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looorg writes:

https://japantoday.com/category/national/world%27s-first-wooden-satellite-developed-in-japan-heads-to-space1

The world's first wooden satellite, built by Japanese researchers, was launched into space on Tuesday, in an early test of using timber in lunar and Mars exploration.

With a 50-year plan of planting trees and building timber houses on the moon and Mars, Doi's team decided to develop a NASA-certified wooden satellite to prove wood is a space-grade material.

Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it, Murata added.

The Forrest of Mars. Red Oak? Wooden Space Stations. Upside it's eco-friendly and it can't rot in space due to the lack of moisture.

"Metal satellites might be banned in the future," Doi said. "If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk's SpaceX."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"They took a dead man and cast him into the well, and then filled it up with stones"

So declares the 800-year-old Norse Sverris Saga, an accounting of the rise and reign of King Sverre Sigurdsson, who went on to rule Norway from 1184 until his death in 1202 CE.

Now, thanks to the efforts of a team of scientists from Scandinavia, Iceland, and Ireland, we have direct, tangible evidence that the Well Man really existed – in the form of bones, freshly analyzed, discovered at the bottom of the very well described.

The Well Man is barely a throwaway line describing a conflict that took place in 1197 CE – a corpse thrown into a castle well by an invading force, probably to make any water therein undrinkable by decaying in it. But that throwaway line has suddenly become one of the most significant in the saga – by being the first incident in such a document ever to be linked to real, historical remains.

[...] "This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," Martin says. "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods."

[...] The event was a stealth attack carried out by the Roman Catholic enemies of King Sverre (known as Baglers, or Bagal, for the crosiers carried by bishops). While he wintered elsewhere, the Baglers invaded his castle in his absence.

"Thorstein Kugad accepted service with the Bagals, and went with them," the saga reads. "The Bagals seized all the property in the castle, and then they burnt every building of it. They took a dead man and cast him into the well, and then filled it up with stones. Before they left the castle they called upon the townsmen to break down all the stone walls; and before they marched from the town they burnt all the King's long-ships. After this they returned to the Uplands, well pleased with the booty they had gained in their journey."

According to the saga, the Baglers spared the people within, leaving them nothing but their clothes – but fresh corpses don't fall from the sky, and it's plausible that the event wasn't completely bloodless. The Well Man may even have been a Bagler himself, slain by the castle's defenders.

"The text is not absolutely correct – what we have seen is that the reality is much more complex than the text," explains archaeologist Anna Petersén of the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Research.

The research also demonstrates the power of a comprehensive genomic database, strong historical records, and how the two can be united to unveil the secrets of the past.

Journal Reference: iScience, Ellegaard et al.: "Corroborating written history with ancient DNA: the case of the Well-man described in an Old Norse saga" https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)02301-0

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/judges-investigation-patent-troll-ip-edge-results-criminal-referrals

In 2022, three companies with strange names and no clear business purpose beyond patent litigation filed dozens of lawsuits in Delaware federal court, accusing businesses of all sizes of patent infringement. Some of these complaints claimed patent rights over basic aspects of modern life; one, for example, involved a patent that pertains to the process of clocking in to work through an app.

These companies–named Mellaconic IP, Backertop Licensing, and Nimitz Technologies–seemed to be typical examples of "patent trolls," companies whose primary business is suing others over patents or demanding licensing fees rather than providing actual products or services.

However, the cases soon took an unusual turn. The Delaware federal judge overseeing the cases, U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly, sought more information about the patents and their ownership. One of the alleged owners was a food-truck operator who had been promised "passive income," but was entitled to only a small portion of any revenue generated from the lawsuits. Another owner was the spouse of an attorney at IP Edge, the patent-assertion company linked to all three LLCs.

Following an extensive investigation, the judge determined that attorneys associated with these shell companies had violated legal ethics rules. He pointed out that the attorneys may have misled Han Bui, the food-truck owner, about his potential liability in the case. Judge Connolly wrote:

[T]he disparity in legal sophistication between Mr. Bui and the IP Edge and Mavexar actors who dealt with him underscore that counsel's failures to comply with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct while representing Mr. Bui and his LLC in the Mellaconic cases are not merely technical or academic.

Judge Connolly also concluded that IP Edge, the patent-assertion company behind hundreds of patent lawsuits and linked to the three LLCs, was the "de facto owner" of the patents asserted in his court, but that it attempted to hide its involvement. He wrote, "IP Edge, however, has gone to great lengths to hide the 'we' from the world," with "we" referring to IP Edge. Connolly further noted, "IP Edge arranged for the patents to be assigned to LLCs it formed under the names of relatively unsophisticated individuals recruited by [IP Edge office manager] Linh Deitz."

The judge referred three IP Edge attorneys to the Supreme Court of Texas' Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee for engaging in "unauthorized practices of law in Texas." Judge Connolly also sent a letter to the Department of Justice, suggesting an investigation into "individuals associated with IP Edge LLC and its affiliate Maxevar LLC."

Original Submission

turgid writes:

The Register reports that Reaction Engines has gone out of business.

Reaction Engines was the company of Alan Bond, of HOTOL (1980s space plane) fame, which he founded to develop new air-breathing rocket engine technology. Their flagship project was the Skylon Single Stage to Orbit space plane, which would use Synergistic Air-Breathing Ram-jet Engines (SABRE) to capture oxygen from the atmosphere, cool and compress it and burn it with on-board liquid hydrogen up to about Mach 5. Then, at speed and altitude, the spacecraft would switch to on-board oxygen stores. In this way, more mass fraction could be dedicated to payload, making SSTO economically feasible.

Also, based on similar technology was LAPCAT, a hypersonic airliner.

Yet another great British Engineering vision finds its way onto the scrapheap for lack of vision among investors. Still, we export a lot of cheese.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Freelance software developer Tim Coates has written a short post about how Pascal remains a valuable and usable language.

Special Note: When I mention Pascal, I'm including versions like Delphi, Free Pascal, Lazarus, and others that have developed over the years. And regardless of which version you use, these variations of Pascal each bring something unique to the table. Together, they keep Pascal relevant and versatile, offering a range of tools for both new and experienced developers.

Pascal was initially started back in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth.

Previously:
(2024) RIP: Niklaus Wirth 15.2.1934 - 1.1.2024
(2023) Thinking Back on 'Turbo Pascal' as It Turns 40
(2023) Pioneering Apple Lisa Goes "Open Source" Thanks to Computer History Museum
(2020) ALGOL 60 at 60: The Greatest Computer Language You've (Probably) Never Used
(2018) UCSD Pascal Pioneer Ken Bowles Has Passed Away
(2018) Original Version of Photoshop Was Written in Pascal; Source Released
(2016) The Developer Died 14 Years Ago, Here's a Print Out of His Source Code

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16, home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are reintroducing buttons and dials to dashboards and steering wheels.

With this "re-buttonization," as The Wall Street Journal describes it, demand for Rachel Plotnick's expertise has grown. Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them. She studies the relationship between technology and society with a focus on everyday or overlooked technologies, and wrote the 2018 book Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Now, companies are reaching out to her to help improve their tactile controls.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

UCLA Chemists Challenge Century-Old Rule:

UCLA chemists have discovered a major flaw in a fundamental rule of organic chemistry that has held for 100 years. They say it's time to rewrite the textbooks.

Organic molecules, which are primarily made of carbon, have specific shapes and arrangements of atoms. Molecules called olefins contain double bonds, or alkenes, between two carbon atoms. Typically, these atoms and their attached groups lie in the same 3D plane, and deviations from this structure are rare.

The rule being questioned, known as Bredt's rule, was established in 1924. It asserts that molecules cannot have a double bond at the "bridgehead" position—the junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule—because this position would distort the geometry of the double bond. Bredt's rule has constrained the design of synthetic molecules by preventing chemists from creating certain structures. Since olefins play a critical role in pharmaceutical research, Bredt's rule has limited the types of molecules that scientists could envision, potentially holding back innovations in drug discovery.

A new paper published on November 1 by UCLA scientists in the journal Science has invalidated that idea. They show how to make several kinds of molecules that violate Bredt's rule, called anti-Bredt olefins, or ABOs, allowing chemists to find practical ways to make and use them in reactions.

"People aren't exploring anti-Bredt olefins because they think they can't," said corresponding author Neil Garg, the Kenneth N. Trueblood Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. "We shouldn't have rules like this — or if we have them, they should only exist with the constant reminder that they're guidelines, not rules. It destroys creativity when we have rules that supposedly can't be overcome."

[...] "There's a big push in the pharmaceutical industry to develop chemical reactions that give three-dimensional structures like ours because they can be used to discover new medicines," Garg said. "What this study shows is that contrary to one hundred years of conventional wisdom, chemists can make and use anti-Bredt olefins to make value-added products."

Journal Reference:
"A solution to the anti-Bredt olefin synthesis problem" by Luca McDermott, Zach G. Walters, Sarah A. French, et al., 1 November 2024, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq3519

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Apple is committing over a billion dollars more to its existing satellite provider GlobalStar in order to have it expand its ground bases and add more satellites for iPhone messaging.

Two years after it first launched Emergency SOS via Satellite with the iPhone 14, Apple is now working to greatly expand the facility. It's already added features such as Roadside Assistance via satellite, and expanded to non-emergency messaging.

Now its satellite provider GlobalStar has announced a new expansion of its Apple deal, which comes in two parts. The first has Apple paying up to $1.1 billion in upfront payments specifically so GlobalStar can add what it describes as a new satellite constellation.

The second is that Apple has now taken a 20% stake in GlobalStar. According to Street Insider, this is an equity deal that is worth approximately $400 million.

This announcement is a financial one from GlobalStar, rather than specific news of new features from either it or Apple. But it will result in greater capacity for expanded features on the iPhone.

Previously: Supported iPhones in the US and Canada Can Now Contact Emergency Services Via Satellite

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

Nvidia will replace Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, indicating the massive impact of the AI boom on the semiconductor and tech industries and the entire market. According to CNBC, this change will happen on November 8, about three months after news of Intel's financial woes broke out.

The move was sparked by Intel's massive stock price drop—over 30% overnight—following the disastrous financial results released last August. The company has been bleeding cash through its data center and foundry divisions, resulting in a $1.6 billion loss for the second quarter of 2024. This was soon followed by news of massive layoffs, with over 15,000 employees affected.

Nvidia shares, on the other hand, have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia's market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies.

Related: Intel Losses Hit $16.6B As Restructuring Efforts Take A Toll

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It's a really old rock:

Scientists in Virginia are looking for mysterious dark matter - and have turned to really old rocks.

The substance, which makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe, shapes and affects the cosmos. But it is entirely invisible and remains undetectable by normal sensors and techniques.

Analyzing billion-year-old rocks, researchers at Virginia Tech hope to find traces of dark matter. The idea was first proposed in the 1980s. Technological advances since then led them to revisit the idea. What if there were traces in Earth's minerals?

"It's crazy. When I first heard about this idea, I was like — this is insane. I want to do it," physics professor Patrick Huber said in a statement.

[...] Using new imaging, Huber and his colleagues hope to uncover trails of destruction from long-ago dark matter interactions inside crystal lattice structures - a pattern of atoms found in a mineral crystal.

Dark matter's interactions with other matter is impossible to perceive except when it collides with the nucleus of a visible matter atom. The nucleus recoils from the collision and releases energy.

Vsevolod Ivanov, who is collaborating with Huber, explained that when a high-energy particle inside a rock bounces off of the charged core of an atom – the basic building block of matter – inside a rock, backward movement can pop that core, or nucleus, out of place. The gap the nucleus leaves behind marks structural changes within the crystal.

"We'll take a crystal that's been exposed to different particles for millions of years and subtract the distributions that correspond to things we do know," Ivanov said. "Whatever is left must be something new, and that could be the dark matter."

The researchers are working to identify and locate potential candidates that could be dark matter detectors.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/openai-launches-chatgpt-with-search-taking-google-head-on/

One of the biggest bummers about the modern Internet has been the decline of Google Search. Once an essential part of using the web, it's now a shadow of its former self, full of SEO-fueled junk and AI-generated spam.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new feature of ChatGPT that could potentially replace Google Search for some people: an upgraded web search capability for its AI assistant that provides answers with source attribution during conversations.
[...]
Each search result in ChatGPT comes with a citation link, and users can click a "Sources" button beneath responses to view referenced materials in a sidebar that pops up beside the chat history.

The new search system runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, which OpenAI says it post-trained using synthetic data output from its o1-preview model.
[...]
ChatGPT with Search also helps OpenAI take advantage of its new publishing partnerships and reframe those media relationships into something beyond merely scraping web data to train its AI models, which caused legal trouble in the past.
[...]
As mentioned above, over the past few years, OpenAI has established new partnerships with major news organizations, collaborating with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media.
[...]
In a hands-on test of ChatGPT with Search, the new feature seemed to consistently pull relevant links from the web while answering our questions, but it wasn't perfect, returning a few errant sources here and there. It also sometimes provided irrelevant images that were shown beside some search results.
[...]
All these new avenues for ChatGPT to potentially prefer one website, source of information, company, brand, or shop brings up a big question: Will OpenAI offer preferential content placement for media partners or advertisers in the future?
[...]
In the future, OpenAI plans to add to the new search feature with custom answers for shopping and travel-related queries. The company also plans to use OpenAI's o1 series for deeper search capabilities and expand the search experience to Advanced Voice Mode and Canvas features.

The search function launches today for ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers through chatgpt.com and mobile apps. Enterprise and education users will gain access in the coming weeks, with a broader rollout to free users planned over several months.

owl writes:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/column-live-nation-decision-will-force-companies-rethink-consumer-arbitration-2024-10-29/

Oct 29 (Reuters) - In a case against entertainment behemoth Live Nation (LYV.N), a U.S. appeals court has rejected a common corporate tactic to combat mass consumer arbitration and has cast doubt on whether companies can force consumers into consolidated arbitration protocols.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, cannot compel its customers to arbitrate antitrust claims because Live Nation's mandatory arbitration provisions were too unfair to be enforceable.

As my Reuters colleague Mike Scarcella reported, the appeals court concluded that the mass arbitration protocol offered by Live Nation's arbitration provider, New Era, featured rules that were "so dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible." (New Era disputed that characterization, insisting that its rules are "objective [and] easy to understand.")

...

In a concurrence, VanDyke said flatly, "The Federal Arbitration Act just does not apply to the type of mass 'arbitration' contemplated by Live Nation's agreements."

That has to be a chilling sentence for companies relying on batch-and-bellwether protocols to mitigate the time and expense of defending thousands of arbitration demands.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.

A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.

[...] Currently, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity attributes gravity to smooth curves in the space-time fabric. But a conclusive graviton detection would prove that gravity comes in the form of quantum particles, just like electromagnetism and the other fundamental forces. Most physicists believe that gravity does have a quantum side, and they’ve spent the better part of a century striving to determine its quantum rules. Nabbing a graviton would confirm that they’re on the right track.

But even if the experiment is relatively straightforward, the interpretation of what, exactly, a detection would prove is not. The simplest explanation of a positive result would be the existence of gravitons. But physicists have already found ways to interpret such a result without reference to gravitons at all.

[...] It’s hard to experimentally probe gravity because the force is extremely weak. You need huge masses — think planets — to significantly warp space-time and generate obvious gravitational attraction. By way of comparison, a credit card-size magnet will stick to your fridge. Electromagnetism is not a subtle force.

One way to study these forces is to disturb an object, then observe the ripples that travel outward as a consequence. Shake a charged particle, and it will create waves of light. Disturb a massive object, and it will emit gravitational waves. We pick up light waves with our eyeballs, but gravitational waves are another matter. It took decades of effort and the construction of the colossal, miles-long detectors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to first sense a rumble in space-time in 2015 — one sent out by a collision between distant black holes.

[...] It would take another conceptual leap to go from a gravitational wave detector to a detector for individual gravitons. In the recent paper, which appeared in Nature Communications in August, Pikovski and his co-authors outlined how the graviton detector would work.

fliptop writes:

Citing various market and macroeconomic headwinds, Electric vehicle startup Fisker Group, a luxury sports car maker, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down all operations to restructure its business and seek funding from investors:

Fisker had begun deliveries of its Ocean battery-electric crossover SUV in 2023 to compete with Tesla, but by February 2024 the vehicle began having various problems. Some of the problems included suddenly losing power, loss of brake power, defective key fobs, and front hoods opening at high speeds. The vehicle also had difficulties with gear shifting.

Fisker warned that it may not have enough money to survive the next 12 months in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 29. Other problems arose as in June, former Fisker employees revealed the company had no plan to stockpile spare parts for Ocean vehicle repairs.

The spare parts problem led technicians and employees to dismantle perfectly good cars to provide spare parts.

Previously:

• Bankrupt Fisker Says It Can't Migrate its EVs to a New Owner's Server (2024)
• Henrik Fisker Debuts EMotion EV at CES (2016)
• Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car (2016)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Reddit's getting more popular:

In May 2023, Reddit announced that its API would no longer be free, signaling the demise of most third-party Reddit apps and the start of a new Reddit era. Reddit was always interested in making money, but the social media platform's drive to reach profitability intensified with its API rule changes, which was followed by it going public and other big moves. With Reddit reporting this week that it has finally turned its first profit, we can expect further evolution from Reddit, whether old-time Redditors like it or not.

In its fiscal Q4 2024 results announced on Tuesday [PDF], Reddit said that in the quarter ending on September 30, it made a profit of $29.9 million. This is significant growth from fiscal Q3 2024, when Reddit lost $7.4 million. Revenue, meanwhile, was up 68 percent year over year, going from $207.5 million to $384.4 million. Reddit is expecting $385 to $400 million in revenue for fiscal Q4.

[...] Of course, more users give ads sold on Reddit the chance to gain more eyeballs, something that can help drive ad sales. Reddit's ad revenue has grown alongside its daily user base. In Q3 2024, Reddit made $315.1 million in ad revenue, a 56 percent year-over-year increase.

Reddit has historically made the majority of its revenue from ad sales. Huffman has long claimed that Reddit started charging for its API in order to prevent big companies, like Google, from using Reddit content for free AI training. However, the high pricing killing third-party apps also fed Reddit's goals of getting users onto its native website and apps—where Reddit sells ads.

Reddit is expected to continue its aggressive ads push, including by exploring new ways to incorporate ads into the user experience. For example, Reddit has previously discussed exploring the addition of ads in Reddit search and in comments. It also added ads to conversation pages and made personalized ads mandatory this year.

Original Submission