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10 Best Wireless Earbuds for Working Out (2023)
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:00:00 +0000
Rock your inner jock with a pair of sturdy, sweatproof, and tangle-proof headphones. Here are our favorites.
Match ID: 0 Score: 25.00 source: www.wired.com age: 4 days
qualifiers: 25.00 fitness

The truth about Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet? It is as strange as you’d expect | Arwa Mahdawi
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 14:50:24 GMT

The actor and influencer has been called out for glorifying restricted eating. What is it with the rich and their weird ideas about wellness?

This time there aren’t any vaginas involved. I say that because half the time Gwyneth Paltrow is in the news it’s vagina-related. On this occasion, however, it’s because a lot of people are seemingly annoyed that she – a woman who has amassed a fortune doling out strange and often suspect health advice via her lifestyle brand Goop – follows that advice herself.

The trouble started when Paltrow appeared on an episode of Dr Will Cole’s The Art of Being Well podcast and shared what she eats in a typical day. Which, no points for guessing, isn’t much. She doesn’t eat until about noon which, in normal-person-speak, means she skips breakfast. In wellness land it means she’s doing “a nice intermittent fast”. Then she has something that won’t spike her blood pressure, such as coffee. She often follows that up with “bone broth”. An hour of “movement” ensues, wrapped up with some vigorous dry brushing and the sauna. Finally: an early dinner. “I try to eat according to paleo,” she says. “So lots of vegetables. It’s really important for me to support my detox.” I’m sorry, detox? You can’t detox if there was never any tox in the first place.

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Match ID: 1 Score: 20.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 20.00 dieting

Electric air taxis being developed for Paris Olympics in 2024
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:57:13 GMT

Aircraft will take off and land vertically, and carry a single passenger between transport hubs, says capital’s airports operator

Athletes are getting in shape for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and so is the world’s first electric air taxi network.

“We are going to make it happen,” Solène Le Bris of Paris airports operator Groupe ADP told an industry audience at Amsterdam Drone Week. “We are trying to launch the first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] pre-commercial service in the world: that’s our ambition.”

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Match ID: 2 Score: 15.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 15.00 athlete

Supreme Court asked to allow West Virginia’s transgender athlete ban
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:00:32 EDT
The case involves a 12-year-old transgender girl who is taking puberty blockers and wants to stay on the girls’ track and cross-country teams at her middle school.
Match ID: 3 Score: 15.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 15.00 athlete

Top 10 Best PLR(Private Label Rights) Websites | Which One You Should Join in 2022?
Sat, 26 Feb 2022 13:36:00 +0000
PLR


Content creation is one of the biggest struggles for many marketers and business owners. It often requires both time and financial resources, especially if you plan to hire a writer.
Today, we have a fantastic opportunity to use other people's products by purchasing Private Label Rights.

To find a good PLR website, first, determine the type of products you want to acquire. One way to do this is to choose among membership sites or PLR product stores. Following are 10 great sites that offer products in both categories.

What are PLR websites?

Private Label Rights (PLR) products are digital products that can be in the form of an ebook, software, online course videos, value-packed articles, etc. You can use these products with some adjustments to sell as your own under your own brand and keep all the money and profit yourself without wasting your time on product creation.
The truth is that locating the best website for PLR materials can be a time-consuming and expensive exercise. That’s why we have researched, analyzed, and ranked the best 10 websites:

1. PLR.me

 PLR.me is of the best places to get PLR content in 2021-2022. It offers a content marketing system that comes with courses, brandable tools, and more. It is the most trusted PLR website, among other PLR sites. The PLR.me platform features smart digital caching PLR tools for health and wellness professionals. The PLR.me platform, which was built on advanced caching technology, has been well-received by big brands such as Toronto Sun and Entrepreneur. The best thing about this website is its content marketing automation tools.

Pricing

  • Pay-as-you-go Plan – $22
  • 100 Monthly Plan – $99/month
  • 400 Annual Plan – $379/year
  • 800 Annual Plan – $579/year
  • 2500 Annual Plan – $990/year

Pros

  • Access over 15,940+ ready-to-use PLR coaching resources.
  • Content marketing and sliding tools are provided by the site.
  • You can create courses, products, webinars, emails, and nearly anything else you can dream of.
  • You can cancel your subscription anytime.

Cons

  • Compared to other top PLR sites, this one is a bit more expensive.

2. InDigitalWorks

InDigitalWorks is a leading private label rights membership website established in 2008. As of now, it has more than 100,000 members from around the globe have joined the platform. The site offers thousands of ready-to-be-sold digital products for online businesses in every single niche possible. InDigitalWorks features hundreds of electronic books, software applications, templates, graphics, videos that you can sell right away.

Pricing:

  • 3 Months Plan – $39
  • 1 Year Plan – $69
  • Lifetime Plan – $79

Pros

  • IndigitalWorks promotes new authors by providing them with 200 free products for download.
  • Largest and most reputable private label rights membership site.
  •  20000+ digital products
  • 137 training videos provided by experts to help beginners set up and grow their online presence for free.
  • 10 GB of web hosting will be available on a reliable server.

Cons

  • Fewer people are experiencing the frustration of not getting the help they need.

3. BuyQualityPLR

BuyQualityPLR’s website is a Top PLR of 2021-2022! It's a source for major Internet Marketing Products and Resources. Whether you’re an Affiliate Marketer, Product Creator, Course Seller,  BuyQualityPLR can assist you in the right direction. You will find several eBooks and digital products related to the Health and Fitness niche, along with a series of Security-based products. If you search for digital products, Resell Rights Products, Private Label Rights Products, or Internet Marketing Products, BuyQualityPLR is among the best websites for your needs.

Pricing

  • Free PLR articles packs, ebooks, and other digital products are available
  • Price ranges from 3.99$ to 99.9$

Pros

  • Everything on this site is written by professionals
  • The quick download features available
  • Doesn't provide membership.
  • Offers thousand of PLR content in many niches
  • Valuable courses available

Cons

  • You can't buy all content because it doesn't provide membership

4. IDPLR

The IDPLR website has helped thousands of internet marketers since 2008. This website follows a membership approach and allows you to gain access to thousands of PLR products in different niches. The best thing about this site is the quality of the products, which is extremely impressive.
This is the best PLR website of 2021-2022, offering over 200k+ high-quality articles. It also gives you graphics, templates, ebooks, and audio.

Pricing

  • 3 Months ACCESS: $39
  • 1 YEAR ACCESS: $69
  • LIFETIME ACCESS: $79

Pros

  • You will have access to over 12,590 PLR products.
  • You will get access to training tutorials and Courses in a Gold membership.
  • 10 GB of web hosting will be available on a reliable server.
  • You will receive 3D eCover Software
  • It offers an unlimited download limit
  • Most important, you will get a 30 day money-back guarantee

Cons:

  • A few products are available for free membership.

5. PLRMines

PLRmines is a leading digital product library for private label rights products. The site provides useful information on products that you can use to grow your business, as well as licenses for reselling the content. You can either purchase a membership or get access through a free trial, and you can find unlimited high-quality resources via the site's paid or free membership. Overall, the site is an excellent resource for finding outstanding private label rights content.

Pricing

  • Lifetime membership:  $97

Pros

  • 4000+ ebooks from top categories
  • Members have access to more than 660 instructional videos covering all kinds of topics in a membership area.
  • You will receive outstanding graphics that are ready to use.
  • They also offer a variety of helpful resources and tools, such as PLR blogs, WordPress themes, and plugins

Cons

  • The free membership won't give you much value.

6. Super-Resell

Super-Resell is another remarkable provider of PLR material. The platform was established in 2009 and offers valuable PLR content to users. Currently, the platform offers standard lifetime memberships and monthly plans at an affordable price. Interested users can purchase up to 10,000 products with digital rights or rights of re-sale. Super-Resell offers a wide range of products such as readymade websites, article packs, videos, ebooks, software, templates, and graphics, etc.

Pricing

  • 6 Months Membership: $49.90
  • Lifetime membership: $129

Pros

  • It offers you products that come with sales pages and those without sales pages.
  •  You'll find thousands of digital products that will help your business grow.
  • Daily News update

Cons

  • The company has set up an automatic renewal system. This can result in costs for you even though you are not using the service.

7. Unstoppable PLR

UnStoppablePLR was launched in 2006 by Aurelius Tjin, an internet marketer. Over the last 15 years, UnStoppablePLR has provided massive value to users by offering high-quality PLR content. The site is one of the best PLR sites because of its affordability and flexibility.

Pricing

  • Regular Price: $29/Month

Pros

  • You’ll get 30 PLR articles in various niches for free.
  • 100% money-back guarantee.
  • Members get access to community
  • It gives you access to professionally designed graphics and much more.

Cons

  • People often complain that not enough PLR products are released each month. 

8. Resell Rights Weekly

Resell Rights Weekly, a private label rights (PLR) website, provides exceptional PLR content. It is among the top free PLR websites that provide free membership. You will get 728+ PLR products completely free and new products every single week. The Resell Rights Weekly gives you free instant access to all products and downloads the ones you require.

Pricing

  • Gold Membership: $19.95/Month

Pros

  • Lots of products available free of cost
  • Free access to the  members forum

Cons

  • The prices for the products at this PLR site are very low quality compared to other websites that sell the same items.

9. MasterResellRights

MasterResellRights was established in 2006, and it has helped many successful entrepreneurs. Once you join MasterResellRights, you will get access to more than 10,000 products and services from other members. It is one of the top PLR sites that provide high-quality PLR products to members across the globe. You will be able to access a lot of other membership privileges at no extra price. The website also provides PLR, MRR, and RR license products.

Pricing

One Month Membership: $19.97
Three Month Membership: $47.00

Pros

Access more than 10,000 high-quality,  PLR articles in different niches.
Get daily fresh new updates
Users get 8 GB of hosting space
You can pay using PayPal

Cons

Only members have access to the features of this site.

10. BigProductStore 

BigProductStore is a popular private label rights website that offers tens of thousands of digital products. These include software, videos, video courses, eBooks, and many others that you can resell, use as you want, or sell and keep 100% of the profit.
The PLR website updates its product list daily. It currently offers over 10,000 products.
The site offers original content for almost every niche and when you register as a member, you can access the exclusive products section where you can download a variety of high-quality, unique, and exclusive products.

Pricing

  • Monthly Plan: $19.90/Month 27% off
  • One-Time-Payment: $98.50  50% off
  • Monthly Ultimate: $29.90/Month 36% off
  • One-Time-Payment Ultimate: $198.50 50% off

Pros

  • You can use PLR products to generate profits, give them as bonuses for your affiliate promotion campaign, or rebrand them and create new unique products.
  • Lifetime memberships for PLR products can save you money if you’re looking for a long-term solution to bulk goods.
  • The website is updated regularly with fresh, quality content.

Cons

  • Product descriptions may not provide much detail, so it can be difficult to know just what you’re downloading.
  • Some product categories such as WP Themes and articles are outdated. 

Match ID: 4 Score: 5.00 source: techncruncher.blogspot.com age: 388 days
qualifiers: 5.00 fitness

Filter efficiency 99.345 (5 matches/763 results)


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The 43 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 19:00:00 +0000
From You to Wednesday, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.
Match ID: 0 Score: 25.00 source: www.wired.com age: 4 days
qualifiers: 25.00 (best|good|great) (show|movie)

“John Wick: Chapter 4,” Reviewed: A Slog with a Sensational Ending
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:36:15 +0000
Keanu Reeves and the viewer alike have sequel fatigue, but the new film’s finale is worth waiting for.
Match ID: 1 Score: 20.00 source: www.newyorker.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 20.00 movie

How an Electrical Engineer Solved Australia’s Most Famous Cold Case
Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:00:02 +0000


Dead, and in a jacket and tie. That’s how he was on 1 December 1948, when two men found him slumped against a retaining wall on the beach at Somerton, a suburb of Adelaide, Australia.

Photo of a person in a shirt and tie. The Somerton Man’s body was found on a beach in 1948. Nobody came forward to identify him. JAMES DURHAM

Police distributed a photograph, but no one came forward to claim the body. Eyewitnesses reported having seen the man, whom the newspapers dubbed the Somerton Man and who appeared to be in his early 40s, lying on the beach earlier, perhaps at one point moving his arm, and they had concluded that he was drunk. The place of death led the police to treat the case as a suicide, despite the apparent lack of a suicide note. The presence of blood in the stomach, a common consequence of poisoning, was noted at the autopsy. Several chemical assays failed to identify any poison; granted, the methods of the day were not up to the task.

Photo of a building from the outside The place on Somerton Beach where the man was found dead is marked with an X. NEWS CORP./ALAMY

Photo of men around clothing Policemen recovered the man’s suitcase from the Adelaide city railway station and examined its contents. NEWS CORP./ALAMY

Image of fingerprints. The man’s fingerprints, taken after autopsy, were sent to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which found no match. DEREK ABBOTT

There was speculation of foul play. Perhaps the man was a spy who had come in from the cold; 1948 was the year after the Cold War got its name. This line of thought was strengthened, a few months later, by codelike writings in a book that came to be associated with the case.

These speculations aside, the idea that a person could simply die in plain view and without friends or family was shocking. This was a man with an athletic build, wearing a nice suit, and showing no signs of having suffered violence. The problem nagged many people over the years, and eventually it took hold of me. In the late 2000s, I began working on the Somerton Man mystery, devoting perhaps 10 hours a week to the research over the course of about 15 years.

Codes and Cyphers

Throughout my career, I have always been interested in cracking mysteries. My students and I used computational linguistics to identify which of the three authors of The Federalist Papers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—was responsible for any given essay. We tried using the same method to confirm authorship of Biblical passages. More recently, we’ve been throwing some natural­-language processing techniques into an effort to decode the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th-century document written in an unknown language and an unknown script. These other projects yield to one or another key method of inquiry. The Somerton Man problem posed a broader challenge.


Image of a newsprint


Photo of people standing around a coffin.


My one great advantage has been my access to students and to scientific instruments at the University of Adelaide, where I am a professor of electrical and electronic engineering. In 2009, I established a working group at the university’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.


A image of a piece of paper that says, "Tamam Shud."


One question surrounding the Somerton Man had already been solved by sleuths of a more literary bent. In 1949, a pathologist had found a bit of paper concealed in one of the dead man’s pockets, and on it were printed the words Tamám Shud, the Persian for “finished.” The phrase appears at the end of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a poem that remains popular to this day.

The police asked the public for copies of the book in which the final page had been torn out. A man found such a book in his car, where apparently it had been thrown in through an open window. The book proved a match.


An image of book pages with a piece ripped out.


The back cover of the book also included scribbled letters, which were at first thought to constitute an encrypted message. But statistical tests carried out by my team showed that it was more likely a string of the initial letters of words. Through computational techniques, we eliminated all of the cryptographic codes known in the 1940s, leaving as a remaining possibility a one-time pad, in which each letter is based on a secret source text. We ransacked the poem itself and other texts, including the Bible and the Talmud, but we never identified a plausible source text. It could have been a pedestrian aide-mémoire—to list the names of horses in an upcoming race, for example. Moreover, our research indicates that it doesn’t have the structural sophistication of a code. The Persian phrase could have been the man’s farewell to the world: his suicide note.


An image of a page with letters on it.


Also scribbled on the back cover was a telephone number that led to one Jo Thomson, a woman who lived merely a five-minute walk from where the Somerton Man had been found. Interviewers then and decades later reported that she had seemed evasive; after her death, some of her relatives and friends said they speculated that she must have known the dead man. I discovered a possible clue: Thomson’s son was missing his lateral incisors, the two teeth that normally flank the central incisors. This condition, found in a very small percentage of the population, is often congenital; oddly, the Somerton Man had it, too. Were they related?

And yet the attempt to link Thomson to the body petered out. Early in the investigation, she told the police that she had given a copy of the Rubáiyát to a lieutenant in the Australian Army whom she had known during the war, and indeed, that man turned out to own a copy. But Thomson hadn’t seen him since 1945, he was very much alive, and the last page of his copy was still intact. A trail to nowhere, one of many that were to follow.


A plaster cast of a person


Upclose images of hair.


DNA from the Death Mask

We engineers in the 21st century had several other items to examine. First was a plaster death mask that had been made six months after the man died, during which time the face had flattened. We tried several methods to reconstruct its original appearance: In 2013 we commissioned a picture by Greg O’Leary, a professional portrait artist. Then, in 2020, we approached Daniel Voshart, who designs graphics for Star Trek movies. He used a suite of professional AI tools to create a lifelike reconstruction of the Somerton Man. Later, we obtained another reconstruction by Michael Streed, a U.S. police sketch artist. We published these images, together with many isolated facts about the body, the teeth, and the clothing, in the hope of garnering insights from the public. No luck.

As the death mask had been molded directly off the Somerton Man’s head, neck, and upper body, some of the man’s hair was embedded in the plaster of ­Paris—a potential DNA gold mine. At the University of ­Adelaide, I had the assistance of a hair forensics expert, Janette Edson. In 2012, with the permission of the police, Janette used a magnifying glass to find where several hairs came together in a cluster. She was then able to pull out single strands without breaking them or damaging the plaster matrix. She thus secured the soft, spongy hair roots as well as several lengths of hair shaft. The received wisdom of forensic science at the time held that the hair shaft would be useless for DNA analysis without the hair root.


A photo of a woman next to a plaster cast of a man.


A woman in front of a device.


Janette performed our first DNA analysis in 2015 and, from the hair root, was able to place the sample within a maternal genetic lineage, or haplotype, known as “H,” which is widely spread around Europe. (Such maternally inherited DNA comes not from the nucleus of a cell but from the mitochondria.) The test therefore told us little we hadn’t already known. The concentration of DNA was far too low for the technology of the time to piece together the sequencing we needed.

Fortunately, sequencing tools continued to improve. In 2018, Guanchen Li and Jeremy Austin, also at the University of Adelaide, obtained the entire mitochondrial genome from hair-root material and narrowed down the maternal haplotype to H4a1a1a.


\u200bThis closeup view of the mask shows embedded hairs standing on end.


An image of magnified hair.


However, to identify Somerton Man using DNA databases, we needed to go to autosomal DNA—the kind that is inherited from both parents. There are more than 20 such databases, 23andMe and Ancestry being the largest. These databases require sequences of from 500,000 to 2,000,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”). The concentration levels of autosomes in the human cell tend to be much lower than those of the mitochondria, and so Li and Austin were able to obtain only 50,000 SNPs, of which 16,000 were usable. This was a breakthrough, but it still wasn’t good enough to work on a database.

Trying a Desperate Move

In 2022, at the suggestion of Colleen Fitzpatrick, a former NASA employee who had trained as a nuclear physicist but then became a forensic genetics expert, I sent a hair sample to Astrea Forensics, a DNA lab in the United States. This was our best hair-root sample, one that I had nervously guarded for 10 years. The result from Astrea came back—and it was a big flop.

Seemingly out of options, we tried a desperate move. We asked Astrea to analyze a 5-centimeter-long shaft of hair that had no root at all. Bang! The company retrieved 2 million SNPs. The identity of the Somerton Man was now within our reach.

So why did the rootless shaft work in our case?


The DNA analysis that police use for standard crime-solving relies on only 20 to 25 short tandem repeats (STRs) of DNA. That’s fine for police, who mostly do one-to-one matches to determine whether the DNA recovered at a crime scene matches a suspect’s DNA.

But finding distant cousins of the Somerton Man on genealogical databases constitutes a one-to-many search, and for that you typically need around 500,000 markers. For these genealogical searches, SNPs are used because they contain information on ethnicity and ancestry generally. Note that SNPs have around 50 to 150 base pairs of nucleotides, whereas typical STRs tend to be longer, containing 80 to 450 base pairs. The hair shaft contains DNA that is mostly fragmented, so it’s of little use when you’re seeking longer STR segments but it’s a great source of SNPs. So this is why crime forensics traditionally focused on the root and ignored the shaft, although this practice is now changing very slowly.

Another reason the shaft was such a trove of DNA is that keratin, its principal component, is a very tough protein, and it had protected the DNA fragments lodged within it. The 74-year-old soft spongy hair root, on the other hand, had not protected the DNA to the same extent. We set a world record for obtaining a human identification, using forensic genealogy, from the oldest piece of hair shaft. Several police departments in the United States now use hair shafts to retrieve DNA, as I am sure many will start to do in other countries, following our example.


An image of a family tree.


Libraries of SNPs can be used to untangle the branching lines of descent in a family tree. We uploaded our 2 million SNPs to GEDmatch Pro, an online genealogical database located in Lake Worth, Fla. (and recently acquired by Qiagen, a biotech company based in the Netherlands). The closest match was a rather distant relative based in Victoria, Australia. Together with Colleen Fitzpatrick, I built out a family tree containing more than 4,000 people. On that tree we found a Charles Webb, son of a baker, born in 1905 in Melbourne, with no date of death recorded.

Charles never had children of his own, but he had five siblings, and I was able to locate some of their living descendants. Their DNA was a dead match. I also found a descendant of one of his maternal aunts, who agreed to undergo a test. When a positive result came through on 22 July 2022, we had all the evidence we needed. This was our champagne moment.

Reconstructing Somerton Man’s Life

In late 2021, police in South Australia ordered an exhumation of the Somerton Man’s body for a thorough analysis of its DNA. At the time we prepared this article, they had not yet confirmed our result, but they did announce that they were “cautiously optimistic” about it.

All at once, we were able to fill in a lot of blank spaces. Webb was born on 16 November 1905, in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, and educated at a technical college, now Swinburne University of Technology. He later worked as an electrical technician at a factory that made electric hand drills. Our DNA tests confirmed he was not related to Thomson’s son, despite the coincidence of their missing lateral incisors.


Photo of a family with names over the top.


We discovered that Webb had married a woman named Dorothy Robinson in 1941 and had separated from her in 1947. She filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, and the divorce lawyers visited his former place of work, confirming that he had quit around 1947 or 1948. But they could not determine what happened to him after that. The divorce finally came through in 1952; in those days, divorces in Australia were granted only five years after separation.

At the time of Webb’s death his family had become quite fragmented. His parents were dead, a brother and a nephew had died in the war, and his eldest brother was ill. One of his sisters died in 1955 and left him money in her will, mistakenly thinking he was still alive and living in another state. The lawyers administering the will were unable to locate Charles.


A image of two spectrographs.


We got more than DNA from the hair: We also vaporized a strand of hair by scanning a laser along its length, a technique known as laser ablation. By performing mass spectrometry on the vapor, we were able to track Webb’s varying exposure to lead. A month before Webb’s death, his lead level was high, perhaps because he had been working with the metal, maybe soldering with it. Over the next month’s worth of hair growth, the lead concentration declined; it reached its lowest level at his death. This might be a sign that he had moved.

With a trove of photographs from family albums and other sources, we were able to compare the face of the young Webb with the artists’ reconstructions we had commissioned in 2013 and 2021 and the AI reconstruction we had commissioned in 2020. Interestingly, the AI reconstruction had best captured his likeness.


An image of a smiling man.


A group photograph, taken in 1921, of the Swinburne College football team, included a young Webb. Clues found in newspapers show that he continued to participate in various sports, which would explain the athletic condition of his body.

An Engineering Approach Paid Off

What’s interesting about solving such a case is how it relies on concepts that may seem counterintuitive to forensic biologists but are quite straightforward to an electronics engineer. For example, when dealing with a standard crime scene that uses only two dozen STR markers, one observes very strict protocols to ensure the integrity of the full set of STRs. When dealing with a case with 2 million SNPs, by contrast, things are more relaxed. Many of the old-school STR protocols don’t apply when you have access to a lot of information. Many SNPs can drop out, some can even be “noise,” the signal may not be clean—and yet you can still crack the case!

Engineers understand this concept well. It’s what we call graceful degradation—when, say, a few flipped bits on a digital video signal are hardly noticed. The same is true for a large SNP file.

And so, when Astrea retrieved the 2 million SNPs, the company didn’t rely on the traditional framework for DNA-sequencing reads. It used a completely different mathematical framework, called imputation. The concept of imputation is not yet fully appreciated by forensics experts who have a biological background. However, for an electronics engineer, the concept is similar to error correction: We infer and “impute” bits of information that have dropped out of a received digital signal. Such an approach is not possible with a few STRs, but when handling over a million SNPs, it’s a different ball game.

Much of the work on identifying Charles Webb from his genealogy had to be done manually because there are simply no automated tools for the task. As an electronics engineer, I now see possible ways to make tools that would speed up the process. One such tool my team has been working on, together with Colleen Fitzpatrick, is software that can input an entire family tree and represent all of the birth locations as colored dots on Google Earth. This helps to visualize geolocation when dealing with a large and complex family.

The Somerton Man case still has its mysteries. We cannot yet determine where Webb lived in his final weeks or what he was doing. Although the literary clue he left in his pocket was probably an elliptical suicide note, we cannot confirm the exact cause of death. There is still room for research; there is much we do not know.

This article appears in the April 2023 print issue as “Finding Somerton Man.”




Match ID: 2 Score: 20.00 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 1 day
qualifiers: 20.00 movie

Podcasts to films: five enriching ways social workers continue their professional development
Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:21:40 GMT

Social work staff explain how continuing professional development increases their understanding and helps protect the people they work with

Being a social worker is not just about helping people, it is also a commitment to lifelong learning. Every day brings challenges and real-life lessons but those working in social care must also complete two pieces of continuing professional development (CPD) annually to maintain their registered status.

CPD does not have to take place in a classroom as social workers are able to learn through a range of experiences in their working – and personal – lives. Conventional training and supervision is an option, but the regulator, Social Work England, also allows CPD from case work, professional feedback, mentoring, and personal lived experience. It particularly encourages CPD that is very personal to the practitioner. As long as it is relevant to a person’s role, and they can reflect on the learning and demonstrate how it has had a positive influence on their work, CPD can take some unexpected forms.

Social media and podcasts. Dunmore Chihwehwete, a social care team manager in the London borough of Barnet, finds YouTube a valuable educational resource. He says: “I’ve learned a lot about the interaction between children and adults from watching recorded sessions between respected psychotherapists and their clients, particularly Salvador Minuchin. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks in the car. The truth is you’re always learning, whether it’s watching a Ted Talk or following an academic on Twitter. I also use an app called iTunes U, where universities upload lectures.”

Criticism and praise. Powerful lessons are learned when things go wrong. Anna Ramsey, a service manager for Essex county council’s adult social care department, takes part in a regular online meeting with her team in which good and bad news stories are shared. She says: “Some complaints are hard to hear, but they’re important learning opportunities. We need to ask: ‘How could we have done better?’ We celebrate successes and learn from errors.”

News, events and charitable efforts. A recently qualified social worker in Manchester, Ashiq Khan, gets involved in charities alongside his work and finds these organisations expand his understanding of the causes they champion. He also finds current events can have a big impact on his work. “I attended a vigil in Manchester for Brianna Ghey, the transgender girl killed there recently,” Khan says. “We have a responsibility in our work to challenge heteronormative ways of thinking and I’ve done a work presentation on the topic. It all made me think about our feelings about gender, sexual orientation, and general attitudes constructed over time. One of the most important reasons for undertaking CPD is to ensure the safety of the people we work with. It helps us to reflect and grow personally and as professionals.”

Documentaries, journals, films and novels. In a hectic working week, it can be tricky to find time for extra reading or watching work-related content. But Khan points out that interesting documentaries, as well as films and novels, can open up difficult topics and feed into CPD learning. “I recently watched a movie based on a true story about a woman who had been trafficked, who then ended up running brothels. It touched on areas we see in our work in Manchester and prompted me to do more research, leading me to other related documentaries. Eye-openers are everywhere, whether it’s in books, magazines or television,” says Khan.

Personal experience. Becky Cuming works for Cornwall council’s social services team, supporting five- to 11-year-olds who have experienced trauma. Some of her most valuable learning comes from reflecting on life experiences with colleagues. “In peer supervision, we used family therapist John Burnham’s social GGRRAAACCEEESSS exercise [looking at aspects of personal and social identity which afford people different levels of power and privilege] and we also did questionnaires on our own childhoods to increase our understanding of how the families we work with feel,” Cuming says.

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Match ID: 3 Score: 2.86 source: www.theguardian.com age: 8 days
qualifiers: 2.86 movie

I Fly Opener’s BlackFly eVTOL
Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:00:01 +0000


On a gin-clear December day, I’m sitting under the plexiglass bubble of a radically new kind of aircraft. It’s a little past noon at the Byron Airport in northern California; in the distance, a jagged line of wind turbines atop rolling hills marks the Altamont Pass, blades spinning lazily. Above me, a cloudless blue sky beckons.

The aircraft, called BlackFly, is unlike anything else on the planet. Built by a Palo Alto, Calif., startup called Opener, it’s an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with stubby wings fore and aft of the pilot, each with four motors and propellers. Visually, it’s as though an aerial speedster from a 1930s pulp sci-fi story has sprung from the page.


There are a couple of hundred startups designing or flying eVTOLs. But only a dozen or so are making tiny, technologically sophisticated machines whose primary purpose is to provide exhilarating but safe flying experiences to people after relatively minimal training. And in that group, Opener has jumped out to an early lead, having built dozens of aircraft at its facilities in Palo Alto and trained more than a score of people to fly them.

My own route to the cockpit of a BlackFly was relatively straightforward. I contacted the company’s CEO, Ken Karklin, in September 2022, pitched him on the idea of a story and video, and three months later I was flying one of his aircraft.

Well, sort of flying it. My brief flight was so highly automated that I was more passenger than pilot. Nevertheless, I spent about a day and a half before the flight being trained to fly the machine manually, so that I could take control if anything went wrong. For this training, I wore a virtual-reality headset and sat in a chair that tilted and gyrated to simulate flying maneuvers. To “fly” this simulation I manipulated a joystick that was identical to the one in the cockpit of a BlackFly. Opener’s chief operating officer, Kristina L. Menton, and engineer Wyatt Warner took turns patiently explaining the operations of the vehicle and giving me challenging tasks to complete, such as hovering and performing virtual landings in a vicious crosswind.

The BlackFly is entirely controlled by that joystick, which is equipped with a trigger and also topped by a thumb switch. To take off, I squeeze the trigger while simultaneously pushing forward on the switch. The machine leaps into the air with the sound of a million bees, and with a surge of giddy elation I am climbing skyward.

Much more so than an airplane or helicopter, the BlackFly taps into archetypal human yearnings for flight, the kind represented by magic carpets, the flying cars in “The Jetsons,” and even those Mountain Banshees in the movie “Avatar.” I’ve had several unusual experiences in aircraft, including flying on NASA’s zero-gravity-simulating “Vomit Comet,” and being whisked around in a BlackFly was definitely the most absorbing and delightful. Gazing out over the Altamont Pass from an altitude of about 60 meters, I had a feeling of joyous release—from Earth’s gravity and from earthly troubles.


For technical details about the BlackFly and to learn more about its origin, go here.

The BlackFly is also a likely harbinger of things to come. Most of the startups developing eVTOLs are building vehicles meant to carry several passengers on commercial runs of less than 50 kilometers. Although the plan is for these to be flown by pilots initially, most of the companies anticipate a day when the flights will be completely automated. So specialized aircraft such as the BlackFly—designed to be registered and operated as “ultralight” aircraft under aviation regulations—could provide mountains of invaluable data on highly and fully automated flying and perhaps even help familiarize people with the idea of flying without a pilot. Indeed, during my flight, dozens of sensors gathered gigabytes of data, to add to the large reservoir Opener has already collected during many hundreds of test flights so far.

As of late February 2023, Opener hadn’t yet announced a retail price or an official commercial release date for the aircraft, which has been under development and testing for more than a decade. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news of the company. Long after my flight was over I was still savoring the experience, and hoping for another one.

Special thanks to IEEE.tv for collaborating on production of this video.


Match ID: 4 Score: 2.86 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 14 days
qualifiers: 2.86 movie

NASA’s DART Mission Aims to Save the World
Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:52:53 +0000


Armageddon ruined everything. Armageddon—the 1998 movie, not the mythical battlefield—told the story of an asteroid headed straight for Earth, and a bunch of swaggering roughnecks sent in space shuttles to blow it up with a nuclear weapon.

Armageddon is big and noisy and stupid and shameless, and it’s going to be huge at the box office,” wrote Jay Carr of the Boston Globe.

Carr was right—the film was the year’s second biggest hit (after Titanic)—and ever since, scientists have had to explain, patiently, that cluttering space with radioactive debris may not be the best way to protect ourselves. NASA is now trying a slightly less dramatic approach with a robotic mission called DART—short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. On Monday at 7:14 p.m. EDT, if all goes well, the little spacecraft will crash into an asteroid called Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos is about 160 meters across, and orbits a 780-meter asteroid, 65803 Didymos. NASA TV plans to cover it live.

DART’s end will be violent, but not blockbuster-movie-violent. Music won’t swell and girlfriends back on Earth won’t swoon. Mission managers hope the spacecraft, with a mass of about 600 kilograms, hitting at 22,000 km/h, will nudge the asteroid slightly in its orbit, just enough to prove that it’s technologically possible in case a future asteroid has Earth in its crosshairs.

“Maybe once a century or so, there’ll be an asteroid sizeable enough that we’d like to certainly know, ahead of time, if it was going to impact,” says Lindley Johnson, who has the title of planetary defense officer at NASA.

“If you just take a hair off the orbital velocity, you’ve changed the orbit of the asteroid so that what would have been impact three or four years down the road is now a complete miss.”

So take that, Hollywood! If DART succeeds, it will show there are better fuels to protect Earth than testosterone.

The risk of a comet or asteroid that wipes out civilization is really very small, but large enough that policymakers take it seriously. NASA, ordered by the U.S. Congress in 2005 to scan the inner solar system for hazards, has found nearly 900 so-called NEOs—near-Earth objects—at least a kilometer across, more than 95 percent of all in that size range that probably exist. It has plotted their orbits far into the future, and none of them stand more than a fraction of a percent chance of hitting Earth in this millennium.

An infographic showing the orientation of Didymos,  Dimorphos, DART, and LICIACube. The DART spacecraft should crash into the asteroid Dimorphos and slow it in its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos. The LICIACube cubesat will fly in formation to take images of the impact.Johns Hopkins APL/NASA

But there are smaller NEOs, perhaps 140 meters or more in diameter, too small to end civilization but large enough to cause mass destruction if they hit a populated area. There may be 25,000 that come within 50 million km of Earth’s orbit, and NASA estimates telescopes have only found about 40 percent of them. That’s why scientists want to expand the search for them and have good ways to deal with them if necessary. DART is the first test.

NASA takes pains to say this is a low-risk mission. Didymos and Dimorphos never cross Earth’s orbit, and computer simulations show that no matter where or how hard DART hits, it cannot possibly divert either one enough to put Earth in danger. Scientists want to see if DART can alter Dimorphos’s speed by perhaps a few centimeters per second.

The DART spacecraft, a 1-meter cube with two long solar panels, is elegantly simple, equipped with a telescope called DRACO, hydrazine maneuvering thrusters, a xenon-fueled ion engine and a navigation system called SMART Nav. It was launched by a SpaceX rocket in November. About 4 hours and 90,000 km before the hoped-for impact, SMART Nav will take over control of the spacecraft, using optical images from the telescope. Didymos, the larger object, should be a point of light by then; Dimorphos, the intended target, will probably not appear as more than one pixel until about 50 minutes before impact. DART will send one image per second back to Earth, but the spacecraft is autonomous; signals from the ground, 38 light-seconds away, would be useless for steering as the ship races in.

A golden cubesat with a bright light and lines The DART spacecraft separated from its SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, 55 minutes after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California, 24 November 2021. In this image from the rocket, the spacecraft had not yet unfurled its solar panels.NASA

What’s more, nobody knows the shape or consistency of little Dimorphos. Is it a solid boulder or a loose cluster of rubble? Is it smooth or craggy, round or elongated? “We’re trying to hit the center,” says Evan Smith, the deputy mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is running DART. “We don’t want to overcorrect for some mountain or crater on one side that’s throwing an odd shadow or something.”

So on final approach, DART will cover 800 km without any steering. Thruster firings could blur the last images of Dimorphos’s surface, which scientists want to study. Impact should be imaged from about 50 km away by an Italian-made minisatellite, called LICIACube, which DART released two weeks ago.

“In the minutes following impact, I know everybody is going be high fiving on the engineering side,” said Tom Statler, DART’s program scientist at NASA, “but I’m going be imagining all the cool stuff that is actually going on on the asteroid, with a crater being dug and ejecta being blasted off.”

There is, of course, a possibility that DART will miss, in which case there should be enough fuel on board to allow engineers to go after a backup target. But an advantage of the Didymos-Dimorphos pair is that it should help in calculating how much effect the impact had. Telescopes on Earth (plus the Hubble and Webb space telescopes) may struggle to measure infinitesimal changes in the orbit of Dimorphos around the sun; it should be easier to see how much its orbit around Didymos is affected. The simplest measurement may be of the changing brightness of the double asteroid, as Dimorphos moves in front of or behind its partner, perhaps more quickly or slowly than it did before impact.

“We are moving an asteroid,” said Statler. “We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Humanity’s never done that before.”


Match ID: 5 Score: 2.86 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 179 days
qualifiers: 2.86 movie

Most Frequently Asked Questions About NFTs(Non-Fungible Tokens)
Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:04:00 +0000

 

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.

1) What is an NFT?

NFT stands for non-fungible  token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.

2) What is Blockchain?

A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.

3) What makes an NFT valuable?


The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.

4) How do NFTs work?

One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain. 

As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network. 

NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.

5) What’s the connection between NFTs and cryptocurrency?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?

Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations

6) How to validate the authencity of an NFT?

When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.

7) How is an NFT valued? What are the most expensive NFTs?

The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.

In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.

8) Can NFTs be used as an investment?

Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.

9) Will NFTs be the future of art and collectibles?

Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.

10) How do we buy an NFTs?

There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.

11) Can i mint NFT for free?

To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.

12) Do i own an NFT if i screenshot it?

The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.

12) Why are people investing so much in NFT?


 Non-fungible tokens have gained the hearts of people around the world, and they have given digital creators the recognition they deserve. One of the remarkable things about non-fungible tokens is that you can take a screenshot of one, but you don’t own it. This is because when a non-fungible token is created, then the transaction is stored on the blockchain, and the license or contract to hold such a token is awarded to the person owning the token in their digital wallet.

You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.

Final Saying

That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below






Match ID: 6 Score: 2.86 source: techncruncher.blogspot.com age: 408 days
qualifiers: 2.86 movie

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Visit by Japan’s Kishida to Kyiv gives sharp contrast to Xi in Russia
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:30:49 EDT
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is in Kyiv to see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as China's Xi Jinping meets Russia's Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Match ID: 0 Score: 80.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan, 40.00 china

Japan's PM offers Ukraine support as China's Xi backs Russia
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:53:52 EDT
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made a surprise visit to Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Match ID: 1 Score: 80.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan, 40.00 china

Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 391 of the invasion
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:00:04 GMT

Russian cruise missiles destroyed in Crimea blast; Xi Jinping meets Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on day two of state visit

Russian cruise missiles intended for use by Moscow’s Black Sea fleet have been destroyed in an explosion in the city of Dzhankoi in the north of the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine’s defence ministry has said. Ihor Ivin, the Russian-installed head of the Dzhankoi administration, was quoted as saying the city had come under attack from drones, and that a 33-year-old man had suffered a shrapnel injury from a downed drone.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are holding a second set of talks on Tuesday. The Chinese president’s trip to Moscow has been viewed as a major boost for his strategic partner Putin. The Chinese leader is expected to continue to position himself as a potential peacemaker in the Ukraine war during his two-day visit to Russia – his first state visit since Putin’s invasion.

Xi met Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin on Tuesday morning, and invited both Mishustin and Putin to visit China later this year.

China’s state media has extensively and positively covered the visit. Most coverage has focused on Xi’s comments and talking about how strong the relationship is. None of the pieces mentioned the recent ICC arrest warrant for the Russian president over alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken criticised Xi on Monday for providing “diplomatic cover” for Russia to continue committing war crimes. Blinken said the visit “suggests that China feels no responsibility to hold the Kremlin accountable for the atrocities committed in Ukraine.” Blinken voiced scepticism over China’s “peace” proposals to end the Ukraine conflict, warning they could be a “stalling tactic” to help Russian troops on the ground in Ukraine.

Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida has arrived for talks with Zelenskiy. Kishida and Zelenskiy are expected to discuss Japanese support for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Kishida, who is to chair the Group of Seven summit in May, is the only G-7 leader who hasn’t visited Ukraine and was under pressure to do so at home.

Japan has continued to import Russian timber worth US$414m since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to a London-based NGO, which accused Tokyo of “helping to bankroll Putin’s bloody war” despite joining other countries in imposing sanctions on the Kremlin.

Iryna Vereshchuk, who is one of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers and is the minister of reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, has said there is no confirmed time agreed for a mooted call between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Xi.

Ukraine is holding its defence of the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut as Russian forces attempted to advance to the city centre, a Ukrainian general has said. There was intense fighting along the eastern frontline, he said on Tuesday.

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Match ID: 2 Score: 80.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan, 40.00 china

Xi invites Putin to China in show of support as Moscow talks continue
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:30:44 GMT

Chinese and Russian leaders to discuss Ukraine in formal talks after friendly dinner, while Fumio Kishida meets Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv

Xi Jinping has invited Vladimir Putin to visit China this year in a symbolic show of support after the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s president over accusations of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.

The Chinese leader extended the invitation during a meeting on Tuesday morning with the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, as part of his state visit to Moscow.

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Match ID: 3 Score: 80.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan, 40.00 china

Taiwan president heads to Latin America after partners switch ties to China
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 21:11:46 GMT

Tsai Ing-wen will visit allies Guatemala and Belize after Honduras said last week it would establish ‘official relations’ with China

Taiwan’s president will visit diplomatic allies Guatemala and Belize next week while also making stopovers in the United States, as it aims to shore up ties in Latin America.

Tsai Ing-wen will depart Taiwan on 29 March for the 10-day trip, stopping in New York and Los Angeles while en route to and from the Central American countries, the island’s ministry said on Tuesday.

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Match ID: 4 Score: 60.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china, 20.00 taiwan

Taiwan’s president to stop in U.S., raising prospect of friction with China
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:43:56 EDT
Tsai Ing-wen will stop in New York and Los Angeles on her way to and from Central America, and is expected to meet House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during the trip.
Match ID: 5 Score: 60.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china, 20.00 taiwan

I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Semiconductor Factory
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000
As the US boosts production of silicon chips, a WIRED journalist goes inside the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry.
Match ID: 6 Score: 60.00 source: www.wired.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china, 20.00 taiwan

USA v Japan: World Baseball Classic final – live
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 23:47:02 GMT
  • United States meet Japan for World Baseball Classic title
  • USA’s Merrill Kelly, Japan’s Shōta Imanaga face off on mound
  • Send Hunter a tweet at @HunterFelt or email him

We’re getting both national anthems! I love this, even if “The Star Spangled Banner” always suffers in comparison.

Both teams’ rosters are out on the field now. It looks like we’re having some pregame ceremonies, as befits a championship game.

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Match ID: 7 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan

Putin: China plan could end war, but Ukraine and West not ready for peace
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:12:04 GMT
Mr Putin says China's plan could end the war - but he claims Ukraine and the West are not ready for peace.
Match ID: 8 Score: 40.00 source: www.bbc.co.uk age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Live updates: Xi and Putin sign agreements as Japan’s leader visits Ukraine
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:01:47 EDT
The visit by Chinese Presiden Xi Jinping's is Beijing's strongest show of support yet for Russian President Vladimir Putin since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Match ID: 9 Score: 40.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Flubs Its First Lines
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:00:00 +0000
Search giant Baidu’s Ernie Bot met online jeers and also faces the challenge of operating on a firewalled internet ruled by government censorship.
Match ID: 10 Score: 40.00 source: www.wired.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Here’s the full analysis of newly uncovered genetic data on COVID’s origins
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 21:28:26 +0000
The genetic data paints a picture of spillover in one zone of the market.
Match ID: 11 Score: 40.00 source: arstechnica.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Xi and Putin showcase alliance but offer no path to peace in Ukraine
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:31:02 EDT
On the second day of a state visit, the leaders-for-life emphasized economic ties, which have grown far stronger since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Match ID: 12 Score: 40.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Nowruz: Kurdish new year 2023 celebrations – in pictures
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:06:35 GMT

Nowruz, which has been celebrated for at least 3,000 years, is one of the most important celebrations in the greater Persian world, which includes the countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey and portions of western China and northern Iraq

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Match ID: 13 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Putin says Russia ‘will respond’ if UK supplies depleted uranium shells to Ukraine
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:02:52 GMT

Russian leader reacts to comments by UK defence minister that Britain will supply armour-piercing rounds to Kyiv

Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit a British statement that it would supply Ukraine with tank shells made with depleted uranium, arguing that the delivery of the armour-piercing weapons would prompt a Russian response.

The Russian leader’s comments, made during the visit to Moscow by his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, came in response to a parliamentary answer given by a junior British defence minister in the House of Lords on Monday.

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Match ID: 14 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 japan

Putin’s two-day charm offensive with Xi underlines who’s boss
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:54:11 GMT

Kremlin toasts the Russian-Chinese partnership, which appears warm but far from equal

Standing alongside Xi Jinping in the 15th-century Chamber of Facets, one of the most historic ceremonial venues at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin raised his glass of white wine.

He proceeded to make a toast to the “health of our great friend Xi and the deepening of the Russian-Chinese partnership”, before ending his speech with the phrase ganbei, Chinese for “empty glass”.

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Match ID: 15 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Putin welcomes China’s controversial proposals for peace in Ukraine
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:28:37 GMT

But US warns against ‘any tactical move by Russia to freeze the war on its own terms’

Vladimir Putin has welcomed China’s proposals for peace in Ukraine at a joint press conference with Xi Jinping in Moscow – a plan the west has warned would allow the Kremlin to “freeze” its territorial gains in the country.

Speaking at the Kremlin during a joint news conference after the second day of talks with China’s president, Xi Jinping, Putin said Beijing’s peace plan “correlates to the point of view of the Russian Federation” and said that Ukraine’s western allies so far have shown no interest in it.

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Match ID: 16 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Screenings of Winnie the Pooh horror film cancelled in Hong Kong
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:46:06 GMT

Distributor gives no reason for cancellation, but Chinese censors have targeted Pooh before due to Xi Jinping comparisons

The screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher film due to be released in Hong Kong this week, has been cancelled, its distributor said on Tuesday, without giving a reason for pulling it.

VII Pillars Entertainment said on its Facebook page that it was with “great regret” that the scheduled release of the film on 23 March had been cancelled. It did not give further details.

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Match ID: 17 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Newly released Chinese Covid data points to infected animals in Wuhan
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:54:52 GMT

Previously unseen genomic samples suggest animals at Huanan market were potential source

Newly released data from early in the Covid-19 pandemic has offered a crucial insight into the outbreak’s origins, suggesting that Covid-infected animals were present at a market in Wuhan and could have been a “potential source of human infections”.

A pre-print report on Monday by a team of international researchers fleshed out analysis of previously unseen genomic samples collected by Chinese scientists at the Huanan market in Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic.

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Match ID: 18 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

China portrays Xi’s Russia trip as bid for leadership of non-Western world
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 07:09:35 EDT
Chinese media was awash with coverage of the visit as evidence of China’s mettle when it comes to standing up to Washington and offering a model to the rest of the world.
Match ID: 19 Score: 40.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

‘He is my best friend’: 10 years of strengthening ties between Putin and Xi
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:57:13 GMT

The Russian and Chinese leaders have met more than 40 times in recent years, fortifying personal and formal relations

A visit by China’s president, Xi Jinping, to Moscow this week has shone a light on his strengthening relationship with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The two leaders have met more than 40 times in recent years, growing increasingly familiar, and now refer to each other as “dear friends”. Xi has been described as a great friend by other world leaders before, including Robert Mugabe and Donald Trump, but does not always reciprocate the compliment like he has with Putin.

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Match ID: 20 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Hong Kong police put bailed pro-democracy leader Albert Ho back under arrest
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 05:11:30 GMT

Solicitor, 71, had been charged under national security law and was released to be treated for lung cancer

Hong Kong police have arrested a veteran pro-democracy politician who was out on bail for medical treatment after spending more than a year in detention on a subversion charge.

Albert Ho, 71, once led the city’s largest opposition group, the Democratic party, and runs his own law firm. Police handcuffed Ho and took him away from his home in a vehicle on Tuesday, a Reuters witness said.

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Match ID: 21 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Is it time to delete TikTok? - podcast
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:00:03 GMT

Western governments are telling their staff to remove the popular social media app from their work phones amid security fears. Alex Hern reports on why time could be running out for TikTok’s current ownership model

The UK has joined the US, Canada and the EU in ordering its government officials to remove the TikTok app from their work devices amid fears of a security threat. Government officials in the west say that TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance puts sensitive user data at risk of being accessed by the Chinese government.

As the Guardian’s UK technology editor Alex Hern tells Hannah Moore, the governments are not able to cite specific incidents to back up their ban but it forms part of an overall cooling in relations with China.

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Match ID: 22 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Biden orders release of intelligence on potential links between Covid and Wuhan lab
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 02:18:28 GMT

Move poses political risk for US president, who has a difficult relationship with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping

A bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan has been signed into law by US president Joe Biden.

“We need to get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins … including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible.

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Match ID: 23 Score: 40.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Senators Warn the Next US Bank Run Could Be Rigged
Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:16:52 +0000
Lawmakers call for an investigation into the SVB collapse, fearing hostile foreign governments will use social media to manipulate markets.
Match ID: 24 Score: 40.00 source: www.wired.com age: 1 day
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Russia’s Space Program Is in Big Trouble
Mon, 20 Mar 2023 06:00:00 +0000
A set of Soyuz spacecraft coolant leaks hints that Roscosmos is struggling as the space agency loses international partnerships and funding.
Match ID: 25 Score: 40.00 source: www.wired.com age: 1 day
qualifiers: 40.00 china

Earthquake hits Pakistan, Afghanistan and India with at least nine dead
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:29:03 GMT

Pakistan so far only country to report loss of life from magnitude 6.5 event, with more than 100 people there confirmed injured

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake has rattled much of Pakistan and Afghanistan, sending panicked residents fleeing from homes and offices, and frightening people even in remote villages. At least nine people died.

More than 100 people were brought to hospitals in the Swat valley region of Pakistan’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in a state of shock, said Bilal Faizi, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s emergency services.

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Match ID: 26 Score: 35.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 35.00 india

Punjab hit by internet blackout as authorities hunt for Sikh preacher
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:15:57 GMT

Shutdown imposed as part of search for Amritpal Singh Sandhu, accused of disrupting communal harmony

Economic life in the north Indian state of Punjab has been paralysed by an internet shutdown, affecting 30 million people, imposed as part of a huge manhunt for a Sikh preacher fighting for a separate Sikh state.

Police have been searching for Amritpal Singh Sandhu, who is wanted for allegedly disrupting communal harmony, since Saturday.

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Match ID: 27 Score: 35.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 35.00 india

As G-20 meetings come to India, Modi launches a public relations blitz
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 02:00:39 EDT
The campaign seeks to hammer home a message that the prime minister is winning clout and respect for India internationally.
Match ID: 28 Score: 35.00 source: www.washingtonpost.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 35.00 india

World’s biggest single eradication operation aims to remove mice from island
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:01:15 GMT

Invasive house mice threaten endangered seabirds and wildlife on Marion Island in Indian Ocean

Non-native house mice are to be removed from Marion Island in the southern Indian Ocean to protect the wandering albatross and other endangered seabirds, in the world’s largest eradication programme of its kind.

Mice accidentally introduced on to the remote island by 19th-century seal hunters have thrived in warmer and drier conditions over the past 30 years, devastating the island’s invertebrates and plants, and then devouring the chicks and even adults of ground- and burrow-nesting seabirds.

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Match ID: 29 Score: 35.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 35.00 india

Adani Group: Chhattisgarh tribes' year-long protest against tycoon's coal mine
Mon, 20 Mar 2023 22:10:41 GMT
Why Chhattisgarh's tribal people are against a new coal mine owned by the Adani Group.
Match ID: 30 Score: 35.00 source: www.bbc.co.uk age: 1 day
qualifiers: 35.00 india

Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own.
Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:00:32 +0000

The U.S. has a long and disturbing habit of ignoring the violence it commits overseas as well as at home.

The post Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own. appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 31 Score: 34.29 source: theintercept.com age: 3 days
qualifiers: 34.29 japan

India’s Sacred Groves Are Resurrecting a Vanishing Forest
Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000
Botanists and community stewards are using patches of native flora as blueprints to revive tropical dry evergreen ecosystems from near-extinction.
Match ID: 32 Score: 30.00 source: www.wired.com age: 3 days
qualifiers: 30.00 india

Understanding the Silicon Valley Bank Run
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 10:00:18 +0000

Damon Silvers, deputy chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the 2008 bank bailout, explains how deregulation paved the way for SVB’s collapse.

The post Understanding the Silicon Valley Bank Run appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 33 Score: 28.57 source: theintercept.com age: 4 days
qualifiers: 28.57 china

Senator Warner on the Restrict Act and a US TikTok Ban
Thu, 16 Mar 2023 16:59:24 +0000
WIRED spoke with the coauthor of the Restrict Act, a bipartisan bill to crack down on tech from six “hostile” countries.
Match ID: 34 Score: 22.86 source: www.wired.com age: 5 days
qualifiers: 22.86 china

Apocalyptic road trip story wins the Waterstones children’s book prize
Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:00:04 GMT

The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail – about a family’s trip across Malaysia during the impending end of the world – wins the older readers category, the overall prize and £5,000

A “phenomenal and tender debut” novel about a family who embark on a road trip across Malaysia before the world ends has won the Waterstones children’s book prize.

The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail won the older readers category as well as being named the overall winner.

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Match ID: 35 Score: 20.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 0 days
qualifiers: 20.00 malaysia

Myanmar is a failing state, led by a junta fuelled by Russian arms, says UN rights envoy
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 19:00:06 GMT

Civilians are being killed by Russian weapons just like in Ukraine, says special rapporteur Tom Andrews in call for global action

Myanmar is a “failing state” and the crisis is getting exponentially worse, a UN special rapporteur for the country has warned, urging countries to adopt the same unified resolve that followed the invasion of Ukraine.

“The same types of weapons that are killing Ukrainians are killing people in Myanmar,” Tom Andrews, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the Guardian in an interview, citing the supply of Russian weapons to the junta since the coup two years ago. The junta relies heavily on aircraft from China and Russia, and has increasingly resorted to airstrikes to attempt to quell determined resistance forces.

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Match ID: 36 Score: 17.14 source: www.theguardian.com age: 6 days
qualifiers: 17.14 china

A Spy Wants to Connect With You on LinkedIn
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000
Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have been caught using fake profiles to gather information. But the platform’s tools to weed them out only go so far.
Match ID: 37 Score: 17.14 source: www.wired.com age: 6 days
qualifiers: 17.14 china

The Key Factor in the Saudi-Iran Deal: Absolutely No U.S. Involvement
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:00:53 +0000

D.C. hawks say American military might brought order to the Middle East, but without U.S. meddling, regional rivals finally made a deal.

The post The Key Factor in the Saudi-Iran Deal: Absolutely No U.S. Involvement appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 38 Score: 17.14 source: theintercept.com age: 6 days
qualifiers: 17.14 china

Caltech Tests Space-Based Solar Power
Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:18:10 +0000


For about as long as engineers have talked about beaming solar power to Earth from space, they’ve had to caution that it was an idea unlikely to become real anytime soon. Elaborate designs for orbiting solar farms have circulated for decades—but since photovoltaic cells were inefficient, any arrays would need to be the size of cities. The plans got no closer to space than the upper shelves of libraries.

That’s beginning to change. Right now, in a sun-synchronous orbit about 525 kilometers overhead, there is a small experimental satellite called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator One (SSPD-1 for short). It was designed and built by a team at the California Institute of Technology, funded by donations from the California real estate developer Donald Bren, and launched on 3 January—among 113 other small payloads—on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

“To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first demonstration of actual power transfer in space, of wireless power transfer,” says Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech and a codirector of the program behind SSPD-1, the Space Solar Power Project.


The Caltech team is waiting for a go-ahead from the operators of a small space tug to which it is attached, providing guidance and attitude control. If all goes well, SSPD-1 will spend at least five to six months testing prototype components of possible future solar stations in space. In the next few weeks, the project managers hope to unfold a lightweight frame, called DOLCE (short for Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment), on which parts of future solar arrays could be mounted. Another small assembly on the spacecraft contains samples of 32 different types of photovoltaic cells, intended to see which would be most efficient and robust. A third part of the vehicle contains a microwave transmitter, set up to prove that energy from the solar cells can be sent to a receiver. For this first experiment, the receivers are right there on board the spacecraft, but if it works, an obvious future step would be to send electricity via microwave to receivers on the ground.

A gold-colored square frame flying in space with Earth in background. Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator, shown orbiting Earth in this artist’s conception, was launched on 3 January.Caltech

One can dismiss the 50-kilogram SSPD-1 as yet another nonstarter, but a growing army of engineers and policymakers take solar energy from space seriously. Airbus, the European aerospace company, has been testing its own technology on the ground, and government agencies in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have all mounted small projects. “Recent technology and conceptual advances have made the concept both viable and economically competitive,” said Frazer-Nash, a British engineering consultancy, in a 2021 report to the U.K. government. Engineers working on the technology say microwave power transmissions would be safe, unlike ionizing radiation, which is harmful to people or other things in its path.

No single thing has happened to start this renaissance. Instead, say engineers, several advances are coming together.

For one thing, the cost of launching hardware into orbit keeps dropping, led by SpaceX and other, smaller companies such as Rocket Lab. SpaceX has a simplified calculator on its website, showing that if you want to launch a 50-kg satellite into sun-synchronous orbit, they’ll do it for US $275,000.

Meanwhile, photovoltaic technology has improved, step by step. Lightweight electronic components keep getting better and cheaper. And there is political pressure as well: Governments and major companies have made commitments to decarbonize in the battle against global climate change, committing to renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels.

Most solar power, at least for the foreseeable future, will be Earth-based, which will be cheaper and easier to maintain than anything anyone can launch into space. Proponents of space-based solar power say that for now, they see it as best used for specialty needs, such as remote outposts, places recovering from disasters, or even other space vehicles.

But Hajimiri says don’t underestimate the advantages of space, such as unfiltered sunlight that is far stronger than what reaches the ground and is uninterrupted by darkness or bad weather—if you can build an orbiting array light enough to be practical.

Most past designs, dictated by the technology of their times, included impossibly large truss structures to hold solar panels and wiring to route power to a central transmitter. The Caltech team would dispense with all that. An array would consist of thousands of independent tiles as small as 100 square centimeters, each with its own solar cells, transmitter, and avionics. They might be loosely connected, or they might even fly in formation.

A sped-up series of pictures shows a square frame unfolding in a lab. An engineer watches in a smock and head covering. Time-lapse images show the experimental DOLCE frame for an orbiting solar array being unfolded in a clean room.Caltech

“The analogy I like to use is that it’s like an army of ants instead of an elephant,” says Hajimiri. Transmission to receivers on the ground could be by phased array—microwave signals from the tiles synchronized so that they can be aimed with no moving parts. And the parts—the photovoltaic cells with their electronics—could perhaps be so lightweight that they’re flexible. New algorithms could keep their signals focused.

“That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about,” said Harry Atwater, a coleader of the Caltech project, as SSPD-1 was being planned. “Really gossamer-like, ultralight, the limits of mass-density deployable systems.”

If it works out, in 30 years maybe there could be orbiting solar power fleets, adding to the world’s energy mix. In other words, as a recent report from Frazer-Nash concluded, this is “a potential game changer.”


Match ID: 39 Score: 15.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 43 days
qualifiers: 5.71 japan, 5.71 china, 4.29 south korea

Indian state to open new Asiatic lion sanctuary as numbers soar
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:14:07 GMT

Gujarat accused of being possessive after conservationists pleaded for more of the endangered lions to be moved to other areas

Lion conservation efforts in the Indian state of Gujarat have been so successful that a new sanctuary will be opened to house the abundant numbers of big cats.

Gir national park is home to the world’s only Asiatic lion population and the only place outside Africa where a lion can be seen in its natural habitat.

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Match ID: 40 Score: 15.00 source: www.theguardian.com age: 6 days
qualifiers: 15.00 india

Cheering Silicon Valley Bank Bailout, Gavin Newsom Doesn’t Mention He’s a Client
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 16:03:03 +0000

At least three of the California governor's wine companies are held by SVB, and a bank president sits on the board of his wife’s charity.

The post Cheering Silicon Valley Bank Bailout, Gavin Newsom Doesn’t Mention He’s a Client appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 41 Score: 11.43 source: theintercept.com age: 7 days
qualifiers: 11.43 china

AI Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 14:00:02 +0000


Not all technological innovation deserves to be called progress. That’s because some advances, despite their conveniences, may not do as much societal advancing, on balance, as advertised. One researcher who stands opposite technology’s cheerleaders is MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. (The “c” in his surname is pronounced like a soft “g.”) IEEE Spectrum spoke with Agemoglu—whose fields of research include labor economics, political economy, and development economics—about his recent work and his take on whether technologies such as artificial intelligence will have a positive or negative net effect on human society.

IEEE Spectrum: In your November 2022 working paper “Automation and the Workforce,” you and your coauthors say that the record is, at best, mixed when AI encounters the job force. What explains the discrepancy between the greater demand for skilled labor and their staffing levels?

Acemoglu: Firms often lay off less-skilled workers and try to increase the employment of skilled workers.

“Generative AI could be used, not for replacing humans, but to be helpful for humans. ... But that’s not the trajectory it’s going in right now.”
—Daron Acemoglu, MIT

In theory, high demand and tight supply are supposed to result in higher prices—in this case, higher salary offers. It stands to reason that, based on this long-accepted principle, firms would think ‘More money, less problems.’

Acemoglu: You may be right to an extent, but... when firms are complaining about skill shortages, a part of it is I think they’re complaining about the general lack of skills among the applicants that they see.

In your 2021 paper “Harms of AI,” you argue if AI remains unregulated, it’s going to cause substantial harm. Could you provide some examples?

Acemoglu: Well, let me give you two examples from Chat GPT, which is all the rage nowadays. ChatGPT could be used for many different things. But the current trajectory of the large language model, epitomized by Chat GPT, is very much focused on the broad automation agenda. ChatGPT tries to impress the users…What it’s trying to do is trying to be as good as humans in a variety of tasks: answering questions, being conversational, writing sonnets, and writing essays. In fact, in a few things, it can be better than humans because writing coherent text is a challenging task and predictive tools of what word should come next, on the basis of the corpus of a lot of data from the Internet, do that fairly well.

The path that GPT3 [the large language model that spawned ChatGPT] is going down is emphasizing automation. And there are already other areas where automation has had a deleterious effect—job losses, inequality, and so forth. If you think about it you will see—or you could argue anyway­—that the same architecture could have been used for very different things. Generative AI could be used, not for replacing humans, but to be helpful for humans. If you want to write an article for IEEE Spectrum, you could either go and have ChatGPT write that article for you, or you could use it to curate a reading list for you that might capture things you didn’t know yourself that are relevant to the topic. The question would then be how reliable the different articles on that reading list are. Still, in that capacity, generative AI would be a human complementary tool rather than a human replacement tool. But that’s not the trajectory it’s going in right now.

“Open AI, taking a page from Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ code book, just dumped it all out. Is that a good thing?”
—Daron Acemoglu, MIT

Let me give you another example more relevant to the political discourse. Because, again, the ChatGPT architecture is based on just taking information from the Internet that it can get for free. And then, having a centralized structure operated by Open AI, it has a conundrum: If you just take the Internet and use your generative AI tools to form sentences, you could very likely end up with hate speech including racial epithets and misogyny, because the Internet is filled with that. So, how does the ChatGPT deal with that? Well, a bunch of engineers sat down and they developed another set of tools, mostly based on reinforcement learning, that allow them to say, “These words are not going to be spoken.” That’s the conundrum of the centralized model. Either it’s going to spew hateful stuff or somebody has to decide what’s sufficiently hateful. But that is not going to be conducive for any type of trust in political discourse. because it could turn out that three or four engineers—essentially a group of white coats—get to decide what people can hear on social and political issues. I believe hose tools could be used in a more decentralized way, rather than within the auspices of centralized big companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Instead of continuing to move fast and break things, innovators should take a more deliberate stance, you say. Are there some definite no-nos that should guide the next steps toward intelligent machines?

Acemoglu: Yes. And again, let me give you an illustration using ChatGPT. They wanted to beat Google [to market, understanding that] some of the technologies were originally developed by Google. And so, they went ahead and released it. It’s now being used by tens of millions of people, but we have no idea what the broader implications of large language models will be if they are used this way, or how they’ll impact journalism, middle school English classes, or what political implications they will have. Google is not my favorite company, but in this instance, I think Google would be much more cautious. They were actually holding back their large language model. But Open AI, taking a page from Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ code book, just dumped it all out. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. Open AI has become a multi-billion-dollar company as a result. It was always a part of Microsoft in reality, but now it’s been integrated into Microsoft Bing, while Google lost something like 100 billion dollars in value. So, you see the high-stakes, cutthroat environment we are in and the incentives that that creates. I don’t think we can trust companies to act responsibly here without regulation.

Tech companies have asserted that automation will put humans in a supervisory role instead of just killing all jobs. The robots are on the floor, and the humans are in a back room overseeing the machines’ activities. But who’s to say the back room is not across an ocean instead of on the other side of a wall—a separation that would further enable employers to slash labor costs by offshoring jobs?

Acemoglu: That’s right. I agree with all those statements. I would say, in fact, that’s the usual excuse of some companies engaged in rapid algorithmic automation. It’s a common refrain. But you’re not going to create 100 million jobs of people supervising, providing data, and training to algorithms. The point of providing data and training is that the algorithm can now do the tasks that humans used to do. That’s very different from what I’m calling human complementarity, where the algorithm becomes a tool for humans.

“[Imagine] using AI... for real-time scheduling which might take the form of zero-hour contracts. In other words, I employ you, but I do not commit to providing you any work.”
—Daron Acemoglu, MIT

According to “The Harms of AI,” executives trained to hack away at labor costs have used tech to help, for instance, skirt labor laws that benefit workers. Say, scheduling hourly workers’ shifts so that hardly any ever reach the weekly threshold of hours that would make them eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance coverage and/or overtime pay.

Acemoglu: Yes, I agree with that statement too. Even more important examples would be using AI for monitoring workers, and for real-time scheduling which might take the form of zero-hour contracts. In other words, I employ you, but I do not commit to providing you any work. You’re my employee. I have the right to call you. And when I call you, you’re expected to show up. So, say I’m Starbucks. I’ll call and say ‘Willie, come in at 8am.’ But I don’t have to call you, and if I don’t do it for a week, you don’t make any money that week.

Will the simultaneous spread of AI and the technologies that enable the surveillance state bring about a total absence of privacy and anonymity, as was depicted in the sci-fi film Minority Report?

Acemoglu: Well, I think it has already happened. In China, that’s exactly the situation urban dwellers find themselves in. And in the United States, it’s actually private companies. Google has much more information about you and can constantly monitor you unless you turn off various settings in your phone. It’s also constantly using the data you leave on the Internet, on other apps, or when you use Gmail. So, there is a complete loss of privacy and anonymity. Some people say ‘Oh, that’s not that bad. Those are companies. That’s not the same as the Chinese government.’ But I think it raises a lot of issues that they are using data for individualized, targeted ads. It’s also problematic that they’re selling your data to third parties.

In four years, when my children will be about to graduate from college, how will AI have changed their career options?

Acemoglu: That goes right back to the earlier discussion with ChatGPT. Programs like GPT3and GPT4 may scuttle a lot of careers but without creating huge productivity improvements on their current path. On the other hand, as I mentioned, there are alternative paths that would actually be much better. AI advances are not preordained. It’s not like we know exactly what’s going to happen in the next four years, but it’s about trajectory. The current trajectory is one based on automation. And if that continues, lots of careers will be closed to your children. But if the trajectory goes in a different direction, and becomes human complementary, who knows? Perhaps they may have some very meaningful new occupations open to them.


Match ID: 42 Score: 11.43 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 7 days
qualifiers: 11.43 china

India’s First Private Space Rocket Blasts Off
Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:51:56 +0000


A rocket built by Indian startup Skyroot has become the country’s first privately developed launch vehicle to reach space, following a successful maiden flight earlier today. The suborbital mission is a major milestone for India’s private space industry, say experts, though more needs to be done to nurture the fledgling sector.

The Vikram-S rocket, named after the founder of the Indian space program, Vikram Sarabhai, lifted off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on India’s east coast, at 11:30 a.m. local time (1 a.m. eastern time). It reached a peak altitude of 89.5 kilometers (55.6 miles), crossing the 80-km line that NASA counts as the boundary of space, but falling just short of the 100 km recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

In the longer run, India’s space industry has ambitions of capturing a significant chunk of the global launch market.

Pawan Kumar Chandana, cofounder of the Hyderabad-based startup, says the success of the launch is a major victory for India’s nascent space industry, but the buildup to the mission was nerve-racking. “We were pretty confident on the vehicle, but, as you know, rockets are very notorious for failure,” he says. “Especially in the last 10 seconds of countdown, the heartbeat was racing up. But once the vehicle had crossed the launcher and then went into the stable trajectory, I think that was the moment of celebration.”

At just 6 meters (20 feet) long and weighing only around 550 kilograms (0.6 tonnes), the Vikram-S is not designed for commercial use. Today’s mission, called Prarambh, which means “the beginning” in Sanskrit, was designed to test key technologies that will be used to build the startup’s first orbital rocket, the Vikram I. The rocket will reportedly be capable of lofting as much as 480 kg up to an 500-km altitude and is slated for a maiden launch next October.

man standing in front of a rocket behind him Skyroot cofounder Pawan Kumar Chandana standing in front of the Vikram-S rocket at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the east coast of India.Skyroot

In particular, the mission has validated Skyroot’s decision to go with a novel all-carbon fiber structure to cut down on weight, says Chandana. It also allowed the company to test 3D-printed thrusters, which were used for spin stabilization in Vikram-S but will power the upper stages of its later rockets. Perhaps the most valuable lesson, though, says Chandana, was the complexity of interfacing Skyroot's vehicle with ISRO’s launch infrastructure. “You can manufacture the rocket, but launching it is a different ball game,” he says. “That was a great learning experience for us and will really help us accelerate our orbital vehicle.”

Skyroot is one of several Indian space startups looking to capitalize on recent efforts by the Indian government to liberalize its highly regulated space sector. Due to the dual-use nature of space technology, ISRO has historically had a government-sanctioned monopoly on most space activities, says Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, in New Delhi. While major Indian engineering players like Larsen & Toubro and Godrej Aerospace have long supplied ISRO with components and even entire space systems, the relationship has been one of a supplier and vendor, she says.

But in 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a series of reforms to allow private players to build satellites and launch vehicles, carry out launches, and provide space-based services. The government also created the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (InSpace), a new agency designed to act as a link between ISRO and the private sector, and affirmed that private companies would be able to take advantage of ISRO’s facilities.

The first launch of a private rocket from an ISRO spaceport is a major milestone for the Indian space industry, says Rajagopalan. “This step itself is pretty crucial, and it’s encouraging to other companies who are looking at this with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement,” she says. But more needs to be done to realize the government’s promised reforms, she adds. The Space Activities Bill that is designed to enshrine the country’s space policy in legislation has been languishing in draft form for years, and without regulatory clarity, it’s hard for the private sector to justify significant investments. “These are big, bold statements, but these need to be translated into actual policy and regulatory mechanisms,” says Rajagopalan.

Skyroot’s launch undoubtedly signals the growing maturity of India’s space industry, says Saurabh Kapil, associate director in PwC’s space practice. “It’s a critical message to the Indian space ecosystem, that we can do it, we have the necessary skill set, we have those engineering capabilities, we have those manufacturing or industrialization capabilities,” he says.

rocket launching into the sky with fire tail The Vikram-S rocket blasting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the east coast of India.Skyroot

However, crossing this technical milestone is only part of the challenge, he says. The industry also needs to demonstrate a clear market for the kind of launch vehicles that companies like Skyroot are building. While private players are showing interest in launching small satellites for applications like agriculture and infrastructure monitoring, he says, these companies will be able to build sustainable businesses only if they are allowed to compete for more lucrative government and defense-sector contacts.

In the longer run, though, India’s space industry has ambitions of capturing a significant chunk of the global launch market, says Kapil. ISRO has already developed a reputation for both reliability and low cost—its 2014 mission to Mars cost just US $74 million, one-ninth the cost of a NASA Mars mission launched the same week. That is likely to translate to India’s private space industry, too, thanks to a considerably lower cost of skilled labor, land, and materials compared with those of other spacefaring nations, says Kapil. “The optimism is definitely there that because we are low on cost and high on reliability, whoever wants to build and launch small satellites is largely going to come to India,” he says.


Match ID: 43 Score: 10.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 123 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china, 5.00 india

The EV Battery Wish List
Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:00:05 +0000


Electric cars barely existed in 2010, when the Tesla Model S was still a glint in Elon Musk’s eye. Now more than 20 million EVs girdle the globe, according to BloombergNEF—and that count is expected to nearly quadruple to 77 million by 2025. A battery will be the high-voltage heart of each of those 77 million electric vehicles, and by far their most expensive component, setting off a worldwide race to ethically source their materials and crank up production to meet exploding demand.

EVs may have seized a record 5.8 percent of the United States market in 2022, according to J.D. Power, and could approach 11 percent of the global market this year. But experts still believe that better batteries, and many more of them, are a key to EVs reaching a market tipping point, even as Reuters projects automakers spending a whopping $1.2 trillion to develop and produce EVs through 2030.

IEEE Spectrum asked five industry experts to gaze deeply into their own crystal balls and outline what needs to happen in the EV battery space to wean the world off fossil-fueled transportation and onto the plug. Here’s what they said:

Emad Dlala, Lucid Motors, vice-president of powertrain

Upstart Lucid Motors hasn’t built many cars, but it’s built a reputation with the record-setting, 830-kilometer driving range of the Air Grand Touring Performance sedan. That range is a testament to Lucid’s obsessive pursuit of efficiency: The Air uses the same 2170-format cylindrical cells (supplied by Samsung SDI) as many EVs, but ekes out more miles via superior battery management, compact-yet-muscular power units and slippery aerodynamics.

Sophisticated chassis and battery design gives new life to “lesser” chemistries—especially lithium iron phosphate that’s the hottest thing in batteries around the world—that would otherwise be uncompetitive and obsolete.

One might think Lucid would call for every electric model to cover such vast distances. Instead, Lucid leaders see a bright future in cars that aim for maximum efficiency — rather than range per se — via smaller, more-affordable batteries.

Lucid’s latest Air Touring model is its most efficient yet on a per-mile basis. Now the world’s most aerodynamic production vehicle, with a 0.197 coefficient of drag, the Air Touring delivers an EPA-rated 7.44 kilometers from each onboard kilowatt hour. Yet propelling this full-size luxury barge still demands a 92 kWh battery aboard.

With all that in mind, the company is developing its next generation of batteries. Extrapolating from company targets, a future compact-size Lucid—think the size of Tesla Model 3 or Model Y—could decisively downsize its battery without sacrificing useful range.

“Our target is to improve efficiency even more,” Dlala says.

“If we do a 250-mile car, we could have a battery that’s just 40 kWh,” or less than half the size of the Air’s. That’s the same size battery as a relatively tiny, base-model Nissan Leaf, whose lesser efficiency translates to just 240 km of EPA-rated driving range.

Such compact batteries would not just save serious money for manufacturers and consumers. They would require fewer raw and refined materials., allowing automakers to theoretically build many more cars from a finite supply. That pack would also weigh about one-third as much as Lucid’s beefiest current battery. The upshot would be a chain of gains that would warm the heart of the most mass-conscious engineer: A lighter chassis to support the smaller battery, slimmer crash structures, downsized brakes. More useable space for passengers and cargo. All those savings would further boost driving range and performance.

This grand design, naturally, would demand an attendant burst of charger development. Once chargers are as ubiquitous and reliable as gas stations—and nearly as fast for fillups—“then I don’t need 400 miles of range,” Dlala says.

All this could grant the ultimate, elusive wish for EV makers: Price parity with internal-combustion automobiles.

“That combination of efficiency and infrastructure will allow us to create competitive prices versus internal combustion cars,” Dlala says.

Ryan Castilloux, geologist, founder and managing director of Adamas Intelligence

Castilloux says that game-changing EV battery breakthroughs have to date been rare. Yet EV batteries are still central to automakers’ calculus, as they seek a sustainable, affordable supply in a period of explosive growth. In a marketplace starving for what they see as their rightful share of kilowatt-hours, smaller or less-connected automakers especially may go hungry.

“Everyone is competing for a limited supply,” says Ryan Castilloux. “That makes for a lumpy growth trajectory in EVs. It’s an immense challenge, and one that won’t go away until the growth slows and the supply side can keep up.”

“In recent decades, it wouldn’t have made sense to think of an automaker becoming a processing or mining company, but now with scarcity of supplies, they have to take drastic measures.”
—Ryan Castilloux, Adamas Intelligence

A battery industry that has succeeded in boosting nickel content for stronger performance, and cutting cobalt to reduce costs, has hit a wall of diminishing returns via chemistry alone. That leaves battery pack design as a new frontier: Castilloux lauds the push to eliminate “aluminum and other zombie materials” to save weight and space. The effort shows in innovations such as large-format cylindrical batteries with higher ratios of active material to surrounding cases—as well as so-called “cell-to-pack” or “pack-to-frame” designs. BMW’s critical “Neue Klasse” EVs, the first arriving in 2025, are just one example: Large-format cells, with no traditional cased modules required, fill an entire open floorpan and serve as a crash-resistant structural member.

“That becomes a low-cost way to generate big improvements in pack density and bolster the mileage of a vehicle,” Castillloux says.

That kind of sophisticated chassis and battery design can also help level the playing field, giving new life to “lesser” chemistries—especially lithium iron phosphate that’s the hottest thing in batteries around the world—that would otherwise be uncompetitive and obsolete.

“Things are moving in the right direction in North America and Europe, but it’s too little too late at the moment, and the West is collectively scrambling to meet demand.”

The drivetrain and battery of a Mercedes-Benz EQS electric vehicle on the assembly line at the Mercedes-Benz Group plant in Sindelfingen, Germany, on Monday, February 13, 2023. Krisztian Bocsi/Getty Images

The tragedy, Castilloux says, is that EV demand was anticipated for several years, “but the action is only happening now.”

“China was only one that acted on it, and is now a decade ahead of the rest of the world,” in both refining and processing battery materials, and cell production itself.

Tesla also got out in front of legacy automakers by thinking in terms of vertical integration, the need to control the entire supply chain, from lithium brine and cobalt mines to final production and recycling.

“In recent decades, it wouldn’t have made sense to think of an automaker becoming a processing or mining company, but now with scarcity of supplies, they have to take drastic measures.”

Dan Nicholson, Vice president of strategic tech initiatives General Motors; board member Society of Automotive Engineers

Automakers are racing to meet soaring EV demand and fill yawning gaps in the market, including building a homegrown supply chain of battery materials as well as batteries. In the United States alone, Atlas Public Policy tallies U.S. $128 billion in announced investments in EV and battery factories and recycling. That still leaves another blind spot: Charging infrastructure. Tesla’s dominant Superchargers aside, many experts cite a patchwork, notoriously unreliable charging network as a leading roadblock to mainstream EV adoption.

“Charging infrastructure is on our wish list of things that need to improve,” said Dan Nicholson, who helps lead General Motors’ new charger initiatives.

The 2021 U.S. Infrastructure Law is providing $7.5 billion to build a network of 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. But rather than own and operate their own chargers like Tesla—akin to automakers running chains of proprietary gas stations—GM, Ford and others argue that standardized, open-source chargers are critical to convince more Americans to kick the ICE habit. Those chargers must be available everywhere people live and work, Nicholson said, and open to drivers of any car brand.

It will help if those chargers actually work: A 2022 study showed nearly 25 percent of public chargers in the San Francisco Bay area—itself a mecca for EV ownership—weren’t functioning properly.

Automakers and battery manufacturers are on board with multiple solutions, including the stunning rise of lithium-iron-phosphate cells in Teslas, Fords and other models.

To fill gaps in public networks, GM is collaborating with EVGo on a national network of 2,000 DC fast-charging stalls, located at 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers, most along major corridors. To reach people where they live, including people with no access to home charging, GM is tapping its more than 4,400 dealers to build up to 10 Level 2 charging stations each, at both dealers and key locations, including underserved urban and rural communities. Nicholson notes that 90 percent of the U.S. population lives within 16 kilometers of a GM dealer.

In his role as an SAE board member, Nicholson also supports future-proof standards for EVs, connectors and chargers. That includes the ISO 15118 international standard that defines two-way communication between EVs and chargers. That standard is key to “Plug and Charge,” the budding interoperability system that allows drivers of any EV to plug into any DC fast charger and simply be billed on the back end. That’s how Teslas have worked since 2012, though with the advantage of a closed system that need only recognize and communicate with Tesla models.

Nicholson said GM is also seeking “uptime guarantees” with charging collaborators. That will allow drivers to see in advance if a charger is operational, and to hold a spot.

“People need to be able to reserve a station, and know it’s going to work when they get there,” he said.

Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst for North and South America, S&P Global Mobility

Despite an electric boom year in 2022, some analysts are downgrading forecasts of EV adoption, due to monkey wrenches of unpredictable demand, looming recession and supply-chain issues. S&P Global Mobility remains bullish, predicting that 42 percent of global buyers will choose an EV in 2030, within sight of President Biden’s goal of 50-percent EV penetration.

“That’s a lot of growth, but there are plenty of people who won’t move along as quickly,” Brinley said. Pushing EVs to a market majority will require stars to align. Brinley says the most critical key is a continued explosion of new EV models at every price point—including SUVs and pickups that are the lifeblood of U.S. buyers.

Regarding batteries, Brinley says ICE manufacturers with an existing manufacturing footprint, labor force and know-how could find an advantage over relative newcomers. The issue will be how well the likes of General Motors and Ford can manage the transition, from scaling back on ICE production to retraining workers — fewer of whom may be required to produce batteries and motors than ICE powertrains. In February, Ford announced a new $3.5 billion plant in Michigan to build LFP batteries, licensing tech from China’s CATL, currently the world’s largest lithium-ion producer.

“Some (legacy) automakers will use LFP for certain use cases, and solid-state in development could change the dynamic again,” Brinley says. “But for the time being, you need both batteries and engines, because people will be buying both,” Brinley says.

At some point, Brinley says, it’s a zero-sum game: A flat global market for cars can’t comfortably accommodate both types of powertrains.

“ICE sales have to come down for BEV sales to come up,” Brinley says. “And that’s going to make for a wild market in the next few years.”

Connor Hund, chief operating officer, NanoGraf

NanoGraf is among several start-ups wishing for not just longer-lasting batteries, but a stable, competitive North American supply chain to counter China’s battery dominance. The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred an unprecedented tsunami of homegrown investment, by requiring robust domestic sourcing of batteries and battery materials as a condition of EV tax breaks for manufacturers and consumers. That includes a $35-per-kWh tax credit on every lithium-ion cell produced, and a $7,500 consumer tax break on eligible EVs.

Connor Hund says NanoGraf aims to onshore production of its silicon-anode material at a new Chicago facility beginning in Q2 this year. The company, whose backers include the Department of Defense, claims to have created the most energy-dense 18650 cylindrical cell yet, at 3.8 amp-hours. The technology key is a pre-lithiated core that allows an anode silicon percentage as high as 25 percent, versus cells that typically top out at 5-to-7 percent silicon.

“There’s certainly room to boost the range of EVs by 20, 30 or even 50 percent by using silicon,” he says.

But whether it’s NanoGraf, or the drive toward large-format 4680 cylindrical cells led by Tesla and Panasonic, scaling up to mass production remains a major hurdle. NanoGraf plans enough initial capacity for 35 to 50 tonnes of its anode materials. But it would need 1,000 tonnes annually to crack the automotive space, with its now-bottomless appetite for batteries—at competitive cost with what automakers currently pay for cells from China, South Korea or elsewhere.

“It’s so cutthroat in that space, and there’s a scale you have to reach,” Hund says.

One wish is being granted: No one is waiting for a magic bullet in technology, including from solid state batteries that many experts now insist won’t be ready for automobiles until 2030 or later. Instead, automakers and battery manufacturers are on board with multiple solutions, including the stunning rise of LFP cells in Teslas, Fords and other models.

“There’s a shortage of all these materials, not enough nickel, cobalt or manganese, so companies targeting different consumers with different solutions is really helpful.”

Western countries have struggled to take a holistic view of everything that’s required, especially when incumbent solutions from China are available. It’s not just raw materials, anodes or cathodes, but the cells, modules, electrolyte and separators.

“You need companies onshoring all those components to have a robust U.S. supply chain,” he says. “We need everyone upstream and downstream of us, whether it’s the graphite, electrolyte or separator. Everyone is just one piece of the puzzle.”

Hund says safer batteries should also be on the industry wish-list, as high-profile fires in Teslas and other models threaten to sully EVs reputation or keep skeptical consumers on the fence.

“We can’t have batteries self-discharging at the rate they are now,” he says, especially with automakers gearing up around the world for their biggest EV invasion yet.

“Getting ahead of this now, versus pushing millions of cars onto the road and dealing with safety later, is very important.”


Update 14 March 2023: This story was corrected to reflect that Lucid’s Air Touring model carries a 92 kWh battery. (A previous version of this story stated that the battery’s capacity was 112 kWh.)


Match ID: 44 Score: 10.00 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 9 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china, 4.29 south korea

“Trauma Never Goes Away”: As America Forgets, Iraq War Stays With U.S. Veterans
Thu, 16 Mar 2023 14:36:42 +0000

Twenty years after the invasion, veterans struggle to reconcile their sacrifices with the unhappy outcome and the false narratives that started the war.

The post “Trauma Never Goes Away”: As America Forgets, Iraq War Stays With U.S. Veterans appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 45 Score: 8.57 source: theintercept.com age: 5 days
qualifiers: 8.57 vietnam

Coaches ensinam homens a conseguir sexo com técnicas inspiradas pelo traficante sexual de crianças e adolescentes
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 14:00:09 +0000

Clube classifica mulheres como ‘a vadia’ e ‘a caçadora de atenção de homens’ e leva homens a países vulneráveis em busca de sexo.

The post Coaches ensinam homens a conseguir sexo com técnicas inspiradas pelo traficante sexual de crianças e adolescentes appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 46 Score: 8.57 source: theintercept.com age: 7 days
qualifiers: 8.57 indonesia

Economics Drives Ray-Gun Resurgence
Sun, 04 Dec 2022 16:00:01 +0000


The technical challenge of missile defense has been compared with that of hitting a bullet with a bullet. Then there is the still tougher economic challenge of using an expensive interceptor to kill a cheaper target—like hitting a lead bullet with a golden one.

Maybe trouble and money could be saved by shooting down such targets with a laser. Once the system was designed, built, and paid for, the cost per shot would be low. Such considerations led planners at the Pentagon to seek a solution from Lockheed Martin, which has just delivered a 300-kilowatt laser to the U.S. Army. The new weapon combines the output of a large bundle of fiber lasers of varying frequencies to form a single beam of white light. This laser has been undergoing tests in the lab, and it should see its first field trials sometime in 2023. General Atomics, a military contractor in San Diego, is also developing a laser of this power for the Army based on what’s known as the distributed-gain design, which has a single aperture.


This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

Both systems offer the prospect of being inexpensive to use. The electric bill itself would range “from US $5 to $10,” for a pulse lasting a few seconds, says Michael Perry, the vice president in charge of laser systems for General Atomics.

Why are we getting ray guns only now, more than a century after H.G. Wells imagined them in his sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds? Put it down partly to the rising demand for cheap antimissile defense, but it’s mainly the result of technical advances in high-energy lasers.

The old standby for powerful lasers employed chemical reactions in flowing gas. That method was clumsy, heavy, and dangerous, and the laser itself became a flammable target for enemies to attack. The advantage was that these chemical lasers could be made immensely powerful, a far cry from the puny pulsed ruby lasers that wowed observers back in the 1960s by punching holes in razor blades (at power levels jocularly measured in “gillettes”).

“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it.” —Robert Afzal, Lockheed Martin

By 2014, fiber lasers had reached the point where they could be considered for weapons, and one 30-kW model was installed on the USS Ponce, where it demonstrated the ability to shoot down speedboats and small drones at relatively close range. The 300-kW fiber lasers being employed now in the two Army projects emit about 100 kW in optical power, enough to burn through much heftier targets (not to mention quite a few gillettes) at considerable distances.

“A laser of that class can be effective against a wide variety of targets, including cruise missiles, mortars, UAVs, and aircraft,” says Perry. “But not reentry vehicles [launched by ballistic missiles].” Those are the warheads, and to ward them off, he says, you’d probably have to hit the rocket when it’s still in the boost phase, which would mean placing your laser in orbit. Laser tech is still far from performing such a feat.

Even so, these futuristic weapons will no doubt find plenty of applications in today’s world. Israel made news in April by field-testing an airborne antimissile laser called Iron Beam, a play on the name Iron Dome, the missile system it has used to down rockets fired from Gaza. The laser system, reportedly rated at about 100 kW, is still not in service and hasn’t seen combat, but one day it may be able to replace some, if not all, of Iron Dome’s missiles with photons. Other countries have similar capabilities, or say they do. In May, Russia said it had used a laser to incinerate a Ukrainian drone from 5 kilometers away, a claim that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, derided.

The good and bad of directed-energy weapons

A missile is destroyed by a low-power, 2013 version of Lockheed Martin’s fiber laser www.youtube.com

Not all ray guns must be lasers, though. In March, Taiwan News reported that Chinese researchers had built a microwave weapon that in principle could be placed in orbit from where its 5-megawatt pulses could fry the electronic heart of an enemy satellite. But making such a machine in the lab is quite different from operating it in the field, not to mention in outer space, where supplying power and removing waste heat constitute major problems.

Because lasers performance falls off in bad weather, they can’t be relied on by themselves to defend critically important targets. They must instead be paired with kinetic weapons—missiles or bullets—to create a layered defense system.

“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it; typically rain and snow are not big deterrents,” says Robert Afzal, an expert on lasers at Lockheed Martin. “But a thundercloud—that’s hard.”

Afzal says that the higher up a laser is placed, the less interference it will face, but there is a trade-off. “With an airplane you have the least amount of resources—least volume, least weight—that is available to you. On a ship, you have a lot more resources available, but you’re in the maritime atmosphere, which is pretty hazy, so you may need a lot more power to get to the target. And the Army is in between: It deals with closer threats, like rockets and mortars, and they need a deep magazine, because they deal with a lot more targets.”

In every case, the point is to use expensive antimissile missiles only when you must. Israel opted to pursue laser weapons in part because its Iron Dome missiles cost so much more than the unguided, largely homemade rockets they defend against. Some of the military drones that Russia and Ukraine are now flying wouldn’t break the budget of the better-heeled sort of hobbyist. And it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed to shoot them from the sky with projectiles so costly that you went broke.

This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence .”


Top Tech 2023


Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.

Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?

Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.

An Airship Resurgence

Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins

A New Way to Speed Up Computing

Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.

The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here

Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.

Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV

Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.

China Builds New Breeder Reactors

The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.


Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence

Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.

A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?

What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.

IBM’s Quantum Leap

The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.

Arthritis Gets a Jolt

Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.

Smartphones Become Satphones

New satellites can connect directly to your phone.

Exascale Comes to Europe

The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.

The Short List

A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.


Match ID: 47 Score: 8.57 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 107 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china, 2.86 taiwan

The Architects of the Iraq War: Where Are They Now?
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 20:52:26 +0000

They’re all doing great, thanks for asking.

The post The Architects of the Iraq War: Where Are They Now? appeared first on The Intercept.


Match ID: 48 Score: 6.43 source: theintercept.com age: 6 days
qualifiers: 6.43 vietnam

Friday Squid Blogging: Chinese Squid Fishing in the Southeast Pacific
2023-03-10T22:05:19Z

Chinese squid fishing boats are overwhelming Ecuador and Peru.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.


Match ID: 49 Score: 5.71 source: www.schneier.com age: 11 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

Another Malware with Persistence
2023-03-10T01:33:57Z

Here’s a piece of Chinese malware that infects SonicWall security appliances and survives firmware updates.

On Thursday, security firm Mandiant published a report that said threat actors with a suspected nexus to China were engaged in a campaign to maintain long-term persistence by running malware on unpatched SonicWall SMA appliances. The campaign was notable for the ability of the malware to remain on the devices even after its firmware received new firmware.

“The attackers put significant effort into the stability and persistence of their tooling,” Mandiant researchers Daniel Lee, Stephen Eckels, and Ben Read wrote. “This allows their access to the network to persist through firmware updates and maintain a foothold on the network through the SonicWall Device.”...


Match ID: 50 Score: 5.71 source: www.schneier.com age: 11 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Sat, 31 Dec 2022 16:00:02 +0000


Each January, the editors of IEEE Spectrum offer up some predictions about technical developments we expect to be in the news over the coming year. You’ll find a couple dozen of those described in the following special report. Of course, the number of things we could have written about is far higher, so we had to be selective in picking which projects to feature. And we’re not ashamed to admit, gee-whiz appeal often shaped our choices.


This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

For example, this year’s survey includes an odd pair of new aircraft that will be taking to the skies. One, whose design was inspired by the giant airships of years past, is longer than a football field; the other, a futuristic single-seat vertical-takeoff craft powered by electricity, is about the length of a small car.

While some of the other stories might not light up your imagination as much, they highlight important technical issues the world faces—like the challenges of shifting from fossil fuels to a hydrogen-based energy economy or the threat that new plutonium breeder reactors in China might accelerate the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So whether you prefer reading about topics that are heavy or light (even lighter than air), you should find something here to get you warmed up for 2023.

This article appears in the January 2023 print issue.


Top Tech 2023


Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.

Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?

Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.

An Airship Resurgence

Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins

A New Way to Speed Up Computing

Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.

The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here

Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.

Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV

Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.

China Builds New Breeder Reactors

The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.


Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence

Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.

A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?

What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.

IBM’s Quantum Leap

The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.

Arthritis Gets a Jolt

Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.

Smartphones Become Satphones

New satellites can connect directly to your phone.

Exascale Comes to Europe

The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.

The Short List

A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.


Match ID: 51 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 80 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

Finally, an eVTOL You Can Buy (Soon)
Thu, 29 Dec 2022 16:00:02 +0000


If electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft do manage to revolutionize transportation, the date of 5 October 2011, may live on in aviation lore. That was the day when a retired mechanical engineer named Marcus Leng flew a home-built eVTOL across his front yard in Warkworth, Ont., Canada, startling his wife and several of his friends.

“So, take off, flew about 6 feet above the ground, pitched the aircraft towards my wife and the two couples that were there, who were behind automobiles for protection, and decided to do a skidding stop in front of them. Nobody had an idea that this was going to be happening,” recalls Leng.


This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

But as he looked to set his craft down, he saw a wing starting to dig into his lawn. “Uh-oh, this is not good,” he thought. “The aircraft is going to spin out of control. But what instead happened was the propulsion systems revved up and down so rapidly that as the aircraft did that skidding turn, that wing corner just dragged along my lawn exactly in the direction I was holding the aircraft, and then came to a stable landing,” says Leng. At that point, he knew that such an aircraft was viable “because to have that sort of an interference in the aircraft and for the control systems to be able to control it was truly remarkable.”

It was the second time anyone, anywhere had ever flown an eVTOL aircraft.

Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society. These companies are fueled by more than US $7 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in startup funding. And yet, 11 years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale. None have even been certified by a civil aviation authority in the West, such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or the European Union Aviation Safety Agency.

But 2023 looks to be a pivotal year for eVTOLs. Several well-funded startups are expected to reach important early milestones in the certification process. And the company Leng founded, Opener, could beat all of them by making its first deliveries—which would also be the first for any maker of an eVTOL.

Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society.

As of late October, the company had built at its facility in Palo Alto, Calif., roughly 70 aircraft—considerably more than are needed for simple testing and evaluation. It had flown more than 30 of them. And late in 2022, the company had begun training a group of operators on a state-of-the-art virtual-reality simulator system.

Opener’s highly unusual, single-seat flier is intended for personal use rather than transporting passengers, which makes it almost unique. Opener intends to have its aircraft classified as an “ultralight,” enabling it to bypass the rigorous certification required for commercial-transport and other aircraft types. The certification issue looms as a major unknown over the entire eVTOL enterprise, at least in the United States, because, as the blog Jetlaw.com noted last August, “the FAA has no clear timeline or direction on when it will finalize a permanent certification process for eVTOL.”

Opener’s strategy is not without risks, either. For one, there’s no guarantee that the FAA will ultimately agree that Opener’s aircraft, called BlackFly, qualifies as an ultralight. And not everyone is happy with this approach. “My concern is, these companies that are saying they can be ultralights and start flying around in public are putting at risk a $10 billion [eVTOL] industry,” says Mark Moore, founder and chief executive of Whisper Aero in Crossville, Tenn. “Because if they crash, people won’t know the difference” between the ultralights and the passenger eVTOLs, he adds. “To me, that’s unacceptable.” Previously, Moore led a team at NASA that designed a personal-use eVTOL and then served as engineering director at Uber’s Elevate initiative.

An unusual-looking aircraft takes to the skies during an airshow. A BlackFly eVTOL took off on 1 October, 2022, at the Pacific Airshow in Huntington Beach, Calif. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Making eVTOLs personal

Opener’s aircraft is as singular as its business model. It’s a radically different kind of aircraft, and it sprang almost entirely from Leng’s fertile mind.

“As a kid,” he says, “I already envisioned what it would be like to have an aircraft that could seamlessly do a vertical takeoff, fly, and land again without any encumbrances whatsoever.” It was a vision that never left him, from a mechanical-engineering degree at the University of Toronto, management jobs in the aerospace industry, starting a company and making a pile of money by inventing a new kind of memory foam, and then retiring in 1996 at the age of 36.

The fundamental challenge to designing a vertical-takeoff aircraft is endowing it with both vertical lift and efficient forward cruising. Most eVTOL makers achieve this by physically tilting multiple large rotors from a vertical rotation axis, for takeoff, to a horizontal one, for cruising. But the mechanism for tilting the rotors must be extremely robust, and therefore it inevitably adds substantial complexity and weight. Such tilt-rotors also entail significant compromises and trade-offs in the size of the rotors and their placement relative to the wings.

Read about author Glenn Zorpette’s flight in a BlackFly here

Opener’s BlackFly ingeniously avoids having to make those trade-offs and compromises. It has two wings, one in front and one behind the pilot. Affixed to each wing are four motors and rotors—and these never change their orientation relative to the wings. Nor do the wings move relative to the fuselage. Instead, the entire aircraft rotates in the air to transition between vertical and horizontal flight.

To control the aircraft, the pilot moves a joystick, and those motions are instantly translated by redundant flight-control systems into commands that alter the relative thrust among the eight motor-propellers.

Visually, it’s an astounding aircraft, like something from a 1930s pulp sci-fi magazine. It’s also a triumph of engineering.

Leng says the journey started for him in 2008, when “I just serendipitously stumbled upon the fact that all the key technologies for making electric VTOL human flight practical were coming to a nexus.”

The journey that made Leng’s dream a reality kicked into high gear in 2014 when a chance meeting with investor Sebastian Thrun at an aviation conference led to Google cofounder Larry Page investing in Leng’s project.

Designing an eVTOL from first principles

Leng started in his basement in 2010, spending his own money on a mélange of home-built and commercially available components. The motors were commercial units that Leng modified himself, the motor controllers were German and off the shelf, the inertial-measurement unit was open source and based on an Arduino microcontroller. The batteries were modified model-aircraft lithium-polymer types.

“The main objective behind this was proof of concept,” he says.“I had to prove it to myself, because up until that point, they were just equations on a piece of paper. I had to get to the point where I knew that this could be practical.”

After his front-yard flight in 2011, there followed several years of refining and rebuilding all of the major components until they achieved the specifications Leng wanted. “Everything on BlackFly is from first principles,” he declares.

The motors started out generating 160 newtons (36 pounds) of static thrust. It was way too low. “I actually tried to purchase motors and motor controllers from companies that manufactured those, and I specifically asked them to customize those motors for me, by suggesting a number of changes,” he says. “I was told that, no, those changes won’t work.”

So he started designing his own brushless AC motors. “I did not want to design motors,” says Leng. “In the end, I was stunned at how much improvement we could make by just applying first principles to this motor design.”

Eleven years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale.

To increase the power density, he had to address the tendency of a motor in an eVTOL to overheat at high thrust, especially during hover, when cooling airflow over the motor is minimal. He began by designing a system to force air through the motor. Then he began working on the rotor of the motor (not to be confused with the rotor wings that lift and propel the aircraft). This is the spinning part of a motor, which is typically a single piece of electrical steel. It’s an iron alloy with very high magnetic permeability.

By layering the steel of the rotor, Leng was able to greatly reduce its heat generation, because the thinner layers of steel limited the eddy currents in the steel that create heat. Less heat meant he could use higher-strength neodymium magnets, which would otherwise become demagnetized. Finally, he rearranged those magnets into a configuration called a Halbach array. In the end Leng’s motors were able to produce 609 newtons (137 lbs.) of thrust.

Overall, the 2-kilogram motors are capable of sustaining 20 kilowatts, for a power density of 10 kilowatts per kilogram, Leng says. It’s an extraordinary figure. One of the few motor manufacturers claiming a density in that range is H3X Technologies, which says its HPDM-250 clocks in at 12 kw/kg.

Advanced air mobility for everybody

The brain of the BlackFly consists of three independent flight controllers, which calculate the aircraft’s orientation and position, based on readings from the inertial-measurement units, GPS receivers, and magnetometers. They also use pitot tubes to measure airspeed. The flight controllers continually cross-check their outputs to make sure they agree. They also feed instructions, based on the operator’s movement of the joystick, to the eight motor controllers (one for each motor).

Equipped with these sophisticated flight controllers, the fly-by-wire BlackFly is similar in that regard to the hobbyist drones that rely on processors and clever algorithms to avoid the tricky manipulations of sticks, levers, and pedals required to fly a traditional fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft.

That sophisticated, real-time control will allow a far larger number of people to consider purchasing a BlackFly when it becomes available. In late November, Opener had not disclosed a likely purchase price, but in the past the company had suggested that BlackFly would cost as much as a luxury SUV. So who might buy it? CEO Ken Karklin points to several distinct groups of potential buyers who have little in common other than wealth.

There are early tech adopters and also people who are already aviators and are “passionate about the future of electric flight, who love the idea of being able to have their own personal vertical-takeoff-and-landing, low-maintenance, clean aircraft that they can fly in rural and uncongested areas,” Karklin says. “One of them is a business owner. He has a plant that’s a 22-mile drive but would only be a 14-mile flight, and he wants to install charging infrastructure on either end and wants to use it to commute every day. We love that.”

Others are less certain about how, or even whether, this market segment will establish itself. “When it comes to personal-use eVTOLs, we are really struggling to see the business case,” says Sergio Cecutta, founder and partner at SMG Consulting, where he studies eVTOLs among other high-tech transportation topics. “I’m not saying they won’t sell. It’s how many will they sell?” He notes that Opener is not the only eVTOL maker pursuing a path to success through the ultralight or some other specialized FAA category. As of early November, the list included Alauda Aeronautics, Air, Alef, Bellwether Industries, Icon Aircraft, Jetson, Lift Aircraft, and Ryse Aero Technologies.

What makes Opener special? Both Karklin and Leng emphasize the value of all that surrounds the BlackFly aircraft. For example, there are virtual-reality-based simulators that they say enable them to fully train an operator in 10 to 15 hours. The aircraft themselves are heavily instrumented: “Every flight, literally, there’s over 1,000 parameters that are recorded, some of them at 1,000 hertz, some 100 Hz, 10 Hz, and 1 Hz,” says Leng. “All that information is stored on the aircraft and downloaded to our database at the end of the flight. When we go and make a software change, we can do what’s called regression testing by running that software using all the data from our previous flights. And we can compare the outputs against what the outputs were during any specific flight and can automatically confirm that the changes that we’ve made are without any issues. And we can also compare, to see if they make an improvement.”

Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive at Google, sits on Opener’s safety-review board. He says what impressed him most when he first met the BlackFly team was “the fact that they had based their entire development around testing. They had a wealth of flight data from flying this vehicle in a drone mode, an unmanned mode.” Having all that data was key. “They could make their decisions based not on analysis, but after real-world operations,” Lu says, adding that he is particularly impressed by Opener’s ability to manage all the flight data. “It allows them to keep track of every aircraft, what sensors are in which aircraft, which versions of code, all the way down to the flights, to what happened in each flight, to videos of what’s happening.” Lu thinks this will be a huge advantage once the aircraft is released into the “real” world.

Karklin declines to comment on whether an ultralight approval, which is governed by what the FAA designates “ Part 103,” might be an opening move toward an FAA type certification in the future. “This is step one for us, and we are going to be very, very focused on personal air vehicles for recreational and fun purposes for the foreseeable future,” he says. “But we’ve also got a working technology stack here and an aircraft architecture that has considerable utility beyond the realm of Part-103 [ultralight] aircraft, both for crewed and uncrewed applications.” Asked what his immediate goals are, Karklin responds without hesitating. “We will be the first eVTOL company, we believe, in serial production, with a small but steadily growing revenue and order book, and with a growing installed base of cloud-connected aircraft that with every flight push all the telemetry, all the flight behavior, all the component behavior, all the operator-behavior data representing all of this up to the cloud, to be ingested by our back office, and processed. And that provides us a lot of opportunity.”

This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Finally, an eVTOL You Can Buy Soonish.”


Top Tech 2023


Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.

Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?

Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.

An Airship Resurgence

Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins

A New Way to Speed Up Computing

Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.

The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here

Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.

Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV

Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.

China Builds New Breeder Reactors

The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.


Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence

Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.

A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?

What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.

IBM’s Quantum Leap

The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.

Arthritis Gets a Jolt

Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.

Smartphones Become Satphones

New satellites can connect directly to your phone.

Exascale Comes to Europe

The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.

The Short List

A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.


Match ID: 52 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 82 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

The Tech Is Finally Good Enough for an Airship Revival
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 16:00:02 +0000


At Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., Lighter Than Air (LTA) Research is floating a new approach to a technology that saw its rise and fall a century ago: airships. Although airships have long since been supplanted by planes, LTA, which was founded in 2015 by CEO Alan Weston, believes that through a combination of new materials, better construction techniques, and technological advancements, airships are poised to—not reclaim the skies, certainly—but find a new niche.

Although airships never died off entirely—the Goodyear blimps, familiar to sports fans, are proof of that—the industry was already in decline by 1937, the year of the Hindenburg disaster. By the end of World War II, airships couldn’t compete with the speed airplanes offered, and they required larger crews. Today, what airships still linger serve primarily for advertising and sightseeing.


This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

LTA’s Pathfinder 1 carries bigger dreams than hovering over a sports stadium, however. The company sees a natural fit for airships in humanitarian and relief missions. Airships can stay aloft for long periods of time, in case ground conditions aren’t ideal, have a long range, and carry significant payloads, according to Carl Taussig, LTA’s chief technical officer.

Pathfinder’s cigar-shaped envelope is just over 120 meters in length and 20 meters in diameter. While that dwarfs Goodyear’s current, 75-meter Wingfoot One, it’s still only half the length of the Hindenburg. LTA expects Pathfinder 1 to carry approximately 4 tonnes of cargo, in addition to its crew, water ballast, and fuel. The airship will have a top speed of 65 knots, or about 120 kilometers per hour—on par with the Hindenburg—with a sustained cruise speed of 35 to 40 knots (65 to 75 km/h).

Some 21st-century Airship Tech

It may not seem much of an advance to be building an airship that flies no faster than the Hindenburg. But Pathfinder 1 carries a lot of new tech that LTA is betting will prove key to an airship resurgence.

For one, airships used to be constructed around riveted aluminum girders, which provided the highest strength-to-weight ratio available at the time. Instead, LTA will be using carbon-fiber tubes attached to titanium hubs. As a result, Pathfinder 1’s primary structure will be both stronger and lighter.

Pathfinder 1’s outer covering is also a step up from past generations. Airships like the 1930s’ Graf Zeppelin had coverings made out of doped cotton canvas. The dope painted on the fabric increased its strength and resiliency. But canvas is still canvas. LTA has instead built its outer coverings out of a three-layer laminate of synthetics. The outermost layer is DuPont’s Tedlar, which is a polyvinyl fluoride. The middle layer is a loose weave of fire-retardant aramid fibers. The inner layer is polyester. “It’s very similar to what’s used in a lot of racing sailboats,” says Taussig. “We needed to modify that material to make it fire resistant and change a little bit about its structural performance.”

A cylindrical white airship under construction in a large aircraft hanger. LTA Research

But neither the materials science nor the manufacturing advances will take primary credit for LTA’s looked-for success, according to Taussig—instead, it’s the introduction of electronics. “Everything’s electric on Pathfinder,” he says. “All the actuation, all the propulsion, all the actual power is all electrically generated. It’s a fully electric fly-by-wire aircraft, which is not something that was possible 80 years ago.” Pathfinder 1 has 12 electric motors for propulsion, as well as four tail fins with steering rudders controlled by its fly-by-wire system. (During initial test flights, the airship will be powered by two reciprocating aircraft engines).

There’s one other piece of equipment making an appearance on Pathfinder 1 that wasn’t available 80 years ago: lidar. Installed at the top of each of Pathfinder 1’s helium gas cells is an automotive-grade lidar. “The lidar can give us a point cloud showing the entire internal hull of that gas cell,” says Taussig, which can then be used to determine the gas cell’s volume accurately. In flight, the airship’s pilots can use that information, as well as data about the helium’s purity, pressure, and temperature, to better keep the craft pitched properly and to avoid extra stress on the internal structure during flight.

Although LTA’s initial focus is on humanitarian applications, there are other areas where airships might shine one day. “An airship is kind of a ‘tweener,’ in between sea cargo and air freight,” says Taussig. Being fully electric, Pathfinder 1 is also greener than traditional air- or sea-freight options.

After completing Pathfinder 1’s construction late in 2022, LTA plans to conduct a series of ground tests on each of the airship’s systems in the first part of 2023. Once the team is satisfied with those tests, they’ll move to tethered flight tests and finally untethered flight tests over San Francisco’s South Bay later in the year.

The company will also construct an approximately 180-meter-long airship, Pathfinder 3 at its Akron Airdock facility in Ohio. Pathfinder 3 won’t be ready to fly in 2023, but its development shows LTA’s aspirations for an airship renaissance is more than just hot air.

This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “The Return of the Airship.”


Top Tech 2023


Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.

Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?

Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.

An Airship Resurgence

Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins

A New Way to Speed Up Computing

Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.

The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here

Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.

Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV

Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.

China Builds New Breeder Reactors

The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.


Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence

Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.

A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?

What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.

IBM’s Quantum Leap

The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.

Arthritis Gets a Jolt

Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.

Smartphones Become Satphones

New satellites can connect directly to your phone.

Exascale Comes to Europe

The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.

The Short List

A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.


Match ID: 53 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 101 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

Neuberger wins clearance to manage assets in China for Chinese residents
Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:39:44 -0500
Neuberger Berman said Monday it became the second global institution to receive final approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) to launch a wholly owned, newly established mutual fund business in China. Neuberger Berman will now be allowed to manage local assets for local clients, which has not been allowed previously. BlackRock Inc. was the first to receive approval. Patrick Liu, CEO of Neuberger Berman Fund Management (China) (FMC), said the country's commitment to opening up to high-quality financial services "will bring significant opportunities for local investors." Michelle Wei will become chief investment officer - equities of the FMC.
Match ID: 54 Score: 5.71 source: www.marketwatch.com age: 113 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

China’s Moon Missions Shadow NASA Artemis’s Pace
Wed, 07 Sep 2022 16:56:57 +0000


This past weekend, NASA scrubbed the Artemis I uncrewed mission to the moon and back. Reportedly, the space agency will try again to launch the inaugural moon mission featuring the gargantuan Space Launch System (SLS) at the end of this month or sometime in October. Meanwhile, half a world away, China is progressing on its own step-by-step program to put both robotic and, eventually, crewed spacecraft on the lunar surface and keep pace with NASA-led achievements.

Asia’s rapidly growing space power has already made a number of impressive lunar leaps but will need to build on these in the coming years. Ambitious sample-return missions, landings at the lunar south pole, testing the ability to 3D print using materials from regolith, and finally sending astronauts on a short-term visit to our celestial neighbor are in the cards before the end of the decade.

The next step, expected around 2024, is Chang’e-6: an unprecedented attempt to collect rock samples from the far side of the moon.

The mission will build on two recent major space achievements. In 2019, China became the first country to safely land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a hemisphere which cannot be seen from Earth—as the moon is tidally locked. The mission was made possible by a relay satellite out beyond the moon at Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, where it can bounce signals between Chang’e-4 and ground stations in China.

Chang’e-5 in 2020 performed the first sampling of lunar material in over four decades. The complex, four-spacecraft mission used an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and return capsule to successfully deliver 1.731 grams of lunar rocks to Earth. The automated rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit of the orbiter and ascent spacecraft was also seen as a test of the technology for getting astronauts off the moon and back to Earth.

Chang’e-6 will again attempt to collect new samples, this time from the South pole-Aitken basin, a massive and ancient impact crater on the far side of the moon. The science return of such a mission could likewise be huge as its rocks have the potential to answer some significant questions about the moon’s geological past, says planetary scientist Katherine Joy of the University of Manchester, in England.

“We think that the basin-formation event was so large that the moon’s mantle could have been excavated from tens of kilometers deep,” says Joy. Fragments of this mantle material originating from deep in the moon would help us to understand how the Moon differentiated early in its history, the nature of its interior, and how volcanism on the far side of the moon is different or similar to that on the nearside.

Chang’e-7, also scheduled for 2024, will look at a different set of questions geared toward lunar resources. It will target the lunar south pole, a region where NASA’s Artemis 3 crewed mission is also looking to land.

The mission will involve a flotilla of spacecraft, including a new relay satellite, an orbiter, lander, rover and a small “hopping” spacecraft designed to inspect permanently shadowed craters which are thought to contain water ice which could be used in the future to provide breathable oxygen, rocket fuel, or drinking water to lunar explorers.

Following this Chang’e-8 is expected to launch around 2027 to test in situ resource utilization and conduct other experiments and technology tests such as oxygen extraction and 3D printing related to building a permanent lunar base—for both robots and crew—in the 2030s, named the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

The upcoming Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 missions are expected to launch on China’s largest current rocket, the Long March 5. But, as with NASA and Artemis, China will need its own megarockets to make human lunar exploration and ultimately, perhaps, crewed lunar bases a reality.

In part in reaction to the achievements of SpaceX, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, is developing a new rocket specifically for launching astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.

The “new generation crew launch vehicle” will essentially bundle three Long March 5 core stages together (which will be no mean feat of engineering) while also improving the performance of its kerosene engines. The result will be a roughly 90-meter-tall rocket resembling a Long March version of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, capable of sending 27 tonnes of payload into translunar injection.

Two launches of the rocket will by 2030, according to leading Chinese space officials, be able to put a pair of astronauts on the moon for a 6-hour stay. Such a mission also requires developing a lunar lander and a new spacecraft capable of keeping astronauts safe in deep space.

For building infrastructure on the moon, China is looking to the future Long March 9, an SLS-class rocket capable of sending 50 tonnes into translunar injection. The project will require CASC to make breakthroughs in a number of areas, including manufacturing new, wider rocket bodies of up to 10 meters in diameter, mastering massive, higher-thrust rocket engines, and building a new launch complex at Wenchang, Hainan island, to handle the monster.

Once again NASA is leading humanity’s journey to the moon, but China’s steady accumulation of capabilities and long-term ambitions means it will likely not be far behind.


Match ID: 55 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 195 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

NASA’s Artemis I Revives the Moonshot
Sun, 28 Aug 2022 13:00:00 +0000



Update 5 Sept.: For now, NASA’s giant Artemis I remains on the ground after two launch attempts scrubbed by a hydrogen leak and a balky engine sensor. Mission managers say Artemis will fly when everything's ready—but haven't yet specified whether that might be in late September or in mid-October.

“When you look at the rocket, it looks almost retro,” said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA. “Looks like we’re looking back toward the Saturn V. But it’s a totally different, new, highly sophisticated—more sophisticated—rocket, and spacecraft.”

Artemis, powered by the Space Launch System rocket, is America’s first attempt to send astronauts to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and technology has taken giant leaps since then. On Artemis I, the first test flight, mission managers say they are taking the SLS, with its uncrewed Orion spacecraft up top, and “stressing it beyond what it is designed for”—the better to ensure safe flights when astronauts make their first landings, currently targeted to begin with Artemis III in 2025.

But Nelson is right: The rocket is retro in many ways, borrowing heavily from the space shuttles America flew for 30 years, and from the Apollo-Saturn V.

Much of Artemis’s hardware is refurbished: Its four main engines, and parts of its two strap-on boosters, all flew before on shuttle missions. The rocket’s apricot color comes from spray-on insulation much like the foam on the shuttle’s external tank. And the large maneuvering engine in Orion’s service module is actually 40 years old—used on 19 space shuttle flights between 1984 and 1992.

“I have a name for missions that use too much new technology—failures.”
—John Casani, NASA

Perhaps more important, the project inherits basic engineering from half a century of spaceflight. Just look at Orion’s crew capsule—a truncated cone, somewhat larger than the Apollo Command Module but conceptually very similar.

Old, of course, does not mean bad. NASA says there is no need to reinvent things engineers got right the first time.

“There are certain fundamental aspects of deep-space exploration that are really independent of money,” says Jim Geffre, Orion vehicle-integration manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “The laws of physics haven’t changed since the 1960s. And capsule shapes happen to be really good for coming back into the atmosphere at Mach 32.”

Roger Launius, who served as NASA’s chief historian from 1990 to 2002 and as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution from then until 2017, tells of a conversation he had with John Casani, a veteran NASA engineer who managed the Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini probes to the outer planets.

“I have a name for missions that use too much new technology,” he recalls Casani saying. “Failures.”

The Artemis I flight is slated for about six weeks. (Apollo 11 lasted eight days.) The ship roughly follows Apollo’s path to the moon’s vicinity, but then puts itself in what NASA calls a distant retrograde orbit. It swoops within 110 kilometers of the lunar surface for a gravity assist, then heads 64,000 km out—taking more than a month but using less fuel than it would in closer orbits. Finally, it comes home, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere at 11 km per second, slowing itself with a heatshield and parachutes, and splashing down in the Pacific not far from San Diego.

If all four, quadruply redundant flight computer modules fail, there is a fifth, entirely separate computer onboard, running different code to get the spacecraft home.

“That extra time in space,” says Geffre, “allows us to operate the systems, give more time in deep space, and all those things that stress it, like radiation and micrometeoroids, thermal environments.”

There are, of course, newer technologies on board. Orion is controlled by two vehicle-management computers, each composed of two flight computer modules (FCMs) to handle guidance, navigation, propulsion, communications, and other systems. The flight control system, Geffre points out, is quad-redundant; if at any point one of the four FCMs disagrees with the others, it will take itself offline and, in a 22-second process, reset itself to make sure its outputs are consistent with the others’. If all four FCMs fail, there is a fifth, entirely separate computer running different code to get the spacecraft home.

Guidance and navigation, too, have advanced since the sextant used on Apollo. Orion uses a star tracker to determine its attitude, imaging stars and comparing them to an onboard database. And an optical navigation camera shoots Earth and the moon so that guidance software can determine their distance and position and keep the spacecraft on course. NASA says it’s there as backup, able to get Orion to a safe splashdown even if all communication with Earth has been lost.

But even those systems aren’t entirely new. Geffre points out that the guidance system’s architecture is derived from the Boeing 787. Computing power in deep space is limited by cosmic radiation, which can corrupt the output of microprocessors beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Beyond that is the inevitable issue of cost. Artemis is a giant project, years behind schedule, started long before NASA began to buy other launches from companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab. NASA’s inspector general, Paul Martin, testified to Congress in March that the first four Artemis missions would cost US $4.1 billion each—“a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.”

Launius, for one, rejects the argument that government is inherently wasteful. “Yes, NASA’s had problems in managing programs in the past. Who hasn’t?” he says. He points out that Blue Origin and SpaceX have had plenty of setbacks of their own—they’re just not obliged to be public about them. “I could go on and on. It’s not a government thing per se and it’s not a NASA thing per se.”

So why return to the moon with—please forgive the pun—such a retro rocket? Partly, say those who watch Artemis closely, because it’s become too big to fail, with so much American money and brainpower invested in it. Partly because it turns NASA’s astronauts outward again, exploring instead of maintaining a space station. Partly because new perspectives could come of it. And partly because China and Russia have ambitions in space that threaten America’s.

“Apollo was a demonstration of technological verisimilitude—to the whole world,” says Launius. “And the whole world knew then, as they know today, that the future belongs to the civilization that can master science and technology.”

Update 7 Sept.: Artemis I has been on launchpad 39B, not 39A as previously reported, at Kennedy Space Center.


Match ID: 56 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 205 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

As China’s Quantum-Encrypting Satellites Shrink, Their Networking Abilities Grow
Thu, 25 Aug 2022 18:37:07 +0000


The orbiting Tiangong-2 space lab has transmitted quantum-encryption keys to four ground stations, researchers reported on 18 August. The same network of ground stations is also able to receive quantum keys from the orbiting Micius satellite, which is in a much higher orbit, using the space station as a repeater. It comes just after the late July launch of Jinan 1, China’s second quantum-encrypting satellite, by the University of Science and Technology of China. USTC told the Xinhua News Agency that the new satellite is one-sixth the mass of its 2016 predecessor.

“The launch is significant,” says physicist Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, because it means the team are starting to build, not just plan, a quantum network. USTC researchers did not reply to IEEE Spectrum’s request for comments.

In quantum-key distribution (QKD), the quantum states of a single photon, such as polarization, encode and distribute random information that can be used to encrypt a classical message. Because it is impossible to copy the quantum state without changing it, senders and recipients can verify that their transmission got through without tampering or reading by third parties. In some scenarios it involves sending just one well-described photon at a time, but single photons are difficult to produce, and in this case, researchers used an attenuated laser to send small pulses that might also come out a couple of photons at a time, or not at all.

The USTC research team, led by Jian-Wei Pan, had already established quantum-key distribution from Micius to a single ground station in 2017, not long after the 2016 launch of the satellite. The work that Pan and colleagues reported this month, but which took place in 2018 and 2019, is a necessary step for building a constellation of quantum-encryption-compatible satellites across a range of orbits, to ensure more secure long-distance communications.

Several other research groups have transmitted quantum keys, and others are now building microsatellites for the same purpose. However, the U.S. National Security Agency’s site about QKD lists several technical limitations, such as requiring an initial verification of the counterparty’s identity, the need for special equipment, the cost, and the risk of hardware-based security vulnerabilities. In the absence of fixes, the NSA does not anticipate approving QKD for national security communications.

However, attenuated laser pulses are just one way of implementing QKD. Another is to use quantum entanglement, by which a pair of photons will behave the same way, even at a distance, when someone measures one of their quantum properties. In earlier experiments, Pan and colleagues also reported using quantum entanglement for QKD and mixing satellite and fiber-optic links to establish a mixed-modality QKD network spanning almost 5,000 kilometers.

“A quantum network with entangled nodes is the thing that would be really interesting, enabling distributed quantum computing and sensing, but that’s a hard thing to make. Being able to do QKD is a necessary but not sufficient first step,” Kwiat says. The USTC experiments are a chance to establish many technical abilities, such as the precise control of the pulse duration and direction of the lasers involved, or the ability to accurately transfer and measure the quantum signals to the standard necessary for a more complex quantum network.

That is a step ahead of the many other QKD efforts made so far on laboratory benchtops, over ground-to-ground cables, or aboard balloons or aircraft. “You have to do things very differently if you’re not allowed to fiddle with something once it’s launched into space,” Kwiat says.

The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, signed on 9 August, allocated more than US $153 million a year for quantum computing and networks. While that’s unlikely to drive more American work toward an end goal of QKD, Kwiat says, “maybe we do it on the way to these more interesting applications.”


Match ID: 57 Score: 5.71 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 208 days
qualifiers: 5.71 china

NASA Selects L3Harris to Develop Imager for NOAA Satellite
Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:46 EDT
NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected L3Harris Technologies Inc. of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to develop the imager for NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program.
Match ID: 58 Score: 5.00 source: www.nasa.gov age: 8 days
qualifiers: 5.00 india

Filter efficiency 92.267 (59 matches/763 results)

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