity resumed. But over the longer term, America's emissions have been trending downward as power plants and cars have gotten cleaner.

Still, the decline in emissions to date hasn't been nearly steep enough to meet the nation's goals for trying to slow global warming. President Biden wants to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. To hit that goal, annual emissions would have to fall more than three times as fast for the rest of the decade as they did last year, the report found.

The researchers looked at planet-warming emissions generated by transportation, electricity, industry and buildings but did not include pollution from agriculture, which accounts for roughly 10 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.

It then continues with more detail on different sectors of the economy and ends off with:

The United States is one of 26 countries around the world that have seen emissions decline in recent years even as they enjoy significant economic growth, a study last year found. That list also includes Brazil, Britain, Japan, much of the European Union and South Africa.

But globally, carbon dioxide emissions still soared to record levels last year, driven in large part by an increase in fossil fuel use in China, India and other fast-growing countries.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Saudi-backed builder of high-end EVs is not having an easy time:

When we saw our first Lucid Air prototype in 2017, we came away extremely impressed. This alpha build appeared far more realized than some prototypes, complete with functioning infotainment software as opposed to the pre-rendered demos that are often more common in such cases. But the startup automaker has had anything but an easy time since then. Yesterday, it announced its Q4 2023 deliveries ahead of an investor call in late February, and the numbers are bad.

Lucid originally planned to launch the Air sedan in 2019. Designed by Tesla's former VP and Chief Vehicle Engineer Peter Rawlinson, together with designer Derek Jenkins, the Air aimed for Mercedes-Benz S-Class levels of space and luxury on the interior but with the footprint of the smaller Mercedes E-Class. Under its ultra-low-drag body was a highly advanced electric vehicle powertrain capable of extremely rapid acceleration, a high top speed, and class-leading range.

But starting a new car company is neither easy nor cheap. Lucid struggled to obtain funding until Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund invested a billion dollars in the company in 2018, allowing Lucid to complete work on its factory in Arizona and push on with developing the Air.

[...] But those big numbers were matched by an equally big price—$169,000, or $139,000 for the slightly less powerful, slightly shorter-range Air Grand Touring.

[...] Since then, the company added some cheaper variants to its lineup—Lucid will sell you an Air Pure for $74,000 after its current incentives are taken into account. But that hasn't resulted in a glut of orders.

For the last three months of 2023, Lucid built just 2,231 Air EVs and delivered 1,734 of those to customers. The results for the whole year weren't any better—Lucid built 8,428 cars and delivered 6,001 of those.

Previously:
    Elon Musk's Ex-Chief Engineer Creates a New Car
    Lucid Air Demos Real World Electric Range of 490 Miles
    Lucid Motors' Flagship 'Air' to Offer 200+ MPH Performance
    Start-Up Lucid Motors Launches With 300-Mile Plus Premium Electric Sedan

Original Submission

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/chinese-developed-nuclear-battery-has-a-50-year-lifespan

Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan. The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm's new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel -63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says that its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging.

Buying an electronics product that can go mains-free for 50 years would be amazing. However, the BV100, which is in the pilot stage ahead of mass production, doesn't offer a lot of power. This 15 x 15 x 5mm battery delivers 100 microwatts at 3 volts. It is mentioned that multiple BV100 batteries can be used together in series or parallel depending on device requirements. Betavolt also asserts that it has plans to launch a 1-watt version of its atomic battery in 2025.

[...] In its press release, Betavolt says its atomic battery is very different from similarly described power cells developed by the US and USSR in the 1960s. It says that the old nuclear batteries were large, dangerous, hot, and expensive products. [...] Meanwhile, the Betavolt BV100 is claimed to be safe for consumers and won't leak radiation even if subjected to gunshots or puncture.

The new, improved levels of safety stem from the choice of materials. Betavolt's battery uses a nickel -63 isotope as the energy source, which decays to a stable isotope of copper. This, plus the diamond semiconductor material, helps the BV100 operate stably in environments ranging from -60 to 120 degrees Celsius, according to the firm.

Original Submission

ElizabethGreene writes:

@KenKirtland17 on Twitter has created a fascinating infographic summary of NASA's plan (PDF) for sending Astronauts to Mars.

It shows 13 SLS Block 2 Cargo launches from 2032 to 2038 and two crewed SLS Block 2 launches to build various spacecraft in Cislunar space. The spacecraft are then fueled by an unspecified number of Commercial Launch Vehicle flights. The mission series culminates with 4 people making a nuclear-powered 180-day trip to Mars, 2 people spending 30 days on the surface, and a 350-day return trip with both Venus and Lunar flybys.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

No word on why he didn't run Wireshark to see exactly what the data was, but a word of warning concerning smart devices.

An LG washing machine owner and self-confessed fintech geek has asked the Twitterverse why his smart home appliance ate an average of 3.66GB of data daily. Concerned about the washer's internet addiction, Johnie forced the device to go cold turkey and blocked it using his router UI. Had the LG washer been hacked, hijacked, or otherwise tampered with over the net – or is this the average data consumption for a modern smart appliance?

[...] For now, it looks like the favored answer to the data mystery is to blame Asus for misreporting it. We may never know what happened with Johnie, who is now running his LG washing machine offline. LG did not immediately reply to a request by Tom's Hardware for more information.

Another relatively innocent reason for the supposed high volume of uploads could be an error in the Asus router firmware. In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted "inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool," with regard to Apple iMessage data use. Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their router UIs. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.

Though Johnie's Tweets were relatively light-hearted, hacking smart connected devices can be severe. Consider what could happen if medical or industrial IoT devices get taken over by attackers, for example. A case in point is provided by a story from earlier this week when Bosch network-connected wrenches used in factories all around the world were found to be riddled with vulnerabilities.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The CAMM2 spec was recently finalized, and memory makers are testing the waters:

Of all the PC-related things to come out of CES this year, my favorite wasn't Nvidia's graphics cards or AMD's newest Ryzens or Intel's iterative processor refreshes or any one of the oddball PC concept designs or anything to do with the mad dash to cram generative AI into everything.

No, of all things, the thing that I liked the most was this Crucial-branded memory module spotted by Tom's Hardware. If it looks a little strange to you, it's because it uses the Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) standard—rather than being a standard stick of RAM that you insert into a slot on your motherboard, it lies flat against the board where metal contacts on the board and the CAMM module can make contact with one another.

CAMM memory has been on my radar for a while, since it first cropped up in a handful of Dell laptops. Mistakenly identified at the time as a proprietary type of RAM that would give Dell an excuse to charge more for it, Dell has been pushing for the standardization of CAMM modules for a couple of years now, and JEDEC (the organization that handles all current computer memory standards) formally finalized the spec last month.

[...] It used to be easy to save some money on a new PC by buying a version without much RAM and performing an upgrade yourself, using third-party RAM sticks that cost a fraction of what manufacturers would charge. But most laptops no longer afford you the luxury.

Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special thin-and-light outliers and became the standard template for the mainstream laptop: We would jettison nearly any port or internal component in the interest of making a laptop that was thinner, sleeker, and lighter.

[...] The CAMM standard (technically finalized as CAMM2) tries to offer the best of all possible worlds.

canopic jug writes:

OpenSSH developer, Damien Miller, has announced plans to remove support for DSA keys from OpenSSH in the near future. His announcement describes the rationale, process, and proposed timeline.

The next release of OpenSSH (due around 2024/03) will make DSA optional at compile time, but still enable it by default. Users and downstream distributors of OpenSSH may use this option to explore the impact of DSA removal in their environments, or to hard-deprecate it early if they desire.

Around 2024/06, a release of OpenSSH will change this compile-time default to disable DSA. It may still be enabled by users/distributors if needed.

Finally, in the first OpenSSH release after 2025/01/01 the DSA code will be removed entirely.

In summary:

2024/01 - this announcement
2024/03 (estimated) - DSA compile-time optional, enabled by default
2024/06 (estimated) - DSA compile-time optional, *disabled* by default
2025/01 (estimated) - DSA is removed from OpenSSH

Very few will notice this change. However, for those few to whom this matters the effects are major.

Previously:
(2021) scp Will Be Replaced With sftp Soon
(2020) SHA-1 to be Disabled in OpenSSH and libssh
(2019) How SSH Key Shielding Works
(2016) Upgrade Your SSH Keys
(2014) OpenSSH No Longer has to Depend on OpenSSL

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-hummingbirds-mental-gears-flight.html

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bizarre Galaxy Discovered With Seemingly No Stars Whatsoever:

A newly discovered object is stretching our understanding of what constitutes a galaxy.

Called J0613+52, this massive blob of something some 270 million light-years away appears to have no stars whatsoever. At least, none that can be seen. It's just a haze made of the kind of gas that's found between stars in normal galaxies, drifting around by its lone self like an absolute badass.

Its mass and motion appear to be normal for what we'd expect of a spiral galaxy... in fact, if you extracted the stars from a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way or Andromeda, J0613+52 is pretty much what you'd end up with.

According to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O'Neil of the Green Bank Observatory, it could be the first discovery of a primordial galaxy in the nearby Universe – a galaxy made up mostly of the gas that formed at the beginning of time.

Original Submission