SpaceX's eighth Starship test flight ended in failure after losing control and breaking apart shortly after launch, sending debris over Florida. "Starship didn't make it quite as high or as far" as the attempt nearly two months ago," notes NPR. That attempt ended with an explosion that sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos. From the report: This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up. The 403-foot rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.

Starship reached nearly 90 miles in altitude before trouble struck and before four mock satellites could be deployed. It was not immediately clear where it came down, but images of flaming debris were captured from Florida, including near Cape Canaveral, and posted online. The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour. "Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now," SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said from the launch site. SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" during the ascent engine firing. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," the company said in a statement posted online. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on X.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells. But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom? An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy took steps to find out, putting a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface. Through a series of experiments, the researchers showed it was possible to use the mushroom's electrophysiological activity as a means of translating environmental cues into directives, which could, in turn, be used to drive a mechanical device's movements. "By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment," says senior researcher Rob Shepherd, a materials scientist at Cornell.

By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of P. eryngii mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus -- in this case, UV light -- to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device. In controlled experiments, the team used the signals from a fungal culture to govern the movements of a five-limbed soft robot and a four-wheeled untethered vehicle. They were able to influence and override the 'natural' impulses produced by the fungi, demonstrating an ability to harness the system's sensory abilities to meet an end goal. "This kind of project is not just about controlling a robot," says Cornell bioroboticist Anand Mishra. "It is also about creating a true connection with the living system. Because once you hear the signal, you also understand what's going on. Maybe that signal is coming from some kind of stresses. So you're seeing the physical response, because those signals we can't visualize, but the robot is making a visualization." The research has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A significant proportion of people paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new study has found. It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers on platforms like Mechanical Turk to complete tasks that are typically hard to automate, such as solving CAPTCHAs, labeling data and annotating text. This data is then fed into AI models to train them. The workers are poorly paid and are often expected to complete lots of tasks very quickly.

No wonder some of them may be turning to tools like ChatGPT to maximize their earning potential. But how many? To find out, a team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) hired 44 people on the gig work platform Amazon Mechanical Turk to summarize 16 extracts from medical research papers. Then they analyzed their responses using an AI model they'd trained themselves that looks for telltale signals of ChatGPT output, such as lack of variety in choice of words. They also extracted the workers' keystrokes in a bid to work out whether they'd copied and pasted their answers, an indicator that they'd generated their responses elsewhere. They estimated that somewhere between 33% and 46% of the workers had used AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's a percentage that's likely to grow even higher as ChatGPT and other AI systems become more powerful and easily accessible, according to the authors of the study, which has been shared on arXiv (PDF) and is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Using AI-generated data to train AI could introduce further errors into already error-prone models. Large language models regularly present false information as fact. If they generate incorrect output that is itself used to train other AI models, the errors can be absorbed by those models and amplified over time, making it more and more difficult to work out their origins, says Ilia Shumailov, a junior research fellow in computer science at Oxford University, who was not involved in the project. Even worse, there's no simple fix. "The problem is, when you're using artificial data, you acquire the errors from the misunderstandings of the models and statistical errors," he says. "You need to make sure that your errors are not biasing the output of other models, and there's no simple way to do that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cheap, light, flexible, yet robust circuit boards are critical for wearable electronics, among other applications. In the future, those electronics might be printed on flexible circuits made out of bacterial cultures used to make the popular fermented black tea drink called kombucha, according to a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. "Nowadays kombucha is emerging as a promising candidate to produce sustainable textiles to be used as eco-friendly bio wearables," co-author Andrew Adamatzky, of the University of the West of England in Bristol, old New Scientist. "We will see that dried -- and hopefully living -- kombucha mats will be incorporated in smart wearables that extend the functionality of clothes and gadgets. We propose to develop smart eco-wearables which are a convergence of dead and alive biological matter."

Adamatzky previously co-authored a 2021 paper demonstrating that living kombucha mats showed dynamic electrical activity and stimulating responses, as well as a paper last year describing the development of a bacterial reactive glove to serve as a living electronic sensing device. Inspired by the potential of kombucha mats for wearable electronics, he and his latest co-authors have now demonstrated that it's possible to print electronic circuits onto dried SCOBY mats. The team used commercially sourced kombucha bacteria to grow their mats, then air-dried the cultures on plastic or paper at room temperature. The mats don't tear easily and are not easily destroyed, even when immersed in water for several days. One of the test mats even survived oven temperatures up to 200 C (392 F), although the mats will burn when exposed to an open flame. Adamatzky et al. were able to print conductive polymer circuits onto the dried kombucha mats with an aerosol jet printer and also successfully tested an alternative method of 3D printing a circuit out of a conductive polyester/copper mix. They could even attach small LEDs to the circuits with an epoxy adhesive spiked with silver, which were still functioning after repeatedly being bent and stretched.

According to Adamatzky et al., unlike the living kombucha mats he worked with previously, the dried SCOBY mats are non-conductive, confining the electrical current to the printed circuit. The mats are also lighter, cheaper, and more flexible than the ceramic or plastic alternatives. Potential applications include wearable heart rate monitors, for instance, and other kombucha-based devices. "Future research will be concerned with printing advanced functional circuits, capable for detecting -- and maybe recognizing -- mechanical, optical, and chemical stimuli," the authors concluded.

Alphabet's Google is combining the eyes and arms of physical robots with the knowledge and conversation skills of virtual chatbots to help its employees fetch soda and chips from breakrooms with ease. From a report: The mechanical waiters, shown in action to reporters last week, embody an artificial intelligence breakthrough that paves the way for multipurpose robots as easy to control as ones that perform single, structured tasks such as vacuuming or standing guard. Google robots are not ready for sale. They perform only a few dozen simple actions, and the company has not yet embedded them with the "OK, Google" summoning feature familiar to consumers.

While Google says it is pursuing development responsibly, adoption could ultimately stall over concerns such as robots becoming surveillance machines, or being equipped with chat technology that can give offensive responses, as Meta Platforms and others have experienced in recent years. Microsoft and Amazon are pursuing comparable research on robots. "It's going to take a while before we can really have a firm grasp on the direct commercial impact," said Vincent Vanhoucke, senior director for Google's robotics research. When asked to help clean a spill, Google's robot recognizes that grabbing a sponge is a doable and more sensible response than apologizing for creating the mess.

Thousands of scientific studies had to toss out weeks of data because of a 56-second TikTok video by a teenager. From a report: The July 23rd video is short and simple. It opens with recent Florida high school graduate and self-described "teen author" Sarah Frank sitting in her bedroom and smiling at the camera. "Welcome to side hustles I recommend trying -- part one," she says in the video, pointing users to the website Prolific.co. "Basically, it's a bunch of surveys for different amounts of money and different amounts of time." That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study. Suddenly, scientists used to getting a wide mix of subjects for their Prolific studies saw their surveys flooded with responses from young women around Frank's age.

Though not particularly well known, Prolific is part of a small collection of online tools that have transformed the way corporations and scientists study the way people think and act. The first and largest of these research platforms is Amazon-owned Mechanical Turk, which was released in 2005 as a general-purpose platform for crowdsourcing work on repetitive tasks. Soon after it was released, behavioral scientists realized its potential value for their research, and it quickly revolutionized several research fields. [...] The Behavioral Lab at Stanford mainly uses the newer, smaller Prolific platform for online studies these days, said Nicholas Hall, director of the Behavioral Lab at the Stanford School of Business. While many Mechanical Turk customers are big businesses conducting corporate research, Prolific gears its product to scientists.

The smaller platform offers more transparency, promises to treat survey participants more ethically, and promises higher-quality research subjects than alternative platforms like Mechanical Turk. Scientists doing this sort of research in the United States generally want a pool of subjects who speak English as a first language, are not too practiced at taking psychological surveys, and together make up a reasonably representative demographic sample of the American population. Prolific, most agreed, did a good job providing high-quality subjects. The sudden change in the platform's demographics threatened to upend that reputation. In the days and weeks after Frank posted her video, researchers scrambled to figure out what was happening to their studies. A member of the Stanford Behavioral Laboratory posted on a Prolific forum, "we have noticed a huge leap in the number of participants on the platform in the US Pool, from 40k to 80k. Which is great, however, now a lot of our studies have a gender skew where maybe 85% of participants are women. Plus the age has been averaging around 21."

From a report: The workers of Mechanical Turk, Amazon's on-demand micro-task platform, say they have encountered mutilated bodies, graphic videos of botched surgeries, and what appeared to be child pornography. They say they have been asked to transcribe Social Security numbers and other personal data. Sometimes their temporary bosses, "requesters" in Amazon's parlance, allegedly ask their anonymized employees to send along their underwear, take photos of their feet, or to draw pictures of their genitals. They say they have been paid to recount traumatic instances in their lives -- a cancer diagnosis, severe depression, or the death of a loved one -- often for less than a dollar. These are some of 1,100 responses to two surveys Gizmodo recently posed to gig workers on Mechanical Turk asking for their experiences using the platform. Unlike the tribulations of Amazon's warehouse workers, which have been well documented, the experiences of gig workers on Mechanical Turk are far less visible.

Bennett Haselton writes: My last article garnered some objections from readers saying that the sample sizes were too small to draw meaningful conclusions. (36 out of 47 survey-takers, or 77%, said that a picture of a black woman breast-feeding was inappropriate; while in a different group, 38 out of 54 survey-takers, or 70%, said that a picture of a white woman breast-feeding was inappropriate in the same context.) My conclusion was that, even on the basis of a relatively small sample, the evidence was strongly against a "huge" gap in the rates at which the surveyed population would consider the two pictures to be inappropriate. I stand by that, but it's worth presenting the math to support that conclusion, because I think the surveys are valuable tools when you understand what you can and cannot demonstrate with a small sample. (Basically, a small sample can present only weak evidence as to what the population average is, but you can confidently demonstrate what it is not.) Keep reading to see what Bennett has to say.

Bennett Haselton writes: A editorial with 24,000 Facebook shares highlights the differences in public reaction to two nearly identical breastfeeding photos, one showing a black woman and one showing a white woman, each breastfeeding an infant. The editorial decries the outrage provoked by the black woman's photo compared to the mild reaction elicited by the white woman's photo, and attributes the difference to racism. I tried an experiment using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to test that theory. Read on to see the kind of results Bennett found.

An anonymous reader writes "MIT Technology Review reports on a chatbot built at the University of Rochester that is capable of high quality, human-level conversation — thanks to software called Chorus that turns to Amazon's crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk to generate and evaluate replies to a human's statements and questions. No one person is ever acting as the bot, instead multiple workers suggest responses that are then voted on to select the best. The crowd workers contributing change frequently, but Chorus also has them keep a running list of important contextual information to give the bot a kind of memory of a conversation's history. The researchers say Chorus-style chat bots could out-perform fully automated assistants such as Siri, while being considerably cheaper than a true concierge service."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton's essay this week is about "A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else." Continue on to see how.

I get a lot of mail from obviously unbalanced people. Enough in fact, that I've often wondered if there was a institution that allowed their patients to only read Slashdot. We've even had a few visits from some questionable individuals. A man who tried to bribe me with a car if I let him "reverse engineer" Rob Malda's Life comes to mind. He insisted on Rob being present for the process and couldn't explain to me what it entailed, so I suggested he leave. The personal visits are rare, however, compared to the amount of mail I get. Here are a few of my favorites; let's hope these people have started to take their medication. Read below and don't be worried if you don't understand all of it.

SubComdrTaco writes "A controller developed at Carnegie Mellon University allows computer users to manipulate three-dimensional images and explore virtual environments not only through sight and sound, but by using their sense of touch. It simulates a hand's responses to touch because it relies on a part that floats in a magnetic field rather than on mechanical linkages and cables, according to Ralph L. Hollis, a Carnegie Mellon professor who developed the controller. The controller — like a joystick topped with a block that can be grasped — has just one moving part and rests in a bowl-like structure connected to a computer. Two of the controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up and move virtual objects on a monitor. In a demonstration Tuesday, visitors to Hollis' lab were invited to move an image of a pin across a plate of various textures, causing the controller to bump along ripples, vibrate across fine striations and glide across smooth areas. On one computer, users could "feel" the contours of a virtual rabbit. Hollis said his researchers had built 10 of the devices, six of which were to be sent to other universities across the country and in Canada, and that a new company, Butterfly Haptics, would begin marketing the device in June or July. The controller, which Hollis said will cost "much less" than $50,000, could enable a would-be surgeon to operate on a virtual human organ and sense the texture of tissue or give a designer the feeling of fitting a part into a virtual jet engine, or might also be used to convey the feeling of wind under the wings of unmanned military planes."

In January we had the chance to ask the designers of Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition a few questions about the new version of the classic tabletop game. The Wizards of the Coast Community Manager, Mike "Gamer_Zer0" Lescault put our questions to members of the development team, including: Andrew Collins, Chris Perkins, Scott Rouse, and Sara Girard. Some of the questions weren't quite answered in as much detail as I would have liked. That said, they've given us a great opportunity to follow up on their responses. If you have a follow-up question, put it in a comment below (one question per comment please). We'll pass on five of the best, and the designers will answer your question on-camera at the Dungeons and Dragons Experience at the end of this month. We'll post the video to the site early in March. This is a great chance to put a face to some legendary designer names, and get your unanswered issues resolved. Get asking.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

Bennett Haselton has written in with an essay on a strange experiment on-line. He starts When you first hear about Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk" service, which allows "requesters" to pay "Turk workers" a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans, what's the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been discussed previously on Slashdot, but I'll bet a week's wages for a Mechanical Turk worker ($1.45, according to one of them) that I was the first person who used it to pay people to write rebuttals to one of my arguments. Keep reading unless you want to fight about it.

The tech culture is becoming a elitist society with no coherent political values, poorly prepared to deal with real politicians, who pass real laws like the DMCA. "How could they take my Napster away?" lamented one recent e-mailer. A new book by journalist Paulina Borsook takes an even sharper look at techno-narcissism and hostility. The tech culture, she says, is at times self-centered and selfish.