SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

Software is making it easier than ever to travel through space, but autonomous technologies could backfire if every glitch and error isn’t removed.

When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space.

Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was the sprawling dashboard of lights and switches and knobs that once dominated the space shuttle’s interior. All of it was replaced with a futuristic console of multiple large touch screens that cycle through a variety of displays. Behind those screens, the vehicle is run by software that’s designed to get into space and navigate to the space station completely autonomously.

[...] But over-relying on software and autonomous systems in spaceflight creates new opportunities for problems to arise. That’s especially a concern for many of the space industry’s new contenders, who aren’t necessarily used to the kind of aggressive and comprehensive testing needed to weed out problems in software and are still trying to strike a good balance between automation and manual control.

Nowadays, a few errors in over one million lines of code could spell the difference between mission success and mission failure. We saw that late last year, when Boeing’s Starliner capsule (the other vehicle NASA is counting on to send American astronauts into space) failed to make it to the ISS because of a glitch in its internal timer.

[...] There’s no consensus on how much further the human role in spaceflight will—or should—shrink. Uitenbroek thinks trying to develop software that can account for every possible contingency is simply impractical, especially when you have deadlines to make.

Chang Díaz disagrees, saying the world is shifting “to a point where eventually the human is going to be taken out of the equation.”

Which approach wins out may depend on the level of success achieved by the different parties sending people into space. NASA has no intention of taking humans out of the equation, but if commercial companies find they have an easier time minimising the human pilot’s role and letting the AI take charge, than[sic] touch screens and pilot-less flight to the ISS are only a taste of what’s to come.

MIT Technology Review

Which approach, do you think, is the best way to go forward ??

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

From Ars Technica:

[...] BMW is planning to move some features of its new cars to a subscription model, something it announced on Wednesday during a briefing for the press on the company's digital plans.

[...] the Bavarian carmaker has plans to apply that model to features like heated seats. BMW says that owners can "benefit in advance from the opportunity to try out the products for a trial period of one month, after which they can book the respective service for one or three years." The company also says that it could allow the second owner of a BMW to activate features that the original purchaser declined.

From Roadshow:

These options will be enabled via the car or the new My BMW app. While some will be permanent and assigned to the car, others will be temporary, with mentioned periods ranging from three months to three years.

[...] So, yes, you could theoretically only pay for heated seats in the colder months if you like, or perhaps save a few bucks by only enabling automatic high-beams on those seasons when the days are shortest.

Also at Hot Hardware, The Drive, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, TechSpot, SlashGear & Forbes.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

New Zealand's ancient monster penguins had northern hemisphere doppelgangers:

New Zealand's monster penguins, which lived 62 million years ago, had doppelgangers in Japan, the U.S. and Canada, a study published today in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research has found.

Scientists have identified striking similarities between the penguins' fossilized bones and those of a group of much younger Northern Hemisphere birds, the plotopterids.

These similarities suggest plotopterids and ancient penguins looked very similar and might help scientists understand how birds started using their wings to swim instead of fly.

Around 62 million years ago, the earliest known penguins swam in tropical seas that almost submerged the land that is now New Zealand. Paleontologists have found the fossilized bones of these ancient waddlers at Waipara, North Canterbury. They have identified nine species, ranging in size from small penguins, the size of today's Yellow-Eyed Penguin, to 1.6-meter-high monsters.

Plotopterids developed in the Northern Hemisphere much later than penguins, with the first species appearing between 37 and 34 million years ago. Their fossils have been found at a number of sites in North America and Japan. Like penguins, they used their flipper-like wings to swim through the sea. Unlike penguins, which have survived into the modern era, the last plotopterid species became extinct around 25 million years ago.

Journal Reference:
Gerald Mayr, James L. Goedert, Vanesa L. De Pietri, et al. Comparative osteology of the penguin‐like mid‐Cenozoic Plotopteridae and the earliest true fossil penguins, with comments on the origins of wing‐propelled diving, Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research (DOI: 10.1111/jzs.12400)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Dish buys prepaid carrier Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion:

After nearly a decade of trying to break into the wireless market, Dish just became the newest national wireless carrier. Today, Dish announced the $1.4 billion acquisition of Boost Mobile. With this purchase, Dish secures its place in the retail wireless market and will serve more than nine million customers.

The deal is the result of T-Mobile's Sprint merger. In order to gain FCC approval and quell fears that the merger would hurt competition, T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to several demands, including divesting Boost Mobile, one of Sprint's prepaid brands. Rumors circulated last year that Dish would buy Boost for $6 billion. Obviously, the final price is nowhere near that amount.

"This marks an important milestone in DISH's evolution as a connectivity company," Dish CEO and president Erik Carlson said in a statement. "It positions us well as we continue to build out the first virtualized, standalone 5G network in America."

Also at Ars Technica and cnet.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Crystal structure discovered almost 200 years ago could hold key to solar cell revolution (SD)

The study in Science, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, revealed that a molecular additive -- a salt based on the organic compound piperidine -- greatly improves the longevity of perovskite solar cells.

[...] One path to the marketplace is a tandem cell made of both silicon and perovskites that could turn more of sunlight's spectrum into energy. Lab tests on tandem cells have produced efficiencies of 28%, and efficiencies in the mid-30s seem realistic, Labram said.

"Tandem cells might allow solar panel producers to offer a performance beyond anything silicon alone might achieve," he said. "The dual approach could help remove the barrier to perovskites entering the market, on the way to perovskites eventually acting as stand-alone cells."

Journal Reference:
Yen-Hung Lin, Nobuya Sakai, Peimei Da, et al. A piperidinium salt stabilizes efficient metal-halide perovskite solar cells [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba1628)

Longevity has been a long-standing concern for hybrid perovskite photovoltaics. We demonstrate high-resilience positive-intrinsic-negative perovskite solar cells by incorporating a piperidinium-based ionic compound into the formamidinium-cesium lead-trihalide perovskite absorber. With the bandgap tuned to be well suited for perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells, this piperidinium additive enhances the open-circuit voltage and cell efficiency. This additive also retards compositional segregation into impurity phases and pinhole formation in the perovskite absorber layer during aggressive aging. Under full-spectrum simulated sunlight in ambient atmosphere, our unencapsulated and encapsulated cells retain 80 and 95% of their peak and post-burn-in efficiencies for 1010 and 1200 hours at 60° and 85°C, respectively. Our analysis reveals detailed degradation routes that contribute to the failure of aged cells.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

More than 75% of all vulnerabilities reside in indirect dependencies:

The vast majority of security vulnerabilities in open-source projects reside in indirect dependencies rather than directly and first-hand loaded components.

"Aggregating the numbers from all ecosystems, we found more than three times as many vulnerabilities in indirect dependencies than we did direct dependencies," Alyssa Miller, Application Security Advocate at Snyk, told ZDNet in an interview discussing Snyk's State of Open Source Security for 2020 study.

The report looked at how vulnerabilities impacted the JavaScript (npm), Ruby (RubyGems), Java (MavenCentral), PHP (Packagist), and Python (PyPI) ecosystems.

Snyk said that 86% of the JavaScript security bugs, 81% of the Ruby bugs, and 74% of the Java ones impacted libraries that were dependencies of the primary components loaded inside a project.

[...] Snyk argues that companies scanning their primary dependencies for security issues without exploring their full dependency tree multiple levels down would release or end up running products that were vulnerable to unforeseen bugs.

So dear Soylentils, how do you track vulnerabilities in libraries that you use in your projects and do you scan beyond direct dependencies?

Previously:
(2020-05-16) Nine in Ten Biz Applications Harbor Out-of-Date, Unsupported, Insecure Open-Source Code, Study Shows

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/study-flying-snakes-wiggle-mid-air-to-stabilize-themselves-while-gliding/

Flying snakes can glide as far as 78 feet (24 meters) without tumbling out of control because they undulate their bodies mid-flight, as if they were swimming through the air. This seems to be a specialized strategy to stabilize their flight rather than an evolutionary remnant of general snake behavior, according to a new paper in the journal Nature Physics. The work could eventually lead to a new, improved control template for dynamic flying robots.

[...] The work nonetheless should prove useful for the improved design of robots inspired by the movements of flying snakes. "The newly discovered kinematic components of aerial undulation... provide the theoretical basis for design of a bio-inspired flying snake robot that glides using aerial undulation as a control template," the authors wrote, adding that this "should markedly simplify the control of a flying snakelike robot."

Journal Reference:
Isaac J. Yeaton, Shane D. Ross, Grant A. Baumgardner, et al. Undulation enables gliding in flying snakes, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0935-4)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

After two months of monitoring, a major encrypted criminal chat network in Europe has been shut down, resulting in over 800 arrests so far.

An estimated 60,000 people, among them up to 10,000 in Britain, subscribed to France-based EncroChat, which has now been taken down.

The system operated on customised Android phones and, according to its website, provided "worry-free secure communications".

Customers had access to features such as self-destructing messages that deleted from the recipient's device after a certain length of time.

There was also panic wipe, where all the data on the device could be deleted by entering a four-digit code from the lock-screen.

According to BBC technology reporter David Molloy

EncroChat sold encrypted phones with a guarantee of anonymity, with a range of special features to remove identifying information. The phones themselves cost roughly £900 (€1,000) each, with a subscription costing £1,350 (€1,500) for six months.

Europol said that French police had discovered some of EncroChat's servers were located in the country, and that it was possible to put a "technical device" in place to access the messages.

In June, rumours began to swirl about EncroChat being compromised by law enforcement.

The Netherlands' National Police said that users began to throw away their phones once the company became aware that messages were being intercepted - "but it was too late".

Police had already intercepted millions of messages, some of which have been acted on already - and others that may be used in the future.

England's National Crime Agency (NCA), roughly comparable to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States, stated that dozens of organized crime groups were shut down primarily across London and Northwestern England.

Details on the method used to breach the encrypted network have not been described in detail other than as "state of the art cyber technology."

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Microsoft to auto upgrade some business and education PCs to Chromium Edge in August

Microsoft this week warned enterprise and education customers running Windows 10 that it will start replacing the old, original Edge browser on their PCs with the newer Chromium-based version on or after July 30.

First to get the forced swap will be machines in educational settings, Microsoft said, citing back-to-school scheduling for the prioritization. (Many K-12 schools, along with colleges and universities, are saying, "We will share a business timeline at a later date," wrote Elliot Kirk, senior program manager with the Edge team, in a July 30 post to a company blog.)

According to Kirk, PCs serviced by Windows Update will be automatically upgraded to the Chromium Edge. "This update will not impact devices in education and business updated by Windows Update for Business (WUfB) or by Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)," he asserted.

[...] Organizations that want to stymie this effort can use the Blocker Toolkit for Edge-to-Edge released in December 2019. The kit, which can be downloaded directly from here in .exe format, blocks Windows Update delivery of the new Edge. It does not prevent students or workers from manually obtaining the Chromium-based Edge. This support document, last revised June 30, covers the Toolkit.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Consumer groups urge scrutiny of Google's Fitbit buyout in letter to antitrust regulators:

A group of 20 consumer organizations on Wednesday evening said it's sending a letter to antitrust regulators around the world, highlighting concerns over Google's proposed acquisition of the fitness tracker pioneer Fitbit.

Google last year announced the $2.1 billion deal with Fitbit as an attempt to bolster its business in wearable technology, like smartwatches and other devices.

[...] The letter calls Google's buyout of Fitbit a "test case" for big tech acquisitions, as Silicon Valley companies expand in part by obtaining data from competitors.

"Google could exploit Fitbit's exceptionally valuable health and location datasets, and data collection capabilities, to strengthen its already dominant position in digital markets such as online advertising," the letter reads. "Google could also use Fitbit's data to establish a commanding position in digital and related health markets, depriving competitors of the ability to compete effectively. This would reduce consumer welfare (including degrading data privacy options), limit innovation and raise prices."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

You have to protect yourself.

Light drinking may protect brain function:

UGA study shows that for older people it could help cognitive condition

[...] The study examined the link between alcohol consumption and changes in cognitive function over time among middle-aged and older adults in the U.S.

[...] Compared to nondrinkers, they found that those who had a drink or two a day tended to perform better on cognitive tests over time.

Even when other important factors known to impact cognition such as age, smoking or education level were controlled for, they saw a pattern of light drinking associated with high cognitive trajectories.

The optimal amount of drinks per week was between 10 and 14 drinks. But that doesn't mean those who drink less should start indulging more, says Zhang.

"It is hard to say this effect is causal," he said. "So, if some people don't drink alcoholic beverages, this study does not encourage them to drink to prevent cognitive function decline."

Journal Reference:
Ruiyuan Zhang, Luqi Shen, Toni Miles, et al. Association of Low to Moderate Alcohol Drinking With Cognitive Functions in US Adults [open], JAMA Network Open (DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.7922)

Original Submission

Stock surge makes Tesla the world’s most valuable automaker

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/stock-surge-makes-tesla-the-worlds-most-valuable-automaker/:

One share of Tesla stock traded for more than $1,130 on Wednesday, pushing the company's market capitalization to nearly $210 billion. That sent Tesla's market cap past Toyota, which is worth either $170 billion or $203 billion, depending on how you count it. Tesla is now the world's most valuable car company.

It's a remarkable milestone for a company that sells far fewer cars than its leading rivals. Toyota and its subsidiaries sold 10.7 million vehicles in 2019, while Volkswagen and its subsidiaries sold almost 11 million vehicles. Tesla sold a comparatively tiny 367,500 vehicles last year.

Tesla stock leaps again on unexpectedly strong delivery numbers

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/tesla-stock-leaps-again-on-unexpectedly-strong-delivery-numbers/:

Tesla has surprised Wall Street again with better-than-expected delivery numbers. The electric carmaker delivered 90,650 vehicles in the second quarter of 2020, up slightly from the 88,400 vehicles delivered in the first quarter. This despite the fact that Tesla's main factory in Fremont, California, was shut down by county officials for the first half of the quarter.

Tesla's stock leapt at the news. After closing at a record high of $1,120 yesterday, Tesla's shares rose above $1,200 in pre-market trading on Thursday morning.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Bizarre new planet is largest known rocky world, 40 times as massive as Earth

About 730 light-years away, not far on the scale of our galaxy, an utterly bizarre planet orbits a sun-like star. Big, dense, and tightly tethered to its home star, the planet is unlike anything astronomers have yet seen—either in our own solar system or afar.

The roasted world known as TOI-849b is the most massive rocky planet ever observed, with as much as 40 Earths' worth of material crammed inside. Perplexingly, TOI-849b's tremendous bulk suggests that it should be a giant, gassy world like Jupiter, yet it has almost no atmosphere. Explaining how such a world emerged challenges what scientists understand about how planets grow.

[...] The planet betrayed its presence by crossing the face of its star and briefly blotting out a smidgen of starlight. Those fleeting, shadowy transits revealed that the alien world circles its star every 18 hours, meaning that its surface temperature is a sweltering 2800°F.

TESS observations also showed that the planet is about 3.4 times as wide as Earth, or 85 percent as wide as Neptune—making it a world of unusual size for its position so close to its star. Up until now, astronomers have primarily observed hot Jupiters or much smaller super-Earths in such tight orbits, and nothing has populated what's known as the hot-Neptune desert.

"There really are no planets of that mass there," Fortney says. TOI-849b is the right radius to be a hot Neptune, but its mass is two to three times larger.

Further observations of the host star's gravitational wobble, made with the HARPS instrument at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, determined that while TOI-849b is roughly as wide as Neptune, it is at least twice as massive. All that bulk means TOI-849b is extremely dense. The rocky planet might have a thin veneer of atmosphere, probably composed of hydrogen and helium—but not nearly as much gas as a world that hefty should hold on to.

Chthonian planet.

Also at University of Warwick and BBC.

A remnant planetary core in the hot-Neptune desert (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2421-7) (DX)

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Geologists identify deep-earth structures that may signal hidden metal lodes

If the world is to maintain a sustainable economy and fend off the worst effects of climate change, at least one industry will soon have to ramp up dramatically: the mining of metals needed to create a vast infrastructure for renewable power generation, storage, transmission and usage. The problem is, demand for such metals is likely to far outstrip currently both known deposits and the existing technology used to find more ore bodies.

Now, in a new study, scientists have discovered previously unrecognized structural lines 100 miles or more down in the earth that appear to signal the locations of giant deposits of copper, lead, zinc and other vital metals lying close enough to the surface to be mined, but too far down to be found using current exploration methods. The discovery could greatly narrow down search areas, and reduce the footprint of future mines, the authors say. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

[...] The study found that 85 percent of all known base-metal deposits hosted in sediments-and 100 percent of all "giant" deposits (those holding more than 10 million tons of metal)-lie above deeply buried lines girdling the planet that mark the edges of ancient continents. Specifically, the deposits lie along boundaries where the earth's lithosphere-the rigid outermost cladding of the planet, comprising the crust and upper mantle-thins out to about 170 kilometers below the surface.

Up to now, all such deposits have been found pretty much at the surface, and their locations have seemed to be somewhat random. Most discoveries have been made basically by geologists combing the ground and whacking at rocks with hammers. Geophysical exploration methods using gravity and other parameters to find buried ore bodies have entered in recent decades, but the results have been underwhelming. The new study presents geologists with a new, high-tech treasure map telling them where to look.

Journal Reference:
Mark J. Hoggard, Karol Czarnota, Fred D. Richards, et al. Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0593-2)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Glass 3.0? Google acquires smart glasses maker North

Google Hardware's latest acquisition is North, a wearables computing company that most recently was making smart glasses that seemed like a successor to Google Glass. Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh announced the purchase on Google's blog, saying, "North's technical expertise will help as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts and ambient computing future."

North developed and released a pair of smart glasses called "Focals," which came the closest we've seen so far to smart glasses that looked like normal glasses. First, the company didn't neglect the "glasses" part of "smart glasses" and provided the frames in a range of styles, sizes, and colors, with support for prescription lenses. The technology was noticeably less invasive, too. Google Glass's display surface was a transparent block distractingly placed in front of the users' face, but Focal's display surface was the glasses' lens itself. A laser projector poked out from the thicker-than-normal temple arms and fired into the lens, which has a special coating, allowing the projection to reflect light into the eye.

[...] Google's smart glasses contribution was, of course, the infamous Google Glass, which launched in 2012 and basically shut down as a consumer product about two years later. (North CEO Stephen Lake actually called Google Glass "a massive failure" in a 2019 tech talk. Awkward!) Most people would think of the product as dead, but Google quietly pivoted Glass to be an enterprise product for assembly-line workers, mechanics, doctors, and other professions that might benefit from hands-free computing. New Glass hardware came out as recently as 2019, with the "Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2," which featured a modern 10nm Qualcomm SoC. With Apple reportedly building a set of smart glasses, the consumer market will probably heat up again soon.

It's back.

Also at BBC.

Previously: Google Glass 'Enterprise Edition': Foldable, More Rugged and Water-Resistant
Intel Abandons Vaunt AR (Augmented Reality) Smartglasses
Intel's Vaunt Augmented Reality Smartglasses Concept Lives on at Canadian Company North
"North Focals" $1000 Smartglasses Reviewed

Related: Apple Glasses Leaks and Rumors: Here's Everything We Expect to See

Original Submission