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upstart writes:

The ghosts of India's TikTok: What happens when a social media app is banned:

TikTok was one of India's most popular apps – until it was banned in 2020. It's a lesson for what might unfold if a US ban goes ahead.

Four years ago, India was TikTok's biggest market. The app boasted a growing base of 200 million users, thriving subcultures and sometimes life-changing opportunities for creators and influencers. TikTok seemed unstoppable – until simmering tensions on the border between India and China erupted into deadly violence. After the border skirmish, the Indian government banned the app on 29 June 2020. Almost overnight, TikTok was gone. But the accounts and videos of Indian TikTok are still online, frozen in time when the app had just emerged as a cultural giant.

In some ways, it could offer a preview of what might lie on the horizon in the United States. In April, 2024 President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could ultimately ban TikTok from the US, marking a new chapter after years of threats and failed legislation. The law requires the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app within the next nine months, with a further three-month grace period, or face a potential ban in the country. ByteDance says it has no intention of selling the social media platform, but on 6 December, a US federal appeals court rejected the company's bid to overturn the law. The platform is set to become unavailable on 29 January, though some observers expect the case will make it to the Supreme Court, the highest authority in the US.

Banning a massive social media app would be an unprecedented moment in American tech history, though the looming court battle currently leaves TikTok's fate uncertain. But the Indian experience shows what can happen when a major country wipes TikTok from its citizen's smartphones. India is not the only country to have taken the step either – in November 2023, Nepal also announced a decision to ban TikTok and Pakistan has implemented a number of temporary bans since 2020. As the app's 150 million US users swipe through videos in limbo, the story of India's TikTok ban shows that users are quick to adapt, but also that when TikTok dies, much of its culture dies with it.

Sucharita Tyagi, a film critic based in Mumbai, had grown her account to 11,000 followers when TikTok came down, with some of her videos racking up millions of views.

"TikTok was huge. People were coming together all over the country, dancing, putting up skits, posting about how they run their homestead in their small town in the hills," says Tyagi. "There was a massive number of people who suddenly had this exposure that they had always been denied, but now it was possible."

The app was a particular phenomenon because of the ways its algorithm gave opportunities to rural Indian users, who were able to find an audience and even reach celebrity status not possible on other apps.

"It democratised content creation for the first time," says New Delhi-based technology writer and analyst Prasanto K Roy. "We began to see a lot of these very rural people fairly low down on the socio-economic ladder who would never dream of getting a following, or making money on it. And TikTok's discovery algorithm would deliver it to users who wanted to see it. There was nothing quite like it in terms of hyper-local videos."

When TikTok went offline in India, the government banned 58 other Chinese apps along with it

TikTok holds a similar cultural significance in the US, where niche communities flourish and an untold number of small creators and businesses base their livelihood around the app. It's a kind of success that's less prevalent on other social media platforms. Instagram, for example, is generally tuned more for consuming content from accounts with big followings, while TikTok places a heavier emphasis on encouraging regular users to post.

When TikTok went offline in India, the government banned 58 other Chinese apps along with it, including some that are currently growing in popularity in the US today, such as the fashion shopping app Shein. As the years rolled on, India banned over a hundred more Chinese apps, though negotiations recently brought an Indian version of Shein back online.

The same could happen in the US. The new law sets a precedent and creates a mechanism for the American government to get rid of other Chinese apps. The privacy and national security concerns politicians voice about TikTok could apply to a host of other companies as well.

And when a popular app is removed, others can attempt to fill the gap. "As soon as TikTok was banned it opened up a multibillion-dollar opportunity," says Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian tech policy analyst and founder of the news site MediaNama. "Multiple Indian start-ups launched or pivoted to fill the gap."

For months, the Indian technology press was flooded with news about these buzzy new Indian social media companies, with names Chingari, Moj and MX Taka Tak. Some found initial success, luring former TikTok stars onto their platforms and securing investments and even governmental support. It splintered the Indian social market into different corners as the new apps battled for dominance, but that post-TikTok gold rush didn't last long.

In August 2020, Instagram launched a short-form video feed called Reels, just months after the TikTok ban. YouTube followed suit with Shorts, its own copycat TikTok functionality, a month later. Instagram and YouTube were already entrenched in India, and the field of new start-ups didn't stand a chance.

upstart writes:

An ethicist's take: Is it OK to lie to an AI chatbot during a job interview?:

If you're secure in your job, you may not have encountered just yet how AI is "elevating" and "enhancing" the job search experience, for employers and job seekers alike. Its use is most clearly felt in the way high-volume staffing agencies have begun to employ AI chatbots to screen applicants well before they interact with a human hiring manager.

From the employer's perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why wade through stacks of resumes to weed out the ones that don't look to be a good fit even just on first glance, if an AI can do that for you?

From the job seeker's perspective, the experience is likely to be decidedly more mixed.

This is because many employers are using AI not just to search a body of documents, screening them for certain keywords, syntax, and so on. Rather, in addition to this, search firms are now using AI chatbots to subsequently "interview" applicants to screen them even more thoroughly and thus further winnow the pool of resumes a human will ultimately have to go through.

Often, this looks the same as conversing with ChatGPT. Other times, it involves answering specific questions in a standard video/phone screen where the chatbot will record your answers, thereby making them analyzable. If you're a job seeker and you find yourself in the latter scenario, don't worry, they will give the chatbot a name like "Corrie" and that will put you completely at ease and in touch with a sense of your worth as a fully-rounded person.

On the job seeker's side, this is where the issues begin to arise.

If you know your words are being scanned by a gatekeeper strictly for certain sets of keywords, what's the incentive to tell the whole truth about your profile? It's not possible to intuit what exact tally or combo of terms you need to hit, so it's better to just give the bot all of the terms listed in the job description and then present your profile more fully at the next stage in an actual interview with a human. After all, how would a job seeker present nontraditional experience to the bot with any assurance it will receive real consideration?

Indeed, when the standardadvice is to apply for jobs of interest even when you only bring somewhere between 40-to-60% of the itemized skills and background, why take the risk the chatbot sets the bar higher?

For a job seeker, lying to the bot — or at least massaging the facts strategically for the sake of impressing a nonhuman gatekeeper — is the best, most effective means of moving on to the next stage in the hiring process, where they can then present themselves in a fuller light.

But what are the ethics of such dishonesty? Someone who lies to the chatbot would have no problem lying to the interviewer, some might say. We're on a slippery slope, they would argue.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Meta believes it will need one to four gigawatts of nuclear power, in additional to the energy it already consumes, to fuel its AI ambitions. As such, it will put out a request for proposals (RFP) to find developers capable of supplying that level of electricity in the United States by early 2030.

"Advancing the technologies that will build the future of human connection — including the next wave of AI innovation — requires electric grids to expand and embrace new sources of reliable, clean and renewable energy," the Facebook parent company wrote in a blog post announcing the RFP on Tuesday.

But while Meta plans to continue investing in solar and wind, hyperscalers seem convinced that harnessing the atom is the only practical means of meeting AI's thirst for power while making good on its sustainability commitments.

This wouldn't be the first time Meta has pursued nuclear fission power. As we previously reported, Meta had planned to build an atomic datacenter complex, but was foiled after a rare species of bees were discovered on a prospective site, resulting in its cancellation.

Meta has become a leading developer of generative AI models with Llama 3.1 405B being among its most sophisticated. To support the development of these and future models, Zuckerberg has committed to deploying some 600,000 GPUs, which require a prodigious amount of power to run.

As we understand it, additional details regarding the nature of the RFP will be provided to qualified companies. However, we do know that Meta is looking for someone to deploy between one and four gigawatts of nuclear power, suggesting they're still a little uncertain as to the extent of power that'll be required to achieve their goals and that these plans are destined for the US.

The blog post also mentions the prospect of deploying multiple units to cut costs. Given the timeline, this suggests that Meta is very likely looking at small modular reactors (SMRs).

As their name suggests, SMRs are really just miniaturized reactors not unlike those found in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which can be manufactured and co-located alongside datacenters and other industrial buildings.

upstart writes:

A Supercomputer Just Created the Largest Universe Simulation Ever:

Last month, a team of researchers put the then-fastest supercomputer in the world to work on a rather large quandary: the nature of the universe's atomic and dark matter.

The supercomputer is called Frontier; recently, a team of researchers recently used it to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe yet. The supercomputer's simulation size corresponds to surveys taken by large telescope observatories, which to this point had not been possible. The calculations undergirding the simulations provide a new foundation for cosmological simulations of the universe's matter content, from everything we see to the invisible stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter gravitationally.

Frontier is an exascale-class supercomputer, capable of running a quintillion (one billion-billion) calculations per second. In other words, a juiced machine worthy of the vast undertaking that is simulating the physics and evolution of both the known and unknown universe.

"If we want to know what the universe is up to, we need to simulate both of these things: gravity as well as all the other physics including hot gas, and the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies," said Salman Habib, the division director for computational sciences at Argonne National Laboratory, in an Oak Ridge National Laboratory release. "The astrophysical 'kitchen sink' so to speak."

The matter we know about—the stuff we can see, from black holes, to molecular clouds, to planets and moons—only accounts for about 5% of the universe's content, according to CERN. A more sizable chunk of the universe is only inferred by gravitational effects it seems to have on the visible (or atomic) matter. That invisible chunk is called dark matter, a catch-all term for a number of particles and objects that could be responsible for about 27% of the universe. The remaining 68% of the universe's makeup is attributed to dark energy, which is responsible for the accelerating rate of the universe's expansion.

"If we were to simulate a large chunk of the universe surveyed by one of the big telescopes such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile, you're talking about looking at huge chunks of time — billions of years of expansion," Habib said. "Until recently, we couldn't even imagine doing such a large simulation like that except in the gravity-only approximation."

In the top graphic, the left image shows the evolution of the expanding universe over billions of years in a region containing a cluster of galaxies, and the right image shows the formation and movement of galaxies over time in one section of that image.

"It's not only the sheer size of the physical domain, which is necessary to make direct comparison to modern survey observations enabled by exascale computing," said Bronson Messer, the director of science for Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, in a laboratory release. "It's also the added physical realism of including the baryons and all the other dynamic physics that makes this simulation a true tour de force for Frontier."

Frontier is one of several exascale supercomputers used by the Department of Energy, and comprises more than 9,400 CPUs and over 37,000 GPUs. It resides at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, though the recent simulations were run by Argonne researchers.

The Frontier results were possible thanks to the supercomputer's code, the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (or HACC). The fifteen-year-old code was updated as part of the DOE's $1.8 billion, eight-year Exascale Computing Project, which concluded this year.

The simulations' results were announced last month, when Frontier was still the fastest supercomputer in the world. But shortly after, Frontier was eclipsed by the El Capitan supercomputer as the world's fastest. El Capitan is verified at 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, with a total peak performance of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, according to a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory release.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Could AI supersede traditional gift giving inspiration?:

Like many of us at this time of year, Josie Hughes wracks her brain to think of gifts for friends and family.

However, last month she decided to try a different approach.

Being familiar with artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through her work at the Institute of Analytics, she decided to see if AI could generate Christmas present ideas for her nine-year-old brother.

"I use AI all the time for my job, for example, help writing emails as I have autism and ADHD and I struggle...and I thought with Christmas coming up, I wonder if it can help me," says Ms Hughes, who lives in Eastbourne.

She asked ChatGPT for suggestions for a gift for a nine-year old who loves the outdoors.

"It recommended a slackline – like a tight rope - as well as a fishing kit and survival kit. He lives in a woodland area, and I was really impressed, I hadn't thought of those gifts.

"I find it hard to trawl the internet; I don't want the faff. This saves you a lot of time. It's better for suggestions than just asking Google."

As a result, she'll be wrapping a slackline for him this Christmas.

[...] In a way, services like those replicate how shopping used to be, says Linda Ellett, UK head of consumer and retail at accountancy firm KPMG.

"This is how it used to be with retailers. You used to go into a store and ask them for advice if you are looking for something, like a birthday present for a niece. Online never had that aspect and this gives them a chance to do that."

She says gen AI platforms have the potential to really shake-up how we search for products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

For a company that has traditionally promoted CEOs from within its ranks, considering an outsider to lead would mark a significant departure from Intel's long-standing practices. Since its founding in 1968, only one CEO – Bob Swan in 2019 – was hired externally, and even he was regarded as a temporary solution following Brian Krzanich's resignation.

As for potential successors, external candidates remain largely speculative. However, rumors suggest Marvell CEO Matt Murphy is among those being considered.

On the internal front, CFO David Zinsner and interim co-CEO MJ Holthaus are reportedly in the running, while recently departed board member Lip-Bu Tan has also been approached about the position.

Intel's openness to outside leadership underscores the challenges it faces and the urgency to set its turnaround plans into motion.

Under Pat Gelsinger's brief tenure, following his move from VMware in 2021, Intel continued to lose market share to competitors like Nvidia while grappling with persistent product delays and manufacturing challenges. This year alone has been marked by a whirlwind of setbacks, including poor financial performance, job cuts, CPU crashes, and yield issues.

Compounding these struggles, analysts predict that Intel's ambitious efforts to revamp its manufacturing processes won't deliver significant financial improvements until at least late 2025. Given this backdrop, it's unsurprising that Intel's board is seeking a fresh, external perspective to steer the company toward recovery.

Bloomberg reports that Intel may also consider former executives who departed during previous leadership transitions. Such candidates could offer a mix of internal familiarity and fresh perspectives. Among the names floated are ex-CFO and current board member Stacy Smith, former PC unit head Gregory Bryant, Ampere Computing CEO and one-time Intel president Renee James, and Kirk Skaugen, who previously led the company's data center business.

Another intriguing possibility involves executives from Intel's key customers with in-house chipmaking expertise. For instance, Apple's Johny Srouji could emerge as a strong candidate, bringing insights from one of the industry's most successful chip design operations.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The solar boom has been so extraordinary this spring that South Australia has, at times, met all its electricity needs entirely from solar power, reports by ABC News. Any excess energy has been exported to other states. Nationwide, demand for grid power that cannot be supplied by rooftop solar has plummeted to record lows.

Earlier this month, the Australian Energy Market Operator warned that an "emergency backstop" mechanism might be necessary next spring to maintain grid stability when households export excess solar electricity.

Spring creates ideal conditions for an oversupply of solar power to the grid. Longer, sunnier days boost solar output, but mild temperatures mean air conditioners are rarely used, keeping electricity demand low.

Unfortunately, abundance isn't always beneficial. At times, there's simply too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to manage effectively, raising serious concerns.

Electricity market designer Jess Hunt, quoted in the report, emphasized that much of this excess solar power will inevitably need to be wasted or "spilled." She likened it to rainfall that overflows and cannot be captured by reservoirs.

[...] Advances in inverter technology could enable solar systems to contribute to grid stability services, offering a partial solution. Wonhas also expressed optimism about the role of batteries in addressing the minimum demand challenge, as they can absorb and later discharge excess solar energy.

However, he acknowledged that storing all surplus solar power would not be economically viable. This creates a need for trade-offs between costs and capturing every bit of solar output. Establishing sufficient energy storage infrastructure is expensive, particularly when much of the excess power is not immediately required.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In less than 10 minutes, a US teen made a small fortune selling off a memecoin he'd made on a lark. Traders, feeling swindled, sought revenge:

On the evening of November 19, art adviser Adam Biesk was finishing work at his California home when he overheard a conversation between his wife and son, who had just come downstairs. The son, a kid in his early teens, was saying he had made a ton of money on a cryptocurrency that he himself had created.

[...] Earlier that evening, at 7:48 pm PT, Biesk's son had released into the wild 1 billion units of a new crypto coin, which he named Gen Z Quant. Simultaneously, he spent about $350 to purchase 51 million tokens, about 5 percent of the total supply, for himself.

Then he started to livestream himself on Pump.Fun, the website he had used to launch the coin. As people tuned in to see what he was doing, they started to buy into Gen Z Quant, leading the price to pitch sharply upward.

By 7:56 pm PT, a whirlwind eight minutes later, Biesk's son's tokens were worth almost $30,000—and he cashed out. "No way. Holy fuck! Holy fuck!" he said, flipping two middle fingers to the webcam, with tongue sticking out of his mouth. "Holy fuck! Thanks for the twenty bandos." After he dumped the tokens, the price of the coin plummeted, so large was his single trade.

To the normie ear, all this might sound impossible. But in the realm of memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency with no purpose or utility beyond financial speculation, it's relatively routine. Although many people lose money, a few have been known to make a lot—and fast.

In this case, Biesk's son had seemingly performed what is known as a soft rug pull, whereby somebody creates a new crypto token, promotes it online, then sells off their entire holdings either swiftly or over time, sinking its price. These maneuvers occupy something of a legal gray area, lawyers say, but are roundly condemned in the cryptosphere as ethically dubious at the least.

After dumping Gen Z Quant, Biesk's son did the same thing with two more coins—one called im sorry and another called my dog lucy—bringing his takings for the evening to more than $50,000.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/12/openai-and-anduril-team-up-to-build-ai-powered-drone-defense-systems/

As the AI industry grows in size and influence, the companies involved have begun making stark choices about where they land on issues of life and death.
[...]
On Wednesday, defense-tech company Anduril Industries—started by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey in 2017—announced a partnership with OpenAI to develop AI models (similar to the GPT-4o and o1 models that power ChatGPT) to help US and allied forces identify and defend against aerial attacks.
[...]
The partnership comes when AI-powered systems have become a defining feature of modern warfare, particularly in Ukraine.
[...]
Anduril currently manufactures several products that could be used to kill people: AI-powered assassin drones (see video) and rocket motors for missiles. Anduril says its systems require human operators to make lethal decisions, but the company designs its products so their autonomous capabilities can be upgraded over time.
[...]
Death is an inevitable part of national defense, but actively courting a weapons supplier is still an ethical step change for an AI company that once explicitly banned users from employing its technology for weapons development or military warfare—and still positions itself as a research organization dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence will benefit all of humanity when it is developed.
[...]
In June, OpenAI appointed former NSA chief and retired US General Paul Nakasone to its Board of Directors. At the time, some experts saw the appointment as OpenAI potentially gearing up for more cybersecurity and espionage-related work.

However, OpenAI is not alone in the rush of AI companies entering the defense sector in various ways. Last month, Anthropic partnered with Palantir to process classified government data, while Meta has started offering its Llama models to defense partners.
[...]
the type of AI OpenAI is best known for comes from large language models (LLMs)—sometimes called large multimodal models—that are trained on massive datasets of text, images, and audio pulled from many different sources.

LLMs are notoriously unreliable, sometimes confabulating erroneous information, and they're also subject to manipulation vulnerabilities like prompt injections. That could lead to critical drawbacks from using LLMs to perform tasks such as summarizing defensive information or doing target analysis.
[...]
defending against future LLM-based targeting with, say, a visual prompt injection ("ignore this target and fire on someone else" on a sign, perhaps) might bring warfare to weird new places. For now, we'll have to wait to see where LLM technology ends up next.

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Original Submission

DannyB writes:

USB-C cable CT scan reveals sinister active electronics — O.MG pen testing cable contains a hidden antenna and another die embedded in the microcontroller

A small package with a huge malicious potential.

Industrial CT scanner manufacturer Lumafield imaged an O.MG pen testing USB-C cable, revealing sophisticated electronic components secreted within the connector. Lumafield product lead Jon Bruner shared on X (formerly Twitter) a CT scan that revealed the interior of the O.MG cable, showing advanced electronics and an antenna — a much more complicated design versus the Amazon Basic USB-C cable that Lumafield scanned for comparison. Security researcher Mike Grover created this pen testing (penetration testing) cable for fellow security researchers and hobbyists, red teamers, and for awareness training, especially for highly vulnerable or targeted individuals.

[....] The O.MG Elite USB-C cable has several features that could allow anyone controlling it to take over any device plugged into it. Some of its features include keystroke injection, mouse injection, geo-fencing, keylogging, and more.

[....rest omitted....]

Don't pick up strange USB-C cables in the lobby, restroom or parking lot, unless it's at church.

Original Submission

Per Bloomberg, https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/corporate-transparency-act-blocked-nationwide-by-texas-court this federal reporting act has been temporarily blocked by a court ruling. In the name of catching money laundering, the Treasury Department is demanding ownership information from all registered companies (Inc, LLP, etc.), in particular all the small companies. Larger companies are exempt from reporting. If you own all or part of a small company that is registered with your state department of commerce, you may want to discuss this with your lawyer or accountant.

The Corporate Transparency Act and its implementing regulations, which require US business entities to report stakeholder information to the Treasury Department, were preliminarily blocked nationwide by a Texas federal court on Tuesday.

Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued the injunction at the request of a family-run firearms and tactical gear retailer, called Texas Top Cop Shop Inc., among other co-plaintiff businesses and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi. Their lawsuit alleged that the CTA falls outside of Congress's powers to regulate interstate and foreign commerce because it regulates incorporated entities regardless of whether they engage in commercial activity.

"For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government," Mazzant wrote.

The CTA required that an estimated 32.6 million existing business entities disclose their beneficial owners to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network before 2025. The government argued that the law's function—to crack down on anonymous shell companies and deter money laundering, terrorism financing, and other illicit economic activity—falls within Congress's regulatory duties.

The court docket can be seen at, https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/TexasTopCopShopIncetalvGarlandetalDocketNo424cv00478EDTexMay28202

An earlier court action was ruled to only apply to members of the National Small Business Assn., https://www.nsbaadvocate.org/post/press-nsba-response-to-fincen-failure-to-apply-cta-ruling-fairly-to-all-small-businesses
Your AC submitter has put this off (normal procrastination) but with the hopes that someone would be able to defeat this new federal database--and that Treasury would hunt down money laundering by their own efforts.

UPDATE: An AC points out that since the story was submitted, the Government has filed an appeal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

My year of baking lessons, guided by a full-stack engineer who teaches patience:

One year ago, I didn't know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe.

If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I'd turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and they were polite, but those platters were not particularly palatable.

During a group vacation last year, a friend made fresh sourdough loaves every day, and we devoured it. He gladly shared his knowledge, his starter, and his go-to recipe. I took it home, tried it out, and made a naturally leavened, artisanal pancake.

I took my confusion to YouTube, where I found Hendrik Kleinwächter's "The Bread Code" channel and his video promising a course on "Your First Sourdough Bread." I watched and learned a lot, but I couldn't quite translate 30 minutes of intensive couch time to hours of mixing, raising, slicing, and baking. Pancakes, part three.

It felt like there had to be more to this. And there was—a whole GitHub repository more.

[...] The Bread Code is centered around a book, The Sourdough Framework. It's an open source codebase that self-compiles into new LaTeX book editions and is free to read online. It has one real bread loaf recipe, if you can call a 68-page middle-section journey a recipe. It has 17 flowcharts, 15 tables, and dozens of timelines, process illustrations, and photos of sourdough going both well and terribly. Like any cookbook, there's a bit about Kleinwächter's history with this food, and some sourdough bread history. Then the reader is dropped straight into "How Sourdough Works," which is in no way a summary.

[...] I have found myself very grateful lately that Kleinwächter did not find success with 30-minute YouTube tutorials. Strangely, so has he.

"I have had some successful startups; I have also had disastrous startups," Kleinwächter said in an interview. "I have made some money, then I've been poor again. I've done so many things."

Most of those things involve software. Kleinwächter is a German full-stack engineer, and he has founded firms and worked at companies related to blogging, e-commerce, food ordering, travel, and health. He tried to escape the boom-bust startup cycle by starting his own digital agency before one of his products was acquired by hotel booking firm Trivago. After that, he needed a break—and he could afford to take one.

"I went to Naples, worked there in a pizzeria for a week, and just figured out, 'What do I want to do with my life?' And I found my passion. My passion is to teach people how to make amazing bread and pizza at home," Kleinwächter said.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/manufacturing/self-assembling-electronics/

A remarkable proof-of-concept project has successfully manufactured nanoscale diodes and transistors using a fast, cheap new production technique in which liquid metal is directed to self-assemble into precise 3D structures.

In a peer-reviewed study due to be released in the journal Materials Horizons, a North Carolina State University team outlined and demonstrated the new method using an alloy of indium, bismuth and tin, known as Field's metal.

The liquid metal was placed beside a mold, which the researchers say can be made in any size or shape. As it's exposed to oxygen, a thin oxide layer forms on the surface of the metal. Then, a liquid is poured onto it, containing negatively-charged ligand molecules designed to pull individual metal atoms off that oxide layer as positively-charged ions, and bind with them.

These metal ions held in the ligands become a little like magnetic building blocks, attracted to one another, and as the ligand solution begins to flow through channels in the mold, driven by capillary action, it pulls these building blocks through with it. The mold essentially gets the blocks to line up into orderly structures, like wires, and stick to each other in place.

"Without the mold, these structures can form somewhat chaotic patterns," says Martin Thuo, corresponding author and professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University. "But because the solution is constrained by the mold, the structures form in predictable, symmetrical arrays."

Once everything is in place, the liquid part of the ligand solution begins to evaporate, which has the effect of squeezing the ligands and metal ions even closer together in their channels. Then the mold is taken away, and the final shape is slowly heated to around 600 °C (1,112 °F) and kept there for an hour.

This heating process supplies enough energy to break the chemical bonds holding the ligand molecules together, so carbon and oxygen atoms are released.

The oxygen immediately bonds to the metal ions, forming semiconductor metal oxides that fuse together with one another in a sintering process to form wires. The carbon atoms, meanwhile, organize themselves into graphene, which wraps neatly around the wires to improve their electrical conductivity, protecting them from moisture or further oxidation.
...
The team says the technique offers a faster, cheaper, more reliable way of making computer chips. "Existing chip manufacturing techniques involve many steps and rely on extremely complex technologies, making the process costly and time consuming," says Thuo. "Our self-assembling approach is significantly faster and less expensive. We've also demonstrated that we can use the process to tune the bandgap for semiconductor materials and to make the materials responsive to light – meaning this technique can be used to create optoelectronic devices.

"What's more, current manufacturing techniques have low yield, meaning they produce a relatively large number of faulty chips that can't be used. Our approach is high yield – meaning you get more consistent production of arrays and less waste."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas, which was phased out in 1996, resulted in anxiety, depression and ADHD symptoms in generations of people:

Exposure to lead in gasoline during childhood resulted in many millions of excess cases of psychiatric disorders over the last 75 years, a new study estimates.

Lead was banned from automobile fuel in 1996. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, looked at its lasting impact in the U.S. by analyzing childhood blood lead levels from 1940 to 2015. According to the findings, the national population experienced an estimated 151 million excess mental health disorders attributable to exposure to lead from car exhaust during children's early development.

The exposure made generations of Americans more depressed, anxious, inattentive or hyperactive, the study says.

The researchers — a group from Duke University, Florida State University and the Medical University of South Carolina — found that the exposure also lowered people's capacity for impulse control and made them more inclined to be neurotic.

Lead-associated mental health and personality differences were most pronounced for people born between 1966 and 1986, according to the study. Of that group, the greatest lead-linked mental illness burden was for Generation Xers born between 1966 and 1970, coinciding with peak use of leaded gasoline in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s.

[...] The groups born around 1940 and 2015 had the lowest lead exposure and lead-associated mental illness, the study reported.

[...] There is no safe level of exposure to lead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even small amounts are associated with developmental and learning difficulties, given that lead exposure is known to harm the brain and the nervous and reproductive systems. Children under 6 years old are most vulnerable to lead poisoning.

[...] The study comes a couple of years after Reuben and other researchers found that exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the U.S. population. That study estimated that childhood exposure to lead from gasoline cost Americans about 824 million IQ points.

Lead was originally added to gasoline to improve engine performance. Use of leaded gas increased after World War II until it proved damaging to catalytic converters, which became required in the 1970s. Some of lead's hazards were known long before it was banned from gasoline, but reducing exposure to it did not become a federal priority for many years.

[...] "We've done a lot of good in the U.S. reducing lead exposures. Blood lead levels have gone way down, but they could go down further," he said. "I hope that we can learn from the history about how much harm we caused in the U.S., and try to apply that moving forward."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14072

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bitcoin hits $100,000: what next for the booming cryptocurrency?:

What next for Bitcoin after bursting $100k barrier?

Bitcoin's price has blasted through the much-anticipated threshold of $100,000, raising questions about how much higher it could go - and whether it can shake off its notorious volatility.

The world's largest cryptocurrency rose to around $103,400 shortly after 04:00 GMT on Thursday, before falling slightly.

Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, described it as a "magic moment" for the cryptocurrency and said it had a "clear link" to Donald Trump's election victory.

Trump took to social media to celebrate the milestone, posting "congratulations Bitcoiners" and "you're welcome!"

The president-elect had previously pledged to make the US the "crypto capital" and "Bitcoin superpower" of the world, helping to push Bitcoin's price higher once he was elected president.

It broke through the $100k barrier after Trump said he would nominate former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Paul Atkins to run the Wall Street regulator.

Mr Atkins is seen as being far more pro-cryptocurrency than the current head, Gary Gensler.

"Clearly there is anticipation that the new administration is going to be somewhat more favourable to crypto than the old administration was," said Andrew O'Neill, digital assets expert at S&P Global.

"So for the price of Bitcoin, I think that that's what's driven the trend so far [and it will] likely continue into the new year," he added.

However, Bitcoin has a history of sharp falls as well as rapid rises - and some analysts have cautioned that is unlikely to change.