upstart writes:

Roman Telescope Will Do in Months What Would Take Hubble a Lifetime:

NASA is still a few years away from launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but a new study explores what this groundbreaking space observatory will be able to do. Unlike the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, which zero in on small patches of the sky, the Roman Telescope will be designed to take a wider view of the cosmos. According to the researchers, it would take Hubble decades to see what Roman will be able to see in a few months.

The Roman Telescope passed a critical design review in 2021 and is currently under construction at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with the aim of launching it aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2027. When complete, it will have two instruments: a coronagraph for visualizing exoplanets and a wide-field camera with a 300.8-megapixel resolution. It's the latter that will allow the Roman Telescope, which will use a 2.4-meter mirror similar to Hubble, to perform both wide and deep sky surveys.

[...] "Roman will take around 100,000 pictures every year," said Jeffrey Kruk, a research astrophysicist at Goddard. "Given Roman's larger field of view, it would take longer than our lifetimes even for powerful telescopes like Hubble or Webb to cover as much sky." Specifically, the study says it would take Hubble 85 years to do what Roman will do in 63 days. However, Roman won't be ideal for precision observations of specific objects. Webb and Hubble will still be vital for that kind of work, but Roman can help nail down observational targets that could solve long-standing mysteries about galactic evolution.

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upstart writes:

AstroAccess is on a mission to make it possible for disabled people to live and work in space:

"I went silent," Dwayne Fernandes told me. "I shut the hell up." Fernandes, a double-amputee since the age of 11, was recounting his experience in weightlessness, having recently participated in a parabolic flight alongside a disabled research crew. The zero-g flight threw him into a deeply contemplative state, and as the crew celebrated its successful mission, he instead felt compelled to put pen to paper and write some poetry.

Speaking to me from his home in Australia, Fernandes told me that "disability is not just a wheelchairwe need to expand that thinking." Disability, he said, is "a condition plus barriers," which for wheelchair users includes barriers such as height or stairs. But gravity can also be a barrier, as he pointed out.

"On that zero-g flight, I had my conditionthe condition stayedbut the barrier went," Fernandes explained. "That became a profound, weird feeling that caused me to re-identify myself. The social model of disability says I'm a person with a disability, but my condition changed in a zero-g environment." When in weightlessness, "I am not disabledI am actually super enabled."

Elaborating on this point, Fernandes described himself as being "compact" and with "upgradeable parts." Legs "get in the way in space," he said, and, as extra weight, they only serve to increase launch costs. "There's no such thing as a spacewalk," he said. "Your feet aren't walkingyour feet are just anchored." All he would need to live and work in space, he said, are "a couple of carabiners and some hooks."

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A couple of unrelated Zoom stories submitted by users:

Porn Zoom bomb forces cancellation of Fed's Waller event

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/feds-waller-virtual-event-canceled-after-zoom-hijack-2023-03-02/

A virtual event with Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller was canceled on Thursday after the Zoom video conference was "hijacked" by a participant who displayed pornographic images.

"We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret," said Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the event via a Zoom link. "We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us."

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upstart writes:

For the second time in four months, the Facebook and Instagram parent company could axe thousands of staff:

Many more Meta workers may be clearing off their desks very soon. Early on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Meta plans to lay off "thousands" of employees, and the first round of staff cuts could be finalized as early as this week, based on anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

[...] The anonymous sources quoted by Bloomberg said this new round of cuts is being driven by declining advertising revenues while it refocuses, again, on its metaverse ambitions. This is an apparent effort to help the company hit certain financial targets for 2023. The company reportedly asked team directors and vice presidents across the company to make up a list of names for those who should get the cut.

[...] In addition to these supposed layoffs, there's a so-called "flattening" happening at the company's Menlo Park headquarters and beyond. Previous reports noted how Meta is putting pressure on middle managers of small teams to either get them to do more grunt work, or otherwise leave the company.

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upstart writes:

Iberians were using heavy metal on hard rock way before it was cool:

It's time to update the history books again. A group of researchers in Germany have shown that steel tools were being used in the Iberian peninsula at least as long ago as 900 BCE far earlier than it was believed knowledge of the metal had made its way to the region.

The team, led by University of Freiburg archaeologist Ralph Araque Gonzalez, base their claims on geochemical and metallographic analyses and some good old fashioned experimental archaeology. They demonstrated that a series of engravings on stone pillars found in the region from the late Bronze Age could only have been made with tools made from proper steel, and it was most likely developed locally.

According to the team's paper on the research, the final bronze age (FBA) in the Iberian peninsula lasted from around 1200800 BCE, and the early iron age (EIA) lasted roughly 200 years after that. Despite that commonly accepted timeline, the team said a series of engraved steles identified as from the FBA/EIA and examined as part of the study were mostly made of extremely hard rock similar to quartzite.

[...] According to the University of Freiburg, up until recently it was believed the ability to create steel an alloy of iron and carbon only became widespread in Europe with the expansion of the Roman Empire.

[...] But evidence of steel tools in Iberia hundreds of years earlier raises a question: how did they get there? Based on where the tool was found, and the context in which it was discovered, Araque Gonzalez concluded that the Romans probably had nothing to do with it.

[...] "Iron metallurgy including the production and tempering of steel were probably indigenous developments of decentralized small communities in Iberia, and not due to the influence of later colonization processes," Araque Gonzalez hypothesized.

Journal Reference:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105742

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fliptop writes:

On April 1, Amazon will be permanently closing some of its Amazon Go stores in major cities on both coasts:

The locations include two stores in Seattle, two stores in New York City and four in San Francisco.

"Like any physical retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio of stores and make optimization decisions along the way. In this case, we've decided to close a small number of Amazon Go stores in Seattle, New York City and San Francisco," an Amazon spokesperson told FOX Business in a Saturday email.

[...] The e-commerce giant is still opening new Amazon Go stores.

"We remain committed to the Amazon Go format, operate more than 20 Amazon Go stores across the U.S., and will continue to learn which locations and features resonate most with customers as we keep evolving our Amazon Go stores," the spokesperson said.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Related: Amazon to Slash More Than 18,000 Jobs in Escalation of Cuts

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upstart writes:

'Firemode reset' sees Interstellar Boundary Explorer back on the job:

NASA engineers have managed to restore the Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft to working condition by using the oldest trick in the computing book.

IBEX was put into contingency mode in February after NASA reset its onboard systems and the almost 15-year-old spacecraft's flight computer subsequently failed to respond to commands uploaded from mission control. Engineers have since performed a so-called "firecode reset" as the craft's orbit reached its closest point to Earth.

"To take the spacecraft out of a contingency mode, the mission team performed a firecode reset (which is an external reset of the spacecraft) instead of waiting for the spacecraft to perform an autonomous reset and power cycle on March 4," NASA confirmed on Monday.

"After the firecode reset, command capability was restored. IBEX telemetry shows that the spacecraft is fully operational and functioning normally."

Launched in 2008, the IBEX spacecraft carries instruments to detect energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) that form when hot ions from the solar wind collide with cold gaseous atoms from the interstellar medium, the stuff in-between stars in outer space.

Using data collected from the IBEX-Hi and IBEX-Lo sensors, astronomers can plot the boundaries of the Solar System. All the planets and other astronomical objects are encased in a bubble known as the "heliosphere" created by the solar wind.

[...] Fixing the satellite will allow astronomers to continue gathering data on the Sun's activity and solar wind for a while yet.

---

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SomeGuy writes:

The NZ Herald reports:

An electric humming vibrator designed to upset neighbors operated for about a month inside New Zealand's tallest apartment tower, sending 25 neighbors "just about insane" before it was discovered and disabled, a resident says.

[...] The device was plugged into the mains and had a metal rod nearly the height of the window and a purple plastic device on the end.

A resident explained a man had installed it in a window cavity, behind a blind, specifically to aggravate his upstairs neighbors for unknown reasons: "The device causes a low vibrating-type hum at about 35-40 cycles per minute at about 80hz. It sounded like a cellphone ringing on vibrate stuck in the wall, but it never stopped and just continued all day, all night."

[...] Ceiling vibrators have a long, height-adjustable rod to run from floor to ceiling and make vibrations or a knocking noise from the head. They can be remote controlled and once switched on, they transmit to upstairs neighbors. Thumpers were said to be invented in China and are sometimes referred to as "noisemaker revenge machines".

[...] "It just about sent 25 residents insane because it took a month for it to be located. Everyone thought it was an electrical or mechanical issue that created a dull, repetitive noise 24 hours a day. I know of residents who couldn't sleep and abandoned parts of their apartments," the resident said.

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upstart writes:

Once praised for its generous social safety net, the country now collects troves of data on welfare claimants:

Denmark's Public Benefits Administration employs hundreds of people who oversee one of the world's most well-funded welfare states. The country spends 26 percent of its GDP on benefitsmore than Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It's been hailed as a leading example of how governments can support their most vulnerable citizens. Bernie Sanders, the US senator, called the Nordic nation of 6 million people a model for how countries should approach welfare.

But over the past decade, the scale of Denmark's benefits spending has come under intense scrutiny, and the perceived scourge of welfare fraud is now at the top of the country's political agenda. Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark's famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground.

It has become an article of faith among the country's right-wing politicians that Denmark is losing hundreds of millions of euros to benefits fraud each year. In 2011, KMD, one of Denmark's largest IT companies, estimated that up to 5 percent of all welfare payments in the country were fraudulent. KMD's estimates would make the Nordic nation an outlier, and its findings have been criticized by some academics. In France, it's estimated that fraud amounts to 0.39 percent of all benefits paid. A similar estimate made in the Netherlands in 2016 by broadcaster RTL found the average amount of fraud per benefit payment was 17 ($18), or just 0.2 percent of total benefits payments.The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. She has tripled the number of state databases her agency can access from three to nine, compiling information on people's taxes, homes, cars, relationships, employers, travel, and citizenship. Her agency has developed an array of machine learning models to analyze this data and predict who may b...

upstart writes:

The sanctions are having a huge impact:

[...] According to China's General Administration of Customs data published Tuesday (via The South China Morning Post), the country imported 67.6 billion integrated circuits (IC) in January and February. That's down 26.5% from the same period last year, and higher than the 15.3% fall recorded for the entirety of 2022.

The total value of these imports also declined, from $68.8 billion last year to $47.8 billion, a drop of 30.5%. That's partly due to chip prices that have fallen due to oversupply and the general economic downturn.

China's IC exports also fell in the first two months, down 20.9% to 37.3 billion units, while the total value of the exports dropped 25.8%.

The US has been tightening its restrictions on China's chip industry over the last 12 months, which the United States says will prevent its global rival from developing semiconductors for military applications, including supercomputers, nuclear weapons modeling, and hypersonic weapons.

October's restrictions on chipmaking tools from the Bureau of Industry and Security were some of the harshest, designed to cap China's logic chips at the 14-nanometre node, DRAM at 18nm, and 3D NAND flash at 128 layers. The US has also prohibited AMD and Nvidia from selling some of its high-performance AI-focused GPUs to China, including team green's A100 GPUs.

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After Nearly a Decade in Development, Japan's New Rocket Fails in Debut

upstart writes:

Japan's science minister said the failure was "extremely regrettable:

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning failed after the vehicle's second stage engine did not ignite.

In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation."

The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.

The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost.

[...] The failure is just the latest challenge for the H3 rocket. A fundamental problem with the booster is that, even if it were to fly safely, the H3 rocket has no clear advantages over the Falcon 9, which now has a streak of more than 170 consecutive successful launches. The new H3 rocket is also fully expendable, unlike the Falcon 9 and many newer boosters in development in the United States and China.

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upstart writes:

Washington judge issued an arrest warrant and ordered her to involuntary detention:

A judge in Washington issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Tacoma woman who has refused to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated for over a year, violating numerous court orders. The judge also upheld an earlier order to have her jailed, where she can be  tested and treated in isolation.

On Thursday, the woman attended the 17th court hearing on the matter and once again refused a court order to isolate or comply with testing and treatmentan order that originally dates back to January 19, 2022. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen rejected her objections to being treated and upheld a finding of contempt. Though it remains unclear what her objections are, the woman's lawyer suggested it may be a problem with understanding, according to The News Tribune. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, however, argued that she "knowingly, willfully, and contemptuously violated this court's orders," noting the lengthy process and numerous proceedings and discussions in which interpreters, translated documents, and speakers of her native language were made available.

[...] As Ars previously reported, the court had renewed orders for her isolation and treatment on a monthly basis since January of 2022. The health department had always said it was approaching the problem cautiously, working to keep a "balance between restricting somebody's liberty and protecting the health of the community." It sees detention as the "very, very last option."

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upstart writes:

50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World:

[...] I'm talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant's newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.

The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user.

[...] The people who developed the Alto came to Xerox PARC from universities, industrial labs, and commercial ventures, bringing with them diverse experiences and skills. But these engineers and programmers largely shared the same point of view. They conceived and developed the Alto in a remarkable burst of creativity, used it to develop diverse and pathbreaking software, and then moved out of Xerox, taking their achievements, design knowledge, and experiences into the wider world, where they and others built on the foundation they had established.

[...] The type of computing they envisioned was thoroughly interactive and personal, comprehensively networked, and completely graphicalwith high-resolution screens and high-quality print output.

[...] Oddly, at the time, an expensive new laboratory was also immediately financially attractive: R&D expenditures were frequently counted as assets instead of business expenses, all with Wall Street's approval. The more you spent, the better your balance sheet looked.

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upstart writes:

Dutch Officials Warn That Big Telecom's Plan To Tax 'Big Tech' Is A Dangerous Dud:

For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They've tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it's effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional troll toll for no coherent reason.

To sell captured lawmakers on the idea, telecom giants have falsely claimed that Big Tech companies get a "free ride" on the Internet (just as they did during the U.S. net neutrality wars). To fix this problem they completely made up, Big Telecom argues Big Tech should be forced to help pay for the kind of broadband infrastructure upgrades the telecoms have routinely neglected for years.

It's a big, dumb con. But yet again, telecom lobbyists have somehow convinced regulators that this blind cash grab is somehow sensible, adult policy. Dutifully, European Commission's industry chief Thierry Breton (himself a former telecom exec) said last September he would launch a consultation on this "fair share" payment scheme in early 2023, ahead of any proposed legislation.

[...] But they're often not looking at the real problem. Both in the EU and North America, regulators routinely and mindlessly let telecom giants consolidate and monopolize an essential utility. Those monopolies then work tirelessly to drive up rates and crush competition. And, utilizing their lobbying power, they've also routinely gleamed billions in subsidies for networks they routinely half-complete.

[...] If the EU successfully implements such a scheme, you can be absolutely sure the next step will be the U.S., with captured regulators like Brendan Carr (who has been beating this idiotic drum for a few years now) at the front of the parade at Comcast's and AT&T's behest.

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owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-modrm-addressing.html

One interesting aspect of a computer's instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode.1 The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it's interesting to look at its roots and original implementation.

In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M2 and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086's limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task.

I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 starting with the silicon die. The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip's 40 external pins. I've labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this discussion are darker and will be discussed in detail below. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below. The BIU handles bus and memory activity as well as instruction prefetching, while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions and microcode. Both units play important roles in memory addressing.

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upstart writes:

The corridor is 30 feet long and likely slopes upward. Where it leads is still a mystery.

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century." [So far - Ed]

As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

...

upstart writes:

Huge lithium find may end world shortage there's a catch:

Lithium, sometimes hyped as white gold, has been highly sought after for its role in battery production, and other things.

Global demand is expected to continue to outstrip supply in the years to come. Albemarle Corporation projects [PDF] lithium demand will rise from 1.8 million metric tons in 2025 to 3.7 million metric tons in 2030 largely due to its role in electric vehicles and other battery dependent devices.

The White House last year said critical minerals rare earth metals, lithium, and cobalt "are essential to our national security and economic prosperity."

Alas for the US, the latest cache of this malleable metal has turned up in Iran one of just four countries America has designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

According to The Financial Tribune, an English language news publication focused on Iran that's operated by Tehran-based Donya-e-Eqtesad, Ebrahim Ali Molla-Beigi, director general of the Exploration Affairs Office of the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade, said that Iran has discovered its first lithium reserve in Hamedan Province, in the western part of the country.

The reserve is said to be 8.5 million metric tons, which if accurate would be among the largest known deposits yet discovered.

According to the US Geological Survey [PDF], the top five identified lithium reserves are: Bolivia, 21 million tons; Argentina, 20 million tons; Chile, 11 million tons; Australia, 7.9 million tons, and China, 6.8 million tons.

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