Newsfeed

Which might help convince your stingy purchase manager

Review  The 2020 Huawei Matebook X Pro faithfully follows its predecessors in form and function. At its heart, it's a well-rounded but pricey ultrabook. No new ground is broken, but the Matebook X Pro gets the fundamentals right.…

Catching up on elastic and hybrid options, but not for cloudy first-timers

Nutanix has struck a deal with Amazon Web Services to have its hyperconverged stack run in the Amazonian cloud.…

Deep-learning model pinpoints the pain in your AES

DEF CON  Convolutional neural networks can reveal which parts of an AES implementation are vulnerable to snooping, according to research by Googlers.…

The dwarf planet Ceres -- long believed to be a barren space rock -- is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. The Guardian reports: Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analyzed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an "extensive reservoir" of brine beneath its surface. Using infrared imaging, one team discovered the presence of the compound hydrohalite -- a material common in sea ice but which until now had never been observed off of Earth. Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from Rome's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica said hydrohalite was a clear sign Ceres used to have sea water. "We can now say that Ceres is a sort of ocean world, as are some of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons," she told AFP. The team said the salt deposits looked like they had built up within the last 2 million years -- the blink of an eye in space time. This suggests that the brine may still be ascending from the planet's interior, something De Sanctis said could have profound implications in future studies. Writing in an accompanying comment article, Julie Castillo-Rogez, from the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the discovery of hydrohalite was a "smoking gun" for ongoing water activity. "That material is unstable on Ceres' surface, and hence must have been emplaced very recently," she said. In a separate paper, US-based researchers analyzed images of the Occator crater and found that its mounds and hills may have formed when water ejected by the impact of a meteor froze on the surface.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Numerous emergency services are on the scene

These measures are in place to try and stop a second wave of the virus

Mobile testing units for coronavirus are at various locations across Essex.

And needs a very blunt instrument to do the job, because the protocol works as planned

China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3, according to observers at the Great Firewall Report (GFR).…

RESIDENTS are calling for action over a sewage pumping station which they say continually lets out an “appalling” smell.

ENFORCING a traffic ban in Braintree town centre can help to increase footfall, it is claimed.

NURSERIES in Braintree are welcoming the community back for the first time since the lockdown.

Family affair - Ria with dad Neil, mum Carol and sister Kaz, celebrating last Christmas

Traffic among tenants in financial capital looks to be as tasty as renting racks

Equinix has entered the Indian market by acquiring two data centres operated by GPX.…

And so will TikTok and Disney, with more to come

Indonesia has found more tech companies willing to become collectors of the nation’s 10 percent digital services tax.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PsyPost: New research based on four decades of longitudinal data indicates that it is rare for a person to receive and keep a single mental disorder diagnosis. Rather, experiencing different successive mental disorders appears to be the norm. The findings, published in JAMA Open, suggest that psychiatrists and other mental health professionals should move toward adopting a life-course perspective on mental disorders. The researchers examined data from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study in New Zealand, which used repeated standardized psychiatric assessments to track 17 mental health conditions from age 11 to age 45. The study included more than one thousand participants and the mental health conditions were diagnosed according to DSM criteria. "These disorders included externalizing disorders (for example, ADHD, conduct disorder, substance dependence), internalizing disorders (for example, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, PTSD), and thought disorders (for example, mania, schizophrenia, OCD). This is the most detailed time series of mental-disorder life-histories ever assembled," explained Avshalom Caspi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. The study also included neurocognitive examinations during childhood and adolescence, along with a neuroimaging-based assessment of brain aging at age 45. About one-third of the participants experienced the initial onset of a disorder by age 15 years and 86% met the criteria for at least one disorder by age 45 years. The researchers found an "ebb and flow" of mental disorders over time. Participants with a disorder from any one of the three diagnostic families were at higher risk for disorders from other diagnostic families in the future. Participants characterized by one consistent mental disorder were not the norm. "The primary finding is that over decades, individuals experience many changing disorder types, shifting between internalizing, externalizing, and/or thought disorder families. People seldom 'get' one disorder and keep it. Every disorder predicted significantly increased risk for every other disorder," Caspi told PsyPost.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can get a Whopper for just £1.99 - don't miss out!

Time to batten down the hatches

But others live on colossal military bases that extend the range of India’s armed forces

India has inaugurated a submarine cable between the mainland and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an archipelago 1350km from the nation’s east coast.…

AT&T's WarnerMedia division is planning to lay off hundreds of employees in AT&T's latest cost-cutting move. Ars Technica reports: "Warner Bros. is expected to commence layoffs of around 650 people starting Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, while HBO is seen shedding between 150 and 175 staffers. A WarnerMedia spokesman declined to comment," Variety reported yesterday. The numbers quoted in Variety may be a bit too high. A source with knowledge of the AT&T layoffs told Ars that the real number is about 600 jobs across all of WarnerMedia, which includes Warner Bros., HBO, and Turner. The layoffs come days after WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar announced a shakeup including the departure of three executives and an increased focus on AT&T's new HBO Max streaming service. Kilar detailed the changes in an internal memo published by CNBC on Friday. In its Q2 2020 earnings report, AT&T said that HBO revenue was "$1.6 billion, down 5.2 percent year over year, reflecting a decrease in subscription revenues and content and other revenues." HBO operating expenses were "$1.5 billion, up 32.5 percent year over year, primarily due to higher programming costs and expenses related to HBO Max." HBO operating income was $113 million, down 80.3 percent. Warner Bros. revenue in Q2 was $3.3 billion, down 3.9 percent year over year partly because of "the postponement of theatrical releases due to closure of movie theaters," AT&T said. Warner Bros. operating income rose 43.9 percent to $633 million, however, as the unit's operating expenses declined 11.1 percent to $2.6 billion "primarily due to the production hiatus and lower marketing expenses."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't panic... still in the testing phase

The US Army Research Laboratory says it is experimenting with reinforcement learning algorithms to control swarms of drones and autonomous vehicles to overwhelm and dominate America's enemies.…