“If a rock falls on Mars, and no one is there to see it, does it leave a trace?” jokes the New York Times, answering “Yes, and it’s a beautiful herringbone-like pattern, new research reveals.”
Scientists have now spotted thousands of tracks on the red planet created by tumbling boulders. Delicate chevron-shaped piles of Martian dust and sand frame the tracks, the team showed, and most fade over the course of a few years.

Rockfalls have been spotted elsewhere in the solar system, including on the moon and even a comet. But a big open question is the timing of these processes on other worlds — are they ongoing or did they predominantly occur in the past?A study of these ephemeral features on Mars, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, says that such boulder tracks can be used to pinpoint recent seismic activity on the red planet. This new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the notion that all of the planet’s exciting geology happened much earlier, s aid Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study…

To arrive at this finding, Vijayan, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmadabad, India, who uses a single name, and his colleagues pored over thousands of images of Mars’ equatorial region. The imagery was captured from 2006 through 2020 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and revealed details as small as 10 inches across. “We can discriminate individual boulders,” Vijayan said. The team manually searched for chain-like features — a telltale signature of a rock careening down an incline — on the sloped walls of impact craters. Vijayan and his collaborators spotted more than 4,500 such boulder tracks, the longest of which stretched more than a mile and a half…

Roughly one-third of the tracks the researchers studied were absent in early images, meaning that they must have formed since 2006… The researchers suggest that winds continuously sweeping over the surface of Mars redistribute dust and sand and erase the ejecta. Because boulder fall ejecta fades so rapidly, seeing it implies that a boulder was dislodged recently, the team suggest. And a common cause of rockfalls, on Earth and elsewhere, is seismic activity…. Since 2019, hundreds of marsquakes have been detected by NASA’s InSight lander, and two of the largest occurred last year in the Cerberus Fossae region.

Today the Mars lander InSight is back in operation after a two-week break to avoid dust storms, while dust storms also delayed the 19th flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter.

And elsewhere on Mars, the Perserverance rover successfully dislodged two pebbles stuck in its sample-collecting apparatus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Researchers Find Evidence of Boulders Tumbling After Recent Earthquakes on Mars

Remember that MIT professor accused of hiding the work he did for the Chinese government? (He was arrested for not disclosing it on federal grant applications, with a U.S. attorney announcing “It is not illegal to collaborate with foreign researchers. It is illegal to lie about it.”)

All charges have been dropped. Mass Live reports:
Chen, 56, was arrested a year ago for failing to disclose millions of dollars in contracts, appointments and awards from the Chinese government when he applied for a grant from the Department of Energy. Among other charges, he was accused of wire fraud and making a false statement on a tax return, according to prosecutors. He pleaded not guilty to the full slate of charges.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said the federal government would drop its case against Chen. After assessing new evidence, Rollins said in a statement her office found it could not meet the burden of proof in a trial. “As prosecutors, we have an obligation in every matter we pursue to continually examine the facts while being open to receiving and uncovering new information,” Rollins said. “Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice….”

Prosecutors had claimed Chen used the U.S. government’s money to benefit the Chinese government, while failing to disclose any relationship with Chinese leaders. Colleagues protested Chen’s arrest, saying grant disclosure violations had been treated as a serious crime, such as espionage or intellectual property theft, the New York Times reported. Recently, Department of Energy officials said they would awarded a grant to him even if he had disclosed his ties to China.

MIT Technology Review adds:
From the start, Chen had maintained his innocence, while MIT had indicated that he was working to establish a research collaboration on behalf of the institution and that the funding in question was actually for the university rather than Chen personally. MIT also paid for his defense….

“The government finally acknowledged what we said all along: Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man,” Robert Fisher, Chen’s defense attorney, said in a statement. “Our defense was never based on any legal technicalities. Gang did not commit any of the offenses he was charged with. Full stop. He was never in a talent program. He was never an overseas scientist for Beijing. He disclosed everything that he was supposed to disclose and never lied to the government or anyone else.”

For his part, Chen said, “While I am relieved that my ordeal is over, I am mindful that this terribly misguided China Initiative continues to bring unwarranted fear to the academic community, and other scientists still face charges.”

“I will have more to share soon,” the scientist added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – All Charges Dropped Against MIT Professor Accused of Hiding Ties to China

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Free Open Source 3D production software Blender has been released in version 3.0 (official showreel) with more new features, improvements and performance optimizations as well as further improved workflows.

In recent years Blender has received an increasing rate of attention from the 3D industry, with various larger businesses such as Epic, Microsoft, Apple and most recently Intel joining the blender foundation and donating to its development fund. Blender has seen an increasing rise in usage in various industries, such as animated feature film production, architecture and game development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Blender 3.0 Released With More New Features and Improvements

“Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications,” reports Neowin:

This means that application developers will now be able to serve ads in traditional desktop applications…. Windows users have been dealing with this in Metro UI apps since Windows 8 and it’s something that’s never gone over well on the desktop.

While it’s doubtful you’ll see ads in KDE’s core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them…. According to the documentation, the advertising plugin supports a variety of platforms. They are as follows:

– Windows 10
– Ubuntu 20.04
– Raspbian Buster
– macOS
– Android 7.0
— iOS

“Our offering aims to disrupt the IoT industry,” explains Qt’s press release, “enabling new business models and business cases that before were not possible.”

Reactions have been mixed. Comments on Phoronix ranged from calling it “a great way for boost development on KDE” to “Not sure if I like this.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps