SoylentNews

Inorganic production of oxygen in the deep ocean

JoeMerchant writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-dark-oxygen-discovered-at-bottom-of-ocean-stuns-scientists

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth's ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.

"The discovery of oxygen production by a non-photosynthetic process requires us to rethink how the evolution of complex life on the planet might have originated," says SAMS marine scientist Nicholas Owens.

Scatterings of polymetallic nodules carpet vast areas of the ocean's bottom. We value these exact metals for their use in batteries, and it turns out that's exactly how the rocks may be spontaneously acting on the ocean floor. Single nodules produced voltages of up to 0.95 V. So when clustered together, like batteries in a series, they can easily reach the 1.5 V required to split oxygen from water in an electrolysis reaction.

This discovery offers a possible explanation for the mysterious stubborn persistence of ocean 'dead zones' decades after deep sea mining has ceased.

"In 2016 and 2017, marine biologists visited sites that were mined in the 1980s and found not even bacteria had recovered in mined areas. In unmined regions, however, marine life flourished," explains Geiger.

"Why such 'dead zones' persist for decades is still unknown. However, this puts a major asterisk onto strategies for sea-floor mining as ocean-floor faunal diversity in nodule-rich areas is higher than in the most diverse tropical rainforests."

As well as these massive implications for deep-sea mining, 'dark oxygen' also sparks a cascade of new questions around the origins of oxygen-breathing life on Earth.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After years of indecision on the issue of third-party cookies, Google has finally made a decision: on Monday, the company revealed that it would no longer pursue its plan to cut off support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Instead, Google played up other options that would hand more control of privacy and tracking to Chrome users.

As one alternative solution, Google touted its Privacy Sandbox, a set of tools in Chrome designed to help you manage third-party cookies that track you and deliver targeted ads. Google said that the performance of this tool's APIs would improve over time following greater industry adoption. That transition is likely to require a lot of effort by publishers, advertisers, and other participants, so Google has something else up its sleeve.

"In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice," Google said in a Monday blog post. "Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they'd be able to adjust that choice at any time."

[...] Third-party cookies have proven to be a contentious issue in the browsing world.

Users see them as a privacy violation, as advertisers use such cookies to track their activities across the internet to serve targeted ads. Regulators worry about flaws in the privacy tools available to users. Meanwhile, websites and advertisers view these cookies as a revenue source, as they provide insight into users' habits and interests. With all these parties weighing in on Google's plans, it's no wonder the company was kicking the can down the road.

[...] In an email to ZDNET, Longacre said: "If you ask me, the decision means Google is finally admitting the alternatives to third-party cookies are worse for targeting and no better for consumer privacy. That said, it was ultimately combined pressure from three groups -- regulators, advertisers, and publishers – that influenced Google to make this decision, in my opinion."

Other browser makers have been able to cut off support for third-party cookies without issue.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An innovative membrane that captures carbon dioxide from the air using humidity differences has been developed. This energy-efficient method could help meet climate goals by offering a sustainable carbon dioxide source for various applications. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Direct air capture was identified as one of the ‘Seven chemical separations to change the world’. This is because although carbon dioxide is the main contributor to climate change (we release ~40 billion tons into the atmosphere every year), separating carbon dioxide from air is very challenging due to its dilute concentration (~0.04%).

Prof Ian Metcalfe, Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University, UK, and lead investigator states, “Dilute separation processes are the most challenging separations to perform for two key reasons. First, due to the low concentration, the kinetics (speed) of chemical reactions targeting the removal of the dilute component are very slow. Second, concentrating the dilute component requires a lot of energy.”

These are the two challenges that the Newcastle researchers (with colleagues at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Imperial College London, UK, Oxford University, UK, Strathclyde University, UK, and UCL, UK) set out to address with their new membrane process. By using naturally occurring humidity differences as a driving force for pumping carbon dioxide out of air, the team overcame the energy challenge. The presence of water also accelerated the transport of carbon dioxide through the membrane, tackling the kinetic challenge.

The work is published in Nature Energy and Dr. Greg A. Mutch, Royal Academy of Engineering Fellow in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University, UK explains, “Direct air capture will be a key component of the energy system of the future. It will be needed to capture the emissions from mobile, distributed sources of carbon dioxide that cannot easily be decarbonized in other ways.”

“In our work, we demonstrate the first synthetic membrane capable of capturing carbon dioxide from air and increasing its concentration without a traditional energy input like heat or pressure. I think a helpful analogy might be a water wheel on a flour mill. Whereas a mill uses the downhill transport of water to drive milling, we use it to pump carbon dioxide out of the air.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last week, Applied Materials pulled back the curtain on its latest materials engineering solutions designed to enable copper wiring to scale down to 2nm dimensions and below while also reducing electrical resistance and strengthening chips for 3D stacking.

The company's Black Diamond low-k dielectric material has been offered since the early 2000s. It surrounds copper wires with a special film engineered to reduce the buildup of electrical charges that increase power consumption and cause interference between electrical signals.

Applied Materials has now come up with an enhanced version of Black Diamond, which reduces the minimum k-value even further, enabling copper wiring scaling to the 2nm node while also increasing mechanical strength – a critical property as chipmakers look to stack multiple logic and memory dies vertically.

But scaling the copper wiring itself as dimensions shrink is another enormous challenge. Today's most cutting-edge logic chips can pack over 60 miles of copper wires that are fashioned by first etching trenches into the dielectric material and then depositing an ultra-thin barrier layer to prevent copper migration. A liner layer goes down next to aid copper adhesion before the final copper deposition fills the remaining space.

The problem is that at 2nm dimensions and below, the barrier and liner layers consume an increasingly large percentage of the available trench volume, leaving little room for sufficient copper fill and risking high resistance and reliability issues. Applied Materials has solved this predicament with this brand-new materials concoction.

Their latest Integrated Materials Solution (IMS) combines six different core technologies into one high-vacuum system, including an industry-first pairing of ruthenium and cobalt to form an ultra-thin 2nm binary metal liner. This allows a 33% reduction in liner thickness compared to previous generations while also improving surface properties for seamless, void-free copper adhesion and reflow. The end result is up to 25% lower electrical resistance in chip wiring to boost performance and reduce power leakage.

Applied Materials claims that all leading logic chipmakers have already adopted its new copper barrier seed IMS with ruthenium CVD technology for 3nm chip production, with 2nm nodes expected to follow.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

UK communications regulator Ofcom has banned mid-contract price rises linked to inflation.

The change, which comes into effect from January 2025, means that price rises must be clearly written into contracts. Ofcom noted that BT and Vodafone had already changed their pricing practices accordingly.

Cristina Luna-Esteban, Ofcom Telecoms Policy Director, criticized the practice of vendors tying customers into contracts where the price could change based on inflation. Future inflation is difficult to predict, after all.

Luna-Esteban said. "We're stepping in on behalf of phone, broadband and pay TV customers to stamp out this practice, so people can be certain of the price they will pay, compare deals more easily and take advantage of the competitive market we have in the UK."

Ofcom proposed the ban in 2023 after UK inflation soared during the previous years, making it impossible for customers to predict what they might be paying during a contract's term. The imposition of early termination fees for customers seeking to escape what they saw as an unexpected rise added to the pain.

In theory, a customer could exit a contract without penalty if they weren't made aware of potential rises when signing the contract. However, providers were able to get around this by simply saying prices would rise by whatever the consumer price index was at the time, plus a certain percentage.

Therefore, the customer was made aware of a rise – but didn't know what it would be.

Ofcom's solution is to require the provider to clearly disclose the rises to avoid a situation in which customers do not know how much they will be expected to pay during their contract term.

[...] "Finally, broadband and mobile customers will know ahead of time exactly what they will pay for the duration of a contract, making it easier for them to properly manage their finances."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants' scientific names:

[ Editor's Comment: caffra means 'infidel' in Arabic, and it was used as a racial slur against black (non-arabic) people, predominantly in South Africa. ]

Scientists have voted to eliminate the names of certain plants that are deemed to be racially offensive. The decision to remove a label that contains such a slur was taken last week after a gruelling six-day session attended by more than 100 researchers, as part of the International Botanical Congress, which officially opens on Sunday in Madrid.

The effect of the vote will be that all plants, fungi and algae names that contain the word caffra, which originates in insults made against Black people, will be replaced by the word affra to denote their African origins. More than 200 species will be affected, including the coast coral tree, which will be known as Erythrina affra instead of Erythrina caffra.

The scientists attending the nomenclature session also agreed to create a special committee which would rule on names given to newly discovered plants, fungi and algae. These are usually named by those who first describe them in the scientific literature. However, the names could now be overruled by the committee if they are deemed to be derogatory to a group or race.

A more general move to rule on other controversial historical labels was not agreed by botanists. Nevertheless, the changes agreed last week are the first rule alterations that taxonomists have officially agreed to the naming of species, and were welcomed by the botanist Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London, who presided over the six-day nomenclature session.

"This is an absolutely monumental first step in addressing an issue that has become a real problem in botany and also in other biological sciences," she told the Observer. "It is a very important start."

upstart writes:

Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we're determined to change that:

'It's never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims of scholarly inquiry.' Photograph: agefotostock/AlamyView image in fullscreen'It's never been more evident that for-profit publishing simply does not align with the aims

Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google's. So we decided to start our own

If you've ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds.

The annual revenues of the "big five" commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. Meanwhile, academics do almost all of the substantive work to produce these articles free of charge: we do the research, write the articles, vet them for quality and edit the journals.

Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place. Universities need access to journals because these are where most cutting-edge research is disseminated. But the cost of subscribing to these journals has become so exorbitantly expensive that some universities are struggling to afford them. Consequently, many researchers (not to mention the general public) remain blocked by paywalls, unable to access the information they need. If your university or library doesn't subscribe to the main journals, downloading a single paywalled article on philosophy or politics can cost between £30 and £40.

The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we'd had enough, and resigned en masse.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

New research led by scientists at the University of Michigan reveals that the Arctic has lost approximately 25% of its cooling ability since 1980 due to diminishing sea ice and reduced reflectivity. Additionally, this phenomenon has contributed to a global loss of up to 15% in cooling power.

Using satellite measurements of cloud cover and the solar radiation reflected by sea ice between 1980 and 2023, the researchers found that the percent decrease in sea ice’s cooling power is about twice as high as the percent decrease in annual average sea ice area in both the Arctic and Antarctic. The added warming impact from this change to sea ice cooling power is toward the higher end of climate model estimates.

“When we use climate simulations to quantify how melting sea ice affects climate, we typically simulate a full century before we have an answer,” said Mark Flanner, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering and the corresponding author of the study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“We’re now reaching the point where we have a long enough record of satellite data to estimate the sea ice climate feedback with measurements.”

[...] The Arctic has seen the largest and most steady declines in sea ice cooling power since 1980, but until recently, the South Pole had appeared more resilient to the changing climate. Its sea ice cover had remained relatively stable from 2007 into the 2010s, and the cooling power of the Antarctic’s sea ice was actually trending up at that time.

That view abruptly changed in 2016, when an area larger than Texas melted on one of the continent’s largest ice shelves. The Antarctic lost sea ice then too, and its cooling power hasn’t recovered, according to the new study. As a result, 2016 and the following seven years have had the weakest global sea ice cooling effect since the early 1980s.

owl writes:

https://pldb.io/blog/JohnOusterhout.html

Dr. John Ousterhout is a computer science luminary who has made significant contributions to the field of computer science, particularly in the areas of operating systems and file systems. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language, and has also worked on several major software projects, including the Log-Structured file system and the Sprite operating system. John Ousterhout's creation of Tcl has had a lasting impact on the technology industry, transforming the way developers think about scripting and automation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two new studies suggest that antibodies that attack people’s own tissues might cause ongoing neurological issues that afflict millions of people with the disease. 

When scientists transferred these antibodies from people with long COVID into healthy mice, certain symptoms, including pain, transferred to the animals too, researchers reported May 31 on bioRxiv.org and June 19 on medRxiv.org. 

Though scientists have previously implicated such antibodies, known as autoantibodies, as suspects in long COVID, the new studies are the first to offer direct evidence that they can do harm. “This is a big deal,” says Manali Mukherjee, a translational immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved in the work. The papers make a good case for therapies that target autoantibodies, she says.

The work could also offer “peace of mind to some of the long-haulers,” Mukherjee says. As someone who has endured long COVID herself, she understands that when patients don’t know the cause of their suffering, it can add to their anxiety. They wonder, “What the hell is going wrong with me?” she says.

[...] Scientists have proposed many hypotheses for what causes long COVID, including SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in the tissues and the reawakening of dormant herpes viruses (SN: 3/4/24). Those elements may still play a role in some people’s long COVID symptoms, but for pain, at least, rogue antibodies seem to be enough to kick-start the symptom all on their own. It’s not an out-of-the-blue role for autoantibodies; scientists suspect they may also be involved in other conditions that cause people pain, including fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.

But if doctors could identify which long COVID patients have pain-linked autoantibodies, they could try to reduce the amount circulating in the blood, says Iwasaki, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “I think that would really be a game changer for this particular set of patients.” 

The work represents a “very strong level of evidence” that autoantibodies could cause harm in people with long COVID, says Ignacio Sanz, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta. Both he and Mukherjee would like to see the findings validated in larger sets of participants. And the real clincher, Sanz says, would come from longer-term studies. If scientists could show that patients’ symptoms ease as these rogue antibodies disappear over time, that’d be an even surer sign of their guilt. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Europe’s largest local authority faces a $15.58 million (£12 million) bill for manually auditing accounts which should have been supported by an Oracle ERP systems installed in April 2022.

The £3.2 billion ($4.1 billion) budget authority has become infamous for its ERP project disaster, which has seen its switch from legacy SAP software to cloud-based Oracle Fusion, a customer win co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison once flaunted to investors.

The delayed project left the council without auditable accounts, and without security features, along with costs climbing from around £20 million to as much as £131 million. The IT problems contributed to the Birmingham City Council becoming effectively bankrupt in September last year.

A report from external auditors stated the council will not have a fully functioning cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP, and will have to wait until September 2025 for a fully functioning finance system.

Yesterday, Mark Stocks, head of public sector practice at external auditors Grant Thornton, told councillors that officials had told him the new accounting “out-of-the-box” system might not be ready until March 2026, nearly four years after the failing customized system first went live.

The lack of a functioning accounting system was making it costly and time consuming to produce a full audit, the auditors concluded after exploratory work.

[...] Problems with the customized ERP system were multiple, but cash management, bank reconciliation and accounts receivable were of particular concern. The council has bought third-party software — CivicaPay/Civica Income Management — as the replacement for the banking system.

Stocks said officials had been working hard to improve the current Oracle system, and said he did not “lose that message.”

Nonetheless, serious issues continue. “You're not going to have a fully functioning finance system and cash system [until] April next year. The actual financial ledger could be April 2026. That's really difficult from a finance officer point of view [and] it's particularly difficult from an external audit point of view to draw a conclusion on your accounts,” he said.

Original Submission

Editor's note: Due to the extensive use of buzzwords, the submitter questions whether this was written by a human or not, but perhaps those who are knowledgeable in network architecture can comment on whether this idea is as revolutionary as TFA suggests.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A research team has proposed a revolutionary polymorphic network environment (PNE) in their study, which seeks to achieve global scalability while addressing the diverse needs of evolving network services. Their framework challenges traditional network designs by creating a versatile “network of networks” that overcomes the limitations of current systems, paving the way for scalable and adaptable network architectures.

A recent paper published in Engineering by scientists Wu Jiangxing and his research team introduces a theoretical framework that promises to transform network systems and architectures. The study tackles a critical issue in network design: how to achieve global scalability while meeting the varied demands of evolving services.

For decades, the quest for an ideal network capable of seamlessly scaling across various dimensions has remained elusive. The team, however, has identified a critical barrier known as the “impossible service-level agreement (S), multiplexity (M), and variousness (V) triangle” dilemma, which highlights the inherent limitations of traditional unimorphic network systems. These systems struggle to adapt to the growing complexity of services and application scenarios while maintaining global scalability throughout the network’s life cycle.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers propose a paradigm shift in network development—an approach they term the polymorphic network environment (PNE). At the core of this framework lies the separation of application network systems from the underlying infrastructure environment. By leveraging core technologies such as network elementization and dynamic resource aggregation, the PNE enables the creation of a versatile “network of networks” capable of accommodating diverse service requirements.

Through extensive theoretical analysis and environment testing, the team demonstrates the viability of the PNE model. Results indicate that the framework not only supports multiple application network modalities simultaneously but also aligns with technical and economic constraints, thus paving the way for scalable and adaptable network architectures.

Reference: “Theoretical Framework for a Polymorphic Network Environment” by Jiangxing Wu et al., 28 February 2024, Engineering. DOI: 10.1016/j.eng.2024.01.018

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new study published in Science Advances reveals a surprising twist in the evolutionary history of complex life. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have discovered that a single-celled organism, a close relative of animals, harbors the remnants of ancient giant viruses woven into its own genetic code. This finding sheds light on how complex organisms may have acquired some of their genes and highlights the dynamic interplay between viruses and their hosts.

The study focused on a microbe called Amoebidium, a unicellular parasite found in freshwater environments. By analyzing Amoebidium's genome, the researchers led by Dr. Alex de Mendoza Soler, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary's School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, found a surprising abundance of genetic material originating from giant viruses—some of the largest viruses known to science. These viral sequences were heavily methylated, a chemical tag that often silences genes.

[...] "These findings challenge our understanding of the relationship between viruses and their hosts," says Dr. de Mendoza Soler. "Traditionally, viruses are seen as invaders, but this study suggests a more complex story. Viral insertions may have played a role in the evolution of complex organisms by providing them with new genes. And this is allowed by the chemical taming of these intruders DNA."

Furthermore, the findings in Amoebidium offer intriguing parallels to how our own genomes interact with viruses. Similar to Amoebidium, humans and other mammals have remnants of ancient viruses, called endogenous retroviruses, integrated into their DNA.

While these remnants were previously thought to be inactive "junk DNA," some might now be beneficial. However, unlike the giant viruses found in Amoebidium, Endogenous retroviruses are much smaller, and the human genome is significantly larger. Future research can explore these similarities and differences to understand the complex interplay between viruses and complex life forms.

More information: Luke A. Sarre et al, DNA methylation enables recurrent endogenization of giant viruses in an animal relative, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado6406

Original Submission

hubie writes:

CrowdStrike broke Debian and Rocky Linux months ago, but no one noticed:

A widespread Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue on Windows PCs disrupted operations across various sectors, notably impacting airlines, banks, and healthcare providers. The issue was caused by a problematic channel file delivered via an update from the popular cybersecurity service provider, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike confirmed that this crash did not impact Mac or Linux PCs.

It turns out that similar problems have been occurring for months without much awareness, despite the fact that many may view this as an isolated incident. Users of Debian and Rocky Linux also experienced significant disruptions as a result of CrowdStrike updates, raising serious concerns about the company's software update and testing procedures. These occurrences highlight potential risks for customers who rely on their products daily.

In April, a CrowdStrike update caused all Debian Linux servers in a civic tech lab to crash simultaneously and refuse to boot. The update proved incompatible with the latest stable version of Debian, despite the specific Linux configuration being supposedly supported. The lab's IT team discovered that removing CrowdStrike allowed the machines to boot and reported the incident.

A team member involved in the incident expressed dissatisfaction with CrowdStrike's delayed response. It took them weeks to provide a root cause analysis after acknowledging the issue a day later. The analysis revealed that the Debian Linux configuration was not included in their test matrix.

"Crowdstrike's model seems to be 'we push software to your machines any time we want, whether or not it's urgent, without testing it'," lamented the team member.

This was not an isolated incident. CrowdStrike users also reported similar issues after upgrading to RockyLinux 9.4, with their servers crashing due to a kernel bug. Crowdstrike support acknowledged the issue, highlighting a pattern of inadequate testing and insufficient attention to compatibility issues across different operating systems.

To avoid such issues in the future, CrowdStrike should prioritize rigorous testing across all supported configurations. Additionally, organizations should approach CrowdStrike updates with caution and have contingency plans in place to mitigate potential disruptions.

Source: Ycombinator, RockyLinux

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At the end of a small country road in Denmark is the "Enorm" factory, an insect farm set up by a Danish woman who wants to revolutionize livestock feed.

Jane Lind Sam and her father, Carsten Lind Pedersen, swapped pigs for soldier flies and created a 22,000-square-metre (237,000 square feet) factory where they intend to produce more than 10,000 tonnes of insect meal and oil a year.

The factory, which opened in December 2023, is the largest of its kind in northern Europe, and its products will initially be used by farmers for animal feed and, perhaps in the future, for human consumption.

The two entrepreneurs are making products that will be "substituting other, maybe less climate-friendly products", Lind Sam, co-owner and chief operations officer, explained to AFP.

They hope to contribute to the evolution of agriculture in a country where the sector's climate impact is under scrutiny.

[...] Under turquoise fluorescent lights, millions of black flies buzzed inside some 500 plastic cages, where they lay hundreds of thousands of eggs every day.

Inside the facility, it was impossible to escape the roar of insects who incessantly lay eggs throughout their 10-day lifespan.

"The female fly lays its eggs in this piece of cardboard," Lind Sam explained as she pulled out a sheet with a honeycomb pattern at the bottom of one of the cages.

About 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of eggs are produced per day. A single gram corresponds to about 40,000 eggs.

From these eggs come some of tomorrow's feeder flies, but also the future maggots which, once they have become pupae, will be transformed.