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A team of MIT researchers has developed a device that can monitor people's sleep postures without having to use cameras or to stick sensors on their body. Engadget reports: It's a wall-mounted monitor the team dubbed BodyCompass, and it works by analyzing radio signals as they bounce off objects in a room. As the researchers explained, a device that can monitor sleep postures has many potential uses. It could be used to track the progression of Parkinson's disease, for instance, since people with the condition lose their ability to turn over in bed. To differentiate between radio signals bouncing off a body and signals bouncing off random objects in a room, the system focuses on signals that bounce off a person's chest and belly. In other words, the body parts that move while breathing. It then sends those signals to the cloud, so the BodyCompass system can analyze the user's posture. The team trained their creation's neural network and tested its accuracy by gathering 200 hours of sleep data from 26 subjects who had to wear sensors on their chest and belly in the beginning. They said that after training the device on a week's worth of data, it predicted the subject's correct body posture 94 percent of the time. In the future, BodyCompass could be paired with other devices to prod sleepers to change positions, such as smart mattresses. When that happens, the device could alert people with epilepsy if they've taken a potentially fatal sleeping position, reduce sleep apnea events and notify caregivers to move immobile patients at risk of developing bedsores. It could also help everyone else get a good night's sleep, because we definitely all need it.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Chinese drone maker DJI has commissioned yet another security audit with FTI Consulting that's given it a clean bill of health, as the US government reportedly prepares to ban its remote controlled aircraft from American skies. DJI, whose headquarters are in the Chinese city of Shenzhen (the firm's full name is Shenzhen Da-Jiang Innovations Technology Company) has reacted to claims that US regulators intend shutting it out of their market by announcing that a new "local data mode" will be implemented. In a statement DJI said its local data mode "eliminates internet connectivity and prevents the transmission of all drone data over the internet," promising to add this to its DJI GO4 and DJI Fly flight control apps "within the coming months." "This expansion brings Local Data Mode to operators of all recent DJI drones, allowing commercial and government customers, including public safety agencies and other federal, state and local government users, to confidently choose the best DJI drone for each mission," boasted the firm, which, perhaps justifiably, claims to have a dominant position in the global small drone market.

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Apple adjusted its App Store review guidelines to loosen restrictions on iPhone and iPad games that stream directly from the internet and in-app purchase rules that have frustrated developers. From a report: The changes mean Apple will approve games that stream from the web, versus from content installed on a device, for the first time. That reverses a rule that frustrated companies including Microsoft. The new rules will still require games to be submitted individually. That means companies still won't be able to launch all-you-can-eat streaming game services on Apple's platform. However, these services can now offer a catalog that directs users to other streaming games from the same developer. But that catalog must point players to the App Store to download those other games individually. Apple is also no longer imposing its in-app purchase requirements on online teaching apps, such as tutoring or workout offerings.

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Chess has a reputation for cold logic, but Vladimir Kramnik loves the game for its beauty. "It's a kind of creation," he says. His passion for the artistry of minds clashing over the board, trading complex but elegant provocations and counters, helped him dethrone Garry Kasparov in 2000 and spend several years as world champion. Yet Kramnik, who retired from competitive chess last year, also believes his beloved game has grown less creative. From a report: He partly blames computers, whose soulless calculations have produced a vast library of openings and defenses that top-flight players know by rote. âoeFor quite a number of games on the highest level, half of the game -- sometimes a full game -- is played out of memory," Kramnik says. "You don't even play your own preparation; you play your computer's preparation." Wednesday, Kramnik presented some ideas for how to restore some of the human art to chess, with help from a counterintuitive source -- the world's most powerful chess computer. He teamed up with Alphabet artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, whose researchers challenged their superhuman game-playing software AlphaZero to learn nine variants of chess chosen to jolt players into creative new patterns. In 2017, AlphaZero showed it could teach itself to roundly beat the best computer players at either chess, Go, or the Japanese game Shogi. Kramnik says its latest results reveal beguiling new vistas of chess to be explored, if people are willing to adopt some small changes to the established rules. The project also showcased a more collaborative mode for the relationship between chess players and machines. "Chess engines were initially built to play against humans with the goal of defeating them," says Nenad Tomasev, a DeepMind researcher who worked on the project. "Now we see a system like AlphaZero used for creative exploration in tandem with humans rather than opposed to them." People have played chess for around 1,500 years, and tweaks to the rules aren't new. Nor are grumbles that computers have made the game boring.

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Joanna Stern, reviewing the Surface Duo for the Wall Street Journal: It isn't always clear when something is ready. Take my grilling. Sometimes I remove steak well before or after I should've. You might say it's a "tough" call. But there's nothing tough about stating this: The new two-screen Surface Duo is undercooked. Microsoft's new $1,400 book-like phone-tablet thingy is not ready for me and not ready for you. Unless, of course, you want an Android device that repeatedly ignores your taps on its screens, randomly slows down, struggles to figure out its own up, down and sideways positioning, and abruptly rearranges parts of its own interface. If that is your dream, well, then it is ready. Somehow, Microsoft disagrees. "We had been testing for some time. We wanted to get it out. We thought this was the right time for us," said Matt Barlow, Microsoft's corporate vice president of modern life, search and devices. With OneNote, I've loved brainstorming and taking notes with the $100 Surface Pen (sold separately). I'd love it even more if the pen could keep up with my writing. Another performance issue. Unfortunately, key Microsoft apps like Excel and Skype haven't been optimized for two screens. Microsoft and Google are also working with third-party app developers. The Kindle app, for instance, places a page on each screen to make this one adorable little e-reader. (Or at least it should. It glitched midway through testing, but began working again later, after I complained to Microsoft.) You can also launch one app on each screen -- Edge browser on left, Word on right, for instance. One of my favorite features is App Groups, which lets you pair two apps together to simultaneously launch. I have Twitter and TikTok in one with the label, "Bad for My Brain." One screen is still better suited to many of our current needs, and that makes this wide device feel awkward more often than not.

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Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation. Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An exciting new vacancy has opened up that will likely tempt some IT leaders into freshening up their CV: the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for 200,000 pound ($255,000) a year. The job is the biggest one in government tech so you'd expect the recruiters at the Cabinet Office to be deluged with applications from hyper-qualified aspiring GCDOs, who got tech goosebumps from just reading the role description. Yet strangely enough, the GCDO job has been open for almost a year now. "We sought out candidates for a similar role last autumn," confirmed Alex Chisholm, the chief operating officer of the civil service, as he announced the new vacancy. And indeed, a similar vacancy went live last October albeit with a slightly different name -- Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) -- but almost exactly the same responsibilities. In both versions of the job, the successful candidate is expected to "enhance Her Majesty's government's reputation as the world's most digitally-advanced government." This includes leading the Government Digital Service (GDS), a branch of the UK Cabinet Office dedicated to the digital transformation of government, and heading the 18,000-strong Digital, Data and Technology Profession department.

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Beijing opposes a forced sale of TikTok's U.S. operations by its Chinese owner ByteDance, and would prefer to see the short video app shut down in the United States, Reuters reported Friday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter. From a report: ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikTok's U.S. business to potential buyers including Microsoft and Oracle since U.S. President Donald Trump threatened last month to ban the service if it was not sold. Trump has given ByteDance a deadline of mid September to finalise a deal. However, Chinese officials believe a forced sale would make both ByteDance and China appear weak in the face of pressure from Washington, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. ByteDance said in a statement to Reuters that the Chinese government had never suggested to it that it should shut down TikTok in the United States or in any other markets. Two of the sources said China was willing to use revisions it made to a technology exports list on Aug. 28 to delay any deal reached by ByteDance, if it had to.

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An anonymous reader writes: Newly released DOJ records show that multiple top members of Mueller's investigative team claimed to have "accidentally wiped" at least 15 phones used during the anti-Trump investigation after the DOJ OIG asked for the devices to be handed over.

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rastos1 writes: Starting with Windows Insiders preview build 20211, WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2, which enables you to access filesystems that aren't natively supported by Windows (such as ext4).

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Sales of vinyl records surpassed those of CDs in the U.S. for the first time since 1986, marking a key turning point for the format's nostalgia-fueled resurgence. From a report: People spent $232.1 million on limited-play and extended-play records in the first half of the year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, eclipsing the $129.9 million they spent on compact discs. Vinyl was the most popular way people listened to music throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, at which point it gave way to tape cassettes -- followed by CDs and digital formats. Each new format was more convenient than the last and suppressed interest in vinyl.

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Facebook sought to derail proposals by the Irish data protection watchdog that the tech giant warns could curb transfers of vast amounts of commercial data across the Atlantic. From a report: The social network giant said it sought a judicial review of the Irish Data Protection Commission's preliminary decision that the company may have to halt trans-Atlantic data transfers using the most commonly used EU tool still available to firms. "A lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would have damaging consequences for the European economy," Facebook said in a statement Friday. "We urge regulators to adopt a pragmatic and proportionate approach until a sustainable long-term solution can be reached." In an investigation into Facebook's data transfers, the Irish authority told the company that so-called standard contractual clauses "cannot in practice be used for EU-US data transfers," according to a blog post by Facebook this week.

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One of the largest camera collections in the world is hidden away in a village hall in a Fife coastal town -- but hardly anybody knows it is there. From a report: At least 3,000 cameras, including some dating back well over a century, belonged to the late Neville "Jim" Matthew. He retired to the picturesque East Neuk village of St Monans after a career that took him around the world. He took over the former Salvation Army hall to store his treasured collection. Inside the hall, row after row of cameras, accessories and memorabilia fill the shelves. They include stereoscopic and 3D cameras as well as East European models, including many that were rare in the West. At the heart of the collection is an array of Kodak Brownie cameras - featuring almost every model ever produced. The Brownie was the first affordable camera and could be bought for just one dollar when it was first sold in 1900. Jim had wanted his collection to be an open attraction, but he was getting older and in ill health, and the task posed too big a challenge. Instead, he was limited to opening once a year for the village festival and for occasional private viewings.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Launched in 2009, AmazonBasics has grown to offer more than 5,000 products, according to the retailer. Its mission: identifying everyday items that Amazon can create at a similar or higher quality and lower price point when compared to existing name brands -- a strategy also employed by companies such as Costco and Target. A growing number of AmazonBasics products, which the company promotes heavily on its site, have become bestsellers since the line's inception, and many have ratings above four stars, according to Marketplace Pulse research. In recent months, the online retailer's sales have been soaring as millions of Americans have been staying at home -- and in many cases working remotely -- during the ongoing pandemic. But consumers have raised serious safety concerns about AmazonBasics items in complaints to government regulators and in reviews posted on Amazon's own website. Since 2016, at least 1,500 reviews, covering more than 70 items, have described products exploding, catching on fire, smoking, melting, causing electrical malfunctions or otherwise posing risks, according to an analysis of AmazonBasics electronics and appliances listed on its website. The reviews identified represent a small fraction of the overall purchases of the products, and fires caused by consumer electronics are not unique to Amazon branded items. User error can also be a factor, as can faulty or aging wiring within a home or a defective device being used in conjunction with the product. But when well-made and used properly by consumers, electronics like those sold under the AmazonBasics name should rarely pose dangers, said electrical engineers interviewed by CNN.

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An anonymous reader shares a report from Motherboard, written by Jason Koebler: In late July, America was briefly enthralled with "Unsolicited Seeds from China," which started showing up in mailboxes in all 50 states. These mystery seeds prompted warnings from the USDA, which said people should not plant them, and should instead alert their state agricultural authority and mail them to the USDA or their local officials. Many Americans heeded this advice. Many more decidedly did not. According to documents obtained by Motherboard from state departments of agriculture, at least hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans planted the seeds. Since the seed story originally broke, I have been obsessed with learning more. To do this, I filed 52 freedom of information requests; one with each of the departments of agriculture (or their state-level equivalent) in all 50 states plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico. I also filed requests with the USDA and several of its labs. Thousands of pages of emails, spreadsheets, reports, and documents, as well as audio voicemail recordings, have been trickling in for the last month, and they have been enlightening in many ways. While scanning through thousands of pages of documents about the seeds, it became clear that, for at least the first few weeks, no one had any idea who sent the seeds, where they came from (other than "China"), or the goal of the seed mailing campaign. Eventually, the official line became that this was a "brushing" campaign, in which items of small value are sent to people whose online accounts have been compromised, or are sent to people as a "gift." In order to leave a positive review from a "verified buyer" (which is weighted higher because the person nominally bought and used the product), you need to have actually bought or received an item, so by receiving seeds, reviews from that account or name will be weighted higher. The "brushing" idea is still what USDA and other agencies are saying, but, at least in the emails I've reviewed there's very little talk about how the scam worked or why it happened. This campaign also seems to be much larger than any other known brushing campaign or any other seed mailing campaign. One thing is clear to me, from reading these documents. American people do not seem particularly well-prepared for scams of this nature. The emails between public officials and scientists, who were dealing with a difficult situation, seem efficient, professional, and appropriately cautious. But communication from the general public is concerning. People planted seeds even when expressly told not to. Hundreds of people had no idea whether they had ever ordered seeds, or how to check. Some people called 911. Others ate the seeds. Others ordered something specific, got what they ordered from who they ordered it from, then still panicked. Others were furious they had to pay for postage to send the seeds to the government. From one recipient in North Carolina: "I did not receive seeds. I received a suspicious package from China with a spoon and a fork in it my concerns are that it is full of Covid."

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[I]n a new study published in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples and found that Earth is barreling toward a hothouse state not seen in 50 million years. Live Science reports: The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth's climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era -- the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states -- dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states -- in response to changes in the planet's orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets. The zig-zagging chart (shown above) ends with a sobering peak. According to the researchers, the current pace of anthropogenic global warming far exceeds the natural climate fluctuations seen at any other point in the Cenozoic era, and has the potential to hyper-drive our planet out of a long icehouse phase into a searing hothouse state. "Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that," study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for 2300 in the 'business-as-usual' scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years." (The IPCC is a United Nations group that assesses the science, risks and impacts of climate change on the planet.)

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NASA aims to pay private companies to collect moon dirt in an effort to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources. Space.com reports: The agency just issued a request for proposals (RFP) to this effect, [NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine] explained in a blog post today. NASA wants private companies, from the United States or abroad, to snag 1.8 ounces to 18 ounces (50 to 500 grams) of lunar material by 2024 and officially transfer ownership of the stuff to the space agency on the lunar surface. NASA will pay $15,000 to $25,000 for each of these caches, with 80% of the money delivered after sample collection. Companies will get 10% upon signing a contract and 10% after launching their spacecraft, Bridenstine added. NASA will eventually bring the lunar material down to Earth, if all goes according to plan. (The space agency already has a considerable stash of moon rocks here, of course. The Apollo astronauts brought home 842 lbs., or 382 kilograms, of lunar material between 1969 and 1972.) The main goal of the new RFP, which you can find here, is to stimulate and normalize the extraction and sale of lunar resources, Bridenstine said. For example, participating companies may choose to collect far more than 18 ounces of material and sell the excess to non-NASA buyers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The latest quarterly earnings report from GameStop doesn't show much sign of a turnaround for the long-troubled game retailer. Sales were down 26.7 percent year over year for the April through June quarter. Even accounting for permanent store closures and COVID-related reduced operating hours, so-called comparable "same-store" sales were still down 12.7 percent year over year. GameStop's already depressed stock is down nearly 8 percent on the news, as of this writing. GameStop still publicly sees an "opportunity to capitalize" on the upcoming release of new Sony and Microsoft consoles, which could help turn its business around in the short term. But there's some reason to believe the coming generation of consoles could actually make GameStop's long-term prospects worse, thanks to console options that get rid of disc drives entirely. In an earnings call, GameStop CEO George Sherman acknowledged that "there has been growth in digitally downloaded games" and said GameStop is "not debating the growth of digital gaming." But he also tried to put a positive spin on the fate of GameStop's physical game sales going into the next generation of consoles. "First, new consoles have a disc drive," Sherman said. "So for the next seven years, the consoles will play both the physical and digital software that we sell." That's only partially true, though. Both the Xbox Series S and the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition actually won't have a disc drive. And while GameStop does sell some digital software, the bulk of its business comes from the sale of new physical games and high-margin pre-owned games. We don't know what percentage of consumers will opt for these disc-free consoles, of course. Still, lower hardware costs could definitely make discless consoles an attractive option to many potential customers this generation. The Xbox Series S is $200 cheaper than the more-powerful, disc-drive-equipped Series X, a sum that could go toward a lot of digital game purchases...

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The apocalyptic orange sky in San Francisco Wednesday was the talk of the town -- and well beyond. However, many people found their efforts to capture the surreal images stymied, as their iPhones "corrected" the smoke-filled sky to a more natural hue. Axios reports: Smartphone cameras do a great job in many situations thanks to software that automatically tries to improve a shot's composition, focus, and settings like white and color balance. But those adjustments can also get in the way of capturing what's unique about some of life's most vivid images. After waking up to the orange sky, I first tried to shoot out my back door, but found my iPhone was adjusting the sky to a much more common gray. On social media, I saw lots of others having the same experience with both still and video coming from their phones. In all cases I used the device's default settings. Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier said she used the app Halide to avoid the iPhone's color correction. Halide, aware that many people were using the app yesterday to take photos of the orange skies, says: "It feels wrong to benefit from this, so we are donating yesterday's sales to our local Wildfire Relief Fund."

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According to Engadget, Motorola's brand-new Razr sports an improved design, support for 5G, and corrects many of the issues the first model was notorious for. Chris Velazco writes: Motorola was always clear that the Razr is a "design-first" device, and it went to great lengths to recreate the visual vibe that its classic flip phones ran with for its first foldable. To pack some much-needed extras into this new model, though, Motorola had to make some changes: The new Razr is a little chubbier, and a features a "chin" that's a bit less prominent than the original's. Personally, these changes are enough to make the Razr just a little less visually striking, but they're worth it when you consider what Motorola could pack in here as a result. For one, Motorola squeezed a better camera into the Razr's top half. My biggest gripe with the original Razr's 16-megapixel rear shooter wasn't that it was bad, per se -- it just wasn't great compared to every other camera you'd find in a similarly priced phone. In response, Motorola chose a 48-megapixel camera for this new model, which should improve photo quality substantially. The somewhat pokey Snapdragon 710 found in the first Razr also is gone, replaced here by a more modern Snapdragon 765G and 8GB of RAM. As I said, we're not working with flagship power here, but the new Razr has everything it needs to run much more smoothly this time around. By now, it might sound like Motorola has improved this new Razr on all fronts, and that's very nearly true. There are only a few things Motorola didn't change here, like its 6.2-inch flexible internal display. It's the exact same panel they used last time, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I was still hoping a second-gen Razr screen would run at a resolution higher than 876 x 2,142. Maybe more curious is the fact that, in the United States anyway, Motorola just plans to call this phone the "Razr," and doesn't plan to differentiate it from the Verizon-only model it released earlier this year. "[I]t's still not a flagship phone, and at $1400 we're not sure it's a great deal either," Velazco says. "But for people who want an extremely pocket-friendly foldable that's also usable while closed, Motorola just might be on the right track."

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