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Submission + - Researchers Claim First Functioning Graphene-Based Chip (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, have developed what they are calling the world’s first functioning graphene-based semiconductor. This breakthrough holds the promise to revolutionize the landscape of electronics, enabling faster traditional computers and offering a new material for future quantum computers. The research, published on January 3 in Nature and led by Walt de Heer, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech, focuses on leveraging epitaxial graphene, a crystal structure of carbon chemically bonded to silicon carbide (SiC). This novel semiconducting material, dubbed semiconducting epitaxial graphene (SEC)—or alternatively, epigraphene—boasts enhanced electron mobility compared with that of traditional silicon, allowing electrons to traverse with significantly less resistance. The outcome is transistors capable of operating at terahertz frequencies, offering speeds 10 times as fast as that of the silicon-based transistors used in current chips.

De Heer describes the method used as a modified version of an extremely simple technique that has been known for over 50 years. “When silicon carbide is heated to well over 1,000C, silicon evaporates from the surface, leaving a carbon-rich surface which then forms into graphene,” says de Heer. This heating step is done with an argon quartz tube in which a stack of two SiC chips are placed in a graphite crucible, according to de Heer. Then a high-frequency current is run through a copper coil around the quartz tube, which heats the graphite crucible through induction. The process takes about an hour. De Heer added that the SEC produced this way is essentially charge neutral, and when exposed to air, it will spontaneously be doped by oxygen. This oxygen doping is easily removed by heating it at about 200C in vacuum. “The chips we use cost about [US] $10, the crucible about $1, and the quartz tube about $10,” said de Heer. [...]

De Heer and his research team concede, however, that further exploration is needed to determine whether graphene-based semiconductors can surpass the current superconducting technology used in advanced quantum computers. The Georgia Tech team do not envision incorporating graphene-based semiconductors with standard silicon or compound semiconductor lines. Instead, they are aiming for a paradigm shift beyond silicon, utilizing silicon carbide. They are developing methods, such as coating SEC with boron nitride, to protect and enhance its compatibility with conventional semiconductor lines. Comparing their work with commercially available graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), de Heer explains that there is a crucial difference: “Conventional GFETs do not use semiconducting graphene, making them unsuitable for digital electronics requiring a complete transistor shutdown.” He says that the SEC developed by his team allows for a complete shutdown, meeting the stringent requirements of digital electronics. De Heer says that it will take time to develop this technology. “I compare this work to the Wright brothers’ first 100-meter flight. It will mainly depend on how much work is done to develop it.”

Submission + - MIT Creates Implantable Device That Produces Insulin (mit.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: MIT researchers unveiled an implantable device designed to provide insulin for Type 1 diabetes treatment and replace injections. The device incorporates many islet cells that produce insulin and features an onboard oxygen factory.

Type 1 diabetes patients are typically required to monitor blood glucose levels and self-administer daily insulin injections, but this process cannot replicate the body’s natural blood glucose control.

The newly developed device, approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, uses a proton-exchange membrane to divide water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen diffuses, and the oxygen is stored and provided to the islet cells via an oxygen-permeable membrane.

Research team member Robert Langer said the device could eventually treat other diseases that call for repeated therapeutic protein delivery.

Submission + - The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by AndrewZX
AndrewZX writes: Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.
Power

Submission + - BYU Professors Discover Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Waste or Risk of Meltdown

Submitted by thedarklaser
thedarklaser writes: Utah BYU Professors having created a nuclear reactor design that could produce enough energy for 1000 homes in the space of 4ft by 7ft. And bonus ... potentially no nuclear waste or risk of melt down.

They use molten salt that bonds with the dissolved fuel. Then, very valuable Molybdenum-99 (as in $30 million per gram) can be extracted from that salt and sold for use in medical imaging.

Additionally this system is very inexpensive, at a cost of around 3 cents per kilowatt hour.

Submission + - Dallas Air Traffic Rerouted as FAA Probes Faulty GPS Signals (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Flights into the Dallas area are being forced to take older, cumbersome routes and a runway at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was temporarily closed after aviation authorities said GPS signals there aren’t reliable. The Federal Aviation Administration said in an emailed statement Tuesday it’s investigating the possible jamming of the global-positioning system that aircraft increasingly use to guide them on more efficient routes and to runways. So far, the agency has found “no evidence of intentional interference,” it said. American Airlines, the primary carrier at DFW, said the GPS issue is not affecting its operations. Southwest Airlines, which flies from nearby Love Field, said it also isn’t experiencing any disruptions. The FAA reopened the closed runway earlier on Tuesday.

The GPS problem — despite the lack of impact — highlights the risk of widespread reliance on the weak GPS radio signals from space used for everything from timing stock trades to guiding jetliners. The FAA occasionally warns pilots in advance of military testing that may degrade the GPS signals and pilots sometimes report short-lived problems, but the interference in Dallas is atypical, said Dan Streufert, founder of the flight-tracking website ADSBexchange.com. “In the US, it’s very unusual to see this without a prior notice,” Streufert said in an interview. ADSBExchange.com monitors aircraft data streams that indicate the accuracy of the GPS signals they are receiving and the website began seeing problems around Dallas on Monday, he said. The military has told the FAA it isn’t conducting any operations that would interfere with GPS in that area, said a person familiar with the situation who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about it. The primary way FAA’s air-traffic system tracks planes is based on GPS, but older radars and radio-direction beacons have remained in place as backups.

Submission + - New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function (mit.edu)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: The Human Genome Project was an ambitious initiative to sequence every piece of human DNA was finally completed in 2003. Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells. The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The project takes advantage of the Perturb-seq approach that makes it possible to follow the impact of turning on or off genes with unprecedented depth. This method was first published in 2016 by a group of researchers including Weissman and fellow MIT professor Aviv Regev, but could only be used on small sets of genes and at great expense.

The Perturb-seq method uses CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to introduce genetic changes into cells, and then uses single-cell RNA sequencing to capture information about the RNAs that are expressed resulting from a given genetic change. Because RNAs control all aspects of how cells behave, this method can help decode the many cellular effects of genetic changes.

Since their initial proof-of-concept paper, Weissman, Regev, and others have used this sequencing method on smaller scales. For example, the researchers used Perturb-seq in 2021 to explore how human and viral genes interact over the course of an infection with HCMV, a common herpesvirus.

In the new study, Replogle and collaborators including Reuben Saunders, a graduate student in Weissman’s lab and co-first author of the paper, scaled up the method to the entire genome. Using human blood cancer cell lines as well noncancerous cells derived from the retina, he performed Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells, and used the data to build a comprehensive map tying genotypes to phenotypes.

Submission + - WhatsApp Ordered To Help U.S. Agents Spy On Chinese Phones (forbes.com)

Submitted by HillNKnowlton22
HillNKnowlton22 writes: U.S. federal agencies have been using a 35-year-old American surveillance law to secretly track WhatsApp users with no explanation as to why and without knowing whom they are targeting. A just-unsealed government surveillance application reveals that in November 2021, DEA investigators demanded the Facebook-owned messaging company track seven users based in mainland China and Macau. The application reveals the DEA didn’t know the identities of any of the targets, but told WhatsApp to monitor the IP addresses and numbers with which the targeted users were communicating, as well as when and how they were using the app. Such surveillance is done using a technology known as a pen register and under the 1986 Pen Register Act, and doesn't seek any message content, which WhatsApp couldn’t provide anyway, as it is end-to-end encrypted. Over at least the last two years, law enforcement in the U.S. has repeatedly ordered WhatsApp and other tech companies to install these pen registers without showing any probable cause but instead showing only "elements" of justifications. “Other than the three elements described above, federal law does not require that an application for an order authorizing the installation and use of a pen register and a trap and trace device specify any facts,” the government wrote in the latest application. American agencies can, therefore, continue to carry out surveillance on users of one of the world’s most popular messaging apps without having to provide any reason, either to a judge or the public.

Submission + - JWST Sunshield Deployment Starts Critical Phase (nasa.gov) 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Over the past few days, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully completed several milestone in getting ready to deploy its massive sunshield. Starting today and through the weekend come the trickiest parts: extending the telescoping mid-booms on either side of the spacecraft, which spreads the sunshield out, then separating each 50-um thick layer. "Webb's sunshield assembly includes 140 release mechanisms, approximately 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, bearings, springs, gears, about 400 pulleys and 90 cables," according to Webb spacecraft systems engineer Krystal Puga.

Follow each milestone here. Unlike other nail-biting JWST events like the rocket launch, something of this size and complexity has never been attempted in space. After this, the telescope's optics will be in the shade forevermore, and can begin cooling to the frigid operating temperature needed to detect infrared light.

Submission + - SPAM: Data Centers Are Pushing Ireland's Electric Grid to the Brink

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Behind every TikTok, Zoom call, and cat meme is a data center that stores, processes, or reroutes that data around the world. The more we do online, the bigger these data centers and their energy footprint get. At full capacity, servers within a modern “hyperscale” (aka “massive”) data center can use as much power as 80,000 households. Although the data center industry is global, places with the right combination of stable climate and friendly regulations attract outsized attention from data center developers. Ireland is one of these places. The island nation hosts 70 data centers and is now the fastest-growing data center market in Europe. Unfortunately, supplying the equivalent of several extra cities worth of electricity to servers that aid your doomscrolling is starting to take a toll on Ireland’s power grid.

Data centers already use around 900 megawatts of electricity in Ireland. According to Paul Deane, an energy researcher working with the MaREI Environmental Research Institute in Ireland, this adds up to at least 11% of Ireland’s total electricity supply at present, a situation he described “as a serious energy systems problem.” As Deane outlined, meeting this demand is making Ireland’s current energy crisis worse and its target of halving greenhouse emissions by 2030 harder to reach. And things are only getting more challenging. A recent report from Eirgrid, Ireland’s state-owned grid operator, shows that data centers will consume almost 30% (PDF) of Ireland’s annual electricity supply by 2029.

Although, as Deane pointed out, data centers are essential to modern life, a small country with little grid power to spare hosting so many of them puts the sustainability of Ireland’s entire power supply at risk. Deane summed up Ireland’s issue with data centers as being a mismatch in size. “Data centers are large power users, and our power system is small, so plugging more of them into a small grid will start to have an outsized impact,” he said. In stark comparison, Germany, the EU’s biggest data center market overall, will use less than 5% of its grid capacity to power data centers in the same period. As well as stoking fears that the industry’s growth will create blackouts and power shortages for Irish consumers this winter, data centers may also derail Ireland’s drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Imaginary numbers could be needed to describe reality

Submitted by InfiniteZero
InfiniteZero writes: Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested. If standard quantum theory holds up, imaginary numbers are critical.

But whether quantum theory needs them or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting.

To test how important imaginary numbers were in describing reality, the researchers used an updated version of the Bell test, an experiment which relies on quantum entanglement.

Submission + - With New Funding Model, MST3K Attempts Online Comeback, Live Tour (mst3k.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will be coming back in 2022 with thirteen new episodes, plus 12 additional shorts, 12 monthly live events. "And this time, we're doing it without a network," explains the web page for their successful comeback campaign on Kickstarter. "Season 13 will be released exclusively in MST3K's new online virtual theatre, THE GIZMOPLEX."

36,581 backers pledged $6,519,019 to fund their own dedicated MST3K venue online, and most contributors to their 2021 Kickstarter campaign received 2022 passes to the online theatre as a thank-you. Now through December, fans who want to buy or gift a 2022 pass can get them discounted to $95. (Normally'll they cost $120.)

Starting on March 4, 2022, assorted MST3K zanies and their puppet robots will be watching (and heckling) 12 carefully-chosen weird movies, including one 1970 Gamera movie that they haven't gotten to yet, a 1968 Italian movie about a professional wrestler called The Batwoman, and Jack Palance's 1979 film, HG Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. And series creator Joel Hodgson will return when they all watch the 2014 movie The Christmas Dragon. The Den of Geek site has all the details on the 13 movies (gleaned from last week's traditional "Turkey Day marathon" of fan-favorite episodes — this year broadcast on YouTube, Twitch, and various web pages and streaming apps).

But in addition there's also a live touring show that will take them all across America. Next week fans can catch shows in the midwestern U.S. — specifically Youngstown Ohio, Nashville Indiana, Madison Wisconsin, and Chicago — before the crew moves on to Salt Lake City, Reno, and Seattle. Then it's on to California — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego — and then dozens of other major cities in the U.S. (Portland! Denver! Austin! Atlanta! Durham! Worcester! New York City!)

"We know that many of you are understandably concerned about COVID and the Delta variant. We are too," explains a special announcement on the tour's web site, promising the tour "will adhere to the same standards as touring Broadway shows in effect at the time of your performance... [E]very theater on the tour will have its own policies."

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Develop An Engineered 'Mini' CRISPR Genome Editing System

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a paper published Sept. 3 in Molecular Cell, [Stanley Qi, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University] and his collaborators announce what they believe is a major step forward for CRISPR: An efficient, multi-purpose, mini CRISPR system. Whereas the commonly used CRISPR systems—with names like Cas9 and Cas12a denoting various versions of CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins—are made of about 1000 to 1500 amino acids, their "CasMINI" has 529. The researchers confirmed in experiments that CasMINI could delete, activate and edit genetic code just like its beefier counterparts. Its smaller size means it should be easier to deliver into human cells and the human body, making it a potential tool for treating diverse ailments, including eye disease, organ degeneration and genetic diseases generally.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Create 'Master Faces' to Bypass Facial Recognition

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have demonstrated a method to create "master faces," computer generated faces that act like master keys for facial recognition systems, and can impersonate several identities with what the researchers claim is a high probability of success. In their paper (PDF), researchers at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the School of Electrical Engineering in Tel Aviv detail how they successfully created nine "master key" faces that are able to impersonate almost half the faces in a dataset of three leading face recognition systems. The researchers say their results show these master faces can successfully impersonate over 40 percent of the population in these systems without any additional information or data of the person they are identifying.

The researchers tested their methods against three deep face recognition systems–Dlib, FaceNet, and SphereFace. Lead author Ron Shmelkin told Motherboard that they used these systems because they are capable of recognizing “high-level semantic features” of the faces that are more sophisticated than just skin color or lighting effects. The researchers used a StyleGAN to generate the faces and then used an evolutionary algorithm and neural network to optimize and predict their success. The evolutionary strategy then creates iterations, or generations, of candidates of varying success rates. The researchers then used the algorithm to train a neural network, to classify the best candidates as the most promising ones. This is what teaches it to predict candidates’ success and, in turn, direct the algorithm to generate better candidates with a higher probability of passing. The researchers even predict that their master faces could be animated using deepfake technology to bypass liveness detection, which is used to determine whether a biometric sample is real or fake.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Self-Driving Waymo Trucks To Haul Loads Between Houston and Fort Worth

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday morning, Waymo announced that it is working with trucking company JB Hunt to autonomously haul cargo loads in Texas. Class 8 JB Hunt trucks equipped with the autonomous driving software and hardware system called Waymo Driver will operate on I-45 in Texas, taking cargo between Houston and Fort Worth. However, the trucks will still carry humans—a trained truck driver and Waymo technicians—to supervise and take over if necessary.

"This will be one of the first opportunities for JB Hunt to receive data and feedback on customer freight moved with a Class 8 tractor operating at this level of autonomy. While we believe there will be a need for highly skilled, professional drivers for many years to come, it is important for JB Hunt as an industry leader to be involved early in the development of advanced autonomous technologies and driving systems to ensure that their implementation will improve efficiency while enhancing safety," said Craig Harper, chief sustainability officer at JB Hunt. "We're thrilled to collaborate with JB Hunt as we advance and commercialize the Waymo Driver," said Charlie Jatt, head of commercialization for trucking at Waymo. "Our teams share an innovative and safety-first mindset as well as a deep appreciation for the potential benefits of autonomous driving technology in trucking. It's companies and relationships like these that will make this technology a commercial reality in the coming years."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - New Boson Appears In Nuclear Decay, Breaks Standard Model (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In November, people started polishing a Nobel prize for a group of physicists who seemed to have found new boson. [...] This result has been cooking for quite some time. The first experimental results date back to 2015, with publication in 2016. Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it. By choosing the energy of the protons correctly, Beryllium in a particular excited state is produced, which quickly decays back to lithium by emitting an electron and a positron. Now, in these experiments, energy and momentum must be conserved. The lithium nucleus is quite a complicated beast and can rattle around in all sorts of ways, meaning that the electron and positron have a certain amount of freedom in the direction in which they are emitted. By contrast, the researchers observed that some electrons and positrons seem to be correlated in their emission direction. Computer modeling confirmed that this was not due to their equipment and could not be explained by the nuclear physics of beryllium, lithium, or any known background process. The correlation could, however, be explained by a new boson that decayed by emitting a positron and an electron. As long as the production was reasonably inefficient, and the mass was about 17MeV (million electron volts), then the data was beautifully explained.

It is always possible to extend our models of the Universe to include new particles, including new bosons and new forces. But, it isn’t good enough to match a single experimental result. You have to match all of them. The end results are particles that look a bit like a backyard panel-beating job. Yeah, the paint matches, but you can still see the wavy patches where the filler hasn’t been sanded flat. The problems arise from the mass—17MeV is at the low end of well-explored territory. So, why did this story flare back up again? A new paper, by the same scientists that published the beryllium results. This time, they measured electron-positron emissions from excited helium. Same experiment, different atom, but the same 17MeV boson was found. The new result is pretty strong evidence.

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