The New York Times reports: Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago... "If you're able to actually identify it, and we're on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, 'Amazing, we know what it was,'" Robert DePalma, a paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt....

A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. Many paleontologists were intrigued but uncertain about the scope of DePalma's claims; a research paper published that year by DePalma and his collaborators mostly described the geological setting of the site, which once lay along the banks of a river. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts. In the 2019 paper, DePalma and his colleagues described how spherules raining down from the sky clogged the gills of paddlefish and sturgeon, suffocating them.

Usually the outsides of impact spherules have been mineralogically transformed by millions of years of chemical reactions with water. But at Tanis, some of them landed in tree resin, which provided a protective enclosure of amber, keeping them almost as pristine as the day they formed.... Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, "collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now...."

DePalma said there also appear to be some bubbles within some of the spherules. Because the spherules do not look to be cracked, it's possible that they could hold bits of air from 66 million years ago.
In 1998, UCLA geochemist Frank Kyte claimed he'd found a fragment of that meteor in a core sample drilled off Hawaii, the article points out, "but other scientists were skeptical that any bits of the meteor could have survived."

But now DePalma tells the Times that this North Dakota discovery "actually falls in line with what Frank Kyte was telling us years ago."

Leaders of the successful unionization drive at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island have heard from workers at 100 other Amazon facilities in all 50 states, the union's president told AFP. "We are witnessing a revolution," he added Friday.

But meanwhile, "Amazon tipped its hand" this week on how it plans to try to defeat that vote, reports the Washington Post. Specifically, yesterday Amazon filed a list of 25 objections to the election with America's National Labor Relations Board — objecting mostly to the actions of the National Labor Relations Board: The company alleged that the regional office of the agency, based in Brooklyn, "created the impression" it was supporting the union by filing a lawsuit against Amazon before the vote. Amazon also alleged the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delayed investigating "unmeritorious" unfair labor practice charges and understaffed the election. Amazon also alleges the independent Amazon Labor Union harassed employees who did not support the union, trespassed on Amazon's property and "misled employees by telling them that they would lose their benefits if they did not support the ALU," among other issues....

Labor lawyers say the company, which strongly opposed unionization, could try to delay the process of workers forming a union for years. "Amazon probably figures it has nothing to lose by exhausting every possible appeals process because time is on its side," said John Logan, chair of the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University.... A representative for the Amazon Labor Union said none of Amazon's objections had merit and called them a tactic to delay the union. "It's a blatant attempt by Amazon to interfere with and go around the democratic choice of their workforce," Amazon worker and labor organizer Connor Spence said....

The NLRB will need to certify the vote before the union can try to bargain a contract with Amazon. The objections could delay or even cancel that process, depending on what the NLRB decides. Amazon has many avenues to fight the vote results, including by refusing to bargain and forcing regulators to get involved.
The president of the Amazon warehouse's reminded AFP what happened after two Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to union in December.

More than 180 more Starbucks cafes launched unionization campaigns, and "On Friday, three more Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to unionize, taking the national total to 16."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Tiny molecular machines make life possible. Spinning rotary motors generate the chemical fuel our cells need, miniature walkers carry nutrients, and minute construction crews build proteins. Now, chemists are getting in on the act by making even smaller and simpler versions of these biological machines.

In three studies, scientists report designing their own molecular pumps and rotary motors. The puny devices are not quite ready to make their real-world debut, but future versions could suck carbon dioxide from the air and harvest valuable metals from seawater. The new studies show it's possible to get teams of motors all working in the same direction and concentrate target chemicals in a confined space, a feat biology uses to sustain work.

"These are very important steps toward useful real-life molecular machines," says Ivan Aprahamian, a chemist at Dartmouth College who wasn't involved with the studies.

"The sudden ear-piercing beep of a radiation meter fills the room," reports CNN, "as a Ukrainian soldier walks in.

"This is where Russian soldiers were living at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and radiation levels are now higher than normal." There's no visible presence of the source of the radioactive material in the room, but Ukrainian officials say it's coming from small particles and dust that the soldiers brought into the building. "They went to the Red Forest and brought radioactive material back with them on their shoes," soldier Ihor Ugolkov explains. "Other places are fine, but radiation increased here, because they were living here."

CNN was given exclusive access to the power plant for the first time since it came back into Ukrainian control. Officials at the plant explain the levels inside the room used by Russian soldiers are only slightly above what the World Nuclear Association describes as naturally occurring radiation. One-time contact would not be dangerous but continuous exposure would pose a health hazard.

"They went everywhere, and they also took some radioactive dust on them [when they left]," Ugolkov adds. It's an example of what Ukrainian officials say was the lax and careless behavior of Russian soldiers while they were in control of the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area around Chernobyl, namely the Red Forest, is still the most nuclear contaminated area on the planet, with most of the radioactive particles present on the soil....

Russian soldiers held Chernobyl for a month and are thought to have been operating in contaminated areas most of the time.
Russian soldiers entered the Red Forest and dug trenches, Ukranian officials believe — and on the edge of the area CNN spotted a Russian military ration box "that exhibited radiation levels 50 times above naturally occurring values."

The 169 Ukraine National Guard soldiers, who guarded the facility, were locked in the plant's Cold War era underground nuclear bunker, crammed up in tight quarters without access to natural light, fresh air or communication with the outside world, according to the Ukrainian Interior Minister.

"They were kept here for 30 days without sufficient lighting and food. They were not allowed outside. On the last day they were taken away from here to an unknown direction," Denys Monastyrskyy says while standing inside the bunker.

The minister says he believes the men have been taken to Russia, via Belarus, as prisoners of war, but doesn't know for certain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A newly proposed amendment to California's hiring discrimination laws would make AI-powered employment decision-making software a source of legal liability. The proposal would make it illegal for businesses and employment agencies to use automated-decision systems to screen out applicants who are considered a protected class by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Broad language, however, means the law could be easily applied to "applications or systems that may only be tangentially related to employment decisions," lawyers Brent Hamilton and Jeffrey Bosley of Davis Wright Tremaine wrote.

Automated-decision systems and algorithms, both fundamental to the law, are broadly defined in the draft, Hamilton and Bosley said. The lack of specificity means that technologies designed to aid human decision-making in small, subtle ways could end up being lumped together with hiring software, as could third-party vendors who provide the code. Strict record keeping requirements are included in the proposed law that double record retention time from two to four years, and require anyone using automated-decision systems to retain all machine-learning data generated as part of its operation and training. Training datasets leave vendors responsible, too: "Any person who engages the advertisement, sale, provision, or use of a selection tool, including but not limited to an automated-decision system, to an employer or other covered entity must maintain records of the assessment criteria used by the automated-decision system," the proposed text says. It specifically mentions it must maintain records for each customer it trains models for, too.

Unintentional filtering isn't covered by the newly proposed California law, which focuses on the ways in which software can discriminate against certain types of people, unintentionally or otherwise. [...] Hamilton and Bosley suggest that California employers review their ATS and RMS software to ensure it conforms to the proposal, enhance their understanding of how the algorithms they use function, be prepared to demonstrate that the results of their process is fair and speak with vendors to ensure they are doing what they need to do to comply. The 45-day public commentary period for the proposed changes is not yet open, meaning there's no timetable for the changes to be reviewed, amended and submitted for passage.

The French aerospace company Gama has raised 2 million euros to deploy a solar sail in space. The Guardian reports: Solar sails require no engines to move. Instead, they are pushed around by the pressure of sunlight. The angle of the sail determines the direction of motion. Gama plans to deploy a 73.3-sq-meter solar sail in a 550km-altitude orbit in October. It will be launched as an additional payload on a SpaceX rocket.

Gama hopes to demonstrate that solar sails can revolutionize access to deep space because they are cost-effective and scalable in size. After this year's deployment test, the company plans to launch a follow-up mission in 2024 to a higher orbit to demonstrate control and onboard navigation. In 2025, it hopes to emulate the Japanese and fly to Venus.

A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. Live Science reports: That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness -- about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies -- and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies. [...] The researchers discovered HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the U.K. Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were particularly looking at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch out or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggested HD1 was extremely distant. The researchers found that the red wavelengths were the equivalent to a galaxy located 13.5 billion light-years away.

HD1 also seems to be growing at a feverish rate -- about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for starburst galaxies that are known to produce stars at an extraordinarily high pace. These stars were also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found. As such, HD1 could be home to the universe's very first stars, called Population III stars; if that identity is verified, this would be the first observation of this type of star, the researchers said. There's also the possibility that HD1 is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the sun. To figure out HD1's true identity, the researchers can look for X-rays, which are emitted as material gets devoured by the gravity of a black hole. "If HD1 is a black hole, we should see X-ray emission from it. If we do not find X-rays, the emission must originate from massive stars," [one of the researchers told Live Science].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: It's a sunny day on a city street as a green bus pulls up by the kerb. Onboard, a handful of passengers sit stony-faced as you step up to present your pass. But you cannot see your body -- only a floating pair of blue hands. It might sound like a bizarre dream, but the scenario is part of a virtual reality (VR) system designed to help people with agoraphobia -- those for whom certain environments, situations and interactions can cause intense fear and distress. Scientists say the approach enables participants to build confidence and ease their fears, helping them to undertake tasks in real life that they had previously avoided. The study also found those with more severe psychological problems benefited the most. "It leads to a real step-change in people's lives," said Prof Daniel Freeman, the lead researcher in the work, from the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford.

The VR experience begins in a virtual therapist's office before moving to scenarios such as opening the front door or being in a doctor's surgery, each with varying levels of difficulty. Participants are asked to complete certain tasks, such as asking for a cup of coffee, and are encouraged to make eye contact or move closer to other characters. Freeman said while the scenarios feel real, the computer-generated scenes allow participants to feel able to try something new or approach the situation differently. "There's a little bit of the conscious bit [of the brain] going: 'OK, it's OK, I know it's not real and therefore I can persist, try something new and do something differently,'" he said. "That enables people to apply it in the real world. Basically, if you get over something in VR, you will get over in the real world."

Writing in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, Freeman and colleagues report how they randomly allocated 174 patients with difficulties going outside and psychosis to use the "gameChange" VR technology alongside their usual care. Another 172 patients were allocated to receive their usual care alone. [...] The results show that six weeks after the trial began, those allocated to the VR therapy had a small but significant reduction in avoiding real-life situations because of agoraphobia, as well as less distress, compared with those who had only received their usual care. However, by six months there was no difference between the two groups. But further analysis revealed that those who had severe agoraphobia benefited most, and for these people the effect was sustained at six months. Such patients were able to complete, on average, two more activities than before -- such as going shopping or getting on a bus.

Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge more quickly and be lighter yet safe, the Japanese automaker said Friday. CBS News reports: The all-solid-state battery will replace the lithium-ion battery now in use for a 2028 product launch and a pilot plant launch in 2024, according to Nissan. The battery would be stable enough to be used in pacemakers, Nissan said. When finished, it will be about half the size of the current battery and fully charge in 15 minutes instead of a few hours.

The collaboration with the U.S. space program, as well as the University of California San Diego, involves the testing of various materials, Corporate Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters. "Both NASA and Nissan need the same kind of battery," he said. Nissan and NASA are using what's called the "original material informatics platform," a computerized database, to test various combinations to see what works best among hundreds of thousands of materials, Doi said. The goal is to avoid the use of expensive materials like rare metals needed for lithium-ion batteries.

Twitter is experimenting with an "unmentioning" feature that will allow users to remove themselves from conversations. The Verge reports: It's limited to some users and only on the web version for now but looks like a very useful way to clean up your mentions. "We're experimenting with Unmentioning -- a way to help you protect your peace and remove yourself from conversations," the tweet reads. The company posted a short GIF of what the feature will look like to its Twitter Safety account.

The "leave this conversation" option will appear on the menu that pops out of the corner of a tweet on the web version of Twitter. (It includes the "mute" and "embed" options as well.) Clicking the "leave this conversation" option brings up another menu that details what happens when you leave a conversation: your username gets untagged, it stops any future mentions in that conversation, and, perhaps most importantly, it will stop notifications.

E Ink has unveiled a new version of its "Kaleido" color e-paper color display capable of playing animations and videos. It can also support displays up to 13.3-inches. Gizmodo reports: Kaleido was followed by Kaleido Plus which offered some key improvements, but it is now being replaced by the freshly announced Kaleido 3. We haven't had a chance to go eyes-on with Kaleido 3 just yet, but according to E Ink, "by optimizing the design of the ePaper module structure, E Ink Kaleido 3 has increased its color saturation by 30 percent compared to the previous generation." That's not a stark contrast on paper (pun intended) and Kaleido 3 still only supports 4,096 colors, but in person, the improvements between versions are usually far more obvious.

E Ink also claims that Kaleido 3, which will be available in three sizes (7.8-inch, 10.3-inch, and 13.3-inch) for everything from e-readers to larger tablets, employs a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light bouncing off the screen to make reading easier at night without resorting to warmer color temperature options for the LEDs which would throw off the accuracy of the colors being displayed. The most interesting upgrade with Kaleido 3 is that E Ink claims the responsiveness of the display has been improved which "enables the module to play animations and videos, providing new options for digital reading and writing in educational and professional applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi OS (and most operating systems based on it) has shipped with a default "pi" user account, making it simpler to boot up a Pi and start working without needing to hook up the device to a monitor or go through a multi-step setup process. But as of today, that's changing -- new installs of the Raspberry Pi OS are shedding that default user account for both security and regulatory reasons.

Raspberry Pi Foundation software engineer Simon Long explains the thinking in this blog post. "[The "pi" user account] could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials," he writes. This move will improve the Pi operating system's security.

Before, even if you assigned a good password to the "pi" account, attackers could still assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that most Raspberry Pi boards were using the "pi" username. Many Pi OS-based operating systems also ship with the default "pi" user account enabled and are completely passwordless, requiring extra steps to assign the account a password in the first place. The flip side is that the change could break some software and scripts, particularly those that are hard-coded to use the "pi" user account and home folder. "[T]he Raspberry Pi OS now boots into a dedicated setup mode the first time you start it up instead of running the setup wizard as an app in the normal desktop environment," adds Ars. "And that setup wizard now prompts you to create a username and password rather than simply assigning a password to the default 'pi' user account. To aid with setup, the wizard can now pair Bluetooth keyboards and mice without requiring you to plug in a USB accessory first."

The new version of the Pi OS also includes experimental support for the Wayland display server protocol, but Long says most people should ignore it for now since it's explicitly labeled as "experimental."

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge.

The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.

The full 90-minute keynote of the Windows 95 launch was uploaded this week by the Blue OS Museum YouTube account. As Gizmodo's Florence Ion notes, "clips from the presentation have floated around online for decades," but the full keynote "has been harder to track down." From the report: [T]he complete presentation is an absolute time capsule of technology culture as it existed on Aug. 24, 1995. It also features some incredibly cringe moments, most of which stem from Jay Leno's cheesy and problematic joke-telling. My face felt flush the entire time I watched this presentation from all the nostalgia pulsating throughout it. There are all the requisite hairstyles, khaki pants, and overly-used Bill Clinton jokes that make this a quintessential event of the '90s. In a slideshow, Gizmodo highlights the "best and worst parts" of the event, adding that if you do watch the entire presentation, "you will have The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' stuck in your head for the rest of the day."

The United States set a major renewable energy milestone last Tuesday: wind power was the second-highest source of electricity for the first time since the Energy Information Administration began gathering the data. From a report: As E&E reporter Ben Storrow noted and the EIA confirmed, wind turbines last Tuesday generated over 2,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, edging out electricity generated by nuclear and coal (but still trailing behind natural gas). Last year, wind was the fourth-largest electricity source behind natural gas, coal, and nuclear, generating close to 380 terawatt-hours for the entire year, according to the EIA. For context, a terawatt is a thousand times bigger than a gigawatt.

Major milestone aside, wind energy in the US is still lagging behind one European country that recently broke a record of its own: Germany. Although the US has more wind capacity by sheer numbers -- it's a larger country with a larger population -- Germany is outpacing the US in terms of how much electricity it gets from wind. In February alone, windmills in Germany generated a record 20.6 terawatt-hours of wind energy, Rystad Energy reported Tuesday, which made up 45% of its total energy in February. In 2020 -- the most recent year the EIA has robust statistics for -- Germany got 24% of its electricity from wind, compared to 8% in the US.