Month: September 2019

Enlarge / The spectrometer for the KATRIN experiment, as it works its way through the German town of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen in 2006 en route to the nearby Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. (credit: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Isaac Asimov dubbed neutrinos "ghost particles." John Updike immortalized them in verse. They've been the subject of several Nobel Prize citations, because these weird tiny particles just keep surprising physicists. And now we have a much better idea of the upper limit of what their rest mass could be, thanks to the first results from the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN) in Germany. Leaders from the experiment announced their results last week at a scientific conference in Japan and posted a preprint to the physics arXiv.

"Knowing the mass of the neutrino will allow scientists to answer fundamental questions in cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics, such as how the universe evolved or what physics exists beyond the Standard Model," said Hamish Robertson, a KATRIN scientist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington. "These findings by the KATRIN collaboration reduce the previous mass range for the neutrino by a factor of two, place more stringent criteria on what the neutrino's mass actually is, and provide a path forward to measure its value definitively."

The ghostly particles are devilishly hard to detect because they so rarely interact with other particles, and when they do, they only interact via the weak nuclear force. Most neutrino hunters bury their experiments deep underground, the better to cancel out noisy interference from other sources, notably the cosmic rays continually bombarding Earth's atmosphere. The experiments usually require enormous tanks of liquid—dry-cleaning fluid, water, heavy water, mineral oil, chlorine, or gallium, for example, depending on the experimental setup. This increases the chances of a neutrino striking one of the atoms in the medium of choice, triggering the decay process. The atom changes into a different element, emitting an electron in the process, which can be detected.

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  A publicity shot shows the truck Rivian plans to build for Amazon. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric trucks from startup Rivian, the e-commerce giant announced Thursday. The order is part of Amazon's larger pledge—also announced today—to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2040. Amazon aims to use 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% by 2030.

Rivian is an electric-vehicle startup that is initially focusing on trucks and SUVs. Amazon led a $700 million funding round for the company earlier this year.

"The first electric delivery vans will go on the road in 2021," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at an event in Washington DC. "The 100,000 will be completely deployed by 2024, let's say."

Enlarge (credit: Han Jun Zeng / Flickr)

Burning fossil fuels spews carbon dioxide into the air, which warms the climate through the greenhouse effect (as if you didn’t know that). But burning fossil fuels also spews sulfur dioxide into the air, and sulfur dioxide forms aerosols that can deflect the sun’s rays and thus cool the climate. It has thus been argued that phasing out fossil fuels would have the undesirable effect of accelerating the warming the planet in the near term, since we’d be getting rid of the cooling aerosols at the same time.

This very argument was, in fact made by countries with serious air pollution issues. This indicated to the IPCC policymakers that the countries were struggling to figure out how, and how much, to limit emissions.

But climate scientists Drew Shindell and Christopher Smith have now re-analyzed the modeling data and concluded that there is no way we could possibly halt emissions quickly enough for the aerosols' "climate penalty" to be meaningful. "Even the most aggressive plausible transition to a clean-energy society," they write, "provides benefits for climate change mitigation."

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  Here you can see the bottom speaker and USB-C port, and you can also see that the screen wraps really far around the sides. [credit: Huawei ]

Huawei has officially taken the wraps off its next flagship smartphone release, the Mate 30 Pro. This phone is interesting not just as the latest device from the world's second-biggest smartphone manufacturer (after Samsung) but also because this is the first big Huawei launch after the Trump administration's executive order banning US companies from doing business with Huawei. As a result, the Mate 30 Pro is an Android phone that doesn't have any Google apps! The company is not even allowed to use the word "Android," which is a Google trademark. It's Huawei's ecosystem or bust.

At the end of a lengthy presentation on the Mate 30, Huawei CEO Richard Yu acknowledged the phone would not be coming with Google's apps and services. Instead, he highlighted "Huawei Mobile Services" as a replacement. Huawei has been using its own app ecosystem in China for some time, as Google Play is not available there, and now this ecosystem will have to come to Europe and the other places Huawei does business.

Does anyone want to buy a phone without Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube? How many of your go-to apps will stop working without Google Play Services? It's a scary proposition for consumers. Huawei apparently doesn't think this plan is going to work either, as it's expecting a $10 billion drop in its consumer devices business this year, thanks to the export ban.

Enlarge / A Vizio TV seen at CES in 2011. (credit: Ethan Miller | Getty Images)

Modern TV, coming to you over the Internet instead of through cable or over the air, has a modern problem: all of your Internet-connected streaming devices are watching you back and feeding your data to advertisers. Two independent sets of researchers this week released papers that measure the extent of the surveillance your TV is conducting on you. They also sort out who exactly is benefiting from the massive amounts of consumer data that is taken with or without consumer knowledge.

The first study (PDF), conducted by researchers at Princeton and the University of Chicago, looked specifically at Roku and Amazon set-top devices. A review of more than 2,000 channels across the two platforms found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire TV channels.

The most prevalent tracker, Google's doubleclick.net, showed up in 975 of the top 1,000 Roku channels, with Google analytics trackers showing up in 360, the researchers found. Over on the Amazon side of things, perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon trackers were the most prevalent, showing up in 687 of 1,000 channels. Doubleclick trackers were found on 307 channels, and Facebook trackers were on 196.