An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times, written by Wudan Yan: Kristin Aquilino, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, knows that expectations are just disappointments in disguise. Over the last decade, she has led the school's white abalone captive breeding program, which aims to bring the marine mollusk back from the brink of extinction. Last June, she and her colleagues drove snails kept in captivity at Davis down the California coast to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Los Angeles. Others were dropped off at labs and aquariums around Southern California; all told, this was the largest spawning attempt of white abalone to date. But when she tried to get them in the mood with what she calls a love potion -- a mix of seawater with hydrogen peroxide -- the snails languished in their tanks occasionally emitting bubbles, but no eggs or sperm. After four hours, Dr. Aquilino called it off. (Simultaneous attempts at the other sites also failed.) "It sucks," she said. "There's a lot of human effort involved, but there's no way they'll spawn today."

After fishermen depleted 99 percent of white abalone from the wild in the 1970s, the sea snails are hanging on by a slimy thread. Despite the urgency of breeding these and other endangered aquatic snails to reintroduce to the wild, propagating more of them in a lab is still a guessing game, Dr. Aquilino says. Now, a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science offers an improved tool for determining which abalone will be reproductive. The technique, using noninvasive ultrasound, a decades-old medical technology, could raise the prospects of successful captive breeding efforts and ultimately help restore endangered abalone in the wild. [...] For Dr. Aquilino, the method offers a glimmer of hope. "When I first saw the ultrasound images of my kids, I saw the future of my family," she said. "When I see the ultrasound images of these abalone, I see the future of an entire species." [...]

Sara Boles, a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr. Gross, discovered a way to perform ultrasounds on the abalone without taking them out of their tanks by holding the device up to their sticky feet. This quickly produced clear images of their swollen or flaccid gonads on a laptop appended to the ultrasound probe. In the new study, Dr. Boles and her colleagues examined over 200 abalone and scored the thickness of their gonads on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine which are likely to spawn. With the ultrasound images, the gonad comes into focus: The stomach appears as a dark, cone-shaped item, and the slightly lighter gonad surrounds it. For now, these images can provide an easy way to score animals, but Dr. Gross and his colleagues want to verify if gonad thickness also correlates with reproductive success. Already, Dr. Boles has used the ultrasound to help Dr. Aquilino in her white abalone breeding efforts. Last spring, after Dr. Aquilino had already visually scored the animals, Dr. Boles brought the ultrasound to her lab. Of the eight white abalone that Dr. Boles rated highest after the ultrasound exam, five spawned; some snails with slightly lower ratings did, too. The method is already helping researchers revise their methods of assessing which abalone are most ready to reproduce.

Intel launched the first wave of its 12th Gen Alder Lake chips at CES 2022 -- but only for its H-series lineup of chips, destined for the most powerful and power-hungry laptops. And now, it's rolling out the rest of its Alder Lake laptop lineup: the P-series and U-series models it briefly showed off in January, which are set to power the thinner, lighter, and cheaper laptops of 2022. From a report: In total, there are a whopping 20 chips fit for a wide range of hardware across the P-series, U-series (15W), and U-series (9W) categories, with the first laptops powered by the new processors set to arrive in March. Like their more powerful H-series cousins (and the Alder Lake desktop chips that Intel launched in late 2021 and at CES 2022), the new P-series and U-series chips have a lot more cores than 2020's 11th Gen models, with a hybrid architecture approach that combines performance and efficiency cores to maximize both power and battery life. And Intel is promising some big improvements focused around those boosted core counts, touting up to 70 percent better multi-thread performance than previous 11th Gen (and AMD) hardware. The company also says that it wins out in benchmarks against chips like Apple's M1 and M1 Pro (although not the M1 Max), and AMD's Ryzen R7 5800U in tasks like web browsing and photo editing.

Mercedes-Benz has unveiled a concept electric vehicle it claims would be able to run for more than 620 miles before needing to recharge. Engadget reports: Should it come to fruition and live up to that promise, the Vision EQXX would beat the range of the Lucid Air Dream Edition by more than 100 miles and the Tesla Model S Long Range Plus by around 220 miles. Based on the automaker's simulations, the Vision EQXX would use less than 10 kWh to travel 62 miles on public roads, delivering an efficiency of more than 6 miles per kWh. Converted into fossil fuel consumption, Mercedes says that's around the "golden figure" of 1 liter of gasoline per 62 miles.

The battery is half the size of and 30 percent lighter than the one in the EQS. However, it still has a capacity of almost 100 kWh. What's more, there are ultra-thin solar panels on the roof that can add up to 25 km (15.5 miles) of range. The Vision EQXX is a lightweight car (1,750 kg or 3,858 lbs) that has been aerodynamically optimized. The automaker says that, with a drag coefficient of cd 0.17, the EV is more aerodynamic than a football (which has a cd of 0.18 to 0.2). What's more, Mercedes claims that 95 percent of battery energy is directed to the wheels.

Teams from Mercedes' research and development centers worked with its Formula 1 and Formula E engineers on the concept. They harnessed digital tools to reduce waste and weight by cutting out excess material -- the wheels are made with magnesium and the brake discs are built with aluminum alloy. The Vision EQXX uses recycled and plant-based materials too. As for the interior, the Vision EQXX's infotainment system has a single 47.5-inch, mini-LED 8K screen. Like the Hyperscreen in the EQS, it spans almost the entire width of the cabin, though this is a one-piece display. The automaker worked with NAVIS Automotive Systems on a navigation system with zoom and scroll functions that include a satellite view. The "Hey Mercedes" voice assistant is integrated into the infotainment system too.

New York-based firm Pliant Energy Systems is building a marine system reminiscent of the cuttlefish with its rippling underwater motion, a report from The Economist reveals. The company's biomimetic machine, called Velox, is based on the principle that propellers are nowhere near as efficient as the fins of sea creatures that are prevalent in nature. Interesting Engineering reports: Unlike propellers, fins and flippers can extend around a sea creature, meaning more propulsion without the need for a large protruding propeller that could get caught or damaged by hitting the seabed. Fins are also flexible, meaning that if they do come in contact with any other object in the sea, they are less likely to get damaged. In an interview with The Economist, an ex-marine biologist and founder of Pliant Energy Systems, Benjamin Pietro Filardo, explained how he is designing submersible machines that are propelled using flexible fin-like materials. He said Velox will produce approximately three times as much thrust per unit energy as the average propeller of a small boat. The system can travel underwater and even come out onto land, using its fins almost like robotic legs. The video below shows Velox skating on ice and swimming in a pool.

Filardo showed his new design to America's Office of Naval Research, leading them to commission a new iteration, called C-Ray, that will be faster and lighter than Velox. C-Ray also won't be tethered, unlike Velox, which is currently controlled via a cable. Autonomous swarms of the machine could eventually be used for missions such as undersea patrols, mine removal, and deepsea exploration and monitoring. [...] Filardo said the system has great potential for scalability, giving the blue whale as an example of a massive sea mammal that uses fins for propulsion. Impressively, he also revealed that he is also working on a concept that would allow his system to moor itself, and then use the undulations of its fins, thanks to the sea current, to recharge. A lot of testing is still needed, but if Filardo's system delivers on its promise, we might eventually see giant mechanical sea beasts silently gliding through the oceans.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The complexities of the real world are starting to bleed into the Metaverse -- the virtual arena where identity functions as both a reflection on and determinant of social capital. Differences in prices for digital avatars based on race, gender and skin color are emerging among a popular collection of NFTs known as CryptoPunks, belying the utopian and egalitarian ideals touted by the closely connected world of crypto, decentralized finance, blockchain and non-fungible tokens. According to both participants in and observers of the space, these price discrepancies are partly explained by the lack of diversity among the investors who favor these status assets. It's a demographic that skews mostly male and White. Female CryptoPunks, and those with darker skin colorings, tend to sell for less than avatars with male traits or fair skin. CryptoPunk investors say the price disparity is not a function of individual prejudice or racism, but of the fact that the people currently willing and able to pay top dollar for digital goods aren't bidding on avatars that don't look like them. "If you look at the blockchain space, it largely tends to be white, it largely tends to be male," said Tony Herrera, an immigrant activist in California who owns 60 CryptoPunks. "One Punk could be dark and one could be light, and the lighter one is going to be the more desirable."

Zebra stripes are unique to each individual zebra, reports LiveScience, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. And even if you look at the three different zebra species, their skin is always the same color: black (according to Tim Caro, a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of California, Davis).

But this still doesn't answer the question of whether their fur is black with white stripes or white with black stripes. For that, we have to look to the zebra's melanocytes, or the cells that produce pigment for their fur. Although zebras have black skin, different developmental processes determine their fur color, just like a light-skinned person can have dark hair, Caro said. In fact, zebras actually have more light-colored hair than dark — their bellies are usually light — so it may seem that zebras are white with black stripes.

But that's not the case. Here's why: Every piece of hair — both light and dark — grows from a follicle filled with melanocyte cells, according to a 2005 review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. These cells produce a pigment that determines the color of hair and skin. This pigment is known as melanin; a lot of melanin leads to darker colors, like dark brown or black, while less melanin leads to lighter colors, such as hazel or blond, Live Science previously reported. Zebras' black fur is chock-full of melanin, but melanin is absent from white fur, in essence, because the follicles that make up the stripes of white hair have "turned off" melanocytes, meaning they don't churn out pigment.

The production of melanin from melanocytes is "prevented during the development of a white hair, but not of a black hair," Caro told Live Science in an email. In other words, for zebras, the animals' default state is to produce black hair, making them black with white stripes, according to Brittanica.... This unique pattern may keep away biting flies, according to research by Caro and his colleagues. In a study published in 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they found that African horseflies landed less frequently on horses wearing striped or checked rugs than they did on horses wearing solid-colored rugs. These biting flies can carry diseases that are fatal to zebras.

The attorneys worry that if law firms, traditionally the defenders of workers' rights, are turning to the programs, why wouldn't every other business? From a report: Camille Anidi, an attorney on Long Island, quickly understood the flaws of the facial recognition software her employers demanded she use when working from home. The system often failed to recognize her face or mistook the Bantu knots in her hair as unauthorized recording devices, forcing her to log back in sometimes more than 25 times a day. When she complained, she said, her bosses brushed it off as a minor technical issue, though some of her lighter-skinned colleagues told her they didn't have the same problem -- a common failing for some facial recognition systems, which have been shown to perform worse for people of color. So after each logout, Anidi gritted her teeth and did what she had to do: Re-scan her face from three angles so she could get back to a job where she was often expected to review 70 documents an hour.

"I want to be able to do the work and would love the money, but it's just that strain: I can't look left for too long, I can't look down, my dog can't walk by, or I get logged out," she said. "Then the company is looking at me like I'm the one delaying!" Facial recognition systems have become an increasingly common element of the rapid rise in work-from-home surveillance during the coronavirus pandemic. Employers argue that they offer a simple and secure way to monitor a scattered workforce. But for Anidi and other lawyers, they serve as a dehumanizing reminder that every second of their workday is rigorously probed and analyzed: After verifying their identity, the software judges their level of attention or distraction and kicks them out of their work networks if the system thinks they're not focused enough.

Contract attorneys such as Anidi have become some of America's first test subjects for this enhanced monitoring, and many are reporting frustrating results, saying the glitchy systems make them feel like a disposable cog with little workday privacy. But the software has also become a flash point for broader questions about how companies treat their remote workforces, especially those, like contract attorneys, whose short-term gigs limit their ability to push for change. The attorneys also worry that it could become the new norm as more jobs are automated and analyzed: If the same kinds of law firms that have litigated worker protections and labor standards are doing it, why wouldn't everyone else?

Beanless brews can cut deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions dramatically -- but what will happen to workers in traditional coffee-growing regions? From a report: Heiko Rischer isn't quite sure how to describe the taste of lab-grown coffee. This summer he sampled one of the first batches in the world produced from cell cultures rather than coffee beans. "To describe it is difficult but, for me, it was in between a coffee and a black tea," said Rischer, head of plant biotechnology at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which developed the coffee. "It depends really on the roasting grade, and this was a bit of a lighter roast, so it had a little bit more of a tea-like sensation." Rischer couldn't swallow the coffee, as this cellular agriculture innovation is not yet approved for public consumption. Instead, he swirled the liquid around in his mouth and spit it out. He predicts that VTT's lab-grown coffee could get regulatory approval in Europe and the US in about four years' time, paving the way for a commercialized product that could have a much lower climate impact than conventional coffee.

The coffee industry is both a contributor to the climate crisis and very vulnerable to its effects. Rising demand for coffee has been linked to deforestation in developing nations, damaging biodiversity and releasing carbon emissions. At the same time, coffee producers are struggling with the impacts of more extreme weather, from frosts to droughts. It's estimated that half of the land used to grow coffee could be unproductive by 2050 due to the climate crisis. In response to the industry's challenges, companies and scientists are trying to develop and commercialize coffee made without coffee beans. VTT's coffee is grown by floating cell cultures in bioreactors filled with a nutrient. The process requires no pesticides and has a much lower water footprint, said Rischer, and because the coffee can be produced in local markets, it cuts transport emissions. The company is working on a life cycle analysis of the process. "Once we have those figures, we will be able to show that the environmental impact will be much lower than what we have with conventional cultivation," Rischer said.

AMD said Windows 11 can cut game performance on Ryzen CPUs by 10 to 15 percent, and the operating system may not utilize AMD's "preferred core" technology, but a fix is in the works. PCWorld reports: A support note on AMD's web site published this week said Windows 11 may increase L3 cache latency a whopping threefold, which can cause slowdowns in latency sensitive applications. Lighter duty, cache-sensitive games might see a 3 percent to 5 percent hit, and lighter-duty games as e-sports titles could see frame rates drop from 10 to 15 percent. AMD also said its "preferred core" feature, which tells the operating system which core in each CPU can hit the highest clock, also doesn't work right in Windows 11. Each CPU is tested to see which core will run the fastest at the factory and is marked so the OS will dispatch tasks to that "preferred core." Since Windows 11 doesn't seem to work with it right now, any performance bump from using the best core wouldn't happen. The company said the performance cost would be most noticeable in CPUs with more than 8 cores and with TDP ratings above 65 watts.

Oracle's Java magazine takes a look at some current JDK Enhancement Proposals, "the vehicle of long standing for updating the Java language and the JVM." Today, concurrency in Java is delivered via nonlightweight threads, which are, for all intents, wrappers around operating-system threads... Project Loom aims to deliver a lighter version of threads, called virtual threads. In the planned implementation, a virtual thread is programmed just as a thread normally would be, but you specify at thread creation that it's virtual. A virtual thread is multiplexed with other virtual threads by the JVM onto operating system threads. This is similar in concept to Java's green threads in its early releases and to fibers in other languages... Because the JVM has knowledge of what your task is doing, it can optimize the scheduling. It will move your virtual thread (that is, the task) off the OS thread when it's idle or waiting and intelligently move some other virtual thread onto the OS thread. When implemented correctly, this allows many lightweight threads to share a single OS thread. The benefit is that the JVM, rather than the OS, schedules your task. This difference enables application-aware magic to occur behind the curtains...

Project Valhalla aims to improve performance as it relates to access to data items... by introducing value types, which are a new form of data type that is programmed like objects but accessed like primitives. Specifically, value types are data aggregates that contain only data (no state) and are not mutable. By this means, [value types] can be stored as a single array with only a single header field for the entire array and direct access to the individual fields...

Project Panama simplifies the process of connecting Java programs to non-Java components. In particular, Panama aims to enable straightforward communication between Java applications and C-based libraries...

Several Amber subprojects are still in progress.

Sealed classes, which have been previewed in the last few Java releases and are scheduled to be finalized in Java 17. Sealed classes (and interfaces) can limit which other classes or interfaces can extend or implement them...

Pattern matching in switches is a feature that will be previewed in Java 17...
The article concludes that Java's past and current projects "testify to how much Java has evolved and how actively the language and runtime continue to evolve."

The New York Times looks at "a wave of new battery technologies that could lead to novel designs in consumer electronics and help accelerate the electrification of cars and airplanes. They may even help store electricity on the power grid, lending a hand to efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels..."

And a longer-life battery from Sila finally made it into a consumer product — the Whoop fitness tracker, which straps around your wrist, but which can also take the form of a "sliver of electronics stitched into the fabric of clothes." Sila's chief executive and co-founder, Gene Berdichevsky, was an early Tesla employee who oversaw battery technology as the company built its first electric car. Introduced in 2008, the Tesla Roadster used a battery based on lithium-ion technology, the same battery technology that powers laptops, smartphones and other consumer devices. The popularity of Tesla, coupled with the rapid growth of the consumer electronics market, sparked a new wave of battery companies.... Congress created ARPA-E, for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, to promote research and development in new energy technologies. The agency nurtured the new battery companies with funding and other support. A decade later, those efforts are beginning to bear fruit...

Sila is not exactly a battery company. It sells a new material — a silicon powder — that can significantly boost the efficiency of batteries, and plans to build them using many of the same factories and other infrastructure that produce lithium-ion batteries... Today, the company produces this silicon powder from its small facility in Alameda [near Oakland, California]. Then it sells the powder to a battery manufacturer — Sila would not identify the other company — which slots the material into its existing process, producing the new battery for the Whoop fitness tracker. "We are just upgrading the factories that are being used today," Mr. Berdichevsky said...

Companies like Sila and QuantumScape already have partnerships with carmakers and expect that their batteries will reach automobiles around the middle of the decade. They hope their technologies significantly reduce the cost of electric cars and extend their driving range... They also hope their batteries lead to new devices and vehicles. Smaller, more efficient batteries could spur the development of "smart glasses" — eyeglasses embedded with tiny computers — by allowing designers to pack a more nimble set of technologies into smaller and lighter frames. The same battery technology could invigorate so-called flying cars, a new type of electric aircraft that could ease commutes across major cities later in the decade.
The Times also notes companies like Enovix and Solid Power have been developing improved batteries "for more than a decade, and some hope to move into mass production around 2025."

And as the batteries progress, the Times got an interesting prediction from Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in battery technologies. "All aspects of life will become more electrified."

Futurism reports: Japan's space agency JAXA has announced that is has successfully demonstrated the operation of a "rotary detonation engine" in space, a world's first.

Such an engine uses a series of controlled explosions that travel around a circular channel at its base. The result is a massive amount of thrust coming from a much smaller engine using significantly less fuel — a potential game changer for deep space exploration, according to JAXA. It's a lucrative endeavor and Japan isn't the only country pursuing the idea. Researchers across the U.S. are testing out the technology to make rockets both lighter and more environmentally friendly...

"We will aim to put the technology into practical use in about five years,"Jiro Kasahara, a Nagoya University professor who is working on the technology with JAXA, told the Japan Times last month.
Ars Technica reports that detonation engines should theoretically weigh less than traditional rocket engines &mdash and that JAXA "plans to use data from this test for potential development of detonation engines for kick stages as well as first- and second-stage rocket engines."

Futurism adds that in the same flight JAXA also successfully tested a second "pulse detonation engine."

A new paper suggests Saturn's core is more like a fluid than a solid, and makes up more of the planet's interior than we thought. From a report: With its massive rings stretching out 175,000 miles in diameter, Saturn is a one-of-a-kind planet in the solar system. Turns out its insides are pretty unique as well. A new study published in Nature Astronomy on Monday suggests the sixth planet from the sun has a "fuzzy" core that jiggles around. It's quite a surprising find. "The conventional picture for Saturn or Jupiter's interior structure is that of a compact core of rocky or icy material, surrounded by a lower-density envelope of hydrogen and helium," says Christopher Mankovich, a planetary scientist at Caltech and coauthor of the new study, along with his colleague Jim Fuller.

What Mankovich and Fuller glimpsed "is essentially a blurred-out version of that conventional structure." Instead of seeing a tidy boundary dividing the heavier rocks and ice from the lighter elements, they found that the core is oscillating so that there is no single, clear separation. This diffuse core extends out to about 60% of Saturn's radius -- a huge leap from the 10 to 20% of a planet's radius that a traditional core would occupy. One of the wildest aspects of the study is that the findings did not come from measuring the core directly -- something we've never been able to do. Instead, Mankovich and Fuller turned to seismographic data on Saturn's rings first collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017.

"Saturn essentially rings like a bell at all times," says Mankovich. As the core wobbles, it creates gravitational perturbations that affect the surrounding rings, creating subtle "waves" that can be measured. When the planet's core was oscillating, Cassini was able to study Saturn's C ring (the second block of rings from the planet) and measure the small yet consistent gravitational "ringing" caused by the core. Mankovich and Fuller looked at the data and created a model for Saturn's structure that would explain these seismographic waves -- and the result is a fuzzy interior. "This study is the only direct evidence for a diffuse core structure in a fluid planet to date," says Mankovich.

Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest high-end foldable smartphones on Wednesday with lower prices than last year's offerings in a push to expand foldable demand beyond niche devices. From a report: The tech giant priced its 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold3 with 7.6-inch main screen to start at $1,799.99 in the United States, and clamshell Galaxy Z Flip3 at $999.99 - down from the launch prices of last year's models at $1,999 and $1,380, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 will launch on August 27 starting in markets such as the United States and Europe.

"There's definitely demand for bigger screens as people consume more media content, and foldables are the only form that makes big screens very portable... the price hurdle is the issue," said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities. Foldable phones, with about 8.6 million units expected to be shipped this year, are expected to account for just 0.6% of estimated 1.447 billion smartphones to be shipped. However, that is more than double the 3 million foldables shipped in 2020, and Samsung will lead the market with over 88% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Besides price drops that analysts said could help capture more demand in the United States and perhaps China, Samsung's foldable unveiled on Wednesday touted lighter, thinner and improved design, durability, and compatibility with a stylus, which could absorb users of Samsung's Galaxy Note phablets whose key feature is the "S Pen".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Twitter image-cropping algorithm prefers to show faces that are slimmer, younger and with lighter skin, a researcher has found. Bogdan Kulynyc won $3,500 in a Twitter-organized contest to find biases in its cropping algorithm. Earlier this year, Twitter's own research found the algorithm had a bias towards cropping out black faces. The "saliency algorithm" decided how images would be cropped in Twitter previews, before being clicked on to open at full size. But when two faces were in the same image, users discovered, the preview crop appeared to favor white faces, hiding the black faces until users clicked through. As a result the company revised how images were handled, saying cropping was best done by people.

The "algorithmic-bias bounty competition" was launched in July -- a reference to the widespread practice of companies offering "bug bounties" for researchers who find flaws in code -- with the aim of uncovering other harmful biases. And Mr Kulynyc, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne's Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory, discovered the "saliency" of a face in an image could be increased -- making it less likely to be hidden by the cropping algorithm -- by "making the person's skin lighter or warmer and smoother; and quite often changing the appearance to that of a younger, more slim, and more stereotypically feminine person".

Awarding him first prize, Twitter said his discovery showed beauty filters could be used to game the algorithm and "how algorithmic models amplify real-world biases and societal expectations of beauty." Second prize went to Halt AI, a female-founded University of Toronto start-up Twitter said showed the algorithm could perpetuate marginalization in the way images were cropped. For example, "images of the elderly and disabled were further marginalized", the company said. Taraaz Research founder Roya Pakzad won third prize for an entry that showed the algorithm was more likely to crop out Arabic text than English in memes.

Magic Leap's next augmented realty headset is on track to be unveiled later this year. From a report: In an interview with Protocol published on Tuesday, CEO Peggy Johnson said the Magic Leap 2 will be released through an early adopter program at the end of this year and will be more generally available in early 2022. Johnson said the new headset, which is intended for enterprise customers, will be lighter and have an improved field of view over the Magic Leap One. "For frontline workers, the product has to be something comfortable that they can wear all day long," Johnson told Protocol. "So we've made the product half the size, about 20% lighter. But most importantly, we've doubled the field of view. That's a hard thing to do. The optics around that are complex, but we have a very talented engineering team." Past stories on Magic Leap: Magic Leap, Which Has Raised Over $2B, Lays off 1,000 Employees and Drops Consumer Business
Translation From VC-Backed PR Jargon To English of Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz's Statement That He's 'Stepping Down'

A software mistake caused a flight on Tui airlines "to take off heavier than expected," according to The Guardian, citing an investigation by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch An update to the airline's reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child's "standard weight" of 35kg [77 pounds] as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg [152 pounds]. This caused the load sheet — produced for the captain to calculate what inputs are needed for take-off — to state that the Boeing 737 was more than 1,200kg lighter [2,645 pounds] than it actually was.

Investigators described the glitch as "a simple flaw" in an IT system. It was programmed in an unnamed foreign country where the title "Miss" is used for a child and "Ms" for an adult female.

Despite the issue, the thrust used for the departure from Birmingham on 21 July 2020 was only "marginally less" than it should have been, and the "safe operation of the aircraft was not compromised", the AAIB said.
They're still classifying it as a "serious incident" — and also note that because of the same software glitch, two more UK flights also took off on the same day with inaccurate load sheets.

For the past few years, Google has been encouraging developers to write Android apps with Kotlin. The underlying OS still uses C and C++, though Google today announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust. From a report: This is part of Google's work to address memory safety bugs in the operating system: "We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android's high severity security vulnerabilities."

The company believes that memory-safe languages, like Rust, are the "most cost-effective means for preventing memory bugs" in the bootloader, fastboot, kernel, and other low-level parts of the OS. Unlike C and C++, where developers manage memory lifetime, Rust "provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid." Google has been working to add this support to AOSP for the past 18 months. Performance is equivalent to the existing languages, while increasing the effectiveness of current sandboxing and reducing the overall need for it. This allows for "new features that are both safer and lighter on resources." Other improvements include data concurrency, a more expressive type system, and safer integer handling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesla is known to be working on designing new battery modules that also work as structural elements, but the California automaker is fashioning those structural modules out of traditional cylindrical cells. There's a more elegant approach to the idea, though, and a group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led by professor Leif Asp has just made a bit of a breakthrough in that regard, making each component of the battery out of materials that work structurally as well as electrically. The structural battery combines a carbon-fiber anode and a lithium-iron phosphate-coated aluminum foil cathode, which are separated by a glass fiber separator in a structural battery electrolyte matrix material. The anode does triple duty, hosting the lithium ions, conducting electrons, and reinforcing everything at the same time. The electrolyte and cathode similarly support structural loads and do their jobs in moving ions.

The researchers tested a couple different types of glass fiber -- both resulting in cells with a nominal voltage of 2.8 V -- and achieved better results in terms of battery performance with thinner, plain weave. The cells using this construction had a specific capacity of 8.55 Ah/kg, an energy density of 23.6 Wh/kg (at 0.05 C), a specific power of 9.56 W/kg (at 3 C), and a thickness of 0.27 mm. To put at least one of those numbers in context, the 4680 cells that Tesla is moving to have an energy density of 380 Wh/kg. However, that energy density figure for the cylindrical cells does not include the mass of the structural matrix that surrounds them (when used as structural panels). Speaking of structural loads, the greatest stiffness was also achieved with plain glass fiber weave, at 25.5 GPa. Again, to put that number into context, it's roughly similar to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, whereas carbon fiber-reinforced plastic will be around 10 times greater, depending on whether it's resin transfer molding or woven sheets pre-impregnated with resin (known as pre-preg). Professor Asp's group is now working to see if swapping the cathode's aluminum foil for carbon fiber will increase both stiffness (which it should) and electrical performance. The group is also testing even thinner separators. He hopes to reach 75 Wh/kg and 75 GPa, which would result in a cell that is slightly stiffer than aluminum (GPa: 68) but obviously much lighter.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is the ninth-richest person in the world — and he loves airships. Now new details have emerged about Brin's secretive airship company, LTA Research and Exploration (which stands for "Lighter Than Air"). SFGate reports: Although back in 2017 the word on the street was that Brin intended the aircraft to serve at least in part as a luxurious "air yacht" for his family and friends, the LTA website states only humanitarian goals: "LTA airships will have the ability to complement — and even speed up — humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, especially in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed by plane and boat due to limited or destroyed infrastructure." Unlike jet planes, airships have the ability to land or deliver goods almost anywhere.

In addition, the LTA site says that their airships are intended to serve as a zero emissions alternative to airplanes, used for both shipping goods and moving people. Climate change has made airships sound more appealing to scientists in recent years — while slower than airplanes, airships are faster than cargo ships and have fewer emissions than both boats and planes. In fact, airships produce 80% to 90% fewer emissions than conventional aircraft.

They're going to be huge — and they're not going to be cheap. "It's going to be massive on a grand scale," a source told the Guardian in 2017, estimating that Brin's airship would be about 650 feet long... A recent job description posted on the LTA website revealed the company's plans to build a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system.
TechCrunch reports that one airship — named Pathfinder 1 — has already been built, and could be ready to launch from Silicon Valley as soon as this year.