Elon Musk is keeping to his promise of opening the Boring Company's proof-of-concept tunnel to the public on December 10th. The two-mile-long Los Angeles tunnel takes 30 seconds to get through via a sped-up video. The Verge reports: Construction on the tunnel began over a year ago, and extends from SpaceX's Hawthorne, California headquarters, to an LA suburb. Since then, the Boring Company has been selected to build tunnels for Chicago and Washington DC, and has sketched out plans to build a larger network of tunnels under LA, with the aim of reducing congestion. The tunnels will theoretically use autonomous, electric skates to move anywhere from 8 to 16 people along the system's rails at speeds anywhere from 124 mph to 155mph.

The world's largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday, boasting one million processor cores and the ability to perform 200 trillion actions per second. HotHardware reports: SpiNNaker has been twenty years and nearly $19.5 million in the making. The project was originally supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), but has been most recently funded by the European Human Brain Project. The supercomputer was designed and built by the University of Manchester's School of Computer Science. Construction began in 2006 and the supercomputer was finally turned on yesterday.

SpiNNaker is not the first supercomputer to incorporate one million processor cores, but it is still incredibly unique since it is designed to mimic the human brain. Most computers send information from one point to another through a standard network. SpiNNaker sends small bits of information to thousands of points, similar to how the neurons pass chemicals and electrical signals through the brain. SpiNNaker uses electronic circuits to imitate neurons. SpiNNaker has so far been used to mimic the processing of more isolated brain networks like the cortex. It has also been used to control SpOmnibot, a robot that processes visual information and navigates towards its targets.

A reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Mario Segale, the Seattle real estate and construction business owner who inspired the name for Nintendo's famous mascot, passed away on October 27 according to reports from The Seattle Times and The Auburn Reporter. He was 84 years old. Segale owned the business park housing Nintendo's American arcade operation in the early '80s, when the company was busy converting thousands of disused Radarscope cabinets to play Donkey Kong. At the time, Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa and other executives were trying to come up with an Americanized name for the game's player avatar, who was still referred to as "Jumpman" at that point (a name that appears on early Donkey Kong cabinet art). As the story goes, when Segale came to Arakawa to demand payment for a late rent bill, inspiration struck.

While the broad strokes of Segale's role in Mario's naming remain consistent, the particulars can change with the retelling. David Sheff's seminal Nintendo history Game Over suggests the executives exclaimed "Super Mario!" after Segale's visit in 1981 (though the book misspells his name "Segali"). As Benj Edwards notes in an in-depth 2010 exploration of the tale, though, the "Super" descriptor for the character wouldn't become common until the release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985. Other retellings over the years go so far as to suggest that the "Super" came from Segale's role as "superintendent" of the building, but these stories offer little in the way of direct evidence. Ars mentions a 1993 Seattle Times article that quotes Segale as joking, "You might say I'm still waiting for my royalty checks."

Applehu Akbar shares a report from Hawaii News Now: After years of legal wrangling and protests, the Thirty Meter Telescope got a green light Tuesday from the state Supreme Court. In a 4-to-1 decision, the state's highest court ruled in favor of the telescope's construction atop Mauna Kea, effectively ending all legal avenues for contesting the controversial project unless the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case. In a statement, TMT International Observatory Board of Governors Chairman Henry Yang said the body is "grateful" for the ruling and "committed to being good stewards on the mountain." Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar adds: "Green anti-science organizations, such as Deep Green Resistance and Sierra Club, have been trying to stop TMT construction for years, in an expanded version of an earlier campaign to halt the construction of large research telescopes in southeastern Arizona. As in Arizona, their excuse was at first endangered species on the construction site, and subsequently native rights.

"TMT is an advanced world-class telescope designed to investigate and answer some of the most fundamental questions regarding our universe, including the formation of stars and galaxies after the Big Bang and how the universe evolved to its present form. Native Hawaiians will also be included in other direct benefits from the TMT," the court wrote. "Thus, use of the land by TMT is consistent with conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the state."

A new study from Oxford University revealed that almost 90 percent of free apps on the Google Play store share data with Alphabet. "The researchers, who analyzed 959,000 apps from the U.S. and UK Google Play stores, said data harvesting and sharing by mobile apps was now 'out of control,'" reports TechSpot. "'We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage,' reads the report." From the report: It's revealed that most of the apps, 88.4 percent, could share data with companies owned by Google parent Alphabet. Next came a firm that's no stranger to data sharing controversies, Facebook (42.5 percent), followed by Twitter (33.8 percent), Verizon (26.27 percent), Microsoft (22.75 percent), and Amazon (17.91 percent). [I]nformation shared by these third-party apps can include age, gender, location, and information about a user's other installed apps. The data "enables construction of detailed profiles about individuals, which could include inferences about shopping habits, socio-economic class or likely political opinions."

Big firms then use the data for a variety of purposes, such as credit scoring and for targeting political messages, but its main use is often ad targeting. Not surprising, given that revenue from online advertising is now over $59 billion per year. According to the research, the average app transfers data to five tracker companies, which pass the data on to larger firms. The biggest culprits are news apps and those aimed at children, both of which tend to have the most third-party trackers associated with them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated China's latest mega-infrastructure project on Tuesday: The world's longest sea crossing. From a report: The 34.2-mile bridge and tunnel that have been almost a decade in the making for the first time connect the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau to the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai by road. The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge spans the mouth of the Pearl River and significantly cuts the commuting time between the three cities. The previously four-hour drive between Zhuhai and Hong Kong will now take 45 minutes. One section of the crossing dives underwater into a 4.2 mile tunnel that creates a channel above for large cargo ship containers to pass through. The project came in over budget -- with Hong Kong alone investing $15 billion in it -- and delayed, as it was originally slate to open in 2016.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Although the century-old technology has disappeared from most people's daily view, magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data in case, say, a software bug deletes thousands of Gmail messages, or a natural disaster wipes out some hard drives. The world's electronic financial, health, and scientific records, collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created. Usually the companies keep one copy of each tape on-site, in a massive vault, and send a second copy to somebody like Iron Mountain. Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two -- Sony and Fujifilm -- and each seems to think that's still one too many.

The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned, but each has spent millions of dollars arguing before the U.S. International Trade Commission to try to ban the other from importing tapes to America. [...] The tech industry worries that if Sony or Fujifilm knocks the other out of the U.S., the winner will hike prices, meaning higher costs for the big cloud providers; for old-line storage makers, including IBM, HPE, and Quantum; and, ultimately, for all those companies' customers. [...] Although Sony and Fujifilm have each assured the trade commission that they could fill the gap if their rival's products were shut out of the U.S., the need for storage continues to grow well beyond old conceptions. Construction is slated to begin as soon as next year on the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope with thousands of antennas in South Africa and Australia meant to detect signals emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It's been estimated the project could generate an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of raw data every day, the equivalent of 300 times the material in the U.S. Library of Congress and a huge storage headache all by itself.

MIT chemical engineers have reportedly designed a material that can react with carbon dioxide from the air, "to grow, strengthen, and even repair itself." According to MIT News, "The polymer, which might someday be used as construction or repair material or for protective coatings, continuously converts the greenhouse gas into a carbon-based material that reinforces itself." From the report: The current version of the new material is a synthetic gel-like substance that performs a chemical process similar to the way plants incorporate carbon dioxide from the air into their growing tissues. The material might, for example, be made into panels of a lightweight matrix that could be shipped to a construction site, where they would harden and solidify just from exposure to air and sunlight, thereby saving on the energy and cost of transportation. The material the team used in these initial proof-of-concept experiments did make use of one biological component -- chloroplasts, the light-harnessing components within plant cells, which the researchers obtained from spinach leaves. The chloroplasts are not alive but catalyze the reaction of carbon dioxide to glucose. Isolated chloroplasts are quite unstable, meaning that they tend to stop functioning after a few hours when removed from the plant. In their paper, [the researchers] demonstrate methods to significantly increase the catalytic lifetime of extracted chloroplasts. In ongoing and future work, the chloroplast is being replaced by catalysts that are nonbiological in origin.

The material the researchers used, a gel matrix composed of a polymer made from aminopropyl methacrylamide (APMA) and glucose, an enzyme called glucose oxidase, and the chloroplasts, becomes stronger as it incorporates the carbon. It is not yet strong enough to be used as a building material, though it might function as a crack filling or coating material, the researchers say. The team has worked out methods to produce materials of this type by the ton, and is now focusing on optimizing the material's properties. Commercial applications such as self-healing coatings and crack filling are realizable in the near term, they say, whereas additional advances in backbone chemistry and materials science are needed before construction materials and composites can be developed.

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: One of the key assumptions of Relativity — both Special and General — is that the speed of light is a constant in all non-accelerating reference frames. As a key assumption, it is also one of the things that gets the kooks, wingnuts and fanatics all riled up, because they have proven that it's wrong, though those pesky scientists refuse to listen to their spittle-flecked presentations.

Back in the real world, real scientists also wonder if the assumption is justified, then try to work out how to test it. One idea for performing this test has just been published — that of using the gravitational lensing of distant supernovae to try to interrogate the speed of light in the distant past.

When a (relatively) nearby galaxy lenses a (relatively) distant galaxy, it is common for multiple images to be formed. If a supernova occurs in the distant galaxy, then supernova images will be seen in the different images, but typically at different times (on Earth) because the light paths from different images are of different lengths, and were of different lengths in the past.

The Chinese-Polish team of authors have studied the possibilities of making such observations and suggest that the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, "a wide-field survey reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror, currently under construction, that will photograph the entire available sky every few nights") should detect several thousand gravitationally-lensed distant quasars, and so yield around 50 gravitationally-lensed distant supernovas per year. This is estimated to "produce robust constraints on the speed of light at the level of delta-c/c;= 0.005" (half a percent) in a decade of operations.

Which will shut the wingnuts, lunatics and kooks up. Not.At.All.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Building walls on the seafloor could prevent glaciers from melting and sea levels rising due to global warming, scientists say. Barriers of sand and rock positioned at the base of glaciers would stop ice sheets sliding and collapsing, and prevent warm water from eroding the ice from beneath, according to research published this week in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union. The audacious idea centers on the construction of "extremely simple structures, merely piles of aggregate on the ocean floor, although more advanced structures could certainly be explored in the future," said the report's authors, Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University, and John Moore, professor of climate change at the University of Lapland in Finland.

Using computer models to gauge the probable impact of walls on erosion of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, one of the world's largest, Wolovick and Moore hoped to test the efficiency of "a locally targeted intervention." They claimed the simplest designs would allow direct comparison with existing engineering projects. "The easiest design that we considered would be comparable to the largest civil engineering projects that humanity has ever attempted," they said. "An ice sheet intervention today would be at the edge of human capabilities." For example, building four isolated walls would require between 0.1 and 1.5 cubic km of material. "That is comparable to the 0.1 km3 that was used to create Palm Jumeirah in Dubai ($12 billion)...(and) the 0.3 km3 that was used to create Hong Kong International Airport ($20 billion)," the report said. The authors say there's only a 30% probability of success due to the harsh environment, but did mention that the scientific community could work on a plan that was both achievable and had a high probability of success.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sheera Frankel and Mike Isaac [write from The New York Times]: "Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebook's campus, an approximately 25-foot by 35-foot conference room is under construction. Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major cable networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes what's being built: "War Room."

Set to open next week, the conference room is in keeping with Facebook's nick-of-time approach to midterm election preparedness. (It introduced a "pilot program" for candidate account security on Monday.) It's a big project. Samidh Chakrabarti, who oversees elections and civic engagement, told the Times: "We see this as probably the biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones." Of course, the effort extends beyond the new conference room. Chakrabarti showed the Times a new internal tool "that helps track information flowing across the social network in real time," helping to identify misinformation as it goes viral or a surge in the creation of new (and likely fake) accounts.

Drone operating system startup Airware, which has appeared in a number of stories over the years, announced today that it will be shutting down immediately despite having raised $118 million from investors. " The startup ran out of money after trying to manufacture its own hardware that couldn't compete with drone giants like China's DJI," reports TechCrunch. "The company at one point had as many as 140 employees, all of which are now out of a job." From the report: Founded in 2011 by Jonathan Downey, the son of two pilots, Airware first built an autopilot system for programming drones to follow certain routes to collect data. It could help businesses check rooftops for damage, see how much of a raw material was coming out of a mine, or build constantly-updated maps of construction sites. Later it tried to build its own drones before pivoting to consult clients on how to most efficiently apply unmanned aerial vehicles. While flying high, Airware launched its own Commercial Drone Fund for investing in the market in 2015, and acquired 38-person drone analytics startup Redbird in 2016. In this pre-crypto, pre-AI boom, Airware scored a ton of hype from us and others as they tried to prove drones could be more than war machines. But over time, the software that shipped with commercial drone hardware from other manufacturers was good enough to make Airware irrelevant, and a downward spiral of layoffs began over the past two years, culminating in today's shutdown. Demonstrating how sudden the shut down is, Airware opened a Tokyo headquarters alongside an investment and partnership from Mitsubishi just four days ago. As for the employees, they "will get one week's severance, COBRA insurance until November, and payouts for unused paid time off," reports TechCrunch.

Recycled plastic is already used to make some products, such as guttering and sewage pipes. Now attention is turning to roads. From a report: On September 11th in Zwolle, a town in the Netherlands, a 30-metre bicycle track made from 70% recycled plastic and the rest from polypropylene was opened [Warning: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. It will be used to test a product called PlasticRoad, which is being developed by two Dutch firms -- KWS, a road builder, and Wavin, a firm that makes plastic piping -- in partnership with Total, a French oil-and-gas firm. PlasticRoad is prefabricated in a factory as modular sections. The sections are then transported to the site and laid end to end on a suitable foundation, such as sand. Because these sections are hollow, internal channels can be incorporated into them for drainage, along with conduits for services such as gas and electricity. For the Zwolle project, sections that were 2.4 metres long and 3 metres wide were used. These were fitted with sensors to measure things such as temperature, flexing and the flow of water through the drainage channels. A second pilot cycleway is being built in the nearby town of Giethoorn.

If all goes well, the inventors hope to develop the idea and make the sections entirely from recycled plastic. Paths, car parks and railway platforms could follow. Eventually, sections for use as actual roads are planned. These could contain sensors for traffic monitoring. In time, the circuits in the plastic roads might extend to assisting autonomous vehicles and recharging electric cars wirelessly. Prefabricated plastic roads should last two-to-three times longer than conventional roads and cost less, the companies claim, mainly because construction times would be reduced by almost two-thirds. Anti-slip surfaces could be incorporated, too, including crushed stones which are traditionally used to dress road surfaces. The sections, when replaced, can also be recycled. But engineers will be watching to see how the track stands up to wear and tear and if the hollow structure causes resonance, which would make such a road unduly noisy.

Mark Lowenstein, writing for Techpinions: As we head toward Apple's annual device announcement-palooza, it's an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs' vaunted, much quoted 'Post-PC Era.' The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn't look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future. [...] Tablets have had a good run, but sales have tailed off of late. I'd say they've had greater influence on the evolution of the smartphone and the PC, rather than leading to a significantly different nomenclature for what most of us carry around today. My Techpinions colleague Ben Bajarin says that Creative Strategies surveys indicate that only about 10% of tablet users have 'replaced their PC' -- a number that has held steady for several years. And that 10% is concentrated in a handful of industries, such as real estate and construction. PC sales aren't exactly surging, but they're steady. Your average white collar professional today still carries around a smartphone and a laptop, with the tablet being an ancillary device, used primarily for media/content consumption.

Tablets have had a significant influence on the design of smartphones and PCs. They ushered in an era of smartphone screen upsizing, led primarily by Samsung, and now reinforced by the iPhone X and the expected announcement next week of a 6.5 inch iPhone model. For those who don't want to swing both a smartphone and tablet, we have 'Phablets,' most personified in the successful Galaxy Note series, and alternative-to-keyboard input devices such as the S Pen and the Apple Pencil. We've also seen the development of some hybrid tablet/PC devices, the most innovative and successful of which is Microsoft's Surface line. But that product is competing more in the tablet category than in the PC category, with the exception of a few market segments.

NASA is challenging people in the United States to come up with an efficient method to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. The atmosphere of Mars consists predominantly of CO2 (95%), and glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said. Space.com reports: The new competition consists of two phases. During Phase 1, applicants submit a detailed description of their CO2-to-glucose conversion system. Interested parties must register by Jan. 24, 2019 and submit their proposals by Feb. 28, 2019. In April, NASA will announce the selection of up to five finalists from this initial crop, each of whom will receive $50,000. Phase 2 will involve the construction and demonstration of a conversion system. Winning this round is worth $750,000, bringing the competition's total purse to $1 million (assuming five finalists are indeed selected from Phase 1). You don't have to win, or even participate in, Phase 1 to compete in Phase 2. The challenge is open to citizens and permanent residents of the United States; foreign nationals can compete if they're part of a U.S.-based team. To register or learn more, go to the CO2 Conversion Challenge website.

Facebook says it is aiming to buy renewable energy to cover 100 percent of its electricity use by the end of 2020, joining companies such as Citigroup and Ikea in setting that deadline for achieving its goal. From a report: By 2020, Facebook plans to power its global operations with 100% renewable energy, and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 75%. It's the next step in ramping up the company's work to move to renewables over the last several years. "There's the expectation that we have as a company that we think this is good for communities and this is good for the world as a whole, but it's also good business sense," says Bobby Hollis, the company's head of global energy. "We really integrate this into our entire business planning process to make sure that we go into places where renewables make sense." In 2017, the company's carbon footprint was 979,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent -- roughly as much as the emissions from more than 100,000 homes, according to an EPA calculator. The company's data centers, which were supporting the data of 2.1 billion people a month by the end of 2017, account for nearly two-thirds of that footprint (other business activities, including construction and employee commutes and travel, account for 38%).

Big U.S. technology companies are involved in the construction of one of the most intrusive citizen surveillance programs in history, HuffingtonPost notes in a new report. From the story: For the past nine years, India has been building the world's biggest biometric database by collecting the fingerprints, iris scans and photos of nearly 1.3 billion people. For U.S. tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the project, called Aadhaar (which means "proof" or "basis" in Hindi), could be a gold mine. The CEO of Microsoft has repeatedly praised the project, and local media have carried frequent reports on consultations between the Indian government and senior executives from companies like Apple and Google (in addition to South Korean-based Samsung) on how to make tech products Aadhaar-enabled. But when reporters of HuffPost and HuffPost India asked these companies in the past weeks to confirm they were integrating Aadhaar into their products, only one company -- Google -- gave a definitive response.

That's because Aadhaar has become deeply controversial, and the subject of a major Supreme Court of India case that will decide the future of the program as early as this month. Launched nine years ago as a simple and revolutionary way to streamline access to welfare programs for India's poor, the database has become Indians' gateway to nearly any type of service -- from food stamps to a passport or a cell phone connection. Practical errors in the system have caused millions of poor Indians to lose out on aid. And the exponential growth of the project has sparked concerns among security researchers and academics that India is the first step toward setting up a surveillance society to rival China.

The $1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile is officially under construction with a scheduled date of operation in 2024. The telescope "will have an array of seven enormous mirrors totaling 80 feet in diameter, giving it 10 times the precision of the Hubble telescope," reports Quartz. "Among its advances is technology to help it correct for the distorting effect of Earth's atmosphere by using software to make hundreds of adjustments per second to its array of secondary mirrors." From the report: The project's architects, a consortium of universities and institutions in the U.S., Korea, and Australia, chose to build in Chile's Atacama desert for its clear, dry skies. Astronomers will use the Magellan Telescope to study the origins of elements and the birth of stars and galaxies, and to examine planets that have been identified as potentially harboring life. Mother Nature Network has an article highlighting nine of the largest new telescopes expected to begin operation in the next decade.

Elon Musk's Boring Company wants to build a transit tunnel connecting Dodger Stadium to a Los Angeles subway station. An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire: The Boring Company laid out the plan for the Dugout Loop on its website, saying that the linkup could take baseball fans and concertgoers to the stadium in less than four minutes for a roughly $1 fare. This ride would be nothing like your typical subway trip: Loopers could book their tickets in advance, through an app-based reservation system that's similar to what's used to purchase theater tickets, or buy them over the phone or in person for a given time (say, 5:45 p.m. heading for the stadium).

At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time. Loopers would board electric-powered pods (also known as "skates") that are based on the Tesla Model X auto design and are capable of carrying 8 to 16 passengers at a time. The skates would be lowered into the tunnel system, and sent autonomously at speeds of 125 to 150 mph from one terminal to the other. The Boring Company says it'll cover the cost of digging the roughly 3.6-mile tunnel with no public funding sought.
The Boring Company's site says this project will preempt construction of their proof-of-concept tunnel under Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard.

"The Boring Company has made technical progress much faster than expected and has decided to make its first tunnel in Los Angeles an operational one, hence Dugout Loop!"

The location for Amazon's second headquarters is shrouded in secrecy, so much so that many city leaders are unaware of the financial incentives their cities used to entice Amazon (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The New York Times reports: Across the country, the search for HQ2, as the project has been nicknamed, is shrouded in secrecy. Even civic leaders can't find out what sort of tax credits and other inducements have been promised to Amazon. And there is a growing legal push to find out, because taxpayers could get saddled with a huge bill and have little chance to stop it. A primary reason for the information blackout is that, in many cases, the bids were handled by local private Chamber of Commerce affiliates or economic development groups that aren't required to make their negotiations public. Many of the groups are also not covered by Freedom of Information Act or state open-records requests.

But another reason is gamesmanship. Some cities say they want their Amazon proposals to remain confidential to avoid showing their hand to rivals. And Amazon required the finalists to sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid the local groups to release proprietary information about the company. With so much secrecy -- and bids like Austin's that involve unelected officials making promises -- there is the risk that taxpayers and their civic leaders will be forced to accept the proposed terms or live with turning down an enormously lucrative opportunity. Amazon, which is expected to make $235 billion in revenue this year, promises to bring the winning location up to 50,000 high-paying jobs and a $5 billion investment in construction.