Month: November 2023

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Over the last few decades, research has grown ever more international. Big projects, like major astronomical observatories, genome sequencing, and particle physics, are all based on large teams of researchers spread across multiple institutions. And, because of the technology that makes remote work possible, even small collaborations that cross countries or continents have become increasingly commonplace.

In theory, this should make it easier for researchers to build teams that have the right talents to bring a scientific project to completion. But is it working out that way? Some recent studies have indicated that the research we produce may be getting increasingly derivative. And a study released today ties that directly to the growth in what it calls "remote collaboration."

So, is science-by-Zoom at fault? While it's a possibility worth exploring, it's difficult to separate cause and effect at this point.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

The appearance of any big brand's ads on websites that the brand has specifically blocked is one of a brand's biggest nightmares. That could include specifically blacklisted sites—like Breitbart—or any category of generally controversial site, like sites in countries sanctioned by the government, sites featuring hardcore pornography, or sites containing pirated content.

According to an Adalytics report, the Google Search Partner Network (SPN) has allegedly been putting brands at risk of all of these undesirable placements without advertisers fully realizing the dangers. Adalytics researchers reported finding Google search ads for top brands and government agencies displaying on hundreds of undesirable websites.

Among those impacted were big brands—like Amazon, Apple, BMW, Home Depot, Lego, Meta, Microsoft, Paramount+, Samsung, and Uber—and top government entities including the US Treasury and the European Commission. Ads from nonprofits like the American Cancer Society and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, as well as major media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal were also found on illegal or adult sites.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alexander Koerner)

Google Play has reversed its latest ban on a web browser that keeps getting targeted by vague Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices. Downloader, an Android TV app that combines a browser with a file manager, was restored to Google Play last night.

Downloader, made by app developer Elias Saba, was suspended on Sunday after a DMCA notice submitted by copyright-enforcement firm MarkScan on behalf of Warner Bros. Discovery. It was the second time in six months that Downloader was suspended based on a complaint that the app's web browser is capable of loading websites.

The first suspension in May lasted three weeks, but Google reversed the latest one much more quickly. As we wrote on Monday, the MarkScan DMCA notice didn't even list any copyrighted works that Downloader supposedly infringed upon.

Enlarge / Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe plant on Long Island circa 1902 in partial stage of completion. (credit: Public domain)

Back in 2012, a crowdfunding effort on Indigogo successfully raised the funds necessary to purchase the Wardenclyffe Tower site on Long Island, New York, where Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla once tried to build an ambitious wireless transmission station. The goal was to raise additional funds to build a $20 million Tesla Science Center there, with a museum, an educational center, and a technological innovation program. The nonprofit group behind the project finally broke ground this April after years of basic restoration work—only to experience a devastating setback last week, two days before Thanksgiving, when a fire broke out.

Over 100 firefighters from 17 local departments responded and battled the flames throughout the night, as residual embers led to two additional outbreaks. One firefighter sustained bruised ribs after falling off a ladder, but there were no other injuries or fatalities. Once the blaze was extinguished, the TSC group called in their engineers to assess the damage and make recommendations for repairs. While an investigation is ongoing as to the cause of the fire, Fire Chief Sean McCarrick said during a press conference on Tuesday, November 28, that they had ruled out arson. According to project architect Mark Thaler, there was nothing flammable in the lab that could have caused the fire, although the back buildings had wood-frame roofs.

The original brick building, designed by Stanford White, is still standing, although there is considerable damage to the structure of the roof, steel girders, chimney, cupola, and a portion of a wall. Some elements have been irreparably destroyed, but fortunately all museum artifacts in TSC's collection were stored offsite. The most pressing concern is that water from the firehoses saturated the brick walls, according to Thaler, since the upcoming colder winter temperatures could freeze that moisture and cause the brick work to break apart and collapse. The engineers have also recommended adding strategic wall supports to both the interior and exterior to shore up the structure.

Enlarge / The active cooling chips are labeled and located in the upper-left corner near a custom heatsink in the 15-inch MacBook Air. (credit: Frore Systems)

What if laptops could get fan-level cooling without moving parts? We could get thinner laptops, for one. We could also potentially squeeze more performance out of today's already impressively thin designs.

That's what San Jose, California startup Frore Systems is trying to convince laptop makers of as it looks for the first OEM to adopt what it describes as the first solid-state active cooling chip.

Most recently, the company equipped the M2 15-inch MacBook Air with three of its chips, dubbed AirJet Minis. Media witnesses to a recent demonstration reported that the chips helped bring MacBook Pro-comparable performance to sustained heavy workloads on the MacBook Air.

Enlarge / A vintage 1981 BBC Micro computer. Fun fact: it was rather tricky to determine which version of BBC Basic a Micro was actually running. (credit: Getty Images)

BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It taught an entire generation of Brits how to code, both in BASIC and, through an inline interpreter, assembly language. And it's still around to teach newcomers and anybody else—except it's now on far, far more platforms than a mail-order computer from the telly.

BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, uses Simple DirectMedia Layer's OS abstraction to make itself available on Windows, x86 Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi's OS, Android, iOS, and inside browsers through WebAssembly. Version 1.38a arrived in mid-November with quite a few fixes and niceties (as first noticed by Hackaday and its readers). On the project's website, you can see BBCSDL running on all these devices, along with a note that on iOS and in browsers, an assembler and a few other functions are not available, due to arbitrary code-execution restrictions.

Richard Russell has been working on ports, interpreters, and other variations of BBC BASIC since 1983, starting with interpreters for Z80 and Intel processors. By 2001, BBC BASIC for Windows was available with a graphical interface and was still compatible with the BBC Micro and Acorn computers from whence it came. BBCSDL has been in development since 2015, providing wider platform offerings while still retaining decent compatibility with BBC BASIC for Windows.

Enlarge / The researchers identified novel materials by using machine learning to first generate candidate structures and then gauge their likely stability. (credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)

Google DeepMind researchers have discovered 2.2 million crystal structures that open potential progress in fields from renewable energy to advanced computation, and show the power of artificial intelligence to discover novel materials.

The trove of theoretically stable but experimentally unrealized combinations identified using an AI tool known as GNoME is more than 45 times larger than the number of such substances unearthed in the history of science, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.

The researchers plan to make 381,000 of the most promising structures available to fellow scientists to make and test their viability in fields from solar cells to superconductors. The venture underscores how harnessing AI can shortcut years of experimental graft—and potentially deliver improved products and processes.

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Widely accepted wisdom has it that electric vehicles are easier to maintain than those with internal combustion powertrains. It seems intuitive—EVs have many fewer moving parts than cars that have to detonate small quantities of hydrocarbon fuel thousands of times a minute. But the data don't really bear out the idea. In fact, according to data collected by Consumer Reports, EVs are significantly less reliable than conventionally powered cars.

CR is known for buying cars for its own test fleet, but for its annual auto reliability survey, the organization cast a wider net. Specifically, it gathered data from 330,000 owners of vehicles from model year 2000 onwards, and it uses that survey data to generate reliability scores for each vehicle and model year.

The results are a little inconvenient for the EV evangelist. EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.