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upstart writes:

China's Spaceplane Conducted Multiple Maneuvers With a Mystery Object in Orbit:

The Chinese spaceplane finally returned to Earth earlier this week, but we're still learning more about its time in orbit. The spacecraft caught and released an unidentified object several times during its flight, performing a series of maneuvers that were captured by orbital radars, according to California-based LeoLabs. The company released its observational data, saying in a tweet that the data shows there were at least two capture and docking operations performed by the spacecraft.

The experimental launch vehicle took off from the Jiuquan Launch Center on August 5 as a classified payload on board a Long March 2F carrier rocket. This was the reusable spacecraft's second time to fly, with its first launch taking place in 2020. The spaceplane only stayed in orbit for four days during its inaugural flight but far outdid itself the second time around.

The spaceplane landed on May 8 after spending 276 days in orbit. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a state-owned manufacturer that makes both civilian and military space launch vehicles, shared very little information about its craft. Observers of low Earth orbit, however, were able to track the spaceplane's activities during its lengthy flight.

In November 2022, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron tracked an object that may have been ejected from the spaceplane. The object remained unidentified, although some speculated it may have been a satellite used to track the spaceplane's performance in orbit.

That same object may be what LeoLabs tracked with its global network of radars. "Since its launch on 4 August 2022, we observed multiple large maneuvers raising the object's altitude — as well as repeated deployments, formation flying, and docking of a sub-satellite Object J (NORAD ID 54218)," the company said in its Twitter thread.

[...] China's experimental vehicle operates like a regular aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and a spacecraft in space, allowing it to complete missions in orbit and then return to Earth's surface, where it performs a horizontal landing. China isn't the only country testing this type of spacecraft; the U.S. Space Force has its own spaceplane. The Boeing X-37 launched in May 2020 for its sixth test flight and landed back on Earth in November 2022 after spending more than two years in orbit.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Hardware designer and manufacturer, SparkFun, has a short biography about computer engineer Ajay Bhatt who is widely recognized as one of the key inventors of the Universal Serial Bus (USB).

Once the design was finalized, Bhatt and his team worked with other technology companies to promote and standardize the USB. They formed a working group called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to develop the USB specification, which was first introduced in 1996.

The USB specification quickly gained widespread adoption in the technology industry due to its convenience and versatility, and new versions of the standard were introduced over the years to improve data transfer speeds, power management, and other features. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, and it continues to evolve and improve with each new iteration.

When Intel initially developed the USB, it held the patents for the technology, which allowed the company to control the standard and charge licensing fees for its use. However, Intel soon realized that its proprietary approach was not in the best interests of the industry or consumers. The company recognized that the success of the USB depended on its widespread adoption and interoperability with different devices, which would not be possible if licensing fees were required for every use.

In response, Intel took a bold step and transferred ownership of the USB specifications to a non-profit organization called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). The USB-IF is a group of companies that work together to promote and develop the USB standard, with the goal of ensuring that the standard remains open and accessible to all.

Intel's decision to transfer ownership of the USB specifications to the USB-IF was a pivotal moment in the development of the USB standard. It helped to ensure that the USB became a truly universal and open interface, which has had a profound impact on the computer industry and consumers around the world. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, from computers and smartphones to home appliances and automotive systems, and it continues to evolve and improve to meet the needs of an ever-changing technological landscape.

Previously:
(2022) Henn Tan and the Invention of the USB Thumb Drive in Singapore
(2022) Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The incident could be related to the ongoing Eta Aquariids meteor shower:

A metallic oblong-shaped rock may have made its way from space all the way to the surface of Earth, traveling hundreds of millions of miles only to land in New Jersey.

The object fell through the roof of a home in Hopewell Township, New Jersey on Monday just after 1:00 p.m. ET, CNBC first reported. Although it remains unidentified, it's suspected that the small rock may in fact be a meteorite that formed billions of years ago.

"We are thinking it's a meteorite, came through here, hit the floor here because that's completely damaged, it ricocheted up to this part of the ceiling and then finally rested on the floor there," Suzy Kop, the daughter of the family that owns the house, told CNBC. The residents were not home at the time, and there were no reported injuries.

[...] Investigations are still ongoing regarding the origin of the flying object, but authorities suspect that it could be related to the ongoing Eta Aquarid meteor shower, which is active between April 15 and May 27. The meteor shower originates from Halley's comet, named after English astronomer Edmond Halley who plotted its orbit in the 17th century.

Thousand of meteorites fall to the surface of Earth each year, but rarely do they ever fall inside people's homes, which makes the latest incident a cosmic treat—especially knowing no one was hurt.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Images from NASA's Perseverance may show record of wild Martian river:

New images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover may show signs of what was once a rollicking river on Mars, one that was deeper and faster-moving than scientists have ever seen evidence for in the past. The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater, the area the rover has been exploring since landing more than two years ago.

Understanding these watery environments could help scientists in their efforts to seek out signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in Martian rock.

Perseverance is exploring the top of a fan-shaped pile of sedimentary rock that stands 820 feet (250 meters) tall and features curving layers suggestive of flowing water. One question scientists want to answer is whether that water flowed in relatively shallow streams—closer to what NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of in Gale Crater—or a more powerful river system.

Stitched together from hundreds of images captured by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z instrument, two new mosaics suggest the latter, revealing important clues: coarse sediment grains and cobbles.

"Those indicate a high-energy river that's truckin' and carrying a lot of debris. The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it's able to move larger pieces of material," said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover. With a background in studying Earth-based rivers, Ives has spent the last six months analyzing images of the Red Planet's surface. "It's been a delight to look at rocks on another planet and see processes that are so familiar," Ives said. Following the curves

[...] "What's exciting here is we've entered a new phase of Jezero's history. And it's the first time we're seeing environments like this on Mars," said Perseverance's deputy project scientist, Katie Stack Morgan of JPL. "We're thinking about rivers on a different scale than we have before."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mitochondrial donation treatment aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases:

The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases.

The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children.

Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor's egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material – about 37 genes – from the donor.

The process has led to the phrase "three-parent babies", though more than 99.8% of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father.

Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the "batteries" can affect all of the children a woman has.

[...] The Newcastle process has several steps. First, sperm from the father is used to fertilise eggs from the affected mother and a healthy female donor. The nuclear genetic material from the donor's egg is then removed and replaced with that from the couple's fertilised egg. The resulting egg has a full set of chromosomes from both parents, but carries the donor's healthy mitochondria instead of the mother's faulty ones. This is then implanted in the womb.

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.