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upstart writes:

Private US Moon lander successfully launches 24 hours after flight was delayed:

A US PRIVATE Moon lander has successfully launched 24 hours after its flight was delayed due to fuel issues. The Nova-C Odysseus lander, built by Texas-based space flight company Intuitive Machines (IM), could become the first private mission – called IM-1 – to land intact on the lunar surface.

The Moon lander had lift-off at 6.05am Irish time this morning atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, SpaceX posted on X (formerly Twitter).

It comes a month after another US spacecraft, Peregrine, failed to touch down following a fuel leak. The failure of Peregrine, operated by US company Astrobotic, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface.

The Beresheet lander, built by Israel's SpaceIL, crashed during descent in 2019, while the Hakuto-R M1 lander, from Japanese company ispace, was destroyed while attempting to land in April last year.

Odysseus would be the first US Moon landing since the final mission of the Apollo programme – Apollo 17 – more than 50 years ago. Odysseus is a hexagonal cylinder about 13ft (4m) tall and 5ft (1.57m) wide and weighs 1,488lb (675kg).

It is part of Nasa's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which aims to involve commercial companies in the exploration of the Moon as the space agency focuses on getting astronauts back there through its Artemis programme.

If all goes to plan, Odysseus could attempt a lunar landing on February 22. The landing site will be at Malapert A, a crater near the Moon's south pole. Once it is on the surface, Odysseus will operate for roughly two weeks, or one lunar day.

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Original Submission

cereal_burpist writes:

[Submitter's note] The 'lite' version of CNN is text-only.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adaptable-high-beams-cars/index.html

Imagine if you could drive at night with your high beams on all the time, bathing the road ahead in bright light but without ever blinding other drivers. In Europe and Asia, many cars offer adaptive driving beam [ADB] headlights that can do this.

It can actually shape the light coming from headlights rather than scattering it all over the road. If there's a car coming in the other direction, or one driving ahead in the same lane, the light stays precisely away from that vehicle. The rest of the road is still covered in bright light with just a pocket of dimmer light around the other vehicles. This way a deer, pedestrian or bicyclist by the side of the road can still be seen clearly while other drivers sharing the road can see, too.

In America, the closest we can get to that today are automatic high beams, a feature available on many new cars that automatically flicks off the high beams if another vehicle is detected ahead. But that still means driving much – or most – of the time using only low beam headlights that don't reach very far.

ADB-enabled headlights already are sold on some luxury cars in America. They just lack the software to perform the way they were designed to.

Some automakers and safety groups, including Ford, Volkswagen and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, are asking NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] to reconsider the regulations to make it easier and less costly to offer these headlights in the US.

AnonTechie writes:

They collect massive amounts of data with little disclosure about its use.

You shouldn't trust any answers a chatbot sends you. And you probably shouldn't trust it with your personal information either. That's especially true for "AI girlfriends" or "AI boyfriends," according to new research.

An analysis of 11 so-called romance and companion chatbots, published on Wednesday by the Mozilla Foundation, has found a litany of security and privacy concerns with the bots. Collectively, the apps, which have been downloaded more than 100 million times on Android devices, gather huge amounts of people's data; use trackers that send information to Google, Facebook, and companies in Russia and China; allow users to use weak passwords; and lack transparency about their ownership and the AI models that power them.

Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world in November 2022, developers have raced to deploy large language models and create chatbots that people can interact with and pay to subscribe to. The Mozilla research provides a glimpse into how this gold rush may have neglected people's privacy, and into tensions between emerging technologies and how they gather and use data. It also indicates how people's chat messages could be abused by hackers.

[...] For AI girlfriends and their ilk, Caltrider says people should be cautious about using romantic chatbots and adopt best security practices. This includes using strong passwords, not signing in to the apps using Facebook or Google, deleting data, and opting out of data collection where it's offered. "Limit the personal information you share as much as possible—not giving up names, locations, ages," Caltrider says, adding that with some of these services, it may not be enough. "Even doing those things might not keep you as safe as you would like to be."

Ars Technica

This story originally appeared on wired.com

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US government today confirmed China's Volt Typhoon crew comprised "multiple" critical infrastructure orgs' IT networks in America – and Uncle Sam warned that the Beijing-backed spies are readying "disruptive or destructive cyberattacks" against those targets.

The Chinese team remotely broke into IT environments — primarily across communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater system sectors — in the continental and non-continental United States and its territories, including Guam.

"Volt Typhoon's choice of targets and pattern of behavior is not consistent with traditional cyber espionage or intelligence gathering operations, and the US authoring agencies assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves on IT networks to enable lateral movement to OT assets to disrupt functions," a dozen Five Eyes government agencies warned on Wednesday. 

[...] According to the US agencies, Volt Typhoon will likely use any network access it can get to pull off disruptive attacks against American systems and equipment in the event of geopolitical tensions or military conflicts.

[...] While the threat to American critical infrastructure appears to be the highest, should US facilities be disrupted, "Canada would likely be affected as well, due to cross-border integration," according to CCCS. 

Australian and New Zealand critical infrastructure could be vulnerable as well.

In addition to sounding the alarm, the government bodies issued a long list of technical details, TTPs observed in the digital break-ins, and detection recommendations and best practices. 

Plus, there's three actions that owners and operators should take "today" to mitigate the threat.

These include: Apply patches for internet-facing systems with priority given to appliances that Volt Typhoon likes to exploit. 

Second: Turn on phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA).

And finally, ensure that logging is turned on for applications, access and security logs, and store these logs in a centralized system.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/microsoft-starts-testing-windows-11-24h2-as-this-years-big-update-takes-shape/

The next major release of Windows isn't due until the end of the year, but it looks like Microsoft is getting an early start. New Windows Insider builds released to the Canary and Dev channels both roll their version numbers to "24H2," indicating that they're the earliest builds of what Microsoft will eventually release to all Windows users sometime this fall.

[...] The early change to the 24H2 numbering is a departure from last year, where Windows 11 23H2 didn't appear publicly until the end of October. And even then, it was mostly just an update that rolled over the version number and Microsoft's support clock for software updates—most of its "new" features had actually rolled out to PCs running Windows 11 22H2 the month before.

There are some signs that this update will be fairly significant in scope. In addition to all the features Microsoft listed, there are signs that the company is revising things like the Windows setup process that you go through when installing the OS from scratch.

[...] A 24H2 update does suggest that Windows 11 will continue on for at least another year, but it doesn't necessarily preclude a Windows 12 launch this year. Windows 10 received a 21H2 update the year Windows 11 came out and a 22H2 update the year after that (not that either came with significant new features). Microsoft could decide to rename the upcoming feature update on relatively short notice—like it originally did with Windows 11, which began as a design overhaul for Windows 10. Windows 12 might happen, or it might not, but I wouldn't take this Windows 11 24H2 update as decisive evidence one way or the other.

[...] To date, Microsoft hasn't imposed any specific system requirements for Copilot or Windows' other generative AI features, aside from 4GB RAM and 720p screen requirements for the Windows 10 version of Copilot, but this could change if more of Windows' AI features begin relying on local processing rather than cloud processing.

[With my latest build, I skipped the OS tax, and used MXLinux instead. Installation was a little more complicated than a fresh windows install. I've also had a few hiccups with game compatibility, but overall Steam's Proton compatibility layer is doing an even better job than when I last tried it out. For example Space Engineers, just worked. Whereas before there were audio and graphical issues.]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Traditional microelectronic architectures, with transistors to control electrical currents along wires, power everything from advanced computers to everyday devices.

But with the integrated circuits offering diminishing returns in terms of speed and adaptability, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are developing nanometer-scale light-based systems that could deliver breakthroughs for ultrafast microelectronics, room-temperature infrared detection (for example, night vision) and a wide variety of technological applications.

"Most modern technologies, from computers to applications like energy harvesting, are built on the ability to push electrons around," said Jacob Pettine, Los Alamos physicist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT). "But the way we control this charge flow remains very limited by conventional materials and structures."

As described in an article just published in Nature, the research team designed and fabricated asymmetric, nano-sized gold structures on an atomically thin layer of graphene. The gold structures are dubbed "nanoantennas" based on the way they capture and focus light waves, forming optical "hot spots" that excite the electrons within the graphene. Only the graphene electrons very near the hot spots are excited, with the rest of the graphene remaining much less excited.

The research team adopted a teardrop shape of gold nanoantennas, where the breaking of inversion symmetry defines a directionality along the structure. The hot spots are located only at the sharp tips of the nanoantennas, leading to a pathway on which the excited hot electrons flow with net directionality—a charge current, controllable and tunable at the nanometer scale by exciting different combinations of hot spots.

"These metasurfaces provide an easy way to control the amplitude, location and direction of hot spots and nanoscale charge current with a response speed faster than a picosecond," said Hou-Tong Chen, a scientist at CINT supervising the research. "You can then think about more detailed functionalities."

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2019/11/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-history-of.html

What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post "80x25" motivated me to investigate this. The source of 80-column lines is clearly punch cards, as commonly claimed. But why 24 or 25 lines? There are many theories, but I found a simple answer: IBM, in particular its dominance of the terminal market. In 1971, IBM introduced a terminal with an 80×24 display (the 3270) and it soon became the best-selling terminal, forcing competing terminals to match its 80×24 size. The display for the IBM PC added one more line to its screen, making the 80×25 size standard in the PC world. The impact of these systems remains decades later: 80-character lines are still a standard, along with both 80×24 and 80×25 terminal windows.

In this blog post, I'll discuss this history in detail, including some other systems that played key roles. The CRT terminal market essentially started with the IBM 2260 Display Station in 1965, built from curious technologies such as sonic delay lines. This led to the popular IBM 3270 display and then widespread, inexpensive terminals such as the DEC VT100. In 1981, IBM released a microcomputer called the DataMaster. While the DataMaster is mostly forgotten, it strongly influenced the IBM PC, including the display. This post also studies reports on the terminal market from the 1970s and 1980s; these make it clear that market forces, not technological forces, led to the popularity of various display sizes.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

I have my country and my convictions. And I don't want to give up on either. I can't betray either one. If your convictions mean anything, you must be ready to stand up for them. And, if necessary, make sacrifices [for them]. If you're not ready [to do that], then you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those aren't convictions or principles; they're just thoughts in your head.

It so happens that in today's Russia, I have to pay for my right to have and to openly express my convictions by sitting in solitary confinement. And, of course, I don't like being in prison. But I won't renounce my convictions or my homeland. My convictions aren't exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience. Those in power must change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair court. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship. The future lies with these principles.

Alexey Navalny, Russia's most famous dissident, has died. (4 June 1976 – 16 February 2024).

Returning to Russia in 2021, after having been treated in Berlin for novichok poisoning, Navalny was immediately arrested on arrival at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. Since then, he has been in and out of (but mostly in) solitary confinement all over the country, with his final station being the Polar Wolf penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Siberia.

On Monday, he had been visited by his parents. In reacting to the news of her son's death, his mother reacted:

"I don't want to hear any condolences. We saw our son in the colony on Feb. 12th. He was alive, healthy, cheerful."

More info here.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/gold-nanocrystals-energy-activity-brain-neurodegenerative-disease/

Phase 2 clinical trials using orally administered gold nanocrystals to treat multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease have produced promising results, restoring metabolites linked to crucial energy activity in the brain that are depleted in these neurodegenerative conditions.

The brain depends on a continuous supply of energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel its resting and active-state functions. Essential to ATP production is the molecule nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+).

As glucose is broken down into smaller molecules by the cells, the chemical bonds holding it together break. The energy held in the broken bonds is harnessed when an electron freed during the process is captured by NAD⁺, converting it to its reduced form, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide + hydrogen (NADH). NADH donates the electron to the mitochondria, which use the electron's energy to produce ATP, a process that oxidizes NADH back to NAD⁺.

Energy metabolism is compromised as we age, evidenced by a reduced NAD⁺/NADH ratio, which is considered a measure of global brain energy capacity. In neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), this reduction is much faster and more severe.

Now, researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern (UT Southwestern) Medical Center have conducted two phase 2 clinical trials on patients with MS and PD to see whether treating these neurodegenerative diseases with orally administered gold nanocrystals could restore the NAD⁺/NADH ratio.

"We are cautiously optimistic that we will be able to prevent or even reverse some neurological disabilities with this strategy," said Peter Sguigna, one of the study's co-authors and lead on the MS trial.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/nvidia-ceo-calls-for-sovereign-ai-as-his-firm-overtakes-amazon-in-market-value/

On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that every country should control its own AI infrastructure so it can protect its culture, Reuters reports. He called this concept "Sovereign AI," which an Nvidia blog post defined as each country owning "the production of their own intelligence."

Huang made the announcement in a discussion with UAE's Minister of AI, Omar Al Olama, during the World Governments Summit in Dubai. "It codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history—you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama.
[...]
Nvidia is well-known for its production of powerful GPU chips that accelerate the training and running of AI models, which are currently being deployed in data centers used by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. The demand for Nvidia's chips has led to massive financial success for the company over the past year.
[...]
Relatedly, the market capitalization of Nvidia first overtook the market cap of Amazon on Monday before slipping behind again, making the two companies neck-and-neck for the fourth most valuable company in the US, behind Microsoft, Apple, and Google parent Alphabet. Reuters reported that when Nvidia first overtook Amazon, it held a stock value of $734.96 per share Monday morning, making Nvidia worth $1.82 trillion in market value versus $1.81 trillion for Amazon. As of this writing, the two companies are still close in value, with Nvidia again in the lead.

[Just think of this, whenever you notice a spike in GPU costs / shortage of GPUs.]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

FYI: SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Orit Hazzan at ACM.org says:

Over the past year, I have published a series of CACM blogs in which I analyzed the introduction of generative AI, in general, and of ChatGPT, in particular, to computer science education (see, ChatGPT in Computer Science Education – January 23, 2023; ChatGPT in Computer Science Education: Freshmen's Conceptions, co-authored with Yael Erez - August 7, 2023; and ChatGPT (and Other Generative AI Applications) as a Disruptive Technology for Computer Science Education: Obsolescence or Reinvention - co-authored with Yael Erez - September 18, 2023).

One of the messages of these blogs was that computer science high school teachers and computer science freshmen clearly see the potential contribution of ChatGPT to computer science teaching and learning processes and highlight the opportunities it opens for computer science education, over the potential threats it poses. Another message was that generative AI, and specifically LLM-based conversational agents (e.g., ChatGPT), may turn out to be disruptive technologies for computer science education and, therefore, should be conceived of as an opportunity for computer science education to stay relevant.

In this blog, we address high school teachers' perspective on the incorporation of ChatGPT into computer science education. [...]

The author then presents the SWOT analysis, concluding:

With respect to the adoption of generative AI, it seems that the chasm in its adoption process has already been crossed and that, due to the simplicity of using the various generative AI applications available, a huge population, either with or without a technological background, has already adopted them.

Based on the SWOT analysis presented above, the meaningful question for our discussion is: With respect to the community of computer science teachers, what stage of the adoption process of innovation is generative AI at? Has the chasm already been crossed?

Related: Amid ChatGPT Outcry, Some Teachers are Inviting AI to Class

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://torrentfreak.com/lawsuit-accuses-annas-archive-of-hacking-worldcat-stealing-2-2-tb-data-240207/

American nonprofit OCLC is known globally for its leading database of bibliographic records, WorldCat. A few months ago, many of these records were posted publicly by the shadow library search engine, Anna's Archive. OCLC believes that this is the result of a year-long hack and, with a lawsuit filed at an Ohio federal court, it demands damages.

Anna's Archive is a meta-search engine for book piracy sources and shadow libraries.

Launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, its self-stated goal is to ensure and facilitate the availability of books and articles to the broader public.

A few months ago, the search engine expanded its offering by making available data from OCLC's proprietary WorldCat database. Anna's Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

These records contain no copyrighted books or articles. However, they can help to create a to-do list of all missing shadow library content on the web, with the ultimate goal of making as much content publicly available as possible.

[...] It is no secret that publishers fiercely oppose the search engine's stated goals. The same also applies to OCLC, which has now elevated its concerns into a full-blown lawsuit, filed this month at a federal court in Ohio.

The complaint accuses Washington citizen Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo and several "John Does" of operating the search engine and scraping WorldCat data. The scraping is equated to a cyberattack by OCLC and started around the time Anna's Archive launched.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/daily-telescope-a-solar-eclipse-from-the-surface-of-mars/

Good morning. It's February 12, and today's image is a real treat from the surface of Mars.

In it we see the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, passing in front of the Sun.

[...] NASA released a bunch of these raw images last week, and planetary scientist Paul Byrne helpfully put them into a video sequence that can be seen here.

[...] Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Related stories on SoylentNews:
Annular Solar Eclipse October 2023 and Total in April 2024 - 20231002
NASA's Perseverance Rover Captures Video of Solar Eclipse on Mars - 20220422
How to Watch Rare "Ring of Fire" Solar Eclipse - 20210609
Coming Jan 31st: a Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse - First Time in 150 Years - 20180105

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2024/02/05/todays-youtubers-are-repeating-the-mistakes-of-yesterdays-bloggers/

I watch a ton of YouTube, on the order of an hour or two each day and I can honestly say the no-ads premium family account on YouTube is one of the best bargains on the internet for everyone in my house.

Lately, YouTube creators are going through a reckoning, and I think it's unfortunate to see some creators I've come to know and trust over the years squander their work as they chase percentage points of revenue instead of focusing on the craft.

It reminds me a lot of how blogging changed around 2005-2009, when ad money came pouring in, and while it was great for bloggers that previously were just publishing for the heck of it (myself included), eventually the money tainted the process as many people rushed to improve their bottom line, often at the expense of whole reason they created their sites.

[...] My hope for YouTube creators is much like bloggers. Don't spend all your time chasing the tea leaves and conventional wisdom. Focus on your channel/site and keep creating things you love that will resonate with your viewers/readers. Hopefully the money will follow, but obsessing over how to eke out every last cent from your work will make your work suffer.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

17% of U.S. adults have noise-induced hearing loss. A new Pitt study uncovers a biologic reason:

It could be a band at a wedding, an explosion on a battlefield or the constant drone of machinery: In the United States, about 17% of adults have hearing loss caused by exposure to loud noises.

Previously, little was known about the exact mechanism by which trauma from those noises led to hearing loss. In a scientific paper published Monday, a Pitt research team has solved part of that puzzle, tying that hearing loss to an excess of a form of zinc in the inner ear. By capturing some of that excess zinc in mice, the researchers were able to prevent hearing loss and even restore lost hearing.

"Hearing loss is a huge problem," said Thanos Tzounopoulos, professor and vice chair of research in the department of otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh. "This can hopefully provide some sort of preventative treatment."

The end goal, a lead researcher said, would be a pill that could be taken preventively or soon after exposure to mitigate the damage.

[...] The research study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, exposed mice to 100 decibels of sound for two hours and then tracked what was happening to the inner ear's "labile" zinc — a form of the element that is not bound to proteins. That free-floating zinc is already known to contribute to damage from strokes and optic nerve injuries, but had not been studied in terms of noise-induced hearing loss.

The researchers found "a huge dysregulation of zinc signaling" after the noise exposure, said Tzounopoulos. "There was much more of the zinc, it was in different locations — it was all over."

In the next step of the experiment, two days before a planned noise exposure, they injected mice with a slow-release chemical gel solution that would chelate the zinc, essentially trapping it so that it is not able to float freely in the ear. Assessing the hearing of the mice by putting electrodes on their skulls and measuring their auditory brain responses, the researchers were able to see a significant improvement in the hearing of the mice who received the chelation solution, compared to those who did not.

[...] One avenue is working on the chemistry of the chelation compound in anticipation of eventually making sure it is safe to be given to humans. They also plan to explore what happens when the treatment is given after noise exposure, versus given preventively.