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upstart writes:

Astrobotic's latest update is optimistic, all things considered:

All may not be lost for Astrobotic's Peregrine moon lander.

Soon after launching on the first-ever flight of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket on Monday (Jan. 8), the lander encountered an anomaly due to a stuck valve in its propulsion system, damaging the spacecraft and causing a significant propellant leak. The company announced on Tuesday (Jan. 9) that a soft lunar landing would be impossible in light of those issues.

Yet on Thursday (Jan. 11), Astrobotic issued its 12th mission update via X, indicating that, despite the crippling propulsion system anomaly, there's some good news. Peregrine was able to power up its payloads — the ones that require power, anyway — and establish connections to ground teams using NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) of communication antennas.

"As Peregrine emerges from a planned communications blackout with NASA's DSN ground network, we're pleased to announce the team's efforts to gather payload data have been fruitful," Astrobotic wrote on X. "We have successfully received data from all 9 payloads designed to communicate with the lander. All 10 payloads requiring power have received it, while the remaining 10 payloads aboard the spacecraft are passive."

It's unclear if any of those payloads will be able to complete the missions for which they were designed, but Astrobotic's update is relatively optimistic. "These payloads have now been able to prove operational capability in space, and payload teams are analyzing the impact of this development now. We are proud of the mission team for achieving this incredible feat under such challenging circumstances."

Accompanying the update is a photograph taken by Peregrine in which the wheels of the tiny Iris lunar rover, built by Carnegie Mellon University, can be seen.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-fastest-insect-uncrewed-boat.html

Whirligig beetles, the world's fastest-swimming insect, achieve surprising speeds by employing a strategy shared by speedy marine mammals and waterfowl, according to a new Cornell University study that rewrites previous explanations of the physics involved.

The centimeter-long beetles can reach a peak acceleration of 100 meters per second and a top velocity of 100 body lengths per second (or one meter per second).

Not only do the results explain the whirligig's Olympian speeds, but they also offer valuable insights for bio-inspired designers of near-surface water robots and uncrewed boats.

Until now, researchers have believed that whirligigs attain their impressive speeds using a propulsion system called drag-based thrust. This type of thrust requires the insect's legs to move faster than the swimming speed, in order for the legs to generate any thrust. For the whirligig beetle to achieve such fast swimming speeds, its legs would need to push against the water at unrealistic speeds.

"It could have well been questioned," said Chris Roh, assistant biological and environmental engineering professor. "The fastest swimmer and drag-based thrust don't usually go together in the same sentence."

In fact, fast-swimming marine mammals and waterfowls tend to forgo drag-based thrust in favor of lift-based thrust, another propulsion system. The finding was described in a study published Jan. 8 in the journal Current Biology.
...
Using two high-speed cameras synchronized at different angles, the researchers could film a whirligig and observe a lift-based thrust mechanism at play. Lift-based thrust works like a propeller, where the thrusting motion is perpendicular to the water surface, eliminating drag and allowing for more efficient momentum capable of greater speed.

More information: Yukun Sun et al, Whirligig beetle uses lift-based thrust for fastest insect swimming, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.11.008

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The innovation that gets an Alzheimer's drug through the blood-brain barrier:

Last week, researchers at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute reported that by using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier, they

improved delivery of a new Alzheimer's treatment and sped up clearance of the sticky plaques that are thought to contribute to some of the cognitive and memory problems in people with Alzheimer's by 32%.

In the West Virginia study, three people with mild Alzheimer's received monthly doses of aducanumab, a lab-made antibody that is delivered via IV. This drug, first approved in 2021,  helps clear away beta-amyloid, a protein fragment that clumps up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. (The drug's approval was controversial, and it's still not clear whether it actually slows progression of the disease.)  After the infusion, the researchers treated specific regions of the patients' brains with focused ultrasound, but just on one side. That allowed them to use the other half of the brain as a control. PET scans revealed a greater reduction in amyloid plaques in the ultrasound-treated regions than in those same regions on the untreated side of the brain, suggesting that more of the antibody was getting into the brain on the treated side.

Aducanumab does clear plaques without ultrasound, but it takes a long time, perhaps in part because the antibody has trouble entering the brain. "Instead of using the therapy intravenously for 18 to 24 months to see the plaque reduction, we want to see if we can achieve that reduction in a few months," says Ali Rezai, a neurosurgeon at West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute and an author of the new study. Cutting the amount of time needed to clear these plaques might help slow the memory loss and cognitive problems that define the disease.

The device used to target and deliver the ultrasound waves, developed by a company called Insightec, consists of an MRI machine and a helmet studded with ultrasound transducers. It's FDA approved, but for an entirely different purpose: to help stop tremors in people with Parkinson's by creating lesions in the brain. To open the blood-brain barrier, "we inject individuals intravenously with microbubbles," Rezai says. These tiny gas bubbles, commonly used as a contrast agent, travel through the bloodstream. Using the MRI, the researchers can aim the ultrasound waves at very specific parts of the brain "with millimeter precision," Rezai says. When the waves hit the microbubbles, the bubbles begin to expand and contract, physically pushing apart the tightly packed cells that line the brain's capillaries. "This temporary opening can last up to 48 hours, which means that during those 48 hours, you can have increased penetration into the brain of therapeutics," he says.

Journal Reference: DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2308719

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

US hospitals will be required to meet basic cybersecurity standards before receiving federal funding, according to rules the White House is expected to propose in the next few weeks.

This comes as hospitals and health clinics nationwide continue to be menaced by ransomware, and cybercrims resort to diabolical tactics to make victims pay up.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an arm of the US Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly drawing up rules connecting hospital IT security with funding, which are set to take effect before the end of the year.

Citing an unnamed government official, this Messenger report says the proposed rules will focus on "those key cybersecurity practices that we really do believe bring a meaningful impact." And federal funding will hinge on hospitals enacting these basic network defenses.

[...] And while no one is going to argue against improving hospitals' security posture, cutting off their funding may not help the situation, according to some.

"Denying funding to hospitals doesn't seem like the best way to help them improve their security," Emsisoft Threat Analyst Brett Callow told The Register. "In fact, it may do the exact opposite."

Original Submission

Why Google is Phasing Out Third-party Cookies - Marketplace

upstart writes:

Google will roll out a set of new tools that still track your behavior online — so we'll still be getting those targeted ads:

From pretty much the very beginning, the web has been fueled by ads. And those ads have been finding their way to relevant users via cookies — those are little bits of code that websites can place on your computer so advertisers can basically follow you around online.

And from pretty much the very beginning, privacy advocates have complained that cookies are a privacy nightmare.

This week, Google started its project to phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser, the world's most popular browser. But the change isn't about all cookies.

"Websites still allow for first-party cookies, which is very useful for the website to be able to remember, for instance, that you've found a product that you want to purchase, and it will stay in your checkout," said Garrett Johnson, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.

[...] "The deprecation of the third-party cookie in 2024, is really poised to shake things up. Because, you know, we're essentially going to have to recalibrate how we effectively find voters and target to them online," said Kate Holliday, vice president of politics and public affairs at advertising firm Powers Interactive Digital.

With this phaseout, Google is introducing what it calls its "privacy sandbox": a set of new tools that still track your behavior online.

upstart writes:

Which countries back South Africa's genocide case against Israel at ICJ?:

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) based in The Hague [heard] its first hearing in South Africa's genocide case against Israel on Thursday, with several countries welcoming the move amid a global chorus for a ceasefire in Gaza.

South Africa filed the lawsuit end of December, accusing Israel of genocide in its war on Gaza and seeking a halt to the brutal military assault that has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, nearly 10,000 of them children.

The 84-page filing by South Africa says Israel violated the 1948 Genocide Convention, drawn up in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

Both Israel and South Africa are signatories to the United Nations Genocide Convention, which gives the ICJ – the highest UN legal body – jurisdiction to rule on disputes over the treaty.

All states that signed the convention are obliged to not commit genocide and also to prevent and punish it. The treaty defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

[...] The ICC and the ICJ are sometimes conflated with one another. Both the courts are located in The Hague, Netherlands. While the purpose of the ICJ is to resolve conflicts between states, the ICC prosecutes individuals for committing crimes, according to the University of Melbourne's Pursuit platform. While states cannot be sued at the ICC, the prosecutor can open an investigation where crimes, including genocide, were likely committed.

The United States has voiced its opposition to the genocide case. National security spokesperson John Kirby called South Africa's submission "meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis" during a White House press briefing on January 3.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday that "there is nothing more atrocious and preposterous" than the lawsuit. Herzog also thanked Blinken for Washington's support of Israel.

Israel's Western allies, including the European Union, have mostly maintained silence on the ICJ case.

The United Kingdom, which has refused to support the case, has been accused of double standards after it submitted detailed legal documents to the ICJ about a month ago to support claims that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya community.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-ancient-dna-reveals-high-multiple.html

Researchers have created the world's largest ancient human gene bank by analyzing the bones and teeth of almost 5,000 humans who lived across western Europe and Asia up to 34,000 years ago.

By sequencing ancient human DNA and comparing it to modern-day samples, the international team of experts mapped the historical spread of genes—and diseases—over time as populations migrated.

The 'astounding' results have been revealed in four trailblazing research papers published (10 January 2024) in the same issue of Nature and provide new biological understanding of debilitating disorders.

The extraordinary study involved a large international team led by Professor Eske Willerslev at the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen, Professor Thomas Werge at the University of Copenhagen, and Professor Rasmus Nielsen at University of California, Berkeley and involved contributions from 175 researchers from around the globe.

The scientists found:

• The startling origins of neurodegenerative diseases including multiple sclerosis
• Why northern Europeans today are taller than people from southern Europe
• How major migration around 5,000 years ago introduced risk genes into the population in north-western Europe—leaving a legacy of higher rates of MS today
• Carrying the MS gene was an advantage at the time as it protected ancient farmers from catching infectious diseases from their sheep and cattle
• Genes known to increase the risk of diseases such as Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes were traced back to hunter gatherers
• Future analysis is hoped to reveal more about the genetic markers of autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression

Northern Europe has the highest prevalence of MS in the world. A new study has found the genes that significantly increase a person's risk of developing MS were introduced into north-western Europe around 5,000 years ago by sheep and cattle herders migrating from the east.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The two fasteners from the sampler head haven't budged for nearly 4 months, keeping the precious material inside:

The final hurdle to retrieving the full sample of asteroid Bennu collected by OSIRIS-REx – the first asteroid return sample in US history – has at last been overcome. NASA technicians have been able to successfully remove the two fasteners from the sampler head that have been preventing them from opening the canister fully since September. This canister opening has to be conducted under the most pristine conditions to not contaminate the sample, so this was quite the issue. Now, NASA can get to the pristine material from asteroid Bennu.

Since they could just take a circular saw and cut through it, once they realized two of the 35 fasteners couldn't be removed with the available and approved tools, researchers had to develop new tools that would do the job.

"Our engineers and scientists have worked tirelessly behind the scenes for months to not only process the more than 70 grams of material we were able to access previously, but also design, develop, and test new tools that allowed us to move past this hurdle," Eileen Stansbery, division chief for ARES (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science) at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said in a statement.

"The innovation and dedication of this team has been remarkable. We are all excited to see the remaining treasure OSIRIS-REx holds."

The new tools were made of a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel; the hardest metal approved for use in the pristine curation gloveboxes. Before it was used on the precious container it was tested in the rehearsal lab.

"In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement," said Dr Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curator at Johnson.

"The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Artificial intelligence can accelerate the process of finding and testing new materials, and now researchers have used that ability to develop a battery that is less dependent on the costly mineral lithium.

Lithium-ion batteries power many devices that we use every day as well as electric vehicles. [...] Finding a replacement for this crucial metal could be costly and time-consuming, requiring researchers to develop and test millions of candidates over the course of years. Using AI, Nathan Baker at Microsoft and his colleagues accomplished the task in months. They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.

The researchers focused on a type of battery that only contains solid parts, and they looked for new materials for the battery component that electric charges move through, called the electrolyte. They started with 23.6 million candidate materials designed by tweaking the structure of established electrolytes and swapping out some lithium atoms for other elements. An AI algorithm then eliminated the materials that it calculated would be unstable, as well as those in which the chemical reactions that make batteries work would be weak. The researchers also considered how each material would behave while the battery was actively working. After only a few days, their list contained just a few hundred candidates, some of which had never been studied before.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The PC industry has ended a two-year run of declining shipments, by growing 0.3 percent in Q4 of 2023, amid a warning that the cost of components will rise this year, as will the cost of laptops and desktops.

This is according to analyst Gartner's figures, but other analysts have a different view of proceedings: IDC reckons this was the eighth straight quarter of "sales-out" shrinkage - meaning sales to retailers and distributors - and Canalys estimates the market actually grew three percent.

We've chosen on this occasion to go down the middle and mostly focus on the data emitted by number crunchers at Gartner, which calculates that some 63.37 million PCs were shipped in the three months.

“The PC market has hit the bottom of its decline after significant adjustment," said Mikako Kitagawa, director analyst at Gartner. "Inventory was normalized in the fourth quarter of 2023, which had been plaguing the industry for two years.

[...] Over at IDC, the analyst estimates that PC shipments were down 2.7 percent to 67.1 million, and also said the market has "bottomed out." Canalys was more bullish, and reckons shipments were up three percent to 65.3 million.

Things certainly seem to be improving but those heady days of the pandemic, when the total available market swelled to 350 million in 2021, seem like a long time ago.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-mind-brains-built-grammar.html

For centuries, a prevailing theory in philosophy has asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate. More recently, the same notion has also held sway in the field of neurobiology, where it is commonly held that neural connections are slowly created from scratch with the accumulation of sensory information and experience.

Eventually, the theory goes, this allows us to create memories in space and time and to then learn from those experiences.

But after spending more than a decade studying activity in the hippocampus, the area of brain which forms memory, Yale's George Dragoi began to have his doubts.

In his research on the hippocampus of rodents, Dragoi, an associate professor of psychiatry and of neuroscience, has found that early in life there emerge in this part of the brain individual functional clusters of cells (and, soon after, short sequences of cells) that predictably will be activated by new experiences. Within days of birth, he found, these cells, clusters, and short sequences become the foundation for increasingly complex sequences of cell assemblies that allow for the creation of memories.

In a new article published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dragoi makes the case that the human brain also develops a cellular template soon after birth which defines who we are and how we perceive the world. He describes it as "the generative grammar" of the brain.

"Neurons organize like letters, then words, then sentences and paragraphs which allow for the internalization of the outside world," Dragoi said. "The brain has its own built-in sense of grammar."

The idea, he admits, runs counter to the tenets of empiricism, a centuries-old theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It also contradicts widely held assumption by life scientists that environmental stimuli will entirely dictate how the brain processes and stores information.

Journal Reference:
Dragoi, G. The generative grammar of the brain: a critique of internally generated representations. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 60–75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00763-0

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Media outlets are calling foul play over AI companies using their content to build chatbots. They may find friends in the Senate:

Logo text More than a decade ago, the normalization of tech companies carrying content created by news organizations without directly paying them — cannibalizing readership and ad revenue — precipitated the decline of the media industry. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, those same firms threaten to further tilt the balance of power between Big Tech and news.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee referenced their failure to adopt legislation that would've barred the exploitation of content by Big Tech in backing proposals that would require AI companies to strike licensing deals with news organizations.

Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and chair of the committee, joined several other senators in supporting calls for a licensing regime and to establish a framework clarifying that intellectual property laws don't protect AI companies using copyrighted material to build their chatbots.

[...] The fight over the legality of AI firms eating content from news organizations without consent or compensation is split into two camps: Those who believe the practice is protected under the "fair use" doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works, and those who argue that it constitutes copyright infringement. Courts are currently wrestling with the issue, but an answer to the question is likely years away. In the meantime, AI companies continue to use copyrighted content as training materials, endangering the financial viability of media in a landscape in which readers can bypass direct sources in favor of search results generated by AI tools.

[...] A lawsuit from The New York Times, filed last month, pulled back the curtain behind negotiations over the price and terms of licensing its content. Before suing, it said that it had been talking for months with OpenAI and Microsoft about a deal, though the talks reached no such truce. In the backdrop of AI companies crawling the internet for high-quality written content, news organizations have been backed into a corner, having to decide whether to accept lowball offers to license their content or expend the time and money to sue in a lawsuit. Some companies, like Axel Springer, took the money.

It's important to note that under intellectual property laws, facts are not protected.

Also at Courthouse News Service and Axios.

Related:

• New York Times Sues Microsoft, ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
• Report: Potential NYT lawsuit could force OpenAI to wipe ChatGPT and start over
• Writers and Publishers Face an Existential Threat From AI: Time to Embrace the True Fans Model

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The OpenWRT project is turning 20 years old this year. During that time they have adapted to existing hardware products. Now the team has the idea to produce their own, fully supported hardware to run their software on:

It is not [a] new [idea]. We first spoke about this during the OpenWrt Summits in 2017 and also 2018. It became clear start of December 2023 while tinkering with Banana Pi style devices that they are already pretty close to what we wanted to achieve in '17/'18. Banana PIs have grown in popularity within the community. They boot using a self compiled Trusted Firmware-A (TF-A)and upstream U-Boot (thx MTK/Daniel) and some of the boards are already fully supported by the upstream Linux kernel. The only nonopen sourcecomponents are the 2.5 GbE PHYandWi-Fi firmware blobsrunning on separate cores that areindependent of the main SoC running Linuxand the DRAM calibration routines which are executed early during boot.

I contacted three project members (pepe2k, dangole, nbd) on December 6th to outline the overall idea. We went over several design proposals, At the beginning we focused on the most powerful (and expensive) configurations possible but finally ended up with something rather simple and above all,feasible. We would like to propose the following as our "first" community driven HW platform called "OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY".

Together with pepe2k (thx a lot) I discussed this for many hours and we worked out the following project proposal. Instead of going insane with specifications, we decided to include some nice features we believe all OpenWrt supported platforms should have (e.g. being almost unbrickablewith multiple recovery options, hassle-free system console access, on-board RTC with battery backup etc.).

This is our first design, so let's KiSS!

The preliminary hardware specifications are included in the message and it will contain a pair of flash chips for redundancy with the aim to make the router harder to accidentally brick during an update.

Previously:
(2021) The Accident which Made the WRT54G Legendarily Popular
(2018) Reunited with LEDE, OpenWrt Releases Stable 18.06 Version
(2015) OpenWrt Gets Update in Face of FCC's Anti-Flashing Push

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The belief that all fingerprints are unique is so well accepted that crime novels and TV shows riff on it. Recent AI research has challenged this notion, at least regarding the fingerprints on different fingers of the same person.

Undergrad researchers at Columbia Engineering found that while the branching and endpoints in the fingerprint ridges might vary, the angles and curvature at the center of the fingerprint could be the same across an individual.

To determine this, the students used a deep contrastive network and a US government database of 60,000 fingerprints to study commonalities in fingerprints. They fed pairs of prints to a neural network, with some coming from the same person and others from different individuals.

The network eventually became able to identify if prints were from the same person to an accuracy of 77 percent. That accuracy increased when multiple pairs of prints were presented.

The team initially had no idea how the network was able to identify whether the prints belonged to the same person. To the human eye, the fingerprints certainly did not appear similar.

In order to understand that it was merely identifying the angles and starting points of the ridges, they had to study the AI system's decision process. Thus, the team concluded that the AI was using an unexpected forensic marker.

As it turns out, humans can be so set in their processes not only when it comes to identifying prints but also identifying science. The first journal the team submitted their results to rejected them with the conclusion: "It is well known that every fingerprint is unique," according to the university.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

One of the Windows updates in the current cycle is for KB5034441, which addresses CVE-2024-20666. From what I can tell, exploiting this vulnerability requires physical access, so there's no risk of this being used in remote attacks. The actual risk to most users is probably very low. Still, it allows security features to be bypassed, so it should be fixed.

The problem is that this update is failing for many users with error code 0x80070643. Microsoft claims that this is due to the recovery partition not being large enough on some systems, though the error code is cryptic and unhelpful. Here's what Microsoft said about that:

Known issue Because of an issue in the error code handling routine, you might receive the following error message instead of the expected error message when there is insufficient disk space:

        0x80070643 - ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

Windows isn't even telling users the correct error. Microsoft claims the update is failing on systems where the recovery partition isn't large enough. From my own experience, I have systems where I allowed the Windows installer to partition the drive automatically, meaning that Windows determined the size of the recovery partition. Windows 10 chose a size of 509 MB on my systems, and this doesn't seem to be scaled depending on the size of the user's drive. For most users, this is probably set automatically by the installer or the computer manufacturer. That said, I've read a user comment that the update failed on a system with a 15 GB recovery partition, so I'm not certain that this can really be blamed on insufficient disk space.

Microsoft's advice to users is that they need to manually resize the recovery partition. The commands are not intuitive, and there's absolutely no reason that Microsoft should be expecting ordinary users to be doing this. Resizing partitions is a fairly high risk operation, one that carries a risk of data loss if not done properly.

This vulnerability probably just isn't a risk at all for most users, but that's not necessarily obvious. They just see the message that a security update failed with a cryptic error message. It's Microsoft's responsibility to ensure that security updates just work when they're being installed on a system in a reasonably standard configuration. If the Windows installer chose a recovery partition of 509 MB, then Microsoft needs to make their updates work with a recovery partition of that size, or they need to automatically resize the partition. This is a dumpster fire, and it's inexcusable to expect Microsoft to expect users to manually repartition their drives.

Original Submission