An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Extreme weather has become the new normal -- whether it's precipitation, drought, wind, heat, or cold. The question of how the ever-shrinking layer of Arctic sea ice has contributed to any of these changes has prompted some lively discussion over the past few years. Researchers have proposed that a weakened jet stream driven by vanishing Arctic sea ice might play a large role in extreme winter events like the descending polar vortex that struck North America earlier this year. But the idea hasn't held up well in light of more recent evidence.

But now, researchers have identified a direct link between extreme winter weather and sea ice loss. The 2018 "Beast of the East" winter storm hit Europe with record-breaking snowfall and low temperatures. And potentially as much as 88 percent of that snowfall originated from increased evaporation of the Barents Sea.

The working hypothesis is that Arctic sea ice acts as a cap for Arctic waters, limiting evaporation. Less sea ice and warmer Arctic temperatures mean more evaporation, potentially explaining the increased severity of winter storms like the Beast of the East. Until now, it's been tough to measure direct evidence linking sea ice loss to extreme European winters, but recent advances in technology are making this a little less challenging.

Reddit unveiled its take on a Clubhouse-like social audio product on Monday, called Reddit Talk. The Verge reports: The company is billing Monday's announcement as a "sneak preview," since the feature isn't widely available yet. Moderators that want to try the feature out in their subreddit can add themselves to a waitlist for access. Based on Reddit's description and images shared by the company, Reddit Talk appears to look a lot like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and other social audio products. Talks will "live" within subreddits, according to Reddit.

During the initial tests, only subreddit moderators will be able to initiate a Talk, and Talk hosts will have the ability to invite, mute, and remove speakers. While only mods can kick off Talks in the beginning, anyone on iOS and Android can listen to one. Moderation has been an issue for Clubhouse, so it's notable that Reddit is starting small and giving access only to moderators first. At some point in the future, mods will be able to bring on trusted community members as co-hosts. The company says it is "testing ways" for hosts to customize how Talks look with emojis and different background colors, and users will be able to change their avatar, too. Earlier today, Facebook also announced that the company is working on a Clubhouse clone.

April 20th or 4/20 is the unofficial marijuana holiday where thousands of cannabis smokers celebrate the smoking of marijuana with marijuana. But this year, it could also be the day the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin shatters new record highs. According to Fortune, "advocates are hoping to see Dogecoin hit $1 on April 20 -- one week after it was valued at just 9 cents. From the report: Dogecoin has already hit some financial landmarks that didn't seem possible at the start of the year. Its market value has topped $50 billion, making it bigger than Ford or Marriott. And if it comes close to hitting its target Tuesday, it could outpace some blue-chip companies. For once (for now), Elon Musk has nothing to do with the furor surrounding Dogecoin. This time, the credit goes, in part, to... Slim Jim. Really.

The packaged meat product latched on to Dogecoin-mania on its Twitter account last Wednesday (saying "RT to send Doge to the moon!!" -- the rallying cry among the r/WallStreetBets crowd for GameStop stock). The cry worked. Doge fans -- and even other brands -- jumped on the bandwagon quickly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A small miracle happened at 3:31am ET on Monday morning. Ingenuity, a tiny NASA helicopter, became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet, Mars. This engineering feat was done with Linux, open-source software, and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) open-source F (pronounced F prime) framework. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his team and the JPL Ingenuity crew took a long hard look into the helicopter's code and found that "nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed to Ingenuity's software via open source. And yet, much like the first image of a black hole, most of these developers are not even aware that they helped make the first Martian helicopter flight possible."

They'll know now. Friedman wrote: "Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open-source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity." The developer list was created by JPL providing GitHub with a comprehensive list of every version of every open source project used by Ingenuity. GitHub could then identify all the contributors who made these projects and their dependencies. Some of those honored, such as Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, are famous developers. Many others labor in obscurity -- but now their work is being recognized. Timothy Canham, a JPL embedded flight software engineer, notes Ingenuity's program is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 running at 2.2GHz, which is "far faster than the Mars Perseverance's rover processors," according to ZDNet. The reason this older chip was used is because it meets NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) radiation standards.

Canham also says the flight control software on Ingenuity runs at 500Hz. The flight software "is used to control the flight hardware and read sensors 500 times per second in order to keep the helicopter stable." Canham added: "We literally ordered parts from SparkFun [Electronics]. This is commercial hardware, but we'll test it, and if it works well, we'll use it."

Here's something to do if that TV commercial is too loud: complain to the feds, who just might do something about it. From a report: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Monday asked for public help to determine whether to update rules to prevent broadcast, cable and satellite providers from sending commercials that are louder than the programming they accompany. "In particular, we invite consumers to tell us their experiences," the agency's media bureau said in a public notice. The action follows an April 13 letter from Representative Anna Eshoo asking FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to look into a reported increase in complaints about loud commercials. Eshoo wrote a 2010 law, known as the CALM Act, or Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, that underpins FCC rules that may be changed. The FCC has never sought to enforce the act, despite receiving thousands of complaints, Eshoo said. A recent press report said complaints to the FCC had increased "sharply," Eshoo wrote. "This worries me a great deal." Eshoo mentioned a March 31 report in Business Insider that said complaints to the FCC for the four-month period from November to February rose 140% compared to the same period a year earlier.

Last month, Sony said that PlayStation Store access for the PS3, PS Vita, and PSP would end this summer. Today, Sony has partially reversed course, announcing on the PlayStation Blog that the PlayStation Store would remain open on the PS3 and PS Vita. CNET reports: "It's clear we made the wrong decision here," Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan wrote on the PlayStation Blog. "We see now that many of you are incredibly passionate about being able to continue purchasing classic games on PS3 and PS Vita for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad we were able to find a solution to continue operations."

Commerce functionality for the PlayStation Portable will still expire on July 2, meaning that the PSP will no longer be able to buy any content on the digital storefront. Users should, however, still be able to re-download any previously purchased games or media.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The latest addition coming to Microsoft Edge is "performance mode." Rolling out first to the Canary channel, "performance mode" in Microsoft Edge is designed to improve how the browser uses the resources available to it. In practice, Microsoft says the new mode will improve speed and responsiveness overall while "optimizing" the use of battery, CPU, and RAM. Apparently, the mode may adjust based on your browsing habits too. "Performance mode helps you optimize speed, responsiveness, memory, CPU and battery usage," says Microsoft. "Performance improvements might vary depending on your individual specifications and browser habits."

One specific change Microsoft notes is that the "Sleeping Tabs" feature in Edge will be locked to five minutes when performance mode is turned on. "Sleeping Tabs" essentially freezes a tab that's left open in the background, saving resources when it's not actively being used. Performance Mode is rolling out now in version 91.0.856.0, available in the Canary channel. The toggle is available in the "System" section of the settings menu.

NASA's first attempt to fly its "Ingenuity" helicopter on Mars was a success, marking what the space agency says is the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world. The BBC reports: The space agency is promising more adventurous flights in the days ahead. Ingenuity will be commanded to fly higher and further as engineers seek to test the limits of the technology. The rotorcraft was carried to Mars in the belly of Nasa's Perseverance Rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February.

The demonstration saw the Mars-copter rise to just over 3m, hover, swivel 96 degrees, hover some more, and then set down. In all, it managed almost 40 seconds of flight, from take-off to landing. Getting airborne on the Red Planet is not easy. The atmosphere is very thin, just 1% of the density here at Earth. This gives the blades on a rotorcraft very little to bite into to gain lift. There's help from the lower gravity at Mars, but still -- it takes a lot of work to get up off the ground. Ingenuity was therefore made extremely light and given the power (a peak power of 350 watts) to turn those blades extremely fast - at over 2,500 revolutions per minute for this particular flight. Control was autonomous. The distance to Mars - currently just under 300 million km -- means radio signals take minutes to traverse the intervening space. Flying by joystick is simply out of the question.

Ingenuity has two cameras onboard. A black-and-white camera that points down to the ground, which is used for navigation, and a high-resolution colour camera that looks out to the horizon. Sample navigation images sent back to Earth revealed the helicopter's shadow on the floor of the crater as it came back in to land. Satellites will send home more pictures of the flight over the next day. There was only sufficient bandwidth in the orbiters' first overflight to return a short snatch of video from Perseverance, which was watching and snapping away from a distance of 65m. Longer sequences should become available in due course.

Translation tools from Google and other companies could be contributing to significant misunderstanding of legal terms with conflicting meanings such as "enjoin," according to research due to be presented at an academic workshop on Monday. From a report: Google's translation software turns an English sentence about a court enjoining violence, or banning it, into one in the Indian language of Kannada that implies the court ordered violence, according to the new study. "Enjoin" can refer to either promoting or restraining an action. Mistranslations also arise with other contronyms, or words with contradictory meanings depending on context, including "all over," "eventual" and "garnish," the paper said.

Google said machine translation is "is still just a complement to specialized professional translation" and that it is "continually researching improvements, from better handling ambiguous language, to mitigating bias, to making large quality gains for under-resourced languages." The study's findings add to scrutiny of automated translations generated by artificial intelligence software. Researchers previously have found programs that learn translations by studying non-diverse text perpetuate historical gender biases, such as associating "doctor" with "he." The new paper raises concerns about a popular method companies use to broaden the vocabulary of their translation software. They translate foreign text into English and then back into the foreign language, aiming to teach the software to associate similar ways of saying the same phrase.

AmiMoJo writes: WordPress announced over the weekend that they plan on treating Google's new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern and hence block it by default on WordPress sites. For some time, browsers have begun to increasingly block third-party browser cookies used by advertisers for interest-based advertising. In response, Google introduced a new ad tracking technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that uses a web browser to anonymously place users into interest or behavioral buckets based on how they browse the web. After Google began testing FLoC this month in Google Chrome, there has been a consensus among privacy advocates that Google's FLoC implementation just replaces one privacy risk with another one.

"WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web -- and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code," says WordPress. WordPress states that this code is planned for WordPress 5.8, scheduled for release in July 2021. As FLoC is expected to roll out sooner, WordPress is considering back-porting this code to earlier versions to "amplify the impact" on current versions of the blogging platform. Further reading: Nobody is Flying To Join Google's FLoC.

schwit1 writes: Able to move 1,600 boxes per hour using just one arm, Dill relies on humans to keep it operating efficiently Pickle Robots says that Dill's approach to the box unloading task is unique in a couple of ways. First, it can handle messy trailers filled with a jumble of boxes of different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights. And second, from the get-go it's intended to work under human supervision, relying on people to step in and handle edge cases.

We asked Meyer how much Dill costs, and to our surprise, he gave us a candid answer: Depending on the configuration, the system can cost anywhere from $50-100k to deploy and about that same amount per year to operate. Meyer points out that you can't really compare the robot to a human (or humans) simply on speed, since with the robot, you don't have to worry about injuries or improper sorting of packages or training or turnover. While Pickle is currently working on several other configurations of robots for package handling, this particular truck unloading configuration will be shipping to customers next year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide. The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi's policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage. "It's very bad news in every possible way," said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality."

The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country's vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace. Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year's draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic's problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others, similar to the app Clubhouse, which gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year. From a report: Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest a lot in audio features and build them out over the coming years. "We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across this whole spectrum," Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on Monday on the Sidechannel Discord server. The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it will be available to everyone on the Facebook app and Messenger this summer, the company said in a blog post. The company will start to test Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook. "You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it'll be a very useful thing," he said. The feature comes with little surprise.

As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in this morning and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million. From a report: Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It's a transformation that once started isn't likely to change back to the old ways of doing business, even when we get past the pandemic. With Ekata, the company gets a solution that can verify the online identity of a person making the transaction in real time using various signals that can indicate if this is fraudulent or true as they open an account or transact business. The company provides a score and other data that predicts the likelihood this person is who they say they are. It's not unlike a credit risk score, except for identity. That was one of the primary reasons Mastercard decided to acquire Ekata, according to Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence solutions at the company. "With the addition of Ekata, we will advance our identity capabilities and create a safer, seamless way for consumers to prove who they say they are in the new digital economy," Bhalla said in a statement.

Several U.S. banks have started deploying camera software that can analyze customer preferences, monitor workers and spot people sleeping near ATMs, even as they remain wary about possible backlash over increased surveillance, Reuters reported Monday, citing more than a dozen banking and technology sources. From the report: Previously unreported trials at City National Bank of Florida and JPMorgan Chase & Co as well as earlier rollouts at banks such as Wells Fargo & Co offer a rare view into the potential U.S. financial institutions see in facial recognition and related artificial intelligence systems. Widespread deployment of such visual AI tools in the heavily regulated banking sector would be a significant step toward their becoming mainstream in corporate America. Bobby Dominguez, chief information security officer at City National, said smartphones that unlock via a face scan have paved the way. "We're already leveraging facial recognition on mobile," he said. "Why not leverage it in the real world?"

City National will begin facial recognition trials early next year to identify customers at teller machines and employees at branches, aiming to replace clunky and less secure authentication measures at its 31 sites, Dominguez said. Eventually, the software could spot people on government watch lists, he said. JPMorgan said it is "conducting a small test of video analytic technology with a handful of branches in Ohio." Wells Fargo said it works to prevent fraud but declined to discuss how.

Google shifted more than $75.4 billion in profits out of the Republic using the controversial "double-Irish" tax arrangement in 2019, the last year in which it used the loophole. From a report: The technology giant availed of the tax arrangement to move the money out of Google Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company via interim dividends and other payments. This company was incorporated in Ireland but tax domiciled in Bermuda at the time of the transfer.

The move allowed Google Ireland Holdings to escape corporation tax both in the Republic and in the United States where its ultimate parent, Alphabet, is headquartered. The holding company reported a $13 billion pretax profit for 2019, which was effectively tax-free, the accounts show. A year earlier, Google Ireland Holdings paid out dividends of 23 billion euros, having recorded turnover of $25.7 billion. Google has used the double Irish loophole to funnel billions in global profits through Ireland and on to Bermuda, effectively putting them beyond the reach of US tax authorities. Companies exploiting the double Irish put their intellectual property into an Irish-registered company that is controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda.

Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service, previously known as xCloud, will begin rolling out in beta to iPhones, iPads and PCs this week. The service will be invite-only to start, Microsoft said in a blog post on Monday. From a report: Xbox Cloud Gaming was on track to launch for iPhones and iPads earlier, but Apple updated its App Store rules in September that impacted services like Xbox Gaming and Google Stadia. Apple's move forced the companies to use web browsers to redesign their services so that they could circumvent the App Store rules. Under the rules, Microsoft, Google and other companies with similar services would have had to offer each game as an individual download instead of offering a complete library the way Netflix does for movies.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is sort of like Netflix for games. People who subscribe to Microsoft's $14.99/month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate plan can access more than 100 titles. The cloud gaming aspect lets you stream the games without having to download them, provided you have a fast enough internet connection. The streaming option is already available for Android phones.

Apple has approved Parler's return to the iOS app store following improvements the social media company made to better detect and moderate hate speech and incitement, according to a letter the iPhone maker sent to Congress on Monday. From a report: The decision clears the way for Parler, an app popular with conservatives including some members of the far right, to be downloaded once again on Apple devices. The letter -- addressed to Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Ken Buck and obtained by CNN -- explained that since the app was removed from Apple's platform in January for violations of its policies, Parler "has proposed updates to its app and the app's content moderation practices." On April 14, Apple's app review team told Parler that its proposed changes were sufficient, the letter continued. Now, all Parler needs to do is to flip the switch. "Apple anticipates that the updated Parler app will become available immediately upon Parler releasing it," Apple's letter said. Parler, an alternative to Facebook and Twitter that bills itself as a haven for free speech, was removed from major tech platforms in early January following the US Capitol riots of Jan. 6.

The UK government will look into the national security implications of U.S. group Nvidia's purchase of British chip designer ARM, it said on Monday, putting a question mark over the $40 billion deal. From a report: Digital minister Oliver Dowden said on Monday he had issued a so-called "intervention notice" over the sale of ARM by Japan's SoftBank to Nvidia. "As a next step and to help me gather the relevant information, the UK's independent competition authority will now prepare a report on the implications of the transaction, which will help inform any further decisions," he said. Nvidia said it did not believe the deal posed any material national security issues.

Slashdot reader quonset reminds us that NASA's Mars helicopter "is officially 'go' for flight!," according to the Twitter feed of the Perserverance Rover, which notes that its cameras are ready to film the historic event.

"Watch with the team as they receive data and find out if they were successful," adds NASA's official feed. "Meet us in mission control April 19 at 6:15am ET (10:15am UTC): Data from the first flight will return to Earth a few hours following the autonomous flight. A livestream will begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT), as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Watch on NASA Television, the agency app, website, and social media platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.

If the flight takes place April 19, a postflight briefing will be held at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT)...

The public and media also may ask questions on social media during the livestream and briefing using #MarsHelicopter. Find the latest schedule updates here.

The Perseverance rover will provide support during flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that enables the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth.
Update: And it's a success! "We've been talking for so long about our Wright Brothers moment on Mars, and here it is," said NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager MiMi Aung. The Perserverance rover has already tweeted out a choppy video.

"Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the nation's most valuable semiconductor company, with a stock price of $645 a share and a market cap of $400 billion, is out to create the metaverse," writes Time magazine.

Huang defines it as "a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours." Huang credits author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, filled with collectives of shared 3-D spaces and virtually enhanced physical spaces that are extensions of the Internet, for conjuring the metaverse. This is already playing out with the massively popular online games like Fortnite and Minecraft, where users create richly imagined virtual worlds. Now the concept is being put to work by Nvidia and others.

Partnering with Nvidia, BMW is using a virtual digital twin of a factory in Regensburg, Germany, to virtually plan new workflows before deploying the changes in real time in their physical factory. The metaverse, says Huang, "is where we will create the future" and transform how the world's biggest industries operate...

Not to make any value judgments about the importance of video games, but do you find it ironic that a company that has its roots in entertainment is now providing vitally important computing power for drug discovery, basic research and reinventing manufacturing?

No, not at all. It's actually the opposite. We always started as a computing company. It just turned out that our first killer app was video games...

How important is the advent and the adaptation of digital twins for manufacturing, business and society at large?

In the future, the digital world or the virtual world will be thousands of times bigger than the physical world. There will be a new New York City. There'll be a new Shanghai. Every single factory and every single building will have a digital twin that will simulate and track the physical version of it. Always. By doing so, engineers and software programmers could simulate new software that will ultimately run in the physical version of the car, the physical version of the robot, the physical version of the airport, the physical version of the building. All of the software that's going to be running in these physical things will be simulated in the digital twin first, and then it will be downloaded into the physical version. And as a result, the product keeps getting better at an exponential rate.

The second thing is, you're going to be able to go in and out of the two worlds through wormholes. We'll go into the virtual world using virtual reality, and the objects in the virtual world, in the digital world, will come into the physical world, using augmented reality. So what's going to happen is pieces of the digital world will be temporarily, or even semipermanently, augmenting our physical world. It's ultimately about the fusion of the virtual world and the physical world.
See also this possibly related story, "Nvidia's newest AI model can transform single images into realistic 3D models."