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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers from Japan have been working hard to keep their cool—or at least—keep their nanodevices from overheating. By adding a tiny coating of silicon dioxide to micro-sized silicon structures, they were able to show a significant increase in the rate of heat dissipated. This work may lead to smaller and cheaper electronic devices that can pack in more microcircuits.

As consumer electronics become ever more compact, while still boasting increased processing power, the need to manage waste heat from microcircuits has grown to become a major concern. Some scientific instruments and nanoscale machines require careful consideration of how localized heat will be shunted out of the device in order to prevent damage. Some cooling occurs when heat is radiated away as electromagnetic waves—similar to how the sun’s power reaches the Earth through the vacuum of space. However, the rate of energy transfer can be too slow to protect the performance of sensitive and densely packed integrated electronic circuits. For the next generation of devices to be developed, novel approaches may need to be established to address this issue of heat transmission.

In a study recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, showed how the rate of radiative heat transfer can be doubled between two micro-scale silicon plates separated by a tiny gap. The key was using a coating of silicon dioxide that created a coupling between the thermal vibrations of the plate at the surface (called phonons) and the photons (which make up the radiation).

“We were able to show both theoretically and experimentally how electromagnetic waves were excited at the interface of the oxide layer that enhanced the rate of heat transfer,” lead author of the study, Saeko Tachikawa says. The small size of the layers compared with the wavelengths of the electromagnetic energy and its attachment to the silicon plate, which carries the energy without loss, allowed the device to surpass the normal limits of heat transfer, and thus cool faster.

Because current microelectronics are already based on silicon, the findings of this research could be easily integrated into future generations of semiconductor devices. “Our work provides insight into possible heat dissipation management strategies in the semiconductor industry, along with various other related fields such as nanotech manufacturing,” says senior author, Masahiro Nomura. The research also helps to establish a better fundamental understanding of how heat transfer works at the nanoscale level, since this is still an area of active research.

Reference: “Enhanced Far-Field Thermal Radiation through a Polaritonic Waveguide” by Saeko Tachikawa, Jose Ordonez-Miranda, Laurent Jalabert, Yunhui Wu, Roman Anufriev, Yangyu Guo, Byunggi Kim, Hiroyuki Fujita, Sebastian Volz and Masahiro Nomura, 3 May 2024, Physical Review Letters.
  DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.186904

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Keys were labeled "DO NOT TRUST." Nearly 500 device models use them anyway.

In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted up. From there, it could remain immune to detection and removal and could load even before the OS and security apps did.

The threat of such BIOS-dwelling malware was largely theoretical and fueled in large part by the creation of ICLord Bioskit by a Chinese researcher in 2007. ICLord was a rootkit, a class of malware that gains and maintains stealthy root access by subverting key protections built into the operating system. The proof of concept demonstrated that such BIOS rootkits weren't only feasible; they were also powerful. In 2011, the threat became a reality with the discovery of Mebromi, the first-known BIOS rootkit to be used in the wild.

Keenly aware of Mebromi and its potential for a devastating new class of attack, the Secure Boot architects hashed out a complex new way to shore up security in the pre-boot environment. Built into UEFI—the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that would become the successor to BIOS—Secure Boot used public-key cryptography to block the loading of any code that wasn't signed with a pre-approved digital signature. [...]

On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022. In a public GitHub repository committed in December of that year, someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published what's known as a platform key, the cryptographic key that forms the root-of-trust anchor between the hardware device and the firmware that runs on it. The repository was located at https://github.com/raywu-aaeon/Ryzen2000_4000.git, and it's not clear when it was taken down.

upstart writes:

Here's what a Sam Altman-backed basic income experiment found:

A recent study on basic income, backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, shows that giving low-income people guaranteed paydays with no strings attached can lead to their working slightly less, affording them more leisure time.

The study, which is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, examined the impact of guaranteed income on recipients' health, spending, employment, ability to relocate and other facets of their lives.

Altman first announced his desire to fund the study in a 2016 blog post on startup accelerator Y Combinator's site.

Some of the questions he set out to answer about how people behave when they're given free cash included, "Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled?" according to the post. Altman, whose OpenAI is behind generative text tool ChatGPT, which threatens to take away some jobs, said in the blog post that he thinks technology's elimination of "traditional jobs" could make universal basic income necessary in the future.

How much cash did participants get?

For OpenResearch's Unconditional Cash Study, 3,000 participants in Illinois and Texas received $1,000 monthly for three years beginning in 2020. The cash transfers represented a 40% boost in recipients' incomes. The cash recipients were within 300% of the federal poverty level, with average incomes of less than $29,000. A control group of 2,000 participants received $50 a month for their contributions.

Basic income recipients spent more money, the study found, with their extra dollars going toward essentials like rent, transportation and food.

Researchers also studied the free money's effect on how much recipients worked, and in what types of jobs. They found that recipients of the cash transfers worked 1.3 to 1.4 hours less each week compared with the control group. Instead of working during those hours, recipients used them for leisure time.

"We observed moderate decreases in labor supply," Eva Vivalt, assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto and one of the study's principal investigators, told CBS MoneyWatch. "From an economist's point of view, it's a moderate effect."

More autonomy, better health

NASA Mars Rover Captures Rock That Could Hold Fossilized Microbes

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has made what could be its most astonishing discovery to date: possible signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The six-wheeled robotic explorer came across an intriguing, arrow-shaped rock dubbed "Cheyava Falls" that may harbor fossilized microbes from billions of years ago, when Mars was a watery world.

Perseverance drilled into the enigmatic rock to collect a core sample on July 21, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley.

The samples carefully stowed beneath the rover's belly are destined to eventually return to Earth, where they will undergo more comprehensive analysis.

"Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance," project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech said Thursday.

Three compelling clues have scientists buzzing.

White calcium sulfate veins run the length of the rock, a telltale sign that water once flowed through it. Between these veins is a reddish middle area, teeming with organic compounds, as detected by the rover's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Finally, tiny off-white splotches ringed with black, reminiscent of leopard spots, contain chemicals that suggest energy sources for ancient microbes, according to scans by the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument.

"On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface," said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

The quest to confirm ancient Martian life is far from over, however.

The real test will come when Perseverance's precious rock samples are returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return Program, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency slated for the 2030s.

While there are alternative explanations for these findings that do not involve microbes, there is a tantalizing chance that Perseverance's core sample might contain actual fossilized microbes—potentially making history as the first proof of life beyond Earth.

"We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable," said Farley.

"Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give. To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we'd want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In 2021, a team led by MIT physicists reported creating a new ultrathin ferroelectric material, or one where positive and negative charges separate into different layers. At the time they noted the material’s potential for applications in computer memory and much more. Now the same core team and colleagues — including two from the lab next door — have built a transistor with that material and shown that its properties are so useful that it could change the world of electronics.

Although the team’s results are based on a single transistor in the lab, “in several aspects its properties already meet or exceed industry standards” for the ferroelectric transistors produced today, says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, who led the work with professor of physics Raymond Ashoori. Both are also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

“In my lab we primarily do fundamental physics. This is one of the first, and perhaps most dramatic, examples of how very basic science has led to something that could have a major impact on applications,” Jarillo-Herrero says.

Says Ashoori, “When I think of my whole career in physics, this is the work that I think 10 to 20 years from now could change the world.”

Among the new transistor’s superlative properties:

• It can switch between positive and negative charges — essentially the ones and zeros of digital information — at very high speeds, on nanosecond time scales. (A nanosecond is a billionth of a second.)
• It is extremely tough. After 100 billion switches it still worked with no signs of degradation.
• The material behind the magic is only billionths of a meter thick, one of the thinnest of its kind in the world. That, in turn, could allow for much denser computer memory storage. It could also lead to much more energy-efficient transistors because the voltage required for switching scales with material thickness. (Ultrathin equals ultralow voltages.)

The work is reported in a recent issue of Science. The co-first authors of the paper are Kenji Yasuda, now an assistant professor at Cornell University, and Evan Zalys-Geller, now at Atom Computing. Additional authors are Xirui Wang, an MIT graduate student in physics; Daniel Bennett and Efthimios Kaxiras of Harvard University; Suraj S. Cheema, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an affiliate of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/26/24206529/intel-13th-14th-gen-crashing-instability-cpu-voltage-q-a

On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel's desktop CPU instability woes — the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the "root cause" of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won't fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom's Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is "confident" the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. (As another preventative measure, you should update your motherboard BIOS ASAP.) But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems.

And, Intel confirms, too-high voltages aren't the only reason some of these chips are failing. Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford confirms it's a primary cause, but the company is still investigating. Intel community manager Lex Hoyos also revealed some instability reports can be traced back to an oxidization manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Over on Ars Technica a user has provided a Gen Z translation of the Bible Linked to Ars because that's where I stole the summary from, the real deal is here

I'd never heard of this before but I saw someone I know post about it... upset that it existed and lots of people commented about being upset. More searching found more people upset including a few saying that it should be "illegal" and penalties need to exist for doing something like this. I did a little more searching and found that at some point, it was something done on TikTok by someone and it got a following. I then found an online version like those other online versions of Bibles. The original post I saw had a screenshot of a page, which I figured was just a prop or photoshopped but it turns out, someone has used ChatGPT to do a Gen-Z slang translation that can be purchased in physical form. Evidently, some people are buying them and taking them to church. In some discussion, I saw people saying that this might be a way to reach some younger people, as a positive.

Anyway... I think it's pretty hilarious. I'm sure a bunch of folks will be gasping and clutching pearls. I figured I'd make a post as a PSA in case others haven't heard about it before (like me).

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://ewpratten.com/blog/camping-radio/

Recently, my father and I took a trip out to a local provincial park for a weekend of camping.

Last time I had been camping happened to coincide with the period of time that I was starting to gain curiosity about amateur radio. I vividly recall being out there wishing I had a radio that I could use to communicate from the campsite.

So, to appease my past self, the present-tense radio-license-having version of me took my HF rig along to make some contacts.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There is not enough evidence to prove an ingredient used in a popular weed killer causes cancer, a Federal Court judge has found:

Justice Michael Lee handed down his judgement in the class action against widely-used herbicide Roundup on Thursday afternoon.

The case, launched by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, claims Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused the cancer of more than 800 Australian non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients.

Justice Lee ruled there is not enough current evidence to say glyphosate is carcinogenic and capable of causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

The judge only needed to consider the question of general causation – not the specific claims of lead applicant Kelvin McNickle or the other class action group members.

Justice Lee ordered the proceedings be dismissed.

Bayer, which acquired Roundup's producer Monsanto in 2018, has previously stated glyphosate-based herbicides have been rigorously tested in hundreds of studies and it is safe when used as directed.

Related:
    •Study First to Link Weed Killer Roundup to Convulsions in Animals
    •US Supreme Court Rejects Bayer's Bid to End Roundup Lawsuits
    •Bayer Loses Appeal of Ruling That its Weed Killer Causes Cancer
    •Widely Used Herbicide Linked to Preterm Births

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a study recently published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers detail how they tested the unparalleled capabilities of Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and observed the entire orbit of WASP-43b, a giant, gas-filled exoplanet. These “phase curve” observations, conducted during Webb’s inaugural year, revealed the temperature distribution across the entire planet and shed light on the planetary climate. The researchers found thick clouds and a surprising lack of methane on the planet’s nightside, and ubiquitous water presence throughout its atmosphere. This is the first time clouds have been inferred on the nightside of the planet; they were found at much higher altitudes in the planetary atmosphere compared to typical clouds observed on Earth.

WASP-43b shares a comparable size and mass with Jupiter, yet it diverges significantly in its planetary characteristics. Its host star, WASP-43A, is much cooler and redder than our sun and is around 86 lightyears away from the Earth. WASP-43b orbits very closely to its star, resulting in a year that lasts only 19.5 hours. This close proximity causes the planet’s rotation to synchronize with its orbit, with one side always facing the star, similar to the tidal locking observed with our moon. As a result, one-half of the planet (dayside) is permanently illuminated and very hot, while the other half (nightside) is permanently shadowed and much colder.

[...] The team found that WASP-43b’s permanently illuminated dayside is as hot as 2285°F (1250°C), while the planet’s nightside, although permanently shadowed, was still very hot 1115°F (600°C).

“The absence of direct sunlight on the planet’s nightside causes significant temperature differences between the day and night sides, which prompts the formation of exceptionally strong winds,” said Dobbs-Dixon, an expert in 3-dimensional atmospheric models and heat redistribution of exoplanetary atmospheres. “While winds on Earth form in a similar manner due to variations in temperature, the close proximity of WASP-43b to its host star results in much more extreme temperature differences. This produced winds of thousands of kilometers per hour, far surpassing those on Earth, crucial for the distribution of heat and shaping the overall planetary climate.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those."

Space Shuttle Columbia was launched from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39B on the morning of July 23, 1999. Two previous launch attempts, on July 20 and 22, were scrubbed because of a faulty sensor and bad weather.

The launch was third time lucky in more ways than one.

Unknown to the Shuttle's crew and flight controllers, Columbia contained several flaws – as do all vehicles – some of which were about to make their presence felt during the launch phase of the mission. A bit of wiring within the payload bay had chafed against a burred screw head, a single gold-plated pin was slightly loose in a deactivated Liquid Oxygen (LOX) post in the main injector of the right engine, and the main center engine had a slight bias in pressure measurements on its B channel that would only show when the engine reached full throttle.

Oh, and there was a slightly loose connection on a hydraulic pressure sensor on the right solid rocket booster (SRB).

The team was blissfully unaware of any of this.

owl writes:

https://blog.mattstuchlik.com/2024/07/21/fastest-memory-read.html

Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s. I'm currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I already learned some interesting things. In this post I'll describe my complete solution (skip to that) including a surprising memory read pattern that achieves up to ~30% higher transfer rates on fully memory bound, single core workloads compared to naive sequential access, while apparently not being widely known (skip to that).

As before, the program is tuned to the input spec and for the HighLoad system: Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz, 512MB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04. It only uses AVX2, no AVX512.

The Challenge

"Print the number of bytes whose value equals 127 in a 250MB stream of bytes uniformly sampled from [0, 255] sent to standard input."

Nothing much to it!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The automaker announced the pivot in an earnings call this week, with CEO Mary Barra citing the Origin's "unique design" as creating too much "regulatory uncertainty." That design was indeed unusual, with no immediately obvious front or rear, and not a single spot for a human driver.

Instead of the Origin, GM's Cruise autonomous driving division will refocus on modifying existing Chevy Bolt EVs for self-driving capabilities. A new generation of autonomous Bolts is slated for production in 2025, and Barra says going this route will reduce costs per vehicle.

GM's chief financial officer Paul Jacobson says the company "might" revisit Origin down the road, but currently the efforts are "really going to be focused" on the Bolt.

Cruise has been under fire since an incident last October when one of its self-driving test vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. California regulators swiftly grounded the robotaxis.

[...] The entire industry has sunk billions into cracking this nut, with the promise of one day raking in massive profits from fleets of driverless robotaxis. However, as Cruise's setbacks show, actually delivering on that reality has been one pothole-ridden road. Many analysts think we're still years away from having a truly driverless car roll up, if it ever happens at all.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes "the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of marine biologists and ecotoxicologists affiliated with several institutions in Brazil has found cocaine in muscle and liver samples collected from Brazilian Sharpnose sharks harvested off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Their study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, highlights the potential impact of the presence of illicit drugs in marine environments.

Prior research has suggested that much cocaine winds up in the ocean via wastewater from sewage systems, drainage from labs and packages abandoned by traffickers attempting to prevent discovery. What is not known is how long the drug persists in the sea and what impact it has on ocean life. For this new study, the research team tested Brazilian Sharpnose sharks, a small variety that makes its home in the shallow waters along many of Brazil's coastal areas.

The researchers purchased 13 of the sharks from local fishermen. Each was dissected in the lab, where the team also collected muscle and liver samples and assessed them with tandem mass spectrometry. They found cocaine in all the samples at concentrations approximately 100 times higher than observed in any other marine animal.

The researchers suggest their findings are just a starting point regarding research into the presence of cocaine in the sea. They note that it is not known what sort of impact the cocaine might have on the sharks. They do not know, for example, if it impacts their behavior, as it does humans, or if it impacts other functions such as their reproductive abilities.

More information:Gapriel de Farias Araujo et al, "Cocaine Shark": First report on cocaine and benzoylecgonine detection in sharks, Science of The Total Environment (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.174798
                                                                               

Original Submission