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Submission + - Did NASA Just Admit That Boeing's Starliner Is Doomed? (pjmedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Think of the space station docking ports as the most expensive and coveted parking spots on or above the Earth because that's exactly what they are. There are only a handful of them, reaching one costs tens of millions of dollars, and they're reserved months or even years in advance. And, needless to say, there's no possibility of double-parking. Every docking port needed by the next vehicle must first be vacated by the current one.

The dock currently occupied by Starliner is needed by a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and its four astronauts set to fly the Crew-9 mission. Crew-9 is set for Aug. 18 and is scheduled to arrive at ISS a day or so later. (The exact details are sketchy.) Starliner has to be somewhere else by then, even if Wilmore and Williams aren't aboard it.

Before I get to the real news, understand that every delay in getting another capsule up to ISS has cascading effects down the line and that the station is nearing the end of its service life and will be deorbited in 2030.

This morning I learned that NASA is now considering bumping Crew-9 from Aug. 18 to Sept 24, which space journalist Eric Berger (the best in the business) called "a significant slip." The reason for the possible delay is a virtual confession that Wilmore and Williams will not be coming home on Starliner this week, next week, or ever.

Boeing needs the extra time to prepare Starliner for self-destruct.

Submission + - Project 2025 could escalate US cybersecurity risks, endanger more Americans (csoonline.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: The conservative think tank blueprint for how Donald Trump should govern the US if he wins in November calls for dismantling CISA, among many cyber-related measures. Experts say this would increase cybersecurity risks, undermine critical infrastructure, and put more Americans in danger. CSO's Cynthia Brumfield takes a look at what could become of US cybersecurity policy under a Trump administration in 2025 and beyond.

Submission + - Ford saw a $1.1 billion loss in its EV business (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

Shares of Ford Motor Co. fell 11.6% in the extended session Wednesday after the car maker reported quarterly profits well below Wall Street's expectations and notched another billion-dollar loss on EVs.

Submission + - Hugo Awards Organizers Reveal Thousands Spent On Fraudulent Votes (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy writing has revealed that almost 400 votes – about 10% of all votes cast in this year’s awards – were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win. The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with “obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics." These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were “translations of consecutive numbers."

The voting pattern was “startlingly and obviously different” to anything the members of the current Hugo adminstration subcommittee had ever seen, and most of the votes favored one finalist, who the subcommittee called “Finalist A." “We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them,” the subcommittee said. Only members of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) can nominate works for the Hugos and vote on finalists, which costs a minimum of £45 each year. Based on the Hugo administration subcommittee’s tally, paying for 377 memberships would have cost at least $22,000. The Hugo administration subcommittee said they received “a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished."

Submission + - One Dead, Two Critically Wounded in Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump 17

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Former President Donald Trump was surrounded and rushed off a stage by Secret Service agents at a rally in Butler, PA following an assassination attempt that left one crowd member dead, two other spectators critically wounded, and Trump bloodied by sniper fire that hit his ear (video). The shooter, who opened fire with an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle from a rooftop several hundred feet from the stage where Trump was speaking, was killed. The release of his identity is pending confirmation by law enforcement.

Submission + - Japan SLIM lands on moon... but may be short mission (space.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon... but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon. (On their third try- two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.

Submission + - Vulcan Rocket has Successful First Launch 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: ULA's Vulcan rocket, many years in development, had a successful first launch this morning from Cape Canaveral. The expendable rocket, which uses two methane-fueled BE-4 engines from Blue Origin in its first stage, is the successor to the Delta and Atlas-V launch vehicles. Years overdue, and with a packed manifest for future launches, Vulcan is critical to the ULA's continued existence. The payload on this first mission is called Peregrine — a lunar lander from Astrobotic. Unfortunately, Peregrine has suffered an anomaly some hours into flight; it is unclear whether the mission can recover.

Submission + - 500-Year-Old Leonardo Da Vinci Sketches Show Him Grappling With Gravity (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of engineers studying the 500-year-old, backward writings of Leonardo da Vinci have found evidence that the Italian polymath was working out gravity a century before its foundations were established by Galileo Galilei. The team’s findings come from a revisit of the Codex Arundel, a compilation of documents written by da Vinci that detail various experiments and personal notes taken down in the latter 40 years of his life. The codex is freely accessible online courtesy of the British Museum. The team’s research is published in the MIT Press journal Leonardo.

Mory Gharib, an engineer at Caltech, said he stumbled across the writings in 2017 when looking for some of da Vinci’s work on flow in hearts. Though the codex was written over a long span of da Vinci’s later years, Gharib suspects the gravitational musings were written sometime in the last 15-or-so years of his life. Gharib recruited co-author Flavio Noca, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, to translate the Italian’s backward writing on the subject. Da Vinci understood some fundamentals of objects in motion. He wanted to make an experiment testing how the motion of a cloud would correspond to the hail it produced, if the cloud’s velocity and any changes to it corresponded with the falling hail’s velocity. In lieu of control of the weather, da Vinci substituted a pitcher for the cloud and sand or water for the hail. Reliable clocks weren’t available until about 140 years after da Vinci’s death in 1519, the researchers note, so the inventor was forced to substitute the constant of time with space: by assuming that the time it took each water/sand particle to fall from the pitcher was constant, he just kept the pitcher at the same height throughout the tests.

Da Vinci’s sketch shows the positions of the falling material over the course of its trajectory toward the ground. By drawing a line through the position of the material at each instance in time, da Vinci realized that a triangle could be formed, with the drawn line being the hypotenuse. By changing the acceleration of the pitcher over the course of the experiment, one would change the shape of the triangle. Leonardo knew that the falling material would accelerate and that the acceleration is downward. What he wasn’t wholly certain on—hence the experiment—was the relationship between the falling material’s acceleration and the pitcher’s acceleration. In one particular case, when the pitcher’s motion was accelerated to the same rate as the falling material being affected by gravity, an equilateral triangle was formed. Literally, as Da Vinci noted, an “Equatione di Moti” or an “equalization of motions.” The researchers modeled da Vinci’s experiment and found that the polymath was wrong in his understanding of the relationship between the falling object and time. “What we saw is that Leonardo wrestled with this, but he modeled it as the falling object’s distance was proportional to 2 to the t power [with t representing time] instead proportional to t squared,” said Chris Roh, a researcher at Cornell University and a co-author of the researcher, in a Caltech release. “It’s wrong, but we later found out that he used this sort of wrong equation in the correct way.” The team interpreted tick marks on da Vinci’s sketches as data points the polymath made based on his eyeballing of the experiment in action. In lieu of a timepiece, da Vinci found the gravitational constant to nearly 98% accuracy.

Submission + - Super-massive Black hole ejected from galaxy. (arxiv.org) 1

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A paper published last week on ArXiv describes the trail of debris left behind by a Super Massive Black Hole ejected from the core of a galaxy.

As part of a study of "low-surface-brightness galaxies" using the Hubble Space Telescope, this 16-strong team noticed a long, linear feature in one of their images. Initially thinking it was a cosmic ray, they looked at the second image taken of the region on HST's next orbit (and through a different filter) — and found it was still visible. In the immortal words of real world science "that's odd", so they investigated more closely.

Their best model of the data is that their target galaxy "RCP 28" merged with another galaxy about 39 million years ago (from our point of view), leading to the ejection of one, or possibly two central black holes from the original galaxies. That would require one of the galaxies to have been the result of a previous merger, but whose central black holes had not yet merged (an event we might have detected using our shiny new gravitational wave telescopes, had they been 39.1 million years ahead of their construction schedules).

After the collision and ejection from the galaxy core, the passage of the black hole through the galaxy and it's surrounding material produced a burst of star formation along that line, which we now see as a faint linear streak of light.

The HST images may show a much fainter streak in the opposite direction, hinting at a second ejected black hole. Or it might be noise. Or something else.

Those who like doom-laden prophecies will be upset to hear that, because we can see this moving across the plane of the sky, it is never going to come any where near us. Even if it weren't moving across our line of sight, at a redshift of z=0.964 (equivalent to about 1600 MPc, I think) it's a toss up which hits us first — this black hole, or the expanding surface of the red giant Sun.

Submission + - USAF might be shooting down hobbyist balloons (aviationweek.com) 1

Submitted by kalieaire
kalieaire writes: Steve Trimble of Aviation week reports that a Hobby Club's missing ballon might have been inadvertently targeted as a malicious UFO and subsequently shot down. When Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS) company founder, Ron Meadows, reached out to Gov't resources at the FBI and DoD, they were brushed off.

“I’m guessing probably they were pico balloons,” said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

According to Trimble, the description of all 3 UFOs shot down during 2/10-12 match the description of Pico Balloon models which can be purchased for $12-180.

Comment Re:Hamster, meet wheel (Score 2) 29

by tsuliga (#63232278) Attached to: Chess.com Visits Spike with New Cat-Themed AI Bot Named 'Mittens'

I know what you mean about memorizing opening moves. I use to play chess in highschool and was pretty good. Then went to a tournament and got destroyed when someone played the sicilian defense against me. Lost in around 10 moves. I then knew I had to memorize opening moves if I wanted to move up in the rankings, but had no interest. So eventually gave up on playing chess. Still like the game, but rarely if ever play now.
IBM

IBM and Maersk Abandon Ship on TradeLens Logistics Blockchain (coindesk.com) 28

Posted by msmash from the end-of-road dept.
Maersk and IBM will wind down their shipping blockchain TradeLens by early 2023, ending the pair's five-year project to improve global trade by connecting supply chains on a permissioned blockchain. From a report: TradeLens emerged during the "enterprise blockchain" era of 2018 as a high-flying effort to make inter-corporate trade more efficient. Open to shipping and freight operators, its members could validate the transaction of goods as recorded on a transparent digital ledger.

The idea was to save its member-shipping companies money by connecting their world. But the network was only as strong as its participants; despite some early wins, TradeLens ultimately failed to catch on with a critical mass of its target industry. "TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business," Maersk Head of Business Platforms Rotem Hershko said in a statement.

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