Day: February 22, 2017

Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from Los Angeles County, California, led fourteen other House Democrats on Friday in urging the House Government Oversight Committee to investigate “troubling reports” of President Donald Trump’s apparently poor security practices and the potential danger to national security posed by them—including his continued use of an unsecured Android device to post to Twitter, discussion of sensitive information (including nuclear strategy) in the restaurant at his Mar-A-Lago resort, and leaving classified material unlocked while visitors were in the Oval Office.

In just its third season, Formula E deserves credit for trying out new ideas in motorsport. Not everything has been a success, but the risk of trying to innovate in broad daylight is that people will see your mistakes as they happen. Take Roborace for example. The idea is to create a series of support races for Formula E where each team uses an identical driverless car, competing to write the best-racing AI. That driverless race car isn’t quite ready yet, but Roborace took a pair of DevBots to Argentina this weekend for a demonstration at the Buenos Aires ePrix.

It may not have been the demonstration that Roborace hoped for. One of the DevBots—the yellow one—ran out of talent and clipped a wall. But that happens to rookie human drivers, too, and at least in this case there was no chance of a rookie seriously hurting themselves. Some argue that this is bad news for Roborace and self-driving cars, but this is racing. If it were easy to get right, it wouldn’t be any fun.

Roborace revealed on Twitter that DevBot 1—the red one—reached a top speed of 115mph (185km/h) on the 1.5-mile (2.4km), 12-turn track:

Devbot 1 wins! Clocking a new new fastest lap at top speed of 186kph #BAePrix 🇦🇷 http://pic.twitter.com/qBvT8iqLWZ

— Roborace (@roborace) February 18, 2017

Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to put that into context. We know the average speed of each Formula E lap, with Jean-Eric Verne’s 2017 qualifying lap at 80.7mph (129.9km/h) being the fastest recorded time we can find for the temporary circuit. But Formula E doesn’t publish peak lap speeds in the official results, so we can’t say if hitting 115mph is good or bad.

The red DevBot also had to cope with a stray dog running across the track—something that also affects the big boys in Formula 1 from time to time.

Roborace says that video from the Buenos Aires test should be online later this week, so until then we’re left with Argentinian journalist Diego Zorrero‘s short clip as the best look yet at how the DevBots cope on concrete-lined street circuits:

Si, estos dos autos no tienen piloto… son los @roborace, http://pic.twitter.com/2sSX22XDyd

— Diego Zorrero (@dzorrero) February 18, 2017

Listing image by Roborace

Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research.

The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it’s retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox.

“Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources,” the CyberX researchers wrote. “In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics.”

Examples of targets infected in the campaign include:

• A company that designs remote monitoring systems for oil and gas pipelines
• An international organization that monitors human rights, counter-terrorism, and computer attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure
• An engineering company that designs electrical substations, gas distribution pipelines, and water supply plants
• A scientific research institute
• Editors of Ukrainian newspapers

HOUSTON—Franklin Chang-Díaz bounds up a handful of stairs and peers through a porthole cut into the side of a silver, tanker-truck-sized vacuum chamber. Inside, a blueish-purple light shines, unchanging and constant, like a bright flashlight. “It looks kind of boring,” Chang-Díaz admits. “But that plume is 3.5 million degrees. If you stuck your hand in that, it would be very bad.”

Truth be told, the plume does not look impressive at all. And yet the engine firing within the vacuum chamber is potentially revolutionary for two simple reasons: first, unlike gas-guzzling conventional rocket engines, it requires little fuel. And second, this engine might one day push spacecraft to velocities sufficient enough to open the Solar System to human exploration.

This has long been the promise of Chang-Díaz’s plasma-based rocket engine, Vasimr. From a theoretical physics standpoint, Vasimr has always seemed a reasonable proposition: generate a plasma, excite it, and then push it out a nozzle at high speed. But what about the real-world engineering of actually building such an engine—managing the plasma and its thermal properties, then successfully firing it for a long period of time? That has proven challenging, and it has led many to doubt Vasimr’s practicality.

Sure, the naysayers say, Chang-Díaz is a wonderful fellow. Hard worker. Brilliant guy. And at a time when the national discourse assails the value of Spanish-speaking immigrants, his story offers a powerful counter to that narrative. Speaking almost no English at the time, he immigrated to the United States from Costa Rica in 1969 to finish high school. Chang-Díaz then earned a doctoral degree in plasma physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later, as an astronaut, Chang-Díaz flew seven Space Shuttle missions, tying Jerry Ross’ record for most spaceflights by anyone, ever.

All the while, from his first days at Johnson Space Center when he installed an early Internet connection to work with data from his Boston-based plasma physics lab, Chang-Díaz nurtured dreams of linking his science background with his career as a flier. Slowly, he developed the theory of a plasma rocket and began to build prototypes. All along, the critics whispered it just wasn’t feasible.

Only, now it just might be. As part of a program to develop the next generation of in-space propulsion systems, NASA awarded Chang-Díaz’s company, Ad Astra, a three-year, $9 million contract in 2015. This unlocked an opportunity long awaited—a chance to prove the doubters wrong. Naturally, it won’t be easy. Ad Astra must fire its plasma rocket for 100 hours, at a power level of 100 kilowatts, next year.

This February, the company has worked about halfway through that contract, and Ars has been keeping tabs on progress in the lab. So far, the immigrant from Costa Rica seems to be holding up his end of the bargain. NASA gave the company a sterling review after the first year of the agreement. Still, there is a ways to go. During a visit this month, the Vasimr engine fired at 100kW for 10 seconds and 50kW for one minute.

The rocket

The rocket engine starts with a neutral gas as a feedstock for plasma, in this case argon. The first stage of the rocket ionizes the argon and turns it into a relatively “cold” plasma. The engine then injects the plasma into the second stage, the “booster,” where it is subjected to a physics phenomenon known as ion cyclotron resonance heating. Essentially, the booster uses a radio frequency that excites the ions, swinging them back and forth.

As the ions resonate and gain more energy, they are spun up into a stream of superheated plasma. This stream then passes through a corkscrew-shaped nozzle and is accelerated out of the back of the rocket, producing a thrust.

Such an engine design offers a couple of key benefits over most existing propulsion technology. Perhaps most notably, unlike chemical rockets, Vasimr operates on electricity. As it flies through space, therefore, it does not need massive fuel tanks or a huge reservoir of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Instead, the rocket just needs some solar panels.

The Sun powers both the production of plasma and the booster exciting the plasma, and the extent to which it does either can be shifted. When a spacecraft needs more thrust, more power can be put into making plasma. This process uses more propellant, but it provides the thrust needed to move out of a gravity well, such as Earth orbit. Later, when the vehicle is moving quickly, more power can be shifted to the booster, providing a higher specific impulse and greater fuel economy.

“It’s like shifting gears in a car,” Chang-Díaz explained. “The engine doesn’t change. But if you want to climb a hill, you put more of your engine power into torque and less into rpm, so you climb the hill, slowly, but you’re able to climb. And when you’re going on a freeway, flat and straight, you upshift. You’re not going to go to Mars in first gear. That’s the problem. It’s why we run out of gas going to Mars with a chemical engine.”

Another benefit of Vasimr’s design is that the plasma remains confined within a magnetic field, inside the engine, throughout the burn. In practical terms, this should greatly reduce the wear and tear on the engine—which is useful if you’re designing a spacecraft to eventually fly people around the entire Solar System.

Listing image by Ad Astra Rocket Company

Food and Drug Administration reports obtained by STAT through a Freedom of Information Act request detail the heart-rending stories of babies and toddlers who became severely ill or died after taking homeopathic teething products—which, as Ars has reported, the FDA has found to contain inconsistent amounts of toxic belladonna, aka deadly nightshade.