Monthly Archives: November 2022

Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash

Posted on by

Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It’s a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Earth and more than double the amount in 2000. Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new, many into so-called recycling bins. Few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don’t exist to do that at scale.

Instead, discarded garments enter a global secondhand supply chain that works to prolong their life, if only a little, by repurposing them as cleaning rags, stuffing for mattresses or insulation. But the rise of fast fashion — and shoppers’ preference for quantity over quality — has led to a glut of low-value clothing that threatens to tank the economics of that trade and inordinately burdens developing countries. Meanwhile, the myth of circularity spreads, shielding companies and consumers from the inconvenient reality that the only way out of the global textile waste crisis is to buy less, buy better and wear longer. In other words, to end fast fashion.

[…] Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK nonprofit. (In contrast, 9% of plastic and about half of paper gets recycled.) The retailers have vowed that what they collect will never go to landfill or waste. But the reality is far messier. Garments dropped at in-store take-back programs enter the multibillion-dollar global secondhand supply chain, joining a torrent of discards from charity bins, thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and Sellpy. The complex task of sorting through that waste stream falls to a largely invisible global industry of brokers and processors. Their business depends on exporting much of the clothing to developing countries for rewear. It’s the most profitable option and, in theory, the most environmentally responsible, because reusing items consumes less resources than recycling them.

Source: Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash – Slashdot

For the First Time Ever, People Are Getting Transfusions of Lab-Grown Blood Cells

Posted on by

[…]An important clinical trial is now underway in the UK. The study is the first to transfuse red blood cells grown in the lab from donated stem cells into humans. Should this research pay off, these blood cells would be incredibly valuable for people with rare blood types, though they wouldn’t replace the need for traditional blood donation.

The RESTORE trial, as it’s known, is being conducted by scientists from the UK’s National Health Services and various universities. At least 10 healthy volunteers are expected to be enrolled in the study. All of them will receive two mini-transfusions, spaced four months apart and in random order, of the lab-grown blood cells and standard cells, both of which are derived from the same donor. As of early Monday, two participants have already gotten the lab-grown blood cells and so far appear to have experienced no side-effects.

The first-of-its-kind experiment is a Phase I trial, meaning that it’s primarily designed to test the safety of a novel or experimental treatment. But the lab-grown cells are theoretically fresher than the mix of newer and older blood cells taken from a typical blood donation (on average, red blood cells live for about 120 days). So the researchers are hoping that the lab-grown cells survive longer than the standard cells in their recipients.

“If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in [the] future, helping transform their care,” said chief researcher Cedric Ghevaert, a hematologist and a professor in transfusion medicine at the University of Cambridge, in a statement released by the NHS.

[…]

Should this project turn out to be a success, lab grown blood cells still won’t replace the donated supply anytime soon. The team’s process is much less efficient than what the human body can do. Currently, for instance, they need about 24 liters of their nutrient solution to filter out one to two tablespoons of red blood cells. Meanwhile, about 45% of our blood is composed of red blood cells.

Even if mass-produced lab-grown blood cells are a far off possibility, they may still be able to help many people in the near future. This technology could one day provide a more reliable and longer-lasting supply of blood cells to people who have a rare mix of blood types or who have developed conditions that make it difficult to receive standard transfusions, such as sickle cell disease.

[…]

Source: For the First Time Ever, People Are Getting Transfusions of Lab-Grown Blood Cells

Scientists zap clouds with electricity to make them rain

Posted on by

A new experiment has shown that zapping clouds with electrical charge can alter droplet sizes in fog or, potentially, help a constipated cloud to rain.

Last year Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, and colleagues from the University of Bath, spent many early mornings chasing fogs in the Somerset Levels, flying uncrewed aircraft into the gloop and releasing charge. Their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that when either positive or negative charge was emitted, the fog formed more water droplets.

“Electric charge can slow evaporation, or even – and this is always amazing to me – cause drops to explode because the electric force on them exceeds the surface tension holding them together,” said Harrison.

The findings could be put to good use in dry regions of the world, such as the Middle East and north Africa, as a means of encouraging clouds to release their rain. Cloud droplets are larger than fog droplets and so more likely to collide, and Harrison and his colleagues believe that adding electrical charge to a cloud could help droplets to stick together and become more weighty.

Source: Scientists zap clouds with electricity to make them rain | Environment | The Guardian

The world’s first offshore floating wind-solar pilot just came online in China

Posted on by

China’s government-owned utility State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) has launched the world’s first commercial offshore floating solar that’s paired with an offshore wind turbine.

 

SPIC is one of five major electrical utility companies in China, and the world’s largest photovoltaic power generation enterprise. The pilot is located off the coast of Haiyang, a city in Shandong, eastern China.

The project uses Norway-based Ocean Sun‘s patented floating solar power technology.

The two solar floaters (see the photo above) have an installed capacity of 0.5 megawatts peak. They’re connected to a transformer on a SPIC-owned wind turbine and then a subsea cable runs from the wind turbine to the power grid.

If the pilot is successful, the plan is to build a 20 MW floating wind-solar farm in 2023 using Ocean Sun’s technology.

Ocean Sun signed an agreement to license its proprietary floating solar technology for the project in July. This project is fully funded by SPIC, and Ocean Sun’s first “truly offshore installation.”

In July, Børge Bjørneklett, CEO and founder of Ocean Sun, said [translation edited for clarity]:

Shandong Province is projecting 42GW of floating solar installations in the next few years, and Ocean Sun will now be a contender for some of this volume. These waters see challenging annual typhoons, and all involved parties are aware of the risks. Ocean Sun will improve our product with learnings from this exposed site.

A wind-solar hybrid system potentially offers the advantage of improving power output reliability. Solar peaks during the day, and whereas offshore wind turbines typically generate most of their power in the afternoon and evening.

Source: The world’s first offshore floating wind-solar pilot just came online in China

Multi-factor authentication bombing fatigue can blow open security

Posted on by

The September cyberattack on ride-hailing service Uber began when a criminal bought the stolen credentials of a company contractor on the dark web.

The miscreant then repeatedly tried to log into the contractor’s Uber account, triggering the two-factor login approval request that the contractor initially denied, blocking access. However, eventually the contractor accepted one of many push notifications, enabling the attacker to log into the account and get access to Uber’s corporate network, systems, and data.

[…]

Microsoft and Cisco Systems were also victims of MFA fatigue – also known as MFA spamming or MFA bombing – this year, and such attacks are rising rapidly. According to Microsoft, between December 2021 and August, the number of multi-factor MFA attacks spiked. There were 22,859 Azure Active Directory Protection sessions with multiple failed MFA attempts last December. In August, there were 40,942.

[…]

In an MFA fatigue situation, the attacker uses the stolen credentials to try to sign into an protected account over and over, overwhelming the user with push notifications. The user may initially tap on the prompt saying it isn’t them trying to sign in, but eventually they wear down from the spamming and accept it just to stop their phone going off. They may assume it’s a temporary glitch or an automated system causing the surge in requests.

[…]

sometimes the attacker will pose as part of the organization’s IT staff, messaging the employee to accept the access attempt.

[…]

Ensuring authentication apps can’t be fat-fingered and requests wrongly accepted before they can be fully evaluated, for instance, would be handy. Adding intelligent handling of logins, so that there’s a cooling off period after a bout of MFA spam, is, again, useful, too.

And on top of this, some forms of MFA, such as one-time authentication tokens, can be phished along with usernames and passwords to allow a miscreant to login as their victim. Finding and implementing a phish-resistant MFA approach is something worth thinking about.

[…]

Some companies are on the ball. Microsoft, for instance, is making number matching a default feature in its Authenticator app. This requires a user who responds to an MFA push notification using the tool to type in a number that appears on their device’s screen to approve a login. The number will only be sent to users who have been enabled for number matching, according to Microsoft.

They’re also adding other features to Authenticator, including showing users what application they’re signing into and the location of the device, based on its IP address, that is being used for signing in. If the user is in California but the device is in Europe, that should raise a big red flag. That also ought to be automatically caught by authentication systems, too.

[…]

As to limiting the number of unsuccessful MFA authentication requests: Okta limits that number to five; Microsoft and Duo offer organizations the ability to implement it in their settings and adjust the number of failed attempts before the user’s account is automatically locked. With Microsoft Authenticator, enterprises also can set the number of minutes before an account lockout counter is reset.

[…]

Source: Multi-factor authentication fatigue can blow open security • The Register

Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late

Posted on by

Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about “the monster lurking inside free trade agreements”. Formally, the monster is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), but here on Techdirt we call it “corporate sovereignty“, because that is what it is: a system of secret courts that effectively places companies above a government, by allowing them to sue a nation if the latter takes actions or brings in laws that might adversely affect their profits.

In 2015, we warned that corporate sovereignty would threaten EU plans to protect the environment in the TAFTA/TTIP trade deal between the US and the EU. TAFTA/TTIP never happened, but fossil fuel companies were able to to use other treaties to demand over $18 billion as “compensation” for the potential loss of future profits as the result of increasing government action to tackle climate change.

Chief among those treaties with corporate sovereignty provisions was the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which is designed to protect investments in the energy sector. Research by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) shows that the fossil fuel industry accounts for almost 20% of known ISDS cases, making it the most litigious group. Recently there has been a wave of corporate sovereignty cases brought by fossil fuel companies, with most settled in their favor. The average amount awarded was over $600 million, almost five times the amount given in non-fossil fuel cases.

It has become clear that corporate sovereignty represents a serious threat to countries’ plans to tackle the climate crisis. The obvious solution is simply to withdraw from the ECT, but there’s a problem. Article 47 of the treaty states:

The provisions of this Treaty shall continue to apply to Investments made in the Area of a Contracting Party by Investors of other Contracting Parties or in the Area of other Contracting Parties by Investors of that Contracting Party as of the date when that Contracting Party’s withdrawal from the Treaty takes effect for a period of 20 years from such date.

This “sunset clause” means any of the 53 signatories to the ECT can be sued in the secret ISDS courts for 20 years after withdrawing from the treaty. As a result of this, the EU in particular has been pushing for the ECT to be “modernized”, and recently announced an “agreement in principle” to achieve that. However, it still contains a corporate sovereignty tribunal system:

The modernised ECT will allow the Contracting Parties to exclude new fossil fuel related investments from investment protection and to phase out protection for the already existing investments. This phasing out of protection for fossil fuel investments will take place within a shorter timeframe than in the case of a withdrawal from the ECT, for both existing and new investments: existing fossil fuel investments will be phased out after 10 years under modernised rules (instead of 20 years under current rules) and new investment in fossil fuels will be excluded after 9 months.

Countries that later withdraw from the modernized ECT can be sued for 10 years, rather than the current 20 years. Several EU countries have decided that is not good enough, and have announced their intention to withdraw from the treaty immediately, as Politico reports:

Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have all declared their intention to exit the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Italy left in 2015. Germany, France and Belgium are examining their options, officials from those countries said.

France has confirmed that it will be pulling out, as has Belgium.  For those countries that leave before the “modernized” ECT comes into force, companies can potentially use the sunset clause to sue them during the full 20 years afterwards. The only solution that addresses the serious threat of corporate sovereignty is to remove the sunset clause completely from the ECT. According to one analysis from the IISD, that’s possible if a group of ECT’s contracting parties agree to the move amongst themselves (“inter se”) as part of a joint withdrawal:

There is a legal basis for a withdrawal from the ECT with an inter se neutralization of the survival clause. In contrast to the continued protection of existing and certain future fossil fuel investments under the EU’s amendment proposal, such a withdrawal would put an immediate end to treaty-based fossil fuel protection and ISDS among all withdrawing states. In the short term, this would significantly reduce ISDS risks, given that 60% of the cases based on the ECT are intra-EU. It would also enable the EU and its member states to comply with the EU’s climate objectives and EU law. If further contracting states were to join, the ISDS risk to strong climate action would be further reduced and could pave the way for a fresh, unencumbered negotiation of a truly modern energy treaty that would support the expedited phase-out from fossil fuels and the transition to renewable energy.

It’s an imperfect solution, but better than the half-hearted “modernized” ECT proposed by the EU. The current mess shows that the issue should have been addressed ten years ago, when the problems of the “lurking monster” of corporate sovereignty first became apparent.

Source: Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late | Techdirt

Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem

Posted on by

Dr. Bik is a microbiologist who has worked at Stanford University and for the Dutch National Institute for Health who is “blessed” with “what I’m told is a better-than-average ability to spot repeating patterns,” according to their new Op-Ed in the New York Times.

In 2014 they’d spotted the same photo “being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments….” Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results…..

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals…. By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public….

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.
Manipulated images “raise questions about an entire line of research, which means potentially millions of dollars of wasted grant money and years of false hope for patients.” Part of the problem is that despite “peer review” at scientific journals, “peer review is unpaid and undervalued, and the system is based on a trusting, non-adversarial relationship. Peer review is not set up to detect fraud.”

But there’s other problems. Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats….

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.
Among their proposed solutions? “Journals should pay the data detectives who find fatal errors or misconduct in published papers, similar to how tech companies pay bounties to computer security experts who find bugs in software.”

Source: ‘Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem’ – Slashdot

Behavior of star clusters challenge Newton’s laws of gravity, point at MOND theory

Posted on by

Certain star clusters do not seem to be following current understandings of Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity, according to new research published on Wednesday.

The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, analyzed open star clusters which are formed when thousands of stars are born in a short time period in a huge gas cloud.

As the stars are born, they blow away the remnants of the gas cloud, causing the cluster to expand and create a loose formation of dozens to thousands of stars held together by weak gravitational forces.

As the clusters dissolve, the stars accumulate on two “tidal tails:” one pulled behind the cluster and the other pushed forward.

“According to Newton’s laws of gravity, it’s a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up,” explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. “So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail.”

Dr. Tereza Jerabkova, a co-author of the paper, explained that it is very difficult to determine which stars belong to which tail.

“To do this, you have to look at the velocity, direction of motion and age of each of these objects,” said Jerabkova, who managed to develop a method to accurately count the stars for the first time using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

The perks of a modified theory

When the researchers looked at the data, they found that it did not fit Newton’s law of gravity and instead fit better with an alternate theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

“Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors,” explained Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. “One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front. However, the first is much narrower than the second – so it’s less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it. Newton’s theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width.”

The researchers simulated the stellar distribution expected according to the MOND theory and found that it lined up well with what they observed in the data from the Gaia mission.

Dr. Ingo Thies, who played a key role in the simulations, explained that the researchers needed to rely on relatively simple computational methods in the study since currently there are no mathematical tools for more detailed analyses of the MOND theory.

The simulations also coincided with the Gaia data in terms of how long the star clusters typically survive, which is much shorter than would be expected according to Newton’s laws.

“This explains a mystery that has been known for a long time,” said Kroupa. “Namely, star clusters in nearby galaxies seem to be disappearing faster than they should.”

The MOND theory is controversial as modifications to Newton’s laws of gravity would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics as well, although they would solve many problems facing cosmology.

[…]

Source: Behavior of star clusters challenge Newton’s laws of gravity – The Jerusalem Post

Paper: Asymmetrical tidal tails of open star clusters: stars crossing their cluster’s práh† challenge Newtonian gravitation

Whoops! Amazon Left Prime Video DB with viewing habits (Named ‘Sauron’) Unprotected – yup Elasticsearch

Posted on by

Amazon didn’t protect one of its internal servers, allowing anyone to view a database named “Sauron” which was full of Prime Video viewing habits.

As TechCrunch reports(Opens in a new window), the unprotected Elasticsearch database was discovered by security researcher Anurag Sen(Opens in a new window). Contained within the database, which anyone who knew the IP address could access using a web browser, were roughly 215 million records of Prime Video viewing habit information. The data included show/movie name, streaming device used, network quality, subscription details, and Prime customer status.

[…]

Source: Whoops! Amazon Left a Prime Video Database Named ‘Sauron’ Unprotected | PCMag