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quietus writes:

"What's wrong with your skin?"

My heart beats faster. I instinctively wrap my cotton cardigan tighter around me and pull the sleeves down over my wrists.

"Oh," I say, after a quick pause during which I try to recenter myself after the surge of stress brought on by my patient's question. "I just have sensitive skin." I smile at the young patient perched on the examination table in my pediatric infectious disease clinic.

"My skin gets super dry sometimes, especially in the winters and when I'm washing my hands a lot, which I do all the time here!"

I spin around on the stool to grab a pair of nitrile blue gloves. Then, because I'm worried my patient thinks I'm putting on gloves to protect them from me, I say reassuringly, "It's not contagious. I always wear gloves." It's not an infection-prevention policy—the glove-wearing; it's an Evelyn-anxiety-avoiding policy. I don't like seeing, under the bright examination room lights, the dry red rashes on my hands when I'm placing my magenta stethoscope on a patient's chest; they are an unpleasant reminder that the rest of my body is more inflamed and uncomfortable.

[...] I have been lamenting to my husband that this eczema-flaring me is just not the best version of me: I am covered from head to toes in eczematous plaques, my hair is greasy from the steroid oil I've applied to my scalp, and my clothes are sticky from the emollients and are lined with skin flakes. [...] The longer the flare goes on, the more I grieve the loss of and yearn for my clear-skinned self, free of eczema-related anxiety, because that is what I keep thinking is the best version of me. The more I chase after her, the farther away she feels.

What false narratives might we be writing about the best versions of ourselves?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Neuralink's brain-chip implant malfunctioned, and the company reportedly considered removing it from its human patient:

Neuralink's brain-chip implant is working — except that some of the device's threads pulled away from the first human patient's brain.

Elon Musk's company shared a progress update in a blog post on Wednesday and said a number of threads "retracted" from the patient's brain a few weeks after his surgery. That rendered the implant less effective.

The "Link" device lets the patient move a computer cursor using his thoughts. An earlier blog post said the process involved more than 1,000 electrodes in the device and at least 64 threads, each thinner than a strand of human hair.

Neuralink measures the speed and accuracy of the Link's cursor control using a metric called bits per second. The Wednesday blog post said a higher BPS score meant it had stronger cursor control.

The retraction of some of the threads caused the electrodes in the device to be less effective, Neuralink said. It said it had since made tweaks which in turn "produced a rapid and sustained improvement in BPS, that has now superseded Noland's initial performance."

[...] The Wall Street Journal reported that Neuralink considered removing the implant from the patient altogether, citing unnamed sources.

In February, Musk said on an X Spaces session that "progress is good" and that "the patient seems to have made a full recovery."

[...] The Journal reported that Neuralink planned to implant 10 devices in other human patients by the end of this year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New method could help high-score chasers trying to avoid game-ending crashes:

Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges.

[...] But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high score tables as machine code instructions.

Taking over a copy of NES Tetris is possible mostly due to the specific way the game crashes. Without going into too much detail, a crash in NES Tetris happens when the game's score handler takes too long to calculate a new score between frames, which can happen after level 155. When this delay occurs, a portion of the control code gets interrupted by the new frame-writing routine, causing it to jump to an unintended portion of the game's RAM to look for the next instruction.

Usually, this unexpected interrupt leads the code to jump to address the very beginning of RAM, where garbage data gets read as code and often leads to a quick crash. But players can manipulate this jump thanks to a little-known vagary in how Tetris handles potential inputs when running on the Japanese version of the console, the Famicom.

Unlike the American Nintendo Entertainment System, the Japanese Famicom featured two controllers hard-wired to the unit. Players who wanted to use third-party controllers could plug them in through an expansion port on the front of the system. [...]

quietus writes:

We all know what the problem is with the current crop of AR "glasses": bulky devices which cause you to discover all kinds of new and unknown neck muscles the longer you wear them.

But ho-ho-ho. A team at Stanford University, Hong Kong University and NVIDIA now have worked something out, massively leaning on machine learning and scifi stuff called -- how unoriginal -- optical metasurfaces. Metasurfaces, in case you didn't know, are components engineered to bend light in unusual ways. Research on metasurfaces and other metamaterials has led to invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, heat, and other types of waves, among other discoveries. Whoa.

In the boffins own words, they created

a unique combination of inverse-designed full-colour metasurface gratings, a compact dispersion-compensating waveguide geometry and artificial-intelligence-driven holography algorithms. These elements are co-designed to eliminate the need for bulky collimation optics between the spatial light modulator and the waveguide and to present vibrant, full-colour, 3D AR content in a compact device form factor. To deliver unprecedented visual quality with our prototype, we develop an innovative image formation model that combines a physically accurate waveguide model with learned components that are automatically calibrated using camera feedback. Our unique co-design of a nanophotonic metasurface waveguide and artificial-intelligence-driven holographic algorithms represents a significant advancement in creating visually compelling 3D AR experiences in a compact wearable device.

Again: whoa -- them scientists created AR glasses as thin as glasses.

There are still a few minor problems though -- the usable field of view is rather limited, for example -- but I'll leave it to the engineering types around here to pick the team's Nature article apart. For all the others, there's a slightly more readable IEEE Spectrum article to enjoy.

Me, I'm going to brush up on Doom III.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/a-crushing-backlash-to-apples-new-ipad-ad/

An advert by Apple for its new iPad tablet showing musical instruments, artistic tools, and games being crushed by a giant hydraulic press has been attacked for cultural insensitivity in an online backlash.

The one-minute video was launched by Apple chief executive Tim Cook to support its new range of iPads, the first time that the US tech giant has overhauled the range for two years as it seeks to reverse faltering sales.
[...]
The campaign has been hit by a wave of outrage, with responses on social media reacting to Cook's X post accusing Apple of crushing [Crush! | iPad Pro | Apple] "beautiful creative tools" and the "symbols of human creativity and cultural achievements."
[...]
"Apple's new iPad spot is essentially them turning into the thing they said they were out to destroy in the 1984 ad," said Slevin. 1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial
[...]
Nataly Kelly, chief marketing officer at Zappi, said: "Is the Apple iPad ad a work of genius or the sign of the dystopian times? It really depends on how old you are. The shock value is the power of this advert, which is controversial by design, so the fact that people are talking about it at all is a win."

Original Submission

quietus writes:

As early as 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins predicted that by 2000 we would have such now-commonplace innovations as color photography, wireless telephones, and home televisions (and even TV dinners), among other things. Personally, I'm not really impressed -- my great-great-grandfather predicted we'd all eat meat from factories by now, and use the cows for transport instead -- and he wasn't even an engineer.

But anyway. Based on that little factoid, a bunch of engineers has started ERVA, the Engineering Research Visionary Alliance.

In a guest article on IEEE Spectrum, they claim that engineering these days means tinkering a bit on the edges. That's wrong. What we need -- dammit -- are bold visions of how to rebuild about everything. Engineers today need a different attitude: the mindset of the futurist.

Engineers are not simply crucial problem-solvers; they have long proven to be proactive architects of the future. For example, Nobel-winning physicists discovered the science behind the sensors that make modern photography possible. Engineers ran with the discovery, developing technology that NASA could use to send back clear pictures from space, giving us glimpses of universes far beyond our line of sight. The same tech enables you to snap photos with your cellphone.

[...] Futuristic thinking pushes the boundaries of what we can currently imagine and conceive. In an era of systemic crises, there is a seemingly paradoxical but accurate truth: It has become impractical to think too pragmatically. It is especially counterintuitive to engineers, as we are biased toward observable, systematic thinking. But it is a limitation we have overcome through visionary exploits of the past—and one we must overcome now, when the world needs us.

[...] Some examples of challenges we have addressed—and the subsequent comprehensive reports on recommended research direction for visionary, futuristic thinking—are:

• The Role of Engineering to Address Climate Change. Our first visioning event considered how engineers can help mitigate the effects of rising global temperatures and better reduce carbon emissions. We envisioned how we could use artificial intelligence and other new technologies, including some revolutionary sensors, to proactively assess weather and water security events, decarbonize without disruptions to our energy supply, and slow the pace of warming.
• Engineering R&D Solutions for Unhackable Infrastructure. We considered a future in which humans and computing systems were connected using trustworthy systems, with engineering solutions to self-identity threats and secure systems before they become compromised. Solutions for unhackable infrastructure should be inherent rather than bolted-on, integrated across connected channels, and activated from the system level to wearables. Actions must be taken now to ensure trustworthiness at every level so that the human element is at the forefront of future information infrastructure.
• Engineering Materials for a Sustainable Future. In our most recent report, we discussed a future in which the most ubiquitous, noncircular materials in our world—concrete, chemicals, and single-use packaging—are created using sustainable materials. We embraced the use of organic and reusable materials, examining what it is likely to take to shift production, storage, and transportation in the process. Again, engineers are required to move beyond current solutions and to push the boundaries of what is possible.

So there you have it, young man -- the world needs you to solve its problems: and they have an open call for proposals. Go for it!

Original Submission

looorg writes:

"A leader of what was once the world's most harmful cyber crime group has been unmasked and sanctioned by the UK, US and Australia, following a National Crime Agency-led international disruption campaign."

https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/lockbit-leader-unmasked-and-sanctioned

[...] The sanctions against Russian national Dmitry Khoroshev, the administrator and developer of the LockBit ransomware group, are being announced today by the FCDO alongside the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.

Khoroshev, AKA LockBitSupp, who thrived on anonymity and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who could reveal his identity, will now be subject to a series of asset freezes and travel bans.

US partners have also unsealed an indictment against him and are offering a reward of up to $10m for information leading to his arrest and/or conviction.

The actions targeting Khoroshev form part of an extensive and ongoing investigation into the LockBit group by the NCA, FBI, and international partners who form the Operation Cronos taskforce.

LockBit provided ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) to a global network of hackers or 'affiliates', supplying them with the tools and infrastructure to carry out attacks.

In February the NCA announced that it had infiltrated the group's network and taken control of its services, including its leak site on the dark web, which compromised the entire criminal enterprise.

The true impact of LockBit's criminality was previously unknown, but data obtained from their systems showed that between June 2022 and February 2024, more than 7,000 attacks were built using their services. The top five countries hit were the US, UK, France, Germany and China.

See also:

• https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/u-s-charges-russian-man-as-boss-of-lockbit-ransomware-group/
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/07/dmitry-khoroshev-named-as-alleged-leader-of-ransomware-gang-lockbit
• https://thehackernews.com/2024/05/russian-hacker-dmitry-khoroshev.html

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following story:

https://www.motortrend.com/features/gm-golden-1955-chevy-bel-air-found-mecum-auctions-indy-2024

70 years ago, General Motors worked out that they were coming up on 50 million cars, made over the corporate history. At the time GM was head and shoulders the biggest car company anywhere, making more than their USA competitors combined. Here's the story of the three gold plated commemorative '55 Bel Air Chevrolets that were built in late 1954, one being #50,000,000 and the other two for publicity use.

All three have been lost or ruined in one way or another, but recently a replica has been built, using period correct parts, some even NOS (new old stock).

Two of the cars (the second and third) simply vanished, and nobody knows where they went. It's possible they could have been crushed after they served their purposes, or maybe they are lurking in a barn someplace. The first car, which was used for the Motorama and other events, was burned in a garage fire and the parts strewn across a property in North Carolina!

[...] The '55 uses a 162-hp 265 V-8 engine dated September 1954, a cast-iron 1955 two-speed Powerglide transmission, a radiator dated September 1954, a voltage regulator dated November 1954, Delco front spiral shocks dated October 1954, and a fuel filler neck, one-piece door striker plates, steering wheel, horn ring, heater control, trunkfloor wiring tabs, 12-volt headlights, and the two-piece battery tray that are all specific to October and November 1954 production cars. Even small pieces such as the distributor cap, rotor, and points are NOS.

No detail was too small to address. For example, the early V-8s had a different oil system, and the golden '55 would have run this. "Early 265s had a swing-arm oil pump. Instead of the pickup arm being fixed, it floated up and down," Blades recalled. "They changed it because they were too expensive. I had one, so we put that in the engine. Even the oil pickup is correct to the date of that car."

The article ends with a pointer to an upcoming auction where this replica will go on the block.

Soundtrack (from Sweden!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSiaXtk1ZAY
And USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSNb1qarA_0

Original Submission

First Living Patient to Receive Genetically Modified Pig Kidney Dead at 62

upstart writes:

First living patient to receive genetically modified pig kidney dead at 62, weeks after historic transplant:

The first living patient to receive a kidney from a genetically modified pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking transplant, his family and doctors announced Saturday.

Richard "Rick" Slayman, 62, was sent home in March, two weeks after undergoing the transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"Their enormous efforts leading the xenotransplant gave our family seven more weeks with Rick, and our memories made during that time will remain in our minds and hearts," his family said in a statement of the practice of healing human patients with animal cells, tissues or organs.

Slayman, of Boston suburb Weymouth, said he underwent the daring procedure after suffering ongoing dialysis complications, which saw him hospitalized every two weeks.

"I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive," he said in a statement at the time.

"Rick accomplished that goal, and his hope and optimism will endure forever," his family said Saturday.

The transplant team at Mass General said it had "no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant."

[...] Before Slayman, pig kidneys had only been tested on brain-dead donors, while two men who received pig hearts both died within months.

The efforts often fail because the human immune system would destroy the foreign animal tissue, and recent procedures like Slayman's use organs from pigs that have been altered to be more human-like.

See: First Time Doctors Transplant Gene-edited Pig Kidney Into Living Human

upstart writes:

Researchers reveal complex communication patterns in sperm whales:

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville's formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.

Now, thanks to machine learning, we're a little closer to understanding these gentle giants. Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) recently used algorithms to decode the "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," revealing sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species.

In a new open-access study published in Nature Communications, the research shows that sperm whales codas, or short bursts of clicks that they use to communicate, vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, revealing a communication system far more intricate than previously understood.

[...] The researchers identified something of a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," where various elements that researchers call "rhythm," "tempo," "rubato," and "ornamentation" interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls — rubato — or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations.

upstart writes:

Nokia 3210 phone relaunched for 25th anniversary – and yes, there's Snake:

One of the most popular early mobile phones – the Nokia 3210 – has been relaunched to mark the device's 25th anniversary.

Human Mobile Devices (HMD), the maker of Nokia phones, said it had relaunched the "cultural icon" as demand for simpler devices as part of a digital detox was rising.

The revamped 3210 includes a two-megapixel camera, supports 4G calling and will still include classic mobile game Snake, HMD confirmed, with the device priced at £74.99 (US$94).

"The Nokia 3210, a cultural icon, is back at the pinnacle of the global dumbphone boom as consumers look to balance their screen time usage with a digital detox," Lars Silberbauer, HMD's chief marketing officer, said.

[...] Mobile phone expert Ben Wood, founder of the virtual Mobile Phone Museum, said the original Nokia 3210 has a "special place in many consumers' hearts" as one of the bestselling mobile phones of all time.

See also:

• Nokia 3210 - Wikipedia
• Redesigned Nokia 3210 (2024) launched with YouTube Shorts support, iconic Snake game: price, specs

Original Submission

Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections

DannyB writes:

Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections

FAA examining whether employees may have falsified records after firm said it might not have properly carried out checks

Boeing faces a new investigation after the planemaker told US regulators it might have failed to properly carry out some quality inspections on its 787 Dreamliner planes.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it was "investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records".

[....] The Boeing executive overseeing the 787 programme, Scott Stocker, wrote in an internal memo, seen by the Guardian, that the problem was reported by an employee and was an instance of "misconduct," but not "an immediate safety of flight issue".

The memo said the company concluded that "several people had been violating company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed".

[....] Stocker said the company would "celebrate" the employee who spoke up.

Can it ever be a management failure that a thing like this can happen?

Another Boeing Mechanical Mishap

anubi writes:

Seems that Boeing is having no end of woe on its aircraft.

A FedEx cargo aircraft made a heart-stopping emergency landing at Istanbul Airport Wednesday after its front landing gear malfunctioned.

The Boeing 767 cargo plane was on its way from Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport to Istanbul when pilots realized the front landing gear failed, according to state-run Anadolu Agency.

A screenshot from Turkish TV shows the cargo plane landing at Istanbul Airport on Wednesday. No casualties were reported.

https://www.newsweek.com/fedex-boeing-plane-emergency-landing-malfunction-1898330

Well, the President of the USA flies Boeing...

https://www.popsci.com/air-force-one-history-next-generation/

Methinks they need their old engineers and maintenance mechanics back. This kind of stuff is hard to cover over with creative writing.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

DannyB writes:

Why do most mammals have 5 fingers?

The simple question of "why five" has puzzled scientists from multiple fields, and the answer still isn't entirely clear.

If you look at the paws of a cat, a dog or even a kangaroo, you'll notice they have something in common with our hands. Even if some might be shrunken or differently positioned, all of these mammals have five digits, or fingers.

[....] To answer the question of why mammals have five fingers, we must first understand why tetrapod (Greek for "four-footed") vertebrates have five fingers. Mammals belong to the superclass Tetrapoda, which also includes reptiles, amphibians and birds. Even members of this group without traditional limbs have five fingers in their skeleton — whales, seals and sea lions have five fingers in their flippers — even if they have four or fewer toes.

There is some variation: Horses have just one toe, and birds have one fused finger bone at the end of their wing. However, scientists have discovered that these animals start out with as many as five fingers as embryos, but they shrink away before they are born.

[....] Nobody is sure when this five-finger plan first evolved. The first known animals to develop fingers evolved from fish around 360 million years ago and had as many as eight fingers, Stewart said. However, the existence of the five-finger plan in most living tetrapods indicates that the trait is likely a "homology" — a gene or structure that is shared between organisms because they have a common ancestor. The common ancestor of all living tetrapods must have somehow evolved to have five fingers and passed that pattern down to its descendants.

A common ancestor explains how mammals got five fingers, but it doesn't tell us why. One theory is canalization — the idea that over time, a gene or trait becomes more stable and less likely to mutate. [....] If the number has worked for millions of years, there's no reason to change it, according to this theory.

[....] Some speculate it might be down to gene linkage: As genes evolve over millions of years, some become linked, meaning changing one gene (the amount of fingers) could lead to other more serious health issues. But as of yet, nobody has offered concrete proof, Stewart told Live Science.

"We can ask a very simple question of why don't we see more than five fingers, and it seems like we should arrive at a simple answer," he said. "But it's a really deep problem. That makes [this field] really exciting."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-here

If you've ever tried to "future-proof" a purchase by paying for everything you might eventually need up front, you know it can be a sucker's game. The problem? We can't actually see the future.

But today we got our hands on LPCAMM2 for the first time, and this looks like the future to us. LPCAMM2 is a totally modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops, using the latest LPDDR chips for maximum speed and efficiency. So instead of overpaying (or under-speccing) based on guesswork about your future memory needs, you'll hopefully be able to buy your next laptop and then install more RAM as needed. Imagine that!

Previously: Compression Attached Memory Modules May Make Upgradable Laptops a Thing Again

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Fall into a black hole in mind-bending NASA animation (video)

"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole."

If you've ever wondered what would happen if you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole, NASA has your answer.

A visualization created on a NASA supercomputer to celebrate the beginning of black hole week on Monday (May 6) takes the viewer on a one-way plunge beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

This outer boundary of a black hole marks the point at which not even light moves fast enough to escape the black hole's intense gravitational pull. That means the event horizon, marked by a golden ring outside of the heart of the black hole, is the point of no return past which no distant observer can ever recover information.

[....] What is interesting is that if you have the choice of what black hole to tumble into, bigger is better.

"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole," Schnittman said. "Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon."

[....] The more mass a black hole has, the further from its singularity its event horizon is located. That means with a supermassive black hole, an infalling astronaut would have the chance to pass the event horizon before meeting their grisly fate.

[....] After a real-time duration of around 3 hours and 30-minute during two orbits of the black hole, we reach its event horizon. This marks the last point at which any distant observer watching our descent would be able to see us. They would forever see our image at the very edge of the event horizon, frozen.

[... rest omitted...]

No information was harmed in the posting of this article.

Original Submission