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The Moon or Bust, Says NASA, After Successful Test Flight

upstart writes:

Heat shield sustained more damage than expected, but this shouldn't discourage astronauts:

NASA is ready to fly a crew of astronauts to the Moon next year after the success of the first test flight of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule.

[...] Orion fulfilled 161 test objectives and was more energy efficient than predicted, generating 20 per cent more power than predicted while consuming about 25 per cent less power than expected. All maneuvers – including flying to and from the Moon, returning to Earth, and releasing the parachute for splashdown into the Pacific Ocean – were executed without any major problems.

There are, however, a few niggling complications. Orion's latching current limiters – which act like circuit breakers to transfer and distribute power from its solar panels – switched open randomly during its flight for unknown reasons. Also, the material covering the heat shield – used to protect the capsule and prevent it and any occupants from incineration as Orion re-enters Earth's atmosphere – deteriorated more than NASA thought it would.

Little things like that.

The mobile launcher part of the SLS also sustained more damage than expected. NASA said its cryogenic fuel lines corroded, while 60 panels and cabinets broke, as did its elevators and blast shields. Officials continue to review hundreds of gigabytes worth of data gathered from the mission.

[...] "We're learning as much as we possibly can from Artemis I to ensure we fully understand every aspect of our systems and feed those lessons learned into how we plan for and fly crewed missions," said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, in a prepared statement. "Safely flying crew is our top priority for Artemis II."

Engineers will, for example, modify the mobile launcher for the upcoming Artemis mission. They will build an emergency egress system at the launchpad in case the crew needs to make a last-minute exit from the rocket.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/wikipedia-ai-truth-duckduckgo-hopes-so-with-new-answerbot/

Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo's browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered by an AI model, the company admits that DuckAssist might make stuff up but hopes it will happen rarely.

Here's how it works: If a DuckDuckGo user searches a question that can be answered by Wikipedia, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to generate a brief summary of what it finds in Wikipedia, with source links listed below. The summary appears above DuckDuckGo's regular search results in a special box.

[...] Update (March 9, 2023): We spoke with a representative of DuckDuckGo and they said they're using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Anthropic's Claude as LLMs. "We're experimenting with OpenAI's recently announced Turbo model, too," they said.

Related:
Robots Let ChatGPT Touch the Real World Thanks to Microsoft (Article has a bunch of other SoylentNews related links as well.)

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Instead of outputting in plastic, this printer builds models that you can eat:

All of the best 3D printers print from some form plastic, either from filament or from resin. But an upcoming printer, Cocoa Press, uses chocolate to create models you can eat. The brainchild of Maker and Battlebots Competitor Ellie Weinstein , who has been working on iterations of the printer since 2014, Cocoa Press will be available for pre-order, starting on April 17th via cocoapress.com (the company is also named Cocoa Press).

[...] In lieu of a roll of filament or a tank full of resin, the Cocoa Press uses 70g cartridges of special chocolate that solidifies at up to 26.67 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit), which the company will sell for $49 for a 10 pack. The cigar-shaped chocolate pieces go into a metal syringe where the entire thing is melted at the same time rather than melting as it passes through the extruder (like a typical FDM printer).

Video demonstrating how the Cocoa Press works.

Related: Why Chocolate Feels So Good? It's Down to Lubrication

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Newly spotted 50-meter asteroid tops Risk List:

Valentine's Day 2046 could be memorable for a number of reasons. Not only might you receive a card from an admirer you never knew you had, but you might also witness a large asteroid slamming into Earth and causing widespread devastation.

Hopefully the only delivery anyone will be getting that day is a card, but scientists say that a 49-meter-wide asteroid discovered last week is currently calculated to have a 1-in-625 chance of hitting our planet in a couple of decades from now.

The rock, called 2023 DW, now sits atop the European Space Agency's Risk List as the only one with a "1" rating on the Torino scale, which is used for categorizing the impact hazard of near-Earth objects.

[...] As asteroid 2023 DW was only discovered a few days ago, scientists are continuing with their analysis to determine more precisely the characteristics of the rock, which is similar in size to an Olympic swimming pool.

[...] If later analysis suggests an increased risk of 2023 DW crashing into Earth, it would be a golden opportunity for NASA to deploy its asteroid deflection system. The technology was tested last year with great success when it smashed a spacecraft into a distant asteroid, with the force of the impact altering the rock's course.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

The results of the great DB debate on The Register were announced. Although it was a close-run race, and RDBMS was well ahead at several points during the week before a late surge for graph DBs yesterday. Over 2,000 readers voted. This debate is a part of the current spotlight on databases.

Our first contributor, arguing FOR the motion, was Andy Pavlo, associate professor of databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University. Pavlo's starting point on Monday was that graph DBMSs are "fundamentally flawed and, for most applications, inferior to relational DBMSs."

Jim Webber, Neo4j's chief scientist and a professor of computer science at Newcastle University, arguing AGAINST, said in his rebuttal that he could not back the idea that "relational can do anything" and rejected the assertion that graph databases cannot properly support views and migrations.

Then, on Wednesday, Pavlo threw down the gauntlet, stating that abandoning the relational database model would be akin to "reinventing the wheel." He also doubled down on a public wager he'd previously made that graph databases won't overtake relational databases in 2030 by marketshare. He has promised that if he loses, Pavlo will replace his official CMU photo with one of him wearing a shirt that says "Graph Databases Are #1."

Webber then countered this in his Thursday argument, noting that the pending standard for graphs, GQL, is overseen by the same ISO committee that delivered SQL. If SQL extensions were enough to solve the graph problem, the committee wouldn't have bothered itself, he seemed to be saying. Instead, it decided graphs were different enough to warrant a full query language.

Webber also mentioned: In late 2010, I visited former colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia. I gave a talk on graph databases and ended it by lightheartedly saying something like, "This technology category is going to catch on. You're going to ignore it for now, but in about a decade you will become interested and start telling us that we've done it all wrong."

Several papers from CIDR 2023 were cited in the discussion.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Results come from a lab that had an earlier superconductivity paper retracted:

On Wednesday, a paper was released by Nature that describes a mixture of elements that can superconduct at room temperature. The work follows a general trend of finding new ways of stuffing hydrogen into a mixture of other atoms by using extreme pressure. This trend produced a variety of high-temperature superconductors in previous research, though characterizing them was difficult because of the pressures involved. This new chemical, however, superconducts at much lower pressures than previous versions, which should make it easier for others to replicate the work.

The lab that produced the chemical, however, had one of its earlier papers on high-temperature superconductivity retracted due to a lack of details regarding one of its key measurements. So, it's a fair bet that many other researchers will try to replicate it.

The form of superconductivity involved here requires that electrons partner up with each other, forming what are called Cooper pairs. One of the things that encourages Cooper pair formation is a high-frequency vibration (called a phonon) among the atomic nuclei that these electrons are associated with. That's easier to arrange with light nuclei, and hydrogen is the lightest around. So finding ways to stuff more hydrogen into a chemical is thought to be a viable route toward producing higher-temperature superconductors.

The surest way of doing that, however, involves extreme pressures. These pressures can induce hydrogen to enter the crystal structure of metals or to form hydrogen-rich chemicals that are unstable at lower pressures. Both of these approaches have resulted in chemicals with very high critical temperatures, the highest point at which they'll support superconductivity. While these have approached room temperature, however, the pressures required were multiple Gigapascals—with each Gigapascal being nearly 10,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level.

In essence, this involves trading off impractical temperatures for impractical pressures.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/musk-apologizes-for-mocking-and-firing-twitter-exec-with-muscular-dystrophy/

After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive's disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur "Halli" Thorleifsson.

Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had "never lived up to its potential." Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.

[...] Before Thorleifsson got the official notification that he'd been fired from Twitter, he told the BBC that he had a theory explaining why it took Twitter nine days to respond to his inquiries about layoffs.

"My theory is they made a mistake and are now looking for anything they can find to make this a 'for cause' firing to avoid having to fulfill their contractual obligations," Thorleifsson told the BBC.

According to The New York Times, the cost of firing Thorleifsson may be greater to Twitter than the cost of keeping him on, which could be another factor motivating Musk's decision to try to rehire the former design executive. Twitter users have speculated that his severance package could be worth $100 million, and Thorleifsson seems willing to take the money and leave. He tweeted that he's OK with his exit from Twitter and asked Musk to confirm he'll receive his full severance.

Related:
Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/02/how-8086-processor-determines-length-of.html

The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complicated instruction set with instructions ranging from one to six bytes long. This raises the question of how the processor knows the length of an instruction.1 The answer is that the 8086 uses an interesting combination of lookup ROMs and microcode to determine how many bytes to use for an instruction. In brief, the ROMs perform enough decoding to figure out if it needs one byte or two. After that, the microcode simply consumes instruction bytes as it needs them. Thus, nothing in the chip explicitly "knows" the length of an instruction. This blog post describes this process in more detail.

[...] The 8086 uses a 6-byte instruction prefetch queue to hold instructions, and this queue will play an important role in this discussion.3 Earlier microprocessors read instructions from memory as they were needed, which could cause the CPU to wait on memory. The 8086, instead, read instructions from memory before they were needed, storing them in the instruction prefetch queue. (You can think of this as a primitive instruction cache.) To execute an instruction, the 8086 took bytes out of the queue one at a time. If the queue ran empty, the processor waited until more instruction bytes were fetched from memory into the queue.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study suggests that judgmental forecasting of trends in time-series data, such as weekly sales data, is lower when the information is displayed in bar chart format as opposed to a line graph or point graph:

A new study suggests that the format in which graphs are presented may be biasing people into being too optimistic or pessimistic about the trends in data that the graphs display.

Academics from City, University of London and University College London found that when people who were not experts about a set of data made predictions about how a trend in the data would develop over time, they made lower judgements when the trend was presented as a 'bar chart' type graph as compared to when exactly the same data was presented as a line graph or a graph consisting of a set of data points only.

Nevertheless, across many different types of trend participants consistently thought sales would be lower when the data were presented as bar charts than line graphs or point graphs.

The researchers wondered whether the reason was that in bar charts the area inside the bar is usually heavily shaded and hence visually draws attention to itself, lowering participants' estimates as compared to the other types of graph where there is no shading to attract the eye and attention.

However, in a third experiment, they found the same lower forecasts for bars even when the bars were left unshaded.

In a fourth experiment they tested a version of a bar chart where the bars emanated from the top of the graph rather than the bottom. While subtle trends in the data suggest this may reverse the bias, the findings were inconclusive.

Woodherd writes:

Better prospects are needed in universities and industry to make the most of valuable talent:

Japanese science has a problem: there are too many PhD holders and not enough senior roles in universities for them to move into. This is partly caused by a well-meaning, but flawed policy to promote Japanese research that dates back almost three decades.

In 1996, Japan began a plan to boost the number of its academic researchers with a PhD but who are not yet in permanent faculty positions. The country aimed to produce 10,000 of these postdoctoral roles and by 2006 it had exceeded this goal, creating more than 16,000 positions. This leaves a fairly obvious question; what happens to a researcher after they've completed a postdoc? There hasn't been a serious enough effort to create a career pathway for these researchers in academia. Employment in industry is also an uphill battle for them because — although progress has been made — Japanese businesses on the whole still don't fully appreciate PhDs as a qualification.

Some comparison:

Many students here in Japan increasingly believe that finding jobs in industry, even in pharmaceutical firms and other research-related companies, is easier without a PhD. This is because there can be a belief in industry that it's better and easier for a company to train newly hired employees from scratch, rather than training someone who already has their 'own way of doing things'. In the United States, 40.2% of PhD holders are employed in private industry, but in Japan that figure is just 14%. Hopefully, the 14% in Japan will prove how PhD holders can contribute to businesses so that more companies employ doctoral graduates, something that could also lead to greater collaboration between academia and industry.

Earning a PhD demands an excess of patience, imagination, flexibility and expertise. Surely these are enviable characteristics for any candidate seeking promotion, be that in academia or private industry.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Rather than obtaining a warrant, the bureau purchased sensitive data:

Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. While the practice of buying people's location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government's ability to warrantlessly track Americans' phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases.

The disclosure came today during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation's intelligence chiefs. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau's use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: "Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?" Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes.

"To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising," Wray said. "I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that's not been active for some time." He added that the bureau now relies on a "court-authorized process" to obtain location data from companies.

It's not immediately clear whether Wray was referring to a warrant—that is, an order signed by a judge who is reasonably convinced that a crime has occurred—or another legal device. Nor did Wray indicate what motivated the FBI to end the practice.

In its landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the Supreme Court held that government agencies accessing historical location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. But the ruling was narrowly construed. Privacy advocates say the decision left open a glaring loophole that allows the government to simply purchase whatever it cannot otherwise legally obtain. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Defense Intelligence Agency are among the list of federal agencies known to have taken advantage of this loophole.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/tesla-under-new-federal-investigation-for-steering-wheels-that-detach/

Tesla has yet another federal headache to contend with. On March 4, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary investigation after two reports of Tesla Model Y steering wheels detaching in drivers' hands while driving.

NHTSA's ODI says that in both cases, the model year 2023 Model Ys each required repairs on the production line that involved removing their steering wheels. The wheels were refitted but were only held in place by friction—Tesla workers never replaced the retaining bolt that affixes the steering wheel to the steering column. In 2018, Ford had to recall more than 1.3 million vehicles after an incorrectly sized bolt resulted in a similar problem.

The ODI document states that "sudden separation occurred when the force exerted on the steering wheel overcame the resistance of the friction fit while the vehicles were in motion" and that both incidents occurred while the electric vehicles still had low mileage.

Related:
Tesla recalls all cars with FSD (full self driving) option (Elon Tweet:"Definitely. The word "recall" for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!")
Feds Open Criminal Investigation Into Tesla Autopilot Claims
NHTSA Investigation Into Telsa Autopilot Intensifies
Tesla's Radar-less Cars Investigated by NHTSA After Complaints Spike
Tesla Under Federal Investigation Over Video Games That Drivers Can Play
Tesla Must Tell NHTSA How Autopilot Sees Emergency Vehicles
NHTSA Opens Investigation into Tesla Autopilot after Crashes with Parked Emergency Vehicles
Tesla Recall is Due to Failing Flash Memory
Tesla Crash Likely Caused by Video Game Distraction
Autopilot Was Engaged In The Crash Of A Tesla Model S Into A Firetruck In LA, NTSB Says
Tesla to Update Battery Software after Recent Car Fires
Tesla Facing Criminal Probe
Former Tesla Employee's Lawyer Claims His Client Was Effectively "SWATted"
NHTSA Finishes Investigation, Declares Tesla Has No Fault in Deadly Crash
Tesla Says Autopilot System Not to Blame for Dutch Crash

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/moderna-ceo-says-private-investors-funded-covid-vaccine-not-billions-from-govt/

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on Monday pushed back on criticism of the company's plans to raise the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent, arguing that the billions of dollars in federal funding the company received played little role in the vaccine's development.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal Health Forum, Bancel suggested that the vaccine's development is thanks to private investors and that the federal funding merely hastened development that would have occurred regardless.
[...]
While the government most recently paid $26 per dose of Moderna's updated booster, the company is planning to raise the price of its shots to $110 to $130 per dose.

Related:
"Pure and Deadly Greed": Lawmakers Slam Pfizer's 400% Price Hike on COVID Shots

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hiatus hacking campaign has infected roughly 100 Draytek routers:

Researchers have uncovered advanced malware that's turning business-grade routers into attacker-controlled listening posts that can sniff email and steal files in an ongoing campaign hitting North and South America and Europe.

Besides passively capturing IMAP, SMTP, and POP email, the malware also backdoors routers with a remote-access Trojan that allows the attackers to download files and run commands of their choice. The backdoor also enables attackers to funnel data from other servers through the router, turning the device into a covert proxy for concealing the true origin of malicious activity.

"This type of agent demonstrates that anyone with a router who uses the Internet can potentially be a target—and they can be used as proxy for another campaign—even if the entity that owns the router does not view themselves as an intelligence target," researchers from security firm Lumen's Black Lotus Labs wrote. "We suspect that threat actors are going to continue to utilize multiple compromised assets in conjunction with one another to avoid detection."

[...] Black Lotus still doesn't know how devices are getting hacked in the first place. Once (and however) that happens, the malware gets installed through a bash script that's deployed post-exploitation. It downloads and installs the two main binaries.

[...] Hiatus is mainly targeting DrayTek routers running an i386 architecture. The researchers, however, have uncovered prebuilt binaries compiled for ARM, MIPS64 big endian, and MIPS32 little endian platforms.

upstart writes:

The gene-editing tool is being tested in people, and the first treatment could be approved this year:

Forget about He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who created gene-edited babies. Instead, when you think about gene editing you should think of Victoria Gray, the African-American woman who says she's been cured of her sickle-cell disease symptoms.

[...] But the designer-baby debate is a distraction from the real story of how gene editing is changing people's lives, through treatments used on adults with serious diseases.

In fact, there are now more than 50 experimental studies underway that use gene editing in human volunteers to treat everything from cancer to HIV and blood diseases, according to a tally shared with MIT Technology Review by David Liu, a gene-editing specialist at Harvard University.

Most of these studies—about 40 of them—involve CRISPR, the most versatile of the gene-editing methods, which was developed only 10 years ago.

[...] To scientists, CRISPR is a revelation because of how it can snip the genome at specific locations. It's made up of a cutting protein paired with a short gene sequence that acts like GPS, zipping to a predetermined spot in a person's chromosomes.

[...] The first generation of CRISPR treatments are also limited in another way. Most use the tool to damage DNA, essentially shutting off genes—a process famously described as "genome vandalism" by Harvard biologist George Church.

[...] Liu's lab is working on next-generation gene-editing approaches. These tools also employ the CRISPR protein, but it's engineered not to cut the DNA helix, but instead to deftly swap individual genetic letters or make larger edits. These are known as "base editors."

[...] Now that gene editing has had its first successes, Urnov says, there's an "urgent need" to open a "path to the clinic for all."

Original Submission