2017 July 11 | AIVAnet

11

Jul

Students are locked in a Beijing bunker for a space isolation experiment

Why it matters to you

China’s Lunar Palace experiment will study our ability to live in isolation and self-sufficiency for long durations in space.

Four Chinese university students have been locked in two bunkers in a Beijing suburb, where they’ll attempt to spend the next 200 days living self-sufficiently. The isolation experiment, called Lunar Palace 365, is designed to study the desolate living conditions in space and on another planet.

While in the Lunar Palace 1 bunkers the students will be restricted to self-sustainability, using just what they brought in while recycling everything from human waste to plant clippings.

This marks the second stage of a three-part, yearlong experiment. During the first stage, four different students spent 60 days within the Lunar Palace 1. These first four students will return for 105 days after the second stage is complete.

The students represent Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and told Reuters they’re enthusiastic to participate as aspiring astronauts.

“I’ll get so much out of this,” doctoral student Liu Guanghui said. “It’s truly a different life experience.”

China has been been ramping up its race to space, jostling to be a leader in exploration, with its near-term plans to send a probe to the far side of the moon in 2018 and launch the core module of its independent space station the following year. China also wants to send astronauts to the moon by 2036, leveraging what they’ve learned from Lunar Palace 365 to facilitate longer stays.

Though the students are expected to remain self-sufficient, scientists from the university say they’ve made precise measurements to ensure the participants had what they’d need before entering the bunker.

“We’ve designed it so the oxygen (produced by plants at the station) is exactly enough to satisfy the humans, the animals, and the organisms that break down the waste materials,” said Liu Hong, a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

China is by no means the first nation to undertake such space-oriented isolation experiments. Russia holds the record for the longest with participants having lasted 520 days.

NASA’s ongoing HI-SEAS experiments puts participants into a 13,570-cubic-foot dome on top of a Hawaiian mountain to simulate what it might be like to live on Mars. The participants are only allowed to leave the dome wearing a “space suit.” One HI-SEAS team ended the longest NASA-sponsored mission of the sort last August when the team emerged from the dome after a year. Another team entered for an eight-month experiment in January.

11

Jul

Spotify denies allegations it uses ‘fake’ artists to cut royalty costs

Last August, Music Business Worldwide reported that Spotify placed its own music tracks into curated playlists as a way to avoid paying royalty fees on tracks the streaming company does not own. The site’s sources claimed that the tracks — typically jazz, chill and mellow piano music — appear on Spotify under the names of artists who don’t actually exist.

Last week, Vulture brought the issue back into the spotlight, calling out two acts, Deep Watch and Enno Aare, as “fake artists” with millions of streams to their credit. Spotify denied the allegations in a statement given to Billboard a couple of days later. “We do not and have never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists,” a Spotify spokesperson told Billboard in an email. “Categorically untrue, full stop.” Music Business Worldwide has jumped back into the fray to counter Spotify’s rebuttal with a new post detailing its logic as well as listing 50 artists it feels aren’t real.

Music Business Worldwide stands by its original reporting and argues that if these artists were, in fact, not contracted by Spotify to create the music, we’d be able to see their music on other services, like YouTube and Apple Music. The author also points out that the allegedly Spotify-created tracks have generated more than 520 million streams, which would amount to more than $3 million in royalty payouts. The author quotes a “senior music executive” who says that the strategy, if true, is designed to lower the amount of music on playlists from “legitimate” labels, thereby saving Spotify a ton of money over having to pay royalties to label-backed artists.

Spotify’s original statement said that the company pays royalties “for all tracks on Spotify, and for everything we playlist. We do not own rights, we’re not a label, all our music is licensed from rightsholders and we pay them — we don’t pay ourselves.” While the statement seems unequivocal, there’s still room for interpretation, depending on how the company defines a “rightsholder.”

“We do not and have never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists,” a Spotify spokesperson told Engadget in response to the latest Music Business Worldwide rebuttal. “We do not own any rights to songs. We license all music on Spotify and pay royalties to rights holders.”

Source: Billboard

11

Jul

Samsung’s attempt to halt remapping of Bixby button targets T-Mobile users

Why it matters to you

The one-upmanship between Samsung and users who have been remapping the Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Samsung — unsurprisingly — wasn’t too enthused when it learned some users were remapping the button dedicated to its not-yet-entirely-functional virtual assistant immediately following the launch of the Galaxy S8. The company responded to that news in the expected way — it released an update that crippled the apps customers had been using, many of which existed long before the device, to remap hardware keys on other Android phones.

However, where there’s a will there’s a way, and every time Samsung has forced developers to take a step back, they’ve usually found a way to take two steps forward. Now, Samsung has released yet another update to keep the button locked to Bixby and only Bixby. Curiously though, this one seems to target T-Mobile users exclusively.

The news comes from developer Jawomo, creator of bxActions, a Bixby button remapper, who related his findings to Android Police. According to Jawomo, T-Mobile customers using his app have reported that last month’s security update has rendered it useless.

Seemingly, the update hasn’t only broken bxActions, but other remapping apps as well, of which there are many on the Google Play Store. These kinds of widespread reports aren’t coming from Galaxy S8 users on other carriers, meaning the block appears to be confined to T-Mobile at the moment. Of course, that can — and very likely will — change in the future.

Nevertheless, developers will probably find a way around this one as well. If Samsung feels obligated to continue to fend off users’ wishes, it will likely face an uphill battle — at least until it can demonstrate Bixby’s value to customers. With the English version of Bixby voice still unreleased — now almost three months since the launch of the device — all pressing the key does is call up the Google Now-like Hello Bixby page.

Worse yet, it doesn’t seem there’s any quick end in sight for Bixby’s absence. Just last week, we learned that Samsung apparently needs even more data to get Bixby’s machine-learning language model to a point where it can be launched to the public. The company is reportedly expanding beta testing in the meantime, but cracks in the communication line between Samsung’s California-based English development team and home base in South Korea have only furthered hindered progress. Rumors suggest the sluggish development pace has even squandered Samsung’s plan to launch a Bixby-powered smart speaker to take on Amazon’s Echo line, Google Home, and Apple’s upcoming HomePod.

11

Jul

Faraday abandons its proposed $1 billion Nevada factory

It’s starting to seem like Faraday Future is capable of just about anything that isn’t related to the business side of being an automaker. The company’s plans for a $1-billion Las Vegas production facility had been delayed before, but now the plant has been scrapped wholesale. The Nevada Independent reports that Faraday will now attempt to build something smaller than the initial 13,000-job factory thanks to hundreds of billions in frozen funds from parent company LeEco.

The idea is to move into a smaller, existing factory and hopefully have cars rolling off the assembly line by the end of next year. Nevada lawmakers insist that the state won’t be left in a lurch because there were forms of insulation between the company and tax breaks and abatements. Those payouts were dependent on Faraday hitting certain milestones along the way to its massive factory opening.

“We have decided to put a hold on our factory at the Apex site in North Las Vegas. We remain committed to the Apex site in Las Vegas for long-term vehicle manufacturing,” Stefan Krause, Faraday Future’s chief financial officer told the Independent in a statement. “We at Faraday Future are significantly shifting our business strategy to position the company as the leader in user-ship personal mobility — a vehicle usage model that reimagines the way users access mobility. As a result of this shift in direction, we are in the final stages of confirming a new manufacturing facility that presents a faster path to start-of-production and aligns with future strategic options.”

As for the 940-acre plot of land Faraday was going to use for its factory, “the company has done little more than move dirt and install some sewer infrastructure,” according to the Independent.

More than that, the company’s Los Angeles offices are in dire financial straits as well. The Verge reports that Faraday is also in danger of missing payroll, which could lead to an exodus of the engineers that helped make recent Pike’s Peak record headlines possible. If you’re still feeling confident about your FF91 pre-order, you’re probably in a very exclusive group.

Source: The Nevada Independent, The Verge

11

Jul

New material bismuthene could boost spintronics information technology

Why it matters to you

One day electronics will not be able to be made smaller, but sprintronics opens up a way for our devices to continue to become faster and more compact.

Researchers have developed a new material called bismuthene, which could make the concept of spintronic information transmission far more viable, as it can operate effectively at room temperature. Said to possess similar properties to the wonder material that is graphene, bismuthene is created through a combination of bismuth atoms and a silicon carbide substrate.

Spintronics, or spin transport electronics, is a long-studied but still-emerging field of nanoscale electronics that manipulates the spin of electrons, rather than their charge, to transmit information. It has huge potential to revolutionize various aspects of electronics and computing, by offering lower-power operation, faster data transfer, and perhaps more crucially, four states compared to traditional computing’s two.

This manipulation of quantum states could translate to much, much faster computational devices in the future and move us beyond the difficulties faced by sub-10nm semiconductor fabrication. However, the traditional materials used in spintronics have been very temperature dependent, commonly requiring cooling to as low as minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

But bismuthene doesn’t have that problem. Developed by a team of researchers from the University of Wurzburg, Germany, it combines a single-atom-thick layer of bismuth built atop a silicon carbide substrate. This causes the bismuth atoms to form a honeycomb design, very similar to graphene.

Better than graphene though, this substance, dubbed bismuthene for its similarities, forms a chemical bond with its substrate that keeps the surface conductive while maintaining the insulative qualities of its center.

This is crucial, since for spintronics to work, there must be no short circuiting through the inside of the material or substrate, and bismuthene solves both those problems. Better yet, it does so at room temperature and above, potentially opening up the door to new spintronic hardware in the future (thanks ScienceDaily).

Although this is still early days, the team of researchers at Wurzburg have tested and proven the results in their own experiments. They expect this development to lead to great advances in information transmission in the future.

Even if this advance proves as successful as the researchers claim, it will still be some time before we see it applied to commercial devices, but it holds exciting potential for spintronic hardware and could help take us beyond our current horizons.