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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At the last Farnborough International Airshow in 2018, the United Kingdom started the countdown to the first orbital launch from the country. The U.K. Space Agency announced it selected a site near the town of Sutherland in northern Scotland to host a vertical launch facility, and awarded $38 million to two companies to perform launches there. Other launch companies and prospective spaceports also announced plans to develop and launch rockets in the county.

Four years later, as the aerospace industry prepares to squeeze onto trains and line up for shuttle buses to return to Farnborough, that countdown still hasn’t reached zero. The Sutherland launch site hasn’t been built yet, while British companies that might use it or other launch sites are still working on their vehicles. The first orbital launch from the U.K. now appears likely to be performed by a U.S. company, Virgin Orbit, whose LauncherOne air-launch system is scheduled to fly from Spaceport Cornwall as soon as September.

Launch companies in the U.K., though, are not deterred by that slow progress. While lagging American launch vehicle developers, they see themselves at the forefront of the European small launch industry, with ambitions to begin launches in the next year or two.

One of the companies that received awards from the U.K. government in 2018 was Orbex, which is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime it plans to launch from Sutherland, capable of placing up to 180 kilograms into orbit. [...]

In close competition with Orbex is Skyrora. It is working on Skyrora XL, a three-stage rocket designed to place payloads weighing up to 315 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit. It is also working on Skylark L, a suborbital sounding rocket intended to test some of the technologies needed for the larger Skyrora XL.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The world is still reeling from the release of the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) first images. These provided a comprehensive overview of the kind of science operations that Webb will conduct over its 20-year mission. They included the most sensitive and detailed look at some iconic astronomical objects, spectra from an exoplanet atmosphere, and a deep field view of some of the most distant galaxies in the universe. Since their release, we've also been treated to glimpses of objects in the solar system captured by Webb's infrared instruments.

Meanwhile, the JWST collaboration released a full report titled titled "Characterization of JWST science performance from commissioning," in which they examined everything Webb has accomplished so far and what they anticipate throughout the mission. This paper recently appeared online and covers everything from the telescope's navigation and pointing to the performance of its many instruments. An interesting tidbit, which was not previously released, is how Webb suffered a series of micrometeoroid impacts, one of which caused "uncorrectable change" in one mirror segment.

[...] "During commissioning, wavefront sensing recorded six localized surface deformations on the primary mirror that are attributed to impact by micrometeoroids. These occurred at a rate (roughly one per month) consistent with pre-launch expectations. Each micrometeoroid caused degradation in the wavefront of the impacted mirror segment, as measured during regular wavefront sensing. Some of the resulting wavefront degradation is correctable through regular wavefront control; some of it comprises high spatial frequency terms that cannot be corrected."

hubie writes:

No, scientists still don't know what dark matter is. But MSU scientists helped uncover new physics while looking for it.

"We started out looking for dark matter and we didn't find it," he said. "Instead, we found other things that have been challenging for theory to explain."

[...] In particular, the team confirmed that when an atom's core, or nucleus, is overstuffed with neutrons, it can still find a way to a more stable configuration by spitting out a proton instead.

[...] When people imagine a nucleus, many may think of a lumpy ball made up of protons and neutrons, Ayyad said. But nuclei can take on strange shapes, including what are known as halo nuclei.

Beryllium-11 is an example of a halo nuclei. It's a form, or isotope, of the element beryllium that has four protons and seven neutrons in its nucleus. It keeps 10 of those 11 nuclear particles in a tight central cluster. But one neutron floats far away from that core, loosely bound to the rest of the nucleus, kind of like the moon ringing around the Earth, Ayyad said.

[...] In 2019, the researchers launched an experiment at Canada's national particle accelerator facility, TRIUMF [...] It looked like the beryllium-11's loosely bound neutron was ejecting an electron like normal beta decay, yet the beryllium wasn't following the known decay path to boron.

The team hypothesized that the high probability of the decay could be explained if a state in boron-11 existed as a doorway to another decay, to beryllium-10 and a proton. For anyone keeping score, that meant the nucleus had once again become beryllium. Only now it had six neutrons instead of seven.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We all became familiar with the idea of "bending a curve" thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it seems another US curve needs bending: that of US traffic fatalities, which have been up strongly and abnormally over the last couple of years. The low-hanging fruit when it comes to changing that might not be in the car as much as around it.

[...] Thanks in large part to in-car safety tech like airbags, antilock brakes, stability control and, more recently, automatic emergency braking, US traffic fatalities have generally been on a long decline since 1970. The 52,000 such deaths recorded 52 years ago shrank to 36,000 in 2019 even as the US population and vehicle miles driven both increased dramatically. But 2020 and 2021 saw the biggest spike in over 50 years to a total of almost 43,000 per year, turning the roadway fatality clock back to 2002. In short, something's not working as well as it did.

"We need regulations related to vehicle design and street design," says Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on urban mobility and equity. "Those two play a really important role in how likely people are to get killed in streets, especially pedestrians (and cyclists) that are struck by cars." 

Speed cameras are common in several countries outside the US, often using technology that calculates average speed of a given vehicle based on the time stamps when it passes two or more places on the roadway.

In-vehicle safety technologies that protect occupants have only become more prevalent over the last couple of years, so Freemark looks at pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in collisions with cars as the next key area for improvement. Three-quarters of US auto buyers select a light truck that is typically heavier and larger than the sedan or coupe they may have chosen as their previous purchase, a formula for a more brutal impact with someone outside of the vehicle. In the future, many more electric cars will be sold and their well-known weight problem could exacerbate the seriousness of collisions.

[...] That difference plays out when you compare roadway fatality stats outside the US. "Over the last 20 years or so we've seen quite a divergence between other developed countries, like France," Freemark said of a comparison he's focused on. He noted other countries' taxation schemes that disincentivize the purchase of large, heavy vehicles as well as automatic speeding cameras and the presence of far more traffic circles that still befuddle most US drivers.

Original Submission

WHO Declares Monkeypox A Global Emergency Amid Surge In Cases

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the monkeypox outbreak in more than 70 countries an “emergency of international concern”.

The WHO label – a “public health emergency of international concern” – is designed to sound an alarm that a coordinated international response is needed and could unlock funding and global efforts to collaborate on sharing vaccines and treatments.

Governments are advised to raise awareness among doctors and hospitals, take protective measures in suspected cases and educate members of the population on how to protect themselves from infection.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among experts serving on the UN health agency’s emergency committee. It was the first time the chief of the UN health agency has taken such an action.

Announcing his decision to declare the health emergency during a media briefing in Geneva, Tedros confirmed that the committee had failed to reach a consensus, with nine members against and six in favour of the declaration.

“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” Tedros said on Saturday.

upstart writes:

Hardcoded password in Confluence app has been leaked on Twitter:

What's worse than a widely used Internet-connected enterprise app with a hardcoded password? Try said enterprise app after the hardcoded password has been leaked to the world.

Atlassian on Wednesday revealed three critical product vulnerabilities, including CVE-2022-26138 stemming from a hardcoded password in Questions for Confluence, an app that allows users to quickly receive support for common questions involving Atlassian products. The company warned the passcode was "trivial to obtain."

The company said that Questions for Confluence had 8,055 installations at the time of publication. When installed, the app creates a Confluence user account named disabledsystemuser, which is intended to help admins move data between the app and the Confluence Cloud service. The hardcoded password protecting this account allows for viewing and editing of all non-restricted pages within Confluence.

"A remote, unauthenticated attacker with knowledge of the hardcoded password could exploit this to log into Confluence and access any pages the confluence-users group has access to," the company said. "It is important to remediate this vulnerability on affected systems immediately."

A day later, Atlassian was back to report that "an external party has discovered and publicly disclosed the hardcoded password on Twitter," leading the company to ratchet up its warnings.

"This issue is likely to be exploited in the wild now that the hardcoded password is publicly known," the updated advisory read. "This vulnerability should be remediated on affected systems immediately."

upstart writes:

We the users want Google to delete our intimate data. Our rights depend on it.:

This is a moment I've long worried would arrive. The way tens of millions of Americans use everyday Google products has suddenly become dangerous. Following the Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, anything Google knows about you could be acquired by police in states where abortion is now illegal. A search for "Plan B," a ping to Google Maps at an abortion clinic or even a message you send about taking a pregnancy test could all become criminal evidence.

There is something Google could do about this: Stop collecting — and start deleting — data that could be used to prosecute abortions. Yet so far, Google and other Big Tech companies have committed to few product changes that might endanger their ability to profit off our personal lives. Nor have they publicly committed to how they might fight legal demands related to prosecuting abortions.

[...] Most of us understand on some level that Google and other tech companies invade our privacy. But Silicon Valley has made us think the stakes are quite low. Google provides useful products, and in exchange we might be targeted with annoying ads. Big whoop.

Until now. The danger of all that data feels different after the end of Roe, said Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita Harvard Business School professor who popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" to describe Google's business. "Every device becomes our potential enemy," she told me.

Zuboff, whose writings are like the "Silent Spring" of the digital age, is very concerned about where our surveillance society goes from here. "The harsh reality is that while we're now worried about women who seek abortions being targeted, the same apparatus could be used to target any group or any subset of our population — or our entire population — at any moment, for any reason that it chooses," she said. "No one is safe from this."

upstart writes:

Lemoine went public with his claims last month, to the chagrin of Google and other AI researchers:

Blake Lemoine, an engineer who's spent the last seven years with Google, has been fired, reports Alex Kantrowitz of the Big Technology newsletter. The news was allegedly broken by Lemoine himself during a taping of the podcast of the same name, though the episode is not yet public. Google confirmed the firing to Engadget.

Lemoine, who most recently was part of Google's Responsible AI project, went to the Washington Post last month with claims that one of company's AI projects had allegedly gained sentience. [...] Lemoine seems not only to have believed LaMDA attained sentience, but was openly questioning whether it possessed a soul. [...]

After making these statements to the press, seemingly without authorization from his employer, Lemoine was put on paid administrative leave. Google, both in statements to the Washington Post then and since, has steadfastly asserted its AI is in no way sentient.

Several members of the AI research community spoke up against Lemoine's claims as well. Margaret Mitchell, who was fired from Google after calling out the lack of diversity within the organization, wrote on Twitter that systems like LaMDA don't develop intent, they instead are "modeling how people express communicative intent in the form of text strings." Less tactfully, Gary Marcus referred to Lemoine's assertions as "nonsense on stilts."

Previously: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/06/13/1441225

Original Submission

hubie writes:

How to turn throwaway cardboard into a DIY arcade game:

Like many people across Colorado, Peter Gyory spent the height of the COVID-19 pandemic sitting at home with nothing to do. Then the researcher, a game designer by training, noticed all the random materials he had lying around his house.

"I was really frustrated that I couldn't make games," said Gyory, a doctoral student at CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute. "I realized I was surrounded by cardboard. I thought: 'How could I make a game out of that?'"

That was the birth of Tinycade. This project, the brainchild of Gyory and his colleagues at ATLAS, brings a do-it-yourself spirit to the world of video games. Tinycade allows anyone, anywhere to make a working arcade machine that can fit on a kitchen table or even a TV tray. All you need are a smartphone, some cardboard, two small mirrors and bric-a-brac like rubber bands and toothpicks. In other words: junk.

"The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," Gyory said.

He presented his team's invention last month at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference on Creativity & Cognition in Venice, Italy.

[...] Once the platform rolls out, gamers will only need to follow a few simple steps: First, you will download a set of stencils that will help you to cut out and assemble an arcade machine from spare cardboard. You then plop your phone in to serve as the screen.

The machine's controllers are also made out of cardboard and can be configured into a wide range of designs—from standard video game D-pads and joysticks to knobs, sliders, switches and much more. Within a Tinycade platform are a set of mirrors that allow your smartphone's camera to see what's going on under those controls. If you press right on the D-pad, say, the pieces will shift to reveal a digital "marker," which looks like simple QR code. Your phone will spot that marker, then tell the character on screen to move right.

[...] In the game Claw, which Gyory designed himself, players have to fight off a horde of oncoming alien ships. You slide around a cardboard claw, then pinch when you want to reach out and grab one of the enemy craft with a hook.

The team, however, has a more ambitious vision for Tinycade: Gyory and his colleagues hope that users will soon be able to use the platform to make new types of controllers for any game they can think of.

Brief video showing the concept.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

US Senators [...] want to ban Internet data caps. The senators today introduced the "Uncap America Act," which would "prohibit predatory data caps that force families to pay high costs and unnecessary fees to access high-speed broadband," they said in a press release.

"A broadband Internet access service provider shall not impose a data cap except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion," the bill says. The proposed law would order the Federal Communications Commission to issue "regulations to define the conditions under which a data cap is to be considered tailored to the purpose of reasonable network management or managing network congestion."

Data caps that don't comply with the exceptions would violate the Communications Act. "While certain broadband Internet access service networks may require practices to effectively manage congestion, those practices should be tailored to improve equitable access among consumers," the bill says. "Unnecessary data caps limit participation in the digital economy and are contrary to the public interest."

The bill can be expected to attract fierce opposition from the broadband industry and would face long odds of passing through the Senate and House. If it does become law, it would likely prohibit the home Internet data caps imposed by Comcast and others, which clearly exist for financial purposes and not for any network management need.

[...] "Americans need fast, reliable, and affordable Internet connections that are free from the burden of data caps that chill Internet use and make it more expensive," said Consumer Reports Senior Policy Counsel Jonathan Schwantes. "Where caps are legitimate and justified, so be it. But we can't allow ISPs to maximize profits at the expense of consumers."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The push toward specialized products, including your cup of coffee, is transforming markets as big and small firms inspire one another:

A time traveller from the early 1990s would be baffled by the coffee marketplace of 2022. What's latte art? Or grind uniformity? Or single-origin beans? And who cares anyway?

That time traveller would discover that a lot of people care and care passionately. Just as the markets of once-mundane items like beer, beignets, chocolate or meat have diversified and specialized to appeal to more discerning consumers, so too has the coffee market.

Connoisseurs commonly discuss defining aspects of third-wave coffee such as tasting notes, regional characteristics and roasting techniques. Coffee consumption has surged in the past decades thanks in part to the growth of the craft coffee community, and big commercial players are taking notice.

[...] "Craft firms believe that products or services should be a highly aesthetic experience," Dolbec says. For example, in coffee, the aesthetic experience — the acid notes of the brew, the latte art, the aroma — are all highly valued by craft coffee producer and consumer alike.

This contrasts with commercial firms, which seek first and foremost to maximize their profits, and whose products are designed to appeal to mass markets. Yet, the study finds that commercial firms are increasingly responding to the rise of craft firms by drawing inspiration from their highly aestheticized products and service.

[...] "All types of firms elaborate to compete against one another," Dolbec says. "They adapt innovations from firms of the same type, they transform innovations from firms that follow a different logic and over time that leads to craft logic becoming more present in the market. Just as you have Tim Horton's talking about homemade espresso drinks, you'll start seeing craft firms selling their own kinds of coffee pods."

Journal Reference:
Pierre-Yann Dolbec, Zeynep Arsel, and Aya Aboelenien, A Practice Perspective on Market Evolution: How Craft and Commercial Coffee Firms Expand Practices and Develop Markets [open], J Marketing, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/00222429221093624

Original Submission

NASA Selects Falcon Heavy to Launch Roman Space Telescope (WFIRST)

takyon writes:

NASA selects Falcon Heavy to launch Roman Space Telescope

NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy, but at a price significantly higher than most previous agency contracts.

NASA announced July 19 that it awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch Roman on the company's Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is valued at $255 million for the launch and other mission-related costs.

Roman is the next large, or flagship, astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft features a 2.4-meter primary mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with a wide field instrument and a coronagraph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets and general astrophysics.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The James Webb Telescope Has Already Made its First Scientific Discovery

upstart writes:

The James Webb Telescope Has Already Made Its First Scientific Discovery:

First comes the art, them comes the science. Just over a week after NASA dazzled the world with the first clutch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers working with one of the pictures believe they have found the oldest galaxy ever imaged—one dating back 13.5 billion years, or just 300 million years after the Big Bang, report Space.com and others.

The age of a galaxy is measured by what is known as its red shift: as the universe expands, the wavelength of light is stretched into the red spectrum. The redder the image, the greater the stretching and the farther—and older—the object in the image is. Analyzing the deep-field image the Webb telescope returned, a team led by astronomer Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics detected a galaxy with a shift that fixes it at the 13.5 billion year point.

"We're potentially looking at the most distant starlight ever seen," Naidu told France 24. The next step is to submit their findings for peer review that should hopefully validate their discovery.

The galaxy is not much as these things go. It measures 3,000 to 4,500 light years across and contains about a billion stars. In comparison, our Milky Way measures about 100,000 light years and contains an estimated 200 billion stars. But seeing something 13.5 billion light years away means we're seeing it as it looked 13.5 billion years ago. Over time, the small, old galaxy would have merged with others nearby, forming a single, giant galactic mass.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Go back over 100 years and zoos provided most people of their only view of animals that many would not have otherwise seen except in drawings. Very few photographs or films were available and people who could afford to would flock to see what must have been almost like science fiction to many of them.

Moving on a few years, and zoos became viewed as a cruel way of keeping animals in captivity for little justifiable reason. Photographs and films were becoming available and then along came television which meant that many more people could see images of animals, often in their native environment. Zoos became less popular and the cost of looking after animals increased to make a visit to the zoo a far more expensive day out than it had been up until this point.

Many zoos changed into wildlife parks, or at least were replaced by such things. More importantly, as it became clear that many animals were facing extinction in the wild, the remaining zoos and parks began cooperative breeding programs to ensure that some species would not disappear quite as quickly as was once feared. The situation today is perhaps slightly better than it was for some animals but, outside of zoos, many have been left with very little natural habitat because of man's demands for living space and resources of all kinds.

Which brings us to this particular piece. It is not earth shattering news, but a panda has lived to the ripe old equivalent age of 105 years in captivity. Has it been a benefit to this panda in particular or even to pandas in general? What are your views on the role of zoos and wildlife parks in the modern world? [JR]

From the following story:

An An, the world’s oldest male giant panda in captivity, has died at the age of 35, the equivalent of 105 years old for a human.

Ocean Park, the Hong Kong theme park where the panda lived, said An An’s health had been declining in recent weeks and he had been eating less. The panda was put down by a veterinarian on Thursday morning after he stopped eating altogether.

“Ocean Park is deeply saddened to announce the loss of An An,” it said in a statement on its website.

An An was a gift from the Chinese government and had been at the park since 1999. Jia Jia, the female panda who was given to Ocean Park with An An, died in 2016 when she was 38.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday ordered phone carriers to block calls from a scamming operation behind more than 8 billion robocalls:

The agency mandated U.S. providers to stop carrying traffic originating from the Sumco Panama company and the two people allegedly behind it, Aaron Michael Jones and Roy Cox. Jr., both of California.

The group is accused of making more than 8 billion robocalls to U.S. consumers since 2018, marketing an auto-warranty scam, records show.

[...] FCC data estimates Sumco Panama generates millions of calls on a daily basis.

Earlier this month, the agency sent cease-and-desist letters to a number of carriers to halt the calls, including Call Pipe, Fugle Telecom, Geist Telecom, Global Lynks, Mobi Telecom, South Dakota Telecom, SipKonnect and Virtual Telecom.

"Now that U.S. voice service providers know the individuals and entities associated with this scheme, the Enforcement Bureau will closely monitor voice service providers' compliance with this order and take appropriate enforcement action as necessary," Acting FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said in a statement.

[...] "Billions of auto warranty robocalls from a single calling campaign -- billions!" FCC Rosenworcel said earlier this month. "Auto warranty scams are one of the top complaints we get from consumers and it's time to hold those responsible for making these junk calls."

See also: FCC Orders Blocking of Auto Warranty Robocall Scam Campaign

Anyone know how telephony works these days? Why is it hard to address robocalls and other issues like phone number spoofing? It seems since both endpoints of a call are fixed that it should be easy to tell where a call originates and from what number. Is this a common scam outside the US?

Original Submission

liar writes:

Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer's drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It's not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer's has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer's research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

The suspicion that something was more than a little wrong with the model that is getting almost all Alzheimer's research funding ($1.6 billion in the last year alone) began with a fight over the drug Simufilam. The drug was being pushed into trials by its manufacturer, Cassava Sciences, but a group of scientists who reviewed the drug maker's claims about Simufilam believed that it was exaggerating the potential [...] and hired an investigator to provide some support for this position.

[...] In 2006, Nature published a paper titled "A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory." Using a series of studies in mice, the paper concluded that "memory deficits in middle-aged mice" were directed caused by accumulations of a soluble substance called "Aβ*56." [...]