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Submission + - China Finds Explanation For "Mystery Hut" Spotted On The Moon (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by BeerFartMoron
BeerFartMoron writes: It's a rock. A small rock.

China has discovered the explanation for the mysterious "hut" its Yutu 2 rover spotted on the moon late last year. As the lunar rover made a closer approach, a log of its activities revealed the object was actually just a rock on a crater rim.

The revelation came as the lunar rover drove closer to the formation that was once believed to be as tall as Paris' Arc de Triomphe, according to a post published Friday on "Our Space," a Chinese media channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration. Instead, it was much smaller and had a peculiar shape. Upon a closer view, the rock looked like a "jade rabbit" holding carrots, the post said.

"The Moon's surface is 38 million square kilometres of rocks, so it would have been astronomically exceptional for it to be anything else," Space News journalist Andrew Jones wrote on Twitter. "But while small, the jade rabbit/ rock will also be a monumental disappointment to some."

Submission + - SPAM: The GMC Hummer EV Could Pop Wheelies Before Engineers Intervened

Submitted by X2b5Ysb8
X2b5Ysb8 writes: Chief engineer Al Oppenheiser told us the wheelies didn't make the final production cut because of "functional safety reasons."

D Driving a 2022 GMC Hummer EV prototype back in Oct. 2021 was an eye-opening experience. I did a fair amount of driving and some riding along with the vehicle's chief engineer, Al Oppenheiser. During one of our chats, Oppenheiser shared with me some of the trials and tribulations his engineering team went through while developing the vehicle. This included one unexpected capability that had to be tuned out before the massive truck was delivered to customers: wheelies. "In the early days when we were just trying to balance the front and rear torque, I got the front end to lift," he told me. As it turns out, so much of the car was developed digitally that, when it came time to do real-world testing, there were a few unexpected quirks. "We had to back off the torque on the front end," he added, just as he prepared the Hummer for another launch.
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Comment Says the "Washington Post" (Score 1) 398

by Martin S. (#62159611) Attached to: Are Social Media Companies Censoring Us? Is It Ever Justified?

The old media, news papers and television news have done exactly the same for as long as they have existed.

How often do you see businesses, capitalist and commercial lobbies on the news? We see them multiples times everyday. Compare this to people from unions, from coops, from charities, members coops or community groups who are like rocking horse manure.

Comment Failure of due diligence. (Score 1) 419

Never push untested changes into production is pretty much the #1 rule of operations.

The big take away from this should be that those companies that suffered with this issue, failed their due diligence at the most fundamental level by not even having even the most elementary processes to deal with due diligence.

Submission + - SPAM: If Only Someone Could Have Predicted This 1

Submitted by X2b5Ysb8
X2b5Ysb8 writes: If Only Someone Could Have Predicted This

In November 2021, Elon Musk tweeted “It’s either traffic forever or tunnels.” Well, that does not really seem to be the case. On Thursday there was a major traffic jam in an underground tunnel built by The Boring Company – run by Musk – at the Las Vegas Convention Center. And it happened during a less-than-crowded CES.
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Submission + - SPAM: AI's 6 Worst-Case Scenarios 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Who needs Terminators when you have precision clickbait and ultra-deepfakes?

Malcolm Murdock, machine-learning engineer and author of the 2019 novel The Quantum Price, puts it, “AI doesn’t have to be sentient to kill us all. There are plenty of other scenarios that will wipe us out before sentient AI becomes a problem.”

“We are entering dangerous and uncharted territory with the rise of surveillance and tracking through data, and we have almost no understanding of the potential implications.”—Andrew Lohn, Georgetown University
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Submission + - Microsoft owned github bends over for another DMCA takedown - noDRM tools (github.com)

Submitted by jbernardo
jbernardo writes: noDRM tools (https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools) are a fork of the long running deDRM tools (https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools), which the author had retired late 2021. Their objective is to allow making copies for personal use of books encrypted by Amazon, among others. Now, the repository has been taken down and a DMCA notice posted, claiming the authors of noDRM had somehow obtained their encryption keys and that these were private property. The corporate abusers requesting the takedown are the french EDRLab (https://www.edrlab.org/about/), a "development lab" specialised in Digital Restrictions Management. Their owners are big French editors Editis, Hachette, Madrigall, Media Participations, Syndicat National de l’édition, Cercle de la Librarie, Centre National du livre, and the French State and Cap Digital.
As expected, Microsoft owned Github didn't even put up a fight.

Submission + - James Webb Mirror Deployment Complete

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: For years naysayers have confidently declared that the numerous automated operations necessary to fully deploy the James Webb Space Telescope were going to guarantee its failure. Today they've been proven wrong.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations. . .

The two wings of Webb’s primary mirror had been folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket prior to launch. After more than a week of other critical spacecraft deployments, the Webb team began remotely unfolding the hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, the largest ever launched into space. This was a multi-day process, with the first side deployed Jan. 7 and the second Jan. 8.

Mission Operations Center ground control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore began deploying the second side panel of the mirror at 8:53 a.m. EST. Once it extended and latched into position at 1:17 p.m. EST, the team declared all major deployments successfully completed.

The world’s largest and most complex space science telescope will now begin moving its 18 primary mirror segments to align the telescope optics. The ground team will command 126 actuators on the backsides of the segments to flex each mirror – an alignment that will take months to complete. Then the team will calibrate the science instruments prior to delivering Webb’s first images this summer.

“I am so proud of the team – spanning continents and decades – that delivered this first-of-its kind achievement,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb’s successful deployment exemplifies the best of what NASA has to offer: the willingness to attempt bold and challenging things in the name of discoveries still unknown.”

Submission + - Salesforce to require MFA for all users starting next month (therecord.media)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Salesforce, the world’s largest customer relationship management (CRM) platform, said that customers must have a form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) turned on starting next month, or they won’t be able to access their accounts. “Beginning February 1, 2022, Salesforce will require customers to use MFA in order to access Salesforce products,” the company said last year.

Salesforce said that users will be able to choose from using security keys, an authenticator app, or an OS biometrics systems to secure accounts. MFA solutions that rely on sending one-time passcodes via email, phone, or SMS messages won’t be allowed “because these methods are inherently vulnerable to interception, spoofing, and other attacks,” Salesforce explained.

Submission + - New lava-like coating can stop fires in their tracks (science.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It takes a lot of science to stop a fire. To prevent homes and workplaces from going up in smoke, manufacturers have added flame retardants to plastic, wood, and steel building materials for decades. But such additives can be toxic, expensive, and sometimes ineffective. Now, researchers in Australia and China have come up with a new flame retardant that, when exposed to extreme heat, forms a ceramic layer akin to hardened lava, squelching the flames before they spread.

“This is very good work,” says David Schiraldi, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University, who has developed other flame retardants. He notes that the ceramic’s starting materials aren’t particularly expensive or toxic, making it more likely to see widespread use. “[This] could impact public safety in the long run.”

Submission + - The Origin of the Blinking Cursor (inverse.com) 1

Submitted by jimminy_cricket
jimminy_cricket writes: These were some of the first growing pains of early word processing. Devoid of the seamless trackpad and mouse control we take for granted today, wordsmiths of the era were instead forced to hack through a digital jungle of their own creation. Unbeknownst to them, engineers were already developing a seemingly innocuous feature that would quietly change computing forever: the blinking cursor.

Patented in 1967 by Charles Kiesling, the blinking cursor "is simply a way to catch the coders' attention and stand apart from a sea of text." According to Kiesling's son, his father said, "there was nothing on the screen to let you know where the cursor was in the first place. So he wrote up the code for it so he would know where he was ready to type on the Cathode Ray Tube."

Submission + - Sony is building a EV (extremetech.com)

Submitted by junk_ball
junk_ball writes: A new player has entered the electric vehicle arena, and it isn’t a mainstream car manufacturer. Sony, whose name normally brings to mind hard-to-find gaming consoles and other in-home gadgets, is well on its way to releasing its first electric SUV to the public.

Sony brought its sleek proof-of-concept to the CES 2022 stage this week. The SUV, referred to as Vision-S 02, is an all-electric seven-seater made to integrate with “a large variety of lifestyles.” Sony says the prototype is currently being tested on public roads.

Submission + - SPAM: Stars May Form 10 Times Faster Than Thought

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers have long thought it takes millions of years for the seeds of stars like the Sun to come together. Clouds of mostly hydrogen gas coalesce under gravity into prestellar cores dense enough to collapse and spark nuclear fusion, while magnetic forces hold matter in place and slow down the process. But observations using the world’s largest radio telescope are casting doubt on this long gestational period. Researchers have zoomed in on a prestellar core in a giant gas cloud—a nursery for hundreds of baby stars—and found the tiny embryo may be forming 10 times faster than thought, thanks to weak magnetic fields. “If this is proven to be the case in other gas clouds, it will be revolutionary for the star formation community,” says Paola Caselli from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who was not involved with the research.

Studying star birth and the tug of war between gravity and magnetic forces has been a challenge because the magnetic fields can be 100,000 times weaker than Earth’s. The only direct way to detect them comes from a phenomenon called the Zeeman effect, in which the magnetic fields cause so-called spectral lines to split in a way that depends on the strength of the field. These spectral lines are bright or dark patterns where atoms or molecules emit or absorb specific wavelengths of light. For gas clouds, the Zeeman splitting occurs in radio wavelengths, so radio telescopes are needed. And the dishes must be big in order to zoom in on a small region of space and reveal such a subtle effect. Previously, researchers had used Puerto Rico’s Arecibo radio telescope—which collapsed in 2020—to study Lynds 1544, a relatively isolated stellar embryo within the Taurus Molecular Cloud, just 450 light-years away from Earth. They measured the magnetic fields in the wispy layers of gas far out from the core, where magnetic forces dominated over gravity. They also analyzed the stronger fields inside the core, where gravity nevertheless dominated because the core is 10,000 times denser than the outer layer, says Richard Crutcher, a radio astronomer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. What was missing was an examination of the intermediate region between the core and the outer layer. That has now come into focus with a new tracer of the Zeeman effect—a particular hydrogen absorption line—detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a giant dish built inside a natural basin in southwestern China.

In a study published today in Nature, researchers report a magnetic field strength of 4 microgauss—no stronger than in the outer layer. “If the standard theory worked, the magnetic field needs to be much stronger to resist a 100-fold increase in cloud density. That didn’t happen,” says Di Li, the chief scientist of FAST who led the study. “The paper basically says that gravity wins in the cloud: That’s where stars start to form, not in the dense core,” Caselli adds. “That’s a very big statement.” The finding implies that a gas cloud could evolve into a stellar embryo 10 times quicker than previously thought, says lead author Tao-Chung Ching of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s National Astronomical Observatories. Li says he wants to study other molecular clouds to see whether the lessons from Lynds 1544 apply more generally.
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