Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 586
June 24, 2021
This Google Contacts redesign is starting to look a bit like Google Plus, Richard Lawler
GoogleWhile Microsoft previews its next OS, Google is displaying a new look for Contacts. According to the company this Circles-style extra information is “a new experience for Google Contacts which will help Google Workspace users learn more about their colleagues.”
In practice, it displays your organizational chart as a part of the Contacts UI as well as your history with a particular person, including both emails and meetings. Keeping things cleanly organized in order to “easily learn more about your colleagues and stakeholders” sounds good. The only problem is that something makes it feel one step away from the bad old days of the early 2010s, when Google forced Google Plus sorting and feeds onto everyone. Events spam and “Email from…
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Four former executives of Nexa Technologies, an alleged supplier of surveillance tech to Libya and Egypt, were indicted for complicity in torture and war crimes (Sidney Fussell/Wired)
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Earth is trapping twice as much heat as it did in 2005, ,
Planet Earth is now trapping twice as much heat as it did 14 years ago, according to findings of a new study, which raise concerns about the possible acceleration of climate change.
For the study, researchers looked at data from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument, which flies on several NASA Earth-observation satellites and measures how much energy the planet absorbs in the form of sunlight and how much of that it emits back into space in the form of infrared radiation.
The difference between the incoming and outflowing energy is called the energy imbalance, and the study found that in the period between 2005 and 2019 the imbalance doubled compared to the years before.
Related: 2020 ties record for the hottest year ever, NASA analysis shows
The scientists used additional data from Argo, an international network of robotic sensors distributed all over the world’s oceans, which measure the rate at which oceans heat up. The researchers said comparing CERES data to Argo helped strengthen the findings as global oceans are known to absorb up to 90% of the excess energy trapped by the planet.
“The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth’s energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they’re both showing this very large trend,” Norman Loeb, lead author for the new study and principal investigator for CERES at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, said in a statement. “The trends we found were quite alarming in a sense,” he added.
Loeb and his team concluded the increased heating is a result of both naturally occurring and human-made processes. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in Earth’s atmosphere lead to more heat being trapped by the planet.
Meanwhile, the shrinking size of ice sheets, caused by the planet’s warming, leads to less of the incoming energy being reflected away from the planet’s surface.
But the researchers found that a natural recurring pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is also contributing. The PDO cycle causes regular fluctuations in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean with its western parts becoming cooler and the eastern parts warming for ten years, following an opposite trend a decade after. An unusually intense PDO phase that began in about 2014 caused a reduction in cloud formation above the ocean, which also resulted in the increased absorption of incoming energy by the planet, the scientists said.
“It’s likely a mix of anthropogenic forcing and internal variability,” said Loeb, referring to the effects human activity has on the heat exchange between the Earth’s atmosphere and the surrounding space environment and the natural variations in the behavior of the planet’s ecosystem. “Over this period they’re both causing warming, which leads to a fairly large change in Earth’s energy imbalance. The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented in this record.”
Loeb added that while the study captures only a short period of time, the rate of the heat uptake suggests that the Earth’s climate is even more off-balance than previously thought and that worse effects can be expected (including steeper temperature and sea level rise) unless the trend is reversed.
The study was published June 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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NASA spacecraft spots China’s Mars rover Zhurong heading south on Red Planet (photo), ,
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The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this photo of China’s Zhurong Mars rover (bottom) and its landing platform on June 11, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)China’s first-ever Mars rover was on the move earlier this month, imagery by a NASA spacecraft shows.
The rover, named Zhurong, is part of Tianwen-1, China’s first fully homegrown Red Planet mission, which arrived in orbit around Mars in February. Zhurong separated from the Tianwen-1 orbiter on May 14 and touched down on the vast plain Utopia Planitia a few hours later.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) photographed Zhurong on June 6 using its HiRISE (“High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment”) camera, which is capable of resolving features as small as a coffee table on the red dirt far below.
Related: China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos
On Wednesday (June 23), the HiRISE team released a second image of Zhurong taken on June 11, which shows the rover and its tracks extending noticeably farther away from the mission’s landing platform.
“The landing site remains distinctly colored from removal of Martian dust during landing, and movement of the Zhurong rover toward the south can be seen when comparing the two images,” HiRISE team members wrote in a description of the photo.
MRO has been circling Mars since 2006, studying the planet’s geology and climate, hunting for signs of water ice, scouting out good potential landing sites for future missions (both crewed and robotic) and serving as a communications relay between Mars rovers and landers and their controllers on Earth.
As the Zhurong images show, MRO also keeps tabs on the Red Planet’s surface robots from time to time as well. Over the years, HiRISE has photographed NASA’s Phoenix and InSight landers and the agency’s Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance rovers — and Zhurong as well.
The camera even managed to document Perseverance’s epic landing sequence on Feb. 18 of this year, photographing the rover’s spacecraft descending through the Red Planet skies under its big supersonic parachute.
Mike Wall is the author of “ Out There ” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
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Balloon-lofted instruments detect earthquake, testing possible Venus technology, ,
Researchers have detected an earthquake using instruments flying in a balloon above California, and the technology could one day detect quakes on Venus.
Temblors on Earth and beyond are a valuable tool for understanding how planets are built and what their interiors are doing, and scientists have measured both moonquakes and marsquakes. But venusquakes are going to be more difficult to detect than either moonquakes or marsquakes, simply because of how hostile the planet’s surface is. No lander has operated on the Venusian surface for much more than two hours, so scientists are evaluating instruments that might detect venusquakes from the less hazardous environment of the planet’s thick cloud deck.
“Much of our understanding about Earth’s interior — how it cools and its relationship to the surface, where life resides — comes from the analysis of seismic waves that traverse regions as deep as Earth’s inner core,” Jennifer M. Jackson, a geologist at Caltech and a co-author on new research, said in a NASA statement.
Related: Why Venus is back in the exploration limelight
“Tens of thousands of ground-based seismometers populate spatially-dense or permanent networks, enabling this possibility on Earth. We don’t have this luxury on other planetary bodies, particularly on Venus,” Jackson said. “Observations of seismic activity there would strengthen our understanding of rocky planets, but Venus’ extreme environment requires us to investigate novel detection techniques.”
Measuring quakes on the moon and mars has been simple conceptually, albeit difficult to execute. The Apollo astronauts set up seismometers on the moon during their missions 50 years ago, and NASA’s InSight lander on Mars includes a superbly precise such detector.
But for Venus, scientists think their best bet will be to design sensor systems that could identify quakes from the planet’s atmosphere. Specifically, they’re determining whether a balloon laden with barometers (instruments that measure atmospheric pressure) would be up to the task of venusquake detection.
That technology isn’t nearly ready to make the trek to our neighboring world. First, the scientists are playing around with the idea here on Earth. So in July 2019, when a powerful earthquake shook Ridgecrest, California, and spawned more than 10,000 aftershocks, scientists took advantage of the bevy of temblors to test balloon-lofted earthquake detection.
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One of four balloons loaded with barometers to attempt to detect earthquakes, as seen in July 2019 during investigations near Ridgecrest, California. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)The trial relied on “heliotrope” balloons, which are special balloons that scientists set out early in the day. (For this research, the scientists nicknamed their balloons: Tortoise, Hare, Hare 2 and CrazyCat.) As the sun heats the balloon, it rises as high as 11 to 15 miles (18 to 24 kilometers); as twilight falls the balloon does as well and scientists can track down their equipment.
On each balloon was a device that tracks movement and a supersensitive barometer to measure air pressure and, the scientists hoped, detect low-frequency sound waves triggered by an aftershock. But the endeavor was tricky: The scientists needed an earthquake to occur while they were observing and to be strong enough for the balloon’s barometer to detect it at such a great distance and amid mid-flight jostling.
“Trying to detect naturally occurring earthquakes from balloons is a challenge, and when you first look at the data, you can feel disappointed, as most low-magnitude quakes don’t produce strong sound waves in the atmosphere,” Quentin Brissaud, a seismologist at Caltech and the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in Oslo, Norway, and the study’s lead author, said in the same statement. “All kinds of environmental noise is detected; even the balloons themselves generate noise.”
But on July 22, as both Tortoise and Hare were floating upward for a day of observations, a medium-size aftershock with a magnitude of 4.2 occurred. Both barometers picked up the signal, although the data on Hare’s instrument included too much noise for the scientists to be confident it was truly detecting the earthquake. But Tortoise got a strong enough read on the event to match ground-based detections, even though the balloon was nearly 50 miles (78 km) away from the aftershock’s epicenter and 3 miles (5 km) above Earth’s surface at the time.
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One of four balloons loaded with barometers to attempt to detect earthquakes, as seen in July 2019 during investigations near Ridgecrest, California. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)“Because there is such a dense network of seismometer ground stations in Southern California, we were able to get the ‘ground truth’ as to [the] timing of the quake and its location,” Brissaud said. “The wave we detected was strongly correlated with nearby ground stations, and when compared to modeled data, that convinced us — we had heard an earthquake.”
The researchers hope both to continue in-flight data collection on Earth, including observing different types of earthquakes under different atmospheric conditions. The scientists also want to start including multiple barometers on each balloon in order to pinpoint where a detected quake is coming from.
And the researchers say there’s also lots of modeling to be done to understand how the technique might work on venusquakes.
“It should be easier to detect venusquakes from the cool layers of Venus’ atmosphere between 50 to 60 kilometers [about 31 to 37 miles] in altitude,” Siddharth Krishnamoorthy, principal investigator of the analysis effort at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in the same statement. “If we drift over a hotspot, or what looks like a volcano from orbit, the balloon would be able to listen for acoustic clues to work out if it’s indeed acting like a terrestrial volcano,”
The research is described in a paper published May 20 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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The full Strawberry Moon, the last supermoon of 2021, rises tonight! Here’s what to expect, ,
The first full moon of summer 2021, also known as the Strawberry Moon, rises tonight (June 24), marking the last supermoon of the year.
June’s full moon arrives Thursday (June 24) at 2:40 p.m. EDT (1940 GMT). Technically, the moon will officially be full before it appears above the horizon, as the full moon rises in the eastern sky at 8:53 p.m. EDT (0053 Friday GMT). The moon will appear full for about three days, starting early Wednesday (June 23) morning through early Saturday (June 26) morning, according to a statement from NASA.
Tonight’s full moon is also a supermoon, which occurs when the moon is at its closest point to Earth in its orbit, also known as perigee. In turn, the moon will look slightly bigger and brighter since it’s closer to the Earth than usual. June’s Strawberry Moon is the second and last supermoon of the year.
Related: June full moon 2021: See the ‘Strawberry supermoon’ shine
This year’s Strawberry Moon closely follows the summer solstice, which occurred Sunday (June 20), marking the official start of summer. During the summer solstice of 2021, the sun was at its highest and northernmost point in the sky of the year. As a result, full moons that occur near the summer solstice are lower in the sky because the moon is exactly opposite the sun during its full phase. In turn, the moon’s low trajectory takes it through the lowest part of the atmosphere, giving the moon its reddish or amber-colored appearance.
June’s full moon is often referred to as the Strawberry Moon because it falls during the strawberry harvesting season in the northeastern U.S. Similarly, June’s full moon has also been called the Rose Moon because it occurs around the time roses bloom.
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A comparison of the apparent size of a perigee moon, or “supermoon,” and an apogee moon (“minimoon”) as seen through Slooh’s Half Meter Telescope at its Canary Islands Observatory in 2015. (Image credit: Slooh)However, this month’s full moon has also gone by several other names, including Mead Moon, Honey Moon, Flower Moon, Hot Moon, Hoe Moon, and the Planting Moon, all of which stem from European or Native American origin and represent various milestones of the summer season, according to NASA.
The nicknames Mead Moon or Honey Moon represent the time in June when honey is ready for harvesting. Mead, or honey wine, is a drink created by fermenting honey mixed with water and sometimes with fruits, spices, grains or hops. Rising around the time honey is harvested, the June full moon is often considered the “sweetest” moon of the year. Subsequently, the term “honeymoon” can be traced back to the tradition of marrying in June and the joyfulness of the first month of marriage.
Adding to the moon’s list of monikers, a tribe community from the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. calls the June full moon the LRO Moon, in honor of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched toward the moon on June 18, 2009 and is still operating today.
To celebrate tonight’s full moon, Krispy Kreme released a new strawberry-themed doughnut today (June 24). The doughnut is filled with strawberry Kreme, dipped in strawberries and Kreme icing, and topped with graham crackers representing “moon dust.”
The Strawberry Supermoon doughnut is Krispy Kreme’s latest space-themed treat, following the Mars doughnut, which was released earlier this year to celebrate the landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover in February.
Editor’s note: If you have an amazing night sky photo or video that you’d like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact editor in chief Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.
Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook
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Visa buys Sweden-based Tink, which offers open banking APIs used by more than 3,400 banks and financial institutions in Europe, for €1.8B (Simon Clark/Wall Street Journal)
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Microsoft needs to show Windows 11 is more than just Windows 10.5,
Microsoft Design (Instagram)Microsoft is about to unveil Windows 11 this morning, the company’s next major operating system. While a leak of Windows 11 has provided an early look at some of the design changes, I’m expecting to see a lot more today. A new Start menu, rounded corners, and a general UI overhaul have been expected for months, but Microsoft will need to show some big changes to Windows 11 to prove it’s more than just Windows 10 with a paint job.
A lot of what we’ve seen so far was already planned for Windows 10X, a version of Windows that was originally going to ship with dual-screen devices. Windows 10X included a new Start menu that acted more like a launcher, which was centered on the taskbar. 10X also featured many simplifications to the UI, and general usability improvements to Windows.
After the pandemic hit, Microsoft quickly attempted to rework Windows 10X for laptops, to offer a more simplified version of its OS for devices that were suddenly in high demand for remote work and schooling. The Windows 10X attempt to simplify Windows and its app model didn’t work out. Sources familiar with the situation tell The Verge that Microsoft had been struggling to hit an acceptable level of app compatibility with 10X over the past couple of years, after the company had originally planned to run every app in a special container to improve the security and performance of devices running the new OS.
The new Windows 11 Start menu.Containers would have been a significant change to Windows, especially for developers, and there’s no sign in the leaked Windows 11 build that Microsoft plans to implement containers any time soon. Instead, Windows 11 appears to be adopting most of the UI changes that were part of Windows 10X. The leaked Windows 11 build also includes some changes to multitasking, improved support for multiple monitors, and some possible performance improvements – particularly for PC gaming.
The most significant change in Windows 11 could be Microsoft’s approach to the apps it allows in the Windows store. The leaked version of Windows 11 doesn’t include the new store, but Microsoft is rumored to be opening its store up to any Windows app. That means Chrome, Adobe Creative Suite, and many other apps that don’t exist in the Windows store will suddenly be available.
Perhaps more significantly, Microsoft is also expected to allow devs to bypass its payment system for store apps. That means developers won’t have to give Microsoft a cut of their revenue for in-app purchases, if they decide to use their own payment systems. This would be a huge change, and one that would put even more pressure on Apple’s App Store, just after Microsoft has helped Epic Games argue that iPhones are general purpose devices just like PCs.
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The new Windows 11 multitasking UI.Beyond the store, I’m hoping to see Microsoft differentiate Windows 11 from Windows 10 with a focus on daily users of the OS. Productivity is a key part of this, as is making Windows easier and more reliable for the millions who use it to study and work each day. Apple impressed us earlier this month with Universal Control, a simple way to use a keyboard and trackpad on a Mac to control an iPad. It makes dragging and dropping content between those devices really simple, and improves productivity if you’re using multiple devices.
There are some hints in the leaked version of Windows 11 that there could be some multitasking improvements on the way. A new control appears on the maximize buttons in Windows 11 allowing you to quickly snap apps into place. These snap features have existed in Windows for years, though, so I’m hoping we’ll see even more changes to help Windows users improve their daily workflow.
Beyond productivity, Windows is also used for PC gaming. A bigger effort to improve Windows 11 for gaming would be welcome news to the millions that use PCs instead of game consoles. The Xbox Game Bar and new Xbox app have been good additions, but the reality is that PC gaming is dominated by Steam and Discord. I’d like to see Microsoft recognize that, instead of trying to force Xbox-like experiences onto PC players. I think the Xbox Game Bar is a good step in the right direction, but there’s still much more Microsoft could do in Windows 11 and beyond.
PC gaming needs to be a Windows 11 focus.Photo by Tom Warren / The VergeI’m hoping Microsoft improves its Game Mode in Windows 11. The mysterious feature simply “optimizes your PC for play,” but the reality is that it does very little. When you run a game with Game Mode enabled, it suppresses Windows Update from installing drivers or trying to reboot your PC, and mysteriously “helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system.” It doesn’t go far enough to limit other apps from hogging your CPU or even GPU resources, though. PC gamers often disable services, limit apps, and play with the registry instead.
Beyond these key areas, I’d also like to see Microsoft improve some of the fundamentals in Windows 11. I still have to dig into the registry to flip the direction of my mouse scroll wheel. While some mice include drivers that will change the direction, Windows doesn’t. It’s a bizarre omission, and there are many examples across Windows where Microsoft could do a better job of cleaning the OS up.
One of those is Settings, where I’m often thrown into the ancient world of the Control Panel to adjust settings. Microsoft keeps Control Panel around for its impressive legacy support, but it should be something you really need to dig for, not an area you randomly stumble upon.
Windows 11 will likely include some big dev changes.I’m expecting Microsoft to have some surprises for Windows 11 that prove it’s not just a Windows 10.5, too. Microsoft employee Miguel de Icaza teased on Tuesday that the company will discuss something he’s spent years pushing for, before later deleting the tweet. It’s a mysterious tease for such a big event. De Icaza co-founded Xamarin, a tool for building mobile apps that can work across iOS and Android. Microsoft acquired Xamarin back in 2016, and the company has been improving its developer support in Windows ever since.
We’re bound to hear about improvements for Windows developers in Windows 11, and perhaps even some changes to Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Linux GUI apps are on the way to Windows, and Microsoft is also holding a separate Windows developer-focused event today, so there’s likely to be a significant dev announcement coming.
Microsoft’s Windows 11 event will run for around 45 minutes start at 11AM ET today, and The Verge will be covering all the news live as it happens.
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Rembrandt’s Night Watch uncropped by AI 300 years after it was trimmed,
A mixture of artificial intelligence and painstaking research has allowed researchers to restore Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch to its original size, the Associated Press reports, centuries after it was trimmed down to fit in a smaller wall. The work was conducted as part of the Operation Night Watch project, and the results are being exhibited in the Honor Gallery in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which sees the original painting flanked by printed strips filling in the lost sections.
The Night Watch was originally completed in 1642, after which it was hung in the club house of the civil militia it was based on. But 70 years later it was moved to a new location, where there wasn’t space for the whole painting and it was unceremoniously cropped to fit. A significant portion was removed from its left-hand side, along with slivers of its top, bottom, and right.
The painting, with its missing sides restored.Image: RijksmuseumAlthough the missing pieces of canvas have never been recovered, AP reports that researchers were able to reconstruct them thanks to a smaller copy of the original painted at the time by Gerrit Lundens. Over the course of nearly two years, scans, X-rays and 528 digital exposures were taken of Rembrandt’s original painting to train an AI model to imitate Rembrandt’s style and fill in the blanks based on Lundens’ copy. “Rembrandt would have definitely done it more beautifully, but this comes very close,” museum director Taco Dibbits said.
It means that when visitors are able to view the restored painting over the coming months at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, they’ll be able to see new details in the margins of the painting. There are two new faces present on its left, where there’s also a small child which can be seen leaning on a railing, rather than simply running out of frame. The work sheds new light on the painting, over three hundreds years after the Dutch masterpiece was unceremoniously mangled.
If you’re not able to make it to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to view the work in person, the museum recently put out a high-resolution scan of the (cropped) painting, which is detailed enough that you can see its individual brushstrokes and cracks.
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Google and Jio Platforms announce JioPhone Next, an affordable phone powered by an optimized version of Android; phone will debut in India on September 10 (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
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