upstart writes:

New research offers an intriguing variation on the famous experiment:

A team of physicists has recreated a classic experiment in particle physics with a dimensional twist, by performing it in time instead of just space. In the process, they showcased the utility of a unique material for future experiments.

The researchers redesigned the double-slit experiment, which was first performed in 1801 and demonstrated a curious trait of light: that it can behave both as a particle and a wave.

The original experiment tested how light moved through space; the recent rendition tested how light would travel if it was only allowed to at specific times. Details of the team's work are published today in Nature Physics.

[...] In the traditional experiment, a beam of light is projected at a barrier, behind which is a photosensitive detector. The barrier has two parallel slits. If you threw ordinary matter at the barrier, they would roughly form the same shape as the slits on the detector. But when light is cast on the slits, it splits into two waves that pass through the barrier and intersect on the other side.

[...] In the new work, the researchers made one big change: They swapped out an ordinary screen with two slits for an indium-tin-oxide filmthe same material that is used in modern phone screens. (It's actually a metamaterial, or a material not found in nature, that is engineered to behave a certain way.)

The researchers changed the reflectance of the screen using ultrafast lasers, which only allowed light through at specific times, quadrillionths of a second apart. Basically, they built a quantum tollbooth, using the lasers to create time-dependent slits in the barrier. Even when they only allowed one photon through the screen, the light produced an interference pattern.

Journal Reference:
Tirole, Romain, Vezzoli, Stefano, Galiffi, Emanuele, et al. Double-slit time diffraction at optical frequencies, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-01993-w)

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RamiK writes:

Bloomberg reports:

Samsung Electronics Co. said it's cutting memory chip production after reporting its slimmest profit since the 2009 financial crisis, a significant step toward ending a supply glut that had cratered prices across the industry.

[...] Operating profit at the world's largest maker of memory chips plunged more than 95% to 600 billion won ($450 million) for the three months ended March, missing the average analyst estimate of 1.4 trillion won. Sales fell 19% to 63 trillion won.

[...] South Korea's largest company had resisted pulling back despite the downturn, in part to grab market share from rivals SK Hynix Inc. and Micron Technology Inc., which have been forced to cut output.

[...] Samsung's shares rose as much as 4.7% in the highest intraday jump in three months. Hynix shares surged as much as 6.7%. [...] The company had warned that earnings would fall in the first quarter on slowing sales. But memory prices tumbled more than anticipated because of sluggish demand for a wide range of electronics from smartphones to PCs, as consumers and companies navigated recession risks. Despite its post-Covid re-opening, China's market has also not bounced back as quickly as some anticipated. Samsung is estimated to have lost about $3 billion in its memory chip division.

[...] Prices of DRAM - a type of memory used to process data - are expected to fall in the current quarter by around 10%, according to Yuanta's Baik. That follows a roughly 20% slide in the previous three months and a more than 30% drop in the fourth quarter of last year. [...] Inventory at Samsung had swelled to 52.2 trillion won at the end of last year after the company maintained production despite a collapse in demand. The existing high inventory will take time to digest, said TrendForce Senior Vice President Avril Wu. "Slower-than-expected demand in the second half of 2023 will prolong the time required for inventory to get back to normal levels."

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upstart writes:

Somebody wants to copyright a rhythm get ready for the dembow tax if they succeed:

One of the most pernicious effects of today's copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against "unauthorised" that is, unpaid use by other artists. That goes against several thousand years of human creativity, which only exists thanks to successive generations of artists using and building on our cultural heritage. The ownership model of art is essentially selfish: it seeks to maximise the financial gains of one creator, at the expense of the entire culture of which they are part. A good example of this clash of interests can be seen in yet another lawsuit in the music industry. This time, somebody is trying to copyright a rhythm:

The [Fish Market song] track featured the first known example of what would come to be known as a "dembow" rhythm the percussive, slightly syncopated four-to-the-floor beat that travelled from reggae to become the signature beat of reggaeton, today the world-conquering sound of Latin American pop.

Now, more than 30 years after Fish Market was released, Steely & Clevie Productions is suing three of reggaeton's most celebrated hitmakers El Chombo, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee for what they characterise as unlawful interpolation of Fish Market's rhythm (or "riddim"), and are seeking the credit and royalties they say they deserved from the start.

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upstart writes:

Synthetic embryos made without eggs and sperm are looking increasingly like the real thingraising thorny ethical questions:

[...] These "synthetic embryos" can be made without the direct contribution of egg or sperm cells. Because they're not "real" embryos, some have argued that the same restrictions don't apply.

Embryos made from stem cells, rather than an egg and sperm, appear to generate a short-lived pregnancy-like response in monkeys.

Recent advances are allowing scientists to create embryo-like structures that look more and more like the real thing. Just this week, scientists in China described how they developed structures called blastoids for 17 days in the lab. They even managed to get some of them to implant in the uteruses of monkeys and trigger the very first signs of pregnancy.

The blastoids didn't survive for very long, probably because researchers haven't quite figured out how best to mimic what happens during the development of a conventional embryo. But most believe that it's just a matter of time. If we can eventually get stem cells to form a viable embryo, a functional fetus, or even a baby, should we treat blastoids in the same way we treat embryos?

Perhaps the bigger question rests on how embryo-like these stem-cell-derived structures are. For some scientists, it's a catch-22 situation. If the blastoids look too much like embryos, then many believe research with them should be restricted in the same way that we control work on human embryos.

But if they don't look enough like embryos, then there's no point in using them for research, says Chuva de Sousa Lopes. "At the moment, it's so difficult to understand how close they are, or how different they are," she says.

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upstart writes:

With Zen 5 CPU and RDNA 3+ iGPU, Strix Point could be a game changer:

At CES 2023, AMD announced its Phoenix-HS APUs featuring Zen 4 CPUs and RDNA 3 iGPUs. The company is expected to follow that with the 'Strix Point' APUs, sporting Zen 5 CPUs and RDNA 3+ iGPUs. According to AMD's official roadmap, the Strix Point chips will launch sometime in 2024, although the exact ETA remains a mystery for now.

Almost a year after AMD officially teased its 'Strix Point' APUs, popular YouTube channel RedGamingTech has shared many interesting details about the upcoming hardware. According to the video, the flagship Strix Point APU will come with 16 cores, including 8 big Zen 5 and 8 smaller Zen 4D cores, alongside 32MB of L3 cache.

On the graphics side, the chip is expected to feature an RDNA 3+ iGPU with 8 Work Group Processors (WGP). The video also suggests that the iGPU on the most powerful Strix Point APU would have clock speeds of more than 3GHz.

If the reported specs hold up, it would be a little disappointing, as an earlier video from the channel claimed that Strix Point's RDNA 3+ iGPU could have 12 WGP/24 Compute Units (CU) with around 9 TFLOPS of FP32 precision performance.

Meanwhile, the mid-range Strix Point SKU will reportedly have 4x Zen 5 and 8x Zen 4D cores, paired with 16MB of L3 cache and 4 RDNA 3+ WGPs. Finally, the entry-level chip is said to come with up to 6 cores, including 2x Zen 5 and 4x Zen 4D. They are also tipped to have 8 MB of L3 cache and a 2 WGP iGPU.

The core count, cache and WGPs will not be the only differences between the high-end and entry-level Strix Point APUs. As per the video, the top-end chip in the lineup will be fabricated using TSMC's 3 nm process, while the other two SKUs will use the 4 nm process. The chips are also expected to have a powerful memory controller with support for DDR5-6400 or LPDDR5X-8533 RAM.

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OpenAI threatened with landmark defamation lawsuit over ChatGPT false claims

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/openai-may-be-sued-after-chatgpt-falsely-says-aussie-mayor-is-an-ex-con/

A spokesperson for Gordon Legal provided a statement to Ars confirming that responses to text prompts generated by ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 vary, with defamatory comments still currently being generated in ChatGPT 3.5. Among "several false statements" generated by ChatGPT were falsehoods stating that Brian Hood "was accused of bribing officials in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam between 1999 and 2005, that he was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of false accounting under the Corporations Act in 2012, and that he authorised payments to a Malaysian arms dealer acting as a middleman to secure a contract with the Malaysian Government." Because "all of these statements are false," Gordon Legal "filed a Concerns Notice to OpenAI" that detailed the inaccuracy and demanded a rectification. "As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into our society, the accuracy of the information provided by these services will come under close legal scrutiny," James Naughton, Hood's lawyer, said, noting that if a defamation claim is raised, it "will aim to remedy the harm caused" to Hood and "ensure the accuracy of this software in his case.")

It was only a matter of time before ChatGPTan artificial intelligence tool that generates responses based on user text promptswas threatened with its first defamation lawsuit. That happened last month, Reuters reported today, when an Australian regional mayor, Brian Hood, sent a letter on March 21 to the tool's developer, OpenAI, announcing his plan to sue the company for ChatGPT's alleged role in spreading false claims that he had gone to prison for bribery.

To avoid the landmark lawsuit, Hood gave OpenAI 28 days to modify ChatGPT's responses and stop the tool from spouting disinformation.

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upstart writes:

How to update copyright: Nigeria shows the way for Africa and the world:

This battle over [copyright] moves to adopt an open-ended fair dealing based on the US approach, rather than one with a limited list of permitted exceptions and limitations, is an important one that is happening all around the world. Open-ended fair use is clearly more helpful for dealing with developments in technology that were never envisaged when old copyright laws were drawn up. They allow at least a basic flexibility in the way that copyright is applied, for example online.

Once again, the current resistance to countries adopting fair use or open norms is the result of the copyright industry refusing to allow any legal developments that favour the public or indeed anyone except themselves. A good example of the fierce battles being fought is South Africa, where President Ramaphosa sent the Copyright Amendment Bill back to Parliament after it was passed, largely because of lobbying by copyright supporters against its fair use provisions.

Nigeria's new law is important because the country is already a leader in Africa, and is predicted to become one of the world's top economies. What happens in Nigeria matters, because it sets an important precedent for other rising nations looking to update their outdated copyright laws to maximise the benefits of the digital world by adopting open norms.

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upstart writes:

As the world gets drier, do we need to turn to the ocean?

Sean Bothwell can understand why people think desalination is a silver bullet. When he was a kid living in California's Orange County, the ocean was always close by. It didn't make sense to him that all the water near him wasn't usable.

"I grew up thinking, like, why the heck aren't we desalinating?" said Bothwell, who is now executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance. "Why are people always saying that we need to save water and conserve?"

[...] For his part, after doing his graduate school thesis on desalination as an adaptation mechanism for climate change, Bothwell's mind began to change on the process of ocean desalination, and he finally understood its problems and limitations.

"I realized all the things that people don't understand about desalof all the issues we work on, [the efficacy] is the toughest thing to communicate to people," he said. "Everyone thinks it's a good idea."

[...] It's not just what gets sucked into plants that poses a problem for the ocean. The potable water produced by desal plants has an evil cousin: the super-salty discharge that remains, a substance known as brine, which is roughly twice as salty as the original seawater. Brine is heavier than seawater and can sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it creates a deoxygenated dead zone. [...]

"Our ocean is already under a ton of different pressures: nutrient runoff, ocean acidification, climate change," said Bothwell. "You add desal on top of it, and it creates a dead zone."

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upstart writes:

Mediterranean cave clues show that islanders ingested mind-bending plants around 3,000 years ago:

Human hair recovered in a Mediterranean island cave has yielded Europe's oldest direct evidence of people taking hallucinogenic drugs, researchers say.

By around 3,000 years ago, visitors at Es Crritx cave on Menorca perhaps shamans who performed spiritual and healing rituals consumed plants containing mind-altering and vision-inducing substances, say archaeologist Elisa Guerra-Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain and colleagues.

Signs of human activity at the cave, including more than 200 human graves arrayed in a chamber at the entrance, were previously dated to between around 3,600 and 2,800 years ago. Researchers had also found a hoard of objects in a small pit within an inner cave chamber, including six wooden containers, each containing locks of human hair.

Chemical analyses of one container's locks, possibly from more than one person, detected three psychoactive plant substances that had been ingested and absorbed into the hair over nearly a year, the scientists report April 6 in Scientific Reports.

Two substances, atropine and scopolamine from nightshade plants, induce disorientation, hallucinations and altered physical sensations. Another, ephedrine, boosts energy and alertness. Shamans would have known how to handle and consume these potentially toxic plants safely, the investigators say.

[...] Other hair analyses have found that Inca kids slated for sacrifice more than 500 years ago ingested hallucinogenic drinks and coca leaves and alcohol (SN: 5/13/22; SN: 7/29/13). And a 2005 study found chemical signs of coca-leaf chewing in the hair of two human mummies from Chile dating to around 3,000 years ago. Indirect evidence of drug use in various parts of the world, such as artistic depictions, go back further.

Journal Reference:
E. Guerra-Doce et al. Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis [open]. Scientific Reports. Published April 6, 2023. 10.1038/s41598-023-31064-2.

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upstart writes:

A new map boosts the count of fiery formations to about 85,000:

The hellscape of Venus is riddled with even more volcanoes than scientists thought.

Using radar images taken by NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s, researchers cataloged about 85,000 volcanoes strewn across the Venusian surface. That's nearly 50 times as many volcanoes as past surveys counted. Planetary scientists Rebecca Hahn and Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis debuted the map in the April JGR Planets.

Such a thorough inventory of volcanism on Venus could offer clues about the planet's interior, such as hot spots of magma production, Byrne says. And with the recent discovery that Venus is volcanically active, the map could also help pinpoint places to look for new eruptions.

Almost all the volcanoes that Hahn and Byrne found are less than 5 kilometers wide. About 700 are 5 to 100 kilometers across, and about 100 are wider than 100 kilometers. The team also found many tight clusters of small volcanoes called volcanic fields.

[This map of Venus] shows the locations and sizes of all volcanoes visible in radar data from the Magellan spacecraft. The newfound volcanoes range in size from less than 5 kilometers wide to more than 100 kilometers across, though most are on the small side.

Journal Reference:
Rebecca M. Hahn, Paul K. Byrne, A Morphological and Spatial Analysis of Volcanoes on Venus [open], JGR Planets, 2023 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JE007753)

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NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on a new (published 5 April 2023) paper combining ice core, tree ring and textual analysis to "more accurately date medieval volcanic eruptions."

The primary author's inspiration to pursue this line of research included:

Sbastien Guillet, an environmental scientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, was rocking out to Pink Floyd's classic Dark Side of the Moon album one day when he made a prescient connection. The darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions. And astronomers know the exact days of those eclipses. So medieval historical accounts of lunar eclipse sightings should be able to help scientists narrow down the time frame in which major eruptions occurred during the High Medieval period spanning 1100 to 1300 CE. Guillet collaborated with several other scientists to conduct such a study, combining textual analysis with tree ring and ice core data. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

"Climate scientists usually identify past volcanic eruptions by measuring the acidity and amount of volcanic ash in cores drilled from polar ice, or by inferring abrupt temperature changes in tree ring records," Andrea Seim (University of Freiburg) and Eduardo Zorita (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) wrote in an accompanying commentary. "However, these sources sometimes disagree, because the location, intensity, and timing of eruptions can produce varying results, as can circulation of the atmosphere. Guillet and colleagues' approach offers an independentand perhaps even more directsource of information about the timing of volcanic eruptions, which could resolve some of these disagreements."
[...]
Guillet's critical insight stems from the impact volcanic eruptions can have on the appearance of a lunar eclipse. If there are a lot of aerosols, the moon will appear dark during the eclipse; if aerosols are scarce, the moon will have a bright reddish appearance. So one should be able to estimate how much volcanic aerosols were in the atmosphere from medieval descriptions of the color and luminosity of the moon during lunar eclipses, and use that information to more accurately date medieval volcanic eruptions.

It's an interesting combination of science and analysis of historical writings to arrive at a better understanding of some of the forces acting on the climate in Medieval Europe.

N.B.: The Nature journal reference appears to be the full paper, not just an abstrac...

upstart writes:

Without an information sharing and analysis center, the country's food and agriculture sector is uniquely vulnerable to hackers:

If hackers wanted to debilitate American society, they would have trouble taking down the entire power grid or financial system, but they could do serious damage to the companies that make and deliver Americans' food.

The US food and agriculture sector lacks the resources, expertise, and government support to protect itself and its products from a rapidly expanding range of cybersecurity threats, according to lawmakers, policy experts, and former government officials. These shortfalls leave gaps that foreign government operatives or cybercriminals could exploit to remotely disable farming equipment, contaminate fertilizer, cripple milk supplies, and kill chickens.

In the past few years, cyberattacks on the meat processing giant JBS Foods and the Iowa farm services firm NEW Cooperative have laid bare the industry's widespread vulnerabilities. And new technologies, including advances in artificial intelligence, are creating previously unimaginable risks, overwhelming a workforce not accustomed to dealing with digital security. Making matters worse, food and agriculture is one of only a few critical infrastructure sectors that doesn't have an information sharing and analysis center, or ISAC, helping companies fight back.

All of these shortcomings make food and agriculture companies a prime target for Russian operatives bent on vengeance for Western sanctions, Chinese spies seeking a competitive advantage for their domestic firms, and ransomware gangs looking for victims that can't afford downtime.

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