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upstart writes:

Microsoft could finally kill HDD boot drives for good:

Microsoft could have plans to scrap its use of hard disk drives (HDD) among its main storage components on PCs running Windows 11, according to a recent report by industry analyst firm Trendfocus, as reported by Tom's Hardware.

If Microsoft goes through with its plans, consumers could begin to see solid-state hard drives (SSD) instead, with the exception of dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops, which require multiple types of storage, as Tom's Hardware noted.

While Microsoft has declined to comment on the matter, the current trends indicate a complete market transition to SSD by 2023. Many PC makers already use SSD as their main storage option; however, it is still not a set standard, especially in emerging markets.

[...] Trendfocus Vice President John Chen told Tom's Hardware that 2023 is still not a hard date for the transition to SSD. Some suggestions considered in talks with Microsoft include holding off the transition of emerging markets until 2024 or pausing the desktop switch until that time.

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upstart writes:

The space telescope's mirror was hit by a micrometeoroid, but it's still in great shape to carry out its mission:

NASA said today that one of the Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments was hit by a micrometeoroid, a small asteroid fragment, between May 23 and May 25. Initial assessments of the telescope found that the spacecraft was still performing exceptionally well, though the effects of the impact were noticeable in recent data readouts.

Micrometeoroids are extremely small (dust-sized), fast-moving space debris. They're a regular part of a hostile space environment that will bombard the Webb telescope throughout its years in operation.

"With Webb's mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time," said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA, in an agency release. "Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed."

[...] Thankfully, Paul Geithner, a technical deputy project manager at NASA, said in the release that "We designed and built Webb with performance margin – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure it can perform its ambitious science mission even after many years in space."

See also: Webb: Engineered to Endure Micrometeoroid Impacts

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DannyB writes:

Company That Turned 'Excited Delirium' Into A Thing Thinks It Can Prevent School Shootings With Drone-Mounted Tasers

Axon — the company that crafted a pseudo-scientific form of plausible deniability for cops who've killed people — now wants to modify the ever-popular (and patently ridiculous) maxim "The only person who can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

There were plenty of "good" guys with guns present at the last major school shooting. They did nothing to stop the killing. Instead, they huddled a safe distance away until another law enforcement agency showed up to actually stop the school shooter.

If law enforcement can't handle mass shootings quickly and competently (and agencies have given us little indication that they can), they certainly shouldn't be entrusted with an airborne weapon now being pushed by a company that sees shootings like the one in Uvalde, Texas as another way to bump year-over-year sales increases.

Here's the EFF's take on this announcement of Axon's armed drone proposal:

Taser and surveillance vendor Axon has proposed what it claims to be the solution to the epidemic of school shootings in the United States: a remote-controlled flying drone armed with a taser. For many many reasons, this is a dangerous idea. Armed drones would mission-creep their way into more every-day policing. We must oppose a process of normalizing the arming of drones and robots.

Here's Axon's far more cheery take on the addition of Taser devices to drones:

Put together, these two technologies may effectively combat mass shootings. In brief, non-lethal drones can be installed in schools and other venues and play the same role that sprinklers and other fire suppression tools do for firefighters: Preventing a catastrophic event, or at least mitigating its worst effects.

upstart writes:

Economist says China must seize TSMC if the US tightens sanctions:

The importance of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC, to the global economy cannot be understated. The world's largest chip manufacturer has a 54% share of the global chip market, which makes an economist's call for China to seize TSMC if the US imposes harsh sanctions on the country all the more concerning.

Bloomberg reports that Chen Wenling, chief economist at the government-run China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said, "If the US and the West impose destructive sanctions on China like sanctions against Russia, we must recover Taiwan."

Chen singled out TSMC in the speech at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University last month. "Especially in the reconstruction of the industrial chain and supply chain, we must seize TSMC," she added.

TSMC is reportedly set to build six chip fabs in the US, though it has announced just one so far. "They [TSMC] are speeding up the transfer to the US to build six factories there," Chen said. "We must not let all the goals of the transfer be achieved."

Chen does talk about the scenario only taking place if the US hit China with Russia-like sanctions, which were put in place after it invaded Ukraine. Taiwan has long said it is an independent nation, while China insists it is part of its territory and has no qualms about using force to bring it under control.

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upstart writes:

NASA and SpaceX stand down on Dragon launch to study hydrazine issue:

NASA and SpaceX have delayed the launch of a Cargo Dragon spacecraft for at least a couple of weeks due to an issue during the prelaunch loading of hypergolic propellants.

The space agency had been planning to launch the spacecraft on June 12 but announced the delay in an email on Monday evening to reporters.

"During propellant loading of the Cargo Dragon spacecraft, elevated vapor readings of mono-methyl hydrazine were measured in an isolated region of the Draco thruster propulsion system," the space agency's statement said. "The propellant and oxidizer have been offloaded from that region to support further inspections and testing."

Draco thrusters provide on-orbit maneuvering propulsion for the Dragon spacecraft. NASA said that it is working with SpaceX to identify the source of the elevated readings and take any corrective actions. On Tuesday morning, astronauts on board the International Space Station were told by Mission Control in Houston that the launch date would slip until at least June 28.

This is not a new Dragon vehicle. Designated Dragon "C208," this vehicle has previously flown two supply missions, both in 2021. It is an upgraded version of the original Cargo Dragon spacecraft, known as "Cargo Dragon 2."

See also: Dragon Mission on Hold as Astronauts Conduct Eye Exams, Spacesuit Work

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upstart writes:

Technology is alienating people:

We take it for granted that technology brings people closer together and improves our access to essential products and services. If you can't imagine life without your smartphone, it's easy to forget that people who can't or don't want to engage with the latest technology are being left behind.

For example, there have recently been reports that cashless payment systems for car parking in the UK are seeing older drivers unfairly hit with fines. This has led to calls for the government to intervene.

Age is one of the biggest predictors of digital exclusion. Only 47% of those aged 75 and over use the internet regularly. And out of the 4 million who have never used the internet in the UK, only 300,000 people are under 55.

But older people are not the only ones who feel shut out by new technology. For example, research shows vulnerable people, such as those with disabilities, are also disengaging with e-services and being "locked out" of society.

From train tickets to vaccine passports, there is a growing expectation that consumers should embrace technology to participate in everyday life. This is a global phenomenon. Out in front, Sweden predicts its economy will be fully cashless by March 2023.

Shops increasingly use QR codes, virtual reality window displays and self-service checkouts. Many of these systems require a smart device, and momentum is building for QR codes to be integrated into digital price tags as they can give customers extra information such as nutritional content of food. Changing paper labels is a labour intensive process.

upstart writes:

AI Trained on 4Chan Becomes 'Hate Speech Machine':

AI researcher and YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI using 3.3 million threads from 4chan's infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. He then unleashed the bot back onto 4chan with predictable results—the AI was just as vile as the posts it was trained on, spouting racial slurs and engaging with antisemitic threads. After Kilcher posted his video and a copy of the program to Hugging Face, a kind of GitHub for AI, ethicists and researchers in the AI field expressed concern.

The bot, which Kilcher called GPT-4chan, "the most horrible model on the internet"—a reference to GPT-3, a language model developed by Open AI that uses deep learning to produce text—was shockingly effective and replicated the tone and feel of 4chan posts. "The model was good in a terrible sense," Klicher said in a video about the project. "It perfectly encapsulated the mix of offensiveness, nihilism, trolling, and deep distrust of any information whatsoever that permeates most posts on /pol."

According to Kilcher's video, he activated nine instances of the bot and allowed them to post for 24 hours on /pol/. In that time, the bots posted around 15,000 times. This was "more than 10 percent of all posts made on the politically incorrect board that day," Kilcher said in his video about the project.

AI researchers viewed Kilcher's video as more than just a YouTube prank. For them, it was an unethical experiment using AI. "This experiment would never pass a human research #ethics board," Lauren Oakden-Rayner, the director of Research at the NeuroRehab Allied Health Network in Australia, said in a Twitter thread.

"Open science and software are wonderful principles but must be balanced against potential harm," she said. "Medical research has a strong ethics culture because we have an awful history of causing harm to people, usually from disempowered groups...he performed human experiments without informing users, without consent or oversight. This breaches every principle of human research ethics."

Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. What are you views? Is this a harmless prank, a justified experiment or something potentially more sinister?

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/06/pulsed-plasma-ignition-that-boosts-fuel-efficiency-has-passed-testing/

In 2019, we took a look at an interesting new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems. It replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle's engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration (nanosecond) pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel/air mixture within the cylinder. Back then, the technology was still being bench-tested, but now it's almost ready for production after validation testing has confirmed its potential to increase fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent when fitted to an existing engine.

"We're showing that the technology has ticked off all the things that an advanced ignition system would need to do to go to market," said Dan Singleton, founder and CEO of TPS.

At this point, some of you are probably wondering why anyone is even bothering to develop new internal combustion engine technology—after all, isn't our future electric? But with the best will in the world, it's going to be many years before countries like the US stop selling new internal combustion-powered vehicles and longer still until they're no longer allowed on our roads.

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upstart writes:

Lobbying ramps up as Congress prepares to vote on landmark legislation:

Amazon and Alphabet are spearheading what is shaping up to be the most intense political campaign by corporate America in recent history as part of a last-ditch attempt to stop Congress from passing laws to curb their market power.

The companies are targeting a "self-preferencing" bill which would prevent large online platforms from using their dominance in one field to give other products an unfair advantage — for example, Alphabet using its Google search engine to promote its travel or shopping products.

[...] Democrats and Republicans have found rare common cause in recent years in their attempts to rein in the corporate power enjoyed by Silicon Valley's largest companies. Members of Congress have proposed a range of legislation to do so, including measures to limit when large technology companies can buy smaller rivals and to stop them acting as both buyers and sellers in the lucrative digital advertising market.

[...] The bill, which has been championed in the Senate by the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar and in the House by her party colleague David Cicilline, specifically targets Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook parent Meta. It has passed through committees in the House and the Senate, and its supporters are now waiting for Democratic leaders to move it to a floor vote.

upstart writes:

OceanGate ramps up the research for its second deep-sea expedition to the Titanic:

One year after OceanGate's first expedition to the Titanic shipwreck, the Everett, Wash.-based company is gearing up for its second annual set of dives starting next week — and this time, science will be at center stage.

Last summer's expedition kicked off what's intended to be a yearly series of visits to the 110-year-old ruin, nearly 13,000 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic. As any movie fan knows, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank during its first voyage from England to New York in 1912, causing more than 1,500 deaths.

The shipwreck was rediscovered in 1985, and there's been a string of crewed and robotic surveys since then. But OceanGate's plan is different. The 13-year-old company and its research partners aim to document how the rapidly deteriorating Titanic and its surroundings are changing on a year-to-year basis — supported by customers who are paying $250,000 each to be part of the adventure.

[...] "One of the ways that we're able to support this kind of scientific research is by finding different ways to fund it," Rush said. "We can take media, as we'll do this year and as we did last year, and film these wrecks and these locations. And we can bring people who are willing to help fund the operation to participate. That gives us a completely different way to fund this, and be able to go back to the Titanic and other sites every year."

[...] This year's expedition begins June 15 [...] is due to wrap up on July 25.

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upstart writes:

Biomedical engineers have developed an edible silk tag with a QR code, which scanned by a smartphone can then confirm authenticity of the whiskey or other liquids, such as liquid medications:

This little silk tag with a QR code is a security measure that could reveal if the whiskey you're wanting to buy is fake. Simply using a smartphone to scan the tag, which was developed by biomedical engineers from Purdue University and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences in South Korea, could confirm the drink's authenticity.

[...] The code on the fluorescent silk tag is the equivalent of a barcode or QR code and is not visible to the naked eye. The tags are also edible, causing no issues if a person swallowed it while downing a shot of whiskey. The tags have not affected the taste of the whiskey.

[...] Kim and Leem placed tags in various brands and price points of whiskey (80 proof, 40% alcohol per volume) over a 10-month period and were able to continually activate the tags and codes with a smartphone app.

One of the ways of bringing this issue to light is to literally shine a light on the tags. The team developed ways and methods for the tags to be activated by smartphones in a variety of light settings.

Kim said the tags are an additional authentication mechanism for marked safety seals on bottles or pills and could help by being placed in high-dollar bottles of alcohol or on expensive medications individually.

Original source

Journal Reference:
Jung Woo Leem et al. Edible Matrix Code with Photogenic Silk Proteins. ACS Cent. Sci., 2022. DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.1c01233

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Keeping Our Sense of Direction: Dealing With a Dead Sensor

As the season has turned to winter in Jezero Crater, conditions have become increasingly challenging for Ingenuity, which was designed for a short flight-test campaign during the much warmer Martian spring. [...] In its new winter operations paradigm, Ingenuity is effectively shutting down during the night, letting its internal temperature drop to about minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 80 degrees Celsius) and letting the onboard electronics reset. This new way of operating carries with it risks to Ingenuity's electronic components, many of which are not designed to survive the temperatures they are being exposed to at night. Moreover, extreme temperature cycles between daytime and nighttime tend to cause stresses that can result in component failure.

Over the past several sols on Mars, the Ingenuity team has been busy recommissioning the helicopter for flight, going through a series of activities that include preflight checkout of sensors and actuators and a high-speed spin of the rotor. These activities have revealed that one of the helicopter's navigation sensors, called the inclinometer, has stopped functioning. A nonworking navigation sensor sounds like a big deal – and it is – but it's not necessarily an end to our flying at Mars.

[...] The inclinometer consists of two accelerometers, whose sole purpose is to measure gravity prior to spin-up and takeoff; the direction of the sensed gravity is used to determine how Ingenuity is oriented relative to the downward direction. The inclinometer is not used during the flight itself, but without it we are forced to find a new way to initialize the navigation algorithms prior to takeoff.

[...] However, we believe an IMU-based initial attitude estimate will allow us to take off safely and thus provides an acceptable fallback that will allow Ingenuity to resume flying.

Taking advantage of this redundancy requires a patch to Ingenuity's flight software. The patch inserts a small code snippet into the software running on Ingenuity's flight computer, intercepting incoming garbage packets from the inclinometer and injecting replacement packets constructed from IMU data. To the navigation algorithms, everything will look as before [...]

A helicopter on Mars must necessarily experience harsher conditions than would a helicopter on the moon.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Volocopter's longer-range drone taxi completes its first test flights:

Volocopter's drone taxi is one step closer to entering service. The German firm has revealed that its four-seat electric VTOL aircraft, the VoloConnect, completed its first flight in May. The machine's initial trip was brief at two minutes and 14 seconds, but the maneuvers proved that the production-level aerodynamics and performance held up in real world conditions. There have been three flights so far.

The 60-mile range and 155MPH flight speed might not sound like much. However, they promise autonomous commuter flights beyond major urban centers — you could fly to a business meeting from the suburbs. The VoloConnect is effectively a companion to the VoloCity, a shorter-ranged eVTOL flier meant strictly for urban jaunts.

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hubie writes:

The brain uses data compression for decision-making:

If you were a kid in the 80s, or are a fan of retro video games, then you must know Frogger. The game can be quite a challenge. To win, you must first survive a stream of heavy traffic, only to then narrowly escape oblivion by zig-zagging across speeding wooden logs. How does the brain know what to focus on within all this mess?

A study published today (June 6th) in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience provides a possible solution: data compression. "Compressing the representations of the external world is akin to eliminating all irrelevant information and adopting temporary 'tunnel vision' of the situation", said one of the study's senior authors Christian Machens, head of the Theoretical Neuroscience lab at the Champalimaud Foundation in Portugal.

"The idea that the brain maximises performance while minimising cost by using data compression is pervasive in studies of sensory processing. However, it hasn't really been examined in cognitive functions," said senior author Joe Paton, Director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Research Programme. "Using a combination of experimental and computational techniques, we demonstrated that this same principle extends across a much broader range of functions than previously appreciated."

Journal Reference:
Motiwala, A., Soares, S., Atallah, B.V. et al. Efficient coding of cognitive variables underlies dopamine response and choice behavior. Nat Neurosci (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-022-01085-7

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Elon Musk accuses Twitter of thwarting his due diligence, threatens to walk out of $44 Billion Twitter deal- Technology News, Firstpost:

In a letter to the regulators and to the board of directors at Twitter, Elon Musk has stated that he was entitled to measure just how bad the spam bot situation is at Twitter as part of his due diligence and that the social media platform is thwarting his requests to learn more about its user base.

Twitter's Parag Agrawal and Elon Musk have been going back and forth over the issue of spam and the number of bots the platform has in its daily user base. Sparring over the issue, Musk had earlier stated that the takeover deal is on hold, pending further investigation.

However Musk's letter formalises the dispute that has been going on for weeks, and for the first time, Musk has gone on record to state that he is willing to walk away from the deal, if Twitter interferes with his due diligence.

Elon Musk's lawyer, Mike Ringler, wrote in the letter, "As Twitter's prospective owner, Mr Musk is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter's business to his ownership and to facilitate his transaction financing. To do both, he must have a complete and accurate understanding of the very core of Twitter's business model - its active user base."

[...] Several trade analysts and investment experts have stated that this may be a clever ruse deployed by Musk, to get Twitter for far cheaper than his initial offer of $54.20 per share. And given how badly tech stocks, particularly that of Twitter, is operating.

Original Submission