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Vast Says It Will Launch its First Space Station in 2025 on a Falcon 9

upstart writes:

"We have a clear path for how we're going to get there":

A private space station company, Vast, announced on Wednesday that it intends to launch a commercial space station as soon as August 2025. After deploying this "Haven-1" space station in low-Earth orbit, four commercial astronauts will launch to the facility on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle.

The California-based company says this crew will then spend about 30 days on board the Haven-1 space station before returning to Earth. As part of Wednesday's announcement, Vast said those four crewed seats are now up for sale, as are those for a second mission that will launch no earlier than 2026.

"It's a super aggressive schedule," Jed McCaleb, the founder of Vast, said in an interview with Ars. "But we have a clear path for how we're going to get there."

[...] The partnership with SpaceX is the key to making this mission happen. Not only will the 3.8-meter-wide Haven-1 module launch inside a Falcon 9 rocket, but part of its life-support systems will also be provided by the Crew Dragon spacecraft when the vehicle is docked.

The Dragon spacecraft will remain powered on the entire time it is attached to Haven-1, providing some of the consumables such as air or water and other services needed to keep humans alive. By leaning on SpaceX and its experience developing these life support systems for Dragon, Vast will attempt to develop a space station on a quicker timeline.

[...] "A commercial rocket launching a commercial spacecraft with commercial astronauts to a commercial space station is the future of low-Earth orbit, and with Vast, we're taking another step toward making that future a reality," said Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, in a statement. "The SpaceX team couldn't be more excited to launch Vast's Haven-1 and support their follow-on human spaceflight missions to the orbiting commercial space station."

upstart writes:

The work is a step toward crash-proof quantum computers:

In 1997, Alexei Kitaev, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology, pointed out that such quasiparticles could lay the perfect foundation for quantum computers. Physicists have long salivated at the possibility of harnessing the quantum world to perform calculations beyond the reach of typical computers and their binary bits. But qubits, the atomlike building blocks of quantum computers, are fragile. Their wave functions collapse at the lightest touch, erasing their memories and their ability to perform quantum calculations. This flimsiness has complicated ambitions to control qubits long enough for them to finish lengthy calculations.

Kitaev realized that the shared memory of non-abelian anyons could serve as an ideal qubit. For starters, it was malleable. You could change the state of the qubit — flipping a zero to a one — by exchanging the positions of the anyons in a manner known as "braiding."

You could also read out the state of the qubit. When the simplest non-abelian anyons are brought together and "fused," for instance, they will emit another quasiparticle only if they have been braided. This quasiparticle serves as a physical record of their crisscrossed journey through space and time.

And crucially, the memory is also nigh incorruptible. As long as the anyons are kept far apart, poking at any individual particle won't change the state the pair is in — whether zero or one. In this way, their collective memory is effectively cut off from the cacophony of the universe.

"This would be the perfect place to hide information," said Maissam Barkeshli, a condensed matter theorist at the University of Maryland.

Kitaev's proposal came to be known as "topological" quantum computing because it relied on the topology of the braids. The term refers to broad features of the braid — for example, the number of turns — that aren't affected by any specific deformation of their path. Most researchers now believe that braids are the future of quantum computing, in one form or another. Microsoft, for instance, has researchers trying to persuade electrons to form non-abelian anyons directly. Already, the company has invested millions of dollars into building tiny wires that — at sufficiently frigid temperatures — should host the simplest species of braidable quasiparticles at their tips. The expectation is that at these low temperatures, electrons will naturally gather to form anyons, which in turn can be braided into reliable qubits.

How one of Vladimir Putin's most prized hacking units got pwned by the FBI

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/how-the-fbi-pwned-turla-a-kremlin-jewel-and-one-of-worlds-most-skilled-apts/

FBI officials on Tuesday dropped a major bombshell: After spending years monitoring exceptionally stealthy malware that one of the Kremlin's most advanced hacker units had installed on hundreds of computers around the world, agents unloaded a payload that caused the malware to disable itself.

The counter hack took aim at Snake, the name of a sprawling piece of cross-platform malware that for more than two decades has been in use for espionage and sabotage. Snake is developed and operated by Turla, one of the world's most sophisticated APTs, short for advanced persistent threats, a term for long-running hacking outfits sponsored by nation states.

If nation-sponsored hacking was baseball, then Turla would not just be a Major League team—it would be a perennial playoff contender. Researchers from multiple security firms largely agree that Turla was behind breaches of the US Department of Defense in 2008, and more recently the German Foreign Office and France's military. The group has also been known for unleashing stealthy Linux malware and using satellite-based Internet links to maintain the stealth of its operations.

One of the most powerful tools in Turla's arsenal is Snake, a digital Swiss Army knife of sorts that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Written in the C programming language, Snake comes as a highly modular series of pieces that are built on top of a massive peer-to-peer network that covertly links one infected computer with another. Snake, the FBI said, has to date spread to more than 50 countries and infected computers belonging to NATO member governments, a US journalist who has covered Russia, and sectors involving critical infrastructure, communications, and education.

A short list of Snake capabilities includes a backdoor that allows Turla to install or uninstall malware on infected computers, send commands, and exfiltrate data of interest to the Kremlin.
[...]
The court documents provide an intriguing but ultimately incomplete account of how the counterhack against Turla worked. A joint cybersecurity advisory issued by law enforcement agencies around the world provided a few additional details.

upstart writes:

With no easy way to revoke compromised keys, MSI, and its customers, are in a real pickle:

A ransomware intrusion on hardware manufacturer Micro-Star International, better known as MSI, is stoking concerns of devastating supply chain attacks that could inject malicious updates that have been signed with company signing keys that are trusted by a huge base of end-user devices, a researcher said.

"​​It's kind of like a doomsday scenario where it's very hard to update the devices simultaneously, and they stay for a while not up to date and will use the old key for authentication," Alex Matrosov, CEO, head of research and founder of security firm Binarly, said in an interview. "It's very hard to solve, and I don't think MSI has any backup solution to actually block the leaked keys."

The intrusion came to light in April when, as first reported by Bleeping Computer, the extortion portal of the Money Message ransomware group listed MSI as a new victim and published screenshots purporting to show folders containing private encryption keys, source code, and other data. A day later, MSI issued a terse advisory saying that it had "suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems." The advisory urged customers to get updates from the MSI website only. It made no mention of leaked keys.

Since then, Matrosov has analyzed data that was released on the Money Message site on the dark web. To his alarm, included in the trove were two private encryption keys. The first is the signing key that digitally signs MSI firmware updates to cryptographically prove that they are legitimate ones from MSI rather than a malicious impostor from a threat actor.

This raises the possibility that the leaked key could push out updates that would infect a computer's most nether regions without triggering a warning. To make matters worse, Matrosov said, MSI doesn't have an automated patching process the way Dell, HP, and many larger hardware makers do. Consequently, MSI doesn't provide the same kind of key revocation capabilities.

upstart writes:

An experiment that could become permanent:

YouTube's annoying ads often push those who don't want to pay $120 for YouTube Premium to use ad blockers. But Google isn't happy about this potentially lost revenue, and has decided to experiment with a feature that urges ad-blocker users to think again.

Redditor Sazk100 posted a screenshot earlier this week showing a YouTube popup warning that ad blockers are not allowed on the platform. It notes that ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide, and that an ad-free experience is available via the paid-for YouTube Premium. The message finishes with two options: Allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium, which is $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year for access to original programs and no ads.

Some users who've seen it say they have been able to simply close the pop-up and continue blocking ads on YouTube, but it's likely that Google will clamp down on this, or make the pop-up appear regularly enough to be a distraction.

The moderators of the YouTube subreddit wrote that an employee had confirmed the ad-blocker message was an experiment by YouTube. A Google spokesperson expanded on this in a statement to IGN.

"We're running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium," they said. "Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers."

While most online companies make their revenue from ads, some complain that YouTube has gone too far, citing its increasing number of unskippable and extended mid-roll ads.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The rebirth of Japan's semiconductor industry depends on it:

A little-known Japanese company called Rapidus aims to mass produce 2nm chips just two years after the likes of Samsung, TSMC, and Intel. Many in the industry consider that an impossible task, but one of the two men leading the company believes it's just a matter of focusing on being the first to break ground on new process technology – kind of like TSMC. Rapidus also has the benefit of being at the center of Japan's strategy to conquer advanced semiconductors, meaning it will see plenty of subsidies over the coming years to fund its ambitions.

Back in 2021, the Japanese government said it would make it a top priority to reboot the local semiconductor industry, which was once a dominant force on the global market. Despite hosting more chip factories than an other country, Japan has fallen behind when it comes to mass-producing chips on advanced process nodes. To put things in perspective, Japan's share of global semiconductor sales has shrunk from 50 percent in 1988 to about 9 percent in 2022.

Meanwhile, Taiwan has become the world leader in this area, mostly thanks to TSMC. The country currently makes more than half of the world's semiconductors, and that figure is over 90 percent if you look at chips made using the most advanced process nodes. South Korea has a much smaller share of the overall market, but dominates when it comes to memory chips, thanks in no small part to companies like Samsung and SK Hynix.

That said, industry veteran Tetsuro Higashi says he's building a semiconductor company that can catch up with the likes of TSMC and Samsung in just four short years. Despite being 73 years old, Higashi is determined to show that Japan has what it takes to rejuvenate its chip industry and help it regain its edge.

Helion Energy Will Provide Microsoft With Fusion Power Starting in 2028

upstart writes:

Helion Energy will provide Microsoft with fusion power starting in 2028:

Helion, the clean energy company with its eye firmly on the fusion prize, announced a couple of years ago that it had secured $2.2 billion of funding to help it develop cleaner, safer energy at a commercial scale in November 2021. Today, it is starting to reap the fruits of its labor, announcing an agreement to provide Microsoft with electricity from its first fusion power plant, with Constellation serving as the power marketer and managing the transmission for the project.

Fusion has been the energy goal for over 60 years, as it produces next to no waste or radioactivity while processing and is far less risky than fission. But achieving the same process that occurs in stars has proved mighty difficult to contain, with it taking more energy to keep the reaction under control than it can generate. Progress has been slow and steady, with the potential rewards keeping companies such as Helion focused on the reaction. Helion has been working on its fusion technology for over a decade. To date, it has built six working prototypes and it expects its seventh prototype to demonstrate the ability to produce energy in 2024.

With this in mind, Helion's plant is expected to be online by 2028 and has a power generation target of 50MW, or greater, with a one-year ramp-up period. While that might seem a long way into the future still, it's significantly sooner than the projections had suggested.

"This collaboration represents a significant milestone for Helion and the fusion industry as a whole," said David Kirtley, CEO at Helion, in a statement to TechCrunch. "We are grateful for the support of a visionary company like Microsoft. We still have a lot of work to do, but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world's first fusion power facility."

upstart writes:

The 'music of the spheres' was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universe:

If you've ever heard the phrase "the music of the spheres," your first thought probably wasn't about mathematics.

But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In fact, that phrase represents a watershed in the history of math's relationship with science.

In its earliest forms, as practiced in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, math was mainly a practical tool for facilitating human interactions. Math was important for calculating the area of a farmer's field, for keeping track of workers' wages, for specifying the right amount of ingredients when making bread or beer. Nobody used math to investigate the nature of physical reality.

Not until ancient Greek philosophers began to seek scientific explanations for natural phenomena (without recourse to myths) did anybody bother to wonder how math would help. And the first of those Greeks to seriously put math to use for that purpose was the mysterious religious cult leader Pythagoras of Samos.

It was Pythagoras who turned math from a mere tool for practical purposes into the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. As the historian Geoffrey Lloyd noted, "The Pythagoreans were ... the first theorists to have attempted deliberately to give the knowledge of nature a quantitative, mathematical foundation."

[...] Pythagoras believed that, at its root, reality was made from numbers. That sounds crazy to modern minds taught that matter is made of atoms and molecules. But in ancient times, nobody really knew anything about what reality is. Every major philosopher had a favorite idea for what sort of substance served as reality's foundation.

upstart writes:

Pearson has already sent out a cease-and-desist letter over use of its intellectual property:

Textbooks giant Pearson is currently taking legal action over the use of its intellectual property to train AI models, chief executive Andy Bird revealed today as the firm laid out its plans for its own artificial intelligence-powered products.

The firm laid out its plans on how it would use AI a week after its share price tumbled by 15% as American rival Chegg said its own business had been hurt by the rise of ChatGPT.

Those plans would include AI-powered summaries of Pearson educational videos, to be rolled out this month for Pearson+ members, as well as AI-generated multiple choice questions for areas where a student might need more help.

Bird said Pearson had an advantage as its AI products would use Pearson content for training, which he said would make it more reliable.

[...] Bird also said it was usually easy to tell what a large language model such as ChatGPT has been trained on, because "you can ask it".

Bird also sought to point out a difference between Pearson and Chegg, which focuses more on homework assistance.

"They are in a very different business to us," he said. "We see a great differentiator between what Chegg are offering and what Pearson+ are offering.

"We're in the business of helping you learn and improve your skills, not in the business of answering."

He added that - as Pearson was in the business of learning - its products would be hard to replace.

"If all we had to do was read a set of facts in order to learn, there'd be no need for schools, colleges and teachers."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Early crop plants were more easily 'tamed':

The story of how ancient wolves came to claim a place near the campfire as humanity's best friend is a familiar tale (even if scientists are still working out some of the specifics). In order to be domesticated, a wild animal must be tamable — capable of living in close proximity to people without exhibiting dangerous aggression or debilitating fear. Taming was the necessary first step in animal domestication, and it is widely known that some animals are easier to tame than others.

But did humans also favor certain wild plants for domestication because they were more easily "tamed"? Research from Washington University in St. Louis calls for a reappraisal of the process of plant domestication, based on almost a decade of observations and experiments. The behavior of erect knotweed, a buckwheat relative, has WashU paleoethnobotanists completely reassessing our understanding of plant domestication.

"We have no equivalent term for tameness in plants," said Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. "But plants are capable of responding to people. They have a developmental capacity to be tamed."

Her work with early indigenous North American crops shows that some wild plants respond quickly to clearing, fertilizing, weeding or thinning. Plants that respond in ways that make cultivation easier or more productive could be considered more easily tamed than those that cannot.

"If plants responded rapidly in ways that were beneficial to early cultivators — for example by producing higher yields, larger seeds, seeds that were easier to sprout, or a second crop in a single growing season — this would have encouraged humans to continue investing in the co-evolutionary relationship," she said.

upstart writes:

ESA taps RISC-V for AI and HPC chip:

The Occamy processor, which uses a chiplet architecture, packs 432 RISC-V and AI accelerators and comes with 32GB of HBM2E memory, has taped out. The chip is backed by the European Space Agency and developed by engineers from ETH Zürich and the University of Bologna, reports HPC Wire.

The ESA-backed Occamy processor uses two chiplets with 216 32-bit RISC-V cores, an unknown number of 64-bit FPUs for matrix calculations, and carries two 16GB HBM2E memory packages from Micron. The cores are interconnected using a silicon interposer, and the dual-tile CPU can deliver 0.75 FP64 TFLOPS of performance and 6 FP8 TFLOPS of compute capability.

Neither ESA nor its development partners have disclosed the Occamy CPUs' power consumption, but it is said that the chip can be passively cooled, meaning it might be a low-power processor.

Each Occamy chiplet has 216 RISC-V cores and matrix FPUs, totaling around a billion transistors spread over 73mm^2 of silicon. The tiles are made by GlobalFoundries using its 14LPP fabrication process.

The 73mm^2 chiplet isn't a particularly large die. For example, Intel's Alder Lake (with six high-performance cores) has a die size of 163 mm^2. As far as performance is concerned, Nvidia's A30 GPU with 24GB of HBM2 memory delivers 5.2 FP64/10.3 FP64 Tensor TFLOPS as well as 330/660 (with sparsity) INT8 TOPS.

Meanwhile, one of the advantages of chiplet designs is that ESA and its partners from ETH Zürich and the University of Bologna can add other chiplets to the package to accelerate certain workloads if needed.

The Occamy CPU is developed as a part of the EuPilot program, and it is one of many chips that the ESA is considering for spaceflight computing. However, there are no guarantees that the process will indeed be used onboard spaceships.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers ruled out overexuberant antibodies in an autoimmune response:

The mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have proven remarkably safe and effective against the deadly pandemic. But, like all medical interventions, they have some risks. One is that a very small number of vaccinated people develop inflammation of and around their heart—conditions called myocarditis, pericarditis, or the combination of the two, myopericarditis. These side effects mostly strike males in their teens and early 20s, most often after a second vaccine dose. Luckily, the conditions are usually mild and resolve on their own.

With the rarity and mildness of these conditions, studies have concluded, and experts agree that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks—male teens and young adults should get vaccinated. In fact, they're significantly more likely to develop myocarditis or pericarditis from a COVID-19 infection than from a COVID-19 vaccination. According to a large 2022 study led by researchers at Harvard University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the group at highest risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination—males ages 12 to 17—saw 35.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0359 percent) after a second vaccine dose, while the rate was nearly double after a COVID-19 infection in the same age group, with 64.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0649 percent).

Still, the conditions are a bit of a puzzle. Why do a small few get this complication after vaccination? Why does it seem to solely affect the heart? How does the damage occur? And what does it all mean for the many other mRNA-based vaccines now being developed?

A new study in Science Immunology provides some fresh insight. The study, led by researchers at Yale University, took a deep dive into the immune responses among 23 people—mostly males and ranging in age from 13 to 21—who developed myocarditis and/or pericarditis after vaccination.

Since the rare phenomenon was first noted, immunologists and other experts have hypothesized that the vaccine could be spurring several aberrant immune responses that would explain the inflamed hearts, such as an autoimmune response or an allergic reaction. And the new study rules some of them out.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/sbf-says-dishonesty-and-unfair-dealing-arent-fraud-seeks-to-dismiss-charges/

Late Monday, legally embroiled FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried moved to dismiss the majority of criminal charges lobbed against him by the United States government after his cryptocurrency exchange went bankrupt in 2022.

In documents filed in a Manhattan federal court, lawyers from the law firm Cohen & Gresser LLP shared Bankman-Fried's first official legal defense. Lawyers accused the US of a "troubling" and "classic rush to judgment," claiming that the government didn't even wait to receive "millions of documents" and "other evidence" against Bankman-Fried before "improperly seeking" to turn "civil and regulatory issues into federal crimes."

After FTX's collapse last year, federal prosecutors acted quickly to intervene, within a month alleging that Bankman-Fried was stealing billions in customer funds, defrauding investors, committing bank and wire fraud, providing improper loans, misleading lenders, transmitting money without a license, making illegal campaign contributions, bribing China officials, and other crimes. Through it all, Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. Now, in his motion to dismiss, Bankman-Fried has requested an oral argument to "fight these baseless charges" and "clear his name." He's asking the court to dismiss 10 out of 13 charges, arguing that federal prosecutors have failed to substantiate most of their claims.

"The Government's haste and apparent willingness to proceed without having all the relevant facts and information has produced an indictment that is not only improperly brought but legally flawed and should be dismissed," Bankman-Fried's lawyers argued in one of several memos filed yesterday.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Australian lawmakers press US envoy for Julian Assange release

Australian lawmakers have met United States Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging her to help drop the pending extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow him to return to Australia.

The "Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group" said on Tuesday it informed Kennedy of "the widespread concern in Australia" about the continued detention of Assange, an Australian citizen.

The meeting comes before US President Joe Biden's scheduled visit to Australia this month for the Quad leaders' summit.

"There are a range of views about Assange in the Australian community and the members of the Parliamentary Group reflect that diversity of views. But what is not in dispute in the Group is that Mr Assange is being treated unjustly," the legislators said in a statement after meeting Kennedy in the capital, Canberra.

Assange is battling extradition from the United Kingdom to the US where he is wanted on criminal charges over the release of confidential military records and diplomatic cables in 2010. Washington says the release of the documents had put lives in danger.

Previously:

April 2023: No NGO Has Been Allowed to See Julian Assange Since Four Years Ago
December 2022: Biden Faces Growing Pressure to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange
August 2022: Assange Lawyers Sue CIA for Spying on Them
June 2022: Julian Assange's Extradition to the US Approved by UK Home Secretary

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of humans:

AI algorithms can screen for pancreatic cancer and predict whether patients will develop the disease up to three years before a human doctor can make the same diagnosis, according to research published in Nature on Monday.

Pancreatic cancer is deadly; the five-year survival rate averages 12 percent. Academics working in Denmark and the US believe AI could help clinicians by detecting pancreatic cancer at earlier stages, if the software can reliably predict which patients are at higher risk of developing the disease.

The researchers trained AI algorithms on millions of medical records obtained in the Danish National Patient Registry and the US Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse. The models were trained to correlate diagnosis codes – labels used by hospitals describing different medical conditions – to pancreatic cancer.

[...] "Cancer gradually develops in the human body, often over many years and fairly slowly, until the disease takes hold," Chris Sander, the study's co-senior investigator and leader of a lab working at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, told The Register.

"The AI system attempts to learn from signs in the human body that may relate to such gradual changes."

[...] The most effective model, based on a transformer-based architecture, showed that out of the top 1,000 highest-risk patients over 50, about 320 would go on to develop pancreatic cancer. The model is less accurate when trying to predict pancreatic cancer over longer time intervals compared to shorter ones, and for patients younger than 50.