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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Moon is so hot right now, metaphorically speaking. Several US government agencies, private space ventures, and foreign governments like China are plotting for mankind’s return to the lunar surface over the next decade. Unlike the days of Apollo, the modern-day race to the Moon involves establishing a sustainable presence and a thriving economy on and around Earth’s natural satellite.

In an attempt to guide ongoing efforts in establishing a lunar infrastructure, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off a seven-month study dedicated to developing an analytical framework for scientific and commercial activity on the Moon. Through the 10-Year Lunar Architecture, or LunA-10, study, DARPA is seeking ideas for technology and infrastructure concepts that could help build a Moon-based economy within the next decade.

“A large paradigm shift is coming in the next 10 years for the lunar economy,” Michael Nayak, program manager at DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, said in a statement. “To get to a turning point faster, LunA-10 uniquely aims to identify solutions that can enable multi-mission lunar systems – imagine a wireless power station that can also provide comms and navigation in its beam.”

[...] Luna-10 will select a group of companies that have an idea for lunar services, allowing them to work together to develop an integrated system for lunar communication, energy, transmission or other building blocks necessary to create a future economy on the Moon. The participating companies will be announced in October 2023, with the final report due by June 2024.

DARPA, however, will not fund the construction or transportation of any of the concepts developed as part of the study. Instead, the agency will provide its “economic expertise to all LunA-10 teams to help analyze and validate definitions of a critical mass to create a thriving, survivable lunar economy,” DARPA wrote in its statement.

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takyon writes:

Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon

Russia's unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon after spinning out of control, officials say.

It was Russia's first Moon mission in almost 50 years.

The craft was due to be the first ever to land on the Moon's south pole, but failed after encountering problems as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.

[...] Roscosmos, Russia's state space corporation, said on Sunday morning that it had lost contact with the Luna-25 shortly after 14:57pm (11:57 GMT) on Saturday.

Preliminary findings showed that the 800kg lander had "ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon", it said in a statement.

Previously: Russia Heads Back to the Moon With Luna 25

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upstart writes:

But its suggestions are so annoyingly plausible:

ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.

The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The US academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model.

"Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose," the team's paper concluded. "Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style." Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong.

OpenAI on the ChatGPT website acknowledges its software "may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts." We've asked the lab if it has any comment about the Purdue study.

The pre-print paper is titled, "Who Answers It Better? An In-Depth Analysis of ChatGPT and Stack Overflow Answers to Software Engineering Questions." It was written by researchers Samia Kabir, David Udo-Imeh, Bonan Kou, and assistant professor Tianyi Zhang.

"During our study, we observed that only when the error in the ChatGPT answer is obvious, users can identify the error," their paper stated. "However, when the error is not readily verifiable or requires external IDE or documentation, users often fail to identify the incorrectness or underestimate the degree of error in the answer."

Even when the answer has a glaring error, the paper stated, two out of the 12 participants still marked the response preferred. The paper attributes this to ChatGPT's pleasant, authoritative style.

"From semi-structured interviews, it is apparent that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct," the paper explained.

Journal Reference:
Kabir, Samia, Udo-Imeh, David N., Kou, Bonan, et al. Who Answers It Better? An In-Depth Analysis of ChatGPT and Stack Overflow Answers to Software Engineering Questions, arXiv (DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2308.02312)

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hubie writes:

Chemical Found in Common Sweetener Damages DNA:

A new study finds a chemical formed when we digest a widely used sweetener is "genotoxic," meaning it breaks up DNA. The chemical is also found in trace amounts in the sweetener itself, and the finding raises questions about how the sweetener may contribute to health problems.

At issue is sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener. Previous work by the same research team established that several fat-soluble compounds are produced in the gut after sucralose ingestion. One of these compounds is sucralose-6-acetate.

"Our new work establishes that sucralose-6-acetate is genotoxic," says Susan Schiffman, corresponding author of the study and an adjunct professor in the joint department of biomedical engineering at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We also found that trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate can be found in off-the-shelf sucralose, even before it is consumed and metabolized.

"To put this in context, the European Food Safety Authority has a threshold of toxicological concern for all genotoxic substances of 0.15 micrograms per person per day," Schiffman says. "Our work suggests that the trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate in a single, daily sucralose-sweetened drink exceed that threshold. And that's not even accounting for the amount of sucralose-6-acetate produced as metabolites after people consume sucralose."

[...] "In short, we found that sucralose-6-acetate is genotoxic, and that it effectively broke up DNA in cells that were exposed to the chemical," Schiffman says.

[...] "This work raises a host of concerns about the potential health effects associated with sucralose and its metabolites. It's time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks. If nothing else, I encourage people to avoid products containing sucralose. It's something you should not be eating."

Journal Reference:
Susan S. Schiffman et al., "Toxicological and pharmacokinetic properties of sucralose-6-acetate and its parent sucralose: in vitro screening assays" [open], Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 2023. DOI: 10.1080/10937404.2023.2213903

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On August 16, the Debian blog announced that the project is now officially 30 years old. The Linux distro was established by Ian A. Murdock in 1993, with a message sent to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup.

[...] Murdock sparked a movement within the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) community, the Debian blog remarks, and he continued to work on the OS before the Debian Project organization took over. The free operating system is now aided by volunteers all around the world, with support from users, contributors, developers, and of course sponsors.

Debian calls itself the "Universal Operating System," and the system can indeed be found almost everywhere. The OS powers cluster systems, data centers, desktop PCs, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, and servers. It can even be found on the computers aboard the International Space Station, with specific, embedded projects conceived to support educational institutions (Debian Edu), scientific research (Debian Science), accessibility (Debian Accessibility), and more.

The best testament to Debian's ongoing success is, however, the fact that it gave birth to more derivative projects than any other Linux distro. Debian is the beating "heart" of gLinux Rodete, the Linux OS internally run by Google, it provided a very convenient way (free as "free in beer") to build some of the most massive cloud infrastructures available today (AWS), and of course it was used as the foundation of Ubuntu.

Nowadays, Ubuntu Linux formally is the most popular free OS with a 33.9% market share, while Debian gets the second place with a 16% share. And then there's the ginormous Chinese market, where Beijing authorities promoted a program to replace Windows with Linux. Chinese users adopted Kylin, which is an Ubuntu remix, and Uniontech's UOS systems with the end-user Linux Deepin system, which is also based on Debian.

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taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/smart-rust-estrogen-pollution-water/

Estrogen can harm aquatic plants and animals when passed into waterways via human and agricultural waste streams. Researchers have now developed a new way of removing the hormone from water, however, using what's known as "smart rust."

Developed by scientists at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, smart rust takes the form of spherical iron oxide (aka rust) nanoparticles that are covered in phosphonic acid molecules. The molecules protrude from the surface of the spheres like hairs. By binding different compounds to the ends of those hairs, it's possible to make them adsorb different types of waterborne pollutants.

The iron oxide particles themselves are superparamagnetic, meaning they're attracted to magnets but not to one another. This quality keeps them from clumping together – so they can be thoroughly mixed into tainted water – while also making it possible to subsequently remove them from that water simply by swirling a magnet through the liquid.

[...] Due to the fact that estrogen molecules consist of a large steroid body with a slight negative charge, he coated smart rust particles with two types of molecules. One of these has particularly long "hairs," while the other is positively charged. When combined on the surface of the iron oxide spheres, these molecules form multitudes of estrogen-trapping pockets.

When tested on water spiked with estradiol, which is the most potent type of estrogen, the new form of smart rust successfully removed the hormone from that water. Further research will now explore how well the technology works in real-world conditions, and how many times the particles can be reused.

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upstart writes:

Company that makes rent-setting software for landlords sued for collusion:

Renters filed a lawsuit this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation's biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price-fixing, or both.

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in US District Court in San Diego.

In an email, a RealPage representative said that the company "strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit." She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

[...] The lawsuit accused the property managers and RealPage of forming "a cartel to artificially inflate the price of and artificially decrease the supply and output of multifamily residential real estate leases from competitive levels."

RealPage's software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals—not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.

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upstart writes:

YouTube tightens thumbscrew to crack down on ad-blockers:

Google has been testing several ways to combat users who use ad-blockers on its YouTube video streaming site. One of the first tests informed users that ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube. The prompt, which blocks access to the site, offers three options to users to react to it. The two prominent ones are to configure the content blocker to allow ads on YouTube or to subscribe to the paid service YouTube Premium.

A small close icon in the top right corner is the third and less focused option. Users have the option to click on the x-icon to close the prompt and continue using YouTube.

Now, it appears, Google is making this option less attractive to users on the site. Instead of displaying the close icon directly, YouTube is now showing a timer in its place. In other words: users who get the prompt have to wait between 30 to 60 seconds before they can close the entire prompt and start using the site.

The notification appears to hit users of different content blockers, including uBlock Origin. It seems that the majority of users are not getting these prompts, likely because Google is still testing reception and the rate of return.

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taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/space/nasa-installs-laser-communication-system-psyche-asteroid-probe/

When NASA's Psyche probe launches in October on its mission to a metal asteroid as much as 309 million miles (497 million km) from Earth, it will be carrying a new laser communications system that promises to revolutionize deep space missions.
...
By relying on old-fashioned X-band radio systems, crewed and robotic missions suffer from bandwidths and transmission speeds that are ridiculously small and slow. A single high resolution image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can take an hour and a half to send and the data from the New Horizons spacecraft's flyby of Pluto took 16 days to download.

In light of this, NASA has been experimenting with using lasers as a way to not only create much faster direct links between space missions and Earth, but also to free up the Deep Space Network (DSN) of antennas for more important tasks than routine communications.

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upstart writes:

The data collection feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it during installation:

When Intel joined the discrete GPU market almost a year ago, everyone wondered when it would catch up with Nvidia and AMD. As of August 2023, it apparently has, at least in one respect; like its competitors, Intel has introduced a telemetry collection service by default in the latest beta driver for its Arc GPUs. You can opt out of it, but we all know most people just click "yes" to everything during a software installation. Intel's release notes for the drivers don't mention this change to how its drivers work, which is a curious omission.

News of Intel adding telemetry collection to its drivers is a significant change to how its GPU drivers work. Intel has even given this new collation routine a cute name—the Intel Computing Improvement Program. Gee, that sounds pretty wonderful. We want to improve our computing, so let's dive into the details briefly. According to TechPowerUp, which discovered the change, Intel has created a landing page for the program that explains what is collected and what isn't. At a high level, it states, "This program uses information about your computer's performance to make product improvements that may benefit you in the future."

[...] Though this sounds like an egregious overreach regarding the type of data captured, to be fair to Intel, it allows you to opt out of this program. That is apparently not the case with Nvidia, which doesn't even ask for permission at any point during driver installation, according to TechPowerUp. AMD, on the other hand, does give you a choice to opt out like Intel does, regardless of what other options you choose during installation, and even provides an explainer about what it's collecting.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/ongoing-scam-tricks-kids-playing-roblox-and-fortnite/

Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox.

For more than three years, security researcher Zach Edwards has been tracking these website hijackings and scams. He says the activity can be linked back to the activities of affiliate users of one advertising company. The US-registered company acts as a service that sends web traffic to a range of online advertisers, allowing individuals to sign up and use its systems. However, on any given day, Edwards, a senior manager of threat insights at Human Security, uncovers scores of .gov, .org, and .edu domains being compromised.

[...] The schemes and ways people make money are complex, but each of the websites is hijacked in a similar way. Vulnerabilities or weaknesses in a website's backend, or its content management system, are exploited by attackers who upload malicious PDF files to the website. These documents, which Edwards calls “poison PDFs,” are designed to show up in search engines and promote “free Fortnite skins,” generators for Roblox’s in-game currency, or cheap streams of Barbie, Oppenheimer, and other popular films.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/an-iowa-school-district-is-using-chatgpt-to-decide-which-books-to-ban/

In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.

The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials. Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be "age appropriate" and devoid of any "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," per Iowa Code 702.17.

But banning books is hard work, according to administrators, so they need to rely on machine intelligence to get it done within the three-month window mandated by the law. "It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements," said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette. "Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections at the start of the 23-24 school year."

[...] "There's something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can't understand books and can't critically think at all," Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.

Also submitted as: https://gizmodo.com/ai-mason-city-iowa-school-libraries-book-ban-1850738954

Original Submission

hubie writes:

If other visual cues are missing, ants build higher nest hills to facilitate homing of foraging nest mates:

Desert ants have outstanding navigational skills. They live in the saltpans of North Africa, an extremely inhospitable environment. To find food for their nest mates, foraging ants have to walk far into the desert. Once they have found food, for example a dead insect, their actual problem begins: How do they find their way back to their nest as quickly as possible in the extremely hot and barren environment? "The desert ant Cataglyphis fortis stands out due its remarkable ability to successfully navigate and forage in even the harshest environments, making it an excellent subject for studying the intricacies of navigation. With an innate navigation mechanism called path integration, these ants use both a sun compass and a step counter to measure the distances they cover. In addition, they possess the ability to learn and utilize visible and olfactory cues. We believe that this extremely harsh habitat has led, during evolution, to a navigation system of unsurpassed precision," said Marilia Freire, the study's lead author, summarizing what is known so far about the amazing orientation skills of these small animals.

The scientists had noticed during previous studies in Tunisia that the nests in the center of the saltpans, where there are hardly any visible landmarks, had high mounds at the nest entrances. In contrast, nest hills near the shrub-covered edges of the saltpans were lower or barely noticeable. So the research team has wondered for some time if these visible differences serve a purpose in helping the ants better find their way home. "It's always hard to tell whether an animal does something on purpose or not. The high nest mounds in the middle of the saltpans could have been a side effect of differences in soil structure or wind conditions. However, crucial for our study was the idea to remove the mounds and to provide some nests with artificial landmarks and others not, and to observe what would happen," Markus Knaden, head of the Project Group Odor-guided Behavior in the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology, explains the goal of the study.

[...] Experiments in which ants could be tracked with particular accuracy during the last meters to the nest, thanks to a grid painted on the floor, showed that the nest hills are important visual cues. If they were removed, fewer ants found their way back to the nest, while their nest mates simultaneously began to rebuild nest mounds as quickly as possible. If, on the other hand, the scientists placed artificial landmarks in the form of small black cylinders near the nest entrances whose mounds they had previously removed, the ants did not invest in building new ones. Apparently, the cylinders were sufficient for orientation.

In ant nests, labor is divided. Ants that go foraging are usually older and more experienced nest members, while younger ants are busy building. Therefore, there must be some kind of information flow between the two groups. The researchers do not yet know exactly how this is achieved. "One possibility would be that ants in the nest somehow notice that fewer foragers return home, and as a result, hill-building activities at the nest entrance are increased," says Marilia Freire.

Markus Knaden has been studying desert ants for 25 years and is still amazed by their fascinating abilities: "The animals can learn visual and olfactory cues despite their small brains. In addition, they are able to decide which information is useful for their navigation and which is not. All this was already known. However, the fact that they even build their own landmarks for orientation and only choose to invest in this work when other environmental cues are missing is quite surprising."

Journal Reference:
Marilia Freire, Antonio Bollig, Markus Knaden, Absence of visual cues motivates desert ants to build their own landmarks, Curr. Biology, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.019

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

What’s a plane without an engine? After aerospace company Pratt & Whitney issued a recall on some of its engine models, airline companies in the U.S. and Europe are scrounging for parts, and doing anything they can to prevent canceled flights.

Financial Times reports that after Pratt & Whitney issued a recall on thousands of engines on Airbus aircraft, major airlines like Spirit, JetBlue, Hawaiian Airlines, and Wizz Air were forced to change their schedules dramatically. The outlet says that Wizz Air—a Hungarian airline that serves most of Europe—is temporarily mulling over scrapping some flights while dealing with maintenance issues as the engine recall overworks staff. Spirit Airlines is facing a slump in revenue with seven Airbuses in its fleet being grounded, potentially through the end of the year, while cutting its planned capacity by 5% according to Reuters.

[...] Last month, Pratt & Whitney issued a recall for its Geared Turbofan engines, which are used to power A320neo Airbus jets. Pratt & Whitney said that contaminants were found in the metal used to build the machines. The mishap is affecting around 1,200 engines produced by the company and will require an inspection period that could take as much as two months. The recall is likely to have an impact on the remainder of the busy summer travel season and—if Spirit’s estimates of being grounded throughout the year are correct—could impact the holiday travel window as well.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Unexpected new insights into how COVID-19 infects cells may help explain why coronaviruses are so good at jumping from species to species and will help scientists better predict how COVID-19 will evolve.

Throughout the pandemic, there has been much discussion of how COVID-19 infiltrates cells by hijacking a protein called ACE2 found on human cells. But the new research from the School of Medicine reveals that ACE2 isn't required for infection. Instead, the virus has other means it can use to infect cells.

[...] "The virus that causes COVID-19 uses ACE2 as the front door to infect cells, but we've found that if the front door is blocked, it can also use the back door or the windows," said researcher Peter Kasson, MD, Ph.D., of UVA's Departments of Molecular Physiology and Biomedical Engineering. "This means the virus can keep spreading as it infects a new species until it adapts to use a particular species' front door. So we have to watch out for new viruses doing the same thing to infect us."

[...] As part of this effort, Kasson and his team wanted to better understand how the virus responsible for COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, can enter human cells. Scientists have known that the virus essentially knocks on the cell's door by binding to ACE2 proteins. These proteins are bountiful on the surfaces of cells lining the nose and lungs.