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Submission + - SpaceX unveils sweeping Starship V3 upgrades ahead of May 19 launch (teslarati.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Here is an explicit, broken-down list of the key changes, first starting with the changes to Super Heavy V3:
  • Grid Fin Redesign: Reduced from four fins to three. Each fin is now 50% larger and stronger, repositioned for better catching and lifting performance. Fins are lowered on the booster to reduce heat exposure during hot staging, with hardware moved inside the fuel tank for protection.
  • Integrated Hot Staging: Eliminates the old disposable interstage shield. The booster dome is now directly exposed to upper-stage engine ignition, protected by tank pressure and steel shielding. Interstage actuators retract after separation.
  • New Fuel Transfer System: Massive redesign of the fuel transfer tube—roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage—enables simultaneous startup of all 33 Raptors for faster, more reliable flip maneuvers.
  • Engine Bay/Thermal Protection: Engine shrouds removed entirely; new shielding added between engines. Propulsion and avionics are more tightly integrated. CO? fire suppression system deleted for a simpler, lighter aft section.
  • Propellant Loading Improvements: Switched from one quick disconnect to two separate systems for added redundancy and reduced pad complexity.

Next, we have the changes to Starship V3:

  • Completely Redesigned Propulsion System: Clean-sheet redesign supports new Raptor startup, larger propellant volume, and an improved reaction control system while reducing trapped or leaked propellant risk.
  • Aft Section Simplification: Fluid and electrical systems rerouted; engine shrouds and large aft cavity deleted.
  • Flap Actuation Upgrade: Changed from two actuators per flap to one actuator with three motors for better redundancy, mass efficiency, and lower cost.
  • Faster Starlink Deployment: Upgraded PEZ dispenser enables quicker satellite release.
  • Long-Duration Spaceflight Capability: New systems for long orbital coasts, orbital refueling, cryogenic fluid management, vacuum-insulated header tanks, and high-voltage cryogenic recirculation.
  • Ship-to-Ship Docking + Refueling: Four docking drogues and dedicated propellant transfer connections added to support in-space refueling architecture.
  • Avionics Upgrades: 60 custom avionics units with integrated batteries, inverters, and high-voltage systems (9 MW peak power). New multi-sensor navigation for precision autonomous flight. RF sensors measure propellant in microgravity. ~50 onboard camera views and 480 Mbps Starlink connectivity for low-latency communications.

Believe it or not, there's more.

Two years ago, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown was Starship V1. Last year, it was Starship V2. V3 is about to become the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown — but don't worry, the company already has plans for V4.

Submission + - C++ Standards Contributor Expelled For 'The Undefined Behavior Question' 23

Submitted by suntzu3000
suntzu3000 writes: Andrew Tomazos, a long-time contributor to the ISO C++ standards committee, recently published a technical paper titled The Undefined Behavior Question . The paper explores the semantics of undefined behavior in C++ and examines this topic in the context of related research. However, controversy arose regarding the paper's title.

Some critics pointed out similarities between the title and Karl Marx's 1844 essay On The Jewish Question , as well as the historical implications of the Jewish Question, a term associated with debates and events leading up to World War II. This led to accusations that the title was "historically insensitive."

In response to requests to change the title, Mr. Tomazos declined, stating that "We cannot allow such an important word as 'question' to become a form of hate speech." He argued that the term was used in its plain, technical sense and had no connection to the historical context cited by critics.

Following this decision, Mr. Tomazos was expelled from the Standard C++ Foundation, and his membership in the ISO WG21 C++ Standards Committee was revoked.

Submission + - BitTorrent is No Longer the 'King' of Upstream Internet Traffic (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today’s data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of ‘top apps’. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it’s been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn’t impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

Submission + - Dell workers can stay remote — but they're not going to get promoted (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dell has had a hybrid working culture in place for more than a decade — long before the pandemic struck.

"Dell cared about the work, not the location," a senior employee at Dell who's worked remotely for more than a decade, told Business Insider last month. "I would say 10% to 15% of every team was remote."

That flexibility has enabled staff to sustain their careers in the face of major life changes, several employees told BI. It has also helped Dell to be placed on the "Best Place to Work for Disability Equality Index" since 2018.

But in February Dell introduced a strict return-to-office mandate, with punitive measures for those who want to stay at home.

Under the new policy, staff were told that from May almost all will be classified as either "hybrid," or "remote."

Hybrid workers will be required to come into an "approved" office at least 39 days a quarter — the equivalent of about three days a week, internal documents seen by BI show.

If they want to keep working from home, staff can opt to go fully remote. But that option has a downside: fully remote workers will not be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles.

The memo states: "For remote team members, it is important to understand the trade-offs: Career advancement, including applying to new roles in the company, will require a team member to reclassify as hybrid onsite."

Submission + - Plants may be absorbing 20% more CO2 than we thought, new models find (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Using realistic ecological modeling, scientists led by Western Sydney University’s Jürgen Knauer found that the globe’s vegetation could actually be taking on about 20% more of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere and will continue to do so through to the end of the century.

“What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate assessments by the likes of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21st century when extended to account for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis,” said Knauer.

Mathematical models of ecological systems are used to understand complex ecological processes and in turn attempt to predict how the real ecosystems they’re based on will change. The researchers found that the more complex their modeling, the more surprising the results – in the environment’s favor.

Submission + - China just stopped exporting two minerals the world's chipmakers need. (cnn.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

China produces about 80% of the world’s gallium and about 60% of germanium, according to the Critical Raw Materials Alliance, but it didn’t sell any of the elements on international markets last month, Chinese customs data released on Wednesday showed. In July, the country exported 5.15 metric tons of forged gallium products and 8.1 metric tons of forged germanium products.

When asked about the lack of exports last month, He Yadong, a spokesperson from China’s commerce ministry told a press briefing Thursday that the department had received applications from companies to export the two materials. Some applications had been approved, he said, without elaborating.

The curbs are indicative of China’s apparent willingness to retaliate against US export controls, despite concerns about economic growth, as a tech war simmers.

Nobody ever said weaning ourselves off the CCP would be easy.
Space

Starship Is Stacked and Ready To Make Its Second Launch Attempt (arstechnica.com) 89

Posted by BeauHD from the get-ready dept.
SpaceX's Starship rocket is fully stacked and ready to launch again. According to Elon Musk, the company is just waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to approve the launch license. Ars Technica reports: That caveat is a big one because the Federal Aviation Administration is still reviewing paperwork and data from SpaceX about the first launch attempt of Starship in April 2023. That flight ended after about 90 seconds due to engine problems and other issues with the booster. The FAA has been reviewing data from that accident, including the environmental implications at the launch site and the delayed activation of the rocket's flight termination system. Following this accident, SpaceX prepared and submitted a "mishap investigation report" to the FAA. After reviewing the report, the FAA will identify corrective actions that the company must make ahead of its second test flight to ensure the safety of people, property, and wildlife near the South Texas launch site, which is surrounded by wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico. [...]

During the upcoming test flight, Starship will carry no payloads but will instead seek to demonstrate the performance of the booster's 33 Raptor rocket engines, stage separation, and ignition of Starship's six engines. Under a nominal flight, Starship will complete nearly three-quarters of an orbit around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The launch date is pending regulatory approval, but it is not expected to occur before the middle of September.

Submission + - YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: A prominent anti-vaccine activist, Joseph Mercola, yesterday lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels.

Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola's complaint, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was "under no obligation to host" Mercola's content after terminating his channel in 2021 "for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines."

“ The court found no breach because 'there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content' or be a 'storage site for users’ content,'" Beeler wrote.

Submission + - Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won't Let Them Dig It Up (time.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.”

Submission + - Germans ready to lean back into nuclear power (spiegel.de)

Submitted by atcclears
atcclears writes: German voters can see the toll of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and the cost of Berlin’s failed 20-year green-energy transition, and they are opening to reality. The country’s economic prospects, and Europe’s, depend on whether their leaders will follow that example. Some 78% of respondents support running the three remaining nuclear power plants at least until summer 2023

Submission + - SPAM: Ancient DNA solves mystery over origin of medieval Black Death 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century.

The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic on record. It may have killed 50% to 60% of the population in parts of Western Europe and 50% in the Middle East, combining for about 50-60 million deaths, Slavin said. An "unaccountable number" of people also died in the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, Slavin added.

Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346.

Reconstructing the pathogen's genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today.

"Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest," said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.
Link to Original Source
The Almighty Buck

Cryptocurrency Luna Now Almost Worthless After Controversial Stablecoin It Is Linked To Loses Peg (cnbc.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the music-stops dept.
Luna, the sister cryptocurrency of controversial stablecoin TerraUSD, has collapsed to nearly $0. From a report: TerraUSD, or UST, has been dragged into the spotlight in the last few days after the so-called stablecoin, which is supposed to be pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar, fell sharply below the $1 mark. UST is an algorithmic stablecoin which uses code to maintain its price at around $1 based on a complex system of minting and burning. A UST token is created by destroying some of the related cryptocurrency luna to maintain the dollar peg. Unlike rival stablecoins Tether and USD Coin, UST is not backed by any real-world assets such as bonds. Instead, the Luna Foundation Guard, a nonprofit created by Terra's founder Do Kwon, is holding about $3.5 billion of bitcoin in reserve. But in times of market volatility, such as this week, UST is being tested. Its peg has been lost and now investors are rushing to dump the associated luna token. Luna's price has plunged from around $85 a week ago to trade at around 3 cents on Thursday, according to data from CoinGecko, making the cryptocurrency almost worthless. The Luna token was trading at $121 last month. At the time of publication, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has delisted Luna Futures-USDT margined contract.

Submission + - Mac Studio Shows Disappointing Performance Despite Apple's Claims (tomsguide.com)

Submitted by exomondo
exomondo writes: Latest benchmarks of Apple's new M1 Ultra show their performance claims in the announcement were misleading. It falls short of Intel's 12900K in single core performance though Apple's 20-core CPU does beat last year's Intel 16-core (8 performance, 8 efficiency) flagship. While it has an edge in power efficienct this highest end 64-core GPU sku also falls far short of Nvidia's 18 month old RTX 3090 despite Apple's claims, not even managing half of the Nvidia GPU's score in Geekbench even when using Apple's own Metal API.

It's much the same story as with the M1 Max announcement where Apple compared its GPU performance to Nvidia 3080-equiped laptops but in real gaming benchmarks it was lucky to get even half the performance while in the case of renderers like Arnold, Cycles and Octane it fell behind by up to 15x.

When it comes to performance-per-watt Apple takes the lead but in raw performance terms their claims appear to be quite exaggerated, particularly when it comes to desktops where power efficiency is much less of a concern.

Submission + - SPAM: A Smart Artificial Pancreas Could Conquer Diabetes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be compared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the temperature of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still "hybrid," meaning that users are required to estimate the carbohydrates in a meal they're about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose control. Nevertheless, the artificial pancreas is a triumph of biotechnology.

It is a triumph of hope, as well. We well remember a morning in late December of 2005, when experts in diabetes technology and bioengineering gathered in the Lister Hill Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. By that point, existing technology enabled people with diabetes to track their blood glucose levels and use those readings to estimate the amount of insulin they needed. The problem was how to remove human intervention from the equation. A distinguished scientist took the podium and explained that biology's glucose-regulation mechanism was far too complex to be artificially replicated. [Boris Kovatchev, a scientist at the University of Virginia, director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology, and a principal investigator of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project] and his colleagues disagreed, and after 14 years of work they were able to prove the scientist wrong.

It was yet another confirmation of Arthur Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." [...] Progress toward better automatic control will be gradual; we anticipate a smooth transition from hybrid to full autonomy, when the patient never intervenes. Work is underway on using faster-acting insulins that are now in clinical trials. Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action. What comes next? Well, what else seems impossible today?
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