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upstart writes:

Various options are still available to nudge the important instrument:

It has now been two weeks since the on-target launch of the European Space Agency's 1.5 billion euro probe that is bound for the moons of Jupiter.

This process had been going well until the space agency attempted to extend a 16-meter-long antenna that is part of its radar instrument. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration, or RIME, is an important scientific instrument on the spacecraft because its ground-penetrating radar will allow for examinations of the interior of intriguing moons such as Europa and Ganymede.

On Friday, the European Space Agency said the long antenna remains stuck to its mounting bracket and is only extended about one-third of its full length. Engineers at the spacecraft's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, are working to solve the issue.

"The current leading hypothesis is that a tiny stuck pin has not yet made way for the antenna's release. In this case, it is thought that just a matter of millimeters could make the difference to set the rest of the radar free," the agency said. "Various options are still available to nudge the important instrument out of its current position. The next steps to fully deploy the antenna include an engine burn to shake the spacecraft a little, followed by a series of rotations that will turn Juice, warming up the mount and radar, which are currently in the cold shadows."

upstart writes:

A complete reimplementation of decades-old code is out the of the question:

Historically, the vast majority of security issues encountered on the Windows platform have been memory-related bugs. Rust can provide a highly effective solution to this long-standing problem, and Windows programmers are well aware of its potential.

Although Rust is still a relatively recent programming language, Microsoft has already embraced the technology as one of the most promising upgrades for Windows core programming. Redmond's software engineers have been diligently rewriting crucial parts of the operating system in Rust, bringing significant improvements in both performance and security to the underlying code.

Rust is a fast, memory-efficient programming language created by Graydon Hoare while working at Mozilla, the first company to officially sponsor and adopt it for their experimental browser engine, Servo. As a typical compiled language, Rust offers native performance for various types of applications, including computer software, low-resource devices, and embedded appliances.

Aside from its performance, one of Rust's main attractions is the fact that the language was designed to provide memory safety from the outset, thereby eliminating many categories of bugs and potential vulnerabilities at compile time. Notably, memory safety bugs account for 70% of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities fixed in Windows since 2006.

According to David "Dwizzle" Weston, VP of OS Security and Enterprise at Microsoft, some Rust code has been implemented in the Windows kernel already. Speaking at BlueHat IL 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel, last month, Weston mentioned that Windows 11 could boot in Rust, even though the code's port is currently disabled and concealed behind a feature flag.

upstart writes:

Russia had previously threatened to leave the ISS by 2024:

Russia had previously threatened to leave the ISS by 2024, but is now the last of NASA's partners to agree to stay aboard the station for a few more years.

Russia has agreed to keep its cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) until 2028 despite earlier threats to withdraw from the orbiting lab.

NASA announced that its Russian counterpart "has confirmed it will support continued station operations through 2028," the space agency wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Russia was the last to sign on to extended operations on the ISS, with Japan, Canada, and the participating countries of the European Space Agency (ESA) having already agreed to support space station operations until 2030, when the ISS is due to retire.

In light of geopolitical tensions between Russia and its Western counterparts, Russia had previously threatened to pull out of the ISS in a series of vague statements. The Russian space agency then downplayed its threats, stating that it was planning on leaving the ISS after 2024.

"We will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made." Yury Borisov, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in July 2022. "I think that by this time we will begin to assemble the Russian orbital station." At that time, it still wasn't clear whether that meant Russia was planning on staying beyond 2024, or if that was the hard cutoff.

Russia is planning on building its own space station in low Earth orbit. The Russian Orbital Space Station, nicknamed 'ROSS,' would launch in two phases. The first phase, which Russia hopes to launch in 2025, would include four modules, while the second phase would add two more modules and a service platform.

NASA and Roscosmos have had a longstanding partnership aboard the ISS for more than two decades. There has been at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on board the space station at all times since the ISS launched in 1998.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

An exploded star can pose more risks to nearby planets than previously thought:

This newly identified threat involves a phase of intense X-rays that can damage the atmospheres of planets up to 160 light-years away.

[...] Earth is not in danger of such a threat today because there are no potential supernova progenitors within this distance, but it may have experienced this kind of X-ray exposure in the past, scientists say.

Before this study, most research on the effects of supernova explosions focused on the danger from two periods: the intense radiation produced by a supernova in the days and months after the explosion, and the energetic particles that arrive hundreds to thousands of years afterward.

However, even these alarming threats do not fully catalog the dangers in the wake of an exploded star. Researchers have discovered that between these two previously identified dangers lurks another. The aftermaths of supernovae always produce X-rays, but if the supernova's blast wave strikes dense surrounding gas, it can produce a particularly large dose of X-rays that arrives months to years after the explosion and may last for decades.

[...] "The Earth is not in any danger from an event like this now because there are no potential supernovae within the X-ray danger zone," said Illinois undergraduate student Connor O'Mahoney, a co-author of the study. "However, it may be the case that such events played a role in Earth's past."

upstart writes:

This Active Camouflage Technology Could Change The Future Of Warfare - SlashGear:

H. G. Wells's "The Invisible Man" brought the idea of invisibility to the mainstream over a century ago. Not long after, the fascination with invisibility became a hot trope in fantasy and sci-fi stories. Scientists have also been at work, trying to materialize their invisibility dreams with tech. Virginia-based defense and aerospace company BAE Systems is yet another player in the invisibility tech race, creating a camouflage system called ADAPTIV.

BAE System's secret sauce to creating invisibility (in infrared, at least) is a cloaking device capable of hiding equipment as large as a military tank and helping them blend with natural surroundings. ADAPTIV seeks to conceal the infrared signature of objects by allowing them to copy the temperature of nearby objects. BAE Systems says its tech can make things such as military vehicles look like a harmless cow, a mound of rocks, or shrubs.

A fruit of three years of research, ADAPTIV isn't a do-it-all invisibility tech that can hide something as heavy as a rocket-raining chopper or a truck from the naked eye. Instead, the tech targets invisibility for infrared sensors, especially for "peacekeeping operations" conducted in urban and remote areas like deserts and forests.

ADAPTIV aims to counter the detection capabilities of infrared sensors in hostile scenarios. Infrared sensors are widely deployed for reliable motion detection, especially in challenging light scenarios. In addition to mapping distances, the most significant advantage of using infrared detectors is their ability to read heat signatures, especially of suspicious objects that may not be a natural part of their immediate environment.

fliptop writes:

I recently finished reading Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor and the information has been a revelation to me. I've always wondered how other people can be "in to" meditating and now, after learning the proper breathing techniques, it's become clear to me. Starting off each day with a brief meditation and breathing session works wonders for preparing my mental and physical state for the day. So I suppose it's no surprise research has found that spending just 15 minutes in reflective solitude really helps your mood and your mind:

Spending time alone can induce fear in a lot of people, which is understandable. At the same time, the difference between moments of solitude and loneliness is often misunderstood. As a psychologist, I study solitude – the time we spend alone, not interacting with other people. I started this research more than ten years ago and, up to that point, findings on young people's time alone had suggested they often experience low moods when alone.

On social media, television or in the music we listen to, we typically picture happiness as excitement, enthusiasm and energisation. From that perspective, solitude is often mistaken for loneliness. In psychology, researchers define loneliness as a distressed feeling that we experience when we don't have, or are unable to get, the kind of social connections or relationships we hope for. Solitude is different.

[...] What can we gain from solitude? In a series of experiments, I brought undergraduate students into a room to sit quietly with themselves. In some studies, I took away the students' backpacks and devices and asked them to sit with their thoughts; at other times, the students stayed in the room with books or their phones.

After just 15 minutes of solitude, I found that any strong emotions the participants might have been feeling, such as anxiety or excitement, dropped. I concluded that solitude has the capacity to bring down people's arousal levels, meaning it can be useful in situations where we feel frustrated, agitated or angry.

[...] To overcome our fear of solitude, we need to recognize its benefits and see it as a positive choice – not something that happens to us. While taking a solo trip might be a bit much for you right now, taking time out of your busy schedule for small doses of solitude might well be just what you need.

upstart writes:

Studying the rare ability may shed light on how the animals learn:

Do you peel bananas from the top or bottom? One elephant goes with a third option.

When handed a slightly browning banana, Pang Pha, an Asian elephant at Zoo Berlin, will use her trunk to break the fruit, shake the pulp onto the ground, discard the peel and then shove the pulp into her mouth, researchers report in the April 10 Current Biology. The rare behavior, previously recorded in just a few elephants, could help shed light on how the animals learn complex movements.

When a zookeeper first told neuroscientist Lena Kaufmann of Humboldt University of Berlin that one of the elephants peeled bananas, she decided to test it out for herself. For weeks, Kaufmann and colleagues couldn't get Pang Pha to replicate the behavior. That's because the way the elephant eats bananas seems to depend on ripeness.

Pang Pha ate green and yellow bananas whole — peel and all. It was only when Kaufmann offered the gentle giant a brown-spotted banana that she revealed her peeling prowess. But the fruit can't be too brown, Kaufmann's team found. Pang Pha rejected completely brown bananas. Initially she would place them gently on the ground in protest. Now she throws them aside.

[...] The new study shows the value of studying individual animals, Kaufmann says. "There's such a rich landscape of behaviors that we lose if we only look at what all elephants have in common," she says. "If you look at each individual elephant, you can see that they're able to do really amazing things."

Journal Reference:
L.V. Kaufmann et al. Elephant banana peeling. Current Biology. 33, April 10, 2023. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.076

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sports Direct owner defends live face-recognition camera use:

Sports Direct's parent company says live face-recognition (LFR) technology has cut crime in its shops.

The cameras check faces against a watch-list, using a system called Facewatch.

On Monday, 50 MPs and peers supported a letter opposing the use of LFR by Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, which owns the company and other chains such as Flannels.

The company says it tells shoppers when the technology is installed in a shop.

Frasers Group told BBC News it took its responsibilities around LFR extremely seriously and stressed its effectiveness.

"Since installing this technology, we have seen a significant reduction in the number of criminal offences taking place in our stores," it said.

The letter criticising its use was organised by campaign groups Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International.

It says research into face-recognition technology suggests;

• 87% of "matches" in Metropolitan Police trials misidentified innocent people
• women and people belonging to some ethnic minorities are more likely to be misidentified than white men are

The technology up-ends the democratic principle of suspicion preceding surveillance and "treats everyone who passes the camera like a potential criminal", the letter adds.

[...] Shop managers' requests to add someone to the database had to be backed-up with full witness statements and explanations, which a panel of former police officers reviewed before accepting, Mr Gordon said.

"There is due process followed to ensure we only include individuals reasonably suspected of crime," he said.

Shop staff and "accredited super-recognisers" - analysts with an aptitude for recognising faces - checked every alert, he told BBC News.

Mr Gordon disputes the accuracy claims the letter makes about the Met Police's LFR, saying Facewatch is more than 99% accurate.

His figures have not been independently audited.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/unsolved-mysteries-tetris-creators-alexey-pajitnov-and-henk-rogers/

Despite creating one of the most recognizable video games of all time, Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov (who first coded the game in Russia) and Henk Rogers (who was instrumental in bringing the game to prominence in the West) have not been all that recognizable to the general public. That has started to change, though, with the recent release of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which dramatizes the real-life story of the pair's unlikely friendship and business partnership.

In Ars Technica's latest Unsolved Mysteries video, Pajitnov and Rogers went all the way back to the game's earliest origins. That includes the origin of "the Tetris song," aka Korobeiniki, which Game Boy Tetris fans have had stuck in their heads for decades now.

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Original Submission

upstart writes:

Corrections systems are using simulators to provide incarcerated individuals with more lifelike instruction:

Atorrus Rainer, age 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy, ­fluorescent-lit room. A virtual-reality headset covers his eyes like oversize goggles. Every so often, he extends his arm, using the VR controller to pick up garbage bags, a toothbrush, and toilet paper during a simulated trip to the supermarket. The experience is limited—Rainer has to follow a pre-written shopping list and can only travel to specific locations within the empty store—but the sheer number of products available, even in this digital world, still overwhelms him. So does the self-checkout station: those didn't exist in 2001, when Rainer, then a teenager, was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. His first experience with one is this virtual interaction taking place inside Fremont Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison about two hours south of Denver.

Rainer is practicing in the hopes of stepping into a real store in the near future through an initiative launched in Colorado in 2017 in response to US Supreme Court rulings that deemed juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional. [...]

The premise of JYACAP is that learning the basic skills they missed the chance to acquire while incarcerated will provide these juvenile lifers with their best chances for success upon release. That's a formidable challenge. Because of safety concerns, they have had limited access to the internet. Though they're now adults, many have never used, or even seen, a smartphone or a laptop. Or had a credit card. "We had to figure out a way of giving them these opportunities in a restricted environment," says Melissa Smith, interim director of prisons for the Colorado Department of Corrections.

[...] Is VR the long-missing piece in an unwieldy puzzle of resources and programs meant to help reverse these statistics? Or is it yet another experiment that will fail to adequately prepare incarcerated individuals for life beyond lockup? "It's not going to be the silver bullet, but it is a tool that I think is very powerful for a lot of people, because they never really get a chance to practice what we're trying to teach them," says Bobbie Ticknor, an associate professor of criminal justice at Valdosta State University. "I think we should use everything we can find and see what works the best."

upstart writes:

The company divulged its supply chain emissions for the first time, and it’s the most polluting part of its business:

Tesla released its 2022 Impact Report this week, and it gives the clearest picture yet of the electric car company's carbon footprint. Tesla disclosed numbers on its supply chain emissions for the first time, which makes its overall carbon footprint much bigger than it has reported in the past.

Last year, the company only disclosed how much greenhouse gas pollution it generated from its direct operations and from customers charging their EVs. Altogether that was roughly equivalent to 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. But that missed the big picture since supply chain pollution — considered indirect emissions — often make up a major chunk of a company's carbon footprint.

This year, Tesla finally released data on its supply chain emissions for 2022, which is equivalent to roughly 30.7 million tons of carbon dioxide. That's a huge change from what the company reported last year.

The disclosure really highlights how important it is to count up all of a company's direct and indirect emissions. It's especially pertinent with a fight brewing in the US between companies and the Securities and Exchange Commission over how much of those emissions ought to be reported under law.

A company's carbon footprint is usually divvied up into three main groups or "scopes." Scope 1 includes direct emissions from its own factories, offices, and vehicles. Scope 2 encompasses emissions from its electricity use, heating, and cooling. Scope 3 comprises all the other indirect emissions from supply chains and the lifecycle of the products a company makes. And there are 15 different categories of emissions within Scope 3 alone to give a sense of how wide-ranging it can be.

upstart writes:

Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election:

Artificial intelligence was once something the average person described in the abstract. They had no tactile relationship with it that they were aware of, even if their devices were often utilizing it. That's all changed over the past year as people have started to engage with AI programs like OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the technology is rapidly advancing.

As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what's real and what's fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation.

"We've seen pretty dramatic shifts in the landscape when it comes to generative tools—particularly in the last year," says Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert. "I think the scale of content we're now seeing being produced is directly related to that dramatic opening up of accessibility."

It's not a question of whether AI-generated content is going to start playing a role in politics, because it's already happening. AI-generated images and videos featuring president Joe Biden and Donald Trump have started spreading around the internet. Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician?

There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It's easy to generate a clone of someone's voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.

"To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates," Ajder says. "Video is really the next frontier in generative AI."

Some deepfakes of political figures have emerged in recent years, such as one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to surrender that was released last year. Once the technology has advanced more, which may not take long considering how quickly other forms of generative AI are advancing, more of these types of videos may appear as they become more convincing and easier to produce.

hubie writes:

Scientists Think They've Finally Figured Out How a Maya Calendar Works:

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered and its deciphering began in the 1940s.

Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn't match that 819 days up to anything.

But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University now think they've finally cracked the code. All they had to do was broaden their thinking, studying how the calendar worked over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and relate it to the time taken for a celestial object to appear to return to approximately the same point in the sky – what's referred to as the synodic period.

[...] "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar."

The Maya calendar is actually a complicated system made up of smaller calendars, developed centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Of the component calendars, the 819-day count is the most baffling to modern anthropologists.

[...] There were other clues to suggest that the 819-day count was associated with the synodic periods of visible planets in the Solar System. The Maya had extremely accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She'd laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn't find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they'd saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. "What are you talking about?" multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn't understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It's been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.

That's approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia's Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.

While some of us may find this phenomenon strange to understand it is becoming increasingly real for many. Are there any other examples of things that we take for granted becoming incomprehensible to those younger that ourselves? I'm not thinking of 'hanging up' the telephone, or why the icon for saving a file appears to some young people to be a vending machine, but things that cause difficulty for others.

Original Submission

UK government blocks Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/uk-government-blocks-microsofts-proposed-activision-purchase/

In its long-awaited final report, the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority said that Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision would "result in a substantial lessening of competition" (SLC) in the supply of cloud-gaming services in the UK. As such, the regulator said that "the only effective remedy to this SLC and its adverse consequences is to prohibit the Merger."

The final report cites Microsoft's "strong position" in the cloud-gaming sector, where the company has an estimated 60 to 70 percent market share that makes it "already much stronger than its rivals." After purchasing Activision, the CMA says Microsoft "would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's titles exclusive to its own cloud gaming service."

Microsoft has in recent months signed deals with Nvidia and smaller cloud-gaming providers in an attempt to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement last month. But the CMA said these kinds of cloud-gaming deals—which Microsoft submitted to the CMA as a proposed remedy for any anticompetitive effects of the merger—were "limited to cloud gaming providers with specific business models" and thus not sufficient to address the regulator's concerns.

Previously:
Microsoft and Activision Will Miss Their Contractual Merger Deadline 20230115
FTC Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Acquisition 20221209
The Biggest Deal in Gaming is Under Fire From U.S. Senators 20220403
Microsoft Set to Purchase Activision Blizzard in $68.7 Billion Deal 20220118

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