Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to three astrophysicists for their work on black holes

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to three astrophysicists for their work on black holes

blognet   Wednesday, October 07, 2020   Comment  

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three astrophysicists Tuesday for work that was literally out of the world, and indeed the universe. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. They were recognized for their work on the gateways to eternity known as black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls in their unsparing maws.

Penrose, a mathematician at Oxford University, was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize for proving that black holes must exist if Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity, is right.

The second half was split between Genzel and Ghez for their relentless and decadeslong investigation of the dark monster here in the centre of our own galaxy, gathering evidence to convict it of being a supermassive black hole.

Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel in physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.

“I’m so thrilled,” she said in an email.

The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

More Einstein, Less Math

Black holes were one of the first and most extreme predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, first announced in November 1915. The theory explains the force we call gravity, as objects try to follow a straight line through a universe whose geometry is warped by matter and energy. As a result, planets as well as light beams follow curving paths, like balls going around a roulette wheel.

Einstein was taken aback a few months later when Karl Schwarzschild, a German astronomer, pointed out that the equations contained an apocalyptic prediction: In effect, cramming too much matter and energy inside too small a space would cause space-time to collapse into a point of infinite density called a singularity. In that place — if you could call it a place — neither Einstein’s equations nor any other physical law made sense.

Einstein could not fault the math, but he figured that in real life, nature would find a way to avoid such a calamity.

In 1965, however, a decade after Einstein’s death, Penrose slammed the door on Einstein’s hopes.

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez have been awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020

Born in 1931 into an intellectual family, Penrose is a professor at the University of Oxford. When he was a child, he recalled in a recent interview, his father and his brother would play mental chess on family hikes, and his job was to keep track of the board.

“My job was the runner,” he said, “I would take the moves from one brother and race up to my father. And I just got exercise by running back and forth.”

A talented mathematician, he invented a new way of portraying space-time, called a Penrose diagram, which bypassed most of the mathematical complexities of general relativity.

His diagrams are now the lingua franca of cosmology. He proved that if too much mass accumulated in too small a place, collapse into a black hole was inevitable. At the boundary of a black hole, called the event horizon, you would have to go faster than the speed of light — the acknowledged cosmic speed limit — to getaway. So you could never escape. Inside the boundary, time and space would switch roles and so all directions would lead downward, to the centre, where the density became infinite and the laws of physics, as we knew them, would break down.

He showed that the black hole would become a gateway to the end of time, the end of the universe.

As they hailed the news, some astronomers and physicists lamented the absence of Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University cosmologist who was arguably the world’s leading black hole theorist until he died in 2018, making him ineligible for the Nobel.

Shortly after Penrose made his breakthrough calculations, Hawking and Penrose collaborated using the same methods to prove that if general relativity was right, the universe must also have had a beginning — a fairly big discovery.

John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, celebrated the accomplishment of Ghez and the other scientists in a tweet. But he added that the moment was poignant.

“I’m thinking of how much Stephen Hawking would have enjoyed sharing a Prize for advances in General Relativity,” he said.

Monster of the Milky Way

Today, astronomers agree that the universe is speckled with monstrous black holes, including beasts lurking in the hearts of most galaxies that are millions and billions of times more massive than the sun. They’ve even taken a picture of one in a galaxy some 55 million light-years away.

But closer to home, at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light-years from here, there is a faint source of radio noise called Sagittarius A*. In 1971 Martin Rees and Donald Lynden-Bell suggested that it was a supermassive black hole.

Working independently, Genzel and Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the centre of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbour a black hole.

Ghez was born in New York on June 16, 1965. She is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the authors of the children’s book “You Can Be a Woman Astronomer.” Noting Tuesday that she was only the fourth woman to win the physics prize, she said that she hoped to inspire young women.

“It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you’re passionate about the science, there is so much that can be done,” she said.

“I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done.”

- Andrea Ghez speaking at today’s press conference where her #NobelPrize in Physics was announced. pic.twitter.com/aVTa5EQqMr

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020

"Completely unexpected and, wow, I'm on cloud 17."

In keeping with the times, #NobelPrize laureate Reinhard Genzel was in the middle of a virtual conference when he was surprised by the call announcing, "This is Stockholm!"

Take a listen to our interview: pic.twitter.com/QenEM0zAJc

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020

This morning Roger Penrose found out he had been awarded this year's #NobelPrize in Physics.

Shortly afterwards he sent us this photo from his home in Oxford. Stay tuned for our phone interview with him - coming soon. pic.twitter.com/EaZxSthlaS

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020

Genzel is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

He grew up in Freiburg, Germany, in the Black Forest. As a young man, he was one of the best javelin throwers in Germany, training with the national team for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Over the years, their observations have crept closer to the conclusion that whatever is at the galactic centre is dark and must have a mass equivalent to 4 million suns, in order to exert enough gravitational pull to keep the stars and gas that circle it in check.

One of the stars, which Genzel calls S2 and Ghez calls S0-2, is a young blue star that follows a very elongated orbit and passes within just 11 billion miles, or 17 light-hours, of the mouth of the putative black hole every 16 years.

During these fraught passages, the star, yanked around an egg-shaped orbit at speeds of up to 5,000 miles per second, should experience the full strangeness of the universe, according to Einstein. That last happened in the summer of 2018, with both teams watching for deviation or surprise from the star.

To conduct that experiment, astronomers needed to know the star’s orbit to a high precision, which in turn required decades of observations with the most powerful telescopes on Earth.

“You need 20 years of data just to get a seat at this table,” said Ghez, who joined the fray in 1995.

In fall 2018, Genzel announced that they had detected the gas clouds circling the centre of the galaxy every 45 minutes or so at 30% the speed of light. Those clouds are so close to the suspected black hole that if they were any closer, they would fall in, according to classical Einsteinian physics, Genzel said.

The results provide “strong support” that the dark thing in Sagittarius “is indeed a massive black hole,” Genzel’s group wrote in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2018.

“Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way,” the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement.

Einstein might grumble, but he would also be proud.

Knowing that black holes exist, physicists say, only reminds us that we don’t understand what goes on inside them and that we don’t really understand gravity.

The black hole “teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,” John Wheeler, one of the leaders of general relativity as a professor at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin, said in his 1998 autobiography.

Most physicists believe that Einstein’s theory of general relativity will need to be modified to cope with extreme situations such as the Big Bang or whatever does happen in black holes.

“We already know Einstein’s theory of gravity is fraying around the edges,” Ghez said in an interview a couple of years ago. “What better places to look for discrepancies in it than a supermassive black hole?”

Tuesday’s award extends a recent streak of prizes for astrophysics.

Last year, cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said “transformed our ideas about the cosmos.”

And in 2017 the committee honoured Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish for the discovery of gravitational waves from black holes.

“Astrophysics seems to own the Nobel physics prize these days,” said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the Kavli Foundation, adding ”and rightly so with all that we are learning about the universe.”

Who Else Won a Nobel Prize This Year?

Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday received the prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus. The Nobel committee said the three scientists had “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”

When Will the Other Nobel Prizes Be Announced?

— The Nobel Prize in chemistry will be announced on Wednesday in Sweden.

— The Nobel Prizes in literature will be announced on Thursday in Sweden. The prizes for both 2018 and 2019 were announced last year after a postponement of the 2018 prize. That occurred after the husband of an academy member was accused, and ultimately convicted, of rape — a crisis that led to the departure of several board members and required the intervention of the king of Sweden.

— The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway.

— The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday next week in Sweden.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-to-three-astrophysicists-for-their-work-on-black-holes-8887611.html

COVID-19 vaccine passports raise concerns about discrimination amin hope for an economic restart

COVID-19 vaccine passports raise concerns about discrimination amin hope for an economic restart

blognet   Tuesday, March 02, 2021   Comment  

The next major flashpoint over coronavirus response has already provoked cries of tyranny and discrimination in Britain, protests in Denmark, digital disinformation in the United States and geopolitical skirmishing within the European Union.

The subject of debate: vaccine passports — government-issued cards or smartphone badges stating that the bearer has been inoculated against the coronavirus.

The idea is to allow families to reunite, economies to restart and hundreds of millions of people who have received a shot to return to a degree of normalcy, all without spreading the virus. Some versions of the documentation might permit bearers to travel internationally. Others would allow entry to vaccinated-only spaces like gyms, concert venues and restaurants.

While such passports are still hypothetical in most places, Israel became the first to roll out its own last week, capitalizing on its high vaccination rate. Several European countries are considering following. President Joe Biden has asked federal agencies to explore options. And some airlines and tourism-reliant industries and destinations expect to require them.

Dividing the world between the vaccinated and unvaccinated raises daunting political and ethical questions. Vaccines go overwhelmingly to rich countries and privileged racial groups within them. Granting special rights for the vaccinated, while tightening restrictions on the unvaccinated, risks widening already-dangerous social gaps.

Vaccine scepticism, already high in many communities, shows signs of spiking if shots become seen as government-mandated. Plans also risk exacerbating COVID nationalism: sparring among nations to advance their citizens’ self-interest over global good.

“Immunity passports promise a way to go back to a more normal social and economic life,” Nicole Hassoun and Anders Herlitz, who study public health ethics, wrote in Scientific American. But with vaccines distributed unequally by race, class and nationality, “it is not obvious that they are ethical.”

Still, there are clear upsides: grandparents reuniting with out-of-town grandchildren; sports, concerts and other events partly but safely returning; resumption of international travel and some tourism; businesses reopened without putting workers at undue risk.

All of that is why, Hassoun and Herlitz wrote, vaccine documents “may be inevitable.”

Widening Society’s Divides

Some countries require proof of vaccination — for example, against yellow fever — to enter. So do schools and daycare facilities in many U.S. states.

But there is little precedent for society-wide restrictions. And by limiting services to people with the proper paperwork, governments would effectively mandate vaccination to use them.

Special privileges for the vaccinated would, by definition, favor demographics that are inoculated at higher rates. In Western countries, those communities tend to be white and well-off.

This evokes an uncomfortable image: professional-class white people disproportionately allowed into shops, baseball games and restaurants, with people of color and members of the working classes disproportionately kept out. If workplaces require proof of vaccination, it could tilt employment as well.

“If vaccines become a passport to doing different things, we’re going to see the communities that have been already hardest hit by COVID being left behind,” said Nicole A. Errett, a University of Washington public health expert.

Then there is enforcement.

“You could easily see a situation where it’s creating discrimination, prejudice and stigma,” said Halima Begum, who runs a British racial equity organization called the Runnymede Trust.

“We already saw, with the coronavirus regulations with lockdown, disproportionate amounts of stops and searches for young minority men,” she said, referring to police-issued searches and fines. “So you can see who is potentially likelier to be grabbed up for not carrying the passport and therefore be denied access.”

That risks increasing public distrust, she said, at a time when governments need perhaps three-quarters of their populations to voluntarily vaccinate.

Still, passport-style policies would, in theory, help control the pandemic as a whole, reducing overall infections and economic disruptions that fall inordinately on underprivileged groups.

The only way to untangle that dilemma, Errett said, is “addressing the inequality itself,” closing the racial and class disparities that have widened throughout the pandemic.

Vaccine Geopolitics

Then there is inequality among nations, mostly relevant for international travel.

The approved coronavirus vaccines have been, with some exceptions, generally distributed among nations rich enough to buy or produce them. The world’s poorest may be two or three years out, although their residents are also less likely to travel across borders.

Yet there are billions in the middle: with the means to travel, and sometimes the need, but not access to shots.

“If we are opening up the world only to people from high-income countries, we are creating a lot of inequity,” Errett said. “We’re cutting people off from resources and from connections that keep economies and communities thriving.”

Still, some poorer countries that rely on tourism are embracing the idea. Thailand’s authorities have said that they hope to set a policy this summer for accepting vaccine passports.

Some experts are urging governments to wait for international standards on the passports before opening up travel, lest uneven standards lead to unsafe practices or geopolitical gamesmanship.

“A challenge since the beginning has been getting countries to do what’s best for the world instead of what’s best for people inside of their borders,” Errett said.

Witness the manoeuvring within the European Union, whose 27 countries share long borders but have starkly different economic needs and vaccination rates.

Southern European states like Spain and Greece, which rely on tourism, are pushing for the bloc to adopt the documents. German and French officials have expressed reservations, at least for now. Their countries have lower vaccination rates, meaning that travel restrictions would put their residents at a relative disadvantage.

A Struggle Over Mandates

When Britain’s foreign secretary speculated recently that proof of vaccination might be required for pubs and stores, a lawmaker in his own party, Mark Harper, retorted, “I don’t think you want to require people to have to have a particular medical procedure before they can go about their day-to-day life.”

California’s vaccine struggle, over whether to tighten school requirements after measles and whooping cough outbreaks highlighted the state’s low immunization rates, offers a worrying preview. Fringe activists had long opposed school vaccination, some motivated by conspiracies, others by what they described as all-natural lifestyles.

When California lawmakers moved to close the state’s generous opt-outs, anti-vaccine groups “pivoted their messaging to one of parental rights,” said Renée DiResta, a Stanford Internet Observatory disinformation expert.

“It attracted a lot more people, and it made the bill partisan,” she said, with Republican state lawmakers near-uniformly opposing it as tyrannical government intrusion.

It passed, as did similar measures in other states. Vaccination increased and preventable disease rates dropped. But the dispute polarized some voters against vaccine mandates and even vaccines themselves. A follow-up bill in 2019 was even more fiercely contested.

Although DiResta supported the bills, she warned that “the spectre of a mandate” could “erode the ability to appeal to people” to get COVID shots on the basis of informed consent.

Backlash, she said, is already forming on social networks, which have been incubators of “anti-vaxxer” sentiment.

“The European conversation around passports has really made it over into the anti-vaxxers communities here,” feeding conspiracies of forced global vaccination, she said.

California’s example suggests that vaccine opponents could exploit discomfort with government mandates to polarize people over whether to get vaccinated at all. Masks and distancing are already politicized in the United States, driving down compliance.

“I think the real risk, honestly, is going to be politicized misinformation,” DiResta said, which might frighten people into believing that “the government is forcing an intervention on you.”

Small minorities outright oppose vaccines. A much larger share — up to one-third of Americans, in one poll, predominantly Republicans — are merely hesitant. The push to achieve herd immunity will depend on that third.

A Muddled Mission

One problem: There is no agreement on the primary purpose of a vaccine passport program.

Governments typically talk about them as a way to open up economies. Individuals, as a way to reenter normal life. Public health experts, as a way to reduce transmissions.

Those goals align, but imperfectly. At some point, authorities have to prioritize.

Errett ticked through implementation questions, broadly unknown, that could force an answer. Would you need two doses to get the document or just one? Do Russian- or Chinese-made vaccines qualify? What are the rules for religious or medical opt-outs? Are some activities restricted to card-carriers until herd immunity, just until infections fall below a certain line — or forever?

“We need to be cognizant of the costs and benefits,” she said, and not just to adjust as we go, but for “the precedent we’re setting.”

“We pandemic people,” she said, “have been saying it since the beginning: We don’t expect this to be the last pandemic that we see.”

Max Fisher c.2021 The New York Times Company

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/covid-19-vaccine-passports-raise-concerns-about-discrimination-amin-hope-for-an-economic-restart-9370001.html

Google, Facebook unveil plans for two new undersea data cables to link Singapore, Indonesia and North America

Google, Facebook unveil plans for two new undersea data cables to link Singapore, Indonesia and North America

blognet   Monday, March 29, 2021   Comment  

Google and Facebook have unveiled plans for two new undersea data cables linking North America and the Asia-Pacific region, weeks after halting one destined for Hong Kong. Facebook said on Sunday it would be investing with partners on the subsea cables known as Echo and Bifrost to connect Singapore, Indonesia and North America, which would increase overall transpacific capacity by 70 percent. "Around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the need for reliable internet access," Facebook said on its engineering blog on Sunday.

"Echo and Bifrost will support further growth for hundreds of millions of people and millions of businesses."

Google indicated Monday it would participate in the Echo cable which would run from Eureka, California to Singapore, "with a stop-over in Guam" and a future connection to Indonesia.

"Echo will be the first-ever cable to directly connect the US to Singapore with direct fiber pairs over an express route," Google Cloud vice president Bikash Koley said.

 

Earlier this month, the two firms halted efforts on a planned undersea cable that would have connected California and Hong Kong, due to tensions between the United States and China.

Last year, the US Department of Justice recommended that the planned cable proposed by Google and Facebook bypass Hong Kong amid concerns it could expose communications traffic to China.

In the new cable projects, Facebook said it was working with partners such as Indonesian companies Telin and XL Axiata and Singapore-based Keppel.

"While these projects are still subject to regulatory approvals, when completed, these cables will deliver much-needed internet capacity, redundancy, and reliability," Facebook said.

"Connecting Singapore, Indonesia and North America, these cable investments reflect our commitment to openness and our innovative partnership model."

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/google-facebook-unveil-plans-for-two-new-undersea-data-cables-to-link-singapore-indonesia-and-north-america-9478341.html

Black holes that 'shouldn’t exist' discovered in the loudest black hole collision on record

Black holes that 'shouldn’t exist' discovered in the loudest black hole collision on record

blognet   Tuesday, October 06, 2020   Comment  

Well, that was some clash of the heavyweights.

Astronomers reported last week that they had detected the loudest, most massive and most violent collision yet between a pair of black holes. Two Goliaths of darkness crashed into each other 7 billion years ago, vibrating space-time and producing a loud, sharp chirp — almost a bang, one astronomer said — lasting just one-tenth of a second in the antennas of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the Virgo interferometer observatory.

That short signal from a galaxy far, far away has left astrophysicists with new questions about how black holes form and grow.

Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago and a member of the LIGO team, called the new discovery “the first LIGO/Virgo detection that’s truly surprising. All the other binary systems that we’ve detected fit reasonably well within expectations. But the black holes in this event aren’t supposed to exist!”

One and perhaps both of the colliding holes were too massive to have been produced by the collapse of a star, according to conventional theories. Moreover, the merger created an even larger black hole, 142 times as massive as the sun, belonging to a whole new category of intermediate-mass, or “missing link,” black holes never reliably seen before.

“Another discovery from the worldwide gravitational-wave detector network that rewrites what we know about our universe,” Zsuzsanna Marka, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who works on LIGO, wrote in an email.

Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College who is not part of the LIGO group, added: “Yes! I’ve been waiting for something like this since I first became interested in gravitational waves.”

The event unfolded at an almost unimaginable distance from Earth — 17 billion light-years away according to standard cosmological calculations that describe an expanding universe. One black hole with 85 times the mass of the sun, and a second with 66 solar masses, collided, creating a black hole 142 times as massive as the sun.

Another eight or so suns’ worth of mass and energy disappeared into gravitational waves, ripples of the space-time fabric, in a split second of frenzy, ringing the universe like a bell on the morning of May 21, 2019.

An international team of scientists who compose the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration reported their findings in two papers published Wednesday in Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Their papers largely affirm a preliminary analysis of the event, known as GW190521 (after the date when it was recorded), made by a group outside the collaborations. In June, a team led by Matthew Graham of the California Institute of Technology, going on publicly available data, ran a preliminary analysis, hoping to beat the LIGO and Virgo groups to the answer.

Using a telescope in California called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, Graham’s team detected a flash of light that could have been caused by the newly formed black hole racing through a disk of dense gas surrounding the center of a faraway galaxy.

They predicted that a final analysis would show that the combined masses of the colliding black holes would exceed 100 solar masses, and that the resulting black hole would spin wildly and have a large recoil velocity.

“This is exactly what LIGO is now reporting,” Graham wrote in an email. “This is a great discovery from LIGO and provides strong evidence in support of the merger model and environment that we have been promoting.”

The discovery is another triumph for the infant branch of gravitational-wave astronomy, and for Virgo in Italy and the twin LIGO facilities in Washington state and Louisiana. Thirty years and $1 billion in the planning and making, the three laboratories use laser light, bouncing between mirrors in L-shaped arms, to detect submicroscopic stretching and compressing of space-time as gravitational waves pass by.

Only confrontations between the most massive denizens of the universe can shake space-time enough to be noticed by these antennas. Black holes are objects predicted by Albert Einstein to be so dense that not even light can escape them.

In September 2015, right after the LIGO antennas went into operation, a pair of colliding black holes was detected, proving both the existence of gravitational waves and of black holes. The discovery earned LIGO’s founders the Nobel Prize in physics.

Since then, a taxonomy of black holes has emerged from the discovery of things banging together out there in the dark.

Two black holes merging in a massive collision [artist's impression] Image: SXS

Most known black holes are the corpses of massive stars that have died and collapsed catastrophically into nothing: dark things a few times as massive as the sun. But galaxies harbor black holes millions or billions of times more massive than that. How these objects can grow so big is an abiding mystery of astronomy.

Until recently there had been scant evidence of black holes of intermediate sizes, with 100 to 100,000 solar masses. The black hole created in the GW190521 merger is the first solid example of this missing link.

“I was searching for heavy black holes for 15 years and here it is!” Sergey Klimenko, a physicist at the University of Florida, wrote in an email. “This discovery is a milestone in gravitational wave astronomy.”

As a result, he said, astronomers may have glimpsed the process by which the universe builds black holes, transforming pipsqueaks into leviathans like the one in the galaxy M87 that was the first ever imaged.

“This is the first and only firm/secure mass measurement of an intermediate mass black hole at the time of its birth,” Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, wrote in an email. “Now we know reliably at least one way” these objects can form, “through the merger of other black holes.”

This merger process could be an important clue to the origin of the heavier of the two black holes that collided in June. That black hole had a mass of 85 suns, and it should not have been existed, according to standard astrophysical logic. Black holes with masses between about 50 and 120 suns cannot be formed, at least from a dying star, so the story and the calculations go.

In stars massive enough to make such a beastly hole, the interior grows so hot when collapsing that light spontaneously creates pairs of electrons and positrons. This makes the star even hotter, which produces more particles, in a runaway reaction that results in a particularly violent explosion called a pair-instability supernova. Such a conflagration leaves nothing behind.

“No neutron star,” Holz said. “No black hole. Nothing.”

He mentioned the black hole in GW190521 with 85 solar masses: “The bigger black hole is right smack in the middle of the region where black holes don’t belong. Nature seems to have ignored all of our careful theoretical calculations arguing that black holes of this mass don’t exist.”

He added: “A discovery like this is simultaneously disheartening and exhilarating. On the one hand, one of our cherished beliefs has been proven wrong. On the other hand, here’s something new and unexpected, and now the race is on to try to figure out what is going on.”

An engaging possibility, Holz and others say, is that the too-heavy hole was made of two smaller black holes that had collided and merged. In that case, the merger seen in June would have been a second- or even third-generation event, one in a hierarchical series of black hole mergers that eventually results in supermassive black holes.

Some astrophysicists think that such mergers are most likely to occur near the centers of galaxies, where supermassive black holes create swirling mosh pits of gas and other objects, and in which thousands of smaller black holes might congregate and breed. That is what Graham’s team had suggested.

But the flare that Graham’s group saw came from a galaxy about 8 billion light-years away, about half as far as the gravitational wave event GW190521, casting their identification of the source in doubt.

Nevertheless, many of the LIGO collaborators, including Kalogera, expressed sympathy with the idea that it is in such giant supermassive black hole mosh pits that bigger black holes are built. These arenas are known as active galactic nuclei, or AGNs.

“I would love the ZTF flash to be true,” Marka of Columbia said. “It is just more exciting.”

K.E. Saavik Ford, an astronomer at the American Museum for Natural History and a member of Graham’s team, called the new LIGO results very exciting.

“We’re super-grateful to them for all of their hard work, and gratified that they do address the AGN scenario extensively in the ApJ paper,” she wrote in an email. “It is the full employment act for AGN modelers!”

Dennis Overbye. c.2020 The New York Times Company

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/black-holes-that-shouldnt-exist-discovered-in-the-loudest-black-hole-collision-on-record-8883481.html

Apple Watch Can Detect COVID-19 A Week Before Symptoms Begin Showing Up

Apple Watch Can Detect COVID-19 A Week Before Symptoms Begin Showing Up

blognet   Sunday, January 17, 2021   Comment  

The Apple Watch is a lot of things and Apple has made sure that the wearable doesn't lag behind in any category. However, the Apple Watch focuses greatly on health and fitness-related features. Now, new studies by Mount Sinai Health System in New York and Stanford University in California have revealed that the Apple Watch and other smartwatches like Fitbit can predict COVID-19 positive ahead of time. This is something remarkable in times like these. Let's dive in to see some more details on the subject.

Apple Watch and Other Smartwatches Can Help Detect COVID-19 A Week Before Symptoms Begin Showing Up

The Apple Watch can detect COVID-19 a week before the symptoms start appearing as per the researchers over at Mount Sinai. Apple's wearable has the ability to detect minor changes in the heartbeat which could potentially lead up to being COVID-19. According to research, it can be detected as early as seven days.

The Apple Watch measures heart rate variability that measures the interval between each heartbeat. However, the same metric is also influenced by inflammation in a person's body. Henceforth, the reading of the inflammation and Covid could be similar. Covid users could see their heart rate variability decrease that suggests that minor variation exists between heartbeats.

“We already knew that heart rate variability markers change as inflammation develops in the body, and Covid is an incredibly inflammatory event,” Hirten told CBS MoneyWatch. “It allows us to predict that people are infected before they know it.”

The research was conducted based on tracking 300 health care workers who wore an Apple Watch between April 29 and September 29. Stanford University in California also conducted a study in which participants wore different smartwatches, including the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Garmin. The study revealed that 81 percent of the participants had their hear rate shoot up more or less nine and a half days before the symptoms appeared. In addition to this, almost two-thirds of cases were detected ranging from four to seven days before the COVID-19 symptoms started showing up. This study was conducted with over 5,000 participants.

Apple is consistently adding more features to the Apple Watch and it is also aiming to improve user's fitness routines as well. What do you think about the study? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

The post Apple Watch Can Detect COVID-19 A Week Before Symptoms Begin Showing Up by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.

source https://wccftech.com/apple-watch-can-detect-covid-19-a-week-before-symptoms-begin-showing-up/

International Astronomical Union names crater on the Moon's South Pole after Arctic explorer Matthew Henson

International Astronomical Union names crater on the Moon's South Pole after Arctic explorer Matthew Henson

blognet   Wednesday, September 22, 2021   Comment  

The International Astronomical Union has named a crater on the South Pole of the Moon after Matthew Henson, a Black man who became one of the first people to stand on top of the world.

Located in the Moon’s South Pole between Sverdrup and de Gerlache craters, the Henson Crater is in the same region where the Artemis program by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) aims to land the next generation of lunar explorers. The explorers will be selected from the space agency’s increasingly diverse astronaut pool.

The Artemis mission aims to establish the infrastructure to advance human exploration at the Moon, and later Mars, a fitting continuation of the legacy of Earth explorers like Henson. The proposal to name the crater after the Arctic explorer was moved by Jordan Bretzfelder, an Exploration Science summer intern with the Lunar and Planetary Institute, in Houston, Texas. The institute is a part of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, which in turn is headquartered at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

According to Bretzfelder, a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that “it felt like a disservice” that Henson’s contributions to polar science had not been appropriately recognized, adding that she was proud to be a part of rectifying it.

In the final push of the expedition, Henson was in the lead as the group sought to reach the North Pole. Unable to tell their precise location because of a mist that had covered the Sun, the group later realised that they had reached the Pole, with Henson’s footprints as the first. He did receive appreciation for his achievements, but many credited Peary with the historic achievement, as they were hesitant to give credit to a Black Man for successfully accomplishing what many had tried and failed to do for years.

This news comes after NASA’s plan to land its VIPER lunar near the Nobile Crater in the Moon’s South Pole to explore the region for water and other resources.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/international-astronomical-union-names-crater-on-the-moons-south-pole-after-arctic-explorer-matthew-henson-9985951.html

Apple vs Epic Games in court: A trial that could alter App Store future and forever change how apps work

AUTO GAMING How to News PHOTOS REVIEWS SCIENCE Videos

Apple vs Epic Games in court: A trial that could alter App Store future and forever change how apps work

blognet   Sunday, May 02, 2021   Comment  

On a Friday in August, Tim Sweeney, a billionaire game developer, sent an email to a contact at Microsoft: “You’ll enjoy the upcoming fireworks show.”

A week later, Sweeney’s game Fortnite delivered good news to players on iPhones: They would get a discount on items in the game if they completed the purchases outside Apple’s payment systems.

The change violated Apple’s rules and cut the iPhone maker off from collecting a commission on one of the world’s most popular games. Hours later, Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store.

(Also read: Epic Games sues Apple, Google for dropping Fortnite from app stores for payment policy violation [August 2020])

Sweeney’s company, Epic Games, immediately sued Apple in federal court. It also began a public relations broadside that was months in the works, complete with a trending #FreeFortnite hashtag and a parody of Apple’s iconic “1984” ad depicting Apple CEO Tim Cook as an evil corporate overlord with an apple for a head.

Epic’s attack was the most direct challenge to Apple’s power in years, and nine months later, the fight is heading to federal court in Oakland, California. On Monday, a trial is scheduled to open with testimony from Sweeney on why he believes Apple is a monopoly abusing its power.

The trial, expected to last about three weeks, carries major implications. If Epic wins, it will upend the economics of the $100 billion app market and create a path for millions of companies and developers to avoid sending up to 30 percent of their app sales to Apple.

An Epic victory would also invigorate the antitrust fight against Apple. Federal and state regulators are scrutinising Apple’s control over the App Store, and on Friday, the European Union charged Apple with violating antitrust laws over its app rules and fees. Apple faces two other federal lawsuits about its App Store fees — one from developers and one from iPhone owners — that are seeking class-action status.

Beating Apple would also bode well for Epic’s upcoming trial against Google over the same issues on the app store for Android devices. That case is expected to go to trial this year and would be decided by the same federal judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California.

If Apple wins, however, it will strengthen its grip over mobile apps and stifle its growing chorus of critics, further empowering a company that is already the world’s most valuable and that topped $200 billion in sales over just the past six months.

The trial will center on a legal debate over whether Apple is a monopoly. Epic’s lawyers have argued that companies need iPhones to reach customers and that Apple unfairly forces app makers to use its payment system and pay its fees.

Apple’s lawyers have responded that iPhones are merely one way to reach consumers and that Apple’s fees are in line with industry standards.

Apple probably has the upper hand, legal experts said. Courts are often more sympathetic to defendants in antitrust trials, since companies have a right to choose with whom they do business.

But Epic is arguing that Apple is using its position of power to stifle competition, a legal theory “that has worked and overcome that disadvantage,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University. The Department of Justice made a similar argument against Microsoft in its antitrust suit two decades ago.

(Also read: Epic Games files complaint against Apple to UK watchdog for alleged 'monopolistic practices')

The case might come down to one narrow technical question: What is the market these two are fighting over? Epic argues that the case is about iPhones and that Apple has a clear monopoly on them. Apple lawyers insist that the market in question includes all gaming platforms — from smartphones to video game consoles to desktop computers — and that Apple hardly has a monopoly there.

The answer will be up to Gonzalez Rogers. And after she decides this case, she is set to hear the next two App Store lawsuits seeking class-action status.

An Apple spokesperson said in a statement that Apple’s top executives would show how the App Store had been good for the world. “We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues,” she said.

Epic declined to comment.

Fortnite, a battle royale video game, is the biggest hit of Epic’s 30 years in business. It got there, in part, because Sweeney pushed the companies behind the big gaming consoles — Microsoft, Sony Group and Nintendo — to let players battle each other across different devices, meaning a Microsoft Xbox owner could play a Sony PlayStation owner for the first time.

In 2018, Epic released Fortnite in an iPhone app. In about two years, Epic earned roughly $1 billion from Fortnite and its other iPhone apps. But it had to pay about 30 percent of that to Apple. Epic was paying similar commissions to the gaming console makers.

Sweeney has said in interviews and on Twitter that he realised the app store commissions meant that Apple and Google could sometimes profit more on a game than the developers who had made it. He saw an opportunity to challenge the tech giants.

Jack Nicas and Erin Griffith[c.2021 The New York Times Company]

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/apple-vs-epic-games-in-court-a-trial-that-could-alter-app-store-future-and-forever-change-how-apps-work-9586771.html

AMD CEO, Lisa Su, Expects Chip Shortages To Continue In First Half of 2022, Easing Down in Second Half

AMD CEO, Lisa Su, Expects Chip Shortages To Continue In First Half of 2022, Easing Down in Second Half

blognet   Tuesday, September 28, 2021   Comment  

In an interview with CNBC during the Code Conference in Beverly Hills in California, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, stated that she expects chip shortages to continue in the first half of 2022 & ease down in the second half of the same year.

AMD CEO Expects Chip Shortages To Continue In 2022, Should Ease Down In Second Half of 2022

The overall semiconductor industry has been hit with one of the worst chip shortages ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. Things started to get bad in late 2019 and got worse between 2020-2021. The industry has been trying to rebound from the shortages but everything has been unsuccessful so far.

AMD and several other chip giants have had their fair share of ups and downs in terms of supply but Lisa Su acknowledges that it is different this time.

The global chip shortage will become less severe in the second half of 2022, AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Monday, though she warned that the first half of the year will be “likely tight.”

“We’ve always gone through cycles of ups and downs, where demand has exceeded supply, or vice versa,” Su said at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “This time, it’s different.”

“It might take, you know, 18 to 24 months to put on a new plant, and in some cases even longer than that,” she said. “These investments were started perhaps a year ago.”

“The pandemic has just taken demand to a new level,” Su said.

via CNBC

According to AMD's CEO, the chip shortages, which are not limited to just CPUs and GPUs, will continue in the first half of 2022 with signs of recovery expected within the second half of 2022. Previously, both AMD's & NVIDIA's CEO had stated that the shortages will persist throughout this year (2021) and that has turned out to be true.

Dr. Lisa Su was recently appointed by US President, Joe Biden, as a part of his council of Advisors on Science & Technology. She was among the several key executives from the tech industry that also include NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google personnel. Talking to CNN, US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, stated that the chip shortage has become so bad that it will be a huge problem impacting the Holiday Season which plays a crucial part in helping boost the US economy post-COVID-19.

Honestly I think we're going to be struggling with it well into next year until we can really smooth out some of these bottlenecks."

US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo via CNN

The Biden administration has been pushing Congress to enact a $52 Billion bill known as the 'Chips for America Act' that would 'incentivize increased semiconductor production & research in the US.'

What we have seen so far is that as supply is unable to meet the demand of consumers, retailers and distributors around the globe are artificially inflating the prices. And users end up with no choice but to pay those higher prices to gain access to tech products. Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, believes that there's a slight chance that the chip shortage might continue into 2023 which is even worse news. We hope it doesn't come down to that and normalization is seen in the supply and chip industry by the end of 2022.

The post AMD CEO, Lisa Su, Expects Chip Shortages To Continue In First Half of 2022, Easing Down in Second Half by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

source https://wccftech.com/amd-ceo-lisa-su-expects-chip-shortages-to-continue-in-first-half-of-2022-easing-down-in-second-half/

General Motors and Microsoft team up to commercialise self-driving vehicles

General Motors and Microsoft team up to commercialise self-driving vehicles

blognet   Wednesday, January 20, 2021   Comment  

General Motors is teaming up with Microsoft to accelerate its rollout of electric, self-driving cars. In the partnership announced Tuesday, the companies said Microsoft’s Azure cloud and edge computing platform would be used to “commercialise its unique autonomous vehicle solutions at scale.” Microsoft joins General Motors, Honda and other institutional investors in a combined new equity investment of more than $2 billion in Cruise, bringing its valuation to about $30 billion.

Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, has been a leader in driverless technology and got the go-ahead from California late last year to test its automated vehicles in San Francisco without backup drivers.

Auto companies have been joining forces and bringing technology firms on board to try to spread out the enormous costs – and by nature, risks – of developing self-driving and electric vehicles.

Honda is in on the Cruise project with GM, Volkswagen and Ford have teamed up with Pittsburgh autonomous vehicle company Argo AI, and Hyundai joined with Fiat Chrysler last summer in a deal to use Waymo’s driverless car technology.

Toyota and Uber are also working together, while Amazon skipped over the automaker part of the equation and last summer bought self-driving technology company Zoox, which is developing an autonomous vehicle for a ride-hailing service.

Mass adoption of driverless vehicles — and profits — are still a ways off, said industry analyst Sam Abuelsamid of Guidehouse Insights.

(Also read: Apple is reportedly in talks with Hyundai to make its first-ever driverless electric car)

“The reality is that the automated driving landscape is taking much longer to mature that had been anticipated a few years ago,” Abuelsamid said. “It’s probably going to be mid-decade before we start to see significant volumes of these vehicles.”

Abuelsamid added that the importance of adding a company like Microsoft to the mix is its cloud computing power and the ability to analyze data from the vehicles to improve the technology.

“Microsoft is a great addition to the team as we drive toward a future world of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion,” said GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. “Microsoft will help us accelerate the commercialization of Cruise’s all-electric, self-driving vehicles and help GM realize even more benefits from cloud computing as we launch 30 new electric vehicles globally by 2025 and create new businesses and services to drive growth.”

General Motors has been aggressively revamping its image, saying the industry has reached a history-changing inflection point for mass adoption of electric vehicles. The 112-year-old Detroit automaker this month unveiled a new corporate logo to signify its new direction as it openly pivots to electric vehicles. It wants to be seen as a clean vehicle company, rather than a builder of cloud-spewing gas-powered pickups and SUVs.

GM scrapped its old square blue logo for a lower case gm surrounded by rounded corners and an ‘m’ that looks like an electrical plug.

Shares in GM jumped more than 9 percent in afternoon trading, to $54.58.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/general-motors-and-microsoft-team-up-to-commercialise-self-driving-vehicles-9220701.html

Virgin Orbit launches seven satellites from three different customers on 747 plane

Virgin Orbit launches seven satellites from three different customers on 747 plane

blognet   Thursday, July 01, 2021   Comment  

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit delivered satellites from three countries into space Wednesday, its second successful rocket launch from a plane.

The company’s modified 747 jet dubbed Cosmic Girl jet took off from California’s Mojave Desert, carrying the 21-meter rocket beneath its left wing. Once the plane was over the Pacific near the Channel Islands, the LauncherOne rocket peeled away, then fired its engine to head to space. The drop occurred at an altitude of about 11,000 meters.

Camera views showed the package of seven small satellites on the end of the second stage, against the curve of the blue Earth. The satellites are from the US Defense Department, the Royal Netherlands Air Force and Poland’s SatRevolution company, which is working to set up an Earth-observing constellation.

Here's a glimpse of rocket drop today from the cameras onboard our flying launchpad, Cosmic Girl. ✈️#TubularBells pic.twitter.com/JiVTNmw71d

— Virgin Orbit (@VirginOrbit) June 30, 2021

Virgin Orbit later declared success, saying the satellites were in the proper orbit.

Branson — whose Virgin Galactic company is close to launching paying customers to the edge of space — planted a kiss on the cheek of Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart, once the satellites reached orbit.

There is no greater sight in the world. Or off it.

Congratulations to our three customers on a perfect start to their missions. #TubularBells pic.twitter.com/khpFEOqddX

— Virgin Orbit (@VirginOrbit) June 30, 2021

“It’s a pinch-yourself moment,” Branson said. “Cheers! Well done, everybody.”

Unbelievably, our adapted Virgin Atlantic 747 dropped @VirginOrbit's rocket to fly into orbit at exactly 7:47! Talk about perfect timing: https://t.co/YVjYYARq8T pic.twitter.com/LJG3dMvv4B

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) June 30, 2021

In an interview later with The Associated Press, Branson declined to say whether he will be on Virgin Galactic’s next test flight to space — or the one after that as originally planned. The company plans three more test flights of its rocket ship this summer and fall before taking paying passengers next year.

“All I can say is when the engineers tell me that I can go to space, I’m ready, fit and healthy to go,” Branson told the AP. “So we’ll see.”

Congratulations to our partners on the successful launch of STP-27VPA today! #PartnersinSpace #SpaceStartsHere https://t.co/mzsWm9Jzp2 @TheRealVOXSpace @VirginOrbit

— Space and Missile Systems Center (@USSF_SMC) June 30, 2021

Virgin Orbit sent its first batch of satellites into orbit in January; the 10 NASA-sponsored satellites were designed and built by universities. A flight demo last year was unsuccessful.

Virgin Orbit said its air-launched system can put satellites into orbit on relatively short notice, compared with the more traditional way of launching rockets from the ground. Branson hopes to make satellite launches “almost routine” from the Mojave Air and Space Port.

The company’s next launch is planned for this fall, according to Hart.

Branson named Wednesday’s mission Tubular Bells after the music made famous in the 1973 horror film “The Exorcist.” It was the first album put out by Virgin Records.

A few hours later, SpaceX launched a rocket from Cape Canaveral, carrying 88 mini-satellites to a rare polar orbit.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/virgin-orbit-launches-seven-satellites-from-three-different-customers-on-747-plane-9769301.html

Blizzard Harassment, Drinking Further Detailed, Activision Meddling Only Deepened Issues

Blizzard Harassment, Drinking Further Detailed, Activision Meddling Only Deepened Issues

blognet   Friday, August 06, 2021   Comment  

A new pair of in-depth reports from The Washington Post and Bloomberg have provided new details on the environment at Blizzard Entertainment that resulted in California filing a bombshell lawsuit against the publisher. Much of the WaPo and Bloomberg reports jive with what’s already been alleged – that Blizzard fostered an environment where women were frequently inappropriately propositioned, harassed, and/or assaulted – but they go into greater detail about some aspects of the company culture.

For those who haven’t been keeping up, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) has filed suit against Activision Blizzard, alleging gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment at the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft publisher. Activision Blizzard’s official response to the suit accuses the DFEH of “distorted […] and false” descriptions and insists the picture painted is “is not the Blizzard workplace of today.” An open letter objecting to the official response was signed by thousands of current and former Acti-Blizz employees, and a walkout was staged last week. Acti-Blizz CEO Bobby Kotick would eventually apologize for the company’s initial response, calling it “tone deaf.” Blizzard president J. Allen Brack has also been replaced by relative newcomers to the studio, Mike Ybarra and Jen Oneal.

One thing both reports delve into, is the alleged drinking culture at Blizzard, with many teams having access to alcohol at work, including frozen margarita machines and full on bars. In addition to the “cube crawls” described in the DFEH lawsuit, in which employees would get drunk and move between cubicles schmoozing (and sometimes harassing), Bloomberg details employees vomiting into trash cans on company time and heavy after-hours drinking and hazing sessions. According to WaPo, this booze-soaked atmosphere was allowed to continue until 2019, when some efforts were made to dial things back, including implementing a two-drink limit at events (a rule many managed to get around).

Per WaPo, three senior leaders were let go between 2018 and 2020 for “harassment or other toxic behavior.” These include former World of Warcraft creative director Alex Afrasiabi, who was specifically named in the lawsuit, esports team exec Tyler Rosen, and chief technology officer Ben Kilgore, who was being groomed to take over the company from co-founder Mike Morhaime before being let go.

Perhaps the most interesting thing revealed by these latest reports is the affect Activision’s growing influence over Blizzard has had on the studio’s culture. As we’ve reported, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and his deputies have been exerting more pressure on Blizzard in recent years, particularly since J. Allen Brack took over the reigns. According to Bloomberg, this only exacerbated the toxicity at the studio. Blizzard devs have been forced to do more with less, and with the prospect of layoffs hanging over their heads, employees have been reluctant to cast their teams in a bad light by reporting misconduct.

If you have the time, I highly suggest you check out both the Bloomberg and Washington Post articles, as they go into more detail than we can cover here, and paint a much fuller picture of the what went wrong behind the scenes at Blizzard. You can catch up on Wccftech’s own extensive coverage of the Activision Blizzard lawsuit and it’s fallout here.

The post Blizzard Harassment, Drinking Further Detailed, Activision Meddling Only Deepened Issues by Nathan Birch appeared first on Wccftech.

source https://wccftech.com/blizzard-harassment-drinking-activision-meddling/

NASA-ESA Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite sends back first sea level measurements

NASA-ESA Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite sends back first sea level measurements

blognet   Thursday, December 10, 2020   Comment  

A newly launched European-US satellite designed to continue a decades-long record of tracking global sea levels has sent back its first measurements, NASA said Thursday. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite was launched 21 November from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California and controllers spent several weeks activating instruments and making sure operations were normal. The first measurements provided information on sea surface height, wave height and wind speed off the southern tip of Africa. Josh Willis, the project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement that “the data look fantastic.”

Named for a late NASA official who had a key role in developing space-based oceanography, the satellite’s main instrument is an extremely accurate radar altimeter that bounces energy off the sea surface.

Space-based sea level measurements have been uninterrupted since the 1992 launch of the U.S.-French TOPEX-Poseidon satellite.

The rate of sea-level rise has doubled since then to 0.16 inch (4 millimetres) per year, almost entirely due to the combination of meltwater from land-based glaciers and ice sheets and the fact that seawater expands as it warms, NASA said.

TOPEX-Poseidon familiarized the public with the concept of ocean surface topography with data turned into brightly coloured graphics of the globe showing warming and cooling watermarking weather-influencing El Nino and La Nina conditions.

TOPEX-Poseidon was followed by a series of satellites including the current Jason-3.

Sometime this month, Sentinel-6 will be moved higher from an initial orbit to its operational orbit, where it will trail Jason-3 by 30 seconds so scientists can cross-check the data to ensure continuity. When that is assured, Sentinel-6 will become the primary satellite.

In addition to NASA, the mission involves the European Space Agency, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, the European Commission, France’s National Center for Space Studies, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Also read: NASA-ESA launch SENTINEL-6 Micheal Freilish satellite to monitor the oceans

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/nasa-esa-sentinel-6-michael-freilich-satellite-sends-back-first-sea-level-measurements-9100781.html

Epic Games v Apple Lawsuit Ruling Called to be Overturned by Epic in New Filing

Epic Games v Apple Lawsuit Ruling Called to be Overturned by Epic in New Filing

blognet   Sunday, January 23, 2022   Comment  

The Epic Games v. Apple lawsuits that took up a big part of 2021 are experiencing more developments, despite both companies essentially losing big throughout the escapade. However, before we get to today’s update, let’s give a brief recollection of what’s happened thus far.

Back in the middle of 2020, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney had been repeatedly discussing how the Apple App Store had been taking a 30% cut of profits from games and purchases sold on the storefront, which is pretty normal, all things considered. Epic had decided to then offer options to compensate them directly, which led to Apple promptly removing Fortnite from iOS.

A big lawsuit occurred and both companies lost big last year as a split decision was reached, and U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Friday that Epic failed to prove that Apple is a monopolist and, as such, it now owes Apple revenue commissions as back payment. The judge also ruled that Apple cannot keep developers from directing customers to alternative payment methods outside its App Store, citing California competition laws.

Fast forward to earlier this week and there’s been yet another new development for the lawsuit. However, Epic is the one making a move now, now arguing that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers “erred” her ruling that the App Store and its guidelines do not violate antitrust laws. This could possibly be done as a way to minimize losses from the first lawsuit, and an excerpt can be seen below:

“Epic told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that a lower-court judge “erred” in finding that App Store rules and restrictions didn’t violate antitrust law. Epic had shown that “Apple unlawfully maintains its monopolies in the iOS app distribution and in-app payment solutions markets by expressly excluding all competitors,” the game maker said in its filing. Moreover, Apple has “ample economic power to coerce developers” into using its own payment system, Epic said.

Epic asked the court to overrule the ruling and send the case back to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, with instructions on how to address issues raised in its antitrust suit. “If not reversed, this decision would upend established principles of antitrust law and, as the district court itself recognized, undermine sound antitrust policy,” the game maker said in its filing.”

If you’re curious, you can view more of the document here, and we’ll update you when more information on the lawsuit is released.

The post Epic Games v Apple Lawsuit Ruling Called to be Overturned by Epic in New Filing by Ule Lopez appeared first on Wccftech.

Apple vs Epic Games trial: Slide presentation review shows App Store has generated $2.1 billion in billings

Apple vs Epic Games trial: Slide presentation review shows App Store has generated $2.1 billion in billings

blognet   Friday, May 07, 2021   Comment  

Apple’s top app store executive on Thursday faced an avalanche of documents unleashed by an Epic Games lawyer aiming to prove allegations that the iPhone maker has been gouging app makers as part of a scheme hatched by Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs. The confrontation in an Oakland, California, courtroom came during the fourth day of an antitrust trial targeting the empire that Apple has built around its iPhone and the digital storefront that serves as the exclusive outlet for people to install apps on the ubiquitous device.

Epic, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, contends Apple’s insistence that apps to pay a 15 percent to 30 percent commission on transactions has turned into illegal monopoly that that should be blown up so other options can be offered on the iPhone, iPad and iPod.

Apple so far has mounted a fierce defense of its so-called “walled garden,” in part by highlighting evidence that its app store commissions and practices mirror those of major video game consoles such as PlayStation, Xbox and Switch that Epic has embraced.

After spending the first three days of the trial soliciting testimony from Epic’s own executives and other parties sympathetic to the company’s case, Epic attorney Katherine Forrest and her supporting team took their first stab an Apple executive — Matt Fischer, who has been running the app store since 2010.

While Fischer was on the witness stand, Forrest repeatedly asked him to review e-mails and slide presentations revolving around the app store’s finances, concerns about fraudulent activity and complaints about Apple highlighting its own services in the search results in the app.

Although significant sections of the documents were redacted to shield confidential business information, they still revealed intriguing tidbits.

For instance, a November 2010 slide presentation showed that the app store already had generated $2.1 billion in billings — far more than Jobs envisioned when he came up with the idea in 2008, a year after release of the first iPhone.

Not long after the app store opened, Jobs speculated that it at most might become a $1 billion business. “We don’t expect this to be a big profit generator,” Jobs said in an interview that Fischer shared with his team in July 2018 as a reminder of how far the app store had come since its inception.

Epic contends app store’s unexpectedly fast start prompted Jobs, who died in August 2011, to shift gears and draw up a new strategy to trap iPhone users by building the walled garden around the device and the app store. Fischer told Forrest that he never heard of such a plan, although he conceded it was possible the strategy was created before he took over management of the app store and was never told about it.

Apple has never revealed how much money it makes from the app store but estimates have pegged its annual profit at $15 billion to $18 billion. The Cupertino, California, company has disclosed that it has invested more than $100 billion in the iPhone and its supporting software, including the app store, to help support its argument that Epic simply wants to freeload off its innovations by evading commissions that have been in place for more than a decade.

Epic also tried to cast doubt on one of Apple’s justifications for forbidding other app stores on the iPhone. Apple says its walled garden and commissions help protect consumers against malicious activity that could defraud them and invade their personal privacy.

Forrest confronted Fischer with a variety of documents raising security questions, including a July 2018 email in which he worried about “an epidemic of apps that are trying to to defraud consumers.”

Under questioning by an Apple lawyer, Fischer said he wasn’t responsible for the store’s privacy, security and fraud controls.

“We have been fighting and combatting fraud for a long time,” Fischer testified on the stand.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/apple-vs-epic-games-trial-slide-presentation-review-showed-app-store-has-already-generated-2-1-billion-in-billings-9600231.html

Apple vs Epic trial: Experts believe Apple has upper hand, doubt judge will agree with Epic’s 'narrow market definition'

Apple vs Epic trial: Experts believe Apple has upper hand, doubt judge will agree with Epic’s 'narrow market definition'

blognet   Friday, May 14, 2021   Comment  

Apple seems to be prevailing in an antitrust trial examining whether its mobile app store illegally skims profits from smaller companies. But the tech giant’s apparent edge has been carved out amid nagging questions about the financial vise it holds people in when they buy digital services on iPhones, iPads and iPods. If nothing else, the skirmish has sharpened the focus on the exclusive payment system that Apple has built into transactions occurring within apps installed on its family of mobile devices.

Apple has collected a 15 percent to 30 percent commission on those in-app purchases for the past 13 years, fueling a moneymaking machine that has helped the company increase its market value from about $150 billion in 2008 to more than $2 trillion today.

Those apps avoid a commission when their customers pay for their services through other options, such as a web browser. But Apple forbids apps from posting any links or making any other suggestions that steer people toward those other alternatives.

The anti-steering provision prompted Epic Games, the maker of the popular video game Fortnite, to sue Apple last year and set the stage for the trial now approaching the end of its second week in an Oakland, California, courtroom.

To prevail, Epic will have to persuade US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that Apple’s app store has become a monopoly that has enabled the Cupertino, California, company to engage in price gouging. That argument will likely require Gonzalez Rogers to embrace Epic’s contention that the iPhone’s software and the app store are large enough to represent a market by themselves.

That has been a tough case to make, largely because the same commission rates have long been charged by similar stores operated by the leading video game consoles — Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Switch — as well as on smartphones and other devices running on Google’s Android system.

What’s more, Apple has never raised its commissions, and last year lowered them for companies that generate less than $1 million in annual sales on its products — a concession that applies to the overwhelming majority of the roughly 1.8 million apps now in its store.

Antitrust expert Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said he doubts Gonzalez Rogers will agree with Epic’s narrow market definition. And that, he said, gives Apple the clear upper hand in the case so far.

“This is a case about market power, so even if there is bad behavior going on, it won’t make a difference if Apple isn’t (judged) a monopolist,” Hovenkamp told The Associated Press.

Epic on Thursday stepped up its efforts to turn the tide and prove Apple holds a monopoly on app distribution. While grilling Apple economic expert Loren Hitt, Epic rolled out evidence that many of the games that produce the most revenue aren’t available to play on consoles.

It remains to be seen whether any of that data will sway Gonzalez Rogers. But the judge has clearly been troubled by Apple’s anti-steering requirements, based on her comments and questions during the past few days of the trial.

Her concerns crystallized while one of Apple’s expert witnesses, Richard Schmalensee, was on the stand.

(Also read: Apple vs Epic trial: Tim Sweeney acknowledges that Epic brazenly violated contract with Apple to make a point)

Schmalensee, formerly dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, also defended American Express in an antitrust case challenging its prohibition on merchants recommending customers use other credit cards with lower transaction fees — a policy the US Supreme Court upheld in a 2018 decision.

After Schmalensee likened Apple’s in-app commissions to a credit card terminal that charges a fee for being part of its store, Gonzalez Rogers questioned why an app couldn’t display different payment options, similar to the way stores can show a sign at checkout stands displaying the different credit cards and other forms of payment they accept. She suggested some sort of button or link might be inserted into apps allowing consumers to choose another payment method.

That is something Epic would like, given the main motives underlying its lawsuit. Epic has two goals: to avoid giving Apple a cut of its sales to Fortnite players making impulse purchases for digital goods while playing the game; and it wants Apple to allow competition on the iPhone, including Epic’s own own unprofitable app store that charges a 12 percent commission.

(Also read: Apple vs Epic Games trial: Slide presentation review shows App Store has generated $2.1 billion in billings)

But Apple insists that its payment system should remain the only option for in-app transactions on the iPhone and its other devices. It argues this helps pay for the $100 billion it says it has invested in mobile software, as well as protecting its customers’ against potential security threats.

Hovenkamp interpreted Gonzalez Rogers’ questions about Apple’s anti-steering requirements as “an invitation to settlement” of the case before she issues her decision at some point after the trial ends late this month.

(Also read: Apple vs Epic Games in court: A trial that could alter App Store future and forever change how apps work)

Even if Gonzalez Rogers sides with Apple and upholds the status quo, Epic could still win if the issues aired out in the trial raise consumers’ awareness about the different options available to them, said Daniel Lyons, a Boston College law professor following the case.

“Even if they lose the case, they have been playing a court-of-public-opinion game,” Lyons said. “You spend a few million dollars on lawyers and you are a company that winds up being in the headlines for sticking up for the little guy. Maybe that’s a win in itself.”

(Also read: Apple cuts ties with recent hire following employee backlash about sexist remarks)

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/apple-vs-epic-trial-experts-believe-apple-has-upper-hand-doubt-judge-will-agree-with-epics-narrow-market-definition-9620681.html

Google I/O 2021: Google and Samsung announce the merge of Wear OS and Tizen

Google I/O 2021: Google and Samsung announce the merge of Wear OS and Tizen

blognet   Wednesday, May 19, 2021   Comment  

At the Google I/O 2021, Google and Samsung said they were teaming up on a joint software platform for smartwatches and other wearables in a move ramping up competition with market leader Apple. The move means Samsung will use Google's Wear OS for its upcoming Galaxy smartwatches instead of its own Tizen platform. "We're bringing the best of Wear and Tizen into a single, unified platform," said Google Wear project director Bjorn Kilburn. "By working together we have been able to take strengths of each and combine them into an experience that has faster performance, longer battery life and more of the apps you love available for the watch."

The combination will allow all device markets to use this platform, creating an ecosystem that could challenge Apple, the longtime leader in the smartwatch segment with about a third of the market, as Google integrates its newly acquired wearables maker Fitbit.

We’re combining the best of @wearosbygoogle and @SamsungMobile Tizen into a unified wearable platform. ⌚ Apps will start faster, battery life will be longer and you'll have more choice than ever before, from devices to apps and watch faces. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/vj2aYZD81x

— Google (@Google) May 18, 2021

Samsung vice president Janghyun Yoon said in a separate statement the South Korean firm "constantly pursues new ways to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers," adding, "That's why we decided to team up with Google... to bring the best of our platforms together into one unified experience."

The announcement came at Google's annual developer conference, held online for a second consecutive year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

At the event, Google unveiled a series of updates and upgrades to its services including maps, search, shopping and photos, while giving a preview of its ongoing research projects.

Google offered a glimpse of its planned AI search tool which it aims to deploy more complex tasks across multiple languages.

(Also read: Google I/O 2021: Google's Project Starline will let you have almost face-to-face conversations through a magic window)

With the so-called Multitask Unified Model, "we're able to better understand much more complex questions and needs," senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said, noting that this is "trained across 75 different languages and many different tasks at once, allowing it to develop a more comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge than previous models."

Google released a test version of Android 12, updating the mobile system used by some three billion devices, with increased privacy controls and personalization.

The tech giant also unveiled its new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California which will carry out research in the emerging field of quantum computing and develop its own quantum processor chips.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai announced a push on geothermal energy as part of Google's sustainability efforts. This will include a geothermal-powered data center in Nevada and installation of "the largest geothermal pile system in North America" at its new California campus.

"We need to go beyond wind and solar and tap into sources of on-demand clear energy like geothermal," to meet sustainability goals, Pichai said.

With inputs from Agence France-Presse

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/google-io-2021-google-and-samsung-announce-the-merge-of-wear-os-and-tizen-9634091.html