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Eric Schlaepfer was trying to fix a broken piece of test equipment when he came across the cause of the problem—a troubled tantalum capacitor. The component had somehow shorted out, and he wanted to know why. So he polished it down for a look inside. He never found the source of the short, but he and his collaborator, Windell H. Oskay, discovered something even better: a breathtaking hidden world inside electronics. What followed were hours and hours of polishing, cleaning, and photography that resulted in Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components (No Starch Press, 2022), an excerpt of which follows. As the authors write, everything about these components is deliberately designed to meet specific technical needs, but that design leads to “accidental beauty: the emergent aesthetics of things you were never expected to see.”

From a book that spans the wide world of electronics, what we at IEEE Spectrum found surprisingly compelling were the insides of things we don’t spend much time thinking about, passive components. Transistors, LEDs, and other semiconductors may be where the action is, but the simple physics of resistors, capacitors, and inductors have their own sort of splendor.

IEEE Spectrum

I found the pictures of various passive components very interesting, maybe you would too !!

Cybersecurity expert Joe Carrigan, co-host of 'Hacking Humans' podcast, offers tips for verifying information online

Before the November midterm elections, Russia activated an army of misinformation-laden social media bots aimed at convincing voters in closely contested House of Representatives and Senate races that the U.S. should not support efforts by Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion.

But the spread of so-called "fake news" via the internet is not confined to election time. An estimated 5 billion people around the globe get entertainment and information and connect with others online, and most of them use social media. By some estimates, 40% of internet users say that they have inadvertently shared misinformation online.

That statistic does not surprise Joe Carrigan, senior security engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. The co-host of a popular Cyberwire podcast called Hacking Humans, Carrigan is an expert on social engineering scams and the bots that perpetrate them.

[...]
The main takeaway, Carrigan says, is that social media platforms are not reliable sources of information.

"People should not get their news from social media—period," he says. "They should totally discount any news delivered by that method. It's a tough stance, but it's the only way to be sure. View any news content on social media with skepticism, and hesitate before you share it."

Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute

Why we need open-source science innovation — not patents and paywalls

As we prepare to invest money to prevent the next global pandemic and find solutions to many other problems, science funders have a large opportunity to move towards open science and more research collaboration by offering open-source endowed chairs.

In these research positions, professors agree to ensure all of their writing is distributed via open access — and they release all of their intellectual property in the public domain or under appropriate open-source licenses.

The global scholarly publishing market has grown steadily and is now worth over US$28 billion. Researchers estimate universities are also able to capture billions through patent licensing, although most technology transfer offices at universities actually lose money.

But many academics want to see their research fully accessible — free for everyone. My research with colleagues has found the majority of American and Canadian academics want to see universities establish open-source endowed chairs.

...
There is a clear willingness of academics to leave behind antiquated IP models for the good of science and society. It is time to provide incentives to accelerate innovation using open science to hasten scientific progress while also making science more just and inclusive.

All research funders — governments, foundations, private companies, donors and universities — should start funding open-source endowed chairs to maximize the impact of their resources.

The Conversation

I refer to the following story submitted by "Danny B":
Facial Recognition Can Expose Political Orientation - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/03/09/0116220
I would hesitate to submit such stories because of the sheer number of hyperlinks. If the story was submitted by manually editing each of the hyperlinks, my hats off to him.

If the hyperlinks were copied automatically, I would like to learn to do this too, especially, if the submission used a short cut (or tool) to copy all links from the original web page. Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated and would encourage me to submit more stories ...

Maybe its time to run our Police like the British, with predominantly unarmed officers, with fire-arms teams readily available when needed.

So what is a few criminals turn runner and get away because some physically un-fit cops can't chase them down? Most criminals get away, then get found out later.

Maybe Unarmed officers would wear WHITE jacketed uniforms, or maybe white sleeves, and wouldn't carry any weapons (and that includes no multi-shock Tasers) other than a small self-defense baton. (Something that leaves a distinctive trace-able mark). They could still wear bullet/stab proof vests if desired.

They'd get defensive martial arts training and conflict deescalation training instead of fire arms training.

This would not, as some claim, result in mass killing of police, because the white jacket would make it clear they are unarmed and present no immediate physical threat.

Even if they come to arrest someone, they are not likely to induce fear and loathing Most police effect most arrests without ever pulling a gun. Most arrests are not for crimes that killing someone is an acceptable outcome.

Even among thieves and drug dealers there's no glory in shooting an unarmed man. The unarmed white shirted police officer would be as safe as the ticket writing "meter maids" of the 50's who were never armed.

Armed apprehension teams could be dispatched when the need presented itself.

Why is it a 5' 2" female unarmed British constable can effect an arrest of a pub brawler, but American ex-military, 6'4" cops can't issue a speeding ticket without a side arm?

It works elsewhere.

Takata Airbag recall http://www.safercar.gov/rs/takata/takatalist.html

Why not just provide optimally cut pieces of kevlar that can be placed over the bag, (but under the steering wheel covers or dashboard plastic). The kevlar would not be attached to anything, and would not prevent or delay deployment. It would be sized to simply snag the shrapnel and slow it enough to prevent penetration. It might be easier to retrofit this change than it would be to replace every airbag in every vehicle.

Dear Editors,
How do I submit this story ??

From the eat-shit-has-a-new-meaning dept.

In a randomized, controlled clinical trial starting this year, researchers will test out such a fecal formula for the treatment of obesity. They’ll also try to glean critical details about the human microbiome and its role in our health and metabolism. The trial, led by Elaine Yu, an assistant professor and clinical researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, will involve taking fecal samples from lean, healthy donors then freeze-drying the stool, putting a gram or two into capsules, and giving them to 20 obese patients.

Such poop-packed pills, which are designed to replace a person’s intestinal microbes with those from a donor via their feces, have proven effective at treating tenacious gut infections. This has led researchers to ponder whether the transplants could remedy other health problems, including obesity and metabolic disorders. A few animal studies and some anecdotal data in humans suggests the answer is yes—and Yu hopes to get a final answer with the upcoming trial.

A few years ago, researchers took the gut microbes from a set of twins—one lean, one obese—and transplanted them into two sets of microbe-free mice. Even though all the mice were on the same diet, the rodents that received the obese twin’s microbes became chubby. The mice that got the lean twin’s mix stayed slim, suggesting that the microbes were calling the shots when it came to the animals’ weight.

In line with those results, another study on lean and obese twins’ microbes suggested that obesity is linked to having altered mixes and lower diversity of gut microbes.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/freeze-dried-poop-pills-being-tested-for-obesity-treatment/

Law enforcement’s surveillance in America—and particularly its ever-increasing use of wiretaps—have been primarily driven for the last 25 years by drug cases. And as the chart above shows, that’s now truer than ever before.

Earlier this month the US court system released its annual report of every wiretap over the last year for which it granted law enforcement a warrant. And of those 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, fully 89 percent were for narcotics cases. That’s the highest percentage of wiretaps focused on drugs in the report’s history, and it continues a steady increase in the proportion of drug-focused spying. Twenty-five years ago, just 62 percent of wiretaps were for drug cases.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/drug-war-driving-us-domestic-spying/

From the Millennium Falcon to the USS Enterprise, science fiction has shown us a vast array of out-of-this-world spaceships that defy our rules of physics. We’ve rounded up some of your favorite intergalactic crafts from television, film and video games, along with real NASA spacecraft, to compare and speculate who has the fastest ship in the universe.

https://www.fatwallet.com/blog/fastest-ship-in-the-universe/

Our study finds that the current real-world deployment of Diffie-Hellman is less secure than previously believed. This page explains how to properly deploy Diffie-Hellman on your server.

When I tested https://soylentnews.org/ on their website, I got the following message:

Warning! This site uses a commonly-shared 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman group, and might be in range of being broken by a nation-state. It might be a good idea to generate a unique, 2048-bit group for the site.

I do not know enough about this to make a comment. Maybe, someone more experienced would find this interesting.