An anonymous reader shares the findings of a new study from the University of Chicago. From a report: If service becomes slow when you're trying to send a quick email on your smartphone, you might scroll through your network options and discover how many Wi-Fi networks there are. In fact, this plethora of options is itself the problem. These networks are in competition with one another, limiting the speed at which each can operate. University of Chicago researchers have demonstrated how this increased network competition could negatively impact internet service for everyday users. When a cellular provider, such as T-Mobile or AT&T, licenses a spectrum band from the FCC, they reserve its exclusive use. As a result, networks operating on licensed bands experience little interference. This allows providers to establish fast and reliable service, but it comes at a cost. To improve bandwidth [to accommodate] more users] without breaking the bank, these providers have begun to also use the unlicensed spectrum via cellular networks using a mode called licensed assisted access (LAA), which operates on the same bands used for Wi-Fi. [The researchers] set out to examine how this shared use of the unlicensed spectrum, called coexistence, impacted both Wi-Fi and cellular users. "We actually found an LAA station located on the UChicago campus, on a pole in front of the bookstore, and in this outside space campus Wi-Fi is also in use," [Monisha Ghosh, associate member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and research professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering] said. "That provided an experimental platform in our backyard, so we started taking measurements." [...] By accessing multiple networks simultaneously, the group found that competition decreased performance -- reducing the amount of data transmitted, the speed of transmission, and the signal quality. This competition was particularly detrimental to Wi-Fi. When LAA was also in active use, data transmitted by Wi-Fi users decreased up to 97%. Conversely, LAA data only exhibited a 35% decrease when Wi-FI was also in use. Ghosh explained that the incompatibility between Wi-Fi and LAA owes in part to the different protocols each employs to deal with heavy internet traffic. The researchers presented their findings in a paper via arXiv.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday asked state residents to voluntarily reduce household water usage by 15% due to worsening drought conditions. From a report: Newsom is yet to issue a California-wide state of emergency or mandate any water use restrictions. However, on Thursday, he expanded his regional drought state of emergency to apply to 50 of the state's 58 counties, which includes about 42% of the population, Newsom said. Newsom encouraged residents to take shorter showers, run dishwashers only when completely full and refrain from watering lawns.

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To stay warm in frigid seas, the marine mammals rely on an unexpected use of the powerhouses of their cells. From a report: Sea otters run hot. It's not just a manner of speaking: Scientists have found that the furry mammals' metabolisms work at a rate three times what might normally be expected from a creature their size, burning swiftly through calories. They seem to be using much of that energy to generate heat, keeping themselves at a toasty 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the frigid ocean, where staying warm is a matter of life and death. But the details of their conversion of food and oxygen into vast reserves of heat have been obscure. Now researchers studying sea otters' muscles report that the feat involves using the mitochondria in their muscle cells in an unexpected way. Their study was published Thursday in the journal Science. Unlike whales and polar bears, sea otters don't have a thick insulating layer of blubber, and their celebrated fur -- the thickest in the world, with up to 2.6 million hairs per square inch -- is not enough on its own to keep them alive in an ocean that can hover on the edge of freezing. Muscles generate heat as they contract, but scientists have known for some time there is another way that muscles can help animals keep warm, a cellular process with the delightful name of proton leak. Inside almost all animal cells, little pill-shaped organelles called mitochondria break down sugar molecules to extract energy. (Mitochondria are often called the powerhouses of the cell.) During the final stage of this process, protons pop through a membrane. In biology textbooks, the protons helpfully trickle through tiny spinning pores, driving them like water wheels to make adenosine triphosphate, a compound that serves as the molecular battery powering cellular processes.

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The calico prances and dozes on a 26-by-62-foot LED billboard in Tokyo. It has drawn crowds in real life and sparked joy on social media. From a report: Ryoko Kikuchi was strolling home from a Tokyo movie theater when she saw a cat the size of a yacht strutting high above the sidewalk, coyly licking its paws. "The way it was meowing was too cute to bear," she said. A lot of people in Tokyo feel the same way, no matter that the cat is just a bunch of pixels on a billboard. The 4K display does not officially "open" until Monday, but it has already drawn socially distanced crowds -- and inspired many social media posts -- since its installation last month. The digital calico behaves a bit like an actual cat, in the sense that it does whatever it pleases. Visitors are only treated to a few brief appearances per hour, in between a stream of advertisements and music videos. The cat yawns here and there, and at 1 a.m. it drops off to sleep for about six hours, resting its head on white paws that hug the side of what appears to be an open-air perch near the Shinjuku subway station. (The three-dimensional look is an illusion created by a curved, 26-by-62-foot LED screen.) It also talks, greeting pedestrians with "nyannichiwa." That is a blend of "konnichiwa," or hello, and "nyan," Japanese for "meow."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive. Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

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Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler spent years illegally colluding to slow the deployment of cleaner emissions technology, says the European Union, which is dishing out fines as a result. From a report: The EU's executive branch hit the Volkswagen Group (which owns Audi and Porsche) and BMW with a collective $1 billion fine on Thursday for their role in the scheme. Volkswagen Group must pay $595 million, while BMW will pay $442 million. Daimler, however, evaded a $861 million fine of its own because the automaker revealed the collusion to the regulators. The scheme described by EU authorities is separate from the Volkswagen Group's massive Dieselgate scandal, in which the company installed software on its diesel vehicles that helped fool environmental regulators into believing they were compliant, when in reality, they were polluting far more than the legal limit. Dieselgate ultimately led to nearly $40 billion in fines, buybacks, and legal fees for the Volkswagen Group. Daimler also installed software on some of its diesel vehicles to cheat emissions tests and has paid billions of dollars in fines. BMW was careful to point out Thursday that, unlike the other companies it was caught colluding with, it had not cheated emissions testing.

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In a few weeks, Firefox will start the by-default rollout of DNS over HTTPS (or DoH for short) to its Canadian users in partnership with local DoH provider CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. From a report: DoH will first become a default for 1% of Canadian Firefox users on July 20 and will gradually reach 100% of Canadian Firefox users in late September 2021 -- thereby further increasing their security and privacy online. This follows the by-default rollout of DoH to US users in February 2020. As part of the rollout, CIRA joins Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program and becomes the first internet registration authority and the first Canadian organization to provide Canadian Firefox users with private and secure encrypted Domain Name System (DNS) services.

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The risk of pathogens spilling over from wildlife trade and farmed animals into humans should be key considerations in efforts to prevent the next pandemic, research suggests. From a report: Researchers have been assessing the risks of the different ways that disease-causing organisms jump from animals to humans in an effort to characterise and address the risk of the next pandemic. In a study published in the journal Biological Reviews, University of Cambridge scientists found that while the risk of another pandemic cannot be eliminated, systemic changes in the way we interact with animals, in general, could substantially minimise the probability. The risks are not just linked to exotic wild animals, they caution. "There's a natural tendency, particularly in the western world, to imagine that this has nothing to do with us. It's something remote and exotic ⦠something that someone else has been doing," said the study's lead author Dr Silviu Petrovan, a veterinarian and wildlife expert at Cambridge. "I suppose what most people have in their minds is not the venison that they buy in Waitrose -- which, of course, is wildlife -- but rather something altogether more exotic."

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ASUS and Qualcomm have teamed up to make a smartphone that shows off some of the latter's mobile tech. Although the phone is ostensibly for the 1.6 million members of the Snapdragon Insiders program (which is a bit like Microsoft's Windows Insider early-access scheme), it'll be more broadly available by August. From a report: The snappily named Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders harnesses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G chipset with a 2.84 GHz octa-core processor and the Adreno 660 GPU. It has what Qualcomm describes as "the most comprehensive support for all key 5G sub-6 and mmWave bands" of any device, along with WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E support with speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps. You'll get 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512GB of storage. The 6.78-inch AMOLED display from Samsung has a 144 Hz refresh rate, which could help make it a solid gaming phone. The screen has up to 1,200 nits of brightness and it's HDR10 and HDR10+ certified. The phone has three rear cameras: a 64MP main lens, 12MP ultrawide camera and 8MP telephoto. The array can capture video in up to 8K. The device also has a 24MP front camera and AI auto-zoom. You'll be able to buy the $1,499 device at ASUSTeK's eShop and other retailers.

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A $150 million chip-making tool from a Dutch company has become a lever in the U.S.-Chinese struggle. It also shows how entrenched the global supply chain is. New York Times: President Biden and many lawmakers in Washington are worried these days about computer chips and China's ambitions with the foundational technology. But a massive machine sold by a Dutch company has emerged as a key lever for policymakers -- and illustrates how any country's hopes of building a completely self-sufficient supply chain in semiconductor technology are unrealistic. The machine is made by ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven. Its system uses a different kind of light to define ultrasmall circuitry on chips, packing more performance into the small slices of silicon. The tool, which took decades to develop and was introduced for high-volume manufacturing in 2017, costs more than $150 million. Shipping it to customers requires 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks and three Boeing 747s. The complex machine is widely acknowledged as necessary for making the most advanced chips, an ability with geopolitical implications. The Trump administration successfully lobbied the Dutch government to block shipments of such a machine to China in 2019, and the Biden administration has shown no signs of reversing that stance. Manufacturers can't produce leading-edge chips without the system, and "it is only made by the Dutch firm ASML," said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which has concluded that it would take China at least a decade to build its own similar equipment. "From China's perspective, that is a frustrating thing."

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Google used anticompetitive practices in an attempt to "preemptively quash" Samsung's Galaxy Store, and prevent it from becoming a viable competitor to its own Play Store. From a report: That's according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by a coalition of three dozen state attorney general, which accuses Google of illegally attempting to control app distribution on Android. The suit also alleges Google paid off app developers to stop them circumventing its store. The allegations challenge one of Google's core defenses of its policies, which is that unlike Apple's iOS rules, Android allows both competing app stores and side-loading apps directly. The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google's business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging. "Google felt deeply threatened when Samsung began to revamp its own app store, the Samsung Galaxy Store," the suit says, and describes Google's approach to the competing store as "a threat it needed to preemptively quash." The suit outlines a range of tactics Google allegedly used to prevent Samsung's store from becoming a viable competitor. It claims Google used revenue share agreements with Android phone manufacturers that "outright prohibited" pre-installing some other app stores, and that it made "a direct attempt to pay Samsung to abandon relationships with top developers and scale back competition through the Samsung Galaxy Store."

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I once had a girlfriend named Kim. We spent a lot of time together. I really loved her, but she also totally frustrated me. One day I was taking a walk with my friend Bodie, a massage therapist, and I kept complaining about Kim. Oh if only Kim would do this. If only Kim would be like that. I hate it when Kim is this way or some other way. Every time I did that, Bodie would say "Why do you feel that way about yourself." I started getting mad, but she kept doing it. Finally, as she said she knew I would, I realized I was projecting all over Kim. None of this had anything to do with her, I was using her to examine my feelings about myself.

Like everyone, I like drugs. Alcohol, weed. I like opiates, I was given huge amounts of them when I had my surgery in 2002. I could have gotten addicted, I probably did to some extent, but luckily it was easy for me to stop. I was a nicotine fiend for over 30 years. And I like sex, and in a way sex is one or more people sharing oxytocin. You feel love because your body bathes you in great drugs!

The interesting thing about drugs, I learned, is there is no such thing as a drug you enjoy that your body doesn't already produce on its own. Feelings work like that too. If someone's anger or fear upsets you, it's only possible because you already had the anger or fear yourself. It's also why people sometimes completely miss how other people feel, they mistake their own feelings for the other person's feelings. If someone does X that evokes my fear, I assume they caused the fear, and therefore are somehow to blame for it. It's usually not the experience the other person has. If you ask them "Are you scared or angry?" in a non-judgemental way (very hard to do I know) you might find they are not. Or if they were, it has passed. Do you remember how, as a child your emotions would flow so easily, one second a baby is smiling and happy, and two seconds later the baby screaming in apparent agony. Inside you're still doing that, even if you pretend not to.

I think in some sense we all want to go back to the womb, to find the perfect container, where everything you need is provided: warmth, shelter, food, and probably some very good drugs too. But no matter how much you love someone, how much you expect from them, they can't take you there. It's not the way it works. We're all on solo trips, fending for ourselves, and beneath it, not too happy about it.

Indian scientists have discovered a new plant species in Antarctica. From a report: Polar biologists stumbled upon a species of moss during an expedition to the ice-covered continent in 2017. Identification is laborious, and it took the scientists five years to confirm that the species had been discovered for the first time. The peer-reviewed paper describing this discovery has been accepted in the leading international journal, Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity. The biologists, based in the Central University of Punjab, have named the specie Bryum Bharatiensis. Bharati is the Hindu goddess of learning and the name of one of India's Antarctic research stations. Prof Felix Bast, a biologist who was part of the six-month-long expedition to the continent - the 36th by Indian scientists - discovered the dark green specie at Larsemann Hills, overlooking the Southern Ocean, in January 2017. This is located near Bharati, one of the remotest research stations in the world.

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An anonymous reader writes: One in five Americans uses a Fitbit, Apple Watch or other wearable fitness tracker. And over the past year, several studies have suggested that the devices -- which can continually collect data on heart rates, body temperature, physical activity and more -- could help detect early signs of Covid-19 symptoms. Now, research suggests that these wearables can also help track patients' recovery from the disease, providing insight into its long-term effects. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers studying Fitbit data reported that people who tested positive for Covid-19 displayed behavioral and physiological changes, including an elevated heart rate, that could last for weeks or months. These symptoms lasted longer in people with Covid than in those with other respiratory illnesses, the scientists found. The new study focuses on a subset of 875 Fitbit-wearing participants who reported a fever, cough, body aches or other symptoms of a respiratory illness and were tested for Covid-19. Of those, 234 people tested positive for the disease. The rest were presumed to have other kinds of infections. Participants in both groups slept more and walked less after they got sick, and their resting heart rates rose. But these changes were more pronounced in people with Covid-19. "There was a much larger change in resting heart rate for individuals who had Covid compared to other viral infections," said Jennifer Radin, an epidemiologist at Scripps who leads the DETECT trial. "We also have a much more drastic change in steps and sleep." The scientists also found that about nine days after participants with Covid first began reporting symptoms, their heart rates dropped. After this dip, which was not observed in those with other illnesses, their heart rates rose again and remained elevated for months. It took 79 days, on average, for their resting heart rates to return to normal, compared with just four days for those in the non-Covid group. This prolonged heart rate elevation may be a sign that Covid-19 disrupts the autonomic nervous system, which regulates basic physiological processes. The heart palpitations and dizziness reported by many people who are recovering from Covid may be symptoms of this disruption. Sleep and physical activity levels also returned to baseline more slowly in those with Covid-19 compared to those with other ailments, Dr. Radin and her colleagues found. The researchers identified a small subset of people with Covid whose heart rates remained more than five beats per minute above normal one to two months after infection. Nearly 14 percent of those with the disease fell into this category, and their heart rates did not return to normal for more than 133 days, on average. These participants were also significantly more likely to report having had a cough, shortness of breath and body aches during the acute phase of their illness than did other Covid patients.

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I'm listening to the Autobiography of Malcolm X and loving it.