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Anti-aristarchus writes:

Salon has an article on Ingenuity.

In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a plane for 12 seconds, 120 feet in the air, on what is now known as the first powered-controlled flight on Earth. Now, 118 years later, the first powered-controlled attempt at a flight on another planet is about to take place.

According to NASA, Ingenuity — the four-pound rotorcraft attached to Perseverance — is on its way to its "airfield" on Mars.

The space agency announced that its target for its first takeoff attempt will happen no earlier than April 8, 2021.

Ingenuity was designed as an experiment to see if it is possible to fly on Mars as we do here on Earth. And the process leading up to the takeoff is a very meticulous one. Consider how long it took humans to stick a powered-controlled flight on Earth; given Mars' thin atmosphere and a twenty-minute delay in communication, it is arguably more challenging on Mars.

"As with everything with the helicopter, this type of deployment has never been done before," Farah Alibay, Mars helicopter integration lead for the Perseverance rover, said in a press statement. "Once we start the deployment there is no turning back."

Every move for the next couple of weeks could make or break Ingenuity's success — starting with precisely positioning the rotorcraft in the middle of its 33-by-33-foot square airfield, which is actually a flat field on the Martian surface with no obstructions. From there, the entire deployment process from Perseverance will take about six Martian days, which are called sols. (The Martian sol is thirty-nine minutes longer than an Earth day.)

Good luck, little chopper!

Previously:
NASA Lays Out Plans for its First Flights on Mars
How NASA Designed a Helicopter that Could Fly Autonomously on Mars
NASA is Sending a Helicopter to Mars, but What For?

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Anti-aristarchus writes:

NASA's TESS planet hunter spied 2,200 candidate worlds in its first 2 years

A NASA spacecraft built to spot alien worlds has completed its first two years of work, and the tally is in: the mission hauled in 2,241 new exoplanet candidates for scientists to study.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018, designed to spend two years poring over most of the sky. Each month, the spacecraft turns to a new strip of stars and stares, watching for the characteristic dips in brightness caused by a planet crossing between star and telescope. In a new catalog, astronomers offer a detailed view of a host of planet candidates the spacecraft identified in its first two years of work.

"The exciting thing is to look at the map of TESS exoplanets as a kind of to-do list — with 2,000 things on it," Natalia Guerrero, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper's lead author, said in a NASA statement.

And, more to come?

TESS is still observing; NASA extended the mission for another two-year stint, which will keep the spacecraft in business until September 2022. And scientists will be working with the existing data, including the new catalog, for years to come.

"Now the community's role is to connect the dots," Guerrero said. "It's really cool because the field is so young, there's still a lot of room for discovery: those 'Aha' moments."

The catalog is described in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org on March 23.

Journal Reference:
Guerrero, Natalia M., Seager, S., Huang, Chelsea X., et al. The TESS Objects of Interest Catalog from the TESS Prime Mission, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12538)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Windows 95 Easter egg discovered after being hidden for 25 years:

When developing software, it is not uncommon for developers to slip in a secret hidden feature, message, or even a mini-game, that users can discover by performing particular actions in a program.

[...] This week, a new Easter egg in Windows 95's Internet Mail program has been discovered by Windows hacker and developer Albacore, opening a secret window that displays a scrolling list of the developer's names.

Before this discovery, there is no known mention of this Easter egg, meaning it has remained undiscovered for close to 25 years.

[...] To access the Easter egg, users need to launch Internet Mail, click on Help, and then About. When the About screen opens, click on the listed comctl32.dll file, so it becomes highlighted, and then type MORTIMER on your keyboard.

After typing 'mortimer,' a small window will be displayed that will begin to list the Internet Mail developer's names, as shown in the video above that was shared with BleepingComputer.

See the linked story on Bleeping Computer for links to this Easter egg and another one for Windows 95 itself.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return:

The chorus of disapproval over Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), rejoining the organisation has intensified as Linux giant Red Hat confirmed it was pulling funding.

Stallman announced he had returned to the FSF's Board of Directors last weekend – news that has not gone down well with all in the community and Red Hat is the latest to register its dismay.

CTO Chris Wright tweeted overnight: "I am really outraged by FSF's decision to reinstate RMS. At a moment in time where diversity and inclusion awareness is growing, this is a step backwards."

Describing itself as "appalled" at the return of Stallman to the FSF board of directors "considering the circumstances of Richard Stallman's original resignation in 2019," Red Hat said it decided to act.

"We are immediately suspending all Red Hat funding of the FSF and any FSF-hosted events. In addition, many Red Hat contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF-led or backed events, and we stand behind them," said Red Hat.

[...] Red Hat's step marks an escalation in the war of words over Stallman's return. As both a long-time donor and contributor of code, the IBM-owned company's action might well give the FSF pause for thought in a way that thousands of outraged tweets might not.

FSF president Geoffrey Knauth stated his intention yesterday "to resign as an FSF officer, director, and voting member as soon as there is a clear path for new leadership."

Red Hat statement about Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation board

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Sea-level rise is accelerating to its highest levels in at least 2,000 years across the Northeast, including New York City, study says:

Along a stretch of the East Coast that includes New York City, sea-level rise has increased at its fastest rate in the prior 100 years compared to the past 2,000 years, according to a new study led by Rutgers University.

"The global rise in sea-level from melting ice and warming oceans from 1900 to 2000 led to a rate that's more than twice the average for the years 0 to 1800 — the most significant change," Rutgers said of the study's findings.

The study uses new techniques and focuses on six specific locations in the northeastern US, including three in New Jersey and one each in Connecticut, New York and North Carolina.

Human-induced climate change is fueling this more dramatic rise. The research shows that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by humans burning fossil fuels have warmed up our planet, causing the oceans to warm and glaciers to melt.

[...] "If you want to know what's driving the sea level change, this budget approach is a way to break down those individual components," said Jennifer Walker, the lead author of this study and a post-doctoral researcher at Rutgers University.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

WWII codebreaker Turing honored on UK's new 50-pound note:

LONDON (AP) — The rainbow flag flew proudly Thursday above the Bank of England in the heart of London's financial district to commemorate World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, the new face of Britain's 50-pound note.

The design of the bank note was unveiled before it is being formally issued to the public on June 23, Turing's birthday. The 50-pound note is the most valuable denomination in circulation but is little used during everyday transactions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic as digital payments increasingly replaced the use of cash.

The new note, which is laden with high-level security features and is made of longer-lasting polymer, completes the bank's rejig of its paper currencies over the past few years. Turing's image joins that of Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, novelist Jane Austen on the 10-pound note and artist J. M. W. Turner on the 20-pound note.

Turing was selected as the new face of the 50-pound note in 2019 following a public nomination process that garnered around 250,000 votes, partly [in] recognition of the discrimination that he faced as a gay man after the war.

Among his many accomplishments, Turing is most famous for the pivotal role he played in breaking Nazi Germany's Enigma code during World War II. The code had been believed to be unbreakable as the cipher changed continuously. Historians say the cracking of the code may have helped shorten the war by at least two years, potentially saving millions of lives.

"There's something of the character of a nation in its money, and we are right to consider and celebrate the people on our bank notes," Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey said.

[...] As part of the new note's design — which includes a metallic hologram that changes between the words "Fifty' and "Pounds" when the note is tilted and an image of a microchip — the bank collaborated with U.K. intelligence and security agency GCHQ to create The Turing Challenge, a set of 12 puzzles

GCHQ said the full challenge could take an experienced puzzler seven hours to complete and may have even left Turing "scratching his head, although we very much doubt it."

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takyon writes:

Baltimore will no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, low-level crimes

A year ago, as the coronavirus began to spread across Maryland, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, a move aimed at curbing Covid-19's spread behind bars.

That shift — repeated by prosecutors in many other cities — didn't just reduce jail populations. In Baltimore, nearly all categories of crime have since declined, confirming to Mosby what she and criminal justice experts have argued for years: Crackdowns on quality-of-life crimes are not necessary for stopping more serious crime.

On Friday, Mosby announced that she was making her pandemic experiment permanent, saying Baltimore — for decades notorious for runaway violence and rough policing — had become a case study in criminal justice reform.

Also at WBAL-TV.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

"Expert" hackers used 11 0-days to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users:

A team of advanced hackers exploited no fewer than 11 zero-day vulnerabilities in a nine-month campaign that used compromised websites to infect fully patched devices running Windows, iOS, and Android, a Google researcher said.

Using novel exploitation and obfuscation techniques, a mastery of a wide range of vulnerability types, and a complex delivery infrastructure, the group exploited four zero-days in February 2020. The hackers' ability to chain together multiple exploits that compromised fully patched Windows and Android devices led members of Google's Project Zero and Threat Analysis Group to call the group "highly sophisticated."

On Thursday, Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone said that, in the eight months that followed the February attacks, the same group exploited seven more previously unknown vulnerabilities, which this time also resided in iOS. As was the case in February, the hackers delivered the exploits through watering-hole attacks, which compromise websites frequented by targets of interest and add code that installs malware on visitors' devices.

[...] The seven zero-days were:

• CVE-2020-15999 - Chrome Freetype heap buffer overflow
• CVE-2020-17087 - Windows heap buffer overflow in cng.sys
• CVE-2020-16009 - Chrome type confusion in TurboFan map deprecation
• CVE-2020-16010 - Chrome for Android heap buffer overflow
• CVE-2020-27930 - Safari arbitrary stack read/write via Type 1 fonts
• CVE-2020-27950 - iOS XNU kernel memory disclosure in mach message trailers
• CVE-2020-27932 - iOS kernel type confusion with turnstiles

Wikipedia has a good description of a Zero-day(0-day) vulnerability.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Event Horizon Telescope captures new view of black hole in polarized light:

Two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made headlines with its announcement of the first direct image of a black hole. Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year. Now the EHT collaboration is back with another groundbreaking result: a new image of the same black hole, this time showing how it looks in polarized light. The ability to measure that polarization for the first time—a signature of magnetic fields at the black hole's edge—is expected to yield fresh insight into how black holes gobble up matter and emit powerful jets from their cores. The new findings were described in three papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This work is a major milestone: the polarization of light carries information that allows us to better understand the physics behind the image we saw in April 2019, which was not possible before," said co-author Iván Martí-Vidal, coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and a researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain. "Unveiling this new polarized-light image required years of work due to the complex techniques involved in obtaining and analyzing the data."

[...] In much the same way that polarized sunglasses reduce glare from bright surfaces, the polarized light around a black hole provides a sharper view of the region around it. In this case, the polarization of light isn't due to special filters (like the lenses in sunglasses) but the presence of magnetic fields in the hot region of space surrounding the black hole. That polarization enables astronomers to map the magnetic field lines at the inner edge and to study the interaction between matter flowing in and being blown outward.

"The observations suggest that the magnetic fields at the black hole's edge are strong enough to push back on the hot gas and help it resist gravity's pull. Only the gas that slips through the field can spiral inwards to the event horizon," said co-author Jason Dexter of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is also coordinator of the EHT Theory Working Group. That means that only theoretical models that incorporate the feature of a strongly magnetized gas accurately describe what the EHT collaboration has observed.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

'Double mutant': What are the risks of India's new Covid-19 variant:

Indian genome scientists have detected a so-called "double variant" of the novel coronavirus.

The government said that an analysis of the samples collected from the western state of Maharashtra showed "an increase in the fraction of samples with the E484Q and L452R mutations" compared with December last year.

"Such [double] mutations confer immune escape and increased infectivity," the health ministry said in a statement.

Dr Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says the E484Q is similar to E484K - a mutation seen in the B.1.351 (South Africa) and P.1 (Brazil) variants, which have emerged independently several times.

If enough mutations happen in a viral family tree or a lineage, the virus can begin to function differently and the lineage can become a so-called 'variant of concern'.

As far as the L452R mutation - also found in the "double mutation" in India - it first got attention as part of B.1.427/B.1.429 lineage in the US, which is sometimes called the "California variant", Dr Kamil told me.

Also at IndiaToday.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Amazon Workers Describe Struggle for Historic Union Vote in Alabama:

Six thousand warehouse workers in Alabama could soon decide the future of a $1.5 trillion tech giant and its 560,000 employees worldwide.

One of those employees, Darryl Richardson, 51, said he was thrilled to work for Amazon when it opened a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, in March 2020. But within weeks his excitement waned. He said he watched workers get fired after violating social-distancing rules and be slapped with write-ups for taking time from work to use the restroom or get a drink of water, a complaint other Amazon workers have made.

One day last summer he picked up the phone and called the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or the RWDSU.

"I was just at home one day, and I just felt like I need to make a phone call to see if I can make some changes," Richardson said. The call helped set into motion a historic battle to unionize the 5,800 workers at the warehouse.

A vote to form a union is now well underway among these workers, and it's scheduled to finish on March 29. Chelsea Connor, a spokesperson for the RWDSU, which is backing the union effort, told Insider she expected a result by Easter.

If the workers vote yes, they would form the first Amazon union in the US, something the tech behemoth has been fighting against for years.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AstraZeneca lowers efficacy claim for COVID-19 vaccine, a bit, after board's rebuke:

Seeking to quell a controversy of its own making, AstraZeneca yesterday issued new data from the latest clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, slightly downgrading its previous estimate of how well the shots protect people from symptomatic disease. The update came after an extraordinary rebuke issued late Monday night by the study's independent monitoring board, which complained that the company had used potentially misleading and "outdated" data in its initial analysis.

The two-dose vaccine, made by AstraZeneca with technology developed by the University of Oxford, had 76% efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 among the 32,000 trial participants in the United States and South America, the company stated in a press release distributed late last night. That's 3% lower than AstraZeneca reported in a press release on 22 March. The new analysis is based on 190 COVID-19 cases that occurred in people who had received the vaccine or a placebo; the previous one evaluated 141 cases, which AstraZeneca says was a pre-specified cutoff point for an interim analysis.

aristarchus writes:

The Fight Against Fake-Paper Factories That Churn Out Sham Science:

When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. "I was determined to try to get to the bottom of what was going on."

A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals' publisher, the RSC in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim of what it believed to be "the systemic production of falsified research".

What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet about. "We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be open and transparent," Fisher says.

Got to say, disruptive tech all around. Gutenberg? Made mass production of forgeries possible. Morse Code? No way to verify authorship[*]. Ma Bell? 2600 is your Daddy.

fleg writes:

Reproduction without pregnancy: would it really emancipate women?:

A team of Israeli scientists announced the mother of all inventions last week. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed in the journal Nature that they had successfully gestated hundreds of mice inside an artificial womb. They placed newly fertilised eggs inside glass vials rotating in a ventilated incubator, and grew the embryos for 11 days – the mid-point of a mouse pregnancy – outside their mothers' bodies. The embryos developed normally; their hearts, visible through the glass vials, pounded steadily at 170 beats per minute.

The mice were no bigger than sunflower seeds, but what they represent is enormous: the breakthrough brings us one step closer to reproduction without pregnancy. The division of labour in gestation is the most intractable imbalance between the sexes. Men only have to contribute a single cell to make a baby, whereas women carry their children for nine months and give birth, sometimes risking their bodies and often risking their careers, in a world of work built largely by men. An artificial womb would mean complete reproductive parity between the sexes: all anyone needs to do is throw in their gametes and the rest is taken care of. But this equality could come at great cost to women. This is radically disruptive technology, and with every new development we are sleepwalking into a world of tough ethical choices.

Article raises some interesting points, amongst them what will the effect be on abortions when you can be pro-choice and pro-life, ie choose to not be pregnant but the prospective child still gets a chance at life?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Optical fiber could boost power of superconducting quantum computers:

The secret to building superconducting quantum computers with massive processing power may be an ordinary telecommunications technology—optical fiber.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have measured and controlled a superconducting quantum bit (qubit) using light-conducting fiber instead of metal electrical wires, paving the way to packing a million qubits into a quantum computer rather than just a few thousand. The demonstration is described in the March 25 issue of Nature.

Superconducting circuits are a leading technology for making quantum computers because they are reliable and easily mass produced. But these circuits must operate at cryogenic temperatures, and schemes for wiring them to room-temperature electronics are complex and prone to overheating the qubits. A universal quantum computer, capable of solving any type of problem, is expected to need about 1 million qubits. Conventional cryostats—supercold dilution refrigerators—with metal wiring can only support thousands at the most.

Optical fiber, the backbone of telecommunications networks, has a glass or plastic core that can carry a high volume of light signals without conducting heat. But superconducting quantum computers use microwave pulses to store and process information. So the light needs to be converted precisely to microwaves.

To solve this problem, NIST researchers combined the fiber with a few other standard components that convert, convey and measure light at the level of single particles, or photons, which could then be easily converted into microwaves. The system worked as well as metal wiring and maintained the qubit's fragile quantum states.

Journal Reference:
F. Lecocq, F. Quinlan, K. Cicak, et al. Control and readout of a superconducting qubit using a photonic link, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03268-x)

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