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An artist’s concept of a planet being eaten by its parent star. |
Not much preamble today, just the stories.
That's your thought for the day. :-)
https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/08/30/2112235/one-third-of-sun-like-stars-may-have-eaten-their-planets
One-Third of Sun-Like Stars May Have Eaten Their Planets (sciencemag.org)
Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning On Killing You? https://t.co/zRpHBZGgkV via @LivingBlueTX
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) October 8, 2021
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| Scientists captured this image of a tick's head at Ohio State University's Campus Microscopy and Imaging Facility. (Image credit: Photo by Dr. Tong Zhang & Dr. Paul Stoodley/Courtesy of Nikon Small World) |
Tick transforms into a glowing alien from a sci-fi nightmare in trippy photo
prizewinning microscopy image of a tick's head rendered in psychedelic colors may change the way you look at bloodsucking parasites.
The intense magnification — combined with glowing hues that illuminate the creature's protruding head, internal structures and armored, spiky exoskeleton — make the tick seem more like a bizarre (or beautiful?) visitor from another world.
The image offers a perspective of the tiny arthropod that you've probably never seen before. And that's exactly the point of this and other standout entries that were recently honored in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, now in its 47th year. The tick photo, and more than 100 others chosen for the contest's top awards, showcase the science and beauty of organisms, minerals and other objects that are too small to be seen with the naked eye.
We in the media have failed to explain to our viewers/readers what's *in* the Build Back Better reconciliation bill.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) October 7, 2021
We just go on and on about $3.5 trillion.
So let me tell you what's in it, and why it matters, in just 60 seconds. Start the clock...pic.twitter.com/oysY9g1cQ1
The newly legible passages are largely sentimental, phrases like "made my heart happy," and "you that I love." Comments on politics and world events, meanwhile, remain uncensored. But even these seemingly intimate phrases don't definitively tell historians anything new about Marie Antoinette and von Fersen's relationship, Seth says. Scholars, she notes, already knew Marie Antoinette had "a very deep affection for him." Still, she adds, the letters offer "direct insight into the thoughts and feelings of Marie Antoinette." In the future, the techniques in this study could be used in combination with machine algorithms to automatically transcribe old texts, the researchers say, making it easier to understand these important documents -- and others like them.The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/09/02/2143226/astronomers-create-treasure-map-to-find-proposed-planet-nine
Astronomers Create 'Treasure Map' To Find Proposed Planet Nine (extremetech.com)
The Planet Nine duo kept some of the original KBOs in the new data set, but it also includes new space rocks. They also discarded any object that appeared to be influenced by Neptune's gravity. The updated set of 11 KBOs still shows an unusual orbital distribution. The study claims there is just a 0.4 percent chance that these orbits are a coincidence. A greater than 99 percent chance that there is a massive object affecting KBOs sounds high, but it's actually lower than the chance assigned to Planet Nine in the original 2016 study. You could argue, of course, that this is a much more realistic number.
Based on the new simulations, Batygin has created a "treasure map" of sorts that points the way to Planet Nine's most likely orbital arc. That expansive area crosses the luminous plane of the Milky Way, which might have helped Planet Nine hide from previous searches. This includes a chance in the expected orbit, bringing Planet Nine in closer to Earth. The original analysis estimated it has an orbital period of 18,500 Earth years, but now it's believed to be in the neighborhood of 7,400 Earth years. The pair believe we are only a few years away from spotting Planet Nine, and it may be the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/09/08/2243202/strange-repeating-radio-signal-near-center-of-milky-way-has-scientists-stumped
Strange, Repeating Radio Signal Near Center of Milky Way Has Scientists Stumped (livescience.com)
The radio source -- known as ASKAP J173608.2321635 -- was detected with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback. In an ASKAP survey taken between April 2019 and August 2020, the strange signal appeared 13 times, never lasting in the sky for more than a few weeks, the researchers wrote. This radio source is highly variable, appearing and disappearing with no predictable schedule, and doesn't seem to appear in any other radio telescope data prior to the ASKAP survey.
When the researchers tried to match the energy source with observations from other telescopes -- including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, as well as the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile, which can pick up near-infrared wavelengths -- the signal disappeared entirely. With no apparent emissions in any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is a radio ghost that seems to defy explanation. Prior surveys have detected low-mass stars that periodically flare up with radio energy, but those flaring stars typically have X-ray counterparts, the researchers wrote. That makes a stellar source unlikely here. Dead stars, like pulsars and magnetars (two types of ultradense, collapsed stars), are also unlikely explanations, the team wrote.The report goes on to say that the closest match is a mysterious class of object known as a galactic center radio transient (GCRT), a rapidly glowing radio source that brightens and decays near the Milky Way's center, usually over the course of a few hours. "So far, only three GCRTs have been confirmed, and all of them appear and disappear much more quickly than this new ASKAP object does," reports Live Science. "However, the few known GCRTs do shine with a similar brightness as the mysterious signal, and their radio flare-ups are never accompanied by X-rays."
Thoughts on the “Debarkle”
Posted on September 12, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 43 Comments
Australian blogger and science fiction genre commentator Camestros Felapton (not their real name, the pen name is taken from logical syllogisms) has taken it upon themselves to write a fairly exhaustive history of the Sad/Rabid Puppy mess in science fiction lit, calling it “Debarkle” and posting it up on their site on a chapter by chapter basis (you can find it here). It’s still being written but as a practical matter it’s beginning to wind down, as the current installments cover the era where the Pups had stopped actively trying to game the Hugo Awards and had mostly dissolved as an ongoing concern. It’s far enough along that I feel all right looking back at the events recorded in a retrospective fashion without worrying too much about new information popping up.
I’m not going to review “Debarkle” in detail here; suffice to say I think it’s reasonably accurate though with a distinct point of view, a well-sourced but somewhat scattershot retelling of events, and as someone who pops up in the narrative relatively frequently (indeed, there are a couple of chapters about me and my work), it’s interesting to see how I come across from the outside. But reading the history as it’s come along has prompted a few of my own thoughts about the events the narrative covers, and their aftermath. Note well that these thoughts will only be interesting to the extent you both know and care about the events under discussion, and I will assume people reading will know what’s being discussed. Also, these thoughts of mine are in no particular order.
1. It really does seem like so long ago now. The nonsense the Sad/Rabid Puppies (henceforth to be referred to as “the Pups”) perpetrated is largely contained in the years of 2014 – 2016, and while that’s not actually all that long ago — a mere five years since MidAmericon II, where new Hugo nomination rules were ratified to minimize slate nominating, and NK Jemisin won the first of her three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards — it feels like a distant memory now, a kind of “oh, yeah, that happened,” sort of event.
There are reasons for that, but I think the largest part has to do with the fact that the Pups, simply and bluntly, failed at every level that was important for their movement. The bifurcated goals of the Pups were to champion science fiction with a certain political/cultural point of view (i.e., largely white, largely conservative), and to destroy the Hugos by flooding the nominations with crap. They did neither very well. Toward the former, the material they slated was largely not very good, and with respect to the latter, the Hugos both still persist and remain a premier award in the field.
Their strategy was bad because it was addressing a problem that largely did not exist and was arrived at in a backward fashion, and their tactics were bad because they exploited loopholes and antagonized everyone who was not part of their clique, activating thousands of dormant Hugo voters against them. They were routed through a simple mechanism for which they had not accounted (“No Award”), and once their slating tactic was blunted by a nomination rule change, they flounced entirely.
When your only track record is that of complete failure, it’s not surprising you don’t have much of an impact. Meanwhile the Hugos have been doing perfectly well, with excellent finalists and winners in most categories, and a wider and more diverse range of authors and creators. Nor are these works or creators obscure, either to fans or the general public; of the six Best Novel finalists for the current year, four are New York Times bestsellers (and commensurately bestsellers on other lists as well), and the authors of the two that are not, have won Hugos and other awards before. The Best Series finalists add a couple more bestsellers and award winners to that stack as well. The Hugos reflect what they are assumed to reflect: What’s interesting, and to varying degrees popular, in the larger field of the genre.
Basically, the post-Pup era has been a golden one for the genre and the award they tried to brigade, and that’s a much more interesting narrative.
2. The authors The Pups put on their enemies lists have done pretty well. This is correlative, not causative, to be sure — nothing the Pups did had much to do with these authors’ critical and commercial successes, and indeed those successes are to some degree why these authors were on the enemies list to begin with — but it’s certainly interesting.
Among the several authors who qualify in this category, I’ll mention two: Me and NK Jemisin. We were particularly favorite targets of the various strains of Pups, who liked to declare that we were nowhere as popular as we were made out to be, that various politically correct forces in publishing and fandom were responsible for our successes, that the fix was in regardless of whatever tripe we published, that our actual sales numbers were terrible, and so on. Along with that was a lot bigoted nonsense; the Pups spent a fair amount of time attempting to devalue my masculinity (among other things it was simultaneously hinted that I was gay and dominated by my wife, which is a nice trick if I do say so myself), and the nonsense I got was nothing compared to what was aimed at Jemisin, a black woman.
Fast forward to 2021 and… well, I’m certainly doing just fine these days, in terms of sales, awards and career opportunities. As for Jemisin, she’s inarguably the most important speculative fiction writer of her generation (note: I’m in her generation), a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and currently writing scripts for the upcoming big studio adaptation of her Broken Earth trilogy. Oh, and both of us are Hugo finalists this year. Now, sure, the Powers That Be may have simply decided to really go all in on faking our respective successes over the last half decade, but the simpler explanation is that, rather than being propped up by The Politically Correct Man, we’re actually good at what we do and we’re savvy enough, business-wise, to catch a wave swelling beneath us. If the Pups have shown us anything, it’s that you can’t simply brigade questionable material to success. There has to be quality there.
3. The Pups have largely not benefitted commercially from their actions. During the course of the Pup nonsense, I was made aware that at least some of the industriousness of a couple of the prime movers was the belief that the noise and controversy of their actions would help drive sales, perhaps through curiosity about the work and perhaps out of the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Some of the more obscure Pups hoped to become less obscure, and the ones who were already comfortable perhaps thought they might move up a rung or two on the ladder.
And, five years later… not really? The best case scenario sees the most popular Pups more or less at the same level of sales and popularity as they were when the nonsense started; they were not hurt by it because they already had their fan bases, contracts and distribution, and their fan base was either sympathetic to their Pup positions, or didn’t know and/or care.
(The latter, incidentally, is important to note; the Pup nonsense really was inside pool and few people not deeply committed to the genre knew much about it. Almost no one in the larger world would (or does) know or care much about an internecine struggle involving the mechanics of a genre award. Bestselling writers are so because they can draw in readers outside of the relatively small base of established SF/F fandom. They weren’t going to be substantially hurt by the Pup antics.)
With that said, the relatively small base of established SF/F fandom can be important for new, struggling and midlist authors, and “new, struggling and midlist authors” describes a fair number of the Pups. I don’t think those authors did themselves any favors alienating fandom, both in actions and in their characterization of fandom at the height of the nonsense, and (for some of the more traditionally established and published authors) by associating themselves and their personal brands with actual hateful bigots. Of the main Pups who were not bestsellers before the nonsense, none of them as far as I can see have really broken out since, in terms of sales and popularity. They’re no longer new, just midlist and/or struggling. They’re not gone — lots are still publishing — but five years on, any benefit they might have gotten from the nonsense is well over and done, and there’s not much record of any benefit.
The one silver lining, perhaps, is that as time goes on the Pup events will become even more obscure than they are today, and there will be a generation of fandom that neither knows much about it, nor care about it if they do. So they have that going for them, which is nice.
4. Even if it had succeeded, the Pup nonsense was futile; the genre had already changed. To the extent that the less malignant Pups had a strategy at all, it missed the realities of the publishing world. Even if the Hugos had lacked a “No Award” mechanism and some of their work walked away with rockets, it wouldn’t have changed what was being published in science fiction and by whom… and who was buying it. Brute-force manipulation of award results, at best, devalues the award itself. But awards, while nice and occasionally useful, aren’t actually hugely significant to the bottom line of publishing. Acquisitions and sales are.
What the Pups missed (or, if they did not miss, at least severely misunderstood) was who is acquiring genre work these days and who is buying it. Hint: it’s not all straight white dudes, and indeed, it may not even be majority straight white dudes anymore. The legions of associate-to-senior editors in publishing right now and in the last decade are more diverse than they’ve ever been, less white, less male, more queer… and with a hellaciously passionate work ethic and a damn fine eye for material. They didn’t necessarily come up through “traditional” science fiction. Lots of them came up through YA or from other genres, and developed their own personal canon of works that may or may not have included “classic” SF work. When they bought work, they didn’t just buy for the audience that SF/F books were assumed to address. They bought for the audience they wanted to bring into the field. They did it in book publishing, and in short fiction publishing as well.
And guess what? It fucking worked. The Pups liked to assert, without much in the way of evidence, that “New York Publishing” was and still is on its way out (which would not be great for them, as the major publisher in the Pup space, based in North Carolina as it is, nevertheless is distributed and put into stores through a New York publisher). Someone should have told that to New York publishing, particularly its science fiction and fantasy imprints; they’re doing just fine. And not only fine: they’re minting more bestsellers and bringing in more readers to the genre and being a larger part of the cultural conversation than they have done before. Likewise, short fiction publishing features more diverse material and storytelling than ever before. Genre literature is finally catching up to where the genre is in other media, in terms of popularity and influence — in large part, I would argue, because the doors are open wide to a larger base of readers and writers.
By the time the Pups noticed this, in their profoundly negative way (not “hey, the field has more and different people in it” but “I’m not winning awards which should be mine, for reasons, waaaaaah“), it was already too late. The more diverse associate-to-senior editors were already in place, working like hell, and their books were already selling and finding and expanding audiences. The Pups didn’t think this stuff was selling, I suspect because they certainly wouldn’t read it, which is a monumental self-own. But it was selling, and is selling, and a lot of it is terrific. And a fair amount of that terrific stuff is now on the bestseller charts and in the award finalist lists.
Yes, yes, but what about the straight white man? Is there a place for him in the science fiction literary culture now? I mean, yes (waves), and even if you consider my straight white male credentials suspicious in some way, there are plenty of other examples — including the Pups themselves, who again are still publishing away, albeit in some cases not with the notability they felt they were entitled to. We straight white dudes show up in bestseller and award lists, still. We just share them more now.
This was already happening when the Pups finally noticed. And by the time they noticed, it was already too late. The genre had changed. It wasn’t just about them anymore, or more accurately, they could no longer assume that it was just about them anymore, as they had done before.
5. The Pup movement is what entitled mediocrity looks like. Which is not to say that the Pups were (or are!) uniformly mediocre writers. Some of them had gotten on to finalist lists on their own steam with their stories and prose, and got decent-to-glowing reviews for their work, and of course sold from all right to very well indeed. But fundamentally the Pup movement was about resentment: Resentment about not winning awards. Resentment about sharing the genre with others. Resentment about having to compete, and being outcompeted. Resentment that had they started their careers 20 years earlier, they might have had more acclaim and baubles. Resentment that says that if you can’t have the success you want, exactly how you want it, then you are entitled to make sure no one else has it either; that you would rather burn something to the ground than to have someone else get it.
At the end of the day, everything about the Pup movement was “I can’t compete, I don’t want to compete, and also, I shouldn’t have to compete, the whole set-up is inherently unfair, so I’m justified in wrecking it.” And that line of thinking is the product of mediocrity, whether or not the prose in question is fine and fair. I don’t know whether that can be fixed, or whether the Pups want to fix it at this late point. Five years on, however, it doesn’t much matter.
— JS
As More US Men Abandon Higher Education, Are Admissions Officers Discriminating Against Women? (nytimes.com)
Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon shared their report:At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years... In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
But numbers can be misleading. New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century."Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported... In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected," the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: "Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive."
The Journal even reported that a former admissions officer at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon "said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become 'higher education's dirty little secret,' practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter."
But even with more women in college, the Times argues that "The raw numbers don't take into account the varying value of college degrees." (And not just because "The female-to-male gender ratio is highest in for-profit colleges, which often overcharge students for worthless degrees.")
"Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates..."Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don't pay well...
The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.
Perseverance's New Rock Samples Reveal Water Was Present on Mars For a Long Time (nasa.gov)
"It's a big deal that the water was there a long time."The Perseverance science team already knew a lake once filled the crater; for how long has been more uncertain. The scientists couldn't dismiss the possibility that Jezero's lake was a "flash in the pan": floodwaters could have rapidly filled the impact crater and dried up in the space of 50 years, for example. But the level of alteration that scientists see in the rock that provided the core samples — as well as in the rock the team targeted on their first sample-acquisition attempt — suggests that groundwater was present for a long time.
This groundwater could have been related to the lake that was once in Jezero, or it could have traveled through the rocks long after the lake had dried up. Though scientists still can't say whether any of the water that altered these rocks was present for tens of thousands or for millions of years, they feel more certain that it was there for long enough to make the area more welcoming to microscopic life in the past.
And they discovered something interesting in the rock samples: salts.These salts may have formed when groundwater flowed through and altered the original minerals in the rock, or more likely when liquid water evaporated, leaving the salts. The salt minerals in these first two rock cores may also have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water. If present, they could serve as microscopic time capsules, offering clues about the ancient climate and habitability of Mars.
Salt minerals are also well-known on Earth for their ability to preserve signs of ancient life.
Travel through galaxies and the dark matter web in this stunning universe simulation
A new simulation of the universe is a map and a time machine rolled up into one.
Called Uchuu, which is Japanese for "Outer Space," the map doesn't include Casseipoia or the moons of Neptune; instead, it's a map of large-scale galaxies and galaxy clusters, all glued together by an invisible web of dark matter, which emits no electromagnetic radiation but still exerts a gravitational force upon the universe.
Researchers from Chiba University in Japan, the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain and several other institutions in Europe, the United States, Argentina and Chile developed the simulation in order to study the structure of the universe over almost its entire 13.8 billion-year history.
To produce Uchuu required “all 40,200 processors (CPU cores) available [at the supercomputer] exclusively for 48 hours each month," Tomoaki Ishiyama, a computer scientist at Chiba University, said in a statement. "Twenty million supercomputer hours were consumed, and 3 Petabytes of data were generated, the equivalent of 894,784,853 pictures from a 12-megapixel cellphone."
The researchers reported the new simulation in the June issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"Uchuu is like a time machine," Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia doctoral student Julia F. Ereza said in the statement. "[W]e can go forward, backward and stop in time, we can 'zoom in' on a single galaxy or 'zoom out' to visualize a whole cluster, we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the universe from its earliest days to the present."
The map is available to download, or you can explore the new simulation even faster via a YouTube introduction.
Originally published on Live Science.
Today, mathematicians and others routinely stray outside our comfortable three dimensions. Sometimes this work involves additional physical dimensions, such as those required by string theory, but more often we work abstractly and do not envision actual space. Some investigations are geometric, such as Maryna Viazovska’s 2016 discovery of the most efficient ways of packing spheres in dimensions eight and 24. Sometimes they require non-integer dimensions when fractals are studied in diverse fields such as physics, biology, engineering, finance and image processing. And in this era of “big data,” scientists, governments and corporations build high-dimensional profiles of people, places and things.
Luckily, dimensions don’t need to be fully understood to be enjoyed, by bird and mathematician alike.
[...]
One remaining question is how a planet can have only one type of volcano littering a region. On Earth volcanoes capable of super eruptions -- the most recent erupted 76,000 years ago in Sumatra, Indonesia -- are dispersed around the globe and exist in the same areas as other volcano types. Mars, too, has many other types of volcanoes, including the biggest volcano in the solar system called Olympus Mons. Olympus Mons is 100 times larger by volume than Earth's largest volcano of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and is known as a "shield volcano," which drains lava down a gently sloping mountain. Arabia Terra so far has the only evidence of explosive volcanoes on Mars. It's possible that super-eruptive volcanoes were concentrated in regions on Earth but have been eroded physically and chemically or moved around the globe as continents shifted due to plate tectonics. These types of explosive volcanoes also could exist in regions of Jupiter's moon Io or could have been clustered on Venus. Whatever the case may be, Richardson hopes Arabia Terra will teach scientists something new about geological processes that help shape planets and moons.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/19/0053221/worlds-white-paint-sets-guiness-record-could-reduce-need-for-air-conditioning
World's Whitest Paint Sets Guinness Record, Could Reduce Need For Air Conditioning (usatoday.com)
"The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made."
Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report:"When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat.
Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings...
Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release.
"This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners.
"Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..."Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.
Strikingly, the brain regions that the U.K. researchers found to be impacted by COVID-19 are all linked to the olfactory bulb, a structure near the front of the brain that passes signals about smells from the nose to other brain regions. The olfactory bulb has connections to regions of the temporal lobe. We often talk about the temporal lobe in the context of aging and Alzheimer’s disease because it is where the hippocampus is located. The hippocampus is likely to play a key role in aging, given its involvement in memory and cognitive processes.
The sense of smell is also important to Alzheimer’s research, as some data has suggested that those at risk for the disease have a reduced sense of smell. While it is far too early to draw any conclusions about the long-term impacts of these COVID-related changes, investigating possible connections between COVID-19-related brain changes and memory is of great interest – particularly given the regions implicated and their importance in memory and Alzheimer’s disease.
D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.
The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.
AP reports that the school principal, Karl Francis, said Corcoran’s art display was part of a school project for students to create something inspired by a book, according to the Portsmouth Herald. Francis issued a statement following the walkout, saying that the art would be put back. The school will also conduct an equity audit, AP notes.
“We welcome the school’s decision to return the artwork to its display, and applaud the student for her courage in standing up for civil rights and justice,” CAIR National Communications Coordinator Ismail Allison said, AP writes.
It’s alarming to think that artwork calling out racism isn’t something the school would like to display. More than anything, I think students of color would at least feel encouraged that their school can’t be pressured into staying quiet about something that affects their well-being outside of the classrooms.
A French Company Is Using Enzymes To Recycle One of the Most Common Single-Use Plastics (technologyreview.com)
Carbios has been developing enzymatic recycling since the company was founded in 2011. Its process relies on enzymes to chop up the long chains of polymers that make up plastic. The resulting monomers can then be purified and strung together to make new plastics. Researchers at Carbios started with a natural enzyme used by bacteria to break down leaves, then tweaked it to make it more efficient at breaking down PET. Carbios estimates that its enzymatic recycling process reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 30% compared to virgin PET. Marty says he expects that number to increase as they work out the kinks. In a recent report, researchers estimated that manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET. The report wasn't specifically about Carbios, but it's probably a good estimate for its process, according to Gregg Beckham, a researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a co-author of the report.
Carbios's product is about twice as expensive as virgin PET, Marty says. By comparison, mechanically recycled PET is only about 50% more expensive than virgin. Marty points out that Carbios's PET would still only cost about two cents for a small, clear plastic bottle, which he argues is a relatively small expense for manufacturers. Companies may be willing to pay. In a press release earlier this year, Carbios revealed demonstration bottles from partner brands that included PepsiCo and Nestle. Carbios recycled discarded plastic and handed it off to the companies, which used it to make new bottles. Eventually, enzymatic recycling may be able do things that mechanical recycling can't, like recycle clothes or mixed streams of plastics.
The team aims to collect more than 800,000 samples in the five years of the project, called Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens -- Viral Zoonoses, or DEEP VZN. The project is expected to yield 8,000 to 12,000 novel, previously unknown, viruses for analysis. The program has parallels with another USAID-funded program, STOP Spillover, which assesses risk factors for animal-to-human disease transmission and implements interventions to stop it. DEEP VZN will select partner sites outside the U.S. based on factors such as commitment to data sharing and whether there are lots of interactions between humans and animals in the region. Other partners for the project include Washington University in St. Louis and the nonprofit FHI 360.
Microsoft has traditionally made installing WSL more of a hassle than it should be, but the company finally got the process right in Windows 10 build 2004. Just open an elevated Command prompt (start --> type cmd --> click Run as Administrator), type wsl --install at the prompt, and you're good to go. Windows 11, thankfully, carries this process forward unchanged. A simple wsl --install with no further arguments gets you Hyper-V and the other underpinnings of WSL, along with the current version of Ubuntu. If you aren't an Ubuntu fan, you can see what other easily installable distributions are available with the command wsl --list --online. If you decide you'd prefer a different distro, you can install it instead with — for example — wsl --install -d openSUSE-42. If you're not sure which distribution you prefer, don't fret. You can install as many as you like, simply by repeating wsl --list --online to enumerate your options and wsl --install -d distroname to install whichever you like. Installing a second distribution doesn't uninstall the first; it creates a separate environment, independent of any others. You can run as many of these installed environments as you like simultaneously, without fear of one messing up another.
In addition to easy installation, WSL on Windows 11 brings support for both graphics and audio in WSL apps. This isn't exactly a first — Microsoft debuted WSLg in April, with Windows 10 Insider Build 21364. But Windows 11 is the first production Windows build with WSLg support. If this is your first time hearing of WSLg, the short version is simple: you can install GUI apps — for example, Firefox — from your Ubuntu (or other distro) command line, and they'll work as expected, including sound. When I installed WSLg on Windows 11 on the Framework laptop, running firefox from the Ubuntu terminal popped up the iconic browser automatically. Heading to YouTube in it worked perfectly, too, with neither frame drops in the video nor glitches in the audio....
[T]here is one obvious "killer app" for WSLg that has us excited — and that's virt-manager, the RedHat-originated virtualization management tool. virt-manager is a simple tool that streamlines the creation, management, and operation of virtual machines using the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine... virt-manager never got a Windows port and seems unlikely to. But it runs under WSLg like a champ.
They reported a few problems, like when running GNOME's Software Center app (and the GNOME shell desktop environment).
But "If you're already a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user, Windows 11 offers an enormously improved experience compared to what you're accustomed to from Windows 10. It installs more easily, makes more functionality available, and offers better desktop integration than older workarounds such as running MobaXTerm's X11 server."
Python Core Developers Release Version 3.10 -- First Major Release Since Transition from Python 2 (zdnet.com)
One of the headline features is "structural pattern matching" in Python 3.10 -- a technique for handling data that's already available in C, Java, JavaScript, Scala and Elixir. "Structural pattern matching has been added in the form of a match statement and case statements of patterns with associated actions. Patterns consist of sequences, mappings, primitive data types as well as class instances. Pattern matching enables programs to extract information from complex data types, branch on the structure of data, and apply specific actions based on different forms of data," the project explains in release 3.10 notes. "While structural pattern matching can be used in its simplest form comparing a variable to a literal in a case statement, its true value for Python lies in its handling of the subject's type and shape," it adds.
Python core contributors presented the update in a meeting this week. Pablo Galindo Salgado, a physicist and core Python contributor, explained how the project is using Microsoft's GitHub Actions DevOps (CI/CD) tools to test Python changes on Windows, Linux and macOS systems. "When you merge something to Python, there is a CI in GitHub Actions, and we have other providers, although we are mainly using GitHub Actions now. It tests your commits on every single commit on Linux, Windows, and macOS," said Salgado.
Besides better error messages (including more precise and reliable line numbers for debugging), other changes to the language include overloading the pipe operator to allow a new syntax for writing union types, and type aliases (a kind of user-specified type, offering a way to explicitly declare an assignment as a type alias).
This is the second crewed mission during the construction of the space station, which China plans to have fully crewed and operational by December 2022. The first crewed mission, a three-month stay by three other astronauts, was completed last month. Six more missions have been scheduled before the end of next year, including two crewed missions, two laboratory modules and two cargo missions. "For the Chinese, this is still early in their human spaceflight effort as they've been doing this for less than 20 years ... and for fewer than 10 missions," Cheng added. "In the past, the Chinese put up a crewed flight only once every two to three years. Now, they're sending them up every few months."
"If the Chinese maintain this pace ... it reflects a major shift in the mission tempo for their human spaceflight efforts...."
China successfully landed an exploratory rover on the moon last December and one on Mars in May. The first module of the Tiangong space station launched in April. Just last week, an international team of scientists released their findings from the moon rocks China brought back to Earth... "The European Space Agency, Russia, India, and Israel have suffered Moon or Mars probe failures in recent years; China succeeded with both on the first tries," David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, told CNN via email. Though the US still has the world's leading space program, he said, "there's no doubt that China is the world's Number 2 space power today."
China's ambitions span years into the future, with grand plans for space exploration, research and commercialization. One of the biggest ventures will be building a joint China-Russia research station on the moon's south pole by 2035 — a facility that will be open to international participation... Chinese astronauts have long been locked out of the International Space Station due to US political objections and legislative restrictions — which is why it has been a long-standing goal of China's to build a station of its own...
One reason space research cannot be divorced from terrestrial politics, and why the issue is so complicated, is because "the Chinese space program is heavily influenced, and its human and lunar programs are overseen, by the Chinese military," Cheng said. "Cooperating with China in space means cooperating with the Chinese military."
Jupiter, and its moons, have been expected to survive, although we previously didn't know for sure. But with our discovery of this new exoplanet, we can now be more certain that Jupiter really will make it. Moreover, the margin of error in the position of this exoplanet could mean that it is almost half as close to the white dwarf as Jupiter currently is to the Sun. If so, that is additional evidence for assuming that Jupiter, and Mars, will make it. So could any life survive this transformation? A white dwarf could power life on moons or planets that end up being very close to it (about one-tenth the distance between the Sun and Mercury) for the first few billion years. After that, there wouldn't be enough radiation to sustain anything. [...]
The new white dwarf exoplanet was found with what is known as the microlensing detection method. This looks at how light bends due to a strong gravitational field, which happens when a star momentarily aligns with a more distant star, as seen from Earth. The gravity from the foreground star magnifies the light from the star behind it. Any planets orbiting the star in the foreground will bend and warp this magnified light, which is how we can detect them. The white dwarf we investigated is one-quarter of the way towards the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, or about 6,500 light years away from our Solar System, and the more distant star is in the centre of the galaxy.
As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma "recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit..."
The indictment says the four alleged scammers stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5m.
The U.S. Department of Justice addsIf convicted, Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses; a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years for interstate transportation of stolen property; and a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years for making false statements to the FBI.
Additionally, if convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, Talsma will serve a maximum term of imprisonment of four years consecutive to any sentence imposed for the other criminal offenses. Restitution and forfeiture of certain assets obtained with the proceeds of the scheme may also be ordered as a result of a conviction.
PANDEMIC
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
Deaths:
Recovered:
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2110.17 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2298 days ago
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