MostCynical writes:The Guardian has a story detailing the firing of Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa)President Trump made the announcement on Twitter on Tuesday, saying Krebs "has been terminated" and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was "highly inaccurate".CISA last week released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the statement read. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."Krebs, is a former Microsoft executive, and was appointed by President Trump after allegations of Russian interference with the 2016 election.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Rocky Mudbutt writes:Grace Mitchell Tada writes for the Hakai Magazine of Coastal Science and Societies about the damaging effects of rising groundwater due to changing sea levels. From the article
hubie writes:Mechanoluminescence, also known as triboluminescence, is the production of light as the result of mechanical action taken on a solid, such as by squeezing or bending it. It was first discovered in 1605 by Sir Francis Bacon when he saw light given off as he was scraping a lump of sugar with a knife (and you may have seen it yourself if you've seen the green spark given off when biting into a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver in the dark). If you stress a solid elastically, meaning that it recovers its original shape when you remove the stress, and it gives off light, this is known as elasto-mechanoluminescence. There are very few materials known with this behavior and they are a topic of interest because there are some useful things one could imagine making with such a material, such as visual stress sensors and other specialty lighting.Researchers in France found that a certain kind of glass containing mechanoluminescent crystalline particles not only gives off light when subject to mechanical stress, but it behaves in a manner suggestive of a photonic sponge. If the glass is initially charged with exposure to UV light, it emits green light as a stress is applied to it. When the applied pressure stops changing and reaches a steady-state, the light disappears. The authors call this a photonic sponge because it is analogous to after one fills a sponge with water, the water only comes out while you are squeezing it to wring it out. What was also surprising in their results was that as they removed the stress, additional light was emitted as the stress was released. The total amount of light emitted didn't depend upon the total static force applied, but rather on the change in the force, known as the deviatoric part of the stress. They used a Li,Na metaphosphate glass embedded with SrAlO particles. Provided with the paper is a video showing the experiment in action.Dubernet, M., Bruyer, E., Gueguen, Y. et al. Mechanics and physics of a glass/particles photonic sponge. Sci Rep 10, 19495 (2020). (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-75504-9)Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
hubie writes:Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are cylindrical tubes made up of very thin walls of carbon atoms. They are what you get if you roll up a sheet of graphene. They come in single walled (SWCNT) and multi-walled (MWCNT) versions, and they have some very remarkable physical and electrical properties. Despite popping up from time-to-time as early has the late 19th Century, they exploded on the science scene in the early 1990s as an area of very active research.However, if one looks back into antiquity at the famed swords of Damascus, they were made from Damascus steel. This steel was recognized to be superior to all others, but the art of its manufacture was lost to time for hundreds of years; however, in 2006 an analysis of an ancient sabre was found to contain CNTs in the steel.A group of researchers from India have now pushed the appearance of CNTs back even further. They were studying black polished pottery shards from a dig site in Keeladi that could be as old as 600 BCE and they determined that the black coating consists of CNTs and graphene.
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:Coating metal bone implants with bacteria found to promote healing while reducing infections:
Disappearing Tweets? Twitter Now Has a Feature for Thatupstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956_:Disappearing Tweets? Twitter Now Has a Feature for That:
martyb writes:The first attempt[*] was a no-go, and the weather forecast is up in the air (thanks to hurricane Eta), but if things work out, SpaceX's Crew-1 will fly to the ISS (International Space Station) today. The launch is scheduled for four hours from the time this story goes live. It marks the official end of the US needing to purchase launches from Russia to get to and from the ISS.A lot has happened along the way to, during, and following the Crew-1 Demo mission where SpaceX sent a Crew Dragon carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS. For one thing, it was a demo flight. How well did things really work out?It's launch day for the historic Crew-1 mission to the space station:
[2020-11-15 17:42:54 UTC: Updated title: TCL Roku TVs are apparently not affected -- the vulnerability described apparently applies only to TCL Android TVs. --martyb]takyon writes:Major Security Flaws in TCL Android Smart TVs May Have Opened Chinese Backdoor, Researchers Say
canopic jug writes:Fifty years ago on November 12, 1970 the Oregon State Highway Department used dynamite to blast the rotting corpse of a stranded whale. It did not go well.
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