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upstart writes:

Geology from 50 Light-Years: Webb Gets Ready to Study Rocky Worlds:

With its mirror segments beautifully aligned and its scientific instruments undergoing calibration, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is just weeks away from full operation. Soon after the first observations are revealed this summer, Webb's in-depth science will begin.

Among the investigations planned for the first year are studies of two hot exoplanets classified as "super-Earths" for their size and rocky composition: the lava-covered 55 Cancri e and the airless LHS 3844 b. Researchers will train Webb's high-precision spectrographs on these planets with a view to understanding the geologic diversity of planets across the galaxy, and the evolution of rocky planets like Earth.

55 Cancri e orbits less than 1.5 million miles from its Sun-like star (one twenty-fifth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun), completing one circuit in less than 18 hours. With surface temperatures far above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals, the day side of the planet is thought to be covered in oceans of lava.

[...] Like 55 Cancri e, LHS 3844 b orbits extremely close to its star, completing one revolution in 11 hours. However, because its star is relatively small and cool, the planet is not hot enough for the surface to be molten. Additionally, Spitzer observations indicate that the planet is very unlikely to have a substantial atmosphere.

[...] These observations of 55 Cancri e and LHS 3844 b will be conducted as part of Webb's Cycle 1 General Observers program. General Observers programs were competitively selected using a dual-anonymous review system, the same system used to allocate time on Hubble.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has exceeded 1.1 exaFLOPS (Rmax), leading the June 2022 TOP500 list as the world's fastest supercomputer and the first truly "exascale" system.

Frontier uses 9,408 64-core Epyc 7A53 CPUs and 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs. It has 4.6 petabytes each of DDR4 and High Bandwidth Memory.

Frontier also reached #2 on the June 2022 Green500 list at 52.227 gigaFLOPS/Watt, behind the smaller Frontier Test & Development System:

Previously, Frontier had been characterized as a two peak exaflops system, but its first Top500 benchmark measures some 1.686 peak exaflops. (Oak Ridge said that there remains "much higher headroom on the GPUs and the CPUs" to achieve the two peak exaflops target.) Outside of Linpack and the Top500, the system benchmarks at 6.88 exaflops of mixed-precision performance on HPL-AI. The team ran out of time and was not able to submit an HPCG benchmark.

[...] Frontier also achieved another win out of the gate: second place on the spring 2022 Green500 list, which ranks supercomputers by their flops per watt. The Oak Ridge team accomplished this by delivering those 1.102 Linpack exaflops in a 21.1-megawatt power envelope, an efficiency of 52.23 gigaflops per watt (which works out to one exaflops at 19.15 megawatts). This puts the system well within the 20-megawatt exascale power envelope target set by DARPA in 2008—a target that had been viewed with much skepticism over the ensuing 14 years. Frontier was only outpaced in efficiency by its own test and development system (Frontier TDS, aka "Crusher"), which delivered 62.68 gigaflops per watt.

#10: 30.05 petaflops (Nov. 2021) → 46.10 petaflops (June 2022)
#100: 4.79 petaflops → 5.39 petaflops
#500: 1.65 petaflops → 1.65 petaflops (both are Lenovo C1040, Xeon E5-2673v4 20C 2.3GHz systems)

Previously: New TOP500 List Released -- Fugaku Holds Top Spot, Exascale Remains Elusive; Green500 Released Too!
Top500: No Exascale, Fugaku Still Reigns, Polaris Debuts at #12

Original Submission

upstart writes:

CubeSat Set to Demonstrate NASA's Fastest Laser Link from Space:

NASA's Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) mission, carrying the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, will debut on May 25 [for a 6-month experiment] as part of SpaceX's Transporter-5 rideshare launch. TBIRD will showcase the high-data-rate capabilities of laser communications from a CubeSat in low-Earth orbit. At 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), TBIRD will downlink data at the highest optical rate ever achieved by NASA.

NASA primarily uses radio frequency to communicate with spacecraft, but with sights set on human exploration of the Moon and Mars and the development of enhanced scientific instruments, NASA needs more efficient communications systems to transmit significant amounts of data. With more data, researchers can make profound discoveries. Laser communications substantially increases data transport capabilities, offering higher data rates and more information packed into a single transmission.

upstart writes:

Gene Editing Can Change The Social Behavior of Animals in Unexpected Ways:

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique can be used to change genetic coding with great precision, and its uses include curing disease and fixing genetic faults. Now it's been used to change animal behavior – and the results are not what scientists were expecting.

CRISPR was used on a group of hamsters to knock out the Avpr1a receptor, which is acted on by the hormone vasopressin. Vasopressin is linked to social actions, such as bonding, cooperation, communication, dominance, and aggression.

Without the Avpr1a receptor, the team behind the study expected social communication and aggressive behavior to be reduced.

Instead, the opposite happened: the hamsters without the receptor showed much higher levels of social communication and aggression. Typical sex differences in aggressiveness disappeared as well, with hamsters of both sexes displaying high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Nokia CEO says 6G will be here by 2030 — but you might not access it via your smartphone

Headquartered in Finland, Nokia builds telecoms networks that enable phones and other internet-enabled devices to communicate with one another.

Asked when he thinks the world will move away from using smartphones to using smart glasses and other devices that are worn on the face, [Nokia CEO] Lundmark said it will happen before 6G arrives.

[...] "By then, definitely the smartphone as we know it today will not anymore be the most common interface," he said. "Many of these things will be built directly into our bodies."

He did not specify exactly what he was referring to but some companies, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink, are working on producing electronic devices that can be implanted into the brain and used for communication with machines and other people. On a more basic level, chips can be implanted into people's fingers and used to unlock things.

6G may be here in the next 8 years or so, but I believe the suggestion of implanted devices being commonplace is a totally unrealistic statement. We have not yet reached the stage where 'implanting things into the brain' has become a simple and low risk proposition. But even if we had, who is going to be performing these operations and at what rate? Who would pay for such medical treatment?

However, let us put these problems aside for a moment. What do you see as the future of personal communications? Let's discuss some realistic or even 'off-the'wall' ideas. What effect would such devices have on our privacy and freedoms? In Star Trek the communicator device, which appeared on our (television) screens around the mid 1960s, does not look too different from some of today's smartphones although at that time it was pure science fiction.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA-Supported Solar Sail Could Take Science to New Heights:

As NASA's exploration continues to push boundaries, a new solar sail concept selected by the agency for development toward a demonstration mission could carry science to new destinations.

The Diffractive Solar Sailing project was selected for Phase III study under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Phase III aims to strategically transition NIAC concepts with the highest potential impact for NASA, other government agencies, or commercial partners.

"As we venture farther out into the cosmos than ever before, we'll need innovative, cutting-edge technologies to drive our missions," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program helps to unlock visionary ideas – like novel solar sails – and bring them closer to reality."

Like a sailboat using wind to cross the ocean, solar sails use the pressure exerted by sunlight to propel a craft through space. Existing reflective solar sail designs are typically very large and very thin, and they are limited by the direction of the sunlight, forcing tradeoffs between power and navigation. Diffractive lightsails would use small gratings embedded in thin films to take advantage of a property of light called diffraction, which causes light to spread out when it passes through a narrow opening. This would allow the spacecraft to make more efficient use of sunlight without sacrificing maneuverability.

[...] Work under Phase III will optimize the sail material and perform ground tests in support of this conceptual solar mission. Orbits passing over the Sun's north and south poles are difficult to achieve using conventional spacecraft propulsion. Lightweight diffractive lightsails, propelled by the constant pressure of sunlight, could place a constellation of science spacecraft in orbit around the Sun's poles to advance our understanding of the Sun and improve our space weather forecasting capabilities.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Digital librarian, Karen Coyle, has written about controlled digital lending (warning for PDF), where an artificial scarcity is applied to digital artifacts to limit concurrent access similar to the limitations that a finite number of objects exhibit in libraries' physical collections. This concept raises a lot of questions about not just copyright and digital versus physical, but also about reading in general. Some authors and publisher associations have already begun to object to controlled digital lending. However, few set aside misinformation and misdirection to allow for a proper, in-depth discussion of the issues.

We now have another question about book digitization: can books be digitized for the purpose of substituting remote lending in the place of the lending of a physical copy? This has been referred to as "Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)," a term developed by the Internet Archive for its online book lending services. The Archive has considerable experience with both digitization and providing online access to materials in various formats, and its Open Library site has been providing digital downloads of out of copyright books for more than a decade. Controlled digital lending applies solely to works that are presumed to be in copyright.

Controlled digital lending works like this: the Archive obtains and retains a physical copy of a book. The book is digitized and added to the Open Library catalog of works. Users can borrow the book for a limited time (2 weeks) after which the book "returns" to the Open Library. While the book is checked out to a user no other user can borrow that "copy." The digital copy is linked one-to-one with a physical copy, so if more than one copy of the physical book is owned then there is one digital loan available for each physical copy.

upstart writes:

A giant planet may have "escaped" from our solar system, study finds:

Although Pluto lost its status as "Planet Nine" when it was downgraded to dwarf planet, there is ample evidence that our solar system either had or currently has a large planet far beyond Pluto that may one day claim Pluto's former mantle and become the rightful ninth planet. Unusually regular orbital patterns observed in the Kuiper belt hint that some celestial body more massive than Pluto lurks beyond the distant band of icy debris at the edge of the solar system where Pluto, Eris and other dwarf planets live.

The hypothetical existence of a distant Planet Nine or "Planet X" remains contentious, but evidence continues to mount in its favor. Certainly, it would not be the first time a hypothetical planet was found. Neptune was the first planet found through studying orbits of other bodies in the solar system; intriguingly, its location was discovered with predictions derived from pen-and-paper calculations about telescope observations.

Inadvertently, a recent astronomy paper in Nature found a high likelihood that a gas giant, akin to those in the outer solar system, may have been rapidly ejected from its orbit around the sun early in the evolution of a solar system. The existence of a "lost" Planet Nine early in the formation of the solar system's history would go far in explaining a lot of how and why the solar system looks as it does today.

Journal Reference: Liu, B., Raymond, S.N. & Jacobson, S.A. Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk. Nature 604, 643–646 (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04535-1

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Massive New Mexico Fire Started By U.S. Forest Service, but widely reported elsewhere:

The largest wildfire in New Mexico history—which is still burning—was started by the U.S. Forest Service, federal investigators announced Friday.

The catastrophe began as two fires that merged into one. Both wildfires have now been conclusively traced to planned burns conducted by the Forest Service. Planned or "prescribed" burns are used to reduce the threat of extreme fires by reducing the amount of dry fuel in the forest.

So far, the New Mexico fire has destroyed 330 homes and scorched some 500 square miles. The cost of battling the blaze has surpassed $130 million, and rises another $5 million each day, according to the Associated Press.

The Hermits Peak Fire started on April 6. On April 19, the Calf Canyon Fire sprang from a reignited "burn pile" that had been dormant through three winter snow events. They merged on April 22, and their destructive march across the Land of Enchantment still hasn't ended.

Tech Review is running a piece on a new/recent approach to self driving, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/05/27/1052826/ai-reinforcement-learning-self-driving-cars-autonomous-vehicles-wayve-waabi-cruise/

Four years ago, Alex Kendall sat in a car on a small road in the British countryside and took his hands off the wheel. The car, equipped with a few cheap cameras and a massive neural network, veered to the side. When it did, Kendall grabbed the wheel for a few seconds to correct it. The car veered again; Kendall corrected it. It took less than 20 minutes for the car to learn to stay on the road by itself, he says.

This was the first time that reinforcement learning—an AI technique that trains a neural network to perform a task via trial and error—had been used to teach a car to drive from scratch on a real road. It was a small step in a new direction—one that a new generation of startups believes just might be the breakthrough that makes driverless cars an everyday reality.

Reinforcement learning has had enormous success producing computer programs that can play video games and Go with superhuman skill; it has even been used to control a nuclear fusion reactor. But driving was thought to be too complicated. "We were laughed at," says Kendall, founder and CEO of the UK-based driverless-car firm Wayve.

Wayve now trains its cars in rush-hour London. Last year, it showed that it could take a car trained on London streets and have it drive in five different cities—Cambridge (UK), Coventry, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester—without additional training. That's something that industry leaders like Cruise and Waymo have struggled to do. This month Wayve announced it is teaming up with Microsoft to train its neural network on Azure, the tech giant's cloud-based supercomputer.

Some of the other players in this field are training their neural networks (NN) in driving simulators (still with humans as the "instructor") instead of on the road as described above.

My question is can the neural net ever get better than the person(s) that trained it? If the human (trainer) nearly misses an accident, is that what the NN will also do? Worse, I hope that they have a way of rewinding the training to some time before there is an actual accident, wouldn't want this in the training set!

I don't see that this "2.0" approach has any possibility of realizing the early hype of "zero accidents" that robot driving advocates are always going on about, but happy to hear otherwise. At best it seems like it might become nearly as good as the humans doing the training--but this would take a lot of time on the road.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russia says it has test-fired another hypersonic missile

The Russian navy on Saturday conducted another test of a prospective hypersonic missile, a demonstration of the military's long-range strike capability amid the fighting in Ukraine.

The Defense Ministry said the Admiral Gorshkov frigate of the Northern Fleet in the White Sea launched the Zircon cruise missile in the Barents Sea, successfully hitting a practice target in the White Sea about 1,000 kilometers (540 nautical miles) away.

[...] Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Zircon is capable of flying at nine times the speed of sound and has a range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). Putin has emphasized that its deployment will significantly boost the capability of Russia's military.

Previously: Russia Reports First Combat Use of Hypersonic Missiles
US Tested Hypersonic Missile but Kept It Quiet to Avoid Escalating Tensions With Russia

Original Submission

upstart writes:

25% of the World's Internet Users Rely on Infrastructure That Is Susceptible to Attacks:

[...] About 25% of the world's Internet users live in countries that are more vulnerable to targeted attacks on their Internet infrastructure than previously thought. Many of the at-risk countries are located in the Global South, which broadly includes the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

That's the conclusion of a sweeping, large-scale study conducted by computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The scientists surveyed 75 countries.

[...] The structure of Internet connectivity differs dramatically in different parts of the world. In many developed countries, such as the United States, a large number of Internet providers compete to provide services for a large number of users. These networks are directly connected to one another and exchange content, a process called direct peering. All the providers can also plug directly into the world's Internet infrastructure.

[...] In other nations, many of them still developing countries, most users rely on a handful of providers for Internet access, and one of these providers serves an overwhelming majority of users. Not only that, but those providers rely on a limited number of companies called transit autonomous systems to get access to the global Internet and traffic from other countries. Researchers found that often these transit autonomous system providers are state-owned.

Journal Reference:
Gamero-Garrido, Alexander, Carisimo, Esteban, Hao, Shuai, et al. Quantifying Nations' Exposure to Traffic Observation and#1, (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_29)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Most doctors still believe in prescribing unnecessary antibiotics to treat asymptomatic infections, study suggests:

An estimated 70% of primary care physicians reported in a survey that they would still prescribe antibiotics to treat asymptomatic infections based solely on a positive urine specimen. This is despite long-held medical guidelines recommending against this practice, according to a new study published today in JAMA Network Open, which was led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers.

Since 2005, medical organizations have been advocating against the routine use of antibiotics to treat patients who have bacteria detected in a urine culture but no symptoms of a urinary tract infection (UTI) like burning or frequent urination. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the medications are not helpful for asymptomatic patients and could lead to adverse health effects like diarrhea, vomiting, rashes, and yeast infections. [...]

Family medicine physicians were more likely to prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily compared to other specialties. Physicians who were in residency training or who resided in the Pacific Northwest were less likely to prescribe antibiotics.

"We found other factors also played a role in prescribing like whether a physician had a stronger preference in favor of over-treating a condition and fear of missing a diagnosis; that person was more likely to favor prescribing antibiotics compared to a physician who felt more comfortable with uncertainty in practicing medicine," said study leader Daniel Morgan, MD, MS, Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health at UMSOM.

Journal Reference:
Jonathan Baghdadi et al, Exploration of Primary Care Clinician Attitudes and Cognitive Characteristics Associated With Prescribing Antibiotics for Asymptomatic Bacteriuria, JAMA Network Open (2022). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.14268

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Instead of getting exploit PoC, they're getting something a lot more sinister:

It's common practice for researchers to publish a PoC [Proof-of-Concept] of recently patched flaws on code repositories, such as GitHub. That way, they can test different solutions among themselves and force admins to apply the fixes as soon as possible.

When Microsoft patched two remote code execution vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-24500 and CVE-2022-26809, a few PoCs popped up on GitHub, one of them coming from an account named "rkxxz".

However, the PoC turned out to be bogus, and what it did instead was install Cobalt Strike beacons on the researchers' endpoints. [...]

Fake Windows exploits target infosec community with Cobalt Strike:

This is not the first time threat actors have targeted vulnerability researchers and pentesters.

In January 2021, the North Korean Lazarus hacking group targeted vulnerability researchers through social media accounts and zero-day browser vulnerabilities.

In March 2021, North Korean hackers again targeted the infosec community by creating a fake cybersecurity company called SecuriElite (located in Turkey).

In November, the Lazarus hacking conducted another campaign using a trojanized version of the IDA Pro reverse engineering application that installed the NukeSped remote access trojan.

By targeting the infosec community, threat actors not only gain access to vulnerability research the victim may be working on but may also potentially gain access to a cybersecurity company's network.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An interesting history story about a French embroiderer who helped revolutionize surgery:

On June 25, 1894, the French President Marie François Sadi Carnot attended a banquet at the Chamber of Commerce in Lyon. [...] One man present, Sante Geronimo Caserio, [...] revealed a dagger, which he plunged deep into Carnot's back. [...]

The surgical trainee Alexis Carrel was, like his fellow countrymen, appalled by the assassination, but he directed his ire not towards things Italian, rather the impotence of his profession. Carrel believed that, if only Carnot's doctors had possessed the skill, they'd have been able to save the president's life.

[...] He soon found that, even with recent advances in surgery, the thread surgeons used was too thick for tiny blood vessels, which would easily tear. The needles were too bulky, too, [...] If he was going to attempt to sew vessels together, he would need better. With nothing very delicate available at surgical suppliers of the time, Carrel turned to Lyon's famous embroiderers. [...]

The woman he went to see was called Marie-Anne Leroudier, one of Lyon's finest embroiderers. Leroudier isn't always mentioned in Carrel's biographies. [...] But if you take the trouble to look up her work, it's unfathomably intricate. [...]