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upstart writes:

Six planets to appear in alignment next week in rare celestial parade:

Stargazers are in with a chance of a celestial treat on Monday with six planets appearing in alignment.

Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus will take part in the parade – which occurs when planets gather on the same side of the sun.

Prof Danny Steeghs, of the University of Warwick said the event, which should be visible around the world, was due to occur around sunrise and would be rather low in the east, meaning the alignment would need some equipment to see properly.

"Uranus and Neptune will be faint, so viewers will require good binoculars to see them," he said, adding that the proximity of Jupiter and Mercury to the sun would restrict their view.

See also:

• Planetary Alignment 2024: What Is It? When Is the Next Planetary Alignment?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Consider the sea urchin. Specifically, the painted urchin: Lytechinus pictus, a prickly Ping-Pong ball from the eastern Pacific Ocean.

The species is a smaller and shorter-spined cousin of the purple urchins devouring kelp forests. They produce massive numbers of sperm and eggs that fertilize outside of their bodies, allowing scientists to watch the process of urchin creation up close and at scale. One generation gives rise to the next in four to six months. They share more genetic material with humans than fruit flies do and can't fly away—in short, an ideal lab animal for the developmental biologist.

Scientists have been using sea urchins to study cell development for roughly 150 years. Despite urchins' status as super reproducers, practical concerns often compel scientists to focus their work on more easily accessible animals: mice, fruit flies, worms.

Scientists working with mice, for example, can order animals online with the specific genetic properties they are hoping to study—transgenic animals, whose genes have been artificially tinkered with to express or repress certain traits.

Researchers working with urchins typically have to spend part of their year collecting them from the ocean.

"Can you imagine if mouse researchers were setting a mousetrap every night, and whatever it is they caught is what they studied?" said Amro Hamdoun, a professor at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

[...] In March, Hamdoun's lab published a paper on the bioRxiv preprint server demonstrating the successful insertion of a piece of foreign DNA—specifically, a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish—into the genome of a painted urchin that passed the change down to its offspring.

The result is the first transgenic sea urchin, one that happens to glow like a Christmas bulb under a fluorescent light. (The paper has been submitted for peer review.)

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

According to the presentation from Sony's internal Game & Network Services business reports, the PS5 has raked in $106 billion in sales since launching in November 2020. That's quite the figure for a console that's 'only' been on the market for around three and a half years.

However, several aspects require clarification. That $106 billion doesn't just account for PS5 hardware and software sales – it covers Sony's entire gaming business during the current generation: PS4 sales, older game releases, subscriptions, the works. It's the total pie, not just the PS5 slice.

Still, the numbers are impressive when you consider the PS4 generation 'only' pulled in $107 billion across its entire seven-year run from 2013 to 2019. With the PS5 closing in on that total revenue after just four years, it's clearly on track to become Sony's biggest console cash cow ever.

The secret sauce seems to be players spending more cash on the PS5 ecosystem as a whole. While the PS4 outsold its successor by a massive 117 million to 56 million units, the higher PS5 price tag combined with increased spending on DLC, microtransactions, services, and accessories is giving Sony a bigger bang for its buck.

[...] There has been some less-welcome news, though. Sony's financial report for the fourth quarter of its financial year revealed that the PS5 missed the revised sales target for the quarter. And earlier this year, Sony's gaming division announced plans to trim its global workforce by roughly eight percent, or around 900 people, with the aim of streamlining resources.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One day last October, subscribers to an ISP known as Windstream began flooding message boards with reports their routers had suddenly stopped working and remained unresponsive to reboots and all other attempts to revive them.

[...] In the messages—which appeared over a few days beginning on October 25—many Windstream users blamed the ISP for the mass bricking. They said it was the result of the company pushing updates that poisoned the devices. Windstream’s Kinetic broadband service has about 1.6 million subscribers in 18 states, including Iowa, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky. For many customers, Kinetic provides an essential link to the outside world.

[...] A report published Thursday by security firm Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs may shed new light on the incident, which Windstream has yet to explain. Black Lotus Labs researchers said that over a 72-hour period beginning on October 25, malware took out more than 600,000 routers connected to a single autonomous system number belonging to an unnamed ISP.

While the researchers aren’t identifying the ISP, the particulars they report match almost perfectly with those detailed in the October messages from Windstream subscribers. Specifically, the date the mass bricking started, the router models affected, the description of the ISP, and the displaying of a static red light by the out-of-commission ActionTec routers. Windstream representatives declined to answer questions sent by email.

According to Black Lotus, the routers—conservatively estimated at a minimum of 600,000—were taken out by an unknown threat actor with equally unknown motivations. The actor took deliberate steps to cover their tracks by using commodity malware known as Chalubo, rather than a custom-developed toolkit. A feature built into Chalubo allowed the actor to execute custom Lua scripts on the infected devices. The researchers believe the malware downloaded and ran code that permanently overwrote the router firmware.

“We assess with high confidence that the malicious firmware update was a deliberate act intended to cause an outage, and though we expected to see a number of router make and models affected across the internet, this event was confined to the single ASN,” Thursday’s report stated before going on to note the troubling implications of a single piece of malware suddenly severing the connections of 600,000 routers.

[...] A Black Lotus representative said in an interview that researchers can't rule out that a nation-state is behind the router-wiping incident affecting the ISP. But so far, the researchers say they aren't aware of any overlap between the attacks and any known nation-state groups they track.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The pigeon wins - but "the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles."

https://youtu.be/4pz2kMxCu8I

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/yes-a-pigeon-is-still-faster-than-gigabit-fiber-internet

Filed under Hardware, though it should be under Meatware.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The CEO of South Korean chemical firm SKC made a big bet on the US CHIPS Act when he decided to grow his manufacturing site in the American South. That gamble has now paid off with some CHIPS change coming SKC's way to help bankroll its factory expansion.

The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is awarding $75 million from the CHIPS Act subsidy pool to SKC subsidiary Absolics to support the construction of additional facilities in Covington, Georgia. Those facilities will be focused on the development and production of glass semiconductor substrates.

According to the department, it's the first CHIPS Act investment in a commercial facility to manufacture new advanced materials for the semiconductor industry – that material being glass substrates. The $53 billion CHIPS funding pool was created by the White House and Congress to boost the development and manufacturing of semiconductors on US soil to help the country wean itself off foreign suppliers.

"An important part of the success of [the] CHIPS program is ensuring the United States is a global leader in every part of the semiconductor supply chain," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. "The advanced semiconductor packaging technologies Absolics is working on will help to achieve that goal." 

Glass is looking increasing attractive as a substrate layer upon which advanced silicon dies sit. Intel, for one, believes glass substrates are the future of multi-die processor packages, and that's perhaps a big reason why Absolics is investing in them.

Absolics' parent is a subsidiary of the South Korean mega-chaebol SK Group, which includes among its other subsidiaries chip giant SK hynix. Having an in-house maker of cutting-edge substrates makes perfect sense given the SK umbrella. 

[...] ... SKC CEO Woncheol Park came to Georgia to announce an expansion of the company's decades-old Covington plant for glass semiconductor work. SK pledged it would spend $240 million on a 120,000-square-foot Absolics facility to manufacture glass substrates, which Park predicted "will be the key material in the high-performance computing industry" in the coming years. 

In 2022 Park said glass substrates made in the US would largely be shipped to Asia for semiconductor manufacturing, with some surely ending up at SK hynix. The reason for making them in America, he said, was because US semi manufacturing was booming [...] and a local glass substrate plant would be well-positioned to benefit from demand for the material.

Now the biz has applied for and bagged $75 million in direct funding from the US government to support that Absolics factory.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-spent-my-summer-of-1982-59638293f358 [Limited Access, use the following link...]

Archive Link: https://archive.is/SoHL9

The Making of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600

In the summer of 1982, I spent about three months creating a list of 4,096 numbers, meticulously ensuring that every single number was the right value, and in the correct place in the list. When I finished, the only tangible evidence of my work was that long list of numbers.

When the list was complete, after nearly 1,000 hours of work, the former Connecticut Leather Company¹ put the numbers (in order) into a computer memory chip and plastic case and sold it at stores throughout the country. And people actually bought it.

The list of numbers that I created was known to the public as the Atari 2600 version of the hit coin-op video game Donkey Kong. To create the list, I wrote a computer program in 6502 assembly language in about 3 months, with little sleep. With enormous pressure to submit final code in time for holiday sales, I finished the game with a push of 72 straight hours at my desk, after which I was told that I looked like a zombie.

[...] For background, Nintendo's Donkey Kong (the arcade game) was a breakthrough in video game design, and one of the most successful coin-operated games of the early 1980's. To be clear, I did not invent Donkey Kong. The game was designed by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, who has gone on to be possibly the most successful video game designer in history. It was the first video game to feature Mario, who went on to fame and fortune in the Super Mario Bros series of games (though in Donkey Kong he was referred to only as Jumpman). Donkey Kong was one of the first video games to use cartoon-quality animation and storytelling to draw the player into the action. My role was limited to creating an Atari 2600 version of Miyamoto's masterpiece.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once

Noise-canceling headphones have gotten very good at creating an auditory blank slate. But allowing certain sounds from a wearer's environment through the erasure still challenges researchers. The latest edition of Apple's AirPods Pro, for instance, automatically adjusts sound levels for wearers — sensing when they're in conversation, for instance — but the user has little control over whom to listen to or when this happens.

A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to "enroll" them. The system, called "Target Speech Hearing," then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker's voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.

[....] To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker's voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there's a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team's machine learning software learns the desired speaker's vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker's voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system's ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking,

[...] Currently the TSH system can enroll[sic] only one speaker at a time, and it's only able to enroll [sic] a speaker when there is not another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker's voice. If a user isn't happy with the sound quality, they can run another enrollment on the speaker to improve the clarity.

It would seem the embedded single board computer would get very good at only allowing the voice of a speaker who talks too much.

See YouTube video: here.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-explains-how-it-accidentally-deleted-a-customer-account/

^{Previously on SoylentNews: "Unprecedented" Google Cloud Event Wipes Out Customer Account and its Backups - 20240521}

Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever, when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google's end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.

[...] Two weeks later, Google Cloud's internal review of the problem is finished, and the company has a blog post up detailing what happened.

Google has a "TL;DR" at the top of the post, and it sounds like a Google employee got an input wrong.

During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer's GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.

[...] In its post-mortem, Google now says, "Data backups that were stored in Google Cloud Storage in the same region were not impacted by the deletion, and, along with third party backup software, were instrumental in aiding the rapid restoration." It's hard to square these two statements, especially with the two-week recovery period. The goal of a backup is to be quickly restored; so either UniSuper's backups didn't get deleted and weren't effective, leading to two weeks of downtime, or they would have been effective had they not been partially or completely wiped out.

[...] Google says Cloud still has "safeguards in place with a combination of soft delete, advance notification, and human-in-the-loop, as appropriate," and it confirmed these safeguards all still work.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

^{[ Editor's Note: We first covered this story here https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/02/05/1626236 but this now has some additional information and quietus' own take on it. ]}

This one screams for a movie adaptation, but fast.

In February this year, Hong Kong police announced that a major firm had been victim of a successful impersonation attack.

Now the Financial Times has revealed the firm involved was Arup engineering -- builder of, among others, the Sydney Opera Building, the Gherkin in central London, Guangzhou Opera House, and others.

What happened was that an employee in the finance department was invited for a video conference with the CFO and other 'senior officers'. During that video conference, this employee was given the order to funnel a total of $25 million (US) to 5 local bank accounts through 15 transactions, which the employee duly did. After what were quite possibly a couple of sleepless nights, she decided to check with her higher-ups, which (one presumes) resulted in a few heart arrythmias.

Turns out that everybody else on that video conference call was a digital fake.

The current working hypothesis is that the scammer(s) used past online conferences to train AI to digitally recreate a scenario where the CFO ordered money transfers. So that adds public video postings as an additional headache to CIOs, CFOs and just about anyone who has decision power over rather large amounts of money. As if phone and Whatsapp scams aren't already bad enough.

Now, remember: this is news because it hit a big company. But let your schadenfreude not stand in the way of a bitter realisation: the inescapable economic trend is that what was once reserved for the rich, will be made accessible for the ordinary people too.

In a few years time, we'll be looking back with tender nostalgia to those Nigerian princes and their eternal banking problems.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

The Conversation

The microbes that live in your gut are having their moment in the sun. Even if you haven't been following the research, you can't have missed the hundreds of adverts for probiotics and prebiotics, aimed at selling you products to keep your microbiome healthy.

Other microbiomes have also recently been discovered, and these too play an important role in your health. Your mouth, nasal cavity, skin and scalp all have their own unique microbiomes. Some have even proposed that the brain has its own microbiome.

The idea that the brain has a microbiome was first suggested in 2013, but it didn't get much attention. This is mostly due to the longstanding belief that the brain is a sterile organ, shielded from the rest of the body and from harmful agents that are circulating in our blood.
...
In healthy brains, the so-called "blood-brain barrier" shields the brain from the blood and any harmful substances dissolved in it. However, during ageing and in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, this protective barrier becomes leaky and blood and harmful substances can enter the brain.

[...] A group of researchers from the University of Edinburgh compared the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease to healthy brains. The brains of people with Alzheimer's harboured more bacteria and fungi than healthy people. But they did find several species of fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms in healthy brains.

The human brain microbiome was found to be a subset (about 20%) of the gut microbiome. Although more bacteria were found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's, the researchers were not able to find a pattern of certain bacteria that were only found in diseased brains. However, this study has yet to be peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal, so the results should be treated with some caution.

DOI: 10.1101/2023.02.06.527297

An excellent overview as a 12 mins vid on the topic

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

SEO Situation on fire: google's weighting parameter list leaked

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-document-leak-ranking-442617
https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot/elixir-google-api/commit/d7a637f4391b2174a2cf43ee11e6577a204a161e

Highlights:

• Change history: Google apparently keeps a copy of every version of every page it has ever indexed. Meaning, Google can "remember" every change ever made to a page. However, Google only uses the last 20 changes of a URL when analyzing links.

• Google stores author information associated with content and tries to determine whether an entity is the author of the document

• Google measures the average weighted font size of terms in documents (avgTermWeight) and anchor text.

• it's likely the internal documents were accidentally included in a code review and pushed live from Google's internal code base, where they were then discovered

See Also: https://gizmodo.com/google-search-seo-leak-gatekeeps-internet-1851508410

Original Submission

quietus writes:

Three years ago, Subaru, Mazda, Toyota, Kawasaki, and Yamaha announced a joint development scheme for combustion engines based on alternatives to conventional fossil fuels i.e. synthetic fuels, biofuels and liquid hydrogen. Last Monday, May 28, Toyota, Subaru and Mazda unveiled the first results of that cooperation, a set of new ICE engines to go into production from 2026.

From the press blurb:

With the next generation of engines, the three companies will seek to not only improve standalone engine performance but also optimize their integration with electric drive units, harnessing the advantages of each.

While being highly efficient and powerful, the new engines will also revolutionize vehicle packaging by being more compact than existing models. Smaller engines will allow for even lower hoods, improving design possibilities and aerodynamic performance while contributing to better fuel efficiency. The development will also emphasize compliance with increasingly strict emissions regulations.

At the same time, the new engines will be made carbon neutral by shifting away from fossil fuels and offering compatibility with various alternatives, including e-fuel (synthetic fuel), biofuels, and liquid hydrogen. In doing so, these engines will contribute to the broader adoption of CN fuels.

Full video report of the press conference, along with detailed pictures of the new engines, here.

Last year, Toyota sold 2,248,477 cars in the United States, an increase of 6.6% compared to the year before, keeping its position as the number one passenger vehicle seller for the 12th consecutive year.

Only about 15,000 of those cars were BEVs.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The PCIe slot is strong enough to sustain the weight of a baby hippo.

Chinese publication Benchlife has shared a preview of the Gigabyte B650E Aorus Pro X USB4, which supports AMD's next-generation Ryzen Zen 5 processors. One of the motherboard's key selling points is the primary expansion slot, which can support graphics cards up to 128 pounds.

Despite being among the best graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 4090 has endured much controversy. First, there were reports of the 16-pin power connector suffering meltdowns. Later, accounts surfaced of the PCB cracking near the PCIe locking tab due to how bulky modern graphics cards have become. Gigabyte eventually revised the design of the brand's GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards. For extra measure, Gigabyte has implemented what the brand calls the "PCIe UD Slot X" in some of its high-end Intel and AMD motherboards.

[...] While the PCIe UD Slot X feature isn't novel, this is the first time we've been given a specific metric of the maximum weight it can withstand. One trend we've seen is that graphics cards are becoming larger and more power-hungry. The transition from the GeForce RTX 30 series (Ampere) to the GeForce RTX 40 series (Ada Lovelace) is a perfect example. Although there are early whispers that the forthcoming GeForce RTX 50 series (Blackwell) likely won't be any slimmer, 128 pounds is overkill.

Moreover, the initial PCB cracking was caused by the design of the cutout, which didn't mitigate the weight of the graphics card. So, while Gigabyte's PCIe UD Slot X supports up to 128 pounds, it still won't impede PCB cracking because the problem lies in the graphics card and not the expansion slot. There weren't any reports of the expansion slot breaking. It was always about the graphics card's warping or the PCB cracking.

Perhaps the 128 pounds refers to impact load, which would make sense. A more sturdy expansion slot will help with shipping and transportation, especially in the case of pre-built machines. But then again, if the fall is high enough, it won't matter if the expansion slot can accommodate up to 500 pounds because the graphics card would probably break. In a situation like this, many would prefer that the expansion slot come off the motherboard rather than fracturing the graphics card, which, in most cases, is the more expensive hardware.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/deny-denounce-delay-the-battle-over-the-risk-of-ultra-processed-foods/

When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term "ultra-processed foods" 15 years ago, he established what he calls a "new paradigm" for assessing the impact of diet on health.

Monteiro had noticed that although Brazilian households were spending less on sugar and oil, obesity rates were going up. The paradox could be explained by increased consumption of food that had undergone high levels of processing, such as the addition of preservatives and flavorings or the removal or addition of nutrients.

But health authorities and food companies resisted the link, Monteiro tells the FT. "[These are] people who spent their whole life thinking that the only link between diet and health is the nutrient content of foods ... Food is more than nutrients."
[...]
In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomized study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein—and gained weight.
[...]
"The strategy I see the food industry using is deny, denounce, and delay," says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a consultant for companies on the multisensory experience of food and drink.

So far the strategy has proved successful. Just a handful of countries, including Belgium, Israel, and Brazil, currently refer to UPFs in their dietary guidelines. But as the weight of evidence about UPFs grows, public health experts say the only question now is how, if at all, it is translated into regulation.