Last week the Linux Foundation announced its Civil Infrastructure Platform project "has expanded its super-long-term stable kernel program with a 6.1-based series.

"Just like for the previously started kernel series (4.4-cip, 4.19-cip and 5.10-cip), the project is committed to maintaining the 6.1-cip kernel for a minimum of 10 years after its initial release." The Civil Infrastructure Platform project is establishing an open source base layer of industrial grade Linux to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks for civil infrastructure. The project's kernels are maintained like regular long-term-stable kernels, and developers of the CIP kernel are also involved in long-term-stable kernel review and testing.

While regular long-term-stable kernels are moving back to 2 years maintenance, CIP kernels are set up for 10 years. In order to enable this extended lifetime, CIP kernels are scoped-down in actively supported kernel features and target architecture. At the same time, CIP kernels accept non-invasive backports from newer mainline kernels that enable new hardware...

"The CIP kernels are developed and reviewed with the same meticulous attention as regular Long-Term-Stable kernels," said Yoshi Kobayashi, Technical Steering Committee Chair at the CIP project. "Our developers actively participate in reviewing and testing long-term-stable kernels, contributing to the overall quality and security of the platform. A key highlight is our work on the IEC 62443 security standard, aimed at fortifying the resilience of critical infrastructure systems."

"As 2023 comes to a close, the CIP project has stood as a beacon of stability and innovation, with a commitment to driving collaboration to strengthen this essential initiative," said Urs Gleim, Governing Board Chair at the CIP project...

The Civil Infrastructure Platform is driving open source collaboration and innovation around industrial grade software for prodúcts used in industrial automation and for civil infrastructure, such as trains and power grids. To learn more about the CIP project, including how to get involved and contribute, please visit our booth at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Japan, December 5 — 6, or visit our website.

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again — two novellas based on Toho's first two Godzilla movies — were finally published in an English translation this month.

Both were written by science fiction author Shigeru Kayama, "who also penned the original scenarios from which the films in question were based," according to Our Culture magazine. And the book's translator calls Kayama both "a figure who is a little bit like Philip K. Dick in this country" and "the key person who developed the contours of the Godzilla story. I think it is no exaggeration to say that he perhaps the closest to being Godzilla's real father than anyone else. Without him, the monster we have today wouldn't exist." The original Godzilla film is a deeply powerful, mournful film that isn't just about a big monster stomping on buildings. It is a serious reflection on Japan's nuclear fears during the Cold War, which left it caught between heavily armed superpowers. Japan recognized that radioactive weapons of mass destruction being developed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R were threats that had the power to suddenly emerge and destroy its citizens and cities at any moment — like Godzilla. We should remember that in the film, it was hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that disturbed Godzilla, who then took revenge for his destroyed habitat by trampling Tokyo and blasting it with atomic rays...

Interestingly, in the novellas that I've translated, Kayama sometimes restored elements that the director and his assistants removed in the moviemaking process. Perhaps the most noticeable one is that in the scenario, Kayama wanted to begin with a long voice-over that talks directly about the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs. He envisioned that as the voice was speaking, the screen would show images from historical footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as images of the tremendously unlucky (and ironically named) fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5, which accidentally found itself in the path of an H-bomb test in the South Pacific in early 1954. (The horrific fate of this boat directly inspired the producer at Toho Studios to make the film.)

However, the director of the film, Ishiro Honda, and his assistant who helped with the screenplay both felt that this kind of direct commentary was too direct for a popular film, and so they toned down the "protest" element in the story. It's clear that they, like Kayama, wanted Godzilla to serve as a monstrous embodiment of radiation and all of the destruction that it could bring, but they also didn't point fingers at the U.S. military which had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was busily developing even more horrifying weapons. After all, the U.S.S.R. had built its own arsenal, and so nuclear weapons no longer belonged to a single country — the threat was broader than that. Plus, protest films rarely attracted a big, popular following. So, Honda and his crew toned down the outspoken language and imagery, but there was still imagery left enough for viewers in 1954 to recall Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon. Interestingly, when Kayama published the novellas, he included an author preface that talks about the anti-nuclear movement and encourages readers to read Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again as his contribution to that movement.
Next the translator hopes to create an English translation of the novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.

But for this book, he struggled with how to assign a gender to Godzilla. "Some people feel very viscerally, like the people at Toho studios feel very strongly that Godzilla is an 'it' and not a 'he' or 'she' or 'they,'" he told MovieWeb. "I kind of give my rationale for that choice in the afterward — Kayama thought about Godzilla as a stand-in for the nuclear bomb, and it was men in America who were developing the hydrogen bombs that frightened Japan so much in 1954. So maybe it's perhaps not inappropriate to call Godzilla 'he.'"

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced plans to launch cloud streaming for PlayStation 5 this month. From a report: The feature, which will be available to PlayStation Plus Premium members, will receive a staggered rollout. Sony is targeting an October 17 launch for Japan, October 23 for Europe and October 30 for North America. "Select PS5 games will be available for streaming, and we're planning to have hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit," said Hideaki Nishino, SIE's senior VP of platform experience.

Supported titles will include Game Catalogue offerings like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Mortal Kombat 11 and Saints Row IV. Some PS5 digital titles that players own will be available for streaming too including Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Genshin Impact, Fall Guys and Fortnite. Game Trials for PS5 titles like Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Calisto Protocol will also be available. Sony said DLC and in-game purchases will be available for PS5 game streaming too.

Microplastics have been found everywhere from the oceans' depths to the Antarctic ice, and now new research has detected it in an alarming new location -- clouds hanging atop two Japanese mountains. From a report: The clouds around Japan's Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama contain concerning levels of the tiny plastic bits, and highlight how the pollution can be spread long distances, contaminating the planet's crops and water via "plastic rainfall." The plastic was so concentrated in the samples researchers collected that it is thought to be causing clouds to form while giving off greenhouse gasses.

"If the issue of 'plastic air pollution' is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future," the study's lead author, Hiroshi Okochi, a professor at Waseda University, said in a statement. The peer-reviewed paper was published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, and the authors believe it is the first to check clouds for microplastics. The pollution is made up of plastic particles smaller than five millimeters that are released from larger pieces of plastic during degradation. They are also intentionally added to some products, or discharged in industrial effluent. Tires are thought to be among the main sources, as are plastic beads used in personal care products. Recent research has found them to be widely accumulating across the globe -- as much as 10m tons are estimated to end up in the oceans annually.

Google Japan's latest DIY project is for people who can't get keyboards off their heads. From a report: Google isn't making this product. Instead, the Gboard CAPS project is another of Google Japan's joke keyboard ideas, like the 5.25-foot-long, single-row Gboard Stick Version keyboard shown off last year, used to promote Google's Gboard app. However, Google Japan seemingly prototyped the keyboard in real life. Everything you need to make this typing topper, including the firmware and hardware, is open source and available on GitHub. How do you type with the hat? It has a 6-axis sensor that reads its position. Turn the hat to select a character and press its top to enter. It pairs via Bluetooth, runs on a 3.7V, 120mAh battery, and charges via USB-C.

The global average temperature for September broke records by such an absurd margin that climate experts are struggling to describe the phenomenon. From a report: "This month was -- in my professional opinion as a climate scientist -- absolutely gobsmackingly bananas," Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley Earth, said on the social media platforms Bluesky and X. The numbers are stark. September 2023 beat the previous record for the month, set in 2020, by 0.5C (0.9F), according to data sets maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The temperature anomaly for the month was roughly 1.7C above pre-industrial levels, which is above the symbolic 1.5C mark set as the stretch goal in the Paris Agreement.

"We've never really seen a jump anything quite of this magnitude," Hausfather said. "Half a degree C is analogous to slightly less than half of all the warming we've seen from pre-industrial [temperatures]." Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of rising temperatures. The global average temperature this year has also seen a boost from El Nino, a natural climate shift in the Pacific. Other factors may also be pushing temperatures up incrementally, such as a decline in cooling aerosol pollution from ships. Hausfather said next September may be unlikely to have all the same compounding factors, and consequently may be not as extreme. But either way, he described September 2023 as a "sneak peek" of what the back-to-school month may feel like in a decade as climate change pushes temperatures higher.

A Tokyo startup has developed a 4.5-meter-tall, four-wheeled robot modeled after the "Mobile Suit Gundam" from the Japanese animation series. It has a price tag of $3 million. Reuters reports: Called ARCHAX after the avian dinosaur archaeopteryx, the robot has cockpit monitors that receive images from cameras hooked up to the exterior so that the pilot can maneuver the arms and hands with joysticks from inside its torso. The 3.5-ton robot, which will be unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show later this month, has two modes: the upright 'robot mode' and a 'vehicle mode' in which it can travel up to 10 km (6 miles) per hour.

"Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one," said Ryo Yoshida, the 25-year-old chief executive of Tsubame Industries. "I wanted to create something that says, 'This is Japan.'" Yoshida plans to build and sell five of the machines for the well-heeled robot fan, but hopes the robot could one day be used for disaster relief or in the space industry.

In a move to strengthen its chip supply chain, Japan announced it will provide up to $1.3 billion in additional subsidies for U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology's plant in Hiroshima Prefecture. The Japan Times reports: The move, which comes on top of the up to 46.5 billion yen aid announced earlier, adds to Japan's efforts to ensure a stable supply of chips at a time when rising tensions between the United States and China are increasingly posing a threat to its economic security. Micron has said it plans to invest up to 500 billion yen in Japan in the next few years and will become the first chipmaker to introduce extreme ultraviolet lithography machines -- state-of-the-art equipment for manufacturing advanced semiconductors -- in Japan. The company is slated to start mass production of next-generation 1-gamma dynamic random access memory chips in 2026.

"Bear attacks in Japan have been rising at an alarming rate, so the city of Takikawa [about 570 miles from Tokyo] installed a robot wolf as a deterrent," reports the BBC. "The robot wolf was originally designed to keep wild animals from farmlands, but is now being used by local governments and managers of highways, golf courses, and pig farms." Digital Trends describes the "Monster Wolf" as "complete with glowing red eyes and protruding fangs." [T]he solar-powered Monster Wolf emits a menacing roar if it detects a nearby bear. It also has a set of flashing LED lights on its tail, and can move its head to appear more real... The robot's design is apparently based on a real wolf that roamed part of the Asian nation more than 100 years ago before it was hunted into extinction.

Japanese news outlet NHK reported earlier this month that bear attacks in the country are at their highest level since records began in 2007. The environment ministry said 53 cases of injuries as a result of such attacks were reported between April and July this year, with at least one person dying following an attack in Hokkaido in May.

Japan's Transport Safety Board on Thursday judged that a cargo ship that spilled 1,000 tons of fuel oil into a pristine marine environment off the coast of Mauritius in 2020 was travelling off course in search of a cell phone signal. From a report: The MV Wakashio was en route from Lianyungang, China to a Brazilian port when, on July 25 2020, it struck trouble near Blue Bay Marine Park, a popular snorkeling spot on the Indian Ocean nation Mauritius. The Japanese-owned vessel was sailing under a Panamanian flag of convenience, and captained by a Indian national. According to the report, two days before it ran aground, the captain changed the 100,000-plus ton ship's route to travel five nautical miles from the coast line instead of the originally planned 22 nautical miles. He ordered the course change without obtaining proper marine charts of the area and therefore did not know that waters in the area are less than 20 meters deep.

The ship subsequently hit a coral reef. "Reefs and obstacles were displayed near the place of occurrence," reads the 89-page Japan Transport Safety Board report in Japanese. "The body buckled due to being knocked to the seabed and broke into the skin near the fuel oil tank. As a result, about 1,000 tons of fuel oil loaded in the tank spilled out to sea," the document states. The report noted that the captain of the vessel changed the voyage plan for the purpose of coming within range of signal for his smartphone. It also noted the behavior was not an isolated incident and that safety awareness among the crew at large was lacking.

"Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet," said Nissan's chief executive Makoto Uchida. The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. The BBC reports: In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars. "It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years," he said. "We are looking at it from the point of view of the technology, from the point of view of cooperating with suppliers, and of course working with the government on how we can deliver that kind of cost competitiveness to the consumer," Mr Uchida added. Will that price parity happen by 2030? "That's what we're aiming for," confirmed Mr Uchida.

Mr Uchida also said that the company was fast-tracking a different kind of battery technology, known as all-solid-state batteries (ASSB), which are lighter, cheaper, and quicker to charge. "We are going to have a pilot plant for ASSB in Japan from next year, and we want to ensure they can be mass produced by 2028," he said. "There are a lot of challenges with this, but we do have a solution, and we are on track [to meet that target]", he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect -- and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement [...] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.

While the law is complex, the reason it's hated is not: It's effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes -- a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. [...] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. "Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers," [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. "If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result."

Meanwhile, the protest movement is steady on the ground in Tokyo. Voiction, which has been meeting with legislators to try to halt the law, plans on continuing to fight through the rest of the year and beyond. [Voice actress Yuhko Kaida] explains that the government could still decide to allow small businesses to not file 2023's consumption tax in March 2024, when taxes are due. "If we have the willpower, we can stop this law," Kaida says. "Then we can reduce the damage to people's lives."

Astronomers have captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, providing new insights into the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The observations focus on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the neighbouring Messier 87 galaxy, whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Like many supermassive black holes, M87 features powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into intergalactic space. Scientists have predicted that the rotation of a black hole powers these cosmic jets, but until now direct evidence was elusive.

"After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists," said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan and co-author. "Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning." M87 is located 55m light years from the Earth and harbours a black hole 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun. Just beyond the black hole is an accretion disk of gas and dust, swirling on the precipice of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of this material is destined to fall into the black hole, disappearing for ever. But a fraction will be ejected out from the poles of the black hole at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. The paper: Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87 (Nature).

SonicSpike shares a report: A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched, and was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later. On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan. Curry said agents with the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit and the Department of Homeland Security questioned him at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC about a "high profile phishing campaign," searched his unlocked phone, and served him with a grand jury subpoena to testify in New York the week after.

According to a photo of the subpoena that Curry posted, the grand jury was investigating wire fraud and money laundering. But Curry said he later received confirmation that the copy of his device data was deleted and the grand jury subpoena was canceled once prosecutors realized that Curry was investigating the theft of crypto, and not involved in it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers backed by the Chinese government are planting malware into routers that provides long-lasting and undetectable backdoor access to the networks of multinational companies in the US and Japan, governments in both countries said Wednesday. The hacking group, tracked under names including BlackTech, Palmerworm, Temp.Overboard, Circuit Panda, and Radio Panda, has been operating since at least 2010, a joint advisory published by government entities in the US and Japan reported. The group has a history of targeting public organizations and private companies in the US and East Asia. The threat actor is somehow gaining administrator credentials to network devices used by subsidiaries and using that control to install malicious firmware that can be triggered with "magic packets" to perform specific tasks.

The hackers then use control of those devices to infiltrate networks of companies that have trusted relationships with the breached subsidiaries. "Specifically, upon gaining an initial foothold into a target network and gaining administrator access to network edge devices, BlackTech cyber actors often modify the firmware to hide their activity across the edge devices to further maintain persistence in the network," officials wrote in Wednesday's advisory. "To extend their foothold across an organization, BlackTech actors target branch routers -- typically smaller appliances used at remote branch offices to connect to a corporate headquarters -- and then abuse the trusted relationship of the branch routers within the corporate network being targeted. BlackTech actors then use the compromised public-facing branch routers as part of their infrastructure for proxying traffic, blending in with corporate network traffic, and pivoting to other victims on the same corporate network."

Most of Wednesday's advisory referred to routers sold by Cisco. In an advisory of its own, Cisco said the threat actors are compromising the devices after acquiring administrative credentials and that there's no indication they are exploiting vulnerabilities. Cisco also said that the hacker's ability to install malicious firmware exists only for older company products. Newer ones are equipped with secure boot capabilities that prevent them from running unauthorized firmware, the company said. "It would be trivial for the BlackTech actors to modify values in their backdoors that would render specific signatures of this router backdoor obsolete," the advisory stated. "For more robust detection, network defenders should monitor network devices for unauthorized downloads of bootloaders and firmware images and reboots. Network defenders should also monitor for unusual traffic destined to the router, including SSH."

To detect and mitigate this threat, the advisory recommends administrators disable outbound connections on virtual teletype (VTY) lines, monitor inbound and outbound connections, block unauthorized outbound connections, restrict administration service access, upgrade to secure boot-capable devices, change compromised passwords, review network device logs, and monitor firmware changes for unauthorized alterations.

Ars Technica notes: "The advisory didn't provide any indicators of compromise that admins can use to determine if they have been targeted or infected."

Michelle Butterfield writes via Global News: A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects. Toregem Biopharma is slated to begin clinical trials in July of next year after it succeeded growing new teeth in mice five years ago, the Japan Times reports. Dr. Katsu Takahashi, a lead researcher on the project and head of the dentistry and oral surgery department at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital, says "the idea of growing new teeth is every dentist's dream."

In his research, which he's been conducting at Kyoto University since 2005, Takahashi learned of a particular gene in mice that affects the growth of their teeth. The antibody for this gene, USAG-1, can help stimulate tooth growth if it is suppressed -- and scientists have since worked to develop a "neutralizing antibody medicine" that is able to block USAG-1. Now, his team has been testing the theory that "blocking" this protein could grow more teeth. After their successful tests on mice, the team went on to perform similarly positive trials on ferrets -- animals who have a similar dental pattern to humans.

Now, testing will turn to healthy adult humans and, if all goes well, the team plans to hold a clinical trial for the drug from 2025 for children between two and six years old with anodontia -- a rare genetic disorder that results in the absence of six or more baby and/or adult teeth. According to the Japan Times, the children involved in the clinical trial will be injected with one dose of the drug to see if it induces teeth growth. If successful, the medicine could be available for regulatory approval by 2030.

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

How many smartphone brands do you think have left the market since 2017? The likes of LG probably come to mind, then there are the many local, lesser-known brands. Maybe fifty, or one hundred? The actual figure is, astoundingly, nearly 500. TechSpot: Counterpoint Research's analysis shows that at its peak in 2017, there were more than 700 smartphone brands contributing to the 1.5 billion units sold annually. In 2023, that number is down by a third to almost 250. Nearly all of those brands that have shuttered over the last five years were local ones found in locations such as India, the Middle East, Africa, China, Japan, and South Korea. The number of global brands such as Samsung has remained consistent at over 30.

Counterpoint Research highlights several reasons behind the shrinking number of brands over the last seven years. The pandemic and component shortages that began in 2020 had a massive impact, while the global economic slowdown following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has caused many smaller smartphone companies to shutter. The local brands have also been dealing with other factors killing off their businesses. More people are holding onto their devices for longer before upgrading, cheaper phones are improving in quality all the time, there's a maturing user base, we've seen technology transitions such as that from 4G to 5G, and a handful of big brands are holding on to more of the market.

The Washington Post reports: Japan launched a lunar mission Thursday, overcoming multiple failures and delays to become the fifth country to head to the moon — just weeks after India — in a global race to better understand Earth's closest neighbor... It is scheduled to enter the moon's orbit in three to four months and land early next year.

The rocket is carrying two space missions: a new X-ray telescope to help scientists better understand the origins of the universe and a lightweight high-precision moon lander that will serve as the basis for future moon landing technology. The telescope separated at 8:56 a.m., and the moon lander separated at 9:29 a.m...

Japan has made several attempts to reach the moon, including its Omotenashi project to land an ultrasmall probe. In November, Japan abandoned the project after failing to restore communications with the spacecraft. Earlier this year, Tokyo-based space company ispace also pulled the plug on the first Japanese private-sector attempt to land on the moon.
Japan's high-precision lander hopes to land within 328 feet (100 meters) of its target — which the article says it "much closer than conventional lunar landers, which usually have an accuracy of several kilometers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Toyota says a recent disruption of operations in Japan-based production plants was caused by its database servers running out of storage space. On August 29th, it was reported that Toyota had to halt operations on 12 of its 14 Japan-based car assembly plants due to an undefined system malfunction. As one of the largest automakers in the world, the situation caused production output losses of roughly 13,000 cars daily, threatening to impact exports to the global market.

In a statement released today on Toyota's Japanese news portal, the company explains that the malfunction occurred during a planned IT systems maintenance event on August 27th, 2023. The planned maintenance was to organize the data and deletion of fragmented data in a database. However, as the storage was filled to capacity before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down. This shutdown directly impacted the company's production ordering system so that no production tasks could be planned and executed.

Toyota explains that its main servers and backup machines operate on the same system. Due to this, both systems faced the same failure, making a switchover impossible, inevitably leading to a halt in factory operations. The restoration came on August 29th, 2023, when Toyota's IT team had prepared a larger capacity server to accept the data that was partially transferred two days back. This allowed Toyota's engineers to restore the production ordering system and the plants to resume operations.