Month: January 2024

Enlarge / A red mud retaining pond in Germany. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The metals that form the foundation of modern society also cause a number of problems. Separating the metals we want from other minerals is often energy-intensive and can leave behind large volumes of toxic waste. Getting them in a pure form can often require a second and considerable energy input, boosting the associated carbon emissions.

A team of researchers from Germany has now figured out how to handle some of these problems for a specific class of mining waste created during aluminum production. Their method relies on hydrogen and electricity, which can both be sourced from renewable power and extracts iron and potentially other metals from the waste. What's left behind may still be toxic but isn't as environmentally damaging.

Out of the mud

The first step in aluminum production is the isolation of aluminum oxide from the other materials in the ore. This leaves behind a material known as red mud; it's estimated that nearly 200 million tonnes are produced annually. While the red color comes from the iron oxides present, there are a lot of other materials in it, some of which can be toxic. And the process of isolating the aluminum oxide leaves the material with a very basic pH.

Enlarge / A delegation of French military officers visited the Combined Space Operations Center in 2022 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: US Space Force/Tech. Sgt. Luke Kitterman)

Late last year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo to overhaul a decades-old policy on how the Pentagon keeps sensitive military space programs secret. However, don't expect defense officials to openly discuss everything they're doing to counter China and Russia in orbit.

John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, revealed the policy change in a roundtable with reporters on January 17. For many years, across multiple administrations, Pentagon officials have lamented their inability to share information with other countries and commercial partners. Inherently, they argued, this stranglehold on information limits the military's capacity to connect with allies, deter adversaries, and respond to threats in space.

In his statement last week, Plumb said this new policy "removes legacy classification barriers that have inhibited our ability to collaborate across the US government and also with allies on issues related to space."

Enlarge / A studio portrait of a crying baby. (credit: Getty | Tim Clayton)

It's hard to imagine a more common stressor for new parents than the recurring riddle: Why is the baby crying? Did she just rub her eyes—tired? Is he licking his lips—hungry? The list of possible culprits and vague signs, made hazier by brutal sleep deprivation, can sometimes feel endless. But for one family in New England, the list seemed to be swiftly coming to an end as their baby continued to slip away from them.

According to a detailed case report published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, it all started when the parents of an otherwise healthy 8-week-old boy noticed that he started crying more and was more irritable. This was about a week before he would end up in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of the Massachusetts General Hospital.

His grandmother, who primarily cared for him, noticed that he seemed to cry more vigorously when the right side of his abdomen was touched. The family took him to his pediatrician, who could find nothing wrong upon examination. Perhaps it was just gas, the pediatrician concluded—a common conclusion.

Enlarge / Still images of AI-generated video examples provided by Google for its Lumiere video synthesis model. (credit: Google)

On Tuesday, Google announced Lumiere, an AI video generator that it calls "a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation" in the accompanying preprint paper. But let's not kid ourselves: It does a great job at creating videos of cute animals in ridiculous scenarios, such as using roller skates, driving a car, or playing a piano. Sure, it can do more, but it is perhaps the most advanced text-to-animal AI video generator yet demonstrated.

According to Google, Lumiere utilizes unique architecture to generate a video's entire temporal duration in one go. Or, as the company put it, "We introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution—an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve."

In layperson terms, Google's tech is designed to handle both the space (where things are in the video) and time (how things move and change throughout the video) aspects simultaneously. So, instead of making a video by putting together many small parts or frames, it can create the entire video, from start to finish, in one smooth process.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It's almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones' internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user "Liv-Lyf" compiled a dozen posts that complain of an "internal storage access issue" and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.

In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, "The symptoms are all the same" as that October bug, with "internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc." When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, "We're aware of this issue and are looking into it," and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.

In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can't write media. File Managers read "0 bytes" for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up.