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hubie writes:A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims to have developed a machine learning model that can infer over 30 personality or psychological traits of a person from simply looking at a picture of them. They used deep generative image models to create photorealistic pictures of different faces and combined that with over one million judgements to infer physical traits such as age and happiness, but also personality traits such as trustworthiness, smart, liberal/conservative, Middle-Eastern, gay, and dorky.One of the authors (Joshua Peterson) announced the paper in a Twitter thread. He noted:

Fnord666 writes:Twitter has just accepted Elon Musk's offer to buy the company.Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company

upstart writes:Insteon finally comes clean about its sudden smart home shutdown:

looorg writes:Since we mentioned that the C64 got middle age (or however you see 40 as) one might also note that the European rival the ZX Spectrum also just turned to (on the 23rd of April). While it might not have been big in America it was fairly popular over in Europe, and certainly then in the UK. More of a rival over here then all this talk about the Apple II etc.https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/spectrum_at_40/

takyon writes:Intel Publishes Open-Source PSE Firmware

upstart writes:Hackers are exploiting 0-days more than ever:

upstart writes:Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, new research shows:

upstart writes:Brave introduces feature to bypass 'harmful' Google AMP pages:

upstart writes:MIT's newest computer vision algorithm identifies images down to the pixel:

upstart writes:ISPs can't find any judges who will block California net neutrality law:

upstart writes:Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models:These days the computational resources to train machine learning models can be quite large and more places are outsourcing model training and development to machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) platforms such as Amazon Sagemaker and Microsoft Azure. With shades of a Ken Thompson speech from almost 40 years ago, you can test whether your new model works as you expect by throwing test data at it, but how do you know you can trust it, that it won't act in a malicious manner using some built-in backdoor? Researchers demonstrate that it is possible to plant undetectable backdoors into machine learning models. From the paper abstract:

upstart writes:In rare interview, Monkey Island designers tell Ars about long-awaited Return:

hubie writes:Google marked Earth Day 2022 with a Doodle consisting of animated GIFs showing time-lapse images of four scenes: glacial retreat at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania between December 1986 and 2020 and in Sermersooq, Greenland between December 2000 and 2020, a coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef between March 2016 and October 2017, and deforestation of the Harz forests in Elend, Germany, between December 1995 and 2020.

AnonTechie writes:

owl writes:https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html

upstart writes:How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town:When specialized ASICs optimized for crypto mining went on the market, a processor arms race began. Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, had some of the cheapest electricity rates in the country and crypto miners beat a path to their town to set up shop. In 2018 the town was receiving a major crypto mining application every week.

upstart found an interesting article written by former Commodore engineer Bil Herd over at Hackaday:Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/cdc-warns-of-puzzling-hepatitis-cases-in-kids-cases-in-2-states-10-countries/

owl writes:https://crystalverse.com/copper-acetate-crystals/

upstart writes:New data prompts reconsideration of decades-old theory about brain injury due to stroke:

hubie writes:As described over at ScienceDaily, a paper in Science out of the University of Minnesota found that those signs put up by various highway departments informing the drivers of how many people have died on that section of the road apparently are distracting enough to cause more accidents than if they weren't put up in the first place.

upstart writes:Build your own quantum computer with Google's latest 'simulator':

hubie writes:Researchers used radiative cooling to generate enough to power LEDs or charge a cellphone

upstart writes:New Atomically Thin Material That Improves the Efficiency of Light-Based Tech: Solar Panels, Cameras, Biosensors:

owl writes:From the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/business/media/netflix-amazon-disney-ads.html

upstart writes:Everyday plastic products release trillions of microscopic particles into water:

upstart writes:Thunderstorms, not a cyclone, were the source of Kaua'i's 2018 record-setting rain:

Taking a page from Elon Musk's SpaceX construction project in Boca Chica (Texas), the state of Maine's largest city (Portland) will be using SPMTs (Self-Propelled Mobile Transports) this coming weekend.It all starts at 7 PM (EDT) on Friday April 22 and continuing through 11 AM on Monday April 25, 2022. "It" is the replacement of a bridge on one of the busiest roads in the state: I-295. The whole highway will be closed, the existing overpass will be demolished, the rubble will be removed, and the previously-constructed replacement overpass will take a ride on the SPMTs to its new home... and you can watch it all happen on-line!The $20.8 million project has a web site: https://verandaplan.org/Linking to active content on their site is non-trivial, but try: https://verandaplan.org/livestream. Here's a short YouTube video of the bridge being moved in preparation for the actual "moving day".The time has come: Veranda Street bridge project starts this week:Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

upstart found a story that led to this one:The Mastcam-Z camera recorded video of Phobos, one of the Red Planet’s two moons:

upstart writes:mRNA quality control identified as novel drug target for Alzheimer's and related dementias:Alzheimer's disease and similar disorders are often marked by the presence of pathological forms of proteins that cause neurons to die. Besides the amyloid beta proteins, which have received a lot of attention, there are also the tau proteins. Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio discovered a new mechanism whereby pathological forms of tau proteins cause cell death, which they believe can be treated with drugs.These proteins are created from messenger RNA (mRNA) that carry nonsense mutations. Clearing out these aberrant mRNAs occurs through a process called nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). The researchers noticed that pathological tau protein buildup was associated with disruptions in the NMD process. Instead of trying to figure out how to clear out the proteins, they think they can attack the cause of the NMD disruptions.

upstart writes:Bacterial soundtracks revealed by graphene membrane:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/04/bugs-in-100-lenovo-models-fixed-to-prevent-unremovable-infections/

DannyB writes:QEMU 7.0 Released With Intel AMX Support, Many RISC-V Additions

upstart writes:Arm movement and running speed: Is the partnership overrated?:

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/linkedin-cant-use-anti-hacking-law-to-block-web-scraping-judges-rule/

Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-of-money-so-why-arent-we-recycling-lithium-batteries/

upstart writes:Rotating blue laser light reveals unimagined dynamics in living cells:University of Freiburg scientists have employed a microscopy technique known as rotating coherent scattering (ROCS) to resolve cellular-level detail without the need to rely on fluorescence imaging. This means they can make "movies" to study the dynamics of cells because they take images at 100 frames per second. It uses a rapidly rotating blue laser beam, causing lightwaves to scatter at the structures of cells to generate images. They use blue laser light because objects as small as cells and viruses scatter much more light in the blue than in the red, allowing them to get "brighter" pictures. The laser is also directed in at an oblique angle to increase the contrast of the image, much as how you'd look for smudges on surfaces by looking at light reflected at low angles.

upstart writes:Researchers break world record for quantum-encrypted communications:

upstart writes:Texas can get to net zero by 2050 and simultaneously bolster the economy:

hubie writes:The most complicated and expensive part of the supply chain is the last-mile delivery, where the costs can account for up to 28% of the total transportation cost and is projected to increase. The two main issues driving these costs will be the continual rise of e-commerce as well as rapid global urbanization, so there is a need for ways to optimize the delivery process to reduce costs. Urbanization leads to continued growth of traffic, which leads to transportation delays, higher fuel costs, and larger environmental impacts. These factors have led companies to consider deliveries by drone, but drones have limited battery capacities. Instead of looking at company delivery trucks as mobile charging stations from which to launch drones, a group of researchers considered utilizing public transportation vehicles to serve that purpose.The idea of letting drones recharge or hitch rides on buses and trams to conserve energy was first introduced by Stanford researchers. The researchers in this work extended that idea to using multiple drones and multiple warehouses operating around the actual transportation nodes of a city (Bremen, Germany) and found that this is an attractive and viable approach that can be implemented in the real world.Journal Reference:

hubie writes:The rover will collect samples and search for signs of life as it explores an ancient and now-dry river channel

upstart writes:Microsoft looking to add advertisements to free-to-play games:

upstart writes:Variable schedules harm workers and businesses:

upstart writes:Mars scientists look to less expensive missions - SpaceNews:

upstart writes:The Lyrid meteor shower peaks April 21-22:

Freeman writes:Drone delivery could be poised to take off in the United States.

upstart writes:The MIT biologist Yukiko Yamashita’s research has shed light on the immortality of germline cells and the function of “junk DNA.”:

DannyB writes:Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users' smart homesThe app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.

hubie writes:The Central Valley of California makes up only 1% of U.S. farmland, but produces 40% of the nation's produce despite only receiving 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) of rainfall a year. That kind of productivity is due to massive pumping of groundwater for irrigation. After decades of pumping, parts of California are literally sinking and water is getting harder to get at (wells in the Tulare Basin have to be drilled a kilometer deep).Groundwater in this region comes from two sources that are separated by a dense layer of clay. The water on top of the clay resides in loose soil and this water gets replenished with rainfall and snowmelt runoff. The water below the clay is the aquifer and this is not replenished. A major problem is that nobody knows where the pumped water is being pulled from, nor how much of it remains.A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory came up with a new method to monitor changes between the two water sources.

upstart writes:Microplastics permeate seafood across southern Australia: