An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Accounts of more than three million users of the U.S.-based FlexBooker appointment scheduling service have been stolen in an attack before the holidays and are now being traded on hacker forums. The same intruders are offering databases claiming to be from two other entities: racing media organization Racing.com and Redbourne Group's rediCASE case management software, both from Australia. Among FlexBooker's customers are owners of any business that needs to schedule appointments, which is everything from accountants, barbers, doctors, mechanics, lawyers, dentists, gyms, salons, therapists, trainers, spas, and the list goes on.

Claiming the attack seems to be a group calling themselves Uawrongteam, who shared links to archives and files with sensitive information, such as photos, driver's licenses, and other IDs. According to Uawrongteam, the database contains a table with 10 million lines of customer information that ranges from payment forms and charges to driver's license photos. The actor notes that some "juicy columns" in the database are names, emails, phone numbers, password salt, and hashed passwords. FlexBooker has sent a data breach notification to customers, confirming the attack and that the intruders "accessed and downloaded" data on the service's Amazon cloud storage system. "On December 23, 2021, starting at 4:05 PM EST our account on Amazon's AWS servers was compromised," reads the notification, adding that the intruders did not access "any credit card or other payment card information."

The Biden administration wants to shove more money into projects that are supposed to capture CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they can escape and heat up the planet. But carbon capture technologies that the Department of Energy has already supported in the name of tackling climate change have mostly fallen flat, according to a recent report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office. From a report: About $1.1 billion has flowed from the Department of Energy to carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects since 2009. Had they panned out, nine coal plants and industrial facilities would have been outfitted with devices that scrub most of the CO2 out of their emissions. Once captured, the CO2 can be sent via pipelines to underground storage in geologic formations. That's not what happened. The DOE doled out $684 million to coal six coal plants, but only one of them actually got built and started operating before shuttering in 2020. Of the three separate industrial facilities that received $438 million, just two got off the ground. Without more accountability, "DOE may risk expending significant taxpayer funds on CCS demonstrations that have little likelihood of success," the GAO says.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people, the department announced on Dec. 27. From a report: The MPD said the floppy disks contained personal data on 38 people who had applied for public housing in Tokyo's Meguro Ward. The ward office had provided the personal information to the MPD to check if the applicants were affiliated with organized crime groups. Police said no leaks or misuse of the information have been confirmed at this point. According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs. The police division and Meguro Ward signed an agreement in 2012 to check whether public housing applicants were affiliated with crime syndicates. Police received the floppy disks from the ward in December 2019 and February 2021 to conduct background checks, and kept them in the division's locked storage. The loss of the disks emerged after a Meguro Ward employee made a new inquiry to the police division on Dec. 7 and police went back to the disks to return them. Police say the disks may have been discarded accidentally.

Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company. Teslarati reports: "Last night, the commissioning of the Northvolt Ett gigafactory in northern Sweden led to the assembly of the first battery cell," Northvolt wrote. The company's factory, located in Vasteras, Sweden, is the first factory in Europe to have a cell that has been "fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company," the company added. The production of the cell is a massive milestone for Northvolt, which has been working to get its gigafactory up and running since 2017. The company said the cell is of a prismatic cell format, which consist of large sheets of anodes, cathodes, and separators sandwiched, rolled up, and pressed to fit into a metallic or hard-plastic housing in cubic form, according to AllAboutCircuits.

Northvolt Labs in Vasteras has been in production since early 2020, the company said. Northvolt plans to expand the production capacity of the facility toward 60 GWh per year, which will fulfill over $30 billion worth of contracts the battery maker has already locked up with various automotive manufacturers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar, Fluence, and Scania. Northvolt Ett will commercially deliver various cell types in 2022. While the company is based in Europe and has various partnerships with European automotive and energy storage companies, it has no plans to only service entities that are only located on the same continent.

A Forbes associate editor covering privacy, cybercrime, and security/surveillance reports on a recently-revealed search warrant.

Instead of investigating a photo, it asked Google to provide information on a suspect who allegedly owned graphic illegal cartoons involving children: That kind of content is potentially illegal to own under U.S. law and can be detected by Google's anti-child sexual material (CSAM) systems, a fact not previously discussed in the public domain, the warrant reveals.... Google also uses machine learning tools to look at files and analyze them for any sign they're of abused children....

As per its legal requirements, Google handed information on what it found, as well as the IP addresses used to access the images, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then passed on the findings to the DHS Homeland Security Investigations unit. Investigators used the IP addresses provided by Google to identify the suspect as the alleged owner of the cartoons, and searched his Google account, receiving back information on emails to and from the defendant. It appears the suspect may actually be a known artist. As no charges have been filed, Forbes isn't publishing his name, but the man identified in the warrant had won several small Midwest art competitions, and one artwork from the 1990s had been mentioned in a major West Coast newspaper...

Google, meanwhile, has in recent years released transparency reports showing how many times it reports issues to NCMEC. The figures reveal a disturbing trend. In the first six months of 2021, it found more than 3.4 million pieces of potentially illegal content in 410,000 separate reports. That was up from 2.9 million in 365,000 reports in the last six months of 2020, and well over double that from January to June 2020, when 1.5 million pieces of CSAM material were discovered and reported to NCMEC in 180,000 reports...

As Google doesn't end-to-end encrypt its communications tools like Gmail or its file storage tech like Drive, it's still possible for the tech company to scan for illegal content. And as it has no plans to introduce those features, law enforcement can still rely on Google to warn NCMEC when abuse happens on its servers. Whether the majority of users will want Google to scan people's accounts so it can help find child abusers, or have improved privacy with end-to-end encryption instead, the Mountain View, California-based business will have to struggle with that balance in perpetuity. The same goes for any one of its rivals.

Heating plasma fuel to over 100 million degrees Celsius to create inexpensive and unlimited zero-emissions electricity "has been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool's gold..." writes the Boston Globe, "or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change." [N]ow, after breakthroughs this year at MIT and elsewhere, scientists — and a growing number of deep-pocketed investors — insist that fusion is for real and could start sending power to electricity grids in about a decade.

To prove that, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, is using a whopping $1.8 billion it raised in recent months from investors such as Bill Gates, Google, and a host of private equity firms to build a prototype of a specially designed fusion reactor on a former Superfund site in Devens. A host of excavators, backhoes, and other heavy machinery are clearing land there and laying concrete foundations on 47 acres of newly acquired land. "It may sound like science fiction, but the science of fusion is real, and the recent scientific advancements are game-changing," said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and cofounder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. "These advancements aren't incremental; they are quantum leap improvements. . . . We're in a new era of actually delivering real energy systems...."

There are now at least 35 companies trying to prove that fusion can be a practical power source, most of them established in the past decade, according to the three-year-old Fusion Industry Association. The promise of fusion was buoyed with significant developments this year. In May, scientists in China used their own specially designed tokamak to sustain a fusion reaction of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, the longest on record. In September, Whyte's team at MIT and his colleagues at Commonwealth Fusion Systems demonstrated that, while using relatively low-cost materials that don't require a large amount of space, they could create the most powerful magnetic field of its kind on Earth, a critical component of the prototype reactor they're building in Devens.

"We have come a long way," said Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who compared their advance to similar breakthroughs that made flight possible. "We're a pretty conservative science bunch, but we're pretty confident." With some $2 billion raised in recent years — more than any of the other fusion startups — his company is racing to prove that their prototype, called SPARC, will produce more energy than it consumes in 2025. If they succeed, the company plans to start building their first power plant several years afterward. Ultimately, he said, their goal is to help build 10,000 200-megawatt fusion power plants around the world, enough to replace nearly all fossil fuels. "This is a solution that can scale to the size of the problem that decarbonization requires," he said.
Phil Warburg, a senior fellow at Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy, disagrees. "Fusion has been an elusive fantasy for a half-century or more," he tells the Boston Globe. "Along with the technical hurdles, the environmental downsides have not been seriously examined, and the economics are anything but proven... The current wave of excitement about fusion comes at a time when we've barely begun to tap the transformative potential of solar, wind, storage, and energy efficiency — all known to be technically viable, economically competitive, and scalable today. The environmental advocacy community needs to focus on vastly expanding those clean-energy applications, leaving fusion to the scientists until they've got something much more credible to show for their efforts."

But Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts rejected the argument that fusion research detracts from investments in renewables as a "false choice.... We're at a very different moment now, and it's good to have a lot of different horses in the race."

The also article notes that officials at America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission told them federal officials are already holding meetings to discuss how they'd regulate fusion reactors.

"Do you need a last-minute gift these upcoming holidays," asks the Free Software Foundation, "one that will keep on giving for the rest of the year?

"Free your own digital life and the ones of those you love by opting to give them a gift that will raise their social consciousness, create more lasting cheer, and defend #UserFreedom: Gift a Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate membership!" After donating, you'll receive a code and a printable page so that you can present your gift as a physical object, if you like. The membership is valid for one year, and includes the many benefits that come with an FSF associate membership, including a USB member card [16GB and pre-loaded with the fully free GNU/Linux distribution Trisquel Live], email forwarding, access to our Jitsi Meet videoconferencing server and member forum, discounts in the FSF shop and on ThinkPenguin hardware, and many more.

Looking for more gifts? You can also check out the latest FSF Giving Guide, or have a look at the great list of potential gifts our operations assistant Davis Remmel made for this very purpose!
"If you're unsure what to get that special someone, or just want to treat yourself," Remmel writes, "consider our Emacs de Luxe Bundle: it has manuals, tutorials, references, mugs, shirts, and just like Emacs it includes the kitchen sink stickers.

"For privacy lovers (or those who have ever uttered the word, "cryptography"), we have a NeuG USB True Random Number Generator (RNG). Your cryptographic keys will be stronger than an ox, without any need to trust your CPU's definition of "random." I recommend this RNG in conjunction with our anti-surveillance webcam stickers, which don't leave residue and can also cover microphone holes."

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. From a report: In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today. [...] The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.

While others have attempted to make batteries in fiber form, [says MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyey, a lead author on the paper], those were structured with key materials on the outside of the fiber, whereas this system embeds the lithium and other materials inside the fiber, with a protective outside coating, thus directly making this version stable and waterproof. This is the first demonstration of a sub-kilometer long fiber battery which is both sufficiently long and highly durable to have practical applications, he says. The fact that they were able to make a 140-meter fiber battery shows that "there's no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length," he says.

The 140-meter fiber produced so far has an energy storage capacity of 123 milliamp-hours, which can charge smartwatches or phones, he says. The fiber device is only a few hundred microns in thickness, thinner than any previous attempts to produce batteries in fiber form. In addition to individual one-dimensional fibers, which can be woven to produce two-dimensional fabrics, the material can also be used in 3D printing or custom-shape systems to create solid objects, such as casings that could provide both the structure of a device and its power source. To demonstrate this capability, a toy submarine was wrapped with the battery fiber to provide it with power. Incorporating the power source into the structure of such devices could lower the overall weight and so improve the efficiency and range they can achieve.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The Biden administration has pledged to create a carbon-free energy sector by 2035, but because renewable resources generate only around 19 percent of US electricity as of 2020, climate experts warn that our transition to a green grid future needs to speed up. A group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has set out to prove that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid. Jacobson is the lead author of a new paper, published in Renewable Energy, which argues that a complete transition to renewable energy -- defined as wind, water, and solar energy -- would benefit the US as a whole and individuals by saving costs, creating jobs, and reducing air pollution and carbon emissions.

They modeled how wind turbines, tidal turbines, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, rooftop and utility photovoltaic panels, and other sources could generate energy in 2050. A host of different sources powered these projections: Jacobson used data from a weather-climate-air pollution model he first built in 1990, which has been used in numerous simulations since. Individual state and sector energy consumption was taken from the Energy Information Administration. Current fossil fuel energy sources were converted to electric devices that are powered by wind, water, and solar. This was then used to create projections for energy use in 2050. Time-dependent energy supply was matched with demand and storage in a grid integration model for every 30 second interval in 2050 and 2051. The study authors analyzed US regions and countrywide demand until the model produced a solution with what the authors called zero-load loss -- meaning, essentially, no blackouts with 100 percent renewable energy and storage. According to Jacobson, no other study is conducting this kind of modeling, which is unique in part because it checks conditions for any simulation every 30 seconds.

As the cost of renewables falls, researchers predict power companies and consumers will migrate to using renewables. Solar and wind are already half the cost of natural gas. Policy may also motivate adoption -- or hinder it. While the current administration has set out goals for a renewable energy grid, new permits for gas and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico counteract those same efforts. [...] The researchers quantified these benefits by looking at private costs, such as those to individuals or corporations, and social ones, which also include health and climate costs. Zero-emissions leads to few air pollution related deaths and illness, and a reduced toll on the healthcare system. [...] The model cannot address emissions from things like long-distance shipping or aviation, though the authors argue that green hydrogen could be a possible alternative to explore. They did not include nuclear energy or carbon capture, which [Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a PhD candidate in the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford and a co-author of the paper] views as "distractions from getting to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible" because the technologies are costly, unproven, or lacking in their promises. "The best path forward would be to invest in what we know works as quickly as we can," she says -- such as wind, water, and solar energy.

The UK National Crime Agency has shared a collection of more than 585 million compromised passwords it found during an investigation with Have I Been Pwned, a website that indexes data from security breaches. The Record reports: The NCA now becomes the second law enforcement agency to officially supply HIBP with hacked passwords after the US Federal Bureau of Investigations began a similar collaboration with the service back in May. In a blog post today, Troy Hunt, HIBP creator Troy Hunt said that 225 million of the compromised passwords found by the NCA were new and unique.

These passwords have been added to a section of the HIBP website called Pwned Passwords. This section allows companies and system administrators to check and see if their current passwords have been compromised in hacks and if they are likely to be part of public lists used by threat actors in brute-force and password-spraying attacks. Currently, the HIBP Pwned Passwords collection includes 5.5 billion entries, of which 847 million are unique. All these passwords are also available as a free download, so companies can check their passwords against the data set locally without connecting to Hunt's service.

In a statement shared by Hunt, the NCA said it found the compromised passwords, paired with email accounts, in an account at a UK cloud storage facility. The NCA said they weren't able to determine or attribute the compromised email and password combos to any specific platform or company.

Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist shares an announcement from a Stanford University institute for environmental studies. "For some, visions of a future powered by clean, renewable energy are clouded by fears of blackouts driven by intermittent electricity supplies," the announcement begins.

"Those fears are misplaced, according to a new Stanford University study that analyzes grid stability under multiple scenarios in which wind, water and solar energy resources power 100% of U.S. energy needs for all purposes." "This study is the first to examine grid stability in all U.S. grid regions and many individual states after electrifying all energy and providing the electricity with only energy that is both clean and renewable," said study lead author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford... Imagine all cars and trucks were powered with electric motors or hydrogen fuel cells, electric heat pumps replaced gas furnaces and water heaters and wind turbines and solar panels replaced coal and natural gas power plants. The study envisions those and many more transitions in place across the electricity, transportation, buildings and industrial sectors in the years 2050 and 2051...

Interconnecting larger and larger geographic regions made power supply smoother and costs lower because it upped the chances of available wind, sun and hydro power availability and reduced the need for extra wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. A significant finding of the study was that long-duration batteries were neither needed nor helpful for keeping the grid stable. Instead, grid stability could be obtained by linking together currently available batteries with storage durations of four hours or less. Linking together short-duration batteries can provide long-term storage when they are used in succession. They can also be discharged simultaneously to meet heavy peaks in demand for short periods. In other words, short-duration batteries can be used for both big peaks in demand for short periods and lower peaks for a long period or anything in-between.
Other findings:

• Cleaner air would spare about 53,200 people from pollution-related deaths every year. It would also spare millions more from pollution-related illnesses. Total estimated health costs saved each year: $700 billion.
• Building and operating a completely renewable grid may create 4.7 million long-term jobs.

• Per capita household energy costs were nearly 63% less.

• New electricity generators would occupy about 0.84% of U.S. land (versus roughly 1.3% occupied today by the fossil fuel industry).

Google has announced a new policy for cloud storage service Drive, which will soon begin to restrict access to files deemed to be in violation of the company's policies. TechRadar reports: As explained in a new blog post, Google will take active steps to identify files hosted on its platform that are in breach of either its Terms of Service or abuse program policies. These files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner. "This will help ensure owners of Google Drive items are fully informed about the status of their content, while also helping to ensure users are protected from abusive content," the company explained.

According to Google, the motive behind the policy change is to shield against the abuse of its services. This broad catchall encompasses cybercriminal activity (like malware hosting, phishing etc.), hate speech, and content that might endanger children, but also sexually explicit material. "We need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide these services, and we ask that everyone abide by [our policies] to help us achieve this goal," states Google in its policy document. "After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action, including restricting access to the content, removing the content, and limiting or terminating a user's access to Google products." Google goes on to say that it may make "exceptions based on artistic, educational, documentary or scientific considerations." As noted by TechRadar, "there is a system to request a review of a decision if someone feels a file has been restricted unfairly, but it's unclear how the process will be handled on Google's end and how long it might take."

Leading chip-maker Intel has stressed that building Metaverse -- at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time -- will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today. Insider reports: Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this Metaverse vision, being popularized by Meta (formerly Facebook) and other companies. "We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors," Koduri said in a blog post. To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades, he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Social media and search engine operators in Japan will be required to specify the countries in which users' data is physically stored, under a planned tweak to local laws. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications this week announced it plans to submit the revision to the Telecommunications Business Law early next year. The amendment, if passed, requires search engines, social media operators and mobile phone companies with over 10 million Japanese users to disclose where in the world they store data, and identify any foreign subcontractors that can access the data. The proposed law applies to overseas companies that operate in Japan -- meaning the likes of Twitter and Facebook will need to disclose their storage choices publicly. Oddly, search engines that just cover travel and food get a pass and don't have to comply. "The move is in part a reaction to Japan's hugely popular homegrown freeware instant communication app, LINE, which had several recent snafus related to data storage and protection," the report adds.

In March, the Japanese government said it was investigating LINE's parent company after a local newspaper reported that engineers at one of the app's Chinese contractors accessed the messages and personal details of LINE users. And just a couple weeks ago, the company announced that around 133,000 users' payment details were mistakenly published on GitHub between September and November of this year.

Google's Pixel 6 line may have served as Android 12's big debut for higher-end phones, but Android 12 (Go edition) plans to bring many of the enhancements and features of Android 12 to lower-end phones, too. Google on Tuesday unveiled a host of new features for the Go edition that are set to roll out to devices in 2022. From a report: Google says that in addition to speed enhancements that'll help apps launch up to 30% faster, Android 12 (Go edition) will include a feature that'll save battery life and storage by automatically "hibernating apps that haven't been used for extended periods of time." And with the Files Go app, you'll be able to recover files within 30 days of deletion. Android 12 (Go edition) will also help you easily translate any content, listen to the news and share apps with nearby devices offline to save data, Google says. The company said Android Go has amassed 200 million users.

Microsoft has launched this week a special web portal where users and researchers can report malicious drivers to the company's security team. From a report: The new Vulnerable and Malicious Driver Reporting Center is basically a web form that allows users to upload a copy of a malicious driver, which gets uploaded and analyzed by a Microsoft automated scanner. At a technical level, Microsoft says this automated scanner can identify techniques that are commonly abused by malicious drivers, such as:
Drivers with the ability to map arbitrary kernel, physical, or device memory to user mode.
Drivers with the ability to read or write arbitrary kernel, physical, or device memory, including Port I/O and central processing unit (CPU) registers from user mode.
Drivers that provide access to storage that bypass Windows access control.

An indestructible "black box" is set to be built upon a granite plain on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia, in early 2022. Its mission: Record "every step we take" toward climate catastrophe, providing a record for future civilizations to understand what caused our demise, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. From a report: The project, led by marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO in collaboration with University of Tasmania researchers, is currently in beta and has already begun collecting information at its website. The structure is designed to be about the size of a city bus, made of 3-inch-thick steel and topped with solar panels. Its interior will be filled with "storage drives" that gather climate change-related data such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average temperatures. In addition, using an algorithm, it will scour the web for tweets, posts, news and headlines.

The developers estimate that storage will run out in 30 to 50 years, according to the ABC. There are plans to increase the storage capacity and provide a more long-term solution, but it's unclear how the structure will be maintained -- how its solar panels might be replaced before the end of civilization, how well those drives hold up after decades and how impervious the vault will be to vandalism or sabotage. Its remote location, around four hours from the closest major city, is one deterrent -- but will that be enough?

Long-time Slashdot reader mtaht writes: Comcast fully deployed bufferbloat fixes across their entire network over the past year, demonstrating 90% improvements in working latency and jitter — which is described in this article by by Comcast Vice President of Technology Policy & Standards. (The article's Cumulative Distribution Function chart is to die for...) But: did anybody notice? Did any other ISPs adopt AQM tech? How many of y'all out there are running smart queue management (sch_cake in linux) nowadays?
But wait — it gets even more interesting...

The Comcast official anticipates even less latency with the newest Wi-Fi 6E standard. (And for home users, the article links to a page recommending "a router whose manufacturer understands the principles of bufferbloat, and has updated the firmware to use one of the Smart Queue Management algorithms such as cake, fq_codel, PIE.")

But then the Comcast VP looks to the future, and where all of this is leading: Currently under discussion at the IETF in the Transport Area Working Group is a proposal for Low Latency, Low Loss Scalable Throughput. This potential approach to achieve very low latency may result in working latencies of roughly one millisecond (though perhaps 1-5 milliseconds initially). As the IETF sorts out the best technical path forward through experimentation and consensus-building (including debate of alternatives), in a few years we may see the beginning of a shift to sub-5 millisecond working latency. This seems likely to not only improve the quality of experience of existing applications but also create a network foundation on which entirely new classes of applications will be built.

While we can certainly think of usable augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), these are applications we know about today. But what happens when the time to access resources on the Internet is the same, or close to the time to access local compute or storage resources? What if the core assumption that developers make about networks — that there is an unpredictable and variable delay — goes away? This is a central assumption embedded into the design of more or less all existing applications. So, if that assumption changes, then we can potentially rethink the design of many applications and all sorts of new applications will become possible. That is a big deal and exciting to think about the possibilities!

In a few years, when most people have 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or eventually 100 Gbps connections in their home, it is perhaps easy to imagine that connection speed is not the only key factor in your performance. We're perhaps entering an era where consistently low working latency will become the next big thing that differentiates various Internet access services and application services/platforms. Beyond that, factors likely exceptionally high uptime, proactive/adaptive security, dynamic privacy protection, and other new things will likely also play a role. But keep an eye on working latency — there's a lot of exciting things happening!

To better understand the coronavirus's journey from one person to another, a team of 50 scientists has for the first time created an atomic simulation of the coronavirus nestled in a tiny airborne drop of water. From a report: To create the model, the researchers needed one of the world's biggest supercomputers to assemble 1.3 billion atoms and track all their movements down to less than a millionth of a second. This computational tour de force is offering an unprecedented glimpse at how the virus survives in the open air as it spreads to a new host. "Putting a virus in a drop of water has never been done before," said Rommie Amaro, a biologist at the University of California San Diego who led the effort, which was unveiled at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis last month. "People have literally never seen what this looks like."

How the coronavirus spreads through the air became the subject of fierce debate early in the pandemic. Many scientists championed the traditional view that most of the virus's transmission was made possible by larger drops, often produced in coughs and sneezes. Those droplets can travel only a few feet before falling to the floor. But epidemiological studies showed that people with Covid-19 could infect others at a much greater distance. Even just talking without masks in a poorly ventilated indoor space like a bar, church or classroom was enough to spread the virus. Those findings pointed to much smaller drops, called aerosols, as important vehicles of infection. Scientists define droplets as having a diameter greater than 100 micrometers, or about 4 thousandths of an inch. Aerosols are smaller -- in some cases so small that only a single virus can fit inside them. And thanks to their minuscule size, aerosols can drift in the air for hours.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) -- the largest our telescopes have ever spotted -- is on a journey from the outer reaches of our Solar System that will see it flying relatively close to Saturn's orbit. Now, a new analysis of the data we've collected on BB has revealed something rather surprising. Digging into readings logged by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) between 2018 and 2020, researchers have discovered that BB became active much earlier, and much farther out from the Sun, than was previously thought.

A comet becomes active when light from the Sun heats its icy surface, turning ice to vapor and releasing trapped dust and grit. The resulting haze, called a coma, can be useful for astronomers in working out exactly what a particular comet is made out of. In the case of BB, it's still too far out for water to sublimate. Based on studies of comets at similar distances, it's likely that the emerging fog is driven instead by a slow release of carbon monoxide. Only one active comet has previously been directly observed at a greater distance from the Sun, and it was much smaller than BB. "These observations are pushing the distances for active comets dramatically farther than we have previously known," says astronomer Tony Farnham, from the University of Maryland (UMD). "We make the assumption that comet BB was probably active even farther out, but we just didn't see it before this. What we don't know yet is if there's some cut-off point where we can start to see these things in cold storage before they become active."

The research has been published in the Planetary Science Journal.