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Enlarge / Artist's illustration of two satellites performing rendezvous and proximity operations in low-Earth orbit. (credit: True Anomaly)
The US Space Force announced Thursday it is partnering with two companies, Rocket Lab and True Anomaly, for a first-of-its-kind mission to demonstrate how the military might counter "on-orbit aggression."
On this mission, a spacecraft built and launched by Rocket Lab will chase down another satellite made by True Anomaly, a Colorado-based startup. "The vendors will exercise a realistic threat response scenario in an on-orbit space domain awareness demonstration called Victus Haze," the Space Force's Space Systems Command said in a statement.
This threat scenario could involve a satellite performing maneuvers that approach a US spacecraft or a satellite doing something else unusual or unexpected. In such a scenario, the Space Force wants to have the capability to respond, either to deter an adversary from taking action or to defend a US satellite from an attack.
Enlarge / A Voyager space probe in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977. (credit: Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.
Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was still alive—it continued to broadcast a steady signal—but could not decipher anything it was saying.
Confirming their hypothesis, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted memory caused the problem. The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing.
Enlarge (credit: Francesco Carta fotografo | Moment)
On Friday, Meta announced policy updates to stop censoring harmless AI-generated content and instead begin "labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as 'Made with AI.'"
Meta's policy updates came after deciding not to remove a controversial post edited to show President Joe Biden seemingly inappropriately touching his granddaughter's chest, with a caption calling Biden a "pedophile." The Oversight Board had agreed with Meta's decision to leave the post online while noting that Meta's current manipulated media policy was too "narrow," "incoherent," and "confusing to users."
Previously, Meta would only remove "videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say." The Oversight Board warned that this policy failed to address other manipulated media, including "cheap fakes," manipulated audio, or content showing people doing things they'd never done.
Enlarge / Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit? (credit: Suyu)
Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo.
A GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice "from a representative of the rightsholder." GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.
An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project's Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:
Enlarge / Nine kerosene-fueled Rutherford engines power Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle off the pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, early Thursday. (credit: Brady Kenniston/Rocket Lab)
Welcome to Edition 6.36 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX wants to launch the next Starship test flight as soon as early May, the company's president and chief operating officer said this week. The third Starship test flight last week went well enough that the Federal Aviation Administration—yes, the FAA, the target of many SpaceX fans' frustrations—anticipates a simpler investigation and launch licensing process than SpaceX went through before its previous Starship flights. However, it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for Starship to start launching real satellites.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Starship could threaten small launch providers. Officials from several companies operating or developing small satellite launch vehicles are worried that SpaceX's giant Starship rocket could have a big impact on their marketability, Space News reports. Starship's ability to haul more than 100 metric tons of payload mass into low-Earth orbit will be attractive not just for customers with heavy satellites but also for those with smaller spacecraft. Aggregating numerous smallsats on Starship will mean lower prices than dedicated small satellite launch companies can offer and could encourage customers to build larger satellites with cheaper parts, further eroding business opportunities for small launch providers.
Enlarge / Chickenpox on a 1-year-old. (credit: BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)
Thanks to the vaccination program that began in 1995, chickenpox is now relatively rare. Cases of the miserable, itchy condition have fallen more than 97 percent. But, while children have largely put the oatmeal baths and oven mitts behind them, doctors have apparently let their diagnostic skills get a little crusty.
According to a study published Thursday, public health researchers in Minnesota found that 55 percent of people diagnosed with chickenpox based on their symptoms were actually negative for the varicella-zoster virus, the virus that causes chickenpox. The study noted that the people were all diagnosed in person by health care providers in medical facilities. But, instead of chickenpox, lab testing showed that some of the patients were actually infected with an enterovirus, which can cause a rash, or the herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores.
The study, published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, supports expanding laboratory testing for suspected chickenpox cases in the state's program and highlights that diagnoses based on symptoms are "unreliable."
Enlarge / Artist's illustration of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. (credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL)
It's been four months since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible signal back to Earth, and the problem has puzzled engineers tasked with supervising the probe exploring interstellar space.
But there's a renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. On March 1, engineers sent a command up to Voyager 1—more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth—to "gently prompt" one of the spacecraft's computers to try different sequences in its software package. This was the latest step in NASA's long-distance troubleshooting to try to isolate the cause of the problem preventing Voyager 1 from transmitting coherent telemetry data.
Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away, it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.
Enlarge / Cell-cultivated chicken is made in the pictured tanks at the Eat Just office on July 27, 2023, in Alameda, Calif. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers, and meatpackers in each state.
State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits.
Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane—a potent greenhouse gas that’s roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions.
Enlarge / The Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024. (credit: Getty | Andi Rice)
Alabama lawmakers on Wednesday hastily passed a bill to provide some civil and criminal immunity to patients and health care providers using in vitro fertilization. The bill, signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey within the hour of its passing, comes into play in the event that embryos—which were recently ruled to be "children" by the state's Supreme Court—are damaged or destroyed, a standard and common occurrence in fertility treatment.
The new protections are intended to restore IVF treatment in Alabama after the state Supreme Court's ruling last month led at least three major IVF providers and one embryo shipping company to suddenly halt aspects of their work in fear of liability for wrongful death lawsuits. People going through the arduous and costly process of IVF were then abruptly denied the very time-sensitive treatments needed to try to grow their families. The ruling drew outcry from around the state and across the nation.
IVF is a type of assisted reproductive technology that involves fertilizing painstakingly harvested eggs with sperm in a lab setting, allowing the fertilized eggs to develop into embryos, and then either transferring a limited number of them into a uterus at a key time in hopes of implantation or freezing them for later use. Not all fertilized eggs develop into viable embryos, and any embryos that are unviable or unneeded are routinely discarded.
Enlarge / Close-up of the 11th-century Verona astrolabe showing Hebrew (top left) and Arabic inscriptions. (credit: Federica Gigante)
Cambridge University historian Federica Gigante is an expert on Islamic astrolabes. So naturally she was intrigued when the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona, Italy, uploaded an image of just such an astrolabe to its website. The museum thought it might be a fake, but when Gigante visited to see the astrolabe firsthand, she realized it was not only an authentic 11th-century instrument—one of the oldest yet discovered—it had engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew.
“This isn’t just an incredibly rare object. It’s a powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews, and Christians over hundreds of years,” Gigante said. “The Verona astrolabe underwent many modifications, additions, and adaptations as it changed hands. At least three separate users felt the need to add translations and corrections to this object, two using Hebrew and one using a Western language.” She described her findings in a new paper published in the journal Nuncius.
As previously reported, astrolabes are actually very ancient instruments—possibly dating as far back as the second century BCE—for determining the time and position of the stars in the sky by measuring a celestial body's altitude above the horizon. Before the emergence of the sextant, astrolabes were mostly used for astronomical and astrological studies, although they also proved useful for navigation on land, as well as for tracking the seasons, tide tables, and time of day. The latter was especially useful for religious functions, such as tracking daily Islamic prayer times, the direction of Mecca, or the feast of Ramadan, among others.
Enlarge / An electron micrograph of norovirus. (credit: Getty| BSIP)
Officials in Alabama have shut down an elementary school for the rest of the week and are conducting a deep clean after 773 of the school's 974 students were absent Wednesday amid an explosive outbreak of gastrointestinal illness.
Local media reported that only 29 students were absent from Fairhope West Elementary School on Tuesday. However, the situation escalated quickly on Wednesday as word spread of a stomach bug going around the Gulf Coast school. A spokesperson for the county school district told AL.com that 773 students and 50 staff were absent Wednesday. It's unclear how many of the absences were due to sickness or precaution.
Health officials are now investigating the cause of the gastrointestinal outbreak, collecting specimens for testing. So far, officials are working under the assumption that it is norovirus, a highly infectious gastrointestinal bug that can survive hand sanitizer and transmit easily from surfaces, food, and water. The symptoms of the unidentified illness align with norovirus: vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and nausea.
Enlarge / Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: studio photograph closeup of a chameleon over a black background. (credit: Stability AI)
On Thursday, Stability AI announced Stable Diffusion 3, an open-weights next-generation image-synthesis model. It follows its predecessors by reportedly generating detailed, multi-subject images with improved quality and accuracy in text generation. The brief announcement was not accompanied by a public demo, but Stability is opening up a waitlist today for those who would like to try it.
Stability says that its Stable Diffusion 3 family of models (which takes text descriptions called "prompts" and turns them into matching images) range in size from 800 million to 8 billion parameters. The size range accommodates allowing different versions of the model to run locally on a variety of devices—from smartphones to servers. Parameter size roughly corresponds to model capability in terms of how much detail it can generate. Larger models also require more VRAM on GPU accelerators to run.
Since 2022, we've seen Stability launch a progression of AI image-generation models: Stable Diffusion 1.4, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, XL, XL Turbo, and now 3. Stability has made a name for itself as providing a more open alternative to proprietary image-synthesis models like OpenAI's DALL-E 3, though not without controversy due to the use of copyrighted training data, bias, and the potential for abuse. (This has led to lawsuits that are unresolved.) Stable Diffusion models have been open-weights and source-available, which means the models can be run locally and fine-tuned to change their outputs.
Enlarge / Nitrogen tanks holding tens of thousands of frozen embryos and eggs sit in the embryology lab at New Hope Fertility Center in New York City on December 20, 2017. (credit: Getty | Carolyn Van Houten)
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) health system is halting in vitro fertilization treatment in the wake of a ruling by the state's Supreme Court on Friday that deemed frozen embryos to be "children." The ruling opens up anyone who destroys embryos to liability in a wrongful death lawsuit, according to multiple media reports.
The announcement—the first facility to report halting IVF services—is the much-feared outcome of Friday's ruling, which was widely decried by reproductive health advocates.
"We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments," UAB said a statement to media. The statement noted that egg retrieval would continue but that egg fertilization and embryo development are now paused.
On Wednesday, Google announced a new family of AI language models called Gemma, which are free, open-weights models built on technology similar to the more powerful but closed Gemini models. Unlike Gemini, Gemma models can run locally on a desktop or laptop computer. It's Google's first significant open large language model (LLM) release since OpenAI's ChatGPT started a frenzy for AI chatbots in 2022.
Gemma models come in two sizes: Gemma 2B (2 billion parameters) and Gemma 7B (7 billion parameters), each available in pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. In AI, parameters are values in a neural network that determine AI model behavior, and weights are a subset of these parameters stored in a file.
Developed by Google DeepMind and other Google AI teams, Gemma pulls from techniques learned during the development of Gemini, which is the family name for Google's most capable (public-facing) commercial LLMs, including the ones that power its Gemini AI assistant. Google says the name comes from the Latin gemma, which means "precious stone."
Enlarge / January 17, 2024, Berlin: In the cell laboratory at the Fertility Center Berlin, an electron microscope is used to fertilize an egg cell. (credit: Getty | Jens Kalaene)
The Alabama Supreme Court on Friday ruled that frozen embryos are "children," entitled to full personhood rights, and anyone who destroys them could be liable in a wrongful death case.
The first-of-its-kind ruling throws into question the future use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) involving in vitro fertilization for patients in Alabama—and beyond. For this technology, people who want children but face challenges to conceiving can create embryos in clinical settings, which may or may not go on to be implanted in a uterus.
In the Alabama case, a hospital patient wandered through an unlocked door, removed frozen, preserved embryos from subzero storage and, suffering an ice burn, dropped the embryos, destroying them. Affected IVF patients filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the IVF clinic under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The case was initially dismissed in a lower court, which ruled the embryos did not meet the definition of a child. But the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that "it applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation." In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.
Enlarge / This artist's illustration released by Astroscale shows the ADRAS-J spacecraft (left) approaching the defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket. (credit: Astroscale)
Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, is preparing a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space.
This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit Sunday by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm's reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).
These maneuvers are complex, but they're nothing new for spacecraft visiting the International Space Station. Military satellites from the United States, Russia, and China also have capabilities for rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), but as far as we know, these spacecraft have only maneuvered in ultra-close range around so-called "cooperative" objects designed to receive them.
Enlarge / All shall tremble before your fully functional forward and reverse lookups! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Here's a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we'll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.
If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you're in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.
(Hi, Lee.)
Enlarge / An artist's concept of the Starlab space station. (credit: Starlab LLC)
The Starlab commercial space station will launch on SpaceX's Starship rocket, officials said this week.
Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028.
"SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship."
Over the last few decades, research has grown ever more international. Big projects, like major astronomical observatories, genome sequencing, and particle physics, are all based on large teams of researchers spread across multiple institutions. And, because of the technology that makes remote work possible, even small collaborations that cross countries or continents have become increasingly commonplace.
In theory, this should make it easier for researchers to build teams that have the right talents to bring a scientific project to completion. But is it working out that way? Some recent studies have indicated that the research we produce may be getting increasingly derivative. And a study released today ties that directly to the growth in what it calls "remote collaboration."
So, is science-by-Zoom at fault? While it's a possibility worth exploring, it's difficult to separate cause and effect at this point.
Enlarge / Screen capture from a demo video of an AI-generated unauthorized David Attenborough voice narrating a developer's video feed. (credit: Charlie Holtz)
On Wednesday, Replicate developer Charlie Holtz combined GPT-4 Vision (commonly called GPT-4V) and ElevenLabs voice cloning technology to create an unauthorized AI version of the famous naturalist David Attenborough narrating Holtz's every move on camera. As of Thursday afternoon, the X post describing the stunt had garnered over 21,000 likes.
"Here we have a remarkable specimen of Homo sapiens distinguished by his silver circular spectacles and a mane of tousled curly locks," the false Attenborough says in the demo as Holtz looks on with a grin. "He's wearing what appears to be a blue fabric covering, which can only be assumed to be part of his mating display."
"Look closely at the subtle arch of his eyebrow," it continues, as if narrating a BBC wildlife documentary. "It's as if he's in the midst of an intricate ritual of curiosity or skepticism. The backdrop suggests a sheltered habitat, possibly a communal feeding area or watering hole."
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Tuesday, YouTube announced it will soon implement stricter measures on realistic AI-generated content hosted by the service. "We’ll require creators to disclose when they've created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools," the company wrote in a statement. The changes will roll out over the coming months and into next year.
The move by YouTube comes as part of a series of efforts by the platform to address challenges posed by generative AI in content creation, including deepfakes, voice cloning, and disinformation. When creators upload content, YouTube will provide new options to indicate if the content includes realistic AI-generated or AI-altered material. "For example, this could be an AI-generated video that realistically depicts an event that never happened, or content showing someone saying or doing something they didn't actually do," YouTube writes.
In the detailed announcement, Jennifer Flannery O'Connor and Emily Moxley, vice presidents of product management at YouTube, explained that the policy update aims to maintain a positive ecosystem in the face of generative AI. "We believe it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a healthy ecosystem of information on YouTube," they write. "We have long-standing policies that prohibit technically manipulated content that misleads viewers ... However, AI’s powerful new forms of storytelling can also be used to generate content that has the potential to mislead viewers—particularly if they’re unaware that the video has been altered or is synthetically created."
Enlarge / People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on June 23, 2022, in New York City. Sunglasses would have been a good idea for this year's ApeFest. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)
Lamps emitting ultraviolet light in the corner of a Bored Ape NFT event in Hong Kong last Saturday are the likely cause of severe eye and skin injuries among attendees, according to Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and host of the event.
The injuries reportedly occurred during "ApeFest," a three-day annual meet-up of people who own Bored Ape NFTs—which sell for tens of thousands of dollars and, amid the 2021 NFT craze, saw highly inflated prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars. However regretful, people who own the cryptocurrency-backed digital images of nonchalant cartoon primates are automatic members of the BAYC. This year, their annual club event ran from November 3–5 and promised "mayhem" and "One big night full of surprises."
Soon after an ApeFest party Saturday night, some attendees reported severe pain and burning sensations in their eyes, as well as vision problems and skin irritation, according to Yuga Labs. Doctors and others on the Internet quickly speculated that the cause was UV exposure and photokeratitis (aka snow blindness, arc eye, or welder's flash), which is akin to a sunburn on the cornea (the clear tissue covering the front of your eye) due to exposure to UV light. The New York Times reported as of Tuesday that the number of attendees injured was over 20.
Enlarge / The Voyager 2 spacecraft before its launch in 1977. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Forty-six years in deep space have taken their toll on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. Their antiquated computers sometimes do puzzling things, their thrusters are wearing out, and their fuel lines are becoming clogged. Around half of their science instruments no longer return data, and their power levels are declining.
Still, the lean team of engineers and scientists working on the Voyager program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking steps to eke out every bit of life from the only two spacecraft flying in interstellar space, the vast volume of dilute gas outside the influence of the Sun's solar wind.
"These are measures that we're trying to take to extend the life of the mission," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars.
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