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Submission + - Sweden VS. Elon/Tesla (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by doc1623
doc1623 writes: Starting Friday, dockworkers in all Swedish ports will refuse to offload Teslas, cleaning crews will no longer clean showrooms, and mechanics wonâ(TM)t fix charging points as the labor dispute rages on.

What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an existential battle between Elon Muskâ(TM)s carmaker and the conventions they say make the countryâ(TM)s labor market fair and efficient.

The standoff in Sweden is the biggest union action the company has faced anywhere in the world. Sweden doesnâ(TM)t have laws that set working conditions, such as a minimum wage. Instead these rules are dictated by collective agreements, a type of contract that defines the benefits employees are entitled to, such as wages and working hours. For five years, industrial workersâ(TM) union IF Metall, which represents Tesla mechanics, has been trying to persuade the company to sign a collective agreement. When Tesla refused, the mechanics decided to strike at the end of October. Then they asked fellow Swedish unions to join them.

Submission + - AI Used To Decipher Ancient Scroll - Student Wins $40k Prize (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia). Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site's most famous artifacts. The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher, because they cannot be unwrapped because they're basically like a stick of charcoal. Instead they must be virtually unwrapped, using a 3D scan dataset of it in its wrapped state. So, the task is to find the tiny bits of ink, assemble them into letters, and try to decipher what they say.

Machine learning is now becoming the key that picks the lock. A student deciphered one of the words using a GTX 1070, which doesn't even have any tensor cores. Imagine what he could do with a RTX 4090!

Submission + - Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working (businessinsider.com) 1

Submitted by Amiga Trombone
Amiga Trombone writes: With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term.

Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk.

Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles.

But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024

Submission + - Chinese Quantum Computer Shatters World Record (yicaiglobal.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The latest version of China’s 255-qubit quantum computer Jiuzhang 3, named after an ancient Chinese mathematics book, has broken the world record for quantum computing in a scientific test, further cementing the country’s status as a global leader in the field of photonics quantum computing. The Jiuzhang 3 prototype achieved a speed that is 1 million times faster at solving Gaussian Boson Sampling problems compared with its predecessor and about 10,000 trillion times faster than US-developed Frontier supercomputer, according to an article published in Physical Review Letters yesterday. The article notes that Frontier, which is currently the fastest conventional computer in the world, would need about 600 years to generate a single ideal sample in the problem of Gaussian Boson Sampling, while Jiuzhang 3, developed by University of Science and Technology of China, can do it in just 1.27 microseconds.

Submission + - Australia student invents affordable electric car conversion kit. (dezeen.com)

Submitted by FrankOVD
FrankOVD writes: Alexander Burton is a bachelor's student in industrial design and sustainable systems engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne and worked on a prototype kit called REVR (Rapid Electric Vehicle Retrofits) for converting ICE cars to hybrid electric for under 3000$. Burton wanted to find an affordable solution for others in his position while helping to reduce the emissions associated with burning petrol as well as manufacturing new electric vehicles, which are estimated to be even higher than for traditional cars. Minimal modifications to the vehicle are needed. A flat, compact, power-dense axial flux motor would be mounted between the car's rear wheels and disc brakes, and a battery and controller system placed in the spare wheel well or boot. Some additional off-the-shelf systems – brake and steering boosters, as well as e-heating and air conditioning – would also be added under the hood. By taking this approach, Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640) and make it compatible with virtually any car.

Burton thinks his prototype, paired with a small battery could give the car 100km of electric range which is where, in his view, people can get "the most bang for their buck" with few changes to the car but major emissions reductions. "While people drive a lot, especially here in Australia, on average they drive 35 kilometres a day and it's mostly commuting."

Burton used the motor modelling packages FEMM and MOTORXP to develop the design of his motor, which sees the spinning part, called the rotor, placed between a vehicle's disc brakes.

The stationary part, or stator, is fixed to existing mounting points on the brake hub.

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

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

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

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

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

Submission + - James Webb Space Telescope's first spectrum of a TRAPPIST-1 planet (phys.org)

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: "In a solar system called TRAPPIST-1, 40 light years from the sun, seven Earth-sized planets revolve around a cold star.

Astronomers obtained new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on TRAPPIST-1 b, the planet in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system closest to its star. These new observations offer insights into how its star can affect observations of exoplanets in the habitable zone of cool stars. In the habitable zone, liquid water can still exist on the orbiting planet's surface.

The team, which included University of Michigan astronomer and NASA Sagan Fellow Ryan MacDonald, published its study in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Our observations did not see signs of an atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1 b. This tells us the planet could be a bare rock, have clouds high in the atmosphere or have a very heavy molecule like carbon dioxide that makes the atmosphere too small to detect," MacDonald said. "But what we do see is that the star is absolutely the biggest effect dominating our observations, and this will do the exact same thing to other planets in the system."

Submission + - Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Heat pumps are more than twice as efficient as fossil fuel heating systems in cold temperatures, research shows. Even at temperatures approaching -30C, heat pumps outperform oil and gas heating systems, according to the research from Oxford University and the Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank. The research, published in the specialist energy research journal Joule, used data from seven field studies in North America, Asia and Europe. It found that at temperatures below zero, heat pumps were between two and three times more efficient than oil and gas heating systems.

Efficiency is important because even when heat pumps use electricity produced from fossil fuels, they require less of them and therefore produce less CO2/pollution.

Submission + - Inverse Vaccine stops Autoimmune Diseases (biorxiv.org) 1

Submitted by laughingskeptic
laughingskeptic writes: An "inverse vaccine" has been created that takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. “In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,” Jeffrey Hubbell, UChicago's Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper, said in the statement. “But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.” News release: https://scitechdaily.com/new-v... Preprint linked in title.

Submission + - Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found (chemistryworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A world-beating deposit of lithium along the Nevada–Oregon border could meet surging demand for this metal, according to a new analysis.

An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world.

‘If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium,’ says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. ‘It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics.’

New in situ analysis reveals that an unusual claystone, composed of the mineral illite, contains 1.3% to 2.4% of lithium in the volcanic crater. This is almost double the lithium present in the main lithium-bearing clay mineral, magnesium smectite, which is more common than illite.

CHINA HAD BETTER HURRY AND BRIBE SOME GREEN ACTIVISTS TO BE SURE WE CAN’T EXPLOIT IT

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Submission + - Detroit woman sues city after being falsely arrested due to facial recognition (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she was falsely arrested because of facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents.

Porcha Woodruff, 32, was getting her two children ready for school on the morning of Feb. 16 when six police officers showed up at her doorstep and presented her with an arrest warrant alleging robbery and carjacking.

Woodruff initially believed the officers were joking given her visibly pregnant state. She was arrested.

"Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she was implicated as a suspect through a photo lineup shown to the victim of the robbery and carjacking, following an unreliable facial recognition match," court documents say.

Submission + - Green Hydrogen at over 90% efficiency (jpost.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has produced "green" hydrogen – hydrogen that is produced without polluting carbon dioxide emissions but is still highly efficient, the university said.

'The TAU team produced hydrogen using a water-based gel to attach the enzyme to the electrode and a biocatalyst. Over 90% of the electrons introduced into the system were deposited in the hydrogen without any secondary processes.'

Submission + - AI Watches Millions of Cars and Tells Cops if You Might Be a Criminal (forbes.com)

Submitted by Geek_Cop
Geek_Cop writes: AI is being used to watch your trip habits and if you're stays are too short and you're using the route of known drug traffikers then the police are notified. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date.

Rekor’s big sell is that its software doesn’t require new cameras; it can be installed in already deployed ones, whether owned by the government, a business or a consumer. It also runs the Rekor Public Safety Network, an opt-in project that has been aggregating vehicle location data from customers for the last three years, since it launched with information from 30 states that, at the time, were reading 150 million plates per month.

Submission + - New Lawsuit Against Bing Based on Allegedly AI-Hallucinated Libelous Statements (reason.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When people search for Jeffery Battle in Bing, they get the following (at least sometimes; this is the output of a search that I ran Tuesday):

But it turns out that this combines facts about two separate people with similar names: (1) Jeffery Battle, who is indeed apparently a veteran, businessman, and adjunct professor, and (2) Jeffrey Leon Battle, who was convicted of trying to join the Taliban shortly after 9/11. The two have nothing in common other than their similar names. The Aerospace Professor did not plead guilty to seditious conspiracy.

And this Bing output doesn't just list the facts about each of the Battles separately, the way that search engine results have long listed separate pages separately. Rather, it expressly connects the two, with the "However, Battle was sentenced " transition, which conveys the message that all the facts are about one person. And to my knowledge, this connection was entirely made up out of whole cloth by Bing's summarization feature (which is apparently based on ChatGPT); I know of no other site that actually makes any such connection (which I stress again is an entirely factually unfounded connection).

Submission + - A primary marker at Crawford Lake, Canada, starts the Anthropocene epoc (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by pyroclast
pyroclast writes: The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages.

The team has gathered core sample sections from a variety of environments around the world, from coral reefs to ice sheets. Samples from a range of these sites were then sent for analysis to the University of Southampton's GAU-Radioanalytical labs at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Researchers there processed the samples to detect a key marker of human influence on the environment — the presence of plutonium.

Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group, explains: "The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global 'fingerprint' on our planet.

Other geological indicators of human activity include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, high concentrations of heavy metals, such as lead, and the presence of plastic fibres and fragments. These coincide with 'The Great Acceleration' — a dramatic surge across a range of human activity, from transportation to energy use, starting in the mid-20th century and continuing today.

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