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The Aptera streamlined car project has been on and off for something like 10(?) years now, including a bankruptcy and reorg. They just released this statement on some wind tunnel testing, so it does seem like there is at least a little bit of life in the company.

From the link:

Alessandro Aquili, head of wind tunnel at Pininfarina, said, "Aptera's exterior design draws inspiration from the research of Prof. Morelli, the same engineer behind the Pininfarina wind tunnel. By building on Prof. Morelli's ideas, Aptera carries on this philosophy, continuing to push bounds of aerodynamic efficiency."

Steve Fambro, CEO and co-founder of Aptera, remarked, "Working with Pininfarina to validate Aptera's shape marks an exciting chapter in our journey toward creating a passenger vehicle with the lowest drag coefficient ever."

Aptera's aerodynamic shape is key to its energy efficiency. According to the company, it will enable its solar EVs to achieve a range of up to 1,000 miles per charge and the ability to drive up to 40 miles per day directly from the sun's rays.

An average of 10 miles a day would probably be enough for my limited/local car use (work from home), but I'm not in Southern CA, we don't get sun year around like they do.

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upstart writes:

You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills:

For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We've made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. I'm asking you to join us, ACLU, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights defenders in a week of action to protect the internet. Will you take a few minutes to join us in telling Congress that these bills must not become law?

The Kids Online Safety Act would increase surveillance and restrict access to information under the guise of protecting children online. KOSA would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general. It would greatly endanger the rights and safety of young people online. KOSA's burdens will affect adults, too, who will likely face hurdles, like age verification, to access legal content online as a result of the bill.

The STOP CSAM Act would put security and free speech at risk by potentially making it a crime to offer encryption. The law would undermine digital security for all internet users, impacting private messaging and email app providers, social media platforms, cloud storage providers, and many other internet intermediaries and online services.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/google-demos-unsettling-tool-to-help-journalists-write-the-news/

Google has been developing tools aimed at helping journalists write news articles, reports The New York Times and Reuters. It has demonstrated one tool, dubbed "Genesis," to the Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Google is positioning the tool as a personal assistant for news reporters.

According to Reuters, Genesis is not intended to automate news writing but can instead potentially support journalists by offering suggestions for headlines or alternative writing styles to enhance productivity.

[...] Like OpenAI with its ChatGPT AI assistant that can compose text, Google has also been developing large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2

[...] However, unnamed anonymous executives who previewed Google's presentation described Genesis as "unsettling," according to the Times. Two of the executives told the outlet that the Google product seemed to underestimate the effort it takes to produce accurate and interesting news stories.

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hubie writes:

Avi and Oumuamua: Setting the Record Straight:

As an astrophysicist that searches for signs of alien technology beyond Earth, I'm often asked these days what I think about Avi Loeb.

Loeb, you might know, recently rose to public prominence with his claims that the first discovered interstellar comet, 'Oumuamua, is actually a piece of an alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System. Since then he has headlined UFO conventions, written a very popular book about his claim, and raised millions of dollars to study UFOs with his "Galileo Project" initiative. His latest venture with that money is to sweep a metal detector across the Pacific to find fragments of what he claims is another interstellar visitor that the US military detected crashing into the ocean, resulting in the headline "Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft" in the Independent.

Loeb has the credentials to be taken seriously. He is a well-respected theoretical cosmologist that has made foundational contributions to our understanding of the early universe. He served as the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, and leads the distinguished Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is well known as an outside-the-box thinker who is brave enough to be wrong often enough to occasionally be right in important and unexpected ways. He is a prolific paper writer, mentor to many students and postdoctoral researchers, and a leader in the community. I, in particular, was strongly influenced by a lecture he gave on "diversifying one's research portfolio" to include a lot of safe but passé research, some more risky cutting edge work, and a small amount of outré science. It's important advice for any scientific field.

But his shenanigans have lately strongly changed the astronomy community's perceptions of him. His recent claims about alien spacecraft and comets and asteroids largely come across to experts as, at best, terribly naive, and often as simply erroneous (Loeb has no formal training or previous track record to speak of in planetary science, which has little in common with the plasma physics he is known for). His promotion of his claims in the media is particularly galling to professionals who discover and study comets, who were very excited about the discovery of 'Oumuamua but have found their careful work dismissed and ridiculed by Loeb, who is the most visible scientist discussing it in the media.

upstart writes:

Stunned Researchers Discover that Metals Can Heal Themselves 'Without Human Intervention':

Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process.

If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution—one in which self-healing engines, bridges, and airplanes could reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

The research team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University described their findings today in the journal Nature.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce.

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," he told the Laboratory's press.

Repeated stress or motion causes microscopic cracks to form in machines' metal components. Over time, these cracks grow and spread until the whole device breaks, or in the scientific lingo, it fails.

The fissure Boyce and his team saw disappear was one of these tiny but consequential fractures—measured in nanometers.

"From solder joints in our electronic devices to our vehicle's engines to the bridges that we drive over, these structures often fail unpredictably due to cyclic loading that leads to crack initiation and eventual fracture," Boyce said. "When they do fail, we have to contend with replacement costs, lost time and, in some cases, even injuries or loss of life. The economic impact of these failures is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the U.S."

mhajicek writes:

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/07/thermal-cloak-keeps-things-cool-when-its-hot-and-warm-in-the-cold/

Cui and colleagues made the outer layer out of silica fibers coated with flakes of hexagonal boron nitride, a material that is the thickness of just a few atoms. The silica fibers reflect visible light while the boron nitride reflects ultraviolet light, so the materials together reflect 96 percent of the sunlight that hits the fabric. The outer layer also absorbs heat from its surroundings and emits it as infrared radiation, which further lowers the temperature under the cloak.

[...] To demonstrate how the cloak could withstand extreme conditions of aerospace, the researchers heated it to 800°C and immersed it in liquid nitrogen. They also blasted it with acid and a blow torch to show. The material did not lose its performance.

[...] The team also made a full-size cloak and tested it outdoors in Shanghai by covering an electric car with it. During the summer, the cabin temperature of an uncovered car reached over 50°C at mid-day, but that of a cloak-covered car reached only about 23°C, 27°C lower than the uncovered car and almost 8°C lower than the temperature outside the car. During winter nights, the cloak kept the car almost 7°C warmer than the outside air.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The decline of science at the FDA has become unmanageable:

Before 1962, US federal law did not require pre-marketing proof of effectiveness for drugs. But senate hearings revealing widespread false advertising of drugs—along with the thalidomide safety disaster—spurred Congress into action. From then on, approval of a New Drug Application (NDA) by the US Food and Drug Administration required proof of "substantial evidence" of effectiveness. This proof was defined as results from "adequate and well-controlled investigations, including clinical investigations," with such evidence also required to advertise claims of safety and effectiveness. A National Academy of Sciences review underscored the need for these mandates, finding over 30% of pre-1962 marketed drugs to be ineffective.

The FDA's legally enforceable regulations detail what "substantial evidence" and "adequate and well-controlled investigations" mean in greater depth, supplemented by guidelines to industry which, although not legally binding, explain the FDA's current interpretation of drug manufacturers' legal obligations. However imperfect, the FDA's enforcement of these provisions assures prescribers, patients, and payers that effectiveness claims are based on science, not science fiction. A published FDA review showed efficacy deficiencies, in whole or in part, underlying initial rejection of 89 of 151 NDAs (59%), highlighting the continuing need for vigilance on this front.

However, as Peter Doshi reports in The BMJ, the FDA subverted the legal standard for effectiveness in its 2019 approval of Recarbrio, a fixed dose combination of imipenem, cilastatin, and relebactam. While the FDA has previously approved products with marginal evidence of effectiveness, approval of the Recarbrio NDA was shocking given its lack of substantial evidence of effectiveness and the complete absence of adequate and well controlled clinical investigations on the actual indication of interest.

[...] What accounts for this descent into cargo cult science? Much of the blame must go to the FDA's reliance on industry paid user fees. Over the past three decades the proportion of the FDA's annual drug budget made up of such fees has risen from less than 10% (fiscal year 1994) to more than two thirds (fiscal year 2023). In addition, the alluring "regulatory flexibilities" provided by the FDA Modernization Act of 1997 and the 21st Century Cures Act have become habit forming, enabling the FDA's leadership and managers to deny scientific reality by defining effectiveness downward. In its quest to avoid difficult choices and hard decisions the FDA has increasingly embraced non-inferiority trials (or vice versa), ignoring the serious regulatory, clinical, and ethical problems caused by their misuse.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/to-defeat-hackers-google-wants-employees-to-work-without-internet-access/

The Internet is dangerous, so what if you just didn't use it? That's the somewhat ironic recommendation Google, one of the world's largest Internet companies, is making to its employees. CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google is "starting a new pilot program where some employees will be restricted to Internet-free desktop PCs" while they work. An internal memo seen by CNBC notes that "Googlers are frequent targets of attacks" by criminals, and a great way to combat that is to not be on the Internet.

Employees of major tech companies are a much richer target for criminals compared to normal people. Tech company employees have all sorts of access to sensitive data, and compromising a single employee could lead to exploiting sensitive infrastructure. Just last week, Microsoft was targeted by a Chinese espionage hacking group that somehow stole a cryptographic key to bypass Microsoft's authentication systems, giving it access to 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies.

Original Submission

ikanreed writes:

A team of Google engineers have proposed an Operating System level security mechanism to guarantee that only officially supported browsers running with no modifications can access certain websites. proposal, hosted on GitHub does not hide their desire to kill adblockers.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

Considering Google's recent "security concerns" excuse for dramatically weakening AdBlock on chrome, this looks an attempt to kick their war on user choice to high gear.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/chasing-defamatory-hallucinations-ftc-opens-investigation-into-openai/

OpenAI, best known for its ChatGPT AI assistant, has come under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that it violated consumer protection laws, potentially putting personal data and reputations at risk, according to The Washington Post and Reuters.

As part of the investigation, the FTC sent a 20-page record request to OpenAI that focuses on the company's risk management strategies surrounding its AI models. The agency is investigating whether the company has engaged in deceptive or unfair practices, resulting in reputational harm to consumers.

The inquiry is also seeking to understand how OpenAI has addressed the potential of its products to generate false, misleading, or disparaging statements about real individuals. In the AI industry, these false generations are sometimes called "hallucinations" or "confabulations."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/07/undocumented-8086-instructions.html

What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will generate an exception, indicating that an illegal instruction was executed. However, early microprocessors didn't include the circuitry to detect illegal instructions, since the chips didn't have transistors to spare. Instead these processors would do something, but the results weren't specified.¹

The 8086 has a number of undocumented instructions. Most of them are simply duplicates of regular instructions, but a few have unexpected behavior, such as revealing the values of internal, hidden registers. In the 8086, most instructions are implemented in microcode, so examining the 8086's microcode can explain why these instructions behave the way they do.

¹ The 6502 processor, for instance, has illegal instructions with various effects, including causing the processor to hang. The article How MOS 6502 illegal opcodes really work describes in detail how the instruction decoding results in various illegal opcodes. Some of these opcodes put the internal bus into a floating state, so the behavior is electrically unpredictable.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It's sewage, not fertilizer fueling nitrogen surge in Florida's Indian River Lagoon:

From recurring harmful algal blooms—including brown tides—to catastrophic seagrass losses, fish kills and unusual marine mammal deaths—including the threatened Florida manatee—the Indian River Lagoon is environmentally distressed. For decades, water managers, policy makers and environmental activists have implicated fertilizer use as the primary contributing source responsible for about 71 percent of these impairments in the lagoon.

Consequently, fertilizer restrictions have been implemented in counties and municipalities along the 156-mile-long Indian River Lagoon on Florida's Atlantic coast to reduce nutrient inputs from urban and agricultural land uses to achieve total maximum daily loads for the lagoon. Excess nutrient inputs, particularly nitrogen, often result in increased harmful algal blooms, seagrass die-offs and fish kills. The hope was that water quality would improve by reducing the nitrogen load.

While these restrictions were well-intended, a new study by Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute reveals fertilizer use is not the root cause of these environmental problems in the Indian River Lagoon. It's sewage.

[...] To assess the effectiveness of these fertilizer bans, researchers collected seawater and macroalgal samples at 20 sites "pre" and about five-years "post" bans. They tested by comparing dissolved seawater nutrient concentrations and tissue nutrient and isotope data of brown tides and macroalgae. Gathering evidence from stable nitrogen isotope values enabled researchers to discriminate between sewage, rainfall and fertilizer, providing a unique "fingerprint" of the samples they collected.

"Our comparative pre- versus post-ban nutrient data indicate that the wet season fertilizer blackouts were not as effective as hoped," said Brian Lapointe, Ph.D., senior author and a research professor at FAU Harbor Branch. "Our findings also suggest that the increasing concentrations of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus observed in some segments of the lagoon following five years of fertilizer bans would support the worsening trend of algal blooms."

upstart writes:

Nearly 40 percent lack enough of the essential nutrient, and can suffer from dizziness to anemia:

Many female adolescents in the United States may not have enough iron in their bodies. But most may never know, partly due to a lack of routine screenings as well as disagreement over what constitutes too little iron, pediatric hematologist Angela Weyand argues.

Iron deficiencies are most commonly diagnosed in toddlers, people who menstruate and pregnant people. But Weyand, of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, frequently treats female adolescents for severe cases of the condition. That led her to suspect that its prevalence was being underestimated in that group.

Her analysis of data from thousands of blood samples collected as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which evaluates a nationally representative sample of people each year, suggests the issue is worthy of attention.

Up to 40 percent of U.S. females from the ages of 12 to 21 could be iron deficient, she and colleagues report in the June 27 JAMA. That's much higher than previous estimates of about 16 percent, which use a lower cutoff point than Weyand's team did for iron levels.

Iron is an essential component of red blood cells that helps deliver oxygen to organs and tissues. Iron deficiency can cause dizziness, headaches, fatigue, sleep disorders and cold hands and feet. Some of those problems can lead to low work productivity or an inability to multitask (SN: 5/4/04). Severe iron deficiency can also lead to anemia, a condition in which the body doesn't have enough healthy red blood cells. Anemia can spark more severe issues, such as heart problems or pregnancy complications.

Weyand and colleagues analyzed levels of two iron-containing proteins, hemoglobin and ferritin, in blood samples collected from almost 3,500 female adolescents from 2003 to 2020 as part of the national survey. The researchers diagnosed iron deficiency if the level of ferritin was below 25 micrograms per liter.

fliptop writes:

What are the inherent risks posed by AI-driven phishing emails, and the unique advantages of generative AI in facilitating such attacks? Daniel Kelley at (interestingly named) SlashNext highlights real cases from cybercrime forums, then dives into the mechanics of these attacks:

Our team recently gained access to a tool known as "WormGPT" through a prominent online forum that's often associated with cybercrime. This tool presents itself as a blackhat alternative to GPT models, designed specifically for malicious activities.

WormGPT is an AI module based on the GPTJ language model, which was developed in 2021. It boasts a range of features, including unlimited character support, chat memory retention, and code formatting capabilities.

As depicted above, WormGPT was allegedly trained on a diverse array of data sources, particularly concentrating on malware-related data. However, the specific datasets utilised during the training process remain confidential, as decided by the tool's author.

As you can see in the screenshot above, we conducted tests focusing on [Business Email Compromise] BEC attacks to comprehensively assess the potential dangers associated with WormGPT. In one experiment, we instructed WormGPT to generate an email intended to pressure an unsuspecting account manager into paying a fraudulent invoice.

The results were unsettling. WormGPT produced an email that was not only remarkably persuasive but also strategically cunning, showcasing its potential for sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks.

In summary, it's similar to ChatGPT but has no ethical boundaries or limitations. This experiment underscores the significant threat posed by generative AI technologies like WormGPT, even in the hands of novice cybercriminals.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

More than twice the power of earlier electric propulsion thrusters:

Early testing has begun on a new solar electric propulsion (SEP) thruster system that will power a NASA satellite in orbit over the moon. The new thrusters are more than twice as powerful as earlier versions.

The Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) will provide 12 kilowatts of power per thruster compared to the four-and-a-half kilowatts used by prior SEPs. The boost should help NASA craft travel farther and faster. Compared to traditional chemical fuel, SEPs are much more efficient when performing low-level thrust, which gives NASA increased flexibility during the satellite's mission.

Called Gateway, the satellite is a critical component of NASA's Artemis lunar mission. The first stage was an unmanned flyby of the moon that NASA successfully carried out late last year. The next phase, Artemis II, will send a crew into orbit around the moon in May 2024.

Gateway will support the final phase, Artemis III, which aims to put the first humans on the moon's surface since the Apollo missions of the 1970s. The satellite will serve as a logistics hub for transporting science experiments, sample collection tools, and other cargo. Artemis will be only the first leg of Gateway's 15-year mission.

Original Submission