Researchers have found that soap bubbles can carry pollen grains and deposit them on flowers. CNET reports: "It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Eijiro Miyako, associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and lead author of a study published in the journal iScience on Wednesday.

The researchers first worked out that soap bubbles could indeed carry pollen. They then tested out different bubble formulations and settled on lauramidopropyl betain, a compound sometimes used in shampoos, as a good vehicle. Now comes the fun part. The researchers used a bubble gun on a pear orchard, "producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success," iScience publisher Cell Press said in a release. They also tested out the use of a drone to direct bubbles at flowers, which proved to be an accurate way to deliver the bubbles. The early experiments are promising, but there are still some hurdles around figuring out the most precise way to aim the bubbles and how to deal with potential weather issues like rain or wind.

"A new modeling study out of Cambridge and Greenwich universities suggests that face masks may be even more important than originally thought in preventing future outbreaks of the new coronavirus," reports SFGate: To ward off resurgences, the reproduction number for the virus (the average number of people who will contract it from one infected person) needs to drop below 1.0. Researchers don't believe that's achievable with lockdowns alone. However, a combination of lockdowns and widespread mask compliance might do the trick, they say. "We show that, when face masks are used by the public all the time (not just from when symptoms first appear), the effective reproduction number, Re, can be decreased below 1, leading to the mitigation of epidemic spread," the scientists wrote in the paper published Wednesday by the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

The modeling indicated that when lockdown periods are combined with 100% face mask use, disease spread is vastly diminished, preventing resurgence for 18 months, the time frame that has frequently been cited for developing a vaccine. It also demonstrated that if people wear masks in public, it is twice as effective at reducing the R number than if face coverings are only worn after symptoms appear.

The masks don't have to be top-of-the-line surgical or respirator masks. Homemade coverings that catch only 50 percent of exhaled droplets would provide a "population-level benefit," they concluded.
Another review funded by the World Health Organization and published in the journal Lancet also concluded "that data from 172 observational studies indicate wearing face masks reduces the risk of coronavirus infection," according to the Washington Post.

A former director of America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday, "It's a lot less economically disruptive to wear a mask than to shut society, so I can't understand some of the resistance to mask wearing."

jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19, the popular free and open-source desktop environment. "In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience," reads the announcement. For a complete list of what's new, you can visit the Plasma 5.19 changelog.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: The classic eye exam may be about to get an upgrade. Researchers have developed an online vision test — fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) — that produces much more accurate diagnoses than the sheet of capital letters we've been staring at since the 19th century. If perfected, the test could also help patients with eye diseases track their vision at home...

[W]hen the researchers ran their "Stanford acuity test" (StAT) through 1000 computer simulations mimicking real patients, the diagnostic reduced error by 74% compared with the classic eye test, the team reports this month in the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The simulations work by starting with a known acuity score and factors in the types of mistakes a human might make. It then virtually "takes" the different eye tests in order to compare how accurate they are. The team used this instead of actual patients because it starts with the "true" acuity — something unknown in a human.

You can take StAT yourself at myeyes.ai, although the team cautions that the test isn't meant to replace doctor visits just yet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Last week the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported something extraordinary. For the first time in 135 years, last year U.S. consumption of renewables surpassed consumption of coal. There are two interrelated reasons for this: The collapse of coal consumption over the past decade, which was fueled by the rise of cheaper alternatives. I have covered the reasons for coal's collapse previously. The short version is that policies to curb carbon emissions were put in place about the same time the shale boom and renewable power revolutions created cheaper, cleaner alternatives to coal. The graphic above shows the surge in renewables that helped collapse coal demand. This surge is better shown by the following graphic, which highlights the three categories of modern renewables that have driven the consumption surge: Wind power, solar power, and biofuels. The report points out that fossil fuels still dominate our energy consumption. "Last year the U.S. consumed 11.3 quadrillion BTUs (quads) of coal and 11.5 quads of renewables," adds Forbes. "But we also consumed 36.7 quads of petroleum and 32.1 quads of natural gas. Each of these categories of fossil fuel consumption was greater than our combined consumption of renewables and coal, which provides a broader perspective on our energy consumption."

"In total, the U.S. consumed 80.5 quads of fossil fuels, 11.5 quads of renewables, and 8.5 quads of nuclear power. Renewables represented 11.4% of U.S. energy consumption in 2019, versus 8.1% a decade ago."

"The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the 'strong preferred limit'," reports Phoronix: The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be enforced. This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and he is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80x25 terminals...

This deprecation involves updating the documentation on the kernel's coding style to be more sensible and updating the checkpatch.pl script that checks patches to no longer have a max line length of 80. Instead, the check patch script is using a maximum line length of 100.
Torvalds noted Friday that spreading code over multiple lines created problems for single-line utilities like grep, while longer lines "are fundamentally useful..." [H]onestly, I don't want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows... If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you'll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That's _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn't be a pain for the rest of us...

So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80x25 terminal window getting line wrapping. For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM. People with restrictive hardware shouldn't make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources...

If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It's just that simple.
"Yes, staying withing 80 columns is certainly still _preferred_," notes the official commit message for this change. "But it's not the hard limit that the checkpatch warnings imply, and other concerns can most certainly dominate. Increase the default limit to 100 characters. Not because 100 characters is some hard limit either, but that's certainly a 'what are you doing' kind of value and less likely to be about the occasional slightly longer lines.'"

"We're less than 10 meters away..."

"@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago.

They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube.

1,024,406 people are already watching...

"NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed. We are now "moments away" from their boarding, with an official "welcoming ceremony" expected to happen soon.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of 63-year-old Harry Sentoso, an Amazon warehouse worker who was called back to work on March 29th -- and died two weeks later of Covid-19. Across the country, Amazon workers have documented more than 1,000 cases among warehouse workers as of May 20, and 7 deaths. Sentoso is the eighth.... The company has put new measures in place to make its warehouses safer for employees, but the number of cases at its facilities keeps rising... Amazon also fired two tech workers who had publicly criticized safety and working conditions at the company's warehouses...

The week before Sentoso died, the company began requiring employees to wear masks on site, and started checking the temperature of workers before they could enter. It began requiring employees to stay six feet apart in late March, and staggered shifts and canceled in-person meetings to make that easier. The company has increased the frequency of cleaning and disinfecting in warehouses as well, and began spraying down whole facilities with disinfectant fogs in mid-April.

But [the late Harry Sentoso's son] Evan, and a contingent of Amazon workers across the country, don't think that those measures are enough. Hundreds of workers at Amazon's facilities in Hawthorne and Eastvale, in Riverside County, have signed and submitted petitions asking the company to close the facilities for two weeks after infections for thorough cleaning and send workers home with quarantine pay. Following worker complaints compiled by the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, Cal OSHA has also launched investigations into both facilities...

The call for a shutdown has been especially loud at warehouses in Pennsylvania and New York that have become coronavirus hotspots, with more than 60 reported cases at each before the company stopped updating the tally even to local employees.

Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google's IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time.

But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%.

Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office.

Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2020 survey of nearly 65,000 developers, revealing their favorite and most dreaded programming languages, tools and frameworks. From a news writeup: The survey shows that TypeScript, Microsoft's superset of the widely-used JavaScript programming language, has overtaken Python as the second most beloved programming language behind Rust. This year 86% of respondents say they are keen to use Rust, while 67.1% want to use TypeScript, and 66.7% want to use Python. Stack Overflow attributes TypeScript's rising popularity to Microsoft's embrace of open source software as well as the existence of larger and more complex JavaScript and Node.js codebases.

Rust has been the most loved programming language for five years running, despite few developers having experience with it. This year, just 5.1% developers report having used Rust, compared with the 68% who use JavaScript, which is the most commonly used language. [...] Meanwhile, the top 10 most dreaded programming languages are VBA, Objective-C, Perl, Assembly, C, PHP, Ruby, C++, Java and R.

The report also looks at average salaries of each developer role. In the US, engineering managers attract the highest salary at $152,000 per year, followed by site reliability engineers who earn $140,000 per year. Salaries across the globe for these roles are lower, at $92,000 for an engineering manager and $80,000 for a site reliability engineer. Other high-paying roles with an average salary of at least $115,000 in the US include data scientist and machine learning specialist, DevOps specialist, engineer, back-end developer, embedded application developers, mobile developers, scientist, desktop application developer, and educator.

Last week, Kotaku reported on a new project, called Insignia, "that aims to recreate the original Xbox Live service, potentially restoring online play to many dozens of classic Xbox games that fell offline when the original Xbox Live service closed on April 15, 2010." From the report: The project's announcement on the r/originalxbox subreddit came from SoullessSentinel, a screen name of one Luke Usher. Usher is well known in the vintage Xbox community as the lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded, arguably the most advanced PC-based emulator of the 2001 Xbox hardware. (Microsoft's classic console has proven notoriously tricky to emulate over the years.)

As a demonstration of Insignia's progress, Usher shared a video depicting the creation of a new Xbox Live account via the Xbox's system UI. It's a cool trick, as this process has not been technically possible since the online service's April 2010 closure. (In a cheeky touch, the video names the newly created account HiroProtagonist, the Gamertag of Xbox co-creator J Allard.) Insignia will work with normal, unmodded consoles, provided the user can perform a one-time process to retrieve their unit's internal encryption keys. Long-existing Xbox soft-mod techniques, which require physical copies of exploitable games like Splinter Cell or MechAssault but do not necessarily alter the console's hardware or operating system, should suffice for accomplishing this key retrieval. Once that initial setup's completed, Usher envisions a more or less vanilla Xbox Live experience, complete with matchmaking, voice chat, messaging, and almost everything else you might remember. (One exception would come in a lack of proprietary game DLC, which Insignia and its developers lack rights to distribute.) Anti-cheating measures are also in the works, as well as reporting and banning mechanisms for truly bad actors. The project works by using a DNS man-in-the-middle maneuver to redirect all of Xbox Live's original server calls to new addresses that point to Insignia's work-in-progress infrastructure.

"The current plan is for Insignia to be a centralized service run by Usher and associates," reports Kotaku. "He believes keeping it centralized will prevent player populations from diluting across multiple third-party servers, and that it will not be much of a resource burden." "The server," he noted, "is used for authentication, matchmaking, storing friends lists, etc. but actual game traffic is usually P2P between Xboxes, so the requirements for our server are pretty low."

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Texas Instruments' graphing calculators have a reputation as hobbyist devices given their program support, but they just lost some of their appeal. Cemetech has learned (via Linus Tech Tips) that Texas Instruments is pulling support for assembly- and C-based programs on the TI-84 Plus CE and its French counterpart, the TI-83 Premium CE. Install the latest firmware for both (OS 5.6 and OS 5.5 respectively) and you'll not only lose access to those apps, but won't have a way to roll back.

The company explained the move as an effort to "prioritize learning and minimize any security risks." It's to reduce cheating, to put it another way... While this could please teachers worried that students will use apps to cheat during exams, enthusiasts are unsurprisingly mad. This reduces the amount of control programmers have over their calculator apps.

The State of Software Security (SOSS): Open Source Edition "analyzed the component open source libraries across the Veracode platform database of 85,000 applications which includes 351,000 unique external libraries," reports TechRepublic. "Chris Eng, chief research officer at Veracode, said open source software has a surprising variety of flaws." "An application's attack surface is not limited to its own code and the code of explicitly included libraries, because those libraries have their own dependencies," he said. The study found that 70% of applications have a security flaw in an open source library on an initial scan.
Other findings from the report:

• The most commonly included libraries are present in over 75% of applications for each language.

• 47% of those flawed libraries in applications are transitive.

• More than 61% of flawed libraries in JavaScript contain vulnerabilities without corresponding common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

• Fixing most library-introduced flaws can be done with a minor version upgrade.

• Using any given PHP library has a greater than 50% chance of bringing a security flaw along with it.

The Trump administration "has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992," reports the Washington Post, "in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions, said a senior administration official and two former officials familiar with the deliberations." The matter came up at a meeting of senior officials representing the top national security agencies last Friday, following accusations from administration officials that Russia and China are conducting low-yield nuclear tests — an assertion that has not been substantiated by publicly available evidence and that both countries have denied.

A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive nuclear discussions, said that demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing that the United States could "rapid test" could prove useful from a negotiating standpoint as Washington seeks a trilateral deal to regulate the arsenals of the biggest nuclear powers. The meeting did not conclude with any agreement to conduct a test, but a senior administration official said the proposal is "very much an ongoing conversation."

Another person familiar with the meeting, however, said a decision was ultimately made to take other measures in response to threats posed by Russia and China and avoid a resumption of testing... During the meeting, serious disagreements emerged over the idea, in particular from the National Nuclear Security Administration, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The Post points out that since 1945 "at least eight countries have collectively conducted about 2,000 nuclear tests, of which more than 1,000 were carried out by the United States.

"The environmental and health-related consequences of nuclear testing moved the process underground, eventually leading to near-global moratorium on testing in this century with the exception of North Korea."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission testing industry. The unanimous 23-to-0 vote ratified a proposal put forward last month by UC President Janet Napolitano to phase out the exams over the next five years until the sprawling UC system can develop its own test.

The battle against standardized tests has raged for years because minority students score, on average, lower than their white classmates. Advocates argue that the exams are an unfair admission barrier to those students because they often cannot pay for pricey test preparation. [...] Ms. Napolitano's proposal allows four years for the UC system to develop a new exam. If it fails to create or adopt one, then it likely would cease to use any exam, said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, which has fought against standardized testing for 30 years. Mr. Schaeffer said he doesn't believe a new exam will be implemented. "It appears very unlikely that they will be able to design an instrument that is more accurate and fairer than relying on applicants' high school records," Mr. Schaeffer said. "And, if a new test somehow meets those goals promoters would face massive adoption barriers, including persuading UC and the rest of the admissions world that a third test is truly needed or useful."

A spokesman for the College Board, which oversees the SAT, said the organization's "mission remains the same: to give all students, and especially low-income and first-generation students, opportunities to show their strength. We must also address the disparities in coursework and classrooms that the evidence shows most drive inequity in California."

New submitter xhonza writes: New OpenBSD version. String of good news. Some of the new changes, as highlighted by Phoronix, include:
- FFS2 file-system improvements including using 64-bit timestamps and block numbers by default for new installs.
- Support for the Raspberry Pi 4 on ARM64 while improving the Raspberry Pi 3 support too. Raspberry Pi 2/3 support has also improved for OpenBSD ARMv7.
- Better support for Rockchip systems like the Pinebook Pro.
- Various SMP improvements including better AMD SMT/Core/Package detection.
- A wide variety of different hardware driver improvements, including Intel AX200 WiFi device support.
- A FIDO driver introduced for FIDO/U2F security keys support.
- Fixed handling of USB 2.0 devices when in use on different USB 3.0 controllers.
- The PowerPC OpenBSD build switched over to Clang as its default code compiler.
- Various dhclient fixes.
- Various security improvements.

The changelog, announcement, and list of mirrors can be found at their respective links.

destinyland shares an update about Billy Mitchell, the intense dark-haired videogame champion in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Last year the videogame record-keepers at Twin Galaxies revoked Billy Mitchell's entire lifetime's worth of videogame high scores after an online discussion argued videotapes of three of Mitchell's performances suggested they'd been achieved using a MAME emulator. Electronic Gaming Monthly reports that Mitchell has since streamed games on Twitch "obtaining scores equal to those that had been disputed, broadcast live from public venues," but the record-keepers also banned Mitchell for life from ever submitting any new high scores.

Ars Technica reports that Mitchell recently updated his defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies, while they've counter-filed a motion to dismiss it which is now scheduled to be heard on July 6. They argue that ruling in Mitchell's favor "would have chilling effects on the freedom of speech." But in March Billy updated his lawsuit to call their accusation "libelous on its face," saying that Twin Galaxies "at least implied [that he was a cheater], so that any reasonable reader would understand Twin Galaxies has called Mitchell a cheater who deserved punishment by stripping him of all his Twin Galaxies records and banning him for life from submitting further records." Ars Technica writes:

Mitchell takes particular issue with Twin Galaxies' alleged refusal to consider "25 sworn affidavits" from eyewitnesses supporting his claims, in favor of an exclusive focus on "scientific" evidence. Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day is quoted saying that he "find[s] it unexplainable that my testimony as the founder and former owner is disregarded, while others, specifically the ones against Billy, are embraced...."

Twin Galaxies' motion highlights that the 3,770-post dispute thread surrounding Mitchell's Donkey Kong scores (which is now included in its entirety in the court record) was viewed nearly 2.4 million times as of March 14... "Twin Galaxies believes that this was the most professionally documented and thoroughly investigated video game score of all time," Twin Galaxies owner Jason Hall said in his public declaration...

Court proceedings are "not the forum for [Mitchell] to get revenge," Twin Galaxies argues, claiming that its statements regarding Mitchell were "protected activity" under the First Amendment, and Mitchell's suit "seeks to chill the expression of free speech."
In the 1985 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Mitchell simultaneously held the highest scores for six different video games — Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time. Because Twin Galaxies now refuses to recognize any of Mitchell's previous records, Guinness has now also expunged those records from its publication.

In 1999 CmdrTaco noted Billy's perfect game of Pac-Man. Though no questions were ever raised about that legendary game, the 2019 edition of Guinness's record book still demoted it to a new section called "Records That Never Were."

In 2001, Slashdot covered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's description of Linux as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

This week during a chat with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Microsoft's current president Brad Smith admitted that "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open-source exploded at the beginning of the century." "And I can say that about me personally. The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn...that you need to change.

"Today, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world when it comes to businesses. When we look at GitHub, we see it as the home for open-source development, and we see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]."

Netflix is working to restore streaming quality in various European countries following government requests for the company to reduce bandwidth usage out of fear that it was putting too much stress on broadband connections. The Verge reports: People in Denmark, Norway, Germany, and other countries reported noticing an uptick in streaming bitrate, according to FlatpanelsHD. Netflix confirmed to the website that it is "working with ISPs to help increase capacity." The company did not say which countries have restored bitrate for higher-quality streaming and which ones haven't. "In the last month alone we have added four times the normal capacity," a spokesperson told FlatpanelsHD. "As conditions improve we will lift these limitations." Other streaming services will likely follow suit, with some already reportedly upping the streaming quality. Apple Insider reports that Apple restored higher bitrates to increase streaming quality for people using Apple TV Plus late last month.

Ivan Mehta, writing for The Next Web: For years, IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) have tried to make development quicker by predicting the next part of a developer's code. Now, startups like Codota are using AI to help developers with code completion on any code editor. The Israel-based startup was found in 2015 by Dror Weiss and Eran Yahav. Codota's free-to-use autocomplete plug-in supports major languages such as Java, Python, Javascript, PHP, and Rust across major IDEs such as Eclipse and Android Studio. Yahav told me that Codota differs from other code completion AIs as it's able to predict the next token completion by leaning on an AI-based code 'dictionary.'