An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: To make small-scale gravity measurements, researchers rely on conceptually simple experiments: measure the changes in rotational speed of an oscillating disc that is subject to a periodically changing gravitational force. The periodic force is supplied by a spinning disc. Both discs have wedges cut out so that the force due to gravity varies as the gaps spin past each other. The two discs are arranged right on top of each other. One is attached to a thin cable and is set in motion by twisting the cable, while the other rotates at a constant rotational speed. As the oscillating disc changes its direction of rotation, it is still subject to a periodic torque from the rotating disc. These torque changes are highly periodic and can be measured very accurately. The wedged disc design gives a set of three rotational frequencies, so the instrumentation errors can be filtered out by examining changes that are common to all three frequencies. The researchers have gone through several iterations to slowly improve their sensitivity over the last decade. Their experiment eliminates -- so far as possible -- all forces due to electrical and magnetic fields. The researchers have a set of three test masses that sit on top of the experiment to allow them to calibrate their analysis against a larger signal. The major improvement, however, was in the analysis. To extract the force due to gravity, careful modeling is required. The researchers changed the design of the pattern cut out of the test mass so that analytical solutions to the model were obtainable for the torques involved. This eliminated many of the uncertainties due to computer modeling. This and many other experimental refinements have allowed them to measure gravitational attraction down to a distance of just 52 micrometers. Once they add additional stabilization against vibration, they will be able to measure at even smaller separations. In the meantime, they have verified that the inverse-square law holds for distances shorter than 50m, and therefore we have no New Physics. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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To help slow the spread of the coronavirus, the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is using advertisements in mobile games to encourage social distancing. CNET reports: The message "Stay Home. Save Lives" has begun to appear in popular games like Candy Crush Saga, Sniper Elite 4, Dirt Rally 2.0 and Farm Heroes. The DCMS teamed up with leading gaming companies in the UK like King Games, Rebellion and Codemasters to include the messages, with the help of geotargeting technology. "It is absolutely vital that we all follow the simple government advice to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. I'm delighted to see the UK's brilliant video games industry stepping up to strongly reinforce this message to gamers across the UK," Cultural Secretary Oliver Dowden said in a release Monday.

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Boris Johnson has been taken into the hospital intensive care unit for treatment for coronavirus after his condition worsened, his office said. The Guardian reports: The British prime minister was admitted to St Thomas's Hospital in London on Sunday night because his virus symptoms had not cleared up and he became more seriously ill on Monday afternoon, a government spokesperson said in an email. "Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the prime minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the intensive care unit at the hospital," according to the statement. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will stand in for Johnson running the country, "where necessary." Mr. Johnson was confirmed to have coronavirus last Thursday, becoming the first Western leader known to have contracted the disease. On Sunday evening, Johnson was admitted to the hospital as a "precautionary step," according to his Downing Street Office.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Several major apps and websites, such as Paypal and Venmo have a flaw that lets hackers easily take over users' accounts once they have taken control of the victim's phone number. Earlier this year, researchers at Princeton University found 17 major companies, among them Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Blizzard, Adobe, eBay, Snapchat, and Yahoo, allowed users to reset their passwords via text message sent to a phone number associated with their accounts. This means that if a hacker takes control of a victim's cellphone number via a common and tragically easy to perform hack known as SIM swapping, they can then hack into the victim's online accounts with these apps and websites. Last week, two months after their initial outreach to the companies to report this flaw in their authentication mechanisms, the Princeton researchers checked again to see if the companies had fixed the problem. Some, including Adobe, Blizzard, Ebay, Microsoft, and Snapchat, have plugged the hole. Others have yet to do it. Paypal and Venmo, given that they are apps that allow users to exchange money and are linked to bank accounts or credit cards, may be the most glaring examples. Motherboard verified this week that it's possible to reset passwords on Paypal and Venmo via text message. Fear not, there is a solution. "The easiest way to make it impossible for SIM swappers to take over your accounts after they hijack your number is to unlink your phone number with those accounts, and use a VoIP number -- such as Google Voice, Skype, or another -- instead," reports Motherboard. "Google Voice numbers, given that they're not actually linked to a real SIM card, are much harder to hijack."

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I suggest we use the word "trump" (lower case) to refer to what we used to call the Republican Party. Example of usage: "That trump is really corrupt. Yeah they all are."

Kudlow: "I don't believe anybody could have predicted the exponential rise of this." OK that right there is why you get people who know math and biology to run the response to a pandemic.

In the past our idiocracy killed people in far-away places. Now as they say, the chickens have come home to roost. Now you can't look the other way.

A sizeable number of Mac users are experiencing occasional system crashes after updating to macOS Catalina version 10.15.4, released a few weeks ago. From a report: The crashing issue appears to be most prominent when users attempt to make large file transfers. In a forum post, SoftRAID described the issue as a bug and said that it is working with Apple engineers on a fix for macOS 10.15.5, or a workaround. "SoftRAID said the issue extends to Apple-formatted disks: There is a serious issue with 10.15.4. It shows up in different scenarios, even on Apple disks but is more likely when there are lots of IO threads. We think it is a threading issue. So while SoftRAID volumes are hit the hardest (it's now hard to copy more than 30GB of data at a time), all systems are impacted by this. In our bug report to Apple, we used a method to reproduce the problem with ONLY Apple formatted disks. Takes longer to reproduce, but that is more likely to get a faster fix to the user base."

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Uber said on Monday its app will list job openings in the delivery, food production and grocery industry that its U.S. drivers can access during a slump in ride-hailing demand due to the coronavirus. From a report: Beginning on Monday, drivers can find job listings of other companies in a new section of their app, Uber said in a blog post. Uber also said it would reach out to the more than 240,000 of its registered drivers holding commercial licenses to connect them to logistics companies for employment and contract opportunities. It also encouraged drivers to sign up for its Uber Eats food delivery service, saying restaurant orders have seen a significant increase since mid-March. Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement the company will keep expanding economic opportunities in coming months by using technology to create fast and flexible access to work.

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It really should be Cuomo v Trump in the November election, assuming Trump hasn't resigned by then.

An experimental program led by Google parent Alphabet to wipe out disease-causing mosquitoes succeeded in nearly eliminating them from three test sites in California's Central Valley. From a report: Stamping out illness caused by mosquitoes is one of Alphabet unit Verily's most ambitious public-health projects. The effort appears to be paying off, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology on Monday. Verily is also running coronavirus triage and testing in parts of California. Bradley White, the lead scientist on the Debug initiative, said mosquito-suppression is even more important during the pandemic, so that outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever donâ(TM)t further overwhelm hospitals. Since 2017, the company has released millions of lab-bred Aedes aegypti male mosquitoes into several Fresno County neighborhoods during mosquito season. The insects are bred in Verily labs to be infected with a common bacterium called Wolbachia. When these male mosquitoes mate with females in the wild, the offspring never hatch. In results of the trial published on Monday, Verily revealed that throughout the peak of the 2018 mosquito season, from July to October, Wolbachia-infected males successfully suppressed more than 93% of the female mosquito population at field test sites. Only female mosquitoes typically bite.

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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said his foundation will spend billions of dollars to fund the construction of factories for the most promising efforts to develop a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus. From a report: Mr. Gates, a billionaire philanthropist who is one the richest people in the world, said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will work with seven makers of a possible vaccine to build these factories. Mr. Gates, who announced the efforts in an appearance on "The Daily Show With Trevor Noah" Thursday, acknowledged that billions of dollars would be wasted on vaccines that won't pan out. "Our early money can accelerate things," Mr. Gates said. "Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don't waste time in serially saying which vaccine works and then building the factory."

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I changed the way tabs work on the Scripting News home page.

There are three tabs: Blog, Links and About.

When you click on a tab, you are redirected with a url of this form:

• http://scripting.com/?tab=name

Where name is the name of the tab you're going to.

That way you always have a link to the tab in the address bar.

And the browser's Back button works.

It used to do it all with JavaScript without redirecting.

It also no longer remembers what tab you had frontmost last time you visited the site. This was always annoying. Not a good heuristic. When I come to scripting.com 99 times out of 100 I want to see the blog. It doesn't matter what I was looking at last time I visited.

This was suggested a long time ago, has been on my todo list ever since, and I finally got around to doing it. It's even worse than it appears.

My maternal grandfather, Rudy Kiesler, was a bundle of energy. Highly opinionated. Very loud. Didn't spend a lot of time thinking (or so it seemed to me as a child) he just burst into action. He was the 13th of 13 children, born in the land between Poland and Germany, sent off to fend for himself as a very young boy.

Jewish, he was deported in the first rounds of the Nazi regime, leaving my grandmother and mother behind. Lucie, my grandmother, was Lutheran, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan princess. Why they married is something I never understood. They didn't seem to have anything in common.

So the women were left in Germany or Czechoslavakia, I'm not clear on which, and Rudy K was in Brooklyn or Queens, setting up a garment business, which he ran until he had a stroke in the 1970s. With no heir wanting to inherit the business, he sold out to Salant & Salant. But he was always a bundle of energy, until he drifted away in a nursing home and died in the early 90s.

He would not have liked this "stay home stay safe" thing. I can't imagine he would have done it. He was the kind of guy who couldn't stand to wait in a line at the World's Fair, so he'd cut in front of the person at the front of the line, and when they complained, he'd ignore them (this actually happened).

Here's a picture of his family in Rockaway probably in 1961 or so.

He was a legend. Still looms large in my mind.

In New Jersey, the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in something that few people outside that state's tech department would have foreseen: a dire need for COBOL coders. From a report, shared by reader AmiMoJo: Standing for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL's day came and went long ago. It initially made a splash by giving coders a programming language that could work across the proprietary computers of multiple manufacturers. That was in the early 1960s. After becoming a staple of mainframes, it eventually came to represent dusty legacy code, including during the Y2K crisis 20 years ago. In New Jersey, experts are now needed to fix COBOL-based unemployment insurance systems -- more than four decades old -- that are overwhelmed due to pandemic-related job losses. At a press conference yesterday, governor Phil Murphy asked for the help of volunteer coders who still knew how to work in COBOL. Of course, as cyber-security expert Joseph Steinberg noted on his blog, such volunteers are likely well over 60 years old, making them especially vulnerable to Covid-19.

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