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owl writes:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v5j3/us-airports-no-longer-have-to-build-their-own-crappy-trains

On January 12 (2021), a time when most of us were distracted by other events pertaining to the federal government, the Federal Aviation Administration updated some rules that will have huge implications for how travelers access airports via public transportation, and even for public transportation systems as a whole. It is also a correction for one of my pet peeves about U.S. public transportation, that we have spent decades building trains-to-the-trains to the airport. This unique type of U.S. transportation has no commonly-recognized name, and I will soon arbitrarily assign a term for them just to make everything easier.

They do not have a name because they make no sense and have no good reason to exist. The train itself should just go to the airport, like they do in virtually every other airport with a mass transit connection in the world. These useless trains only exist because of byzantine bureaucratic rule that has condemned U.S. travelers to this crappy extra train for no good reason. And it's finally, finally, finally fixed.

To fully understand what's going on here, let's back up and talk about airport transportation. Most large international airports anywhere in the world have some type of "people mover" system, which can be anything from those weird and amazing mobile lounges at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. to the automated trains more commonly found at airports these days (including also at Dulles). Airports have these when they are very large with terminals very far apart and even those moving walkways you are supposed to walk on and not just stand there for fuck's sake MOVE are not enough to get people around efficiently.

Generally speaking, there are two types of airport people movers. The first and most common from a global perspective are those designed to get people between terminals at massive international airports. The second and most common in the U.S. but virtually non-existent elsewhere are those that not only connect terminals but also the airport to rental car hubs and mass transportation. These second types, which I will continue to refer to as people movers for convenience, are frustrating as hell, as it requires travelers—to mention airport employees—to take a train to the train, an unnecessary and expensive transfer that typically requires a second fare.

So: why? Why this extra train? It's because of this weird FAA rule.

In 1990, Congress passed the Aviation Safety and Capacity Expansion Act of 1990 which allowed airports, with the FAA's permission, to charge a small Passenger Facility Fee (PFC)—initially a maximum of $3 per ticket, later upped to $4.50 and, like the federal gas tax, not increased in the 20 years since despite losing much of its value to inflation—for airport improvements. The statute allows the revenue to be used for specific types of internal airport improvements only, such as people movers that stay within airport grounds. And in 2004 the FAA clarified that only rail lines which exclusively serve airports are eligible for PFCs.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/microsoft-risks-huge-fine-over-possibly-abusive-bundling-of-teams-and-office/

Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for "possibly abusively" bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses.

On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft's "suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering" unfairly shut out rivals in the "software as a service" (SaaS) market.

"Since at least April 2019," the EC found, Microsoft's practice of "tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications" potentially restricted competition in the "market for communication and collaboration products."

[...] For Microsoft, the EC's findings are likely not entirely unexpected, although Tuesday's announcement must be disappointing. The company had been hoping to avoid further scrutiny by introducing some major changes last year. Most drastically, Microsoft began "offering some suites without Teams," the EC said, but even that wasn't enough to appease EU regulators.

[...] Microsoft will now be given an opportunity to defend its practices. If the company is unsuccessful, it risks a potential fine up to 10 percent of its annual worldwide turnover and an order possibly impacting how the leading global company conducts business.

In a statement to Ars, Microsoft President Brad Smith confirmed that the tech giant would work with the commission to figure out a better solution.

"Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the commission's remaining concerns," Smith said.

owl writes:

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for-good-as-paul-allen-estate-will-auction-vintage-items/

Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing near the start of the pandemic.

Allen's estate, which has been managing and winding down his vast array of holdings since his death in 2018, confirmed to GeekWire that the 12-year-old museum is closed for good. The museum website and social media accounts were taken down Tuesday.

The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen's personal collection of computer artifacts, displayed over the years at Living Computers, will be auctioned by Christie's as part of a broader sale of various Allen items later this year.

Original Submission

https://www.sciencealert.com/ai-designs-radical-magnet-free-of-rare-earth-metals-in-just-3-months

We urgently need to move away from fossil fuels, but electric vehicles and other green technology can put their own pressures on the environment. That pressure could be eased with a new magnet design, free from rare-earth metals, that was built with AI in just three months.

Rare-earth metals are essential components in modern-day gadgets and electric tech – including cars, wind turbines, and solar panels – but getting them out of the ground costs a lot in terms of money, energy, and environmental impact.

As a result, technology that doesn't use these metals can help us transition towards a greener future more quickly. Enter UK company Materials Nexus, which has used its bespoke AI platform to create MagNex, a permanent magnet requiring no rare-earth metals.

This isn't the first such magnet to be developed, but discovering these materials typically requires a lot of trial and error and can take decades. The use of AI sped everything up by approximately 200 times – in just three months, it had designed, synthesized, and tested the new magnet.

The AI works by analysing over 100 million compositions of possible rare-earth-free magnets, weighing up not only the potential performance but also supply chain security, cost to manufacture, and environmental issues.

"AI-powered materials design will impact not only magnetics but also the entire field of materials science," says physicist Jonathan Bean, the CEO of Materials Nexus.

"We have now identified a scalable method for designing new materials for all kinds of industrial needs."

AnonTechie writes:

A war has erupted around young people's use social media and it is messy. In the United States, surgeon general Vivek Murthy has recommended cigarette packet-like warnings for platforms like Instagram to remind teens and parents social media "has not proved safe".

In Australia, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says he would ban social media for those under 16 within 100 days, if the Coalition wins the next election. Announcing the policy, Dutton argued social media is to blame for "a high prevalence of many health conditions, issues around body image [and] bullying online".

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also backs a ban "if it can be effective". Meanwhile, Education Minister Jason Clare describes social media as a "cesspit".

Technology experts have already noted legal bans and age verification is very hard to enforce.

But we also need to view this from an a digital literacy perspective. A social media ban only delays young people's exposure to these platforms, it does not help them to manage or learn anything. When they eventually start using these platforms, the same algorithms will still be at work, shaping their perceptions and behaviours.

If we want to keep children safe online, we need to approach this differently.

[...] A ban seems simple, but to really keep our kids safe online we need to do more complex work to reclaim control on social media. This is something the entire community needs to contribute to: schools, parents, governments and industry.

[Source]: The Conversation

[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/internet-archive-forced-to-remove-500000-books-after-publishers-court-win/

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.
[...]
IA will have an opportunity to defend its practices when oral arguments start in its appeal on June 28.

"Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library," Freeland wrote, while arguing that the "potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive" and publishers should just "let readers read."
[...]
After publishers won an injunction stopping IA's digital lending, which "limits what we can do with our digitized books," IA's help page said, the open library started shrinking. While "removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities," everyone else has been cut off, causing many books in IA's collection to show up as "Borrow Unavailable."
[...]
In an IA blog, one independent researcher called IA a "lifeline," while others claimed academic progress was "halted" or delayed by the takedowns.

"I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston.
[...]
In the open letter to publishers—which Techdirt opined "will almost certainly fall on extremely deaf ears"—the Internet Archive and its fans "respectfully" asked publishers "to restore access to the books" that were removed.

upstart writes:

Sprayable gel simplifies surgeries:

In an animal study, the researchers showed that the gel, called GastroShield, is simple to apply in the course of current endoscopic procedures and provides wound protection for three to seven days.

In addition to its potential in colonoscopies, this gel could be useful for treating stomach ulcers and inflammatory conditions such as Crohn's disease, or for delivering cancer drugs, says Natalie Artzi, a principal research scientist in MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, who coauthored a paper on the work with colleagues including Professor Elazer Edelman '78, SM '79, PhD '84, former MIT postdoc Pere Dosta, and former visiting student Gonzalo Muñoz Taboada.

Members of the research team have started a company called BioDevek that plans to further develop the new material for use in humans.

Journal Reference: DOI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202311798

Original Submission

pkrasimirov writes:

The 6-ton (13,000 pounds) high-resolution observation satellite Resurs P1 was launched in 2013 and decommissioned in 2022 due to 'equipment malfunction'. Between 26 June 13:05 UTC and 27 June 00:51 UTC it 'released a number of fragments' where number is > 100.

Nine astronauts aboard the International Space Station climbed into their respective spacecraft to take refuge from potential impacts with space debris

Apparently they stayed there one hour.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2024/06/27/iss-astronauts-take-shelter-after-russian-spacecraft-breaks-up-in-orbit/
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-06-27/russian-satellite-blasts-debris-in-space-forces-iss-astronauts-to-shelter

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sweat may protect against Lyme disease:

Most people's sweat contains a protein that can prevent Lyme disease, researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have discovered. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a less protective variant that makes the tick-borne infection more likely.

By running a genome-wide association study, the researchers identified three variants more common in people who'd had Lyme disease. One—in a gene for a secretoglobin, a type of protein that in this case is produced primarily in the sweat glands—was previously unknown. In vitro, it significantly inhibited growth of Lyme-causing bacteria, but a variant version required twice as much to do so. And when mice were injected with Lyme bacteria that had been exposed to the normal version of the sweat protein, they did not develop the disease.

It's unknown how the protein inhibits the bacteria, but the researchers hope it can be used in preventive skin creams or to treat the 10% or so of Lyme infections that don't respond to antibiotics.

"We think there are real implications here for a preventative and possibly a therapeutic," says Michal Caspi Tal of MIT's Department of Biological Engineering, one of the senior authors of the new study. She also plans to study whether the 10 other secretoglobins in the human body could have antimicrobial qualities too.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Drugs are more effective at certain times of day:

The study also revealed that the liver is more susceptible to infections such as malaria at certain points in the circadian cycle, when fewer inflammatory proteins are being produced—possibly because its response to pathogens declines after meals, when it has typically been exposed to an influx of microorganisms that might trigger inflammation even if they are not harmful.

"One of the earliest applications for this method could be fine-tuning drug regimens of already approved drugs to maximize their efficacy and minimize their toxicity," says Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM '93, PhD '97, a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), who is the senior author of the new study.

The MIT researchers are now working with collaborators to analyze a cancer drug they suspect may be affected by circadian cycles, and they hope to investigate whether this may be true of drugs used in pain management as well. They are also taking advantage of the cycles in inflammatory signals to study infections that are usually difficult to establish in engineered livers, including certain types of malaria.

Journal Reference:
Just a moment..., (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm9281)

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

The House Ban On DJI Drones Is Mindless Anticompetitive Fear Mongering

When it comes to China, the U.S. likes to pretend its business policies are well-crafted, logic-driven decisions based on the welfare of the markets and the public, but very often that's simply not the case. We've already noted how the TikTok ban is an unconstitutional mess that doesn't have the public's support, in large part because it doesn't actually fix any of the problems supporters of a ban like to claim.

"Essentially, the US government pressured drone manufacturers to implement privacy and safety features that required internet infrastructure to operate, DJI built those features, and now lawmakers say those same features could be used by China to spy on Americans and are the reason for the ban. Meanwhile, the only existing American drone manufacturers create far more invasive products that are sold exclusively to law enforcement and government entities, which are increasingly using them to conduct surveillance on American citizens and communities."

Who's the naive idiot who thinks congress makes "well-crafted, logic-driven decisions based on the welfare of the markets and the public"?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Does proton decay exist and how do we search for it? This is what a recently submitted study to the arXiv preprint server hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigate a concept of using samples from the moon to search for evidence of proton decay, which remains a hypothetical type of particle decay that has yet to be observed and continues to elude particle physicists.

This study holds the potential to help solve one of the longstanding mysteries in all of physics, as it could enable new studies into deep-level and the laws of nature, overall.

[...] Dr. Stengel tells Universe Today this research started around 2018 with lead author, Dr. Sebastian Baum, and other scientists regarding the use of paleo-detectors, which is a proposed method to examine particles that span vast periods of geological timeframes.

[...] For the study, the researchers proposed a hypothetical concept using paleo-detectors that would involve collecting mineral samples from more than 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) beneath the lunar surface and analyzing them for presence of proton decay, either on the moon itself or back on Earth.

[...] Dr. Stengel tells Universe Today, "For a lunar mineral sample which is both sufficiently radiopure to mitigate radiogenic backgrounds and buried at sufficient depths for shielding from other cosmic ray backgrounds, we show that the sensitivity of paleo-detectors to proton decay could in principle be competitive with next-generation conventional proton decay experiments."

As noted, proton decay continues to be a hypothetical type of particle decay and was first proposed in 1967 by the Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. Andrei Sakharov. As its name implies, proton decay is hypothesized to occur when protons decays into particle smaller than an atom, also called subatomic particles.

[...] Dr. Stengel tells Universe Today, "Proton decay is a generic prediction of particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model (SM). In particular, proton decay could be one of the only low energy predictions of so-called Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), which attempt to combine all of the forces which mediate SM interactions into one force at very high energies. Physicists have been designing and building experiments to look for proton decay for over 50 years."

tekk writes:

The 2024 Old Computer Challenge has been announced. The challenge started 4 years ago with the challenge to use a computer with 1 core at a max of 1 GHz and 512MB of RAM for a week and grew a small community surrounding them with 34 entrants for 2023. This year's theme, however, is no theme at all. The announcement post includes suggestions however there's no set of official rules this time around.

Anyone interested in participating can take a look at Headcrash's OCC Site to look at previous years' entries and find instructions for how to get listed this year.

Personally I'm planning on running a classic Clamshell Mac with OS9 as my daily driver :)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Congratulations, world. We’ve done it. Since passing the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, we’ve reduced cancer-causing particulate emissions from our cars and other sources dramatically, a change that has added years to our lives.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we can now spend more time focusing on the remaining sources, including some unexpected ones. In an EV era, tires are becoming the greatest emitters of particulate matter, and as we’ve seen, whether it’s the microplastics in our shrimp or the preservatives in our salmon, they’re having a disturbing impact on our environment.

Gunnlaugur Erlendsson wants to do something about that. The affable Icelander founded Enso to tackle what he saw as a developing need for better EV tires. The UK-based company’s next big step is coming close to home: a $500 million US tire factory specifically for building eco-friendly tires for EVs. 

Well, eco-friendlier, anyway.

[...] While EV-specific tires are increasingly common, Erlendsson says most tire manufacturers are too focused on partnering with auto manufacturers, shipping new tires with new cars. “So even though technology exists to make tires much better today, it isn’t hitting the 90 percent of the tire industry, which is the aftermarket,” he said.

While Erlendsson said Enso is working to develop partnerships with those same vehicle manufacturers, the company’s US business model will focus on the 90 percent, creating tires in the correct fitments for popular EVs, regardless of brand, then selling them directly to customers.

What makes Enso’s tires different? Erlendsson was light on the technical details but promised 10 percent lower rolling resistance than regular tires, equating to a commensurate range increase. That’ll make your EV cheaper to run, while a 35 percent increase in tire life means lower wear, fewer particulates in the air, and fewer old tires sent to the incinerator, where half of all American tires go to die. 

Enso’s new factory will also handle recycling. It will be truly carbon neutral, not reliant on carbon offsets, and manufacture tires out of recycled carbon black and tire silica made from rice husks. 

owl writes:

https://gizmodo.com/detect-aliens-warp-drive-collapse-gravitational-waves-1851550746

Warp drives, inspired by Albert Einstein's grasp of cosmological physics, were first mathematically modeled by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. According to Alcubierre, a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel (relative to an outside observer) through a mechanism known as a "warp bubble," which contracts space in front of it and expands space behind. The warp drive doesn't accelerate the spacecraft locally to faster-than-light speeds; instead, it manipulates spacetime around the vessel. Such a spaceship could travel vast distances in a short period by "warping" spacetime, bypassing the light-speed limit in a way that is consistent with general relativity.

The trouble is, this model requires negative energy, a speculative form of energy where there's less energy than empty space, which is not currently understood or achievable with today's technology. This gap in our understanding keeps the actual construction of a warp drive, as portrayed in Star Wars and Star Trek, firmly within the realms of science fiction.

In a study uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, astrophysicist and mathematician Katy Clough from Queen Mary University of London, along with colleagues Tim Dietrich from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Sebastian Khan from Cardiff University, explore the possibility that the hypothetical collapse of warp drives could emit detectable gravitational waves.

Note: Simply disable CSS style sheets to bypass the "Continue Reading" button.

Original Submission