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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 05, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the laughter-and-tears dept.

Intro:

There can be few series made for television that have had such an impact in countries all around the world as MASH.

This submission arrived as an obituary but wasn't best suited to being front page story. It was submitted anonymously and we could not therefore suggest to the submitter that he/she put it in a journal - if indeed they have one.

Nevertheless, the fact that somebody created a comedy about a war that had ended many years before, and in which every character would be memorable years later was a concept that few today would back financially as a sure-fire winner. But it was.

It can still be found being repeated on various channels, and the humour remains as sharp as it ever was - along with its anti-war message. It is perhaps a pity that more people don't remember that aspect of it. As well as much laughter there were also moments of intense sadness - but both caused the viewer to think more deeply about the subject of war, and of the doctors, nurses, medics (and clerks!) who never lifted a weapon in anger but who could still hold their heads up high when they finally returned home. Those who served in such roles were changed people as a result of the experience.

What do you remember of the characters that starred in MASH, and which scenes in particular spring to mind whenever a discussion such as this is started? Are there other TV series that have had such an impact on you, and would you recommend them to our community?

And the obituary? It is repeated in full after the break. It is well worth a read...[JR]

Loretta Swit obituary:

The American actor Loretta Swit, who has died aged 87, achieved worldwide fame as Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, head nurse with a mobile army hospital during the Korean war, in the TV sitcom M*A*S*H. She appeared in all 11 series, from 1972 to 1983 – longer than the conflict that inspired it – taking over the role played by Sally Kellerman in the 1970 film.

Misogyny ran throughout the big-screen version of M*A*S*H in a way that was not present in the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker on which it was based.In the TV version, too, Major Houlihan, a strict disciplinarian, was the butt of sexist jokes from the surgeons and other men in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit, particularly "Hawkeye" Pierce (played by Alan Alda). Swit – who had the only leading female role in the show – took a stand before the fifth series began. She was then allowed to contribute to her character's development, making Houlihan more three-dimensional, warm and brave. "I am a feminist, from the top of my head to the bottom of my toenail, and I favour playing strong women," she told the American magazine Closer Weekly in 2022.

From then on, Swit's character was referred to mainly by her real name rather than as "Hot Lips" and a more human side emerged when Houlihan broke down in front of her nurses, confessing she was hurt by the disdain they held for her because of her stern manner. The character's long-running relationship with Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) ended and she married Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott (first played by Beeson Carroll and then Mike Henry), whom she later divorced when he cheated on her. Swit's performance won her two Emmy awards as outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series, in 1980 and 1982.

She might have had global recognition for a second TV role, in a programme that was groundbreaking for its portrayal of women, if the M*A*S*H producers had not refused to let her out of her contract. Swit played the police detective Christine Cagney, alongside Tyne Daly as Mary Beth Lacey, in the feature-length 1981 pilot of Cagney & Lacey. It was the first American police drama to feature women in the two lead roles. In Cagney & Lacey, there was gritty realism and the authenticity of women balancing their work and home lives but, as Swit was unavailable, Meg Foster took over as Cagney when the series began, replaced after six episodes by Sharon Gless.

Swit never had another starring vehicle. "Actors are always identified with certain parts," she said. "To some, Marlon Brando will always be the Godfather. That's just how it is."

Perhaps her best film role was as the first female American president – succeeding a former circus clown, a parody of Ronald Reagan – in Whoops Apocalypse (1986), the writers Andrew Marshall and David Renwick's variation on their British sitcom.

Loretta was born in Passaic, New Jersey, to parents of Polish descent, Nellie (nee Kassack) and Lester Szwed, an upholsterer, who anglicised the family name to Swit. She attended Pope Pius XII high school, Passaic, where she appeared in school plays, and Gibbs College, Montclair, New Jersey, then had various secretarial jobs. Moving to New York, she trained in acting with Gene Frankel at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1959. Her break in New York theatre came off-Broadway, at the Circle in the Square in 1961 when she joined the cast of the long-running Actors' Playhouse production of The Balcony, by Jean Genet.

She spent the rest of the decade exclusively on stage until travelling to Hollywood in 1969. Then, she began to get small roles on television, including three in Hawaii Five-O (between 1969 and 1972) and two in Gunsmoke (both in 1970).

Later, she starred on Broadway as Doris in Bernard Slade's "annual adultery" play Same Time, Next Year (Brooks Atkinson theatre, 1975-76), taking over the role originated by Ellen Burstyn. The New York Times observed that she gave a "stylish impersonation" of Burstyn, who had won a Tony award for her performance.

Swit was on Broadway again in Rupert Holmes's musical version of Charles Dickens's unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Imperial theatre, 1985-86), replacing Cleo Laine in the dual roles of the Princess Puffer and Miss Angela Prysock. One stage part that seemed made for Swit was the title character in the British playwright Willy Russell's one-woman show Shirley Valentine, which she took first in Chicago (Wellington and Wisdom Bridge theatres, 1990), then on an American tour (1995) and Canadian stages (1997 and 2010). The role of the bored Liverpool housewife escaping her humdrum life and uncaring husband had been played in the West End of London and the film version by Pauline Collins, who also took it to Broadway. Swit said of the character: "A lot of her experiences are universal – her ambition and desire, her lust for life and feelings of frustration at not fulfilling certain aspects of her own potential. I had kinship with her the moment I read the script."

Eve Ensler's comic and at times seriously political play The Vagina Monologues had Swit as one of the three women taking multiple roles, first at the Westside theatre in New York (1999), then in the West End (Arts theatre, 2001-02) and on an American tour (2002-03).

The actor was a passionate animal activist and supported many charities, as well as setting up her own, SwitHeart Animal Alliance. Her book SwitHeart: The Watercolour Artistry & Animal Activism of Loretta Swit was published in 2017.

Swit's 1983 marriage to the actor and lawyer Dennis Holahan ended in divorce 12 years later.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 05, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the my-password-is-123456 dept.

Risevatnet Lake is a small dammed lake near the city of Svelgen in the South-West of Norway. It primarily serves as a fish farm.

On April 7 its dam control system was breached by a Russian hacktivist group, Z-PENTEST (guess what the Z stands for). The main valve was put on maximum opening, increasing the water flow to maximum volume for four hours before the incident was detected; on April 10 the dam's owner alerted authorities.

The hackers got in through a weak password -- the classical 123456, or risevatnet123, perhaps -- on the web interface used to control the dam. This web interface was directly connected to the Internet.
  Once logged in, the hackers could directly control a motorized valve which controlled the water flow. (Why local teenagers hadn't discovered this before remains a mystery.)

About 145,000 Industrial Control Devices (ICS) were found to be directly connected to the Internet in a 2024 Censys scan (pdf). Of these devices, 48,000, or 38%, were located in the US, with Europe accounting for a comparable number (35%). A sizeable portion (34%) of devices were water and wastewater related, while 23% were associated with agricultural processes. Many of these devices -- including HMIs, PLCs, and SCADA panels—were discoverable with simple scans, and often "protected" by default or easily guessed passwords.

If you read around a bit, the impression is that Z-PENTEST is something like a splinter group from another "hacktivist" group, the People's Cyber Army. Both groups have boosted on Telegram about similar actions before -- aiming for oil wells, dams and rural water systems. Their targets have been in the United States, Canada, Australia, France, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, Romania, Germany, and Poland.

It has to be seen whether this latest action -- freeing fish from Western Propaganda and the Capitalists' Deadly Grip -- will give them much street cred in the hacker scene.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 05, @11:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-what-she-said dept.

Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum Mirabile Is A Novel Archaeon With An Unprecedentedly Small Genome:

Defining the minimal genetic requirements for cellular life remains a fundamental question in biology. Genomic exploration continually reveals novel microbial lineages, often exhibiting extreme genome reduction, particularly within symbiotic relationships.

Here, we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome— from a dinoflagellate-associated microbial community.

Phylogenetic analyses place Sukunaarchaeum as a deeply branching lineage within the tree of Archaea, representing a novel major branch distinct from established phyla. Environmental sequence data indicate that sequences closely related to Sukunaarchaeum form a diverse and previously overlooked clade in microbial surveys.

Its genome is profoundly stripped-down, lacking virtually all recognizable metabolic pathways, and primarily encoding the machinery for its replicative core: DNA replication, transcription, and translation. This suggests an unprecedented level of metabolic dependence on a host, a condition that challenges the functional distinctions between minimal cellular life and viruses.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum pushes the conventional boundaries of cellular life and highlights the vast unexplored biological novelty within microbial interactions, suggesting that further exploration of symbiotic systems may reveal even more extraordinary life forms, reshaping our understanding of cellular evolution.

See also:


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Saturday July 05, @07:00AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly announced the order on Friday, when she said a national security review concluded the company’s ongoing operations “would be injurious to Canada’s national security.”

Canada’s government will stop using any Hikvision products it finds and has banned government agencies from buying any more Hikvision kit.

Hikvision has responded by criticizing the Minister’s “unfounded allegations of national security concerns.”

“Instead of evaluating our technology on its cybersecurity merits, the decision appears to be driven by the parent company’s country of origin, reflecting broader geopolitical tensions and an unjustified bias against Chinese companies,” the company stated.

According to Hikvision Canada: "Hikvision Canada Inc. is a full service, end-to-end security solutions provider, employing a number of experienced, professionals situated across the country. Offices which include state of the art customer experience showrooms are located in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. In addition, Hikvision Canada has a full Distribution Warehouse facility in Vancouver."


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Saturday July 05, @02:15AM   Printer-friendly

A newly unsealed federal criminal indictment says North Korean criminals stole $1 million in cryptocurrency from Atlanta blockchain security startup Starter Labs.

"The defendants used fake and stolen personal identities to conceal their North Korean nationality, pose as remote IT workers, and exploit their victims' trust to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars," said U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. "This indictment highlights the unique threat North Korea poses to companies that hire remote IT workers and underscores our resolve to prosecute any actor, in the United States or abroad, who steals from Georgia businesses."

The FBI indicted Kim Kwang Jin, Kang Tae Bok, Jong Pong Ju and Chang Nam Il on wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy charges. According to the FBI, the men used fake and stolen identities to infiltrate the American business as remote IT workers. They then gained their employer's trust to gain access to the company's virtual currency and steal it.

The Atlanta business and a Serbian company also targeted said they wouldn't have hired the men had they known they were North Korean citizens.

All four men indicted are wanted. FBI agents are now offering a $5 million for information.

The North Koreans worked for the Atlanta company for about two years before striking and cleaning out a cryptocurrency account.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @09:23PM   Printer-friendly

Mess is best: disordered structure of battery-like devices improves performance:

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge used experimental and computer modelling techniques to study the porous carbon electrodes used in supercapacitors. They found that electrodes with a more disordered chemical structure stored far more energy than electrodes with a highly ordered structure.

Supercapacitors are a key technology for the energy transition and could be useful for certain forms of public transport, as well as for managing intermittent solar and wind energy generation, but their adoption has been limited by poor energy density.

The researchers say their results, reported in the journal Science, represent a breakthrough in the field and could reinvigorate the development of this important net-zero technology.

Like batteries, supercapacitors store energy, but supercapacitors can charge in seconds or a few minutes, while batteries take much longer. Supercapacitors are far more durable than batteries, and can last for millions of charge cycles. However, the low energy density of supercapacitors makes them unsuitable for delivering long-term energy storage or continuous power.

"Supercapacitors are a complementary technology to batteries, rather than a replacement," said Dr Alex Forse from Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, who led the research. "Their durability and extremely fast charging capabilities make them useful for a wide range of applications."

A bus, train or metro powered by supercapacitors, for example, could fully charge in the time it takes to let passengers off and on, providing it with enough power to reach the next stop. This would eliminate the need to install any charging infrastructure along the line. However, before supercapacitors are put into widespread use, their energy storage capacity needs to be improved.

While a battery uses chemical reactions to store and release charge, a supercapacitor relies on the movement of charged molecules between porous carbon electrodes, which have a highly disordered structure. "Think of a sheet of graphene, which has a highly ordered chemical structure," said Forse. "If you scrunch up that sheet of graphene into a ball, you have a disordered mess, which is sort of like the electrode in a supercapacitor."

Because of the inherent messiness of the electrodes, it's been difficult for scientists to study them and determine which parameters are the most important when attempting to improve performance. This lack of clear consensus has led to the field getting a bit stuck.

Many scientists have thought that the size of the tiny holes, or nanopores, in the carbon electrodes was the key to improved energy capacity. However, the Cambridge team analysed a series of commercially available nanoporous carbon electrodes and found there was no link between pore size and storage capacity.

Forse and his colleagues took a new approach and used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy – a sort of 'MRI' for batteries – to study the electrode materials. They found that the messiness of the materials – long thought to be a hindrance – was the key to their success.

"Using NMR spectroscopy, we found that energy storage capacity correlates with how disordered the materials are – the more disordered materials can store more energy," said first author Xinyu Liu, a PhD candidate co-supervised by Forse and Professor Dame Clare Grey. "Messiness is hard to measure – it's only possible thanks to new NMR and simulation techniques, which is why messiness is a characteristic that's been overlooked in this field."

When analysing the electrode materials with NMR spectroscopy, a spectrum with different peaks and valleys is produced. The position of the peak indicates how ordered or disordered the carbon is. "It wasn't our plan to look for this, it was a big surprise," said Forse. "When we plotted the position of the peak against energy capacity, a striking correlation came through – the most disordered materials had a capacity almost double that of the most ordered materials."

So why is mess good? Forse says that's the next thing the team is working on. More disordered carbons store ions more efficiently in their nanopores, and the team hope to use these results to design better supercapacitors. The messiness of the materials is determined at the point they are synthesised.

"We want to look at new ways of making these materials, to see how far messiness can take you in terms of improving energy storage," said Forse. "It could be a turning point for a field that's been stuck for a little while. Clare and I started working on this topic over a decade ago, and it's exciting to see a lot of our previous fundamental work now having a clear application."

Reference:
Xinyu Liu et al. 'Structural disorder determines capacitance in nanoporous carbons.' Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adn6242


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Manufacturing advanced computer components of the future may take place in space rather than on Earth. Space Forge, a UK-based startup, had its ForgeStar-1 satellite launched into orbit via SpaceX, paving the way for the satellite to ignite its forge and begin producing semiconductors in space.

ForgeStar-1 is officially the UK's first ever in-space manufacturing satellite, enabling the company to build semiconductors in space. The satellite was entirely designed and built in Cardiff, Wales, and launched into space as part of SpaceX's Transporter-14 rideshare mission. The satellite waited for approvals in the United States since April before finally entering orbit today.

ForgeStar-1 has yet to ignite its forge, with the timetable for when this will happen not yet public. "We've built and launched Britain's first manufacturing satellite, and it's alive in orbit. That's a massive technical achievement," shared Space Forge CEO Joshua Western. "Now, we take the next step: proving that we can create the right environment for manufacturing in space. This is the start of a new era for materials science and industrial capability."

In-space manufacturing is a relatively new field that seeks to utilize the unique characteristics of outer space and/or low-Earth orbit to achieve fabrication methods not possible on Earth. Space Forge's primary goals are to produce semiconductors for data center, quantum, and military use cases, using "space-derived crystal seeds" to initiate semiconductor growth, utilizing unlimited vacuum and subzero temperatures for manufacturing, and then returning the chips to Earth for packaging.

The ForgeStar-1 satellite will not bring the cargo it manufactures back to Earth at the completion of its mission. Acting more as a proof-of-concept and prototype for a litany of technologies engineered by Space Forge, the satellite will be tasked with running through the successful application of key technologies for in-space manufacturing, and will end its mission with a spectacular fireball.

Space Forge plans to test both the best-case and worst-case scenarios for the satellite's recovery. First, it will deploy its proprietary Pridwen heat shield and on-orbit controls to steer the satellite, and then test its failsafe mechanism, which involves disintegrating the craft in orbit.

The company's roadmap from 2022 shows that ForgeStar-1's successor, ForgeStar-2, will be the first craft from the company to develop semiconductors that will be returned safely to Earth. The craft will develop enough chips so that the "value of the material manufactured in space exceeds the cost of placing the satellite into orbit", and will be joined eventually by a full stable of Space Forge satellites. The company eventually hopes to build 10-12 satellites per year, reusing craft after the completion of their one- to six-month fabrication missions. Eventually, the company aims to surpass 100 satellite launches per year.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @11:57AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Meta announced just a couple weeks ago that it would finally start testing a dedicated inbox for direct messages on Threads. Now, it's making the feature official and rolling out DMs to everyone. As with the earlier test, the update will add a messaging tab to the Threads app where users can access the inbox and exchange DMs with mutuals.

Meta says that initially people will only be able to send messages to users who already follow them or mutual followers from Instagram, though it plans to roll out more customizable inbox controls in a later update. Messaging will also only be available to Threads users over the age of 18. The app also won't support group messaging for now, though it's apparently in the works. Those limitations could be a bit frustrating as it makes Threads DMs more limited than what's available on Instagram, but it's still a lot more convenient than Meta's previous insistence on relying on the Instagram inbox for Threads.

The company's executives were initially very much opposed to bringing DMs to Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained his thinking in 2023, noting that "two redundant message threads with each of your friends with the same handles in two different apps" seemed like a less than ideal solution. But that position has made less and less sense as Threads has grown to more than 350 million users. "More than a third of daily Threads users with connections follow mostly different accounts on Threads than on Instagram, showing that Threads is establishing its own unique user base," Meta notes in a blog post.

Two years in, the company is also more explicitly positioning Threads as an alternative to X rather than another offshoot of Instagram. While Mosseri once said that the goal of Threads "isn't to replace Twitter," Meta has since walked back its prohibition on recommending political content and experimented with features to help users find familiar creators from X. The company has also leaned more heavily into real-time conversations and news by making trending topics more prominent in the app and surfacing more links in recommendations. Today's update also adds a "highlighter" feature that will make trends even more visible in users' feeds.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @07:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the price-of-putting-your-head-in-the-ground dept.

"The green transition is not easy, but it is possible."

(Terje Aasland, Minister of Energy, Norway)

Ultimately, to manage this climate change thingy, we need to put back all the carbon dioxide emitted since about the 1960s somewhere in a deep hole.

Now Norway has taken the first serious step towards that goal.

We've mentioned their industrial scale carbon-capture-and-storage [CCS] project -- dubbed NorthernLights -- earlier before, when it was still in the proof-of-concept phase. Now NorthernLights has turned fully operational.

The first shipment of carbon dioxide left Heidelberg Materials' plant in Brevik in southern Norway this month by ship, and will be injected in reservoirs under the North Sea in August. It is set to store 5mn tonnes of carbon dioxide under the sea, at a cost of $3.4bn, spread out of 10 years. The Norvegian government subsidizes 64% of the costs, while the rest is covered by a consortium of 3 oil companies (Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies).

Proponents of CCS argue that it is the most promising solution for so-called hard-to-abate sectors — such as cement, steel and coal-fired power — to eliminate their emissions. But critics contend that it is a costly process, difficult to scale and dependent on massive subsidies. These are often difficult for most cash-strapped governments to provide, except for the likes of Norway, western Europe's largest petroleum producer and home to the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.

To put this in context, the European Union has set a target of capturing and storing 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, by 2050.

The driver to do so is the increasing cost of carbon permits. These are publicly traded in the EUs Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) under a cap-and-trade system. The cap means that the amount of carbon permits given to a company each year are decreasing in time, ending up at 0 in 2050. The scheme currently covers only the largest emitters, i.e. approximately 10,000 companies in the power sector and manufacturing industry as well as airlines operating between airports located in the European Economic Area, covering roughly 40 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the EU. There are talks going on to extend the system to other companies as well.

The EU ETS market didn't come out of the blue: it was inspired by the USA's Clean Air Act of 1977, which laid down a trading scheme to curb acid rain by capping-and-trading sulphur dioxide emissions. Other countries, as well as separate US states, are now copying this approach for their own carbon dioxide emissions, e.g. China and California. The global value of carbon markets is expected to reach 2.68 trillion dollars by 2028 and 22 trillion by 2050.

Albert Rösti, Switzerland's energy minister, said on Tuesday that CCS was "too expensive" for his landlocked country and that it would be the "last step" to meeting climate targets after easier measures such as cutting transport emissions. Nonetheless, he added: "It is not only theory, but Norway has gone to action."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @05:35AM   Printer-friendly

From the staff, may I wish all members of our US community a very happy Independence Day and holiday weekend.

When the BBQs and beer get too much, when being sociable with other family members is getting you down, come back and join in a discussion or two.

posted by janrinok on Friday July 04, @02:27AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

China aims to become the global supplier of chips in the next few years.

Market research and tech consulting firm Yole Group predicts that China will have 30% of the world’s global foundry production capacity, making it the largest hub of semiconductor production. At the moment, Taiwan holds the highest output capacity at 23%, followed closely by China at 21%, South Korea at 19%, Japan at 13%, the U.S. at 10%, and Europe at 8%. According to Digitimes, China is expected to take the lead because of the massive investments in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, driven by Beijing’s goal of reaching self-sufficiency for its chip production.

In 2024, the East Asian country’s semiconductor production hit 8.85 million wafers per month, an increase of 15% from the previous year, and is projected to hit 10.1 million in 2025. China achieved this with the construction of 18 new fabs — for example, Huahong Semiconductor, and pure-play foundry based in Shanghai, just opened a 12-inch fab in Wuxi, with production beginning in the first quarter of this year.

The U.S. is the largest consumer of wafers, accounting for about 57% of global demand. However, it holds just around 10% of global production capacity, meaning it must source the rest of its supply from other major producers like Taiwan, South Korea, and China. On the other hand, Digitimes says that Japan’s and Europe’s production largely satisfies internal demand. There are other producers out there, too, like Singapore and Malaysia, which make up around 6% of global foundry capacity. These companies are largely foreign-owned, though, and exist to satisfy the demand in areas like the U.S. and China.

It seems that the report does not consider the fabs that are under construction in the United States, though. Several companies have started construction in the U.S., TSMC chief among them, with the company expecting to build 30% of its advanced chips in Arizona. Intel, Samsung, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and Texas Instruments also have projects underway, which will add to the U.S. wafer production capacity.

Additionally, the report did not specify how the technological capabilities of China's fabs compare to those of their Western counterparts. The U.S. has been putting export controls on the most advanced chip-making tech, making it harder for Chinese companies to acquire the necessary equipment to produce the latest chips. Because of this, Beijing is pouring billions of dollars into helping fill in the gaps in its semiconductor industry, like lithography tools and electronic design automation (EDA) software. So, even though China will likely have the upper hand when it comes to output capacity, the question of which country will have the greatest capability of producing cutting-edge chips in the near future is still up in the air.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday July 03, @09:43PM   Printer-friendly

Earthquake-induced electricity offers answer to mystery of gold nugget formation:

The pressure created by earthquakes could trigger quartz veins to generate enough electricity to form large nuggets of gold, researchers in Australia have found.

Most gold nuggets originate in quartz veins when gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids from the earth's crust are transported along fracture networks by earthquakes. '[Quartz veins] form over the accumulation of thousands of earthquake events,' says Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and lead researcher on the study. 'There's a fault that turns into a quartz vein and then it'll fracture open repeatedly during many, many earthquakes... And every time it fractures open, a gold-bearing fluid from deep in the crust flows through it.'

The overall mechanism behind the transport and deposition of gold are relatively well understood but the formation of large nuggets of gold in quartz veins has remained something of a mystery, particularly given the low concentration of gold in hydrothermal fluids and the chemical inertness of quartz. 'In this type of setting gold is transported in fluid as molecules in tiny amounts,' explains Laura Petrella, a geologist at the University of Western Australia, who was not involved in the study. 'So we struggle to understand how big nuggets can form, considering that we have only a little amount of gold in the fluid.'

Quartz veins are known to emit a measurable electric charge when put under mechanical stress, such as by an earthquake – a phenomenon known as piezoelectricity. To investigate whether earthquake-induced piezoelectric discharges from quartz could explain the formation of gold nuggets, the researchers conducted experiments using slabs of quartz. The slabs were placed within sealed chambers containing gold-rich solutions and the shaking of an earthquake was replicated mechanically.

'Using our model, you have a quartz vein, it breaks open during the "earthquake", gold rich fluid is rushing by, but the ground is shaking because it's an earthquake, so it's all rattling, and that rattling will stress the quartz crystals that are in the vein wall and generate a voltage,' Voisey explains. 'If that voltage is high enough ie higher than the redox potential of a gold-bearing ligand or gold-bearing molecule, that gold will get reduced, so it gets separated from the molecule – it'll precipitate as native gold.'

As expected, the rattled quartz created an electrical field and this resulted in the gold nanoparticles in the solution being drawn out and deposited as grains along the vein. However, this wasn't the end of the story.

'When [the gold] precipitates, it then becomes the focus for ongoing electron donation, because gold is a conductor and quartz is an insulator,' says Voisey. 'If you have gold on a piece of quartz and you deform the quartz, it will use that voltage to donate its own electrons, and when it does that, it becomes the focus for further gold reduction from the fluid and it'll grow and become a big gold nugget.'

Voisey says this work was a 'pure scientific endeavour'. 'The cool thing about it is that we're explaining something that we haven't been able to explain. We know a lot about how gold mineralises – people have been studying this forever, but this was just one of the little outstanding things.'

Petrella says it was a 'novel idea' to look at the electric properties of quartz. 'It's very interesting ... of course, this type of gold deposit forms as a result of fracturing in the crust so we already kind of know they form as a result of earthquakes ... but they actually show that the specific property of the quartz might be able to trigger the deposition of gold that is in the fluid originally.'

She says that one limitation of the work is that for the process to work the quartz would need to be crystalised already, which might not always be the case. 'This theory works really well for what we call remobilisation. Remobilisation is when you have a vein already formed with gold already in it, and then when you apply more stress on this vein, then you will move around, redissolve the gold, and then reprecipitate it. So in the case of remobilisation, this theory that they propose would work really well.'

She says that that the researchers' findings could have important applications in gold mining. 'Mining explorers would be really interested in knowing how you concentrate gold, because it would help in targeting high-grade gold deposits – obviously, it's more environmental friendly to mine a deposit where gold is concentrated.'

Gold nugget formation from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz:

Gold nuggets occur predominantly in quartz veins, and the current paradigm posits that gold precipitates from dilute (1 mg kg−1 gold), hot, water ± carbon dioxide-rich fluids owing to changes in temperature, pressure and/or fluid chemistry. However, the widespread occurrence of large gold nuggets is at odds with the dilute nature of these fluids and the chemical inertness of quartz. Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of earthquake activity that drives orogenic gold deposit formation means that quartz crystals in veins will experience thousands of episodes of deviatoric stress. Here we use quartz deformation experiments and piezoelectric modelling to investigate whether piezoelectric discharge from quartz can explain the ubiquitous gold–quartz association and the formation of gold nuggets. We find that stress on quartz crystals can generate enough voltage to electrochemically deposit aqueous gold from solution as well as accumulate gold nanoparticles. Nucleation of gold via piezo-driven reactions is rate-limiting because quartz is an insulator; however, since gold is a conductor, our results show that existing gold grains are the focus of ongoing growth. We suggest this mechanism can help explain the creation of large nuggets and the commonly observed highly interconnected gold networks within quartz vein fractures.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Thursday July 03, @04:56PM   Printer-friendly

A new study is shedding light on why solar radiation is more effective than other forms of energy at causing water to evaporate. The key factor turns out to be the oscillating electric field inherent to sunlight itself:

"It's well established that the sun is exceptionally good at causing water to evaporate – more efficient than heating water on the stove, for instance," says Saqlain Raza, first author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. "However, it has not been clear exactly why. Our work highlights the role that electric fields play in this process."

"This is part of a larger effort in the research community to understand this phenomenon, which has applications such as engineering more efficient water-evaporation technologies," says Jun Liu, co-corresponding author of the paper and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State.

To explore questions related to sunlight's efficiency at evaporating water, the researchers turned to computational simulations. This allowed them to alter different parameters associated with sunlight to see how those characteristics influence evaporation.

"Light is an electromagnetic wave, which consists – in part – of an oscillating electric field," Liu says. "We found that if we removed the oscillating electric field from the equation, it takes longer for sunlight to evaporate water. But when the field is present, water evaporates very quickly. And the stronger the electric field, the faster the water evaporates. The presence of this electric field is what separates light from heat when it comes to evaporating water."

But what exactly is the oscillating electric field doing?

"During evaporation, one of two things is happening," Raza says. "Evaporation either frees individual water molecules, which drift away from the bulk of liquid water, or it frees water clusters. Water clusters are finite groups of water molecules which are connected to each other but can be broken away from the rest of the liquid water even though they are still interconnected. Usually both of these things happen to varying degrees."

"We found that the oscillating electric field is particularly good at breaking off water clusters," says Liu. "This is more efficient, because it doesn't take more energy to break off a water cluster (with lots of molecules) than it does to break off a single molecule."

[...] "This work substantially advances our understanding of what's taking place in this phenomenon, since we are the first to show the role of the water clusters via computational simulation," says Liu.

Journal Reference:
Saqlain Raza, Cong Yang, Xin Qian, et al. Oscillations in incident electric field enhances interfacial water evaporation [open], Materials Horizons (DOI: 10.1039/D5MH00353A)


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posted by hubie on Thursday July 03, @12:11PM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line.

While China, with a maglev train hitting 650 km/h (404 mph) in just seven seconds, might regard the achievement as cute, it is a milestone for Germany, where exceeding 300 km/h (186 mph) on the rail network is rare.

The UK had its own attempt at going beyond traditional rail in the 1960s and the early 1970s with the Hovertrain, but the project was cancelled in 1973.

France pushed a steel-wheeled TGV to a record 574.8 km/h (357 mph) in 2007, yet the German achievement will inject a dose of pride into the country's beleaguered network, once an icon of efficiency.

According to a report in the UK's Financial Times, Deutsche Bahn delivers "one of the least reliable services in central Europe," even when compared to the UK's rail system, which is hardly a performance benchmark.

The test ran on a high-speed line that had been in continuous operation for ten years. According to Dr Philipp Nagl, CEO of DB InfraGO AG, no adjustments were needed.

"It is confirmation that infrastructure investments are the foundation for reliable, sustainable, and efficient mobility and logistics over generations," he said.

[...] Thomas Graetz, Vice President High Speed and Intercity Trains, Siemens Mobility, said: "Our goal was to gain in-depth insights into acoustics, aerodynamics, and driving behavior at extreme speeds." Mission accomplished – though what counts as "extreme speeds" seems to vary by country.

Trains on the UK's HS2 railway (whenever it finally opens) are expected to reach speeds of 360 km/h.

An insight into the technology behind Germany's rail network came last year, with an advertisement for an IT professional willing to endure Windows 3.11.


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posted by hubie on Thursday July 03, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the stronger-Arm dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year.

Market watcher IDC says Arm servers are attracting mass interest thanks mainly to the launch of large rack-scale configurations, referring to systems such as Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72, designed for AI processing.

In its latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, IDC estimates that servers based on the Arm architecture will account for 21.1 percent of total global shipments this year - not the 50 percent touted by Arm infrastructure chief Mohamed Awad in April.

Servers with at least one GPU fitted, sometimes styled as AI-capable, are projected to grow 46.7 percent, representing almost half of the total market value for this year. The fast pace of adoption by hyperscale customers and cloud service providers is fueling the server market, which IDC says is set to triple in size over just three years.

[...] IDC's regional market projections anticipate the US having the highest expansion with a 59.7 percent jump over 2024, which would see it account for almost 62 percent of the total server revenue by the end of 2025.

China is the other region heating up in the sales stakes, with IDC forecasting growth of 39.5 percent to make up more than 21 percent of the quarterly revenue worldwide. EMEA and Latin America are in single-digit growth territory at 7 and 0.7 percent, respectively, while Canada is expected to decline 9.6 percent this year due to an unspecified "very large deal" that happened in 2024.


Original Submission

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