Slashdot Mirror

Salon writes that Silicon Valley tech workers are "defying their overlords," arguing that recent unionization attempts by Kickstarter employees may be only the beginning: The workers' Kickstarter campaign is not the first attempt, though, or even the first time rumblings of unionization, have circulated among programmers. In 2018, software engineers at the startup Lanetix announced their intent to unionize -- and were promptly fired by management (It is illegal to fire employees for trying to unionize). The National Labor Relations Board intervened, and ultimately forced Lanetix to pay the 15 fired engineers a total of $775,000. The show of worker power at Lanetix may have paved the way for Kickstarter's workers. Similarly, workers across the video game industry -- generally among the most overworked, underpaid workers within the tech industry -- have been making steps towards unionization. Game Workers Unite, profiled by Salon last year, is building a grassroots movement to organize the ranks of video game makers.

Together, this suggests that a small but visible movement for white-collar software engineers unionizing has been gaining steam in the Valley over the past few years -- suggesting that the people who make up the tech industry, once a bastion of libertarianism, are starting to understand the often subtle ways that their employers exploit them... For decades, libertarianism was part and parcel to the tech industry. Despite a grueling work culture and a high-profile collusion scandal among major tech corporations to suppress software engineers' wages, tech workers were more likely to see themselves as future founders than an exploited underclass -- a point of view encouraged by employers through high wages and generous, often absurd office perks. Recent developments suggest such endearing tactics are no longer working.

IEEE Spectrum is publishing a six-part series exploring the human history of AI. the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer. But his first design for a massive computing machine, a contraption called the Difference Engine that had some 25,000 parts, was just a giant calculator intended to handle logarithmic tables. It wasn't until he began designing his first Analytical Engine that he began to dream of a smart machine that could handle more general-purpose computations.

This short essay argues that Babbage's creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.

GITAI is a robotics startup with offices in Japan and the United States that's developing tech to put humanoid telepresence robots in space to take over for astronauts. IEEE: This week, GITAI is announcing a joint research agreement with JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) to see what it takes for robots to be useful in orbit, with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station. It's also worth noting that GITAI has some new hires, including folks from the famous (and somewhat mysterious) Japanese bipedal robot company SCHAFT.

[...] GITAI says that their robots will "reduce the cost of space work to 10 percent" of the cost of using a real astronaut, by instead relying on earthbound humans for immersive teleoperation. As you might expect, the trouble with immersive teleoperation between Earth and orbit is getting data back and forth over a restrictive network. Part of GITAI's secret sauce involves compressing "data of 360-degree camera with resolution of 2.7K from original data volume of 800 Mbps to average 2.5 Mbps." At the same time, they've managed to reduce latency to 60 ms, which is really quite good, for talking to space. The plan is to get all of this working in low Earth orbit by 2020.

Engineers at the University of Michigan have built the first millimeter-scale stand-alone device that meets Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) specifications. "Consuming just 0.6 milliwatts during transmission, it would broadcast for 11 years using a typical 5.8-mm coin battery," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Such a millimeter-scale BLE radio would allow these ant-sized sensors to communicate with ordinary equipment, even a smartphone." From the report: The transmitter chip, which debuted last month at IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, had to solve two problems. The first is power consumption, and the second is the size of the antenna. An ordinary transmitter circuit requires a tunable RF oscillator to generate the frequency, a power amplifier to boost its amplitude, and an antenna to radiate the signal. The Michigan team combined the oscillator and the antenna in a way that made the amplifier unnecessary. They called their invention a power oscillator. The key part of an oscillator is the resonant tank circuit: an inductor and a capacitor. Energy sloshes back and forth between the inductor's magnetic field and the capacitor's electric field at a resonant frequency determined by the capacitance and inductance. In the new circuit, the team used the antenna itself as the inductor in the resonant tank. Because it was acting as an inductor, the antenna radiated using changing magnetic field instead of an electric field; that meant it could be more compact.

However, size wasn't the only thing. Quality factor, or Q, is a dimensionless quantity that basically says how efficient your resonator is. As a 14-mm long loop of conductor, the antenna was considerably larger than an on-chip inductor for a millimeter-scale radio could be. That led to a Q was that was about five times what an on-chip inductor would deliver. Though it was a much more efficient solution, in order to meet BLE specifications, the team needed a better way to power the power oscillator. Their solution was to build an on-chip transformer into the circuit that supplies power to it. The transformer looks like two nested coils. One coil is attached to the supply voltage end of the oscillator circuit, and the other is attached to ground side. Pumping the transformer at a frequency twice that of the power amplifier wound up efficiently boosting the flow of power to the antenna.

Oracle "swung the layoff axe" Thursday, reports IEEE Spectrum, saying that the move "clear-cut teams of engineers." The exact numbers of employees cut and their specific roles have not been reported by the company, but the layoffs are clearly significant. Fifty in Mexico, 50 in New Hampshire, 100 in India, at least that many in Silicon Valley -- the numbers, according to anecdotal reports on theLayoff.com and from internal chatter, are adding up quickly....

Oracle's layoff day started at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, when an email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line "Organizational Restructuring" arrived in employee inboxes. The email informed staff members that, going forward, everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation... Then the email continued with a perky sentence that made some employees furious: "OCI's business is stronger than ever, and this team's future is bright." At approximately 10 a.m., I'm told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began -- and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business.

Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building, and were told that Friday (today) would their last official day. "The morning felt like a slaughter," one Oracle employee told me. "One person after another...." And, that employee said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
Business Insider reports that Oracle hasn't formally announced the number of people laid off, but adds that "One source we spoke to was told by his manager that 1,500 people worldwide were cut."

the_newsbeagle writes: An FDA advisory committee met today to consider approving the NeuroAD device, which is supposed to help with the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. The device uses a combination of brain stimulation and cognitive training tasks to strengthen the neural circuits involved in language, memory, and other components of cognition. The treatment requires patients to come to the clinic daily for 1-hour sessions. Regulators in Israel and Europe have already approved the device. The CEO of the company behind the device, Neuronix, says that they're not attempting to cure the underlying biological causes of Alzheimer's. "We're attempting to modify the course of the disease," he says. The cognitive improvements last for up to a year, after which they fade away.

When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. Tekla Perry shares a report: That's the conclusion of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study was put together by a global team of researchers led by Prashant Loyalka, an assistant professor at Stanford University. The team constructed a careful sampling mechanism to select senior (typically fourth year) computer science or equivalent students in each of the four countries, making sure that both the educational institutions and students enrolled at those schools were statistically representative of schools and computer science students throughout the respective nations. The sampling also ensured that study participants represented both elite and non-elite universities.

The final selection included 6847 students from the U.S., 678 from China, 364 from India, and 551 from Russia. Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia. When the researchers tabulated the results, the U.S. students came out ahead in every category. U.S. seniors outperformed their peers overall; students from elite U.S. schools outclassed their counterparts at the other countries' elite institutions; and the same was true for students at non-elite universities. (The differences among the scores of students in China, India, and Russia were not statistically significant, the researchers indicated.)

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, or KU Leuven, says it has developed a solar panel that converts sunlight directly into hydrogen using moisture in the air. The prototype takes the water vapor and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. If it scales successfully, the technology could help address a major challenge facing the hydrogen economy. A small but growing number of facilities are producing "green" hydrogen using electrolysis, which splits water molecules using electricity -- ideally from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Other researchers, including the team in Belgium, are developing what's called direct solar water-splitting technologies. These use chemical and biological components to split water directly on the solar panel, forgoing the need for large, expensive electrolysis plants.

KU Leuven sits on a grassy campus in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium. Earlier this month, professor Johan Martens and his team at the Center for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis announced their prototype could produce 250 liters of hydrogen per day on average over a full year, which they claim is a world record. A family living in a well-insulated Belgian house could use about 20 of these panels to meet their power and heating needs during an entire year, they predict. The solar panel measures 1.65 meters long -- roughly the height of a kitchen refrigerator, or this reporter -- and has a rated power output of about 210 watts. The system can convert 15 percent of the solar energy it receives into hydrogen, the team says. That's a significant leap from 0.1 percent efficiency they first achieved 10 years ago.

Researchers at Google, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California Santa Barbara has solved one of the biggest limitations with quantum computing: all the control and readout circuits of quantum computer systems must be at room temperature, while their superconducting qubits live in a cryogenic enclosure at less than 1 kelvin. "For today's sub-100-qubit systems, there's enough space for specialized RF cabling to come in and out of the enclosure," reports IEEE Spectrum. "But to scale up to the million-qubit systems needed to do really cool stuff, there just won't be enough room."

At the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco last month, the researchers reported making a key control circuit in CMOS that will work at cryogenic temperatures. They described it as "a high-performance, low-power pulse modulator needed to program the qubits." From the report: "The current approach is OK for now," says Joseph Bardin, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who designed the IC while on sabbatical at Google. "But it's not scalable to a million qubits." For Google's 72-qubit quantum processor there are already 168 coaxial cables going into the refrigerator and connecting to the 10-millikelvin quantum processor. The pulse modulator IC Bardin worked on is used to encode quantum states on a qubit in order to execute a program. Quantum computers get their parallelizing power because qubits don't have to be just 0 or 1, like the bits in an ordinary computer. Instead, they can be a mix of those states. The pulse modulator uses a specific set of RF frequencies to produce that mix.

"The biggest challenge is heat dissipation," explains Bardin. The qubits are at 10 millikelvins, but the control circuits, which necessarily throw off heat, can't be held that low. The researchers aimed for 4 K for the control IC. "However, at 4 K, thermodynamics limits the efficiency of cooling. The best you're going to get is about 1 percent efficiency. In practice it's worse." So the power dissipated by the electronics per qubit had to be only in the milliwatt range. That power constraint had to be balanced with the need for control accuracy, Bardin says. This was complicated by how differently CMOS transistors behave at 4 k, which is a more than 200 degrees below what silicon foundries' simulation models can deal with. Bardin and the Google team managed to design the IC in a way that compensates for these problems and achieves the balance between power consumption and performance. The resulting IC consumed less than 2 mW, yet it was able to put a qubit through its paces in testing.

the_newsbeagle writes: In newborn intensive care units (NICUs) today, tiny fragile babies lie in incubators, wired to a variety of monitors that track their vital signs. This mess of wires makes it complicated for nurses to pick up the babies for routine tasks like diaper changes, and makes it hard for new parents to pick up their infants for cuddling. Skin-to-skin contact between parents and infants has been proven not only to help with bonding, but also to have a host of medical benefits for the infants, so the wires that tether babies to their beds are a real problem. At Northwestern University, an electrical engineer who works on flexible, stretchable electronics teamed up with a pediatric dermatologist to invent a solution. They devised a system of stick-on wireless biosensors (with a gentle adhesive that's safe even for thin preemie skin) that actually provide more information than today's standard setup. The system "is composed of two sensors, one that sticks to the chest to record electrocardiograms (providing heart rate), another that sticks to the foot to record photoplethysmograms (measuring blood oxygenation) and skin temperature," reports IEEE Spectrum. "The foot sensor required the engineering team to create software that could compensate for movement artifacts in the data. Time-syncing these two sensors also provides a continuous measurement of blood pressure; the system knows when the heart pumps out a pulse of blood and when it arrives at the foot, and that time measurement correlates well with blood pressure."

"The sensors use near-field communication (NFC) to connect to a module that can be attached to the baby's bed, and which both receives the data and sends wireless power to the sensors," the report adds. "That module transmits the data via bluetooth to a mobile phone or tablet."

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A new kind of magnet, theorized for decades, may now have been experimentally proven to exist. And it could eventually lead to better data storage devices. In a normal magnet, the magnetic moments of individual grains align with each other to generate a magnetic field. In contrast, in the new "singlet-based" magnet, magnetic moments are temporary in nature, popping in and out of existence. Although a singlet-based magnet's field is unstable, the fact that such magnets can more easily transition between magnetic and non-magnetic states can make them well-suited for data storage application. Specifically, they could operate more quickly and with less power than conventional devices, says Andrew Wray, a materials physicist at New York University who led the research. Now, Wray and his colleagues have discovered the first example of a singlet-based magnet that is robust -- one made from uranium antimonide (USb2). "It ends up taking very little energy to create spin excitons for uranium antimonide," Wray says. "This is essential for the singlet-based magnet, because if it took a lot of energy, then there wouldn't be enough spin excitons to condense, stabilize one another, and give you a magnet." The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed a new method of harvesting electricity from body heat to power wearable devices. "The new, wearable thermoelectric generator is also sourced from non-toxic and non-allergenic substances, making it a viable candidate for wearable technology," reports IEEE Spectrum. Furthermore, "the substrate on which the generator is built is plain old cotton fabric." From the report: More precisely, it's a vapor-deposited strip of cotton fabric -- coated with a material called, brace yourself, "persistently p-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)" a.k.a. PEDOT-Cl. One end of the fabric touches a person's skin and is thus at a person's body temperature. The other end, ideally, is exposed to the open air. The greater the difference in temperature between the two ends, the greater the electrical output. [...] The innovation here was to vapor deposit their polymer only onto the surface of the cotton fibers -- and not soak the entire cloth in the polymer.

By keeping the semiconducting material on the surface, they could allow for charge to flow through the material while still thermally insulating one end of the generator from the other. This stems from the competing demands of a good thermoelectric conductor. The ideal material must somehow keep one side hot and the other side cold -- in other words, the material must be thermally insulating. However, it must at the same time conduct electrons. Electrical current needs to flow, or it's not a very good generator. With this vapor deposition trick, she says, "The polymer can be really, really electrically conductive." And PEDOT-Cl fills that bill. However, because the polymer is only coated on the outer surface of the cotton fibers, the bulk of the material (i.e. the cotton) is still able to perform its thermally insulating role. The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

the_newsbeagle writes: The stethoscope is a ubiquitous medical tool that has barely changed since it was invented in the early 1800s. But now a team of engineers, doctors, and public health researchers have come together to reinvent the tool using adaptive acoustics and AI. Their motivation is this statistic: Every year, nearly 1 million kids die of pneumonia around the world, with most deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The death toll is highest among children under the age of 5. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University, designed a smart stethoscope for use by unskilled workers in noisy medical clinics. It uses a dynamic audio filtering system to remove ambient noise and distracting body sounds while not interfering with the subtle sounds from the lungs. And it uses AI to analyze the cleaned-up signal and provide a diagnosis.

the_newsbeagle writes: The stethoscope is a ubiquitous medical tool that has barely changed since it was invented in the early 1800s. But now a team of engineers, doctors, and public health researchers have come together to reinvent the tool using adaptive acoustics and AI. Their motivation is this statistic: Every year, nearly 1 million kids die of pneumonia around the world, with most deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The death toll is highest among children under the age of 5. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University, designed a smart stethoscope for use by unskilled workers in noisy medical clinics. It uses a dynamic audio filtering system to remove ambient noise and distracting body sounds while not interfering with the subtle sounds from the lungs. And it uses AI to analyze the cleaned-up signal and provide a diagnosis.

The Hanford Vit Plant in Washington state, a $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste, is now on track to begin "glassifying" low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, reports IEEE Spectrum. This is "a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline." From the report: Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation's radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it's unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility's long-term prospects. Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

However, higher-level waste has a longer timeline. Separate pretreatment and vitrification facilities aren't slated for commissioning until 2033. All parts of the Vit Plant are legally required to begin fully operating by 2036, under a consent decree between Washington, Oregon, and the federal government. The DOE hasn't said whether, or how, its proposal to reclassify nuclear waste would affect existing plans at Hanford if adopted. The agency is not making any decisions on the classification or disposal of any particular waste stream at this time, a DOE official said by email. [...] Though current law defines high-level radioactive waste as the sludge that results from processing highly radioactive nuclear fuel, the DOE is considering slapping a new, potentially less expensive label on it if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for Class C low-level radioactive waste. Reclassifying nuclear waste would allow the federal government to sidestep decades of cleanup work, saving it billions of dollars. The relabeling might even enable the DOE to bypass costly vitrification and instead contain tank waste by covering it with concrete-like grout, as the agency does at other decommissioned nuclear sites. Officials and citizens in Washington and Oregon oppose this method for Hanford, "citing the risk of long-term soil and groundwater contamination and the challenges of moving and storing voluminous grout blocks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Earlier federal studies found that grout 'actually performed the worst of all the supplemental treatment options considered.' (A 2017 report to Congress, however, suggested both vitrification and grout could effectively treat Hanford's low-activity waste.)"

Wave723 writes: To make its developers' jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.

A new 3D-printing technique could render a three-dimensional object in minutes instead of hours -- at up to 100 times current speeds. The experimental approach uses a vat of resin and some clever tricks with UV and blue LED lights (no lasers needed) to accelerate the printing process. From a report: The technique looks almost like a time-reverse film loop of an object dissolving in a reservoir of acid. But instead of acid, this reservoir contains a specially-designed resin that hardens when exposed to a particular shade of blue light. Crucially, that hardening (the technical term is polymerization) does not take place in the presence of a certain wavelength of UV light. The resin is also particularly absorbent at the wavelengths of both the blue and UV light. So the intensity of UV or blue light going in translates directly to the depth to which light will penetrate into the resin bath. The brighter the light beam, the further it penetrates and the further its effects (whether inhibiting polymerization in the case of UV light, or causing it in the case of blue light) will be felt in the bath along that particular light path.

Timothy Scott, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, says the way to get a 3D-printed object out of this process is to send UV light through a glass-bottomed basin of resin. Then, at the same time, through that same glass window, send patterns of bright and dim blue light. If this printing process used only the blue light, it would immediately harden the first bit of resin it encounters in the basin -- the stuff just inside the glass. And so each successive layer of the object to be printed would need to be scraped or pulled off the window's surface -- a time-consuming and potentially destructive process.

The snow-dusted peak of Mount Wilson in California has been home to many famous observatories. Until 1949, its 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker telescope was the largest aperture telescope in the world, and in 2004, its CHARA array became the world's largest optical interferometer. Now, two new observatories are being built there that, while not focused on the stars, might prove equally historic. They could house Facebook's first laser communications systems designed to connect to satellites in orbit. IEEE Spectrum reports: Construction permits issued by the County of Los Angeles show that a small company called PointView Tech is building two detached observatories on the mountain peak. PointView is the company that IEEE Spectrum revealed last year to be a previously unknown subsidiary of Facebook working on an experimental satellite called Athena. In April, PointView sought permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to test whether E-band radio signals could "be used for the provision of fixed and mobile broadband access in unserved and underserved areas."

That application was still pending at the FCC before the current U.S. federal government shutdown took effect, but it and other public documents and presentations now strongly suggest that PointView is planning to utilize laser technology, possibly both in Athena and future spacecraft. Facebook has long been interested in free space optical, or laser, communication technology. Lasers are able to support much higher data rates than radio transmitters for a given input power, and their signals are largely immune to interference or hacking, although clouds can be problematic. Although Facebook developed millimeter-wave E-band links for its stratospheric Aquila drones, it was also experimenting with air-to-ground laser communications before it canceled its drone program last June. The laser tests, which used technology supplied by German company Mynaric, succeeded in establishing 10-gigabit-per-second links between a ground station and a light aircraft flying overhead.

The snow-dusted peak of Mount Wilson in California has been home to many famous observatories. Until 1949, its 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker telescope was the largest aperture telescope in the world, and in 2004, its CHARA array became the world's largest optical interferometer. Now, two new observatories are being built there that, while not focused on the stars, might prove equally historic. They could house Facebook's first laser communications systems designed to connect to satellites in orbit. IEEE Spectrum reports: Construction permits issued by the County of Los Angeles show that a small company called PointView Tech is building two detached observatories on the mountain peak. PointView is the company that IEEE Spectrum revealed last year to be a previously unknown subsidiary of Facebook working on an experimental satellite called Athena. In April, PointView sought permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to test whether E-band radio signals could "be used for the provision of fixed and mobile broadband access in unserved and underserved areas."

That application was still pending at the FCC before the current U.S. federal government shutdown took effect, but it and other public documents and presentations now strongly suggest that PointView is planning to utilize laser technology, possibly both in Athena and future spacecraft. Facebook has long been interested in free space optical, or laser, communication technology. Lasers are able to support much higher data rates than radio transmitters for a given input power, and their signals are largely immune to interference or hacking, although clouds can be problematic. Although Facebook developed millimeter-wave E-band links for its stratospheric Aquila drones, it was also experimenting with air-to-ground laser communications before it canceled its drone program last June. The laser tests, which used technology supplied by German company Mynaric, succeeded in establishing 10-gigabit-per-second links between a ground station and a light aircraft flying overhead.

Two new observatories are being built on Mount Wilson in California -- home to the 100-inch Hooker telescope, one of the largest aperture telescopes in the world, and CHARA array, the world's largest optical interferometer. As IEEE Spectrum reports, "they could house Facebook's first laser communications systems designed to connect to satellites in orbit." From the report: Construction permits issued by the County of Los Angeles show that a small company called PointView Tech is building two detached observatories on the mountain peak. PointView is the company that IEEE Spectrum revealed last year to be a previously unknown subsidiary of Facebook working on an experimental satellite called Athena. In April, PointView sought permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to test whether E-band radio signals could "be used for the provision of fixed and mobile broadband access in unserved and underserved areas."

That application was still pending at the FCC before the current U.S. federal government shutdown took effect, but it and other public documents and presentations now strongly suggest that PointView is planning to utilize laser technology, possibly both in Athena and future spacecraft. [...] Planning documents show that construction work on PointView's Mount Wilson observatories began in July and passed inspection in the middle of December. If the observatories are part of a laser satellite installation, they might use an optical ground station conceptually similar to [German company Mynaric]. This transmits its own laser beam up into the atmosphere for a drone -- or potentially a satellite -- to lock on to. Facebook and the Mount Wilson Institute didn't comment, but the report does go on to cite scientific papers authored by Facebook researchers suggesting that the company is committing resources to orbital lasers. "In a series of papers published in 2017 and 2018, engineers Raichelle Aniceto and Slaven Moro subjected multiple components, including an optical modem, to radiation similar to that experienced on orbit," reports IEEE Spectrum.

Two new observatories are being built on Mount Wilson in California -- home to the 100-inch Hooker telescope, one of the largest aperture telescopes in the world, and CHARA array, the world's largest optical interferometer. As IEEE Spectrum reports, "they could house Facebook's first laser communications systems designed to connect to satellites in orbit." From the report: Construction permits issued by the County of Los Angeles show that a small company called PointView Tech is building two detached observatories on the mountain peak. PointView is the company that IEEE Spectrum revealed last year to be a previously unknown subsidiary of Facebook working on an experimental satellite called Athena. In April, PointView sought permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to test whether E-band radio signals could "be used for the provision of fixed and mobile broadband access in unserved and underserved areas."

That application was still pending at the FCC before the current U.S. federal government shutdown took effect, but it and other public documents and presentations now strongly suggest that PointView is planning to utilize laser technology, possibly both in Athena and future spacecraft. [...] Planning documents show that construction work on PointView's Mount Wilson observatories began in July and passed inspection in the middle of December. If the observatories are part of a laser satellite installation, they might use an optical ground station conceptually similar to [German company Mynaric]. This transmits its own laser beam up into the atmosphere for a drone -- or potentially a satellite -- to lock on to. Facebook and the Mount Wilson Institute didn't comment, but the report does go on to cite scientific papers authored by Facebook researchers suggesting that the company is committing resources to orbital lasers. "In a series of papers published in 2017 and 2018, engineers Raichelle Aniceto and Slaven Moro subjected multiple components, including an optical modem, to radiation similar to that experienced on orbit," reports IEEE Spectrum.

Data-science job openings are expanding faster than the number of technologists looking for them, says job-search firm Indeed. From a report: Back in August, a LinkedIn analysis concluded that the United States is facing a significant shortage of data scientists, a big change from a surplus in 2015. Last week, job-search firm Indeed reported that its data indicates the shortage is getting worse: While more job seekers are interested in data-science jobs, the number of job postings from employers has been rising faster than the number of interested applicants.

According to Indeed, job postings for data scientists as a share of all postings were up 29 percent in December 2018 compared with December 2017, while searches were only up around 14 percent. "The bargaining power in data science remains with the job seekers," Andrew Flowers, Indeed economist, stated in a press release. [...] Salaries for data scientists are up as well. Average salary in the area surrounding Houston, which topped the 2018 list when adjusted for the cost of living, climbed 16.5 percent since 2017, while the average salary in the San Francisco Bay Area, No. 2 on the adjusted list, jumped 13.7 percent over Indeed's 2017 numbers.

Data-science job openings are expanding faster than the number of technologists looking for them, says job-search firm Indeed. From a report: Back in August, a LinkedIn analysis concluded that the United States is facing a significant shortage of data scientists, a big change from a surplus in 2015. Last week, job-search firm Indeed reported that its data indicates the shortage is getting worse: While more job seekers are interested in data-science jobs, the number of job postings from employers has been rising faster than the number of interested applicants.

According to Indeed, job postings for data scientists as a share of all postings were up 29 percent in December 2018 compared with December 2017, while searches were only up around 14 percent. "The bargaining power in data science remains with the job seekers," Andrew Flowers, Indeed economist, stated in a press release. [...] Salaries for data scientists are up as well. Average salary in the area surrounding Houston, which topped the 2018 list when adjusted for the cost of living, climbed 16.5 percent since 2017, while the average salary in the San Francisco Bay Area, No. 2 on the adjusted list, jumped 13.7 percent over Indeed's 2017 numbers.

For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.

Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.

Kenya runs on mobile phones. And yet, outside of major cities like Nairobi, the infrastructure for mobile telephony is lacking. That's why, in 2019, telecommunications provider Telkom Kenya will begin turning to high-altitude balloons built by the Alphabet subsidiary Loon to provide mobile phone service. From a report: "High-altitude balloons are actually a very reasonable way to approach this problem," says Sal Candido, Loon's head of engineering. "They're high, they cover a lot of ground, and there are no obstacles." It's simple "but for one thing," Candido adds -- each balloon needs to stay in place in the stratosphere, providing coverage for one area for hundreds of days before being replaced. Candido has been with Loon for five years, long before the effort -- then known as Project Loon -- graduated from X, the Alphabet research and development subsidiary, in July 2018. Candido initially worked on developing the balloons' navigation system, one of the key components needed to address the "one thing" keeping the idea from really lifting off.

The challenge of how to navigate the balloons properly has changed drastically during Candido's time at Loon, because over the years the understanding of how Loon would operate has changed drastically as well. [...] As Loon launched more balloons for its test flights -- the company has now logged over 30 million kilometers -- the engineering team realized that they could control where the balloons would travel. "Sometimes the most obvious answer comes to you much later on," Candido says. "Why don't the balloons just not leave the coverage area?" It turns out that this is possible, at least in most places, for reasonable durations.

Wave723 quotes IEEE Spectrum: On New Year's Eve, millions of people will use Facebook's Messenger app to wish friends and family a 'Happy New Year!' If everything goes smoothly, those messages will reach recipients in fewer than 100 milliseconds, and life will go on. But if the service stalls or fails, a small team of software engineers based in the company's New York City office will have to answer for it.
The article says the team "tested and tweaked the app throughout the year and will soon face their biggest annual performance exam," since Messenger's 1.3 billion monthly active users send more messages on New Year's Eve than any other day of the year. Many of them hit "send" at the exact moment when their clock strikes midnight, "and people often try to resend messages that don't appear to make it through right away, which piles on more requests."

The solution appears to be load testing, re-directing traffic, message batching, and discarding "read receipts" and temporarily disabling other minor Facebook functions -- or, more generally, what their engineering manager describes as "graceful degradation."

An anonymous reader writes: Job-search site Indeed crunched its Silicon Valley hiring numbers for 2018, looking at tech job searches, salaries, and employers, and found that engineers who combine tech skills with business skills as directors of product management earn the most, with an average salary of US $186,766. Last year, the gig came in as number two, at $173,556. Also climbing up the ranks, and now in the number two spot with an average annual salary of $181,100, is senior reliability engineer. Application security engineer is third at $173,903. Neither made the top 20 in 2017. And while it seems that machine learning engineers have been getting all the love in 2018, those jobs came in eighth place, at $159,230. That's still a bit of a leap from last year, when the job made its first appearance on Indeed's top 20 highest-paying jobs in the 13th spot at $149,519. This year's top 20 is below; last year's numbers are here. Further reading: 'Blockchain Developer' is the Fastest-Growing US Job (LinkedIn study).

Louisiana is rolling out a new digital driver's license app, called LA Wallet, that will let retailers digitally verify the age of their customers, if required. "According to IEEE Spectrum, Louisiana's Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control is expected to announce that bars, restaurants, grocery stores and other retails are allowed to accept LA Wallet as proof of age, according to the app's developer, Envoc." From the report: The Baton Rouge-based company launched LA Wallet in June, after two years of collaboration with state officials. But so far only law enforcement officers making routine traffic stops are required to accept the digital driver's license. Next week's announcement would greatly broaden the scope of the app's use. About 71,000 people have downloaded LA Wallet so far, says Calvin Fabre, founder and president of Envoc. The app costs $5.99 in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Users buy it, create an account with some basic information from their physical driver's license, and create a password. That's it. No biometric security -- like iris scans or facial recognition -- required. The app links back to Louisiana's Office of Motor Vehicles database, which completes the digital license with the user's photo and additional information. Any changes to the license, like a suspension or renewal, are updated immediately in the app with a wireless network connection.

To present the license -- say, to a cop during a traffic stop -- the driver (hoping his phone battery isn't dead) opens the app with a password, shows the cop the digital license image, and authenticates it by pressing and holding the screen to reveal a security seal. The license can be flipped over to show a scannable bar code on the back. There's also a handy security feature that allows anyone with the LA Wallet app to authenticate another person's Louisiana digital driver's license. It allows the bar patron to select which information she would like to reveal to the bartender -- in this case, simply the fact that she is over 21. That information is displayed on the phone with a photo and embedded QR code. The bartender scans the code with her app, which tells her that the woman seated on the other side of the bar is indeed over 21. None of the customer's personal information, such as her name, birth date, or address, is displayed or stored on the bartender's phone.

DeepMind has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. "The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go," reports IEEE Spectrum. "That earlier system had itself made history by beating one of the world's best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement. AlphaZero trained itself -- in just 3 days." From the report: The research, published today in the journal Science, was performed by a team led by DeepMind's David Silver. The paper was accompanied by a commentary by Murray Campbell, an AI researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. AlphaZero can crack any game that provides all the information that's relevant to decision-making; the new generation of games to which Campbell alludes do not. Poker furnishes a good example of such games of "imperfect" information: Players can hold their cards close to their chests. Other examples include many multiplayer games, such as StarCraft II, Dota, and Minecraft. But they may not pose a worthy challenge for long.

DeepMind developed the self-training method, called deep reinforcement learning, specifically to attack Go. Today's announcement that they've generalized it to other games means they were able to find tricks to preserve its playing strength after giving up certain advantages peculiar to playing Go. The biggest such advantage was the symmetry of the Go board, which allowed the specialized machine to calculate more possibilities by treating many of them as mirror images. The researchers have so far unleashed their creation only on Go, chess and Shogi, a Japanese form of chess. Go and Shogi are astronomically complex, and that's why both games long resisted the "brute-force" algorithms that the IBM team used against Kasparov two decades ago.

Will Moore's law really come to an end by 2025? Maybe not...

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades. The ACT device eliminates the need for semiconductors. Instead, it uses two in-plane symmetric metal electrodes (source and drain) separated by an air gap of less than 35 nanometers, and a bottom metal gate to tune the field emission. The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering...

Using metal and air in place of semiconductors for the main components of the transistor has a number of other advantages, says Shruti Nirantar, a Ph.D. candidate in RMIT's Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group. Fabrication becomes essentially a single-step process of laying down the emitter and collector and defining the air gap. And though standard silicon fabrication processes are employed in producing ACTs, the number of processing steps are far fewer, given that doping, thermal processing, oxidation, and silicide formation are unnecessary. Consequently, production costs should be cut significantly. In addition, replacing silicon with metal means these ACT devices can be fabricated on any dielectric surface, provided the underlying substrate allows effective modulation of emission current from source to drain with a bottom-gate field. "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers," says Nirantar. "So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies."
The article also suggests ACT devices could become important in space exploration, since electrons would be unaffected by extraterrestrial vacuums and radiation.

Nirantar was lead author on a new paper published in Nano Letters, and believes that their new approach "means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."

Wave723 writes: What do a Silicon Valley massage spa, a local community college, and a Californian plastics manufacturer have in common? They will soon be testing hundreds of cutting-edge wireless devices, according to an application for an experimental permit filed last week with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). If that sounds unlikely, it is. It seems much more likely that the new devices will actually be tested at three nearby Amazon facilities. These include two buildings belonging to the company's secretive Lab126 research division, and one of the retailer's largest fulfillment centers in the state.

On November 19, a company called Chrome Enterprises LLC sought permission to test up to 450 prototype devices using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a new technology that aims to deliver ultra-fast wireless broadband over shared radio frequencies. In particular, CBRS opens access to a radio frequency band (3.5 Gigahertz) that the FCC had previously set aside for military use, and makes it so that the military can share that band with anyone who buys a router or phone that supports the service, or has a cell phone plan with a carrier that has paid for a sliver of the band.

Last year, a study from the BrainGate consortium reported that a brain-computer interface (BCI) enabled a paralyzed man to type up to eight words per minute via thoughts alone. Now, according to new results from a BrainGate2 clinical trial, the same BCI was used to help three participants operate an off-the-shelf tablet. IEEE Spectrum reports: All three participants suffer from weakness or loss of movement in their arms due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease) or spinal cord injury. Each received the brain implant, an array of microelectrodes, as part of the BrainGate2 clinical trial. For this particular study, decoded neural signals from the implant were routed through an industry-standard Human Interface Device protocol, providing a virtual mouse. That "mouse" was paired to a Google Nexus 9 tablet via Bluetooth.

Each participant was asked to try out seven common apps on the tablet: email, chat, web browser, video sharing, music streaming, a weather program and a news aggregator. The researchers also asked the users if they wanted any additional apps, and subsequently added the keyboard app, grocery shopping on Amazon, and a calculator. The participants made up to 22 point-and-click selections per minute and typed up to 30 characters per minute in email and text programs. What's more, all three participants really enjoyed using the tablet.

A kidney was flown thousands of meters by a drone without incurring any damage. Reader Wave723 shares a report: When a patient who needs an organ transplantation is finally matched with a donor, every second matters. A longer wait between when an organ is removed from a donor and when it is placed into a recipient is associated with poorer organ function following transplantation. To maximize the chances of success, organs must be shipped from A to B as quickly and safely as possible -- and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task. [...] Last March, they (Dr. Joseph Scalea of the University of Maryland Medical Center and his team) received news that a kidney -- which was not healthy enough to be used in a transplantation -- was available for research. Over the course of roughly 24 hours, the kidney was shipped more than 1,600 kilometers (km) to Baltimore and the drone was set up for its first delivery mission. The results were published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine on 6 November.

In total, the little bean-shaped organ was airborne for a little more than an hour over the course of 14 flight missions. For the farthest mission, the kidney flew 2,415 meters, a distance similar to the length of potential shipment routes for donor organs between inner city hospitals. The researchers found that the temperature of the kidney remained stable, at a cool 2.5 degrees Celsius, throughout the test runs. Air pressure corresponded with altitude, and the drone-borne organ achieved a maximum speed of 67.6 km/h. In an interesting twist, the kidney was subjected to slightly fewer vibrations when transported in the drone compared to a control delivery mission in a fixed wing plane (a dual engine turboprop King Air). Biopsies of the kidney before and after drone transportation revealed no damage from the journey, suggesting that the experiment -- which the research team believes is the first ever use of a drone for organ delivery -- was a success.

A kidney was flown thousands of meters by a drone without incurring any damage. Reader Wave723 shares a report: When a patient who needs an organ transplantation is finally matched with a donor, every second matters. A longer wait between when an organ is removed from a donor and when it is placed into a recipient is associated with poorer organ function following transplantation. To maximize the chances of success, organs must be shipped from A to B as quickly and safely as possible -- and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task. [...] Last March, they (Dr. Joseph Scalea of the University of Maryland Medical Center and his team) received news that a kidney -- which was not healthy enough to be used in a transplantation -- was available for research. Over the course of roughly 24 hours, the kidney was shipped more than 1,600 kilometers (km) to Baltimore and the drone was set up for its first delivery mission. The results were published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine on 6 November.

In total, the little bean-shaped organ was airborne for a little more than an hour over the course of 14 flight missions. For the farthest mission, the kidney flew 2,415 meters, a distance similar to the length of potential shipment routes for donor organs between inner city hospitals. The researchers found that the temperature of the kidney remained stable, at a cool 2.5 degrees Celsius, throughout the test runs. Air pressure corresponded with altitude, and the drone-borne organ achieved a maximum speed of 67.6 km/h. In an interesting twist, the kidney was subjected to slightly fewer vibrations when transported in the drone compared to a control delivery mission in a fixed wing plane (a dual engine turboprop King Air). Biopsies of the kidney before and after drone transportation revealed no damage from the journey, suggesting that the experiment -- which the research team believes is the first ever use of a drone for organ delivery -- was a success.

"Quantum computing is complex and it's not all it's cracked up to be," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77, pointing to this new article from IEEE Spectrum arguing it's "not in our foreseeable future": Having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed-matter physics, I've developed my very pessimistic view. It's based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work.... Experts estimate that the number of qubits needed for a useful quantum computer, one that could compete with your laptop in solving certain kinds of interesting problems, is between 1,000 and 100,000. So the number of continuous parameters describing the state of such a useful quantum computer at any given moment must be at least 2**1,000, which is to say about 10**300. That's a very big number indeed. How big? It is much, much greater than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. To repeat: A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. At this point in a description of a possible future technology, a hardheaded engineer loses interest....

[I]t's absolutely unimaginable how to keep errors under control for the 10300 continuous parameters that must be processed by a useful quantum computer. Yet quantum-computing theorists have succeeded in convincing the general public that this is feasible.... Even without considering these impossibly large numbers, it's sobering that no one has yet figured out how to combine many physical qubits into a smaller number of logical qubits that can compute something useful. And it's not like this hasn't long been a key goal.... On the hardware front, advanced research is under way, with a 49-qubit chip (Intel), a 50-qubit chip (IBM), and a 72-qubit chip (Google) having recently been fabricated and studied. The eventual outcome of this activity is not entirely clear, especially because these companies have not revealed the details of their work...

I believe that, appearances to the contrary, the quantum computing fervor is nearing its end. That's because a few decades is the maximum lifetime of any big bubble in technology or science. After a certain period, too many unfulfilled promises have been made, and anyone who has been following the topic starts to get annoyed by further announcements of impending breakthroughs. What's more, by that time all the tenured faculty positions in the field are already occupied. The proponents have grown older and less zealous, while the younger generation seeks something completely new and more likely to succeed.
He advises quantum computing researchers to follow the advice of IBM physicist Rolf Landauer. Decades ago Landauer warned quantum computing's proponents that they needed a disclaimer in all of their publications.

"This scheme, like all other schemes for quantum computation, relies on speculative technology, does not in its current form take into account all possible sources of noise, unreliability and manufacturing error, and probably will not work."

"Think your vintage computer hardware is old?" writes long-time Slashdot reader corrosive_nf. "Ken Shirriff, Robert Garne, and their associates probably have you beat.

"The IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959, and these guys are keeping one alive in a computer museum... [T]he volunteers have to go digging through historical archives and do some detective work to figure out solutions to pretty much anything!" Many things that we take for granted are done very differently in old computers. For instance, the IBM 1401 uses 6-bit characters, not bytes. It used decimal memory addressing, not binary. It's also interesting how much people could accomplish with limited resources, running a Fortran compiler on the 1401 with just 8K of memory. Finally, working on the 1401 has given them a deeper understanding of how computers really work. It's not a black box; you can see the individual transistors that are performing operations and each ferrite core that stores a bit.
"It's a way of keeping history alive," says one of the volunteers at Silicon Valley's Computer History museum. "For museum visitors, seeing the IBM 1401 in operation gives them a feeling for what computers were like in the 1960s, the full experience of punching data onto cards and then seeing and hearing the system processing cards....

"So far, things are breaking slowly enough that we can keep up, so it's more of a challenge than an annoyance."

A startup says it can replace donated eyes with 3D-printed corneas. From a report: Here's a futuristic problem that may not have occurred to you: If self-driving cars really catch on and the number of traffic fatalities plunges, so will the number of organs available for transplant. Currently, about 20 percent of donated organs come from people who die in car accidents. Luckily, there's a futuristic solution: 3D-printed organs.

This technology is far from ready for the clinic, as researchers are still trying to figure out how to print out complex tissue structures with blood vessels and nerves. But for one early indicator of progress in this field, look to the eye. Precise Bio, a North Carolina-based startup founded by several professors at the renowned Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is working on bioprinting tissues for a variety of medical applications. The company just announced that its first products will be for the eye -- starting with a human cornea suitable for transplantation. "We plan to put our printers in eye banks," says Precise Bio CEO Aryeh Batt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Deep learning has a DRAM problem. Systems designed to do difficult things in real time, such as telling a cat from a kid in a car's backup camera video stream, are continuously shuttling the data that makes up the neural network's guts from memory to the processor. The problem, according to startup Flex Logix, isn't a lack of storage for that data; it's a lack of bandwidth between the processor and memory. Some systems need four or even eight DRAM chips to sling the 100s of gigabits to the processor, which adds a lot of space and consumes considerable power. Flex Logix says that the interconnect technology and tile-based architecture it developed for reconfigurable chips will lead to AI systems that need the bandwidth of only a single DRAM chip and consume one-tenth the power.

Mountain View-based Flex Logix had started to commercialize a new architecture for embedded field programmable gate arrays (eFPGAs). But after some exploration, one of the founders, Cheng C. Wang, realized the technology could speed neural networks. A neural network is made up of connections and "weights" that denote how strong those connections are. A good AI chip needs two things, explains the other founder Geoff Tate. One is a lot of circuits that do the critical "inferencing" computation, called multiply and accumulate. "But what's even harder is that you have to be very good at bringing in all these weights, so that the multipliers always have the data they need in order to do the math that's required. [Wang] realized that the technology that we have in the interconnect of our FPGA, he could adapt to make an architecture that was extremely good at loading weights rapidly and efficiently, giving high performance and low power."

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars. From a report: The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years. This robot factory isn't science fiction: It's being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it's known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars -- and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the "gear-ratio problem." By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today's rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit -- launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We'd start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site. Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It's still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Over the past six months a small, publicly available genealogy database has become the go-to source for solving cold case crimes. The free online tool, called GEDmatch, is an ancestry service that allows people to submit their DNA data and search for relatives -- an open access version of AncestryDNA or 23andMe. Since April, investigators have used GEDmatch to identify victims, killers, and missing persons all over the U.S. in at least 19 cases, many of them decades old, according to authors of a report published today in Science. The authors predict that in the near future, as genetic genealogy reports gain in popularity, such tools could be used to find nearly any individual in the U.S. of European descent.

GEDmatch holds the genetic data of only about a million people. But cold case investigators have been exploiting the database using a genomic analysis technique called long-range familial search. The technique allows researchers to match an individual's DNA to distant relatives, such as third cousins. Chances are, one of those relatives will have used a genetic genealogy service. More than 17 million people have participated in these services -- a number that has grown rapidly over the last two years. AncestryDNA and 23andMe hold most of those customers. A genetic match to a distant relative can fairly quickly lead investigators to the person of interest. In a highly publicized case, GEDmatch was used earlier this year to identify the "Golden State Killer," a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, but was never caught. In April, investigators were able to use a genealogy database to narrow down DNA data from crime scenes and identify the "Golden State Killer," a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years ago, IBM announced that it was investing $3 billion over the next five years into the future of nanoelectronics with a broad project it dubbed "7nm and Beyond." With at least one major chipmaker, GlobalFoundries, hitting the wall at the 7-nm node, IBM is forging ahead, using graphene to deposit nanomaterials in predefined locations without chemical contamination. In research described in the journal Nature Communications, the IBM researchers for the first time electrified graphene so that it helps to deposit nanomaterials with 97% accuracy.

"As this method works for a wide variety of nanomaterials, we envision integrated devices with functionalities that represent the unique physical properties of the nanomaterial," said Mathias Steiner, manager at IBM Research-Brazil. "We also can envision on-chip light detectors and emitters operating within a distinct wavelength range determined by the optical properties of the nanomaterial." As an example, Steiner explained that if you wanted to modify the spectral performance of an optoelectronic device, you could simply replace the nanomaterial while keeping the manufacturing process flow the same. If you take the method one step further, you could assemble different nanomaterials in different places doing multiple passes of assembly to create on-chip light detectors operating in different detection windows at the same time.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years ago, IBM announced that it was investing $3 billion over the next five years into the future of nanoelectronics with a broad project it dubbed "7nm and Beyond." With at least one major chipmaker, GlobalFoundries, hitting the wall at the 7-nm node, IBM is forging ahead, using graphene to deposit nanomaterials in predefined locations without chemical contamination. In research described in the journal Nature Communications, the IBM researchers for the first time electrified graphene so that it helps to deposit nanomaterials with 97% accuracy.

"As this method works for a wide variety of nanomaterials, we envision integrated devices with functionalities that represent the unique physical properties of the nanomaterial," said Mathias Steiner, manager at IBM Research-Brazil. "We also can envision on-chip light detectors and emitters operating within a distinct wavelength range determined by the optical properties of the nanomaterial." As an example, Steiner explained that if you wanted to modify the spectral performance of an optoelectronic device, you could simply replace the nanomaterial while keeping the manufacturing process flow the same. If you take the method one step further, you could assemble different nanomaterials in different places doing multiple passes of assembly to create on-chip light detectors operating in different detection windows at the same time.

talonyx writes: D-Wave Systems, the contentious but scrappy maker of quantum annealing processors, has launched a cloud-based platform where developers can sign up for free and run problems on their quantum processor unit (QPU). There's an in-depth set of demos, documentation, and an open-source Python SDK to look at. "Leap is the latest addition to the quantum cloud -- services that virtualize quantum computing for almost anyone with a computer and a broadband connection to use," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Leap allows anyone to sign up, giving them one minute of time on a cloud-connected 2000Q each month. That might not sound like much, but a key advantage of quantum computing is to be able to solve in milliseconds problems like factoring large numbers, optimizing routes, or calculating molecular structures that could take traditional computers days or weeks."

"D-Wave estimates that each user's free minute of quantum computing time should be enough to run between 400 and 4,000 jobs each month," the report adds. "If developers want more, the company will charge commercial users $2,000 for one hour of access each month."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [A] software remedy can't solve Subaru's issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru's recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents' B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents' bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed." Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.

Tekla S. Perry, writing for IEEE Spectrum: David Patterson -- University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer -- says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect. That's because Moore's Law really is over, he says : "We are now a factor of 15 behind where we should be if Moore's Law were still operative. We are in the post -- Moore's Law era." This means, Patterson told engineers attending the 2018 @Scale Conference held in San Jose last week, that "we're at the end of the performance scaling that we are used to. When performance doubled every 18 months, people would throw out their desktop computers that were working fine because a friend's new computer was so much faster." But last year, he said, "single program performance only grew 3 percent, so it's doubling every 20 years. If you are just sitting there waiting for chips to get faster, you are going to have to wait a long time."

Radio astronomers have so far cataloged fewer than 300 fast radio bursts, mysterious broadband radio signals that originate from well beyond the Milky Way. Almost a third of them -- 72, to be precise -- were not detected by astronomers at all but instead were recently discovered by an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained to spot their telltale signals, even hidden underneath noisy background data. The very first recorded fast radio burst, or FRB, was spotted by radio astronomers in 2007, nestled in data from 2001, reads a report on IEEE Spectrum. Today, algorithms spot FRBs by sifting through massive amounts of data as it comes in. However, today's best algorithms still can't detect every FRB that reaches Earth. That's why AI developed by Breakthrough Listen, a SETI project headed by the University of California, Berkeley, which has already found dozens of new bursts in its trial run, will be a big help in future searches. The report adds: There are a few theories about what FRBs (fast radio bursts) might be. The prevailing theory is that they're created by rapidly rotating neutron stars. In other theories, they emanate from supermassive black holes. Even more out-there theories describe how they're produced when neutron stars collide with stars composed of hypothetical dark matter particles called axions. The bursts are probably not sent by aliens, but that theory has its supporters, too. What we do know is that FRBs come from deep space and each burst lasts for only a few milliseconds. Traditionally, algorithms tease them out of the data by identifying the quadratic signals associated with FRBs. But these signals are coming from far-flung galaxies. "Because these pulses travel so far, there are plenty of complications en route," says Zhang. Pulses can be distorted and warped along the way. And even when one reaches Earth, our own noisy planet can obfuscate a pulse. That's why it makes sense to train an AI -- specifically, a convolutional neural network -- to poke through the data and find the ones that traditional algorithms missed. "In radio astronomy," says Zhang, "at least nowadays, it's characterized by big data." Case in point: The 72 FRBs identified by the Berkeley team's AI were found in 8 terabytes of data gathered by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. To even give the AI enough information to learn how to spot those signals in the first place, Zhang says the team generated about 100,000 fake FRB pulses. The simple quadratic structure of FRBs makes it fairly easy to construct fake pulses for training, according to Zhang. Then, they disguised these signals among the Green Bank Telescope data. As the team explains in their paper [PDF], accepted by The Astrophysical Journal with a preprint available on arXiv, it took 20 hours to train the AI with those fake pulses using a Nvidia Titan Xp GPU. By the end, the AI could detect 88 percent of the fake test signals. Furthermore, 98 percent of the identifications that the AI made were actually planted signals, as opposed to the machine mistakenly identifying background noise as an FRB pulse.

Radio astronomers have so far cataloged fewer than 300 fast radio bursts, mysterious broadband radio signals that originate from well beyond the Milky Way. Almost a third of them -- 72, to be precise -- were not detected by astronomers at all but instead were recently discovered by an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained to spot their telltale signals, even hidden underneath noisy background data. The very first recorded fast radio burst, or FRB, was spotted by radio astronomers in 2007, nestled in data from 2001, reads a report on IEEE Spectrum. Today, algorithms spot FRBs by sifting through massive amounts of data as it comes in. However, today's best algorithms still can't detect every FRB that reaches Earth. That's why AI developed by Breakthrough Listen, a SETI project headed by the University of California, Berkeley, which has already found dozens of new bursts in its trial run, will be a big help in future searches. The report adds: There are a few theories about what FRBs (fast radio bursts) might be. The prevailing theory is that they're created by rapidly rotating neutron stars. In other theories, they emanate from supermassive black holes. Even more out-there theories describe how they're produced when neutron stars collide with stars composed of hypothetical dark matter particles called axions. The bursts are probably not sent by aliens, but that theory has its supporters, too. What we do know is that FRBs come from deep space and each burst lasts for only a few milliseconds. Traditionally, algorithms tease them out of the data by identifying the quadratic signals associated with FRBs. But these signals are coming from far-flung galaxies. "Because these pulses travel so far, there are plenty of complications en route," says Zhang. Pulses can be distorted and warped along the way. And even when one reaches Earth, our own noisy planet can obfuscate a pulse. That's why it makes sense to train an AI -- specifically, a convolutional neural network -- to poke through the data and find the ones that traditional algorithms missed. "In radio astronomy," says Zhang, "at least nowadays, it's characterized by big data." Case in point: The 72 FRBs identified by the Berkeley team's AI were found in 8 terabytes of data gathered by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. To even give the AI enough information to learn how to spot those signals in the first place, Zhang says the team generated about 100,000 fake FRB pulses. The simple quadratic structure of FRBs makes it fairly easy to construct fake pulses for training, according to Zhang. Then, they disguised these signals among the Green Bank Telescope data. As the team explains in their paper [PDF], accepted by The Astrophysical Journal with a preprint available on arXiv, it took 20 hours to train the AI with those fake pulses using a Nvidia Titan Xp GPU. By the end, the AI could detect 88 percent of the fake test signals. Furthermore, 98 percent of the identifications that the AI made were actually planted signals, as opposed to the machine mistakenly identifying background noise as an FRB pulse.

Radio astronomers have so far cataloged fewer than 300 fast radio bursts, mysterious broadband radio signals that originate from well beyond the Milky Way. Almost a third of them -- 72, to be precise -- were not detected by astronomers at all but instead were recently discovered by an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained to spot their telltale signals, even hidden underneath noisy background data. The very first recorded fast radio burst, or FRB, was spotted by radio astronomers in 2007, nestled in data from 2001, reads a report on IEEE Spectrum. Today, algorithms spot FRBs by sifting through massive amounts of data as it comes in. However, today's best algorithms still can't detect every FRB that reaches Earth. That's why AI developed by Breakthrough Listen, a SETI project headed by the University of California, Berkeley, which has already found dozens of new bursts in its trial run, will be a big help in future searches. The report adds: There are a few theories about what FRBs (fast radio bursts) might be. The prevailing theory is that they're created by rapidly rotating neutron stars. In other theories, they emanate from supermassive black holes. Even more out-there theories describe how they're produced when neutron stars collide with stars composed of hypothetical dark matter particles called axions. The bursts are probably not sent by aliens, but that theory has its supporters, too. What we do know is that FRBs come from deep space and each burst lasts for only a few milliseconds. Traditionally, algorithms tease them out of the data by identifying the quadratic signals associated with FRBs. But these signals are coming from far-flung galaxies. "Because these pulses travel so far, there are plenty of complications en route," says Zhang. Pulses can be distorted and warped along the way. And even when one reaches Earth, our own noisy planet can obfuscate a pulse. That's why it makes sense to train an AI -- specifically, a convolutional neural network -- to poke through the data and find the ones that traditional algorithms missed. "In radio astronomy," says Zhang, "at least nowadays, it's characterized by big data." Case in point: The 72 FRBs identified by the Berkeley team's AI were found in 8 terabytes of data gathered by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. To even give the AI enough information to learn how to spot those signals in the first place, Zhang says the team generated about 100,000 fake FRB pulses. The simple quadratic structure of FRBs makes it fairly easy to construct fake pulses for training, according to Zhang. Then, they disguised these signals among the Green Bank Telescope data. As the team explains in their paper [PDF], accepted by The Astrophysical Journal with a preprint available on arXiv, it took 20 hours to train the AI with those fake pulses using a Nvidia Titan Xp GPU. By the end, the AI could detect 88 percent of the fake test signals. Furthermore, 98 percent of the identifications that the AI made were actually planted signals, as opposed to the machine mistakenly identifying background noise as an FRB pulse.

Wave723 shares an article from IEEE's Spectrum: I was scrolling through emails on my phone one recent morning when a strange message appeared among the usual mix of advertisements and morning newsletters. It was a confirmation for an upcoming doctor's appointment in New York City, but came from an address I'd never seen before. And at the top, there was a friendly note: "I guess this is for you :)" The note, I would later learn, was written by a Norwegian named Andre Nordum whose email address is just a few letters different from my own... he'd Googled my name to try to track down my personal email address and forward the message to me.

All day, I thought about Andre's act of digital kindness and the heartwarming fact that a stranger had spent time and effort trying to send me a bit of important information. I also felt a twinge of guilt: I'd received emails in the past -- from car dealerships and daycares -- that were clearly meant for other people, and I'd never forwarded any of them along.
The 33-year-old Norwegian banker later joked that he did it because "I did not want to get emails about your dermatology history for the foreseeable future." But another Norwegian has been returning mis-directed emails for over a decade with mundane stories about the family dog and games of pickleball -- meant for another E. Nordrum.

"It's a little bit like sitting on the bus or overhearing somebody in the restaurant or something," he says, admitting that when they finally stopped coming, "I was a little bit sad, actually." In 2017 the other E. Nordrum flew from America to Norway on a vacation, finally meeting the man who'd been returning all his mis-addressed emails -- and they ended up talking for hours.

The article calls it a reminder "of how downright pleasant it can sometimes be to interact with strangers on the Internet." But it also asks an interesting question: "Do these email mix-ups happen to everyone? " I know I'm still getting emails about a storage space somebody opened 1300 miles away. And Slashdot reader antdude writes, "A few days ago, I got an USC.edu's doctor email (CCed with a few other people) about an upcoming surgery for a transplant. I was like huh?"

How about the rest of Slashdot's readers. Have you ever gotten someone else's email?

When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.

Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.