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Urgent Policies Needed To Steer Countries To Net Zero, Says IEA Chief Published on April 01, 2021 at 09:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: New energy policies are urgently needed to put countries on the path to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, the world's leading energy economist has warned, as economies are rapidly gearing up for a return to fossil fuel use instead of forging a green recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of the world's biggest economies now have long-term goals of reaching net zero by mid-century, but few have the policies required to meet those goals, said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA's latest figures show global coal use was about 4% higher in the last quarter of 2020 than in the same period in 2019, the clearest indication yet of a potentially disastrous rebound in the use of the dirtiest fossil fuels, following last year's lockdowns around the world when emiss...

Scientists Create Simple Synthetic Cell That Grows and Divides Normally Published on April 01, 2021 at 07:32AM Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes. Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells' unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports: Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. They didn't build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of li...

Biden Infrastructure Plan Promises Broadband To All Within 8 Years Published on April 01, 2021 at 06:55AM One of the many promises made in President Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan is to deliver "future proof" broadband to every home in American within eight years. It sets aside $100 billion to accomplish this feat. Motherboard reports: While specifics are murky, a new fact sheet on the proposal states the plan won't just involve throwing more subsidies at America's deep-pocketed incumbents, an American pastime studies show historically hasn't delivered on the promise of faster, better broadband. Instead, the Biden administration says it plans to "prioritize support" for broadband networks owned, operated, or run in concert with local governments. Frustrated by limited competition and substandard service, some 750 U.S. communities have built local broadband networks that studies have shown are faster and less expensive than traditional opti...

Facebook Blames 'Technical Issue' For Shorting Video Creators Thousands of Dollars In Ad Revenue Published on April 01, 2021 at 06:15AM The Verge spoke with several Facebook video creators, all of whom say the company shorted them on cash and ignored their requests for help. From the report: The creators had no reason to initially question the amount they were paid since Facebook's estimated revenue tool almost always mirrored their actual payouts. Usually, they'd be short only a couple hundred dollars. But after their revenue seemed off two months in a row, the creators say they looked into the issue. All three say the problems began in January, around the time Facebook transitioned to its new Pages experience and made updates to how creators can monetize. [...] [T]hese creators say Facebook only cares about advertisers, leaving them with no one to turn to when their payments are unexpectedly short. They reached out for help, but the company gave them no feedback on ...

Amazon's Twitter Army Was Handpicked For 'Great Sense of Humor' Published on April 01, 2021 at 05:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Amazon's small Twitter army of "ambassadors" was quietly conceived in 2018 under the codename "Veritas," which sought to train and dispatch select employees to the social media trenches to defend Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, according to an internal description of the program obtained exclusively by The Intercept. Amazon ambassadors drew attention this week as they responded to a wave of online criticism for the company's treatment of workers amid a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Anticipating criticisms of worker conditions at their fulfillment centers in particular, Amazon designed Veritas to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their "great sense of humor" to confront critics -- including policymakers -- on Twitter in a "blunt" man...

India Offers $1 Billion In Cash To Each Chipmaker Who 'Makes In India' Published on April 01, 2021 at 04:50AM According to Reuters, India is offering more than $1 billion in cash to each semiconductor company that sets up manufacturing units in the country as it seeks to build on its smartphone assembly industry and strengthen its electronics supply chain. From the report: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Make in India" drive has helped to turn India into the world's second-biggest mobile manufacturer after China. New Delhi believes it is time for chip companies to set up in the country. "The government will give cash incentives of more than $1 billion to each company which will set up chip fabrication units," a senior government official told Reuters, declining to be named as he was not authorised to speak with media. "We're assuring them that the government will be a buyer and there will also be mandates in the private market (for compani...

Teens Fully Protected By Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine, Company Says Published on April 01, 2021 at 04:10AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Adolescents ages 12 to 15 were completely protected from symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine in a small Phase III clinical trial, Pfizer reported in a press release Wednesday. The company also said that the vaccine was well-tolerated in the age group, spurring only the standard side effects seen in people ages 16 to 25. The vaccine is already authorized for use in people age 16 and over. The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents ages 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in ...

Google Promises Not to Muzzle Staff on Pay, Settling Labor Case Published on April 01, 2021 at 03:30AM According to Bloomberg, Google has settled one of the first legal complaints filed by a new union, promising not to silence workers who talk about their pay. From the report: "WE WILL NOT tell you that you cannot discuss policies with other employees," states the notice to staff, signed by an attorney for Google and parent Alphabet Inc. and being posted at a Google data center in South Carolina. "WE WILL NOT discipline you because you exercise your right to discuss wage rates, bonuses, hours and working conditions with other employees." The settlement ends a National Labor Relations Board complaint filed by the Alphabet Workers Union in February alleging that management at the data center forbid workers from discussing their pay and also suspended a data technician, Shannon Wait, because she wrote a pro-union post on Facebook. Wait was reinstated earlier this yea...

Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says Published on April 01, 2021 at 02:55AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning -- the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI -- or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of la...

Apple To Build Battery-Based Solar Energy Storage Project in Monterey County Published on April 01, 2021 at 02:15AM Apple said Wednesday that it will build a battery-based renewable energy storage facility in Central California near a solar energy installation that already provides energy for all of its facilities in the state. From a report: Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. It is located next to the California Flats solar installation in southeastern Monterey County, about 100 miles southeast of Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters. The site sends 130-megawatts of electricity directly to Apple's California facilities during daylight hours but does not provide power during dark hours. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, told Reuters in an interview the company intends to develop what it believes will be one of the largest battery-based...

Russia Unveils World's First Coronavirus Vaccine For Dogs, Cats and Other Animal Published on April 01, 2021 at 01:35AM Hmmmmmm writes: Russia has registered the world's first coronavirus vaccine for dogs, cats, minks, foxes and other animals, the country's agriculture safety watchdog said Wednesday. Called Carnivak-Cov, the vaccine was developed by scientists at the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, also known as Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia's Tass News Agency said. Rosselkhoznadzor deputy head Konstantin Savenkov said Wednesday that this would be the world's first authorized for widespread animal inoculations. The vaccine could be mass produced as soon as April, although the agency did not say when it would be on the market. 'Carnivak-Cov, a sorbate inactivated vaccine against the coronavirus infection is the world's first and only product for preventing covid-19 in animals,' Savenkov told Tass News. Two U.S. companies, New J...

Microsoft Wins US Army Contract for Augmented-Reality Headsets, Worth Up To $21.9 Billion Over 10 Years Published on April 01, 2021 at 12:57AM The Pentagon announced that Microsoft has won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented-reality headsets for the U.S. Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88 billion over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson said. From a report: The deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a futuristic product resulting from years of research, beyond core areas such as operating systems and productivity software. It follows a $480 million contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, in 2018. The new deal will involve providing production versions. The standard-issue HoloLens, which costs $3,500, enables people to see holograms overlaid over their actual environments and interact using hand and voice gestures. An IVAS prototype that a CNBC reporter tried o...

Hitachi To Buy US Software Developer GlobalLogic for $9.6 Billion Published on April 01, 2021 at 12:15AM Hitachi said on Wednesday it will buy U.S. software company GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion, including repayment of debt, as the Japanese industrial conglomerate pivots from electronics hardware to digital services. From a report: The deal is the biggest Japanese outbound acquisition of a U.S. hi-tech company on record, according to Refinitiv data. The acquisition is part of Hitachi's ongoing business portfolio overhaul, which includes the $7 billion acquisition of ABB's power grid business last year and a series of divestitures of its domestic hardware subsidiaries. Hitachi's stock tumbled 7% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, its sharpest daily fall in more than a year, on the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Aiming To Announce Mixed-Reality Headset in 'Next Several Months' Published on March 31, 2021 at 11:35PM Apple is aiming to announce a mixed-reality headset at an in-person event sometime in the "next several months," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. From a report: In a newsletter outlining the possible future of the company's WWDC conference taking place in an in-person format, Gurman says that Apple aims to release a mixed-reality headset, the first major new device since 2015, at an in-person sometime in the "next several months." Apple last held an in-person event in September of 2019. All events since have been held digitally due to the global health crisis. "Sometime in the next several months, the company is poised to announce a mixed reality headset, its first major new device since 2015. If possible, Apple won't want to make such a critical announcement at an online event. It wants employees, the media, its partners and...

Antimatter Atoms Can Be Precisely Manipulated and Cooled With Lasers Published on March 31, 2021 at 10:55PM One of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has now been applied to antimatter atoms for the first time. From a report: Laser cooling, which slows the motion of particles so they can be measured more precisely, can make antihydrogen atoms slow down by an order of magnitude. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom is made out of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada's national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used an antihydrogen trapping experiment called ALPHA-2 at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to create clouds of about 1000 antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. The team developed a laser that shoots particles of light called photons at the right wavelength to slow down any...

A Cautionary Tale For China's Ambitious Chipmakers Published on March 31, 2021 at 10:15PM An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips -- bits of silicon wafer and microscopic circuitry that help run nearly all our electronic devices. Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. promised a way out, toward self-reliance in the face of increasingly tough U.S. curbs on this technology. The private company once boasted on its website that it would raise a total of $20 billion to churn out 60,000 leading-edge chips a year. None of that would come to pass. Hongxin's unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan. The company is one of six multibillion-dollar chip projects to fail in the last two years. Their rise and fall is a cautionary tale in an industr...

'Fake' Amazon Workers Defend Company on Twitter Published on March 31, 2021 at 09:36PM 'Fake' accounts claiming to be Amazon workers have been praising their working conditions on Twitter. From a report: Votes are currently being counted in Alabama to decide whether Amazon warehouse workers will form a union. But last night, a series of anti-union tweets were sent from accounts claiming to be staff. Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake. Most of the accounts were made just a few days ago, often with only a few tweets, all related to Amazon. "What bothers me most about unions is there's no ability to opt out of dues," one user under the handle @AmazonFCDarla tweeted, despite a state law in Alabama which prevents this. "Amazon takes great care of me," she added. Another account - which later changed its profile picture after it was revealed to be fake - said: "Unions are good for some c...

Biden Details $2 Trillion Plan To Rebuild Infrastructure and Reshape the Economy Published on March 31, 2021 at 08:50PM President Biden will unveil an infrastructure plan on Wednesday whose $2 trillion price tag would translate into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, repairs to the 10 most economically important bridges in the country, the elimination of lead pipes and service lines from the nation's water supplies and a long list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run. From a report: Biden administration officials said the proposal, which they detailed in a 25-page briefing paper and which Mr. Biden will discuss in an afternoon speech in Pittsburgh, would also accelerate the fight against climate change by hastening the shift to new, cleaner energy sources, and would help promote racial equity in the economy. The spending in the plan would take place over eight years, officials said. Unlike the e...

Volkswagen Isn't Rebranding Itself Voltswagen Published on March 31, 2021 at 08:10PM Volkswagen is staying Volkswagen. From a report: Volkswagen's U.S. subsidiary said Tuesday the company would rebrand itself as Voltswagen of America to promote its electric car strategy, but a spokesman for the parent company in Germany later said the move was a joke. The name change, which immediately lit up social media and online news sites, was originally intended as an early April Fools' Day stunt to get people talking about VW's ambitious electric car strategy as the company rolls out its first all-electric sport-utility vehicle, the ID. 4, in U.S. dealerships, the spokesman said. The problem for VW is that everyone took it seriously, creating confusion about the company's intentions and moving the shares, putting VW's communications team on the defensive. "We didn't mean to mislead anyone," a Volkswagen spokesman in Wolfsburg told The Wall Street Journal. ...

Turing Award Goes To Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks Published on March 31, 2021 at 07:30PM Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho developed many of the fundamental concepts that researchers use when they build new software. From a report: When Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman met while waiting in the registration line on their first day of graduate school at Princeton University in 1963, computer science was still a strange new world. Using a computer required a set of esoteric skills typically reserved for trained engineers and mathematicians. But today, thanks in part to the work of Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman, practically anyone can use a computer and program it to perform new tasks. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman would receive this year's Turing Award for their work on the fundamental concepts that underpin computer programming languages. Given since 1966 and often...

Google Collects 20 Times More Telemetry From Android Devices Than Apple From iOS Published on March 31, 2021 at 06:30PM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record by Recorded Future: Academic research published last week looked at the telemetry traffic sent by modern iOS and Android devices back to Apple and Google servers and found that Google collects around 20 times more telemetry data from Android devices than Apple from iOS. The research, conducted by Professor Douglas J. Leith from Trinity College at the University of Dublin, analyzed traffic originating from iOS and Android devices heading to Apple and Google servers at various stages of a phone's operation... [...] The study unearthed some uncomfortable results. For starters, Prof. Leith said that "both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this [option]." Furthermore, "this data is sent even when a user is not logged in (indeed even if they have never...

IPv4 Parsing Flaw In NPM Netmask Could Affect 270,000 Apps Published on March 31, 2021 at 03:30PM chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Independent security researchers analyzing the widely used open source component netmask have discovered security vulnerabilities that could leave more than a quarter million open source applications vulnerable to attack, according to a report released Monday, The Security Ledger reports. According to a report by the site Sick Codes, the flaws open applications that rely on netmask to a wide range of malicious attacks including Server Side Request Forgeries (SSRF) and Remote- and Local File Includes (RFI, LFI) that could enable attackers to ferry malicious code into a protected network, or siphon sensitive data out of one. Even worse, the flaws appear to stretch far beyond a single open source module, affecting a wide range of open source development languages, researchers say. Netmask is a widely used package that allows developers t...

Optical Mouse Inventor, Infoseek Founder Hunts For a Covid Cure Published on March 31, 2021 at 12:30PM Steve Kirsch has been interested in repurposing drugs since he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer years ago. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, he talks about his efforts to raise funds for Covid research, to get the word out about promising drugs, and to light a fire under the FDA. "If these guys were [working] in Silicon Valley, they'd be fired," he says. Specifically, Kirsch believes that fluvoxamine will be a game changer for treating Covid-19, as it's an inexpensive, easy-to-take pill with few side effects and has proven to prevent severe illness and death from the coronavirus. Here's an excerpt from the interview he had with IEEE Spectrum: Kirsch: We applied for an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA [for fluvoxamine] in late January. Lately, we've been just trying to find out how that's going, like, 'What do you guys think? Can we h...

Japan's Cherry Blossom 'Earliest Peak Since 812' Published on March 31, 2021 at 09:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The cherry blossom season, Japan's traditional sign of spring, peaked at the earliest date since records began 1,200 years ago, research shows. The 2021 season in the city of Kyoto peaked on 26 March, according to data collected by Osaka University. Increasingly early flowerings in recent decades are likely to be as a result of climate change, scientists say. The records from Kyoto go back to 812 AD in imperial court documents and diaries. The previous record there was set in 1409, when the season reached its peak on March 27. "In Kyoto, records of the timing of celebrations of cherry blossom festivals going back to the 9th Century reconstruct the past climate and demonstrate the local increase in temperature associated with global warming and urbanization," according to an earlier paper published in the scientific journal...

Ubiquiti Massively Downplayed a 'Catastrophic' Security Breach To Minimize Impact On Stock Price, Alleges Whistleblower Published on March 31, 2021 at 06:30AM In January, Ubiquiti Networks sent out a notification to its customers informing them of a security breach and asking all users to change their account passwords and turn on two-factor authentication. "We recently became aware of unauthorized access to certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third party cloud provider," Ubiquiti said at the time. Now, according to Krebs on Security, a whistleblower "alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a 'catastrophic' incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication." From the report: "It was catastrophically worse than reported, and legal silenced and overruled efforts to decisively protect customers," [the source] wrote in a letter to the European Data Protection S...