SoylentNews

upstart writes:

A 54-atom golden knot is tighter than the knots in DNA and comes close to the theoretical limit of knot size:

The knot is composed of 54 atoms, chained together and ensnared in a trefoil, the simplest nontrivial knot. The knot has no loose end; it is a continuous loop, passing through itself in mesmerizing arcs. The team's work describing the self-assembled "metallaknot" was published in Nature Communications.

It is made up of gold, carbon, and phosphorus, as reported by New Scientist. The knot is formulaically described as [Au6{1,2-C6H4(OCH2CC)2}3{Ph2P(CH2)4PPh2}3], or Au6 for short, in reference to the six gold atoms in the knot.

You may wonder how a team determines the tightness of a knot at the molecular scale. As the researchers state in their paper, the knots are "classified according to the minimum number of crossings when the reduced form of the structure is projected onto a two-dimensional surface."

In 2017, a team of researchers crafted a knot with 24 atoms per crossing, which made it into the Guinness Book. In 2020, a different team managed to produce a 69-atom-long knot with a backbone crossing ratio (or BCR) of 23, making it the record holder. The smaller the BCR, the tighter the knot.

The newest—and indeed, smallest and tightest knot—beats the 2020 record. The new knot is just 54 atoms long, and has a remarkably low BCR of just 18. It is tighter than the BCR of the tightest organic trefoil knots by a BCR margin of 7.3.

Journal Reference:
DOI: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00321

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As part of its mandate in the Digital Services Act, the European Commission has sent requests for a new set of information about to 17 tech companies about how they protect users.

The European Commission is casting its net a bit wider on this round of information requests. In addition to the regulars it demands information from, in Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, it has also hit AliExpress, Zalando, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.

A report by Reuters on Thursday morning claims that data requested includes data relevant to the EU elections, how counterfeit goods are identified, plus information on how the platforms tackle both illegal content and sale of illicit goods. It's not clear why Apple is bundled up in this round of requests, but it potentially involves how it manages iMessage, or perhaps cloned apps on the App Store.

In total, the 17 companies under 10 different umbrellas must provide requested information by February 9.

The information request follows one on December 14, 2023. That request appeared to be a little more broad with some overlap to the new request. That request reportedly covered "systemic risks relevant to their services, in particular those related to the dissemination of illegal and harmful content, any negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights, as well as any negative effect on public security, public health, and minors."

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is another legislative package that will place restrictions on how tech giants operate. In this case, the DSA focuses much more on online content and moderation.

In a nutshell, the DSA puts additional responsibility on online platforms and tech companies to police content, including both reporting and taking down illegal content.

According to the provisions of the DSA, regulations will be applied on companies in tiers. The largest firms including those with more than 45 million active users across Europe will see the biggest effects. Apple falls into that category, but it has argued that iMessage specifically does not.

Additionally, the DSA will ban "dark patterns," or misleading user interfaces such as those that coerce users into subscribing to a platform or making an in-app purchase.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.autoblog.com/2024/01/24/our-vehicles-got-bigger-so-why-are-we-parking-them-in-little-spaces/

I was leaving the local butcher shop the other week when a bigger carnivore blocked my path: The driver of a Ford pickup was struggling to park his rig. It was the most-super of Super Duties — a crew cab long-box dually — so it took him a couple of minutes and several cuts of the wheel to ease the beast into a prime spot near the store entrance. He was holding up a lot of traffic.

That's a tight parking lot, with spaces 8-8½ feet wide. And the width of that dually at the hips? Also 8 feet. What was he thinking? Other than, "I'd rather do this than go find an easy spot on the back row and walk 50 yards." Maybe he had a bum knee. Doesn't make his truck any smaller.

Granted, this was over the holidays, when parking lots get a little nuts. But why do drivers of big pickups or jumbo SUVs try to park among the normies?

We've all been in this situation: You return to your vehicle to discover somebody parked too close. You have to crawl in through the back hatch, or enter on the passenger side and clamber over the center console. Sometimes this is simply because of a bad parking job. Sometimes, a vehicle has been jammed into a space where it honestly doesn't fit.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-nasa-invests-nuclear-rocket-concept.html

In the coming years, NASA plans to send several astrobiology missions to Venus and Mars to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. These will occur alongside crewed missions to the moon (for the first time since the Apollo Era) and the first crewed missions to Mars.

Beyond the inner solar system, there are ambitious plans to send robotic missions to Europa, Titan, and other "Ocean Worlds" that could host exotic life. To accomplish these objectives, NASA is investing in some interesting new technologies through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

This year's selection includes solar-powered aircraft, bioreactors, lightsails, hibernation technology, astrobiology experiments, and nuclear propulsion technology. This includes a concept for a Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket (TFINER), a proposal by senior technical staff member James Bickford and his colleagues at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory—a Massachusetts-based independent technology developer.

This proposal relies on the decay of radioactive isotopes to generate propulsion and was recently selected by the NIAC for Phase I development.

As their proposal paper indicates, advanced propulsion is essential to realizing several next-generation mission concepts. These include sending a telescope to the focal point of the sun's gravitational lens and a rendezvous with a passing interstellar object. These mission concepts require rapid velocities that are simply not possible with conventional rocketry.

AnonTechie writes:

University of Queensland researchers have found there are two key reasons people choose to be anonymous online – self-expression or toxic behaviour.

A team led by PhD candidate Lewis Nitschinsk from UQ's School of Psychology collected data from more than 1,300 participants across the globe via an online survey and daily diary, where they tracked their online behaviour over a week. "Our study specifically looked at what people do online when they're anonymous, as opposed to when they make themselves identifiable," Mr Nitschinsk said.

[...] Mr Nitschinsk said the results help understand the complexities of how people interact online.

"Learning about different motivations means we can be better informed about potential benefits and risks of being anonymous online, and interacting with other anonymous people in online communities," he said.

"The next stage of our research is to understand how seeking anonymity is associated with one's wellbeing and how anonymous online behaviour differs across cultures."

[Also Covered By]: Phys.Org

[Journal Reference]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231210465

What motivates you to be anonymous online ?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting that Teitoevry, based in Finland, has been breached by the Akira ransomware crew. The compromise affects electronic health records, movie ticket sales, some universities and colleges, and some regional authorities and municipal councils among their Swedish customers:

Officials in Uppsala County, located on the east-central coast of Sweden, launched crisis management plans after the region's patient medical record system went offline and some financial systems became unavailable, warning that the situation could deteriorate unless the systems are restored quickly.

BankInfoSecurity: Ransomware Hit on Tietoevry Causes IT Outages Across Sweden

The company, which last reported annual revenue of $3.3 billion, has 24,000 employees and counts customers in over 90 countries. Tietoevry first alerted Swedish customers to the attack on Saturday, saying it had quickly isolated the infrastructure that the attacker accessed, thus containing the incident. The company apologized for the resulting outages and said it had deployed teams working around the clock to remediate the attack and bring systems back online. "Currently, Tietoevry cannot say how long the restoration process as a whole will take - considering the nature of the incident and the number of customer-specific systems to be restored, the total timespan may extend over several days, even weeks," the company said in a Monday update. "We are focused on resolving this as soon as technically possible, in close collaboration with the customers in question."

The Säkerhetspolisen, Sweden's security service responsible for counterintelligence, did not immediately respond to an enquiry about potential risks related to government payroll information being exposed to criminals.

fliptop writes:

Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case:

A video gaining views on rival platform Instagram Threads shows X search results where numerous bots, including many verified with a blue check, are posting a variation of the phrase "I'm sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy."

The response is what OpenAI's chatbot says when a user asks a question or requests that it perform a task in violation of OpenAI's terms of service. In this case, it's also an indication that the X account in question is using AI to create its posts.

[...] It does appear that at least some of the bot accounts are older, according to the "join date" that's displayed on their X profile. You can view one example of this here, for instance (see below). These accounts also post content that reads as if it's the output of some AI query, as it most likely is.

[...] Despite the numerous posts from these bots, AI-powered accounts aren't X's only problem. Many bots and bot farms are run without OpenAI's assistance, and are harder to detect. According to data pulled from Fedica, a social media analytics and publishing platform, only 202 accounts posted OpenAI's automated response over the past 30 days, as seen in this query here. While a few were from real people joking about the bot problem, the majority were AI responses. More bots may have already been deleted by X, but that data isn't available.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Previously: Crypto Botnet on X is Powered by ChatGPT

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-01-mini-robots-insects-smallest-lightest.html

Two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider, developed at Washington State University, are the smallest, lightest and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever known to be created.

Such miniature robots could someday be used for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication or robotic-assisted surgery. Reporting on their work in the proceedings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, the mini-bug weighs in at eight milligrams while the water strider weighs 55 milligrams. Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

"That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale, although it still lags behind their biological relatives," said Conor Trygstad, a Ph.D. student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and lead author on the work. An ant typically weighs up to five milligrams and can move at almost a meter per second.

The key to the tiny robots is their tiny actuators that make the robots move. Trygstad used a new fabrication technique to miniaturize the actuator down to less than a milligram, the smallest ever known to have been made.

"The actuators are the smallest and fastest ever developed for micro-robotics," said Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia, Flaherty Associate Professor in Engineering at WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering who led the project.

The actuator uses a material called a shape memory alloy that is able to change shapes when it's heated. It is called 'shape memory' because it remembers and then returns to its original shape. Unlike a typical motor that would move a robot, these alloys don't have any moving parts or spinning components.

"They're very mechanically sound," said Trygstad. "The development of the very lightweight actuator opens up new realms in micro-robotics."

Shape memory alloys are not generally used for large-scale robotic movement because they are too slow. In the case of the WSU robots, however, the actuators are made of two tiny shape memory alloy wires that are 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. With a small amount of current, the wires can be heated up and cooled easily, allowing the robots to flap their fins or move their feet at up to 40 times per second. In preliminary tests, the actuator was also able to lift more than 150 times its own weight.

More information: Conor K. Trygstad et al, A New 1-mg Fast Unimorph SMA-Based Actuator for Microrobotics, 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342518

Original Submission

https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962

[...] why did the left hand (LH) mid-exit door plug blow off of the 737-9 registered as N704AL? Simple- as has been covered in a number of articles and videos across aviation channels, there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.

As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.

The mid-exit doors on a 737-9 of both the regular and plug variety come from Spirit already installed in what is supposed to be the final configuration and in the Renton factory, there is a job for the doors team to verify this "final" install and rigging meets drawing requirements. In a healthy production system, this would be a "belt and suspenders" sort of check, but the 737 production system is quite far from healthy, its a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen. As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances. Obviously, this did not happen. Now, on the incident aircraft this check job was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH side door, not the LH that actually failed. I could blame the team for missing certain details, but given the enormous volume of defects they were already finding and fixing, it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did. I know what you are thinking at this point, but grab some popcorn because there is a plot twist coming up. [....]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

From the Abstract:

We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants' language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

Journal Reference: Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, Dan Boneh https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3623157

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Turner syndrome is a genetic condition in which a (female) person has only one X chromosome instead of two. Scientists have used a new computational method for precisely measuring sex chromosomes to identify the first prehistoric person with this syndrome dating back some 2,500 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology. The team identified four other individuals with sex chromosomes outside the usual XX or XY designations: an early medieval individual with Jacobs syndrome (XYY) and three people from various periods with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). They also identified an Iron Age infant with Down syndrome.

"It’s hard to see a full picture of how these individuals lived and interacted with their society, as they weren’t found with possessions or in unusual graves, but it can allow some insight into how perceptions of gender identity have evolved over time," said co-author Kakia Anastasiadou, a graduate student at the Francis Crick Institute.

Added co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, “The results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made in ancient DNA analysis."

According to the authors, the emergence of ancient genomics "has revolutionized our ability to examine human biology over thousands of years, providing insight into phenotypic variation, social stratification, and their impact on health throughout history." When it comes to determining sex identification of ancient remains, genomic data can often overcome some of the limitations of traditional osteological analysis, which is less useful if a skeleton is incomplete or for analyzing non-adult remains. There are several publicly available tools for doing ancient DNA analysis, but they are less useful for detecting extra or missing sex chromosomes.

Anastasiadou et al. relied on a large database of ancient DNA collected as part of the Thousand Ancient British Genomes project. Their new computational technique involved determining a predicted baseline number of X and Y chromosomes one would expect to see and comparing that to a careful counting of the exact number of X and Y chromosomes present in the samples. They combined this technique with osteological methods.

taylorvich writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-cargo-ship

The shipping industry has been trying to cut its carbon emissions for years, and with little to show for it. Nearly all of the world's ship fleet still runs on diesel fuel, with about a quarter of new ships on order being built to run on somewhat lower-carbon alternatives like liquefied natural gas, methanol, or hybrid propulsion.

The industry now faces serious pressure to pick up the pace. Shipping uses over 300 million tonnes of fossil fuels every year, producing 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. At a July meeting of the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. body that governs the industry, representatives doubled down on carbon-reduction ambitions, setting a net-zero emissions goal for 2050. The IMO's previous goal was a 50 percent reduction by 2050 in comparison with 2008 levels. The European Union plans to begin charging shippers for carbon emissions this year.

Hedging its bets, the industry is exploring ammonia, batteries, and hydrogen, among other options for powering ships. A small but growing group of analysts, though, are pushing for a zero-emissions technology that already plows the oceans: nuclear propulsion.

Today, some 200 nuclear reactors are already operating on 160 vessels, mostly naval ships and submarines. Nuclear-powered ships can go years without refueling. They do not need giant fuel tanks, which opens up more space for cargo and passengers. And the reactors themselves are getting better, too: Fourth-generation small modular reactors (SMRs) being developed by companies including U.S.-based TerraPower and London-based Newcleo should be safer and simpler to operate than conventional reactors.

For shipping, nuclear is really the only abundant, realistic, carbon-free option, according to Håvard Lien, vice president of research and innovation at the Norwegian shipbuilding company Vard Group. "It's becoming more and more apparent that we need to do something about emissions," he notes. "At the same time, it's becoming apparent that alternative-fuel solutions we're looking at have big drawbacks, and that producing these fuels will take a lot of green power that will be needed to replace coal and gas on shore. Having an energy source that you can fit onboard a ship and does not compete with shore energy is a very high priority."

fliptop writes:

There's an old saying about the news business: If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one:

As the prospects for news publishers waned in the last decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country's most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.

[...] But it increasingly looks like the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies' finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.

[...] In the middle of last year, The Times was on track to lose $30 million to $40 million in 2023, according to three people with knowledge of the projections. Last year, the company cut about 74 jobs, and executives have met in recent days to discuss the possibility of deep job cuts, according to two other people familiar with the conversations. Members of The Los Angeles Times union have called an emergency meeting for Thursday to discuss the possibility of another "major" round of layoffs: "This is the big one," read the email to employees.

[...] Mr. Bezos hasn't fared much better at The Washington Post. Like many news organizations, The Post has struggled to hold onto the momentum it gained in the wake of the 2020 election. Sagging subscriptions and advertising revenue led to losses of about $100 million last year. At the end of the year, the company eliminated 240 of its 2,500 jobs through buyouts, including some of its well-regarded journalists.

[...] Time is facing similar headwinds. The publication lost around $20 million in 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the publication's financial picture. Time has weighed cutting costs in the first quarter of the year to help offset some of the losses, one of the people said.

Related:

• AI Threatens to Crush News Organizations. Lawmakers Signal Change Is Ahead
• Co-Founder of Salesforce Buys Time Magazine for $190 Million
• Publisher Drops Tronc Name, Reverts to Tribune Publishing

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Forty years ago in January of 1984 was the launch of Apple's then new, graphical PC, the MacIntosh. Many sites are covering the milestone. What are Soylentils' thoughts on the different stages of MacIntosh hardware and software over time? Its old operating system, its current Mach microkernel plus Darwin-based operating system, and choice of CPUs have been quite defining. Has it lived up to the ambition of becoming a tool to amplify human intellectual capacity, a bicycle for the mind, of sorts? Have people learned how use computers or do the computers now use them?

That legacy has been long-lasting. For the first half of its existence, the Mac occupied only a slice of the market, even as it inspired so many rivals; now it's a substantial chunk of PC sales. Even within the Apple juggernaut, $30 billion isn't chicken feed! What's more, when people think of PCs these days, many will envision a Macintosh. More often than not, the open laptops populating coffee shops and tech company workstations beam out glowing Apples from their covers. Apple claims that its Macbook Air is the world's best-selling computer model. One 2019 survey reported that more than two-thirds of all college students prefer a Mac. And Apple has relentlessly improved the product, whether with the increasingly slim profile of the iMac or the 22-hour battery life of the Macbook Pro. Moreover, the Mac is still a thing. Chromebooks and Surface PCs come and go, but Apple's creation remains the pinnacle of PC-dom. "It's not a story of nostalgia, or history passing us by," says Greg "Joz" Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a rare on-the-record interview with five Apple executives involved in its Macintosh operation. "The fact we did this for 40 years is unbelievable."

Wired: Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules

And

Back to the Macintosh story, Apple's budget model challenged the IBM PC's 8/16-bit Intel 8088 chip with a Motorola 68000 processor, a 16/32-bit chip that could handle twice as much data in a single instruction. The differences were stark at the surface as well. The Macintosh was tiny compared to an IBM PC and the computer's motherboard and a floppy disk drive were built into the same case as its small, but sharp, black and white monitor, making for a small footprint on a desk. This was an important consideration at a time when desks weren't designed for computers.

The most important difference was the mouse and graphical user interface which made a computer much easier for anyone to learn to use. Apple didn't invent this concept that was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Macintosh was, however, the computer that took this idea out of the lab and demonstrated that this should be the way of the future.

Digital Trends: 40 years ago, Apple's original Macintosh started a revolution

SomeGuy writes:

Write the amount you wish to pay someone on a piece of paper, and mail it in. Simple. No expensive computing device needed, no browser dependencies, no compatibility headaches, and no web site to get hacked.

But getting your check to where it needs to go has become a lot more difficult lately.

This last year has seen a huge increase in mail drop box break ins. The once familiar blue drop boxes around the country are either being covered up or removed. Even the post office is warning, don't send checks through the mail. The attacks on the postal service have continued.

CBS News reported that Pittsburgh-area post office collection boxes were broken into. Boston.com reports on a string of mail collection box thefts at post offices and strip malls. In Tampa Bay, ABC Action News reports of brazen thieves stealing checks from mail as postal workers pick it up.

But now even taking your check directly in to a post office is not a guarantee. WSBTV in Atlanta reports a postal employee was fired for stealing thousands of checks.

Paying most bills with cash has already been not an option for a long time. New, more secure mail pickup boxes are on the way. A spokesperson for the Postal Inspection Service emphasizes "There is no plan to stop until the mail is secure,"

But, will the problems be solved before digitally enamored begin to look down on and ignore checks like they do landline telephones? Will rampant crime leave us with no other alternative than electronic payments?

Original Submission