Month: August 2023

On Friday, the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco was briefly clogged with traffic after autonomous taxis froze at a busy intersection. The jam consisted of at least 10 driverless Chevy Bolts operated by Cruise, General Motors‘ self-driving car subsidiary. 

“One of them was stopped at the top of the hill for no apparent reason,” witness Valerie Jacobson told NBC Bay Area.

The mishap coincided with a music festival taking place in nearby Golden Gate Park. Cruise blamed the festival for interfering with network connections to the cars.

“A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were impacted,” said a statement put out by Cruise on social media.

The cluster comes just a day after the state’s Public Utilities Commission ruled 3-1 in favor of letting Cruise and Waymo expand their driverless taxi operations. Waymo is owned by Alphabet, parent company of Google, and uses Jaguar I-Pace electric crossovers. The ruling allowed the companies to conduct robotaxi operations 24/7 throughout San Francisco.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin cautioned that “these things are not ready for prime time,” when speaking to NBC Bay Area. “[It’s] scary as heck if you think about the fact that moving these vehicles out of traffic requires cell service,” he added.

Peskin pointed out that cell service disruption could occur because of a natural disaster. In a situation like that the driverless cars could prevent emergency vehicles from getting through, or block evacuation routes. In an interview with ABC7 San Francisco, he drove the point home: “If there’s a power outage or if there’s a natural disaster like we just saw in Lahaina that these cars could congest our streets at the precise time when we would be needing to deploy emergency apparatus.”

Though the traffic jam cleared after about 20 minutes, this isn’t the first time robotaxis have caused confusion in situations that human drivers would have been able to figure out in seconds. When a robotaxi encounters a confusing situation, it seems to default to simply stopping.

In April, a Cruise robotaxi collided with a city bus, and another was unable to follow a police officer’s instructions to pull over. A similar Cruise traffic jam of eight vehicles blocked city streets for hours last summer, but the cause was never explained. Last December, NHTSA opened an investigation into Cruise for its vehicles’ greater-than-average rate of hard braking and immobilization.

Internet of things devices have been plagued by security issues and unfixed vulnerabilities for more than a decade, fueling botnets, facilitating government surveillance, and exposing institutional networks and individual users around the world. But many manufacturers have been slow to improve their practices and invest in raising the bar. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, researchers from Panasonic laid out the company’s strategy for improving IoT defenses based on a five-year project to gather and analyze data on how the company’s own products are attacked.

The researchers use Panasonic home appliances and other internet-connected electronics made by the company to create honeypots that lure real-world attackers to exploit the devices. This way Panasonic can capture current strains of malware and analyze them. Such IoT threat intelligence work is rare from a legacy manufacturer, but Panasonic says it would like to share its findings and collaborate with other companies so the industry can start to compile a broader view of the latest threats across products.

“Attack cycles are becoming faster. And now the malware is becoming all the more complicated and complex,” says Yuki Osawa, chief engineer at Panasonic who spoke with WIRED ahead of the conference through an interpreter. “Traditionally, IoT malware is rather simple. What we are afraid of most is that some kind of a cutting-edge, most advanced type of malware will also target IoT. So there is importance to protect [against] malware even after the product is shipped.”

Panasonic calls its efforts to track threats and develop countermeasures “ASTIRA,” a portmanteau of the Buddhist demigods known as “asura” and “threat intelligence.” And insights from ASTIRA feed into the IoT security solution known as “Threat Resilience and Immunity Module,” or THREIM, which works to detect and block malware on Panasonic devices. In an analysis of Panasonic products running ARM processors, Osawa says, the malware detection rate was about 86 percent for 1,800 malware samples from the ASTIRA honeypots.

“We use the technology to immunize our IoT devices just like protecting humans from the Covid-19 infection,” Osawa says. “These anti-malware functions are built in, no installation required and [they] are very lightweight. It doesn’t affect the capability of the device itself.”

Osawa emphasizes that the ability to push patches to IoT devices is important—a capability that is often lacking in the industry as a whole. But he notes that Panasonic doesn’t always see firmware updates as a feasible solution to dealing with IoT security issues. This is because, in the company’s view, end users don’t have adequate education about the need to install updates on their embedded devices, and not all updates can be delivered automatically without user involvement.

For this reason, Panasonic’s approach melds shipping patches with built-in malware detection and defense. And Osawa emphasizes that Panasonic views it as the manufacturer’s responsibility to develop a security strategy for its products rather than relying on third-party security solutions to defend IoT. He says that this way, vendors can determine a “reasonable level of security” for each product based on its design and the threats it faces. And he adds that by deploying its own solutions out of the box, manufacturers can avoid having to share trade secrets with outside organizations.

“Manufacturers ourselves have to be responsible for developing and providing these security solutions,” Osawa says. “I’m not saying that we’re going to do everything ourselves but we need to have a firm collaboration with third-party security solution vendors. The reason why we make it built in is that inside of the devices, [there are] secrets and we don’t have to open it. We can keep it black box and still we can provide the security as well.”

Developing threat intelligence capabilities for IoT is a crucial step in improving the state of defense for the devices overall. But independent security researchers who have long railed against IoT’s black box model of security through obscurity may take issue with Panasonic’s strategy.

A Chinese startup is taking jet-powered steps to landing and reusing rockets. 

Chinese commercial launch company Galactic Energy announced in late July that it had recently used a small test article propelled by a jet engine to test guidance software for landing rockets.

The trajectory deviation, landing point deviation, attitude deviation and other indicators all met the design requirements, according to a Galactic Energy statement.

The “Firebird-1” vehicle used for the flight is a small technology verification platform. The company is working towards a “hop test” with Firebird-6 which will be powered by a kerosene-liquid oxygen engine. 

Related: Chinese company’s rocket launches 3 satellites into orbit

The tests are part of the plan to make the company’s upcoming Pallas 1 rocket reusable. Galactic Energy is targeting a first test flight of Pallas 1 next year. The rocket is designed to be capable of carrying 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit. 

The first launch will be expendable, but the firm plans to make the rocket capable of being recovered by a Falcon 9-like vertical landing in 2025. 

Galactic Energy is one of a number of Chinese launch startups and is one of its most successful, having succeeded with all six of its launches of its Ceres 1 small solid rocket. 

China has yet to develop a reusable rocket. Only the U.S. companies SpaceX (orbital) and Blue Origin (suborbital) have so far managed to land and reuse rockets. But Galactic Energy and Chinese counterparts  Landspace (with the Zhuque 2 rocket), iSpace (Hyperbola 2), Deep Blue Aerospace (Nebula 1) CAS Space (Lijian rockets) and Space Pioneer (Tianlong 3) are all developing reusable launch vehicles.

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A groundbreaking demonstration by the European Space Agency (ESA) suggests it’s possible to deorbit satellites safely and in a reasonably controlled manner, even for those not originally designed for such maneuvers.

As planned, the Aeolus Earth Explorer satellite met its demise above Antarctica on July 28 at around 3:00 p.m. ET, as U.S. Space Command confirmed shortly afterward. The reentry followed a series of complex maneuvers that lowered the defunct satellite’s orbit from approximately 199 miles (320 kilometers) to a mere 75 miles (120 km), ensuring its safe return and eventual incineration in the atmosphere.

A newly released animation illustrates the possible final moments of the spacecraft. The simulation, made with the SCARAB tool, is based on a model of the Aeolus spacecraft that took the satellite’s shape, size, mass, and materials into consideration, along with the principles of aerothermodynamics. The simulation depicts Aeolus’s reentry in its final moments, showcasing the controlled descent made possible by its “six degrees of freedom,” that is, its ability to move freely in three-dimensional space along the x-, y-, and z-axis.

Importantly, the satellite wasn’t designed to fly at such low altitudes, but the demonstration showed that it’s still possible to deorbit satellites in this particular manner—at least for a similar cohort of satellites with sufficient amounts of fuel remaining.

Aeolus, designed and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), studied global wind patterns prior to its retirement, contributing to our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and enabling more accurate weather predictions. But the satellite had been losing altitude at a steady pace and it was nearly out of fuel. Without intervention, it would continue its uncontrolled descent and eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, with debris falling unpredictably in undesignated locations.

To prevent potential risks to people and property below, ESA decided to deliberately crash the satellite into Earth’s atmosphere, but in a controlled manner. For an entire week, mission controllers guided the satellite to its doom, allowing most of it to burn up during reentry. “This assisted reentry attempt goes above and beyond safety regulations for the mission, which was planned and designed in the late 1990s,” Tim Flohrer, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, explained in a statement.

For the assisted reentry, teams of engineers and flight dynamics experts positioned Aeolus such that any remaining fragments would fall safely within the satellite’s planned Atlantic ground tracks. By successfully executing the controlled reentry, the risk of potential debris falling in populated or undesired locations was significantly reduced. “By turning Aeolus’s original fate—an uncontrolled, ‘natural’ reentry—into an assisted one, they reduced that risk another 42 times.”

This bodes well for similar future efforts, in the ongoing effort to keep low Earth orbit free from all that superfluous clutter.

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There are already so many streaming services out there, but the market is not fully saturated just yet. The space agency NASA has announced its own streaming service, NASA+, and it’s completely free.

“See more rockets, more science, and more space,” NASA said of its new streaming service.

NASA+ won’t have any ads or subscription options, so thankfully this one won’t add to your existing monthly bill. What it will have includes a collection of original video series and live coverage for NASA missions. After all, NASA is putting humans back on the Moon and going to Mars, so now is a good time to get people excited about space again with a new streaming service.

“Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity,” NASA boss Marc Etkind said in a news release.

NASA+ will be available on “most major platforms” through the NASA App on iOS and Android devices. Users can also stream content through Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and via the web.

In addition to launching NASA+, NASA is revamping its websites, and you can get a sneak peek at the progress made so far right here.

As mentioned, NASA is sending humans back to the moon. The Artemis program began with the launch of the uncrewed Artemis I in November 2022 that orbited around the Moon but didn’t come down for a landing. Artemis II (November 2024) will take a crew of human astronauts to the Moon, but it won’t be until 2025’s Artemis III–if all goes to plan–that humans will land on the Moon to conduct further research. If all goes to plan, it will be the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972 that humans visited the lunar surface.

After this, NASA plans to send an astronaut to Mars.

NASA’s latest rocket launch took place on August 1, with a ship heading to the International Space Station carrying supplies.

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All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the next week. It required four ingredients, and so far he had access to three.

His followers on X (that is, Twitter, post-rebrand), offered ideas: He could melt down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or try to buy it in pure form off Etsy, where the DEA might not be looking. Others offered connections to Eastern European suppliers. They were deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had learned about a possible superconductor called LK-99 earlier that week through a post on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint in which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, in their words, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was among those racing to replicate it.

Superconductivity—a set of properties in which electrical resistance drops to zero—typically appears only under frigid or high pressure conditions. But the researchers claimed LK-99 exhibited these qualities at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Among the evidence: an apparent drop in resistance to zero at 400 Kelvin (127 degrees Celsius) and a video of the material levitating above a magnet. The authors, led by Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon, proposed that this was the result of the Meissner effect, the expulsion of a magnetic field as a material crosses the threshold of superconductivity. If that were true, it could indeed lead to a new era: resistanceless power lines, practical levitating trains, and powerful quantum devices.

On X and Reddit, large language models went by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets were spun up (the odds: not particularly good). Anons with a strangely sophisticated knowledge of electronic band structure went to war with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an apparent resurgence of technological progress. Their mantra was seductive, and maybe a little reductive: a return to a time of leapfrogging discoveries—the lightbulb, the Manhattan Project, the internet—where the impact of scientific discovery is tangible within the span of a human’s earthly presence. “We’re back,” as one X user put it.

Experts are doubtful. Multiple versions of the LK-99 paper have appeared online with inconsistent data—reportedly the result of warring between the authors about the precise nature of the claim. The researchers aren’t well known in the field, and their analysis lacks basic tests typically used to confirm superconductivity. Spurious claims are also so common in the field that physicists joke about USOs—“unidentified superconducting objects”—a play on UFOs. (Most recent sighting: a room-temperature, high-pressure material from a University of Rochester lab that has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and rigged data.) There are more likely explanations for the levitation, explains Richard Greene, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland, including magnetic properties in the compound in its normal, non-superconducting state. The betting markets probably had it right: Odds are the new era is not yet upon us.

But the claim is still worth checking out, Greene adds. In his long career studying superconductive materials, he’s seen advances come from outsiders with puzzling papers that explored unfamiliar types of compounds. That includes, in the 1980s, a class of materials that exhibited superconductivity above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 degrees C), making way for all sorts of applications, from magnetic resonance imagery to tokamaks for nuclear fusion. Plus, because physicists understand the mechanics of only certain forms of superconductivity, a seemingly strange or inconsistent result can’t immediately be discounted. Perhaps it’s just something nobody has seen before.

For the first time, scientists have used genetic engineering to trigger ‘virgin birth’ in female animals that normally need a male partner to reproduce.

Previously, scientists have generated young mice and frogs with no genetic input from a male parent. But those offspring were made by tinkering with egg cells in laboratory dishes rather than by giving female animals the capacity for virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis.

Earlier research identified candidate genes for parthenogenesis, says study co-author Alexis Sperling, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But her team, she says, not only pinpointed such genes but also confirmed their function by activating them in another species.

No male needed

In mammals, offspring are produced when males’ sperm fertilizes females’ eggs. But many species of insect and lizard, as well as other animals, have also evolved parthenogenesis, which requires no genetic contribution from a male, as an alternative to sex.

To identify the genes that underlie parthenogenesis, Sperling and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of two strains of the fly Drosophila mercatorum: one that reproduces sexually and another that reproduces through parthenogenesis. The researchers then compared gene activity in eggs from flies capable of parthenogenesis with that in eggs from flies capable of only sexual reproduction to identify the genes at work during one process but not the other.

The comparison allowed the authors to identify 44 genes that were potentially involved in parthenogenesis. The researchers altered the equivalent genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which usually cannot reproduce asexually.

After altering various combinations of genes, the scientists hit on a combination that induced parthenogenesis in roughly 11% of female fruit flies. Some of the offspring of these genetically engineered flies were also capable of parthenogenesis.

Although the parthenogenetic flies received genes only from their mothers, they weren’t always clones of their parent. Some had three sets of chromosomes, whereas eggs laid by mothers reproducing through parthenogenesis usually have only two.

Less complicated than sex

“Parthenogenesis is the most effective way to reproduce. In animals, doing sex is very complicated,” says Tanja Schwander, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who has studied parthenogenesis in stick insects. Studying parthenogenesis, she says, helps biologists to understand the benefits and trade-offs associated with sexual reproduction.

The new work could also help biologists to understand the evolution of parthenogenesis itself, says Chau-Ti Ting, an evolutionary biologist at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. She hopes to determine whether other species of fly have genes for parthenogenesis similar to those in D. mercatorum; this could help her to piece together how the behaviour evolved.

Sperling notes that some agricultural pests use parthenogenesis to multiply quickly, amplifying their power to damage crops. In the United Kingdom, for example, a species of moth turned to parthenogenesis because of widespread use of pesticides that disrupt the male moths’ reproduction. Now the moths have become a major pest, Sperling says. She hopes to study which policies and pest-management strategies could trigger pests to rely on parthenogenesis — knowledge that could help to keep pests in check.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 28, 2023.