Varda Space Industries plans to eventually land its spacecraft in Australia, but the company is still waiting on approval to bring down its already-launched first vehicle in Utah next year, according to a media report.
Varda launched its debut mission on SpaceX‘s Transporter-8 mission in June, and the capsule remains operational in space. Varda will land its future spacecraft at the Koonibba Test Range northwest of Adelaide, Australia under a newly announced agreement with Southern Launch. The first missions to use the site will land as soon as 2024, SpaceNews said in a report.
But the company, which is developing systems that will allow customers to manufacture products (for example, pharmaceuticals) in orbit and bring them down to Earth, is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Air Force to land its first spacecraft at the Utah Test and Training Range.
“We got very, very close,” Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said in an Oct. 20 interview with SpaceNews. The situation was related to “a coordination problem amongst three different groups that had not worked through this operation before,” he added, referring to the Utah range, the Air Force and the FAA.
California-based Varda is the first company to apply for an FAA reentry license through Part 450, a new set of regulations that were put in place to make the approval process easier. Asparouhov declined to comment on whether his company would have secured approvals faster under older FAA rules.
The spacecraft is fully operational in orbit. Asparouhov said that onboard experiments are finished, and that the FAA and Air Force have expressed no concerns about safety.
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While companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are all-in on the power of next-generation machine learning algorithms, some regulators are dreading what it might mean for our already-stressed communication networks. The chairwoman of the US Federal Communications Commission, for one, who’s just proposed an investigation into what “AI” could mean for even more spam calls and texts. The FCC will vote to adopt a multi-tiered action in November.
Chairwoman Rosencworcel, who’s served on the Commission since 2012 and as its executive since being confirmed late in 2021, is particularly concerned with how newly empowered AI tools could affect senior citizens. The FCC’s initial press release (PDF link) lists four main goals: determining whether AI technologies fall under the Comission’s jurisdiction via the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, if and when future AI tech might do the same, how AI impacts existing regulatory frameworks, and if the FCC should consider ways to verify the authenticity of auto-generated AI voice and text from “trusted sources.”
That last bullet point would seem to contain the potential for the most problems. Auto-generated text and natural-sounding voice algorithms are already fairly easy tools to use, albeit not quite as fast as necessary for real-time back-and-forth in a phone call setting. Combine it with some “big iron” data centers, whether wholly created for the purpose of mass calls and texts or merely rented from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Replacing human-staffed call centers around the world in scammer hotbeds like India and Cambodia with fully automated AI systems could exponentially increase both the volume and the efficacy of scams, which are already being sent hundreds of billions of times every year. While filters and blocks exist, it’s estimated that billions of dollars are lost to scams each year in the US alone, many of which target senior citizens specifically.
The FCC’s brief does mention that AI technology could also be used to fight against spammers and scams, presumably with some kind of real-time scanning system alerting users that they’re talking to a computer. But the details of this, and the potential evolution of the threat posed by AI tools, will have to wait for the Commission’s November 15th session.
A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.
AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond.
Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.
The team intends to integrate Nightshade into Glaze, and artists can choose whether they want to use the data-poisoning tool or not. The team is also making Nightshade open source, which would allow others to tinker with it and make their own versions. The more people use it and make their own versions of it, the more powerful the tool becomes, Zhao says. The data sets for large AI models can consist of billions of images, so the more poisoned images can be scraped into the model, the more damage the technique will cause.
A targeted attack
Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images.
Artists who want to upload their work online but don’t want their images to be scraped by AI companies can upload them to Glaze and choose to mask it with an art style different from theirs. They can then also opt to use Nightshade. Once AI developers scrape the internet to get more data to tweak an existing AI model or build a new one, these poisoned samples make their way into the model’s data set and cause it to malfunction.
Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample.
The researchers tested the attack on Stable Diffusion’s latest models and on an AI model they trained themselves from scratch. When they fed Stable Diffusion just 50 poisoned images of dogs and then prompted it to create images of dogs itself, the output started looking weird—creatures with too many limbs and cartoonish faces. With 300 poisoned samples, an attacker can manipulate Stable Diffusion to generate images of dogs to look like cats.
COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS
Generative AI models are excellent at making connections between words, which helps the poison spread. Nightshade infects not only the word “dog” but all similar concepts, such as “puppy,” “husky,” and “wolf.” The poison attack also works on tangentially related images. For example, if the model scraped a poisoned image for the prompt “fantasy art,” the prompts “dragon” and “a castle in The Lord of the Rings” would similarly be manipulated into something else.
COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS
Zhao admits there is a risk that people might abuse the data poisoning technique for malicious uses. However, he says attackers would need thousands of poisoned samples to inflict real damage on larger, more powerful models, as they are trained on billions of data samples.
“We don’t yet know of robust defenses against these attacks. We haven’t yet seen poisoning attacks on modern [machine learning] models in the wild, but it could be just a matter of time,” says Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor at Cornell University who studies AI model security and was not involved in the research. “The time to work on defenses is now,” Shmatikov adds.
Gautam Kamath, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo who researches data privacy and robustness in AI models and wasn’t involved in the study, says the work is “fantastic.”
The research shows that vulnerabilities “don’t magically go away for these new models, and in fact only become more serious,” Kamath says. “This is especially true as these models become more powerful and people place more trust in them, since the stakes only rise over time.”
A powerful deterrent
Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, who has studied the security of deep-learning systems and wasn’t involved in the work, says Nightshade could have a big impact if it makes AI companies respect artists’ rights more—for example, by being more willing to pay out royalties.
AI companies that have developed generative text-to-image models, such as Stability AI and OpenAI, have offered to let artists opt out of having their images used to train future versions of the models. But artists say this is not enough. Eva Toorenent, an illustrator and artist who has used Glaze, says opt-out policies require artists to jump through hoops and still leave tech companies with all the power.
Toorenent hopes Nightshade will change the status quo.
“It is going to make [AI companies] think twice, because they have the possibility of destroying their entire model by taking our work without our consent,” she says.
Autumn Beverly, another artist, says tools like Nightshade and Glaze have given her the confidence to post her work online again. She previously removed it from the internet after discovering it had been scraped without her consent into the popular LAION image database.
“I’m just really grateful that we have a tool that can help return the power back to the artists for their own work,” she says.
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After struggling to land its first in-space manufacturing capsule in the U.S., Varda Space is now looking down under for future batches of space drugs to reenter through Earth’s atmosphere.
How Invincible’s Omni-Man Joined Mortal Kombat 1
California-based Varda Space Industries announced an agreement with Southern Launch, an end-to-end launch service provider based in Australia, to land a future mission at the company’s Kooniba Test Range in the far west of South Australia. Varda’s upcoming mission could launch as early as mid 2024, according to the company.
Meanwhile, Varda’s first in-space manufacturing capsule, which launched in June, is still stuck in orbit after the company was denied reentry to Earth. The U.S. Air Force denied a request from Varda Space Industries to land its capsule at a Utah training area, while the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not grant the company permission to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, leaving its first test mission stranded in space.
The capsule was scheduled to land at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) in September, but it is designed to last for up to a year in orbit. The startup continues to confirm the spacecraft’s health and is working with UTTR for a landing site to return its capsule to Earth.
The 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule is designed to manufacture products in a microgravity environment (to avoid gravity-induced defects) and transport them back to Earth. For its first mission, the first drug-manufacturing experiment succeeded in growing crystals of the drug ritonavir, which is used for the treatment of HIV, in orbit. Protein crystals made in space form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.
Although the mission succeeded in producing the crystals in space, it missed a crucial part of in-space manufacturing: actually bringing the products back to Earth. A spokesperson from the FAA told TechCrunch at the time that the company’s request was not granted “due to the overall safety, risk and impact analysis.”
Delian Asparouhov, Varda’s president and co-founder, suggested to the media that the issue stemmed from a coordination lapse among parties involved in the company’s first mission. “If you look at some of the initial challenges with our first mission, it ultimately just comes down to the fact that Varda, FAA, and UTTR have never attempted something like this,” Asparouhov told Ars Technica. “It’s pretty complicated to align all these organizations that have a variety of different regulatory approvals and safety officers.”
The Koonibba test range stretches across 8,880 square miles (23,000 square kilometers) of uninhabited land where the in-space manufacturing capsules can reenter. It seems that targeting a different continent altogether might be easier than navigating regulatory frameworks within the United States.
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The conventional wisdom is that technology and stricter emissions laws have made cars ever cleaner. In theory, a new car purchased today should emit less harmful emissions than one sold 10 years ago. However, a new study has found the opposite is true, due to the increased appetite for SUVs.
Published by the climate action group Possible, and reported on by The Guardian, the study finds that the average new internal combustion car in 2023 is a worse polluter than the average new car sold 10 years ago. That’s because consumers have been increasingly buying SUVs instead of cars. Those vehicles are heavier and burn more fuel. As a result, they are less efficient and emit more CO2 than cars.
That may not be surprising in itself, but the fact that the market shift is so drastic that it has caused average emissions from ICE vehicles to increase is. Furthermore, the study, which was U.K.-based, found that the wealthiest fifth of consumers bought the heaviest polluters.
SUVs were more prevalent in affluent areas such as Chelsea and Kensington, both urban areas where off-road utility isn’t much of an issue. Range Rovers and such are jokingly called “Chelsea tractors” in Britain. Possible argues that such buyers would be able to afford electrified cars, and is thus calling for lawmakers to institute a vehicle tax based on emissions.
Of course, the legal landscape is much different in the U.S., where SUVs and crossover are classified as “light trucks,” which means automakers are not subject to the same emissions rules when building them as they would be with cars. It’s why so many companies have abandoned sedans altogether. Until this legal loophole is closed, automakers will continue to push taller-than-necessary vehicles onto the public.
Add to that the threat of increasing pedestrian injury, frontover deaths, a higher risk of rollover, hampered visibility for other drivers, and more tire particulates being shed from heavy vehicles, and there are many reasons SUVs make less sense than cars. For what it’s worth, Possible found that, on average, the least polluting ICE car you can buy in the U.K. in 2023 is a seven-year-old used car.
LONDON/DETROIT — A race is on to certify battery health and performance in used electric vehicles, with a clutch of startups scrambling to help buyers figure out how much a secondhand EV is really worth.
With traditional combustion-engine cars, mileage and years racked up can quickly tell prospective buyers how much they should fork out. That formula does not work with EVs — whose value depends largely on their battery’s driving range and ability to hold a charge.
Until recently, there was no way to measure battery health, hampering used EV sales. But that is changing as companies rush to scale up EV battery tests — some of which take just minutes.
One of them is Altelium, a UK startup that has a developed an EV battery state-of-health test and certificate launching this year in more than 7,000 U.S. car dealers and over 5,000 UK dealers through dealer service providers including Assurant and GardX.
“If the second-hand car market doesn’t work properly, the new car market doesn’t work properly and the electric transition won’t happen,” said Alex Johns, business development manager at Altelium, which says it has received interest from other markets including China. “We’re in an implementation race.”
A battery typically makes up around 40% of a new EV’s price. How that battery is treated is key. Charging an EV rapidly too often, constantly charging when the battery is nearly full or leaving it for long periods fully charged can degrade its battery more quickly.
Austrian startup Aviloo, which has developed a test for dealers and private individuals, has found that after 100,000 kilometres (62,140 miles) EV battery health can vary by up to 30%.
A consumer who wants a used EV with 90% of its range when new could end up buying one with just 70% because of the previous owner’s bad charging habits — which should potentially shave thousands of euros off its value, said Marcus Berger, CEO of Aviloo, whose investors include Volkswagen.
“With an EV, mileage and age don’t tell you anything,” said Berger. “It’s all about the battery.”
CRITICAL INFORMATION
Automakers provide in-vehicle EV range information that critics say is often excessively rosy, making independent tests vital. A lack of visibility has hurt the EV market.
According to EV battery tracking startup Recurrent, U.S. used EV prices in September were down 32% year-on-year, versus a 7% drop for fossil-fuel models. UK used EV prices were down 23% year-on-year in August while those of fossil-fuel models were up at least 4%, according to AutoTrader, which cited “consumer concerns around battery life in used EVs” as cause for concern.
A price war started by Tesla has also weighed on used EV prices.
AutoTrader and Deutsche Automobil Treuhand data show residual values for three-year old EVs in the UK and Germany are over 10 percentage points lower than fossil-fuel equivalents.
“Knowing the capacity of that (EV) battery is going to be critical,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Mobility R&D at Atlanta-based Cox Automotive, which owns Manheim, the world’s largest used-vehicle auction house.
Driverama, which buys around 100,000 used cars in Germany annually for sale across central Europe, uses Aviloo to weed out EVs below 80% battery capacity or with battery defects, said Chief Operating Officer Eldar Vagabov.
‘RELIABLE NOT RUBBISH’
For Michael Willvonseder, 38, an independent battery test was essential before spending 31,000 euros ($32,820) on a 2014 seven-seater Tesla Model S with 240,000 km on it.
The resident of Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, used Aviloo and found the battery had 90% of its original capacity — with a range of 412 km versus 456 km when new.
“I want a car that’s reliable, not rubbish, and I need it to last a long time,” Willvonseder said.
The race to properly value used EVs is becoming urgent because of a looming influx of vehicles.
In Europe, for instance, more than 1.2 million new fully-electric cars were sold in 2021 — and many will hit the used market in 2024 when their lease contracts end.
If used prices remain low, that could hurt new EV prices.
“You need a high functioning used-car market for residuals on new cars to be good,” said Scott Case, CEO of Seattle-based Recurrent, which has signed up 20,000 EV owners to track battery data, and is also working with Black Book and dealers.
Owners who care for their batteries could earn a “potential premium of thousands of dollars” when selling, Case said.
Startups face competition from German certification agency TUV Rheinland, which operates in 60 countries. It has launched Battery Quick Check — jointly developed with startup Twaice — in car workshops across Germany and expects to launch in other markets next year.
“People just want less risk,” when buying a used EV, said Battery Quick Check managing director Katharina Alamo Alonso.
Nothing can travel faster than light, or 299,792,458 meters per second. But a certain group of particles acts as if it can, a team of physicists recently concluded, potentially paving the way for a powerful light source that could reveal new kinds of science.
OnePlus Open is the ‘Phablet” We’ve Been Waiting For
When electrons are excited and pushed around, they produce light of various energies that can be used to study phenomena far beyond the limits of the naked eye or typical microscopes. Scientists have learned how to generate and corral electrons in machines, to get the particles to produce light of high energies. These light sources—from synchrotrons and cyclotrons to linear accelerators—allow scientists to see incredibly tiny things, like the structure of a molecule. The insights gleaned from this technology have enabled the development of new drugs, the creation of better computer chips, and non-destructive research into fossils. The waves emitted by electrons literally shed light on what would otherwise be invisible.
But these light sources are not common. They’re expensive to build, require large amounts of land, and can be booked up by scientists months in advance. Now, a team of physicists posit that quasiparticles—groups of electrons that behave as if they were one particle—can be used as light sources in smaller lab and industry settings, making it easier for scientists to make discoveries wherever they are. The team’s research describing their findings is published today in Nature Photonics.
“No individual particles are moving faster than the speed of light, but features in the collection of particles can, and do,” said John Palastro, a physicist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester and co-author of the new study, in a video call with Gizmodo. “This does not violate any rules or laws of physics.”
“I think relaxing those requirements on the electron beam and getting away from this idea that every electron has to be moving in unison to produce this very coherent radiation, really democratizes these sources—it makes them more widely accessible,” Palastro added.
In their paper, the team explores the possibility of making plasma accelerator-based light sources as bright as larger free electron lasers by making their light more coherent, vis-a-vis quasiparticles. The team ran simulations of quasiparticles’ properties in a plasma using supercomputers made available by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), according to a University of Rochester release.
Large linear accelerators are some of the most powerful light sources on Earth. Consider the $1 billion upgrade to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source—simply dubbed LCLS-II—which achieved first light last month. LCLS-II can generate one million X-ray pulses per second, up from the original LCLS’ minuscule 120 pulses per second. The new X-ray pulses are 10,000 times brighter than those produced by LCLS, paving the way for scientists to peer at previously unseeable phenomena, from molecules in plant cells to how materials change phase. All those X-rays are produced by intentionally wobbling (or ‘undulating’) groups of fast-moving electrons, using large magnets. You can read a full breakdown on how linear accelerators like LCLS-II work here.
In a linear accelerator, “every electron is doing the same thing as the collective thing,” said Bernardo Malaca, a physicist at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal and the study’s lead author, in a video call with Gizmodo. “There is no electron that’s undulating in our case, but we’re still making an undulator-like spectrum.”
The researchers liken quasiparticles to the Mexican wave, a popular collective behavior in which sports fans stand up and sit down in sequence. A stadium full of people can give the illusion of a wave rippling around the venue, though no one person is moving laterally.
“One is clearly able to see that the wave could in principle travel faster than any human could, provided the audience collaborates. Quasiparticles are very similar, but the dynamics can be more extreme,” said co-author Jorge Vieira, also a physicist at the Instituto Superior Técnico, in an email to Gizmodo. “For example, single particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light, but quasiparticles can travel at any velocity, including superluminal.”
“Because quasiparticles are a result of a collective behavior, there are no limits for its acceleration,” Vieira added. “In principle, this acceleration could be as strong as in the vicinity of a black-hole, for example.”
To be clear: the electrons in the bunch composing the quasiparticle are not moving faster than light. But the quasiparticle can effectively travel faster than light, the researchers say, if the wavelengths involved are larger than the quasiparticle itself.
The difference between what is perceptually happening and actually happening regarding traveling faster than light is an “unneeded distinction,” Malaca said. “There are actual things that travel faster than light, which are not individual particles, but are waves or current profiles. Those travel faster than light and can produce real faster-than-light-ish effects. So you measure things that you only associate with superluminal particles.”
The group found that the electrons’ collective quality doesn’t have to be as pristine as the beams produced by large facilities, and could practically be implemented in more “table-top” settings, Palastro said. In other words, scientists could run experiments using very bright light sources on-site, instead of having to wait for an opening at an in-demand linear accelerator.
