Diesel trains are noisy and polluting, but on stretches of non-electrified rail, what else are you going to do? Hydrogen trains are one option, but now there’s another: Canadian transportation firm Bombardier has (re-)introduced the battery powered train. In Berlin, it launched the Bombardier Talent 3 electro-hybrid train, the first of its kind in Europe in over 60 years, the company said. The train took its maiden voyage with local luminaries including the federal commissioner for rail transport and the Brandenburg transport minister.
“Around 40 percent of the German rail network is not electrified,” said Bombardier German transportation chief, Michael Fohrer. “The Bombardier battery-operated train is an attractive option to counter that, both economically and ecologically speaking.” Developed with $4 million worth of support from the German government, the train uses Bombardier’s MITRAC powertrain (below) that allows for different combinations of motors and batteries.
The train that ran on the weekend can go about 40 km (25 miles) on a charge, but future version will be able to run for up to 100 km (62 miles). It generates no exhaust and is 90 percent efficient in terms of efficiency and recyclability, Bombardier said.
Germany is trying hard to reduce its dependence on diesel trains. Earlier this year, Alstom unveiled the Coradia iLint, a hydrogen-powered train that will one day run for about 1,000 km (620 miles) on a tank of hydrogen. “On non-electrified or only partially electrified routes, the motto is: move away from diesel on the tracks and toward cleaner and more environmentally-friendly mobility,” said Germany’s state secretary for rail transport Enak Ferlemann.
Germany has a ways to go to catch up with Holland, which runs 100 percent of its trains on wind power. It’s trying to catch up, though: In 2019, operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) will start a twelve-month trial run with passengers on Bombardier’s 40 km-range prototype train near Lake Constance in Germany’s southwest.
There are very few people in this world who would wonder, “what would happen if I made a jeep that could fly?” It seems more like the kind of thing you’d make a rough crayon sketch of in kindergarten than it does something someone would actually sit down and seriously draft up. But someone out there, well—they really did try it out.
According to Aviastar, Piasecki was a leading name in vertical lift research and development. They were trying to develop machines that could rise off the ground, kind of like a helicopter, but were way smaller and easier to control. That made them the perfect candidate for the US Army Transportation Research Command contract to develop what was essentially to be a flying jeep.
The Piasecki crafts weren’t the first of their kind. There had been an effort to get a flying jeep since WWII, but nobody could really figure it out. Piasecki were just the ones who actually figured out how to get the thing off the ground.
In essence, their craft was powered by two engines that powered two three-bladed ducted rotors that were connected to the same gearbox. That way, if one of the engines failed—something you can reasonably expect to happen in the battlefield—then both of the rotors would still function.
And, since you don’t really want to mess with a good thing, Piasecki made sure the controls were pretty standard. They looked mostly like what you’d find in a helicopter, so a pilot who was skilled at flying could easily take over the wheel of the so-called Model 59K Sky Car. You could control directional stability, and you’d land on three wheels.
The Army liked what they saw, and Piasecki rebranded their craft the Airgeep VZ-8P. It got fitted with more powerful engines approved to be up to military standard.
The first flight took place in June 1959, where it actually did make it up in the air. Everyone was so stoked that they immediately sent it out to the Navy so that they could look at it, too.
The Navy decided that the Army’s engine left something to be desired, so they replaced it with an AiResearch 331-6 turbine, which was lighter and more powerful.
Where the initial model had been pretty standard, the VZ-8P underwent enough changes that Piasecki started calling this new version the “B” model. Originally only having two seats, the Airgeep was now equipped with two ejector seats for the pilot and gunner, as well as three additional seats for passengers. The landing gear was upgraded significantly, and the Navy had included floatation devices in the event of a water landing.
At that point, the Airgeep was capable of flying several thousand feet in the sky as well as down near the ground—the latter being where it was assumed they’d usually be spending most of their time, since it kept them out of radar detection.
Out of the options that the military were considering, the Piasecki model was the most impressive. Unfortunately, the Army wasn’t quite convinced. They decided that the whole concept of a flying jeep was silly and probably wouldn’t work at all in the midst of actual combat. The whole project got scrapped, and the Army went back to focusing on developing helicopters.
Which is kind of unfortunate. I don’t know about you, but I’m still down for living in a society that has flying jeeps—even if they are impractical for military purposes.
Artist’s depiction of the BFR spacecraft encircling the Moon. Illustration: SpaceX
In a tweet posted late yesterday, SpaceX said it has signed a passenger to fly around the Moon aboard its next-generation launch system. Details are scarce, but the announcement suggests the Elon Musk-led rocket company is still intent on delivering private individuals, rather than just cargo and professional astronauts, into space.
That SpaceX has revived its lunar intentions shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Back in June, when the company canceled its plans to send a pair of space tourists around the Moon, SpaceX insisted that it was a postponement, and not an abandonment, of the company’s space tourism ambitions.
“SpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,” said James Gleeson, a company spokesperson, at the time.
What’s more, it was obvious why the company had postponed the lunar mission. Back in February, Elon Musk admitted that the Falcon Heavy, just one day before its inaugural launch, will not be rated for human space travel, saying SpaceX will instead focus its energies on developing the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR)—a strong hint that the company was intending to use the BFR launch system, and not the Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon Spacecraft, to deliver humans into space.
Yesterday’s surprise tweet suggests SpaceX is inching closer to its ambitions.
“SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle,” announced SpaceX in its tweet, saying it’s “an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.”
The name of the passenger will be announced on Monday, September 17, at 9pm ET, which you’ll be able to watch here. No timelines or other details were provided by SpaceX. Hopefully, we’ll learn more on Monday, as the SpaceX hype machine continues to rev on all four cylinders.
Interestingly, the illustration accompanying the tweet showed a slightly modified version of the BFR spacecraft, which was first unveiled last September during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Australia. It’s now got larger tail fins and seven engines in its base, as opposed to the original six. When asked on Twitter if the changes were reflective of the current BFR design, Musk responded in the affirmative.
To date, most of the development work has been done on the spacecraft element, reports SpaceNews, and it could be ready for short suborbital “hops” next year. Reminiscent of the retired Space Shuttle, the reusable BFR spacecraft could potentially carry a dozen, if not dozens, of passengers around the Moon. Or Mars.
As for the rocket portion itself, which will also be reusable, it’s still about one to two years away from an initial test flight, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Yesterday’s announcement can be interpreted as a strong sign that SpaceX is steadily turning its attention towards the BFR project, and at the expense of the Falcon Heavy project. The future of SpaceX, as the company has consistently reiterated, will involve the human exploration of space, whether it be lunar flybys or colonies on Mars. The company believes there’s money to be made in space tourism, whereas global demand for the launch of large commercial satellites is slipping appreciably and the appeal for smaller satellites steadily increases.
A man who federal authorities said ran a fake cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, and who pleaded guilty last year to one count of wire fraud, is now headed to prison.
On Thursday, Homero Joshua Garza, also known as Josh Garza, has now been sentenced by a federal judge in Hartford, Connecticut to 21 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and over $9 million in restitution. The news was first reported Thursday by CoinDesk.
In their sentencing memorandum filed before the hearing, prosecutors were blunt in their assessment of Garza, saying that he “lied to investors and customers and took their money” to the tune of $9 million in losses spread across thousands of people worldwide.
GAW Miners—which stood for Geniuses at Work—first arrived on the Bitcoin scene in 2014, re-selling mining rigs. While GAW initially began as a legitimate company, it soon shifted to its own cloud-based mining service (ZenMiner). When GAW was unable to fill demand for this service, Garza created something called “hashlets“—a slice of purported mining profits, that would “always make money.” As 2014 drew to a close and as the Bitcoin hash rate increased, making it more difficult for miners anywhere to make money, his hardware became obsolete.
As he could no longer pay earlier investors, Garza switched tactics again and introduced GAW’s own altcoin, dubbed “PayCoin.” He promised a $20 per PayCoin price floor, which he would prop up with a claimed $100 million reserve that did not actually exist. GAW also ran its own cloud-based wallet service (Paybase), cloud-based mining service (ZenMiner) and online discussion board (HashTalk). All were fraudulent, using money that later customers put in to pay out earlier ones.
In August 2015, Garza’s brother, Carlos Garza, a former GAW employee, was ordered to respond to a subpoena as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into the company. When Carlos Garza appeared before SEC lawyers in Boston, not only did he refuse to answer almost every question, but he provided the same answer nearly verbatim each time: “I’m very scared. I don’t understand, these type of questions, this type of law at all. I want to help, but l’d have to have an attorney present. I can’t afford one at this time, but if I were to get appointed counsel, or retain counsel, then I’d absolutely come back and help.”
As SEC lawyers pointed out, the government does not appoint counsel in civil cases.
A curious origin story
Over time, Josh Garza’s scheme drew the attention of the SEC, which formally brought a civil complaint in December 2015. Garza pleaded guilty to criminal charges in July 2017.
Federal prosecutors said Garza’s entire setup was a house of cards. ”As with all Ponzi schemes, eventually the truth caught up with the defendant and his companies,” they wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “The market value of PayCoin collapsed, and many customers lost everything they had invested.”
In a phone interview with Ars in January 2015, Garza said that he “started the company because of scammers.”
He claimed that he first heard of Bitcoin around a year earlier, at which point he tried to buy a hardware mining rig, and “spent $100,000 for a product I never got.” He declined to say which company he purchased from.
“I’d never had any experience with that—realizing a couple weeks later that these guys didn’t care how much money I can afford to lose,” he said. “I got really frustrated and thought we should start a company to try to fix this.”
Garza told Ars that GAW made “over $1 million in sales our first month,” adding that within a few months, “we leveled at $60 million to $80 million per year.”
He claimed the company has 100,000 customers at present, with “10,000 to 15,000 new accounts per day.”
In this case, greed is not good
Garza’s attorney, Marjorie Peerce, wrote in her own sentencing memorandum that her client was deeply sorry for what he had done and that Garza should not be sentenced to prison.
In a three-page letter sent to the judge, Garza himself apologized directly and said that while the company started “with a legitimate purpose,” the company eventually “turned into greed.”
“That greed turned in to poor personal and business purchasing decisions; like spending unnecessary money on a private flight with our management team to a conference and even large bonuses to myself,” he wrote.
Garza, who is currently out on bond, and is now living in Texas, was ordered to report to prison on January 4, 2019.
Quantum computers promise to transform computer security, finance, and many other fields by solving certain problems far faster than conventional machines. To unlock that potential, the U.S. government has just passed a bill to foster a viable quantum computing industry.
Christopher Monroe, at the University of Maryland, told the audience at EmTech, a conference organized by MIT Technology Review, that the U.S. needs a new generation of engineers, schooled in the quirks of quantum physics as well as the principles of computer engineering, to help create quantum computers that can tackle real-world problems.
That is why Monroe helped draft the National Quantum Initiative Act, a bill that just passed today that would establish a federal program for accelerating quantum computing research and training. The act will release $1.275 billion to help fund several centers of excellence that should help train many quantum engineers.
Monroe is also the cofounder of IonQ, one of several startups now racing to develop usable quantum computers. It is hard for these companies to find engineers to help them develop and commercialize scalable systems. “We need quantum systems engineers,” Monroe said. “We need that workforce.”
Quantum computers operate in a totally different way to conventional machines. In an ordinary computer, bits of information are represented using either a one or a zero. But in the quantum realm, matter behaves in bizarre ways. Quantum bits, or qubits, created and manipulated using superposition and entanglement, can perform certain types of calculation very rapidly on vast amounts of data.
In theory, a quantum machine with just a few hundred qubits should be able to run calculations that would be inconceivable using traditional hardware.
In practice, though, it is devilishly tricky to scale these systems up due to their sensitivity to interference. Quantum computers were first proposed decades ago, but research on the technology has progressed at a glacial pace.
Startups and big tech companies are currently racing to develop more powerful quantum computers. IonQ is building its computers using ions trapped with electric fields. Several others, including Google, IBM, and Rigetti are developing quantum computers using superconducting circuits. Rigetti recently demonstrated a new quantum cloud service (see “Running quantum algorithms in the cloud just got a lot faster”).
Monroe said the new national plan should also help the US compete internationally. China is pouring billions of dollars into its own quantum computing projects. The international picture is also significant because these technologies promise to be useful for breaking—but also securing—communications channels.
Within five years, quantum computers would be capable of calculations that could never be run using conventional hardware, Monroe predicts. But it remains unclear precisely how useful these early systems will be, since they will only be capable of certain types of computation.
Figuring out how to use these machines will then be up to the quantum software engineers. “When we build them, they will be useful for something,” Monroe says.
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An MIT professor has built a prototype device that can wirelessly track your health — even through walls — using a mix of radio signals and machine learning. Dina Katabi’s gadget resembles a WiFi router and is designed to sit in your pad and monitor your breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more as you go about your day. It’s already doing that in over 200 homes around the US of both healthy people and those with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, depression, and pulmonary diseases.
Here’s how it works: The device emits radio signals that bounce off nearby people’s bodies and back to the box. The neural network under the hood then analyses these reflections to estimate a person’s posture and movements without cameras and behind walls. It can also extract all that valuable health data from those same signals.
The box “takes advantage of the fact that every time we move—even if it’s just a teeny, tiny bit, such as when we breathe—we change the electromagnetic field surrounding us,” writes Rachel Metz in MIT Technology Review.
Research has shown that the device can accurately monitor sleep, including individual sleep stages — meaning it could replace laborious studies that require participants to wear electrodes and snooze in a lab. Another benefit touted by its creator is its ability to silently track people over time to give better insights into a patient’s life and the medication they’re taking. This, says Katabi, could help doctors figure out how some meds help certain patients but not others.
In terms of privacy, the device is encrypted and only works with your consent. In addition, it requires the user to complete a set of specific movements before it can track you, making it virtually impossible to snoop on an unwilling participant.
Of course, wearables with heart rate monitors are now the norm (the Apple Watch 4, meanwhile, even packs an electrocardiogram, or EKG, and can detect atrial fibrillation) and there’s sleep tracking devices to monitor the amount of quality shut-eye we’re getting. But this piece of kit, its maker claims, can discretely beam even more granular physiological data to your physician — plus you don’t have to wear it.
Next up, Katabi’s startup Emerald Innovations plans to commercialise the tech having recently made it available to biotech and pharmaceutical companies for research.
Project Verify would let you confirm or deny logins for other apps and websites.
The four major US mobile carriers have unveiled a system that would let them manage your logins across any third-party website or app that hooks into it.
“Project Verify” from a consortium of AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile US, and Sprint, was unveiled in a demo yesterday. It works similarly to other multi-factor authentication systems by letting users approve or deny login requests from other websites and apps, reducing the number of times users must enter passwords. The carriers’ consortium is putting the call out to developers of third-party apps and websites, who can contact the consortium for information on linking to the new authentication system.
“The Project Verify app can be preloaded or downloaded to the user’s mobile device,” a video describing the technology says. “And then when they face a login screen on their favorite sites and apps, they select the verify option. That’s it—Project Verify does the rest.”
The carriers hope to launch Verify next year.
Introducing Project Verify.
The carrier system would verify each person’s identity with “a multi-factor profile based around the user’s personal mobile device,” taking into account the user’s phone number, account tenure, IP address, phone account type, and SIM card details. The system “combines the carriers’ proprietary, network-based authentication capabilities with other methods to verify a user’s identity,” the carriers say.
Users would be able to log in to Project Verify-linked sites or apps by selecting the verify option within those apps or sites. The Project Verify app would let them manage which sites and apps are linked to their mobile identity.
Is this a good idea?
But do you want your carrier managing your logins across the websites and apps you use on your phone? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint aren’t exactly the tech industry’s best protectors of security and privacy.
The four major carriers were recently caught leaking the real-time location of most US cell phones. After facing pressure from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the carriers agreed to stop selling their mobile customers’ location information to third-party data brokers.
The carriers don’t face any major rules preventing them from misusing their customers’ Web-browsing and app-usage data. Last year, the mobile carriers and other Internet providers convinced Congress and President Trump to prevent implementation of rules that would have forced them to get customers’ opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling their browsing and app-usage histories for advertising purposes.
“I don’t trust the carriers”
There are good reasons to be skeptical of the carriers’ ability to securely manage logins, security reporter Brian Krebs wrote yesterday.
“A key question about adoption of this fledgling initiative will be how much trust consumers place with the wireless companies, which have struggled mightily over the past several years to validate that their own customers are who they say they are,” Krebs wrote. He continued:
All four major mobile providers currently are struggling to protect customers against scams designed to seize control over a target’s mobile phone number. In an increasingly common scenario, attackers impersonate the customer over the phone or in mobile retail stores in a bid to get the target’s number transferred to a device they control. When successful, these attacks—known as SIM swaps and mobile number port-out scams—allow thieves to intercept one-time authentication codes sent to a customer’s mobile device via text message or automated phone call.
AT&T VP Johannes Jaskolski, who is managing the carriers’ Project Verify consortium, told Krebs that the system will not centralize subscriber data into a multi-carrier database.
“We’re not going to be aggregating and centralizing this subscriber data, which will remain with each carrier separately,” Jaskolski said. Verify “will be portable by design and is not designed to keep a subscriber stuck to one specific carrier.” It will let the user maintain “control of whatever gets shared with third parties,” he added.
But Krebs is still skeptical, and so is security researcher Nicholas Weaver of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley. Krebs paraphrased Weaver as saying that “this new solution could make mobile phones and their associated numbers even more of an attractive target for cyber thieves.”
“The carriers have a dismal track record of authenticating the user,” Weaver also said. “If the carriers were trustworthy, I think this would be unequivocally a good idea. The problem is I don’t trust the carriers.”
