UPDATE (1/25/2018): NASA has successfully unfrozen Curiosity, which will now live to rove another day.

But here's the original report shared by a reader detailing what the concerns were: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. Mars is far enough away that we can't directly control Curiosity in real-time -- the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn't bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along.

Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn't add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it's still in communication with the team here on Earth. Since everything else is working on the rover, NASA was able to develop a set of instructions that should get the rover moving again. When transmitted, the data will inform Curiosity of its attitude and confirm its current state. This should allow the rover to recover and keep performing its safety checks. However, NASA also hopes to gather data on what caused the issue in the first place. The hope is they can avoid another freeze-up in the future.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Corvallis Gazette-Times: A petition to limit each grocery store to two self-checkout kiosks can move forward to signature gathering for a state ballot measure. On Friday, the Oregon Supreme Court certified the attorney general's description of the proposed measure. Backers need 112,020 signatures to get to voters' ballots in November. Filed in July, Initiative Petition 41 is backed by the Oregon AFL-CIO, a coalition of labor groups representing about 300,000 Oregon workers.

"We have been consistently concerned about the impacts of technology and automation on the livelihoods of working people, especially when they have no voice in how technology is used in their workplaces," Graham Trainor, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, said in a statement. "You can see expansion of self-checkout machines in stores across the country and in Oregon." He said jobs are lost as a result. The AFL-CIO contends self-checkout kiosks make customers feel socially isolated, particularly elderly people, and that the kiosks let stores rely more on part-time workers and leaves workers "feeling devalued." They also claim self-checkout stands make it easier for minors to buy alcohol and for people to steal from stores. The measure would give the state Bureau of Labor and Industries enforcement power and let it issue penalties for stores that provide too many self-service stations. "Today's customer wants convenience and less hassle when shopping," said Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, an industry group. "This is evident in the growth of online shopping for local pick-up and home delivery. This measure is tone deaf to what the public is demanding in the marketplace."

He said that self-checkout lets customers check out more quickly and privately. He said presuming that self-checkout machines would replace workers is "simply untrue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On New Year's Eve, while the rest of the world was preparing to ring in a new decade, employees of the German energy company EnBW were getting ready to pull the plug on one of the country's few remaining nuclear power plants. The license to operate the two reactors at the Philippsburg nuclear facility expired at midnight after 35 years of providing carbon-free power to Germans living along the country's southwestern border. The Philippsburg plant was the eleventh nuclear facility decommissioned in Germany over the last decade. The country's remaining six nuclear plants will go dark by 2022. To uncover the hidden costs of denuclearizing Germany, economists used machine learning to analyze reams of data gathered between 2011 and 2017. The researchers, based at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and Carnegie Mellon University, found that nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions. More distressingly, the researchers estimated that burning more coal led to local increases in particle pollution and sulfur dioxide and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses. "Altogether, the researchers calculated that the increased carbon emissions and deaths caused by local air pollution amounted to a social cost of about $12 billion per year," the report says. "The study found that this dwarfs the cost of keeping nuclear power plants online by billions of dollars, even when the risks of a meltdown and the cost of nuclear waste storage are considered."

Apple on Thursday pushed back against EU lawmakers' call for a common charger, warning the move could hamper innovation, create a mountain of electronic waste and irk consumers. From a report: Apple's comments came a week after lawmakers at the European Parliament called for a common charger for all mobile phones and amended a draft law to say the ability to work with common chargers would be an essential requirement for radio equipment in the bloc. A move to a common charger would affect Apple more than any other company as its iPhones and most of its products are powered by its Lightning cable, whereas Android devices are powered by USB-C connectors. "We believe regulation that forces conformity across the type of connector built into all smartphones stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, and would harm consumers in Europe and the economy as a whole," Apple said in a statement.

Microsoft has published a blog post detailing exactly how it imagines dual-screen apps will run on devices like the Surface Duo and Surface Neo -- two foldable devices unveiled back on October that run Android and Windows 10X, respectively. The Verge reports: By default, an app will occupy a single screen according to Microsoft. Surface Duo or Surface Neo users can then span the app across both displays when they're in double-portrait or double-landscape layout. Microsoft envisions that app developers will experiment with different ways to utilize both screens. Some of these include simply using both screens as an extended canvas, having two pages of a document shown at once, using the second display as a companion or dual view of something, or having a master part of the app on one display and details on the second.

These are "initial app pattern ideas," according to Microsoft, and the company could well extend them based on developer feedback in the coming months. Microsoft is also releasing an Android emulator for the Surface Duo today to allow devs to test mobile apps. A Windows 10X emulator for the Surface Neo will arrive next month at around the same time that Microsoft plans to detail more of its dual-screen plans during a developer webcast. Microsoft's Android emulator will naturally support Android apps, and the Windows 10X version will include support for native Windows APIs to let developers detect hinge positions and optimize their win32 or Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for these new devices. Microsoft is also proposing new web standards for dual-screen layouts, and is "actively incubating new capabilities that enable web content to provide a great experience on dual-screen devices."

A team at Facebook AI has created a reinforcement learning algorithm that lets a robot find its way in an unfamiliar environment without using a map. MIT Technology Review reports: Using just a depth-sensing camera, GPS, and compass data, the algorithm gets a robot to its goal 99.9% of the time along a route that is very close to the shortest possible path, which means no wrong turns, no backtracking, and no exploration. This is a big improvement over previous best efforts. [...] Facebook trained bots for three days inside AI Habitat, a photorealistic virtual mock-up of the interior of a building, with rooms and corridors and furniture. In that time they took 2.5 billion steps -- the equivalent of 80 years of human experience. Others have taken a month or more to train bots in a similar task, but Facebook massively sped things up by culling the slowest bots from the pool so that faster ones did not have to wait at the finish line each round.

As ever, the team doesn't know exactly how the AI learned to navigate, but a best guess is that it picked up on patterns in the interior structure of the human-designed environments. Facebook is now testing its algorithm in real physical spaces using a LoCoBot robot.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD launched its latest midrange graphics card based on the company's all new Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT slots in under $300 ($279 MSRP) and is based on the same Navi 10 GPU as AMD's current high-end Radeon RX 5700 series cards. AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT is outfitted with 36 compute units, with a total of 2,304 stream processors and is essentially a Radeon 5700 spec GPU with 2GB less GDDR 6 memory (6GB total) and a narrower 192-bit interface, versus Radeon RX 5700's 8GB, 256-bit config. HotHardware took a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT around the benchmark track and this card has a BIOS switch on-board that toggles between performance and silent/quiet modes. In performance mode, the card has a 160W power target, 14Gbps memory data rate, a Boost Clock of 1,750MHz and a Game Clock of 1,615MHz. In silent/quiet mode, things are a bit more tame with a 135W power target, 12Gbps memory, and 1,620 MHz/1,460MHz Boost and Game Clocks, respectively. In the gaming benchmarks, the new Radeon RX 5600 XT is generally faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 overall, with the exception of a few titles that are more NVIDIA-optimized and in VR. Though it lacks the capability for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the new AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT weighs in $20-30 less than NVIDIA's closest competitor and offers similar if not better performance.

Sonos has announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. From a report: That's fair enough, especially considering some of the devices were introduced as far back as 2005. What's likely to raise the heckles of affected Sonos customers, though, is that should they choose to continue using their legacy products, they won't be able to get updates for their contemporary ones. The reason this is the case is that a multi-speaker Sonos system requires all devices to operate on the same software and older products "do not have enough memory or processing power to sustain future innovation." Thus, as Sonos explains in an email to customers, "If modern products remain connected to legacy products after May, they also will not receive software updates and new features."

A Twitter user's complaint last week in which he produces photo evidence of HP warning him that his ink cartridges would be disabled until he starts paying for HP Instant Ink monthly subscription service has gone viral on the social media.

Ryan Sullivan, the user who made the complaint, said he only discovered the warning after cancelling a random HP subscription -- which charged him $4.99 a month -- after "over a year" of the billing cycle. "Cartridge cannot be used until printer is enrolled in HP Instant Ink," Sullivan was informed by an error message.

"The release of the Windows Terminal preview v0.8 has arrived!" announces a post on Microsoft's Command Line blog:
Search functionality has been added to the Terminal! The default key binding to invoke the search dropdown is {"command": "find", "keys": ["ctrl+shift+f"]}. Feel free to customize this key binding in your profiles.json if you prefer different key presses! The dropdown allows you to search up and down through the buffer as well as with letter case matching.
You can search through multiple tabs, reports the Verge -- and those tabs can also be resized "so you can fit more tabs into View." But they also note that Microsoft added some interesting retro-style CRT effects: If you're old enough to be a fan of CRT monitors then this one is for you. A new experimental feature will be enabled that includes the classic scan lines that you might have seen before the world switched to flat monitors and LCD technology.
To enable it just add the following code snippet to any of your profiles: "experimental.retroTerminalEffect": true

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Boeing's troubled 737 Max has run into a new glitch. During a recent technical review involving the Max, Boeing observed an issue with the plane's flight computers, according to a source familiar with the matter. The source said the issue is not related to the software revisions Boeing made to address the cause of two fatal crashes that killed 346 people, and would not occur during flight. The Max has been grounded since March following the second of those crashes.

The computer issue was observed when booting up the computers on a Max and involves the so-called software power up monitoring function, which checks for anomalies when turning on the computers. It's similar to the steps any computer might make when first turned on. The source said the process of turning on the computers is performed when the plane is on the ground, rather than in flight. The source said the test was intended to find any issues like this one and that Boeing would fix the problem.

On Monday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) discussed the idea of introducing "binding measures" that would require chargers that fit all mobile phones and portable electronic devices. The company that would be impacted most by this legislation would be Apple and its iPhone, which uses a Lightning cable while most new Android phones use USB-C ports for charging. ZDNet reports: The EU introduced the voluntary Radio Equipment Directive in 2014, but MEPs believe the effort fell short of the objectives. "The voluntary agreements between different industry players have not yielded the desired results," MEPs said. The proposed more stringent measures are aimed at reducing electronic waste, which is estimated to amount to 51,000 tons per year in old chargers.

Apple last year argued that regulations to standardize chargers for phones would "freeze innovation rather than encourage it" and it claimed the proposal was "bad for the environment and unnecessarily disruptive for customers." Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reckons Apple has a different idea in store: getting rid of the Lightning port and not replacing it with USB-C, which is a standard that Apple doesn't have complete control over. According to the analyst, Apple plans to remove the Lightning connector on a flagship iPhone to be released in 2021. Instead it would rely on wireless charging.

Gary Starkweather, engineer and inventor of the first laser printer, died on December 26 at the age of 81. The New York Times reports: Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 -- several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings -- when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer? "What you have to do is not just look at the marble," he said in a talk at the University of South Florida in 2017. "You have to see the angel in the marble."

Because his idea ventured away from the company's core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off. "If you have a good idea, you can bet someone else doesn't think it's good," Mr. Starkweather would say in 1997 in a lecture for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. But he soon finagled a move to the company's new research lab in Northern California, where a group of visionaries was developing what would become the most important digital technologies of the next three decades, including the personal computer as it is known today. At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.

Researchers from the University Hospital Zurich, ETH Zurich, Wyss Zurich and the University of Zurich have developed a machine that repairs injured human livers and keeps them alive outside the body for one week. ScienceDaily reports: Until now, livers could be stored safely outside the body for only a few hours. With the novel perfusion technology, livers -- and even injured livers -- can now be kept alive outside of the body for an entire week. This is a major breakthrough in transplantation medicine, which may increase the number of available organs for transplantation and save many lives of patients suffering from severe liver disease or a variety of cancers. Injured cadaveric livers, initially not suitable for use in transplantation, may regain full function while perfused in the new machine for several days. The basis for this technology is a complex perfusion system, mimicking most core body functions close to physiology. The corresponding study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The inaugural study shows that six of ten perfused poor-quality human livers, declined for transplantation by all centers in Europe, recovered to full function within one week of perfusion on the machine. The next step will be to use these organs for transplantation. The proposed technology opens a large avenue for many applications offering a new life for many patients with end stage liver disease or cancer.

Google is working to improve the speed and security of on-device AI through a little-known initiative called Coral. The Verge reports: "Traditionally, data from [AI] devices was sent to large compute instances, housed in centralized data centers where machine learning models could operate at speed," Vikram Tank, product manager at Coral, explained to The Verge over email. "Coral is a platform of hardware and software components from Google that help you build devices with local AI -- providing hardware acceleration for neural networks ... right on the edge device." To meet customers' needs Coral offers two main types of products: accelerators and dev boards meant for prototyping new ideas, and modules that are destined to power the AI brains of production devices like smart cameras and sensors. In both cases, the heart of the hardware is Google's Edge TPU, an ASIC chip optimized to run lightweight machine learning algorithms -- a (very) little brother to the water-cooled TPU used in Google's cloud servers.

While its hardware can be used by lone engineers to create fun projects (Coral offers guides on how to build an AI marshmallow-sorting machine and smart bird feeder, for example), the long-term focus, says Tank, is on enterprise customers in industries like the automotive world and health care. Although Coral is targeting the world of enterprise, the project actually has its roots in Google's "AIY" range of do-it-yourself machine learning kits, says Tank. Launched in 2017 and powered by Raspberry Pi computers, AIY kits let anyone build their own smart speakers and smart cameras, and they were a big success in the STEM toys and maker markets. Tank says the AIY team quickly noticed that while some customers just wanted to follow the instructions and build the toys, others wanted to cannibalize the hardware to prototype their own devices. Coral was created to cater to these customers. The Coral team says it's trying to differentiate itself from the competition by tightly integrating its hardware with Google's ecosystem of AI services. "Coral is so tightly integrated with Google's AI ecosystem that its Edge TPU-powered hardware only works with Google's machine learning framework, TensorFlow, a fact that rivals in the AI edge market The Verge spoke to said was potentially a limiting factor," the report says.

"Coral products process specifically for their platform [while] our products support all the major AI frameworks and models in the market," a spokesperson for AI edge firm Kneron told The Verge. (Kneron said there was "no negativity" in its assessment and that Google's entry into the market was welcome as it "validates and drives innovation in the space.")

Cy Guy writes: Having not learned the lessons of Jurassic Park and the Terminator, scientists from the University of Vermont and Tufts have created "reconfigurable organisms" using stem cells from frogs. But don't worry, the research was funded by the Department of Defense, so I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong this time. "The robots, which are less than 1mm long, are designed by an 'evolutionary algorithm' that runs on a supercomputer," reports The Guardian. "The program starts by generating random 3D configurations of 500 to 1,000 skin and heart cells. Each design is then tested in a virtual environment, to see, for example, how far it moves when the heart cells are set beating. The best performers are used to spawn more designs, which themselves are then put through their paces."

"Because heart cells spontaneously contract and relax, they behave like miniature engines that drive the robots along until their energy reserves run out," the report adds. "The cells have enough fuel inside them for the robots to survive for a week to 10 days before keeling over."

The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Busan-based firm Jenax has spent the past few years developing J.Flex, an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ultra-thin, flexible, and rechargeable. With the arrival of so many wearable gadgets, phones with flexible displays, and other portable gizmos, "we're now interacting with machines on a different level from what we did before," says EJ Shin, head of strategic planning at Jenax. "What we're doing at Jenax is putting batteries into locations where they couldn't be before," says Shin. Her firm demonstrated some of those new possibilities last week at CES 2020 in Las Vegas.

The devices shown by Jenax included a sensor-lined football helmet developed by UK-based firm HP1 Technologies to measure pressure and force of impact; a medical sensor patch designed in France that will be embedded in clothing to monitor a wearer's heart rate; and wearable power banks in the form of belts and bracelets for patients who must continuously be hooked up to medical devices. To make batteries flexible, companies play around with the components of a battery cell, namely the cathode, anode, electrolyte, and membrane separator. In the case of Jenax, which has more than 100 patents protecting its battery technology, Shin says the secret to its flexibility lies in "a combination of materials, polymer electrolyte, and the know-how developed over the years." J.Flex is made from graphite and lithium cobalt oxide, but its exact composition and architecture remains a secret. "J.Flex can be as thin as 0.5 millimeters (suitable for sensors), and as tiny as 20 by 20 millimeters (mm) or as large as 200 by 200 mm," the report adds. "Its operating voltage is between 3 and 4.25 volts. Depending on the size, battery capacity varies from 10 milliampere-hours to 5 ampere-hours, with close to 90 percent of this capacity remaining after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles. Each charge typically takes an hour. J. Flex's battery life depends on how it's used, Shin says -- a single charge can last for a month in a sensor, but wouldn't last that long if the battery was powering a display."

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from The Verge: We've already seen Samsung's new rugged smartphone with a removable battery, the Galaxy XCover Pro, because the company revealed it on its Finnish website before taking it down. Today, though, the company is officially announcing the phone and that it's coming to the U.S. for $499. For that price, you're getting a phone with a swappable battery that's a meaty 4,050mAh, and the phone even supports 15W fast charging, as well as with special docks that use pogo pins. The XCover Pro is intended to be used by workers in industrial settings or out in the field, so that huge battery should theoretically let workers use their phones for longer and give them the option to swap in a fresh battery in a pinch.

Otherwise, the phone's specs are mid-range: a 6.3-inch 2220 x 1080 display (which Samsung says you can use when you have gloves on), a 2GHz octa-core Exynos 9611 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage (with support for microSD storage up to 512GB). For cameras, the phone has a 13-megapixel front-facing camera in a corner of the screen and two rear cameras: a 25-megapixel camera and an 8-megapixel camera. It'll also ship with the latest Android 10 and Samsung's One UI 2.0, contrary to information from the early reveal that indicated that the XCover Pro was running Android 9 Pie.

Ever-faster processors led to bloated software, but physical limits may force a return to the concise code of the past. John Naughton: Moore's law is just a statement of an empirical correlation observed over a particular period in history and we are reaching the limits of its application. In 2010, Moore himself predicted that the laws of physics would call a halt to the exponential increases. "In terms of size of transistor," he said, "you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms, which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far -- but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit." We've now reached 2020 and so the certainty that we will always have sufficiently powerful computing hardware for our expanding needs is beginning to look complacent. Since this has been obvious for decades to those in the business, there's been lots of research into ingenious ways of packing more computing power into machines, for example using multi-core architectures in which a CPU has two or more separate processing units called "cores" -- in the hope of postponing the awful day when the silicon chip finally runs out of road. (The new Apple Mac Pro, for example, is powered by a 28-core Intel Xeon processor.) And of course there is also a good deal of frenzied research into quantum computing, which could, in principle, be an epochal development.

But computing involves a combination of hardware and software and one of the predictable consequences of Moore's law is that it made programmers lazier. Writing software is a craft and some people are better at it than others. They write code that is more elegant and, more importantly, leaner, so that it executes faster. In the early days, when the hardware was relatively primitive, craftsmanship really mattered. When Bill Gates was a lad, for example, he wrote a Basic interpreter for one of the earliest microcomputers, the TRS-80. Because the machine had only a tiny read-only memory, Gates had to fit it into just 16 kilobytes. He wrote it in assembly language to increase efficiency and save space; there's a legend that for years afterwards he could recite the entire program by heart. There are thousands of stories like this from the early days of computing. But as Moore's law took hold, the need to write lean, parsimonious code gradually disappeared and incentives changed.

Insecure storage systems being used by hundreds of hospitals, medical offices and imaging centers are exposing over 1 billion medical images of patients across the world. "Yet despite warnings from security researchers who have spent weeks alerting hospitals and doctors' offices to the problem, many have ignored their warnings and continue to expose their patients' private health information," writes Zack Whittaker from TechCrunch. From the report: "It seems to get worse every day," said Dirk Schrader, who led the research at Germany-based security firm Greenbone Networks, which has been monitoring the number of exposed servers for the past year. The problem is well-documented. Greenbone found 24 million patient exams storing more than 720 million medical images in September, which first unearthed the scale of the problem as reported by ProPublica. Two months later, the number of exposed servers had increased by more than half, to 35 million patient exams, exposing 1.19 billion scans and representing a considerable violation of patient privacy.

A decades-old file format and industry standard known as DICOM was designed to make it easier for medical practitioners to store medical images in a single file and share them with other medical practices. DICOM images can be viewed using any of the free-to-use apps, as would any radiologist. DICOM images are typically stored in a picture archiving and communications system, known as a PACS server, allowing for easy storage and sharing. But many doctors' offices disregard security best practices and connect their PACS server directly to the internet without a password. These unprotected servers not only expose medical imaging but also patient personal health information. Many patient scans include cover sheets baked into the DICOM file, including the patient's name, date of birth and sensitive information about their diagnoses. In some cases, hospitals use a patient's Social Security number to identify patients in these systems.