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Submission+-Nissan Finds a Second Use For Old LEAF Batteries (slashgear.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nissan has found a second-life for old LEAF batteries inside mobile machines that help workers at Nissan factories worldwide. The old batteries are being used in automated guided vehicles or AGVs used for various tasks inside the manufacturing facilities, including delivering parts to workers on the assembly line.

AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they’re needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn’t waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line. Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.

Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.

Submission+-Nasal Spray Could Prevent Coronavirus Transmission (columbia.edu)

Submitted by Snard
Snard writes: A nasal antiviral created by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons blocked transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in ferrets, suggesting the nasal spray also may prevent infection in people exposed to the new coronavirus.

The compound in the spray—a lipopeptide developed by Anne Moscona, MD, and Matteo Porotto, PhD, professors in the Department of Pediatrics and directors of the Center for Host-Pathogen Interaction—is designed to prevent the new coronavirus from entering host cells.

The antiviral lipopeptide is inexpensive to produce, has a long shelf life, and does not require refrigeration. These features make it stand out from other antiviral approaches under development, including monoclonal antibodies. The new nasal lipopeptide could be ideal for halting the spread of COVID in the United States and globally; the transportable and stable compound could be especially key in rural, low-income, and hard-to-reach populations.

Submission+-Honda Plants Shutdown (reuters.com)

Submitted by Dharkfiber
Dharkfiber writes: Ransomware causing heartburn in manufacturing again. âoe Production resumed at most of the plants by Tuesday, but its main plant in Ohio, as well as those in Turkey, India and Brazil remain suspended as the ransomware disputed the companyâ(TM)s production systems, he said.â

Submission+-Redox-Flow Cell Stores Renewable Energy As Hydrogen (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Hydrogen is a very good carrier for this type of work,” says Wei Wang, who is the chief scientist for stationary energy storage research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. It’s an efficient energy carrier, and can be easily stored in pressurized tanks. When needed, the gas can then be converted back into electrical energy via a fuel cell and fed into the grid. But water electrolyzers are expensive. They work under acidic conditions which require corrosion-resistant metal plates and catalysts made from precious metals such as titanium, platinum, and iridium. “Also, the oxygen electrode isn’t very efficient,” says Kathy Ayers, vice-president of R&D at Nel Hydrogen, an Oslo-based company that specializes in hydrogen production and storage. “You lose about 0.3 volts just from the fact that you’re trying to convert water to oxygen or vice versa,” she says. Splitting a water molecule requires 1.23 V of energy.

In a bid to overcome this problem, Nel Hydrogen and Wang’s team at Pacific Northwest joined forces in 2016, after receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The solution they’ve come up with is a fuel cell that acts as both a battery and hydrogen generator. “We call it a redox-flow cell because it’s a hybrid between a redox-flow battery and a water electrolyzer,” explains Wang. A redox-flow battery, in essence a reversible fuel cell, is typically made up of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs, and generates electricity at the battery’s electrodes.

Submission+-US Planning To Announce Criminal Charges Related To Huawei (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. prosecutors are planning to file criminal charges related to Huawei, China’s largest smartphone maker. Huawei has been the target of a broad U.S. crackdown over allegations it stole trade secrets, violated sanctions against Iran and sold equipment that could be used by China’s Communist Party for spying. The criminal charges planned for Monday also would mark an escalation of tensions between the world’s largest economies, which are mired in a trade war that has roiled markets. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and FBI Director Christopher Wray will make a China-related enforcement announcement at 4:30 p.m., according to the Justice Department. They’ll be joined by officials from the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Brooklyn, New York, and Seattle, which have been leading investigations into allegations of trade-secret theft and bank fraud connected to Iran-sanctions violations.

Submission+-Breakthrough ultrasound treatment to reverse dementia moves to human trials

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs. The new announcement regarding the upcoming move to human trials is underpinned by a large funding injection from the Australian government helping accelerate the treatment's development. The first stage is a phase 1 safety trial, kicking off later in 2019, to explore the safety profile of the treatment in human subjects suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Submission+-Netflix is ending reviews july 30th

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Netflix is sending e-mails to subscribers announcing the end of user authored reviews on Netflix. Past reviews are being archived. The stated reason is declining usage. This follows on the previous years decision to remove range voting for user ratings (0 to 5 stars) and substitute a thumbs/up down approval voting system. One suspects that the former is an unintended consequence of the latter, since the purpose of people who write a review is to try to explain the nuances of their decision. An inexpressive rating system defeats that. It can be argued that approval voting has technical advantages in aggregating ratings for a recommendation engine as it doesn't need to normalize the biases in a rating system between different users and mostly heads off gaming the system with exaggerated degrees of rating. But evidently that was also a necessary component of the review process itself regardless of its utility for recommendation engines.

Submission+-LA Councilman Asks City Attorney To 'Review Possible Legal Action' Against Waze (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yet another Los Angeles city councilman has taken Waze to task for creating "dangerous conditions" in his district, and the politician is now "asking the City to review possible legal action." "Waze has upended our City’s traffic plans, residential neighborhoods, and public safety for far too long," LA City Councilman David Ryu said in a statement released Wednesday. "Their responses have been inadequate and their solutions, non-existent. They say the crises of congestion they cause is the price for innovation—I say that’s a false choice." In a new letter sent to the City Attorney’s Office, Ryu formally asked Los Angeles’ top attorney to examine Waze’s behavior. While Ryu said he supported "advances in technology," he decried Waze and its parent company, Google, for refusing "any responsibility for the traffic problems their app creates or the concerns of residents and City officials."

Submission+-How Does Microsoft Avoid Being the Next IBM? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For fans of the platform, the official confirmation that Windows on phones isn't under active development any longer — security bugs will be fixed, but new features and new hardware aren't on the cards --
  isn't a big surprise. This is merely a sad acknowledgement of what we already knew. Last week, Microsoft also announced that it was getting out of the music business, signaling another small retreat from the consumer space. It's tempting to shrug and dismiss each of these instances, pointing to Microsoft's continued enterprise strength as evidence that the company's position remains strong. And certainly, sticking to the enterprise space is a thing that Microsoft could do. Become the next IBM: a stable, dull, multibillion dollar business. But IBM probably doesn't want to be IBM right now—it has had five straight years of falling revenue amid declining relevance of its legacy businesses—and Microsoft probably shouldn't want to be the next IBM, either. Today, Microsoft is facing similar pressures—Windows, though still critical, isn't as essential to people's lives as it was a decade ago—and risks a similar fate. Dropping consumer ambitions and retreating to the enterprise is a mistake. Microsoft's failure in smartphones is bad for Windows, and it's bad for Microsoft's position in the enterprise as a whole.

Submission+-The US Government Wants To Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In one of the biggest wins for the right to repair movement yet, the US Copyright Office suggested Thursday that the US government should take actions to make it legal to repair anything you own, forever—even if it requires hacking into the product's software. Manufacturers—including John Deere, Ford, various printer companies, and a host of consumer electronics companies—have argued that it should be illegal to bypass the software locks that they put into their products, claiming that such circumvention violated copyright law. Thursday, the US Copyright Office said it's tired of having to deal with the same issues every three years; it should be legal to repair the things you buy—everything you buy—forever. "The growing demand for relief under section 1201 has coincided with a general understanding that bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically noninfringing," the report stated. "Repair activities are often protected from infringement claims by multiple copyright law provisions." "The Office recommends against limiting an exemption to specific technologies or devices, such as motor vehicles, as any statutory language would likely be soon outpaced by technology," it continued.

Submission+-SPAM:Direct Counterfactual Quantum Communication Achieved For The First Time

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Quantum communication is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is called counterfactual communication — a type of quantum communication where no particles travel between two recipients.

Theoretical physicists have long proposed that such a form of communication would be possible, but now, for the first time, researchers have been able to experimentally achieve it — transferring a black and white bitmap image from one location to another without sending any physical particles.
Link to Original Source

Submission+-Teachers can use this to see who's learning (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: Until now, researchers had not had a good way to study how people actually experienced what is called "epiphany learning."

In new research, scientists at The Ohio State University used eye-tracking and pupil dilation technology to see what happens as people figured out how to win a strategy game on a computer.

"We could see our study participants figuring out the solution through their eye movements as they considered their options," said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology and economics at Ohio State.

"We could predict they were about to have an epiphany before they even knew it was coming."

This might be useful to determine when you are trying to teach a difficult subject to someone who you're afraid might be inclined to just nod their head. Or maybe this is how the Voight-Kampff test works. (Are you a replicant?) http://www.bfi.org.uk/are-you-...

Submission+-Destructive KillDisk Malware Turns Into Ransomware (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: A recently discovered variant of the KillDisk malware encrypts files and holds them for ransom instead of deleting them. Since KillDisk has been used in attacks aimed at industrial control systems (ICS), experts are concerned that threat actors may be bringing ransomware into the industrial domain.

CyberX VP of research David Atch told SecurityWeek that the KillDisk variant they have analyzed is a well-written piece of ransomware, and victims are instructed to pay 222 bitcoins ($210,000) to recover their files, which experts believe suggests that the attackers are targeting “organizations with deep pockets.”

Submission+-EU court: Linking without permission violates copyright

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: From the "look-but-don't-link dept

Reuters is reporting that Playboy has won a lawsuit against a Netherlands news site for linking to photos without permission.



"It is undisputed that GS Media (which owns GreenStijl)provided the hyperlinks to the files containing the photos for profit and that Sanoma had not authorised the publication of those photos on the internet," the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said in a statement.

"When hyperlinks are posted for profit, it may be expected that the person who posted such a link should carry out the checks necessary to ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published.

The European Commission, the EU executive, is set next week to propose tougher rules on publishing copyrighted content, including a new exclusive right for news publishers to ask search engines like Google to pay to show snippets of their articles.

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If it's working, the diagnostics say it's fine. If it's not working, the diagnostics say it's fine. - A proposed addition to rules for realtime programming

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